Month: February 2018

Saturday February 3, 2018

6:30 p.m. How about a second session? We’ve covered pride, lust, envy, gluttony. That leaves covetousness, anger, ennui. You up for finishing the list?

Well, let’s see how it goes. About covetousness, perhaps you can easily see its close kinship to envy. Where envy tempts you to think you don’t have the right place in the world, covetousness tempts you to think you don’t have the right goods, or the right amount of certain goods, or the right amount of goods in general. The one is about place, which easily shades into the things that are the perquisites of place, and the other is about owning things, which equally easily shades into the position or situation that would make owning such things natural.

Without entering into questions of social justice or injustice, we remind you that sins are not really about actions, but about their effect on your choices. Again, the 3D world by itself is not quite real. Its experiences are transitory, first-tier experiences, important primarily for the second-tier effects they suggest, which, as Viktor Frankl reminds you, depend upon your reactions. So, in the context of you as compound beings responding in the 3D crucible to the interaction of vast impersonal forces with pre-existing structures, what is important is not what “happens to you” but what you decide to be, or remain being, or become, in the face of ongoing stimuli, which will often seem to be “external.”

And it we choose to covet something, we not only convince ourselves that the world is disconnected, but we fixate on an external as if it were internal. Loosely expressed, but close enough.

That’s correct. Is that culpable? No. It may be very understandable, in fact. But the point is, it is never helpful. How could an error be helpful?

Okay. How about anger?

Anger similarly tempts you to see the world as disconnected and out of balance. In this case, its close connection to pride is not necessarily apparent, but a moment’s thought will bring you there.

Pride says, I deserve better than this.

That’s one reaction. Another is frustration at one’s inability to find a way to whatever is desired. At the root of anger is going to be fear of consequences of continuing to exist in whatever stream of events is unfolding.

Could you clarify that, a bit?

The Dalai Lama, as you know, struggled with anger throughout a long life of watching and hearing about what the Chinese were doing to his people. He was of course kept fully informed about first-tier events. He was aware of the suffering – the unnecessary suffering, had other minds been differently formed – and this bore upon him.

He knew what we are telling you. He knew it, believed it, lived it – and still it was only natural that he would have to struggle not to give in to anger. It is not sufficient to know, abstractly, intellectually, that anger is a snare. One must overcome it by an act of will, while remaining aware of the causes of legitimate anger (which is not the same thing as the sin of anger).

Explain that parenthetical comment?

Again, it is the admixture of the wrong kind of pride that turns a legitimate reaction against you. Legitimate anger is, for instance, anger on another’s behalf. Mix that reaction with self-righteousness, though, or one’s own imperious will, and it tempts you to the kind of judgment that is condemnation rather than – or even in addition to – discernment. It leads you to assume that you know better than the universe does.

But when we see unmerited suffering being caused, is that knowing better than the universe?

Think of the Japanese expression Sayonara, which, yes, means goodbye colloquially, but literally means, “If it must be.” It is a greater part of wisdom to know when something must be. As an example, tell of the monk who reported to the Dalai Lama after years of confinement and torture.

Yes, I was thinking of that. When he was asked if he was ever afraid, he said, yes once he was, because he was afraid he was on the verse of hating his torturers.

That is a way to deal with “what must be.” He wasn’t condoning what they were doing to him. He wasn’t forcing himself to see it as somehow right. He wasn’t even allowing himself anger as a weapon of resistance. In his extremity he clung to the knowledge that the real enemy is the force that can compel you to renounce your greater understanding, can compel you to decide (second-tier reaction) to be otherwise than you would have been. He was wise and stalwart, and thereby turned the situation to ultimate advantage. He did not allow himself to turn to anger.

What about ennui, then? This one seems to be less under our control than the others.

No, it seems to you to be less under your control than the others, because when you fall into the other errors you remain somewhat aware that you are doing so, while your struggles with ennui seem to you to be struggles against who you are. You see no element of personal choice.

I don’t think that’s quite true, at least not in recent years. I’ve learned better.

True enough, in your latter years you have recognized that it is possible to imitate your models in this – Lincoln, Churchill – in actively refusing to concede that life is hopeless. It is in turning life into an act of faith that one remembers that there are reasons for that faith, that it isn’t just hoping against hope, or whistling in the dark. But if one does not struggle against these feelings, one may by – what shall we call it? Moral inertia, perhaps – strengthen the very forces sapping your will to live.

Ennui is yet another example of the dangerous effects produced when the wrong kind of pride mixes with qualities that might otherwise be innocuous or positive. Resignation, non-attachment, willingness to accept whatever comes – these are all non-problems. They are often enough valuable methods of riding the rapids of life. But add the wrong kind of pride and they become a sort of defiance of the universe, a sort of saying, “I’ll take my ball and go home.”

“If I can’t have life my own way, I’ll sulk”?

More or less. But who gets life their own way, while defining “their own way” from a 3D perspective? If you want everything to be peachy-keen every moment – well, you’re going to be disappointed. Life is not like that, and it’s a damn good thing for you that it isn’t, or how would you ever contend against yourselves? How would you ever address the things you were created in 3D to address?

Charlie Brown told Lucy that in life we have our ups and downs, and she said she didn’t want downs, just ups and ups and ups.

Yes, and she’s portrayed as so happy.

Good sarcasm.

So now we’ve taken a look at the seven broad roadways leading downward, not from a pietistic or moralistic perspective, but strictly to show you why they are errors of perception and conduct that can never leave you happier or more fulfilled. So this is a good time to end this session and resume perhaps after you give yourself a day off.

Good timing in another way, too, as we are finishing the last page of this 110th journal book since September 6, 1966.

Perhaps you can see that your non-3D self had a better idea of your life than you.

Yes. Thanks as always.

Saturday, February 3, 2018

4:40 a.m. Shall we proceed? Gluttony, presumably? At least, that’s next on the list if one uses my handy LEG CAPS acronym.

We can give a few words to gluttony, if you wish. First, remember that each of the seven major avenues of error turn toxic only when mingled with a distorted form of pride; when, one might say, one’s self-image is out of drawing in a certain way. In other words, it is the admixture of a mistaken sense of who one is that takes certain qualities and turns them against one’s best interest.

Gluttony is not about over-eating, though at first glance it will seem so. If it were about over-eating, anorexia would be one of the counter-balancing virtues.

I know that’s a joke, or irony anyway. I merely note it lest someone reading this miss the fact.

Never wrong to be careful. Some, though, will think themselves underestimated. No harm done. Our point: Remember that we are not talking about first-level consequences, but second-level. Not physical results per se, but what the physical experiences leave as residue in who one is, what changes they make in you by the decisions you make about them.

Yes, I get that. It was a valuable distinction you made, a while ago.

You might as well express the joke that is running through your mind; we may be able to turn it to advantage.

Which is to say, you may be planting the remembrance in the first place! Well, General Winfield Hancock was a slim, athletic man until gravely wounded in the battle of Gettysburg. After that, his mobility was much reduced, and he began putting on weight, until after a while he was pretty immense. Someone writing to someone after meeting him said, whimsically, “If, as has been said, all flesh is grass, the general may be compared to a load of hay.” I think it is a funny comment, but I look forward to seeing how you intend to use it.

Isn’t it obvious? Over-eating is a failure of prudence and temperance, perhaps, but it by itself could scarcely be said to be a failure of moral character; it could scarcely lead one into the shoal waters we mentioned by analogy earlier. But if gluttony is not simply over-eating, what is it?

I’m getting, it’s a concentration on the wrong things.

Not quite, but you’re on the right track.

It’s a wrong kind of pleasure? The thought comes to me of the Romans with their feasts complete with vomitoriums where the guests could (and did) deliberately throw up what they had eaten, so they could return to eat all over again.

That’s closer yet. You sense there’s something wrong with that, something unhealthy. Pursue it.

Well, it can’t be as simple as misuse of pleasures of the senses. At least, I don’t think so. I mean, that begs the question of the word “misuse.” We can feel that it’s wrong – that it is repulsive, in fact – but putting a reason for it being wrong isn’t quite so easy.

Concentration on the wrong thing? Or, let’s say, concentration on a thing in the wrong way?

I get, it’s making an idol out of a sensual pleasure. Is that what you have in mind?

Notice what we’re doing, here. We are helping you clarify your understanding by holding the space, as you say. If we – if you – hold your attention on a subject long enough, without trying to force a conclusion or chop logic (which is another way to say the same thing), clarity will gradually emerge. It is mostly a matter of concentration combined with non-attachment to any given conclusion.

Okay.

That’s all guidance is, you see.

If you say so.

So, proceed.

Well, I can see that the idea of making idols of sensory pleasures might be the difference between sex and lust, or between appetite and gluttony, or between –. Hmm, actually, only those two. The others – pride, envy, covetousness, anger, ennui – are not particularly connected to sensual pleasures.

No, they are a distorted sense of self and self’s place in the scheme of things, as we shall see. But, you are correct, lust and gluttony are similar in that they channel through the senses and seem as though they could not manifest in the absence of 3D life. In reality, they could, and can, and do, but the manifestation is different. But that may be said of any 3D phenomenon as it manifests outside the crucible.

So, again, gluttony is associated with pride. How?

Well –. I sort of almost feel it, but not quite. It’s like part of me knows the answer and part doesn’t.

It would be closer to say, part of you knows how to look at things a certain way, and another doesn’t.

And the way to resolve it, presumably, is to settle in and intend for the understanding to surface.

Do so.

[Pause]

I tried to feel what it would be like to be one of those Romans, and all I got was a sense of swinish insensibility. No doubt they were very fashionable, and what they were eating was very elegantly prepared, but there was a swinishness about the misuse of a legitimate pleasure to encourage a – something. But I don’t quite have the “something.”

Stay with it. Retain the sense of the Romans but without judgment. Judgment [in the sense of condemnation] can never be correct, and only misleads.

Ah, I get it. You want me to find why it was harmful, and condemning them for indulging in it would only throw me off the track.

It would, in effect, say – as judgment always says – “This is about them, not me.” How could that produce illumination?

All right. I’ll go at it again.

[Pause]

Can it be as simple as, it concentrates the mind on the 3D as if that’s all there is? Lust would do that too.

Well, you tell us. Can it be that simple?

Maybe so. I can see gluttony and lust as leading toward a blindness to the world beyond the 3D, although what that has to do with pride, I don’t see.

Well, try to imagine either lust or gluttony coexisting with an active sense of humility. That is, try to imagine these two moods (for that is one way they might be seen) both being active at the same time.

I guess they couldn’t very well.

Humility is remembering one’s limitations, one’s true place in the world. It doesn’t mean thinking yourself a worm, it means remembering you are not a god. Lust or gluttony is devoting yourself – at least, for whatever time one or the other is dominant in your mood – to one object and necessarily forgetting at least for that time any competing or complementary or conflicting priorities. Can you imagine being drawn by gluttony and at the same moment remembering that you are more than your physical body? Is it likely that you could be consumed by lust and at the same moment be aware that your 3D life is other than it appears?

You see? These are not acts or attitudes to be punished; they are acts or attitudes that are their own punishment; they contain their own drawbacks. Again, not wrong because forbidden; not forbidden at all. But, worse than useless. Misleading. Harmful.

Anger, pride, may leave you beside yourself, forgetting who and what you are. Covetousness and envy may lead you to be unable to remember the balance in the world. Ennui may leave you unable to summon the will to be. And lust and gluttony may misdirect desire.

Can you clarify just a bit more how pride is involved with lust or gluttony?

Both depend upon a misperception – temporary or relatively persistent – of self as being centered in or wholly confined to 3D. Both put one’s 3D-mind’s idea of desire and satisfaction in center place. Both make it harder to for you enjoy 3D without losing yourself in it.

Lust without that distorted sense of self is sexual appetite. Gluttony without it is the appetite of taste, the love of food and drink. As we keep saying, sin is the turning of legitimate pleasures into pitfalls.

And there is your hour.

Thanks as always. Till next time.

 

Friday, February 2, 2018

4 a.m. Shall we deal with Dirk’s question? I asked him to phrase it as though to you.

[Dirk Dunning: In speaking about lust and other vices, you attempted to describe them as the intersection between vast impersonal forces. Frank interpreted that and attempted to analogize this to weather. You said “No, that doesn’t get the idea. More like sonic booms – the effect of interaction of forces pushing through the atmosphere.”

[By this do I understand you to mean that they result from the interaction or boundary between forces? Are they then phenomena that represent the tension, stress and boundary between these forces? As such, are they then what might be called “emergent” phenomena? Or said in more plain language, are they the result of the interaction between these forces – without independent form of their own?]

The short answer would be, yes, that is what we are trying to get across. Sins are not structures in themselves, but the result – and cause – of interactions of forces. They may be regarded as side-effects (viewed as results) and as precipitators (viewed as causes).

Hmm. Is that what the church means by Original Sin? A warping causing further warping?

Without speaking for the church, we could say, that is a productive way to see it. Only, the creation stories of Genesis are intended for people whose customary framework assumes 3D conditions, so of course the fables, the myths, in which these truths are expressed are going to be distorted by 3D logic attempting to interpret non-3D phenomena, just like people’s accounts of afterdeath phenomena, and for the same reason.

Thus, you don’t need to postulate a snake in the garden making a subversive and disastrous suggestion to the first woman. Even when you translate these story elements into their psychic equivalents, it is still being told as understood by minds interpreting it as if it were a 3D story. This can hardly be avoided, but needs to be held in mind. To take those stories as codifications of important psychological truths is important, but not sufficient if you are able to carry things further. If you once remember that any story is a sequential account of simultaneously occurring events in a different environment, you save yourself confusion.

That said, don’t throw out the baby. Those stories mean something. They have importance. The fact that they may need to be decoded not once but on multiple levels does not mean they are useless; still less, that they are invented. In fact it is a sign that they are potentially important and are valuable clues. It would be well to suspect that where there are elaborately constructed and preserved clues, there may be something the clues are pointing toward! The world’s spiritual libraries were not compiled around trivia, still less around nothing.

But, to turn again. Yes, sin may be regarded as a phenomenon that occurs at the intersection of forces, the boundary – a continually fluctuating boundary – between different energies, each with its own dynamic. This is not the only way to see the phenomenon, and to see it only in this way would lose important aspects of it, but it is one way, and does shed light on what is going on. You may choose to regard it as the mechanistic aspect, as opposed to the will-driven aspect, of the situation.

What I think you just said is that we can take a systems approach to understanding life, and in so doing see it as the interaction of forces affecting our lifes, downplaying our personal interactions, or we can take a psychological approach and see it as our making choices that affect it. (And of course I recognize that in the writing of this paragraph I received additional clarity, so that I knew more by its end than I brought to its beginning.)

To respond to your parenthetical, this is how human thought nearly always works, except in the deliberate logical step-by-step construction that occasionally happens. When you “feel your way” through a problem, your non-3D component is being allowed to feed you ideas as you go, instead of your blocking it out by your own 3D-oriented thinking.

As to the content, yes, that is what we are saying. There is one reality (as we continually remind you), but it looks different from different angles, and is well worth constant reexamination.

So where do we go from here?

If you once see sin and error – and other error, we should say – as systems phenomena rather than as moral failings for which you should feel guilt, things change.

”One of those things. The kind of thing that happens in 3D.”

Yes. It relieves you from unbearable pressure, you see.

I do, but perhaps not everybody will see it automatically. It’s what I came to realize about classic Catholic guilt, it is the continual knowledge of failure to live up to a standard that, being an ideal, can’t be lived up to. It is a playing against a stacked deck, a variant on the joke about the three rules of life: (1) You can’t win, (2) You can’t break even, (3) You can’t even quit the game.

And of course at some point human flesh is going to rebel. No one can thrive under so unremitting a load of guilt. Either people throw away the code itself, which means throwing away the valuable guidelines that make sense of life, or they redefine themselves as evil – with terrible consequences – or they give up in one way or another, ending in despair.

But the answer is not to refuse to see, nor to say that everything that has been seen over the ages is wrong, nor to say, “It does not apply to me.” The answer is to see farther, and that is what we are attempting to help you to do, primarily by holding two contexts in your minds at the same time, to help you re-knit your world.

By two contexts, I get, metaphysics as we commonly see it today, and traditional religious thought, which never have anything to say to one another.

You can see the benefits of the procedure. It assists you to see your blind spots, your hot buttons, your dead-end thinking, your accustomed ways of not-seeing. We do that simply by describing things out of their ordinary contexts, but without distorting them. A systems context is no less accurate than a psychological one, and associating the two will bring clarity that can never be attained by examining either context alone. It is in discomfort that additional clarity is to be found.

Through discomfort, I take it.

Well, through it but also in it. The presence of discomfort is a useful alarm clock that wakens you from sleepwalking though the explorations.

Interesting. But you don’t mean shock for shock’s sake.

No, but when resistance or sleep is ingrained enough, that might be appropriate. Unnecessary and undesirable in a self-selected audience.

So, to reiterate. Two sets of forces, one that we have been deliberately describing in identical terms: vast impersonal forces sweeping through your lives, and what we have been looking at as structures, because they have a structural aspect, the forces of All-D beings manifesting in the 3D crucible. The interaction of these two sets of forces produces vortices.

Psychological warping?

Sometimes. But also creativity in all its aspects. Life, really. Your 3D life, we remind you, is driven not by thought or logic, still less by the pre-determination of circumstance, but by passion. When passion has constructive outlet, it manifests quite differently from when it does not. But of course “constructive” is a judgment requiring definition – but then, that is what metaphysics is, what religion does.

What? Provide definitions for what is constructive and what is not?

Can you tell us what else they do, or could do?

So we’re back to scriptures as guidance.

In a free-will universe, a crucible constructed specifically to provide an arena in which to exercise your will to create what you wish to become, what would be more important than to provide some guidance along the way?

And there’s your hour.

Well, it’s all very interesting. This one I’ll have to re-read a couple of times, I suspect. Thanks as always.

 

Thursday, February 1, 2018

5:30 a.m. All right, gentlemen. Do we begin on envy (or another of the seven sins or errors or missings of the mark), or do you have other fish to fry?

We can discuss envy, if you wish.

Doesn’t matter to me. I had the idea you were going to go down the line using my LEG CAPS acronym.

You see that at least one of your friends has misconstrued the message.

I suppose that can’t be helped, can it? If I like the plaudits I should be prepared for the brickbats.

Or maybe it isn’t about you at all, but about the message.

Well, yes, I guess I do know that, only isn’t it more how the message and messenger are interconnected, inevitably?

That’s what we are saying. It isn’t about you, but about the interconnection. The message, in the largest sense, is always the same. Reality doesn’t change, in that sense. But it [the message] is always incomplete, because reality is always bigger than any given expression of it, so the aspect given by any one messenger is going to differ, slightly or significantly, messenger by messenger.

Hence, subject to distortion?

It will look that way to some. To others, it will look like a uniquely opportune rephrasing, opening windows. Your own opinion of it could change from one moment to the next, and although that would matter to you, it wouldn’t matter to the message. In other words, you can’t judge an incomplete message, and it will always be incomplete, always, as you put it, an interim report. But what you can do, as we repeatedly have emphasized, is weigh it moment by moment: Does this resonate, does that resonate? Does what did resonate before resonate with me now? Does what didn’t resonate before now seem truer than I had thought it?

Not writing scriptures, I know.

How one deals with scriptures is not any different, in practice. All you ever know, all that ever affects you or offers the possibility of constructive change, is your personal interaction at that moment. What this means is, a conjoining of the stimulus of the present moment with what you are at that moment, in other words, what you have made of yourself to that point. We bid you remember, that means more than 3D elements only; it means how the interactions of cohabiting one personality have affected all the various strands that comprise it.

Now, I’m sure you’ve never said that before!

Haven’t we? But surely the implications are there in the material.

Sometimes it requires a 2×4 to the back of the head, maybe. I’ll speak only for myself (obviously), but I never thought of our moment-by-moment interactions as affecting all our strands, equally moment by moment.

Now that you point it out, we can see that the temptation would be to consider your present life as a unit and each “past life,” each strand, as a unit, and perhaps assume that when you were completed, each of the strands updates their files, so to speak. But in other contexts you saw clearly enough the connection between any decision and the strands, and of course any decision is going to be a matter of that present moment.

Well, actually, there are two ways of seeing it. One, every time you decide, things change all up and down the line. Two, the only change that really registers is what you finally become as a result of a lifetime of decisions. Here’s the difficult part: Bothe ways of seeing it are true, impossible as that may be to fit into 3D-oriented logic.

I can sort of feel it; I can’t say I can reconcile it.

It is like people returning from death, trying to make sense of things that happened outside 3D constraints by fitting them into those constraints. A certain amount of distortion is unavoidable. It is sufficient that you accept the input and let it find its own place; you don’t need to give intellectual assent to it, nor reject it. Truth will resonate regardless whether you understand it.

So let us proceed to the rest of the sins, remembering that we said that very form of harmful error would be found to be mingled with a distorted, harmful, form of pride.

Envy. What is that but a tacit assumption that you are in the wrong place or that your life is on the wrong track? And what is that idea but an unconscious assumption that there can be an external force that can push you, or anyone, out of place?

Yes, clear enough. “He has something I ought to have. It’s not fair.”

And, there is a common saying, true enough in its own context, “Life is unfair.” But it would be better phrased, “Life appears unfair as long as you don’t take into account all its aspects that are invisible to you.” You understand.

Sure. I went into that with what I was then calling the guys upstairs – you, for all I know – back in 1993, when Kelly Neff and I discovered those lives as Marcus and Katrina, two children killed in 1943 by Nazis. I asked why those lives, and was shown how the suffering then readjusted the balance for them, in a sense; how it burned away guilt and burned away isolation from people.

But not everybody came to that realization. To them life may still seem unfair, because they are looking only at the present moment.

I get, any present moment is always going to be unfair.

Is always going to appear unfair. If that present moment could somehow exist in isolation, that would be true enough: Some people are happy and some miserable. Some have opportunities or fulfillment and some do not. Some have the basic necessities of life and some do not.

And it isn’t that “things even out, over time.” To say that would be in effect to say, “It doesn’t matter, life will be unfair to everybody sooner or later.” Rather, life is never unfair. It always is adjusted exactly to every individual’s reality.

That last word seems to have made the sentence meaningless. Could we substitute another?

What we’re meaning to say is that life is always in balance. The visible 3D present moment always exists with the invisible reality of which it is a part. How could anything get disconnected? So injustice, tragedy, accident, again are somewhat real, but only somewhat. Look a little deeper and you see the eternal balance. Life doesn’t get out of order.

Okay. (Though you know some are going to have a hard time accepting that.)

Whether people can or cannot accept an argument or portrait or statement at any given time is not your concern. What cannot be assimilated now will perhaps be valued later. What you can do is set it out, as a vendor sets out the jewelry s/he has made at an open market. Those who are not drawn to the merchandise do not detract from [did they mean “interfere with”?] those who do, and nothing is lost.

Does this sum up envy?

We have said what needs to be said. It is the nature of sins to lead you astray; that is why they are singled out as perils. If you experience envy, it leads you to think that life is not treating you fairly; that things are not as they should be; that you know better than the universe. Is this helpful in any way?

Clearly not.

To strive for social justice is one thing. To strive to change things because one feels envy of others is something apparently the same, or similar, but in actuality very different. It is not necessary – in order to avoid expressing or feeling envy – to endorse whatever social order one finds oneself in. only, as always, be aware of your motivations.

And there is your hour, and next time we may move to another subject, circumstances not overruling.

Okay. Thanks as always.