Friday, February 18, 2022
5:10 a.m. “Your friends would help you, you know.” In the dream, she had done something quite mundane – on the order of changing batteries, though it was not that – that I find sometimes beyond me. I awoke thinking of that line – delivered last and therefore remembered by me – as having rather a wider meaning than changing batteries, or whatever. I suppose it would depend upon my knowing what kind of help to ask for, and how to ask.
Very well, friends, I suppose that refers to you, no less than to friends in 3D form. Would you care to elaborate?
No, we should prefer to continue along the lines we were pursuing yesterday.
Continue, then. Looking back, I see you were talking about choices in life, immediate and longer-term.
In a larger sense, we are meaning to discuss your lives in 3D as combining predestination and free will in the way they manifest as actions rooted both in the personal subjectivity and the shared subjectivity. Only first set your switches to facilitate the conversation.
All right. Proceed.
We might start with the most mundane, and risk being seen as discussing irrelevancies. We might begin at the most exalted, most abstract and theoretical levels, and risk being seen as departing from the practical entirely. Twin perils, you see.
How do you proposed to address them?
Let us be as obviously practical as we can be, and risk seeming to deal with trivia. After all, in a way of looking at it, all life could be seen as unending trivial events inner and outer, manifesting and resolving and leading onward to more trivia. Only, miraculously, at some point one’s vision of one’s own life may clear, revealing that the trivial resolved into patterns, and the patterns reinforced and became meaningful, rather like fractals.
Interesting comparison. Any given fractal may look simple, viewed at a close enough level but then sheer repetition and elaboration lends them an incredible beauty.
It also allows the construction of quite elaborate structures using only a few simple rules that may be left to function on their own. In a way, you could say that human 3D life could be seen to be fractals written into a given moment of space-time and allowed to (encouraged to) manifest their nature. The result is beautiful and useful, only it must be seen in the proper scale if you are to see it to greatest effect.
It will be easier, going on, if you follow up that idea that came to you yesterday; you will find that it solidifies your understandings without requiring you to harden any given set of understandings into a shell that would prevent further growth.
You refer to the thought I had, that I could go through these sessions and when I find a paragraph or even a sentence that describes a given thing, I could pull it out, save it as a definition, and thus pretty painlessly and automatically assemble a glossary of terms that would in sum sketch out the world as you see it.
Doing it that way would free you from the feeling that you were setting sparks into concrete, a job both impossible and undesirable. It might be seen, rather, as assembling an album of photographs of fireworks.
Is this the thing my dream said my friends could help with?
It could be; it isn’t necessarily. And you already require and receive assistance on quite mundane things, taken for granted by those leading a less abstracted life. There is no need to worry nor to feel impelled, merely because of a dream.
“Them old dreams is only in your head,” Bob Dylan had a psychiatrist say.
We smile. At any rate, let us examine your lives a little more carefully than heretofore – that is, at an ever more intimate scale.
Reverting to the idea: If I were doing it with today’s so far, would I wind up with an entry for fractals? That doesn’t seem right. But how else could it be?
The entry might be, “Analogies: Life as fractals, 2022-02-18.”
Oh, I see. Yes, that might work. And if you were to add to the analogy another day, I could just add more date citations. It would build pretty easily, maybe.
As we said. And other entries might be structured in a way to hold similar topics together, you see: “Analogies: Life as fireworks,” etc.
It would benefit from a scheme of categories thought out in advance.
It would also benefit by evolving naturally. In practice, it would proceed organically, probably requiring and repaying periodical revision as your understanding refined itself.
Now, bear in mind, this could be done by anyone, each according to his or her individual understanding. There would be no “holy canon” aspect of it. It would be closer to a do-it-yourself cosmology, made more practical by computers and electronic inter-communication.
If we had Paul Brunton’s works on computer, we could do the same thing, I see. It hasn’t been technologically possible before now. The internet has given us not only an extended research tool but a collaborative tool unprecedented in our experience.
A continuing collaborative (and also solitary) research and assimilation and construction tool. It makes possible what has not till now been possible in the same way it makes possible, on a routine basis, meetings of people around the world, at trivial cost.
We seem to be having a hard time getting to the point, this morning. My fault, I suppose, but the idea intrigues me.
Our part was mostly in reminding you of a thought that was likely to be forgotten or at least left on the back burner. It is a good idea; consider it strongly. Like re-reading your journals, it can be done in small increments, filling time that otherwise might drag, without direction.
Now, let us take this as example, for it is trivial in itself and yet is also part of a larger pattern.
Yes, I see that. We could look at the process as continuing from my talking to you all for 25 years or however long it has been, but also from my journaling as a habit, which goes back to Sept. 6, 1966, and for that matter, probably to my day-dreaming isolated childhood.
At no point in your life (including now; including moments to come) could you look and say, “Aha! That is the meaning of my life.” Not even to yourself, let alone to others. Yet equally, at any given moment, including this one and future ones, you could feel your life; you could sort of inarticulately and indefinably know the only right way for you to proceed. That doesn’t mean you always did, or do, or will proceed in the way that is best indicated by your pattern (even rebellion and lostness may be part of a pattern, after all); but it does mean that a part of you always knows, and may be contacted if you choose. You are never orphans; you are never stuck in the wrong play, with forgotten lines or lines for the wrong role. If you feel that way, it is, by definition, part of the pattern you are laying down (or are following; we realize that the two seem like very different understandings).
And as a part of this continuing soap-opera you are in at the moment, you intend to tie our individual lives in with the larger life – as you have been threatening to do, repeatedly! Said with a smile, but also seriously.
Things go where they go, and no matter where, no loss. Intent is all.
I’ll take your word for it, though I admit, I take it for granted, too. So, today’s theme?
“Analogies: Life as fractals”?
Maybe so. Our thanks as always.