“Everyone knows that when individuals in the presence of others respond to events, their glances, looks, and postural shifts carry all kinds of implication and meaning.” (1)
So says Erving Goffman in his Forms of Talk, written between 1974 and 1980. I’ve been working in my garage after the move, sorting things out, throwing things away and discovering some lost treasure.
And looking at them has offered a useful way of seeing how far we’ve progressed.
I brought two boxes of anthropology, sociology and psychology books back with me. And one of them was Goffman’s Forms of Talk.
At various times in his career, Goffman called himself a microanalyst of social interaction and a dramaturgical analyst.
Microanalyst means nothing escaped his attention. He discussed every element of a social scene or social interaction, right down to what is not said or not done.
Dramaturgical analyst means he saw our lives as staged performances and analyzed all the strategies and tactics people use to perform successfully and sell the success of their performance to others. To him all life was a performance.
We lightworkers know par excellence that we’re engaged in a performance. We know we chose our roles before we were born, our families, neighborhoods, etc.
But what Goffman helped me see was that how we play that part is up to us.
How we play it, though it looks like it can be determined by many outside factors, is actually determined only by ourselves. We choose how we’ll play our parts.
And I’m not talking about choice as determined by the constraints that come from our culture. I’m talking of the unimpacted, innocent, and always-new domain called “choice,” where the difference between “yes” and “no” is freely and, in the last analysis, arbitrarily decided by us.
No one determines our choice but us. And, in the final outcome, we’re not required to listen to any other voice than our own. Even if we choose to follow someone else’s demands, it’s still us choosing.
Moreover, the higher-dimensional beings we collaborate with respect our freewill because they know it’s guaranteed to us by the universal Law of Freewill. For them to interfere with it would be to commit a “reviewable error.”
The people Goffman studied would be in a state I’d call “unconscious awareness.” They’re aware of things around them but they may not be conscious of a higher purpose, an orderly life, a Divine Plan being acted out. They’re perhaps not self-reflective, moment by moment. They may not “look at themselves,” observe their own thoughts and actions, etc.
We lightworkers have to be aware of those things because we’re taking part in a coordinated and mammoth undertaking: building the social and instituitional structures of a new world.
We ourselves may place certain constraints on our own behavior consistent with working with the Divine Plan. But we no longer work within a structure in which others determine the constraints and our freedoms are severely limited.
One of the turns in the road we’ve taken carries us away from the work of social scientists like Goffman. Unlike them, who were hedged in by the scholarly paradigms of the day, we’ve had to find and come from our hearts, the well-spring of love, our higher Selves.
Goffman’s book is, well, deeply analytical, as he says. He was an intellectual’s intellectual, but in this age of what Archangel Michael called “heart consciousness,” (2) his microanalysis reads rather much like a very fancy juggling act. At last one tires of it. It doesn’t help us to know the heart.
I’m not implying that Goffman or his colleagues lacked heart. The paradigm of empirical materialism ruled anything that could not be seen or heard or touched as being non-existent and therefore not a proper subject of study. Nothing spiritual or higher-dimensional falls within those parameters and so everything most valuable in life is left out of empirical studies.
We’re left in the end to study the husks of life, so to speak, and not the fruit.
Compare what Goffman said at the top of the article with what Archangel Michael says here: “Anchor the love in the very core of your heart consciousness and in every cell of your body.” (3) I don’t know about you, but that causes a stir in me.
But it would not have attracted the attention of a sociologist as a sociologist. Perhaps a psychologist of the likes of Leo Buscaglia, whose job it was to advise us on how to be happy. But not a microanalyst of social interaction.
We’ve had to find the heart because, without doing so, there’s no love and without love there’s no peace in the world and therefore no evolution for the human race. And this generation will have peace in the world. That’s already been decided.
So Goffman’s analysis, as brilliant as it is, is still only a description of what amounts to the wrapper of life. As one Hindu sage said, it’s information, not transformation.
We live in the heart, as we’re discovering. The heart is the cause of transformation. If we know that, why are we not all madly studying the heart? And love?
I’d be willing to say that coming from heart consciousness is what’ll distinguish what passes for social science, literature and other humanistic studies in the future. What life looks like viewed from the heart will be their central focus.
If we could just get that love is:
- Everything
- What we’re looking for
- The answer to every question
- What will see Nova Earth be built
- Etc.
then we could all go home. One word would do it.
But, for whatever reason, we can’t get that and so social science remains relevant until we do.
Thus, I’m willing to speculate that the measure of whether this generation is accomplishing its part in the process of building the new world is the degree to which we succeed in coming from the heart and love.
The amount of love being shared is more important than the amount of revenue being generated.
There’s nothing more important than our ability to experience our own love – from within, from the ancient spring in the heart – and then to send it out to the world. Our reward is to experience it as the love goes past and out.
As long as we cannot get that, well, then we clear more and more brush. You either get the experience or the barrier. As long as we get the barrier, the techniques of social-scientists may continue to fill a need. Once past the final barrier, their role will morph in ways that I cannot predict.
Footnotes
(1) Erving Goffman, Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1981, 4.
(2) “Archangel Michael: Ascension will See the Entire Planet Fall in Love,” Dec. 7, 2014, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2014/12/07/archangel-michael-ascension-will-see-the-entire-planet-fall-in-love/.
(3) Loc. cit.