Society and reality (from “Life More Abundantly”)

Wednesday, October 9, 2019
Let’s keep talking about the celestial kingdom that is half the human environment, or inheritance. What is fundamental is that the world is less energy than thought. Thus we had you summarize Paul Brunton’s conclusions.

The world is not solid but ethereal. It is not matter, nor energy (which is matter); but something that precedes matter/energy. Brunton provided you a way to understand that the world is thought into existence, continually, and not by any one individual or group , nor even by everything taken as a whole, but necessarily must be by something greater than the whole.

That is so clear to me now, and still hard to explain convincingly.

Sparks, remember, not chains.

If the world is made of thought, it follows that the world in all its apparent solidity, in all its apparent reality, cannot be what it seems. The world is what everyone knows it is, yet what that is, is not agreed upon. Take your present political situation, which means, really, your present social situation.

Spinning out of control.

Yes, invoking fears of civil war, assassinations, conversion of institutional rule to rule by force majeure.

You still live in this society, even if you do not participate in its rituals of seeing the world through the same filters moment by moment. You use a different continuing thread to remain oriented.

Is that what the news cycles are? Ways for people to tell themselves a story?

The human brain functions as a reducing valve, excluding vastly more than it ever includes. No two people’s resulting input is just the same. There are significant overlaps, but never identity. No one’s picture is, or ever could be, identical to the actual big picture. It is too big a fish for anyone’s net.

It is true that you in 3D are part of larger beings that extend laterally in 3D as well as in non-3D. You are larger, longer beings in – and outside of – space and time than you experience yourselves to be.

The world is larger than individuals, than humanity as a whole, than the four kingdoms we have sketched, than the entire 3D from galaxies to the smallest energy swirls. It has its own independent existence, and is not a figment nor creation of anyone’s imagination. That ought to be obvious, though it may be lost sight of in flights of abstraction. But that is not the end of the story. The world is not your thought, but it is the stuff that thoughts are made of.

You in your 3D identities make sense of the continual bombardment of data as best you can, and no two of you put it together exactly the same way, because no two of you ever have exactly the same pieces. But you do put it together, and any given culture may be defined as a tent thrown up to include certain rules of thumb and exclude others. Thus different cultures live to greater or less extent in different worlds. And as above, so below. Within cultures are subcultures, each of which gathers around certain shared perceptions and (thus) values and ideals and assumptions. And each of these subdivide in turn.

And when each subculture acquires its own echo-chamber –

Precisely. Different news sources embodying different assumptions are going to produce different self-reinforcing pictures of the world, even if they attempt to be fair and impartial, because what is self-evidently true to one is damnable falsehood to another.

And both may be right at the same time.

Yes, but good luck bringing many people to understand that. It will seem an obvious contradiction in terms.

Don’t I know it. But we have strayed a long way from where I thought we were going today.

From where we thought we were going today, too. But, nothing lost.

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