Nathaniel on perspective

Sunday, October 22, 2017

6 a.m. Dreams of drama, and I awaken thinking of Richard Bach, who certainly knew or knows how to dramatize his inner life.

Several journal entries that I am tempted to include here, after yesterday’s extraordinary session, and ask for your comments.

By all means. And we’re glad you are finally able to read The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events. We know you have been wanting to for a while.

A while, yes. About 20 years. Right after The Nature of Personal Reality, and then I got the strongest feeling not to, not yet. And of course I see why, and that was accurate: It was too early in my process. I would have been prey to “I’m just making this up because I have read it in Seth,” and, worse, I would have had to believe or disbelieve; I didn’t have the background context that the ensuing years have provided. I couldn’t have wrestled with it, as you always put it.

So enter your notes from yesterday.

[Reading The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, I see why I shouldn’t have read it, and thus was prevented from reading it, 20 years ago. What I’m reading makes perfect sense to me today. Then, I would have had to be accepting it on faith, which wouldn’t have done any good and would have perhaps hampered my own exploration.

[No two people do it the same way. Rob and Jane worked together; Rob researched, cross-referenced, annotated. Jane pursued other lines of research and thought. Very different even from Cayce, who also had someone transcribing his voice, but did no research nor cross-referencing. Different from me, certainly, typing up my own material, putting it out for question and comment, but – at least since Rita passed over – not analyzing or cross-referencing. Pretty good results so far, though.

[Another difference between my process and either Jane Roberts or Cayce, of course, is that mine is interactive, not merely receptive.

[Am I getting a little puffed up, comparing myself to them? And yet, the material is there, and it came through via my agency. I guess it is a valid comparison. But Neale Walsch did it the way I do, come to think of it, and had far more – incomparably more – impact than I am having. Remember that, if you tend to get impressed with yourself, o scribe!]

Comment?

Accurate enough, as we see it. It is important in one’s relation to one’s own life, not merely in relation to others, to avoid the twin pitfalls of too little and too much estimation.

“Too much respect is as distancing as contempt,” I was told.

Yes, only in the case of one’s own life and work, the latter is likely to be the greater error. It is easy to misjudge how well or how badly – how much or how little – one’s life’s work amounts to. Not only do you have no external perspective, but at least half the data is invisible to you.

Say a little more on that?

The only perspective you have on your effect is reputation and observable impact, both very second-hand sources of information, easily misinterpreted. Not only that, you can have no such data on your future reputation and impact. It may be far greater or far less – and in any case is likely to be far different in shape – than you suppose. Nor can you easily weigh the invisible, the impact on a soul who then proceeds in its altered life to impact others, and so forth.

Yes, I see all that, and I am very aware that you are speaking directly to our readers, not just to me. I mention it in case it doesn’t immediately occur to them.

It is, of course, applicable to everybody, yes. Not everybody is as one-sided as you were created, so their impact is likely to be distributed among various points of their horoscope, so to speak. But everybody has impact. (Or, as that is almost a violent word, let us say everybody’s warmth affects others.) And what about your other entries?

I hadn’t decided whether to add them.

[Watched “Terminator 3,” found in alphabetizing my DVDs and tapes. Thinking about the story. The visuals show how much people hate our civilization, and want to see it smashed – trucks, cars, buildings, people, cities. I don’t even know if the movie makers know they are expressing that. Maybe they think people just like “action.” (Even that would show how boring and unsatisfying people’s lives are.) But there is a deeper theme, for me: sitting on the sidelines watching the inevitable catastrophe. That’s what I have been doing my whole life, with the exception of a half-hearted attempt to enter political life. If it is inevitable, you waste your life trying to stop it – even if you know what to do. But how do you know it is? Well, I guess the answer to that is simple: You know.

[I can’t help wondering what form the catastrophe will take, and how much it will leave us alone. I don’t mean Skynet, I mean the progressive destruction of the republic.

[No way to know. Work while I have time, and hope that something survives.]

It is in the dreams of the future that you find your magnetic pull–. No, let’s start again.

You know that the physical brain reacts to depictions nearly as strongly as to the real physical event. Your brains are always playing virtual reality, and the difference in input is less significant, less discernable, to it than you might assume. So, all those depictions of mass destruction, of lethal conflict, of raw emotion (that is, the scenes themselves, and the reaction they were created to produce) are real. As real as the rest of your lives, that is. Or, let’s say, a half-step less real, as your physical life is a half-step less real than the reality above (and below, and around) it.

So media presentation of a portrait of your world is not limited to “news” broadcasts with their own peculiar bias toward the dramatic and away from the analytical; it includes the overt drama and all its subtexts. It includes the fiction and non-fiction that you read. It includes second-hand experience at roughly the same level as first-hand, depending upon your intuitive / sensory mix. Someone like you lives as much in secondary reports as in primary experience; more, sometimes. Others may live only in the primary, as far as they know, and yet they will be suffused by secondary reports absorbed unconsciously and uncritically stored as data.

But surely even in the case of the least self-conscious persons, they have their unbroken link to intuition – to their non-3D component – to keep them aligned.

Ah, but that is a vast and different and quite apposite line of inquiry. (Apposite, yes, not opposite. This for those who are challenged by the vocabulary.)

That’s the first time I’ve seen you do anything like that. Or was it me bleeding through?

No, actually it was our doing, and for a good reason although we know it seemed like sarcasm or derogation. [I think they meant condescension.] It is important, very occasionally, to remind people that your extensive vocabulary includes words not in common parlance, which they should not assume to be typographical errors.

Even though sometimes they are.

Because sometimes they are. It is a way of saying, “stay alert.”

That implies that “apposite” was chosen by me rather than you.

It is a meaningless distinction, in context, or we could come through in Swahili or Urdu. Vocabulary, grammar, syntax, cultural inferences, analogies, etc., etc., can only come by way of the conduit. You know that full well. As you say, don’t expect science or music to come through you, as you don’t have it in your data banks.

All right, I see that. I guess I did know it, in a slightly different context, though. So, you were about to say – ?

The unbroken and unbreakable link between conscious and unconscious, between 3D awareness and All-D awareness, let’s say, is not meant to produce homogenous 3D results. Quite the contrary. It is meant to support the existence of the 3D being; it is, as a parallel function, the repository of the record of all 3D experience. (It is your feed to the Akashic Record, you might say.) But although it is always acting as a receiver, it is experienced by the 3D being as transmitter only under certain constraints. The 3D being may choose to shut off any messages it finds uncomfortable. It tunes out its bad conscience, you might say. Or, it tunes out thoughts and realizations that contradict what it chooses to think of realize. Or it tunes out intuitive input in general, as distraction or as hallucination or as fantasy.

“It isn’t real.”

That’s one version, yes. “It isn’t real, I don’t want to hear about it, it produces uncomfortable sensations.” For any of those reasons, and there are more, any 3D being may shut itself off from receiving some of the input available to it. But, a couple of points.

• This isn’t a It is a function of free will, and nobody has any objection to it.
• Overwhelming need may cause (or enable, depending upon how you choose to look at it) the non-3D component to flood the 3D with input that can not be ignored and may be life changing.

I see.

And that is enough for now. With the additional material to transcribe, you will find this enough to do, and this is a convenient place to stop.

Okay. Till next time.