Monday, October 5, 2020
I understand you to be concentrating on how the layer of feelings/perceptions colors how we experience the world. It occurred to me, an example of a factor that would be neither emotion nor thought would be a continual awareness of physical illness or debility.
Many similar influences might be cited. This will serve as example, one that you and Dirk should be able to relate to, particularly.
- A chronic illness pulls your mental default position away from that common to the mainstream.
- Its fostered habit of continual or periodic monitoring of health factors itself alters one’s mental default position.
- Additionally, what that monitoring reveals, and what it mandates, will move one from a sort of mainstream unconsciousness, in that it is a commonly taken-for-granted factor that cannot be taken for granted.
- During flare-ups, the condition will entirely redirect one’s attention. In intervals between flare-ups, it will not be entirely absent from consideration.
Now, what we want to stress here is not any difficulty that such condition may cause. Difficulty is part of life. Instead, we want to emphasize, as example, that such condition shapes one’s expectations, perceptions, and conclusions about life – not merely consciously, but far beyond the layer of 3D consciousness. This awareness cannot properly be said to be thinking, though thinking will sooner or later be involved, nor emotion or feeling, though they too will come into play. Primarily it will be in perceptions. It will be a part of the data out of which one constructs one’s model of the world.
Again, this is one example. Bearing in mind that it is example, and is only one of many, some things need to be said:
- Your own body in such circumstances is certainly going to be part of the “other” you experience. Your body does not automatically respond in the way it does when, say, you intend to move your arm and it moves. Therefore you experience the body as other than “you” in a way you probably would not do otherwise.
- At the same time, your body is going to be obviously part of “you.” It isn’t like you can lay it down and move off from it, however rebellious it might be.
- Therefore, an anomalous situation. Your body is both “you” and “other,” blurring what otherwise might seem a logical division of reality.
- Cam you call your awareness of this anomaly mental? Emotional? It is neither. It is basic to your experience of the world, like your awareness that you have a body, that you even exist in a world.
- It is not the condition, but the result of the condition, we draw your attention to. Your physical debility per se is only a first-tier experience. You won’t be dragging it (or perhaps we should say, it won’t be dragging you) into your post-3D existence. But the awareness it shaped, and what you did with that awareness, are second- and third-tier, respectively, and they will accompany you. Really, they become part of you.
- Can you possibly think that someone with such a chronic condition will experience the world in the same way as those without it? This is not to say that any two people will necessarily react in the same way to the same illness; it is to say, rather, that any two people with such a condition shaping their lives will live in a different world from those who do not.
- Only, don’t over-emphasize the importance of this one example. It is only one example. Lives lived in poverty or affluence, or under the influence of prejudice, or lived in emotional warmth or sterility, or in a supportive or challenging environment will all differ in their experience of what the world is and of what they are and of what they are in context of the “otherness,” the outside world. Only, these examples are more ambiguous, in that thought and feeling more clearly enter into the equation.
Your point is that our interface with the “external” world is neither intellectual nor emotional, primarily.
Our point is more that 3D life is not as it appears to be. Your subjective and objective worlds are not separate as they appear to be, nor is the distinction between sensory and intuitive, nor is the difference between thought and feeling. Life is one thing, and if we can once get that across in a meaningful way, everything else will fall into place.
Life is one thing, experienced as dualities. Dualities are always only relatively true, only relatively real. In actual fact, they are polar positions within a unity, and only relatively polar at that.
We are trying to provide you with the material to bridge seemingly irreconcilable opposites, and show that they are merely different emphases of the one unified reality that is all there is. In showing you how pre-conscious apprehension shapes the idea of the world that you can hold, we are showing you – if you can see it – how what looks like two, or like many, is always only one.
If there is any clearer way of saying it, I don’t know what it would be. Still, I get the sense that we haven’t conveyed it except to those who receive the spark.
It isn’t ever any different. Sparks fly from one to another, or they do not. But there is no other way to convey a knowing. Words, pictures, examples, illustrations, fables – whatever one uses, it is only effective when it happens to strike a spark in just the right way at just the right time. And the right way and right time cannot be mandated.
Can the would-be recipient improve his or her chances?
At attitude of open receptiveness is always helpful, in that it is the opposite of closing one’s mind. But beyond that, you tell us: How successful have you been, all these decades, learning to come to new understandings by force of will, so to speak?
True enough. But righteous persistence did and does bring reward.
Indeed it does – but in its own time, in its own way.
You don’t need to tell me that. Me, nor anyone who has spent years in diligent or even in recurrent or occasional searching for greater truth.
Yes, but realize that what we said may be taken as encouragement. The fact that progress comes in its own time, in its own way, means you aren’t liable to screw up the process. You can’t take one wrong turn and lose the results of so many years of striving. Third-tier experience will bring you new first-tier experiences.
I get that. To paraphrase: Our resolute continuation on whatever path we find will bring us new opportunities.
That is what we said, yes. And obviously, you don’t need to be perfect in your application, only resolute in your intent. That should make you realize, you can hardly fail except by deliberately turning away, choosing failure. And even if you do that, it isn’t the end of the story, and there is always the ability to repent and turn around.