Thursday, September 16, 2021
7:10 a.m. “The meaning of any one life,” you said (in opposition to “the meaning of life” that you will address at another time).
Yes, although to discuss either is to implicitly discuss the other as well.
So I assumed.
In all this, remember the touchstone: “As above, so below.” Also, “Man is the measure of all things.” They amount to the same thing, really: The universe is so much vaster than your one mind, you can never absorb it in its detail or anything like its detail. You can grasp the pattern, if anything, but if you succeed at that, you succeed in everything. It is in understanding man in the universe that you understand the universe, as you only understand a ring fully by understanding both the jewel and the setting.
I wrote “understand,” but that isn’t really the right word. It isn’t so much a matter of understanding as of – what?
Perception, perhaps, or really, grokking. It may have to proceed through a period of rational analysis, but it comes to a state of knowing that is beyond analysis.
Somebody said that the world can never be known by learning each of its parts.
True insight. Every organism is a culmination and an essential addition of function; its constituent layers are part of it, but do not explain it, nor could they be used to predict it. Until the change happens, they are merely more of the same. Merely piling on more chlorophyll and oxygen and hydrocarbons does not result in a flower. And when the flower arrives, it is not what any of the molecules that make it up could have predicted, at least not by their own hydrocarbon logic. If they get an intuitive glimpse of impending flower-ness, it comes not from their sensory experience.
Interesting metaphor. It’s funny, it doesn’t seem to quite work, yet it does get the job done.
Perhaps the very oddness helps make the point.
Perhaps. It keeps us from immediately sliding off it and saying, “Seen that before.” And – interestingly – I write “sliding,” am reminded of my slide-switches, and the reminder changes my viewpoint so that I am watching this as well as doing it. It’s getting easier.
Most things do, given righteous persistence.
That’s very gratifying.
You like to quote Emerson. It applies here.
“Lowly faithful, banish fear / right onward drive unharmed. / The port, well worth the cruise, is near / and every wave is charmed.”
But it is not the final two lines we would bring to your attention, but the first two. Driving ahead without fearing has brought you to this place and can bring you farther, if persisted in.
I get that the advice is for one and all. Fear is the enemy of life more abundantly.
Let’s not look at it that way. It is true, in context, but by being seen as a negative is less helpful than might be.
Rephrase away, then.
Let us set the agenda firmly. We are in pursuit of life more abundantly, and within that goal we are looking at the meaning of any one life – that is, specifically your life, the life of Frank and the life of whoever comes to this statement. It may be set out in abstract terms (though we hope to avoid that) but it is meant to be severely practical. However, nothing can be made practical without being attempted. Merely nodding and passing on to other things is not attempting.
Your task and your opportunity are of course firmly enmeshed in your situation. If you were not in 3D, you could not be reading this. If you didn’t know you were ready to break open the shell, you wouldn’t be reading this.
Long pause. Considering how to continue?
Allowing you to experience the sense of distance/no-distance.
Well, it’s very interesting, true.
Attaining and retaining that state is not the least important thing you came to 3D to do.
Why?
A thinning of the veil (as some people call it) for one makes it easier for others. Not so much by example or instruction (which doesn’t often work very well) as by the knowledge that it can be done without one being a superhero, a someone-special – specifically, a “someone in some way essentially different from me.”
Well, that’s what I tried to show my classes at TMI: It’s a natural ability, and the obstacle is mostly the sense that it is something exalted and different.
Only, you have 50 years of experience at knocking at the door and it not being opened. Or – may we say it – pushing on a door that opens outward. So you know that what is easy and natural may nonetheless require a key. It may be a simple key (a visualization of slide-switches, say), but in its absence your “Open sesame” does not do it.
But I hear you saying, not very far between the lines, that it was righteous persistence that is finally bringing me access, more than any specific thing I did or thought or even endured.
Isn’t it so? That is what Jesus said. Do you think he was lying? Or was setting our sugar-coated fairy tales? Or was misguided? Knock and it will be opened. Ask and you will receive. Understand, these were the most sophisticated techniques available for the common people. And – ironically from a certain perspective – it is only the common people who can profit by the words, for the sophisticated brush them aside, not being in the habit of trusting in that way.
It makes sense that a way forward must exist for all if it exists for any.
That is a belief, not a known. In the context of any one specific life, yes, justice would require that everyone have access to salvation, so to speak. But given that you are all irreproducible combinations of elements combining innumerable others past present and future, does it seem likely that all of you would be ready willing and able to move in the same direction toward the same goal at the same time?
I’m interested in your saying, just now, that we combine elements “past present and future.” Past and future I can see, but present?
That’s because you are used to thinking that your present-moment life goes on primarily externally except for your inner life. If that were a conscious thought – as it will be now – you’d see how ridiculous it is.
I do, and it’s true, I didn’t realize I was thinking that way. Particularly ridiculous given that I know we are elements in group minds.
Perhaps you’d better spell it out.
You’re saying, our life in the present moment is as psychically connected to others as it ever is via our strands. Obvious once said, of course.
We smile. Perhaps you’d better nudge your “clarity” slide-switch back to maximum,. Because we doubt that all of your readers will have understood from that brief summary. What is obvious to you at the moment was not so, a few moments ago, and, for all you know, won’t be obvious a few minutes from now if you do not encase it in words.
Let me slow down, then. It may help my legibility, too.
I get that you mean this. I am connected to Joe Smallwood, say, via a strand. That strand extends into my past. His future, but my past. For all I know that same strand extends into my future. Still Joe’s future, but mine too. That, I understand. But now I see that that strand (and others, of course) connects me to others now. That is, others alive in any present moment may share that strand, and so we affect each other even if we never learn of each other’s existence.
Yes, better. People will be able to follow that, and some will be led to redirect their exploring in that direction as well.
I can’t quite see how we wrote so much so easily, but there’s our hour. [50 minutes, actually.] A good place to pause?
You’re thinking we didn’t really get started, but it was a good morning’s work. More next time. Remember, the idea here is not to set out a tidy scheme that will look nice; it is to provide a set of tools. Or, let’s say, it is an instructional video on how to use the tools one already has, know it or now, know what they are for or not.
The sense of viewing from a distance as well as being right here has persisted. I’m hoping to prolong the times it is here.
Only, don’t try. Allow.
Okay. Till next time, and thanks.