TGU — seeking a preliminary image

Tuesday, March 6, 2018

7:10 a.m. All right, to continue. The nature of the vast impersonal forces of the universe, as it applies to how things play out here.

That isn’t quite the center of things. How they play out in 3D, yes – but 3D itself is not the center of things, of course.

Well, you lead and we will follow as best we can.

Imagine, if you can and will, all of reality as a concept, most of which you of course cannot experience directly; most of which you cannot well imagine; most of it as unknown and unknowable as the back of your head is to your unaided eye. Mirrors or cameras will give you an idea of it – often a misleadingly detailed idea of it – but direct vision for you yourself, as opposed to everyone else you know or don’t know, is and always will be impossible. Or, if that analogy stretches your patience or ingenuity, try another, the inside of one of the bones of your arm, or the microorganisms digesting your food, or – to shift the analogy very slightly, at least slightly in our view – the physical existence of your various strands. Most of the makeup of the world – of the totality of reality, we mean, seen and unseen – is now and forever will be a mystery while people are in 3D limitations. But, if you cannot envision the contents of totality, still you can envision totality itself.

Now find a way to conveniently imagine – that is, hold an image of – that totality and its subdivision. One example might be to envision an orange as the totality and segments of the orange as various divisions. The image is too rigid, too static, but it may give you the idea. Being in 3D, you need to ground visions or ideas in 3D clothing or you will be unable to really retain a grasp of them. The danger is in the image obtaining too firm a grip at the expense of the thing being imaged, but there is no practical way to absorb very abstract relationships without relating them in your minds to relationships you have experienced or can imagine experiencing. Such 3D examples need not be tangibles – they could be the interplay of emotion, for instance – but they need to be related to direct 3D experience, bounded by 3D limitations.

So, envision a sphere of some sort – a traditional representation of totality. A globe with or without continents and seas but primarily characterized by lines of longitude might do well. In any case, it is one thing that is about to be logically subdivided innumerable times. Whatever the visualized image, that is the gist of it. Indivisible, it is to be logically, or perhaps we should say conceptually divided. You see the essential?

I do, and I think I see where you are at least beginning.

The image could be improved upon, if we could bring into it the pairings of opposites.

Something electrical, perhaps?

More like the way scientists imagine atoms are constructed, the tension of immensely opposing and mutually binding forces.

Should I give you time to consider?

No, although it is true that Non-3D thought does sometimes benefit from interaction with a 3D-delimited mind, and of course such interaction can only take place in 3D time, rather than the instantaneous moment you tend to assume. Not this time, for you have no such images.

What I do have is a clear feeling for how you are describing a totality held together by some immense central attraction, which is the only thing preventing all these pairs of opposites from flying apart.

Yes, but that isn’t so much an image as it is an image of an image; that is, it tells but doesn’t show.

Magnets, then.

Possibly. But can you work it out in terms of a sphere and of innumerable and mutable pairs of opposites?

Well, say the entire surface of the sphere is composed of magnetic particles whose north pole faces the center of the sphere. The center is an immensely strong south pole, holding it all together, in the absence of which they would fly apart by the mutual repulsion of magnetism. But this doesn’t work, does it?

Not for our purposes. It does not provide for paired opposites, for one thing. Better for us to continue a while, and the requisite image may surface as it were between us.

Someday we should talk more about that process. It is as if you and we hold opposite ends of a seine, and occasionally catch migrating ideas.

Someday, perhaps, or perhaps that is a discussion better suited to other pairs of fishermen.

Very well, a sphere representing totality. Orange segments representing not a chaotic but an orderly subdivision into paired opposites. A contrasting electrical or magnetic analogy to remind you that the pairings are not fixed and immutable but varying and changing.

You mean, I think, both varying in how the orange may be sliced and also changeable over time.

“Over time” is not quite right, but changeable, anyway. Let’s leave that nuance.

Now, suppose that were an adequate idea of the forces involved, you can see that even in the presence of terrific tension that could never be dispensed with or evaded, the picture is somewhat static, for it does not take into account the fact that from an absolute standpoint the world (that is, reality as a whole) does not stand still, does not repeat itself, does not go from order to chaos or from chaos to order or from one to the other and back again. Theologians and philosophers and logic-choppers have all constructed religions and philosophies and “scientific” models that make sense of things, but the only way they have been able to do it is by widespread ignoring of evidence. Any system will contain truth. The question of usefulness, though, involves the question, How much truth?

Enough of that tangent. The salient point: There can be no adequate model of reality, no adequate understanding of The Way Things Are except locally, in 3D and in your own mind-territory, so to speak. Anyone claiming to offer more than that has a lot of proving to do.

What about “As above, so below,” though?

That rule of thumb works wonderfully well within the part of reality you inhabit. Don’t expect it to serve equally well in dealing with the unknown.

I thought dealing with the unknown is what we’ve been doing right along.

Let’s say, then, the unknowable basis of the unknown.

Have we gotten anywhere today?

Not very far, but a little. Here’s your take-away point. All of reality is whatever it is, you, and we, don’t know that. [“Don’t know what,” maybe?] Anything we examine is going to look different – less distorted – if we remember that we are examining and experiencing forces that are in themselves unknown and unknowable except insofar as they touch the All-D world we inhabit. Can you see why that is an important distinction to bear in mind?

Well, it’s a reminder that we aren’t the center of things, I suppose.

That isn’t what we mean. In so far as you are examining your lives and the reality that shapes them, you are and must be the center of things. But our point is that no adequate grasp of the function and purpose and side-effects of a dog’s tail can be obtained if you don’t have any idea that the tail has a dog attached! You may not now or ever have much idea of what the dog is like or what he’s doing, but the fact that a something – even an unknowable something – is motivating what you experience will change your ideas about your experience.

Somebody is sure to say, “Right, and dog is God spelled backwards. You’re just sneaking God in between the lines.”

You cannot worry about such fears except perhaps to acknowledge them. Regardless of people’s emotional complexes attached to ideas, this idea will be necessary if you are to see things differently: You in 3D (we in All-D together) are impacted by forces over which we have no control (though we have some control over how we allow them to manifest around us), that have their own nature and purpose, unknown and perhaps unknowable, but whose effects may become better known, giving us a firmer grip on things. For remember, what you are after is a greater grip on things. If you pursue this only as an abstract exercise or a game, you will get nothing from it ultimately. Pursued seriously, as many of you have been pursuing it, you will change your life, and that now, not in some pearly-gated future.

Enough for the moment.

Thanks as always.