The 3D and non-3D: Herds and outliers, edited [from 1-7-2019]

You live at a remove from the physical world, mentally. This won’t come as news to you. Even when you spend your time reading of, understanding, conceptualizing the world, you aren’t really participating in it the way other people do.

It is difficult for me, participating in the world around me.

Let’s say, it is difficult for you to do things in the way others do, for you can do things others can’t, and for the same reason. You live from a somewhat different standing-place. You are scarcely alone in that, of course, but by nature you and others in that situation experience yourselves as essentially alone. Start with Laurens van der Post’s analogy of the herd and the outliers.

Van der Post said that he had observed that herds would have one or more members who for whatever reason were neither fully accepted into the herd nor quite outcast. He said the outlying positions of these individuals made them hypervigilant, continually alert, even more so than the rest of the herd, and therefore provided the herd with an advantage of increased sensitivity.

That’s right. The race’s sentinels don’t necessarily persuade anybody; they react, and their reactions alert the rest through a process of contagion. Artists, scholars, prophets, eccentrics – we neither set such people upon pedestals nor smile at them as if they were to be pitied – there is a whole class of outliers in any society, and they serve a function, just as the relatively compact mass that forms a society’s center of gravity serve a function. That does not guarantee that either outlier or mass is comfortable.

Hold the herd-and-outlier analogy in mind. Now consider, the 3D portion of the world goes on within the larger All-D world. If your mental world is anchored in one place, it won’t be anchored in a different place. The way you see the world will necessarily be different from any other person’s way of seeing it, because you are all experiencing it as individuals. But beyond that, some of you will experience it as outliers and others as part of the center of gravity. That is, you won’t be living quite in the same world, nor quite in different worlds. You will be tenuously bound together.

Now, bear in mind, you are all experiencing the 3D world while being part of the greater all-encompassing world of which it is a part. (We’ve said many times, everyone is, must be, in all dimensions.) But that doesn’t mean you are all even roughly equally aware of the encompassing world we have been calling the non-3D. You all feed situation reports to the larger beings of which you are a part. Everyone’s particular position on a scale of awareness of the non-3D in ordinary life determines, or anyway facilitates, their particular report. Those reports affect the non-3D being, and in turn affect our feedback to our 3D components. You understand, language is overemphasizing separation here and understating the connection.

Let’s sum it up this way. All aspects of the world deserve and receive equal attention, which in effect means everything gets reported on, and these reports are collated and summarized and fed back into the morning briefings of the participants, who then go about their day in light of the developing situation. That ought to be an analogy that provides a flexible understanding without luring you to read it literally.