Tuesday, May 7, 2019
When we think of the 3D as a dream, we don’t usually think in terms of galaxies and nebulae and all that as being ephemeral. But they would have to be, of course. Given that you probably prompted the thoughts, you want to take off on it?
Yes. As a general rule it is important periodically to go back and connect ideas that have been kept in separate buckets. Some ideas won’t be reconciled, but it’s worthwhile to find your inconsistencies. Other ideas may shed light upon one another, and this is all to the good. Not everything even within one context will automatically sort itself out. You will need to do some work at it – but it is very productive work.
So reincarnation and quantum mechanics and evolution and coincidence theory and the concerns of everyday life, and consultations with the guys – it is all input, it is all data, it all provides clues. Or (same data, different way of looking at it) it is all sand in the gears, all confusion twice compounded. But even confusion twice compounded may be turned to account! There isn’t any such thing as bad luck or dead ends except in a context that expects or demands certain results that the universe declines to provide.
A factor that comes to the forefront is the disparity between the temporal limits of 3D life and the lack of such limits outside of 3D. Life in the world v. the afterlife; time v. eternity. And (so you won’t have to say it), Eternity is a word meaning not “a very long time,” but outside of time, superior to time, existing in a dimension beyond time.
This is a religious question. We have been bringing you along for years to get you to the point where you can consider religious questions as religious questions, without falling into reflexive dismissal or (most unlikely) retreat into sectarian dogma.
We would have you connect to religious thought as it has been expressed over the centuries. There is no use pretending that things that millions of people have believed over thousands of years are obviously ridiculous, or fatuous, or superstitious. Any given teaching may be any of these things, but that is true of any avenue of thought. If you will not mesh your own metaphysics with religious teachings through the ages, you cannot progress toward truth beyond a certain point. Judging how far a given teaching differs from where you begin, and condemning it proportionate to the extent of the difference, isn’t coordinating and it certainly isn’t learning. It is merely reinforcing one’s own prejudice. No one is as impartial as he thinks himself, it is merely that he defines his position as the rational, reasonable center. But to become aware of a defect is to begin to see how to overcome it.
No one is impartial, because that would require a lack of preference that is impossible in 3D conditions. But one may be partial without hating what one does not extend to. (One can love one’s country without hating or fearing foreigners. ) To move to another level of understanding, you must to some degree sacrifice your comfort with your religious (or anti-religious) preferences. The world is wider than your idea of it. When we advise you to begin to absorb religious tenets, we are easily misunderstood. Perhaps we should begin by detailing what we do not mean.
Religions are compounded of a view of reality, and prescribed rules of conduct. Not the same thing. Are we agreed?
Of course. The Catholic Church held certain views that did not have to result in all its rules. Some of them were (are?) arbitrary. If there is a God with certain attributes and expectations, it does not necessarily follow that one should not eat meat on Friday.
And does it necessarily follow that one need follow the ten commandments, even if one remembers them?
I expect you are about to tell me.
No, we are not. We’re making a different point entirely. Our point here is, Don’t go picking and choosing among a church’s rules and prohibitions. Some may be arbitrary, some may stem from a misinterpretation of reality, some may have become inappropriate through changes in human condition, some may have served validly to distinguish a sect from its neighbors but had no greater purpose.
Well, by that token, I can’t see that we can pick among their tenets, either. One religion will pick one aspect of divinity (whatever `divinity’ may mean) and another a different, perhaps contradictory, aspect. Islam centers on submission to fate. Christianity, on living in love. Judaism, on living up to a compact with God. Manicheism, on living in a dualistic world. And so on.
True enough, but as soon as a church springs up, it has to minister to people of many different levels of development, with different needs, different responses. Codes of law emerge, and direct experience with the divine (again, whatever that is) may become exceedingly rare, and may be actively discouraged. And, as with any human institution – as you have often pointed out – politics soon enters, and compromise. All these factors will affect any religion, even before one considers corruption, or hypocrisy, or any of the human failings that inevitably infect any human endeavor. Scientists in their organizations follow the same pattern. So do politicians, mathematicians, professionals, club members – anything. It is just human nature.
So, no picking and choosing among a given church’s prohibitions.
It is deeper than that. You yourself can’t exist in a church. You can’t regress to living by belief in the same way you did. While it is true that your knowledge will always be limited, thus leaving you living in faith de facto, the word “faith” needs looking at, to sort out confusion among meanings. Faith cannot be mandated. You cannot just say “I am going to believe” and that’s that. It can look like you can, but it is closer to abandoning resistance to faith. You see the point?
Sometimes life pushes you to a conclusion that you don’t want to come to. You fight it tooth and nail until you are too tired, and when you give in, you wonder why you weren’t able to do so long before. I take it that is what you mean by abandoning resistance.
Surely you can see that this is a very different psychological process from willing yourself to believe. Until recently, most people who could not live by faith wound up living what you might call “faith in nothingness” or “faith in absence of meaning.” They couldn’t have faith in God or their religion, but they couldn’t live without faith either, so they transferred it to other things – to chance, to Evolution, to Progress, to the coming revolution, whatever. It’s still living in faith, if you do or don’t know what you have faith in. Some believe that their faith is in Knowledge. But this is a dangerous pitfall. Beware of making idols of abstractions. Your task is to learn to live in a very different kind of faith. Perhaps we should say, living in trust. They sound similar but are very different.
I’d say it’s the difference between talking to someone in the non-3D only if you can call it a name and identify it as a person, or talking to TGU and instead of asking for bona fides, taking what comes and then trying to weigh it.
A very good analogy.