Wednesday, December 11, 2024
4:25 a.m. Okay, let’s see if we can have an actual session. Yesterday’s drumming in the engineers’ group centered on the question, “Why do the things that spark my interest do so?”
Your answer was: “This is worth a full conversation when you are up to it. The question as posed assumes motion and intention, but it would be more accurate to say that the person and the interest are both points within a circle, and the question is more, what connects them. We realize this sounds like the same thing. It will take a while to express, so let’s wait for a quiet morning.”
So, “Why do the things that spark my interest do so?”
Recognition.
That says a lot that has been going through my mind since I got the answer to the question in yesterday’s drumming.
It isn’t that the concept is difficult, nor complicated. It is more that we felt the need to separate and combine a few idea-threads:
- You don’t change who you are, in the course of your 3D life, as we have said previously. You may change emphasis on which aspects you favor or present to the world and to yourself.
- “Who you are” always consists of vastly more than can be expressed. Herein is your freedom, for if you decide you want less of this, more of that, you don’t have to change what you are, you change what you express, that is, what you approve or disapprove among your innate totality of qualities.
- In effect, as we have said many times – in effect, there is no “external,” no “other.” Yet always it will seem so while you are in 3D. Indeed, that is the reason for space/time compression into “here, now.” Dividing yourself into “self” and “other” gives you a way of standing outside yourself, in a way.
- Considering these points, can you see that anything you long for, love, are interested in, admire, hate, fear – all of it is part of you, because you are only sort of individual. You are much closer to being a relationship of qualities held arbitrarily in a given moment of constricted consciousness, the crucible that is here/now.
- Within this unified way of experiencing the world, experiencing life, you see that everything is meaningful, necessarily. There can be nothing disconnected or accidental. Again, this doesn’t predetermine anything: It is there for your decision. “How will I respond to this yearning, this aversion, this abstract curiosity?”
How such attractions manifest is sometimes important, sometimes not, but it is never random.
I take that to mean, major landmarks in our life may be placed there in a way that we can scarcely avoid them, while other things may be left strewn around for us to deal with or not depending upon remote consequences of choices made for quite other reasons.
That makes it sound like littering, but, a reasonable view. Yes, your lives have major vectors predetermined by what you are. As Emerson put it, character is fate. But you aren’t walking a path so much as following an internal homing device.
Ah! And our homing devices may have to accommodate various strands within us, some of which conflict.
Again, opportunities for freedom. The very things that give you problems are the things that give you possibilities.
The analogy that comes to mind is an absurd one. We don’t spend a lot of time wondering whether to use both our arms, nor whether to have the pancreas function. But we may have to fight to control our temper, or our lusts, and we may have to decide whether to invest time and energy in picking up a new skill.
There you are. But the leap you just made may not be obvious to others, nor to you when not intuitively linked.
If we are led toward a new interest, presumably there is a reason for it to be found in our constitution. We recognize at some level (conscious or otherwise) that this new interest would fulfill an incompletion. That’s the light side. But, like “the force,” it has a dark side.. Compulsions.
Well, temptations, anyway. Yes. As we occasionally point out, you are not nearly the rational beings you think yourselves, nor the unvarying uninterrupted awarenesses that you sometimes imagine yourselves to be.
I was thinking about the seven deadly sins the other day, for the first time in a while, remembering that you described the sins as tendencies and the virtues as decisions.
We didn’t put it quite that way, but that’s true enough. A sin is something you fall into. A virtue is something you struggle to live. And you see the important thing.
Oh yes. It is a matter of awareness. A lowered level of consciousness easily falls into habits. It requires conscious awareness to live a decision. Much easier to smoke cigarettes (if you are in that habit) than to cease to do so.
Habits make excellent servants, and terrible masters. Perhaps you could more overtly draw the connection in your mind at the moment between sin and what we have been discussing.
Defining sin as “missing the mark,” and not as some blot on the copybook that is going to be condemned by some God-the-judge-and-jury, it is clear to me (at the moment, anyway) that sin is a “going with the flow” that doesn’t conduce to our benefit because it isn’t our agenda, but the agenda of habit, or robot, or lowered level of consciousness.
I remember the sins by my acronym LEG CAPS or LEG CAPE, standing for Lust, Envy, Gluttony, Covetousness, Anger, Pride, and either Sloth or Ennui depending on which you cite. It is clear that even at their most intense – and of course they can have overwhelming intensity, leaving us all but helpless – they are not the result of any conscious decision, but are always something welling up from below.
And thus churches had good reason to condemn them in people.
Well – I’m not sure it is ever productive to condemn others. And I don’t like the whole God-as-judge-and-jury thing. But as a practical matter, I can see that these are obstacles that need to be fought. Only, fighting things for the wrong reasons may cause more problems than it solves.
Yes indeed. Why else are we spending this time suggesting other ways for you to see things? The older ways have had their possibilities tried and exhausted, and the time is ripe for new approaches based in a new overall understanding.
There is much more to be said about sin and the struggle within yourself to express your values. In a sense it could be said that sin, like evil, like pain and suffering, presents opportunity.
Yes, I see that. And if one is concentrating on the world as if it were the important, the real, thing, one sees pain and suffering and says, “Something is broken.” Otherwise, we see that all is well even when all is not good.
And enough for now.
First session in a while. Feels good. Thanks.