Imagination and liberation

Thursday, September 13, 2018

6:40 a.m. I was doing something, having awakened but still in bed. What?

You were letting scenarios play, watching.

So I was. But there was a point to what I was doing. What was it?

You need to loosen the reins on your imagination, quite a bit. We know this comes as a surprise to you, but maybe not to those who know you. Wanting to be a writer isn’t automatically the same as having a good imagination, and even writing a couple of novels doesn’t necessarily evidence the kind of imagining that we have in mind.

Okay. Enlighten me. I sort of know this behind my own back, so to speak.

It could be an intricate discussion, but for the moment we would prefer to hold it to what is practical for your liberation, now, rather than to expand it into general truths. You are ready now; you need it now.

To write the book the guys are pushing me to do?

Well?

All right. I answered my question in asking it. So, I’m listening.

Just “imagining” that you could talk to The Boss, or Evangeline, or the guys, at all, was a form of liberation. It was the beginning peck at the eggshell from inside. Until then you were confining yourself, in effect, to what the 3D world was willing to validate. Anything else that you experienced or even longed to experience, you wrote off as wishful thinking. Now, wishful thinking could also be looked at as long-range planning, but it isn’t looked at that way, usually. It is dismissed, or rather is held in the “not really relevant” bin.

Now, when validated experience expanded your idea of the possible, you still held these things in that bin, in a way, only you redefined it as “perhaps realer than I thought, but still not fully trustworthy.” You did those things, but part of you was prepared to disown them – and thus [prepared to disown] the part of you that experienced them! – if it seemed necessary.

I never wanted to fool myself or mislead others. So I sort of fooled myself and misled others in the opposite direction, didn’t I?

No, that’s too harsh, too black and white. What you did was to hamper yourself, to stay half in and half out of the eggshell.

The trick seems to be to avoid becoming a flake, believing anything and everything, on the one hand, and being unable to escape cultural conditioning, on the other.

In your particular culture, yes. Other cultures, with different boundaries to what is “real” and what is “imagined,” create different problems for their inhabitants. But you came to live in the here and in the now that is America in the 20th and 21st centuries.

And, I feel and have long felt, [came here] to help at least some others to break out of the cultural trance – without losing their balance – so that they could live more freely, my own struggles being the model.

You might say you imagined that role for yourself, or you might say – which is the same thing – that you woke up in mid life to realize it.

Now, the next step beyond imagining a role for oneself – that is, imagining a life, imagining a purpose and therefore a means – is imagining the way to do it, and the consequences that follow from pursuing that way. In short, you get out of the eggshell, your wings are strengthened by the struggle to escape – as planned by nature – and, then what? What gives a chick the idea that those muscles that got it out of the shell will enable it to fly?

Mama and papa bird, usually. The newly hatched chick is pretty helpless, isn’t it? Doesn’t even know how to feed itself.

Correct. In the case of humans, even though they define themselves as 3D-merely, they are of course never divorced from their parent consciousness, their non-3D component but more than that, the beyond-3D-and-non-3D-divisions consciousness from which the creature was created. For, remember, though you think of “energy” and “non-3D” as different from 3D, they are not separate worlds. Energy is matter; the non-3D extensions of a 3D person may be equally well seen as the 3D person being extensions of the non-3D, but in either case they are part of the same complex. In speaking of the “parent consciousness,” we mean something prior to the 3D-non-3D-complex living a 3D life.

To continue the analogy for a moment, the chick has “feed” from its parents. The 3D person receives “feed” continually from its prior self, its parent consciousness. and in both cases, much of this feed is considered to be “instinct.” What is instinct? Pursue the definitions and you will see that they describe effects and step around the question of causes, because there is no way to account for that feed in any scheme that does not allow for (a) non-3D feed and, even more, (b) parental guidance, call it, from the non-3D being of which the creature is created.

Discussions of divine providence, guardian angels, etc. touch on these questions from a theological standpoint. Science has no such standpoint, and can only analyze ever more closely how such feed occurs, not from where and certainly not why.

But to keep it to the realm of the immediately practical. Your friend Michael [Langevin] assists you to pry open your imagination of yourself, and thus helps you break out of the eggshell in the only way that help can be given without enfeebling the chick. In other words, encouragement and mirroring lend the chick energy, but the chick still has to do the work, in the process strengthening the muscles it will need if it is to fly.

Michael reminds me of my influence on his life. This shows me that one idea I may have of myself isn’t necessarily inflated or fanciful.

That’s one way to look at it. Another would be to look back at your past 25 years or so and count the magicians / shamans / practitioners / acolytes / aspirers you have interacted with to your mutual benefit, sometimes leading, sometimes following.

More than 25 years. You’d have to go back at least to Louis Meinhardt, and that began in 1971, which makes, what, nearly 50 years.

Well, you see, that is how inter-3D reinforcement happens. They struggle, you struggle, but even in your struggles you encourage each other to keep pushing against the damned eggshell (for that is how it often seems to you).

All right. Now, suppose you spend what seems like a lifetime, packing at that shell, pushing against it, experiencing it as a crippling, almost suffocating impediment to your real life that you imagine (though of course you cannot remember). When you finally break out of the shell, is it surprising that your initial reaction may be disorientation?

All our personal history will suggest that we are not free, but that this must be some new form of struggle against the confining shell.

And it will take an effort of reimagining yourselves to see – to realize – the new possibilities.

Good thing we have nagging parental consciousness to prod us in new directions.

You also have drives – hunger, discomfort, everything the 3D world throws at you continually, to keep you moving. It’s all designed for your benefit, but, as usual,

It all hangs on the question of “which you.”

That’s it. Even understanding that question is a massive advance, enabling other shifts in perspective.

Are we still in “the realm of the immediately practical”?

We smile. Don’t worry about it, of course we are. Absorbing a concept is a form of re-imagining.

That hadn’t occurred to me.

It is what we have been talking about.

I see it, now that you say it. But I hadn’t.

You are going to have to find ways to expand your ideas of what is possible to include a sense of it being possible for you, and here, and now.

I guess we’re sending this off. Some valuable clues here.

Even sending things a little more personal is a rearranging, you see.

That’s what happened with the Mind Mirror, isn’t it? When Judith [Pennington] gave me feedback showing, electronically, that my alpha state was something objective as well as subjective, it changed me.

It validated a part of your imagined being, yes. You are not only a self-contained housecat but also (not instead) an eagle looking on from a high place at a distance.

I get that there is much more to be said, but that’s enough for the moment, given that I have this to transcribe.

You could reimagine a different way of working, of course. You could do this much longer, and transcribe later, maybe not even the same day. But notice, your immediate reaction is against changes. So, look at that.

I see. What we’re used to doing has its own momentum.

Habit is strong, and like anything in life, has its advantages and disadvantages. Think how helpful the habits have been that led you to early morning conversations, and to touch-typing, however awkward at first, until it became another advantage.

I first taught myself touch-typing in 1966, when I had access to an IBM Selectric typewriter. But it wasn’t until a little while ago – 2015, maybe? – that daily feed over a long time moved me to a new level of ability.

That’s what happens. Long, often discouragingly long times pecking at the shell, then liberation and new abilities and new struggles.

Presumably not only here in 3D.

Let’s just say that those who are longing for death to bring them to a land of eternal rest aren’t entirely wrong, but are in for a surprise! Rest looks good when you are tired, but it palls into boredom later. The world is better organized than that. But this is enough for now.

Okay, many thanks. Entertaining as always.

That’s the bait.

Smiling. Till next time.