Monday, May 14, 2018
How is our present moment a trance?
Like a trance, we said. More like a trance than like a physically fixed phenomenon. It is, you might say, always an altered state, altered in the sense of directed, focused, intended, in a certain direction.
Vast forces, personal and impersonal, are always at play, because the moment is always the present moment. There no more exists a dead past or a dead future than there exists dead matter. Everything is alive; everything is continually alive and growing, choosing, interacting. Instead of thinking of a stable picture that gets perturbed, you should think of perturbation as the stability. Continual interaction is the norm. Change is not interruption or incident; it is the air we breathe. This means, you see, that any present moment of reality anywhere involves the totality of being. There is no such thing as a local unconnected incident, if you examine things closely enough.
“All is one” again.
Well, we never said it isn’t true, only that it is misinterpreted, and accepted superstitiously rather than intelligently.
“Everything is connected” does not mean everything is equally important at any given time-place. The relative importance of this and that fluctuates not by size or inherent nature or even by context, but according to intensity. You see?
I am beginning to, maybe. It is different for each of us at any given moment because at any given moment each of us will be lighting up different things. Each of us will be lending this or that some of our own intensity, you might say.
That’s more the idea. What you concentrate on (deliberately or in reaction to some stimulus) acquires greater intensity. In effect, you promote it to greater importance. Not permanently, nor for anyone else exactly, but at that moment and for yourself.
I am deliberately going slowly. I feel like I have about a fingertip’s grasp on the material.
Well, take these sessions as an example of just what we are talking about! You intend to hold a conversation with us. That is, it is held as important in your mind. You sit at your desk, you write. This is intent and what we might call bodily indicators of intent. The bodily indicators help, because they are habits, and habits encourage the mind to return to a familiar routine area of interest. But bodily indicators by themselves do not suffice; they degenerate into rote and superstition unless maintained in connection with active will.
I think of Thomas Merton praying, and knowing the difference between active practice and going through the motions. He must have seen the difference very clearly in his decades in the monastery.
But that individual mental intent flickers, if unassisted by habit. This is the origin of, and reason for, so many religious practices, you see. (We know that it is unfashionable to appreciate them, but after all any attitude toward anything not well understood will soon resemble bias more than understanding.) At any given moment, an independent mind may outshine minds in harness to a routine such as prayer, but over time, prayer bounded by (assisted by) routine and by community will attain a higher average level than the fluctuating individual. One function of a spiritually oriented community is to provide a continuing average encouragement in a certain direction. This applies whether you look at a Benedictine monastery or a Gurdjieff community or a Zen Buddhist temple or whatever. Islam attempts to make every day a day of habitual prayer (five times a day, and in public) as a way of doing what the medieval church in Europe did.
That little aside was to show you that what we are discussing has its practical application in your everyday life. (If it did not, why bother talking about it? Instead we would talk about something that did have practical application.)
Now, as we have said, you continually choose what you want to be, and this is one aspect of that process. If you repeatedly fix your intent upon one thing, it in effect acquires a relatively permanent importance in the scheme of things. You emphasized one thing and in the process automatically de-emphasized its opposite. You said, “I choose to value this, to be this, and not that.” (You might, of course, have said you choose to be this and that. Our point is not rejection so much as selection. Even choosing to accept everything would be in effect to reject the option of rejecting something.)
You are describing the mechanism behind “create your reality.” What we fixate on assumes correspondingly greater importance.
That is a very acceptable way to see it. Now, bear in mind the distinction we are beginning to draw between personal and impersonal forces; between personal and impersonal reality.
Yes, I see it. I don’t have a clear idea of what the vast personal forces are, but I can see that they would be the things that would directly enter into our choice. Seth concentrated on these in order to restore to us our sense of our power. But there are also vast impersonal forces in play that need to be taken into account, if we are to have a more complete picture.
That’s correct. Your intent for the ever-present ever-current living moment is not the whole story – how could you think it is, when your whole lives tell you otherwise? You have to factor in the existence and influence of the vast impersonal forces that create the “weather” in which you do your intending. If you will hold in mind an image of any given present moment being more a trance than an objectively bounded condition, you will be in a place to continue. So let’s pause here.
Okay. See you next time. Thanks as always.