So You Think Your Life Was Wasted (5)

Connecting to other parts of ourselves

Back when I was still new to all this I discovered John Cotton, a “past life” of mine living in Virginia in the 1700s. Eventually I “retrieved” him, which it seems to me amounts to my having lifted myself by my own bootstraps. I was told later that I was gradually assembling the whole party of those known to me, drawing them closer to my everyday mind, which would pay off for me – as it would for anybody who did it – by increasing my range. After I got a handle on those closest to me in temperament, disposition, the era and geography, I could use them to help me move farther afield.

Of course, what is close to one may be very far from another. Suppose that two people (embodied) each connect to lives in 15th century China. For one it may be very close because of the close emotional or mental makeup. But another may find a Chinese life very foreign, very tentative, because there is not the emotional similarity to bridge the gap in life circumstances. Establishing closer relationships with those you are closest to (whether in terms of geography or timeline or emotional makeup or even similar experience) will help you to use them to provide the bridge.

The point about similar experience is important! As an example, something that happened to me at a lake in the night.

Back in 1980 my brother and I went camping in the Desolation Wilderness in California, off Lake Tahoe. One dark night I volunteered to go get water at a nearby lake, and for some unknown reason I insisted (not that there was an argument about it, but I was definite about it, not knowing why) on walking over there without a flashlight or lantern. There was no moon, as I recall, and if there were stars visible they weren’t providing a lot of light. Anyway, I more or less felt my way across the terrain, came to the fringe of trees, carefully and climbed down to water’s edge. As I dipped into the lake, I had the strongest feeling that I was s a Japanese sailor, visiting long before Columbus, going to a lake in California at night for water. If I am remembering this right, I knew that it wasn’t the same lake; just a similar experience.

Now, don’t over-dramatize this. I knew who I was. I wasn’t seeing visions (wasn’t seeing much, in fact!) but there was this definite and inexplicable presence in my mind. I knew he was there before Columbus, even though history said otherwise. In the years since, I have learned that historians are now conceding that such a thing would have been possible.

Being at the lake in that way, in the absence of artificial light (which of course is a reason why I didn’t bring it) allowed me to receive a quick intuitive connection. It had no intellectual content, and therefore my intellect did not shut off the sense of contact. But – because there was no context – I never knew what to do with the contact experience.

Limitations on guidance

As I would go through past journals I would see much wisdom from the guys upstairs, chiefly on how I should lead my life – and I would see moments of blankness. Someone asked me one day, why should I expect the guys to know everything? Where did that expectation come from? And one of my correspondents suggests that I unconsciously picked that up in my Catholic boyhood as an attribute of God.

The guys, when asked, said, “Who did the expecting, if not you?” And yet, they went on to admit that it is true that that we think and perceive is colored by what we are, which includes them. So in that sense we might say that they shape our expectations. But it’s truer to say that they and we shape them. It isn’t done in isolation because there isn’t any isolation. You might think of it as a benign tug of war.

Now, think what this does, for instance, to the question of contamination. How can psychic material be “contaminated” by Downstairs input if we are Upstairs and Downstairs, connected by links of greater or lesser clarity and strength depending upon the time and circumstance.

The question of access and contamination and reliability is bound into the very nature of our assumptions about what is going on. Since those assumptions vary wildly among us, different people have experiences that vary equally wildly, and so do our interpretations even of similar experiences. And what is true among us is also true within us, as our inner community of diverse forces and attitudes interacts. We believe x at some levels and not at others. We pledge allegiance to y at some levels and not at others (other levels in fact may hate and fear y)! So you could not expect consistent results even if “external” circumstances did not vary or waver. Now, apply this specifically to the expectations that anyone on the other side would know everything. The guys said to me:

“Knowing – well! – that you believed [that they knew everything], unconsciously, what were we to do when you began to learn to contact us consciously and began to ask us for information we did not have and could not get – and that sometimes did not exist (as for instance when you, assuming only one version of reality, asked what “would” happen), how could we respond? Eventually we were able to put across the fact that there is no one reality — hence no “would” about it. We could give probabilities (that is, relative counts) but if you took that as a sign that we were hedging rather than responding, what were we to do?”

However, they also pointed out that they do have access to whatever information I wanted, whether it be details of various lives or evidence that it is not all fairy tales. But the fact that I don’t have access to them, doesn’t mean that they don’t exist. Either the access isn’t real or for some reason I don’t have the key, or don’t have it yet. In either case, via them or via my-Downstairs-self, I need to have and use the key.

Years ago, I heard psychic Ingo Swann describe how he programs his access to various abilities by changing settings on his inner control panel. It is a matter merely of visualizing a control panel and moving the switches to the position you prefer. Simple metaphor, and one the unconscious is going to understand.

So, at one point, feeling that I was starting my access to other lives at 10%, I consciously set it to 20%. I moved it up, thinking to set it to 100% but then backed off lest the result of internal chaos. Then after a while – a couple of years later, as it happened, I set it higher, to 50%. (This tells me that our interaction with the control panel is not fantasy; there are constrains, however little obvious to our everyday self they may be.) The guys advised that I start with 50% and go higher after a bit, bearing in mind that results would come faster now because increasing access is a cumulative thing. It’s harder to get moving from a dead stop than it is to increase the motion.

In any case, it’s our life, for us to choose from within the situation. So, you might look at it this way. We ask, they respond as best we can, but our filters block a good deal of their response. (“Don’t think the frustration is all on one side,” they’ve said more than once!) Those filters are sometimes mental or emotional, but sometimes they are the result of pre-set “control-panel switches.” We have the right and the ability to re-set them as we please. Remember, though, that lack of through-put does not mean that the other end of the channel has ceased to exist.

More next Friday.