Thursday, October 6, 2022
5:55 a.m. I’m hoping to continue the discussion – but I’m hoping you know where to go next, because I sure don’t. Concentrating for presence, receptivity, clarity. Over to you.
From the individual point of view, you take what comes and you react to it, and your reaction continues to shape who you are, either by reinforcing who you were already or by modifying it, slightly or sometimes radically.
From a systems view, such individual reactions are the whole, operating through its units. The sum of all those reactions shapes the potential and the limitations of the situation that results.
Either way you look at it, inputs were processed and resulted in altered outputs. Can the system care about – can it even notice – every element within it? Well, yes and no. A good deal depends upon your definition of “cares about.”
It is a continuing discussion, whether there can be a God who cares about each individual. This is one of those arguments that turn people into believers or atheists.
Only because it is a question badly posed. If it were asked, can a system exist which operates under laws (or, ultimately, within one law) and which consists of self-aware units and combinations that exist in several layers, and interconnect, and affect each other by what they themselves decide, and how they themselves alter – does that phrasing require you to decide if there is or is not an overarching person that is aware of each atom and cares about it? The problem with discussions about (let alone attempted definitions of) “God” is that so little of the web of assumptions going into the argument is conscious.
Not to mention, so many of the definitions of people, of life, etc., are wrong.
That too. As you know, our preference is to stay close to what you can do, what you can know first-hand by personal experience. Then, any such inevitable distortions and misunderstandings work themselves out, provided only that you continue to approach such questions in integrity.
Now let’s work our way backward for a moment, posing some rhetorical questions.
- Can a system of inputs being processed and turned into output which thus becomes input be considered mindless, or accidental?
- Can it equally validly be considered mindful, or determined?
- Does it matter if one looks at it as if the material world is really rocks in space, or sees the material world as mind-stuff? (Yes, it matters in effect, but is there any way to prove it?)
- You experience your own consciousness, and nothing else, firsthand. Yet you experience “other” as somehow inseparable from you.
- You may be observed from another viewpoint as “other,” just as you experience everything else as “other.” Does this suggest that viewpoint is more important than evidence?
- If you – as well as others – are a continuing element in processing input, and if that input is the unfinished business of the shared subjectivity – which of course includes your personal subjectivity within it – are you not in a situation of taking in each other’s laundry? That is, isn’t the situation inextricably about you and not-you?
- You are connected to other by Strands, by situations, by unfinished (and, for that matter, also by finished) business. Is the distinction between “you” and “other” real, or is it merely conceptual?
- Disease, illness, maladjustment, war, constructive cooperation, activity, disaster – all the fluctuations in human 3D existence – can they accurately be described as purely personal? As purely impersonal? As “yours”? As “other”?
You see where this leads?
Not quite. “All is one,” for one thing. But that seems more like something you are taking for granted than like something you are leading to.
Isn’t the question on the table at the moment the question of how illness originates, how it is distributed, what purpose it serves, etc.?
Yes, that’s a way to put it.
Aren’t we looking at it – encouraging you to look at it – from a systems point of view and from a personal-experience point of view?
Yes. And so –?
So you should all stop taking things personally, and at the same time should take them as your personal responsibility, and you’ll not only be happier and more equanimous, you will be more efficient in serving your purpose. And that purpose is (1) to play your part in the system, and (2) equally, to develop yourself. The two purposes do not – could not – cut against each other. Once you see that, your way will be less encumbered by internal objections and drag.
We will, in changing our own experience, somewhat change those along the Strands we share.
And vice-versa, of course, which is why you fluctuate in your beliefs, in your experience, over your lifetime. The Strands you comprise are no more unvarying than you are.
Clear, as you say it.
So how do you stop taking difficulties personally, while recognizing them as part of your personal responsibility? Understand, you are neither victim nor culprit. You didn’t bring sin or corruption into the world, and you don’t “deserve” to suffer the consequences. Or should we say that it is “your fault” that the 3D is subject to gravity (as if, for the moment, gravity were a “bad” thing), or should say that it is your “misfortune” to be subject to gravity? No, gravity just is, it’s part of the package, and there isn’t anything wrong, so how could it be your fault or your unfair burden?
I think you’re saying, in effect, that illness, disease, misfortune of any kind, shouldn’t be looked at as some inexplicable interruption of life, some distortion of life, but should be accepted as a natural part of the process, like occasional hurricanes as part of the overall weather system.
Yes indeed.
And that system requirements are somehow magnetized to us as we can use them.
Well, a better way to look at it would be not to look at it by effect (you can “use” the illness or whatever) but by affinity. It is true that you can use whatever comes to you, but that isn’t why this rather than that comes to you. How could it be, if (as is true) you can use whatever comes? If comes to you because something in you aligns with it.
That’s sort of conceptually clear, but I can’t think of a way to exemplify it.
You do not enter into 3D life tabula rasa – that is, as a “blank slate.” The philosophers who thought that conclusion inevitable were quite unaware that their unconscious assumptions were blinding them to any evidence that would render such a conclusion – such an assumption, really – so evidently wrong as to be almost ludicrous. You always enter as a work in progress. You, like the rest of the reality, always are in the midst of unfinished business!
Except perhaps the Buddha, I suppose, or Jesus, or perhaps others we haven’t heard of.
Set that to the side for the moment. Even if there were occasional exceptions, the overwhelming, overwhelming majority of 3D beings enter with unfinished business, and in a way you could say such things are receptors for whatever will lead to the opportunity to process them. “Misfortune” may be quite as useful as “fortunate” situations. Do you think you will regret skinned knees, after you look back on your 3D life, or will you regret (if anything) what you became as a result of how you reacted to skinned knees?
You have a wonderful way of posing rhetorical questions that make things clear.
Thank you. Call this “Systems and individuals,” perhaps.
All right. Our thanks as always.