Conversations September 13, 2010

Monday, September 13, 2010

5:15 AM. Surprisingly, a solid night’s sleep. I’d have bet the other way, but I’m glad to have been wrong. But I’m sort of tired this morning, and blank, so I hope you guys have a topic in mind. I’m really tempted to skip doing this, but I know I’d be sorry in a few hours.

It wouldn’t be the end of the world if you took a day off. But there is support in routine. It’s usually worth pushing through a little reluctance or fatigue — or pain, if it came to that — to see how deep it is. Sometimes the weather isn’t propitious (internal weather or external weather for that matter) but so what?

Well, I’m here, I’ve got my coffee and have had my first couple of sips, let’s go, and we’ll see how it goes.

Do you notice the encouragement provided by the stack of paper that is your efforts to date?

I do indeed. Three thick binders so far. It’s very neat, very organized, a lot of source material waiting for me to find a way to hold it in my mind together long enough to sketch out an outline.

There isn’t any reason why you couldn’t use the time usually allotted to the sessions to organize, instead.

No, I’d miss this. Let’s proceed.

Very well. More on the porous nature of consciousness, by which for the moment we will refer to the fact that human intelligence is actually the meeting point of many kinds of minds. We spoke briefly of the simplicity that is shared by trees and —

But let us start again. Very difficult to say sequentially (that is, in words, which only function one after the other) what is better perceived simultaneously, right-brain fashion. If we could show you, you’d see that a whole lot of words are going to be expended to describe something pretty simple. It’s the old blind man and elephant thing. In this case the blindness is not because you are in the body but because you cannot intuit what is to be conveyed, but must laboriously construct from what we must equally laboriously describe, feature by feature. This obviously results in redundancy, as we have to go back time and time again to the same things and say, “oh, but now look how this relates to this new thing.” A picture in this case would be worth about a hundred thousand words, not just one thousand. But — we hear you say — enough complaining, on with the show.

Only smilingly.

We know. Very well. In all this, we proceed from, and keep returning to, your person-mind, of which you are the ringmaster. We began by pointing out that you incorporate strand-minds, but not every strand-mind is a former person-mind. (Besides, “former” is a time-oriented word that distorts the relationship.) You as ringmaster have to balance and harmonize various strand-mind components as best you can. The degree to which you — to which anyone — is aware of the comprising elements varies from those who think themselves one unvarying thing, to those who think themselves one thing subject to moods and circumstances, to those who begin to suspect that they are influenced by complexes and compulsions etc. below the level of their awareness, to those who see themselves as blessed or cursed by the presence of other spirit entities, to those whose very sense of identity seems to hang on a thread among competing spirits, or minds, or personalities, however they conceptualize them. (To some they will be past lives, to others, contending spirits, to others personality fragments, depending, as we say, upon what they have been taught implicitly or explicitly, and what is most congenial to their habitual thought patterns.)

But of course this is merely one level of the things affecting your life. All the mechanisms that go into maintaining your body as a machine are another level, and again consciousness of these mechanisms varies widely. Some never given them a thought. They want their body to do something, it does it or can’t do it; it gives them health or illness partly depending on whether they follow the rules of good health and partly unpredictably. If something gets out of whack, they try to fix it themselves, or have some health specialist fix it, but in either case they never waver in their assumption that problem and cure are mechanical and nothing more. At the other end of the scale are people who are in continuous communication with their body’s intelligences, and balance so readily as to need spend little or no time at it. We will not take the time to fill in the dots; we have sketched it for you years ago in our description of the different levels of control of health that may be obtained by different levels of awareness. But what we did not go into then, and shall here, is what is being communicated with. At the time, we left untouched your assumption that you were communicating with your body’s intelligence either as a whole or as special areas, as, a shoulder. There was no reason to get into theory, and good reason to not do so, not wanting to lay out an extensive background. We will not sketch them today. That is the next level of detail down. Today is an overview.

Beyond the conscious strand-lines and the (so far unspecified) minds that maintain the physical organism, other kinds of mind enter in, as well.

I must say, I can’t imagine what they could be.

If you could, there wouldn’t be much use in your and our going to so much work, would there? We’ll say it again: Our work is to relate this to that, when you have been familiar with the this and familiar with the that, but haven’t ever thought to relate the two. Either thought or revelation consists in seeing new relationships when previously one saw only separation. Since you can’t easily think your way to some things, the easy way is to have them revealed to you; then it is up to you, to tie the revelation to the rest of your mental world.

That’s an interesting thought in itself.

Yes, isn’t it? But, to continue. You as human are an intersection of physical and mental and spiritual. Now here is where your readers are going to face amazingly strong resistances, worrying that they are to be led down the garden path, perhaps because of Frank’s personal agenda, as you have already seen. But the positive spin on that is, merely, if no resistances, not much new can have been said.

To rephrase: If the material doesn’t jolt us out of our accustomed mental habits from time to time, it can’t be accomplishing much.

That’s what we said. So, the spiritual, and this will complete our overview of the three kinds of intelligences that are available to any person-group. (Freudians might consider comparing this to ego, id, and superego, but we warn you that it won’t fit at all well.)

Spiritual influences may be looked at as non-physical influences, if you wish, but this is a dumbing-down of understandings that the world’s religions have long held and worked out in some detail. If you think angels are fairy-tales but the guys upstairs are sources of valuable information, this doesn’t show that you are modern, rational, and clear-sighted. It shows that you are still locked in to a system that sees the world as fundamentally material with perhaps a saving grace of non-material mental presence. If, instead, you think angels are a prettification of demons or nature-spirits or such-like, this is a different problem of assimilation, but probably less of a problem than the previous example. And, lastly, if you think angels are the conventional representation of beings with wings, all sugar-coated and “nice” this is a misunderstanding at the opposite extreme from the first example.

Spiritual forces are real, they are primary, and they are (therefore) everyday ordinary part of real life.

Almost finished the overview? It’s only eight pages, but 70 minutes, and I’m getting tired.

What we have said will do for a beginning. You have three levels of very different kinds of influence, what may be called human, material, and spiritual, but they may as easily be categorized in entirely different ways. You will notice, Frank, that you earlier confused physical spirits (let’s call them) and spiritual spirits, if that isn’t too awkward a phrase, thinking they must be the same thing because both non-physical. [Nature spirits versus TGU, would be a better way to put it.] But in the first case there really isn’t anything — well, we’ll say it but we’ll have to mostly un-say it later — there isn’t anything you can experience that isn’t partly physical in some way. But — as we say, we have to take that back immediately, for it is true that spiritual influences may be experienced by your minds that are nonphysical (else how are you receiving this, by the way?) but — well, it is a tangled subject, best taken up in its own place, the description in greater depth of spiritual influence.

Now, in this case, someone versed in the lore of nature-spirits would be better able than you to translate what we will say about that level. But such translations will follow: We need to give you the outline as best we can, so as to make old things new again.

That’s the first time I drew the connection between this work and my publication of Robert Clarke’s books. That’s what he was doing, too, but from another vantage point.

Of course. And if you will look at your life and your friends and your influences like books, you will see that this is a major theme they have in common: making old things new by seeing them in a new way, in a new context.

Okay. Many thanks for all this.

Noon, nearly. After I wrote, transcribed, and sent the above, I started to set out for the post office to mail my first orders for Robert Clarke’s books, but my nose clogged up and I began having serious trouble breathing. I had the books in the car already when I decided I couldn’t go. So I stayed and tried various things — the inhaler, DMSO with colloidal silver, ozone water. Nothing was helping. Finally I gave into the impulse I’d been having, and called Nancy, who knew just why I had the impulse — she had been writing [that is, talking to her guys] about my asthma robot or whatever it is that is attached to it.

Let me talk to the representative of the body that we discovered while talking. I never knew I could talk to you; I never really knew you were there. My apologies for lifetime’s neglect. So how can you and I work together? For, I get a strong sense that together we will amount to more than merely one person getting a handle on his health and health problems. I was thinking to call you Mac unless you have a preferred name, and then I thought, might as well call you Scotty — I can imagine you in Scott’s exasperated competence.

Mac is fine. Otherwise you’ll go imitating Scotty in your mind, hearing me talking that way. It would distract from the conversation, I’d think.

Yeah, I would [think so] too. Okay, what do we need to do to learn to work together? I put my attention on my lungs and nasal passages when I was feeling better, thinking to perhaps pay more attention. In the past I would deliberately not have paid attention, for fear the attention would start up the problem again.

And so it would have, if you were treating it as a problem in mechanics, only. It is the only thing in life — your body — that you treat as if it weren’t connected to everything else. You don’t quite think of it that way, but you’re not far from it.

What should I have for lunch? Breakfast, whatever it is. [Reading this, it seems like sarcasm, but it wasn’t.]

You can’t decide by what you think is going to taste like. You’ve noticed how dulled your taste has become. Why do you suppose that is?

Your doing?

Indirectly. It’s an effect of imbalance, and an attempt to overcome the cause of the imbalance, which is an imagination of how things taste. You even rely on intuition to tell you how things taste!

I wouldn’t have put it that way. That’s interesting. My idea of how it tastes overcomes my experience of it.

You hardly have an experience of it. You read, you think, you do anything but pay attention [while eating].

And this would help how?

You’d reconnect, to that extent, with what your body is feeling, how it is reacting to what you’re giving it.

[I looked in the pantry, got a sense of what was wanted.] So. Rice-a-roni?

Best choice among the possibilities.

All right, I’ll try it.

And eat it without reading.

Well — I’ll try to remember.

People remember what’s important to them.

1 PM. Well, so that was lunch. About half the Rice-A-Roni.

And what did you learn from the experiment?

A couple of things. It’s as important not to let my mind wander off as not to read. In other words, pay attention to what I was eating. I learned again that I can’t really quite taste things — it’s like tasting through a layer of mucus.

Equivalent to a smoker’s loss of taste, but for different reasons.

I ate much more slowly, and not as much.

And now try to realize in the next hour or so how the meal affected you — for meals do.

I’m sneezing, for one thing.

That’s the black pepper you added halfway through, after asking if there was any reason not to. It didn’t really add to the taste, did it?

To the bite.

Again, like smokers and salt.

The sneezing is annoying, being so constant, but I suppose there’s nothing wrong with it.

It will help, in this case. But it won’t be fun.

I never thought it would be.

We are only at the beginning of a long road, for I’m not the only mind involved in this. But keep thinking of it as learning to cooperate in creating a joint mind — that will hold your attention — and you won’t be bored.

I don’t see that I could have done this without Nancy’s help.

You haven’t done anything yet, you just had a light bulb turned on. But yes, you’re working well together.

What does the headache mean?

Partly stress — not quite enough sleep, the mucus problem, the breathing, the continual reading. Take a nap, or try to.

Try is right, but — I’ll try.

[Things fluctuated throughout the day, being mostly all right until after supper, and then we started all over again. More on that in Tuesday’s entries.)

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