Wednesday, May 9, 2018
We have arrived at the interface between personal and impersonal, or between any one specific consciousness in 3D and all the rest of 3D and non-3D reality that that consciousness interacts with. Your job in 3D is to widen your comprehension of yourself and of “the other.” Naturally you can’t do all of it at once, nor necessarily at the same time, nor necessarily in equal proportions. Every 3D experience is different. But the ultimate goal – not any proximate or immediate goal – is necessarily the same for all.
But it won’t seem that way.
How could it? Everyone’s position is too different. Everyone has different deficits to make up, and different past accomplishments to build on.
This interface is the reason we kept building up the concept of vast impersonal forces, because once one begins to see that one’s ability to shape reality is vastly greater than one had thought, there is a temptation to over-do it, and think one can do everything. But the world is always greater than the individual, even if the individual is greater than s/he had previously experienced itself.
Saying that reality has plasticity does not amount to saying that it has infinite plasticity, for that would amount to saying, “It’s all about you,” for everyone. There is a sense in which that is true, but only a sense. Life is always bigger than any one living thing or any collection of living things.
We got that the first time.
Maybe. And maybe as soon as we change context you lose it again. For instance, Jesus asks rhetorically, “What does it profit somebody to gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” Doesn’t that speak to the infinite value of your own soul to you, when weighed in the balance against the rest of reality? So, doesn’t that say that it is all about you?
Of course it does. But it equally says the rest of reality exists; it isn’t a figment of our imaginations and it isn’t merely an extension of our own personalities.
True enough. Our point here is that changing contexts always presents the risk of one losing newly acquired perspective, and must be guarded against.
We have been at some pains to reinforce your sense of identity with the world around you and to reinforce your sense that nothing is as it seems. Only, be careful how you digest this. That things are not as they seem stems not from someone attempting to deceive you, but from the unavoidable inadequacies of anyone’s ability to perceive and comprehend.
I got that a while ago. We’ll never get to a “the truth,” only to the highest truth we are able to comprehend at a given time.
Well, having painted your personal dimensions as All-D creatures experiencing yourselves initially as isolated 3D individuals, now we proceed to paint the world
- as if it mattered, rather than you;
- as if it were primary, rather than you;
- as if it was real, rather than you.
And of course, this is how most people do see things, only they don’t see the world any more clearly than they see themselves, and for the same reason.
The reason being – ?
What you pay attention to, you get to know. But if the filters between perceiver and whatever is perceives are strong enough, no image gets admitted that contradicts the filter. A confirmed materialist cannot (usually) see spiritual influences. A Christian Scientist cannot (usually) see physical rather than spiritual obstacles to perfect health. Bear in mind, in citing these examples of filters, we are not taking sides. Each is a legitimate point of view. What they have in common is the limitation in admitted input that the filters enforce.
We have sketched repeatedly how larger parts of yourselves interact with (you might almost say interfere with) your strictly 3D experience. The hard-headed materialist’s convictions may be undermined by contrary knowledge flowing out of the non-3D component. You should be familiar with all that. But now continue with the idea of the world at large as resistance, as obstacle, as contradicter. Once you get to realizing your own internal contradictions, you may begin to downplay those of the reality around you. Nothing wrong with that as a stage in your development, but like every overreach, it needs correcting.
The world is going to influence your 3D experience at least as much as your own internal struggles.
Common sense tells you that the world actually exists, in the way that you do. It isn’t what it appears to be, but it isn’t nothing, either, nor an arbitrary creation of your own mind. It ought to be unnecessary to say something that is so obvious, only once one sets sail on the intuitive seas, it is a temptation to forget about the sensory shores.
Interesting metaphor.
Yes, provided it isn’t taken too literally. It isn’t as if there were one area of life that is intuitive and another that is sensory. It is rather a matter of qualities.
You will remember that we spoke of the present moment (any present moment) as a sort of trance. By that, we mean not that strictly material causes lead to strictly material results. But it is a sort of cumulative total of all forces at that given time. Clearly, times differ from each other if only in that.
You mean, I think, that every present moment is shaped by the cumulative force of everything in that moment, hence has a solidity and massiveness relative to any one of us.
Of course. That is your experience every day. Only it isn’t that simple, and the discovery of the ways in which it is not simple lead you to see that you are more than you thought you were, and that reality is more than you thought it was. At the moment we are going to concentrate on the solidity and force and mass of the external, rather than concentrating (as we do at other times) on its plasticity and impressionability and its phantom nature compared to the inner reality of any 3D being. Both ways of looking at it are true, so we move now to the underreported aspect.
And do we have time to begin?
Try this. You exist in 2018, at the moment. You and everyone in the world are affected by the 2016 presidential elections. It doesn’t matter if you don’t read the news or listen to the radio or discuss it with your friends and neighbors. Even if you didn’t even know about it, you couldn’t help be affected, because of all those around you who care. Can anyone in his right mind maintain that 2018 can be the same as 2014, say?
But to say this is not to say that things are as they appear from any given viewpoint. It is to say, merely – but a big merely – that any present moment has its own “objective” reality that affects one’s subjective reality because of its effect on so many other 3D minds, let alone its expression in 3D external reality.
The 1848 elections changed the country. So did discovery of gold in California. So did whatever was invented in that year, or put into execution. So did Emerson’s visit to Europe, and the revolution in France. So did The Year of Hope in general. And we could look at the world of painting, sculpture, scholarship, technology, whatever, and we would see the changes in that context. The Fox sisters, in New York, or Joseph Smith. I see that what we concentrate on affects how we experience it, and I see that it exists regardless how any of us experience it.
That’s right. The world is there, and is not to be talked away. The fact that it is deeper than it appears does not mean it doesn’t exist. Quite the contrary, in fact. But that is enough for today.