Tuesday, April 26, 2022
4:35 a.m. I had to look back to remember it, but yesterday I noted that I would like more about what I called the ecology of the present moment. You know what I meant, though I don’t see how anyone else could have, as that is sort of a twisted use of the word, or let’s say, a creative distortion. Can we proceed in that direction? I set my switches.
By all means we can proceed there. It is a logical expansion of the themes already laid down.
The flora and fauna of this ecology?
- Thought-elements. (Memories, dreams, reflections, to borrow Jung’s phrase)
- The ambient emotions of the moment
- Sensory associations, mostly beneath the threshold of consciousness.
Let’s begin with these. If we succeed in tying together even so much, we will have accomplished something.
But these elements are Moby-Dick without the whale.
To be sure. Your own awareness is the whale, the center of your perception; in a sense, the center of your own universe, as we keep saying.
I get that we need an image. The person floating in space doesn’t quite do it.
Suppose you think of sensitive instrument, suspended in a “soup” of many ingredients. You may think of the soup as atmosphere, or as a sea, or as a field of interacting waves of energy.
Doesn’t quite work, but that’s in the right direction, I think.
Well, let’s analyze what the image would need to convey, and perhaps the analytical effort will clarify matters.
In a way, you could say it needs to stress focus, receptivity, clarity, and presence.
Big surprise, no? What you do to clarify communication with us is exactly what you do to live in the 3D-plus-non-3D world you are born into. You can’t concentrate on everything; most of your psychic ecology will be beyond your level of awareness, or beyond your level of attention, or beyond your range of interests. But regardless what you concentrate on, or are even particularly aware of, it all goes on around you (goes on through you, we should probably say), all the time.
I guess it’s only common sense, after all. What we pay attention to increases in our awareness, and conversely we can only pay attention to what we can be aware of.
And “what you can be aware of” will change, partly according to your 3D intent and partly according to conditions set out by living in the shared subjectivity.
Feels like I fumbled the end of that sentence.
No matter. Close enough. The point is that you all live among a web of relationships of all kinds, all seeming to center on you, and of course all also (not instead) centering on no one. The world you live in – that we live in –
Sorry, lost it.
Don’t blame the cat. It was your directed response to her action that diverted you. Not that this does any harm, because the link between us is always the energetic connection, not the words that flow, but it does serve for a brief aside, which is, what happens around you needn’t be taken into the circle of your awareness. The world could fall apart around you and not affect you, provided that you maintained your own focus.
That raises two associations: the grandfather in “Witness” telling his grandson that “what we first take into our hand, we then take into our heart,” and Thoreau writing that he wouldn’t run around the corner to watch the world blow up (though it has always seemed to me, he wouldn’t need to!).
But you see, this aside is not an interruption, but an illustration. Your world is partly set up by the interaction of the shared subjectivity with your personal world (that is, by “things happening around you”) and partly by your directed response to whatever happens. You are not a victim, are not blowing in the wind, are not helpless. Just the opposite, you are more like a sailing ship on the high seas, using the winds and tides and currents to make your way along your course, regardless what course those conditions would make easier or harder to steer.
You have said from the beginning that we are here to choose.
In a way, everything we have said since is merely elucidation. Your choices shape you as individuals; they shape the world by how they affect its unfinished business, and also by how they modify one of the players of the game, with all that player’s extensions.
“Extensions” meaning, I take it, past lives, and anyone touching us.
And anyone touching those who touch you, and anyone touching those touching those touching you – rippling out indefinitely. And the same for everyone else, obviously. So it is millions of ripples of change, radiating and interacting and arousing new ripples.
The “unfinished business” you mentioned.
Yes, and remember, we said that “unfinished business” means factors actively in play; it doesn’t mean, intermediate steps toward having everything at rest.
So, then, to resume your earlier thought –?
Don’t obsess over an uncompleted sentence. Sustained intent will get us there regardless of speed bumps or detours.
All right.
We listed three kinds of elements perpetually affecting your life in 3D: thought, emotion, and sensory data. This is, above all, intended to loosen the unconscious assumption that your mental life (let alone your psychic life in general!) is only, or even primarily, composed of thought. You are minds encased in animal bodies for a good reason! Your bodies are your receiving instruments: They continually report on elements of your environment that thought has little part in.
I guess the key is to remember that this is all mind-stuff, and that therefore physical can’t be any less real, any less important, than non-physical.
Yes, unless you suppose that you wound up in bodies accidentally.
Very funny.
Yes, but remember how dry-as-dust intellectuals can go wrong, conceiving of life as logic and thought, and in practice overlooking – ignoring – the fact that life takes place in 3D. It is the same error as is made by those who would wish the world away, saying that 3D things are mere distractions from important “spiritual” things. Same error, inverted.
I was petting the cat yesterday, she stretched out, luxuriating, and I thought how strange life is, that she in her body and I in my body were co-existing, and touching only at one small point (call it affection, or interest, or whatever) and were mostly living in different worlds, incommunicable to each other.
Only a slight exaggeration of the 3D condition even among members of the same species.
We send smoke signals and that’s about the best we can do.
And nothing wrong with it. Don’t let yourself fall into the common error of thinking yourself wiser than the universe.
Did we accomplish what you wanted to accomplish?
We made a start. From time to time today, dredge for an acceptable image that will symbolize our joint thought about the ecology of the moment.
Okay. Our thanks as always. Is this “Exploring a web of relationship (4)”? Or should we call it something else?
Perhaps “The ecology of the moment (1).”
Sounds good. Okay, and thanks.