Nathaniel on testing

Friday, October 13, 2017

5:35 a.m. All right. I don’t feel 100%, but ready if you are.

Does it ever strike you that the external conditions in which one works reflect internal conditions, hence – mean something?

The thought has crossed my mind, but I don’t know how to read the message. If I am working through a headache, or other aches, or am wheezing, or sleep-deprived, or any other possible annoyance that may be there, yes I can see that it may mean something, since external and internal are the same thing according to you, but how are we to read the story they tell? I have known people – nurses, say – who carry on through unbelievable constant pain. It isn’t so much that they live in pain as that their lives are pain. And others who live their lives dragging a handicap – Christopher Reeve after his fall from a horse left him a quadriplegic, say. We can see the quiet day-to-day heroism so often around us, but other than as opportunities to build character, what do you mean, “mean something”?

The expression of the interaction of pre-formed conduits channeling high pressure, be it wind or water. Life is the testing, you might say, of prefabricated construction in real-life conditions, with the structure being able to modify itself as it goes along.

Yes, so –?

So when you hear a building creak and shudder, it is reasonable to deduce that it is in the presence of high winds. If you live in the structure long enough, it is reasonable to acquire a conscious or unconscious knowledge of the prevailing winds, so that you more or less automatically learn to read and even predict the weather.

So, say we do. What good does it do us to sense the forces around us (which I suppose is where you’re going with this)? And what would it do to help somebody in Reeve’s condition, where the wind was strong and unrelenting?

Pull back a little from the physicality of the analogy. Our point is that there is you – the pre-formed continuing structure – and there are the seemingly external forces that interact with it, stress it, compel or allow it to modify. Treating those forces as external can bring advantages, but realizing that they are no really external brings other advantages, more appropriate to this stage of your development.

You have our attention, I’m sure. Everybody surely wants to understand the interaction.

It can be difficult to make simple distinctions, when appearance and customary thought channels tend to blur them. Consider a few facts:

• The soul is a collection of strands living one life together.
• Spirit, we have been describing as the animating force, separate from the soul but essential to it.
• Life, we said, for 3D compound beings, is choice. It is the lifelong moment-by-moment process of reacting to every moment.
• Every heads-or-tails decision is another path down the road, another timeline, equally real but all but the current one seeming un-
• Your soul’s life is thus a probability-cloud rather than a battlefield, in that every choice is automatically taken both ways.
• 3D reality may be seen as a vast kaleidoscope shining with the result of all those choices, able to show any timeline.

Perhaps it is time to take these facts and ask “why?” Why should it be this way, or, if that question is too hard, what does it mean for us?

If we thought there were only one timeline, the way appearances would suggest, we might say life is a testing, a trial in which we might succeed or fail, and of course many religions have come to just that conclusion.

Or, if you thought that all choice was meaningless, in that some version of you would take every path, you might conclude that life is itself meaningless, mere play, perhaps. “Walking each other home,” as one person put it.

Only, it doesn’t feel meaningless.

Nor is it. But knowing there is a meaning is not the same as knowing what the meaning is, and that knowing may be beyond any 3D logic in that you don’t have the framework to make it comprehensible.

Yes, I do know that. I used to think we could learn the meaning of things. Now I think, we’ll be lucky to see the meaning of our own lives in the context we know, let alone in the context of the worlds larger and smaller than us, or the world beyond the All-D at our level. Even our non-3D component can only tell us as much as it knows, even assuming we are capable of understanding that much (which I doubt), but there is no reason to assume you-all know everything.

Indeed we do not. But it is not necessary to know everything to know something. Not necessary for us, not necessary for you. As Rita told you, you’ll never get to know everything, and then be bored.

Yes, I remember that.

There is more than one meaning to the word “testing,” you know. It isn’t always pass / fail; sometimes it is more like assaying ore, a matter of finding out what a given thing is composed of. Your lives may be considered to be subjects for assay, rather than subjects for passing or failing an exam.

“Even the drunk who dies in the gutter created a flower.”

Exactly. You don’t fail a life, you shape it. And you don’t shape it by making this or that choice, but by making all of them. The resulting probability-cloud is more like a decision-tree, as we said, with the tree, not any one branch, being the result. And the only way a decision-tree can be created (according to 3D logic and experience) is to be lived, moment by moment, choosing.

And according to All-D logic?

You know the answer to that. At the very moment of creation, all potential is automatically nascent. All equally real, all equally evanescent. All waiting for the finger of God to touch it, a la the famous painting.

I’m struggling, here. The next line was going to be something like “and the spirit –

Get it?

Now I do, at least I think so. The vast impersonal forces you keep talking about, the animating forces – that’s the equivalent to the finger of God giving Adam life.

No spirit, no animation, correct. And that reality has to be conceptualized some way or the other. It is always going to be an analogy: It is always going to follow 3D logic, even when to do so requires postulating miracles.

So are we talking about forces, or a force?

Dealer’s choice.

It’s all in how we choose to see it?

It’s all, let us say, in how your life to date leads you to see it. Nothing you conclude is going to be 100% right, how could it be? But every conclusion leads onward.

And every version of reality has its place I the scheme of things.

By definition. Could there be a junk reality? Could there, therefore, be meaningless sets of choices?

This feels a bit theoretical, a bit divorced from the lives we lead.

Little by little, as we continually remind you. And this is a convenient place to pause, not only because it has been your accustomed hour.

Okay. I’m going to have to think about this, as I type it up, and see if we really got anywhere.

Not the first time you will have posed that question.

Not quite the first, no. All right, see you next time, and as always, thanks.