Aside: Controversy
DeMarco, Frank. Rita's World: A
View from the Non-Physical (Kindle Location's 3830). Rainbow Ridge Books.
Kindle Edition
(A) ... Of course I am aware of
the controversy about the topic of suffering.
In such cases, the conclusions people come to are less important than
the question of whether their thought processes were activated or not. That is, when the subject arose, did their
truth-detector, as you call it, engage, or did they play old tapes of opinions
previously arrived at? If the former,
they had engaged with the material; if the latter, they have not. Progress may come out of engagement,
regardless of conclusions and final stances (assuming there could be such a thing
as a "final" stance), but what could result from refusal or inability
to engage?
The potential for static on the
line comes not from others but from yourself of course. When is it ever different in life? "If only 'they' were different, or acted
differently, then I wouldn't have to -" etc. That often seems true and never is, and a
good thing it isn't, or your free will would be dependent on outside variables.
(Q) Viktor Frankl said the one thing no one can
take from us is the ability to choose our attitude toward what happens to us.
(A) And he learned that wisdom in a hard
school. So the point is, don't let your
awareness of others listening in, and don't let your concern over their
possible reactions, move you off the place where you need to be, to engage in
this enterprise. I, on my end, promise
that I won't be thrown off the rails either.
There is a big difference, you see, between being flexible and
responsive, on the one hand, and being dependent upon external feedback, on the
other.
Delusions of competence
DeMarco, Frank. Rita's World: A
View from the Non-Physical (Kindle Location's 3845). Rainbow Ridge Books.
Kindle Edition
(A) To return to the subject of suffering.
(Q) I just glanced back, to refresh my
memory. You said three things - the
world is just, and then you were going to talk about the manifestation of
hidden relationships and delusions of competence.
(A) Many of the difficulties people have with
this and related subjects stem from the mind's persistent pattern of reverting
to thinking of people as unitary individuals rather than as functioning
communities. If you think in those terms
- especially if you don't think so
much as automatically (unconsciously) assume
- you come up with logical sounding and often persuasive descriptions of the
way things must be. So, if you can't
stand the idea of the universe being unjust, and yet you see bad things
happening to good people, to quote an old book title, you invent the idea that
everything that happens to you now is payback for something you did earlier,
or, presumably, is an advance payment that you can use at a later time to
amortize something you haven't done yet!
But even the idea of
"bad" and "good" people is a distortion based on an
inadequate concept of what we truly are and how we truly function. We won't follow that up at the moment, but
make a note of it. The point will be
obvious to some, less so to others. And
in fact, the previous paragraph is full of similar distortions all caused by
unconscious assumptions. That we know
what a " bad" thing is, for instance.
That "bad" things shouldn't happen to "good" people
if this were a just world. That
everything has to be repaid. (It does,
actually, but not in the way that is so often assumed when people begin
throwing around words like Karma.)
So, let us talk about hidden
relationships. Or come to think of it,
let's dispose of delusions of competence, since it will require only a few
words and we're halfway there.
People have strong feelings about
what they see or think they see, and those feelings are rooted in their values,
and so far, well and good. But that doesn't
mean they are competent to judge what they see.
It doesn't mean they understand or that they even see clearly. Think how scientists continually see more and
more deeply, the more they investigate any phenomenon. The whole field of chaos studies, invented
about five seconds ago (in terms of a civilization's lifespan), suddenly
demonstrated that what looked - well, chaotic - had implicit laws that it followed. Think of it!
Chaos is rooted in order, and order in chaos. The more closely you look at anything, the
more complex it reveals itself to be, and the more interrelated.
Yet people think themselves
competent to judge and even condemn, because it offends their sense of the
fitness of things.
(Q) I remember the guys telling you that just
because you don't like sharks, that doesn't mean the world doesn't need
predators, and also scavengers. They
said without killers the world would be awash with live bodies, and without
scavengers it would be awash with dead ones.
As I recall, you didn't like the answer much.
(A) No, I can't say that I did. But I respected it, and that's the
difference. A scholar learns to respect
the data, not quarrel with it, and to wrestle with the argument, not dismiss
it. It was easier, perhaps, because Bob
[Monroe] always said Earth was a system of organized predation modified by the
existence of love.
The point here is that there is a
very big and crucial difference between rejecting an argument because something
within you feels that it is untrue, and rejecting it because something within
you says, "by rights, it shouldn't
be true". The latter amounts to
pretending to know the dynamics of the system, and also sets up your own
morality as presumably superior to that of the creator of the system.
(Q) It still surprises me how easily people talk
about making "a better world", as if they or anyone knew how to do
it. Working on our own stuff, sure; we
can do that, and it's a lifetime job.
But reforming others? Or putting
some automatic mechanism into place that will fix things? I don't think so.
(A) But, you see, working on yourself is the way to make a better world, and
thank you for that deft segue.
(Q) You're welcome. Any time.
Hidden relationships
DeMarco, Frank. Rita's World: A
View from the Non-Physical (Kindle Location's 3882). Rainbow Ridge Books.
Kindle Edition
(A) Once you stop thinking of yourselves as
unitary individuals and experience yourselves as communities, you begin to
realize that you extend in all directions as well as backward and forward in
time. If you have uncounted strands,
each of which was an "individual" comprising uncounted strands, which
each -. You see? You change what you are and you impact parts
of yourself that you will never experience until your consciousness centers on
the non-3D and you can see yourself as you actually are rather than as you look
in any one particular time-slice that you call "right now". As you have experienced, Frank, and as many
others have experienced somewhat less publicly, you, in your present, can
impact and therefore change other strands of yourself in their present [i.e., the time in which they live], which in turn
will have further ramifications, again usually unsuspected by you.
That is the power to change the world. That is the only power to change the world.
The only power you have, and
the only power you need. Because, perhaps it may not have occurred to
you, changing the physical world at any given moment is not the point of all
this. The physical is a subset of the
nonphysical, created to serve a specific purpose, and doing so. You
are the purpose of the whole exercise, not foreign relations or the elimination
of poverty or a cure for cancer. All
things pass away, but does the nonphysical pass away?
This is a part of what I mean by
hidden relationships. Another part is
that you do not know the healing effects that suffering can produce, or the
growth. It is always a mistake to judge
the suffering of others as if you knew.
You don't, you can't, and in a sense, it isn't any of your
business. To alleviate the causes of
suffering is well and good. Who can
argue against it? To want to
alleviate it, however, is not necessarily any more than an emotional
impulse. At worst, a self-indulgence,
reassuring yourself that you are a caring individual. To condemn the world for containing what you
perceive to be injustices is to arrogate to yourself the right to judge what is
beyond your ability to understand, let alone to prescribe how to cure. Actions
always have unanticipated consequences.
The evil that you shut the door to here may come with redoubled force
through the window there.
