Thursday, June 7, 2018
Private session yesterday. (Why do I feel compelled to write that? Is it anybody’s business?)
Your life is not your own, once you begin to allow people to participate. How far you open the door is, of course, up to you. But if you were to feel obliged to publicize every communication, you would thereby assure that you could not take advantage of this access for your most personal matters.
I suppose it is like any other aspect of life, a resource to be used only with discretion.
You are all private, you are all public.
Okay, so today’s topic?
You will notice your boredom with “Topaz.”
The Alfred Hitchcock movie, yes. I have watched about an hour of it, and it does not grip me. It is supposed to be a suspenseful drama, but I feel myself not much caring.
And you know why, though there is a paradox.
I was prepared to say, “The drama is too external,” then I was prepared to object that I’m re-reading those Lucas Davenport novels of John Sandford, which are just police novels. But I realize, I’m re-reading the novels not for the plot but in order to hang out with the characters, and even their actions are overlaid with their psychological drama.
And that is our morning’s theme: When you get to a certain point, you cease to believe in the primacy of action and instead believe in the primacy of psychology. But you can express it yourself more easily, and we will edit as necessary.
I get that you are saying that once we no longer take for granted the external drama, it heightens our interest in the internal drama. Life-and-death situations aren’t as exciting when death is just death and not catastrophe. If the external world is only a reflection of our internal, real, world, external drama cannot be more than a hinting at the real conflicts going on.
And we’ll take it from here.
- The external world is not only a reflection of the internal world;
- neither is it unconnected to it,
- nor independent of it,
- nor superior in importance to it.
Any of these relationships may seem obvious from a given point of view, but each reflects the limitations of a point of view. A wider view of the reality of the internal/external relationship is what we are trying to provide. Reality includes:
- The personal world you know. Obviously nothing can be more real than that, although materialist science may think it only theoretical because it cannot be measured by instruments.
- The objective world you experience. A thing may be more than can be grasped, without ceasing to exist.
- The unbreakable connection between the personal and external world. Your senses tell you that 3D is all there is, but you cannot disconnect from the All-D context.
- Your deeper reality, the “you-ness” that precedes, co-exists with, and follows your time in 3D. You have an independent place to stand, even if it is not as you may conceive it.
- Similarly, the external world may be said to have its place to stand, independent of any of its components.
- Finally, the forces we are calling the vast impersonal forces exist, and coordinate or potentiate and channel all this into a coherent functioning pattern.
Bear in mind, the external world as you experience it is going to be different for each person, since each person is different. That doesn’t make the external world per se different, only different for each.
All right.
You see,
- the entire universe does not center on any of you. (We state it thus baldly merely to flush out any hidden assumptions.)
- Neither do you exist merely for the universe.
It is a much more cooperative relationship than you commonly realize, and it is distorted by your assumption that one end is real and the other unreal, or that one is important and the other not. We said from the beginning, “Beware of pedestals; they distort relationships.”
I am thinking of Eisenhower as depicted in that excellent film, “Ike: Countdown to D-Day.” His concentration was, and needed to be, entirely on externals. He focused upon the task at hand. It wasn’t the time for metaphysical questioning or discussions such as these. He acted as though what was external was real, and needed to.
He did not, and needed not to.
You may wish to explain that for the studio audience.
He relied upon God’s approval of his motivations. He prayed in his attitude if not necessarily in words. He assumed, and tried to live up to, the fact that the forces he was commanding were doing God’s work. In this he was like Lincoln 80 years earlier. Just because you do not share the form of the connection, do not be blind to the forces involved, like the dictator who asked, “And how many divisions does the Pope have?” If you do not believe in God in the way Ike did, or Lincoln did (or, if you do), recognize with the Sufis that “Words are a prison; God is free.”
One of my favorite sayings.
Which is why we used it. So do you see that, and why, Eisenhower, in concentrating on external forces, nonetheless involved the deeper reality beneath them?
Are you saying he was directing – using – the vast impersonal forces as they flowed through the moment?
Just as Hitler had used them, just as Churchill or Lincoln used them, yes. Just as Dion Fortune’s group began to use them in a coordinated fashion after Dunkirk. Prayer is not self-delusion, nor is it desperation, nor a magic wand. Regardless of its form or apparent intent, it is an alignment.
Prayer is magic?
Magic as in “direction of forces beyond human control,” yes. And as has been said, people are praying all the time, and their prayers are always answered.