You have stumbled upon a promising technique to accomplish two kinds of thing at the same time.
Joint investigation, you mean.
Think of it as a continuing seminar. It isn’t something you have to invent. People have been doing this for as long as there have been people. But this could be a new wrinkle.
The new wrinkle being an open society, an open investigation, rather than something shrouded in secrecy. I read somewhere that these things have cycles – natural cycles, I gather – and will go maybe 100 years in the open, then for 100 years may have to go underground, then rinse and repeat. True?
Not exactly 100 years, of course, but basically, yes. So think of your era as bringing back into the open things once hidden.
Parenthetically, “open” and “hidden” would be better understood as “closely held” and “widespread.” We aren’t talking about a cycle driven by social pressures such as persecution or even incomprehension. We refer to a natural cycle that, in pursuing its natural existence, often generates persecution or ridicule as a side-effect.
Just as a year has its rhythm of seasons, so does everything, only some cycles are long, some short; some are obvious, some aren’t. The cycle of overt and covert manifests in many things, in many ways. In one subject it may been social, in another economic or political or philosophical (that is, abstract and seemingly divorced from the practical). All life is cyclical, and life’s very complexity should show you that it is many cycles, not one or a few.
So in some eras certain kinds of ideas and perceptions are easy, and in other eras they are hard. Thus certain ideas are widespread and accepted in some times, and eccentric and unpopular in others. Same ideas, but different environments.
Yeats had that suspicion. In his Autobiographies, he speculated that some thoughts can’t be widely accepted in some times. He wondered if there was an intelligent force determining the nature of the zeitgeist.
Your lifetime has watched as the cycle moved into openness. The cycle is far longer than 100 years, obviously (though it has sub-cycles 100 years or less). But let’s move to bullet-points:
- The Renaissance was a culture hinge-point for what would be the West, and hence eventually for the emerging global culture. Asia, the Americas, peripheral Europe (that is, Europe beyond the maritime powers), and Africa would all be drawn into one culture, a process that is culminating in your time and just beyond. The Renaissance moved from a magical world to a mechanical one. It didn’t intend to do it, it didn’t realize it was doing it, it wouldn’t even have approved of doing it. But it did it, thinking it was merely moving from ignorance to knowledge, from superstition to wisdom.
- What are misperceived as religious wars could be better understood as political wars waged around banners of religion, and better yet understood as wars between viewpoints, the corporate v. the individual; that is, the universal body of authority v. the individual conscience, the individual response to the voice of God, so to speak.
- But (oddly enough still unsuspected), there was a natural compensating movement. The very mindset that rejected the universal pretensions of the church began setting up an alternative church with universal pretensions, that exalted “science” as an alternative to “medieval superstition.” This tended to be in Protestant states where the universal pretensions of the church lo longer had political or economic or social power to oppose them. The belief system told them that they were believers in individual conscience, etc. This masked or muffled the reality that they had not eliminated their belief in a universal authority but had displaced it.
- You saw in The Sleepwalkers, Arthur Koestler’s history of how medieval man began transitioning into “modern” man, how someone could be both scientist and astrologer (Kepler, Newton, etc.) and then gradually it became impossible to be both. A new cultural matrix emerged, and hardened, and what had been possible for a short time (during the changing of social paradigms) ceased to be possible.
- Your own era, beginning in the dark nineteenth century, has begun to emerge from this strait-jacket, so that you have lived your whole lives – certainly since 1916 or so, after a couple of years of war had begun to destroy the pillars of what had been – in a jumble of what was, and what would be, and what looked like it would be, but never would. This is creation and destruction; both, necessarily.
- A symptom of the change is that your civilization no longer knows what is superstition and what is knowledge. You don’t know what is real. There is nothing wrong with this, but of course it is uncomfortable. Those who say, “Everything is falling apart” are quite eight. Those who say, “We’re finally getting back on track” are also quite right.
- So see your own condition in this context. Your explorations are not random or in any way accidental. You are being guided, and sometimes you are aware of it. Trust that guidance. Test it, but trust it. This is how you explore with confidence.
Now, it may seem like we have gone on a long journey without much reference to what we propose to talk about, but context is important.
Because you are in the beginning phase of the establishment of a new worldview, you have opportunities that did not exist even a hundred years earlier. What were esoteric societies in the 1920s would be seen in your day as much closer to the mainstream. What can be accomplished in your day by a few people working closely together is far greater than could have been accomplished then, because so much of the inertia acting as drag has been attenuated.
Gentlemen, yesterday you said specific next time. Ready?
What we meant by that is that we, having set out the background out of which you all are working, now feel ready to talk about the process as it emanates from these conditions. If we were trying to describe “What is possible for you to accomplish” to someone in the Middle Ages, say, or ancient Rome, or Czarist Russia, or Meiji Japan, what we would have to say would be somewhat different, because to some extent you are your times and your place, and time and place make a difference. It is a great omission, to neglect one’s environment in weighing one’s possibilities. You know this as a matter of common sense in your everyday lives: It applies no less in the larger sense of where and when your non-3D self chose to plop you into 3D existence.
So we are between stable civilizations, which leaves us like – oh, particles suspended between opposing fields that to some degree cancel each other out, leaving us freedom of action within greater limits.
The peculiar qualities of your time are rooted in many decades of preparation, and of course they will be in effect for decades to come. But at any given moment within this larger cycle, the interaction of smaller cycles will produce unique combinations of qualities. Be alert to the very specific qualities of this moment. The “now” is always a different opportunity within a larger wave of continuity.
We are attempting, not to describe your time, but the clearest possibilities for people like you in your time. This means, implicitly, that we address ourselves to those open enough, curious enough, hungry enough, practical enough (“grounded enough,” more or less), altruistic enough, to hear what we have to say. We seek the fertile soil of the parable, rather than the stony ground or the thicket of weeds.
If you have been created with a set of qualities that predisposes and enables you to do a certain kind of work – maybe you’d be happiest, doing it!
We don’t intend to set out a list of “have to” instructions. “Have to” is suited to a different type of person. The interlocutor suited to people who respond to set rules would strike you as a drill sergeant. It would be intolerable. But to another type of person, the structure would lend reassurance.
You are saying, in larger terms no less than in personal terms, one size never fits all. What is experienced as tyranny by one may be experienced as firm, reassuring guidance by another. What is a healthy, enabling freedom to one is anarchy or the threat of anarchy to another. Neither is wrong, only the opposite may be true for others at the same time.
Yes, and bear that in mind in your individual lives. Things in your life that chafe may be reassuring if seen from a different attitude – and you always possess the potential to choose a different attitude. That is your freedom, your possibility. That is what freedom to choose is, a freedom to choose your second-tier, and ultimately your third-tier, reaction. Ultimately it is about creating yourself through your pattern of choices, but that freedom is also about your fitting yourself and your life into the situation presented by the interaction of the personal subjectivity and the shared subjectivity. Your present moment is always perfect, if you can adjust yourself to see it.