TGU: Trusting life

Sunday, July 15, 2018

4 a.m. So, guys – wheezing? I started to ask, “clarity?” but got diverted, probably by you yourselves.

Well, we did want to put in a word about wheezing and your life. Though it is now only a mild annoyance, once in your life it was a major annoyance, a disruption, even a threat.

I well remember.

But you were not remembering, that’s the point. Well and good to make progress, but much better to remember what you progressed from, and to.

Okay.

You are pleased with, but didn’t take much notice of, your [healing] working with ___’s husband, adapting your spiel instinctively to his comfort zone.

___ noticed.

And he isn’t the only one, nor will he be. But what about you? Are you noticing?

Not taking it for granted, you mean?

Not noticing that you – and others – take it for granted.

I suppose this ties in to what I was thinking about when I got up, just now. I was feeling a certain amount of decent envy, as I often do, of what other people accomplish in their lives – in this case, Jim Lewis and Bob Holbrook, I think – and Jim pointed out how impressive he thought my work was. I said, more or less, “But to me it seems like such a narrow, limited area of achievement.” But he didn’t see it that way. I suppose anybody else’s life looks more successful, more fulfilling, than one’s own.

Don’t over-generalize that statement. That is your pattern; it doesn’t necessarily extend to others.

Still, that is my pattern. I look at my life as largely a waste of opportunities and abilities.

And how does it serve you to feed that particular robot?

You mean, I take it, that what I know about my life isn’t necessarily true.

It isn’t necessarily in perspective. For you to get here required many trade-offs, and you don’t have any idea what your life would have had to be, for you to be where you are in certain abilities and yet be other places in achievement.

Well, I’ll take some reframing, if you have it in the offing. I can’t seem to take it from anyone else who is available.

Then here it is. Your horoscope is a promise that you live in faith [i.e., live believing, on faith] will be fulfilled, can’t possibly not be fulfilled. So, as your life is not chance and coincidence, and as you trust it, trust all of it. That includes trusting your own past sins of omission and commission.

That’s a somewhat different concept – trusting our sins.

Look at your failures and successes, your vices and virtues, your inabilities and abilities, your evil deeds and thoughts and your good deeds and thoughts, fairly. That is, don’t weight the scales one way or the other. Don’t heavily emphasize the “good” (that is, the things you approve of) and discount the “bad” (what you disapprove), nor the opposite. Come to a fair reckoning. It is hard enough to get a balanced view of your life without making it harder by being too hard or too easy on yourselves by deliberately miscounting.

You have always said we can’t judge our lives (let alone anyone else’s life) accurately because living in 3D time-slices prevents us from seeing things in perspective. But this is a little different, seems to me.

Not so much different as an extension into another realm of thought. Your view of your lives is distorted by more than one factor; time is not the only agent warping your perspective. So, to repeat, to overcome the drag of the robot that says, “I’m not good enough, I’m not a satisfactory result of so much raw material,” the answer is: Trust your life. And we want to say a little more about that, as usual aiming our remarks not at you as a particular example (though you are that) and not even at certain of your friends as examples (though they too could be that) but at everybody living their lives moment by moment in 3D, struggling or swimming in a continuing movie that they may or may not be enjoying.

Let us say this as bluntly as we can, if only to get your full attention: It is stupid to distrust your life. It may also be self-indulgent. Certainly it is not productive for you, nor – you may not have thought of this – is it helpful to others.

Angst over missed opportunities, perfectly natural, as is angst over things you’ve done or omitted to do that you would give lots to have a chance to choose differently. But regrets are merely judgments in two senses of the word “judgment,” unhelpfully coupled. In the sense of discernment, sure; it is always good to be as aware as possible. But in the sense of self-condemnation, no. All that does is freeze you in position. It is a form of being wedded to a description of your possibilities that you despise. What good can come of that?

Similarly, if you feel you have been held back by others – external 3D others or internal non-3D others – what are you doing but painting yourself as victim? “I deserved better. I wuz robbed.” But if you put your life in the scales against [holocaust survivor] Viktor Frankl, where are you? Suppose you were robbed, so to speak. Can that have been an accident, in a world in which chance and accident do not exist?

You’re saying we have a tendency to feel sorry for ourselves, and should get over it.

Not quite. Many of you are quite valiant in bearing the burden that your life feels like to you. but we are saying: “Stop thinking you know better than life. Just because you have other preferences doesn’t mean you know what you are asking.”

Trust life.

Well, what is the advantage to dis-trusting life? What is the advantage to wishing things had turned out differently, that you had turned out differently?

None that I can see. I can imagine some people asking, though, if we should thereby be perfectly delighted with our lives including the things we are ashamed of, or regret, or remember with pain.

You know your grandmother’s saying, “Everybody rides the mule.”

Everybody has something to bear, yes.

Everybody has valid reason to complain, and valid reason to rejoice, on an on-going basis. Which one you do, or what proportions you allot to doing each one, is up to you. it’s your choice – only, don’t think you are the victim of cosmic injustice, just because you don’t approve of what is. Maybe the world is larger than your comprehension of it.

When we started this, I thought it was going to be private, but I see that with a couple of discreet omissions, I can post it, and, I gather, you’d like me to.

It’s your choice, always, but it may help people.

May help me, for that matter. Okay, then, always pleasant talking with you. our thanks for this, and we’ll talk to you another time.