TGU — 3D and non-3D in history

Tuesday, June 7, 2016

F: 5 a.m. Matters seem to be proceeding nicely, despite curiosity about who you are and what your connection to me or us may be, so do continue.

TGU: Very well. What I have to tell you is not so very complicated. The hardest part of telling people something new is getting them to realize that it has something new in it, and it is not the same old thing come round again. The impulse to say “this is nothing but—” is very strong.

F: Mostly what we hear is the same old thing, come around again.

TGU: How would you know? If the impulse to see it that way puts a filter in front of you and you see things through that filter  — how would you know?

F: I see your point. And yet —

TGU: I am not saying that most “new” things are not rehashes of old things – I am merely pointing out that it is not safe to trust your instincts that say so, if you know that the bias may be there. In such cases – cases where you have identified a perceptual bias – you will have to examine carefully what may seem obvious (because of the filter you are trying to see through) but may not be so in fact.

F: That implies that our filters as individuals determine what aspects of truth we are naturally open to, and which ones we are naturally closed to, or skeptical of – and even in the course of writing out the sentence, I realize that it is obvious.

TGU: Obvious when stated or heard, not so obvious when your conscious attention has been drawn to other things and this thought has been forgotten.

F: No, I see that.

TGU: Your explorations – not just you as an individual but you as part of the present state of world culture – have led to incompatible conclusions, which is always an infallible sign of too limited a scope, or of error in the interpretation, or both.

Traditional explanations of life were centered on meaning in a way that strikes the secular philosophy of your time as naïve. And yet that “naïve” assumption that the gods cared about the individual were not naïve in the sense of being inaccurate because uninformed, only in the sense of proceeding from inadequate definitions. And, in fact, the farther you go behind monotheistic religions, the more insights you can find, because perceptions had not been sacrificed to consistency.

Monotheism is an organizing principle, and a powerful one. I do not imply that it was a dead end or a detour or even an error. The error lies in stopping at what is always a new starting place.

That is, monotheism cleared out what had become a jungle of gods and conflicting forces that were liable to choke the life out of those who took their belief systems for unchallenged reality. In a way, you might say that monotheism came to clear the ground a bit, so that humans could have freedom to develop new aspects of their lives. The peoples who ceased to believe in Baal and Moloch and personified forces of nature were thereby freed to experience the world differently, and for a while any new clearing like that has more positive than negative aspects. (Even that statement, you should realize, is a culture-bound judgement.) it is only when a belief – a way of seeing the world – becomes unchallenged that it becomes more strait-jacket than protective sheath.

Bear in mind in discussing this, your non-3D aspects are not sleeping or non-existent or uncaring in such matters. You in 3D feel strong impulses in certain directions that come from your own non-3D components – leading you, nudging you, suggesting to you, so that you may be more open to certain new possibilities than you might be otherwise. Is that not what is happening to you right this instant? So when Jewish tribes overwhelm the natives in Canaan or wherever, the non-3D aspects of all concerned may have very different agendas than are obvious to those contending in 3D. When Christianity or Islam spring up out of the existing accepted order (plus an unassimilated chaos beyond the accepted order), again the non-3D s actively participating in the dance, regardless whether anyone in 3D recognizes it or not. When religious unity is lost and serious rifts arise, almost to the point of developing different religions within the religions – Shia and Sunni, or Catholic and Protestant, or Orthodox and non-orthodox Judaism – still the non-3D is involved, and for good reason.

One the one hand, any 3D “individual” must be (and is) left to play out his or her free will. It is in order to develop and exercise that free will, after all, that the Soul, “the individual,” has been created.

But on the other hand there are tides in the affairs not only of the 3D but of the no-3D (and there will come a time when it is obvious that it must be so in one if in the other) that bias us toward certain outcomes over others. So it becomes a matter of the non-3D aspects leading without coercing. Persuading, you might say, or even enticing, rather than forcing or even pushing or pulling.

It is between those two necessities that human life proceeds, with “individuals” developing according to their choices and societies developing according to a confluence of forces that are mixtures of cooperation and conflict, proceeding from what you might see as “natural or 3D causes and “supernatural” or non-3D biases. Thus, for instance, the first world war, in order to break the stranglehold of a certain way of being in the world, to liberate so many complementary or contradictory manifestations.

So if you look at your wars and cooperations, your trauma –

F: That was getting too rhetorical.

TGU: Yes it was. Thank you for catching it.

So you may see that when you may condemn in history as madness or savagery or just plain evil may be, at the same time, just that and yet may have other aspects seen or unseen.

F: Doing evil that good may come?

TGU: You might look at it that way, or you might more profitably see it as the usual compromise between agendas, with an overriding, or sometimes an underlying, bias toward certain results.

F: I know where you are going, and not only do I sense other people’s resistance to the moral of the story, I somewhat share it.

TGU: Nobody said you have to like it. I only say, if you cannot bend to consider the viewpoint, there are things you cannot understand.

F: And besides, death doesn’t mean to you what it does to us, nor suffering.

TGU: That’s true but it is also silly. It is putting off on us – as if we were different from you – what you shirk from assuming.

F: All right, true enough. If you want me to say it, I will. You mean that when the ancient Jews experienced God as saying, “Exterminate the following people and take their land,” or “kill all the men and assimilate the women and children as slaves,” they really did hear God’s voice, in a way. When the Muslims did similar things, or Christians, they really did respond to divine promptings.

TGU: When any mass movement erupts in the 3D world, it has a very narrow and shallow intellectual rationalization and a broad and deep emotional impetus, and if you think that impetus comes only from sociological or economic or ideological sources, you are falling into the same blunders as the materialists you decry. Rightly decry, I might add.

F: So Hitler, Stalin, Mao, the Spanish Inquisition, the Iraq-Iran War, the French reign of terror, were all perfectly fine, just business as usual, don’t worry about it?

TGU: Calm down a little. Nobody is asking you to defend anything, just to look at it from a new point of view. I am saying they don’t mean what you think they mean, and they cannot be understood in their own context nearly as well as they may be understood in a new context, which I am prepared to provide. Remember, all these cataclysms have two aspects – what they do to the individuals involved, and what they do to the cultures they occur in, which is a secondary indirect form of “what they do to the individuals involved.”

F: It has been an hour, but I get the sense that this is a bad time to stop.

TGU: For fear that you’ll not find the thread next time? Don’t worry about that. We’ll hold the page. All I need to add right now is that the discussion is part of a larger discussion, remember, which is how to tie in various contradictory theories and experiences of what it means to live in the world and then beyond the world

F: I’ll keep it in mind. Very well, then, till next time when we resume with The Conceptual Perils of Pauline.