Thursday, May 23, 2024
4:05 a.m. My neighbor Don DeBats, whose cat Lila I am hosting as I do when Don and Margaret Ann are gone, died yesterday in Australia of a brain aneurism. Quite a shock. Ordinarily I wouldn’t bring that to this on-going conversation, but something says I should. I take it you will have a thing or two to say?
He got the form of departure that you have in mind: swift, relatively painless, leaving the inevitable loose ends but not involving any long intermediate state of advanced care or prolonged suspense. You may take this – including your reaction – as a reminder of the effect on others of a sudden departure. It always comes as a shock to others, even it they half-expected it “sometime.”
What struck me was the uncompleted task, the book he had been working on for so many months, still many months away from completion. But a you say, always there are loose ends.
The background suspense of “When am I going to die? How? What will I leave uncompleted? How will that death round out the life, what meaning will it seem to leave?” always adds mystery to your lives, and reminds you that you are not in charge, not in that shaping way.
Is that important?
Let’s talk about The Eternal Now.
Very dramatic, but I wait and nothing more comes.
You always know your overall shape of your life.
I deny that. Or, you are using “know” in a different sense than the obvious.
More like, we are using “you” in a different sense.
Ah. Okay, I see that. Our larger awareness knows the shape of things to come, presumably including possible branchings.
You are yet immersed in the past->present>future way of seeing things. We repeat, let’s discuss it from the Eternal Now.
- Your life in all its potential variations is there, now. It springs forth as one
This is going to be difficult, isn’t it? Talking without time-flow getting in the way.
It ought to be easy, but yes, we are finding it difficult. In such cases it is usually a matter of finding the right approach. It is a difficulty inherent in language. We need an analogy. You have the problem: Can you reach to an analogy that will carry us over the difficulty?
An absurd analogy comes to mind, probably because I have been reading Eugene Manlove Rhodes. What about a roundup on the plains? The fate of any one cow is indeterminate – too many possibilities – but the fate of the herd is roughly settled.
We smile. Get along, little dogie. We don’t see how that is going to help.
What if our entire cloud of possibilities in life is the herd, and the life we actually chose as we went is the individual cow?
Shake the hopper, try again.
Well, the word “precipitate” comes to mind, as when a chemical mixture results in something precipitating from the formula.
No, but the process is helpful. Again?
A jigsaw puzzle. The wholeness of the picture is inherent in the situation even as you attack it in the only way possible, piece by piece.
Not that either. Let’s try this another way. Say what you think we want to explain.
If I could do that, we’d be finished, wouldn’t we?
Humor us.
Well, I get that it is something to do with seeing our lives two ways at once, sequentially, the way we live them, and as a gestalt, the way I suppose they look from the non-3D.
Yes. Toward what end?
You always know the overall shape of your life. The microscope analogy, maybe?
Maybe.
- With the microscope adjusted to the 3D sequential level, the logic of your life is sequential and variable – that is, it may go this way or that, depending upon your decisions.
- From the non-3D, non-sequential view – the gestalt – your life is more like an accomplished thing, because it is not sequential except from the 3D perspective.
- At the same time, every choice produces a different gestalt, sometimes radically different, sometimes trivially, but different with each choice.
- All these variations are equally real, but equally evanescent, for they are closer to dreams or abstract ideas than like material objects.
- Thus, all changes are equally real at the non-3D level, but all but one are only theoretical, or anyway limited in date, in 3D.
- So, your life is seen as a whole, in non-3D, but that whole is not what you would expect by following 3D rules. It is closer to a probability cloud than a single exposure.
- And the thing that confuses the issue is that language tempts you to think of any complete life as one iteration, rather than all But things change all the time, and your life is the total of the change, and the interactions among the changes, and (bear this in mind if you hope to understand), an individual life is never more than one end of a process. The non-3D never writes obits; it notes situation reports.
- Inherent in this – implicit – is the fact that every life is and remains influenced by continuing changes in the constituent strands. Even if you in your present 3D life were to somehow come to a halt, making no decisions, no changes, still change would flow in from those other parts of yourselves in other 3D lifetimes.
The point here is that
- There is no “Final result” and
- Nonetheless there is an overall “shape” to your life inherent from the beginning.
Swedenborg knew the date he would die, to the day.
In that version of his life he did, yes. Do you think he was equally well connected in the versions in which he continued to occupy himself with the physical sciences only?
From the non-3D standpoint, presumably he took all paths.
Yes, but from any one 3D viewpoint, he took the one that fits with the variation you are in. Both views true, neither view complete and sufficient.
Once again, the key is to be able to change viewpoints so that you can understand. When you remember that your Ives are being lived out in the now – that the “now” is all that exists – any sense of doom or of lost opportunity has no place to root itself. It is only the 3D viewpoint that may lead to those. However, the 3D view provides the texture and the moment-by-moment drama that the non-3D cannot. As we say, change viewpoints. We don’t mean change from A to B and stay at B. We mean, go from A to B, B to A, as conditions warrant, remembering that perspective is the way things look from any one viewpoint, is necessarily limited, necessarily a distortion, though often a useful one.
I’m not sure what we accomplished today.
Potentially, it is one more bit of data telling you a way to approach understanding your lives. That it was difficult to get to isn’t a problem and may in fact be an indicator that it was worth doing. Just call this one “The Eternal Now” and we’ll move on to other aspects another time.
If you say so. Till then, and our thanks for this, as always.