Thursday, January 12, 2023
5:15 a.m. I suppose you’d like to discuss yesterday’s drumming question at our ILC meeting.
We would, and we should like to recognize and encourage your willingness to open up a little more. It was the kind of question it would have been easy to hide from.
[The five-minute shamanic drumming question: “What is an unconscious bias that I can let go of?”
[Can? Or should? There is a difference. Or, could be willing to?
[You still have a bias that sees your life separate from the world, as if you can do as you please and not affect things. That is a common bias but leads to feelings of futility and ennui and disconnection. Consciously remember that you are part of everything inner and outer, and the same thoughts, emotions, actions, acquire new significance and offer greater promise.
[You believe that everything is connected; you don’t necessarily live it. Intend to live more profoundly.]
I wouldn’t say it was any new perception.
It is an important thing when a known idea penetrates to deeper levels. The more thoroughly one admits a thing, the more profound a third-tier decision it becomes.
Or represents?
Or represents. It is a continuing process.
Beyond a certain point, it is more an act of faith than of knowledge, to think that our most private thoughts are yet in the pool of common human experience.
That is an accurate insight said only vaguely. Should you choose to, you can bring a much sharper awareness to bear.
In other words, recalibrate. True. Very well, explicitly rather than tacitly: greater presence, receptivity, clarity. Let me be more fully here, now.
Established habits become default postures, and so need not be continually spelled out, but every so often one may need to refocus by using one’s little rituals.
Understood. So, what I was meaning is that I have been changed profoundly by the moment-by-moment effects – and still more by the cumulative effects – of so many years of coaching and of sincere conversation. I remember well how quickly Rita’s and my life began to change from our very first few sessions in 2001. And I can see that nonetheless, there is probably never a stopping-place except an arbitrary one. Until we say “Stop, I have had enough changes for this lifetime,” everything we know is liable to be reinterpreted, time after time, we doing the reinterpreting and we being reinterpreted as well, so to speak.
And – to come to the nub of your prior statement –
And, as I said, it still requires faith sometimes to believe what is not necessarily evident. We – I – may fully believe that all our mind is one thing, that life is more a shared dream than a shared and also individual experience, but our sensory evidence persists in saying, “Not only are you alone in this, but there’s no getting out of the closet or out of the locked room around the closet, nor out of the house around the closet,” and on and on. What seems to us so private may not be shameful or even embarrassing. Indeed, it may be something we cherish and protect from possible profanation by the world’s eyes. Still, it may be impossible to believe that it is nonetheless common human property in the non-3D world.
We shall play devil’s advocate, for the moment. What difference does it make whether one’s inmost being is truly hedged around by silence or is spotlighted? What does it matter if common knowledge is in non-3D, if you live your lives in 3D, where barriers are available on every side?
Doesn’t the difference between our self-knowledge and our appearance tend to undermine us?
You should spell out the difference between persona and essence, perhaps.
We cannot help wearing what Yeats called the mask, what Jung called the persona. Since all aspects of us cannot be presented simultaneously (in the way that no one can see all sides of a sphere from any one point of view), in any situation some, and only some, aspects are present and some are hidden, either consciously or unconsciously. Who we are in essence remains unmanifest, necessarily. With the best will in the world, we could not present ourselves in our entirety even if we could know ourselves in our entirety, which I imagine is not possible.
And therefore you are always in a position of your self-knowledge and your appearance being different. So why (or rather more important, how) should it undermine you sometimes?
I’m going to hand over to you. I sense that it does, but I don’t know that I could say how it does.
You could, it you could summon the energy to do the work, for thinking as opposed to receptivity is work. It is hard work.
Which I should do more of?
Which you are wanting to do more of, as you well know. But perhaps most people would be the better for doing more thinking and more receiving. Whichever they do less of, they should think to balance by doing more of the other. The ideal is not a continuing state of balance between the two, but an enhanced ability to employ either and both.
Well, how it undermines us. Let me try to think it out.
Use bullets. This relieves you of the perceived need to connect various points by logical chains.
Yes. Well, how.
- Sometimes we may feel like a fraud.
- Sometimes, a sense of futility, as the impossibility of translation and expression overwhelms us.
- It spotlights the usual problem: “Which you?”
- It “irks and repents us” as Thoreau or Emerson said. The sheer recalcitrance of life.
- The gulf of incomprehension between people exacerbated by the distortion and insufficiency of words.
- The exceptional shared intuitive moments, by contrast.
That is as far as I can get at this moment.
Yes, that is reception. Now think about what you received.
I see those are various aspects of the trap that 3D life sometimes seems to be. We feel isolated from others, unable to communicate our deepest nature, unsure if we would even meet acceptance if people could see us entire. More than that, we can’t see ourselves entire. So many Strands, so many cross-purposes and half-suspected motives and habit-patterns. It’s Plato’s man in a cave, for sure.
But –
But there is the other side of the picture, the fact that despite these obstacles we do connect with others; they do inspire us, and us them. They do forgive and indeed accept us, and we them. We are somehow important to one another even when experienced only peripherally. All this, I take it, is because on a non-3D level we know each other as all one thing.
Let’s say you recognize the fractal pattern you share. You are never identical, yet you are never unrelated. You each march to your own music, but the music has more in common than you sometimes think.
Perhaps you’d spell out the opportunity and pitfall here.
Sketch the dragon and the treasure it guards, you mean? Yes, we can do that. As usual, they are the same thing in its twin aspects.
Individuality as experienced in 3D is a lonely thing. Connection as experienced in 3D is a promise and a gleam and a sometime thing. Does that mean it is different essentially in non-3D? Try to remember this fact in everything you think about! : 3D and non-3D are ends of a polarity rather than different things. So how different is it going to be in non-3D. It is different, but think, how is it different?
It has to be the difference between perceiving something via the senses and perceiving it intuitively.
Correct. And so?
I don’t know if this is right, but I get that in a way, it is up to us how we experience things. We can concentrate on the 3D (sensory) experience, or the non-3D (intuitive) experience, and while either approach will have its own flavor, either one will contain the other as well.
How you experience life is up to you, in that sense. Viktor Frankl did not put it in these terms, nor did Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, but while they were in prison they learned to see life more intuitively than they had been doing, and this changed the meaning of the hard life they were experiencing. Few of you are in their hard circumstances, but if you were reading this in jail, you would find that it still applied. Your private life is private; it is also in common. And this has nothing to do with how much or how little effort you make to communicate it or even share it by actions.
Think about your life in terms of the dragon guarding the treasure – and dragon and treasure being the same thing – and be reassured.
Well, thanks for this exercise in receptivity and thought.
And that would be a good title for it.
Perhaps it would. Very well, our thanks as always.