Thursday, August 12, 2021
2:35 a.m. Very well, slide switches set to maximum focus, clarity, receptivity. “What does spirit get out of this 3D experiencing?” That’s the question you posed for us, rhetorically. I can’t say I understand it, really.
It is merely a rephrasing of your underlying question of “What’s it all about?” As usual, we are trying to look at familiar things from an unfamiliar viewpoint, so as to help you associate things that had been seen in separation. People ask “What is the meaning of life?” and they ask, perhaps, “What is my personal fate: Will I have an afterlife?” etc. Near-death experiencers report personal unveilings, mystics report cosmic harmonies, metaphysicians present elaborate understandings, etc., — and the result is what? Contradiction and confusion? Why? Because the fields of inquiry don’t overlap. Or, let’s say, the road maps are all on a different scale, and they don’t link up smoothly.
One size does not fit all.
No, of course not, but that isn’t quite the problem. The problem is
- A confusion of languages. Before you can know if two reports agree, you have to figure out if they mean the same thing by the same word. This leads to problems like very specialized jargon that becomes incomprehensible without serious study, or else the use of common languages in an entirely undisciplined fashion that leaves you less sure than ever what the speaker, or writer, actually means.
- A confusion of perceptions. You got a glimpse of the promised land, great. The report you bring back: How much of it is accurate memory, and how much is filling in the blanks with what you expected? How much is perception, and how much is projection, in other words. And this problem would exist even if the language problem did not.
- A confusion of interpretation. Even if two people spoke the same language, so to speak, and each returned accurate reports of each one’s brief experience, how much would background differences color their understanding, once again blurring distinctions? A devout Muslim, Jew, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, materialist, would each interpret at a pre-conscious level, and how likely is it that each one would seem to share the same perceptions, after interpretation had finished coloring them without the person’s conscious knowledge?
- And, as we say, a confusion of fields of inquiry. Someone thinking he is investigating individual survival of death is not really looking at things in the same way as someone investigating the nature of time and space, or the nature of 3D and non-3D reality per se. Therefore the two are looking at different things even if they are the same things, because each will be seeing things within its own scale of inquiry. A Monroe program teaching people to do retrievals is seeing the world in a very different way from other equally valid forms of inquiry and intervention. Catholics praying for the souls of the faithful departed are attempting to intervene to help, as well, but the two worldviews have no place to touch.
Seemingly.
“Seemingly” is right! And that is our point. It is that “seemingly” that lies like a stone in the river, dividing waters that are really all the same stream. It is the learning to see beyond the obstacles to a common understanding that we are about.
Only, do we really need a “common understanding”? Given that we’re all different, and our higher selves are different, and our environments and purposes – how much common understanding can there be? Seems to me, sooner or later some bright boy says, “In the interest of clarity, we’re going to have to begin enforcing a common understanding.” And right there is your beginnings of an Inquisition, or a Party Line, or a sort of invisible understood official orthodoxy beyond which one learns not to inquire.
Yes, as if any understanding could ever be enforced! What can be enforced is lip service, and perhaps mental conformity, and certainly social or professional conformance. But understanding? No, enforcement only means – and always means – enforcing the lowest common denominator (on the one hand) and the driving into corners any understanding more advanced or even merely different. You can see it in the history of any religion, any scientific establishment, any political arrangement set up to enact a theory. Trying to enforce understandings is like ordering the tide not to follow its own nature, or ordering fog to disperse, or form.
So now if you look at the obstacles to any sharing of understandings, you see that we must take into account
- Language
- Perception
- Interpretations
- Fields of inquiry
Do you wonder that we progress so slowly, so ploddingly? Do you wonder that any shared understanding that does result is so fragile, in a way? So easily misinterpreted, so easily warped by so many individual and often invisible factors?
I don’t wonder, but it is a bit daunting. It makes you (or, anyway, makes me) wonder how much good it does to go to so much work to create a soap bubble.
Yet you are driven to it – or let’s say lured to it – so there must be a reason, right?
No question. The allure is there. Always has been there, even when there seemed no chance that I would ever find anything. That’s one reason for the unending tide of books in my life, I expect: I was hoping to find the answer in a book.
But we have been at this for nearly an hour – though only six pages in my journal – and it seems to me the only thing we have accomplished is a listing of difficulties.
If you will look again at the initial question –
“What does spirit get out of this 3D experiencing?”
Would you rather we answered the question without context? You have a thousand New Age books to do that, and ten thousand, a hundred thousand, books of religion or philosophy or metaphysical speculation, in all degrees of certainty. What’s the point of adding to the pile?
But you aren’t exactly saying, “The question can’t be answered.”
No indeed. We are in the process of answering it. But it can’t be answered in ten words or less, pretending that any three people experience the same phrases and sentences to say the same things. Impressing this fact is the very first necessity, if we are to add context rather than merely make pronouncements.
Fair enough. And I sometimes get the feeling of you all sighing, saying to yourselves, “Okay, we’re going to have to remind them again, and that will leave us maybe five minutes to add something new while they’re holding the old in active awareness.”
Just as you, on your end, shake your heads and say, “But we know that!” because you recognize what we’re reminding you of, not necessarily realizing that recognition once reminded is not the same thing as having been actively remembered prior to the reminder.
So I guess we’ll go at it again next time. Our thanks as always for all this effort, so patiently given over so long a time. Of course, you don’t have Netflix over there (presumably), so maybe this is all amusement for you. In any case, thanks.