Sunday, September 18, 2022
4:35 a.m. Not sure where to resume. I think with this sentence that caught my eye as I looked back over Friday’s. “Our allegiance is to something deeper than that church; it is to what the church holds allegiance to….”
Set your intent.
The Puerto Rican Communications Commission, until I can remember PRCC as a unit. Presence, receptivity, clarity, considering. And, I know: As slowly as I can go.
It is always going to be a problem in 3D: How do you sift the grain from the chaff? Any organization may be alien to you, for any of a million reasons; still, what it believes in, and supports, may be more or less what you believe in and support. It isn’t the path for you, but you wish it well for the sake of those it helps.
I see it in my life. I was in Scotland, and a friend (Michael Ross) and I were touring this old Catholic church that had been destroyed by the Protestants centuries ago and was being restored. I was thoroughly in sympathy with the restoration movement, and was feeling (or was persuaded I was feeling) the energy of the place, as a sacred spot that had had a church built upon it – when I walked into a room that had the kind of literature churches have in their lobbies – innocuous pamphlets, single sheets, maybe even little booklets. Something within me froze: I went from active sympathy to a sense of alienation, instantly. And later I figured out why, but it was a shock, as when a priest passed and I had a similar sense of withdrawing.
This was Pluscarden Abbey; it took till now for the name to surface, as I was confident it would. [Photos at https://www.pluscardenabbey.org]
So, guys, would you like to help me separate the various things that were going on, to help make your point?
It isn’t difficult, though there were, it is true, several strands to the reaction.
We may need to agree upon a word to distinguish various meanings of the word “strands,” as we did for the word “judgment.” In this case we mean strands just as it is used in ordinary conversation, not to mark other-life influences within you.
Maybe capitalize the word when we’re using it our way, and otherwise use it uncapitalized, in the way that is common?
That may serve. We shall try it and see. The strands of your reaction:
- You were intellectually convinced of some things before you were emotionally convinced, and here was a demonstration of it.
- Seeing anything in the flesh is going to evoke different reactions than merely thinking about it – particularly if the 3D manifestation is the first since you have begun thinking of a thing differently.
- Never forget, every experience includes and constellates the question: Which you? The boy who rejected the church is not the same person as the man who saw the church abstractly as a very good thing.
- It is just such shocks that may serve to open diplomatic relations, as you like to say, between parts of yourself that may have been coexisting by ignoring each other, or let’s say by forgetting each other.
- But every experience has the potential to teach you new things, the more you return to it with questioning mind. Every new examination will attach new context, and this will reveal new sides to the situation.
- Implied in the previous point is this, which may not have occurred to you: There can be no ultimate, final, judgment. Everything you believe, everything you know, everything you are down-to-the-ground sure of, may look different later. Or it may not, but even if it never looks different to you, remember that all judgments are subject to later revision, — or do you want the 15-year-old that you were to decide your life for you? Doing its best at 15, fine, but are those judgments likely to hold up over a long lifetime?
More to the point at the moment: Your experience then shows you now the difficulty any alliance must face.
I see that. I wondered once at an aside in a John LeCarre novel where the character said he supposed that allies always hate each other. I eventually came to see that he meant that in an alliance, you necessarily often cannot get what you want, perhaps not even what you need from the other, but you are still tied to the other by need.
So you today – and any who are in a similar position, intellectually and emotionally – find yourself allied to organizations that are somewhat oriented in the same way you are, and somewhat in favor of the things you favor, and somewhat friendly and well-meaning to what you are, even while not being able to see or even suspect who you are beyond whatever shows.
Certainly true politically, but I see you mean, for instance, churches, and scientific and metaphysically oriented organizations.
Many things. The fact is, 3D life is a series of alliances, many of them running parallel in your life, not merely sequentially. You are the center of your world. Everyone else is the center of a world. You share certain aspects of life: You are in the same times, which means you are working on aspects of the shared subjectivity that the times allowed to manifest. But you are the heirs of your own composition, so to speak. You were formed of various Strands, each with a history, each with unfinished business.
And I heard a major side-trail open up there. But do we want to pursue it now? Every Strand is engaged with its own times, its own shared subjectivity – but in linking to other lives it is enmeshed also in those times.
Hold the thought. Let’s begin with it next time. An advantage of paying attention, you see. You didn’t miss the bird on the wing.
So if at best you are among allies rather than family, what does this imply?
About what?
Sit with the question.
I suppose, come to think of it, even our Stands could be considered as much allies as family. They are and they aren’t part of us. They do and they don’t necessarily share our values and goals.
It’s complicated, you see. But isn’t that your experience of life? Do you know many people who experience life as simple?
This is hooking up things I hadn’t connected before.
Slowly.
- People whose Strands clash experience the world in a different way from those whose Strands coexist in harmony.
- Yet that equation changes during life, or may change, anyway. Different circumstances may call forth different reactions – may awaken different Strands, so to speak, and in effect all alliances may have to be renegotiated.
- Or, if not renegotiated, let’s say they may manifest different priorities, suffer different strains.
- Different alliances, different ratios among Strands, will, in effect, show the world as correspondingly different.
Hence, as we said, judgments will alter in the light of new context. And this process is never-ending, unless you think that all Strands can finish all their unfinished business simultaneously, and hence cease agitating each other. Since every Strand extends in many directions beyond the link you share, in effect you would be requiring that the entire universe cease to revolve. Do you think that is likely to happen? Do you think it would be a good thing if it did?
It’s striking, how things are suddenly clear that weren’t, in all the time we’ve been thinking about things.
We promised Rita, and we promise you, you’ll never be bored unless you want to be.
I look forward to looking at that side-trail next time. Today’s theme?
“Allegiance and alliance,” perhaps.
Not bad. Till next time, then, and of course you have our thanks for all this, as always.