Herds, outliers, and situation reports (from Life More Abundantly)

You live at a remove from the physical world, mentally. Even when you spend your time reading of the world, understanding the world, conceptualizing the world, you aren’t really participating in it the way other people do.

Which is why I interact so badly with practical things, have such anxiety when faced with the prospect of looming events such as a trip or a meeting or even a social event.

You used to say, in a different context, that you were always playing “away” games. There’s something in that. It is difficult for you to do things in the way others do, for you can do things others can’t, and for the same reason. You live from a somewhat different standing-place. You are scarcely alone in that, but by nature you and others in that situation experience yourselves as alone in a world you share with others only by the narrowest of connections. It is difficult to state, because the words are not there to express it. The differences, not being widely experienced, have not come into common use in language. Start with Laurens van der Post’s analogy of the herd and the outliers.

He said that he had observed that herds would have one or more members who were not fully accepted but were not quite outcast. The outlying positions of these individuals made them hypervigilant, continually alert, and therefore provided the herd with an advantage.

Yes, because even though the entire herd experienced their lives as continually requiring alertness, the outlier sensed danger quicker than those who were to some degree lulled by the proximity of their fellows.

Only, van der Post’s analogy didn’t refer to danger specifically, but to increased sensitivity.

That’s right. The race’s sentinels don’t necessarily persuade anybody; they react, and their reactions alert the rest through a process of contagion. There are outliers in any society, and they serve a function, just as the relatively compact mass that forms a society’s center of gravity serve a function. That does not guarantee that either outlier or mass is comfortable. One’s 3D life is only a subset of All-D life, and the 3D portion of the world goes on within the larger All-D world. Difficult to express, even after so many months of exposition attempting to express the essential unity. But clearly, if your mental world is anchored in one place, it won’t be anchored in a different place. The way you see the world will necessarily be different from any other person’s way of seeing it, because you are all experiencing it as individuals. But beyond that, some experience it as outliers and others as part of the center of gravity. You won’t be living quite in the same world, nor quite in different worlds. You will be tenuously bound together.

We’ve said many times, everyone is, must be, in all dimensions. But that doesn’t mean you are all equally aware of the encompassing world we have been calling the non-3D. Everyone’s position on a scale of awareness of the non-3D in ordinary life facilitates their particular interim report.

All aspects of the world deserve and receive equal attention, which in effect means everything gets reported on, and these reports are collated and summarized and fed back to the participants, who go about their day in light of the developing situation. That ought to be an analogy that provides a flexible understanding without luring you to read it literally. You all feed situation reports to the larger beings of which you are a part. Those reports affect the non-3D being, and in turn affect our feedback to our 3D components. You understand, language is overemphasizing separation here and understating the degree of connection.

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