Tuesday, November 12, 2019
I got the sense that the gods at war (or at peace) channel through us, and we decide whether the small amount of force that channels through us will be used constructively or destructively.
Another way to say it would be whether your decisions will turn that energy to good or evil purpose. Freud got a sense of how the source of the sexual energy could be diverted – sublimated – or could express in so many, many ways. Only his reading of the libido and its place in human life was colored by his starting place in a sexually repressed and culturally ingrown Europe, so he never got a fair and unprejudiced look at the subject, but regarded it as pathological more than natural. This is still being corrected in your time.
Plus he was Jewish, and so outside the Protestant mainstream of northern Europe or the Catholic mainstream of southern Europe.
And he was in silent rejection of his own religious heritage, which cut him off from an antidote to materialist skepticism, and was a city-dweller, which cut him off from a peasant’s matter of fact view of life. He was also a medical man rather than a scientist or naturalist or literary scholar, which inclined him to see the play of these energies as pathological. Jung served as counterweight to all these biases.
Still, Jung says he was a great man.
We are not saying different. We are showing the bias that led his rediscoveries to make less of a positive impact upon Western culture than they theoretically might have done. Had Freud understood differently the forces he began to see, he might have encouraged Western intellectual man into more productive patterns. However, what he did accomplish amounted to a massive dynamiting of the roadblock that had made Western thought into a dead-end. Possibly no one could have done more than he did.
Here were his neglected vistas:
- The gods – trans-human intelligences with their own agenda – influenced human life directly and indirectly.
- These gods may equally validly be regarded as personal or impersonal, lives or energies, persons or forces.
- The gods, whatever they really are, are experienced by humans as energy flowing through themselves.
- “Energy” as in urges, “instincts,” tides of impersonally originating emotion, the fuel of all activity, be it mental or physical.
- Trans-personal energy, flowing through humans, is directed through (that is, expresses as) human individual desires, actions, and – let’s call it orientation.
- Human activity (internal or external makes little difference) is itself an input into the economy of the universe. It doesn’t stop with 3D expression. It has further consequences. It is a further cause.
- Thus, human decisions matter. To themselves, in that decisions help shape one’s further destiny, but also to the world, as, say, the outline of the Battle of Britain shaped the outcome of the war and hence of the operative possibilities after that.
This is a much broader canvas than is painted on by materialists, by those who think death is the end, by those who cannot see human activity as meaningful because taking place on “a 3rd class planet circling a 4th class star,” etc.
We must keep reminding you (-all) that 3D life is not an end in itself. To try to live as though it were is to live a pointless unsatisfying life – if only because you have to die! But even if you could live in one body forever, life would be pointless and unsatisfying. What is inherently unsatisfying in and of itself cannot satisfy. It is tautological.
But, like any tautology, it depends upon definitions.
Yes. But our definition is not arbitrary, nor a matter of taste. People may, over long periods of time, concentrate so hard on the game as to invest it in meaning – but let their self-hypnosis waver even slightly, and the spell is gone. They who look outwardly, dream. It is only in reaching for what is important in life that one achieves satisfaction. But this statement is far from self-explanatory.
It needs breaking down into components:
- Using a specific skill in life leads to satisfaction. So does pursuing and achieving a life path – a career, say, or a general pattern of life.
- These things end. It is in the nature of life in 3D, things end.
- The process of adjustment to loss varies considerably. The worst loss is one that cannot be compensated for. It may be a mate, or a path, or one’s physical or mental abilities.
- It may be what is called zest for life.
Is there any aspect of life that can be guaranteed not to run out of road?
Nothing I can think of.
Nor we. Philosophic calm, religious zeal or enthusiasm, the love of learning for its own sake, virtuous and satisfying courses of action such as philanthropy or just charity – you name it, it may or may not be attractive to a given person, may or may not provide meaning for that person, but nothing in life is the universal meaning. It may be made to serve in place of one, but it will not bear the weight on its own.
Some paths are more satisfying than others, however.
For a given person, yes. Not one for all.
But then, what of our life in connection with our larger life beyond. Won’t this serve?
How do you embody it?
Isn’t knowing about it enough?
Ask us when you are depressed.
So, then –?
Our point here is simply that 3D life does not satisfy in its own terms. It offers many satisfactions, and of course some lives are happier than others, but in and of itself, it is not enough. “And yet it is,” you say, and that isn’t wrong, but it needs looking at.
I think I just got it. Life is not the same as a definition of life, or a philosophy of life. People may live in connection with the non-3D component of their life without ever thinking about it, just taking it for granted.
Correct. And these lead blessed lives. Not easy lives, necessarily. Certainly not necessarily prosperous or famous or any attribute commonly given to success, but blessed. It is as the peasant said at Tolstoy’s funeral, “with too much reading one often loses the way.” Simplicity is a gift and is not bestowed on request.
You are talking about a sure instinct.
That is a good way to say it. and that instinct has nothing to do with learning or lack of learning.
However, I get that the eightfold path applies here.
[The Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path:
Right understanding.
Right thought.
Right speech.
Right action.
Right livelihood.
Right effort.
Right mindfulness.
Right concentration.]
That’s why it was codified, after all. Right livelihood assures that you don’t’ throw your shovelful of dirt into the air and have it land right back down in the hole you’re digging.
Odd image.
Not a bad one, though. More to the point than a ditch or anything that implies forward progress. You’re always in the hole you dig, at least until you stop digging.