Now remember that at the moment we are looking at your 3D life as an experiencer of the interaction of soul and spirit: soul, the shaped collection of traits, and spirit, the free-ranging animating force. You may find it easiest to begin with negative manifestations. Let us start with hatred.
Which, I presume, begins with fear.
That’s a “yes but no.” But explaining why it is a “yes but no” may take some doing. It isn’t simple.
Your ideas about things are based on a combination of input and prior ideas, mostly.
Input is determined, or let’s say skewed, by perception, and your sensory perceptions by themselves are obviously limited to a tiny percentage of the physically existent spectrum. Even the electromagnetic spectrum recognized by science – which is to say, sensory data extended by instrumentation and inference – is mostly far beyond your ability to experience directly by sight, sound, smell, taste, touch. That limited input is interpreted by ideas of how things are, ideas formed from prior first-hand and second-hand experience, all of it also subject to those same limitations.
If this were the whole story, your possibilities would be very much more limited, for how could you break out of the self-contained idea-system and experience-system delivered and limited by sensory data? You can get an idea of what your world would be like by looking at the mental constructs of people who do believe that sensory data is all there is. Of course, these people themselves do not live in the world they deduce; no one could. But they ignore and deny experience to the contrary, so you can get an idea of that mental reality by overhearing their mental reinforcement of their ideas as they ty to persuade others.
The compensating factor in your lives is, of course, what you would call direct feed. Call it intuition, divine guidance, extra-sensory knowing, instinctive wisdom, inexplicable useful connection – however you think of it, it is the other part of your being – that makes possible your limited 3D existence. No one and nothing could exist without an unbroken connection to its larger self centered beyond the 3D construct. The birds that build nests may not be able to say non-3D, but they rely on it, as all animals and vegetables do, to enable them to make sense of incoming sensory data and, particularly, to make sense of it in advance. You call it instinct, in animals, in babies, in yourselves sometimes, but that’s what it really is, connection. And remember, that isn’t connection to a something else; it is connection to another part of yourself.
Aha! And the two forms of perception are sometimes at war with one another.
Not the forms, but the results of having contradictory ideas about the meaning of the data from two different kinds of sources.
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This is an edited excerpt from “Only Somewhat Real,” not yet published.