Tuesday, March 29, 2022
5:15 a.m. An awful lot – a richness – of associations go on beneath our surface consciousness. I awaken to a fully formed paragraph that could go into a science-fiction/spy story I will never write, and that, for all I know, someone else is writing, or has written,. Then a long chain of memory and association starting with an image of Tom Selleck as Eisenhower and going through the D-Day movie (“Ike: Countdown to D-Day”), and trying to remember, and finally remembering, the name of the general our Air Force accidentally killed at St. Lo, and remembering that they call the West Point Class of 1915 “The year the stars fell on” [because so many of that class became generals]. And on and on. A great richness of interest, sometimes of entertainment, sometimes of anguish even. It all goes on, behind the scenes, and are we to believe that this has no point but to interfere with our efforts at one-pointed mindfulness? I don’t think so. Like most things, it is a question of who’s going to be in charge, us or it.
So, guys, anything on your minds this morning, or do we take a day off?
We always have something on our minds; you can always take a day off.
Well, I have my coffee, and I have a cat crowding me out of my desk space, only grudgingly leaving me enough room to write, and my back started off hurting and rapidly eased as I went downstairs and back upstairs to feed Lila, and I have a slight headache – more or less an echo of a headache, nothing much – and as I write this long sentence my ears have begun ringing, ever louder, so I guess that all adds up to, “We’re up; we might as well do something.” And it’s nearly 5:30. So, over to you. (And to seal the deal, the cat just took herself off to somewhere more interesting, so I have the blotter back.)
All this may serve to remind you that life has more layers, all intricately interconnected – braided, almost – than is usually realized. If you were to try to record – or even to notice – all the layers operative at any one moment, you would discover that it can’t be done. Closer examination would reveal more subtle connections, and even closer examination would continue to reveal wheels within wheels. How could you know what layers were “important” and which were not? Your judgment would be affected by your preoccupations of the moment; you stand on a moving platform. Besides, even what you judge from a definite perspective (which is the same as saying, within a definite context), you don’t necessarily judge accurately.
It is unsafe to presume that anything in life is unimportant. You think life comes with spare parts, or with tret?
Tret?
Look it up. [I did. Tret has a couple of definitions, but basically it is an allowance to purchasers of certain commodities to compensate for waste or deterioration during transit. Wise guys.] The point is that everyone judges life by what they think is important, and that is always an arbitrary measure.
I got – well, you’d better spell it out.
You got that people’s values are always arbitrary compared to a theoretical whole, but are never arbitrary in the context of their own lives, and that is a correct modification of our thought.
How is it that I can correct you? Particularly, given that it is your thought.
You are more correcting our expression of our thought in sequential exposition, that is, words. You’re doing it all the time as you choose words, even when you don’t realize you are doing the choosing.
Meaning, I think, that even when I am writing without knowing ahead of time what comes next, it is still flowing through unconscious processes that turn any thought into words.
Yes. It is the process of expressing non-3D clusters of realization, doing so in 3D – hence sequential – strings of words. It is a process of interpretation. A visual artist – a Dali, a van Gough, a Picasso – will perform the same translation from non-3D into 3D by attempting to avoid the simultaneous-into-sequential process. Sometimes it works well, and conveys the feeling. Sometimes it can’t do it, because the translation requires specific signposts such as words.
So, to resume? I had to look back to see what you had been driving at.
There too, you see, you are more of the process than you sometimes think. This participation is one reason why people think they can’t do this.
Yes, it’s a version of, “I’m probably just making this up, but –“
In the age you have entered – the beginning of the very little understood Age of Aquarius – you will not “keep yourself out of it,” so to speak, but will realize that the human input is very much part of the equation. Aquarius is a human emphasis, you see: Not the water, but the bearer of the water. And not the mundane human but the divine human which includes the mundane but is not limited to it. The Age of Pisces centered on the transformative power of love (which inevitably included lessons of hate), and centered on the direct connection between the human and the divine as in parental form. The Lord’s Prayer was revolutionary in addressing the divine not as an imperial Jupiter or Jehovah, a la Thomas Hardy, but as “our father,” meaning, a creator of the same substance as yourselves.
Hardy’s quote is more or less, “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods: They kill us for their sport.” He was quoting a Greek, I think. A net search will tell me, and I will insert it here.
[Not Greek at all, as it turns out. The quote is from “King Lear.”]
But you see, what a revolution in emotional understanding, and in philosophical position, to see the divine not as something impossibly far elevated and of a different nature form humans, but as of the same substance, and integrally related to, and concerned for, its human children. Now it is no longer “They kill us for their sport,” but our father who cares for his children.
You had forgotten a “stray thought” about sin. Can you recapture it?
Probably, but why not just give it to me?
What you work for, you get more from. What is given you, not so much.
I think it was that the seven sins, that we were told are ways of missing the mark, look different if we use them as trail-signs rather than as reproaches. It didn’t come in those words, though.
Paraphrase. Paraphrasing is always working the material, for it is a way to put something into your, definite and specific, context.
It was in the context of the vast impersonal forces. Oh! In fact, this is more than I had gotten.
That’s what we said; you get more when you work it. So –?
Let’s see if we can get this into words. The vast impersonal forces flow through our lives as allowed by the filters that are our times. We have yet to explore that; I don’t really understand the filtering process, but taking that as given, these forces flow into life, and they flow through humans; we are step-down transformers. Or it may be closer to call us transducers, transforming one from of energy into another. Anyway, those energies interact with what we are when they come into contact with us. We, experiencing them, decide whether to express them freely, or to resist them, or to use one form of input to produce a different form of output of our choosing. And the result that we can observe is our actions, our thoughts, our impulses, our self-transformation. And we judge all that (judge, in this case, meaning “discern,” not “condemn”) by what we observe the result to be.
See?
I do. It’s a more sophisticated understanding of something taught usually in terms of good and evil, of trial and error, of aspiration and guilt.
Exactly. Whereas you can look at the sins as your report card saying “Here you are,” and the virtues as the habits that you intend to use to correct your past errors in self-creation. It is social and it is individual: It is of concern to the entire human race in its 3D and non-3D manifestations, and it is of concern to each fragment of humanity with its own tasks and opportunities.
And I get, fleetingly, that the vast impersonal forces flow into life not only among humans, but among everything.
Yes indeed, but that’s another story, and we’d rather not dilute the impact of this realization. Manifesting the sins is feedback, not a tribunal’s condemnation. Take it for granted (or test it, if you prefer), that these are the major ways of missing the mark. And the mark is –?
Life more abundantly, I take it.
That is it from the 3D individual’s viewpoint, yes. And from the system as a whole?
That’s above my pay grade, I’m afraid.
We’ll get there. What do you think we should call today’s session?
I don’t know. “A wealth of input”?
Try, “Transducing.”
I may. Thanks for this very interesting material.