TGU — a sense of sin as GPS system

Sunday, June 19, 2016

F: 3:30 a.m. I am remembering when things took a theological turn in 2006 and I bought a two-inch thick Catechism, thinking I could use that as a crib sheet, and scarcely looked into it and haven’t looked into it since. It did tell me about the four cardinal virtues, I remember that, and I remember being surprised to find out what they were, they seemed so little theological in the sense that “God commands this, or else,” and instead seemed – well, practical, helpful, a set of guidelines. Temperance, Justice, Prudence, and Fortitude. It wasn’t what I expected. Anyway, I hope you know where you are wanting to go.

TGU: Hold closely to the orienting thought. A sense of sin can be used to show the links between two ways of seeing the All-D. You have had a sense of how individual life is eternal at one level; we are exploring how it is eternal as part of something larger, and we can so

F: I went drifting.

TGU: All we want to accomplish is to show you as both your own bundle and as also part of the next larger being, and show how cross-purposes and tensions arise from your riding two horses at once, or rather from your being two horses at once. One way to do this is to examine one common symptom of the strain, a sense of sin. Another would be a sense of being an orphan in the universe, but we are pursuing a sense of sin, at the moment.

F: I’ll suppress the joke that comes to mind. But if a sense of sin arises from the conflict between two layers, and it is “as above, so below,” wouldn’t such a sense be evident all up and down the great chain of being?

TGU: No. It is unique to this level of being, because the interface between 3D and non-3D is the cause of the strain. Your cells and organs have no sense of sin relative to you as an organism, and the higher (larger) being that you are part of has no such sense relative to what it is a constituent part of. It is only at this level, and if you will think about it, perhaps you will see why.

F: What comes to mind, immediately, is that 3D conditions of separation and of sequence must be at fault.

TGU: Not “at fault,” exactly – there is no sense finding fault with the universe – but essential to the discontinuity, yes.

F: So why aren’t larger beings neurotic too, given that they contain so many of us neurotics – oh, I think I got it.

TGU: As usual, it will be easiest if you do the work of spelling it out in sequential logic – that is, in words – and we then comment or correct as need be.

F: Well, I haven’t thought this through, of course (which for me would be more a process of feeling for relationship than of constructing logical chains), but I suppose the key fact is that no matter how nuts we as individual strands are, the next larger being functions in non-3D – it has no physical body, so is not living under conviction of the reality of separation and sequential time – and these conditions are the prerequisite for neurosis.

TGU: You’d better say some more.

F: How do you lie or feel resentment outside of the 3D conditions that make us feel alone (isolated) and not, or not only, a part of a whole? So if you are a larger being living in non-3D, comprising strands (entire lifetimes, at our level) that were shaped in 3D conditions, I suppose you would be aware of where they were warped, but would not share that warped quality.

TGU: Well, not quite so fast, not quite so easy. You have seen what you are thinking of as warps in a strand’s character manifest in that strand’s continuing interaction strand-to-strand, so to speak. What you are, as you are, does not necessarily change merely by your dropping the body. What may change is your viewpoint, as you integrate your viewpoint with the rest of what you always have been connected to but may not have suspected. And sometimes a “departed” 3D strand cannot reintegrate, for one reason or another (usually relating to fear in one way or another) and so you in 3D may be called upon to do a retrieval, or other steps may have to be taken.

Try to get beyond the idea that physical death is some sort of magical wand that makes you what you have not made yourself. If you are a blue thread, or a red one (so to speak), you may realize that you are part of an elaborate fabric with threads of many other colors – but you (considered still as an individual) will still be a blue thread, or red, or whatever. Death does not transmute, it integrates.

F: Which is why people say it is important to do our shaping while we are in 3D.

TGU: That’s what it [3D] was created for, remember. That is what those irksome conditions of perceived isolation and concentration of attention by being pinned to the ever-moving present moment were designed to assist. The gift that you are to your larger being is formed in the 3D. Use your time well.

F: Is this the parable of the three servants and their use of their talents?

TGU: You tell me.

F: Very funny. Okay, I’ll take that to mean, that is one meaning of it.

TGU: Good parables have more than one level of meaning.

So, to return. You as one lifetime in 3D (however much or little you may be in communication with non-3D aspects or with the 3D-ongoing-experiences, call them, of “past lives”), have one set of priorities, values, and governing or ungovernable passions. You embody a particular set of reactions, say. You are a certain unique viewpoint. This viewpoint is shaped by what you think and feel and how you act during your lifetime. It is what you might call your character, or might equally (though perhaps less descriptively or suggestively) call your mind, or your soul. You form this as best you can, and the result is what you make it. Any result will necessarily include large elements of unconsciousness.

F: That isn’t quite the right way to say that. I think you mean, what you come out as must necessarily include a lot of things that you were but were not conscious of being.

TGU: That is true but it stands on the very edge of a long discussion of psychology and its perceived or derived processes.

F: In terms of

TGU: Never mind. Not for the moment. For the moment, hold this thought. You in your 3D life shape the one strand you have responsibility for. As we have seen, that shaping may have extensive consequences “elsewhere” – as when you and Joseph interacted on July 4 in 1863 and 1994 – but it is still shaping concentrated on one particular strand (in all its ramifications) at one particular time (its physical lifetime).

Now, consider this. We have alluded to it before, but we have to come back to it every so often, because the structure of language tends to conceal or slur over the fact: You live in the non-3D quite as continuously as in the 3D. It isn’t a matter of your shaping your strand in isolation (though it may feel like it) and then presenting it as a gift when you leave your 3D focus. No. That is just language, language shaped by perception. (Other languages, by the way, will embody different perceptions.) Instead, you are in a state of continuous feed not only with your other strands but with the other levels – larger beings and smaller – that you are equally intimately connected to.

F: It isn’t “shape now, report later.” It is shape now – because it is always now – and report continuously.

TGU: Notice how this small reminder changes things.

F: It makes the shaping more alive, somehow, more urgent, almost.

TGU: How about, more significant, more cannot-be-deferred?

F: Yes, that’s the sense of it I get.

TGU: Well, what do you suppose the concept of sin is designed to do? How do you think it is designed to help?

F: “Missing the mark.”

TGU: Exactly. Sin is sometimes defined as missing the mark, and perhaps you can see that an onboard GPS that will tell you when you are going off-course could be helpful not only to you as strand but to you as “strand forming part of a larger being.”

The difficulty comes in defining sin. Sin that is inherently warping is one thing. Sin that is merely transgression of a moral code is another. That moral code may be arbitrary, or self-serving for someone, or obsolete, because too narrowly construed, or obsolete because the nature of the 3D being and its environment have changed.

F: So it isn’t as simple as finding a moral code and adhering to it. (Not that I thought it was, or I’d still be a Catholic. Nothing wrong with that moral code except that it sets an impossible ideal.)

TGU: As with fears or other occurrences or semi-conscious or misunderstood psychic impulses, a sense of sin may mislead as well as lead.

F: It’s still a matter of discernment, isn’t it?

TGU: What do you think your long continuing education is, anyway? It is all about having discernment so that you may make the unconscious conscious, so that it may cease to rule your life.

F: Carl Jung’s quotation.

TGU: Where do you suppose we found that? And, seriously now, why do you suppose that saying penetrated so deeply? It is a key.

F: And there’s our hour, and a little. Thanks for this, very interesting as usual.