Life patterns and the vast impersonal forces

Thursday, April 7, 2022

6 a.m. Should I skip today? I was dreaming things and then remembering what I had dreamed, but it is all gone now, and I’m tired. But usually when I make the effort, I’m glad later that I did.

Guys?

We could talk about Arjuna and the Bhagavad-Gita. But it would be better if you re-read it first. The translation you have is accurate and you needn’t worry about literary style.

Only, I’m spending so much time watching NCIS and reading Maurice Walsh and Joseph Conrad and in general filling my time with things that can be done while the lines are slack rather than taut. If we’d been doing this in my 20s or 30s, it would have been a different story: I would have been able to give it hours at a time, and well I remember doing so. Of course there were the demands of fatherhood after a while, but even so I put in a lot of hours. Then, I had time but very few clues. Now I have clues and time, but not the endless reserves of energy I once had.

The stages of a man’s life that were delineated long ago in India were not prescription, but observation. The householder is not the sage, nor the student. Each phase of life has its proper opportunities and restrictions, and while the stages may differ according to an individual’s life circumstances, still each life will have its stages. The Dalai Lama was never a householder in the sense of wife and children, but perhaps he had to be the householder for his people in general.

It’s the same old story, I guess: No need for regrets, nothing by chance.

Life is infinitely complex, but that is because it is the playing-out in real time of so many conflicting cycles.

You don’t mean conflicting in the sense of working against each other, but in terms of producing complex effects.

Yes.

Gurdjieff had a teaching about us being under 96 sets of laws, I think it was. I was never able to internalize the sense of what he was saying. Maybe it was Ouspensky.

There comes a difficulty in any study of life behind life, of the hidden mechanisms, of the reasons behind the more obvious reasons. And that difficulty is that there can be an intrinsic satisfaction in pursuing the understanding for the sake of solving the puzzle, rather than for the sake of using the understanding to aid one’s own way in the 3D world toward other goals.

Is that a difficulty? Or is it just different people concentrating on different things?

Both, in a way. It is true that any one person’s path may serve to burn off some of the shared karma – that is, work out some of humanity’s unfinished business – but it is equally true that any given individual has possibilities that are more desirable or less desirable in terms of the development of that particular one. It’s always a balance.

Good thing we have many goals to chose among.

Oh yes!! Movement that is disadvantageous in one direction may e turned to account in another.

I think the meaning came clear, but we sure didn’t say it clearly.

Consider explicitly setting your switches.

I guess I forgot, not quite expecting to begin a session when I picked up my pen. Okay, done.

It would be a prime mistake – or perhaps we should say, it is a common one – to think of life as one thing at a time. It never is. Life is always coming at you in multiple plot lines, with multiple sub-plots. What you put your attention to seems more real, usually more important, but it all keeps coming at you. Therein is your freedom.

I get where you’re going with this. Life itself is the same thing, writ large.

And writ small, yes. At any level you care to imagine, 3D life is pouring energy through structures, and those structures respond according to their natures.

The vast impersonal forces you mention: life energy.

That’s one way to see them. Also libido – soul energy. Chi. The life-force. The love that shapes and fuels the stars and planets and minerals and plants and animals and humans and seraphs. This energy is. It expresses. That is its nature, to exist and express and suffuse creation. It is spirit in its aspect of being beyond modification or direction by you or anyone or anything. The spirt blows where it wants to.

But the soul – the shaped structure that may be a mountain or a person or the bacteria in an animal’s gut or anything in 3D (wholly or partially) – is shaped; it responds to that energy; it is the harp that the divine wind plays.

Only humans choose, in the sense of shaping themselves unconsciously and consciously. That is why only humans reshape their environment inner and outer, consciously and/or unconsciously. That’s what you are there to do, to choose. The choosing affects you and it affects those around you, and it affects the very course of events. Your 3D lives are not separable from the world, you see. You think yourselves insignificant, or even pestilential, but this is only your worm’s-eye view. From our viewpoint, you are doing just what you were designed to do.

That is what’s wrong with seeing things as right and wrong, you see: It automatically invalidates certain choices. In effect, it invalidates certain kinds of people. It says, “I know better than nature how things should be.” It says, “I am more moral and more clear-sighted than God.” And all you’re really doing is saying, “My viewpoint prefers this to that, and my viewpoint ought to be universally accepted as the only valid viewpoint.” Stated that way, perhaps you can see how ridiculous it is, but in ten minutes you will be back to doing the same thing. And that very blindness isn’t wrong either, except in a mindset that insists that everything be seen as good or evil.

I have had halfway to the front of my mind an image of one of Napoleon’s soldiers. Why?

Was Napoleon’s career “Good”? Was it “bad”? Ditto for any of his soldiers. It’s all mind-stuff. Why is one play better than another? Why are your values universal? How do you know the distant effects of actions that seem to you good or bad? Indeed, even if there were a way to say, “This is absolutely bad,” how could you trace the ultimate effect on individual souls or on the world-stage of anything, let alone everything? Even the bubonic plague had beneficial effects on European life, finally, and as to what it did for the souls of those struck down by it, can you even pretend to know?

We’ve sort of wound up talking about Arjuna anyway, haven’t we?

We smile. Well done, Arjuna. You finally understand.

Today’s theme?

“Life energy”?

Maybe. Okay, thanks for all this. And as usual, after the fact I’m glad I made the effort, even though I have another hour’s work ahead of me. Then there’s always time for slackening the bow. Till next time.