Sunday, March 20, 2022
5 a.m. Setting switches. F, R, C, P. “Actions and consequences (2)”?
We don’t need to do it in order. If you prefer to discuss your realizations since yesterday’s conversation, it won’t interfere.
Briefly, anyway. I got that I ought to note down associations as they come to me, and I did snag a few:
- Hamas. Irish. Our different reactions to similar phenomena.
- Cats play with their trapped victims. Cruelty is not an exclusively human trait.
- Cruelty can stem from more than one motivation; hence, observed effects may be more similar than unperceived causes. Specifically,
- Inattention or lack of care (indifference) as opposed to
- Deliberate cruelty as compensation for cruelty suffered. “Getting even” with a specific person or with the world.
Good sparks, all. Continued observation of stray thoughts, recorded, will lead to more. Which ties into your second set of realizations, and then we can proceed from yesterday’s start.
Well, I recognized in a couple of ways the difference between clusters of associations and chains. For instance, I realized that I should have written my novels, and should certainly write my final novel, if I write another, by letting ideas clump, rather than by working them together logically. I knew this abstractly (from Forester’s Long Before Forty if from nothing else), but knowing is one thing, living it is another. And this morning, as I was waking up, I was noticing the process behind the dream. I could sort of feel the dream casting about for where to go and what to use. I never saw behind the scenes like that before. Ordinarily a dream comes as a story, no matter what it comprises or what the emotional point. But this was closer to watching a movie being made, and watching the movie as it resulted. The observation of the dreaming and the realization about the creative process centered on the change in metaphor, and tie in to a third realization, which is that our second-tier consequences of our choices change our center of gravity (so to speak) and therefore change the probabilities within the choices life presents. Our sand-patterns on the drumhead change, because our second-tier consequences have changed something.
Noting these realizations and associations can enrich your daily life. We encourage sustained attention.
I see the value of it. I’ve always done that, sort of haphazardly, and my journal-books are littered with such observations, mostly left untended. That is why I have often felt a certain frustration at the wastefulness of leaving so much material unharvested. But at the same time, I see that it doesn’t matter. So, to work?
As if this hasn’t been productive? Very well, part two. Yesterday we began with the 3D/non-3D being – the personal subjectivity. Now let’s look briefly at the shared subjectivity in which you live and move and have your being. What is the relationship of “the world” to the individual expressing cruelty? That is, choosing to express cruelty. Limiting the scope of the inquiry helps clarity. Cruelty that results from indifference or from carelessness or from ignorance is a different order of cause and effect.
Yes, I see that. And you are exactly on what I wanted us to explore. Why do we live among monsters?
The shared subjectivity pre-exists you and remains in being after you as 3D person are gone. That is, it is not confined in time. Absorb that.
Well, I get that it is an important statement, but I don’t know where to go with it.
You in 3D are confined in time. Any lifetime you could mention is. You are all alive now in your own times, and are alive in only a different way in terms of any other time. Joe Indian is alive in the 1800s and can be contacted, as you saw. But he is not in any way alive in the 1900s or 2000s.
Not even in me?
But he isn’t in you! Are you in him? This is an important point, and one commonly slurred over. You connect. You share a thread. You are both part of one thing. But that is all in the invisible realm, seen from 3D. Within 3D, when you’re dead, you’re dead. When you haven’t yet been born, you don’t yet exist. It’s obvious, but it needs to be thought through, and it rarely is.
I get that you could see us as fragments, each confined to one span of time (and space), bounded by our birth and death dates.
And the shared subjectivity is not bounded in that way, yes. That’s a real difference, and you still haven’t seen why or how. You think of your non-3D component as being essentially tied to your 3D self, but is it bounded by your dates? Alternatively, is it immortal (unbounded) in the same way as the shared subjectivity?
It seems to be a little of each, or let’s say somewhere in between.
Well, you see, that’s why you experience yourselves as half human, half divine. You are anchored in one particular time-space, but you range beyond it to others. However, that doesn’t mean you extend everywhere, everywhen. It means merely that your boundaries are wider than you commonly suppose, and that you always have more territory available for exploration than you have time to explore in.
All right, but have we wandered from the question of why we have monsters of cruelty among us?
We haven’t wandered at all. We have broadened the search patterns. At least, that’s our intent. You won’t come to new conclusions on a very old subject if you confine yourself to previously explored territory. It is in the putting-together of previously separated concepts that new understandings are to be forged.
All right, it seems that what you have added today is the different time-span of any individual life as opposed to the unlimited (maybe?) time-span occupied by the shared subjectivity. Is that any different from reminding us that the world is a lot bigger than any of us?
It is reminding you, in this context, of just that fact. That is why the world sems indifferent to cruelty (even, dependent upon cruelty, sometimes). It is why your lives may seem dwarfed to insignificance. Mostly, it is one facet of why you can’t ever judge life thinking you know enough to judge it. God created the world and found it good; later in Genesis you see people choosing to see the world as good and evil. Once you’ve eaten the apple, you can’t un-see that way of seeing things. You can overcome that way of seeing by force of will, or let’s say force of intellect, force of character, but you can’t change your instinctive response, you can only override it, or overwrite it, or refuse to see it.
But would it be an improvement to be unable to see cruelty as wrong? Would there be an advantage to being a cat playing with a cornered mouse?
What do you think a monster of cruelty is, but a person who doesn’t see cruelty as wrong for him?
As I say: Is that an advantage?
Here we return to the concept of the vast impersonal forces that will be expressed in your lives, as they blow through time and space.
Meaning that cruelty has to be expressed by someone or other?
Well – let’s say, if the force is not expressed as cruelty, it must be expressed as something else.
Cayce said energy builds up and is expressed by humans or by the world. I have assumed that’s why all his predictions of earthquakes and mass destruction were wrong, because those same energies were expressed through World War II.
It’s a long subject, and we’ll get to it if you remain interested.
But I don’t get that you have said what you wanted to say about the shared subjectivity as cause and effect.
No, not yet, but making clearer the distinction between human and trans-human scale was worth doing, and will contribute. More next time.
Our thanks as always.