Glassblowing was an appropriate analogy for the interplay of compound beings and the vast impersonal forces that are beyond personality or easily discerned individuality.
Hold the visual image this calls forth. It may remind you that life is greater, wider, deeper, more intricate, more mysterious, than it sometimes appears in 3D. It will also remind you that your 3D and non-3D components are – obviously – in the same boat, as are you and all your fellows past, present, and future.
When one goes to thinking about the larger questions – what is the meaning of life, why am I here, where do I go from here, why am I as I am and what can I do to change or continue, that sort of question – there is often a tendency to unconsciously distort the question (and thus the answer) by considering oneself separate, or by considering one’s class of beings as separate. Surely you can see that an inquiry into the meaning of life that assumes, silently, that the center of life is oneself, or is 3D beings as a whole, or is compound beings as a whole, is necessarily going to be seriously skewed by that assumption. The proportions are wrong; it is out of drawing.
But of course the tendency is natural. To proceed to describe all heaven and earth as if one knew, is to disconnect from reality in an alternative way, particularly if the resulting scheme still talks of human existence, or compound-being existence, as if they were realer than they are, rather than half-abstractions.
Being in bodies, living in 3D as part of compound beings as you are, and each of you functioning as if you were a unit rather than an interconnected part of a larger something, certainly you must relate to the greater reality in terms you can relate to. Only, do not allow yourself to think that simplifications that form a coherent scheme express reality in anything like its complexity.
Each of you is the center of your universe, – only remember that this is a limitation of perspective for the sake of utility and reference, rather than a description that would be recognizable from any viewpoint other than someone’s living in 3D.
And perhaps you can see now why the recent reorientations, accustoming you to recognizing that 3D and non-3D are complementary parts of one whole; are, in fact, one undivided and indivisible reality. “This world and the next world” is a sterile concept needing to be overcome if you are to deepen your understanding of the way things are. The 3D world per se isn’t as real as it sometimes appears.
It has been necessary to do two complementary things: to get the materialistic vision expanded to include all the non-physical forces it wants to deny, and to get the metaphysical vision expanded to include all the religious insights it wants to deny. Not that either half of this large task has been accomplished, but many people chipping away will have an effect. Cayce the first, Seth the second, and many, many people following upon them, and many, many to follow as time goes on. But – that is what we are about here, tying together perceived antagonisms to overcome their partiality at a higher level. You cannot move forward by clinging to your accustomed prejudices.
So I take it the grain of sand’s view of the glassblowing process might not be entirely adequate to the full picture.
Yes, funny, but that’s the idea. Only, remember, that grain of sand has its own level of awareness. Like everything else, it is made of and from consciousness. It is no more dead or inert than anything else could be. It isn’t unconscious, or orphaned in the universe; it is different; it has its own appropriate level of participation in the world. It has its own non-3D component, obviously, or else how did it manage to exist in only some of the dimensions. So, don’t pity it, learn to speak its language, if you can, if you wish to. After all, that’s what larger beings have to learn to do, to speak to you.
Was that my thought, rather than yours?
You mean, was that an error of reception, you inserting something that did not belong?
Yes, I guess that’s one way to put it.
Did the idea surprise you?
Yes it did.
Well?
“Well?” meaning I suppose that the fact that it was a surprise ought to tell me it wasn’t mine.
You might say that. But it would be better to loosen your hold on the idea that ideas originate with anyone. It would be closer to say they originate from the interaction of two or more mental processes, and would be closer yet to say they don’t so much originate as reveal themselves. But let’s pursue the idea itself, rather than ideas about ideas.
Yes, larger beings have to learn to communicate with partial beings, call them. Do you automatically know how to talk to the bacteria in your body, or the habit-systems that maintain your body moment by moment? Do you even maintain a continual awareness that they are there to be communicated with? The analogy is fairly close.
So, now. Bearing in mind that analogies are necessarily approximations, which means necessarily somewhat inadequate, somewhat inaccurate, think of that grain-of-sand-into-glass analogy. In a way, that is your life. It is the transformation of particles into a larger structure; it is the fusing under hellishly hot conditions of things that were separate into things that are functionally one. It is the creation of larger structures from simple components.
[It was only in typing this up that I realized they meant that our multiple strands are fused, in 3D conditions, into a unity, a higher level of structure. Presumably that new structure becomes a strand in yet another 3D being, and thus becomes part of something even more complicated, more intricate.]
It is analogy, remember, and every analogy breaks down somewhere. But it is a good analogy. Can you see now why we aren’t as concerned with peace on earth, and social justice, and intellectual comprehension of the way things are, as you might expect? It isn’t that they aren’t real within your context; it is that your context itself is only somewhat real, only transiently real, you might say, next to the overwhelmingly important fact that the fire is melting the sand into glass.
But. Analogies break down. Do not allow yourselves to fall into the error of thinking nothing matters, that you are an insignificant grain of sand, that you are going to be annihilated by the vast impersonal forces that are, in fact, transforming and shaping you. You are still the spark of consciousness that you experience yourself to be. Your non-3D component is as much in the transforming furnace as you are. Your unique contribution to the whole is still unique, still a contribution. Only, what is really going on is also at a scale far larger than that of compound beings, let alone 3D individuals.
I feel like I am breathing very rarified air, this morning. I didn’t expect any of this. Can you really relate it to the sins and virtues, I wonder?
The difficulty will be in not allowing yourselves to be seduced by any one aspect of reality, any one particularly vivid analogy. It was desirable to remind you that Life is bigger than your 3D experience; it would be undesirable if that glimpse then persuaded you that your here-and-now had no place in things, no importance in your development, for it would soon follow that you would conclude that your very existence has no point, no importance. And such is not the case.
Our hour is up, but we can continue if you wish to round things off.
No, this is a unit as it is. Only remember that holding two or more competing or complementary or contradictory visions at the same time may lead you to be able to intuit things that cannot quite be put into sequential thinking.