Nathaniel on evil within duality

Nathaniel on evil within duality

Saturday, January 20, 2018

6:25 a.m. Are we to continue on context, or return to Pride, or what? Your move.

You were just dreaming of being interrupted while speaking [to a group], then regaining the floor by interrupting your supplanter, then using the fact of the interruptions as examples of life and the process of living.

Your life story?

In a sense. Yours, too, and all of you. Interruptions, punctuation, rhythm – three ways of seeing the same natural phenomenon. How you incorporate interruption into what you see as your normal life (that is, the life you would lead if you were not interrupted) defines your lives. Nothing is out of place, or unwanted, or disruptive, by definition, save as seen by one 3D-driven viewpoint. How does a pathless path (or, a field of endless connected possibility) get interrupted?

That’s a seemingly far place from the subject of sin and virtues and choice, but not really. There is still the question we were discussing, the impurities in the glass. Were they added deliberately to provide color in the finished product? Were they incidental to some other process, and incorporated as merely another fact of existence? Were they – you’ll pardon the expression – accidental? Were they the result of prior poor choices?

It’s all in how you choose to see it. Of course, how you choose to see it is to some extent the result of all the forces that make you who you are – environment, heredity, your own prior choices – because they set up probabilities. However, and this is a point worth stressing, skewing the probabilities is exactly your place in the scheme of things.

We are a way for the universe to proceed without inevitability, you’re saying.

That’s a way to look at it. If you were servo-mechanisms, you could be dispensed with and nothing would be any different. You are closer to random-number generators with inclinations.

Non-computer people may not know that computers use routines called random-number generators to produce results that are unpredictable (though not truly random; but close enough for the purpose). I take you to be saying that our very construction somehow allows us a degree of freedom.

Not so much “allows” as “produces for you” a degree of freedom. That’s what 3D does, it allows freedom within order, so as to produce change that is dependent upon what preceded, but is not determined by what preceded.

Giving our human free will an important part to play, though it is not yet clear to me to what end.

Quote that verse from the Rubaiyat, and recognize that in fact you do remold the sorry scheme of things closer to heart’s desire. Only, you don’t do it autistically, one by one to each person’s unmodulated desire, but as a whole, continuously.

[Verse XCIX:

[Ah, Love! could you and I with Him conspire To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire, Would not we shatter it to bits – and then Re-mould it nearer to the Heart’s Desire!]

Now we’re going to ask you to consider, why should there be sin in the 3D world in the wake of your having chosen to eat of the fruit of the tree of Perceiving Things As Good and Evil? Why should the two facts be connected at all? You are used to connecting them, because you have always heard the biblical story passed along with one point of view assumed. But when you look at it, why should it be, as the old sampler said, that “In Adam’s fall, we sinned all”? why should it be that seeing things as good and evil – rather than as all good – produces in you (that is, in humans) an inclination to sin? Why wouldn’t it merely produce a shuddering, “Oh, I don’t like that” response?

Something in us heard the call from it. Something in us resonated to it.

But you resonate to truth and beauty and all the attributes of good, as well. So why the attraction to evil, a compulsion sometimes, but anyway a propensity to give in to it? Phrase your knowing as best you can, and we will proceed from it.

Reading what you’ve just said, I get that we recognize an affinity to evil as well as to good, that it is forbidden fruit not so much in the sense that someone has said “Don’t touch” as in the sense that we know it’s bad for us but it calls to us, it is us, even though we don’t want it to be.

Lt us suggest that human response to evil is to demonize it, literally. Not wanting it to exist, not recognizing it in yourselves as part of yourselves (rather than as infestation or incursion), you do what duality does; you say “I am not that,” and you scapegoat those characteristics and those who most clearly display them.

I watched a Charles Bronson film last night, and as always I reacted as the script wanted me to. There were men doing evil, deliberately hurting others for the sake of their own pleasure in it, out of their own evil nature. I as viewer wanted them stopped, and of course I wanted them killed, as the only reliable way to get them really, permanently, stopped. Now, I knew what the filmmakers were doing, but should I have rooted for evil? Clearly not. Should I have been able to imagine a compromise that left the men freed of their own propensity to do evil? When we get on the subject of good and evil, it is easier to keep it real by clothing the issue in real-life characters.

Isn’t that almost a definition of one feature of 3D existence? You are all in the theater of the real, and you are all playing different roles in the course of your improv performances. And – listen, now – and in different times you are charged with incorporating and expressing different forces, some of which express as evil.

As I get up to get more coffee, I “hear” Jesus’ saying that it is inevitable that evil enters the world, but woe to the man by whom it comes. Better for him to go hang himself.

That’s the sense of it, yes. What you experience as evil is an integral part of you as humans, because it is an integral part of the vast impersonal forces manifesting through you. In areas of life that do not experience the world as Good and Evil, such manifestations are less polarized, less alienated. But you are where they are sharp dichotomies, either/or. So, you choose. You choose implicitly or explicitly, unconsciously (on automatic pilot) or consciously according to your preference, but you choose. And how you choose helps determine what manifests, and in what way.

I don’t think you are saying that to choose to do evil is as acceptable as to choose to do what is good. And I don’t think you are saying that evil isn’t really evil but only looks that way. But damn if I can see what you are saying.

Yes, it’s difficult, because it requires that you be able to see a thing from several angles at once. Jesus, you will note, did not attempt to teach the multitudes what they had no way of understanding. He kept his teaching simple and as helpful as he could, and still he was mostly misunderstood, because people will add logic and structure to their partial understanding.

Thus he concentrated on the qualities they should encourage within themselves, rather than try to explain multiple levels of reality.

Isn’t that what religions do? And isn’t that where the real work is done, within the human struggling with his or her own mutually contradictory tendencies? That by the way is why people can be corrupted; it is why they can be saved, too. You embody the contradictions, and it’s up to you what you will make of yourselves, moment by moment rather than once for all.

I had thought, when you began on Pride, that sin was going to wind up to be us concentrating on what we wanted, regardless of others. Selfishness, in other words.

But that would beg the question of why you would want certain things. Why would you want to maim or kill, or starve or torture, to do any of the things that your best selves abhor?

If you were to say – as people are prone to say – that some people are just evil, and therefore do evil, consistently choose evil, that isn’t incorrect as far as it goes, but what of the rest of you? How is it that you are unable to live without harboring evil thoughts, doing evil deeds, producing evil results, even if they are far outweighed by the good that you do? (Recognize that in this question we are treating those qualities as though they could be measured against each other quantitatively, so that one set “outweighed” the other. A necessary conceit, only.)

I have read that it is because the line between good and evil runs within us, not between us.

But now, sink into that thought. Go deeper than that surface acceptance.

I only get that somebody has to wear the black hat, but that actor isn’t any different inherently than the others acting in the improv.

But why do those characteristics have to express?

Because they exist. I can’t get any farther than that.

Because they exist. Because pretending that they don’t exist leads to neurosis. That is, recognizing your own complicity is essential to making it conscious so that you may control it. Otherwise your lives will be surrounded by collateral damage.

I don’t know. It seems like you are implying that if we only saw evil differently, it wouldn’t be evil.

If you saw a natural force as natural, rather than as not-natural and hence to be despised and if possible destroyed, is it possible that the level of violence in the confrontation would be drastically reduced?

So a world needing no Charles Bronson or Clint Eastwood or even Tom Hanks, archetypal good guy, fighting evil? No evil to be fought?

What a boring planet you’d live on, right?

It just doesn’t seem real, what I get.

That is because, after all, you – 3D-you and non-3D-you – are living in the wake of the world having eaten of the fruit of that duality-perception tree. You are a part of human race, and cannot escape your heritage any more than your arm can have a different blood type than the rest of your body. We are all in this together. Your occasional theoretical structures aside, you know this, you all know this. The world may be recreated closer to heart’s desire, but not by any one part of it.

And that will do for now.

Okay. Thanks.