All we can do
Thursday, March 5, 2020
5 a.m. I have been rereading and I just put it down, as I do every so often when I get impatient with just reading instead of living. But that’s what I do: I read. Nothing important in my life gets recorded. Some of it is inaccessible, some unnoticed, some considered boring, some – well, who knows? And of course this statement can’t be literally true. Talking to the guys, so to speak, has centered on other things all these years because I can’t know what my life is.
No, no. Guys. A little help here.
Thank you for finally asking. But instead of beating yourself up – or expecting us to do it – you might instead consider your situation calmly.
Go ahead.
Do you think everyone else considers their life perfect, or even bearable? Yet, in their dissatisfaction, are they right? Wrong? A little of each?
You cannot expect to understand your life. You know this, but you lose sight of it. You can hope to understand it looking backward, but even that understanding must be provisional, imperfect, subject to serious revision in terms of later experience. Your job is to live your life, more than to understand it.
That doesn’t mean, don’t introspect. It means, expecting your life to make sense as you go along is not always sensible. Sometimes it may seem to make sense, but for all you know, it is least true at those times. Sometimes it may seem out of control – out of your control, we remind you – and perhaps those are some of your best times, even if they may feel like the worst.
All you can do, all you need do, all you can be expected to do, or asked to do, is to live your life with integrity, moment by moment. And what does that mean? It means intending to do your best as you go along. It doesn’t guarantee success, doesn’t mean you won’t cringe with embarrassment later, looking back. It certainly does not guarantee that you won’t hurt others by action or inaction. All it will do is assure that you will keep your conscious life connected with your unconscious motivation.
That is, my 3D mind with my non-3D mind.
Well –
It is true that there is a rough equivalence between conscious and 3D, and unconscious and non-3D. Only of course remember that your mind exists in non-3D and manifests, as far as you are concerned, in 3D. But then, the difference between 3D and non-3D is less absolute than appears; you know that by now.
The point is: All your life is lived here, now. Your making sense of it is always there, then. That is, your view of your life is a perspective. It’s a landscape, at best a movie taken of the scenery passed by the moving train. You can’t understand your life that way. No one can, nor is it necessary.
What you can judge is, how are you now, here? Not ten minutes ago, not ten minutes from now, but now. And it is always now.
But doesn’t looking at our track record give us a way to see where we are?
Only indirectly, at best. If, looking back, you can see more clearly who and what you are, it will help if it helps you to see who and what you are still. That is, if it identifies patterns, robots, themes, relationships that remain active, then yes, you may learn something about yourself. This will be helpful only if it leads you to decisions: to continue being like this, to cease to be like that. You see? If you use your past for course-corrections, yes, it can be useful. Otherwise you wind up like the people Whitman decried, weeping for their sins unlike the animals who never do it.
Animals live in the present.
They do, and so do human animals, only humans often think they don’t. That is, a screen of memories and apprehensions of past and future separate them from the reality, and deaden them to their true moment-by-moment life.
“Be here now.”
It all starts there. If you aren’t awake, what can you accomplish?
Now type this up and send it out if you wish, and we can get more personal yet, if you wish.
Oh, go ahead. I can always decide later [whether to include it].
Do you remember Thoreau saying there is always life which rightly lived implies a divine discontent?
I don’t think that’s quite right. I think it said implies a divine satisfaction.
And the difference would be?
Considerable, I should think.
Do you? What is the difference between discontent and satisfaction?
Only the difference between night and day.
You mean that sarcastically, but it’s accurate enough. Night and day exist only in reference to each other. Each specific state is part of a regular whole whose appearance varies.
So we should remember to not over-invest in dissatisfaction or contentment, but remember that they are parts of a perfect whole?
Do you have any reason to suspect otherwise? Do you think anyone’s life is or could be all one and none of the other? Only, don’t let yourself fall into speculation, but stay with your own life. Could you say your life was all satisfaction, all dissatisfaction? All contentment, all lack of contentment? How many periods of life have you experienced that were all day or all night? Not only does it rain upon the just and the unjust alike, both the just and the unjust experience some rain, some shine. Nobody gets all one, and it wouldn’t be good thing if you could.
So the question becomes: Hw can you best use the weather that comes to you? The answer, obviously, will vary from one person to another. What’s good for one will be poison to another.
And for me?
We can put it into general terms, for all: Follow what provides satisfaction. What that will be specifically will be different for each, but as a general rule it will hold.
“Follow your bliss.”
“Bliss” may be a misleading word here, but follow your satisfaction, because there’s a reason why it satisfies. Since you won’t know much of your subterranean motivations, you have to follow what guidance you can find, and what is more reliable than your feelings? Not necessarily your feeling at any given moment – there is a difference between an impulse or an emotion and a feeling—but over time feelings will tell you what you are, and what you should do.
“Feelings are the language of the soul.”
You will find that anything you can be told has been said somewhere. Only, follow the ones that resonate.
I didn’t think we would come up with a session for others today.
Share the Brunton excerpt your brother sent to you, as well.
Okay. My personal thanks, and on behalf of others as well, as usual.