Thursday, March 24, 2022
12:35 a.m. Since I can’t sleep at the moment, let’s try for more. Setting switches for maximum focus, receptivity, clarity, presence. Guys, can we continue your exposition on the factors leading to the existence in 3D of such things as deliberate cruelty?
It may be that you cannot sleep at the moment, but that doesn’t mean you have enough energy to do this. Let the wells refill for a few more hours. We aren’t going anywhere, and the times are not about to close the doorway on access to the information.
All right. Later, then.
5:35 a.m. So. Now?
Re-read yesterday’s, to smooth the way.
Yes. As so often, I am left with the sense of so much potentially illuminating connection, just outside my awareness.
That is always so; one’s awareness of it varies.
Now, we are inviting you to see the interaction among forces usually considered in isolation from one another. The better you understand the necessary interrelation, the wider your mental horizons will become, and you will truly have new wine and new wineskins. But if you consider old issues only in the contexts in which they have previously been examined, how likely are you to come to more sophisticated understandings?
Thus,
- The individual 3D life, considered as if separate, which it is, in a way, and to a limited degree.
- “The world” considered as if separate, perhaps as if inanimate, usually as a collection of unconnected items.
- Time, considered either as an unvarying factor, a given, like height or length or breadth, or as an element variably experienced according to one’s psychological position at the moment, but in any case a sliding transience.
Look at them separately, you have a jumble, you have three factors that make sense each within its own frame of reference, but not together. See them as firmly and inevitably interconnected, because part of one system, and suddenly life makes sense. And this doesn’t even consider the many interrelations we have drawn within each part of the system.
So,
- Considered either as “missing the mark” – as a mistake on the journey to self-perfection – or as a deliberate offense against rules established by God
- Virtue, both as reminders of the way toward your goal and as outward signs of inner qualities.
- Habits, and intent, as means to an end.
- Above all, continuous choosing, as navigation among possibilities, with or without a compass, with or without a known external goal (a port) or a known internal goal (a quality of being, while one is a sailor).
These are usually considered either separately or within one or another system of thought and values.
Thus,
- Emotion, feeling; one’s response to stimuli known or unknown, a response often experienced as external to oneself.
- Concepts, thought; the things one thinks one is living, usually only partly congruent to reality.
- (Harder to name this one.) One’s variable state of being; one’s altered states, be they high or low, controlled or otherwise, pleasant or unpleasant.
Moods.
Yes, moods. That’s a good way to see them.
Finally (for now):
- “The news” – external reports.
- One’s inner preoccupations, that repeatedly surface internally or eternally or, usually, both, connected but not quite seamless.
- Jolts, mild perturbations, earthquakes, inner and/or outer.
Now put this all together in the new way we have been suggesting, and see how simply they fit. When you get closer to the truth of anything, facts converge.
So now,
- Instead of individuals in a world that is external to them, driven by a moving moment that proceeds without reference to them, continually destroying the past and creating the future, it itself being “the present moment” only for a split-second, if that, you have you as 3D individual living amid “the world” as part of you, you being part of it, the individual subjectivity and the shared subjectivity functioning to play off each other, with time being not the great destroyer but the great separator, the great means of divining differences.
- Instead of a (deadly serious) game of reward and punishment, of continual striving to follow the rules lest you pay the ultimate penalty after you “die,” you have a sense of continual self-creation through choice, made possible (and even necessary) by the time and space 3D provides. Sin, virtue, judgment, are not done away with, exactly, but are seen in different light. The power of intent is seen in its orienting ability as you self-create.
- Instead of thought and emotion and seemingly externally caused moods jangling among one anther, pretty meaninglessly, you have the sense of what happens when your more immediate awareness (3D you) meets the wider awareness (your greater self, containing so much of which you are unaware). And you, remember, are still part of the shared subjectivity. Don’t lose sight of this connection; it holds together many things that will otherwise seem unconnected.
- Finally, instead of external v. internal, periodically affected by “events” physical or mental, you have one system, in which the 3D individual experiences the rest of itself, you might say, or, equally, in which the whole experiences aspects of itself.
Is this not a more coherent portrait of your lives as you live them?
Well, it is to me. Perhaps others will find things to object to, or things they cannot quite accept or make sense of.
So – we can all but hear you cry – what about monsters of cruelty among you?
Well, yes. What about them?
Examining the question of evil as it must manifest is going to be very different if we do it against the backdrop we just painted than if we were to do it in accordance with your society’s accepted (if inchoate) views.
To be sure. But are you ever going to actually do it?
That’s what we are doing. Or would you prefer to tread the same old ground so long trampled by those who see the world as a chaos, or as a battlefield?
I notice that in your summary, you didn’t mention the vast impersonal forces.
This is where we have arrived now. They can only be understood when seen in the proper context. To try to talk about them while thinking of the world as a chaos, or as a battlefield, would be to see them entirely differently. You will notice we didn’t refer to the apple of the tree of Seeing Things as Good and Evil, either. In considering these things, try to remember (as we have reminded you more than once) that, try as you will, you cannot escape the effects of that apple. By an effort of concentration you can overcome that bias toward seeing things in terms of good and evil, but as soon as you relax your vigilance, it comes back in from the wings.
So now, with luck, we will be able to discuss cruelty (among other attributes) in light of the vast impersonal forces as they manifest in the 3D world. But it is important that you try to keep in mind the world we’re painting, as opposed to the one painted for you, all your lives, by your society and by your 3D sensory evidence. Once you really change your viewpoint, your vantage point, suddenly all the world, inner and outer, transforms.
Very well. A lot of summation today. Looking forward to next time. Our thanks as always.