Nathaniel on dealing with problems

Nathaniel on dealing with problems

Friday, November 10, 2017

2:10 a.m. Louisa Calio posts a query on my blog that amounts to, can you give us an interpretation of 3D events that will make sense of the stupidity we live among, or, really, some way of seeing it that will make us feel better about it.

Answering your rough paraphrase rather than her original, we probably should say, “No, we can’t.” But we can give you a few clues, to help you arrive there yourselves. We can suggest interpretations; how you react is always an individual reaction, a merging of new data with old patterns and assumed relationships.

Sure, we can see that. But, subject to that proviso—

Your ways of making sense of things often put the cart before the horse. But explaining how you are doing that isn’t always so easy, given that it involves looking at the same thing from a different point of view, rather than altering or adding to the thing being observed. So you will perhaps be tempted to say, “That’s just talking around it” when we show you how it looks from another perspective.

We’ll try not to do that.

Louisa says – quote it –

“…the nature and purpose of some of these extreme conflicts within the individual…”

It isn’t so much that the conflicts have a purpose as that they express a result.

I know that seems helpful to you, but to us, not so much. A little more explaining?

You come into 3D embodying conflicts, precipitating conflicts around you by what you have within you. That’s one thing that 3D is, an arena, a place and time in which conflicts – and harmony, but we’re talking about conflicts at the moment – come front and center to be transformed. You wouldn’t expect a football game to be tranquil and harmonious; you wouldn’t expect a piano concert to be cacophonous. You expect each event to express in its own way. The thing that makes it hard for you to see, sometimes, is that your football game and piano concert are taking place at the same time, along with drag racing, aerial acrobatic exhibitions, family feuds, three different melodramas being filmed, prolonged mattress testing, and half a million other events including the depths of non-social interactions with yourselves such as monasticism, intense study, illnesses, and other preoccupations. It can get a bit crowded.

Makes me tired just thinking about it.

Yes, but it’s intriguing. Remember how Bob Monroe said AA dived in, because he was fascinated by the raw energy of it all?

I do now that you remind me. Far Journeys, the best of his books.

Well, with all that going on, what could you say is “the point” of it?

Meaning, it won’t have just one point?

Meaning, too, that the purpose of a football game or a concert isn’t just for producing the cheers of the fans or the ovations of the audience.

Aha. Meaning, Loosh may be produced but that doesn’t mean it is more than a by-product.

At this point we advise people to re-read Far Journeys to refresh their memory of what Bob actually said. The Loosh analogy was not, by far, the end of the story, but the beginning of Bob’s deeper exploration.

I won’t quote it, but if I can find the place easily, I’ll indicate the relevant chapters.

Not necessary. Tell them, as you told Colin Wilson, to begin at Chapter 12.

Consider it done. Okay, so –

Bearing in mind this great assortment of activity taking place around you, remember that it is all taking place within you, too.

I know that isn’t the best way to say what I feel you’re moving to.

Possibly not. Then let’s say this, your own selective attention is a powerful tool to overcome the effects on you of cacophony. You can tune yourselves to live more harmonious lives, and those who prefer to live more on the edge can tune to do that, instead.

It isn’t exactly a matter of ignoring larger parts of the world’s events, but of deciding which events are going to be allowed in to fill our RAM [the available workspace in our metaphorical computer] at any given moment.

Not that you must tune certain things out – that doesn’t work very well, being like telling yourself you are not going to think about elephants or whatever, and in the process fixing your attention exactly there – but that you can tune other things in.

In a sense, that amounts to saying that the world’s miseries and problems mostly aren’t our concern and needn’t bother us.

Step carefully here. Any true statement may be made to seem uninviting or shallow or even silly. Look at it a little more slowly. Most of the world’s problems, conflicts, tragedies, perplexities, generation-long tangles, etc. are not everybody’s business, in toto. Nobody can be concerned with more than a small fraction of what goes on in the world, any more than one can be a professional in all fields, or a master of all sciences. Your lives make you specialists; one time, one place, one heredity, even if that heredity is complicated. You can’t be really – as opposed to superficially, at best – concerned with everything wrong in the world. Don’t count the cats in Zanzibar unless you happen to be called to do it, but even if you are, you may be sure that you can’t do that and tend to every other possible task in the world.

All right.

And if it isn’t up to you to do something you can’t do, why would it be up to you to suffer because you can’t? That suffering is not externally-mandated. It is, in a way, the product of a decision. You decide to suffer (and of course, as always the question arises: Which “you”?) or you decide not to. Or, easier than that, your own makeup prevents the conflict from arising in the first place.

Feeling for people, even feeling for the Earth – nothing wrong with it. But allowing yourself to feel guilty for not doing what was never within your power to do is a waste of energy and potential that could go elsewhere and produce something more satisfactory.

Now, we realize that  this argument has centered on what you call “world affairs” or “social problems,” and Louisa specifically used as example a situation very close to home, concerning her own family. That is the complement of the “social problem.” It is the very personal conflict that does deserve and even demand your engagement. But we wanted to trace the social aspect first, so as to gain perspective from the contrast between the two.

So – in cases closer to home?

There is still the same dynamic: Plenty of things are going on, and only a few of them will fill your RAM, the others automatically being swapped out. So – what do you want, what do you concentrate on?

I know you don’t mean to imply that we can choose only smooth events if we want them, but I can’t get what you do mean. (And we’re already an hour into this; again moving slowly apparently.)

If you come into 3D life embodying certain contradictions, it is for a reason, and those contradictions may express. They may not; you may choose to defer dealing with that particular karma (so to speak), but, they may. Anything that does express may be regarded as material presenting itself to be worked. Even if you can see no way to alter events, you still can choose your attitude toward them, like Viktor Frankl in the concentration camps.

You can always choose to see yourself as victim or can live in faith that it all makes sense, or you can alternate or even do both at the same time. But you will express an attitude toward the events of your life.

Now, a thought and we will end for now. Your external events in 3D won’t mean much to you once you have transcended those limits. Your internal events – the way you shaped yourself by how you reacted to external events – will remain with you, because they will be a part of you. Which do you think is going to be important, once you have dropped the 3D body?

And that’s enough for the day.

All right, our thanks, as always.