Wednesday, June 15, 2016
F: 4 a.m. I had thought, maybe I’ll skip today, but here I am. I started a painting yesterday but I have no idea if I’ll be able to get the soap bubble idea. I’ll have to remember to let the guys work through me, the way I later realized I painted that picture explaining about rings and threads.
So, friend, off we go?
TGU: If you are up to it.
F: I brewed the coffee, I have to be up to it now.
TGU: Well, we’re smiling. No you don’t have to be. Cold coffee is acceptable on a Virginia Spring morning if you want to rest a little.
F: Well, it’s weird. Once again, I read the clock wrong, reading 5 a.m. when it turned out to be 4 a.m. Why is that?
TGU: Don’t blame it on us. But do take a few minutes if you think it would help.
F: Perhaps I shall.
4:30 a.m. Interesting to feel that shift into quietness as I lay there. Okay, let’s go.
TGU: You understand, this all follows from your willingness to go beyond the definitions and understandings you had attained and settled for. Any understanding is only a stage in an unending journey, so there can be no thought of arriving at a final resting place, yet there need be no thought of “having to” push on until you get there. Go as long as you wish to go, stop whenever you wish to stop, or feel unable to continue. What could be freer than that?
F: So are we just wasting our time, trying to come to the truth?
TGU: It is the process of seeking, not the goal of an arrival, that will be your entertainment and your schooling and your exercise program. In no way is it a waste of time; in no way is it a mandatory activity. If it doesn’t interest you at any given time, why pursue it? If it does, why let anything less compelling push it aside?
F: Free will all around, which is the way I seem to experience life. Why do others experience it differently? Or – I can feel that isn’t quite the right question, so answer what you want to answer, even if I didn’t quite ask it.
TGU: Everybody is a combination of elements that is different. At any given time, some will experience life in one way, others in another way. Life changes, your ruminations change you, your “external” situation changes – and affects your conclusions about the world. Today you believe in free will, tomorrow you feel constricted by external realities that you cannot change by willing it, the next day you consider that you are being guided, and one or another aspect of that situation seems to you more important, or less. Fluctuations, pretty continuous.
You will remember times in your lives when you felt freer, or more constricted; more in charge of things or more at the mercy of various elements beyond your control; more conscious of what and who you are, or less. It changes, you change. That is life, and life is change.
F: So just because I feel I can trust you guys today, it doesn’t mean I can trust that it will always feel that way.
TGU: Did you know, 25 years ago, what you would be 25 years in the future? Inertia aside, did you – do you – see 25 minutes into the future?
F: No, but I trust that all will be well.
TGU: Tell about the moment of death.
F: Yes, I wound up telling this to a couple of people at TMI one day. I realized one day, like many people I wasn’t afraid to die, but I did have some fear about the dying process. Then it occurred to me, I trust life otherwise, why shouldn’t I trust life right up to the end – including whatever my final moments would be? I could see that it was a new thought to them. Sometimes I think, I must be awfully slack; but then I reflect that the opposite of slack is taut, and that is too tense for me. Been there!
TGU: Well, you see, your position of trust – living in faith, as you sometimes put it – is not something inevitable. It was partly provided you as an opportunity, and partly grasped by you as a decision. The combination of factors is always present.
F: I think I’d better unpack that. If I get it right, you mean, I am a particular bundle of strands and the composition of those strands – of the bundle – allows me the possibility of living in faith. A different combination might not have that possibility. That’s half of it. The other half is, it was (is) my choice as to whether to make the possibility real or not.
TGU: We use this as an entry-point to the further consideration of your positions in the world. Always you are a combination of determined elements (your jumping-off point at any given moment) and free-will possibilities (what you choose to do, to become, starting at that present-moment point).
This is not new. Obviously this is ground that has been traversed in argument (if only within oneself) many times. The very fact that it cannot be settled, only abandoned, should tell you it is a real co-existence of two factors.
F: By “abandoned,” I take it you mean we say, “to hell with arguing about it, this is my experience.”
TGU: One way to argue is to live your beliefs, of course, and you do not (could not) defer living until you first figure out what you are going to believe.
Now. Start with the thought that who and what you are is more or less as we have been sketching it these few years. Now walk with us as we change perspective, no longer considering you as if you were a unit (however much larger a unit than you had thought before; still, a unit) but now remembering that you are equally a part of something larger than human size.
F: “Have you not heard it said, `ye are gods’?”
TGU: Of course you are. You are human, which means, 3D-experiencing-creatures from one perspective, creator gods from another. Not one or the other, but unavoidably both, as you are both body and soul, only it would be clearer (and fuzzier) to say body-soul.
You are human, with the responsibility of being human. That means living what you are; it means a process of choosing among your possibilities and expressing the choice by what you live. It is not a matter of opinion in the sense of playing with ideas. You express your opinions by living them.
But whereas until recently we have been sketching the composition and potential of humans as individuals, now we move to your composition and potential as creator gods. It is not a change in definition. It is a change in perspective.
Creator gods – the phrase is internally redundant – have potential and responsibility beyond the awareness of the individual who defines himself as only creature, rather than as creature and creator, or – a little closer – creature and therefore creator.
F: This is getting muddy.
TGU: It is only a first pass.
F: Okay.
TGU: We are going to talk about sin, among many theological concerns. In fact, we are going to address every issue you know yourself incompetent to discuss.
F: Splendid. As if I couldn’t make a fool of myself unassisted.
TGU: The fool does all right in the tarot.
F: I’d like his opinion of that. But go ahead, you know I’m with you.
TGU: Every theological concern involves the question of the human relation to the divine. All the answers may be different, or may seem contradictory, or may be contradictory from a certain level, but the question will always be about that relationship even when it appears to be concerned with, say, relations between individuals, or an individual’s relation to society. At any rate, that is one way of seeing it, and that is the point of view we are going to pursue.
Understand first off – we’re not saying you don’t, we’re merely underlining – everything you see depends upon the definitions you bring to it.
F: Reality ain’t WYSIWYG, huh?
TGU: Reality is closer to the converse – what you get is what you see. That is, how you see things determines what you think they mean. Tell about your insight.
F: My friend Jim Marion, ex-priest, author of Putting On the Mind of Christ that we published (which was about different religious beliefs according to people’s place on Ken Wilber’s scale), was staying at Rita’s house overnight before speaking to the Charlottesville Unity. It occurred to me to ask him – because he is a scholar – if my thought was correct. It had occurred to me that maybe the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (in the Garden of Eden story) was a misunderstanding. What if the intended meaning was the Tree of the Perception of [things as] Good and Evil.
Jim thought for a moment and said, “Hebrew has very few abstract words. That is a very permissible translation.”
TGU: It is just such insights we will be nudging your community toward, as we proceed. Re-translating that one word showed you that words that seemed to mean one thing may have been intended to mean something else, with radically different results, or we should say, leading down radically different pathways.
And that will do for today.
F: Our thanks, as always.
(From Frank and TGU today:)
TGU: It is the process of seeking, not the goal of an arrival, that will be your entertainment and your schooling and your exercise program. In no way is it a waste of time; in no way is it a mandatory activity.
Synchronism 1: A summary of my “conversation” this week about the game of golf:
Golf is a sport which cannot be perfected. The value of playing it is to fulfill a natural drive to move toward perfection. One finds out in the process that practice is vital, but trying harder per se only works to worsen the situation. One learns patience, or one suffers. One learns to accept mistakes, because pursuing perfection is a game of mistakes. One must accept the situation and movie on, ever toward the goal. The mistakes are never forgotten, they are built into the record, but they are seen as part of the game. “Fate”, if you believe in it, can work for you or against you, bringing you difficulty or joy.
No matter what science is applied, rhythm, feel and judgement are required. Subtleness and touch are important.
It is a game played along side others, each keeping their own score. One’s progress does not directly affect another’s, although encouraging each other in the process is helpful. This game is voluntary, and you don’t have to play it.
(John: And the analogy is?)
(From My Joint Mind:)
We are (among other things) a consciousness reaching for a fulfillment, a perfection, that can be sensed, but never fully realized. It can be approached, but not achieved, because any level once achieved will open to itself new levels. It’s continuous and it’s eternal. The alternative is stasis. In the process of reaching and trying and extending (not knowing exactly where and how to go) there will be wrong directions, there will be backtracks, there will be a certain amount of trial and error. It is not a situation of rediscovering what is already known, just for the sake of experiencing it. It is a process of uncovering new possibility, of creating. Creating is not reproducing. It is new, different and found by exploration of every path possible, not knowing ahead of time, which path will be more fruitful. All paths are extensions of “as is”.
Synchronism 2: Yesterday, I was drawn back to reading Seth on the subject of the Garden of Eden. From Roberts, Jane (2012-06-02). Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment, Volume One (A Seth Book) (Kindle Locations 3889-3890). Amber-Allen Publishing, Inc.. Kindle Edition.
Here are a few quotes of that perspective:
“The Garden of Eden legend represents a distorted version of man’s awakening as a physical creature. He becomes fully operational in his physical body, and while awake can only sense the dream body that had earlier been so real to him. He now encounters his experience from within a body that must be fed, clothed, protected from the elements— a body that is subject to gravity and to earth’s laws.
“The Garden of Eden story in its most basic sense refers to man’s sudden realization that now he must act within time. His experiences must be neurologically structured. This immediately brought about the importance of choosing between one action and another, and made acts of decision highly important.
“By the time” that the Garden of Eden tale reached your biblical stories, the entire picture had already been seen in the light of concepts about good and evil that actually appeared, in those terms, a long time later in man’s development.”
Synchronism 3: Our role as bringing to reality the “imagined” or “dreamed” creations (of other consciousness), while learning how to become responsible creators ourselves. Further thoughts from Seth, same reference as above:
“In his life [each] man is embarked upon a cooperative venture with his own species, and with the other species, and dying he also in that regard acts in a cooperative manner, returning his physical substance to the earth. (Pause.) Physically speaking, man’s “purpose” is to help enrich the quality of existence in all of its dimensions. Spiritually speaking, his “purpose” is to understand the qualities of love and creativity, to intellectually and psychically understand the sources of his being, and to lovingly create other dimensions of reality of which he is presently unaware. (Pause.) In his thinking, in the quality of his thoughts, in their motion, he is indeed experimenting with a unique and a new kind of reality, forming other subjective worlds which will in their turn grow into consciousness and song, which will in their turn flower from a dream dimension into other ones. Man is learning to create new worlds. In order to do so he has taken on many challenges.
(Long pause.) You all have physical parents. Some of you have physical children as well— but you will all “one day” also be the mental parents of dream children who also waken in a new world, and look about them for the first time, feeling isolated and frightened and triumphant all at once. All worlds have an inner beginning. All of your dreams somewhere waken, but when they do they waken with the desire for creativity themselves, and they are born of an innocent new intent. That which is in harmony with the universe, with All That Is, has a natural inborn impetus that will dissolve all impediments. It is easier, therefore, for nature to flourish than not.”
John