Monday, May 27, 2024
5 a.m. Gentlemen?
You will see from your effort just now to help your friend that this material has put everything into question, just as it did for Rita. Describe it when you transcribe this, so that people will have the context.
I woke up from a dream in which I was telephoned (by a hospital, I think) and urgently told to bring my neighbor Don there. (He had died Wednesday morning) They gave me an address which I thought was close but which turned out to be at the other end of the state. When I knocked at his bedroom door, he was surprised, not ready, and I think that’s where the dream ended and I woke up. So I thought, maybe this was a call for a retrieval. But when I came back a few minutes later, I still didn’t know. I think I did contact him, but rather than go through the usual drill, I told him if he wanted to stay around for a while, fine, but when he is ready to move, he should consult his instincts (rather than his reasoning) on how to go home. I don’t know why I was moved to put it just that way, but it seemed appropriate.
It cannot be expected that a new view will revolutionize any one neat division of your life and not all. How could it? What we are looking at here is a revolution of your psychic interpretational structure – we know this term doesn’t mean anything to you yet – and not merely a rearrangement of data, nor even a rearrangement of how past and present and future data is to be interpreted.
“Psychic interpretational structure.” You’re right, it seems to have meaning, but I don’t know what it will prove to be.
Nor will you understand it from any one session. It will reveal its meaning in layers, which of course means, over time. Just as Jung’s terms took time to percolate to the outside world, just as any trade has its specific argot, so any new way of seeing things will generate a new vocabulary perforce, because you cannot well describe a new thing using only old vocabulary. In fact, not only vocabulary but sometimes grammar and other framework need to be tortured into a new ability to express what had been inexpressible for lack of supporting context.
You have always gone out of your way, it seems to me – I know I have, on this end – to avoid generating specialized vocabulary beyond the bare necessity. We have been keeping it simple, and that has served.
Yes, and serves still. The ones who will apply this new way of seeing to their respective specialties will generate specialized vocabularies as the developing situation requires. Our job was to keep it simple stupid. But OTOH you don’t stay at the beginner’s level forever. Little by little, things more complicated, more nuanced, less obviously connected, need expression. It’s natural.
So what do we mean in referring to a psychic interpretational structure?
It sounds like “the mental habits that structure the world to us.”
Not a bad place to start. Very well, let’s think together. How do your habits structure the world you perceive?
It’s obvious enough. In fact, you have told us more than once. We have filters that allow certain input into consciousness and not other input. This, on a pre-conscious level, obviously, means we only see as much as we have previously determined to see.
You might better say, you see only as much as predetermined limits allow you to see. But who and what set these limits? We don’t mean, Name the person responsible. We mean, What are the factors involved? How does it happen that you can think this but not that, can perceive this but not that, can credit this but not that idea?
Can’t you just spell it out?
We could (and will) set out some hints, but it is always better if you work at it, construct your own bridges.
I get:
- Our heredity via strands
- Astrological limitations on our psyche
- Societal shared beliefs unconsciously accepted.
I imagine there are more, but these come to mind. And, I’m not sure how any of them operate to create a structure in the psyche. I know little about psychology and nothing about the physiology of consciousness.
This is a good starting-place – and, don’t neglect to ponder how you want about answering our question.
Oh, as usual I just dredged. I held the question in mind and waited for something to surface. I didn’t construct chains of logic, if that is what you mean. I don’t do that very well.
Au contraire, you do it very well, but you do not do it at the beginning. First you let things surface, then you examine them to see how they may make sense. This is one way to think, and it works well for those fishing in the dawn or in the twilight. Those who fish at midday use other techniques better suited to those conditions.
Nor is this a detour. The question of how one thinks relates closely to the question of how one does or does not admit date into consideration.
I see that. The midday thinker wants (needs?) things plain and simple, well-defined. The half-light thinker is drawn to interpreting half-seen, indeterminate, ambiguous possibilities.
And midday thinking, as you call it, is impatient of half-light data. Half-light thinkers are bored with midday data that is interpreted in an inadmissibly flat take-it-or-leave-it way.
Could the human race, or any part of it, do well by not employing both strategies, or is it better served by having both at its disposal? And what more convenient than to have the two functions unevenly distributed among individuals, so that the usual competition/cooperation may manifest?
I can already see that I will title this conversation. “Midday and half-light thinkers,” or perhaps “thinking.” It is a clearer view than I have had of a division that is surely obvious to everyone.
Maybe not. Wait till the session is over, and look back at it, as usual. Perhaps the center of gravity will be elsewhere.
So your initial description of what factors set the limits of what you perceive included three factors. But even by now, only a few moments later, further possibilities will have occurred to you while you concentrated on this discussion. (Physical heredity, for instance.) How can this happen? How is it that your minds can work on more than one level?
I gather that this “working on more than one level” is distributed quite unevenly. Einstein in his old age lamented that he was no longer able to think on more than three or four levels at a time – dumbfounding his interlocutor, who drily wrote that he himself had no experiences of such diminishment, never having been able to think on more than one level at a time.
Yes, now write your suspicions.
Well, as I was writing that, I thought, probably we do think on many levels, but aren’t aware of it, unlike Einstein, who was. I mean by that, maybe Einstein was different more in his awareness of various levels of thinking, and not merely in the exceptional ability he also possessed.
Everybody who reads this (or read anything) has the experience of ideas popping up as they read. Mostly they ignore them. Sometimes they get diverted by them and need to return their attention after proceeding down the garden path. Some are able to entertain both at the same time, and some are able to entertain more than two, some more easily than others.
It certainly happens to me, here. I would be getting something from you, and getting a thought reacting to it perhaps, or anticipating it, and having a side-trail open up as something suggests something else, non-logically, but not at random, and hearing my next question or statement well up. And all the while, sometimes hesitating between expressing your thought by this word or that one. It’s really quite intricate as you look at it, but it’s mostly automatic.
One prime use of meditation is to break the trance that persuades you that your moment-to-moment conscious mind is linear and logical.
Next time we should start by looking at your proposed factors in setting your mental limits:
- Strand heredity;
- Astrological limitations;
- Social understandings.
Are you still sure you want to call this “Midday and half-light thinking”?
I’ll need to look at it. Our thanks for all this, as always.