Monday, September 12, 2022
4:50 a.m. Shall we proceed? You left it at, we should take the world more seriously, but in a different way.
Yes, and you are beginning to see, in a general way, the direction of our argument.
Well, considering the above with your statement that the realest aspects of 3D life appear the least real, and earlier admonitions to take seriously religious preoccupations, and your approval of astrology and other means of tying together the moment and its qualities, it does seem clear enough that you are saying the shared subjectivity – what seems to us external to ourselves – warrants more attention from us than it has had, but not as something existing external and existing without relation to us but as something equally important but not yet understood.
Your difficulty in groping your way to the end of that long sentence will surprise you, after a while. Once the point is made, the preliminary gropings seem so unnecessary, even inexplicable.
- Take the 3D world seriously. It exists. You swim in it. You pilot a body that manifests its qualities. Don’t wave it all away with a philosophic or metaphysical formula.
- However, do not make the mistake of seeing it as simpler than it is. Just as 3D extends into non-3D dimensions, so any other conceptual boundary you may imagine you see can be only somewhat real. There are no hard and fast boundaries in reality, as we keep reminding you.
- In taking the 3D world seriously, you must necessarily remember to take your own individual psychic world seriously, for the one is part of the other. There is no “the world” separate from you. If there were, how could you experience it?
- Of course this does not mean that the world is a dream that you as an individual are dreaming. But it is a dream that everybody (in 3D and not) is dreaming. A moment’s thought should show you that anything dependent on one person’s attention would be infinitely fragile, evanescent.
- Just as there is no “the world” separate from you, so can there be no “you” separate from “the world.” It is the same statement. You don’t go off after death and leave the things of earth behind, not in the way you usually think. First, you don’t “go off” at all. Second, you don’t shed all that part of yourself like a snake shedding its skin. Any moment of time you ever lived in, remains: Could it somehow remain without you?
- The shared subjectivity may be seen as the analogue to your various extensions to other lives. (This is an important point and needs mulling.)
This does seem to pull together things I have been considering in separation. Couldn’t we summarize it, crudely, by saying that the world and everything and everybody in it is holy?
You could indeed.
It means that “ordinary” is more magical than we give it credit for being.
It means that every one of you is more magical than you give yourselves credit for being.
People talk abut “the holy land,” or about sacred spots, or holy individuals, but at best this is an exaggeration of differences, and at worst, a misunderstanding.
Less a misunderstanding than a misperception. You may look at that view as an exaggeration of differences, an exaggeration of the reality of boundaries.
I see that it can be difficult to show how materialism is mistaken, because in a way it is right to put emphasis on the reality (at least, the relative reality) of the stone we kick. But it is blind to the extension of 3D into non-3D.
No! No. To think that is to slide back into the mindset that Colin Wilson and Bernard Shaw shared, a sense of the primacy of the 3D and its extension. We repeat, the material world has no life independent of the rest of life.
I can’t untwist that sentence, though I see where I was going wrong.
The 3D world exists, but it does not exist as something independent of what people call the spiritual life. There is no physical-only. There could never be a physical-only, because what you perceive as physical is a slowed-down version of reality that is itself projected from a higher reality, as we keep saying. This is why we renamed the seemingly self-existent external world the shared subjectivity, to get you thinking of it as mind-stuff like the rest of mind-stuff. If we now emphasize that this part of the mind-stuff is as numinous – as sacred – as any other part of it, this is not to say it has an independent existence in the way it appears to have.
So when you said materialism “is blind to the extension of 3D into non-3D,” we had to object, because although that is true in a sense, it is terribly misleading. It seems to put 3D first, and that is precisely the mistake we are correcting. The 3D does not, could not, come first.
Ah, I start to get it.
Spell out what you are getting?
If 3D came first, reality would be divided. If 3D is a result of a projected reality, there is no such division required.
This is accurate enough, but not everyone will be able to follow it. You yourself perhaps would not come to it in the absence of our direct link. But yes, that is so. Any scheme that supposes multiple pieces, multiple causes, cannot be true in an unfractured universe.
I see, though, that this won’t be convincing to everybody. I can envision contrary arguments.
We remind you that we are not in the persuasion business. We are, at most, unrollers of maps for your benefit. The proper use of our instruction is to weigh what we say – and what it suggests to you – and see what you come up with. People will come up with different things – even contrary things – and even if what they come up with demonstrates that they don’t really get what we’re saying – that is, if our sparks combine with their substance to produce something radically different from our meaning – still, trust the process. People no more come to conclusions at random than they do anything at random. Your thoughts, your emotions, your tendencies conscious and unconscious, proceed from what you are. How could they be wrong for you? And of course that says, how could they be universally applicable?
It is an odd form of teaching you do, continually laying out perspectives and then saying, take it or leave it, it’s all the same to us.
Perhaps that is an experience more common to teachers than you know. A true teacher educes, s/he calls forth what it there in the student to be called forth. How could s/he know ahead of time what there is in any given pupil? Set out the material as best you can, and see what happens. Whatever it is, it won’t be random, but will proceed from what the pupil is, and what the teacher is, and what the teaching is, and what the time allows.
Enough for the moment.
Okay, our thanks as always. And our next starting-place?
Living an everyday sacred and grounded life.
See you then. Today’s theme was?
“No separation,” perhaps.
Till next time then.