The Law of Both

[Paloma]

A facebook friend posted a photo of a Russian superyacht called A. Once, while in Barbados I saw another superyacht also called Motoryacht A. Same owner. Didn't know at the time that the guy owned two superyachts.
People were gossiping about the fact that he and his wife were alone on board with 30+ staff.
So this morning I noticed many incredibly negative comments on that FB page regarding the Russian owner's wealth and how he spends his money. I just checked him out. Andrey Melnichenko, a Piscean Industrialist youngish billionaire and philantropist, married to a former model and pop singer. Also checked out the FB pages of the people who made negative comments...mostly New Age types. I always like to see both ends of the stick, to see the polarity in context.

According to Wikipedia: "In 2016, Melnichenko was given a special award for "good deeds" and charity works by the President of Russia. According to media reports, he is one of the main social investors and philanthropists of Russia"

Motoryacht A:


Sailingyacht A:

[sandy]

How he came to be a billionaire might be of use to know when assessing his riches and also his agenda re: philantrophy. Often charity work is purposeful for more reasons than good will....:-)

Having Yacht's may be one way to actually get away from it all and one would think that this would be necessary for sanity and travel safety in the case of mega rich entities.

Not ever experiencing this life style I can only guess....

I do have a few first cousins that are millionaires and some of them have said they are envious of me due to the life I have lived. My seeming lack of fear and roots of confidence I present, the things I have seen and done leaves them in awe they say. They say I have lived and they have not!! Something to think about as when it comes from 2 different cousins at different times in my life it has some food for thought for sure.

Happy to be me.............

[Amanda]

How thought provoking - a millionaire/billionaire who needs to get away from it ... exactly what are they getting away from I ponder????? Sometimes charity work is actually a front for tax rebate/dodge/whatever? I do not know the wealthy person in question so I cannot make any assessment on a personal level. I still think that we should ask some homeless people what they think of the Law of Both.

How about the Law of All? This is where every single Person has a home and all that they need. As I pondered this thread I recalled the collapse in America a few years ago - where two major mortgage banks/financial institutions failed and many many many People had their homes taken away. I later recall reading articles that stated there were enough empty homes to house every homeless Person in America. Picture me shaking my head in sadness.

How do we as Humans - supposedly sentient Beings - reconcile empty homes with the homeless? More importantly how do we reconcile the fact that there is ample space and there are ample resources for every single Human??? What's the adage: Money is the root of all evil? During discussions people have stated to me it is the 'love' of money that is the root of all evil. Who knows? Maybe having money and not losing your soul is the true test of what type of sentient Human Being a person is or becomes???

Sandy - how lovely that your relatives could see how full your life is and how enriched you have been for your experiences. Good for You.

Much Peace - as we seek answers for all our questions - Amanda

[Paloma]

How thought provoking - a millionaire/billionaire who needs to get away from it ... exactly what are they getting away from I ponder????? Sometimes charity work is actually a front for tax rebate/dodge/whatever? I do not know the wealthy person in question so I cannot make any assessment on a personal level. I still think that we should ask some homeless people what they think of the Law of Both.

How about the Law of All? This is where every single Person has a home and all that they need. As I pondered this thread I recalled the collapse in America a few years ago - where two major mortgage banks/financial institutions failed and many many many People had their homes taken away. I later recall reading articles that stated there were enough empty homes to house every homeless Person in America. Picture me shaking my head in sadness.

How do we as Humans - supposedly sentient Beings - reconcile empty homes with the homeless? More importantly how do we reconcile the fact that there is ample space and there are ample resources for every single Human??? What's the adage: Money is the root of all evil? During discussions people have stated to me it is the 'love' of money that is the root of all evil. Who knows? Maybe having money and not losing your soul is the true test of what type of sentient Human Being a person is or becomes???

Sandy - how lovely that your relatives could see how full your life is and how enriched you have been for your experiences. Good for You.

Much Peace - as we seek answers for all our questions - Amanda

Amanda, you stated the law of ALL, as an alternative to the law of BOTH.
I feel that perhaps you misunderstood where I was coming from.
The law of ALL and the law of BOTH are meant to be one and the same.
I guess I didn't make myself very clear.

"Both" meaning the reconciling of two opposites. This AND that...BOTH. Like the term "I'm ok, you're ok" from Transactional Analysis. There was a book once with that title. The goal being that everyone is ok. Everyone. You AND Me. WIN WIN.

With reconciling those opposites of wealth and poverty you will no longer have wealthy people looking down on poor people with disdain, nor poor people being resentful of those who have wealth. Then both lifestyles are a simple matter of choice.
Total equality is not possible. Not even two grains of rice are ever exactly alike.

[Paloma]

Both alt media and mainstream are finally exposing Hollywood sleeze bags.
New Yorker article on Harvey Weinstein 's hotel room Miss Conduct.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/ji...-in-their-acts

[Paloma]

Here are the gory details:
Harvey Weinstein's victims telling their story.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-...-their-stories

[Dreamtimer]

After seeing his image so much I don't want to read these and see his face in my mind.

[sandy]

These stories evoke anger, digust and sorrow..............the dynamics of power once again pervert goodness in too many ways to mention.

[araucaria]

Bothness is duality. Duality gets a bad press, but those who place the emphasis on oneness are looking in the wrong direction. Unless they understand infinite oneness as actual multiplicity. What has been created is infinite otherness. The source of evil in the world is ultimately the overweening ego where otherness is entirely taken over by self. The principle of Both is fundamental in rejecting that. The intuition I want to explore is that the Both principle is subverted by itself, in other words, you have BOTH the Both principle and... something else. This cannot be done in a couple of sentences, because understanding only develops as one goes along; so please bear with me.

I’d like to discuss in a single post two very different intellectual achievements from this angle of bothness, which is something I do a lot. This is not the clash of opposites to be reconciled. On the contrary it is about finding a possibly unlikely common denominator whereby the same thing is being said in very different ways. I have been reading Michael Newton’s two books on life between lives, Journey of Souls and Destiny of Souls.
http://bookpdfg0ekewing.blogspot.fr/...ouls-case.html
http://www.unicusmagazine.com/PDF/De...en%20Lives.pdf
And I have been listening on the radio to commentaries on Puccini’s Tosca and the opera itself (a week ago now).
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b098n4hq
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0993rbh#play

What is the common denominator here? It is the need for BOTH fiction and fact, because fiction is in many ways truer than fact. Hence truth-seekers are looking in the wrong direction. Unless they factor in the truth of fiction.

Michael Newton’s biggest fiction is death. For there to be such a thing as between lives at all means that death as currently understood is a false fact, or a fiction. This introduces bothness into the very heart of the soul, if I am allowed to mix my metaphors... It means that one soul can be two or many more human beings, both X and Y, both man and woman, both perpetrator and victim, etc etc. But the fiction does not stop there. According to Newton’s hundreds of patients, they spend their time in the spirit world holding inquests into past lives and not only planning their next lives, but rehearsing a whole play to be put on with members of their soul group and other groups. ‘All the world’s a stage’ as Shakespeare famously said, but he said it on a stage – and so it was taken as unbelievable fiction. Not so: it would seem to be the basic fact of life.

Hence we have another Both-And: everything becomes both hugely unimportant – because we can try try try again until we get something right – and hugely important – because every time we mess up for ourselves, we mess up for others. Life on earth is a special kind of play because we don’t get to memorize the script; we have to improvise from day one; all we have tried to memorize are some clues to watch out for – major milestones telling us to marry this person, follow that profession... – and if we miss these at some stage we may well stray not only from the script but even from the entire plot. But the show must go on; the important thing is how we cope when this happens. When you mess up, you are not supposed to bail out by committing suicide (this is stated several times) or ditch someone else by killing them (this I infer from the above); you are expected to deal with the situation, find a solution. If you get into a rut of real evil, you don’t go to hell, but you do get sin-binned/sidelined for a while: you punish yourself.

You see what happens to the predestiny/free will debate. It is not either/or but both/and. You use free will when you have forgotten your lines; your predestiny is real enough when you recognize the milestones. But if you are yourself predetermining that destiny, then it is just more free will. Notice how both/and does NOT require a perfect balance. The universe has to be predominantly benevolent in order to hold together at all.

This means that evil in the world is not a necessity, although it is bound to happen to some degree. It is a factor of inefficiency, like a motor that needs tuning to get maximum efficiency. The purpose of multiple lives being to tune the collective motor. Bad things happen accidentally because we are all at some stage of a learning process, learning from our mistakes. Deliberately doing evil then becomes a step in the wrong direction. Hence the overall situation is very much not all about me; it is about me’s fitting in together – bothness on the way to infinity.

One of the really interesting things one learns about the other side is that you can enjoy a delicious orange, a splash in the ocean or the joys of sex, but for the real physical experience, you need to come to Earth. That is also what we come for, not just the spiritual education. We need both spiritual education and physical education. Another is the interest in music; according to Michael Newton:

People in deep hypnosis explain that musical thought is the language of souls. The composition and transmission of harmonic resonance appears to relate to the formation and presentation of spiritual language. Far beyond musical communication, I'm told spiritual harmonics are the building blocks of energy creation and soul unification.

This being the other-worldly situation as corroborated by hundreds of people (note how for what you read in the newspapers, corroboration starts with just two or three), it is interesting to note how many creative souls end up doing things that are actually a commentary on who they really are. They become involved in all kinds of fiction: art, writing, theatre... creating and playing fictional characters and sometimes fictionalizing ‘real’ people. This is the case with Giacomo Puccini and the original author of the play Tosca, Victorien Sardou, whose characters include an honest painter, Cavaradossi, and his lover, the devout opera singer Tosca, alongside the villain, the evil chief of police, Baron Scarpia, who wants the rebel dead and his lover for himself. Puccini’s intense theatricality is too much for many musical purists; deliberately so, because it is not all about the music. It is not singers dressing up and trying to act; it is full-blooded musical drama. Both music and drama.

The potential problem is that music itself is a hybrid: not entirely intellectual. You don’t make music with the mind, but with the body, producing sound wave frequencies that reverberate through the air/ether. A highbrow person will dismiss music he doesn’t like as middle-brow or lowbrow. What he is not getting at all is this other component which has nothing to do with the brow at all. The music of the likes of Puccini is aimed both at the head and at the gut, which the musical snob simply cannot... stomach.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tosca

In Act I, the painter is painting a Madonna in a church. Tosca is jealous because the portrait reminds her of someone else, the Marquesa Attavanti, who is not a character on stage but who comes to her family chapel to pray, making her an ‘ideal’ model, both there and not there. Tosca is only pretending to be jealous, asking him to change the colour of the eyes. But she has good reason to be jealous, because Cavaradossi is behaving suspiciously, trying to hide the fact that he is hiding someone in the chapel. But it turns out to be the brother and fellow rebel Angelotti whom he is helping to escape. And the prima donna has good reason not to be jealous, because this is a sacred icon he is painting, and her piety, especially here in church, does not allow jealousy, especially of the Madonna.

Then Scarpia bursts in, looking for his prisoner, arresting Cavaradossi and lusting after Tosca, although he begins by scolding the excited choir boys for disrespect in church, and ends by remembering God and singing along for the Te Deum with hypocritical devotion. More pretending.

In Act II, Cavaradossi is tortured offstage to find out the whereabouts of Angelotti. This works on several fictional levels. He says he doesn’t know, which is true when you consider the theatrical situation. Angelotti’s part is over by this point, and for all he knows the singer could be anywhere; he may have gone home. Meanwhile Tosca can be heard singing a cantata in the courtyard until Scarpia slams the window shut. Again two levels: the singer for once explicitly singing, while for the rest of the time she and the others are singing they are implicitly speaking, i.e. pretending. She is brought on stage and reveals the painter’s secret because while he scorns the physical torture, she is overcome by the mental torture. There is an interesting reversal here: the physical reality is taken off-stage, while the focus is on the work of the mind. It is as if the action has moved off-world. The tenor can well withstand the physical torture because it is not for real. As one commentator explains, what he is actually doing between screams is changing out of his clean shirt into one ‘bloodied’ with red paint. For a painter donning this painted cloth, this is literally like getting inside his painting, and becoming his own Madonna.

What happens from the audience’s viewpoint is that they get the full emotional experience of torture vicariously: like Tosca through empathizing with another. But in contrast with the fictional character, simply by entertaining ideas of torture, without any such being actually carried out. The tortured man is probably just sitting down resting, but the audience share the traumatic experience merely through a little play-acting and some menacing-sounding music, by empathizing with someone empathizing – not even that: with someone pretending with great conviction to empathize. It is manipulative trickery that some will not like at all, but if it develops empathy in a harmless way where no one gets hurt, maybe some of the reticence is misplaced or too this-worldly. It brings a victim’s-eye view of the type provided by karmic role-swapping. In other words, if it persuades one to avoid the pain by avoiding causing the pain, then the lesson can be learnt through mere fiction, instead of having to go through with the whole business for real. This corresponds to what most people would consider to be building a better world.

Michael Newton’s focus is not on building a better world per se, simply because he takes one soul, or small group, at a time. So we have to extrapolate in order to imagine how this bigger picture might develop. Art and notably the theatre are ways of doing this. One of his clients talks about a place, the ‘Space of Transformation’, where he can practise this kind of catharsis:

S: (takes a deep breath) I can identify pain, but in order to diffuse it in the human body I assimilate it. This eventually makes me ineffective. I become a sponge rather than a mirror of light. Here I can practice my art.
S: I learn to manipulate my energy rather than absorb pain. The energy belt of compassion is like a liquid pool where I can swim and become part of the emotion in an experience which is so subjective I cannot describe it to you. It assists me in working on calmness within a sea of adversity. It is wondrous... it is... alive.

After he is taken off for execution, Scarpia bargains with Tosca to save him: a mock execution with a safe passage in return for sexual favours. Before she gives in, she sings the famous aria Vissi d’arte asking God what she did wrong to end up in this hell. While Scarpia drafts the document, Tosca seizes a knife from his supper table, and when he has his Weinsteinian moment she stabs him to death. Penetration takes place, only the male and female roles are reversed. When in Act III she recounts the story to her lover, she is very much the one in charge, and he plays the ‘feminine’ role of inactive admirer. For the mock execution, Tosca tells him, Cavaradossi must fall like an artist, the way she herself does on stage. However, it turns out to be a ‘fake mock execution’, a double lie, something she and the first-time viewer only find out when he fails to get up.

Hence you have a complex Schrodinger’s cat-type whereby an actor is pretending to die for real (he knows how the story turns out), while pretending to pretend to die (like a fictional artist, Tosca), i.e. BOTH pretending not to pretend to die AND still not dying for real (as the real-life tenor). It gets rather complicated, but the bottom line is that the flesh-and-blood guy will get up and take a bow – which is how Michael Newton’s dead people are welcomed back in the spirit world after dying for their earth audience. In other words, all this pretence seems to be a true reflection of the larger reality of reincarnating souls... A paradox? Yes, a seeming contradiction. A dilemma? Yes: ‘when you come to a fork in the road, take it’ (Yogi Berra).

At the end Tosca is about to seized for Scarpia’s murder but she escapes arrest by leaping off the castle battlements into the Tiber/to a soft landing in the wings. Her last words, ‘O Scarpia, avanti a Dio’ (see you on the other side) are hardly final, since they suggest unfinished business for an after-life post-mortem. So, what the hell has been going on? Is there something here to help answer Tosca’s question?

Perhaps in all these levels of fiction, Scarpia’s lethal contribution is something in the order of material fact. What I think may have happened in early history is that some incarnating soul, rather than exploring deeper and deeper layers of ‘fiction’, i.e. life with some degree of unreality, decided that in pretending to pretend, the pretence cancelled itself out, and this somehow made him real. This is encapsulated in the story of Adam and Eve. Eating of the tree of knowledge was forbidden as being a dangerous activity and a Pandora’s box where there was no going back. Once you become for real, then so does everyone and everything else. A knife will start to cut; you can no longer pretend to stab someone. They will die ‘for real’. Or at least they and you will die for real within the bounds of this reality; this is no longer true once you step out of it.

Hence reality is itself a fiction, but no longer an innocent one. Potential situations harden into facts, things become carved in stone, and before you know it you have dogmatists, bible-thumpers and other controllers breathing down your neck with weapons that really do hurt. ‘Where is Angelotti’ (he has got to be somewhere)? The innocent answer no longer works: ‘Where’s Angelotti? I don’t know; he’s around somewhere.’ That’s what it means to be free. No one needs to know where you are or what you are doing – people in retirement either love it or hate it. But Angelotti is supposed to be chained up in prison; his freedom is rebellion, we can’t have that. The trouble with other-worldly telepathy is that you could call Angelotti 24/7. In that sense, he couldn’t escape, but on the other hand he could, because you would respect his privacy. Down here, some of these telepaths have learned to consider that he owes them something. He doesn’t.

Written in 1900 and looking back to 1800, Puccin’s Tosca was ahead of its time in taking us into a world of both this and that. The backdrop is the moment after the Battle of Marengo when the outcome is undecided: at first Scarpia’s camp is reported to have won, later the rebels siding with Napoleon’s revolutionary forces (before Napoleon became a dictator) – so everyone gets to celebrate. Tosca is not jealous, but she is jealous enough for Scarpia to get some leverage out of it. She is a weak woman and also a strong man. Angelotti is an elusive particle that we only see fleetingly at the beginning. Later he is supposedly hiding in a well, alive then dead. Cavaradossi ends up both dead and alive. And Scarpia, Scarpia the great controller controls very little. His prisoner and rival escapes, and so does his female prey, who even takes him out (he didn’t see that coming). His sexual encounter is a sham anyway; spasms of fury, spasms of love, it is all the same to him, Tosca does not even need to pretend. His presence is more effective in the last act when he is no longer strutting around the stage. He takes responsibility for two more deaths; the deaths are unreal, but from his own chosen standpoint, the responsibility is very real. Everything is in flux, except for this one hard ‘fact’.

The trouble with ‘facts’ is that they lead BOTH to evil outcomes and to advancement. In terms of knowledge, slowing things right down from energy frequencies to matter frequencies is a tremendous tool; like playing back a movie film in slow motion, or even studying individual stills, you discover so much more. This is where technology comes into the picture, as something commandeered by the cabal. But the hard facts one learns are not the reality, any more than the stills are the movie, or the movie the reality. What we are seeing nowadays is the softening of these facts back into a kind of probability wave/cloud. The JFK assassination, for example, ever in the news, is a kind of Schrodinger’s cat experiment in reverse. We start out with a dead president/cat, and work our way back to a totally theoretical place where all possible scenarios are on the table together. This is a sign that we have gone too far and are looking for a way back. The weaponization of Earth eventually gets out of hand. Sometimes a civilization will collapse with a global reset and a cyclical new age, and occasionally a planet will actually explode. The best we can do is try and see if this cycle is easier than the last, and harder than the next. By this stage the picture has grown so huge that souls can only get back to the individual and collective task of learning together to outgrow the need for reincarnation.

We need to see how two things happened together here, one very negative, the other very positive: BOTH JFK the man was killed by person(s) unknown or known, traumatizing the world, AND the world’s most powerful control base (the US presidency) was dealt a body blow, by the cabal itself. Hence the controversy over whether JFK was a part of the cabal or a good man fighting it, or more likely the one growing into the other, is ultimately a distraction. ‘JFK’ is just the past life of some soul who has moved on, i.e. pretended to die. The bottom line is that the cabal bubble is gradually bursting. We don’t need such hard facts any more; what we need is tolerance.

Interestingly, one by-product of this is that it helps to understand and deal with pathological liars. They embody both extremes of pretence and factuality, relying on both and substituting one for the other. In a context where pretending is the rule, the supply of ‘factual’ credibility they crave for is actually cut off. If one responds to them as fascinating story-tellers rather than important truth-tellers, then they can be of value both to oneself and to society at large. If the cabal bubble is gradually bursting, it is largely due to the changing status of the pathological liars. Both they and we are discovering that they need us more than we need them. Hence, as their audience wises up and sees that they don’t need to know, but can tolerantly listen, they may find it necessary to modify the way they relate to these issues, and the insoluble problem of sociopathic liars will fade away like last year’s flu.

Tolerance is the engineering term for the range of dimensions within which a component will function. BOTH precision is required (as a not always attainable ideal) AND a degree of imprecision is allowed. This is where idealism is tempered with pragmatism: workability as a concept is more forgiving than fundamentalist idealism. There are multiple solutions that will work, and while yours may be different from mine, BOTH will get the job done.
http://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post748408
http://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...=1#post1150664
http://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post622591

[Emil El Zapato]

Fear of death as described by Heidegger and Ken Wilber is 'active nothining' i.e. anxiety.

The drive to reconcile perceived opposites is indicative of the healthy mind. Those that can't will find themselves stuck in double-bind conundrums and will be actively engaged in making themselves and those around them very unhappy.

[Dreamtimer]

That was a very interesting and engaging post, auracaria. Now I want to watch/listen to Tosca.

Your discussion of the time between lives where things are set up is very interesting. I find that dynamic exists in the Dreamtime. We can rehearse the whole play in between lives. We can also do this in the Dreamtime. We step out of the bounds of space and time and have the opportunity to take that fork and see what might happen. Additionally, many dreaming cultures used drama in waking life to act out dreams in order to help bring them forth or avoid them, depending.

The liars are losing their audience and thus their power. Is our current President, I wonder, a kind of last gasp of this old order?

[Emil El Zapato]

Hi Dreamtimer,

yes, they have been increasingly desperate for quite a few years now. They have been forced out of the closet and in so doing have exposed themselves as completely unbalanced nad self-destructive to the extreme, which isn't new but somehow has escaped attention for millennia.

NAP

[Paloma]

Thanks, araucaria, for going a little bit deeper into this topic. And also for shedding a new light on opera. Brilliant minds at work, all around.

My own "both" moment here is to deal with two strong impulses simultaneously, one of which is
to inspect the construction work which we started here at home, yesterday. After much procrastination we decided to enclose our outside living room with glass walls and glass sliding doors, integrating it with the indoor living room, thus prohibiting insect intruders as well as dozens of large toads entrance to our home, and even denying them the pleasure of eating and being eaten.
The lights attract insects at night, and so dozens of toads follow them, and then basically move in. After stuffing themselves they are unable to move and so they remain there until the morning. It has become intolerable.

The other desire or impulse was to give you the kind of response that your thoughtful post merits.
First of all, let me quote what I thought was your best sentence:
" By this stage the picture has grown so huge that souls can only get back to the individual and collective task of learning together to outgrow the need for reincarnation."
I can't think of a better summary of what life is about.

Individual lives are to find their place in the collective, becoming a well-functioning cell in the body of humankind.
Can that happen while the body of humankind is going through premature decomposition? Or perhaps it is just shedding old skin?
Gettng out of PA and directing my perception towards the latter I found fresh energy and purpose.

Thanks so much for joining us here. It will keep my head spinning in an upwards direction.

[Paloma]

Thinking of all sorts of bothness, led me to temperature, which in turn got me thinking of absolute zero, which seems to have as an opposite infinite heat.
So then I found this website: http://www.iflscience.com/physics/jo...absolute-zero/
And there I came across this surprising statement:

Understanding temperature

The concept of temperature is intimately connected to the concept of disorder. Typically, a high degree of order corresponds to a low temperature. A perfect order is tantamount to absolute zero and a maximum possible disorder corresponds to an infinite temperature.

Ice crystals are more ordered than boiling water and, as intuition tells us, ice is indeed colder than hot water. By adding more energy in the water molecules will cause their motion to become ever more chaotic and disordered, thus increasing their temperature.

But under certain very special circumstances, a system may become more ordered when more energy is added beyond a critical value which corresponds to an infinite temperature.

Such a system is then characterised by negative absolute temperature. Continuing to add more energy in such a system would ultimately render it perfectly ordered at which point it would have reached negative absolute zero.

If the positive absolute zero is the point at which all motion stops, then the negative absolute zero is the point where all motion is as fast as it possibly can be.



Since we are talking about both matter and spirit here, and the transformation point where one becomes the other, and vice versa, I recall a saying I heard years ago, that spirit is matter, at its highest. And matter is spirit, at its lowest.
It's all just a matter of temperature, or energy.

[sandy]

Very pragmatic and ultimately thought provoking thread and posts...............my head hurts


The only real constant is movement/energy, seen and unseen, including purpose whether Universal or Individual; it all serves Sources mission here on earth.

CREATION ,