Nathaniel on sin and on prayer

Nathaniel on sin and on prayer

6:45 a.m. Yesterday’s was pretty satisfactory and seemed clearly an introduction . Do proceed.

We were pleased, ourselves. Perhaps you begin to see where this is going. As you get a clearer idea – now, and any time – hold it in suspension for as long as you can. Delay crystallization until it cannot be delayed further. Thus you will avoid many errors born of premature clarity.

Stay fluid.

Keep your understandings fluid, yes. Calcification of ideas reduces your ability to discard this, add that, modify the other, and the net effect is to freeze any progress at all, because the overthrow necessary is too great.

I believe you mean, it’s easier to tinker moment by moment than to undertake a major overhaul.

That, but also it is a perceptual strategy. You don’t want to wind up having to discard evidence merely because it seems (or is) inconsistent with the structure you have become accustomed to. You, Frank, have been pretty good about this, and you see the result is that your inconsistent conceptualizations have over time contributed toward a new understanding that you could not have come to without the intervening scaffolding of inadequate concepts that could be discarded after they had advanced you to a place from which new views could be entertained and absorbed. No one ever comes to “the absolute and un-improvable truth”; no one is big enough. Instead, one may come to the largest truth one can encompass at that moment. With diligence and good fortune, one’s scope may expand and more truth be available for assimilation, but no one ever knows everything.

And Rita said, that’s just as well, since we’ll never reach a dead-end path and be bored.

To put it that way is to assume that such a goal is more universal than perhaps it is, but, within those terms, true.

Now, to continue using the error of lust as an example of the situation you find yourselves in as local representatives of your Sam.

That opened vistas!

Yes. Don’t pursue them yet, you will only delay your understanding. Guesswork is close in feel to intuition, but is very different.

More like snatching than receiving.

Closer to using logic to assist fantasy than opening to new input, yes. The sentence you said and the one we just said are the same truth, differently stated.

It can be difficult not to pursue an exciting thought, lest we lose it. But I can see that, in the context of discourse designed to give it to us, we are unlikely to lose sight of it.

Also, remember, words as sparks. The inspiration will not be lost.

So, you are the 3D component of a larger total being. Or really, it would be better to say, you are an All-D being, part of whose consciousness focuses in 3D. That being is entirely part of its Sam, its larger creator being. As a created part of a creator being, it too is a creator, and creates creator beings, though the “creator” aspect of what it creates is not always apparent to it. All your children are alive, not only the human children.

We shall not pursue that thought at this moment, but we need first to remind you of your true position in the universe. You are not orphans, you are not victims or creations-only. you are creations that are creators as well, and your connection to your creator and to your own creations cannot be broken. In past sessions you have been told, at great length and in many repeated applications, that you are connected to everyone and everything else in 3D. It is as well now to remind you that such unbroken connection extends vertically as well, so to speak.

Is this what Jesus meant in telling people to regard God as “our father” rather than as the different breed, different kind of being, that the Roman gods, say, were seen as?

It was a part of his revolution, yes. And if you will read the “our father” prayer as a compressed statement of the way the world really is, rather than how his contemporary world saw it, you will learn something.

I see. Let’s defer pursuing the main track long enough to look at this.

Why not? You have it memorized; the passage of decades will not have erased it. Look at it now with new eyes. State it.

Our father, –. You know, I’m inclined to put it into modern English, instead of the way we learned it.

Do both, it will serve. Give it first as you were taught it.

Our father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on Earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen.

I lost confidence after “Give us this day our daily bread” – it seemed like I was forgetting something that came before the next part, but fortunately I still have my childhood Catechism that my mother saved for me all those years, and I found that my memory was correct, and there was no phrase I was thinking I was leaving out.

Now restate it as you understand it today, in today’s words.

Our father, who lives beyond the 3D world we inhabit, may your existence be remembered and revered. May your kingdom come and your will be done here in the way it is beyond the 3D. We rely on you for our daily existence, and ask you to help us move from judgment to easy acceptance.

The last sentence, I can’t translate.

Is it not instructive that you find that you don’t actually know how to translate that line to fit your current understanding?

It is. And of course I recognize that sin is precisely your subject matter.

Now allow us.

We have no quarrel with your interpretation of the first sentence, nor the second. The third is perhaps arguable, but your paraphrase will serve. So let us look at that troublesome final sentence.

“Lead us not into temptation.” You are inclined to see that as meaning, “Don’t give us more than we can handle.” “But deliver us from evil” – and this one leaves you more at sea than you expected to be.

The Protestants add, “For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever,” but I don’t know what that is in aid of unless just to underline that God is another order of being entirely.

Better we proceed from your understanding. Someone born into a Protestant tradition will be better able to comment on it. In general, it is a good strategy to stick with what is closest.

So, that troublesome fourth sentence. What does it mean? Is “evil” only a primitive concept? Is “temptation”? Hardly. No one who lived in the 20th or 21st centuries need doubt the existence of evil. It may be defined away, but that is mere sleight of hand. Evil exists and you know it does. Temptation to participate in it if only passively does, and you know that too. but how does this square with moving beyond the situation set up by choosing to perceive the world as good and evil?

In other words, what is the reality behind good and evil?

That’s right. The fact that they are not only what they seem does not mean they do not exist. It means that they do not exist in separation. Good and evil exist in eternal co-dependence, one might almost say. In a larger view they are not enemies but parts of a polarity.

However – this does not affect your lives as humans! As humans, you experience evil as evil, not as a denatured half of an abstract polarity. You see a child killed, an animal tortured, you see people suffer because others are allowing evil to flow through them, and you know that this is not theoretical, not abstract, not immaterial. It is true that the 3D is only somewhat real, but that is the same as saying that it is somewhat real.

Jesus was not teaching a philosophy course. He was providing people a way to change their lives. That fourth sentence had power. Let us paraphrase the lord’s prayer for effect:

One. We recognize that we are not orphans in the world, and that we were created by a being worth our reverence.

Two. We long for the day when in 3D we will live in the same order that prevails beyond it.

Three. Provide for us day by day, and recognize our limitations and help us do so for others.

Four. Help us choose wisely, and put your thumb on the scales when need be to stop us from making irretrievable errors.

I presume there was a strategy involved in deliberately saying “Put your thumb on the scales.”

It is – was – always is – important to keep it honest. There is a temptation, or let us say, rather, a tendency, to assent to these things abstractly but compartmentalize them so that they do not enter into one’s everyday mental life. The thumb on the scales was chosen deliberately as the opposite of high-flying, to give a little jolt, to keep the reader honest in the sense of reminding him or her that we are talking about real things here, not just abstract ideas.

Now, we are well over your hour, so we may resume later, either tomorrow or, if you should choose to take a day off, later.

Very interesting as always. Thank you.