3D and also non-3D

Wednesday, October 17, 2018

5:10 a.m. Gentlemen, any comment on Kristiina’s comment (responding to “Strands and Viewpoints”)?

Kristiina: [Been wrestling with my own fluidity or plasticity recently. But also watching how the world applies more and more pressure on humans, in workplaces and politics, for example. Tremendous emotional pressure is used in trifling matters while truly big issues interest no-one. Is that pressure to help in crystallization? It is as if the plan is to make everyone behave like hens running around cackling and flapping wings. And this is only social posturing. When the hawk is flying, hens will shut up and hide. I find the social field extremely difficult to navigate because the pressure to join some cackling coterie is so big. But there is so much to chew on this post, I’ll need to re-read and examine myself. Important to remember Gurdjieff and crystallization. Although I have a constitution that is quite averse to crystallization.]

[TGU:] This is relevant in connection with your current reading.

You mean The Education of Julius Caesar, by Arthur Kahn, published 30 years ago and more relevant today than then.

More obviously relevant, you mean.

Yes. Our eyes are open more. But you surely don’t want me to try to summarize it.

Only the theme.

Oligarchs rule the world and attempt to prevent anything from happening that threatens their predominance. When a man like Caesar emerges from their ranks, they oppose him at every turn, because they do not understand – nor want to understand – pressures for change except in terms of fear, and therefore in terms of “a few troublemakers” who are attempting to destroy the social order for their own ends.

That is simplified, but will do for our purposes at the moment. Kristiina sees that people obsess over trivia and cannot concentrate on larger issues. This is of course encouraged by certain forces in society – but what may not be obvious is that sometimes the resulting social situation may be of use to us in our attempt to wake people up to their true situation beyond merely 3D matters.

Mostly people see a division between “practical” and “spiritual” matters.

One reason why we do not use such terms, but prefer emotionally neutral language like 3D and non-3D. To divide the two aspects of what is, after all, one reality is to distort the picture. How could anyone hope to understand half a reality? Yet that is what is commonly attempted.

The image that came to me was of molecules of water being brought to a boil.

Well – we didn’t include the idea of molecules. That is your understanding of it. But anyway, water, boiling. The very uncomfortable pressure of events is energizing people in the way more energy is any system must. More energy is not necessarily smooth energy, nor ordered energy.

Are we not speaking too elliptically here?

It is as well to begin with very generalized statements, so that people may first feel the familiarity, rather than beginning with any given particular instance that must miss the majority, being applicable only to a few.

Still, this seems a little – vague, undefined.

You observed, years ago, that life often holds one’s attention in one direction so as to more smoothly move one in another direction.

That isn’t clear. I mean, if we are looking to the West, the ground beneath us may be moving to the North or South without our being very aware of it, because we are intent on whatever it is in the West that we are fixing our attention on.

Or, obsessing over the trivial while (perhaps because) oblivious to the momentous.

It is true socially. I take it you are adding, also in a larger sense.

Well here you could use a new word or phrase, to describe an aspect of reality in an emotionally neutral way, in the way we use 3D and non-3D. The word would describe the overarching purpose of a given soul that transcends its specific 3D life and yet is integral to it; dependent upon its decisions; inescapably intertwined with it.

I’m open to suggestion.

We prefer that you seek it, as it will be better rooted in 3D experience that way.

If you say so.

This connects with your realization yesterday.

In that it is the same process? Well, I’ll transcribe it here, and we’ll see.

You won’t be able to convey it by transcribing your notes to yourself. Describe it, thus bringing it to greater clarity for yourself as well.

And this isn’t a digression?

The insight we are attempting to find a word for – the approach, we should say – will be worth the small amount of time invested.

I woke up at four in the morning yesterday and made myself get out of bed and write down what I had just experienced, lest I should forget it. I had had an image of a large room, with a wall two stories high, hung with great art, and I knew it referred to ___. But I couldn’t find the name. I knew full well it was a name I knew, but I couldn’t find it. In other words, this was what people jestingly and in some worry call “a senior moment,” where the knowledge is there but the word is not.

Well, this has been happening to me since I was in my twenties or thirties, and it does not panic me, nor does it make me impatient. I lay there trying to work out whose name it was that I couldn’t find. [And, typing this, it occurs to me that my tracing it out consciously was what was important here. Just waiting for the name to surface often happens to us, but wouldn’t have elucidated anything in the way that observing myself trace it out did.] My mind made association after association, something like this, though not exactly. This is for the purpose of illustration. Some of these were the stepping stones I used, some may not have been. I thought, a woman; acquired the art with her brother; Rose; Jewish; Stein; Gloria?; Gertrude! Gertrude Stein, famous for having said, “a rose is a rose is a rose. All the clues were correct. Even the slight wrong number (Gloria?) was in the direction of the right answer, in that her name did begin with a G.

From this unremarkable event, I came to two realizations:

1) The information was there, but I had had to retrieve it from an unfamiliar starting place. Had I begun with Hemingway, or the Lost Generation, or any of the usual connections, probably I wouldn’t have had any difficulty in retrieving her name, nor even been aware of the retrieval process. It was as if the information was usually approached via a well-trodden path leading from the left, and I was this time approaching from the right, and there was a barrier between me and the information, so I had to feel around in other directions to arrive there. By a circuitous but oriented path, in other words.

And that led immediately to:

2. This is the same process we use sometimes in bringing information from non-3D into conscious thought.

“Senior moments” aren’t necessarily what they appear to be. Oh, and suddenly I see the application here in yet another context: Plasticity. The more versatile, flexible, adaptable, fluid our mental processes, the more easily we cope with the processes that tend to construct barriers between various aspects of our lives. Interesting that I didn’t see that right off, it is so obvious.

Yes. You see the application to our discussion of the individual both in 3D society and in its own non-3D process?

Perhaps not quite. You could spell it out for us.

You realized that a specific 3D condition (we won’t call it a problem) is also – not instead, but also – a problem in a larger context.

I thought you weren’t going to call it a problem. Did I get the word wrong?

No matter. Take it as a problem in the algebraic sense, rather than as a dilemma or an obstacle. The salient point is that because you are beings in 3D, and of 3D, yet also beyond 3D and of another nature entirely – all your reality is different from your understanding of it as long as you understand it only as this and not that, or that and not this.

I’m nearly with you, not quite.

And you couldn’t make such a statement if you weren’t seeing that you transcend 3D. but those who do not realize that they do, in effect don’t! hence, panic. Hence, frantic undirected activity. Hence, fear-driven obsession with whatever aspect of their reality they do perceive.

I don’t think you are saying that social chaos is good for us, or even quite that it can be turned to account.

Oh no, of course it can be turned to account. It may be the heat that brings the water to boil, loosening the bonds. But we are saying that isn’t necessarily why the chaos exists, merely that it may be turned to account.

I think we need the point of this spelled out a little more plainly.

Those of you who can, now is the time to take advantage of these heightened energies to work on your own longtime project, which is not this lifetime, yet must work through this lifetime. If you can believe that all is well, when what you see is falling apart, you will realize that what you see is not all that is, and that will be an important clue and a valuable aid.

If you say so. Okay, thanks, and maybe we’ll need to return to this.