Saturday, October 8, 2022
5:30 a.m. All right, guys, let’s look some more at this question of illness (as an example of things we experience that we tend to label as negative, but probably ought to see as neutral) and the times and the relationship of any individual’s experiences to the experience of the life going on around them.
In the phrasing of the question is an indicator that you have moved quite a bit, over the years, toward a broader perspective, which is of course beneficial to you, and productive. You may wish to pay attention to your slide-switches.
Okay. Presence, receptivity, clarity. I was re-reading our past several sessions, trying to help us pursue whatever it is you are pursuing, if only by reducing the drag of my own unawareness.
Always good to strike a balance between receptivity and passivity. Too little mental participation would be as unhelpful as insensitivity to non-sensory input. Active receptivity is the desired balance here.
Let’s continue looking at your 3D lives from a systems viewpoint. It will show you things by indirection. Some things that can’t be said may however be hinted at, may be backlit, let’s say.
First begin by remembering that in trying to see life straight, you are having to overcome the effects of eating the apple. It is one thing to know that you shouldn’t judge things as good and bad; another thing entirely, to be able to avoid doing so. This is particularly the case in anything you have not consciously considered. In other words, once you put your attention to it, you see that this or that example is something you have reflexively judged. Until you put your attention to it, though, you don’t notice.
To state it as clearly as we can: The effects of eating the apple do not manifest so much in how you consciously decide to see things. They manifest in how you unconsciously see them; how you assume things to be. Those peoples who descend from cultures that didn’t eat the apple do not experience life in the ame way, even if the externals are identical, because they do not label.
I can see that, as you say it. And you guys are what I used to humorously describe myself as, you are the Apostles to the Christians.
Someone has to do missionary work, if the world-pot is to be stirred! But seriously, this work could be considered, in toto, as an Epistle to the Unaffiliated. And of course what we hope to convert people to is not an orientation but a way of approaching life; not dogma but the habit of seeing ever more deeply.
Life more abundantly.
That is always the goal.
So – this diversion aside – peoples who descend from those who did eat the apple tend to label things good and bad; they tend to do it indiscriminately, unconsciously, and (therefore) erroneously. But it may take some explaining to show how we’re seeing it.
I get the idea of a hurricane hitting, and people labelling it a bad thing because of the destruction it leaves in its wake.
Yes, that’s a good example, and we will add to it, contagions such as the 2019 virus you are still experiencing worldwide. Who is considering either of these phenomena neutrally? They are clearly “bad.”
I’m edging toward your distinction. Clearly they are destructive. I know you aren’t disputing that.
That merely backs up the argument one level. It becomes that destruction is “bad.”
I think I’m beginning to see.
“Fortunate or unfortunate” is not the same as “good or bad,” though at first glance you may think so. Nobody is likely to regard a hurricane or a viral plague as fortunate, but that doesn’t mean they must see them as “bad.” The good or bad is a tag you add on, unconsciously, reflexively, and quite unhelpfully.
Now, you might ask how such labelling can be unhelpful, but consider – how much analysis do you do, once you have begun by looking at something as bad? You may analyze the cause and effect, in the way that a social worker may look at juvenile delinquency, say. But that isn’t the same thing as understanding that accepts.
That may be misunderstood, I think, by any who come to it when not linked to your mind that originates it. I take it that this is in line with what Jung says, about condemnation always isolating, never helping to heal.
Yes, only it can be slippery. In saying that people judge hurricanes to be bad, we are not imagining that they really treat them as malign. Some animists may, but mostly when people talk about “nature’s fury,” it is a threadbare expression. Still they are seeing it as “a bad thing.”
Hard to see why they would see it as a good one.
But you see, that’s our point. As long as you continue along that good-bad continuum, you cannot escape the blinders. Why does a storm or a virus have to be good or bad? (Indeed, how could they be?) Fortunate or unfortunate, yes, but not good or bad. To insist on labelling things in that way is to cling to your blinders lest you have to waken to uncomfortably new ways of seeing.
In case we haven’t really absorbed your point, would you mind going into the difference, as you see it, between good-bad and fortunate-unfortunate?
This seems hardly necessary. Isn’t the difference obvious?
I don’t think it is, actually, especially for those of us who haven’t really rooted out the reflexes left over from generations of Strands shaped by that eating of the apple. If we have thousands of people on the various Strands we participate in – that’s a lot of drag to overcome.
Yes, true enough. Very well, look at it this way. When you were a boy in the 1940s and 50s, it was common to expose young boys, particularly, to what were called childhood diseases, so that they would acquire immunity that would save them from danger after puberty.
Mumps, for one.
Yes. Measles, chicken pox, mumps. You were expected to contract them, you were expected to recover from them, and life went on. They were considered neither good nor bad; they were mostly inconvenient, but just something to be encountered in the ordinary course of life. That was a sound and healthy attitude. But polio, say, was another story.
Nobody would call polio good. And “unfortunate” doesn’t do it.
No indeed. So was the polio virus bad?
Ah, aren’t we teasing out a linguistic ambiguity here, such as we found in the word “judgment,” which can mean discernment or can mean condemnation, two very different things? “Bad” as in effect is not the same thing as “bad” as in intent; using the same word for each introduces (or anyway expresses) confusion.
Yes, and thank you for clarifying our point. That is indeed a part of what we’re trying to get across. Seeing polio as an unfortunate effect is different from imagining it as a malign effect. “God,” or “the universe,” or “blind fate” did not punish the person who contracted polio, or AIDS, or any socially prevalent infection. There was no malign intent; it was closer to being in the wrong place at the wrong time. (Only, don’t let that slip into a sense of “accident.”)
Now, it took an entire session, nearly an hour, to clarify this one point, but that is time well spent, because anyone who internalizes the logic will have acquired the key to gradually undoing layers of conditioning – and remember, what you do for yourself, you do for everyone. Working on yourself is never a matter of one person, though it usually looks that way.
Let’s pause here. Call this one “Redefinition,” perhaps.
We could use that label for practically any session we’ve ever had.
Well, you suggest.
“The apple and our unconscious assumptions,” perhaps?
Your choice, always.
Thanks as always.