Humanity’s role (from October 6, 2019)

Sunday, October 6, 2019

Re-reading your final paragraph from yesterday, I see that it may be misread in a way I hadn’t considered.

[“The essential difference  {between human and animal}– and we will have to resume on this point – is that humans are in 3D to shape themselves by their choices in a deliberately restricted environment, and nothing else in that environment is there for that same purpose, but [is there] to help provide the ecology of the process. Whitman was right that animals do not weep for their sins, but not perhaps for the reason he assumed. Start thinking that the 3D is provided for humans, and that it is not provided for its own sake but for the sake of non-3D purposes, and you will begin to come out of the woods without reverting either to scientific or religious dogma.”]

Clarification of ambiguities is your game – go to it.

What you said and meant to say is that only humans are in 3D to use it to reshape themselves; everything and everyone else is there in a supportive role to enable that process to take place. It was only the structure of the sentence that might lead people to misread it.

Thank you for providing them the clarification, and we shall use the opportunity to provide another, though a slippery and hard-to-describe one. And that is: Different actors play different roles at different times.

We have seen that as it applies to the human drama, but you are meaning it in a larger context.

Indeed we are. But, as we said, it is slippery. Rather than you “taking dictation,” as you say, this time we would like you to sit with the feeling, the not-thought-but-sort-of-a-logical-but-non-verbal-perception, so that you may get the overall sense of it. Then express it and we’ll see where we get to and how we do.

Okay. Interesting idea. Not sure we’ve ever done this in just this way. 6:43.

6:45. I made note of the times merely to see how long I’d take. Two minutes doesn’t sound like much of a gap, but, like when in the black box, it can seem long. So here is as much as I get. I think it is the thin edge of the wedge, but we’ll start here and see. And I’ll put it in Roman rather than in itals, for easier reading.

Let’s look at it this way. As so often, it’s all in the angle you view things from. We are accustomed to identifying with the human body, the human personality, the human identity, call it, including ancestry, affiliations, associations, resonances of character and interests, etc. This is natural and all but unavoidable. It’s what we are, after all. But it isn’t only what we are, and we tend to forget that. Beneath the compound spirit that has become human is the more universal spirit that does not change with our 3D experiences, that is not shaped by repeated pairings of physical heredities. We are the unchanged thing as much as we are the shaped, created, self-modifying thing we know ourselves to be.

Well, in the same way, the 3D drama may be considered two ways, both as story and as actors playing roles in that story. Only in this case, the “actors” include not only human actors but all the kingdoms, especially including the animal kingdom. (This shades off into other statements I am not so sure of, so I’ll stick to the point that is central at the moment.)

So, to hold to the analogy, at any given performance of the play, the cast may include certain energies playing humans, but at other performances, different energies may be playing the humans. It isn’t as if the universe is divided into humans on one hand and second-class citizens on the other. It is divided into the human experience and all other experience, but that is not the same thing as saying that only one class of actor gets to play human. It means, only one group at any given time.

I’m not sure I made that spectacularly clear, but it’s a start. Your critique?

As you say, it’s a start.

Laughing. All right, where do we go from here?

But we did not mean it satirically. It’s a start. From our point of view, that may be said of anything and everything we have ever succeeded in conveying.

Here is our paraphrase of your interpretation of what you intuited of our intended message. (And if you will re-read that sentence, you will have an enhanced understanding of the difficulties always inherent in translation.) Or rather, here is our continuation, hoping to shed side-lights that may say what cannot be said directly.

Some people, looking at a scheme that positions humans in the center of the 3D world, will object that this is nothing but what we might call collective human egotism. Despite the fact that we have gone to some trouble to show that this is not leftover thought from other times, the suspicion remains, because of a strong emotional vested interest in not being drawn into sympathy with any such view.  So, to demonstrate our point, let us turn the focus from humans to, say, the bee.

The 3D world from a bee’s perspective has been developed and maintained specifically to provide a nurturing environment for bees to exist, including a means of nutrition that also accomplishes their purpose in the larger scheme of things. Does a bee need to be aware of the place in the scheme of things occupied by whales, tigers, termites, jellyfish, oak trees, rain clouds, metallic ores? It does not. We need not posit nor deny that bees might become aware of such things to state confidently that such knowledge is not essential to it maintaining its bee-ness. Similarly, humans. You can see human “purpose” (though each of you may have a different piece of the puzzle, and some of the pieces may be being held backwards), but you cannot see the world from a non-human point of view.

Isn’t that precisely what we’re trying to do here?

No. Here we are trying to convey it as an abstract idea, just as you might grasp the conditions inside the atmosphere of the planet Jupiter, but you can no more actually see the one than the other.

I think you mean, we can’t experience the reality, as opposed to an abstraction.

Yes, better. All right, so the bee isn’t wrong (and neither is the human) in seeing itself and its species as the center of its world and as a vital link in the scheme of things. But that isn’t the whole story, by a long chalk. It is equally true that (a) the bee is a role as much as an essence, and (b) bees as a species are a role, are a function, quite as much as they are an independent existence; they are part of an ecology, after all. Neither bees nor humans (nor everything else) can live in isolation.

When an individual bee dies, does it go to bee-heaven? Alternatively, does the spark that animated the flying creature disappear rather than changing existence? Does the bee reincarnate in an attempt to become a better bee?

Aha, the light dawns! But I’d prefer you continue.

As with the bee, continue the analogy where you please. To trees, daffodils, pond slime, bacteria – and, much more interesting (at least, to us, given where it will take us), to the animating principle behind power spots, to the intelligence that governs subassemblies such as your muscle-groups or your nervous systems or your specialized organs like the liver. And we can generalize much farther than that: the intelligences that form and are embodied (so to speak) in created machinery or even in dwellings. In short, the living animating souls, call them, behind and within even what you think of as “inanimate” material. This, not to mention particular animals such as pets that form close symbiotic bonds with humans and across species, such as, for instance, cats and dogs in the same household, or canaries, or whatever.

I gather that this boils down (at least for the moment) to the fact that while the human role is unique, the spirit that plays the human role is not.

At any given time it is, but yes, otherwise, not. The world is not divided into officers and other ranks.