Monday, September 20, 2022
6:10 a.m. Anything on your minds for this morning, guys?
You don’t have to do this every day. You put in a good day yesterday, between this and cleaning up old files.
I’m just tired, this morning, I guess. Maybe later.
[A very few minutes later:]
– I was sitting here running the waters of life and health, and the thought came that the energy reaches each cell and as it passes, encourages them. It was a sense of an army, or any coordinated enterprise, any band of defenders. Hadn’t thought of things that way. I wonder, what is a cell’s experience of 3D life? What is it in non-3D? In fact, instead of wondering, why not ask? Guys?
You are asking, in effect, what is the experience, in the largest sense, of any portion of mind-stuff that is participating in 3D.
I guess I am, yes. I wouldn’t have put it that way.
Reframing the question is one way of facilitating a certain approach to an answer.
Sort of setting up the expectations behind our backs?
More like painting background, or context., that will flavor the show. A background is a sort of unnoticed influence.
We should like you to consider the cells in your body – which after all anyone would describe as alive – as a variant of the composition of stone, say, or anything you would describe as inanimate. Every thing, “living” or dead,” “sentient” or “inanimate,” is composed of matter, no exceptions. Molecules, atoms, sub-atomic particles, the works. In fact it is a problem for materialist science how “life” arises from “dead material,” and how “consciousness” arises from “unconsciousness.” It is the same problem, seen differently. They can’t figure it out, because they begin from the wrong end, thinking they know what matter is, what consciousness is, what life is. as opposed to – non-life, call it.
You are close to arguing away the question.
We are close to showing you that the question arises from a wrong understanding. To ask what a cell’s experience of 3D life is: – so many assumptions and definitions.
I get that you were ready to set out some bullet-points, but nothing came.
You remembered yourself (PRCC), which helps. The problem is that you aren’t confident there will be any bullets, because you don’t have any sense of what they will be.
That’s true, but I am holding myself in willingness.
Merely let go. If nothing happens, if garbage emerges, so what? You are not required to send out failed attempts.
True. Well, let’s see, then. Assumptions and definitions?
- Living or dead. When it’s all mind-stuff?
- Conscious or unconscious. In a way, same thing: It’s all mind-stuff.
- Organized, disorganized, organizing, disorganizing? Nothing is static, everything flows. How could there be a perpetual state of being, for anything?
- Within 3D terms (that is, in the realm of “somewhat real” that we have set out many times), structures are created, employed, dissolved. Life is impermanence, but it is not the impermanence of chaos, but of flow.
- Can you pinpoint the molecules of oxygen in the air you breathed yesterday? Where are they? Is someone else using them without your permission? Did they get involved in a fire and then get “destroyed”? Is it their hard fate to circle the earth forever, or get bonded as rust to some old iron girder, or get destroyed by some chemical recombination they had no say in?
- That is, does it make sense in any way (except provisionally for analysis, and practically, for usage), to treat anything as if it were a unit? Units are temporary formations, mind-stuff doing a do-si-do in 3D. Blast anything to its component atoms, blast the atoms to subatomic particles, go as far as you wish, and still whatever comprised it exists.
- Or, look at things the other way. The things these subatomic particles form when properly combined (for the moment) into atoms, molecules, substances, etc.: Can the thing have a quality it picks up from nowhere?
- Yet, if that quality inhered in its constituent parts, how can that be? How could anything new enter the world, anything more complex, anything the result of whatever had preceded it?
Now, wait. You’re saying, “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,” somehow.
No, we’re about to say something a little different.
- Every layer of organization of matter has a new feature that was not evident in previous layers. Einstein was made of the same elements that went into an amoeba or a chemical bath or a flower or a politician, but no one could say there was no difference in organization between him and other layers. They were all material; they were all made of the same somewhat-real elements in the somewhat-real 3D world – yet, each layer includes differences.
It ought to be evident that the differences in organization cannot be merely chemical. That is, a flower and a whale and a mountain and an Einstein are all made partly from matter and partly, surely, from – something else.
If you say “mind,” you’re saying mind added to what you already defined as mind-stuff.
Indeed we are. Good thinking, now settle in and see what comes next.
Well, the mind-body problem isn’t what it looks to be. We aren’t adding one thing to a different kind of something. We’re adding mind to mind.
Not quite.
We are adding organization of some kind, we’re adding complexification.
That’s a very reasonable way to look at it. It may be seen physically. Put enough of a given something in the same place and time, under the right conditions, and it will spontaneously (whatever that is supposed to mean) organize itself into a more complex structure with new possibilities.
How many politicians to make an Einstein?
How many honeybees to make a hive? How many wheels to make a wagon? It should be obvious that “spontaneous” really means, “suddenly able to conform to an advanced pattern, a possibility, that required that certain prerequisites be met.
Plato’s pre-existing patterns.
Yes. It wasn’t a flight of fancy on his part. But – keep looking more closely. Where to those patterns arise?
Is this a trick question? They arise in the non-3D.
Which interpenetrates the 3D and is not really a separate thing except in the language. So where do Platonic Ideas arise/ Or, we’ll settle for, Where do they live?
Any pattern implies an intelligence that laid down that pattern, even if the pattern then replicates itself. A hive of bees was designed somewhere as a pattern for future bees to conform to, and they’ve been doing it ever since.
So where does that creating intelligence abide?
On a higher level of organization than ours, I suppose, or it wouldn’t be invisible to us.
Very good. There’s your hour, and we can continue this another time.
Today’s theme?
That’s an interesting question. Any title we might give it will give you too definite an idea – that is, too partial a sense of it. You choose.
“Organization”?
That will do nicely.
Then, till next time, and thanks as always.