Sunday, June 12, 2016
5:30 a.m. all right, friend. Yesterday you said we are one part of a larger being and that was our starting-point for today. I’m ready to continue if you are.
This may be difficult to say clearly and I know it will be difficult for some to accept. The answer to that is as usual, don’t accept it unless the material compels you to. And by that I mean, compels you not by logic, but because it resonates. And even then, you will want to examine it for contradictions and questionable inferences, because the more severely you wrestle with new understandings, the more they become yours, the closer you bind them to you.
Odd way to put it.
Odd, perhaps, but not random.
Remember that one starting-point for this long exercise in redefinition was for you to realize that souls are created and then go on. I was going to say “go on forever,” but that isn’t exactly true and isn’t exactly not true either. For the moment, as a rough approximation, say forever.
A second point was that spirit, unlike soul, is from forever to forever, and is not modified, nor can it be tied in knots, but nor can develop. Whereas soul experiences and grows, spirit is, and continues unchanged. Only, don’t overly separate in theory what function together in practice during any one 3D lifetime.
But if the spirit is unchanging, in the larger being, from any lower being’s perspective, there is experiencing and growth just as you experience it in the life you are leading.
And, remember, the larger being is part of the life you are leading. That is as true a way to put it as the opposite way, that you are a part of it. I invert the order merely to remind you that it isn’t a situation in which you feed the larger being but it does not feed you. There is a continuous two-way interchange going on, rather.
Even this is somewhat distorted by analogy.
Your liver, your heart, could be considered part of the larger being that is your body. They could be described as continuously interacting with that larger being. That wouldn’t be untrue, but really they are part and parcel of that body; without them the body would be incomplete and in fact could not function. So it isn’t just a matter of considering how the liver “feeds” the larger being, nor of how it “receives feed” from the larger being.
Our 3D lives are more intimately connected to the larger being than we sometimes think.
Yes, but remember, you say “our 3D lives” – don’t forget that your 3D life includes your non-3D component. All that is you is inherently connected to the larger being.
And presumably so on, up and down the scale of being.
Precisely. No “you” and there would be a hole in the universe, so to speak. A body could survive amputation, or the surgical removal of a given number of cells, or the malfunction of its organs to a certain extent – but in any such case, it is not unaffected by the loss.
It is striking to me to see – by implied comparison – how accustomed we have become to thinking of ourselves as being dispensable, accidental, perhaps detrimental.
It is part of the disease that is eating at your culture, that sense of being unneeded, and separate, and insignificant.
Colin Wilson used to argue against what he called “the fallacy of insignificance,” come to think of it. But I don’t think he meant it in just this way.
He did not have a very definite or very clear idea of what he would have thought of as “the afterlife.” It was struggle enough in his life for him to overcome the implied meaninglessness the early twentieth century took for granted.
Which he did.
Well, let’s use that as a starting-point, an example concrete enough, enough of a known quantity, to serve as a public example, and one known to you [personally] as an individual, and one suitable to serve as an example of relationships between the larger being and individual souls.
You – any of you – are well familiar with people who do, and people who don’t, think there is any “afterlife,” and with people who do, or don’t, think they have a firm idea of what the afterlife is. Among yourselves you are beginning to see that the very term “afterlife” might as well be renamed “afterthought” or even “aftershock” – in other words, it is more current and more closely connected to everyday life than a term like “afterlife” implies. And isn’t that what we are about here, providing a corrected picture of life?
So, let us take the life of Colin Wilson as an approachable model for examination.
Seen as a 3D being, his life is as familiar a story as your own. He lived in one time and place, and lived connected to his non-3D as you do, regardless whether he (or you) realized it at any given moment. Well and good.
Now let us look at him as part of the larger being, taking a little creative license if need be so as to enhance the clarity of the relationship.
Not sure what you mean by that last.
No matter. Colin Wilson is created in 1931 in England, blah blah blah. You know or can learn the biography. But a more interesting question is, why that combination of elements, why that combination of possibilities? On two levels: what was his mission over and above the usual mission of living his life and making of himself what he wished?
There is always the primary mission of living your life and choosing what you want to be. (Not talking about external achievement, here, but of self-creation from the materials provided by your inner and outer environment.) But there is also another level of mission that can be considered as more impersonal and less particular. There are choices the larger being is making that you and all others are executing. Sometimes what you want as a 3D soul and what the larger being wants (experienced as part of you), only overlap, or conflict, and this too as a part of your life’s choices. Do you wrestle with those uncomfortable “otherness” wishes? Do you say, “Your will, not mine”? Do you say, “I will not serve!”? These choices are choices on your 3D soul level and, at the same time, they do not leave your higher being unaffected, for how could they?
I am beginning to see it. Once we think of the larger being as having the same possibilities and limitations as we do, but at another level, it is no longer a matter of gods and worms, but of contradictory and confirming currents within us.
And with this new vantage point you can begin to do the work of seeing your life as an integral part of a larger life – and can begin to see that many a theological puzzle, or problem, that you may have passed by as superstition is in fact a record of people wrestling with perceptions and experiences that are not only real, but critically important to understand your lives – if you bring them into your present. In other words, if you wrestle with their meaning so that you may re-interpret them in your own terms.
So, if Colin Wilson is born into certain circumstances, it is not only for reasons that may be considered to be reasons of his own (how can that be the truth, given that “he” as a bundle does not yet exist?) but because that mixture of elements may serve the purpose of the larger being.
“God has no hands to use but ours.”
And substitute “the next larger being” for “God” and you see a very true statement in a new way. The larger being is not God, yet it has many of the attributes attributed to God, and you can see how people would have been led to accept an over-simplified picture of man here, God here, because it is truer than experiencing man alone, or man subject to many insensate forces, or man subject to conflicting gods.
Now, it remains true that even using the word “God” confuses things because of the mental and emotional baggage people bring to the subject, but we have reached the point where the roiling is beyond necessary and becomes productive.
Meaning, I take it, we now begin to wrestle – there’s that word again – with accepted theological systems, to see what light they can shed on things.
Not quite. Not as any one individual. You rightly have said that you don’t have the background in such matters. But you as a community, each one sticking in his or her oar, can offer valuable bits that will add up to surprisingly more. Whether you will or will not is of course not up to the larger being. In a sense, the larger being always lives in hope of cooperation from its constituent elements. That’s the awkward side of free will in practice.
Always on Plan B. That’s what the guys told Rita and me, years ago. “We’re always on Plan B.”
I believe they said actually on plans C, D, E, etc.
Probably so. That sounds right. Anyway, shall we continue, or pause?
We can pause. We are doing a little better – so far – than I had expected.
Well, good. See you next time.