The future of the individual (1)

Tuesday, October 18, 2022

9:30 a.m. You said yesterday that we as individuals were more important than the world in total. You didn’t put it that way, but that’s what it amounted to. Care to say more?

It will need to be said far more carefully. Focus, please.

Presence, receptivity, clarity. Go ahead.

So many terms to define carefully, and so many relationships to clarify. It is a case of having to do many things at the same time. Let’s see if bullet points will do it.

  • You as individuals. In this discussion, “you” will mean you as a subdivision of your larger being. One given 3D life is only a part, even when one considers other lives, Strands, to be part of the one life.
  • The world. This may be seen two ways, and it makes a difference. “The world” as an abstraction, merely the total of everything, could be disregarded. Real things (including souls, obviously) always outweigh abstractions. But “the world” as the sum total of souls is not an abstraction but a piece of verbal shorthand; in other words, it refers to real things, not some abstract concept.
  • Individuals have a future, a life beyond 3D life. They have a purpose; they are a vector. This 3D life is a template and a finishing-ground (or, if you will, a nursery, a school, and a training-ground), not an end in itself.
  • The world as total of souls – or, say, as the shared subjectivity in which individuals swim – does not have a future. It has no life toward which it is growing. It is now what it was and will be, an environment.

You need to modify your third bullet, don’t you? 3D life is not a training ground but an experience of a training ground.

That is correct. Good clarification.

This says, as the Egyptians seem to have been saying, that First Life is merely to be shaped, and the important business proceeds from there.

It doesn’t say that, you intuit it, but, close enough. Your experience of 3D life is important, it is never meaningless, but it aims you at something, it is not the end in itself.

I can see that you are having trouble making a destination clear, but I’m not sure what it is. (Come to think of it, that’s probably saying the same thing twice.)

The difference is between you at one level, and you at that level and another level. This is mostly what we’re hoping to sketch vie bullet-points: The former was only a beginning.

  • You – as we described you in the first bullet – may be seen in two ways: (1), as a subset of a larger being, (2) as a being considered only in relation to 3D. To begin to consider you as in (1), we need to take for granted the definition in (2) that we have been describing, these many years.

I think I see that. If we were still thinking of ourselves as one-body-one-person, or even as one-body-one-reincarnational-history, it would be harder for us to understand the first of the two definitions.

You have thought you understood, as we have suggested relationships in the past, but no, you couldn’t have gotten it right.

I was thinking of us 3D beings as the children (so to speak) of the larger non-3D being, but I hadn’t gotten any farther than that.

Implied, you see, is a qualitative difference between 3D beings and their “parent” being.

Yes, that’s how I was thinking of it.

Now we want to refine your understanding of the situation.

  • Remember, 3D and non-3D are not different, nor separated. They are polarities and they interpenetrate.
  • Therefore, do not overdraw the distinction between consciousness currently immersed in 3D – you – and that which is “located” in non-3D. Same substance, different state, like water and ice.
  • Therefore – and this will not have come clear until now, perhaps – consider all of it together as one thing: the larger being, all of its “children.” Part is in 3D, part isn’t, but it is all one thing as opposed to another.
  • This separate being – this larger non-3D being and all its children who live in and also out of 3D – may be called –. Well, what should we call it? At some point names only confuse, as they imply more of a distinction than is warranted.

I get it, you’re reminding us that distinctions are always provisional; no absolute separation in reality, but not undifferentiated jello either.

Yes.

Will it help to say that we are going to treat as individuals things that we will later have to see as all part of one something?

You have been paying attention. Yes, that will help clarify what we are doing here. For initial exploration, we treat it as if it were a discrete unit, then later we may go over it again, stressing connections instead of distinctions.

But while we are stressing distinctions, we want to say this: Each such unit has a destiny, a future, a state it can grow into, which is not merely more of the same.

Bob Monroe talked of clusters “winking out” of existence when they reached a certain level of completion. I gathered he meant they were moving on to a new level of complexity.

Close enough. The point is, life never ends, it never stays still, and it changes nature, situation, possibilities, challenges, depending upon what it chooses. And in the case of this larger being we’re sketching, that means all these decisions made by 3D beings, that shape them, and in so doing help shape the larger being of which they are part.

And you still haven’t gotten it said. I get the sense of it, though. On the one hand, – no, it fled.

You got distracted. Let’s pause there, and resume another time. This is hard work, and taking it slowly helps give you time to process in the background.

Okay. Today’s theme?

“The future of the individual”?

Perhaps. Add “(1)”?

Perhaps.

Thanks as always.

 

Leave a Reply