Friday, September 20, 2019
In trying to make sense of the world, each of you will inevitably make your own road map, and a map is always an abstraction, a simplification. In making your maps, don’t ignore all the map-making that has gone before, just because those maps were incomplete and were partially erroneous. Specifically, we refer to religious, philosophical, metaphysical maps. Discard them, or even remain in ignorance of them, at your peril. You aren’t the first people to concern yourselves with these things, and if you know things others did not know, so they also knew things you do not know. You are always going to choose, which implies rejection as well as acceptance, but what is rejected may be rejected well or badly. In this case, attitude is all, because “exterior” does not exist in an absolute sense. What does exist, for each of you, is your own mental world, your own world of choice shaping your continued being.
We waste a tremendous amount of time and energy, don’t we?
Well, you expend a tremendous amount of time and energy; we aren’t sure you should think of it as wasted. But let’s spell out, a little, what you spend on.
Well, we’re always concentrating on things that have only ephemeral existence.
As opposed to?
Huh. Well, that’s a thought.
Sure. The temptation is to say, life (reality) consists of essential and inessential, significant and meaningless, permanent and ephemeral. But, does it, really? And if it did, could you distinguish one from the other?
Provisionally, we do just that, every day. I don’t see that we have any choice in the matter.
We’d say, day by day you choose among limited options. What those options are, what those limits are, varies according to your past and present and future choices, including interactions physical and non-physical. But you do not have the luxury of deferring choice until you know. You are always choosing according to instinct, because you never have the knowledge that would be necessary to informed choice. And this is by benevolent design, for the “luxury” of deferred choice until you know would actually be paralysis. Thus everything you do stems from your values, which stem from what you are. Those values tend to constrict your effective choices among experience.
We only admit into consideration data that matches what we already think. We don’t easily believe things that contradict what we already believe, because if we did, we’d be starting over every day. But we don’t get to live our lives believing only what we already believe, because the world – the “external” world – keeps presenting us with contrary or overlapping and partly contrary data.
Reality is all one thing. You are part of the world, which means, the world is part of you. Nobody lives alone. You can absorb only that for which you have receptors. But that means, nothing external can come to you “out of left field” except in the sense of being unexpected to your 3D awareness. World War II entirely transformed the lives of hundreds of millions who never had any direct part in it; it transformed nobody “by chance” or “accidentally” except in appearance. In fact, everybody in the world at that time had in common – that they were in the world at that time!
The concept stretches us a little farther than is quite comfortable. Usually when people say, “We’re all one thing,” they aren’t including their political foes, and politics in the Philippine Islands, and conditions in Chinese factories, and – oh, any of the millions of things that go on in the practical physical world.
Your limited sample may not be taking account of millions of Christian and Muslim and Hindu and Buddhist and Jewish mystics and monks. Their view of the world may be quite unillusioned next to those few people you have met. It’s an important point, the same point we began with. You all create the world you live in by what you select to become aware of. What you select is enabled both by what you consciously choose and by what you unconsciously are, which is the result of past choices. Therefore the world to you looks like internal and external, choice and constraint.
I feel like we never quite say it, never quite nail it down.
We can only point to the moon. You like to quote Kerouac, “What can’t be said, can’t be said, and it can’t be whistled, either.” But it can be hinted at, can be seen behind the screens, can be brought to mind by comparisons and allusions.