Monday, December 20, 2021
6:30 a.m. I know it’s time to get up when I find myself composing well-rounded paragraphs about this or that, especially if they concern a dream I have just emerged from – which promptly vanishes. I rarely make it to my desk with the dream still remembered.
I did have something I thought we might talk about, something about the importance of our lives. Sin comes into it, somewhere between the theological sense of sin and a different sense that somehow blended personal and communal aspects. But more than that, I can’t recall. Hopefully you gentlemen can. In fact, it is probably more your idea than mine. In any case, I set my switches – and over to you.
Possibly it would be better if you took the day off.
Because?
Because the difficulty with the coffeemaker has changed your focus. Can you not feel it?
I can, but I shouldn’t think it would be an annoyance not easily overcome.
Overcome it, then.
Well, it feels like I have.
Yes, you have – now.
Merely a matter of recognizing that I had gotten nudged off balance?
Yes, but that’s a big “merely.” Being attentive to one’s present-moment state is a matter of a little more concentration than may at first appear. If you think you are in one place, but your feelings are in another, there is, in effect, a slight blurriness, a blurring of perspective that can distort meaning. For that matter, the blurriness may be more than “slight.” Nor is this an uncommon state of affairs, but it is more noticeable – if you pay attention to it – when you are making an effort to be focused and present.
As I am, in setting the imaginal slide-switches.
Yes, but separate intent from reality. You did set your intent for focus and presence – but you hear all that background chatter, the alternative stations playing on other channels, so to speak.
I did. I don’t hear them so much now.
And to that extent you have achieved focus that had eluded you earlier. But even now, if you focus on your own condition, rather than focusing on our proposed topic of conversation, you will hear alternatives running, even if so little and fragmentary as remembering your neighbor surprising you by saying he doesn’t like jazz.
Yes. Nothing to do with this, nothing to do with whatever I had been dreaming about, nothing to do with any context at all, as far as I can see, yet it pops up, and then is going. Someone riffling through my mental files, in effect, and I getting inklings of them doing so.
And that is truer than you know. You thought you were being whimsical, but, to coin a phrase, many a truth is said in whimsy. You know you are connected to unnumbered others along various lines we are calling threads. You know you can communicate with them (to an extend determined partly by where you are, partly by where they are, mentally). Why should you think it impossible that one or more of “them” is riffling through your files, as you put it? For one thing, “they” are “you.” For another, how it is any different from us communicating with you? We, too, are you.
You are saying we are even less separate, one from another, than we have come to believe.
You are still a more intricate construction (if you wish to look at yourself that way for the moment) than you suspect. You have more abilities, more vulnerabilities, more access, more permeability to others (which is the same thing seen differently) than you yet know. You are an individual, but “individual” is not what you and your society have assumed it to be.
Well, we have absorbed that individuals are actually communities and are part of larger communities.
You have, and you haven’t. We are saying that the structure is still more complicated than you have yet realized. You are more complicated, we are more complicated, the personal and the shared subjectivity are more complicated.
Time to kick away more scaffolding, I take it.
It is a process. You start from one concept, you learn that the concept is too simple as you add piece to piece to piece. At some point the modified concept becomes too complicated to grasp, almost – and then perhaps a more sophisticated way of looking at things produces a new simplicity, that is, a new concept that embodies the former concept and all its gradually discovered aspects, and shows it in a clear uncluttered form.
And the clearer concepts allow us to penetrate father into the heart of things.
That’s the intent, yes.
And so –?
So, many things that appear to be obstacles, or imperfections, may be seen differently once you change your model, or see it with new eyes. Even careful analysis of your model and your daily-life experience will change things. And clearer perception of what is, means greater ability to function.
To paraphrase that: If we watch what really goes on, and particularly if we do so while observing how it squares or doesn’t square with our model of how thing work, we can perhaps wind up with a more sophisticated model that explains more, thus offering us more opportunities.
Yes. “Life more abundantly” means, freer, truer, deeper, more satisfying, more productive.
Now, you aren’t yet living everything you know. For that matter, you aren’t yet realizing everything you have learned. That is, “knowing” – coming to know – is a process. It doesn’t happen all at once. There is the reception of an idea or a possibility, then its gradual integration with previously accepted ideas and accepted beliefs (a process that usually involves conflict), then perhaps a crystallizing event, if only a mental event, often involving emotion. From “belief” to “known” is a longer and more variable process than may appear.,
So our job is not only to learn new concepts and relationships, but also to be sure we have really internalized what we have already been given.
Bearing in mind, the process of internalization may involve rejection as well as acceptance. Not every truth is for everybody.
We tend to assume that it must be.
To the contrary. It can’t be.
So, different truths for different people?
Isn’t that what you see around you, every day of your life?
Is it? I would have said, different people are able to absorb different aspects of the truth; I would not have said the truth itself differs by person.
It’s a matter of how you want to look at it. If a person’s repertoire goes from A to E but no farther, and another’s goes from S to W, say, can you say the truth is the same for both?
You can say that the truth remains true regardless of how much of it was can or can’t absorb. The alphabet always goes from A to Z, regardless of how few of the letters we can spell.
But in 3D, truth is an equation, not a commodity or a unit. Just as it takes two to speak truth – one to speak and one to hear – so it takes two to perceive a truth.
That isn’t clear.
Some things that are true for you are not true for someone else, not only because you, and he, can see only partially, but also because you and he may be on opposite poles of some polarity. It is true that life does not contradict itself, but it is also true that life contains and expresses all contradictions. Unless you have some way of escaping 3D limitations, your grasp on any particular truth or set of truths is going to be partial, and someone else’s partial grasp may contradict yours, neither of you being entirely right nor (therefore) entirely wrong.
And there’s our hour. Our theme today?
Perhaps “Focus,” or better, perhaps, “Refining the model.” Something on that order.
All right. Well, our thanks as always. And next time? TBA?
As today, only at some point we will want to be saying more about the interpenetration of minds, because it involves more than sharing thoughts.
We’ll look forward to it.