The other day you referred to “we” humans. I take it that was you slipping in a further redefinition.
Drawing a connection that is not necessarily obvious, let’s say. There is still a tendency to think of non-3D elements as separate from 3D individuals. It may be time to remind people that sometimes what those in 3D think of as non-3D individuals are actually extensions of those 3D individuals into non-3D, then experienced as if separate. Some of the guidance that people experience is another part of themselves. Some is not, but some is. That is worth realizing and remembering.
Okay, so what occurred to me last night was – ?
You continue to read novels and see dramas, and of course they involve passions. What is a villain but a person in the grip of a hot or cold passion? Some are personifications of such drives – that is, their whole lives are driven by greed or hatred or by indifference or whatever. Others are a mixture of traits and characteristics and only occasionally – perhaps only on one fatal occasion – explode into action, or coldly execute some scheme. We emphasize hot or cold, you see, because this is not necessarily a matter of a lapse, nor of a thorough-going rottenness. It could be either; it could be any shade between. But no matter how it expresses, it is a passion motivating a personality.
I’m getting that you want to make a distinction in our thinking that often we don’t make.
Passion is not always emotional. There can be a cold passion, just as deadly, just as icily indifferent to suffering. The evil done by the Himmlers of the world is quite as deadly as that done in a rage by Goering, say, or by calculation (Goebbels, say), or by someone possessed by a demon, like Hitler. Nor, we hasten to add, is this a political statement, as if evil existed on the right and not also the left. But the personalities and consequences of the Nazis we cited are well known. Those of Stalin and Mao tse-tung are less so, and in any case we would hope that those who are following this line of exposition would be beyond capture by ideology by this point.
You are citing Himmler as a mild-mannered clerk, like Eichmann; Goering as an impulsive, passionate driving force; Goebbels as all intellect and no morality or even decency; Hitler as a man swallowed by his hatred and resentments and his all-consuming will to have his way, less out of egotism than out of delusions of grandeur.
That’s right. A metaphysical scheme that does not explain the existence of such men (and women, of course) is no good to you. But now let us connect some dots: the existence of forces that run through human lives, and the timing of the release of such forces.
Should I try to set it out more carefully, or do you want to continue?
Bullet-points, perhaps.
All right. It’s more than just “on the one hand on the other hand.” It is a correlating of things we don’t usually think of together.
- We as individuals are communities of threads, as has been explained.
- In a sense, our character is something like a ratio among these threads.
- Our decisions over a lifetime strengthen some elements and weaken others. That’s what recurrent free choice does; that’s what free will in 3D conditions is all about.
- But our actions are not taken in a vacuum. Our life situations are defined not only by our inner drives but by external situations. We respond to externals in our individual manner, but we do not shape those externals.
- The manifestation of such externals is not random, but is not under human 3D control. It may be compared to the weather, an external force to which we adapt.
- That weather has its timing, and as was said, it may be mapped by astrology. The psychic influences of any given moment are to be seen in the stars, for those who learn to read them.
Yes, good. And the interconnection between the individual (as shaped by its decisions), and the weather at any given moment, is the passions. At least, that is one way of saying it.
On the one hand, who we are; on the other hand, what we have to contend with at any given moment.
Close enough. You see – or apparently you do not yet quite see – this is the piece missing from many a model of human behavior. Humans are not of a piece; they are often self-contradictory; they change over time; they sometimes behave in unpredictable ways; sometimes they “aren’t themselves.” You have come to see that this is because they are communities acting as individuals. Well and good. But the next step is to ask yourself, how and why and even when do humans manifest various characteristics?
People are not puppets; they do have free will, and they exercise it to varying degrees in different circumstances and in different parts of their lives. Nonetheless humans as groups are quite predictable and are often quite easily manipulated. How are the two equally true statements to be reconciled?
I get that it is the interaction of our inner lives with the vast impersonal forces sweeping through our outer lives but it hasn’t yet clicked. Need the right image, I imagine.
Your statement is not quite correct. It isn’t flat wrong, but it is misleading as stated. The vast impersonal forces do not sweep through your outer lives, because there is no such division, and if there were it would be the inner and not the outer which is primary. The vast impersonal forces are of the same nature and quality as the vast personal forces, and that will take some explaining. As we have been at this an hour, let us pause here and continue from this point. Thus, there is your next starting place.
Wednesday, June 13, 2018
You said we would begin with the statement that the vast impersonal and personal forces share the same nature and quality.
This is an example of the same thing experienced differently. Thus it looks like two and not one. Or, it is two different things sharing the same characteristics. The two ways of looking at it make an ambiguous situation artificially clear, but only misleadingly so.
Like our thinking that you in non-3D are one being, subdivided, or many beings, intensely interconnected.
Yes, same thing. It is a characteristic of mind functioning under 3D conditions that things seem to be either/or, easier than both/and or neither/nor. Two-value logic corresponds to the overall condition of duality, while four-value logic blurs the distinctions and seems like fuzzy thinking until one’s level of perception and understanding rises to a level able to comprehend that the thing under examination at the moment (like all life in 3D) transcends dualistic logic.
We’ll keep it in mind as we go.
Actually, probably you won’t be able to keep it in mind except sporadically. The habits of 3D perception are very strong. But as long as you are able to periodically recoup your understanding, to recast what you have come to, and say, “Except, it isn’t only this way,” no harm done.
Ultimately, you and the forces we are to discuss are not separate. “All is one.” But everything is separate. Both sort of true, from a 3D perspective. Neither the whole story. It is just a condition of 3D existence, one that can be sensed only because you extend beyond 3D as well. To the degree that you remain within the 3D trance, life is either/or. To the degree that you transcend it, life is all one, either/or, both/and. It is the fact that you exist in All-D, not merely in 3D, that allows you fish to perceive water and the fishbowl.
So, within these limitations –
Describing the forces as the weather around you is a productive analogy, but it exaggerates the distinction between them and yourselves. We will employ it for the moment, remembering that it is a provisional aid to the understanding, and not a description set in stone as an absolute.
You as created beings – as knots in the fabric, to refer to a different analogy – represent complex structures with their own inertia.
No, that isn’t going to work very well, I don’t think. I get where you are going, but the analogy won’t work.
We recognize the difficulty, but let’s try simple inadequate models and work our way toward more complex suggestive ones. The process is a groping toward a common understanding between two beings in very different conditions. It is you and we each grasping a huge beach ball in the dark, attempting to walk with it while not stumbling over the uneven ground, not able to tell very well where the other’s grasp is, how firm, what the next step will do to the delicate balance – you get the idea. It isn’t a hazardous process, but it is somewhat unpredictable, haphazard, even.
If we think of you in 3D as sailing ships, each rigged differently and each with different origins and distinctions, you could see that the same winds and tides will hit each ship with different effect and will be used differently. But – as you already said – this is an inadequate metaphor. So let us seek a more complex one.
Suppose yourselves each an electronic chip. The same electric current running through each will produce very different effects, not because of a difference in the current, but because each chip consists of different units combined in a way that will produce a certain effect. Thus, the current is motivator, the chips are animated but not defined by it. This is a better analogy than ships and wind, but still far from adequate, so let’s build on the understanding.
We are searching now for an analogy that will show how the being is affected by – and also affects – the forces that move it. Not a ship being pushed by wind and tide. Not an electronic chip being animated by an electric current. We need something much more interactive, though still a matter of great disparity of forces. We need to bring will into it, you see, which implies perception and judgment.
Something less automatic than an electronic circuit no matter how variable its result. How about a prism?
That is an advance in one way, in that it demonstrates the acted-upon as being also the transformer, but it lacks the element of will. A prism will affect the light passing through it according to its own nature, but its nature does not change according to its decisions or circumstances. You do, and that is the point of 3D existence.
Well, what about decision-circuits employing light rather than electricity? Logic-gates shunt the light into this prism or that, and in effect the same input is continually changed as it shines through and the logic-gates vary their positions.
Yes, in some ways that is pretty good. You may wish to define logic-gates for people who do not deal with computer logic.
A logic-gate – it’s probably called something else, but that’s how I think of it – is a decision-point in the flow. Input will go right if the switch is set one way, left if set the other way. A simple binary choice, but put a million of them in sequence and you’ve got a complicated, seemingly infinite set of paths possible.
If you take your 3D life to be a run through this amazingly long sequence of logic-gates, you can get a sense of how your lives are continuous choice. But the analogy does not allow for any but choices pre-planned by the designer of the sequence, nor does it provide for a modification of the motivating force by decisions during the sequence. So, better to revert to the use of logic-gates to choose among prisms – remembering that the analogy is still necessarily inadequate.
Ideally, we will find an analogy or an image that will show the rats changing the maze even as they are running through it, but that may take some doing!