Pain and suffering and purpose

Saturday, May 7, 2022

5:25 a.m. Well, using the term “mind-stuff” got people’s attention, all right. But – is anybody really relating new material to old? I can’t see how people who have been following the material as you have been giving it can have not understood “mind-stuff” to mean “Reality is all one thing; there is no absolute distinction between physical matter and the rest of reality” But if one or two did, then chances are many did, and did not say so.

Yes, we picked up on your distress, of course. Set your switches, set aside any emotional reactions on your part – this doesn’t mean you are failing in what you are doing – and we’ll talk about it.

Very well. Setting for maximum focus, receptivity, clarity, presence.

While you’re at it, set for minimum emotional reactivity. Do not identify with the work, nor with the success or failure (in your eyes) of the work.

Yes, all right.

You are experiencing the condition we work in. It is a natural effect of working in time-slices. A thing comprehended in one moment may be disremembered at another, and – most likely – will be only incompletely associated with something else comprehended at another time. Tuesday is not Friday, and nothing you can do can make it so. You can’t hover over 3D reality, living without living the limitations. You might as well try living in height and breadth but not in length, or living every day of a week but one.

Which is why you tell us to live here, now.

Mostly it is why we tell you that you will only make the material yours by wrestling with it. Working the material enables you to associate things picked up at different times, so that now they are part of a thing forged in this time.

Am I fantasizing, to get that what you just said is also a description of 3D life?

No, you aren’t fantasizing, you’re listening. The analogy is close. A 3D mind consists of all those threads having the same experiences together. What is that but saying that in effect you – here, now – are working the material inherent in all those threads? You won’t be activating everything in every thread at any one time, but over the course of your life you will probably activate a lot of them. Everything you do in your life is a shared experience among your threads, binding them together. That’s how you create a new habit-pattern, or crystal.

Ah, and the more reflective we are, the better we associate the threads.

Yes, although conscious reflection is not the only way, nor even the strongest way, necessarily. Prolonged suffering can do it. Any intensity of experience deepens the internal bonds. “Bonds” not in the sense of constriction, of course, but meaning ties, as in “bonds of affection.”

It puts yet another light on what you’ve been telling us.

Listen, if we say we want you to have life more abundantly, and we advise you what helps the process and what doesn’t and what impairs it, that is a key that can be used to see the material. It isn’t the only key.

I think you’re meaning, any thread we follow will lead us to see the material as centering on that thread.

Yes. “Thread” here not meaning quite the same thing as when we are discussing your constituent psychic elements.

Understood.

So, work with the material we give you. But work your life’s material, in general. It is the same process, pursued for the same goal of greater internal freedom, hence greater “space” for understanding more, and living more, and becoming more. No two people will be affected in the same way, because no two people have identical vectors. The goal is not to produce an army of ants, but to facilitate the self-production of individual minds that will enhance the quality of the overall being. But the process of facilitation is roughly the same for all.

Emerson said he didn’t seek to call an army of young men to him (“What could I have done with them?”) but to themselves.

Is there any better goal?

Now, you left off yesterday intending to resume on the subject of why pain and suffering is not good or bad, though we mostly see it as bad. I, like you, could imagine people saying, “That’s easy for you to say.” But this morning’s start leads right into it, doesn’t it.

It does. In fact, we already answered it, in passing.

Yes, I thought so.

[“Ah, and the more reflective we are, the better we associate the threads.

[“Yes, although conscious reflection is not the only way, nor even the strongest way, necessarily. Prolonged suffering can do it. Any intensity of experience deepens the internal bonds.”]

What makes all the difference, you see, is what goal you discern when you look at your life. If you imagine that a 3D life is for the purpose of enjoyment, you will measure its “success” or “failure” in terms of enjoyment. If achievement, or love, or amassing of riches or of experience or of knowledge or of wisdom, same thing.

But it is short-sighted to see a 3D life as if that’s all it is.

Of course. Your conscious intent may be one thing, or even several things. That doesn’t mean that is your whole-person goal, if we may put it that way. Every life you connect with along your constituent threads may have its own idea of what’s important. The times you live in – the unfinished business, as we’re calling it – may impose its own imperatives.

Thoreau and Emerson were vigorously anti-slavery, but they didn’t want a civil war about it.

Exactly. Their idea of their ideal life did not include a civil war, but they were part of their times.

And so –

And so, millions upon millions of people died in Nazi and Communist prison camps. That’ a lot of suffering, often over many years. Do you suppose it was all wasted? Certainly it blighted the lives of the prisoners. Was it wasted? Was it a sign that the universe, or God, was (is) heatless? Insensitive? Unaware? How could an over-arching, connecting, consciousness be unaware? But it could easily see things differently. Or do you think God also ate of the fruit of the Tree of Seeing Things as Good and Evil?

JFK famously said, “Life is unfair,” stating it (in typical Gemini style) as merely a fact of life to be considered, not as something to get outraged over. Some people took that as a sign that he was callous. After all, he was born rich and lived his life rich. They may not consider that he was born sickly and lived his life as a continuing series of life-threatening illnesses, spending, his brother estimated, half his days on Earth in acute physical pain. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to him to blame God or nature; he just accepted the situation as what is.

And suffering had one side-effect for him that it often does: It deepened him.

Yes. Somebody said, I can’t tell if pain makes us better, but I can tell that it makes us deeper. I’m slightly mangling the quotation, but that’s the sense of it.

Suppose for the moment that the over-arching intent of whatever put you together by associating various strands in one time-place is that you attain intensity of consciousness. For some, that will involve a path of physical suffering. The suffering won’t have a side-effect of producing enhanced concentration, say; it will be not side-effect but prime effect. It is useful, you see, just as we have always said.

But there are other paths to enhanced consciousness.

Of course there are. For every person, there is, potentially, a different path. Our point is merely that “Life is unfair” is true only when seen only within the realm of what is obvious to 3D senses and feelings and conclusions. Take that same experience and put it through another filter, and you may get meaning.

I am hearing something you intend to say that may come out sounding harsh.

Nonetheless, it needs to be said, for some may take it to heart, and it will help them. It could even be the biggest “Aha!” of their lives.

Well, go ahead.

We ask you (anyone reading this): Are you in love with your suffering? Are you wedded to the idea of yourself as victim? Are you using “Life is unfair” to persuade yourself that you are more moral than God, more clear-sighted than nature?

You’re going to make a lot of friends with that.

We aren’t in the business of making friends; we’re in the business of helping people to have life more abundantly. And this, not merely for their individual sakes, but as part of something vastly bigger.

Today’s theme?

“Pain and suffering,” perhaps.

We’ll see. Our thanks as always.