Monday, March 29, 2021
4:50 a.m. Very well, my friends, yesterday we began something. I have ben waiting until we could resume. So – how do we best deal with what you call the unsummoned opportunity, the virus and its effects.
Remember, we posed the question: “Where did it come from, and why, and how – and, what can each of you do in response?” We are not satisfied with responding merely to your original question, which could be said to be: “How should society have dealt with it, and how should individuals deal with it?”
Yet I get that you could, if you wished, tell us your view on inoculations (vaccines) in the situation.
We could and what good would it do? If Facebook has taught you anything, these past months and years, it is the futility of argument to change anyone’s mind.
So true.
So you wish us to engage in it?
Touché. Proceed, then.
What does (or may) change people’s minds is presenting new facts – or, better, already acknowledged facts from another context – and showing their relevance. This is not persuasion, so much as exposition. And what else have we been doing with you, these 35 years?
Seems to me you haven’t been particularly shy about saying, “No, that’s wrong, because you aren’t thinking about X and such.”
Not quite the same thing as saying, “No, that’s wrong because you’re stupid,” or “No, that’s wrong because your values are wrong or you are evil or (fill in your own blanks).” Instead, we say, “Look at it this way, and see if it resonates.”
And I get – “Besides, it wouldn’t matter which answer we gave, because the premises are wrong.”
Precisely. That is why we began by reminding you that the epidemic is not the result of meaningless accidents nor of a divine will nor of some technological inevitability stemming from complication. If any of these explanations were correct, then the question of vaccination or not would be very different; would be susceptible to being answered. But given the actual facts, the real answer is – “It doesn’t matter.” Or, to put it more carefully, “Results follow beliefs.”
I know where you’re going with that. You may find it a hard sell.
Except we are not selling. We are answering your concerns as best we can. We have no investment in being believed; our investment is in setting out the information so that those with ears may hear it.
In the case of the virus, as in the case of everything in your lives, results follow belief. Facts conform themselves to your perception of reality. Only, as usual –
“Which you.”
Which you. You as 3D and non-3D self have a very different view of 3D life than you as 3D self only. You see wider and deeper, your aims are not confined to 3D definitions, your reliance is not upon what the senses can perceive but upon what your total self knows. We know of no one whose non-3D self whines about the unfairness of life, nor frets about uncertainty, nor casts about to separate the players into victims and villains.
Nor, presumably, feels itself inadequate to the present moment.
You have learned a thing of two, these past decades.
I feel very grateful to have come to the position of trust – and, I believe, of knowledge – that you have helped me see.
As we said earlier, you (any of you) will live in trust or in doubt or in fear, not that any of these is an unshakeable condition. And reality will conform itself around you to validate your beliefs, until those beliefs change.
It is giving me a deeper understanding of religious thought over the ages. Not the making of rules to follow, but the sense of “scripture as how-to.”
That’s what they’re there for, as we have mentioned more than once. Any body of scripture is higher perception mingled with cultural artifact, and historical commentary often enough, and logical rules derived in good faith (but often enough wrong or incomplete) by followers who were attracted by the initial insights and experiences.
So “I will lift up my eyes to the lord” reads differently if you think it is a communing with one’s non-3D self rather than looking up like a puppy hoping for a pat on the head or hoping to avoid a kick in the ribs.
I get the sense, though, that this may lose people, that they may not be able to connect it to the problem we are discussing.
Possibly. So, state the position more flatly, and we will correct if need be.
If we live in faith we will fear nothing and will have no need to fear. Like the 23rd psalm, in fact. In such case, how can a virus or an earthquake or a terrorist bullet or a nuclear war harm us? But “How can it harm us” is not the same as saying, “I am bulletproof.” It says, “Whatever happens to me will not be random.” But this faith cannot be assumed at will, like a magic shield. It must have grown around us by our life living it.
No, don’t set rules like that. Remember, miracles do happen. There is no predicting how someone may come to that kind of trust. Some grow into it, some receive it as a gift, apparently (but only in appearance) without cause. There is no telling how it will come, if it does.
I stand corrected. But in any case, neither the person who lives in trust nor the one who lives in fear nor the one who lives in doubt will receive anything, be it virus or death or life in health, by accident. Always it will conform to their nature.
Let us be sure, though, that no one thinks we are saying, “If you live in trust you will not get the virus,” nor, “If you live in fear you will get the virus.” This is not what it means.
No, and of course I didn’t mean to imply that, but I can see how people might have jumped to that conclusion if you hadn’t filled in the blank. The short version is, “Nobody gets cheated, nobody is the victim of some cosmic injustice, no matter how it appears.”
That’s how it looks from here. Only don’t be surprised that many people are unable to feel this as truth. Everyone’s path is different, and the universe accommodates and uses skepticism no less than it does faith.
So to circle back to where we began, I suppose you’d say both Dirk’s position and mine are viable and it all depends.
Would you expect anything else? A scientific quantified analysis of a situation will lead to certain conclusions, and they will not be wrong. An intuitive examination of one’s own positon will lead to certain conclusions for oneself that may be at great variance from the scientifically derived conclusions, and they will not be wrong either. You have to recognize that you are measuring different things, with different scales, for different reasons. “Quod licit jovi, non licit bovi.”
So what does society do, given that it must legislate for society as a whole, rather than for individuals one at a time?
In general, we’d say, it legislates as little as possible, for just that reason. However, this is not the actual case, is it? Your society (that is, 3D society, not only any one specific country) thinks it must set guidelines, and guidelines easily morph into directions, and into punitive measures against those who do not conform. And this situation, too, is as much a demonstration to you as is the virus itself.
In terms of showing us what we are rather than what we like to think we are, you mean.
Can anyone doubt that an impersonal society built upon the premise of uncontrolled random interaction of forces must rest upon coercion? Well, here is one more demonstration. It took two world wars to discredit war as a normal, reasonable feature of life in an ever-more-tightly-interwoven global society. The accompanying lesson that “society is for the mutual benefit of all its citizens rather than only some” has yet to be absorbed. Look for the equivalent of world wars, until it is. Consider this virus one of those new world wars, to be waged not one nation against another, but society seen as a whole against the unforeseen, and the invisible, and the incalculable.
Which doesn’t say what we should do in this particular situation.
Oh, it does, but you aren’t looking at it in the proper context. What it says is, Pay attention!
You care to elaborate on that?
If need be. But enough for the moment.
Well, our thanks as always.