Nathaniel on creating a new society

Wednesday. January 3, 2018

6:50 a.m. Yesterday’s session has sent me back to E.F. Schumacher. Re-reading Small is Beautiful.

There is an entirely different way to dissect societies, and this one follows more closely the idea behind the question.

Yes, I’ve been thinking that. Yesterday’s answer sort of surprised me, it seemed superficial next to the real problem.

Superficial viewed one way. Necessary scaffolding, viewed another way. People’s first view of society tends to be economic or social or both.

Or political, you mean?

Social, political, doesn’t matter. The point is that before you can show people the deeper roots of anything, usually you have to show them that what they think are the roots are only a surface layer. The way to do that is to address those ideas first and show why they can’t be the basic problem.

As Joseph did in the sessions that became Chasing Smallwood, discussing the roots of the challenge of our time. [2-17-2006]

So first we point out that the economic model has alternatives. Next we might show that the various forms of political structure all have virtues and vices, advantages and disadvantages. Then, a reminder than ideology is, as you sometimes say, for idiots, because to believe that any ideology is going to lead to perfection is to believe that one size fits all. When you get through these layers of analysis – and they can be gotten through, only it is tangential to what really concerns us, so we will leave people to do it on their own – you come down to the fact that what people get, what they will stand for, depends primarily upon the shared Zeitgeist [spirit of the times] in the largest sense. That is, what people want relies ultimately on what they think is true. When their idea of what is true changes, so does their society, because society reflects the beliefs, it does not shape them.

Some fairly broad-brush painting, here.

Necessary. All this has been gone into time and again. We can’t be continually recapping “for those who tuned in late.” You don’t have that many years left.

Which I’m taking not as a dire prediction but as a statement of a lot more ground left to cover.

Nobody does much pioneering by continually retracing their steps. Anyway, the point, as you well know, is that the form of your social organization isn’t nearly as important as the ideas behind it, the view of reality people hold.

Because that’s what limits their world.

Let’s say, that’s what bounds their horizons. Everybody is surrounded by a horizon beyond which they cannot see. Large or small, it’s always a circle with you at the center, and no matter where you go or how fast you move, you’re still in the center and always will be. So, you can’t get to see everything, but what you do see – what your circle includes – will be set by where you stand at any given moment.

This is true of individuals. It is also true of communities. And, as usual, individuals are communities at another scale, and communities, at another scale, are individuals. As above, so below, and don’t ever forget it. It is the key to so many conundrums.

A community that believes in materialism believes in many things whether it knows it or not: chance, death, disconnection, either the separation of physical and non-physical or the nonexistence of the latter. It is likely to be oblivious to psychic forces as an everyday fact of life; unlikely to believe in spirits and therefore in the possibility of communication with spirits. It is likely to be atheistic in effect if not in theory. And all these unconscious beliefs have so many consequences!

If you believe in chance, can you believe that everything has meaning? If you believe in death – death as a final end to life, of course we mean – can you avoid a sense of desperation of at least of loss? Can you easily resist temptations to greed of one sort of another? If you believe that you and everyone else are disconnected rather than all part of one thing, is it easy to resist temptations to selfishness, fear, isolation, meaningless, ennui? If you don’t believe that life continues beyond the 3D world as you experience it, the meaning you find in life will have to come from the things of life, and what when they are not enough? Will you even know why they are not enough? Most of all – though it may not seem to be “most of all” – a sense of the material and spiritual world being separate will lead either to what you might call a superstitious religion or no religion at all.

Broad-brush? Certainly. But it is a broad topic. Any single statement we made (or will make) could be examined and found incomplete or provisional or sloppily put, but remember, you are learning to see words as provocations, not as law. Use them to get the underlying sense of what we’re saying. In your wrestling with the material, quarrel with the sense of it, don’t quibble with any given expression of it.

Now, realize, communities are no more consistent in their beliefs than are individuals. (Now why should that be, we wonder.)  It is as common for communities to hold incompatible beliefs in separate pockets, so to speak, as it is for individuals. So, in both cases, you will have sub-communities organized around beliefs that other sub-communities regard as superstition or left-over primitive belief. You know.

It really is true, isn’t it, how very much we as individuals are the same makeup as communities. One hand doesn’t necessarily know what the other hand does, or let’s say one group of neurons doesn’t necessarily know that the other groups believe.

What is warfare, what is inter-cultural exchange (and the need for them) but the result of imperfect communication between entities believing different things?

I’d have to think about that one.

While you’re thinking, ask yourself, what is work on yourself, what is psychiatry, what is any attempt to gain control, but an attempt to establish diplomatic relations among previously unconscious sub-communities?

All right.

So, if you want to create a new society, you go about it not by organizing and politicking and warring and propagandizing and all the other activities that make so much noise in the world, but by changing how you experience the world.

And that’s how the monasteries and hermitages have always done it! I never thought of it just that way.

Of course. Now, if you believe in separation (regardless whether you believe in spirit or not), you will be inclined to see these isolated communities or individuals as powerless, isolated (as they appear), irrelevant. But if you see them as feeding their modulated input into the Zeitgeist via the group mind – and it will take effect seemingly slowly, seemingly diffusely – then you see that the true struggle for a society’s values is fought in secret, or let us say in the darkness.

We’re running out of time and you have many questions. This is a case where the right questions will materially assist in exposition.

I shall encourage our friends to pose them, and to continue to pose them. Meanwhile, one question: How are you relating this to our coexistence with “vast impersonal forces”?

The short cryptic answer is that it is these forces, contending, that manifest in your lives as individual strife, community strife. Now one tendency prevails, then another. The universe as you experience it has tides and eddies, as the compilers of the I Ching well knew.

And there is your hour.

Okay. Many thanks.

 

18 thoughts on “Nathaniel on creating a new society

  1. Frank, thank you. I have now(in these days), noticed in particular, the Zeitgeist of our time.
    Quote Nathaniel: “Society reflects the beliefs.”
    And a belief is an Idea-Construction as such.
    Therefore nowadays in to try wrapping my mind about simultaneous Time – such as; “ALL Time” is always the reflection of The Present(in the NOW), according to Seth.
    Obviously A New Society Is Already Created ?

    P.S. I have had a witty dream some nights ago.
    Recall asking a man for giving me a new voice, I wanted to have A NEW voice.
    Well, replied the man( a doctor of some sort? ), we can try out several new “voices” if you wish. Without hesitating he was turning around to his “Radio-Station-Instruments” there in the room, and as he told me: Please give me a moment- and then in him to begin with trying out different volumes/sounds of voices upon a strange instrument-board…. The INSIDE looking as a Communication-Station with all the electronic equipment & panels ? (felt as a Communication Central or inside a Space Station), and it was funny to me.
    Then I began to laugh deeply for a brief moment (not my ordinary laughter, it sounds more as a deeper male-laughter).
    The man/doctor, his outlook (brown eyes and brown hair, the white skin) dressed as a ordinary human being, working with the “co-ordinates.”
    And obviously working with the new voices in me to choose from – but when me to laugh, he was turning around looking at me with a smile, and begging me to carry on with the same laughter, and said: No need for you to make “another voice.”

    When to wake up from the dream felt a bit disappointed because I wanted to have “a new voice,” but not given any…(shit).

    1. Years ago I had a dream or vision or something — i forget the particulars, in which my body was in the black box but I was in the control room, and i got the sense that the real me wasn’t the same thing as the me experienced in the body. i get that same sense in your dream — when you said “The INSIDE looking as a Communication-Station with all the electronic equipment & panels” — like, the “you” in the dream is the realer you, and communicating with the 3D you. Who knows, but one possible interpretation.

      1. Hi Frank. I am really appreciating your comments all the time either for the replies & comments to me or all the others.
        And yes, what you told here could be very true indeed.
        AND, when thinking about Jane Roberts was told by Seth, her male-name was Ruburt (Ruburt was Jane`s “whole Self”). Seth often naming Jane as “Ruburt.”

        And quote Seth:
        “When I tell you that you lived, for example, in 1836, I say this because it makes sense to you now, You live all your reincarnations at once, but you find this difficult to understand.”

        Another Seth quote about the same:
        “Because I say that you create physical matter by use of the inner sense, I do not mean that you are the creators of the universe. I am saying that you are the creators of the physical world as you know it.”

        And cannot let it be with to mention the two other quotes by Seth:
        “There is never any justification for violence. for hatred, for murder. Those who indulge in violence for whatever reason are themselves changed, and the purity of their purpose adulterated.”

        Next by Seth:
        “You will reincarnate whether or not you believe that you will. It is much easier if your theories fit reality, but if they do not, you will not change the nature of reincarnation one iota.”

        P.S. I CAN remember as a child to have felt STRANGE about to be born as a FEMALE. Luckily (I SAY “lucikly” as ACCEPTING IT as in me to become accustomed to be a socalled “normal” girl). And luckily in me accepting the challenge of HOW TO LEARN becoming a female. “Back in my head” to KNOW(more or less consciously) it all the way. I was THE ONLY ONE among all the ladies at the hospital, who was there giving birth at the same time ), who KNEW not to have given birth to children before! I felt myself as “a stranger” to it, among all the ladies there. And the twins became born during much effort by the doctores & nurses.
        And 6 years later on got QUITE ANOTHER FEELING when to give birth to my third son. The “motherly-feeling” came naturally – instead of the highly STRANGE EMOTION & SHOCK(actually a formidable shock when giving birth to the twins, even to know beforehand about the twins) – I went rapidly into COMA, the bloodpressure arising rapidly and my body reacted with total “unknowingness” MY BODYILY REACTION seemed “out-of control” – I had no pain as to recal. But THE RAPID bodily reaction surprised the doctors & nurses as they told me later on they really struggled to save both the twins and me. I don`t remember anything of it as I fell into Coma.
        Afterwards my old FAMILY- doctor told me(back then we had a family doctor who is following your pregnanacy ALL THE TIME). And the doctor could NOT understand WHY my BODY reacted in that manner at all (the doctor told me afterwards). And the doctor told me: I was all healthy during the whole pregnancy and the babies in the womb likewise. Well, the twins survived and me too, thanks to the doctors & nurses at the hospital.

        MANY others among us cannot COPE with their inheritance of once upon a time(simultaneously) were created as an ANDROGYNOUS entity. The struggle “back” began when “the division” became manifested into two “parts.” And therefore us, supposingly, whom were original created as ONE, as the “Androgynous Entity,” became, by the dividing, in us becomig “strangers” to the Creation of the Universe. Because originally we were created as ONE.
        BTW: As a woman in this “life-time” around, to become born as a blonde with blue eyes(WHY?). But anyway, one might wonder about “the genes.”
        Seemingly “the whole Self of me,” is a male with the brown hair and brown eyes? Wonder what NAME Seth would naming “him.” I`ll have to ask.

        1. I can only repeat that it is such a give when you, and others, share with the rest of us part of the mysterious land your life is to us. Thoreau said it, anyone who has lived sincerely is a foreign land to the rest of us, and if we too are living as sincerely as we can, the differences in experience among us — and the similarities in reactions sometimes — are very enlightening.

  2. I like the reminder about the value of the individual–“feeding [our] modulated input into the Zeitgeist via the group mind,” thereby creating and feeding those vast, impersonal forces. Also that the “true struggle for a society’s values is fought in secret, or let us say in the darkness,” each of us engaging in it by our existence and expression. There is so much to consider in each session.
    Thanks.

  3. Good morning and good new year all. It seems that I’m not the only one having thoughts that are off the beaten path today. I, at first, put them off to feeling under the weather (fighting off a cold), but maybe they’re not. Let me see if I can share them coherently.

    As I was eating breakfast, I was considering how my sense of my individual self had shifted dramatically because of the information Frank has been relating. My earlier model was of a soul that incarnated again and again to work on stuff, learn lessons, and refine itself. If I shift my perspective to the All-D, where Nathaniel, Rita and TGU have been moving us, there seems to be no separate little soul known as Jane C. As I thought on this, I sensed that “Jane C” was an actor in a grand play, a part that my “Greater I” expresses through when playing in 3D theater. This distressed me a bit, as I thought about my parents (who are now gone) and wondered how it was that I can still experience them as individuals whether in dreams or in meditative state? Specifically, did they really love me, or was it some part they played? Can I still experience them as individuals and feel that loving connection that we had here on earth? Wow. Heavy thoughts for a cold, sunny morning! I brewed a pot of coffee and got down to work on this one.

    TGU and Rita have said that we are strands of other personalities in our SAM (I-There cluster). From this side, those strands look like guidance and may look separate. But Frank’s work has been about shifting perspective. My personality, Jane C, can be seen as a new lens or way of experiencing 3D. And that personality is valued, as it brings a unique spotlight on life in the physical world. From the shifted perspective, I am not just an individual soul. Instead, there is a node in a great, multi-dimensional, fluid tapestry where all the threads that make up “Jane C” meet. Soul or node – doesn’t matter what term I use. Each one depends on one’s perspective. It’s what Nathaniel and Company have been saying all along.

    So now I loop it back to the million dollar question: did my parents love me and can I still touch that love? Of course, they did. I jokingly say that my mother had to have loved me, as she didn’t drown me when she had the chance. I was not an easy child to raise. From the 3D perspective, I can and do still connect with my parents as individuals through dreams and meditation and feel that love.

    If I shift to the All-D, I sense the unconditional love flowing from the All-That-Is through the grand tapestry, that grand cosmic force that Nathaniel alludes to, through each and every strand and node, to each and every strand and node. Wow. That’s huge.

    And I’m out of coffee. Thanks for listening.

      1. “As I was eating breakfast, I was considering how my sense of my individual self had shifted dramatically because of the information Frank has been relating.” Exactly how I feel.

  4. Gandhi said something to the effect that “People are looking for a system so perfect that it doesn’t take good people to run it.”

    1. Yep. So did Thomas Carlyle, and Thoreau for that matter. I’m sure it’s just around the corner. BTW re-reading Small is Beautiful and finding it more prophetic and insightful even than before. I guess I’ll have to re-read A Guide for the Perplexed after that.

  5. Dear all good friends – A snowy day today, but NOT cold at all – as you “over there” seems to experience nowadays.

    I love to read what all of you are telling as always.
    But when to consider all the Methaphysical/Spiritual materials EVER to have read; the one book “Robes” by Penny Kelly is the most COMPACT book ever, and a heavy Hammer upon the head!!
    A BIG CHALLENGE in digesting the information (DESPITE of all the books to have read through the years). The Kundalini of hers` gave me “a warning” in not to accept everything as “good.” (Good for a reason which could become avoided and not even necessary to experience).
    I have learned too much by the lessons when to study the Paramahansa Yogananda teachings(I am to trust Yogananda in every way. He IS love), to KNOW what the Kundalini Force CAN DO if not properly prepared (or mature enough) to handle it on forehand.

    Kenny Pelly to have awakened her Kundalini- it is obvious by no doubt – BUT, I`m NOT quite sure if (when to read her story) it is “for the good of all,” as a whole. The Mankind is not mature enough to handle the sexual energy(awakened by the Kundalini) as Penny Kelly to have done as yet.
    I am to recall Blavatskys` and her warnings, told by the MAHATMAS. They told about the awakening of the sexual force by the Kundalini is dangerous if not to know “what you are dealing with.” And if you do – you are into a deep danger when it is “taking over your body.” Because when you are “under its sexual rule,” you can no longer be “The Own Master” of your bodily functions.
    According to Paramahansa Yogananda the sexual force is to become “spiritualized” into the God-Force” learned by an educated and experienced Master.
    In my own opinion(my concept of the book “Robes”), when to read what have happened to Penny Kelly`s life after doing it (opening up the Kundalini) – Well, “something” about Kellys story, was felt as NOT “meant to be made at all.”
    But “Robes” have changed my concept about the world in a thought-provoking way about FREQUENCIES.

    As it is told by many: “The importance to make own decisions. The own INNER expression for each of us.”
    The Value Fullfillment, as Seth putting it.

  6. Frank,
    I perceive ‘TGU’ (under whatever name) through you and through my own ‘guidance’ beginning to speak to us as co-workers … with concomitant expectations.

    “ … to create a new society, you go about it not by organizing and politicking and warring and propagandizing and all the other activities that make so much noise in the world, but by changing how you experience the world.”

    Nathanial’s (perhaps shifting) use of the pronoun ‘you’ here is worth some consideration and thought. But the obvious overarching theme: the work that each of us (here in this forum and in everyday life) does to grow and change inside IS how this shift in consciousness is happening.

    What a wild ride … thanks for your work in ‘pioneering’ this path! 🙂
    Jim

    1. Jim, thanks for showing that next step in your thinking. I was sensing it but hadn’t articulated it–we are the shift. That turns on a lot of lights.
      Jane

    2. Probably worth actively remembering — TGU & co. certainly never forget it — that we’ll all part of the one whole, so differences in the meaning of You are mostly nuances, and not very stable ones.

  7. Frank, thank you again for providing this thought provoking forum with Nathaniel.

    I have some questions regarding the “vast impersonal forces” :

    How are the vast impersonal forces related to the concept of creating our own reality? Are the vast impersonal forces the building blocks of consciousness that we use to create our physical world? Does the ebb and flow of the vast impersonal forces that we experience resonate with the constraints provided by our compositions (our strands) and their ongoing interplay and prominence at a given time?

    Thank you,
    Karla

    1. I think of them as the energy that flows through us, the animating force. As to the rest of your question, I haven’t thought in those terms. I don’t think they apply, but meditate on it, ponder it, and let us know what comes to you.

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