18. Coexistence and feedback

Tuesday, May 14, 2024

6:25 a.m. Shall we proceed? The interaction of threads through time, you said, and among different ages and organizing principles.

The world – reality – is more of one piece in its diversity than may appear, and one reason for it (or one consequence, if you wish to look at it differently) is that all ages, all points of view, are alive. It is not mostly dead or as yet uncreated except for one sliver called the present moment. It is all alive, all the time. And this has consequences, some of which are not obvious. It is a continuous contention among influences. The way of seeing things that died out ages ago (as seen through 3D time-slices) is still alive and well. The way of seeing that has not yet formed in your moment is still alive, or you would say is already alive.

Obviously there is no way of making sense of this if you think time moves, as it appears to. We trust that no one reding this is still captive to that way of seeing things, or nothing of this can make sense.

There are so many unsuspected complications, that add richness to life:

• Your “past life” components – the threads that flourish in a different time-slice – bring to your mental life the assumptions and formulations and predilections of their age.
• It isn’t that they are hitch-hiking on your life, watching. They are contributing.
• What is the contribution of another point of view? It is another way of experiencing the world, it is not merely opinions and preferences.
• You are made up not only of opinions but of visceral responses, many of which may clash violently, some of which may be closer to mutual incomprehension, and up and down the scale of cooperation and conflict.
• As a boy you liked cufflinks and what you would now consider overly dressy clothes. You were equally at home in dungarees and flannel shirts. You may look at this as different preferences, or you may look a little deeper and ask why the preferences.
• Similarly, your political attitudes. The surface manifestations varied by time and circumstance, but you came from the same place [this meant, the manifestations reflected the same values] despite contradictions. How is that?
• And different people are combinations of different values, similarly. How is that, that everyone’s combination differs? Yes, it is because everybody is different, but – why are they different? And – how are they made different?

So let’s do some abstract thinking.

What is the practical effect of the simultaneous existence within you all of different ages?

Interesting way to put it, “different ages,” but I see why you put it that way. If I have a caveman in my family tree of strands, he isn’t just a point of view – he is an active vote on what I am and what I can do and what I may wish to become.

Yes – and you are an active vote within him. You will have to ignore the cognitive dissonance here, if you wish to explore this. Take in the argument first, and criticize it later. Or, if you can’t help criticizing as we go along, remember to stop while you criticize, and resume only when you are ready to perceive again. Perception and analysis: both necessary, but you can’t do both at the same time. If you try to do so, probably you will end up carping at our argument as you go, poking holes. It will do you no good at all. First play along, then see what you feel about it.

Now, it will probably help you to remember at this point that reality is all mind-stuff. It is not an uneasy alliance between mind and matter. Many of the hardest obstacles to understanding disappear if you hold in mind that what seems like physical reality – the journal book, the pen, the computer, the coffee – are mind-stuff; that you and everything are mind-stuff, rather than the separated material you appear to be.

I think we’ve gotten that. As you have said, we’re real, but only somewhat real. Reality is deeper than 3D appearances.

Still, you’d be surprised how often the idea of “things in space” recurs, because your sensory experience is continually assuming it. A reminder every so often seems worthwhile.

The fact that all of reality is mind-stuff rather than some of it being one thing and some being another will be best held in mind as you consider the idea of contact across time and across space and across your mental worlds.

The fascist or Nazi or Stalinist or Maoist world-view is alive and active. The faith in the common man of Lincoln and Jefferson is alive. The belief in the divine ordination of human slavery is alive. The sense of the world as a pit of horrors, or a den of perpetual temptation, or a garden of delight, or a valley of tears – it is all alive.

Anything that anyone ever experienced is alive. This is not a metaphor, not a figure of speech. Just as you are not units but are communities, so those communities are not divided between an active link and passive observers, but are true connections.

I get that you are saying communities in more ways than associating. I get hierarchies, structures? Classes, castes, almost? Specializations?

Yes provided you do not allow your thought to become too concrete. Don’t think in terms of trade unions or political movements or social structures in the sense of fixed organizations, but what is there, always, is hierarchy, organization.

Fluid, though, I take it.

Fluid but not shapeless. Are your lives in 3D shapeless? Could they be? But fluid, to be sure. The most stable among you still experiences flow in what you are.

I was about to ask, when you answered before I finished phrasing the question in my mind, let alone putting it on paper. The question was going to be, Why. The answer I got was, Regulation. I had the sense of a vast machine maintaining itself via feedback from all its components.

The fact that an analogy pretty much has to be either mechanical or organic is an unfortunate constriction of language. Either one has its suggestive and its misleading points. Life is not a machine (lifeless), but it is not exactly organic either. It is above either end of that polarity. Perhaps the best way to think of it is indirectly. You know how sometimes people explain the body as if it were a machine. That is more or less the case here. Not really mechanical, but with analogies to a machine’s active and interactive subassemblies working together to a pattern and for a purpose. But the machine has no will of its own, and here the analogy breaks down.

Does it, though? What about artificial intelligence, as an analogy? Isn’t that a sort of machine becoming ever more sophisticated?

That’s a good question for another time. The point here is that every bit of reality serves potentially as feedback for every other bit of reality. As always, no absolute divisions. A thing once thought, once imagined, once experienced, once fantasized in connection with something else – remains. It lives. It is a part of reality evermore. Cayce said thoughts are things. He didn’t mean they are objects. He meant they are real, and have real consequences. Mostly, people think of this in terms of present-tense action, but it is far deeper than that.

We are at a place to pause, I think. But where do we go from here?

Well, where do you suppose all this contention and cooperation and coexistence leads? What is it for? We’ll probably continue from that question, though not definitely.

This is quite a ride. Very well, our thanks as always, for all this.