Rita — the wheel or a couple of spokes

Friday, August 25, 2017

4:45 a.m. Odd how I wake up several times during the night and it’s only interruption and then it is a time as definite as an alarm clock, though not jarring. Very well, Miss Rita, I’m ready if you are. “Not even God could understand everything, so to speak”?

Bearing in  mind that this was your understanding and phrasing, not mine, but, as I said, would serve as the text for a full sermon.

I think I know where we’re going with this: It is an opposition to the old determinist position that maintained that (a) God knows everything that is going to happen, and therefore (b) God creates sinners knowing that they are going to sin – knowing just how they are going to sin – and then punishes them for it. Thus, according to this logical construct, free will is an illusion and God is cruel.

Beyond those two destructive conclusions, another followed: With free will an illusion and God’s justice equally an illusion, the world is meaningless and our lives themselves are meaningless. Or – one variant – the free will is sort of real but the events are nonetheless predetermined, hence we live going through the motions. Another variant – this (that is, 3D) life is real, and an afterlife is at best theoretical, or shall we say debatable. Any way you look at it, a grim picture. Either it isn’t fair (in that it is a rigged game) or it isn’t fair in another way (in that we are over-matched), or it isn’t real.

But when you realize that there isn’t any “the” future—

And when you realize that there isn’t any “only 3D” or “only afterlife” about it, you see that of course life doesn’t seem to make sense either logically or shall we say ethically. It would be like trying to make sense of a wheel if you only saw a part of it. You would never see its true nature and of course you could never possibly guess at its true purpose. A bit of rim and a few spokes might suggest a complete circle and its internal bracing, but if you had not [guessed], or lacked the ability to visualize the whole using the evidence of the part, tales of covered wagons or even hoops would seem flights of fancy to you, perhaps.

So we’re trying to suggest enough of the full wheel to help people envision it.

And perhaps they would never be able to – nor would you or anybody – if it weren’t for the part of you that exists in non-3D and wants to help you wake up to the larger world you inhabit but cannot sense or envision as long as you continually hypnotize yourselves into defining yourselves as “3D only.” However, you do have that assistance. You can intuit your way to a realization of greater connection. Thus you are already able to do what you hope to become able to do “someday” – just as you, Frank, told your intuition class.

Yes, but I trust that you remember how maddening our situation is. I was always aware (or let’s say I always had the uncaused knowing) that if I could just turn the knob, maybe only slightly, I could have the perfect health I wanted, instead of suffering from asthma. I knew that as a boy. It was a knowing beyond the possibility of questioning. But I didn’t know how to find the knob, let alone how to turn it. As I say, maddening.

And productively hopeful. It kept you searching.

It may look like that, in retrospect. The actuality was that it kept me in a state of frustration, and self-doubt, and ungrounded belief.

Yes, that’s what I just said (as you liked to say when pointing out that A sometimes closely resembled B but required a shift in point of view to realize it).

However, a state of belief is less productive than a state of having a knowing, as Bob [Monroe] spent his life pointing out and demonstrating. So the step after dissatisfaction with a picture that doesn’t make sense is the correction of the picture until it either does make sense or has to be replaced by another that does. But right there is the potential stumbling-block.

Yes. “Common sense.”

Well – “make sense” in general.

Thoreau said somewhere, it is a mistake for people to ask you to say things that make sense to them, because there are things that cannot appeal to the common sense. I’m hashing his thought – it has been a long time since I’ve read him, too long, I’m realizing – but the gist of it is there. Not everything we know can make sense to someone whose assumptions are “common sense” assumptions, because they will actively clash.

Take your own situation as a boy who “knew” somehow that his health was dependent not upon physical conditions alone but upon some other factor he could not name and could not manipulate. If that boy had tried to explain what he knew, without being able to explain how he knew it, without being able to offer one shred of evidence for the knowing, how could he have done it? He couldn’t have done it. And any attempt to do so probably would have weakened his knowing.

It is the same thing with people’s knowing that the world truly makes sense, truly is important, truly is just.

In other words, that “all is well.”

Exactly. You will remember that I had a hard time accepting that. A lifetime of political involvement (even though from the sidelines) had made me very much aware of how much was not well. My professional life has shown me how much suffering was in the world, much of it seemingly unnecessary suffering. And anyone who watched the TV news received reinforcement every day in the conviction that all is not well.

And yet, it is.

And yet, it is – but not when seen only incompletely, like seeing a few spokes and a part of a rim, rather than a complete functional whole. And it is the ever-more-inescapable fact that life is not just, or sane, or even endurable when seen in that partial way that is leading people to recognize that there is an unbroken wheel that is the model from which the few obvious spokes and a part of a rim are abstracted by “common sense.” In other words, your knowing as a boy that you could be healthy, if only you could find and turn the knob, served to keep you oriented toward a greater reality that could be found. In just that way, people’s discomfort with the world they experience, combined with an inner sense that what appears isn’t the whole of what is, leads them in the same way.

By that logic, you could almost say that the worse the world gets or appears to get, the greater the pressure on those who can wake up, to wake up.

Yes but not quite.

I suppose that’s better than “yes but no” that we used to get from the guys.

What you just said is one special case out of a vastly larger universe of possible reactions. It is equally true that people hear Louis Armstrong singing “What a wonderful world” and intuitively respond saying yes with their inner knowing. In other words, people don’t wake up only in reaction to dissatisfaction. For that matter, dissatisfaction is one thing, despair quite another, opposite, thing.

The one leads onward, the other sees the world as a dead end.

People don’t commit suicide out of hopefulness.

And it is hopefulness you are here to encourage.

Of course, and not me, but us. Not just you and me, but anybody who reads this and responds. You have seen the emptiness of political and ideological and economic technical panaceas. So the next question (without necessarily looking for a panacea) is, what is real?

Which is where I came in, as we used to say.

You can’t build reality upon unreality. You can’t build truth upon lies, or meaning upon firmly held illusions or mistakes. When your internal senses tell you you are on the wrong road, maybe you should look around to see if there’s another road to be taken. (If there weren’t, why would your alarms be ringing? If the different road were obvious, or conversely if it were inaccessible to you, why would the alarms be ringing?)

And the right road is the one that makes sense of the statement that “all is well.”

Not that makes sense of the statement; that leads to that inescapable conclusion.

That sounds like the same thing, though I can feel that it isn’t.

It isn’t the statement that is an absolute needing to be shored up by logic. It is an absolute that will serve as an indicator as to whether you are on the right track or not, in the same way “as above, so below” serves.

And that’s what we’re about. Okay, Rita, it has been an hour, and like any experienced lecturer, you fitted your lesson into the time allotted. (I know that you know, even if the readers don’t, that I’m smiling.) Till next time.