Life really is different

Tuesday, September 3, 2024

5 a.m. Jon, I’d like to try to continue what you began yesterday. I know our chances of really clearing it up are slim.

Slim but not negligible. The times, they are a-changing, and what couldn’t be easily grasped before are more easily grasped now. But of course it won’t be easy.

How about it we look at the points you made in order. First was, Life really is different; it isn’t what it seems to be. I take it this is because our 3D environment warps our perceptions.

But you see, even there – that sentence takes for granted the existence of a 3D environment; it makes the world seem real, solid, in a way that it isn’t, and unless people can get beyond that idea – and stay beyond it while thinking this through – they can’t really get the changed perception that will make sense of this. If they can’t eventually see that difference, it will remain all words, all theory, that they may assent to, but that will not change their lives. And of course, I say “they” but I mean “you,” too, and I would have meant, “me.” It isn’t a matter of brainpower; it is openness to an insight.

This first point is the entryway to everything that follows. Although you are holding a pen, writing in a book supported by a desk, etc., etc., all that is real only in its own terms, the way a stage-set in a movie is real in appearance though it is only a wall and some paint. Within the context of the movie, the set is real, and allows its interaction to proceed. But it is a background artificially created to support something that cannot be understood as a movie if you remain within the context of the movie.

But this is all words, and unless you get an insight into the reality they are pointing to, they’re just words. Memorizing them won’t help, and in fact may make things worse (in that the memorization concretizes the finger rather than the idea the finger is pointing to).

Try to let it come real to you, whoever reads this: Real life is garbed in 3D, but is deeper and realer than 3D. and that doesn’t mean that only non-3D is real. Within this context, non-3D is inextricably connected to the concept of 3D: They’re at the same level of reality that we need to penetrate beyond.

I have been quietly awed for years by our audacity here. Either we are damned fools or we are something else – pioneers, I guess – but either way we are saying our whole civilization is wrong: its philistines, its sophisticates, its conventionally pious, its mystics, philosophers, you name it. And common sense says, How can that be? I’ve been over this before, many times: How can it be that everybody is out of step but my Johnny? How much vastly more likely that we are just fooling ourselves, or anyway making some basic error.

And you know the answer to that doubt: New times provide new opportunities, new ways to penetrate deeper into life. Besides, it’s mostly a matter of mistranslation. People have gotten here before, but,

a) They didn’t have all the help available now,

b) They have been misunderstood, and what we know of as their teachings are their teachings as interpreted by those who misunderstood them.

By (a) I mean a couple of things. First, physical metaphors like computers and animation didn’t exist to change their sensory habits, so it was a longer stretch for them to make than it would be today. Second, everybody stands on the backs of what has been said, thought, understood, previously. It is an advantage, in some ways, to see how many people went down so many blind alleys. It potentially increases your sophistication and analysis.

But surely they had teachers we don’t know of, traditions and understandings we don’t.

Oh yes, I’m not saying we have progressed without also regressing. But it is helpful – can be helpful – to recognize at a glance errors that enticed others.

Aha, I just got something that ought to have been obvious before. The guys have said that in forming a new worldview, we will find ourselves incorporating some things that our present worldview regards as superstition, because we will understand its true nature. That applies to religious and metaphysical insights too, I see. In fact, the older and more esoteric they are, the more valuable they may prove to be.

As inspiration, yes. Not as something to be adopted blindly or wholeheartedly. You will find many things in the Vedas that you will understand from your new view that your present civilization had dismissed; but you will not be able to merely accept the Vedas as they were understood in their heyday. That would be an archaism, not a new appreciation.

We are really going to have to hammer on this one point, because if you don’t get this, you don’t get any of it: Life is different from what it is going to seem to be. If you think you can just add this on to your ordinary perception of life, fine, but you won’t change your life, you will blow beautiful soap-bubbles and admire their momentary beauty.

Matter/energy is an appearance, not an ultimate reality. Difference in time (past, present, future) is an appearance (a way of experiencing 3D), not an ultimate reality. Therefore you don’t know where or what you are. No one does. You have relatively firm ideas about your place in the movie, but as long as you believe the movie is “real life,” you aren’t getting beyond appearances to reality.

Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Most people go through 3D life believing in it. After all, it wouldn’t be must of a movie if you couldn’t lose yourself in it. But if you want to go deeper – if something within you says you have to go deeper – the first real step has to be to recognize what is movie-set and what is beyond movie-set.

We have to start by recognizing that we don’t know anything.

Easy to say, but not quite right. It isn’t that you don’t know anything. It is closer to say, you can’t trust anything your senses tell you, and therefore you can’t trust the towers of logic you (and mostly others) have built on what the senses say. If you are going to go deeper, you have to recognize that you are still a beginner, not an expert, and “beginner’s mind” means openness to the new, if it means anything. Yet this “openness to the new” is the very hardest thing to maintain. It feels like, “I’ve wasted my time up to now,” or it feels like “This is just know-it-all preaching.” True critical thinking based in true openness to the new is rare, and essential. Even in those who can do it, it comes and goes.

And in its absence, all this exploration is just flapping our jaws.

It isn’t quite that grim. Integrity, perseverance, intent.

I’m not sure if this clarified anything, but I’d say next time we ought to proceed to your second item.

Little by little gets it done.

Thanks again, and till next time.