Ideas and individuals

My friend Jim is convinced that we in 3D are – what? Victims? Laboratory animals? He sees human suffering as being designed by non-physical powers to cause suffering so as to produce what Bob Monroe called Loosh, which can be used by these higher beings (call them that) for their own purposes. Everything you have said that I take as evidence of our interaction he seems to take as evidence of our being manipulated for the benefit of others. I think this is a fair summary of his position.

And your part in it?

I’d like to show him that that isn’t how I experience it, but words are so clumsy that we all attach our own meanings to what we read. Plus, I have come to see that there isn’t really any persuading anybody about anything. As you have pointed out, words are sparks, not law.

So, where is the problem?

Yeah, I know. He has a different view of things and so what? But I can’t help thinking if I can’t say anything helpful, still maybe you can.

But why would we want to do that? If his life has led him to his own conclusions, presumably there is a reason for it.

[!]

There ought to be a way to show the this-then-this-then-this process that happens somehow. We need some kind of super exclamation point, to show when we experience a fast concatenation of realizations.

Lacking that, center, slow down, and trace them out, not trying to reproduce the sequence, only to sketch where you came to.

Well, when you said that I connected several insights, each of which led instantly – faster than memory could record – to new ones. It was nearly instant, didn’t take more than a flash, but reoriented several previously unconnected ideas.

• We don’t come to our ideas without a reason.
• Our ideas express our own psychic realities; they are not really data-driven.
• They are necessary to our overall development; they cannot be accidental or irrelevant.
• Our lives are not meant as expressions of some ultimate or abstract truth, but as expressions of who and what we are. As part of that, we entertain only the ideas we can and (one might almost say) should, ought to, entertain.

Now why do you suppose a simple question would realign all that?

Because I was ready, I suppose, and your question sparked it.

And that is all you can do, need ever do, should ever do. Your ideas, your ways of seeing the world, your prejudices, your hunches, your unreasoning or seemingly baseless certainties, are all part of you, and you embody them for a reason. No ideas are better than any other ideas for a given person.

I think you mean that for any given person, some ideas are going to seem right and others wrong. So there’s no judging another person’s ideas without in effect judging the person – and we have been told for years that we never have the data to judge anyone else, or even ourselves. We are here to express what we are, and of course our ideas are part of that expression.

Correct so far.

Whether our ideas are more accurate or less is something we also can’t guess, because we don’t have that data either. A heliocentric view of the solar system is right in terms of physics and a geocentric one is right in terms of psychology, say. (I’m not sure I actually agree with this example, but let’s go with it.)

I think you will find, when you look at it, that most of your social and ideological and political problems stem from the idea that there is a right and a wrong, a correct and an incorrect, and everybody and his position should be judged by how closely their position agrees with somebody’s idea of what is right. Since everybody’s ideas are different, anything other than “live and let live” – which is itself an idea – leads to chaos, which is what you are experiencing. (This ignores, for simplicity of statement, complicating factors such as greed, manipulation, etc., but they too stem from what people are, both individually and in packs.)

I can sort of see it. This assumption that there is one truth leads to the assumption that (of course) wherever we are is nearer the truth than anybody else, or we would move. And, it invalidates other ideas, hence invalidates other people themselves who hold these ideas.

Well, isn’t that what you see all around you?

It is, for sure, particularly in the poor excuse for a country that used to be America. Liberals and conservatives are tearing it to pieces in the name of fighting to preserve it. I have been saying for months that they’re all crazy, acting identically only around different ideas. But I hadn’t thought, until now, to see that it is fueled by each side feeling that the other side is invalidating them as what they are. Obvious, once I see it, but it wasn’t obvious before.

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This is an edited excerpt from “Only Somewhat Real,” not yet published.