Monday, September 2, 2024
4:25 a.m. Okay, Jon, ready if you are. Looking back, I see on Friday we left off with the question of who is holding the scales, and for what. Referring to our lives as conduits of vast impersonal forces. What is it all about in its own terms?
Always keep in mind, we are talking in circles here. We go over the same thing time after time, but every time is just a little bit different, and the differences add up.
Was that you, or me?
Maybe you haven’t quite made the link. Nothing harmed. Try again.
Okay. I do “hear” your voice though, not just the words or the meanings.
That should give you confidence. The thing we’re always looking at is, what is the meaning of life, and what is the meaning of one’s own life, and what is the extent and range of the life. That is, is life an in-and-out or is it reincarnation, etc.
Now, the strings metaphor served us well to get us out of the conventional reincarnation model of one life moving to the next. But now let’s go beyond it, remembering that this world is all mind-stuff. By the way, that means the non-3D as well as the 3D. That ought to be obvious, since we have agreed that they interpenetrate, and therefore are more poles to a magnet than different things. Not that they’re “things” in any case.
Since everything is mind-stuff, with the 3D being a more concrete form of dream, it may be more productive to see it as an eternal swirling than as units. And this means that each life is a swirl, an energy-pattern, almost you might say an abstraction, rather than a “thing” even if you define “thing” as energy, or soul, or avatar or whatever.
And that means, even the idea of past lives still being alive in their own present is a metaphor. It isn’t really that way because reality isn’t that way; it is what reality can look like when you retain certain incorrect assumptions in the back of your mind.
This is one reason why you can’t really reconcile a present moment that is separated from all other present moments, all of them alive. This concept contains hidden assumptions that mislead.
And it’s nearly impossible to express.
Well, you’re feeling it, intuiting it, because we are linked. That is probably the best anybody can do, is intuit, because the words deaden and mislead and separate.
But we can try.
That’s what we are doing, but I’m saying, we can’t really succeed at it. The best we can do is turn people’s minds to where maybe they can intuit.
I get that it’s a matter of clearing away wrong concepts.
Yes, except you could very nearly say they’re all wrong concepts. Not just the ones we’re talking about, but everything. That’s why the Tao is described in terms of what it isn’t. The master knew it couldn’t be described; the best he could do is name some mistaken ideas and say, “Nope, not that either.”
I get that the root of the difficulty is that we can’t really get out of our own way. We try to imagine different terrain but we’re always relating it to what our senses tell us, or what we think we know, or what we have been told that great teachers said.
Well, chew on this, see how far you get:
- There is no matter, no energy, no past or future.
- Consciousness is not what it seems to be; almost the opposite.
- Nothing has weight or substance. There is nothing solid nor fluid nor gaseous nor plasmic in life except conceptually.
- History is real and also non-existent. I don’t mean recorded history, I mean what actually happened, recorded or remembered or not.
- There is no place to stand and no need for one.
- There is no plural, not really, only provisionally. Therefore, no judge, no jury, no defendant, no prosecutor. Also no rewards or penalties.
- And yet, in effect, there are.
That should be enough to start with.
Shall we go through them in order?
We pretty much have to, but bear in mind, all it will do is add to confusion – until, for some, a sudden leap to new assumptions that may straighten it out.
I am aware that the entire process proceeds as if we were plural, etc. I get that the best we can do is follow your ideas without arguing, until they suddenly make sense or never do.
Argument may be how some people bring themselves to the point where intuition kicks in. You can’t tell. In any case, they’ll have their own non-3D nature prompting them.
So, I’ve numbered them, replacing the bullets.
- Life, reality, is really different from what it appears to be. We aren’t just playing with words. No matter, no energy. (E=mc2, remember; they are the same thing.) No past, no future, only “now.” But “now” does not imply a time and a place, it means closer to a being suspended in mid-air.
- Consciousness proceeds by isolating you from almost all input. It is why you feel yourself separate from “others.” It is why you feel the “material world” as external to you, and the “spiritual world” as separate from the rest of life. Higher, greater, consciousness is by way of opening the valves that produced consciousness in the first place by closing off the overwhelming input that would make it not possible to function as 3D humans.
- There just isn’t anything substantial. “Life is but a dream,” and if it is sometimes a nightmare, it is because you have to take it seriously.
- What happened led to where you are, but it wasn’t any more substantial than you are. How could it be? So it is real, it is tangible, is a filament to the web; but it is not any more real than the rocks and clouds and ideas and passions around you and within you.
- Again, the word is “suspended.” If you look at life as if it were as it seems, you will see “here” and “there”; “now” and “then”; “I” and “other.” Very persuasive and entirely untrue except in appearance.
- “All is one.” That’s what it means. In the absence of plurality, all the relationships between items, between qualities, between individuals, may be seen as what they are: provisional at best, and mostly illusion.
- And yet, in effect, the world is as you experience it, which is one reason why it is so hard to get beyond the illusion.
That’s quite a lot, packed tight.
It has to be packed as tight as possible, because it is hard for people to keep long strings in mind at the same time. But a master would put all this in many fewer words. The disadvantage of that is that it makes it harder for people to climb aboard the train.
Bronson Alcott’s Orphic Sayings. They turned out to have quite a bit of meaning, but they were so compressed – took so much for granted, or anyway were so elliptical – that I can see why they didn’t have the impact they should have had.
He did the best he could. That’s all anybody can do.
Well, thanks for all this. It’ll take some chewing.