Sunday, October 30, 2022
5:45 a.m. Well, guys, shall we return to ancient Egypt and its take on immortality?
We could. Or we could address the subject more directly. Or we could instead address other aspects of the same topic, namely the ancient forgotten civilization. Or we could address your present peril.
The chances that we are in the process of dying and perhaps even becoming a forgotten civilization ourselves.
Yes. And no matter which entry point we choose, our preference as usual will be that we address something that you, here, now, can do something with, if only mentally. There is no point in wasting time – whatever you look at – by leaving your own life unexamined.
I think you just said, study whatever we want, but relate it to ourselves.
Given that all things connect, whyever not?
Not always so easy to see the difference between idle occupation – reading for fun, or doing anything we like – and working on ourselves.
“Working on yourselves” sounds so grim and determined and humorless. Why should you not think of it as play, as recreation – that is, re-creation? Why shouldn’t you do anything you want, but do it consciously? If you have a paintbrush or chisel or potter’s tool or tennis racket or shovel in hand, or if you are sitting in silent satisfaction, or are addressing a knotty problem, or are doing anything at all – why should you not be aware of yourself doing whatever you are doing, and be in quiet joy?
That’s the kind of admonition that sounds not only advisable but even obvious. Not so easy to do, though. That’s one of the first things Gurdjieff told his students, if I remember rightly, that we mostly are not present but mostly insist that we are.
What is “life more abundantly” but life lived consciously? And Jesus, like any awakened soul, taught his friends and disciples how to live more consciously. In practice, his teachings amount to instructions on how to avoid common obstacles and how to maximize one’s chances of doing so. If you look at religious teachings outside of the framework of right and wrong, and instead look at them as instruction manuals to get to a goal perhaps not suspected at the beginning of the journey, perhaps you will find that they make more sense. Did we not spend time discussing the sins and virtues? Did we do so in terms of salvation and damnation? Did we promise heaven or hell? No. We said, Here is the reason behind the dogma.
But, you know, no one can live forever on his toes, forever keyed up, forever living on cigarettes and nerve endings. Relaxation of tension is as necessary to long-term endeavor as exhalation is to breathing. So, it would be undesirable – even if it were possible – to live a life of continuous struggle. Live a little! Play. Only, do so in a certain way and you will make progress. Do so in a different way, and it will be one step forward, two steps back. Try to avoid doing so at all, and it will be worse than that; you’ll forget what you were doing entirely, and it may be quite a while before you wake up again.
Where are we going, here?
Focus.
Ironic. Okay. Presence, receptivity, clarity. I thought I was awake. Was I not?
Consciousness is a rheostat, not an on/off switch.
Of course. Well, then – ?
You may consider every true civilization to be a common striving toward some ideal. The ideal may be implicit, and it may well wander over time, and it is likely to contain certain internal contradictions, but at the core of any common enterprise will be a shared ideal. When that ideal is abandoned or discredited or superseded for whatever reason, that civilization has changed and will change, more drastically and probably more quickly. It will be somewhat like an individual who has lost faith in whatever it believed. If it finds a new faith, well and good. If not, well, there are many possibilities.
None of them good.
Not necessarily. Sometimes losing one’s faith is a prerequisite to catching sight of a better ideal. Sometimes, in fact, it is the result of catching sight of a better ideal. Or, let’s say, catching the scent, living for the moment in faith that one’s instincts are not steering you wrongly.
But the process of abandoning one faith and adopting another can be pretty messy, particularly for a society.
There is such a thing as growing into a new faith. That is, one pursues one’s truth, one’s vision of the truth, and a way of seeing crystallizes around what is seen. That is, this is not blind faith. It is one’s best attempt to live what one knows, and what one feels, and what one more-than-suspects. You are doing it right now. You all do. Your grasp of life and the world within you and around you is always a work in progress, a sort of open-ended improvisation. That’s how it should be; the alternative is temporary fossilization.
But what can you know for sure? What can you know that is guaranteed not to be overthrown or at least seen quite differently, once some new fragment of truth has come floating by? And why – other than for purposes of catching your breath – would you want to pretend that you have come to “the” truth, and have come to the most consciousness you will ever achieve?
Now, your own civilization is a long way from the certainties and ideals it began with. You can see clearly that it is inadequate to deal with current realities, let alone with the onrushing future. Rather than looking at this as a tragedy, look at it as a life-cycle’s final stages. Only, let’s look at this more carefully, more slowly:
- No civilization has a beginning nor an ending point. Everything has predecessor and successor stages that are part of it and part “not-yet-it” or part “still-it.”
- Civilizations are less real than individuals. Be wary of thinking an abstraction to be realer than it can be.
- Still, it is not nothing. It is a pattern, or filter, affecting every individual subjectivity within it.
- Every ending is a beginning, and vice versa. Try not to be seduced by the idea that “progress” means improvement. It means change, and change implies loss, no less than gain.
- The coat that used to fit the boy won’t fit the man. Should it not be discarded? That doesn’t mean it was a failure; it means, its time of usefulness has passed.
- All of which is to say, what it is to be human is changing, again, and nothing that used to be seen as true, nothing that could be taken as a given, nothing that one may have identified oneself with, can be taken for granted.
- This is uncomfortable. Many will be reacting from fear, and thus it is a “dangerous” time. (For those who think life is chance, particularly so.) Thus the relative insanity you see playing out around you.
- On the other hand – and here is the nub of it – those who are able to live in calm faith will find themselves floated above the chaos. They will still be among chaos, but they will not be drawn into it like the victims of quicksand.
- But – avoiding quicksand is not the point of increasing your consciousness, of living life more abundantly. It is merely an accidental side-effect, so to speak. The apostles were mostly murdered, you will remember. Greater life is not – and is not meant to be, and is not pretended to be – an invisible shield against the slings and arrows. It is oriented in a way quite unconnected to the 3D world’s vision.
That last point. I get it, but you didn’t quite say it, I think. You mean, we’re set on something that isn’t anything the 3D world can see. What it can see of it looks, to it, like fantasy or delusion or mass hysteria or something.
Yes, and that is worth pursuing next time, your hour being up.
So what shall we call today’s theme?
“New wine, new wineskins,” perhaps.
I wouldn’t have thought of that, but yes, I guess so. Very well, our thanks for this, as always.