Monday, May 22, 2023
Dirk sent me three YouTube videos explaining the functioning of life at levels below the chromosome, and it is like looking through Jim Meissner’s dark microscope, I can’t emotionally comprehend that all this is going on, all the time, at a tiny scale. I can’t get an image of the intelligence at work there. The videos show the mechanisms, but of course they cannot show the intangible behind it, any more than they could show the intangible thing behind our consciousness at this level.
I said I might ask the guys, though I have the wrong kind of training for it.
You said we would ask you why a mind that thought in terms of the significance of Daniel Boone (as an example) would be a good medium to explain scientific understandings.
And even as I write that out, I get a hint where you’re going to go with it.
Your function is as translator, and encourager, and if there is one thing your transforming civilization needs above all else, it is people to translate one level to another, to erase boundaries between specialists, and encouraging others to do the same. Not so that you yourselves may become specialists, nor, certainly, that you may create new specialties, but that you may make the walls between cells more transparent, and see farther, encourage others to see farther. The alternative is a specialization that understands less and less, because always within an unchanging and increasingly arbitrary context that comes to seem more and more inevitable and obvious.
And if non-specialists
[They interrupted me here, which they rarely do.]
You are all non-specialists in everything except whatever you do specialize in. Just because you ignore whole worlds of thought because they do not interest you, or are beyond your ability to master, doesn’t mean that they cease to exist or cease to influence you or cease to matter to your own specialized circle of knowledge, whether you do or do not realize it.
Thoreau said “We are all provincials in the universe.”
Precisely. So do not feel that there is any area of thought or of life that does not affect you. Any time you feel impelled to look at something new, be assured that (a) there’s a reason particular to you, and (b) your very interest in overstepping bounds is of interest to the universe. Again, the world does not revolve around you as an individual, and does.
Bear in mind, non-specialists do not trump specialists in their own field. Rather, they complement them. They provide what the specialist, from long mental habit, may no longer be able to provide: a fresh look at thing, informed enough to be thought-provoking, but inevitably wrong and even wrong-headed in many details and perhaps even in large areas of interpretation.
That’s interesting in itself. I know of historical examples of vital reframings coming from non-specialists. Jenner. Lister, Pasteur. No doubt I could think of others in other fields if it were important. But let’s look specifically at what those YouTubes aroused in me. I can’t state it very precisely.
Make the effort, first recalibrating and slowing down as much as possible. The effort to bring the concern into focus always polarizes you toward the attitude needed to hear the answers. (At least, that’s one way to look at the process.)
Very well. I see life at microscopic and sub-microscopic levels – life-processes enlarged as much as one million times – and what I see is so active, so intricate, so multitudinous and almost demonically energetic, that it is impossible to reconcile what I am seeing with the stable, macro-level body I am somewhat familiar with. Trillions of cells always dying, always being generated; all that helix-stripping, recombination, etc.
Yes, but look at your – emotional vertigo, I suppose we could call it – in trying to absorb the reality of it.
I see all those madly functioning machines, and it all goes on without our participation – at least, at any level we can identify with – and it looks like an ant colony.
Go deeper, please.
I guess I’m seeing it as life at a different level, presumably directed by some intelligence, presumably proceeding at a different level of intelligence, a different kind of intelligence, pretty alien to us even though we depend on it every moment.
You’re getting closer. Keep on.
I have gotten used to the idea that cells and organs and what I call sub-assemblies of the body each have their own intelligence, their own kind of intelligence that, as you have said many times, does not read newspapers but knows how to process sugars. But this takes that to another level.
Yes. It ties things in more, if you stop to realize it. It isn’t like there are only two or three types of directed intelligence making up the 3D world. There are actually millions.
Millions? I would have settled for “uncounted,” but I got that you were insisting on millions.
Yes. You can radically expand your understanding of things if you make the effort. Remember, now, everything is made of mind-stuff. Can it be castles in the air, created at whim, altered at whim, maintained – as you say – “horseback”? Just as minerals provide stability in the 3D world, so does every kind of intelligence in every manifestation, and it all interlocks, with – as we keep reminding you – no spare parts and nothing missing or accidental.
So, insects, mammals, birds not only have different receptors, and therefore to some extend perceive different worlds; each is in the world representing a different niche in creation.
Well, if it is true at the levels you can perceive with the senses, why would anyone think it wouldn’t be true at levels too small or too large to be grasped by physical analogy? As above, so below. We remind you, the structure of physical reality is fractal. Not only patterns but, let’s call it, purposes, repeat.
Stars and interstellar debris have their own level of consciousness; they play their part in the whole scheme of things. Like you, they are born, live, die – which means, their non-3D essence appears in 3D and eventually winks out again, leaving them changed by their experience and in another way unaffected and invulnerable.
What is true of the universe you see around you is true of the universe you do not see, within you.
But here is the point you felt but didn’t quite express: Everything at every level has as its purpose to be what it is and to do what is appropriate for it to do. But you will never see the purpose (though you may intuit it, or deduce it); you will never see the animating intelligence that produces, organizes, directs that purpose as it manifests. But can any rational creature imagine that the universe if winging it, day by day? Can anyone imagine that the sun “just happens” to rise in the east and set in the west, day by day, varying slightly according to age-old patterns?
The closer you look into mechanism, the less sense it makes, emotionally, intuitively, until you remember that the animating and directing intelligence is invisible in it as it is invisible in you.
Enough for the moment.
Well, this was very interesting, and should strike sparks. Thanks as always.
And as I’m crying, I feel an incredible amount of love.