how the world works

Tuesday, May 28, 2024

3:35 a.m. Yesterday’s session started quite a few hares running. I am still pondering the meaning of “psychic interpretational structures.” But you said we should begin today with the three factors I mentioned as limiting our view of the world as we come in. that is, the factors that provide the initial filters through which we see the world. What came to mind was our heredity of strands, the astrological conditions prevailing when we were born, and the beliefs accepted by whatever society we are born into. Thinking it over, these still seem valid.

As we said, a good place to begin.

• Your inheritance via strands. This is merely a special case of your over-all heredity. Physically you inherit your body, and that presents limits and opportunities. Mentally, emotionally, the same, for it is all one package. But then add to this physical heredity – which Yeats called your inheritance of race – the other inheritance, which he called your inheritance of soul: your “spiritual” limits and potentials. These come from the strands that make you. You might accurately say, you inherit ideas, attitudes, values, vulnerabilities. None of it is destined, in the sense of being rigidly and permanently fixed. But, like your physical heredity, it is a set of limits and possibilities that shape you.
• The astrological conditions. This would have been much better understood by the educated of many centuries ago, when it had not been relegated to the ranks of superstition. Because its nature and functioning are not widely understood today, the “scientific art” will need to be studied in order to see why a natal position will play out seemingly arbitrarily, to those who are not aware of the ground-rules. Year by year, a person’s life is a sort of moving interference pattern. That is, the birth-time (and place) conditions “set.” They fix. The rest of the person’s life is an interaction between that set pattern and the continually changing patterns it encounters day by day. If you were born on January 12, 1876, say, your pattern set, hardened, to the conditions prevailing at that moment; then that pattern encountered the conditions –the cosmic weather, so to speak –every moment thereafter. Obviously, every moment will produce a different interference pattern. We could go into this at some length, and perhaps at some time we may. The point here is twofold: 1) Life presents as an unending series of changes along regular determinable patterns, and 2) Everyone’s interaction with those patterns is structured by their time of entry.
• Societal constraints. Clearly, a person born at a given time into the United States will meet different conditions than a person born at the exact same moment into China, or Peru. Your family, your clan, your fellow citizens, all have unconscious and conscious beliefs that they inculcate into new arrivals. We don’t mean deliberate indoctrination: Is it indoctrination to believe and teach that things do (or that they don’t) “just happen,” or that life can be explained best, perhaps only, by the given accepted belief structures, or that God rules the world, or that chance does, or that the world is a set of impersonal laws, a great clockwork?

Any and all of these three types of constraint may be overcome by the individual in the course of life, but everyone, always, begins with limits that are unconsciously experienced, unconsciously accepted. There is no way to shape anything but to limit it. There is no way to accept form, but to accept limits. There is no way to act, to experience, without accepting form, which means accepting limits. Your destiny is what you are born into. Your freedom is what you can do within those limits or can do beyond them.

Some thought will connect this sketch with hallowed beliefs held by people over the ages. Karma, for instance. Can you see that karma could be seen as the new individual accepting the limits inherent in the strands’ emotional patterns?

I think you mean, at the end of a life, we are a certain way, as a result of our life’s decisions, and that pattern becomes part of the life we join as a strand. And of course this would hold for every strand, so the karma of the new individual would be a combination of past karmas.

Or, “unfinished business,” as we once said, but not quite as simple as “One unit becomes another unit, bringing its baggage with it.”

Another example would be, “The stars impel; they do not compel,” a recognition that we are born into patterns, but what we do within those limits is up to us. Astrology without free will would be the ultimate in wasted motion, for what is the good of determining the cosmic weather if there is nothing you can do with the knowledge?

Viktor Frankl said you can at least determine to have one attitude or another toward whatever comes at you.

And that was very insightful of him, for that is your true freedom – hence, your true responsibility. This is how you shape the karma that you will pass along.

And you can see, with a little thought, that societal beliefs create a good deal of variability. Someone born into the Jewish slums of New York City in the 1890s will experience a very different set of expectations and conditions than one born into Beacon Hill in Boston, or Nob Hill in San Francisco, or into the well-to-do or middle class, or the poor of other ethnic extractions in the same city. All these locations will imprint different ideas of the world, just as every moment will imprint different possibilities, gift, disabilities, and just as every strand will contribute psychological patterns.

The point of this analysis of conditions is to provide an understanding of the possibilities provided b the nature of the strands that combine, and the time they initially manifest into as a baby, and the place (physical and mental) they manifest into. As with astrology, if you couldn’t then do something with the knowledge, what use would it be?

Ponder this, because this is a good place to pause,. Think about it, get a firm sense of these three factors as determinants of the unconscious filters you begin with. Then we will resume probably with a look at the filters as they function, all of this aimed at providing you an understanding of what we mean by psychic interpretational structures.

Our thanks as always, for all of this.

 

Sunday, May 26, 2024

4:20 a.m. I have been tempted to ask about Monroe’s concept of Loosh, and have been reluctant at the same time. Would that be a productive direction to go?

A better direction would be the question of source and interpretation, for this is a special case of that, and the general problem will arise continuously as time goes on.

Remember, understanding has nothing to do with convincing. Exposition, too, is about sparks, not debate. Sometimes you will want to supply logic to help guide your listener in a certain direction, but it is not your responsibility to persuade anyone to follow the bread crumbs. In the case of Loosh, specifically, you can refer those interested to the chapters in Monroe’s Far Journeys. But if they read what is there and decline to come to the conclusions that seem obvious to you, what can you do? What should you do?

You do the best you can. Still, it is a queasy feeling to guess how our own dialogue may be misinterpreted.

Yes, let’s look at that question of interpretation. What is it but connecting the dots? But aren’t patterns of dots always de facto Rorschach Tests? Take comfort in the fact that people will be drawn to the things they need. If they need to see a tiger, that’s what they will see. If a lamb. They will see lamb. And in a way, that is just what will be there. It isn’t that reality is a clear tiger, a clear lamb. Reality is a blurry set of impressions like a scene at dusk: Your mind works to make sense out of inadequate data.

Isn’t that your entire life? Do scientists not spend their careers making patterns from inadequate data, then amending the pattern as new data seems to change things? Do not psychologists, theologians, artists, change their views in light of greater experience? Even in terms of strictly personal lives, do you not see life differently as new experiences add to and alter your understanding? Are not many young adults likely to be more intolerant than older ones, largely because they have not yet had enough mutually contradictory or conflicting experiences to soften their judgments?

“And” – I can all but hear you say – “nothing wrong with it.”

Well, is there? If patterns of behavior persist, is it not likely there’s reason for them?

Let’s bring back to the center certain facts that may tend to get lost in the argument. That is, remember context!

• Life is somewhat real It is never as clear-cut and definite as it will appear.
• Life is flexible and ambiguous. Cause and effect goes only so far. Meaning is only so definite. Everything can always be seen differently.
• You are not a separated bit of awareness except  relatively. Your individual 3D input is valuable to your larger being, and thus to the whole, but it is valid as your experience, not as evidence of accuracy.

Here is what it comes to. If you were to define things strictly, you would have to conclude that almost everything you “know” is only somewhat true. It may be true in some circumstances but not in others, or in some perspectives, but not others. You yourself – who you are really – will show different aspects of yourself according to the context you examine yourself in, and so in effect you are different according to how you see yourself.

“As a man thinks, so he is”?

Let’s not get sidetracked. The point here is that the very things you may find difficult about life in 3D are integral to the experience: They “come with the territory.” So why fight them? It would be like bemoaning your need to continually breathe an oxygen-nitrogen mixture. Yes it is a necessity, yes it can have its inconvenient or limiting aspects, yes it tethers your possibilities. But even if your list of objections were valid, what practical purpose would it serve to complain about their existence? It is well to know the constraints, if only for your own safety, but what good would it do you to complain about them, or resent them?

It is just as easy to change your attitude and give thanks for what that same dependency makes possible in life. Do you suppose the deep-sea diver resents the supply of oxygen that keeps him alive? He may wish he had gills; not having gills, he is likely to be glad for a way to carry his oxygen-breathing habits beneath the surface of the sea.

We know that 3D life has its difficulties, of course. The 3D conditions were created specifically to allow you to accomplish certain things that cannot be done outside those conditions, as we have often said. It is not that the scuba diver, who cannot survive beneath the surface without that equipment, is there in order to be forced to rely on the air supply; the air supply is provided so that the diver may dive.

This sounds like, “Quit whining, there’s nothing wrong with life except the way you’re thinking about it.”

It sounds nicer to say, “All is well, all is always well,” but yes, that’s the tenor of our remarks. Life is what you make it. There are always things to object to. There are always things to rejoice in. Your attitude is not dependent upon objective evidence. Rather, your attitude reflects the evidence that reinforces it.

Now, having said that very true thing, remember nonetheless that you have a right to your attitude. We are not saying, “If you don’t see things our way, you are wrong.” (Though in a way, we are!) We’re saying, “The way you see the world is an integral part of the gift to reality that is you.” Reality generates optimists and pessimists as it generates and populates every other polarity. So, whatever your emotional makeup leads you to select as evidence, by definition it cannot be “wrong.” That doesn’t mean it will be or won’t be accurate. It means you have the right, as well as the responsibility, to be you, to come to your conclusions. Only, remember, your viewpoint is only one viewpoint among so many. Don’t confuse your right to an opinion with a guarantee of accuracy. And the same goes for anyone else’s opinion. So, don’t set yourself up as all-knowing and don’t set up anybody else as all-knowing. Remember that in every case you are selecting what you need, mostly unconsciously.

A word about that? I hear you saying, our emotions are driving what we allow into our belief-system.

You will remember, we said that in 3D you are primarily emotional beings, not intellectual. It cannot be any other way, because most of you is beneath the threshold of conscious activity, necessarily. The input is too vast, too unremitting, for a conscious mind to encompass. If you didn’t filter out most of the input, you’d be overwhelmed. But you didn’t design those filters consciously; usually you aren’t even aware of them.

I think a problem here is the word “emotional.” People may tend to think of emotion in terms of outbursts, of strong currents.

We understand, but there’s only so much we can do while confined to language. As a rule of thumb: If something seems wrong or seems inexplicable, ponder it. Meditate on it. Try to see how it could be seen that would make sense of it.

The skill that reading Thoreau taught me.

It is always important to be able to go behind the word to the underlying idea. Enough for the moment.

Our thanks as always.

 

Friday, May 24, 2024

3:55 a.m. Ready if you are. Still reading Jung on Active Imagination, a work compiled by Joan Chodorow from different things he wrote here and there. I never realized that “the transcendent function” he wrote about meant connecting conscious and unconscious  – or, in our terms, 3D and non-3D, in a way.

This is an example of your seeing things differently in light of what you have been given. It would take a foolhardy person to claim or pretend that Jung didn’t know what he was talking about, and an equally foolhardy one to say, “Yes, he did, but it doesn’t have anything to do with this.” No, if what we have given you over the years is a true way of seeing, it must change the context for everything, enriching it, as for instance in the way  Jung revivified and explained the subject of alchemy by understanding it in light of the new emerging science of psychology.

We don’t always say it explicitly, but I bear in mind what you pointed out sometime, that we aren’t after any “The Truth,” which is beyond  attaining, but a closer approximation, a “Closer to the truth.”

Let’s look at that subject.

[Long pause.]

I may not be together enough for this at the moment.

It isn’t that; you are paying more attention to the fantasies and flashes that come to you, attached to a stray word or thought or line of thought, just as Jung’s book said. It is distracting you, but – kept in its place – will become as helpful as any other techniques and awarenesses that have come to you during this long process.

Let me perhaps talk to Dr. Jung himself.

Yes, better. Notice that if we had jumped in when you thought we were ready, this might not have occurred to you. And in such case, either we would have had to suggest it, or Jung would have had to come in unannounced, as he did originally.

[Different “voice”] You will see that one’s learning carries one along at its own pace, in its own way. It may perhaps exact a toll for crossing the river. Knowledge rarely comes for free. If you wish to buy the pearl of great price, you will have to pay for it; saying “Thank you very much” will not suffice. You may pay by work, or attention, or forfeiture of alternative opportunity, but in some way you will give value to obtain value. That is the law of life.

Like the supposed invisible motto of the Senate: Nothing for nothing.

You must keep in mind, anyone is agent for the whole. No one’s life is his alone. No one’s work is his alone. You are each on borrowed time,, using borrowed resources, paying with borrowed value to receive something of borrowed value, and that temporarily. As your friends often say, “and nothing wrong with it.”

Everything I learned – including the great deal that I learned but did not find occasion to put into works published – came to me and I went to it. It did not descend from the clouds as a free gift. I did not construct it from my own intelligence and application. The work and I met in the middle, one might say.

In another time, in another place, you wouldn’t have come up with the same thing.

That is one way to see it. Equally, if I had been in another time, another place, the information would have had to find someone else, or would have had to wait, perhaps forever. Just as there is no ownership of ideas (from the 3D standpoint), so from the non-3D standpoint receptive minds are not interchangeable. It makes a difference.

We can clearly see how important it was that Freud and you initiate so vast a revolution in the West’s view of the psyche. I think you aren’t quite saying, “It’s always like that,” but are saying something like, “You can never know.”

You will remember Emerson as an older man, reflecting that he as a younger man had entertained ideas that were radically different from those accepted at the time, yet had lived to see them accepted widely. How can anyone know the value of the gift? How can they know that anybody else can and will nurture it, if they do not? More than anything, how can they know what they are doing, what it will lead them to, and what it will lead others to? There is a valid psychological reason why Moses cannot quite enter the promised land.

I take that to mean, roughly, that pioneers are still shaped by the beliefs and experiences they started from, and only those who get to live by the newer understandings can go farther, because free of the earlier pioneer’s cultural baggage.

To make a mundane example, a very isolated individual, an Emerson, a Bob Monroe. They help free successors who continue along that road, a Thoreau for Emerson, a Bruce Moen for Monroe. And even these are what you might call first-generation descendants. Nor of course did Emerson or Monroe spring into the world without antecedents.

And a much larger example would be one Carl Jung and his intellectual and spiritual descendants.

Yes, yes, but the number of potential examples is endless, because that is how the world proceeds. Any new truth, or we should better say any new way of grasping truth, any new facet of the gem that may appear, will be apprehended singly. One man, one woman will get a glimmer, and will follow it, mixing that idea with everything within them. I do not mean to say that this will happen only to one at a given time, there could be many. But to each it will be a private struggle. And of course, as each person is different, so each way of seeing that same idea will be different.

Understand this well. Bringing fire to humans is always a private affair, and is always likely to exact a cost from each Prometheus. Yet what better fulfills man’s nature than fidelity to a great task, undertaken not for external (one might say extraneous) reward, but for very love of the endeavor? If your work is not a gift of love, whatever else it may be, then God help you.

And of course worse for us if we shrink from the struggle, thinking ourselves unworthy.

“Struggle” is perhaps over-dramatic. Simply, “the task” will do. But yes, if you bury the one talent you have been given, for fear of being inadequate to it, things will not go well for you. Much better a thousand blunders and backslidings than a confining of yourself only to what you are sure you can do skillfully and successfully.

I think of how hard it was for you to take the subject of alchemy seriously, but how you persevered.

Well, you know, I had to! I was being urged in that direction, and I knew by then that such persistent urges are not to be denied or ignored. But yes, it was very difficult for quite a while, trying to find the pearl hidden in the dunghill. I would think, “Why must I waste my time and effort on this nonsense?” But another part of me knew better. The ego self can be quite opinionated, and is very ready to raise objections and emotional barriers against anything it does not understand, or disapproves of, but it must not be allowed to prevail. Its legitimate function is to work the material that comes into your life, but it is not its legitimate function  to decide in advance what is or is not worthy of your time and attention. That is for a wiser, more experienced, more broadly connected part of you.

I know that you do not mean this only for the few who are in a position to revolutionize people’s thought, but perhaps the wider implications for us all haven’t yet been spelled out.

Well, it is simply that you never know. Just as you never know when your death-date will be, and you never do find out until that day, so you never know just what of your efforts may turn out to be valuable to yourself and your fellows. The doodles you make while on the telephone may prove to be the point, and the conversation merely the occasion, as was pointed out.

By Gurdjieff, I think, or perhaps Ouspensky.

The authorship doesn’t matter. The content matters. And this is the point here: You never know what you or anyone else may be capable of doing, and you never know what may hinge on your own efforts. Bear it in mind.

Thank you. Enough for the moment?

Yes. Pay attention to your life; it is only lent to you, and you will have to account for your stewardship.

Sobering thought/

Also, perhaps, an encouraging one. Very well.

Our thanks to you and all, as always.

 

Thursday, May 23, 2024

9:50 a.m. As I sat quietly pondering, I realized, what you’re doing is a quiet revolution that has nothing to do with overthrowing anything, but merely seeing them in different contexts – which is the most thorough-going revolution possible.

This is not really a new idea to you. It is perhaps the first time it has come front and center.

I would say so.

You might spell it out, lest it become less clear to you later.

It isn’t hard. All those self-help books people put out, all those confident formulas for success in one guise or another, every worked-out system of philosophy or religion or whatever attempting to explain the world and our place in it – all the things people have ever taught or believed – they aren’t wrong, but they are limited. We aren’t saying, “We’re right and you’re wrong”; we’re saying, “You are right as far as you go, as far as your axioms and definitions will take you – but if you will look at the world our way, you’ll see it all differently.”

Still think you wasted your life? Or met with insufficient success?

It’s breathtaking. That’s a cliché, but warranted. (And serious business, for an asthmatic! 😊) I could never believe that everybody else was wrong and we were right. “Everybody’s out of step but my Johnny.” But this, I can believe. What was true is no longer the ultimate in truth. The way things were seen is not the way they will be seen. And it will change everything and nothing.

Nor will it be the final word, of course, only a new way opening.

The teachings of the Buddha, and the Tao, and Jesus and life more abundantly: It is all the same and it is all different because seen from a new place.

Nor are the social sciences nor even the physical sciences unaffected. Nor psychology, nor anything anyone puts mind to. Christianity revolutionized the Western world, and is still revolutionizing parts of the world beyond, by seeing man’s relation to the divine differently. Actually, any religion, even those that exaggerate the distance between the human and the divine, see the relationship differently: That difference is what is at the root of their gift.

I will send this out, hoping it doesn’t sound like psychic inflation. (And hoping it isn’t!)

Remember that there is no ownership of ideas. Any way of seeing is open to any who are capable of adopting it.

And I will rely on it to make its own way, without the help of Madison Avenue.

 

Thursday, May 23, 2024

4:05 a.m. My neighbor Don DeBats, whose cat Lila I am hosting as I do when Don and Margaret Ann are gone, died yesterday in Australia of a brain aneurism. Quite a shock. Ordinarily I wouldn’t bring that to this on-going conversation, but something says I should. I take it you will have a thing or two to say?

He got the form of departure that you have in mind: swift, relatively painless, leaving the inevitable loose ends but not involving any long intermediate state of advanced care or prolonged suspense. You may take this – including your reaction – as a reminder of the effect on others of a sudden departure. It always comes as a shock to others, even it they half-expected it “sometime.”

What struck me was the uncompleted task, the book he had been working on for so many months, still many months away from completion. But a you say, always there are loose ends.

The background suspense of “When am I going to die? How? What will I leave uncompleted? How will that death round out the life, what meaning will it seem to leave?” always adds mystery to your lives, and reminds you that you are not in charge, not in that shaping way.

Is that important?

Let’s talk about The Eternal Now.

Very dramatic, but I wait and nothing more comes.

You always know your overall shape of your life.

I deny that. Or, you are using “know” in a different sense than the obvious.

More like, we are using “you” in a different sense.

Ah. Okay, I see that. Our larger awareness knows the shape of things to come, presumably including possible branchings.

You are yet immersed in the past->present>future way of seeing things. We repeat, let’s discuss it from the Eternal Now.

• Your life in all its potential variations is there, now. It springs forth as one

This is going to be difficult, isn’t it? Talking without time-flow getting in the way.

It ought to be easy, but yes, we are finding it difficult. In such cases it is usually a matter of finding the right approach. It is a difficulty inherent in language. We need an analogy. You have the problem: Can you reach to an analogy that will carry us over the difficulty?

An absurd analogy comes to mind, probably because I have been reading Eugene Manlove Rhodes. What about a roundup on the plains? The fate of any one cow is indeterminate – too many possibilities – but the fate of the herd is roughly settled.

We smile. Get along, little dogie. We don’t see how that is going to help.

­What if our entire cloud of possibilities in life is the herd, and the life we actually chose as we went is the individual cow?

Shake the hopper, try again.

Well, the word “precipitate” comes to mind, as when a chemical mixture results in something precipitating from the formula.

No, but the process is helpful. Again?

A jigsaw puzzle. The wholeness of the picture is inherent in the situation even as you attack it in the only way possible, piece by piece.

Not that either. Let’s try this another way. Say what you think we want to explain.

If I could do that, we’d be finished, wouldn’t we?

Humor us.

Well, I get that it is something to do with seeing our lives two ways at once, sequentially, the way we live them, and as a gestalt, the way I suppose they look from the non-3D.

Yes. Toward what end?

You always know the overall shape of your life. The microscope analogy, maybe?

Maybe.

• With the microscope adjusted to the 3D sequential level, the logic of your life is sequential and variable – that is, it may go this way or that, depending upon your decisions.
• From the non-3D, non-sequential view – the gestalt – your life is more like an accomplished thing, because it is not sequential except from the 3D perspective.
• At the same time, every choice produces a different gestalt, sometimes radically different, sometimes trivially, but different with each choice.
• All these variations are equally real, but equally evanescent, for they are closer to dreams or abstract ideas than like material objects.
• Thus, all changes are equally real at the non-3D level, but all but one are only theoretical, or anyway limited in date, in 3D.
• So, your life is seen as a whole, in non-3D, but that whole is not what you would expect by following 3D rules. It is closer to a probability cloud than a single exposure.
• And the thing that confuses the issue is that language tempts you to think of any complete life as one iteration, rather than all But things change all the time, and your life is the total of the change, and the interactions among the changes, and (bear this in mind if you hope to understand), an individual life is never more than one end of a process. The non-3D never writes obits; it notes situation reports.
• Inherent in this – implicit – is the fact that every life is and remains influenced by continuing changes in the constituent strands. Even if you in your present 3D life were to somehow come to a halt, making no decisions, no changes, still change would flow in from those other parts of yourselves in other 3D lifetimes.

The point here is that

1. There is no “Final result” and
2. Nonetheless there is an overall “shape” to your life inherent from the beginning.

Swedenborg knew the date he would die, to the day.

In that version of his life he did, yes. Do you think he was equally well connected in the versions in which he continued to occupy himself with the physical sciences only?

From the non-3D standpoint, presumably he took all paths.

Yes, but from any one 3D viewpoint, he took the one that fits with the variation you are in. Both views true, neither view complete and sufficient.

Once again, the key is to be able to change viewpoints so that you can understand. When you remember that your Ives are being lived out in the now – that the “now” is all that exists – any sense of doom or of lost opportunity has no place to root itself. It is only the 3D viewpoint that may lead to those. However, the 3D view provides the texture and the moment-by-moment drama that the non-3D cannot. As we say, change viewpoints. We don’t mean change from A to B and stay at B. We mean, go from A to B, B to A, as conditions warrant, remembering that perspective is the way things look from any one viewpoint, is necessarily limited, necessarily a distortion, though often a useful one.

I’m not sure what we accomplished today.

Potentially, it is one more bit of data telling you a way to approach understanding your lives. That it was difficult to get to isn’t a problem and may in fact be an indicator that it was worth doing. Just call this one “The Eternal Now” and we’ll move on to other aspects another time.

If you say so. Till then, and our thanks for this, as always.

 

Wednesday, May 22, 2024

3:40 a.m. Friends? I don’t have any more questions queued up, so it’s up to you.

[Pause] Nothing coming, I will sit quietly waiting.

Remembering that “Man is the measure of all things,” considering your more far-reaching questions: What is the process all about? Where is it going, why is it this way, how does it proceed?

In short, what is the meaning of life.

Any question you could ask will amount to a variant of that same question. It varies mostly in the details. It is really the only question worth asking, is it not?

To a certain temperament, yes.

We would say to all temperaments. The variants are mostly in manifestation – which amounts to saying, it’s all in the details. You get to the center by many routes, from starting-places far removed from one another. If you will remember that, and if you will dare to follow your inclinations in such matters, you will see that in your very individuality is your solidarity with all others. For as we have said, there are no absolute divisions in reality. Everything shades into its neighbors, every contradiction is part of a polarity, hence part of a sliding scale.

Perhaps you can see now that the universe has neither beginning nor end – not in space, not in time. How could it? “Beginning” and “end” are time-related concepts, space-related concepts, and so do not correspond with anything outside of 3D reality. Does a dream occupy a space? Does dreamtime have a beginning, an ending?

But although things don’t begin nor end, yet clearly they continually change – or do they?

That’s an interesting thought, and I’ll spell it out, as I think you want me to do. Just as we as individuals do not change what we are composed of, but change what expresses, so the universe. Do I have that right?

That’s the idea. How could the “everything” change its composition?

You make it sound like a hamster wheel, all movement and no progress.

The hamster isn’t trying to get anywhere; give it that much credit for intelligence. It is enjoying its functioning. It likes running. The hamster wheel allows it to do so in a safe and convenient space.

So you are implying that not only 3D but perhaps also the non-3D is designed to give us exercise?

Remember that who you are in 3D, not merely where you are or what you experience, is the hamster wheel. Your lifetime of self-development is itself part of the process. The universe doesn’t hinge upon your creating greater awareness, expressing yourselves more fully – and yet, in a sense, it does, in the same way that a play may be said to depend upon its painted backdrops, its rehearsed performances, its attentive audiences.

I think you are merely saying, everybody has a part to play, and one is just as important as the next.

The meaning is slipping out through the cracks, here. Let’s try again.

• The universe – reality – has no spare parts.
• Beginnings and endings are only relative to any given thing being considered.
• The world-dream is one of continuous unfolding of the consequences of everyone’s choices.
• Those choices need not be considered as steps toward a goal. They may be considered that way, but they can just as easily and as correctly be seen as flowerings in their own right.
• If 3D life is a slowing and a constricting for the sake of greater focus, greater awareness, life after 3D may be considered a Venturi effect, spreading and speeding the flow of just the same amount of fluid.
• As to the final meaning of life (in the sense of all life, of all the universe), how could you ever expect to comprehend it even if you could get the data? But as you were told, thousands of years ago, “As above, so below.” Look to analogy to give you the best hints available.

What it boils down to is, of course, the simple observable fact that people don’t do things without reasons. They may or may not be aware of the reasons, but the reasons always exist. Should you expect all of reality to be less coherent than 3D life?

You mean, I think: Trust that life and the world are not meaningless.

If you think it makes more sense, you could think they are meaningless, but we’d be interested to know how that belief served you. More to the point, we’d like to see the evidence for it. Everything you examine makes sense in its own terms and as part of something bigger and smaller, so why would life in general be any different? We would say it requires quite a strong emotional investment to believe that life is random or pointless or disconnected.

It can look that way, but I agree, the closer you look at it, the clearer its unity appears. But what is your practical point here?

Perhaps simply this: Each person will divine a different meaning to life (including, for some, no-meaning) and will be correct, automatically, in that what you see reflects what you are. So don’t be so shy about assuming that you know as much about the meaning of life as anybody else – only, don’t forget, that means “not much.” You “know” what you need to know, to be you. Whether you grow in your questionings all your life, or stay in one place, it is you, and you belong to the dream like everybody else.

So just happily keep the hamster wheel spinning?

Does the hamster seem bored, or tired, or frustrated, or put-upon, as it manically turns the wheel? The point of the exercise is not to turn the wheel. The wheel is to provide a way for the hamster to exercise full-tilt without hurting anybody.

This is an analogy to act as counter to the movie analogy.

Yes. Every analogy has its strength and weakness, and changing analogy changes the light in which you see things. The movie analogy centered on showing how everything works together. The hamster wheel centers on showing reality not as pointless but as constructed specifically to be helpful, once you stop thinking in terms of “getting somewhere” and move to thinking in terms of body-building by exercise.

So, you see, those who think that reality is a meaningless exercise are correct in their terms. Those who say it is suffused with meaning (even if the perceived meanings differ among them, as they will) are also correct. Every view of life is correct until it gets to the point of saying, “This is the only way to see it.” And even this attitude serves its purpose, for as you know, not everybody is able to leave things open-ended. Those who need defined, bounded, certainties will find them. It’s all part of the overall ecology.

I suppose you are saying, “Don’t forget that everything you know is based at some level on faith.”

Of course, and nothing wrong with it. Nothing hinges on your coming up with a Certified Absolutely Correct Summary. Good thing, too, since no one could ever provide it. All you can do – all we can do – is give it our best effort, and that effort itself, as much as whatever result we come to, is part of the perfection of the dream.

It feels a little disconcerting, as if we are happily spinning our wheels. And that expression is going to ring differently now!

Be what you are. Strive for what you are called to strive for. Rest when you feel like it. It is all life, and therefore it is all good. It isn’t a race and it isn’t meaningless. But what it amounts to depends on who you are, what you are. Be a little leery of anybody who tries to tell you, “Life is this.” Maybe so, but it is also all other things.

Enough for now.

Quite a ride. Our thanks as always.