Let us begin our long discussion of the forces that influence your lives, and that your lives use in order to make shapes.
Interesting way to think of it.
An analogy: Think of the air you breathe. Chemically, you change its composition; physically, within limits, you direct the outward flow of breathed air. You are not the air, and yet the air is a part of you, but not as a component so much as part of a process. Air flows through you. It is changed in predictable fashion as it does so, but this is not a one-time change, nor an accident, nor an incident: It is a process, and it must continue if you are to live. Eliminate humans and the air continues to exist and be influenced by other beings. But eliminate air and humans die. So you may wish to think of these “vast impersonal forces” we have been mentioning as the equivalent of air to breathe. And in fact the same word is sometimes used for breath and spirit, and that’s what they are talking about.
I thought I understood before, but this is clearer. The soul is us, the created physical beings attached to strands etc. The spirit is the force that flows through us, animating us, interacting with us, but not us.
That’s correct. Spirit both is part of you (because you couldn’t exist without it) and is not a part of you (because it has its own independent existence that would not fail in your absence.)
Compound beings are soul and spirit, localized collections of strands and characteristics, serving as conduits for forces forever beyond them. So now that you are clear on that distinction – you interact with spirit; you embody soul – let us look at the forces flowing through you.
The forces of good and evil, I take it.
Well, not quite. Good and evil may be looked at more as effects than as causes. Remember, God looked at his creation and found it good. He didn’t find it good and evil, he found it good. Evil didn’t enter into the picture until a compound being chose to experience the result of perceiving things as good and evil. Dropping into duality, in other words.
But wasn’t “creation” – the 3D world in its widest ramifications – already by nature dualistic?
Only if experienced – seen – that way.
You’re going to have to explain that.
Oh yes, and it won’t be a brief explanation. By the time we have explained it as best we can, many things will appear in different light.
Remember if you can – the 3D world is not exactly a creation, more like a separation from the larger reality. It is a creation in so far as anything is a creation that is gathered together from a larger, more comprehensive whole, but only in that sense. “The world was created out of nothing” can only mean – nothing like it existed before it was created. That doesn’t mean first there was a vacuum, then there was rubble filling the vacuum.
I get the sense of the 3D world as being a truncated part of reality, and it was the treating the truncated part as if it were a whole that is meant by creation. Is that right, or even partly right?
That is a serviceable interim way to look at it. Remember, there is one reality, not two. The 3D world is part of the All-D, as we are calling it. So if 3D had been created out of nothing, in the way people commonly understand the idea, what of the rest of All-D? Yes, you might imagine that it was created and unnoticed, or was created and somewhat noticed and considered as the spiritual complement of the physical world, but there is no need for so complicated a reaction. Considered as a world in itself, the 3D world came into existence when compound beings were – truncated, I suppose we should say – to experience only so much of reality and no more. But it is not this simple.
I notice it never is.
Over-simplifying is one of the great roots of fanaticism and determined ignorance.
The forces that flow through you manifest as good and evil not so much because it is their nature as because that is your nature. It isn’t spirit that is perceiving things as good and evil; it is your perception, just as was said in the Book of Genesis. But misinterpretation of intent leads to mistranslation and misunderstanding, and a devil of a lot of bad theology is based on logical conclusions from bad translations and incorrect assumptions.
—
This is an edited excerpt from “Only Somewhat Real,” not yet published.