Sunday, August 2, 2015
CGJ: This exploration of reincarnation is leading you to places that will either intimidate you – not just you, Frank, but any who read this – or enlighten and inspire you, or confuse and even depress you. So be advised in advance that such reactions are not each intrinsic to the material, or to the exploration, but to the combination of the individual mind that is reacting, and what it reacts to.
F: One size does not fit all.
CGJ: Certainly not. It can almost be said that in a practical sense, no one truth fits all. What is truth for one is oversimplification for another and is insufficiently rigid and sharp-edged for a third and is only provisionally true for a fourth.
Now, I am saying something a little different here than you may at first realize. It is not, exactly, that different minds are able to see only certain aspects of truth, although that is so as well. But in a real and practical sense – even in an abstract and theoretical sense – what is true will differ, depending upon what sort of mind is at the other end of the equation.
F: Truth is in the eye of the beholder?
CGJ: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and there was a reason for the Greeks to equate beauty and truth. Truth is relative.
F: You’re going to get me into hot water here, I can see. (Not that I mind.)
CGJ: The point I wish to make is a subtle one, easily missed. Because it is easily missed, it can be the basis of an important mental realignment.
Finite minds can perceive only limited truth. Obvious, and so we understand subjectivity, and think, “ah, but the objective truth is out there, beyond our grasp.” That is so, abstractly, but in practice, the truth for one mind will differ from the truth for another, as the one side of an arithmetical equation will differ depending on the terms on the other side.
You understand what I am saying here? It is not a matter of one mind seeing only so much of the truth. In effect there is only one truth (or set of truths) that will match that mind. From the point of view of any limited mind – and whose mind is unlimited? – truth will show only the aspects that find receptors. Other aspects will not exist for that mind, and it is not a matter of open-mindedness (or lack of it) or education or experience, which is another word for education.
F: We each live in our own worlds, then.
CGJ: Go slowly with a new thought. Accepting or rejecting a new thought too soon will reduce its ability to affect you. Rather than accepting or rejecting, think about it, roll it about on the tongue, so to speak. Resist the impulse to associate it with accustomed thought, saying, “that is only x in new clothes.”
F: All right. Then, a better way to paraphrase?
CGJ: A better way is not to paraphrase, but to wrestle with the words and the idea as given, and see where your mind takes you.
F: So, we each live in a world whose truths are matched to our – to our what? Our total being? To the part of our total being we are aware of? To our – well, to what?
CGJ: Good. Think about it. Now, consider. If truth actually differs among people, how can you expect to convince anyone of anything, when what you experience as truth may not match their experience? I do not mean “opinion” here, quite, nor even experience in the sense of “that which has happened to me up to this point,” but, that which is or ever can be true.
An analogy would be religious missionaries. Omitting consideration of any but those motivated by the purest intent (as evidenced by their willingness to be martyred if need be), you see people whose truth impelled them to share what they had been given – they were giving a gift to the less fortunate – and yet you in your day cannot see it as they did, because you are different. Your times are different, currents of opinion are different, but this is not the decisive aspect of things, because in your times are still plenty of people whose being does have receptors for that truth.
F: But I can remember when I did too, as a boy in the Catholic church.
CGJ: Yes. Your truth (anyone’s) is not necessarily an unchanging set of opinions or tastes. It is the limit of what you can experience. You have experienced great alterations in belief – one might almost say alternations, in that your path has been uncertain and wavering in detail though less so in orientation – but all of that is included in your truth, by definition or you could not have experienced it. Others never believed in missionary work, and others continue to believe. The point is the analogy.
F: It still seems like perceived truth differing rather than truth differing.
CGJ: Another analogy, then. If each mind is a prism –
No, a better analogy. Each mind is at the separative end of a prism, and receives only blue, say, or green, or a blue-green range. That is its truth, and for it red is only theoretical. You might conceivably convince that soul that red can exist or even does exist – elsewhere – but you could not bring it to a practical, tangible experience of red as an input. You couldn’t; it does not exist for it.
F: I can hear the next bit already – “can’t, unless we move beyond the individual mind to the mind from which it was formed.”
CGJ: Yes, only don’t confuse that level with an idea of God. Now send this out and think about it as you can, and we will resume another time after your friends add their pieces to the puzzle.
Wow (again), Frank! (and a “hat tippo” to Dr. Jung!) It “should by now” be of no surprise to me when I run across material such as this (and my “reading list”, both on my night table, and what I choose to view online, plus who I share my ideas w/ is pretty “tightly focused” at this time), for I’ve been grappling w/ this “question of truth” for several days (well, decades) now.
After running across some material earlier this week, which was put forth as “Truth” by the poster (on another blog), I found myself feeling physically ill (no wonder “gurus” make me nervous!), as I described elsewhere; I’ve done much processing on this (including the tentative, initial contact w/ my own Whole Self) w/ Susan, and keep coming back to the thought, as I’ve expressed before, “Who, of any of us, ‘doing Human’, has the Universal Truth for even one other person?” We find ideas which resonate, and I have found such material (plus my own process), but/and it is still up to me to “wrestle w/ the ideas”. I find my own concept of “truth” (and I am hesitant to use that word, even for myself!) is an evolving/changing thing. An example would be how my own ideas on “reincarnation” have moved from a linear “life-after-life” sense, to a group of lives, all connected w/ Whole Self (I have you, Frank, to thank for that, as well as Joan Grant; when I first read, in “Cosmic Internet”, about how James Leininger was not necessarily the direct reincarnation of James Huston–I’d read the book fairly recently, before encountering your material, and Joan Grant’s “Far Memory”–it upset me. Now, it “just seems logical”–and far more expansive–for me to think to “reincarnation” in more “simultaneous/group terms”.)
It is also “no accident” that C. Jung should come up again today, for I was just considering his ideas this morning as I awakened. Truth “being relative” is a comfortable–and challenging–idea for me; “comfortable” in that it gives me the “permission slip” to continue w/ my own explorations, thru my own Whole Self conversations, dream analysis, and (hopefully) more visits to TMI. And “challenging”, for it is up to me to “do the work”!
I will continue to “document my findings” along the way. Whether it ever gets published (or even shared w/ more than Susan) is immaterial to me right now; the journey has become “imperative” (well, I’ve been on the journey since “Day One”; it is just a “more consciously chosen” journey now.
Thanks again, Frank, for “putting yourself out there”, and thanks in advance to the others, who will (hopefully) share their thoughts on this posting!
Craig
Ditto to what Craig says (in the consideration as much as I am able to put myself in his shoes, that is)… AND his wife, because it is obvious YOU, Craig, consider both of you as ONE unit.
Quote:
CGJ:”Yes, only don`t confuse that level with an idea of God.”
And yours, Frank:
“I can hear the next bit already– “can`t, unless we move beyond the individual mind to the mind from which it was formed”.
Please don`t laugh, but it reminds me about something told: “The Universes (Cosmos&all within it) became AN IDEA in the mind of The Creator/God/The First Cause.”
And the initial IDEA (becoming IDEAS) of creation has just One purpose to fulfill …namely all possibilities inherited within “The Oneness”…. It is all equal. Or, in mundane words: “WE are ALL the Same.”
…It is in the eyes who sees…
BTW:
Ouspensky said the same, before A.Huxley said it in public (anyway, time is without limitation and the transference in use continually): “The whole Universe within a Grain of Sand.”
Always grateful to Frank&Company.
B&B,Inger Lise.
CGJ’s first paragraph got my attention. It raised my antenna that there was content here that was not going to be obvious or easily understood; and furthermore, depending on “the combination of our individual mind and what it reacts to” might cause wildly varying reactions.
“Send this out and think about it, and we will resume another time after your friends add their pieces to the puzzle.” That’s an invitation if I ever heard one.
All day yesterday I was very frustrated because these words from CGJ, and those in between, were on my mind; however, it was a day of constant distraction, one that didn’t allow me to process the material other than to let it marinate. That was good, albeit inconsistent with my impetuous and impatient mentality.
So I’ve now read and reread this several times, and have tried to just let the thoughts flow in, as I believe CGJ intended.
Our individual aspect is a braided mind community designed with specific receptors that allow us to “experience as truth” in a very specific way. As CGJ said, “That which is or ever can be” is not the same for any of us. (That means that what we perceive from this dialogue from Frank and CGJ will be different for each of us, and a good lesson to be learned is to understand what each of us perceive as the “truth” in these words, because (borrowing a phrase from a fellow TMI explorer) It is going to be different and it is all true.
Further, it is important that we perceive the specific way we do, so important, that it is not left to chance. As we “walk the possibilities” with our “truth-filtered mindset” we are making real what was theoretical in a way intended by greater consciousness. We are creating a unique version (let’s say, the reality we perceive) and we are solidifying a perspective that has greater use and purpose beyond our Earth life.
To use a current example, it is important and necessary that we perceive a subject like the killing of Cecil the lion differently. We are designed to see it differently, so that our limited mind will bring it’s perception as designed to a less-limited greater mind.
Some relatively inelegant analogies came to mind. I might be a tip of an index finger in the making, while another person is part of an ear. We may not be able to relate to each other very well until we are able to expand our awareness to experience ourselves together as part of the same body. These thought analogies can make one feel both insignificant and significant at the same time.
Our freedom to choose (our free will) and our ability to create is commensurate with our level of consciousness. The finger as a whole can do more than the point of the finger and the hand can do even more. But “as above, so below” and vice versa, so there will always be limits at any level. My impression is that we are more limited than we like to think we are.
It is valuable to think about these ideas from the point of view of our greater being and tie it to what we call reincarnation. It moves the force for our becoming and our being out of ourselves. That (for me) places my current awareness at a region of consciousness closer to expansion, new expression and change rather than near the source. For me, it implies our becoming as explorers of new territory rather than (or perhaps in addition to) broadening our awareness of what already is.
John
I too have been grappling with this for several decades, nearly a half century, and the intensity has rapidly increased in the past year and a half. When I retired about 15 years ago, I set out to seriously answer “what am I?”, the charge Shri Ramana gave me back in the late sixties. Because of health issues, I began with my physiology and dove into medical text books. You don’t get far, or I didn’t, into neurophysiology before you run into “The Hard Problem”, i.e. how is it we are conscious. An auxiliary hard problem is that of content: well does the everyday world in which we seem to live represent reality out there? But, each of our everyday worlds is actually constructed from sensory bits and pieces in our frontal and prefrontal cortex, or so the neurophysiologists say. Psychologists answer with many experiments noting how our imaginations perturb what we seem to be experiencing.
Hypnotists and their marketing propaganda buddies provide evidence they are be able to twist your everyday world in amazing ways. Sociologists go further and assert our everyday realities are socially constructed. Indeed, quantum physicists announce that reality out there consists almost entirely of empty space with vibrating minuscules widely scattered here and there. On the other hand, Dr. Johnson replied to Bishop Berkeley’s doubts by noting that when he kicked a rock, he felt it. Neither hard problem version seems any closer to being solved, perhaps because there is an even harder one: neurophysiologists can’t even find the mind anywhere in the brain.
We, on the other hand, have piles of evidence from meditation, martial arts, OOB, NDE, and psychedelic assisted travels that the mind isn’t resident in the physical body. In the process, we also have evidence that what the detached mind imaginatively intends simply happens on the other side. Inspired knowing, loving, creativity, healing, and manifesting are inseparably tied together in the mind bundle. I can’t guess how many have pointed this out and demonstrated it in past ages and yesterday, but I’m aware of many.
What we can imagine is constrained by our prior experiences, I guess our larger beings’ prior experiences, all those stories and meanings we lug around. Thus, many truss themselves into heavens and hells in 3D and on the other side. Rita has pointed out that we don’t lose these personality bindings when we die; many we may have been given when we incarnated and may be intrinsic to our greater being’s personality. Imagination is hampered in 3D, because the imagining of 3D reality is a joint affair involving multitude upon multitude of higher beings whose imaginations have been programmed by many different and widely varying prior experiences. Awareness of others’ minds is the kicker that makes this possible; think shapeshifting. I conclude our purpose, I of course mean our higher beings’ purposes, for incarnating here is to playfully co-create in this 3D imaginal zone as freely as possible. There is no other reality, but it is not an illusion. Thus, my inspirations, the shapeshifting one only this morning.
Thanks, Frank, for opening these doors.
A joy to watch your and others’ creation through the doors we opened.