Nathaniel: Illness as an indicator

Monday, November 20, 2017

3:15 a.m. For the first time in weeks, I find my lungs more or less at rest even while I am lying down, sleeping or half-sleeping. Now why is that? I instinctively relate it to my change of state, noticed yesterday and Saturday. But I still required the inhaler Saturday night, and I needed the nebulizer, though only to a small degree, last night. Yet it feels like I’ve really changed – like somebody inside got the message. Any light you fine citizens care to shed on the subject?

Think of it as a reason for thanks giving.

Nice pun. And –?

Why does there have to be an “and”?

Because usually, there is one.

You’re a little late, learning that.

I’m a little late learning most things. So what’s going on?

Why would you think what you already know needs to be confirmed by a process that you half-suspect (half-correctly) is you talking to yourself?

I do love your straight answers.

I thought you told people the process never gets contentious.

Maybe it should, sometimes. But I take it that as usual we’re playing Socratic games?

Our rhetorical question was equally a straight question: How would confirmation from a source that may well be only a part of your own mind be confirmation? Of anything?

You – and others – have pointed out many times that sometimes we need to hear input from outside ourselves in order to give it the weight it deserves. And yes, I realize that by some definitions this does not count as input from “outside” myself, but I don’t know what that would mean anymore anyway. Even if this is a willed semi-disassociation, that may not really be much of a meaningful distinction. If we are all one thing, our entire lives are, or could be described as, a willed (or sometimes unconscious) semi-dissociation from the rest of ourselves. And that is probably the only way 3D can function, maintaining the illusion of separation.

That is the way 3D does function, but it is not the only way it does, and is certainly not the only way it could function. You were told years before that the next step will be for people in 3D to walk around as now, only do so knowing they are connected. Well, that will amount to their experiencing themselves being connected to each other as well, even if (conceptually) at one remove.

At which time – I get it – we will realize more fully that in speaking to “others” we are always speaking to an extended part of ourselves. It is true that at the moment we can at most accept that idea only theoretically. It doesn’t yet feel as true as we can accept it to be.

Realizations come incrementally. First perhaps one cannot imagine not being a closed unit. Then perhaps one’s system shifts to allow for the possibility of non-physical communication. Later, that communication may become more closely defined, so as to envisage or recognize (take your pick) specific individuals. Then perhaps the system shifts again and you realize that – or imagine that – those other personalities are either dramatizations of part of yourself or are extensions of yourself that you have merely begun to recognize. And so on. Definitions are structures, and may function as scaffolding or as prison cells, perhaps alternately.

And I’m comfortable with proceeding in the absence of any decision as to what is “the truth.” So, back to the substance of my question. Let me rephrase. I feel intuitively that the

You see? A chunk of awareness hits – interrelated bits of information, thoughts, memories associate themselves and suddenly relate to your larger pre-existing mental structure – and you stop in your tracks and say “aha!”

Yes, it’s interesting. I haven’t yet tried to describe the experience. The pause and the implied aha seem necessary to seat it in, though of course I don’t know. it happens more usually when I am writing out what is coming through.

Subtext.

Subtext, yes. The words are saying one thing and the context tells me something else, either a confirmation or an expansion or a settling-into-context or a mental leap. Always satisfying when it happens.

So, I was starting to say that I intuitively felt this latest change connects somehow to – well, I don’t remember what I was going to relate it to from yesterday, but I realized that, as I had suspected, this goes back directly to my session with Jane Mullen three weeks ago. For just a moment, I saw connections more clearly. Let me pause, sink in, and see if I can retrieve that awareness.

[Pause]

I went away somewhere. Don’t know that I came back with what I went dredging for, though.

Oh sure you did.

I did?

Start to express it and it will manifest.

You know, I know you’re right, but logically that sounds backwards.

It’s called priming the pump, and you used to be very familiar with the process.

Not in this context, though.

No, not specifically as a means of recalling information you already know you have but cannot place. But the process is the same. Open the pipe, expect it to flow. How can that work less effectively than sitting by the closed pipe, wishing for water?

Smiling. Okay, let’s see.

It is a feature of a temperament like mine that on the one hand I am open to miracles, and on the other hand I tend to expect them. That is, I underrate the importance of process, and tend to rely upon quantum leaps of a different state (a higher state, hopefully). So when I have a transformative experience I fall into the mental trap of expressing results in binary: on / off, yes / no, whereas they may well come like turning up a rheostat. And rheostats may be turned smoothly or in increments even or uneven, but in no case do they more than superficially resemble an on / off switch.

So, I can’t remember exactly what Jane and I discussed, nor even if it was absolutely a discovery but more a placement into new context. I could look it up (I wrote it out, I think), but it isn’t necessary. The work loosened the knot. Something over the weekend loosened it more.

Yes. Seeing asthma less as a disconnected physical problem and more as an indicator of an internal situation that can be triggered by external circumstances allows you control.

I think I’ll have to spell that out for people, and perhaps for myself as well, lest I forget the connection that at the moment seems so obvious.

Asthma exists. It is a systemic weakness. Environment affects it. There isn’t any talking it away as only this or only that. Mary Baker Eddy [founder of Christian Science] might have a difficult time removing it by concentrating on proper thought. And yet she isn’t exactly wrong either. It is (as usual) a matter of context.

We all have weak points, what I think of as fuses or circuit-breakers, the things that are going to go first, given sufficient stress. Asthma has always been mine. Well, you can look at it, and at specific asthma attacks, in one or two ways. The one would be, “Something caused it (Fall, dust, mold, allergens in food, whatever) and the only thing to do is to find the counter-agents that will control it – pills, inhalers, nebulizers, shots, whatever.” The other would concede all this, but say, “Why is it the weak point in the first place? If we correct the weakness, the same causes will no longer trigger it, as it will not exist in that vulnerable form.”

Perhaps the most productive approach would be to recognize weaknesses as indicators, and correct the imbalance they are warning against, so that they don’t even need to be disabled (“cured”) but may continue to operate as sentinels, without necessary triggering.

We can wrap it up on that note – you’ve been at it an hour – but let’s add this one thing. “Perfect health” is a misnomer for “absence of symptoms.” It stems from assuming that an absence of indicators of distress is in and of itself an absolute good. Certainly it is more comfortable; it is not necessarily as informative, or as trans-formative.

I know you aren’t saying illness is necessarily good for us.

No, but it isn’t necessarily bad for you. or, let’s say it differently, it isn’t necessarily as helpful to have no flashing indicators as it would be to have a more delicately calibrated mechanism that would sound the alarms more frequently. But that wouldn’t serve everybody. Some want growth more than comfort, some don’t.

Again I get that you are aiming that particular statement beyond me.

Think of yourself as a telegraph wire, sometimes.

Humming with electricity. Okay, till next time.