Nathaniel — personal and impersonal forces

Thursday, October 19, 2017

2:15 a.m. Since it looks like I’m not going to be doing any more sleeping for a while, let’s chat. What’s next on your list of items to discuss?

Let us continue describing your lives in the context of forces beyond the – well, let us say beyond the obvious, or beyond the transient and apparent.

Deeper than what is seemingly common sense.

That’s right. Hard offhand to find a way to describe the difference. If in 3D you see a murder, or even a screaming argument, or even an icy silent confrontation, there is always an immediate cause to it. It can always be ascribed to circumstances, from “He made me do it” to “It was inevitable, given the circumstances.” But there is a deeper causation that may be discerned and described, and this is among the things we have been working up to.

We are what circumstances have made us, and the animating forces blow through us like people blowing a whistle, say. Every whistle sounds the sound it is, and can sound no other.

Clearly you could use more sleep. That is far too mechanical and determined an analogy, and your lives show that it is.

Enlighten us.

You are, if you are anything like an instrument, a pipe with various stops, that may be played. The winds that blow through are modulated by your interaction with them. If you play a flute, your fingers determine the notes emitted, depending on which holes they cover and which they don’t, and in what combinations and in what order. The structure of the pipe does not change, but the effective passage of the wind through the pipe does change.

A better analogy, I concede that.

It is your free will in 3D circumstances that is the point of your existence, after all. Merely being the passive spectator of impersonal forces has nothing to do with free will. Further, it is not what happens to you in your life, but how you are changed by what happens to you, that is the importance of the events of a life. If your ability to react and choose were not there, what would your life be?

But we would like to poke a little deeper than that. Let us say, what you are as you find yourselves in 3D existence is not adequately explained by your circumstances, your 3D heredity or even by what may be called your non-3D heredity – your strands, past lives, extensive connections.

5:45 a.m. Go on.

What you are is explained by circumstances beyond the 3D world. Just as your present-day self is not explanation enough for itself, but must be seen in context of its past, so your physical being cannot be explanation for itself, but must be seen in context of the larger being from which it springs – only, observation of that level of being is not possible.

Not even by intuitive inference? I mean, cannot our non-3D communications provide us the data, just as you are doing?

But remember, we – your non-3D components, and their friends and relations, so to speak – are at your level. We remind you, the 3D and non-3D aspects of yourself – the All-D creatures – are not separate. So in a sense, higher levels are as much a mystery to us as to you.

Plenty of people talk about them, though.

Yes. They do.

But don’t know what they’re talking about?

Let’s say, our information and theirs are not the same.

So say clearly what you mean, here.

If you ask someone for a description of a far country where he has been and you have not, how do you judge the accuracy of the description you receive? You weigh the known biases of the traveler, for one, and if possible you compare his “traveler’s tale” to those of others. But various stories are not always comparable, as they may not be describing the same things. A description of the Sahara desert and another of Cairo and a third of Naples and a fourth of – oh, anywhere – would not necessarily resemble each other, and not because any or all were inaccurate, but because they were describing different aspects of the same world.

Yes, and –?

What is the difference between a traveler’s tale and hearsay, in the absence of any way to verify them?

You tell us.

It was a rhetorical question. The difference is not in the reports, nor in the reporter, but in your own decision about them. That is, you decide what is reliable and what isn’t, but your decision isn’t necessarily accurate either; it’s just that you have to make it. You can keep that decision tentative. You can suspend judgment. But at some point you will have to make it, if only by default.

And we never have sufficient data to base a decision on.

You don’t have sufficient evidence; you don’t have sufficient evidence for a logical fact-driven conclusion. What do you have?

Psychic’s Disease? Uncaused certainty?

Not necessarily. What you do have is a feeling, one way or another, a sort of centering in. This may be Psychic’s Disease, depending upon how reckless you are at coming to certainties, but it needn’t be. It is a perfectly legitimate method of judging things you cannot decide on evidence.

My old friend Ed Carter once told me that at the highest levels of management, all decisions are made on intuition, because if they could be made on logic they would have been made at lower levels of management.

This is merely to remind you that there are areas in which we know, and others in which we don’t, just like your own lives. Nobody knows everything, and nobody’s range is precisely the same as anybody else’s.

So, our take-away here, besides the reminder of fallibility?

It is more than a reminder of fallibility. It is a reminder of levels of being. If you were to ask a cell in your stomach muscles of its opinion of an afterlife, even if it could convey the opinion (or even have one), how likely is it that its reality and yours would overlap sufficiently to provide you with guidance? It is as immortal as you, in the sense that its non-3D existence is not threatened by the termination of span of its 3D existence, but that doesn’t mean your reality and its are any more translatable one to the other. And as above, so below.

I am more than ordinarily in the dark about this morning’s talk, and so I am not sure I’m really on the beam, here.

Perhaps we made too big a leap. Sometimes connections that are obvious to us are not so to you, just as sometimes you intuit a lot from us that needs spelling-out for those who were not there at that moment when the spark jumped.

Vivid analogy.

Remember our larger theme, your souls as conduits of vast impersonal forces that are experienced as personal drives.

You hadn’t added that last phrase before.

We would have thought it went without saying. Perhaps that is part of the gap in communications. It is because you necessarily experience, but less necessarily conceptualize, impersonal forces as personal, that much confusion arises.

Why?

Why does it cause confusion?

Yes.

But – here imagine sputtering noises. We can hardly imagine why it isn’t obvious. If you think a penguin is an albatross, won’t it cause confusion? They’re both birds, and they both like cold water, and that is about all they have in common.

Well, spell it out for us.

[Pause]

It is a difference in responsibility, let’s put it that way. If you think the impersonal is personal, you are likely to assume responsibility for things that are in fact well beyond your control. Thus you may blame yourself for an eclipse of the sun. Alternatively, you may blame the Gulf Stream for your own hasty decision. You see?

It muddles things.

It has to. It is true that sometimes – maybe even many times – the confusion makes no difference, isn’t even evident. But sometimes it matters.

All divination systems have as their basis the connection between inner and outer worlds. Some recognize that the connection is in fact identity, some don’t, but all see at least a connection, and they serve to act as indicators. Astrology, tarot, I Ching, to name but three, all translate the impersonal forces of the world for the individual querent. In short, “How will I likely be experiencing (as personal forces flowing through me) the winds flowing through the world (the impersonal forces)?”

Yes, I see that.

That is a sorting-out, you see, only it is implicit rather than explicit, at least in practice. The person using the system is interested in the factors impacting his, or her, life, not in the factors as an abstract description of the world’s weather. Nonetheless, it is indeed a weather report, and the wise querent is the one who explicitly recognizes that there isn’t anything personal about whether it’s raining, and yet at the same time it is very personal, but in an entirely different sense.

Now, since it helps you to know where we will resume: When we resume, let’s continue with the distinction between your ideas of personal and impersonal. Obviously that doesn’t mean Frank’s ideas except as representative of a 3D individual’s ideas.

All right. I can’t say I’m less at sea about today’s session than I was. Perhaps it will become clearer in retrospect, as I type it in.

That is an advantage to being your own secretary, just as Hemingway saw advantage to typing up what he had first handwritten.

In his case, though, it was to revise as he went.

Which could be paraphrased to say, in his case, it was to get another look at the material, to see it as a whole – which sometimes led to revision.

I see. Interesting. Okay, till next time.