Wednesday May 4, 2016
F: 10:30 a.m. So, Miss Rita, too late today?
R: The time constraints – and the energy constraints – are on your side, not mine.
F: Shall we continue, then? Were you going to go into the similarities between all created beings?
R: We can approach the subject, but this is not your strong point.
F: Theory?
R: Well, careful dissection of logical derivations, say.
F: Did I get that right?
R: Close enough.
All things that exist in 3D or in non-3D were created. There is no such thing as “creation out of nothing,” only creation out of the range one is considering. So, the 3D world came into being not out of nothing but out of what would seem to be nothing because it transcended the field of interest.
F: I think you just said, the 3D is a part of something larger (or deeper, or however we should think of it) and is created out of that larger thing – but in strictly 3D terms, there was no 3D there before it was created.
R: You see the difficulties, partly of language, partly of 3D logic.
F: I do. And I see why so many logical conundrums arise from people using the wrong starting-points and assumptions.
R: Still, we can get at it.
The 3D is a part of the All-D, as we have said. As such, it always existed even before specifically created.
F: Meaning, I think, it was there but maybe is only seen as a unit when our field of vision (so to speak) is restricted to its terms.
R: That’s right. If you watch a play on stage, it only works for you to the extent that your attention focuses within the world on stage. To the extent that you remain aware of the audience, or other things in your mental world that are beyond the stage action, it is less effective. So, in that sense, you could say the play only exists to the extent that you concentrate on it. If you are daydreaming through it, or bored by it, or sleeping through it, it exists so much the less for you.
Now, this is true at any level you care to consider it. A novel and its characters are real only so much as they are real to you. But that sentence says more than may be immediately apparent.
F: Yes, I get it. We as receivers are part of the creation process.
R: Yes – but go slowly here. Let us take [author C.S. Forester’s character Horatio] Hornblower. Millions of people have received Hornblower’s image into their mental world over a span of years approaching 80. Of those millions or hundreds of millions, only a certain percentage made him real enough to live among them. For others, he was a one-time acquaintance, but for a certain number he was a continuing person. I don’t mean that they thought about him all the time, but that he had a place in their mental world that could be revived by an association of ideas, or deepened by a re-reading or by the acquaintance of another story about him, or a movie or any cultural reference.
On one hand, perhaps no two people envision him exactly the same. On the other hand, he is described very precisely, very carefully, so everyone begins with the same data (in so far as he himself is concerned; however, they may have wildly different ideas and associations about the Napoleonic Wars, and England, thus changing who he is experienced to be).
So what is Hornblower? He never lived in 3D. He was invented or intuited by a specific author who himself lived in 3D but of course existed out of the non-3D and thought with a mind in the non-3D. So, say that Hornblower was as real as a painting by Corot, or Monet, or Jackson Pollack, as real as a building in Palladian style, or a photograph, or a symphony.
You see? He is a creation, and has life in the way other creatures – artistic or otherwise – have life.
F: I see the argument, but it seems strained.
R: It is an analogy, not an identity. Because you must bear in mind, you are a creation, as well. You were thought together out of elements 3D and non-3D. You form a seeming unit, you are reacted to by others, which interaction affects both you and them. You in turn create – children of your body, children of your mind and spirit, and these creations interact with the world in their turn.
It is to bring you to a sense of yourself as flow that I am saying this. You are process, created and creating.
F: Bucky Fuller compared us to knots in a rope – patterns using matter but not confined to it. He also said, “I seem to be a verb.”
R: If you will remember that any interaction is an inter-action and not a matter concerning only one side (only yourself, that is), you will come closer to understand how a creation like Hornblower may be said to exist in reality.
F: Having to think about that. It seems to hinge upon the fact that our reaction to something is almost part of that something.
R: It is a part. Nothing exists in isolation, and the fact that a given thing means different things to different people does not mean it is ever-changeable. It means that nothing is anything in particular without context.
F: So Hornblower is sort of suspended between C.S. Forester and anyone who reads the stories.
R: That’s right – and even though he will be at least somewhat different for each different person, each version will be valid.
F: Even if the reader doesn’t know any English history, or French history for that matter?
R: Or know anything or care anything about naval realities or warfare or 18th century life. That’s right. The richer the knowledge the reader brings to the story, the richer his understanding of, experience of, Hornblower — but it is the relation that determines the result, not Hornblower in isolation, not Forester as creation.
F: That’s only six pages, but I think that’s enough for now, don’t you?
R: It’s always up to you, but this does make a discrete unit.
F: Very well, thanks and till next time.