Friday, September 4, 2015
5:45 a.m. All right, let’s keep going. Into the breach: soul and spirit, some clarification.
You have been given a view of the non-3D life from the point of view of the soul created to hold together various strands to create a new habit-pattern, a new viewpoint, a new window on the 3D world and thus a new window on the non-3D world thereafter. But this view must now be corrected, or shall we say compensated, or complemented, by the same reality seen from the point of view you call spirit.
In this phrasing we are being careful to imply that soul and spirit, though different manifestations, are not in any way absolutely different.
I know what you are meaning to convey there, but I’m not sure how to get it across. I guess a good analogy would help, but I can’t think of one and I gather you don’t have one to suggest.
Why not spell out your understanding, and we will correct or modify if need be?
All right. I think you’re meaning, soul and spirit are the same essence, manifesting differently enough to seem like different things. Like, I suppose, vegetables and animals might be seen as fundamentally different but are both living matter.
Maybe a more productive analogy would be humans and animals being different expressions of animal life – physically identical except for a small percentage of their genetic make-up, but that small percentage being enough to render them vastly different in appearance and function in their environment – yet still mostly the same thing, not easily seen to be such when looked at only in the physical environment.
In fact, this is a very good analogy. In 3D, humans and other animals may not even be able to communicate except indirectly because only humans have intelligent speech, and humans have lost the ability to understand non-vocal communication. So, the gap is widened, perceptually. Now as humans re-learn the language they lost – as they begin to realize the other ways animals communicate, and mostly as they realize that animals who cannot talk can nonetheless understand – the differences between humans and other animals will seem to shrink, and what they are in common will seem to expand.
All through writing that, I was in mind of the analogy the guys once provided of the difference between us in the 3D and us in the non-3D – the difference between ice cubes and water. Same substance, different expression because different environment.
Yes, but look at that closely. The ice cube, though it experience itself (and other ice cubes) as separate and different, is still water, only temporarily frozen in form, or let us say firmed up in expression, made more rigid. So the soul is still spirit, only somewhat more rigid in expression.
For the first time I got the sense that souls, too, like bodies, may be only temporary.
Yes. Yes. Ice cubes are not intended to be forever as ice cubes. The water does not cease to exist, whether as liquid or as vapor. But in solid shape, it may have only a very limited life. Can anyone in his right mind say that this is a tragedy? Only if it sees things exclusively from the point of view of the ice cube. But in that case, this is the same mind-set that sees physical death as a tragedy because the 3D body ceases to exist as a container after the end of its time to function.
Okay, were circling back on old material and looking at it again, aren’t we? Understanding A better because we now understand B better.
You can see that your earlier questions could not be answered clearly except in whatever context you inhabited (or, you may think, created). The whole discussion of minds being discarded as insufficiently unique to be worth keeping could go only so far because of the contents of your conceptions to that point.
Yes, it looked very much like murder, or callous indifference, to some who read it.
And it may still look like loss to many, as long as they cling to identification with soul – that is, as individuality – rather than with spirit, or identity.
You’re going to confuse people with the word “identity.” You mean, more, universality, I think. Or – well, I don’t know – what?
Oneness, perhaps. If one identifies with any specific thing, loss is the inevitable result. If one identifies with the “all” of things, loss is out of the equation entirely. That isn’t the reason to identify with the all, just to avoid the feeling of loss. The reason is, that is a valid way to see it. But perhaps a more balanced view while you are in 3D is to recognize that life does involve loss, but only relative loss, never absolute loss. A hand of playing-cards, once thrown in so a new deal may proceed, ceases to exist as a present reality. It exists as a memory, and as a potential future reality again, but not (in the given 3D moment) as an existing reality. So, the soul.
Thoreau expressed a similar thought once, though not in the context of playing cards, of course. He said he identified not with the individual but with the thing that pre-existed the individual and would not cease to exist with the end of the individual.
Yes. But to most people until they come to think about it – and that’s what we’re doing, here, trying to help you all think about it – the thought of an individual soul ceasing to exist will seem as final as death, and perhaps even more wasteful and tragic.
It will, unless you can tell us how else to think of it. We have become accustomed to the idea of the soul as immortal.
And here is where things get tricky. The soul is immortal. And yet, it may cease to exist as a separate or relatively separate “individual” soul. But this is going to take some context to establish, because as usual what one can understand depends upon what one has as a platform from which to examine it. Just as the materialist has no platform from which to examine non-3D existence, so one who holds too firm a view of the nature and structure of non-3D existence will have no place to stand and change viewpoints. Both – standing in one place, and changing viewpoints. Both, not one or the other. Were you to do only the one, your views would harden inappropriately. Were you to do only the other, you would produce only a kaleidoscope, or a whirlwind.
I see my value to this process.
Of course. Your very limitations aid you in doing your job. Others with different limitations – hence with different abilities – will complement your efforts, if you all work together either simultaneously or in succession.
I think we’re pretty much done this morning.
There are other mornings, and as you have seen repeatedly, Yeats was quite right to say that achievement comes in sedentary little stitches.
Seems so. All right, you’ve whetted our appetites for more. I’ll be interested to see where this goes. Till next time, then.