Friday, May 6, 2023
5:40 a.m. A few days ago, I was reading a history book with interest, and made a note to ask sometime why I am so interested in history. After all, history is as ephemeral as everything else in 3D. I suppose everybody is interested in something, but still I find it curious. And I suspect you will broaden the scope of my inquiry. Feel free.
As you say, everybody is interested in something, or in some combination of somethings. For some, it is some aspect of the tangible physical 3D world; for others, some abstraction; for still others, perhaps abstractions about tangibles. Even if your fascination is in finding the day’s food and shelter, your attention will be on something.
That sounds like merely playing with the idea.
No, it’s deeper than it looks. But you first need to remember the conditions of your life: compression in time and space; expression of relationship to other Strands; your personal subjectivity as it relates to the shared subjectivity. All well, no accidents, no spare parts, no missing parts. If you can’t subscribe to this vision of life, or if you can’t keep it in your awareness, you will slip back to thinking of orphans in a world of chance. If your mental makeup cannot abide a vision of meaning, then of course what you will be seeing will be meaninglessness.
We know this isn’t where you thought this would go, but it is our job, you might say, to choose among possible threads in a discussion, and go this way rather than that way. Your thoughts and ideas aren’t really decided by default, so much as by your and our innate biases, as they interact with what the times will allow to manifest.
That will be an interesting topic in itself.
We haven’t left your proposed topic, merely broadened it. Slow down as best you can, and let’s look at things.
BTW I seem to be functioning differently since last month’s course at TMI.
Yes, your radio is better tuned, less static.
So to look at this. Each of you is a reporter of the world as it is. It takes all reports to make a comprehensive sitrep. And by situation report, we mean non-3D as well as 3D, and we mean the interaction of the two as well as either separately. Well, how are such reports compiled except in the experiences of those who are living them?
I’m not sure I am entirely following. Part of what you’re saying, you said years ago, but another part seems to say, between the lines, that something – perhaps another higher level of being – wants to experience our lives second-hand. Not just our lives in 3D, but (since they are not really separable) in 3D and no-3D together.
This is not something to obsess over, and it certainly isn’t a new thought in the world. Life wants to know what it is experiencing. Or, say, God, or the gods, or the All That Is requires and enjoys self-awareness. Each of you and each of us and groups of you and groups of us and all of us together provide that many-focuses awareness.
Hold to “As above, so below,” for a better feel for this. Just as you in your life represent all humanity (and beyond-humanity) in your daily life, so does “all of us seen as a unit” represent our experience. Life is, life chooses, life experiences, life savors, life chooses again. What this amounts to ultimately, how can you know? How can we know? But do you need to know everything in order to know something?
I sort of used to think so.
Yes, past tense.
Well, I learned. Just as I don’t direct the politics of Burma, and am not responsible for fixing streets in San Diego, and do not keep the books sorted in the local library, so I don’t need to run the world, nor understand it, to live in it. And a good thing, too.
So OT1H you are free to interest yourself in whatever attracts you, and OTOH that clause doesn’t really make sense: It says, you are free to be attracted to whatever attracts you.
Hmm – meaning, what we are determines what will draw us?
Well, did you ever feel you might equally well have spent your life studying biology or chemistry or sociology or woodworking or traffic management?
I see your point. I suppose we could look at formal schooling as spreading a vast buffet, from which we pick what attracts us. And another way to say that is, it spreads a vast buffet, and some thing or things shine for us.
Or, also, you shine for the things.
That’s a different way to see it. I suppose so.
If you think in terms of systems rather than assuming that individual decisions are the only things that count, you get a better handle on complex situations.
And I suppose all manner of generalizations apply, like young girls being attracted to horses, or boys being attracted to cars. (Of course, I am aware, these examples may no longer be representative. They were when I was a boy.)
We do not intend to tell you why you were drawn by any given thing in life. Those who discover their one big thing are fortunate and usually happy. Those who never discover one big thing may be just as happy, depending upon what they do with the world they find themselves in. and, ultimately, those who live unhappy lives will find that they were happy in a different way, but there’s no point in going into that, as it will merely raise people’s defenses and segue into political discussion that will provide heat but not light. For those who can think of these things quietly, and as Newton’s little child, it may prove to be a valuable thought.
Newton said the way he learned anything was to sit with a new observation and observe it with the mind of a little child, which I take to mean, without presuming to tell it what it meant, but instead being open to follow thought wherever it might lead. Only, it may not have been Newton. I kind of think it was Einstein, not that it matters.
To conclude with your question, we’d say this. Pursue anything you are inclined to pursue, and see where it leads. The closer in touch you are with your instincts – your non-3D guidance – the more interest you will find in life. In this, consider Hemingway, intensely sensual, intensely intuitive. He did not find life boring.
But even those who find life boring are sending their own sitrep.
Yes, they are, and so are you all. The report is on the world as you find it; it is not (and is not meant to be) the world as abstractly defined.
Sometime, merely as a matter of interest, you might discuss how our changing our focus of attention from one interest to another changes the general situation.
Perhaps. As is our wont, we will try to keep it practical, if we do.
Our thanks as always.