Saturday, May 12, 2018
The inertia and the plasticity of the single present moment: So, building upon that –?
Vast impersonal forces, vast personal forces, and the trance of the living present moment.
Okay. Sounds like you have a lesson plan prepared.
We smile. Let’s say, We’ve done this before.
That’s my line.
Most of what we can say depends upon your lines: That is our lexicon, our vocabulary, even to a degree our grammar. That is one reason why we continually encourage others to enter the fray. Every new voice brings to the task a different toolset, and the more skills and experiences we have available to work with, the better we can do. More participants not only reduces the guru factor – a good objective in itself – but reduces the pressure on each of them to think, “I’m nobody special, what can I add?” and “What if I get it wrong, and mislead people?”
It’s a different form of “Safety in numbers.”
It is.
So. We have been accustoming you to the existence of what we sometimes call “the weather”: Objective conditions beyond the control of individual All-D beings, not malleable by the human will. We have deliberately used the exact same term, Vast Impersonal Forces, because invariant terminology serves to objectify an idea, makes it seem more real, because the name becomes familiar. This may seem ridiculously unlikely, but it is true. What you hear repeatedly in identical nomenclature, you come to believe in. If we had said sometimes vast impersonal forces, sometimes non-subjective factors, sometimes dynamics beyond the human 3D scale, sometimes aspects of reality from beyond the 3D / non-3D interface, our statements might have been equally correct, and they would have lost much of their force.
Repetition sells.
It does. Familiarity may breed contempt, but it also breeds – familiarity. Recognition is half the battle to acceptance. Then the problem becomes being sure that people look at what they have come to recognize. We’ve got their attention; now we need to engage their critical faculties, because as we’ve said often, until you wrestle with a thing, it isn’t yours.
So what are these vast impersonal forces?
I’m getting that the terms has two meanings at least. One, “impersonal” in the sense of “beyond any given individual,” and two, in the sense of “not having to do with human activity at all.”
True as far as it goes. Let’s look at the trance (the spell, if you prefer) that is the ever-enduring single living present moment shared by all humanity and experienced (usually) as if unique to each moment of sequentially experienced time. It could be further subdivided, as you are intuiting, but one step at a time.
Slow down, in other words.
Always a good thing. Once you’re up to speed, it’s helpful to look deeper, slower, more mind-intensely.
Striking, how even the reminder to slow down changes my perceived mental state.
More mindfulness always will.
We need to make a few flat statements for you to provisionally accept, if we are going to be able to continue. After you have absorbed the gist of the next leap in understanding, then it will be time to look back and criticize and parse what we are about to say. That is, then it will be time to wrestle with the material. But you cannot productively wrestle with it until you have understood it, and you cannot come to understand it by trying to fit it in with wherever you are at the outset.
I get it. A leap of faith until we absorb it, then a more careful reconsideration to see if it holds up in the cold light of day.
A little dramatic, but yes. So here it is:
- Everything is alive and conscious, and each part of reality has a different kind of consciousness specific to its nature.
The consciousness of rocks is real, but it is not the same as that of trees, nor either to that of mammals. Extend that. Transitory forms – clouds, explosions, energy vortexes, dust balls – all have their specific unified consciousness as well. Try not to let logical objections derail you, here. Everything solid, liquid, gaseous, plasmic, has its own specific form of consciousness which is an integral subset of the overall consciousness which is reality.
- The overwhelming majority of the kinds of energy that make up reality is not perceptible to the senses.
In other contexts, you know that. Beyond infra-red in one direction, beyond ultraviolet in another direction, your senses have no connect to what is. It is and must be and must remain terra incognita, because you do not have the sensory receptors for it. (Nothing wrong with the situation. How would it help an otter to be able to read a newspaper? How would it help a rock to have a sense of smell? Only, when you come up against a limit, recognize it!)
- All that energy beyond the range of your senses and instrumentation exists; it has its own consciousness; it contributes to the shaping of reality.
This is the same as saying it impacts your life even though you may not be aware of it nor it of you. For the moment, accept as fact that the otter’s mind is affected by the human mind and the human mind is affected by the otter’s. Neither one necessarily recognizes it.
So one restricted definition of vast impersonal forces would be the influence of so many unperceived and imperceptible influences upon your world.
Now, you might say, “If I can’t perceive them, how can they affect me?” But that is a silly argument. You can’t perceive microwaves, but they can cook you. So then you respond, “But microwaves can be perceived by instruments, which means they are within our range, so no wonder they can affect us.” But, you see, that makes our point for us. Forces that cannot be perceived by the senses or by extensions of the senses do affect you, and, as you may say, are therefore detectable somehow. (We realize that this isn’t quite logical, but follow the argument for the sake of where it leads rather than parse it here.) If so, how?
Directly.
Of course. Intuitively. Only,
- what is intuitively experienced may easily be shut out by logical / emotional filters, and if it is, then it might as well not exist for that individual. But, it exists, acknowledged or not. This is one aspect of what we call “the weather.”
I suppose that these forces, that cannot be experienced through the senses nor instrumentation, religions call spirits, genii, demons, angels, etc.
Let’s say, scripture (when it is not prescribing rules of conduct) deals with the existence of things known but not perceived by the senses. These things known may or may not be perceived at all accurately, and the logical assumptions and conclusions connected with them may be very close or wildly wrong or anywhere in between, but they do at least recognize forces that instrument-bound science and “common sense” perception cannot.
“There is more in heaven and earth, Horatio, than your science knows.” Rough paraphrase.
It is in the awareness that the world extends far beyond the bounds of what may be perceived by senses and instruments that an extension of field becomes possible for the All-D creature.
In other words, if we remember that the world is far more than we can ever measure, we won’t allow our filters to leave us half blind and half deaf.
That’s a way to put it. We would have said, “a rather poetic way to put it,” if we didn’t fear you’d think we meant it as a compliment!
Very funny. Okay, thanks for all this, and till next time.