Continuing on pride as a sin

Continuing on pride as a sin

Wednesday, January 17, 2018

4:35 a.m. Ready if you are.

One could go on about pride for quite some time, because pride as missing the mark – as opposed to its positive connotations – is extensive, widespread. Scratch any sin and you will find pride involved if no other than an active sense of separation from others in 3D, and in separation from one’s responsibilities within the totality of 3D existence.

That’s a little vague.

Consider that life is somewhat a matter of self-definition. Whether one accepts the definitions others provide (directly or indirectly) or forms one’s definitions oneself by prolonged acts of will (although they may not be obviously so), in one way or another, usually in several ways, in fact, everyone necessarily adheres to a story of who they are. You can see, it’s only natural. You’re in 3D, you have to have some way of seeing yourself.

Well, depths of perception differ among individuals. Leaving aside, for the moment, the question of what one’s society tells him he is, everyone’s depth of awareness says, “I am this,” or “I am that,” even if the consciousness of that individual does not know it, or argues against it. In other words, some people know they are all alone in the universe and it’s every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost. Others know that we are all in it together, here to help one another. You see? That strength of knowing has nothing to do with the reality of things; it has to do with the reality they are here to experience.

A person expresses different aspects of reality, according to how s/he sees the world.

Yes, provided you remember that how you see the world is likely to be the result of many things: environment, 3D heredity, non-3D heredity (that is, the qualities you bring into this life), and what we might call the results of contention, that is, the thought forms and ideas and emotional patterns you develop in the course of your life spent reconciling so many factors.

Well, if you approach each day with Abraham Lincoln’s humility, you are not likely to err on the side of pride as sin. You will take pride in your accomplishments, but that is a different meaning of the word pride. Compare Lincoln and any example to you of one acting from vanity (we do not mean vanity of appearance, necessarily) and you will see more clearly.

Someone like the later Franklin Roosevelt, making decisions out of arrogant certainty. Or Kaiser Wilhelm. Like that?

That is one way it can express, but better to steer away from the statesman aspect and stay closer to the aspect of personal character. An equivalent to Lincoln on the opposite side politically might be Jefferson Davis, yet they might have little or no value as opposing examples of the quality of pride and resisting pride as applies to all you non-statesmen.

I see it more clearly than I can yet express it. I take it you want me to find the examples? The difficulty is that by definition we need famous people, or we will have no common frame of reference.

You know enough examples! Only, don’t limit yourself to those Lincoln knew or interacted with.

Yes, I see – though Robert E. Lee, come to think of it, is a man who matched Lincoln’s humility. Well, George McClellan. There’s a puffed-up theatrical person, very much the great man in his own mind. But I’m hearing you, feeling you, pushing me in another direction. Get off politics.

Well, how about Hemingway? Humble in relation to his trade, proud in reaction to fame and achievement? No? Why not?

To illustrate the way pride becomes a missing of the mark, you need to show a quality closer to the bone, not a reflection of achievement or place, although those are not incorrect as examples.

You’d better take the lead, and maybe something will occur to me as you do.

No, think about the theme. How does pride as a sin mingle with a man’s or woman’s perceptions to lead in the wrong direction? Keep it close; perhaps keep it in the abstract rather than finding a known life-story to illustrate it.

You are asking me to think, as well as intuit.

That’s exactly what we are asking, of you, of everyone.

I guess the first question is, wrong direction relative to what goals. I doubt you are concerned with 3D achievement per se, since as you have said it all falls away as we die, so it must be 3D achievement in so far as it affects the enduring habit-system we create in the living of our lives. But I’m seeing something even behind that, a complex of traits you wish to encourage.

Think of your lives in their aspect as creators-by-deciding-things.

You mean, deciding moment by moment and thereby each creating our characters.

That is what you are there to do, to choose and choose and choose. You know that: Now connect that to the question of purpose, and sin as diversion from the purpose.

You have said that our decisions within each timeline have an effect in some way, that we are not just hamsters in a cage going through meaningless motions. So if the point is for us to somehow set our imprint on the pattern, I guess –. Oh! Do you mean sin is what prevents us from being the real us? Or, maybe, the ideal us?

See? Working it out in thought, combined with openness to the intuitive flashes that become possible when you have bent your thinking apparatus to a given task, brings results. Now, follow up the scent you have just caught.

Sin is somehow a warping of ourselves from our true potential. That’s awfully slippery still, but that’s sort of it.

A dwarfing of your potential, call it. That’s why it is bad for you. but obviously this statement is loaded with unspoken assumptions. Still, you are in the right direction.

It doesn’t have to do with external rules or external effects; it is about our own self-creation.

Not quite. Your life in 3D, no less than in non-3D and in fact in some ways more urgently (because you live in the crucible of the present moment limited in extent, and therefore in effect under pressure) cannot help but effect those around you. So, your choices and their effects cannot help but affect others’ environment, and what you might call the general situation. Lincoln was not working out his salvation in isolation, and who and what he had made himself had a real impact on others. This is true of every person, all the time, only your stories aren’t public knowledge.

So, let’s say it isn’t only to do with externals. Isn’t primarily, let’s say.

Yes, that’s closer. We haven’t talked about the necessary interconnection of public and private sectors, because we have wanted to focus your attention upon the closest area of engagement, but you can see that the external conditions of one’s life have to have a huge effect on the living of it. It is just that the cause and effect isn’t the way they are assumed to be.

I don’t get the sense that this has been digression, but I don’t quite see the thread we’re following. The bread crumbs only show a few at a time.

You are going to be redefining a lot of things you’re heard about but never given much attention to – at least, we think that’s what’s going to happen. Partly it’s up to your willingness. But it isn’t as simple as “list a sin, talk about it.” It’s still all about the interplay of vast impersonal forces with compound beings structured and being restructured by experiences in the denser medium that is a crucible.

You make it sound like glassblowing, a little. Fire and air and skillful direction and the sand becomes transparent or translucent, assumes shape.

And acquires function. And that’s where we choose to pause for now.

All right, well, thanks and see you next time, except we never see you at all.

Faith is belief in things unseen.

So it is. Okay.