Wednesday, October 5, 2022
5:25 a.m. Shall we continue? We’re wandering, I think, though you did warn us it’s a broad subject.
Look back, then, and summarize.
We started with discussing why we in 3D wake and sleep. We discussed the way everything is connected, matter as well as mind, all being mind-stuff. We moved to the question of illness as a social statistic rather than an individual problem. You said illness is neutral, not necessarily good or bad. We found genetics as a metaphor for the question of how the factors in illness are distributed. This is rough, but more or less accurate.
Accurate enough to orient. Focus.
Yes. Presence, receptivity, clarity.
As an orienting principle, take the continual interaction of positive, negative, and reconciling principles, recognizing that in each specific instance, a given force may play any of the three roles. Two forces would produce stalemate or divergence or conflict. One force would produce stasis. Three forces allow for change and stability.
The three we use as framework are individual subjectivity, shared subjectivity, and the quality of the moment. This could be said, “”I, other, the times,” remembering that both “I” and “other” are approximations; they are labels on certain parts of an undivided whole, they are not separate things.
Yes. You have described the external world (including our bodies) as unrecognized parts of who we are.
Not exactly. The shared subjectivity reflects to you unrecognized aspects of who you are. It is the only way you have of obtaining an outside view of yourself – which in practice means, a view of the things you have not included in your consciousness.
And I begin to see where you’re going with this, maybe.
Yes. You heard the hint when we reminded you that your body ought to be counted with the shared subjectivity in some contexts, and with the individual subjectivity in other contexts. Your physical body is the bridge between inner and outer, between “I” and “External.” It expresses (and shapes) you; it also expresses and channels the external world.
Hence, illness.
Well, hence the opening for illness, and for health, and for the transmission and reception of disease.
I will be damned.
If you will, it is you who will have to do the damning.
You know what I mean. This simple rejiggering begins to explain a lot. You had shown us that the body was in a sense us, in a sense other, but I hadn’t put it in terms of public health – or of individual health, really.
Remember that from the individual point of view, anything life serves up will have its uses. It can be turned to account. It can be coped with, and it can be suffered, and it can be profited by, and it can leave scars, and it can cripple and it can cause one to do things one would rather not have done, or things one cannot bear to remember having done, or things one cannot believe one was capable of (good or bad). The difference in result is partly dependent on the ratio of stimulus to what it encounters, and partly a result of the intent, the will, of the one encountering it.
That’s awfully abstract. I think you just said, anything that happens to us is subject to how we meet it, but that nonetheless we don’t have the ability to have everything our own way.
Doesn’t that square with your experience of life?
It does, of course.
You always have free will. Free will is always a factor in how you meet events. But you are not Superman, nor a god: Things happened to you not as you will but as they happen.
We keep coming back to Viktor Frankl’s insight that we always have freedom to decide how to respond to what happens.
That is, you can always form your second-tier response, whether or not you were able to shape your first-tier response or were overwhelmed by the moment. It is life’s second-tier responses, ultimately, that shape who you become.
But that’s from the individual perspective. How does it look rom the perspective of the system at large? (Not that “the system at large” has a perspective, but how would it look if it did.)
The key here – one often overlooked – is not the individual nor the collective, but the times in which they manifest. Jung’s insight that every moment of time expresses different qualities is accurate, and will lead you to many things.
Consider the paradox. We say there is only one, eternal, “now.” Yet we say that all moments of time exist and do not cease to exist, and are active, not inert; alive, not museum pieces. How can both aspects of time be true? How can the living present moment continually slide you into uncharted waters, continually slide you away from familiar, perhaps cherished, surroundings?
I’m groping for it. Time is the reconciling principle somehow, stemming from our interaction with our surroundings.
That’s more literally true than you may think.
We experience happy times as fleeting, painful times as dragging.
You can do better than that somewhat sleepy generalization. Try.
Yes, all right. We know that our experience of time has a variable quality, which you have said is a function of our consciousness. The year after Gateway seemed to go on forever – not that I minded!
An artist, a scientist, a thinker, may experience a depth of time that ordinarily s/he would not. You call it “Losing track of time.” You might better call it, “Time losing its hold on you.” What changes? Clearly it can only be your depth of engagement with the material. Thus, the variable isn’t (can’t be) the environment nor the times, but your engagement. It isn’t quite that simple, for life has to present you with the opportunity to engage, but that itself [the opportunity] is a ratio involving an individual’s sensitivity. Jacob Boehme caught a glimpse of sunlight reflecting off a bowl. Krishnamurti saw white birds against a dark background. Many a poet experienced transport by stimuli others might have found quite mundane. One’s sensitivity to the environment makes a difference. Still, basically the variable to watch is your own sensitivity, your own response to life and the world at any given moment. And isn’t it a good thing?
In that otherwise we would be dependent on something outside our control.
Yes. Your reaction is under your control, depending upon how you have developed. But the stimulus isn’t. How could it be? Should you be required to devise each test, as well as respond to it? However, let us return to looking at this from the system’s point of view.
Every moment that you move into is shaped by
- What has occurred previously
- What “the stars” allow, so to speak
That is, the state of the shared subjectivity’s unfinished business, combined with the potential and limitations of the quality of the new moment, add up to what that new moment can and must bring. The astrology of it (that is, the unending systematic change in cosmic “weather”) assures that you don’t continually tread the same ground, and that the ground changes not arbitrarily but according to law. The hared subjectivity aspect of it assures that nothing is forgotten, either on a personal or on a system level.
The universe always presents the bill.
Let’s say, the universe always sweeps up after the party. Equally true.
And we’re out of time, but I felt like we got somewhere this time. The theme?
“Three principles as they interact.”
Okay. Our thanks as always.