Rita on Living our values and Aggression

Living our values

DeMarco, Frank. Rita's World: A View from the Non-Physical (Kindle Location's 5093). Rainbow Ridge Books. Kindle Edition

(Q) [Charles: "Stephen Hawking was quoted yesterday as saying that our most immediate threat is human behavior.  'The human failing I would most like to correct is aggression ... It may have had survival advantage in caveman days, to get more food, territory, or a partner with whom to reproduce, but now it threatens to destroy us all'. Would Rita please comment on this?"]

(A)  Without getting into ideology, and certainly not into politics, let me say that of course everything looks different from here.  How could it not?  Context is all, or nearly all.  Our 3D lives are a long effort to express what is within us, which requires and presupposes a decision - a continuing decision, you might say - as to what we wantto express, what we want to be.  You may have contradictory values included in your 3D soul - well, your task is to judge which ones you wish to express and encourage, and which you wish to repress and discourage.  And, of course, there are productive and destructive ways of going about all this, but if you don't realize that we are by naturecompound beings, the task is going to be misunderstood.

Aggression

To answer the question succinctly, let me say this.  Hawking is correct and also not.

Hawking is right that aggression as a trait threatens destruction, although I would now judge that the danger is substantially less in 2015 than it was fifty years before.  But he is making an unnoticed error in attributing it to humannature.  It would be closer to the truth to say that humans are living withaggression (as with all values and the behaviors arising from them) that are brought forth from the non-3D and are expressed more clearly in 3D circumstances.  Life is a conflict of values, both in 3D and in non-3D.  Behavior is a little different in different terrain, but the originating forces are, of course, the same.

Hawking says the human failinghe would like to correct. Is it specifically human, though? Is it a failing?  And even if either or both, is it meaningful to talk of correctingit?

The statement could be rephrased several ways.  One would be: "I don't like aggression and would like to see it eliminated".  Another would be: "There is something defective in human nature, and I would like to see it altered and therefore cured".  Another would be: "I'm tired of war and the causes of war and I dream of a world without them."  And yet another would be -

Well, even this many is enough not to invalidate the statement but to illuminate the tacit assumptions it incorporates.  The additional rephrasing dealt with the assumption of individuals acting in mutual isolation, but you have enough to see my point here.

I would argue that it is not aggressionbut selfishnessthat threatens life as you are living it.  That is, most people are not malign or even hostile, particularly; but a civilization that fosters a sense of isolation, of lack of mutual interdependence, is not only profoundly inhuman, it is also profoundly unscientific, because interdependence is perhaps the first law of nature, recognized or not.  What is the much-quoted "survival of the fittest" but a statement that the most successful species is the one that best fits into the existing order of things?  It is not who is the most ruthless. Anything that overreaches risks pulling the temple down around his ears.

Here is my point.  Aggression flows from a sense of isolation, which may result in fear, in ruthlessness, in a sense that it is dog-eat-dog, sauve' qui peut.  But, without that sense of isolation - in non-3D, in other words - the values still exist, and still have their vigorous proponents.  It is just that we in non-3D do not experience the world as you do, so of course, everything expresses differently.  So, I'd say it isn't aggressionthat threatens you; it is the belief that you each exist in isolation - in isolation from non-3D, from each other, from your pasts and futures.  But that is not what Hawking is saying, because he is concentrating on effects and not causes.  This is not to criticize his work, only to clarify.  Now, I suggest that we move on to something else until questions and comments proceed from this, for we have not begun to exhaust the subject.

(Q)  If I hear you right, you're saying, again, let this marinate for a while.

(A)  Too big a chunk of unfamiliar material may prove indigestible, for two reasons. One, the temptation will be to embrace it but then move on, leaving it as a cyst rather than incorporating it. Two, the implications of new material only reveal themselves in connection with various facets of reality. Look at life through new lenses and each day illumines different things, as happened to us in 2001 and 2002 when we lived with the material the guys provided us week by week.

(Q)  Yes, I well remember, and it's true, the continuing nature of the tutorial, combined with the somewhat random barrage of questions from the Voyagers mailing list and others, did result in our being presented new aspects of what might have been glossed over otherwise.

(A)  Glossed over, encapsulated, and in essence disregarded.  Okay, next question.