TGU — Individuals and patterns

3:10 a.m. I guess I’ve done all the sleeping I care to. Shall we continue?

Perhaps you can see now why it is that some people have such a hard time in the world.

They wind up fighting themselves all the time. They’re torn two ways, rather than being able to drive without friction in any given direction.

None of this would be news to an astrologer. The different patterns of people’s lives are clear to them, in a way not clear to people who think others are individuals rather than communities, and who fantasize that people are driven by rational motives such as economics or ambition (which of course presumes that these motives are in themselves rational), rather than the tangled snarl of motives that in fact are in play.

Not going to be all that easy to explain.

But easy enough to hint at, if people will read intuitively.

You don’t want us to bring out the rubber hoses, to make you tell us what you mean?

Leave that for the logic-choppers, always trying to simplify the world so that it makes sense – which in context means, so that it may be reduced to rules, even rules of thumb, rather than be encountered in its full confusing but rich complexity.

So, I can see that if we remember that as individuals we are also communities, we’ll be able to get a more nuanced idea of the everyday life of those around us. And of ourselves too, come to think of it. When Rita and I began to absorb the ideas we were being given in 2001 and 2002, we began to see the world differently, not only in the specifics mentioned, but in other things that suggested themselves as they arose in ordinary life.

Any change of viewpoint is going to do that naturally. What we are doing at the moment is tying together some loose ends, but they will produce large readjustments for some people. On the one hand, people as communities with all of a community’s complex interactions, tensions, surprises, compromises. On the other, that community living its complex life affected by the weather: vast impersonal and personal forces; the pressure (noticed or, more usually, unnoticed) of other people’s expectations and what we might call the inertia of their being; the fact of external reality to be dealt with as another form of inertia. And, of course, all these forces as affected by and affecting the preferences and inertia of that community / individual’s own non-3D components, and its “other life” components living in their own present, and – but that’s complication enough.

Again, as I see what you are doing and why, I fall back on Rita’s very illuminating statement. She said, sometimes in order to understand A, you have to understand B, but to understand B you have to understand A. I learned so much from watching that simple concept in action in books – scriptures particularly – and in watching your patient process of educating me by repeatedly saying, “Well, that’s the way we put it up to now, but now you can see that it isn’t really that simple,” and changing metaphor or re-examining relationships I thought well understood. It really is a good corrective to the black-and-white mentality we fall into sometimes.

How could you be expected to understand anything new when what you already understood was wrong in so many respects? Some leaps are too great to be made, and some chasms are too wide to be jumped, and cannot be spanned by two or more smaller jumps. In such case, there is nothing to be done but go around, no matter how long the distance. It is not a case of following the shortest path between two points, but of following the shortest practical path, which is not the same thing.

Thus you often find spiritual teachers having to first re-educate their would-be pupils, before they can give them what they know, because what they know will not fit into the pupil’s firm but incorrect understandings.

Well, I appreciate your patience and your dedication, expressed over so many years.

Willing teachers find it very satisfactory to find willing students. In such case, aptitude, ability, past achievement count for much less than willingness to be instructed – which means, willingness to admit to oneself that one does not already know the thing one wishes to learn. There is more to it than that, of course, but without “beginner’s mind” there is very little room for maneuver.

Are we wasting our time, here?

And wasting the time of others, you mean? Hardly. You never know – which by the way also means we never know – who will benefit when from what. All you can do is keep the conversation at a level of sincerity, and trust that your intent will carry you through. We are, as always, mixing conversation about the process in with conversation about the material per se, because process and material illuminate each other. Reminding people why we move crab-wise sometimes may remind them that the individual and the individual’s “external” surroundings can not be understood in isolation.

Yes, I get that you mean that last in several ways. I don’t know how to phrase it.

Bullet points will do as well as anything.

Okay:

• We as individuals are communities.

• We as communities interrelate.

• We as communities and individuals are affected by what seem to be external forces.

• Those forces are external in that we don’t choose or manipulate them, but are internal in that they affect us by corresponding to what is in us.

 

Yes, that’s the sense of it.

I am feeling an internal rearrangement going on right now, as a matter of fact.

Yes, astrology. You understood it one way when you still thought of things as unconnected. You see it another way now that we are connecting it to the vast impersonal forces.

Shall I set it out?

This time, it will be easier if we do, actually.

Okay.

Astrology is a weather report. You know that. But look what happens when you realize that the aspect of Jupiter to Uranus doesn’t cause anything, but indicates something, when you realize that just as the scriptures say, the planets and stars are there as indicators, as signs.

Astrology isn’t science (in the sense of strict cause-and-effect and logical correlation) so much as it is art (in the sense of a poem suggesting what cannot be directly said). When you begin to look at it as your indicator of the psychic weather affecting your internal community, you see (in a different way, perhaps) how the vast impersonal forces continually interact with who and what you are.

We left out something, didn’t we?

Well, left it out, deferred it until now, one. When we said you were created as a bundle of threads and were inserted into a specific time-place, we might have added – and do add, now – that the time-place into which you were inserted had its particular characteristics, its prevailing weather, and the imprint of that moment is the initial pattern of your life.

I think you mean, that is how the combination of threads that we are will tend to express.

That’s right. That exact combination of threads, inserted into a different moment of time, would express quite differently. But that pattern is your starting-place; what you do with it is a matter of your free will.

And that is enough for today.

Very well, thanks as always. Till next time.

— And I hear your caveat, as I walk upstairs to type this up: No need to think everybody should delve into astrology.

No. The understanding is the important part.