Wednesday, February 23, 2022
6:15 a.m. I awoke thinking of injustice, specifically the deliberately immoral but carefully legal strategy Google employed in stealing ideas from all over the world.
No you didn’t. you woke up from a long dream you don’t remember. The thoughts about Google came afterward.
Hmm, maybe so; but I have only been up a few minutes, and the dream is gone, as if it had never existed. At any rate, I’m ready if you are, once I set my switches. (And though I remember MRCP, I can’t remember what M stands for. Looking back, I see it is because it isn’t M at all, but F! Some mindfulness! Good thing I found that acronym.) So, to proceed?
Yesterday we said we should look at different kinds of individuals.
Ah yes, and I thought – sometime yesterday – perhaps this will make sense of the concept of group karma.
In general, we are trying to make sense of many concepts, correct in themselves (that is, in their own frame of reference), but becoming skewed when seen from other points of view.
And in general, that is how the new global culture will emerge, is it not? Each fragmentary culture becoming aware of other fragmentary cultures and gradually absorbing elements of each other, transmuting them as they go.
In general, yes. It is an unending process, as you can imagine; endless creativity, endless creation and re-creation.
Toynbee wrote a couple of chapters about contacts among civilizations across space, and contacts across time, as I recall. If I had a better memory, or if I had read more slowly and carefully, what an education I should have had by now, the number of books I have read and thought about!
And of course, a prime satisfaction in life is nourishing regrets, particularly regrets that may not even be well-founded.
Very funny. All right, so different kinds of individuals.
Put all of this in the context of “as above, so below,” if you wish to center on the commonality of it. You are all individuals made up of communities, making part of greater communities.
- A cloud is a part of a weather front, you might say, but is itself a collection of moisture held in suspension in air.
- A rock is a part of a mountain, and is in itself a collection of smaller undifferentiated rock, so that one rock is almost only an abstract distinction among rock.
- An animal is a part of a family or herd or flock or whatever, and is itself a holding-together of tissues and organs and sub-intelligences of another order.
- A human is a part of a 3D family and a part of its own non-3D lineage, and at the same time is a holding-together of sub-intelligences (as in any other animal) and of strands along the non-3D.
- A man-mad creation – a toy, a tool, an artwork, a building, an idea being put into form – is itself a part of that creator’s mental world (this, regardless if it is the child of one creator or of many), and at the same time is part of whatever class of thing it belongs to and contributes to.
- An organization – a police force, a symphony, a fire department, a corporation – partakes in the nature of those who began it, and those who carry it on, and at the same time its energy contributes to the flavor of its society.
- A country may be considered in various ways – politically, or culturally, or racially, or sociologically, or psychologically – and in each of these contexts, it too will be made up of components and will itself b e a component of something larger.
And so on and so forth. The principle is the same. In non-3D, it is as in 3D, only of course as adjusted for our different environment. Smaller items are part of larger ones; they are also made up of things even smaller than they. You understand, “larger” and “smaller” cannot be physical characteristics in a non-3D environment; it is a way of describing relationships, merely.
Now at this point you are asking, “So what?” The so-what is to remind you that everything connects, and that a few simple principles will serve as your Ariadne’s thread to get you out of the labyrinth of multiple fragmentary views of reality.
So now, consider Google as you were just inundating yourself in the story.
(It was a four-part Netflix series called “The Billion Dollar Code,” and I saw the last episode last night.)
Google may serve as example, only remembering that you never have a story from every side. There’s always more to be said for and against anyone.
Yes, I have to work to remember that, sometimes. But mostly I am done with crusades.
You say that in this mood, talking to this interlocutor. Another mood, another companion, and perhaps you will be buckling on your armor again; and of course, you’re there to choose, so who is to say that this is right for you, this is wrong? Only – and this is what we have been building up to, though it is not a startling conclusion – actions have consequences.
Go ahead.
Well, it is very tempting in 3D to see events playing out as “So and so got away with it,” whatever “it” may be. Or, if they don’t get away with it, the temptation is to say, “So and so got punished for it.” In either case, we’d say this is a relatively unthinking view of the situation. Nobody ever gets away with anything; neither (in a way) do they ever get punished for anything. That view of things unconsciously relies on the idea of separation, and of chance.
I see why you say “chance” in this context, but I think it would mislead if not explained. You mean, I think, the idea that anything could happen without its necessary consequence.
Nor also without the necessary precedent condition. Don’t overlook that. In a way, everybody is always the child of its parents; everybody’s children are always the children of their parents. You understand.
There are no orphans in the universe, including organizations, countries, and states.
And people and tribes and families, yes. Everything connects, visibly and invisibly, and the disconnects that are obvious in 3D are not absolute when considered in the wider 3D/non-3D context. So there’s no use thinking you’re going to get away with something, and there’s no use thinking you’re going to avenge victims by killing their oppressors.
That’s taking a pretty philosophical view of things. There is a need to see some sort of justice in the world. We couldn’t just let the Nazis go unpunished, after Dachau, after invading so many countries, after so many things.
But of course in actual fact that is exactly what you did, necessarily. Most Nazis were not punished, only a relatively few scapegoats. Not that the scapegoats didn’t really deserve what they got, but the fact, as opposed to the perception, is that most Nazis necessarily escaped any particular punishment, just as most perpetrators of most injustices go unpunished. It is always that way, and attempting to punish more only ends up adding to the world’s injustices, sooner or later.
If it is true for individuals, the saying, “If you go to take revenge, dig two graves,” – and we would say that it is – then how could this not apply to societies as well? Punishment marks the punisher no less than the punished, for of course they are thereby connected by the same act. And this is where Jung’s concept of enantiodromia * comes in, the conversion of something into its opposite.
There was a quote from Auden that John LeCarre used in The Honorable Schoolboy, about those who have evil done to them doing evil in return.
It is a natural wheel of consequences.
Deepak Chopra’s The Return of Merlin had that as its theme, as I recall: To get off the wheel, we must cease to resist as the situation seems to dictate. Must cease to resist at all. But is it possible?
Perhaps he intended the novel as a teaching tool, rather than as a manual of instruction. It is less important, in a way, what you do, than how you see.
Besides, who is innocent and who is guilty? Are you as an individual complicit in the systematic defrauding of the Indians of their land? Is any generation complicit in the crimes of its predecessors? It can’t be.
Ah, and this is where we move into group karma.
Yes it is. Call today’s, perhaps, “Everything connects.”
Yes, that sounds pretty good. Okay, looking forward to more, and thanks for this.
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* Wikipedia says Jung defines enantiodromia as “the emergence of the unconscious opposite in the course of time.”