This World

Tuesday, May 14, 2024

6:25 a.m. Shall we proceed? The interaction of threads through time, you said, and among different ages and organizing principles.

The world – reality – is more of one piece in its diversity than may appear, and one reason for it (or one consequence, if you wish to look at it differently) is that all ages, all points of view, are alive. It is not mostly dead or as yet uncreated except for one sliver called the present moment. It is all alive, all the time. And this has consequences, some of which are not obvious. It is a continuous contention among influences. The way of seeing things that died out ages ago (as seen through 3D time-slices) is still alive and well. The way of seeing that has not yet formed in your moment is still alive, or you would say is already alive.

Obviously there is no way of making sense of this if you think time moves, as it appears to. We trust that no one reding this is still captive to that way of seeing things, or nothing of this can make sense.

There are so many unsuspected complications, that add richness to life:

• Your “past life” components – the threads that flourish in a different time-slice – bring to your mental life the assumptions and formulations and predilections of their age.
• It isn’t that they are hitch-hiking on your life, watching. They are contributing.
• What is the contribution of another point of view? It is another way of experiencing the world, it is not merely opinions and preferences.
• You are made up not only of opinions but of visceral responses, many of which may clash violently, some of which may be closer to mutual incomprehension, and up and down the scale of cooperation and conflict.
• As a boy you liked cufflinks and what you would now consider overly dressy clothes. You were equally at home in dungarees and flannel shirts. You may look at this as different preferences, or you may look a little deeper and ask why the preferences.
• Similarly, your political attitudes. The surface manifestations varied by time and circumstance, but you came from the same place [this meant, the manifestations reflected the same values] despite contradictions. How is that?
• And different people are combinations of different values, similarly. How is that, that everyone’s combination differs? Yes, it is because everybody is different, but – why are they different? And – how are they made different?

So let’s do some abstract thinking.

What is the practical effect of the simultaneous existence within you all of different ages?

Interesting way to put it, “different ages,” but I see why you put it that way. If I have a caveman in my family tree of strands, he isn’t just a point of view – he is an active vote on what I am and what I can do and what I may wish to become.

Yes – and you are an active vote within him. You will have to ignore the cognitive dissonance here, if you wish to explore this. Take in the argument first, and criticize it later. Or, if you can’t help criticizing as we go along, remember to stop while you criticize, and resume only when you are ready to perceive again. Perception and analysis: both necessary, but you can’t do both at the same time. If you try to do so, probably you will end up carping at our argument as you go, poking holes. It will do you no good at all. First play along, then see what you feel about it.

Now, it will probably help you to remember at this point that reality is all mind-stuff. It is not an uneasy alliance between mind and matter. Many of the hardest obstacles to understanding disappear if you hold in mind that what seems like physical reality – the journal book, the pen, the computer, the coffee – are mind-stuff; that you and everything are mind-stuff, rather than the separated material you appear to be.

I think we’ve gotten that. As you have said, we’re real, but only somewhat real. Reality is deeper than 3D appearances.

Still, you’d be surprised how often the idea of “things in space” recurs, because your sensory experience is continually assuming it. A reminder every so often seems worthwhile.

The fact that all of reality is mind-stuff rather than some of it being one thing and some being another will be best held in mind as you consider the idea of contact across time and across space and across your mental worlds.

The fascist or Nazi or Stalinist or Maoist world-view is alive and active. The faith in the common man of Lincoln and Jefferson is alive. The belief in the divine ordination of human slavery is alive. The sense of the world as a pit of horrors, or a den of perpetual temptation, or a garden of delight, or a valley of tears – it is all alive.

Anything that anyone ever experienced is alive. This is not a metaphor, not a figure of speech. Just as you are not units but are communities, so those communities are not divided between an active link and passive observers, but are true connections.

I get that you are saying communities in more ways than associating. I get hierarchies, structures? Classes, castes, almost? Specializations?

Yes provided you do not allow your thought to become too concrete. Don’t think in terms of trade unions or political movements or social structures in the sense of fixed organizations, but what is there, always, is hierarchy, organization.

Fluid, though, I take it.

Fluid but not shapeless. Are your lives in 3D shapeless? Could they be? But fluid, to be sure. The most stable among you still experiences flow in what you are.

I was about to ask, when you answered before I finished phrasing the question in my mind, let alone putting it on paper. The question was going to be, Why. The answer I got was, Regulation. I had the sense of a vast machine maintaining itself via feedback from all its components.

The fact that an analogy pretty much has to be either mechanical or organic is an unfortunate constriction of language. Either one has its suggestive and its misleading points. Life is not a machine (lifeless), but it is not exactly organic either. It is above either end of that polarity. Perhaps the best way to think of it is indirectly. You know how sometimes people explain the body as if it were a machine. That is more or less the case here. Not really mechanical, but with analogies to a machine’s active and interactive subassemblies working together to a pattern and for a purpose. But the machine has no will of its own, and here the analogy breaks down.

Does it, though? What about artificial intelligence, as an analogy? Isn’t that a sort of machine becoming ever more sophisticated?

That’s a good question for another time. The point here is that every bit of reality serves potentially as feedback for every other bit of reality. As always, no absolute divisions. A thing once thought, once imagined, once experienced, once fantasized in connection with something else – remains. It lives. It is a part of reality evermore. Cayce said thoughts are things. He didn’t mean they are objects. He meant they are real, and have real consequences. Mostly, people think of this in terms of present-tense action, but it is far deeper than that.

We are at a place to pause, I think. But where do we go from here?

Well, where do you suppose all this contention and cooperation and coexistence leads? What is it for? We’ll probably continue from that question, though not definitely.

This is quite a ride. Very well, our thanks as always, for all this.

 

Monday, May 13, 2024

4:30 a.m. Yesterday it seemed you intend to continue by saying that what we’re dealing with is not everything.

That isn’t the best way to put it. Let us just say that there is no way for any discussion to include everything. No mental space, however abstract what it is dealing with may be, can hold everything. There is no possibility of expressing a final Truth that can’t later be seen more clearly. This is not a flaw nor a punishment nor a lack of skill; it is merely a fact of life. The finite cannot comprehend – that is, embody, even mentally – that which is not bounded. Anything that is not limited has no sharp edges. You understand? It has no endings. It is like asking “Where does space end, or where does time end?” the question as posed cannot be answered, not because you don’t know enough, but because the questions silently compound incompatible assumptions.

Like, “How many angels could dance on the point of a needle.”

Yes. You might as well ask what color Heaven is, or how much does it weigh, or what is its tensile strength, or what is its monetary value.

We repeat, there’s nothing wrong with not knowing everything, especially if you are aware that you don’t know everything.

I think you are saying, by indirection, “Stick to what you can know.”

Well, you like to keep things practical. And why not? What is the advantage to going into the im-practical? By “practical” we don’t mean “useable.” It is a perfectly valid function to learn something that can’t be put to some practical use. What is not worthwhile is to pretend you are gathering what can’t be gotten. And of course the joker in that particular deck is that you can’t always know what is or is not within reach.

So let us return to the question of The Meaning of Life, remembering that from a higher perspective than we can attain, perhaps it all looks quite different. And of course, at a practical level, The Meaning of Life always means “The Meaning of My Life.” Could there be a general meaning that did not include the specific? And, if that were possible, what good would it do anybody to satisfy idle curiosity?

I can think of a reason.

To demolish competing error? Perhaps. But what good would that do, finally? Knowledge either is or is not practical for a given person.

But can’t that change over time?

What is or isn’t practical? Yes, of course it can. Why else would the same old story need to be put into new form as the ages roll on?

• A given age acquires an understanding of how the world is. That understanding is not learned by individuals, as much as absorbed through the cultural atmosphere.
• Folk tales, traditions, superstitions, attitudes, habits, assumptions – everything in life reflects that understanding.
• It is not a matter of conscious creation: It is a matter of sensitivity to the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the age.
• Now, people living in that age think, perhaps. They begin to be dissatisfied with the myth they have been raised on. Their thought may not be more profound than the myth; it may be, and often is, shallower. But it is different.
• For whatever reason, one age of development passes into another. The myth by which people live changes, to greater or lesser degree. Effectively, the world changes, because of course all you can know of the world is filtered through your beliefs.
• This altered understanding permeates the social life in the same way as before; it is in the air people breathe. And again, over time, thought, external circumstance, many things, go into the alteration of the zeitgeist.
• Externally, the times change, as measured by astrology. Internally they change, measured by anthropology or sociology or psychology. The change is real, and not less so because it is not of strictly internal or strictly external origin. Indeed, that is a measure of how real a thing is – how far it extends.
• All this talk of change and of different understandings involves non-3D and 3D interaction both, of course. That is the nature of 3D life. But it is easy for you as observer of life to underestimate one or the other factor.

We have said more than once that any new age is going to incorporate different materials than did the previous one. It will resurrect some things from the taint of superstition – the mantic arts, for example – and will relegate some previous beliefs into the category of superstition – the idea of meaningless coincidence, for example. Until the new view coheres, it will feel sometimes like a jumble. Until the proper organizing principle appears, you will live in several worlds, changing your viewpoint perhaps every few minutes.

And you have been providing us the organizing principle. I got that.

Not the organizing principle, but one of them. No age has only one organizing principle. It is the conflict among organizing principles within a common worldview that makes an age. For instance, in your present age that is passing away, any of several organizing principles may be a person’s anchor, while yet all people share a common approach.

• A religious person may believe in God, may see reality through that lens.
• A materialist may believe what can be experienced by the senses, by “common sense.”
• A politically active person may share either of the two beliefs but center on the question of how to shape or reshape society.
• A scientist, too, may be either religious or materialist and may be interested only in understanding some aspect of the world more completely.
• And on and on. You can extend the list merely by thinking of the kind of lives people live, and of course there is no need to restrict refinement to what people do for a living. It is approach, not how that approach is channeled, that we refer to here.

As it is now, so it has always been and will always be: No matter what the age, it will comprise multiple organizing principles and will be all the richer for it.

So, we are providing you one way to better understand the world and your place in it. The fact that contradictory or overlapping or complementary views will also thrive is not reason for worry, nor a sign of failure. This is not a zero-sum game.

And I gather that it is not only among us but within us that multiple viewpoints may contend.

Of course. And this ties in with the various threads you comprise. Bertram the Norman monk has a very different view of life than you do, or than Joseph Smallwood does, or than does the other Joseph – the Egyptian priest. You all share certain values; that doesn’t mean you see them in the same way or in the same context.

That seems obvious a you say it, but I hadn’t yet put it together.

Everything we have said today is obvious once you see the connection, and may be obscure until then.

This feels now like a long lead-up to seeing threads differently.

Not differently, perhaps, so much as in a different context. This shows you how threads not only help shape you, but how, in so doing, they bring something of other ages into your active psychic space.

Enough for now. Next time, perhaps we will say more about the interaction of threads through time and among different ages and organizing principles. We are tying you as individuals in 3D to you as part of the non-3D mesh, you see.

Well, I do, sort of. I’ll take your world for where we’re going. Thanks as always.