Compound in another sense

Compound in another sense

Friday, January 26, 2018

7:20 a.m. Very well, let’s begin. I had awakened with the idea that we should be addressing the subject of lust as one of the seven deadly sins, but as I was perking the coffee I got that it might be, instead, the question of what’s behind the conflict we seem to be enmeshed in. Which is it, then? Or is it something else entirely?

No reason not to continue glancing at the sins and virtues first, and then at a later time move to broader issues. So let us look at lust, and begin by saying, paradoxically enough, that lust is not necessarily really about sex, any more than sex is necessarily about procreation or about the unification of opposites, or the desire for overcoming solitude. And, once again, sex will be found not unmingled with pride and certainly not when the subject of lust.

Am I mangling the sense of all this?

Only slightly, perhaps, but it will untangle easily enough.

Understand, that in this discussion no less than in others, we make no attempt at consistency with the common understandings of the subject. Where we can agree with the accepted view, fine; we have no wish to stress the unusual merely for the sake of novelty. However, how likely is it that new views will correspond with old, in the process of saying anything meaningful?

Understood. Indeed, by now – expected.

Yet many will expect, perhaps unconsciously, that upon the subject of sex and lust there could be nothing new to say. It isn’t as if the subjects had escaped fascinated attention! However, it is one thing to see, and another to understand that which has been seen. More than that, it is scarcely possible to see that which one’s unconscious training has said cannot exist.

Last bit isn’t clear.

It will become so. Tell your idea of how sex manifests in humans, and we will proceed from that. It is not, of course, “your” idea except in so far as you have fastened upon it.

I have come to think of us as compound beings in a different sense. It seems we are two levels, animal and divine. The god energy and goddess energy is an integral part of the human experience, and so is the individual mind. I see, as you begin to flow through my mind in the writing of this, that I was not as clear-headed about it as I had thought.

No, but it provides the necessary springboard. Yes, you are compound beings in more ways than one. Not only are you combinations of strands – which might be thought of as, in part, combinations of previous combinations – but also you are combinations of currently existing flesh and currently manifesting energies. The result is necessarily a mixture of characteristics that might be seen, in one division of analysis,

Sorry. That last infelicity [of phrasing: “division of analysis”] threw me out, and I was unable to get it back.

Every moment has its own characteristics, and those characteristics suffuse everything that occurs in it, including human procreation, human birth – hence the horoscope – and human activity thereafter right through death, for you can no more die uncoordinated with your times than you can be born that way. Hence delayed births or premature ones; hence delayed deaths or premature ones. It’s all a matter of fit.

We are born, live, and die in accordance with the times we live in.

It would be as accurate to say that your times are a part of your total self; and, that your total selves are a part of your times. This is not the truism or even cliché that it may appear. We are saying something more significant than that. A part of your heredity is the place and time you are born into and function within. At a gross and obvious level, yes, this is a truism; however, look more deeply. It means you react to things not nearly so independently (or even as erratically or idiosyncratically) as you may assume. Your very independence, your erratic impulses, your characteristic idiosyncrasies, stem from the fit between you and the times you inhabit. Which, of course, begs a careful analysis, once again, of “which you.” In this case we mean, not 3D-you or non-3D you. We mean, which strands of your dual heredity are you expressing, your personal strand (which itself comprises 3D, non-3D, etc.) or the other strand, which requires a name and an explanation.

I had been thinking of it as the animal strand, but I see that sometimes I was thinking of it as the god or goddess energy, and it isn’t either one, is it?

Let’s say, rather, that either is one way of seeing things that downplays the other. They are inextricable, and seeing them as separate and even antagonistic is as misleading in the end as not seeing one or the other aspect at all. Let us call that aspect of yourselves by some new name, not for the sake of introducing novelties but for the sake of providing a new understanding, which is very much not the same thing.

And I’m nominated to provide the new name?

The initiating suggestions, at least, yes. By proceeding this way we begin closest to you, you see. Less gap to fill.

Interesting way to think about it. Very well, let’s see. Yeats spoke of man’s two eternities, that of race and that of soul. I suppose he must have meant physical and spiritual heredity co-existing within the living conscious individual. But that doesn’t give us a useable handle. Should we say temporal, to include the awareness of how much we are a part of the times we enter into?

You can see that that would be insufficient. Nor temporal-spatial, or some such usage. It doesn’t do what we need it to do, which is to hold together in a word (which is a symbol) concepts one or more parts of which are apt to be overlooked or forgotten.

And merely contrasting personal and impersonal won’t do.

They would if “impersonal” had the necessary connotations in common parlance, but it does not.

Yes. God and goddess energy expresses part of it – it is impersonal and forceful. Animal expresses part of it – equally impersonal, equally forceful. The two are rarely seen as the same thing, though. There is a barbarous word some people like to use (that will probably require spellchecker to get it spelled correctly), chthonic, meaning earthly, but I don’t think that does it either.

Notice how the process of searching does draw you toward the answer.

Yes, I am sort of feeling that. I don’t know what I am being drawn to, but as I hold my attention on the question, I am all but pulled in a current that I can notice by paying sufficient attention.

However the current is not the important part, nor your noticing it. Sufficient to allow oneself to be carried along. This is merely to alert you and your readers to the dynamics of the process.

Understood.

So?

Well, it’s almost the difference between general and specific, or tangible and abstract.

You are getting toward it. Proceed a little farther.

Our personal strand is one aspect. Another is impersonal – that is, shared and seemingly external – and universal – Ah! Do I have it? Are we not looking at another example of structure (our personal strand) and vast impersonal forces (this animal and divine strand)?

You are indeed. And?

And you’re looking to find a word that will bind our ideas of animal with those of the divine, to bind them as one force, in relation to our personal selves, our individual decisions creating the habit-patterns we call our minds, or souls.

Yes. That is exactly the necessity. You have a personal soul interacting with the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, in which you live. So what shall we call that animal and divine (that is, superpersonal) force that is a half of what you are and what you live among?

There were times when this wasn’t a problem, weren’t there? When this understanding we are struggling toward was well understood and expressed in various cultures’ mythology or religions.

Of course. However, there would be no advantage in appropriating past conceptualizations, for you would thereby accrete all the unexamined associations that have grown about the words and the concepts, and the misunderstanding of what those myths and religious teachings embodied. You need new wineskins. So, tanner, produce one! It doesn’t have to be perfect and it doesn’t have to be any more than a way-station to bring you somewhere presently unseen. But the need is now, for without serviceable words, we cannot provide you the bridge to understanding.

I presume we don’t really want some hyphenated hybrid word, clumsy and therefore unlikely to serve.

It doesn’t have to be perfect.

External. Temporal. Material. Dynamic. Forceful. Energetic. Larger. Impersonal. Collective. I can’t seem to find it.

Try!

I don’t know that I’m going to do much better than energetic, but that makes it sound like an exhortation to take exercise.

Yes, very funny, but perhaps a differentiation between personal and energetic strands will serve. We shall see.

Next time.

To be sure. You are well beyond your usual hour, but, a good beginning.

I hope so. Very well, till next time. (And don’t think I haven’t noticed a certain British cadence to today’s interaction. Too much watching of “The Crown,” I presume.) Our thanks as always.