Saturday, September 29, 2018
12:30 a.m. Last question so far, unless I have missed one.
Then take a day off from this.
Okay.
[From Paul ___: Thanks Frank and OverFrank for the opportunity! One theological point has always been danced around in your dialogs, but answering of these questions in recent days has swung the discussion ever closer to this, so I would like to bring it up. Namely, I am curious about the TGU take on the notion of the so called “fall from grace,” which is the other side of the “perceiving things as good or evil” coin, it seems to me. Is this simply a distortion of the notion of free will, turned into an instrument for guilt and control within Abrahamic religions (casting the dragnet wider than Christianity here)? On is there more to say? I have read some /interesting/ interpretations from other non-3D sources, but all come back to the attempt to deny people the opportunity to recognize their own divinity by those “privatizing institutions” TGU mentioned, which actually go back millennia before Jesus. This appears to me to be at the very root of so much of the fear that blocks people’s ability to perceive. Thanks again!]
[TGU:] it appears to us that the question as phrased wishes us to read motives into people’s behavior, and to generalize, at that. Rather than respond literally to the request, let us take it as a springboard for what we assume to be the real underlying question, What is the truth behind the various interpretations of the doctrine.
I suppose that’s right.
There would be little point in our detailing how and why specific distortions enter the record. Much more productive to show the reality described, as we see it, and leave different readers to draw their own conclusions as to why and how distortions were arrived at. You see why?
Anybody can be in error; most people operate out of mixed motives; different societies produce different ways to see things, which shape and limit the possibilities for seers within them.
More or less. and there is never much point in castigating others for their errors or even their deliberate sins of misdirection, except as productive bad examples to be used for one’s own course correction.
“Condemnation isolates; only understanding liberates,” Carl Jung said.
This is not to say that condemnation was in the mind of our questioner, only that it would be implicit in any description of various errors or deliberate misdirections by others, and would not serve our purpose, which is to liberate.
I get that. So, the fall from grace.
We are going to give you a viewpoint perhaps rather different than you expect. Rather than dismiss it or criticize it reflexively, we suggest that you consider it, weighing various aspects of the question in the way a prospective purchaser might weigh the various points of an animal. Look at it; consider it; feel your way toward a judgment. Don’t merely reflexively react. (And this advice applies whether your instinctive, reflexive initial judgment is positive or negative toward what we have to say about it. Consideration will reveal unsuspected aspects of the question.)
What if you looked at the description of mankind’s fall from grace as a description of the unreliability of 3D judgment based on 3D perceptions and logic alone? That is, what if it is a warning not to believe the obvious merely because it is obvious?
Yes, we know that isn’t what the theological argument seems to be about, but maybe it would be worth your while to think about it in these terms.
I hear you saying between the lines – as you say so often – that ascribing cynical or manipulative motives to someone’s actions is rarely productive of illumination into the essence of the thing.
Well – it isn’t productive. Of course there are always people ready to use any argument or situation for their own good. But suppose they were to use the law of gravity for cynical or manipulative purposes. Would that taint Newton? Would it discredit centuries of mathematical observation and deduction? Would it mean that celestial mechanics, say, was only a cynical façade? Better to examine any dogma or argument on its own terms, for it will prove to have been constructed or deduced in good faith, regardless of who or what forces may have misused it later.
So it isn’t necessarily even meant to be about mankind’s rebelling against divine ordinances? Human complicity in, or seduction by, Luciferian insurrection?
Let’s look at it not as it has been interpreted but as we might deductively interpret it, for, as we say, the productive way to use this example is as a guide for oneself, rather than as a retrospective tribunal over the supposed sins of others.
It is true that eating of the fruit of the tree of the perception of things as good or evil shaped human experience. The biblical account is an excellent metaphor for the situation, misread only because read by the very result, by the distorted means of judgment, that followed the descent into perception of duality as reality and oneness as no longer applicable to human experience in 3D. That is, once humans saw everything as some form of duality, they had lost their previous ability to dwell in the garden of Eden. They were psychologically incapable of seeing the perfection of things, and could only see that everything could be – must be – either good or evil.
But – as is implicit in the story, which was not so much fabricated as divined – it didn’t have to be that way. Humans might have – and still might today, only today it must be done individually, against the terrific drag of mass-consciousness – human might have, and might, live in the 3D world while seeing its underlying unity rather than seeing it only as duality. It is the seeing it as duality that has led to strife, and conflict of will, and being lost. It is the seeing life in a distorted lens that has led to the need for Jesus and the Buddha and others to remind people that life doesn’t have to be that way. “I come that you may have life more abundantly.”
Now, is the falling into a perception of duality rather than unity the same thing as a fall from grace? Well – maybe so, maybe no. Just as humans didn’t have to fall into the snare of seeing 3D as duality, so they didn’t and don’t have to fall into the snare of thinking themselves orphans, or victims, or rebels.
That is, we don’t have to assume that either we don’t have free will, or that the mark of free will is rebellion.
If you think that you are separate from each other, you may wind up at war. If you think you are separate from divine invisible but real forces directing your life, you may find yourselves at war with God, so to speak.
I get it. Wrong ideas about things lead to wrong ideas of who and what we are, hence to wrong ideas of our proper role in this 3D life and in the non-3D life we also lead.
Yes, thinking oneself alone, or alienated, or victimized, is the fall from grace. Given any of these assumptions, no situation is tolerable. Absent these assumptions, life is good and is clearly seen as good. It is as simple as s redefinition of life, but that may require an act of faith.
Faith that life makes sense; faith that our thinking so is an accurate perception and not wishful thinking.
Faith that you are not alone.
As you well know, that was the most striking of the understandings I came to in my Gateway program in 1992, that contrary to my entire experience of life to that point, I was not alone and never had been.
Which transformed your effective life going forward, necessarily.
Not to as deep an extent as it might have, however, had I thought about it more.
Life always holds room for improvement. Still, it was a turning point, and, you turned. And of course, so may anyone, unpredictably, when the awareness of the unbreakable unity of life suddenly sinks in.
And that should be enough on the subject for the moment. Remember to take your weekly break from this addictive entertainment.
All right. You know we thank you for all this – I, and unpredictable numbers of others. Till next time, then.
Thanks to all involved during this current series of exploration. I have recently been able to consistently read along here.
I like this session a lot. It feels very profound and useful to me. Good guidance for living in duality but not being of it, which requires vigilance and can be tricky.
One way to think of the “original” perception of the fall from the garden is sort of obverse to the “cynical” framing. That is, the initial or original perception of duality was not colored by or necessarily leading toward guilt and forms of social control. Rather, it was a perception colored by an immense sadness and irretrievable loss. A loss of cosmic and devastating proportions; a catastrophe in which it was felt that that the whole of life, the pure ever flowing source of life, was lost immediately and forever.
Was that perception true or accurate? Well, it hardly matters now does it? Such a piercing and anguished sense of loss is difficult to imagine and might be too painful in any case. But one can see how, living in the aftermath of such a memory generation after generation, the concept of guilt would have arisen and become more and more tangible – true; simply an existential fact of the human condition and thus, later, amenable to all sorts of uses for control and domination.
Nietzsche’ great historical insight was to see how we insist on writing the outcomes and effects of historical events and processes into their origins.