Conversations July 11, 2010

Sunday, July 11, 2010

5 AM. Alone in the house, Michael having left sometime like 11 or so last night. So now, back into harness, after a very enjoyable interlude. How much is it worth, having friends? Can anything match it? All right guys, speaking of friends —

Waiting for a question, eh? I sort of thought you had stuff queued up.

Let’s talk about avatars, then, and missions, and possibilities.

Oh sure, let’s take off our clothes and dance in the public fountains, too.

At some point you have to jump or not jump. Is there a better time than now, with Michael scarcely out the door?

Well, fine, I hope you know what you’re doing — what I’m doing. What we are doing. It is starting to feel like sitting in the shotgun seat while somebody’s driving who is young, reckless and maybe has been drinking.

Jim Chastain said there were twelve of you who had agreed to incarnate together in order to accomplish certain work. He didn’t know who all of them were — he knew himself and one other, who you also know, but we’ll respect your caution in public, and then he met you and Michael and recognized the two of you as two more.

And I think I know one more, at least. But I don’t know in the way he apparently knew, and I don’t have anything to tell me that his idea is real except my feelings. Nor do I know how we’re supposed to work or what specifically we’re supposed to do.

Yes, but look at your life now as opposed to May 2000 when you and he were introduced by a mutual friend.

Mainly I was ten years younger.

Oh, nonsense. You know better. No use pretending, here, or we’ll get nowhere.

All right, true enough. That was before my time in the black box at Monroe — ten sessions in the fall of 2000, another ten in 2004. Before the sessions with Rita that became The Sphere And The Hologram.

You were a partner in a business that was apparently on its way ever-upward, but you were a bit trapped — though you weren’t quite realizing it yet — doing so much work bringing in other people’s work to existence at the expense of your own. You had a lot of illusions about who you were and where you were going. You had been living on your own only a few months. You hadn’t yet published Muddy Tracks, though you had written the first version. In short, you hadn’t begun to be known, to yourself (though you thought so because of your gains since 1992) or to any group of people beyond the small Voyagers Mailing List.

[The Voyagers Mailing List, or VML, was a computer list of people that was created in 1994 for people interested in Bob Monroe’s work.]

Yes, when you put it that way, I was more an employee of Hampton Roads than my own man.

The surest difference, the thing that should convince you, is that then you had begun to experience things and now you know some things, and know you know them. Then you were still learning to learn, and now you are learning to teach. Then you were unknown to almost anyone — although the editor and the chairman were known a little more widely — and now the roles of editor and chairman have been discarded, and you are shining through, via books and website and, ultimately, this material.

Nice of you to do my PR for me.

Well, Michael would be among the first — was among the first — to point out that you aren’t doing it!

Okay. So the point is?

The initial point was, look at your life to see where you are now, by comparing it to where you have been. Then, feel your way forward, by doing what seems right both logically and intuitively. This is true for anyone. Fly like Lindbergh.

I get the analogy. [Lindbergh only flew when both his intuition and the instrument readings agreed that it was safe. If either intuition or sensory data said don’t fly, he didn’t fly.]

Now to the part that makes you uncomfortable. You now know things, and they can be taught. More, they can be caught by contagion. You know it, you’ve done it, you see it. And you don’t want to go on the road.

No indeed. Too much work.

Not too much work, too much disruption in your pattern. Like any cat, you have your habits. And anyone’s habits are a part of who they are: The habits themselves provide clues for those who are perplexed. In short — if you don’t know what you should be doing, look first at what you are doing, what is comfortable — or uncomfortable — to do. In your case you like a secluded existence punctuated by company. Another person might find that lonely or distracting, depending. Your life is nearly totally unstructured by any necessity, allowing you to find your own structure such as this new habit of early-morning consultations. Another person might find lack of structure demoralizing and disorienting, or might find your self-created (self-discovered) habits too confining, again depending.

You already realized that there are three media suited to you: radio, print, and the Internet. Not television for several reasons, not particularly public appearances in large groups, for similar reasons. And public appearances in front of small groups because this feeds you in healthy amounts that present less temptation to ego-inflation.

Yes, and I realized in talking to Michael that we get fed by people we may never meet or hear from who have read our books or in any way profited by something we have created. That’s one cause of the differences in me over ten years — Muddy Tracks helped some people and they sent energy somehow, not suspecting it but voluntarily, and I received it, not suspecting it but receiving it.

When you think of yourself as connecting along threads to those who are affected, of course they are going to feed your energy; they received energy, were somewhat raised in voltage, so to speak, and that raised level passed down to you as well. Any good deed should be regarded as payment in advance, or perhaps as an investment that will pay unpredictable returns.

I’ve certainly seen that in other aspects of my life.

No reason at all why it should be different in this one. On an in-flowing tide, altruism and generosity are very good investments and may be trusted to be practical as well as pleasing. Pleasing to yourself, we mean; nice to look back on. It is calculating and grasping that won’t work so well, on an in-coming tide. They aren’t practical, but because for so long they were experienced as such, it will take a long series of shocks for the culture as a whole to realize it. Ask BP.

Say more about this?

The single factor that most often disrupts the calculations of the worldly is the assumption that what did work will continue to work. When the tides turn, only the impractical, the visionary, the too-good-to-be true is at all practical. This — although you haven’t known it until now — is why you can’t get very upset about conspiracies and world takeover schemes and all that. Not that people’s intent isn’t there. Not that the scheming and the putting pieces into place isn’t there, but that they don’t and can’t reckon into their accounting the turning of the cosmic tides that is the essence of your time. What worked for hundreds of years and seemed a cinch to continue to work and was concentrated and perfected in the planning and needed just a little more work, a little more time — suddenly goes slowly haywire. And we put “suddenly” and “slowly” in the same sentence for a reason. The BP blowout happened suddenly. All the changes that will follow from it will manifest (relatively) slowly.

And if those you think of as the unknown powers-that-be realize that the larger tide has turned, do you think they can use an in-flowing tide to further goals that were developed in days of an out-flowing tide that shaped all their expectations, goals, habits, and therefore wisdom, their worldly-wisdom?

If everything you were working for was defined in times that rewarded separation, exploitation, greed, etc. — how well do you think that’s going to work in times of an underlying movement toward unity, sharing, generosity?

And although this new disruptive force will take a while to become apparent, you can see ripples now. For instance, take the waves of scandal overwhelming the structure of the Catholic Church. You, as a member of what you call The Club of ex-Catholics, can see that the criticism of hierarchy and externals is unfairly being applied to the sincere clerics as well, and to the internal work that continues to be fostered, unnoticed. Well, that will serve as a good example. The church, being mostly centered in spiritual rather than temporal matters, experiences the effect of this turning of the tides of life before corporations or governments or other organized forms that concern themselves (or think they concern themselves) only with temporal matters rather than spiritual ones. In other words, some organizations whose central reason for existence is based on non-temporal realities will naturally experience these changes first, before temporally-oriented organizations. And as it does experience them, it is shaken in every part of itself that thought itself the most “prudent,” the most “realistic.” It is the parts that were corrupted by going with the outgoing tide rather than resisting it, as was its mandate, that now suffer, and inevitably so. But the results won’t be the destruction of the church but its total or near-total transformation into a new organization that will flow with the incoming tide. And of course this will be as true for other religious organizations, only the result will be different in so far as their self-defined role and their resulting goals and stakes are different.

And what purging Churches receive today, corporations, states, criminal organizations, etc. receive a little later or a lot later, depending — but it cannot fail to come, for the underlying tides of life are larger than anything within life can be.

Conspirators and planners and straight-line calculators are in for a disappointment. Should this be a surprise? We told you, before September 11, 2001, all is well; all is always well.

And I take it that this is our latest intermission point. It has been a little more than 80 minutes, and I’m running down. (On the other hand, the early sun in the trees is magnificent as always.) Thanks as ever.

And ours to all who do the work.

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