Monday, July 24, 2017
6:20 a.m. Miss Rita? I have lost the thread of where you were going, so I hope you haven’t.
You can always glance back at past material and something will spark.
It would be a nice confidence-builder if you would just kick in automatically.
Very well. Consider our longer-term goal, which remains, “how do they spend their time there?” In order to address the question, it is necessary to define terms, to show the nature of “they” and “time” and “there,” and that is what we are in the process of doing. It is because people do not take the time to consider differences and similarities that they sometimes come up with extraordinary results – and I do not mean “extraordinary” in any complimentary way. Hasty assumptions lead to distorted pictures.
Now, in the course of so many conversations, beginning with ours in 2001 in the wake of your very productive series of 10 PREP sessions the preceding Fall, a lot of mental preparation has been accomplished. Our immediately preceding series a few months ago described the process of dying to the 3D world’s limitations and awakening to the non-3D’s possibilities. [These will be published in September as Awakening from the 3D World.] This series builds on all that and could not have been comprehensible to you without the mental readjustments that came from your familiarity with another way of seeing things.
Just as they said in 2000, only I didn’t realize it was going to be an unending process; I got a place to stand, but a place to stand is as much a place to step out from as it is a place to remain. Like a step on a ladder, it occurs to me.
That’s right. Well, not every step will be difficult for everybody; not ever step, though, will be easy or even possible for everybody. If learning is any one thing it is this: individual. What one person grasps in a fluent intuitive leap, another must puzzle over and wrestle with. But a few steps later, perhaps the positions are reversed, and the new bit of understanding comes easily to one who has had to struggle, and comes only with difficulty to one who up until that point has had it easy. In other words, there is no real reason for complacency or for despair. Only, keep at it.
I could feel that “despair” wasn’t quite the right word. “Discouragement?”
Yes, that would be more accurate.
So – no, one more piece of it. One of our necessary goals, or at least a very desirable goal, is to help the reader to first realize, and then begin to reconcile, the many seemingly contradictory descriptions of what people call the Afterlife. Once you realize that there is a reason for those varying descriptions, you realize
I got it. We’re acting as intelligence agents, picking up various clues, comparing various stories, trying to piece together the real story by weighing so many contradictory versions.
That’s a reasonable description of the process, and remember, it is a never-ending one. An intelligence agent who took any one report for gospel wouldn’t be doing a very good job. In fact, he or she would likely mislead rather than inform. It is always a matter of weighing and sifting and speculating and trying on this theory and that one, using all available means to make sense of things. Intuition, sensory evidence, second- and third-hand reports (that is, personal interactions, and reading, etc.) all come into play. When you stop actively weighing and measuring, you are no longer gathering intelligence; you are pausing. Nothing wrong with that, and in fact of course it is a necessary alternation: assimilation, then digestion. Only, be aware of the distinction.
And this ties in to my long-standing conviction that any new understanding that is going to affect our culture must take into account what so many spiritual and religious and psychological teachers have given us over the years.
Yes it should (though I wouldn’t be quite so free with the word “must.” It would be better if it did, but will proceed whether it does or not). And your statement opens a door that I shall step through, regardless of your discomfort.
Interesting that it isn’t nearly as great as it would have been a while ago. Am I becoming inflated?
It is well to watch against that always, but no, in this instance you are at least temporarily acting from confidence in allowing me to proceed on this tack.
Go ahead then, before I lose my nerve.
Yes, I’m smiling too, but recognize that that would indeed be a possibility. And recognize that many a reader will be faced with exactly the same obstacle and reservation. You aren’t the only person who worries about the process of psychic inflation, and as Carl Jung well knew, there is good reason for the worry. It is always a real danger. In dealing with the transcendental, it is important for the only-human part of you to remember that it is not identical with the forces it is contacting.
We are humans, not gods, and if we are occasionally allowed to convey the messages of the gods, that doesn’t confer special quasi-divine or even heroic status on us as individuals.
That’s right. Taking down a telegram announcing that someone has won a lottery does not make the telegraph operator the source of the bounty.
Understood.
Yes, but it is well for you and everyone to be aware of the danger of psychic inflation, of the wrong application of these energies, for your own protection. Nietzsche was carried away [when he became insane] proclaiming “I am God, I am God,” and perhaps in a sense he was right, in that we are all part of God; it didn’t help him any to become inflated through the contact with the divine. Instead, the high voltage shattered him. Carl Jung, on the other hand, tended his own fire, sat in contemplation, lived among his family and friends, and made his jokes. In that balanced way he saw farther than Nietzsche and preserved his own being.
So, you were about to say—
When you wrote “any new understanding that is going to affect our culture” you went farther than usual in allowing yourself to work on the assumption that this work has a larger significance than just a few people. That is the door I am stepping through.
Recognize – you, Frank, and every person who reads this now or in their future – that the fallacy of insignificance is quite as great a wrong turning as is psychic inflation. It is in saying, “it’s only me,” or “I can’t have any importance” that people sometimes fail to give their gift to the world. Yes, it is very important not to become inflated. Perhaps we should begin to say, it is equally important that you not allow yourselves to become psychologically de-flated! Better than either extreme is to live your lives quietly (or flamboyantly; this is not about style but centeredness) and, being centered, interact with the world as ambassadors.
In other words, giving the world whatever gift is ours to give.
To give – which means, to develop, to nurture, to protect. How do you know – and I’m addressing this to everybody here – how do you know the value of what it is that you have been entrusted with? Beware the false voice that says, in effect, “if this were important, it would have been given to somebody important.” Possibly that is putting the cart before the horse. Possibly one becomes important by doing what Carl Jung did, and living the message before he gave it to the world.
So many examples of various aspects of this come to mind. But I think I’ll resist setting them out.
That’s our position here, continually. Any given point radiates in all directions, and each path could be followed. We are always having to prune our discussion-tree.
Nice metaphor.
It is a fine line, sometimes, between pruning digressions and allowing not-quite-true statements to stand, at the risk of misleading. In any case, there’s your hour, and we can resume at any convenient time.
A lot of food for thought here. Our thanks as always.