Friday, September 10, 2021
7:05 a.m. I guess I am ready if you are. Strange to find it hard to wake up, and to be starting so late. Physically a good sign, I suppose.
Let us discuss your emotional situation in abstract terms. You drive the pen, you transcribe the session: Obviously nothing goes on the record unless you put it there.
We can see how it goes, I guess.
Here is how you are situated as we see it. And in describing this, let’s look at it in two ways at once. (Well, alternately, but you see what we mean: in the same breath.) This will accomplish two things: It will show your situation as it may also play out in other people, and it will begin to illustrate the play of strands within the individual, one of the four things we listed as ways to continue to explore life more abundantly.
Coexisting within your consciousness are several things that seem unlikely to coexist, yet associate naturally:
- There is your everyday level of consciousness, whatever rut or routine or comfortable arrangement you have come to. (Choose your description to match your emotional reaction to it. One man’s rut is another man’s comfort, you understand.)
- There is your moment of exaltation, when you remember how much more you are than ordinarily appears. This may or may not have anything to do with your status in the 3D world, more usually not. It is a recognition, a remembering, not a striving for status.
- There is your black depression in which you see your life as an on-going train wreck.
The three states of being do not follow any pattern vis a vis each other. Exaltation need not be followed, nor preceded, by depression. The pattern of repetition varies by individual, and, within individuals, by time of life and even, one might say, by time of day. Still, they are linked.
It is not news that our moods vary.
No, it isn’t. This is how you (all) usually see life, as an alternation of moods. But now look at it as the interaction among strands. Same phenomena; very different understanding of them.
Bear in mind as we go through this, it is, as always, and necessarily, simplification. We are tracing the skeleton here, not sketching the outline or painting the surface.
We’ll keep it in mind.
We have said that life is problems, as the Buddha said that life involves suffering. We have also said that life is the working-out of the problems of coexistence of strands. And we have said that the seemingly external is actually the part of the shared subjectivity that belongs to you.
I don’t know that you have actually said that last.
We have said it in effect, surely. Your individual psyche is never troubled by what it never knows about. We will deliberately use an extreme example, to avoid political overtones: You do not worry about the emotional turmoil being experienced or expressed by hot lava. You do not worry about real-estate prices on Jupiter, or the state of the arts among dolphins, or the rate of illiteracy among flowers. You see what we are doing here? We are making absurd examples to clarify the point. Your life – your mental, emotional, physical life – is bounded. That is what 3D does. That’s what it is supposed to do. It concentrates your attention. To make an equally absurd example, in the temporal dimension, you don’t worry about tribal elections among the Māori of pre-contact times. Nor do you follow the politics of civilizations you have never heard of that are in your past or in your future. You concern yourself with what is within your world; that’s life in 3D. And at the same time, the statement may be reversed without losing meaning: What concerns you is what you experience of your world. The shared subjectivity is as real and as dreamlike and as persistent and as malleable as your personal subjectivity, and couldn’t be anything else because the two are actually part of the same thing.
So, to describe in terms of strands the same reality we just described in terms of moods:
- Your everyday consciousness may be seen as a state of equilibrium among strands. That is, regardless whether you are feeling like you are in a rut (discontented) or are in safe harbor (comfortable), the reality seen in terms of strands is that they are coexisting more or less peacefully and smoothly.
- A state of exaltation is a departure from the equilibrium, resulting from one strand or set of strands (or, to say it more accurately, one quality, that may be found in multiple strands in varying degrees of influence) temporarily seizing the bit in its teeth (seen from the point of view of other contrary qualities that also exist within you) and bringing you to another state of being.
- A state of depression is a departure from equilibrium in the opposite direction. The very memory of a state of exaltation may provoke a reaction. So may a long period of absence of such memory, taken to be “normal” or “realistic.”
This third example feels different somehow.
Merely refocus.
Okay.
Looking at Churchill’s “black dog” or Lincoln’s prolonged melancholy as an item in itself is the usual way to see the state of depression. It is seen as either episodic or chronic, but in either case as if it were something extraneous or, let’s say, autonomous. Certainly it is experienced as having its own will.
I heard a whiff there of the definition of spirit, that goes where it wants to go.
Do you know anyone who ever chooses to be depressed? Just as you cannot enter into a state of exaltation by willpower, so neither can you avoid a state of depression. That’s our point here: not so much that they seem autonomous, but why they do.
Depression is defined as a lowering of function, if I’m not mistaken. That isn’t how it is said technically, but that’s what it amounts to: We can’t function fully; we’re being smothered by pillows, only they never complete the job.
In this third case, seen from the interaction of strands, perhaps you will be able to see that your mind contains the very same elements that experienced exaltation, the same elements that endure or enjoy an everyday average. So why do they sometimes produce depression? Surely you can see that it is a question of who takes the lead.
When we are exalted, certain traits are leading the charge? And when we are depressed, or running on the flat, others?
It is a way of seeing it, yes. You are always the same mixture, each of you, but as we said long ago, the total is so great for you to choose among, that in effect your choice is unlimited.
And why can’t we choose, then? We are here to choose. Why can’t we choose to live permanently in a state of exaltation so that that is our normal, our routine?
Your rut? Who says you don’t?
Experience.
No, that is your reading of your experience. Does everyone you know live at the same level? As each other, as you? Surely not, you know better than that. “But their mixture is different,” and that is true, but it is not the reason people live at different levels. You choose, all right, every moment of every day, even if sometimes your choice is not to summon the energy to choose by intent rather than merely by default.
Isn’t that argument a little circular? Sometimes we’re depressed – that is, sometimes we don’t have enough energy to keep moving – and therefore we choose to continue to be depressed?
Circular in a way, yes. Or you might look at it as a feedback loop. The key here is summoning energy, and that energy comes, in effect, from without. At least, when necessary it can, if remembered.
But if we need to be at a certain level of being in order to be together enough to summon the energy, isn’t that still circular?
We can see that it may look that way. We can take this up next time if you wish. Call this one something like “moods and strands,” or whatever strikes you.
All right. I see it has been our full hour. Thanks for this, and till next time.