Sunday, May 7, 2023
6 a.m. Perhaps you have other fish to fry, but I’d be interested in more about how you and we and the times interact to choose which threads among all possible threads to follow, in the course of discussion.
It won’t come as some blinding revelation. Like most of what we have to say, it is your everyday life seen from a different angle. Why should anybody expect that what we have to describe will be something never before seen or talked about? Context is all.
I do understand that. Just as yesterday, you remind us of the overarching situation and then look at something well familiar but not well understood.
Or, let’s say, not well understood in a certain context. Often it is one detail now to be seen in its surrounding form, purpose, function, and effect. A shoulder joint won’t make much sense to someone with no experience of shoulders, and how are shoulders to be understood except in the context of the body as a unit. And so on and so forth. Close examination shows everything in new light. At the same time, the thing being examined remains the thing it is. Therefore, a certain kind of mentality cannot listen to people like us. For one thing, it cannot sit still long enough to look into nuances and contexts. For another, anything it encounters reminds it of something else, and rather than following the exposition, it follows associations of kindled ideas. And of course some merely snort and say, “That’s nothing but….”
However, there are the rest of us –
So you think, but in fact it is not a difference among individuals (or even among communities), but among moods.
I get that. We may be one or another kind of mind, depending upon the subject matter.
Ys, very good. You may have infinite patience with the complications and associations and nuances in history or psychology or even metaphysics, and be totally unable to sit still before similar explorations in chemistry or politics or celestial mechanics. If we were to sketch one rule of thumb here, it would be, You aren’t as invariant as you sometimes think yourselves.
Hmm, another variable? As, you, the times, and now the subject matter?
Let’s go a little deeper. Slow down, go into the crystal.
Okay.
“The subject matter” is less invariant, too, than you might think. The same subject isn’t the same subject from one time to the next, and you know why, if you think about it.
Rather than thinking of it as a unit, thinking of it as a galaxy of connected points leads one to see that who and what we are, at any given moment, affects how we and any subject matter interact.
Or, may interact. There isn’t anything determined about it, but the opportunities differ, yes.
I remember beginning to learn of the fascinating details of structure because Nancy Dorman showed me her coloring book on the human musculature, and talked about various things, from her knowledge as massage therapist, I’d never paid attention to. I realized for the first time that the body was an interesting thing in itself, not merely an often inconvenient conveyance.
It may not have occurred to you how many avenues that exposure opened up. Your healing work had been as abstract as your care of your body, if somewhat less careless and taken for granted. After you began to pay attention, gradually you developed the habit of associating body and mind functionally, as well as conceptually.
You’re right, I hadn’t made that association. I can somewhat remember stages of my progressive realizations, and if I were to concentrate on it, probably I could reconstruct a line of pebbles: this, then this, then this.
And construct is exactly what you would be doing; choosing among potential memoires which ones you would associate, and in which order.
So, you see, just this few minutes’ work illustrates how you and we and the times and the context develop a theme in one direction that could as easily have gone in a different direction.
Let’s send it in a different direction, if only for the sake of illustrating the process.
Well, let’s go back to “So you think, but in fact it is not a difference among individuals (or even among communities), but among moods.” We could as easily say, moods are a function of the interface between conscious and unconscious mind, between yourselves as you understand yourself and yourselves as you interact with the world in ways beyond your awareness, or yourselves and what you think of as the externals of the world.
Yes, we have been there.
You see? Your initial response represents your mind in another mood.
Got me. Did you plan that?
We allowed for it. You might have responded in a different way, and might yet. So – respond again.
I suppose I might ask, what determines moods?
No, rather than approaching it abstractly (another potential reaction, you see), another personal response.
I can see at least one potential take-away: We oughtn’t to judge others, unless we are willing to include ourselves in the indictment. What we judge in others is behavior or reaction we ourselves engage in, in another mood.
Yes. And you might look at moods as delineations of difference, or let’s say as treaty provisions.
Well now, that’s interesting.
Certainly. Again, you were thinking of yourself as an individual, but if you remember that you are also a community, you see that any mental state amounts to an accommodation among peers.
An accommodation that varies with circumstance, time, and God knows what-all else.
As we’re always reminding you, every subject provides links to deeper connection, depending mostly upon your willingness or otherwise to pursue it. Or, not so much pursue as allow.
Sure, I see that. “Pursue” implies we are hunting, tracking something down. “Allow” implies we are sitting quietly, waiting to see what timid or stealthy animals emerge from the underbrush. Or, to change analogies, “allow” implies that we at most steer our canoe in its downriver course, moving toward whatever draws our attention.
So you see, thinking that your mental flow is under your control, or is not under your control, or is partly and intermittently under your control, are three very different ideas, leading to perception of different kinds of possibilities. As usual, any simple answer would be simple at the expense of accuracy.
Always an education, and frequently an entertainment, talking to you guys. Our thanks as always.