No place to stand – and intuition

Saturday, September 7, 2024

1:10 a.m. “No place to stand and no need of one. Suspended, instead.” Jon, I presume you are ready to clarify.

I am. But it should be obvious what I meant.

Obvious I think to some, those who have gotten your meaning already. But others won’t find it means much, if anything.

But you know what it means. Set it out, as you would for the guys, and I’ll correct it if necessary.

I take it to mean, simply, “Don’t keep in the back of your mind the idea that the 3D/non-3D world really is primary. Don’t think it is real. Recognize that reality is not based in 3D/non-3D, but is deeper, not rooted in physical reality at all.

You might think of the 3D/non-3D as an island floating on nothing. Truly, it isn’t really real. Bu it can be hard to adjust your minds to realize that the concept really means something, and has practical consequences.

I know. There’s a sort of halfway house where we start to believe it, are intellectually convinced by it, but still live with our assumptions otherwise.

And it is to people in that place that I address myself. Those who think the idea is nonsense won’t listen, and those who understand it don’t need the explanation.

However –

I know. Well, try to sleep and return when you can. I’m not going anywhere.

5:24 a.m. Okay. Continue?

How can you be sick, how can I have died of a specific illness, if the 3D world isn’t real?

Surely people don’t think the argument is that thin.

Some do. Remember, to some it doesn’t make any sense. Think of your own reaction when you hear something that seems to you to be just playing with words.

Flat-Earthers, say? You get into a conversation with one of them and they can talk forever, giving you all these reasons why what we see is illusion, but they can’t explain why everything in the sky is round and not flat, and it doesn’t bother them. They have a need to believe what they believe, and logic and common sense and even intuition aren’t going to make any headway against it.

Well, what we’re saying sounds like Flat-Earthers, to some. It is too far from their experience. And, interesting you mention intuition. Their intuition tells them you are wrong. Why is that? How can it be? Are their guys lying to them? Are they perhaps unable to hear their guys or maybe believe them?

I expect you’re going to tell us.

This may turn into a sidebar, but that’s all right if it does, it is an interesting subject I don’t remember you ever addressing. You tend to take your connection for granted.

After all this time, I ought to!

But you always functioned this way. It is what made you different. It sometimes made you eccentric, sometimes entirely illogical, quixotic. You did things nobody would do, because it seemed right. (I don’t mean morally right, I mean accurate.)

Sure. Who runs for Congress without backing or preparation ten years out of high school? Who sees it as inevitable, years earlier? Who starts a shopper paper without considering economics? Etc., etc. And yet all those quixotic decisions led to something. They weren’t dead-ends at all, they were just curiously distorted ways to get somewhere.

You see, it was you in the hands of your guidance. Now, your example isn’t necessarily something people should imitate. You yourself probably wouldn’t do some of those things again if you had your choice.

Certainly I’d do some things differently!

A balanced use of intuition checks impulses against logic. Logic may still say, “Do it,” but at least you will have checked. But that isn’t the topic here, prudence. The topic is the absolute certainty that intuition can provide, that cannot be shaken by fact or appearance. Sometimes the certainty is right, and you look brilliant. Sometimes it is wrong, and you look not only wrong-headed but practically insane. It’s a dangerous way to live.

Churchill did it. Some reporter, writing about examples of Churchill’s prescience as a young man, asked rhetorically, “Does he have a demon that tells him things?” Yet Churchill was never trusted by his political partners even when they entrusted him with power, as they did over a fifty-year span, off and on.

And when you were young, your admiration for him was unbounded.

And ill-informed. It took a long time to see the other colors in the portrait.

But the point here is that you took him as a model, unconsciously. Why? Because he was British, or aristocratic, or imperialist? No, because something in you recognized something in him, and I’m telling you what it was.

I see. And as usual I took it for granted and never examined it.

You lived very close to unconsciously in certain respects. You did not calculate – which is the first requisite for a political career such as you thought you wanted. You did not plan, you never got your ticket punched. All this was the same trait manifesting in different ways. This is you scoring 100% for intuition and 0% for sensation on the Myers-Briggs.

And being pleased at that result, until I thought about it.

And it took you a good while to think about it! But my point is, all this led you to be able to do what you did. If you had been more balanced, maybe you wouldn’t have been able to do it.

A guy I knew did say, in effect  – this was 50 years ago, nearly – that someone who goes off half-cocked may be valuable because sometimes you need somebody to get things started.

Here’s the point, or anyway my point. People are often led by their intuition – their guidance – their guys upstairs – and sometimes the result is rational and sometimes it isn’t. Either way, the process is similar.

You’re saying, you can’t trust any process to bring you safely home, but it may.

I was saying, you can’t ever tell which process will take you to where you want to go, but the two statements go together. They’re both true.

Now, to return to the main point. People whose intuition tells them there’s nothing in this will not be convinced by argument, and that’s fine. Others will have an intuitive recognition, and that’s fine too. Sometimes you have to make the statement and let people come to it as best they can. Saying that the 3D/non-3D system is a sort of island in reality is one of those statements.

I started to write (thinking it was you), something like, “How are you going to prove it either way?” But, there’s Paul Brunton.

Who provided you with logical demonstration of what you already knew. Provided you; he won’t provide everybody. They have to be in a certain place.

His books were The Hidden Teaching Beyond Yoga and The Wisdom of the Oversoul, both available in a beautiful paperback edition from North Atlantic Books.

Nice plug, but again, not everybody will get from them what you did, because in every book the author is only half the equation. The reader is the other half. Again, Brunton didn’t prove anything. What he did, most skillfully, was point you in a direction and show the logical consequences of your beliefs. Not that he would necessarily agree that this is what he was doing, but that is the effect.

Feels like we mostly wandered, this time.

It has an inner consistency that may be more obvious to you when you type it up. In any cases, it says all that can be said about the 3D/non-3D being different from the underlying reality. What else could be said?

I’ll take your word for it. This has been quite a week. Our thanks.

We can take the two final points together, perhaps. We’ll see how it goes.

Okay.