Tuesday, April 5, 2022
5:10 am. F, R, C, P. Gentlemen, shall we continue on the story of Adam and Eve and the apple, or go to Arjuna’s story, or what?
Let us remember context, here. The larger question is what are you doing here and now, and why? “Why” in two senses: How did it happen, and what does it accomplish? After all, what questions could be more relevant? You find yourselves in the woods, waking up from sleep. [The beginning of Dante’s Inferno.] But Dante’s answers can’t be yours, because you live in a different world, as different kinds of people, and this means that all the old answers have to be re-examined, to see which ones are still relevant and accurate, and which are not obsolete or downright mistaken. At the same time, you aren’t beginning from scratch, nor proceeding without road maps. It’s just that things have changed, and it is not safe to assume that your GPS can be relied upon.
A lot of metaphors there.
Only one central image, really, with everything else dependent from it: The world has changed, therefore so has your personal reality, therefore so has your potential.
It needs spelling-out a bit, or people will misunderstand what you mean.
Sketch what you understand us to be saying, emphasizing how it differs from whatever you imagine that people may assume.
Let’s see if bullet-points will do it.
- “The world has changed” does not refer primarily to political or social or intellectual changes – which are effects – but to the qualities of reality that the times allow in. This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, so to speak.
- Our personal reality has changed, as a result. Even if we were to come into the world comprising exactly what we would have comprised if we had come in 50 years ago, or 100, or 150, what can manifest is determined (shaped) partly by the new conditions we live in.
- Therefore, what we have the potential to become has changed; our options. our range, is different. Probably it is more restricted in some directions, but certainly it is less restricted in other directions.
All this, as opposed to people thinking that social developments are driving, rather than resulting from, the change.
That’s a good summary. So let’s look at how things are changing, and that choices you face. As we have said more than once, anything new will include part of what you already know and believe and experience and manifest, and part of the things from your culture’s past that your present (or let’s call it your immediately past) culture has rejected as superstition or error, and part of the things that have seemed unrealistic hopes and dreams. Only of course it won’t all be sunshine and roses. No new age is, only in prospect. The Age of Aquarius will have its full share of darkness: How could it not? But its darkness, like its light, will have its differences from the Age of Pisces.
Such language will raise resistances among people who can’t see how astrology can have any validity.
Can’t be helped. Did Carl Jung enjoy coming to take Alchemy seriously? Anything that has ever absorbed the attention of serious minds over any considerable length of time contains some central insight that is true and worth absorbing. Only, it may not mean for you what it has meant for others in the past, or will mean for those who follow you in the sequence of years.
Intrinsic to any exploration is a careful study of such maps or travelers’ tales as exist. That is why careful examination of humanity’s scriptures will be important. They are messages in a bottle from those who preceded you.
Only, we can’t study them in the same way our ancestors did.
You do not read the Vedas as a Hindu, nor the Torah as a Jew, nor the New Testament as a Christian. But they all have important things to tell you: It is your job to decode them, to find out what.
I take it you mean “our” job, not specifically “my” job.
Of course, but we agree that it is just as well to put the difference on the record. Indeed, you yourself, Frank, can do vanishingly little of what needs to be done for others, and that is true for all. But each of you can find what you need, and what you can absorb to transform your life (that is, your mind, your set of lived-out choices). It is but a matter of being open and willing. Work on yourself is always real work. Work supposedly for the transformation of society or even of a few or even any one other, may often be more pretense than reality.
So, re-examining scripture will prove very fruitful for some, but not for all. Scientific, artistic, historical, sociological, psychological explanations: There are as many ways into the labyrinth of meaning as there are kinds of people. But the Ariadne’s Thread that will lead you safely out again is to be found within.
With all the pitfalls connected with Psychic’s Disease.
That’s why we recommend that you read mythology, particularly the mythology of other cultures, to which you will not have built up an immunity. The ancient Greeks expressed their understanding of the relationships among various elements of life in their myths. So did the Sumerians, the Egyptians, the American Indians North and South; so did countless civilizations you will never hear the names of. And so – most tellingly – did composites formed of one civilization atop another.
Yes, I get it: Recalibrate and slow down.
Yes, because untrodden ground and a subtle readjustment to be made.
Go ahead.
You think civilizations, cultures, far more unitary than they are in fact. Explain this for us.
We can see that America is made up of strands from all over the world, so we can see it here most easily. It has always been a stretch, one new layer coming in and tinting what it finds. Tainting it, the earlier people would say. So, English, German, Scot, Welsh, then Irish, then waves of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, then Asians – and all this placed atop the pre-existing Indian and African cultures forcibly grafted onto the tree. But the same process takes place throughout Europe, if you look closely, only slower and less violently. And although I am not up on it, I’d imagine that the same process goes on in all cultures, only slower yet. At any given moment, things look settled, but over time it’s like a slow-moving river of mud.
You are now in the process of knitting together all the world’s people into a new comprehensive fabric, remember. The process is only what you are used to, writ large.
Therefore, you are living and are going to continue to live, among a cacophony of cultures. The West (and even much of the non-West for that matter) assumes that the current Western belief in Progress Through Technology in a secular context is the backbone upon which the future will be organized. It isn’t, or let’s say (since nothing is certain in any given timeline until it happens), it isn’t likely to be.
But we are not writing about society. We are writing about you as individuals. So why bring up larger issues?
They’re going to affect us.
They are, and you’re going to affect them. But why more specifically?
I suppose to orient us.
True enough, but is that all? Is it even the most important thing?
I don’t know. You tell us.
Everything we have been doing for 25 years is aimed at clarifying your position in the world. Why?
Well, when you put it that way, I guess I don’t know why. I just assumed it was because that’s what was important to me, but of course that begs the question of why it was important to me.
You are less an explorer than a model for explorers, a case-study, let’s say. You are the master of the private library who shows a young Columbus old maps that show places currently no longer known, mostly thought to be fable rather than fact. Is that a worthwhile role?
It works for me. I wouldn’t mind living in the new worlds to be found, but this way I don’t have to live through storms at sea in the middle of the night, and I don’t have to think about seasickness or scurvy.
You do stand watch, however, and you don’t object to being out of sight of land. Enough metaphor. Call this, perhaps, “What we’re doing,” or even something like “Finding our way.”
I’ll find something. Very well, our thanks as always.