Questions, and aspirations

Friday, August 30, 2024

5:40 a.m. Jon, let’s talk. We were in the middle of something and now I don’t remember what it was, but perhaps you do. I suppose we could talk about how our unrequited desires and aspirations are part of our lives.

That’s a good topic, but it isn’t quite that they are part of your lives, nor even why they are part of your lives. It is more like how they are part of your lives. And here as well.

Always interesting to get a sort of overviewing sense of an answer, just by the way you reframe the question.

Asking the right question in the right way is itself the answer, because the asking wasn’t the beginning but the end of the process. It doesn’t look that way when you are functioning in the body because you can only process sequential logic –

That isn’t right, but I don’t know how to fix it.

It’s easy enough, we just try again. The way to say it is that in 3D, conscious reasoning is more obvious to you than the unconscious factors that are frequently – you might almost say usually – more important. If your thinking is being fashioned from within a given mood, for instance, the mood may or may not be obvious to you as a factor in your thinking, but either way, it will be there. So many factors go into your moment-by-moment perceptions and thought that you are always working the data while it is changing around you. You don’t have the luxury of working from a stable platform.

The result is that your mental and emotional life is chaotic (seen from outside the 3D condition) and if you didn’t have guidance from your non-3D anchor, you would never be able to navigate. You would scarcely be able to swim!

I get the sense that you are connecting “mental and emotional” in a way that the language isn’t quite expressing.

As you told your friends, language follows experience before it can be reshaped so as to be able to express the experience. Yes, current ideas of “mental” and “emotional” are radically insufficient and therefore misleading. But until someone invents a way to describe the swirling sea of interacting influences that is your moment-by-moment reality, it will be difficult to help you keep in mind that at no time are we describing a steady platform.

If we were able to create the necessary verbal shortcuts to do that, you could more easily see that the interaction within you of 3D and non-3D functioning both confuses and often resolves issues. So, by the time you get the question right, you are ready to hear the answer. This may not be clear to everybody, but it will be to some, anyway.

But to get to your question: Your unfulfilled and even your  unfulfillable aspirations, longings, painful deprivations, and so forth, are all a part of your mental makeup when you die, and so remain with you. We were calling it “unfinished business” and that was right in a way, wrong in a way.

It is a simple readjustment, but some will find it impossible to accept: Your frustrations and achievements etc. are as much a part of you as your aspirations and values. Can you see that they are the same thing? It may help if you remember that language always freezes separations, making them seem more real than they are. Just as your mental life isn’t as stable as you think, your categories of thought aren’t as real or defined as you think they are. This is not because you aren’t thinking right, it is because you are functioning in 3D conditions, and that is a skill that some master better than others do.

I once asked the guys about when somebody would realize something (he having passed over, I think; I can’t remember the specifics, only the resolution) and they said, “How soon after you die do you suppose you will approve of slavery?” I took that to mean that what we think and feel are part of us, and it isn’t a matter of learning that we were wrong (or right) after we die.

The important part of that is the realizing that who you are, what you believe, how you feel, what you struggle with, how you have failed in your own eyes – all of it – is part of your experience and therefore by definition can’t be wrong.

A Hitler or a Stalin or a hatchet-murderer is not wrong?

This is going to take some careful considering. Look at it this way, if you came into 3D and became a hatchet-murderer, there are many ways it could happen. Some of these ways are 3D-you following the currents you swim in. in law they might defend your actions as being of “diminished responsibility.” Other ways might involve a conscious choice of evil. Others might be a momentary loss of control, in the way somebody might shoot someone they loved merely because they had a gun handy at a moment of overmastering passion. We aren’t concerned here with the sociology of it, nor the legal or civil aspects. We are looking at how you cannot judge someone else’s actions accurately if you don’t know the swirl of motivations and temptations and confusions that resulted in the action.

The guys have always said, “You never have the data.”

You couldn’t. there’s too much of it and its too evanescent.

Somebody said, “To understand everything would be to forgive everything.”

He had the right idea, as long as you remember that he could know that but probably couldn’t live it, except maybe in fortunate moments.

To return to your specific question, there isn’t anything wrong with dying with your life aspirations unfulfilled. What is real is the aspiration, not the 3D result. Do you see that?

I think you are saying, we turn ourselves into conduits of the vast impersonal forces by our decisions including which aspirations to hold, and this is our achievement.

Let’s say it is your lasting influence. Nothing is forever except life itself, but while your influence lasts, you will have put your tiny weight on one side or another of various scales.

I get the idea, but – what scales? Who is holding them? For what?

Another time.

Thanks again.

 

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