Chasing Smallwood — .32. The physical and the non-physical

[A book with four interlocking themes:

  • how to communicate with the dead;
  • the life of a 19th-century American;
  • the massive task facing us today, and
  • the physical world’s place in the scheme of things.]

[7 a.m. Thursday, February 16, 2006]

(11 a.m.) All right. Typed that up and sent it out. Continue?

Your second questions was, do we communicate up here, and – to throw ‘em both in together – if what you do there affects what I can do here.

Sure we communicate! We do nothing but communicate. But it ain’t exactly like conveying information; more like communicating states of being. This won’t be all that easy for you to get, and maybe we’ll have to call in somebody else, but let’s try. What you learn today, what happens to you inside and outside, changes you, a little or a lot. In your bodies, you don’t notice these changes so much, or so quickly. So what you regard as communicating, we think of as smoke signals! That is, you ain’t communicating very much! You’re hinting.

Us, it’s different. If something changes me, it changes me all the way through, and anybody touching onto me knows it, and that changes them too. And the people they touch feel their change, and change in turn. You see how volatile it all is?

So what do you think? You think it makes any difference to the other side what you do, when everything you do or think or feel – or choose, in short – affects us and has to affect us and can’t help affecting us?

You see? Sometimes you think what happens in physical world isn’t important. That couldn’t be farther from the truth. Your choices continually affect us, as we affect you. Does this speak of our interest in your life? Does it speak to the feeling that you have that what you are – what you choose to become – somehow matters?

You see? What is this but the feeling that (on the one hand) God loves and cares for you and (on the other hand) you have a responsibility. It is true that religions put rules around it all, and it is true that every vision includes distortion, and so you get the vindictive God, the angry God, the judgmental God, the capricious and arbitrary God. This can’t be helped much, because it is human nature to conceive its God in the only model it knows: itself. “God is created in the image of man.”

It is a new day; it demands new images of God. Your present natures will not content themselves with older containers, for they do not fit you. What relationship do you have with an image of God molded from the monarchs of Assyria? Yet the underlying reality does not change. This is why version after version of an image of God appears: You need to have some recognizable model of reality, yet your perception of reality changes, and therefore reality appears to change, and the model must change. You will make better models if you study the older ones and try to see what the older model-makers were seeing, than to start continually from scratch. There can be an advantage sometimes to starting from scratch, but not continually.

(1 p.m. So – last question for the moment – what is your life there?

That is not the easiest question you have ever asked. If it could really be told, it would be told, of course. But translation errors overwhelm. Here is a thought experiment:

If your life and motivations and surroundings were exactly the same except that you knew and experienced at all times that all is connected, and if consequences were not delayed, and if you could range where you wanted to in time and space – but could not be fixed in one time-space and could not experience delayed consequences – what would your life be?

And if, at the same time you were in this condition of freedom-of-time-and-place and immediate consequences and total connection, one part of you was connected to just those opposing conditions –what would your life be?

That is our situation; and given that you are part of us, it is your situation as well. You identify with one end of the continuum, we with the other – for the moment. That is the biggest difference.

3:30. Well, friends, you heard my brother ask [in an email] what is the ultimate crisis, the root of so much that is wrong. (You also heard him suspect that you’re just teasing us, wanting to be begged for information. Did you hear me defending you? )

You know our methods, and expressed them very well. We approach a subject by circling around it, as the context in which something is seen determines how it looks. Another way to say that is, the context one sees from determines what can be seen. That is a major theme here, of course.

It is also true that we are attempting to monitor your energy usage. It would not do to make you an example of what can go wrong, when we’re busy making you an example of what can go easily and well. So this limits our sessions somewhat. Also, given that this is being distributed in email, and not everyone prints out their email, the shorter the session the greater chance that it will actually be read. We might even recommend sending them in pieces, as you used to send your black-box transcriptions.

We don’t want to say more at this time. You did get some exercise, and that is very good. Get some rest too. Perhaps after supper, depending on how you feel.

Okay.

 

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