Sunday, August 27, 2017
6:30 a.m. Orchestration? I stayed up till one, correcting my 1971 Master’s thesis on Thoreau’s personal religion. All night I had – dreams? Or approaching memories? – and they all led places I didn’t dare go. I think they were all connected to Nazi Germany. And, before the dreams, I was going to begin to wheeze; I lay still, relaxing, did it just right, felt myself relax something seemingly just in front of the junction of my shoulder blades, and it did relax, with all but a click, it was so definite. And then I was fine. But the wheezing and the eventual asthma attack were perhaps to prevent me from following or being overwhelmed by such memories.
Maybe.
Rita? And, I think, Joyce? I don’t know if this will go on the record or not – it will depend on what I find, I suppose. Can you help me with this?
Help is always available for the asking, you know that.
Well, I’m asking. Can you help me sort this out?
Notice that you are tempted to run away into some other activity.
Oh, I notice! And, I hear you: slow down, get calm. [I do it.] Okay.
That’s better. So, how to sort it out?
I do get that the things are all related.
These, and your diligent work recently. You aren’t thinking to factor in your efforts on behalf of others, but of course they are going to redound to your advantage.
You mean the AIG course.
I mean, more specifically, the care you lavished on seeming strangers. It is the concern, the assistance freely offered, that brings reward.
Well, I do believe that. I think it is a law of life.
Then, count it among the factors.
I’m hoping you can structure this. I feel it is important, but I have nowhere to go with it.
Let’s begin with what is easiest emotionally, and see how far we can get. The key you were always looking for.
Yes, let’s start there. apparently a part of me did know how to turn off the asthma attacks, just as I always “knew” as a boy. But it never would have occurred to me that the attacks were not affliction but protection!
Yet you have long known, in a disconnected part of your idea-systems, that you find physical pain easier to bear than emotional pain.
That’s true. I’ve known that for some time.
Possibly it was even truer when you were newly formed and defenseless from the memories – or, not memories in the common understanding of them as concepts and events and specifics, but more like overwhelming tides of feeling and reaction.
It is as if Katrina as a strand was such an important part of me that the horror of her life, the last part of her life, could have overwhelmed the rest of me.
“As if” is an important modifier, because of course no concept is going to be exactly right. You are still understanding A by understanding B, in an unending reciprocating process. But that means you (anybody) are always going to be making sense of things through inadequate concepts. As Bob [Monroe] used to say, “you do the best you can.”
This morning feels like it might be a major rearrangement.
More for you experientially than for people reading this conceptually. What is a revolution for you may be only a concept of greater or lesser interest for others, unless and until it applies to their own life.
So, one piece of this: I know how to stop that tightening that can make it impossible to breathe automatically. Is this a permanent acquisition, or will it work only in certain circumstances?
Not the way to think about it. Consider it, instead, one more tool in the toolkit, not a panacea. Far more important than its practical assistance is what it leads you to.
I can glimpse that already. But I’m counting on you to spell it out.
Well, better concepts, better living, have consequences, just as bad habits and evil companions have consequences in the opposite direction. That is the first thing to be absorbed. Not that sickness is a sign of evil nor that health is a reward for good. Not at all. That is a misapplied understanding of the relationship. It is not, even, that being on the right path necessarily makes your life easier. Don’t ever forget, you can never judge another person’s life accurately. Most of it is hidden from you by the nature of things. And – here is another example, if you needed it – you can’t really judge your own life either; too much of it, too, is hidden from you by the nature of things.
The confounding factor is that sometimes your proper path leads through, not around, pain and suffering. Sometimes the most productive path involves sickness or injury rather than untroubled health. So, you don’t want to be making offhand judgments that amount to “pain or suffering or illness or anything inconvenient (or poverty, for that matter) are signs that the person either is or at least was on the wrong track, or did bad things, or is `balancing bad karma’.” Such judgments are easy to make, but not easy to make with any accuracy.
I get that. Indeed, I have had it for some time. The co-confounding factor of course is that – sometimes we can judge fairly accurately.
Seemingly, particularly in near-time factors, and particularly to the degree that one has carefully developed his or her psychic abilities – which in this context means, more or less, honing the ability to “see” some of the non-3D factors involved. Still, it is better not to judge save in the sense of discernment, not of condemnation.
Understood.
Now here is an entirely different light on an lifetime’s struggles with asthma.
Boy, I’ll say! And it already feels like maybe I’m stretching it too far, applying it too widely. But the idea of physical disruption serving to distract me from straying into emotional overwhelm from experiences I would have been entirely unable to cope with – well, it’s pretty major. And of course it leads me back to Joyce. [She and I and our friend Rich Spees did Lifeline together in 1995.] You were a Godsend, Joyce. I’ll find my description from Muddy Tracks and patch it in here.
[When I first mention Katrina to Joyce, the name and the situation startle her, because she remembers a life in which she had killed her daughter, whose name was Katherine, in order to save her from the Nazis. The guilt and pain from that act lasted into another lifetime. My Katrina was not her Katherine, of course, as mine had been killed by the Nazis, and hers, mercifully, by her own mother. And anyway, Katrina’s mother had died before the war.
[When I tell the story, I am concentrating on the facts and focusing on Katrina’s fate at Auschwitz, but when Joyce hears me refer to Katrina’s parents as “the father” and “the wife,” she says, “‘The wife.’ Do you mean your mother?”
[Instantly I am filled with a devastating sense of loss!
[Which confirms that I’m dealing with something real, here. But in the next instant, the emotion is cut off, against my wishes, by my internal control unit and a lifetime of denial of emotion. This, despite the changes in me since Gateway. (There are always more levels, it seems.) And at least for the moment, there’s nothing I can do about it.
[Meanwhile in C1, something is going on behind the scenes. By suppertime I am filled with an overwhelming sorrow that is just over my mental horizon. I’m trying to figure out how to get at it, and I have no ideas at all. Getting at my emotions has never been my strong point. Supper I eat alone, at one of the tables for two that adjoin the windows. Just as the meal is over, Joyce leaves her table, gets a cup of coffee, and comes to my table.
[“Do you mind if I join you?”
[“I was praying that you would.”
[She asks to hear the rest of Katrina’s story and tells me more of hers. It is clear to both of us that I need healing, as she does.
…
[All night, I try to will my inner demons into coming where they can be dealt with. All night, I wrestle with a long, slow-motion nightmare, partly involving me trying to kill somebody and having no luck with it. The feelings, I know, are connected with Katrina.
[I don’t have any doubt that this first retrieval run is for Katrina…. I find her without difficulty. She is there because she never realized that she was dead. Whatever the Nazi bastards did to her (and I haven’t found out, nor do I necessarily want or need to know), she spent the last few days of her life psychologically dissociated. I call her to me….
[Tears from the moment I find Katrina. Large quantities of tears, quiet tears overflowing my eyes and running down the sides of my head. And then I know, this is why we look for past lives, to make ourselves whole. This time, at least, I have no doubts about the reality of what’s going on. I lie there feeling the tears flow, and the emotional reality is far too intense for me to bother to try to question it. I decide that this is what I’ll do next. I will concentrate on survivors and bring them up. It comes to me that if we bring forth the trapped “past incarnations” of those who are in the body now, we will lighten the consciousness of living beings without them necessarily knowing one thing about it. “We’ll lighten the whole world,” is the way it comes to me. ]
It was all I could do to deal with even the little contact I had with Katrina that day. I don’t know if I could have gone even as far as I did without you.
And you forget about us. [That is, the dead.]
I do, it’s true. out of sight, out of mind until something reminds me. But when I do think of you, it is as always with great love and gratitude, and it used to be with great regret that I wasn’t able to do anything to help you in return.
But you did, of course, and you know it but don’t quite dare to acknowledge it. You were almost the last voice I heard, and we made the step together.
We did?
We did. Your conscious mind could not know it, of course – it would only “imagine” or “make up a story” about that last perfectly timed phone call, but the rest of you knew, and of course it helped shape your next steps in awareness. Only, what is pretty quick in non-3D may seem less so in 3D when 20 years elapse!
I have never ceased to feel our connection, I just don’t have definite information about it. That’s why you entered into [the character] Claire in Angelo’s story, even though she and he were experiencing things I actually either made up or experienced in relation to somebody else. (And for that matter, my relation to her in this life was almost nil. It mostly took place in “past life” time. So much I don’t know!)
But an hour has elapsed, and probably I should pause here, even though we have barely dipped a toe into this morning’s experiences and their meanings. Rita, Joyce, thanks and love to both of you.