Tuesday, August 13, 2024
5:30 a.m. Lila got me up at about five. Lungs feel on the edge of trouble, yet I am able to prevent it. Do I have energy enough to continue with Jon? It’s only 5:30, why shouldn’t I have it? Jon?
Start with the concepts of limitation and perseverance. Considered together, they provide a way in.
Yes, I got that yesterday. Intend one thing, but don’t intend it for a moment and go on to intend something else, but intend it, fasten your life to it. That is both limitation and perseverance, come to think of it.
“Hitch your wagon to a star.”
Emerson. I got the aspiration end of it, but I guess I never fully appreciated the perseverance and limitation end. “Limitation” meaning, focus.
And you’re always quoting Jesus, didn’t he say to sell everything you own, to buy the pearl of great price? Isn’t that limitation m- giving up everything else – and isn’t it aspiration and perseverance?
Clearly.
Anybody has only so much energy, time, attention, talent, interest. I am not saying “specialize” meaning do only one thing. For some people, that’s fine, but for others, it isn’t. Nothing wrong with being a Jack-of-all-trades, if that’s how you’re made. But whatever you do, you can do it in a focused way or an unfocused way, and the results you get are going to be different.
I see where you are going, but it hasn’t been clearly stated yet.
It is difficult to state as an abstract saying without leaving it so wide-open for interpretation that it leads directly to mis-interpretation.
Well, let me try. I think what you’re getting at is that our lives have an important spine and many unimportant alternate bodies. Though, that’s pretty clumsy.
But that’s getting there. You mean to say, your life is going to have one central preoccupation, and maybe it can be put into words and maybe it can’t. Maybe you know it consciously, maybe you only sort of feel it, maybe you don’t have a clue about it. Regardless, it is there. It stems from what you are. You are going to live this out whether you’re aware of it or not. That’s a given.
But how you live it out is up for grabs. Maybe you do this, maybe you do that, maybe you go back and forth. The how of it is up to you, in a way that the essence of it can never be. You live your essence, you choose among potential expressions of it.
So the predetermined part of us is our underlying mission, and the freewill part of us is how we go about living it.
Wait. Slow down. I said it is easily misinterpreted, and that means that even a true statement has to be carefully defined, or it will lead people astray.
It is important that people know what we aren’t talking about, if they’re to have any chance of confining themselves to what we are talking about. This is not about intent versus deeds. It isn’t about internal versus external. It isn’t about unlimited potential versus limitations in practice. All of these things enter into it, but they enter into it, they aren’t it, and they aren’t the essence of it.
We come into a 3D life to express the interaction of the traits and characteristics that are combined in our birth moment. At least, it could be seen that way. It would be equally true to say that we have to wait for the proper moment to roll around that will allow that particular combination. But the difference in theory doesn’t matter in practice. In practice, we enter a life as a bundle of traits and characteristics, and our life is the living of those things through what seems like an unending series of external events. This won’t be news to you; you’ve been getting the picture with increasing clarity all these 25 or 30 years. That is what looks like predestination to you: It is the hand you’ve been dealt. But the way you play that hand is the freewill part of it, and what does that mean in practice?
Our attitude toward whatever happens to us.
Yes. It isn’t what we do; that is effect, not cause, and it is manifestation, not impelling force. (That’s the same thing said twice.)
Your friend Viktor Frankl.
He wasn’t a friend, and I didn’t appreciate him sufficiently, being put off by his mannerisms and his emotional barriers, but yes, Frankl. Our freedom is our freedom to chose how to react to what happens to us. In other words, freedom is choosing how to be molded by external events.
And if I understand you, you’re saying the shaping of our – character, call it – is what is real, rather than whatever results manifest externally.
No! Well, yes, but not the way you mean. You are still leaving too much out. The world is more than stage scenery.
Go ahead.
I could see this in 3D, but it is even clearer now. There is such a thing as pursuing something true to the point of it becoming false, because it is too out of context.
The shaping of your character by events is what is real, in the larger sense, and in the longer run. But that doesn’t mean that the rest of your life is negligible. You can strew a lot of wreckage around just by carelessness. The 3D world counts because it is the world of others too, not just yourself. If you’ll think about it, you’ll see it has to be that way, because you – we – are all one. We consider ourselves individually as a sort of convenient shorthand, and for practical purposes, but the wolf is part of the pack. The outlier is part of the herd. As you sometimes say, nobody changes his own diapers.
So if you leave out the effects of your life on the 3D world around you, you are automatically leaving out some of the effects on you of your own life. So what I object to in your statement is the idea that, in any context, the 3D results don’t matter.
But the rest of it is right – that the shaping of our character by our decisions is what is of central importance in life.
It is right as long as you don’t forget that the 3D world is more than stage scenery for anybody’s particular drama. It is that, but it is not only that.
Yes, I get it.
You do at the moment, In any case, remember the paired concepts of limitation and perseverance, and it will give you an insight into the underlying nature of 3D life that will save you from delusions of helplessness.
I’m enjoying this dialogue, and I hope you will continue it, not just with me but with others.
The restriction is never on the non-3D side. You should know that by now.
I do. Next time, then.