Monday, August 23, 2010
7 AM. I had to go back to Saturday’s material to remember where we were. For good and sufficient reasons, I have felt unable to do any of the work I had started doing in making notes and thereby making lists.
And in the absence of questions, and in the absence of a continuation of our line of explanation, you find yourself dependent upon us for continuity. If we were blank this morning, if you couldn’t hear our prompting, where would you be? We mean this not as any form of chastisement but as observation on the process — for you, for others. One effect is to loosen your connection to the material at the moment. Another is to tempt you to discouragement. A third, the most potentially disruptive, is to tempt you to put off working until another day.
Yes, all as I have observed in the past and in the present. Fortunate that you were ready to move on to what you called our spiritual heredity as part of the computer analogy.
By the way — and only by the way, but worth noting as a glimpse of how the system works behind the scenes — we will mention that your friend Jim, some months ago, didn’t like your analogy of robots, and substituted computer-programming subroutines as a more acceptable analogy. You may remember that this substitution was fine with us. What you wouldn’t have any way to know is that this then furnished an example of how we can learn from you, that is, how a suggestion made from the nature of a three-dimensional mind — your “conscious” minds — may not only inspire another person-group’s conscious mind but may in fact put a suggestion into the larger mind of another. In other words, don’t ever think that all the bright ideas come from this side and are translated into physical existence. Sometimes — often enough — the physical limitations of the physical brain will spark that aspect of the mind (for all mind is non-physical, we remind you) to see in a new way that proves quite useful. Indeed, in a way, one might say that this is an acceptable definition of life in the physical: using the limitations of the situation to learn to see things in new ways.
Now, to proceed to the question of one’s spiritual heredity, bearing in mind that the very expression “one’s” is in our view something of a misnomer. In fact, that bears emphasis. It isn’t “one” spiritual heredity, exactly. Every element —
No, you are beginning to add logical Story to our attempts to explain. You have to let that go.
Interesting. (“Fascinating!”) I can sort of see my attempts to proceed from a logical premise. I heard that it is a misnomer, then I think it was my own logic that was off and running, saying “in that case, it must be x and such” until they reined me in. I suppose that means that as we gain experience in this, we become more sensitive to nuance, and so it becomes easier to be prevented from mixing in our own stuff with theirs.
Go take care of what is on your mind; or clear it from your mind. But don’t try to do this and that at the same time; that amounts to trying to do and not-do at the same time.
It’s only an e-mail reply. I thought I could put off composing it, but it is in my mind, it’s true. All right — and BTW I notice that is the second or third interruption before we get to the independent spiritual heredity.
It requires concentration; it doesn’t require hesitation first, if that is what you suspect. Go send your e-mail, to clear your mind, then return.
Okay.
7:50 AM. Back.
The underlying idea behind reincarnation is that a unit removes from a lifetime, then if in the proper condition doesn’t have to return to the world of illusion, but if tempted back, returns and again takes on a lifetime. (This is of course only a rough approximation of a complex and intellectually developed system of thought and perception.)
We propose to you that it is the identification of the unit that has led to conceptual problems — and that resulted from conceptual problems in the first place! With the proper re-conceptualization of the unit involved in reincarnation schemes, we can sign off on them. (And if you don’t see the pitfall implied and contained in the very mention of a conceptualization, well — you should. To make a distinction is to make an error. It’s just that it cannot be helped, either by Buddhists or by we guys upstairs.)
What is the purpose of life, really? To cure one’s ignorance? To overcome one’s one-sided-ness or one’s faults? To have an interesting time for its own sake? To add to the store of interesting movies available on the other side (“The Life Of Frank, or, the amazing non-adventures of an intuitive” or any other way you could dramatize your life and see it one way)?
We have been offering you a different concept of the purpose of life — not as an either/or but as at least an equally important adjunct to the others that have been proposed over the years. As with everything else, there is no one way to see it. One aspect of the theory of relativity we entirely agree with is that there is no one place to judge from; therefore all judgments are as much an expression of perspective as of measurement.
That said, we will insist that the conventional explanations of life do not express the relationship and function that we are emphasizing, and therefore they miss the very important purpose life serves and can serve more consciously. Everything we say has been coming from one central idea, one preoccupation, you might say, which is that your life has meaning regardless, but can have greater meaning if you consciously cooperate with its underlying purpose, for thus your experience is richer and deeper and your effective horizons much broader.
A person-group comes into being. For the moment forget just how it comes into being (that is, the question of who and what is choosing among the potential physical elements that will express or will, rather, have the possibility of expressing). By whatever methods and through whatever agents, a person-group constellates from the parents’ combined potential pool of traits, and thus the new person-group is limited — given shape — in time and space and physical heredity.
There are many questions here. Why those parents and not different ones? Why that time and place rather than others in which those same parents might have conceived? Why
Wool-gathering
The point is that questions of who choose and why did they choose this rather than that are always inherent. Some see it as a council of advisors who help the soul-between-lives to “plan” a life. Others see it as a form of external judgment with which the soul-between-lives concurs, in one way or another.
Can you see that the question of who (or what) is being formed and by what rules of its nature (or rules of some other kind) it is shaped, is not addressed, but begged?
If you see each life as in fact not unitary but community-natured — as we do — then it easier to see that each new lifetime is significantly different in composition. Different heredity, different circumstances. What is the continuity within that group, among those lives? The continuity is what we are seeking here — the spiritual heredity. The continuing aspect of spirit that some call a traveling soul. We prefer to use soul to refer to each specific person-group, yet spirit is not divisible. Can you see that there is a gap in the concepts?
Almost. It is just out of range.
A soul: a given person-group’s common factor, common expression of its nature.
A spirit: the non-physical continuation that comes into a person-group from somewhere and remains (or goes elsewhere, depending on how you choose to see it) after the person-group is no longer in the body.
Where is the logic of the spirit? That is, where is the personal aspect of undivided spirit that experiences itself in various person-groups? Spirit is indivisible, yet it has aspects that manifest as separate — how shall we think of these aspects, in connection to various person-groups and in connection to itself regardless of person-groups?
This is hard!
Yes, it is, because you do not have the accustomed concepts to associate your thoughts with, and it is therefore a strain for you to bring it in relatively undistorted, relatively uncontaminated.
Well, I’m trying. Continue?
Any memory presupposes something to contain the memory. How could one retain memories of a past-life trauma if there were no common factor between present-life and past-life beings? And clearly the common factor can’t be physical heredity, because if it were, one could only incarnate within one’s own line of ancestry. And while that theme bears thought as an example of a vision of separations and re-weavings, it isn’t the case in fact.
So — if not within the physical heredity, where? It can only —
No, try not to let logic persuade you to insert the obvious (and logically impeccable, but irrelevant) “it can only be in the non-physical” because of course that’s all conditioned on the initial “if” which you would then be likely to disregard.
Getting awfully tired. Leaving out letters, scarcely shaping the letters correctly anyway — I mean, even recognizable to me. I hate to stop, though — it seems you are barely starting.
So we are. All the more reason for a fresh continuation on a fresh day. We’re getting there.
Okay. Signing off for today then.