Friday, April 5, 2019
All right, friends… Any advice?
More important is the insight you got on awakening. Every time you revisit your life, you have an opportunity to resolve to be different than the person who made that decision. This is the value of introspection and repentance, only it is not well understood if seen as merely good intentions for the future, or regret for the past.
An example of the importance as context of the metaphysical understanding people bring, or don’t bring, to their lives. Say you attempt to live the rules your church lays down. If you think life is a keeping of accounts against a final score, that’s one view of life. If you think you will be judged good or bad according to how you acted in your life, that is a second. If you think you will be judged good or bad according to your predominant intent during your life, that’s a third. And all these are only alternative ways of understanding the world that share a way of seeing it: One time, one space, separation from others, you as poor soul vis a vis an immortal omniscient God.
And if you belong to no church, and recognize none?
Still you have to deduce the rules . Why are we here? What is right and wrong? What is worth doing?
Exactly, and that process of deduction will result in whatever your conclusions about reality dictate.
Depending on whether we believe in reincarnation, or “past” lives, or one life, then judgment, or life as meaningless accident.
More, if you believe one reality, or an indefinite number of realities; in your being isolated or in your being part of everything; if you apply “as above, so below” to your speculations about life, or not. All those suppositions and conclusions will have their effect. Now, try setting up a church whose rules will apply to everyone. Try setting out a code of conduct or an explanation of the meaning of life that everyone can even understand the same way.
It can’t be done.
Different eyes and ears will see and hear different things, regardless of everyone’s best intent. That’s why there are so many churches, so many philosophies and schools of philosophy, so many competing and contradictory schools of scientific investigation.
So, back to that insight about revisiting our lives.
This needs to be said somewhat carefully, merely because new ideas are easily misunderstood, due to the human tendency to attach anything new to the already existing understanding, rather than considering it on its own.
It’s hard for us to look at anything new in isolation, rather than in terms of what we already know.
And now you understand what the man meant who wrote, “Do not understand me too soon.” Look at a new idea first without agreeing or disagreeing. Taste it, because an unsuspected inertia will want to accept or reject it, probably modifying it behind your awareness. The more slowly you consider something, the more chance of seeing it in unexpected productive ways, even if you reject it in the end. In other words, sometimes the journey is worth more than the destination, and is rarely justified or invalidated by the destination.
When we say, “revisiting your life,” this is what we mean: You live, choosing, reacting, resolving, intending, regretting, acting, not-acting (that is, inert rather than in motion, so to speak), and the present moment moves on. Most past moments are forgotten, or are remembered without emotional charge, and these we are not concerned with here. But some moments, usually moments you are not contented with, burn in memory. Happy moments rarely obsess people; it is what they should have done, or shouldn’t have done, that obsesses them, and the things that happened to them.
The things where we think of ourselves as being acted upon, and not in any good way.
That’s the idea. All the things one stuffs rather than cherishes become potential field to be explored for buried treasure.
Hence, analytical psychology – or confession, I suppose.
Your friend was not wrong in saying, “Self-knowledge is always bad news,” except in making it an absolute. It is true that in 3D life, you tend to avoid touching sore spots; however, it is equally true, as Carl Jung pointed out, that the part of your mind of which your 3D component tends to be unconscious contains greater, not only lesser, versions of your possibilities.
So. Something happens in your past. Someone hurts you, or life delivers a blow, or you hurt someone. Whatever the specifics, it is not a happy memory. Now, perhaps
- you stuff it and never see it again, or
- it pops up anyway, from time to time, or
- it obsesses you and it requires continuous effort to repress, that you may live. Or
- it slumbers until some certain thing wakes it, and it becomes one of the conditions noted above.
How you deal with it, whether as suppressed memory, or active unrelenting obsession, or occasional irritation, or suddenly aroused uncomfortable memory, depends upon your metaphysics, even if that metaphysics expresses in religious terms, or scientific terms, or aesthetic terms.
Walt Whitman admired that animals did not lie in the dark and weep for their sins.
Weeping for your sins implies repentance, yes, but it also assumes that “what’s done is done,” which is true only in the most superficial view of 3D life. It entirely overlooks alternate versions of your timeline, and it entirely overlooks first-, second- and third-tier effects. The first-tier effect happened, and (at least, for any given timeline) that’s that. The second-tier effect, your reaction to the first-tier effect, and the third-tier effect, your changes in response to past reactions, are malleable. They may be altered at any time, and repeatedly. Your life is written in pencil, or chalk, not in indelible ink, not carved into tablets. And this malleability is the clue you needed.
If you move into an altered state of awareness (rather than your normal preoccupation with the “external” world and the present moment), you can relive those key moments, can visualize a different outcome, can pull to yourself a different present reality rooted in a different third-tier experience from that same first-tier event.
This is powerful and easy, if your assumptions do not paralyze you, but it depends upon an understanding of the facts of time and space that most people do not have, and are not taught. If your church or your school of philosophy or your branch of science does not realize that “life is but a dream,” how can they prescribe useful rules of conduct, or construct useful maps of reality to guide you? Yet such rules and maps are necessary and cannot be deferred until the moment that everybody is awake and aware. Hence, your numerous and often contradictory religions and philosophies. No need to postulate malign intent. Lack of knowledge serves just as well.