Wednesday, March 28, 2018
So, my friends, if I have the idea right, you are tying together personal self-development (dealing with our individual issues) and development as a group. But I find, writing this, I am still a bit vague as to the latter.
Instead of thinking of yourselves as individuals only, we are encouraging you to see yourselves as individuals and as communities; similarly we are encouraging you now on a larger scale to see yourselves as individuals and as part of a larger community which is itself also an individual.
Odd. It feels like you’ve said all that, only now it is new ground all over again.
There is a momentary blurring of focus, nothing important. Remember “as above, so below,” and you will see that the blurring comes chiefly from limitations of language that tempt you (and therefore us) to use the same words for different things, and sometimes different words to not recognize the same things. In this case, it is a matter of scale which is being obscured.
Here is the gist of what we mean.
- The 3D human is one level, a collection of strands living together in the 3D crucible, and ultimately either fusing and attaining permanence, or not.
- The All-D human of which the 3D-human is a part is itself both individual and part of a larger being. That is, it is both individual in its own right and it is a strand in a larger being.
- That larger being is itself also part of something still larger, but it passes from our range of vision. We are concerning ourselves with structure as you may experience it practically.
You are sticking to the levels we may directly affect, and that may be directly affected by us.
That’s right. It is important that whether you choose to occupy yourself with effort or with flights of fancy, you know which one you are dealing with. We hate to see you spinning your wheels thinking you are going somewhere. Spinning your wheels may be fun sometimes, or unavoidable in certain conditions, but it is well for you to know whether you are really working out your salvation or are merely running in place, enjoying a daydream (or suffering a nightmare).
So, again: The 3D human, individual yet comprising a community of strands. At another turn of the microscope dial, individual, yet, as an individual, only one strand in something larger.
Why don’t we invent a simple way to distinguish between whether we’re talking about us in one way or in the other?
The disadvantage to doing so is that as soon as we invent names, people will begin to see the distinctions as more absolute than they are. It is a tendency of left-brain sequential processing to exaggerate the individuality and forget the underlying unity. We have been going to some pains to counter that tendency.
Either way, there’s a tradeoff.
However, even your being aware of the constraint aids understanding, so the discussion every so often is not a waste of time. So, to return.
We are currently tying together your lives
- as individuals-in-the-making (that is, experiencing the living-together of the strands that comprise you)
- as pieces-of-the-moment: that is, as part of the 3D world as it is affected by the vast impersonal forces, (most of which you will never experience directly nor even suspect) that are the world).
We encourage you to reread that slowly, encouraging your deepest intuitions to surface, not overruling them with logic or with previous assumptions. What if what we just said is true? How does the statement feel to you? It needs to be weighed as a unit, and not as separate pieces, and some of you will find it very hard to do that. If you find it hard, persist, as long as necessary (that is, repeatedly when you remember to), and the very effort will bring its reward.
The first half, you see, is more or less Rita’s discourses to you, concentrating on the less obvious facets of the 3D experience in its All-D context. The second half is Nathaniel’s, concentrating on the day-to-day struggles of human life and their meaning for you. These are not separate agendas or separate fields of study, but one agenda, one field of study, necessarily considered separately at first and now rewoven.
It is all well and good to study your lives as they appear once you remove some of the epicycles, so to speak. Equally, it is all well and good to study your lives as the battlegrounds among forces and impulses that you experience. But it is far more enlightening to do both at once after the ground has been cleared. Just as the sun rather than the earth is the center of the solar system, the compound being you are continually shaping is and should be the effective center. This is not contradiction; it is expression of the fact that life is both.
I think of Yeats, in this context: “Why does the struggle to attain truth take away our pity, and the struggle to overcome our passions restore it again?”
He was seeing the unity of the two subjects, you see. He wanted to see as profoundly as possible; he also wanted to overcome himself, so to speak. The two tasks sometimes seem contradictory; they may be better seen as reciprocating.
And that is why we have been able to broaden the scope of inquiry, finally. You were given the necessary ideas. You have been living your lives, which is itself instructive, assuming you pay attention. So now we begin to show you how theology sheds light on psychology, and inner work turns out to be outer work as well, and politics and ideology are seen to be not irrelevancies nor “external” (whatever that would be) but illustrations writ large of whatever work is yet undone in each person’s individual case.
Which is enough for the moment.
It felt, as we are going along, as if we were only re-treading familiar ground, yet I see that perhaps we did make relationships a little clearer.
You will find that novelty is not as useful nor as much a sign of progress as one might tend to think. There is value in consolidating what one may think of as familiar territory. After all, you will not be the same person as you do so. you won’t be stepping back into the same river, because that can’t be done.