Wednesday, May 11, 2022
6:30 a.m. Gentlemen? Care to address Jane Coleman’s question?
You produced an analogy even while you were discussing the question. Set your switches and we shall see what we shall see.
All right. As always: focus, receptivity, clarity, presence.
Number the points in her question as received.
[Jane’s question:]
[1. The Guys have equated love to gravity, that love is a force.
- We’ve confused this with the emotion we call love, the energy between two people who are attracted to each other.
- And emotions are the boundary layer between us and what we do not know, not to be confused with Big Love, for lack of a better term.
- It seems to me that Big Love is the driving force behind creation, the One creating the many so the One might know itself in the many. And the many also create, being like that which created them. And this creating is love in action.
[Would the Guys please say a bit more about this subject, correcting what I don’t have straight?]
Done. The first three points were in one graf, but I’ve separated it for clarity here.
Now, your analogy.
Already? Prior to discussion? All right, well, we were fishing for an image, as you often advise us to do, that would clarify the distinction between love as a universal force and love as we experience it, and what came was: alloy. Alloying tin and copper produces bronze, with qualities unlike the qualities of either copper or tin alone.
Yes, a serviceable metaphor. And you did not mention that the question was sparked in response to your saying that you wished that people would submit questions for us to pursue whenever a previous discussion had raised them. That’s important. It is only the interaction – the active engagement – that turns the theoretically plausible into the experientially tangible.
And besides, it helps me when I can’t remember where we were going and what would logically come next.
That too. You feel sheepish about it sometimes, but after all, there is a difference – if sometimes a subtle one – between tracking and pursuit. The tracker reads signs, the pursuer thinks in the head of what he’s pursuing. A subtle difference, with a lot of overlap, but a difference nonetheless.
So, the questions?
Start with #4. This is actually two ideas, not one. It is certainly true that creations are themselves creators, sharing the attributes of their creator even in their different conditions of being. Your words are the creation of your mind. They do not have the flexibility your mind has; they do not arrange and rearrange. Nonetheless they may be said to be creative in themselves, as sparks to minds that share the attributes of the mind that created them.
And similarly we 3D beings may spark the non-3D beings from which we were created.
Yes. Your 3D experience in all its variety engenders complex possibilities that are latent but not manifest before you engender them. So you are creators in that way (invisible to you) as well as in the more easily seen sense of creating poetry, sculpture, enterprises, etc. All life is a continuing dance of being created, and creating, and being re-created, and creating from that new place.
Lovely image.
And it is also true that creating is love in action, provided that you remember that you continually create things you disapprove of, as well as what you approve of. You don’t like to know this – why would you? – so you concentrate on your positive results; but just as no one can be all good or all bad, so no one can do all good or all bad. And because it is important that you see clearly if you are to get anywhere, we have been working to weaken the effects on you of eating the apple. You can’t see clearly if you insist on labeling things as bad and good. Is hydrogen bad? Is it good? Is the fact that clouds are white, or grey, or bluish-white, or red? Is the fact that you were born and will die? If you get married, if you divorced, if you stayed single – is it good? Is it bad? Judgments don’t describe. If anything, they make description unreliable.
So, when you say that creation is love in action, you aren’t wrong. But if you pretend to yourselves (or if you never think about it in the first place, so merely assume) that creation – love in action – creates only what you label “good” – well, this is self-evidently a massive error, unless you go back to the sense of it in Genesis where God looked upon his creation and found it good.
Good, including presumably the tree of seeing things as good and evil. Good, including presumably all the pitfalls and detours inherent in the world and all its inhabitants.
If God didn’t create what you call evil, who did? If you (humans) created it, it had to be inherent in you, and if God created you, the onus comes right back to God.
We get the point, even if we can’t help seeing some things as evil.
And of course some things are evil, relatively, or else every direction would be equally desirable. But what “evil” really means is a matter of context and observation, as much as anything. It would take us away from the subject of love per se. We would not have mingled subjects if not for the likelihood that people would enjoy a warm, fuzzy feeling about the undoubted fact that creation is active love, and would inadvertently assume that this meant the creation only of things they label as good. Even the creation of what you deem evil is still an act of love, perforce.
And this ties to (1). Love is not a warm fuzzy feeling. It is a force, a condition of existence. You think we say it is “like” gravity, but it is gravity, as it is anything else holding reality together. It is the one unopposed force, as we have said. It can be resisted; it can’t be countered, for there is nothing opposite love but (relative) lack of love.
As to (2), you all know – many from experience! – that love and hatred are very, very closely akin. A jilted lover can become filled with hatred quite as strong as the love that preceded it. Passionate love – or perhaps we should say emotional love, to avoid confusion with sexual passion – emotional love is volatile, changeable, contingent upon the action of others. Good thing for you that gravity doesn’t work that way!
Smiling.
Besides, emotional love is not directed only to people. Many times it is directed at possessions, or even self-images. Certainly at daydreams. And of course at pet animals and wild animals and birds and fish and otters – whatever catches a person’s heart. People feel emotional love for favorite places, too. The list could be made longer, and we suggest it may be profitable for you to do so.
And finally, we come to (3), where we might just as easily have started. Only, everything we said up to now is comprehensible in terms of any single individual. Emotion as boundary layer, though, is always a boundary between what a person knows of himself or herself and what is experienced as “other.” So, in practice, emotions are almost always elicited by first-hand or second-hand interaction with “the world.” It is “the world” in some form that usually sparks emotion in the 3D individual, because it is “the world” that activates the parts of the individual’s psyche that are otherwise beyond the ken of consciousness.
Do you see now why we had you put your “alloy” metaphor first? Rereading this will in effect re-arrange the order. (That is, having read it all, on re-reading the image, it will inform what you then re-read.) It is a form of repetition through echoing, you might say.
And today’s theme? “Love,” I suppose.
Or “Love reconsidered,” or something like that.
Our thanks as always. I started to write, “Our love as always,” and that’s true too.