Thursday, November 18, 2021
Gentlemen, you’re up. More about crossing thresholds?
Your reminder to your friends yesterday, that significant change is not necessarily accompanied by dramatic trappings, was well to say. It is the anticipation of bells and whistles, as you say, that leads many to devalue natural processes that flow smoothly. By the same token, that expectation sometimes leads people to overvalue what may be merely flash and little substance. Do not take this to be criticism of what you are or of what tendencies you may be subject to: It is merely a noticing of difficulties inherent in 3D existence.
I feel well supported by the universe. Once I learned to stop taking setbacks or problems personally, it became much easier to take what comes, as it comes, in faith that it makes sense in context whether or not I understand it. And you reassured us long ago that life sends us no more than we can handle, no matter how bad it may look.
And that is a very helpful attitude, as you see.
I do. Repining against fate, or feeling sorry for myself, or being angry with the gods, or feeling cheated: any or all of these temptations would have the effect of piling on unnecessary emotional miseries, and what good would that do? Much easier to take what comes, living in quiet faith that all is well. I might have saved myself and others a world of grief, if I had learned that earlier.
Life lived alone is a very different thing than life lived among others. Let’s consider it in terms of how the shared subjectivity and the personal subjectivity interact.
That’s a very interesting thought. I have danced around it, but I get a glimpse of what you intend to explore here.
Husband your energy, because although you are on your way to being entirely well again, still you are dragging the results of your year’s physical difficulties. That is, guard your energy level, keeping in mind that your stamina may be less than you are accustomed to.
I get your point. You may fire when you are ready, Gridley.
It may be as well to begin as bullet points, to stress inter-relationships, before going into more extensive discussion.
- Hold in mind the model of emotions as the interface between the conscious and the parts of your mind of which you are unconscious, (for they are all conscious in themselves).
- You experience life as “you” interfacing with “other.” Thus, you v. the world; you v. others; your consciousness v. life that seems to be not your consciousness.
- The personal subjectivity – the “you” you identify with, the part of your mind and being of which you are conscious – seems to you to be a unit.
- The shared subjectivity – the collective energies that make up the world as it is created and maintained out of mind-stuff – seems to you to be objectively “out there,” separate, different from you.
- Your personal subjectivity interacts with various aspects of the shared subjectivity continuously, in countless ways, and your tendency is to experience it as “things happening to me,” rarely as “things happening because I and they coincide and manifest.”
- If there were no shared subjectivity, you would not be aware that you are alive.
- You may experience this in miniature by comparing your mental and emotional existence (1) when you are living in conditions less impacted by others and by the world and (2) when you are actively relating to others or to seemingly objective external conditions.
Aha! That’s one reason for the worldwide pause in our incessant busy-ness, isn’t it? That’s one reason the virus was made to disrupt business as usual? To remind us of life as opposed to trance-living in routines and preoccupations?
Without going into “why,” we can say that one effect has indeed been that many people have been able to raise their heads and say, “Why am I wasting my life and substance pursuing trivial things?” But notice your automatic assumption that the virus and its conditions and effects are “other”; that they are things that happened to you. Indeed they are; and indeed that doesn’t mean what at first it seems to you to mean.
No, I get it. It is the shared subjectivity interacting with our individual subjectivity – presumably to somewhat different effect for each of us – but there is timing involved, and that timing cannot depend on anyone’s personal subjectivity; it must emanate from the shared subjectivity or from something behind it all.
As denoted by the signs in the heavens, as we have said. The nature of the times and the sequence of the changes in the times are marked by (not caused by) the positions of planets, stars, etc., systematized as astrological symbolism. But now if you will carry this one small step farther, you will see that astrology and what it marks can only be part of the shared subjectivity, which means cannot be separate from human existence. (Non-human existence as well, of course; that is what the seasons are. But that’s another subject.) This is why astrology “works,” because it is not and cannot be separate from the human mind – because that human mind is part of the same overall mind. How could the shared subjectivity and the personal subjectivity go separate ways? Does the “tails” side of a coin go separate ways from the “heads” side? Could it ever? Are the two sides, in fact, two? Aren’t they each an aspect of one undivided thing?
Now, to return to our central point at the moment: Anyone may live in such a way as to minimize your interaction with other people and even with the world in general. Your monk living in a cave, what is he doing if not that? But is that a desired end? Did God or the gods or the world or however you wish to think of purpose intend for individual subjectivity to live divorced from collective subjectivity? If so, why not bring everyone into the world deaf, blind, and mute? Why not render all the world autistic? Why – in fact – bring people into 3D at all? No, living divorced from the shared subjectivity is not the desired end-result. But it may be a desired interval, a resting-up, a time for taking stock.
It is a great mistake, to think that practices and circumstances that may be transiently helpful would be desirable in and of themselves for one and all, or from now forever. Yet this mistake is made by many: by the weary, and the sick at heart, and the directionless. So, knowing that it is a snare and a misreading, don’t fall for it.
“Don’t criticize your life,” Thoreau said somewhere. “It isn’t as bad as you are.” Today’s theme?
“Life never ‘just happens,” perhaps. Something on that order.