Tuesday, December 14, 2021
3:15 a.m. My brother suggests that where you left off on Sunday is a good jumping-off place for another session, and perhaps you agree. You said, “And nothing exists without reason and purpose and function, which are not the same thing.”
And, as we said, if you can name a thing, it existed, or why would the name exist? That may not be as obvious as it first appears, but in fact may also be more profoundly true than first appears.
[A false start.]
Cross it out. Try again.
Yes. I had a hard time even remembering my slide-switches. Oddly, I could remember my acronym easier than the qualities it represented. I suppose that is a function of acronyms. Anyway, after I remembered that I want maximum focus, receptivity, clarity, presence, I realized that my ears were ringing and I felt a little removed. I don’t know why we should have trouble with a little point like the differences of the three qualities, but what came was muddled. So try, try again.
As we tried to say, these definitions really are ways of illuminating differences in context. The three qualities may at first appear to be more or less the same thing. That’s why we added that they aren’t. A thing’s reason for existence is not the same as its purpose or its function.
- Reason: Why it exists at all; that is, how it came to be.
- Purpose: Why it exists, in a different sense of the question. What purpose does it serve, since it exists.
- Function: What does it do, how does it interact, in serving that purpose?
You can see that these three qualities are closely connected; as we said, they are nuances. But realizing that the nuances exist may help in seeing clearly.
An illustration, perhaps?
Oxygen became a part of the Earth’s atmosphere as a result of certain chemical reactions including photosynthesis. That is the reason it exists there. Existing, it serves to allow certain forms of life to exist, humans among them. The organic mechanisms “burn” oxygen as fuel, you might say. That is its purpose as far as oxygen-breathers are concerned. (Side-note: Obviously, the question of a thing’s purpose will always tacitly come from a point of view.) And how it functions is as a part of a complicated exchange of intake and outgo between oxygen consumers such as mammals and oxygen producers such as vegetation. This is not a treatise on oxygen, merely an example for the sake of clarity, so we do not feel it necessary to try to make a scientifically exact statement.
Like the German pope in “The Two Popes”: “It’s a German joke, it doesn’t have to be funny.” It’s an explanation, it doesn’t have to be accurate.
Yes, very funny, but it is a good thing for you[-all] that this is so, or where would analogy lead you?
Now, I know you always say that everything leads to everything else, but do you wish to continue on this, or is that enough?
If anyone has questions or suggestions for further exploration, we can look at it more, but for now it is enough.
Then, where would you like to go today?
St. Petersburg.
Joke for joke, eh?
The joke is that in the days of the Soviet Union, a man was filling out a questionnaire:
Where were you born? St. Petersburg.
Where were you educated? Petrograd.
Where do you live? Leningrad.
Where would you like to live? St. Petersburg.
Knowing how you operate, that is a springboard for something. Go ahead.
Sometimes a joke is just a cigar, you know, but yes, it can be used. The spine of that joke is that the four questions refer to the same city at different times. From the point of view of the Soviet citizen in the joke, St. Petersburg represents paradise lost, and he would desperately like to be able to return to it. Well, after the Soviet empire collapsed, Leningrad was indeed renamed St. Petersburg – but does that mean that the St. Petersburg of the year 2000 was much like that of the year 1900?
You couldn’t expect it to be.
No, of course not. It was the city of 1900 after a full century of experiences. Just as no country can return to its pre-war condition, because the war stemmed from the pre-war conditions, and changed them, so nothing goes back to what it was.
And I hear the analogy clearly enough. For us to get back to a former way of functioning would not be the same as if we had never left it.
Nor would you want it to be. What good would all your experiences be, if they had not changed you? To hold to our example, the horrendous suffering of the city’s people, under Stalin’s terror, under three years of siege by German armies, under more decades of continuous repression – should all that go for nothing?
The Leningraders might have regarded it as a good trade, if that suffering had allowed them to return to Czarist days.
Czarist days helped bring on everything that followed, remember.
Well, I know your interests are not particularly economic or political, and I know you have shown us in many ways that the physical world is only somewhat real, so I know that this digression into Russian history is not mere tourism, and is not ideological or political. But given that this 3D life is only somewhat real, how should we think about those millions of lives truncated and the hundreds of millions stunted?
“Only somewhat real” doesn’t mean unreal. Suffering can’t be waved away with a formula, you know we don’t mean that. From within a 3D viewpoint, suffering is as absolute as the top of your desk is solid. While you are in 3D considering things from 3D viewpoints, they’re real. Only, don’t forget that at a higher level they are only relatively real, and from an absolute viewpoint (an All-D viewpoint) they are real in a very different way.
And most of all remember, we are concerned with each of you – each of us, remember – as individuals, as specific consciousness habit-systems, even though you are made up of a community of elements and form part of a larger community of elements. We are not concerned with countries per se because, as abstractions, they are less real than individuals. However – and we haven’t ever gone into this very much – countries have souls too, just as every created thing must. But it is a different order of soul than an individual’s, and so in a sense lives in a different world with different rules and goals.
That’s something new!
For another time. What would have been the point in our spending time on something remote from your own concerns, before giving you a way to do the necessary work on yourselves? First do the work, if you want to get out of Leningrad. Then, when you find yourself in St. Petersburg-post-Leningrad, will be time enough to learn the new ground-rules.
Well, you always come up with something new, to remind us that we still don’t know everything. Or, it sometimes seems, anything.
Of the two delusions, the one that assumes you don’t know anything is slightly preferable to the one that thinks you know everything, but only slightly. A know-nothing is only marginally easier to teach than a know-it-all.
In other words don’t get carried away by a sense of the hopelessness of trying to understand everything.
Just do your day’s work and enjoy your life as it comes to you. You never have to do more than you have the resources to do.
Okay, well, there’s our hour. Thanks as always.