Sunday, May 22, 2022
6:10 a.m. Well, guys, we’ve gotten our first reaction to your exploration of our human habit of second-guessing the universe, and probably a good deal of silent dissent from others, as well. Do you want to address it directly, or are you okay with our putting it off to our Wednesday meeting?
Misunderstandings and disagreements are most productive of clarity when allowed to grow to maturity: that is, to become conscious. So, wait. Meanwhile we will continue.
Okay by me. Setting for maximum focus, receptivity, clarity, presence.
Reprint the list.
- Good and bad as judgments. The fruit of the tree.
- Light and darkness as conditions.
- The vast impersonal forces as they flow through 3D humans and thereby process the shared subjectivity’s unfinished business as well as the individual’s.
- The nature of perception via comparison. How do you know hot if you have never experienced cold? Or, rather, how can hot exist without reference to cold?
- A system’s components are always balanced, though not necessarily obviously.
- “One man’s meat is another man’s poison.”
- Whether you are lost depends not only on where you are but where you were and where you want to go. “Confused” is not the same as “lost.”
- We say it again: Never assume you are smarter or better than the conditions of existence. What looks wrong, or unnecessary, or repugnant, may be merely a matter of your point of view. You may not like dung beetles, but they serve a necessary purpose. And those who see them differently see not something repugnant but, for instance, a scarab.
Where would you like to resume?
Let’s begin with number one. It is important, if you are to understand us, to realize that you cannot get beyond this set of perceptions. What you can get beyond is a set of judgments.
Interesting distinction. You’ve made it before, but I can see that it is easily missed.
Every time you look at the world, you see things that are more agreeable or less, more pleasing or less, more uplifting, or jarring, or disgusting, or alienating, or less. These are reactions, they are not yet judgments. But if the reaction is unconsidered by the conscious mind – if you do not decide about them – they are likely to be filed as good or bad, without your even noticing.
Now, good or bad doesn’t have to refer to moral or immoral. It doesn’t have to refer to wholesome or unwholesome, attractive or unattractive, life-enhancing or morbid. Good and bad have many meanings, and the meanings slide, and of course the less conscious one is, the greater the play for unnoticed slippage. But in general, good and bad mean just what you know they mean; they are used in a way to indicate “I like it” or “I don’t like it.”
Maybe “I approve or it” or don’t approve of it?
That too. Our point here is that rather than explore the many nuances of the way the comparatives are used (for, good and bad are implied comparatives, usually), we want to center on the difference in 3D processing. You react, consciously or unconsciously; you only sometimes decide. Naturally, the more you decide, the freer you are.
We took a leap there that may lose some people.
It should be obvious that the more areas of your life you are conscious of, the more you have the ability to choose to increase or decrease in their influence on your life as it proceeds. Freedom likes in consciousness.
I half-remember something from a long time ago – not from these discussions but from earlier, I think. Consciousness is freedom, something else is serfdom, unconsciousness is slavery. Cant remember the middle term.
The basic idea is correct, anyway. Just as no work can be done in sleep, so nothing can be worked until you become conscious of it. That coming-to-consciousness may be painful, or is likely to be at least uncomfortable, but it is the only way to broaden your field of choice. So, the way to overcome seeing things as good or evil is to systematically doubt your instinctive reactions. “Doubt” doesn’t mean, discard. Your instinctive reactions may be right, at least for you. But the doubt brings the reaction to consciousness as a judgment, hence frees you to actively consider it, rather than assuming that your prejudices are “obviously” true.
That word “prejudice” will stop some people. I remember when Rita mentioned that I had a bias in some direction, I was highly insulted for a moment, until we clarified what she meant. I thought, for a moment, she was calling me a bigot, when she was merely pointing out that I had an instinctive inclination to see something a certain way.
Yes, it can be amusing: People with strong reactions are likely to deny having a bias, as if an arrow could set fly without a bowstring behind it.
To sum up point one, you are by nature going to react. It is up to you whether you react consciously as well.
So, point two? [Light and darkness as conditions.]
This should be clear by now. Light and dark, like good and bad (or, perhaps more obviously, better or worse) are comparative terms that assume each other. You don’t have up without down, or in without out, so why should you expect to have good without bad or light without darkness?
Point three?
Let’s skip to four, as it is a natural continuation of point two. [The nature of perception via comparison. How do you know hot if you have never experienced cold? Or, rather, how can hot exist without reference to cold?] Isn’t this clear in itself?
I should think so.
Then, as point five reminds you [A system’s components are always balanced, though not necessarily obviously], it should be intuitively obvious that all these balanced comparatives form a system, an ecology. If they did not, what you would have would be an unbalanced system, or perhaps a chaos. The key here is not whether you approve of things as they are. You may, you may not. But the key is, an ecology continues. It is the sum of processes that balance out. To the degree that any of tis components get out of balance (and are not brought back into balance by other elements of the system), the ecology will change. But even in changing, it will be maintaining itself over time. And “over time” is what you in 3D may miss, oddly enough. One would think that time-dependent factors would be always foremost in your minds, but, not always.
It’s sort of a seesaw between our awareness of the world through the present moment (which, as you have pointed out, distorts how we see things), and our awareness of the unstoppable passage of time, carrying away each present moment. It’s a contradiction we live in, as you know.
As we know indeed, being half inside it and half outside it. You forget, sometimes, or undervalue the fact, that we are having your experience too, a little second-hand but no less immediate for all that.
And so to point six [“One man’s meat is another man’s poison”], which will expand as you ponder it.
Yes, I see. I was thinking of it as a matter of tastes. Chacun a son gout. But it’s literally true, too, isn’t it?
Not so much “too” as, primarily. What will nourish one will poison another – and vice-versa. And what is a requirement of a balanced ecology?
That the waste products of one element nourish a second element, whose waste products nourish a third, perhaps, whose waste products nourish the first. Algae feed fish, fish droppings fertilize plants, plant decay feeds algae. Or, humans excrete carbon dioxide, plants excrete oxygen, and everybody’s happy. Even simpler.
Why should it be any different – indeed, we might ask how could it be any different – in terms of good and bad, light and darkness? Just because something is repugnant to you does not mean it doesn’t have a legitimate place in the system. Your well-being may depend upon it, know it or not.
That’s hard to envision, in terms of good and evil.
That will bring us to point number three [The vast impersonal forces as they flow through 3D humans and thereby process the shared subjectivity’s unfinished business as well as the individual’s], next time.
Okay, and our continuing thanks for your efforts. Today’s theme?
“Perception and judgment,” probably.
Perhaps. Or maybe, “Perception v. judgment”?
It isn’t quite so adversarial. More like different parts of a process.
Well, we’ll see. Till next time.