A very sleepy JT keeps the racket down for his sleeping houseguests while Geoff rants and raves about all the new ways he’s been feeling supported by others lately. A big shoutout to the Creekmason Initiates discord to that effect!
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Intro!
Why am I constantly having to relearn the same lessons?
Is it like this for everyone?
”Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it” works on the microcosmic level too I guess… as above, so below.
Is it like this because we’re all hopped up on micro plastics or lead or something?
Fluoride in the water?
Is it TV or the internet rotting our brains?
Is it just human nature?
Was Socrates right to say we shouldn’t start writing or we’d lose the faculty of memory? Were Ancient Greeks, with their memorized multi-hour lectures and tremendous epic poems better people than we are because they could actually grow because they weren’t constantly being severed from the lessons they learned yesterday?
It seems to me that you can’t escape samsara if you can’t remember the perspective shifts that make you a better person.
The Dweller on the Threshold is a theosophical concept that tries to explain this phenomenon. A being that guards the gates of enlightenment and doesn’t permit entry to those who haven’t burned off their karma yet.
But not karma as in a reward and punishment system for good and bad behavior. That’s not really how it works. Karma is more like accumulated baggage.
Let’s say that in a past life, I was too concerned with my own personal well-being. I habitually out myself before others. I viewed everything through the myopic lens of my own self-actualization. As a result, I’m paranoid about systems, trends and even conspiracies in broader society today. For a non-metaphysical conception, let’s just say that that mindset is my inheritance as a white male born during the petering out of supremacist patriarchy.
So now, whenever I start to feel the self-love that describes enlightenment, the dweller manifests as someone calling out my privilege, as someone drawing my attention to tragic current events, or as my own compulsion to read comments sections to see what people think about the things I vibe with.
My mellow is like, totally harshed.
I feel compelled to tie all the good and bad news I absorb together into an overarching story of warning and shout it crazily from the rooftops.
This possibly metaphorical Dweller shoves me back into samsara to learn the same lessons over again: I need to learn to find balance between self-actualization and collective justice. To find the middle path between being hyper fixated on happiness in my home life and on vast systems of inequity.
To basically be a source of joy and love and a reducer of suffering for every person whose life I touch, however deeply or briefly.ds