TGU — Holding definitions

Saturday, June 2, 2018

3:10 a.m. So Netflix sends the first disk of a TV series set in England called “Afterlife.” I watched a couple of episodes, didn’t much like it. But interesting to see a drama about the problem real psychics have with the world. Being taken for obvious fakes; being haunted sometimes by perceptions – unwanted strong perceptions – often of very unpleasant things; being patronized by closed-mind people often unaware of how their rationalism is based in unconscious terror or a need for certainty.

I have a certain decent envy of such abilities, but, to each his blue-eyed own, as Pogo used to say. The reason for mentioning “Afterlife” is the things people do to each other in the grip of compulsions they usually don’t understand and at any rate don’t know how to break. At least, I think that’s why I’m mentioning it.

Sometimes the music can drive you mad. Sometimes its sheer volume and intensity and unremitting persistence will beat down resistance, and people do things they don’t even approve of, or don’t remember in other “moods” as they are called.

The world isn’t really divided between good guys and monsters. The difference between the best and the worst is very little, and has more to do with awareness (or lack of it) than with soundness or rottenness. But that is why it is so important, if you are to understand the world, to see the intricate and unbreakable connection between inner world and outer, between individual and environment, between one’s own sails and rigging and the weather.

We wish we could make it clearer why evil exists and people who do evil, and even intend evil, approve of evil exist, but “evil people” per se do not exist.

A lot of tangled definitions to be remembered, if we are to get and hold your meaning.

Too many, we sometimes think, but that is why educating you is a process rather than an event. Until you come to live these understandings, so that you do not have to make a conscious effort to see in a certain way, you can’t hold it all. However, we can itemize, from time to time, and unpredictably some of you will get it at any given moment.

• We speak, in this context, of evil. That doesn’t mean we accept it as an absolute. We are defining within your perceptions.
• We distinguish between the doing of evil and the being evil.
• You are, remember, communities practicing cohabitation in the process of becoming an entity larger than the comprising threads.
• We speak of background noise, or music, or weather, or vast impersonal forces, and implicit in citing them is the fact of their relationship to you as 3D / non-3D beings.

Half an hour, and hardly begun.

Never despair. Any ground gained is gained.

In the past, when I’d hit a blank patch. I’d often quit for the moment. I’ve learned to persist somewhat more.

You still quit when it affects your own emotional life or questions of health. It is for others that you have patience and persistence.

Still, any ground gained –

Oh, we aren’t criticizing, only noting. It is like your typing. At first the typing up of an hour’s session was a major drain on your energy if only because it seemed so much of a chore. Today it is scarcely noticed.

Yes, that’s the benefit of habit. It’s like the stairs in this house, that at first seemed a bit of an obstacle and now are – as you say – scarcely noticed.

Habit smooths anything. That is why it is important to have good ones and not bad ones. What is any acquired skill but a collection of physical and mental habits? Emotional ones too, for that matter.

People should find that fact very hopeful.

Well, you do, so yes, chances are they will as well.

To return to the main theme: the living among external forces.

Well, we ought to have added, in our list above, living as if internal and external were either separable or identical. This is one more reason why it is so difficult to speak truth to the unprepared; they can’t understand you for lack of preparation.

Or lack of fortunate constitution.

Yes, but that amounts to prior preparation.

We should explain. I meant, some people just come into this world knowing, which leaves them ready as soon as they hear the world, like the apostles who instantly gave up their old life as soon as Jesus and they recognized each other. And, as you said, they were ready because the threads that constituted them had done the preparation in other lives. It is a free gift from life, so to speak, not anything earned in this life.

That is a way to think of it, yes.

Now put it together, as best you can. Think your way into it; feel your way into it. You have to be in a certain frame of mind for this to be real and not merely words. If it is just words to you, you will have to wait until it comes alive. And there is little you can do to speed that day. Intend, perhaps. Persevere in intent. Live your ignorance without denying it. Travel hopefully, knowing that intent will be rewarded.

Is that what Jesus meant by “knock and it shall be opened to you”?

He didn’t promised that it would open in thirty seconds. What he was saying was, Righteous persistence wins reward.

My favorite line from the I Ching.

Gee, do you suppose that means something, that the line appealed and gave hope?

Very funny. It is interesting to me – looking over my own shoulder – how often I think in terms of Jesus’s words, even though I don’t sit and read them to keep them in mind.

You did the reading as you did the yearning and the intending. You know the saying you recently came across, “No seed ever sees the flower.” You are on the flowering end of your life, benefitting from the planting and tending of the seed so many decades ago.

That’s what it feels like. Sometimes I feel like, “Well, can’t be long now,” and other times like, “If we wrap it up now, it’ll be something of a waste, it took me so long to get here.” Either way, a hopeful journey, in retrospect. I might have lived it smoother if I had had consistent faith that it would all work out.

That may be said of – by – anybody. The point is to set your intent and live it, for what you intend will determine your possibilities.

We’re nearly out of time. Do we need to wrap up the morning’s theme, whatever it was?

This morning has been more about encouraging people to sit with what they have been given here and in their lives. If they will do that, connections will occur and will seat in. if they will not do that, all this will be the equivalent of a novel or an instruction book in how to write a screenplay: words, true words, but not transformation. And transformation is the name of the game. Not, taking one thing and turning it into something else, but assisting the seed in its process of dying to itself so that it may become the flowering.

Thanks for all this. Not merely any one session, nor even all the sessions taken together, but the reminder that we are not alone and life is not meaningless. All this, even more than the clues you have given us to make the world more understandable. It’s a great gift and we appreciate it.

You might look at it as a gift from yourselves to yourselves, or, equally, from ourselves to ourselves. Same statement. Okay, till next time.

That’s my line. Till next time.