Thursday, June 14, 2018
It occurred to me to look at the 3D world from outside rather than under the impression that it is its own raison d’etre.
Looking at the 3D world as if from outside may assist us to find a helpful image. We had come up with the image of a light show, remember, with all the lights continually flashing, changing color, forming new patterns, as individual minds fluctuated. We would like to find an image of that sort, and tie it in with the concept of the vast impersonal forces affecting the light show. In other words, the light show changing not so much in terms of interactions among its own components, but of interactions of the entire show with forces from outside it.
You’re seeking to integrate larger and larger aspects of reality, in other words.
It is always a two-part process, now building up from individual building-blocks, then looking from a higher synthesis to see how the blocks interrelate to form a system. The world can never be understood merely by adding to an inventory of parts; nor by sweeping generalizations that cannot be illustrated. So, first one way, then the other. We don’t know any other way to proceed.
That’s what an image does, then. It summarized previous understandings.
The world cannot be captured in words, in sequential processing. An image is closer to a gestalt.
Does this imply that what cannot be summarized in an image or metaphor has not yet been properly understood?
That’s a pretty flat statement. We’d want to think before signing off on it. While we wait for the proper clarifying image to suggest itself, let us return to the question of the weather you exist in and the non-3D elements of the situation. After all, considering the 3D as if it were a world unto itself is only somewhat true.
We tend to think that this is the world, and we’re of realizing that we extend into the non-3D.
Nothing wrong with that; one’s surroundings always loom largest, whether in space or time. “Here, now,” is what 3D is all about! But it is truer to life to say that the non-3D is primary and vastly more extensive, and the 3D secondary and only a local phenomenon. It is even truer to say that the All-D is all-encompassing reality, and both non-3D and 3D are specialized expressions. Neither the 3D nor the non-3D is an entity that can exist.. Each is only an abstraction.
Ah, got it! We constructed “non-3D” as scaffolding to help us see that the “3D” we commonly experience is incomplete. The non-3D means all the aspects of reality that are not obvious in 3D.
All that do not obviously manifest, yes. So this is a reminder that the reality of things is neither material, as 3D appears to be, nor only non-material, as non-3D was defined to be, but, always, All-D. Reality is never in pieces. Do not confuse the scaffolding with the stonework.
What we have been telling you to clarify relationships also, inadvertently and necessarily, distorted larger relationships by ignoring them. This couldn’t be helped. If we could say everything at once, we would, gladly, but saying “All is one” is useful only to move people out of a sense of things as separate. Once you see that everything is connected, “All is well” does not necessarily bring you any farther in practical understanding. So, rather than soaring over the landscape, we plod. Then we soar again to give you a sense of the terrain from the air. Then we plod so that your feet will feel the changes in elevation, the roughness of the path, the view from ground level. This repetitive alternation may seem frustratingly slow, but it is the only way we know.
People have the idea that if they could find the proper guide and reach enlightenment (whatever that means to them) they could then begin to live. But that is a confusion of ideas. It assumes that enlightenment is a “there,” rather than a way of being while one travels.
So, we are always saying, “Now, how your new viewpoint reinterprets what you used to perceive.” Not so much “used to think,” as “used to perceive.” Your world changes as you see it differently, and you see it differently as it changes. As so often, a reciprocating process.
When you begin from the thought that reality by definition involves all dimensions and not only some of them, then what you have learned, have experienced, have seen with new eyes opens yet new vistas. Spending time in an older framework was not time wasted. It is what allows you to move on from a higher base camp.
- You see that the 3D world is a subset of the entire world.
- Then you see that the separation is only for the process of analysis, and must be reunited to take account of the larger reality.
- Now you begin to see that neither 3D nor non-3D exists as such, but only as abstractions.
And I think you’re about to say, “And the very concept of dimensions is only an abstraction, something unreal but useful for the purposes of analysis.” I have had this thought more than once.
This will be a stumbling-block for some, because their senses tell them that height, depth, width obviously exist and compose the substance of the 3D world.
But they don’t, of course. They are merely ways of describing orientation in space.
Yes, but go slowly now. The spatial dimensions are similar to the temporal dimension in this respect: They are measured, hence are assumed to be real, as if they were objects rather than relationships.
Time is measured in seconds, minutes, hours, in the same way we measure inches, feet, yards. In both cases, the measuring medium could be looked at as merely a measurement of relationship. You can’t box up a dozen dimensions, whether height or minutes. They don’t exist; they measure.
It might be better to say, “They don’t exist as such; they are inferred from relationships in time and space.”
So if dimensions are abstractions, they cannot be barriers or destinations. We don’t move to the 4th, 5th, 6th, etc. dimension. There isn’t any place to move to. It would be like moving to seconds or minutes.
However, that doesn’t render the metaphor invalid or even, necessarily, misleading. It only reminds you that a metaphor is a metaphor and not a road map.
Friday, June 15, 2018
You suggested that we begin with a description of how life in 3D looks from an All-D perspective.
In a way, you might say that this is what we have been doing all along.
I see that. A double translation – 3D into All-D perspective and then back to us.
Except that you are in both “places,” always. If we could once get across how this is, most of the translation errors would go away automatically.
But let us look at 3D life as a thing only partially seen, partially understood, because strictly speaking the 3D world is only a subset of the All-D world. The 3D world you experience could never exist by itself, as neither could you exist as bodies that had width and height but no depth. It isn’t that it wouldn’t be likely, or hard to imagine: It is that it would not be possible. It is an error in translation, an error in perception.
The 3D world that you experience is part of the world. It is a special set of conditions supported by the framework of the rest of the All-D. Clearly anything understood in isolation is going to be understood differently, depending upon where the boundaries are drawn. This should not be a difficult thought. Everything is understood in isolation, and everything is understood in relation to the boundaries drawn around it.
So that any subject is defined in advance by how we choose to think of it. “This belongs to this subject of examination, this does not,” and so we define a subject into existence and then think that the limits we put on it in advance are the natural and inevitable limits.
Of course. When Galileo decided to study only the observable properties of objects, he defined away in advance certain attributes that he decided could not be of interest because they could not be measured. This decision made possible a science of celestial mechanics – but it shaped, rather than revealed, that science. If celestial mechanics had been required to include properties such as color, it would have come to very different results. We are not saying this could have been (or even should have been) done, only that definitions affect what is to be examined in powerful and often unnoticed ways. That process has resulted in the powerful but one-sided civilization that is in its terminal flourishing state in the world.
The Western worldview that began with the Renaissance and the Protestant Revolution resulted in creating a global civilization, first by empire, then by trade and technology. The non-Western world is currently enchanted with the new possibilities, so it looks like that world-view is not only triumphant, but still gaining strength. But it is gaining strength in the way the Roman Empire expanded, not as an outgrowth of strength but of an unhealthy hypertrophy of certain traits at the expense of more human possibilities which will reassert themselves, even if it requires the overthrow of the empire and the institution of an age of feudalism. This is all analogy, but not a far-fetched one.
Correct, only remember that these processes require time. Meanwhile, your whole lives are to be lived. So let us continue with our larger, but scarcely irrelevant, field of inquiry.
You incarnate into the 3D world. You live, you make choices as to how and what you wish to be. Then, you die, you reunite your 3D-limited consciousness with the unlimited consciousness of your Sam. You have thus added a new bit of awareness to your Sam’s total. Then you enter another life, perhaps as one strand of many. Regardless how prominent or non-prominent a part you play in this new intelligence, this new soul in formation, you play some part. Therefore by definition your previous experiences play a part in that new soul’s repertoire. Then that soul returns, and is used as a thread in another existence, and so on. You see our point? What was experienced continues. It doesn’t necessarily dominate, or even emerge now and then, but it is always there, always flavoring the soup.
When John F. Kennedy won the presidential election of 1960, massive consequences followed. The hundreds of millions of people affected by the New Frontier idea, and by the assassination of the president and by the long consequences of that action, would have been affected quite differently if the 1960 election had gone the other way. Can the alteration of so many hundreds of million souls be of no consequence to the library of souls that is your Sam, and all the other affected Sams? Yet it can hardly be said that the external events in and of themselves matter, except in so far as they affect people.
Depending upon where you set your boundaries for this investigation, that sentence will seem tautological, or nonsensical, or arguable. Surely, an external event matters in itself, if only because it is the bridge between external circumstances. But that doesn’t mean it matters because what happens externally matters in and of itself. Instead it – external reality – matters because of the changes it produces in the souls living in that event. In a sense, external events are the weather you live in.