Monday, September 19, 2022
6 a.m. Reading, reading, reading. Did all the stuff I’m getting from the guys actually come by way of Richard Bach? So much of what I re-read seems to have it all there, at least in potential and often enough spelled out. Of course, truth converges, and there was a time when his ideas seemed foreign, at least some of them. But it’s striking to be re-reading Running from Safety, or Illusions, or even Nothing by Chance, and see it all laid out. Not the explanations of how things are, but certainly the “how it works in practice.” And I’ve been reading Richard for quite a few years – as in, I suppose, fifty. Fifty years ago, I was 26 and he was 36. That’s a lot of steering, a lot of encouragement.
All right, friends, shall we take the side trail we passed yesterday? You were pointing out that each of us is an alliance of many Strands, which meant that each of them with its own unfinished business was participating in the same moment as we do. And doesn’t that tie together the events of one time with those of all the others?
It is all one present moment. This is another way why.
Another way why it’s all one moment, and therefore another way how it’s all one moment.
That’s right. You always have to be careful that focusing your microscope doesn’t give you an exaggerated idea of reality’s divisions at the expense of remembering reality’s unity. You may cut a town into town lots, or may cut a day into hours, or may cut a human being’s body and soul into logical parts, but life doesn’t inhere in division; it is in one-ness.
We’ll risk generalizing it this far: Any time that logical analysis makes it look like its two things (no matter what “it” we’re talking about), it’s still always one. Every time, if you look closer, analyze more carefully, factor in things you hastily discarded, you’ll see the same. There are no absolute divisions in reality.
So, now look at what it means, that humans are the tying together of many times and many places, all experiencing (second-hand, one might say) a given present moment. Lots of consequences.
It’s like kneading bread to get the yeast evenly distributed.
Yes it is. Time is not a sequence, not a flow from past to present to future. It is not, you might say, one-dimensional. It is closer to outer space, packed with black holes, gravitational distortions, interruptions of cookie-sheet smoothness everywhere. Nothing in outer space is as it seems to the eye – empty, seamless, uniform. It is more like the medieval pictured it, in a way: packed with energy, tumultuously full of events, suffused with causation and reactions. Sorry to be opaque here, we are constrained to rely on effects; you don’t know anything about modern astronomy nor medieval and classical astronomy nor Chinese nor Mayan astronomy, let alone Egyptian astronomy. Mostly what you think you know is you putting your assumptions on whatever shards of old belief systems happen to have survived the ages. Just because you can put a label on something doesn’t mean you have understood it – or even, perhaps, really recognized it.
So with time, too.
That was an interesting experience. It was like watching the pot of water on the stove suddenly boiling over, after years of seeing it gently simmering.
Yes, a little unexpected vehemence, eh? Perhaps this process of extended exposition creates its own tensions, the tension you feel when unexpressed things build up within you over time, and there is never occasion to set them out. Instead, you have to continue with half-understandings, or lose your teaching-learning link by proceeding too far too soon.
Several things set us to boiling over, actually, not because we are emotionally involved nor even because you may be ready to hear them, but because the times and the material given have finally released the spring. You might refocus, first.
Presence, receptivity, clarity, considering. Go ahead.
- Each of you helps hold time-space together. Or, to state the same thing from the other end of the lens, one of the things “the times” do is precipitate individual combinations.
- It isn’t just humans. Anything produced by sexual recombination is a compound being, including trees, animals, insects. You can’t feel or see or perhaps imagine how they participate, but that is just your limitation. Reality has broader views.
- Remember, always – don’t let yourself lose this connection, or none of it can be seen properly – it’s all mind-stuff. You are all mind-stuff; so are mountain ranges and oceans and clouds. But compound beings are a particular kind of mind-stuff with their own properties.
- The reason it is important to remember that the heaviest metal, the dullest day, is still just mind-stuff is that otherwise you start making divisions and you start creating logical obstacles that may appear real.
- A concomitant to “It’s all mind-stuff” is “Dreams don’t divide. They don’t
I’m setting the sense of it, but that isn’t getting it said.
No. But let’s continue, see where we go:
- “Life is but a dream” is truer than “Life is what it looks like, a lot of plodding or even dancing, through a whole bunch of events.” There is nothing solid about life, save thinking make it so.
- Space, time, the whole stage apparatus is one thing, not several. Everything interconnects, which is the same as saying, “There’s only one everything.” When you let this become more than just words, more than just a nice idea, your world opens up.
- Because 3D humans comprise many Strands, and because those Strands each involve themselves, and everything they connect to, to every person’s present moment, in effect there is only one present moment, and you are all experiencing it “now” as you “did then” and “will do in the future.” Again, when the reality of this sinks in and it ceases to be “just words,” your life changes.
Well, for the first time I have an idea how it can be that time is all one present moment, seen from each fragment of reality that 3D sequence allows us. I mean, how could Joseph be living in a living moment in 1863? I accepted that somehow he could, but only now can I see how it makes sense. It’s like everything being alive, regardless of appearances. Once we remember that its all mind-stuff, the logical problems disappear. Once we remember that there’s only the eternal now, braiding and looping and kneading itself automatically everywhere, again the logical problems disappear.
This has been quite a side-trail! More like a superhighway.
Even though we are only 50 minutes in, this is a logical place to pause. You will noticed that going slower does not in fact result in your gleaning less.
I do notice. What I get is richer, too. Today’s theme was?
“Kneading,” perhaps?
“Kneading time and space?”
If you prefer.
And I get that tomorrow’s (or whenever) is our old standby, TBA.
By this time, that shouldn’t cost you any anxiety.
Not noticeably. Thanks as always.