Friday, September 13, 2019
I have been reading, watching Netflix, and of course thinking of things I’ve read over the years.
And it all makes you feel, as you do so often, that you are living in a lunatic asylum.
I feel like I am living in a world structured on behalf of fools, psychopaths, sociopaths. I recognize that this is only a partial view, and that the good and the quietly strong and sane receive little ink in the world, but still, it’s a lot to live with.
The dissonance you and others are experiencing could be seen as the thinning of internal walls between non-coherent belief systems. You become aware of the contradictions you embody and live with. The result is an improvement in vision, but the process is uncomfortable.
I get that in this we are somehow participating in the group mind of our civilization, going through the same process.
Well, let’s take it a little slowly. Let’s take you as an example. You were born into postwar America, immersed yourself in American history, gradually broadened out your acquaintance to other countries, other times. That was the inner world you concentrated on, not really paying attention to the world you were actually living in.
Everybody constructs road-maps of the world. Not one road-map, but many, each tied to specific kinds of purpose, each tied to different clusters of experience. Thus people have one set of beliefs in one circumstance, another in a second, yet another in a third, and often enough the various road-maps are kept unconnected to the others. You can function this way – you mostly have functioned this way – changing in changing circumstances, not noticing the changes in you, of you.
The multiple “I”s taking turns steering, that Gurdjieff described.
Yes, but in your age, the maps are being superseded by GPS. Now they interact, and contradictions are glaringly obvious, like it or not. Now it is less possible to live with unnoticed internal contradictions. The result may often seem chaotic, but it may be the process of rendering chaos into ordered patterns.
“It hurts but it’s good for you,” so to speak.
It doesn’t even hurt necessarily. Uncomfortable, yes, but sleeping out in the open on a camping trip may be uncomfortable. You do it for the sake of the trip, and you don’t begrudge the discomfort, for the sake of the experience it enables.
I can see 3D life as a camping trip. It isn’t an analogy that had occurred to me before.
Your joke has been that you realized you were in an insane asylum but only became uncomfortable when you realized you weren’t one of the ones carrying keys. In other words, that maybe you belonged there. But there’s truth in the joke, except for the inference that you are as crazy as anybody else. It’s closer to say, the others aren’t any crazier than you are. It is their actions, their manifestations, like yours, that may be incomprehensible to others, which makes them unpredictable, uninterpretable, and therefore menacing.
Are you saying nobody is crazy?
Let’s say crazy is as crazy does. Crazy, like evil, is a part of the 3D condition. The same mind in non-3D manifests differently. It isn’t like you are then surrounded by dangerous criminals and lunatics. Nor, of course, that you appear like that to others. For one thing, the concept of “others” looks very different in surroundings where the concept of “external” is clearly illusory.