Tuesday, November 16, 2021
Gentlemen, you said yesterday that no religion is the final word, and I got that this is partly because nobody ever gets it entirely right and partly because things don’t stand still, so that what is new ground one day is old-fashioned another day.
It isn’t so much about “old fashioned” – clinging to the past, yearning toward the future, it’s a matter of taste – but of keeping up with new understandings. Once you realize that old ways of understanding things were not exactly correct – or have become incorrect as things changed – you see that there can be no final revelation. The world moves on; so must your understandings, or there comes into being a gap, and a widening gap.
Specifically, suppose a people believe that the material world is what it appears to be. Perhaps they think that life is a matter only of birth, living in the world, then death and it’s over. A religious insight that comes into being and tells them that life extends beyond death will be a real advance. It offers people a way to transcend past limitations. Surely a good thing? But of course that new insight will still incorporate past misunderstandings.
Yes, I see that. You don’t go in one bound from a bunch of errors to suddenly everything right and in right proportions, no matter how inspired the prophet. We are as grounded by our errors as by our truths, and we can only move so many things at a time without becoming totally disoriented, ungrounded.
That’s right. So after the insight that life continues beyond the grave, a new civilization establishes itself, based on this new way of seeing things. (We ignore the frictions, the wars, the self-contradictions, that accompany such major changes. Yes, they occur. They could hardly not occur. But we merely note that fact, because we are concentrating on something else.)
Then maybe this civilization discovers, after a while, that time is not what it thought it was; that material is not what it thought it was. Maybe it learns that what had seemed obvious cause and effect cannot have been so, because the laws governing the world are other than what had been thought. Sooner or later this is going to change the society’s beliefs and its knowns and its values. It cannot help but do so, regardless whether those changes seem to emanate from science or religion or philosophy or whatever.
And then they discover that the human mind is more, and more mysterious, than had been thought. The unconscious mind is discovered and explored, deepening the mystery. Extrasensory perception, action at a distance, inter-influencing of minds, all previously presumed to be impossible, now are documented. A society’s understanding of things – its practical theology – has to be updated.
And with these successive updatings of ideas as to what the world is, what humans are, comes the need to update what the gods are. It won’t do, to say “It was all superstition and error, we don’t need that anymore; we’re grown-up now.” That may sound sophisticated and progressive, but in fact it relegates a society’s theology to the unconscious mind. It is done behind your own back, so to speak.
So now we come along, explaining the ways in which “All is one” describes reality, and you can see that you are going to have to ask yourselves, “What does this imply about reality?” Not merely, “How do we adjust our ideas about physical mechanisms and limitations and possibilities,” but, “What is a more accurate description of our relation to divine forces?” This is a real question, a vital question, and as we said, if you shirk it, it will be answered in the worst possible way, haphazardly, unconsciously, by default. You can see that it is not a simple question. How could it be?
- Who are “we” in 3D and non-3D?
- What larger forces determine the laws that govern reality?
- How far do we extend? How far are we subject to forces beyond our reach?
- How stable is our understanding at any given time? Since our understandings change what they understand, where is our place to stand?
- How many things in past civilizations have been discarded as superstition that now ought to be reevaluated? How many accepted truths need to be reevaluated, too?
But if our grasp of truth is always incomplete, and truth itself changes, we are always playing catch-up. Tell us, how is it that truth can change? If it is true today, must it not have been true yesterday, and will it not be true tomorrow? Not – do we recognize it as true, but – truth, in and of itself.
Is it true that the population of the United States is fewer than ten million people of European descent, almost entirely clustered on the Atlantic seaboard? It was true once. Is it true today?
That seems to be a different order of truth. That is fact, but it isn’t – oh, I don’t know how to say it: It isn’t laws, it isn’t generalities of nature. Gravity today is what it was then, for instance. That is the kind of truth that doesn’t change. Aren’t we talking about different things, using the same words?
What if gravity does change? What if what you think of as the immutable laws of reality are in fact variable, regardless of your knowing?
Even so, the truth of it wouldn’t change just because we didn’t get it right.
But that is where you are mistaken. The very rules of nature may change. The facts of life in the 3D world may change. Where is it written that, no matter how the mind (of which the human mind is part) may change, the world that is made of mind-stuff will not change? Where is it written that rules, relationships, essences, are immutable in the face of continual growth, which means change? Thus, as soon as you comprehend the world (assuming it could be comprehended in full, and with accuracy), the very comprehending would change it, for now a new fact (your comprehension) would be in play.
It is something of a feedback mechanism, I guess. It may start quite simply, but each access of understanding becomes a new factor changing the situation. As the lab rats learn, the maze gets more complicated. As the researchers learn, their own contribution to the situation helps raise it beyond their previous limits.
Yet, to extend your analogy, as the maze itself gains experience, it (not just the lab rats and the researchers) gains in complexity. It is difficult to pursue this particular analogy without severe distortion, though, so we should pick another. The 3D world is not a laboratory experiment, nor is the 3D individual a lab rat. Think instead of a self-learning artificial intelligence. It complexifies; what it perceives complexifies accordingly. Ever more sophisticated understandings call forth ever more complex interactions because now they need to accommodate the new understandings. You see? The new understandings are, themselves, new factors in “what is.”
Now, send this out so that those who are interested may chew upon it, and we will resume another time.
All right. Well, our thanks as always.