Yesterday, thinking about “the gods love those who willingly do their bidding,” I wrote, “Let’s hope the gods don’t go to war.” In response, I got, “Oh, but they do! Why do you think humans go to war?” and was told this could be the theme of our next session.
Pray expand upon your statement.
We have arrived at the junction of
- 3D lives,
- vast impersonal forces,
- vast personal forces,
- the “exterior” world as something in and of itself, and
- much more that follows from this understanding of one more way in which the 3D and non-3D worlds tie together.
The 3D and non-3D, considered separately, will make sense to a degree in that context. But, not really.
- 3D life existing in and of itself to a degree, makes sense. Seen absolutely, it must always seem tragic, pointless, confusing, tedious.
- Non-3D, looked at as absolutely (rather than relatively) separate, also must appear pointless, chaotic, or else disconnected from real life, fairy-tale-like.
A good instance is the gods at war. The Greeks and Romans saw the non-3D as the origin of human conflict, and the 3D as the level where conflicts are played out, or where human conflict engages the gods to take sides. Read The Iliad and The Odyssey for a peek into that worldview.
In medieval times, God and the Devil are seen as battling for human souls, more than as playing politics and warfare. However, “more than” is not “rather than.”
By the 19th century, the sense of divine interest in human external affairs was fragmented. Some believed in divine providence, in “fighting for the lord,” and some did not.
World War I began in Victorian-Era piety and ended in despair and cynicism and moral exhaustion. Only the threat posed by Hitler brought forth a last gasp of real psychological reliance upon God’s help, in the West. But in the postwar era even this emotionally based sense of dependence did not last.
It isn’t that non-3D intervention wavers or disappears and reappears throughout history; it is that it is seen, experienced, and interpreted differently. Caesar was considered beloved of the gods. Joan of Arc was an unlettered farm girl whose career was initiated and punctuated either by miracles or by very improbable meaningless coincidences. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain fought four years in the American Civil War and saw God’s intervention repeatedly and in detail.
One difficulty is that 3D events must be seen in two ways:
- in and of and for themselves, and
- as part of the larger whole.
Seen the first way, it shades off into irrelevance and meaninglessness. Seen the other, it shades off into superstition and a different form of irrelevance. However, pathological manifestations do not discredit; they merely show what happens when a given tendency is carried too far.
I appreciate your effort to bring many things into one consideration, but can we approach more closely?
We are swimming against the tide of your times, you know, so it takes a bit of explaining. We’ll say a few things that maybe will themselves need explaining.
- “The gods at war” is one way to see vast forces contending. There is not a right and wrong about up and down, or inside and out, but they lead in contrary directions, and each has its inherent right to expression.
- Any 3D manifestation is going to be incomplete, inadequately balanced.
- Imbalance over time in a social environment will call forth its nemesis.
- Hence, adjustment via war, or via ebbs and flows of social movements, religions, worldviews, etc. There is no reason to expect reaction to be reasonable.
- Washington’s life, Lincoln’s, Lee’s, Marshall’s, all show lives whose strictly personal aspect fitted in with a social necessity.
- Authors, inventors, reformers, entertainers, “all walks of life,” live lives that have direct reference to the individual’s larger being and also have their societal effect. Harriett Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain.
The gods are to be found on all sides, not just one. In your day you are likely to think of it as a battle of ideals. We would see that as merely a watered-down version of the battle of gods. The older civilizations personified traits and forces; yours depersonalizes them. Neither view is absolute; it is more a matter of taste. But either way, 3D and non-3D are not and cannot be independent, one from the other. You could as well separate the fates of heads and tails, fore and aft. Distinction between them there is; disconnection there is not and cannot be.
Is lightning mere electricity, or a bolt of Thor? An omen of this or that? An effect of physical and/or mental and/or force of character? Edgar Cayce’s sources said that force expresses either in human affairs (war, say) or as natural phenomena (earthquakes, say, or volcanoes). The Romans followed omens; so did the ancient Chinese, and the American Indians, and Shakespeare’s characters, etc. Were they all stupid? Ignorant? Merely superstitious? Magicians and priests alike seek to bend non-human power to further human ends. A mistake, all of it?
- Non-3D forces manifesting in 3D are not perceived as they are, because 3D provides inadequate perceptual grounds. They are perceived in relation to existing categories. So don’t be so sure what is possible and what is not.
- Remember, you are the divine, only you are not all that the divine is. How you interpret what you experience depends upon what you are beforehand. More, what you experience, itself, depends upon what you are beforehand. You are the divine, but you are only a subset of the divine. It cannot be any other way, in the nature of things.
Given that we extend beyond the 3D, we perceive with non-3D eyes as well.
You do when your filters allow it, yes.
- “The gods at war” is the same thing as “natural forces interacting,” but each view has been strained through a different filter.
- “Animate” v. “inanimate” is a division that seems to be common-sense observation. Your desk is not given to dancing. Yet this is only a filter operating to make sense of the world.
- Filters might be grouped by those which make the world static and predictable and those which make it dynamic and even chaotic. The world is neither one nor the other. It is, as it ever was, beyond definition.
- You must realize that life cannot be determined by logic. Logic analyzes, but it does not provide what is to be analyzed. Your filters do that.
- Your life in 3D must always be a subset of your life. That you do not recognize your larger life does not mean it does not exist. If your filters block it, it does not exist for you, and your logic will thus infallibly exclude it, barring miracles.
- Necessarily then, your 3D life is repeatedly, if not continuously, being shaped and affected by forces beyond your cognition or logic. As you are more than you can perceive, so is your life.
And as for us as individuals, necessarily for a culture or civilization.
Yes, only a culture has a greater mass, a greater inertia, a greater stability (three ways to say the same thing) than the individual. Hence change comes from the individual in 3D; stability comes from the context in 3D. It is a balance.
- 3D life is a construct, remember. It appears to be solid, but its essence is evanescent.
- Can a soap-bubble be said to be independent of internal forces (surface tension) or of external forces (wind, or a solid object)?
- The gods at war, or the gods at peace, exist in their own terms, but their existence necessarily has consequences for the 3D world that experiences their shadows.