What immortality really is

[January 6, 2006]

(7 a.m.) All right, friends, here we are at the same place and time: here and now. The eastern sky is a series of blue-white interruptions to the heavier blue that is cloud cover near the horizon. It looks like a set of thick dark blue plates stacked, with the sky showing between the plates and then above the stack, and just the least pink above the bottommost layer. Now that I’ve gotten that out of my system, what’s up today?

Perhaps we should begin to tie together what it is we intend you to accomplish with our help. As we told you yesterday – you needn’t transcribe the session unless you wish to – your job is less to tell people how to do it, or even in a way to do it yourself, as to encourage and inspire them to find out for themselves how to do it. For of course everyone has guidance! That’s the point of finding guidance — is it not? — that everyone has guidance!

You will remember addressing this question in Muddy Tracks nearly at the outset, in which you asked us for a description of how to safely proceed.

Yes, but I don’t want to copy that here.

We don’t see the need for you to copy our advice. The Dion Fortune quotation was less widely available. The point is, everyone has guidance that will guide them to discovering how to contact guidance. You know? Your lives are mostly response to unconscious guidance moment by moment. Some respond freely, some resist, some respond freely in one area and resist in another. It is your guidance that shapes your life, and it is your guidance that –

Sorry, lost the thread.

Yes, you know why? You were half-thinking about the fact that you hadn’t yet put the date and day at the top of this journal page. The split in your attention brought your conscious mind a little closer to the surface and broke water, so to speak. The process is a balance in which you maintain enough consciousness to do the writing, and drink your coffee, and look off at the sky et cetera, but leave another layer free to receive the information, shape it (for of course your mental processes are involved, and of necessity) and express it. Because you have been doing this so long, the balance has shifted; more of you can be more to the surface than when you began and it does not interfere; in fact it helps, for who can run the body (which means, in this context, also the mind) better than the occupant? Also the deep habit-pattern of writing in your journal vastly assists, which is why –

1. A) we had you take up the habit in the first place, among other reasons
2. B) you are finding the information flowing so easily this way as opposed to typing or writing single sheets.

It is also why we also encouraged you successfully to talk to us via computer, so that another set of habit-patterns would form and so would be available.

This side-bar is itself of interest in the same subject matter, us adding only this: The important thing to remember is that “we” are part of “you.” Your language patterns aside (that is, disregarding the fact that your language makes distinctions seem more absolute than they are), hold in your awareness the fact that “we” and “you” are different parts of the same being, “we” on our side and “you” on your side.

Even to say “different parts” is misleading – but that is a difficulty of the language. In fact you need to hone a skill you all use but are often only scarcely aware of – use language less as absolute concrete literal meaning and more as suggestive symbolic trigger to deeper meanings.

Associative thinking may appear to be no thinking at all. It feels and functions and results very differently from logical thinking. Cultivate the habit, if you wish to move between the prison bars that a language necessarily becomes.

Now to resume our regularly scheduled programming – we were discussing the fact that guidance shapes your lives, necessarily and for no one’s benefit more than your own! So the trick is not to develop new access. It is not to come into contact with forces or beings who may be requested to aid you.

It is simply to do more consciously what you cannot help doing in many ways, in many times, unconsciously.

You breathe. If you did not breathe, you could not live. Yet you may go to a self-development class, or a meditation class, and find that the first step is to learn how to breathe properly.

That is – how to breathe consciously.

The process, the necessity, the reward, is similar here. You live in guidance. Now, learn to do it consciously.

Now when your teacher taught you how to breathe consciously, did s/he have to move your muscles for you? Was it necessary to give each person individual, highly detailed, instruction? Was it necessary to study the subject? Wasn’t most of the instruction accomplished when the teacher pointed out to you that you could and should breathe consciously?

Techniques can be important, but we say this flatly: Technique is detail.

No one ever became a great artist or a great saint or a great intellectual or a great anything by mastering technique. Greatness does not inhere in technique but in inspiration. Craft, skill, proficiency, relate to technique, and the truly great were not deficient in technique, but no one has ever done or ever will do anything great and lasting and important and soul-lifting on technique alone.

This is where religions may go wrong. Their hearts may be in the right place but their confidence may be misplaced, thinking that technique – rules – the following of rules, the doing a certain thing in a certain manner – is the way. It is not. It may be the method to be followed along the way, but it is not the way.

This is where art goes wrong. One proficient in technique and not in touch with guidance produces soul-less (literally!) trash. One who is connected may produce soaring art even with defective technique – in fact he will create his own technique as a by-product of expressing that inspiration.

Similarly, your readers. It does not matter how guidance is made conscious, provided that the heart is pure; that is, that the intent is pure.

But having said that, we need to take back a bit of it – even though what we just said is true. And the reason to modify the statement is the existence of fear. Fear is the great distorter.

Your correspondent who lives in Alabama. Tell her that all we have to offer was offered by Jesus and could be restated in those words. It is a matter of interpreting into modern language. And the reason we mention her here is that it is the fear that her neighbors have – the fear of making a mistake that will damn them, not a negligible fear, as you know first-hand from your Catholic boyhood – that may lead them to lash out against what would be a message of hope and promise. That fear needs to be recognized and honored; their own internal guidance will do its part.

We are not saying – do not mis-hear us, friends – we do not say that opposition stemming from fear may always be overcome; neither do we suggest that guidance will always lead people along similar paths. As odd as it may seem to you, other paths that may seem utterly inconsistent with following guidance have their place too. God is not necessarily agreeing with you and disagreeing with them! Each person’s path has been chosen – is being chosen – and for you to convert them is the same process as them converting you: good intention but perhaps an invasion. God is at Gateway courses [at The Monroe Institute] – but he is equally at Baptist church services, and Muslim mosques and – though you may hate to think it – Pat Robertson’s television broadcasts.

We are straying from our point which is that all have access to guidance but that fear may prevent some of you from making that access more conscious.

Treat that fear as you would treat any obstruction in the flow of energy: Make it conscious (that is, bring it into awareness), dwell in it (that is, absorb the character of it; feel it and feel its nature) and reason with it (ask how it is serving you, listen to the response, and either tell it that you don’t need that protection or, if appropriate, suggest another way that the same kind of protection may be provided without interfering with your development of greater access to conscious guidance).

Make it conscious.

Dwell in it.

Reason with it.

That is the way to deal with all obstructions, be they physical, mental, emotional or energetic.

Enough for now. Happy typing.

(10:40) Friends, something on the difference between completed and in-process. Dana [Redfield] last night said she was having a hard time with the idea of talking to a past life. She has had regressions and it didn’t feel like the description we gave here. I know the difference of course – you gave it to Rita [Warren] and me some time ago in one of the sessions – but would you care to address the subject here?

And if we said no? We smile.

Here is the concept we laid out. Remember, now, a concept is meant as an assistance, not as an idol. And on the other hand, it is as the joke you cited last night – “Please don’t bite my finger; look where I’m pointing.” With these complementary caveats, we proceed.

Move your frame of reference from your life in a body, lived one moment of time-space sequentially at a time, to the other part of you that lives outside of – therefore beyond – time-space. That part of you contains all versions of your life, for as you know each decision, each alternative possibility is fully lived out, though you necessarily are aware of only one version at a time as “real,” the others being regarded as “theoretical” or even “fantasy.”

Contact between individuals is never merely person to person on a Downstairs level. If it is contact between people in bodies, there is Downstairs contact, but more significantly there is contact Upstairs to Upstairs, so to speak. You might think of the communication as Downstairs to Upstairs to the other person’s Upstairs to their Downstairs – and back again. This will become more understandable when you reflect upon things you know about someone’s hidden inner state “intuitively.”

Now, in the absence of bodies – when one in a body contacts another who is not in body, what you might call a past life – the only communication is Upstairs to Upstairs and then down to you on a Downstairs level.

But who is it that you are contacting? It depends largely upon your expectations until you know what the situation is (what we’re in the process of explaining); then it becomes a matter of what you intend.

The part of a “person” – we put the word in quotes merely to remind you that you aren’t as much separated individuals as you usually think you are – the part that is outside time and space comprises (among other things!) all versions of an individual, and every moment of all versions of that individual, and a sort of summing-up of the individual. Now, this Upstairs, this completed-person, is alive and conscious, and is conscious not merely of that one life but of everything around it including you. So, you talk, and you talk to a being who on the one hand is the very spit and image of the person, and on the other hand is an eternal being in full conscious relatedness, and on the third hand, so to speak, may be part of your Guys Upstairs!

Let us state this slowly and plainly, without flourish or exaggeration or metaphor. This is what immortality is, and you can no more forfeit immortality than live without breathing.

So – that is what it means to speak to the completed self. If on the other hand you choose to speak to, say, Frank in 1955 – if you choose to speak to the self-in-process rather than the completed-self — here is where complications begin. Because even that self-in-process is connected to the completed-self. How could it not be? So there will be bleed-through as it knows what it should not know.

Worse (for you), you will be tying on to one version, not the sum of all possible versions, and you may obtain what we might call a false precision. Worse yet, you may tie onto one version one time, another at another time, and then where is your coherent story?

You – Frank – had problems with brother Smallwood’s story. Suppose you had latched on to an in-process Smallwood?

Enough for now. If any have questions, that will serve as the point of departure.

My thanks as ever.

And ours in return.