Sunday, January 26, 2020
I have been asked a question I am reluctant to try to answer, and overnight, it occurred to me there was a very good reason for my reluctance, more than just a hesitation to impose my interpretation.
It’s worth pursuing. Perhaps we are part of the source of your reluctance (assuming a difference between us and you, rather than a difference in emphasis).
I remembered that you said at some point that it is a big mistake to try to understand new material by merely fitting it into our established understandings.
Yes. It is one form of “nothing but,” and prevents or at least retards the making of new connections from a different point of view. It only reinforces the old one.
The specific question was if shared subjectivity was more or less what some people call consensus reality. The first reason I couldn’t answer the question is that I don’t know what either term means, and the second is that although I have a pretty good sense of shared subjectivity, I don’t know at all what others mean by consensus reality. I know what I think they mean, sort of.
You have a deeper reluctance than that, rooted in the ambivalence you have always had about New Age certainties and ideas that became dogmas. However, instead of giving our opinion of what someone may mean about what they may or may not have understood, we can talk of what we know. Let us look at shared subjectivity.
My sense of it is that you are saying that the “external” world is as alive and as eternal as our individual internal worlds; not a dead fixed thing any more than matter is dead units occupying space.
That, but more than that. Internal and external are the same thing, the same process, the same working-out of the interplay of forces. Only, just as any one body is one body among all living and dead humanity, so one 3D mind is one mind among all living and no longer living (in 3D) minds. You are the center of your mental universe; everybody is. Extend that idea and you see a universe of live minds, not a hierarchy.
- You are each the center; hence, there is no one center, no implied hierarchy of “central” and “less central” and “more central.”
- You are each the universe in miniature, and at the same time you are each a splinter of the entirety.
- There is no “then” in the real world. The time is always “now.” The year 1865 is no less alive now. Ten minutes ago is no less alive now than it was then. This has consequences. To think that the moving moment of “now” differentiates between what is briefly alive and what is dead or not yet existent, distorts reality. There is nothing dead, be it moments of time or the things contained in those moments. But your access to any moment except “now” is non-existent in 3D, by design. (Access via non-3D is another thing.) We’ve said all this.
- Every thing, every mind, every moment of time, being alive, where is there room for anything to be fixed, unalterable, dead?
- Everything being part of everything, where is there room for division and separations other than in a relative sense?
- These things being so, surely it follows that “individual” is only a localized version of “universal.”
Not sure that will be understood as meant.
Everything we have said or will say is simple and self-evident when seen from the right standing-place, and is convoluted and even irritating when seen from other standing-places.
That gave me a whole new idea of how you work.
But spell it out.
By giving us descriptions of how things are, sometimes in great detail, you provide us with something to react against. By how irritating or how opaque it is, we can tell how far off we are. When we stand in the right place, it snaps into clarity.
We can’t quite sign off on that way of putting it. That makes it sound like we are confusing people deliberately. But true, that’s the effect. Our plainest statement is mystifying if you try to cram it into an accustomed way of seeing things that does not fit. You can’t believe both that every thing is alive and that the universe is composed mostly of dead matter; nor both that every moment (and its contents) is alive and that the universe is composed mostly of dead matter.
Until you choose a perspective, two contrary perspectives will be a jumble of incompatibles. But an excellent way of realigning your view is to adopt multiple viewpoints, for just that reason.
I’m pretty sure you mean, one way to escape our accustomed limited perspective is to tentatively adopt another, and see the discontinuities between them. Does that mean we can never come to a fixed perspective?
Not at all; people do it all the time. This is for when your previous certainties no longer satisfy but you can’t quite see your way to a higher synthesis. No matter how high your present viewpoint, there is always another to be achieved, now or later.
To learn something new as an added item in your inventory, you connect it to what you know. That is not what we are doing together here. Here we are suspending what we know as concepts. Rather than trying to add something new, we are trying to look at what we already know from a different angle, to see how our new standing-point may be. So, to try to add new viewpoints to old structures is to defeat the purpose.
Again, we have said this many times, but, as we have also said many times, the temptation is very hard for 3D-oriented minds to resist. Addition always seems more sensible than substitution or deliberately imposed uncertainty.
And I’d bet that most people, most of the time, read what you just said, nod agreement, and continue to try to fit whatever you say into their comfortable accustomed mental categories.
You should know.
Touché. Are you accusing me of being human?
We’d never do that; you do it enough yourself. Enough for the moment.