Sept. 8, 2022
Different societies allow and encourage and almost require different abilities to emerge in the individuals comprising them. But this is far from a simple statement, given that the individuals involved are themselves communities learning to function as a new unprecedented individual, learning to synthesize background experiences, abilities, tendencies into something necessarily unique.
Something new is not necessarily something unprecedented – hence our earlier discussion about mind crystallizing or not. But, sometimes they are. That’s the goal, you might say, not only of an individual’s existence but of a society’s existence, of humanity’s (or other species’) existence.
It isn’t “all about you” in any 3D sense. But let’s remain on firm ground: your lives. That’s what concerns you – and rightly so – when you are in the body. Only, once you make the Copernican Shift and put your full self in the center of your life, rather than only the part of you known or knowable to 3D senses and 3D logic, you are in a different mental world. Similarly, once you put your society (your civilization) into the center, rather than you as individuals, you see the limits of what is called individualism, the distorting effect that always follows putting an unreality in the center.
You can easily see that societies built upon false premises cannot help be distorted in their beliefs, practices, perceptions, priorities. But recognize, that goes for yours too. You can’t judge the truth of information by whether it does or doesn’t conform to what seems reasonable within the confines of your society’s assumptions.
Sure, we know that.
You do not know that. You know it sometimes; you know it sporadically; you know it in one corner of your mind, while other corners believe other things. Nobody is always a sheepdog or even always a wolf. In some circumstances, anyone will be a sheep.
By which I take it you mean, we accept unthinkingly more than we realize we do.
Yes. It’s necessary, you can’t doubt everything. But it is worth remembering that you do so.
Now, when we use the word “society,” we are folding several meanings into the one word, with confusing results:
- Your civilization
- Your part of that civilization (that is, your nation or state)
- Your ethnic and linguistic subset of that part
- Your particular family background
- Your community of being (strands).
Is it any wonder that so tangled a mass of cross-references, continually sliding in your mind, results in confusion of thought? So, it is not surprising – shouldn’t be surprising, anyway – that each of you distorts your society’s false premises in your own fashion. However, it is also true that each of you brings in your own sliver of truth in your own fashion. Such is the value and the disadvantage of individual lives lived in a given time and place, and forwarded (so to speak) into the non-3D as a new unique vantage point.
The overarching theme is that societies change, and those changes interact with individual potential, and new individuals change society as well. It is a continuing interactive process, sometimes so slow-moving as to appear glacial or even non-existent; other times, changes come in torrents, and old people look in bewilderment at a landscape unrecognizably different from the one they grew up in. Not only are institutions and mores changed, but the very nature of their children and grandchildren is alien to them. Your grandparents experienced it.
Doesn’t any generation, that lives long enough?
You are reading the Adams-Jefferson letters. They comment on the changes in the social situation, but does it seem to you that they saw people as having changed?
Very much the opposite. These two literate, classically trained men of the world – and Abigail Adams, who contributed to the dialog – saw human nature as intractable, for better or worse. Any changes they noticed, they ascribed to the influence of a new society that they had helped to emerge from its European background.
So even in an era of revolutionary change, changes in human nature may not be obvious; may not exist. But sometimes they do occur, slowly or quickly, and you see the differences between what men believe between one era and another. An ancient Roman might not have felt terribly out of place technologically in the Middle Ages, say, but he would have had a hard time encompassing its mind-set. And the disparity increases and the time-lag shortens, as you near your present moment.
Of course there are always forerunners and throwbacks, but the mass is fairly compact for any given time and place. Even a jangled mass – New York City in its immigrant-packed heyday in the late 19th century, say – is as self-coherent as miles of Iowa cornfields and villages, say, or California boomtowns, or New England fishing towns. And it is the same in your time, only in some eras, change occurs slowly and continuity is more obvious, but in yours, continuity scarcely is visible. What is continuous is the flow.
Now, our point here is simple. Change is good, continuity is good, and everyone welcomes each in different proportions, and differently in different mental contexts. So – liberal or conservative, depending upon the issue, depending upon the time of day, depending upon one’s family traditions of thought and emotion. It is not a war of different kinds of people, though it is somewhat a war of perceptions. Rearrange your political thinking, and your view of the world and the society’s possibilities changes accordingly.
If I hear your subtext, you are saying we can’t really afford to continue to consider politics and psychology and metaphysics etc. as separate subjects without application one to the other.
Well, you can’t understand what you firmly mis-understand. If you cannot see the connections, you will be bewildered, frightened, disoriented, perhaps despairing, anyway. Sound like any society you know?
And more so every year.
The readjustment pains are necessary. The extreme disorientation and accompanying fear are not: They will increase or decrease according to people’s level of understanding of what is going on.
Understandings cascade down into society from a few – maybe originally from only one – to a larger few, then a larger few yet. That is, understandings diffuse into societies in an organic rather than in a random way. And this takes time, and is assisted by the existence of societies. This ties in to your previous statement about society having many ways for people to associate. We were talking of it in context of ways for an individual to have a place. Now we’re looking at it as the way the individual moves society.
Esoteric societies move society in ways individuals working alone can’t. How? By using magical powers directly? By exerting occult influences on the minds of society’s movers and shakers?
I don’t know, but when you posed the question, I thought of Dion Fortune saying (through her character Morgan LeFay, who does work mostly alone) that to enter new ideas into the mind of humanity, you must live them, not merely speak them.
A part of living your highest truths is living in the world as it is, living your life where and when you are. How else can a body function, save in time and space? How else can one person influence another, save through what he or she is?
Not, also, what he or she does? Says? Preaches? Teaches?
Do they not flow from what s/he is?
What of the solitary hermit in the desert?
The fact that you even heard of them shows you that they had their influence, influence that proceeded from what they did, or said: ultimately, from what they were. It is Emerson’s mousetrap.
Emerson said if somebody invents a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to his door even if he lives out in the woods somewhere. But the mousetrap can’t quite be said to proceed from what the man was, can it? Or – can it? I guess the lightbulb came because of what Edison was, which led to what he did.
Individuals transmit change to the world around them. Even on the most mundane subject – light bulbs, mousetraps – individuals cannot function without others. What good would it to do invent the lightbulb if there were none to provide the raw materials, to assemble it, to sell the concept and finance the initial capital requirements, to string the wires and build the generators and produce the lamps, etc., etc.? Jefferson constructed the moldboard plow by applying mathematics to a practical problem. Where did he get his knowledge of mathematics, if not from his teachers?
If you are eager to change what people can be (to remove previous limits and set new ones), you can’t do it alone, any more than inventors can acquire and make practical their bright ideas. The specifics of what kinds of help you require are different, but the situation is the same otherwise.
My friend Dana Redfield said (I think in her novel Jonah) “no one crosses alone.”
And we could expand that to say, no one even exists alone. Be you ever so solitary, even lonely, you can’t possibly be alone in the largest sense, because you exist as a community, in a community, therefore for a community.
To paraphrase Mr. Lincoln, it is a matter of enlightenment of the people, by the people, for the people.
Yes. It is not a few high priests enlightening the masses. The absolute differences between the most and the least “enlightened” is relatively small. How could it be otherwise, given that you (we) are all one?