The spirit, continued

[I have labeled my interlocutor J for Jung, but in this case I think it was sometimes Jung, sometimes a group, sometimes “to be defined.” I’m perfectly comfortable with that, but I mention it here lest the reader think I am more certain of who is speaking than in fact I am.]
Monday, September 7, 2015
F: 6 a.m. Hard to just get going without re-reading yesterday’s or Saturday’s to be sure I’m not losing the trail. I miss having Charles’ help in queueing up questions. Well, I will open it up for input, and if nothing, I’ll look at the past couple of entries.
J: There isn’t any harm in your re-reading at any time. The only harm would be if it shook your confidence that indeed you were bringing in information rather than “inventing,” as it would seem to you. That is a matter of confidence and of
F: It was another “c” word, but I’ve lost it.
J: There is no need to make things difficult for yourself by thinking it all depends on you. Remember? What do you tell people? Don’t worry about the source, bring in what comes, and judge it later. Besides, most of the divisions that seem to you in 3D to be clear are nonexistent.

F: Let me talk to Dr. Jung, then, if you please. I am reading The Portable Jung that Joseph Campbell edited, and whereas in past years I could only get a few pages into it before my mind would wander, now I am nearly 200 pages into it in a very short time, and I find it easy reading. In fact, much of it I knew from reading other things of Jung’s but not in this organized fashion, and much of it is making sense as an explanation of what I have been experiencing, and some of it I am finding myself reinterpreting.
J: Yes, and you think, “that’s a bold thing to do, reinterpreting Jung” – but you also feel me reading along beside you, so to speak, encouraging you to wrestle with the material in light of your new understanding of the position of the mind in the worlds. (Worlds, meaning 3D and non-3D considered as if separate but interacting.) Bold, yes, but not uncalled-for, provided that you and anyone who reads this remember that there’s no harm in thinking a thing but only your own experience will give you a place to stand to weigh it, and affirm or discard the thought.
F: One thing I do see, clearly, is how freeing my method of approach is. By allowing thought in and not worrying whose it is, and if I am making it up, and not worrying if it is abstractly true, I can just allow it in, which gives me something to use my discernment on.
J: You thus neatly sideslip many problems – including one that has not occurred to you but is very real, the temptation that may come to someone legitimately functioning, and that is, to cheat. This may be by resorting to a known bag of tricks when inspiration fails, to mouth empty but high-sounding words when there is only silence, to judge what it is that someone wants to hear, and saying that. All these practices amount to betraying your gift, and they guarantee that your access will dry up.
F: Just as Hemingway said of the writer who prostitutes his gift.
J: Yes, and usually for the same reason – in order to make money.
F: Well, as you know, I’ve always been shy of that, and I think for the reason you just named. If people are paying you, they expect results, and if the moment arrives and inspiration does not – what do you do?
J: Another aspect of it is that someone who does not cheat does merely fade away with the gift. That is a better solution, because lack of integrity always injures the person giving in to it. That isn’t quite the moralistic statement it sounds like – someone may be representing deceit as a characteristic without being untrue to what he is – but we don’t need to explore that particular side-trail today. Anyone reading this may easily explore it (or anything we say that, as you put it, “has hooks” for them), merely by settling in with the question and asking enlightenment about it.
F: So then, I take it there is a main trail that you wish us to follow this morning.
J: There is, and you can find it just as you intuited. Glance back at your typescript of the past few sessions and stop when you feel the hook.
F: Hmm. Always a new technique. All right, back in a few minutes.
[A couple of minutes, later]
Well, it’s very interesting to do it that way, sort of glancing at entries, letting my eye be caught by this or that phrase or sentence or paragraph, but not really reading it at all. And the process worked, for in fact I had forgotten! We were discussing the nature of Spirit.
J: Nor have we ceased to do so, but not necessarily obviously.
The purpose of bringing spirit into the discussion is to stitch together a view of reality that otherwise will tend to fragment, if you concentrate only on the progress of a soul, and the relationship of souls one to the other. We began your reorientation with extensive redefinitions of what souls are, because in a practical way, the soul is closest to the aspects of 3D experience that are most obvious. But, having established that a soul is created fresh each time and does not cease to exist upon physical death, and having now added that a soul is not necessarily immortal (although that could take some spelling-out, at some other time), we turn to examination of the next part of the total being that you think of as individuals and we see as many extensions from one being.
F: And I suppose I need to point out to people that you don’t mean there is only one such being, and you aren’t talking about God, whatever God is.
J: Your statement is an excellent example of the kind of thing that causes us problems in how to respond to it. Our answer has to be one of your familiar “yes but no” answers. To assent, or even to dissent, would tend to reinforce the form of the statement, the assumptions behind the statement, which in this case is undesirable.
There is more than one such being, correct – and yet, ultimately all beings are part of one essential (that is, in essence) unity. We are not meaning God, correct – and yet it may be experienced as God, and, after all, everything created is a part of the creator, and if your sense of God is “the creator,” to say the larger being is God is true from a point of view, just as you are, and we are. So – yes, your clarification does clarify – but don’t clarify too certainly. What is true from one angle is untrue from another. The key is, what is helpful.
F: But now it is nearly seven, the sun is well up, and we have barely begun. I’m feeling all right, so let’s go longer.
J: Very well, we shall see. Since part of your time was spent re-reading and since your new diet is clarifying you, perhaps the rules for you are being expanded. But we shall see.
F: Spirit. I notice it is hard for me to hold my mind on it, but I wouldn’t think it would be hard for you to, if that is your intent.
J: There is such a thing as what we might call the familiarity effect. Thoughts in accustomed channels run with less friction, shall we say, than thoughts overrunning the banks, or cutting cross-country, so to speak. Breaking new trails does require effort, even though it is “merely” a mental process.
Each soul may be considered to comprise other souls that we have been calling strands. But that is not all a soul is, a collection of past contents and past containers. It is also, and primarily, a new infusion of energy into the 3D world. It is that energy that is the ring that holds the strands.
F: I don’t quite have that, or I should say we haven’t quite captured it in words. That last sentence is a kind of slurring over.
J: Not slurring over, but an initial imprecise attempt at rendering a new approach to truth. So let us revisit the sentence and in giving it again we will inevitably change it, and every change will add the possibility of understanding it better.
F: Rephrasings provide new hooks.
J: Correct. So let us say, rephrasing, every new soul constellates in one time and one place, anchoring various strands so that they may have the experience of living together. An acceptable paraphrase of previous understandings, surely? Well then, ask yourself, what is it that constellates? What is the binding energy around which the new soul takes form?
It isn’t the physical body, for the body itself is laid down upon what you could call an energetic pattern, and it comes into independent physical existence – that is, it is born – only at a time close enough to its nature that it can live. {I understood this to be a reference to astrology.]
It isn’t the individual strands, nor is it all the strands together, for no fish creates his fishbowl; no kernel of corn creates its cob or its protective husk. For that matter, no baby creates its parents.
F: Yes, I see, and it is surprising I never came to think about it. “Spirit” has always seemed so formless a concept that I sort of passed it by, in considering the shaping of souls.
J: “Formless” is exactly the nature of spirit, but formless is not the same as inconsiderable, or ineffable. The wind is formless, but it is powerful.
Now, this is enough, even if you feel like going on. These things are given in increments so that people may mull them between them, you understand. Too much at a time may result in essential points being slurred over because of sheer volume of material. A book read at a gulp is experienced very differently than one read in bits. The successive bits enable one to change, to respond, thus bringing a new changed individual to the next bit.
F: I got something on the wing just there, some analogy to Rita’s A and B.
J: Yes. You may regard the affair from the point of view of the non-3D for once. Our task might be put this way: To get them to understand A, we must get them to understand B, but for them to understand B, they would need to understand A, so all we can do is nudge them along, encouraging them to change position (which in context amounts to changing what they are), so that in the next iteration there will be less of a gap between where they are and where they need to be if they are to understand.
Only, our situation is much more complicated than merely a two-variable problem! To understand A you really should be brought to understand a whole alphabet! But this is impractical at any given time (that is, in context, in any given one person’s lifetime), and so we settle for nudging you along by allowing the inevitable distortions along the way and counting on it eventually sorting out.
F: I’m glad to see that all the frustration isn’t on this end.
J: You will be less glad in a few years!
F: Smiling. Thanks for all this, today and all our lives. We do appreciate it. Till next time.