Nathaniel: The process of creating a framework

Wednesday. October 11, 2017

4:50 a.m. Shall we dance?

Try to hold in mind the continuing trend in our discussions, our argument. We know it is difficult to do over time. There is one world, not two. The physical and the spiritual, the 3D and the non-3D, are aspects of one reality, and cannot be considered as separate entities without serious distortion in your understanding. The internal world you experience through your direct feed and the external world you experience by way of your senses are the same world, not different worlds. They are two modes of experience seeming (until you transcend appearances) to be two cooperating or even non-connected environments. Your lives are internal, not external, or let us say the external reality you perceive as primary is really an internal reality perceived in distortion.

I was clear until that last sentence, but that one didn’t seem to come out straight. Try it again?

No, it wouldn’t get any straighter. It expresses a reality that must be intuited or cannot be grasped.

It seems to me an echo of something Rita said in her sessions about the way we perceive things differently after we drop the body [Awakening from the 3D World], but I can’t quite pull it up.

Again, no need. People – including you – can always re-read it, if it calls to them.

All right. And –?

If you can remember that framework, it will keep you oriented as we proceed. One world, not two. Everything connected, not separate or separable. We have said before, it is because people no longer have an intellectual and (even more) an emotional framework that holds together heaven and earth, so to speak, that they have ceased to be able to believe in anything beyond what their senses report, and the result is emptiness and despair. Faith in the unseen depends upon a framework that is itself believed in. We know that seems circular.

We don’t live in an age of faith.

Au contraire. The problem is that you all have too much faith, in too many things, and too little knowledge holding it all together.

Emerson’s quote, if I can find it.

Certainly. And these all have their modern equivalents, which you can insert here if you find the quotation.

[No need, they haven’t changed, just changed names.]

Emerson, age 44, August 1847:

The Superstitions of our Age:

The fear of Catholicism;

The fear of pauperism;

The fear of immigration;

The fear of manufacturing interests;

The fear of radicalism or democracy;

And faith in the steam engine.

“And faith in the steam engine” struck me particularly hard when I first read it, many years ago. Certainly true.

The basis of faith is always knowledge. But knowledge is not the same thing as facts, certainly not memorized facts or agreed-upon facts, or any body of logically connected facts and arguments. Those things are results, not building blocks.

I’m not sure that’s quite clear.

What you know is from direct feed. What you experience isn’t the same thing.

Man, this keeps getting fuzzier. I have a sense of what you’re getting at, but the words just keep confusing it, or is the thought itself, or my understanding of it, unclear, or wrong?

Have you noticed? – perhaps not – that abstract statements get us into trouble, and the more abstract, the larger the scale of abstraction, the greater the difficulty. That is why your dialogue format with Rita worked so well, it kept drawing you back to the personal and the specific.

Well, it seems to me I was just recording what I was getting, above. It doesn’t feel like I am the one steering the discussion.

It isn’t a matter of intent, or even of perception. What we’re pointing out here is that abstract statements are difficult to convey accurately, and they tend to attract a fuzziness. That’s an awkward way to put it, but that’s what it amounts to. When you try to convey something, the more abstract it is, the more likely it is that unconscious mental associations will find their way into the statement, clouding the result.

Jung said somewhere that the unconscious tends to come in via pompous language.

That isn’t quite what he said, but that’s the idea, yes. So, when it happens to you, perhaps use that statement from experience of his as a touchstone, and remember that the very difficulty of expression may be (may be) a sign of deep and meaningful content. That is, when you find yourself in difficulty, work where you are. Good advice in general, of course. So let’s continue trying to make a clear statement about faith and knowledge, internal and external, intuition and sensory experience.

There isn’t any use clinging to what you had, even if in fact you actually ever had it. Times change in order to provide the opportunity for new ways to understand the world and thus understand yourselves. Times change, you change. You change, times change. Like so much else, it is a reciprocating process, because that is one of the underlying laws of 3D life.

Only 3D life?

It is only in slowed-down 3D life that the process is that apparent. Delayed consequences assist analysis and experiences. But this is a side-trail that we don’t wish to divert ourselves onto.

Trying to retain old ways of understanding life may work for some – or we should say may seem to relatively work for them – but a changing civilization reflects and potentiates changing mass consciousness, which in turn changes the ecology of individual consciousness.

That word “ecology” is going to startle some people, as they relate it only to nature.

Ecology refers to the fishbowl in relation to the fish. In this case, we refer to the mental, spiritual, abstract fishbowl around the 3D personalities experiencing 3D life. The waters in which you swim are collective in the same way as the physical environment you experience is collective.

I think you mean, collective awareness holds our physical world, and in the same way it creates the boundaries of our mental world at any given time.

Yes, with hesitations. Those words are all loaded with misleading unconscious connotations and associations. But, as stated, and subject to interpretation, yes.

You are not living in a mental ecology that will encourage blind faith in a religious scheme without disastrous results, and the disastrous results themselves will further undermine attempts to live it. But this means two things, or let’s say it means one thing in two aspects.

1)

Started to list them, blanked out on them entirely. Waited, still nothing. Your move.

Sometimes the act of sorting that is implied in numbering moves you to a more analytical space and impedes flow.

Well, I tried to step aside.

What is, and what you try to make be, are not always identical, as you may have noticed.

Anyway –

You will not find your salvation (and by “you” we mean your time and your society) by any one blind faith. It can only be a faith built upon what you know. And that cannot be based upon sensory data, it is too unreliable and, worse, second-hand and superficial. But neither can it be built in active opposition to that sensory data. It must be firmly rooted in experience and it must successfully reinterpret the sensory data that people accept.

And that is what we are doing here.

Indeed it is. Put it into context.

I suppose I could draw a line, but it would always be somewhat arbitrary. Parallel to the accepted materialist interpretations of the world has been another very different interpretation of what is. Swedenborg to Emerson to Whitman to William James and Carl Jung, perhaps. The Fox sisters to Edgar Cayce and Jane Roberts, say. Rhine and Monroe and so many psychic investigators.

Yes and another line as well, religious mystics, hard-headed physics mystics, people who feel their way to what is real.

Frustrating, how slowly this goes, sometimes. Here’s an hour gone and I feel like we never got started on what you were intending to say.

Look at things a different way. When you re-read and you don’t find words or arguments that are not to the point, doesn’t that mean that what was said was to the point? Some things just require a certain amount of time and attention to be said and understood. Persevere and it will come forth.

I’ll take your word for it. Okay, till next time.