Nathaniel — Reality, not comfort
Sunday, January 21, 2018
6 a.m. I just glanced back at my typed-up transcripts, thinking to hold together the shape you’re constructing, but I find I can’t do it. I have to yield control because I cannot create the structure myself. As usual, I’m working on faith, having nothing else – well, your track record is pretty good, but other than that, nothing to rely on. So –
It will always be a temptation to assume ownership of ideas, particularly in a structure of ideas requiring a prolonged succession of sessions.
I wish you wouldn’t do that, things like “succession of sessions.” But I find myself unable to come up with a substitute word to break the repetition.
Leave it. Let it come out as it will, and blame it on us. To some degree – it will vary by individual – stylistics will be so tightly connected to the source of the material as to become an obstacle if you attempt to shape form without shaping content. Remember, we are coming through your mind, using what is to hand. That is not the same thing, though, as your choosing from your inventory of words except when the meaning is well understood and fluent. [I think they mean, when it comes fluently.] You understand? If we speak in clichés or in a manner stylistically offensive to you, let it go as ours rather than yours. If you bring in the sense of it, that’s all anybody will care about. Stylistic stumbles, grammatical mistakes – or, let’s call them infelicities, as sometimes it is more a matter of choice than of ignorance – all that won’t matter and won’t bring down the level of discourse, any more than fine words and wording would raise it. And that’s enough about process for the moment. Not that it is not worthwhile to clarify these points as they arise, but they mustn’t overbalance the load.
And somehow we have consumed 15 minutes in writing less than two pages. But anyway –
We were intending to remind you to sink into yourself – or, it could be phrased as, “allow your non-3D component to come more to the directing level of your mind, as opposed to the 3D level that necessarily concerns itself with different matters.”
[Doing so.] Yes. All right, and as always it is remarkable, the difference.
Slower is better, at least for those whose 3D apprehension is quick. Now we may proceed.
[A pause.] But I sit here not knowing where you intend to go. Nothing arises.
Then do what you often do: Ask the question.
Oh, the pump-priming question. Very well, what would I ask if I had enough sense to know what to ask?
And off we go. (We’re smiling.)
The point of the current series is to remind you all to relate everyday life – which in the case of those inclined to read this will include metaphysical speculation – with the subject matter you are drawn to. It is useless – or, no, it was a way-station, but it is not a viable way forward – to substitute for religions you could no longer believe in, some bloodless abstraction that made nice pictures but did not actually make sense of your everyday lives, nor the life you see around you. What kind of metaphysics is it that does not take into account everything that religions took account of, and explain better their place in the scheme of things?
Talk of the Earth-school is well and good as a way of reorienting a mind seeking an alternative to nihilism and also to a decayed superstitious religion – but if you were to remain there by choice, for comfort, it would amount to an alternative fairy-tale with no more reality than the things it supplanted.
Talk of NDEs and OBEs as if you were individuals is well and good in so far as it leads outward from a more enclosed sense of who and what you are, but it is only a simplified explanation, and cannot be or become more than that until so many terms have been redefined. One you realize, for example, that individuals are also communities; that “as above, so below” implies structures at levels very different from the accustomed human level; that the various hollow heavens created by the mind belong to a scheme of things itself invented by minds at only a certain level – all those things and many more must be reconceptualized if they are to make sense in a larger whole, and sometimes the process of letting go is going to be painful. Sometimes it is going to make you suspect you are losing ground, reverting. Sometimes it will tempt you to throw up your hands at an impossible task.
How can you hope to understand, if for whatever reason you refuse to accept evidence you know exists? Evil may not be absolute; separation, ego, the seven sins, may not be absolute, but they exist, and you will take them into account or you will fail to understand or even to face the facts.
You will recall, we pointed out that you are not fundamentally rational, reasonable beings, but are driven by emotion, mood, “external” conditions, even while thinking yourselves unchanging and balanced. If you cannot take into your metaphysics even this basic fact of your lives, how far can you go? It is time to balance the scales again: 3D reality is not entirely real, but neither is it entirely not real. That is, you can’t explain anything away, and it is a waste of time trying.
We know our audience. We are trying to help you wake up, and your own non-3D component is bringing you to us in a state of acquiescence or at least receptivity for the same reason. It would be a waste of time for the committed born-again Christian, or the devout and certain of any religion, to explore these pages: They will find the inspiration they need in other things, and they have as good a chance as anybody else of responding, and as good a chance of refusing to respond because it requires that they adjust their comfortable belief.
If you cannot believe a given thing because you associate it in your mind with a religion or a way of life you reject, realize this: You are choosing superstition over truth.
“What?” you say. But that is what it amounts to. All the truth that you can handle, at any one time, is more than enough to cope with. To decide not to deal with this or that because it isn’t comfortable is to say, “I prefer comfort to truth,” which is also to say, “I prefer sleep to awareness.” It’s your life, you may choose what you will. Only, don’t confuse truth with sleep. Don’t refuse to know what you are doing in preferring not to tiptoe through delicate areas that make you uncomfortable.
And, while we’re hectoring you, let us remind you, this effort is not made for the sake of amusing you, but of helping you struggle or glide to a new level of awareness which will have its own challenges.
Whew! Got that off the chests you don’t have?
It was worthwhile as a reminder, because this entire series is meant to challenge. Should a third-grader be given the same easy lessons as a kindergartener?
Speaking of the Earth-school –
We never said the analogy was wrong, only that it is very easily carried much too far.
Okay. You know I have often wished I was versed in theology for just this reason – all the while carefully making no move to acquire any such expertise.
For the audience you choose to address, any such credential would be a handicap, not an advantage.
But what of just studying the subject? [i.e., without seeking a degree or any such credential.]
We hardly know what to say in response. We might say, “What else have you been doing,” but that is only somewhat right. We might say, “Immersing yourself in somebody else’s thought always carries the potential to be carried away by it, losing or diluting your own particular contribution.”
Which goes for those reading your contributions here, as well.
Of course. The point is that neither you nor they should rely upon “authority” (nor are you nor they likely to do so), so the ultimate authority for you and for them is, as we have always said, your own resonance with what is said. What better judge can there be but your own recognition? But here we come to a productive distinction. We might have said, “than your own soul.” Why did we not?
I get it vaguely, but not closely enough to spell it out. Some difference in soul and spirit.
Yes. Your soul is your structure, call it. Your spirit – an integral part of the spirit, remember – is your share of the vast impersonal forces blowing through your life. You, as a 3D and non-3D compound being, are an intermediary point, a conjunction (not to say intersection!) of structure and animator.
If your soul were capable of reacting alone, the reaction would be relatively personal. If your animating spirit were capable of reacting alone, it would be so impersonal as to hardly connect at all. The process of your resonance is in effect the joint operation of spirt and soul working in harmony. Non-recognition, non-resonance, indicates a separation of some kind between the two. Not separation in the sense of two things each going its separate way, but separation as in each one being on a different page, so to speak; each one being in a different mood.
And sin is that which leads us to miss the mark by creating or widening the breach between spirit and soul.
That’s it more or less. And that’s a starting place for your next hour, which may relieve your internal anxieties.
Very funny. Okay, till next time. Thanks.