The mental as a field

Monday, September 9, 2019

2:25 a.m. Wheezing, more coughing, sneezing. Maybe this is why I spent so much time sleeping yesterday – sleeping while I could.

Since I scheduled a post yesterday of my reactions to the Hemingway quote I hate, I feel no particular compulsion to converse on the record, guys. But – anything you care to say off the record?

You mean, is there anything you would like kept off the record.

All right, say it that way.

You don’t need to converse with us to go back to that place of health. Concentrate on that for its own sake.

Okay. Worth trying.

5:55 a.m. And it did work. First in the desk chair, then in the zero-gravity chair, then finally I was able to go to bed. But I see I gained only three hours. Still, that’s a lot sometimes.

7:45 a.m. And I guess I’m up for the day. I got my night’s sleep in bits. Three installments, looks like.

9:55. Things seem more or less normal. Only in the daytime (if then). Why? Actually, no reason to leave that as a rhetorical question. Why?

In sleep, or toward sleep when weariness is great enough, the equation changes.

Between mental and physical?

That is how we conceptualized it for you, years ago, but not really. It’s more like physical – which includes mental, though you didn’t know that then – and non-physical, which also includes mental, which you did not realize in quite this way.

So physical – mental – non-physical, with each of the extreme terms sharing space in the middle, so to speak.

Yes, but do not think to divide mental between the two. The point is that the two share the space you call mental. That’s what it is; that’s what creates it and its unique properties, that it is shared between them.

I tend to say interfaces between them, but even that isn’t quite right, is it?

It isn’t sufficient. Look at it this way. Suppose you have two fields, rather than one of them being what you call substance, or matter. [That is, suppose matter is actually a field.] The intersection and interaction and interference of these two fields may be considered as an entity in itself. It isn’t, really; it isn’t part of either, but it is the result of the interaction. And that is what mind is. That’s why it is so volatile, so sensitive to perturbation, so creative of interpretation.

God, I can feel it, I’m so close to something that would make sense of so much, but I don’t have the scientific background to grasp it.

In this case, that background would hinder you, because enmeshed in too many firmly held misconceptions. This is why it requires amateurs, to be able to disrupt well-ordered and accepted ways of thinking.

But it isn’t like nobody else is getting this. I can sense that.

No, and isn’t that good? Redundancy is the best safeguard.

Proceed, then.

Paul Brunton sensed and deduced that your experience of the world (that is, of reality) can only come via the mind, hence the mind is the ultimate

You were saying?

Leaving it as “the ultimate” is fine. He was careful not to think the world away – that is, dismiss it as only an illusion – and not to take its independent existence for granted. He balanced.

Yes, I found it very reasonable. It felt right.

Well, now look at that “mental” as a field interacting with 3D and non-3D always. Is it an individual field, when it interacts as well with every other mental field? Is it a collective field, when it uniquely interacts with at least one field (the 3D) that is unique, and perhaps both? (The non-3D, remember, though not divided is not uniform. As above, so below.)

It is both and neither, depending upon what we stress.

Of course. And what happens to that field when the 3D pole ceases to exist: that is, dies?

I see it! In terms of time, the mental field ceases to exist, for there is no second pole to hold it in being. But wherever it was, it remains. The mind – the mental field – that was suspended between George Washington’s 3D existence and the non-3D remains in that context. That’s why we can still talk to past lives, why we can interact with living beings and not merely statues or recordings.

You must damp down your excitement if we are to continue.

Yeah, I get that. I’d flare up like a flash bulb, and then out.

Except you are a reusable bulb, but there could be recharging time involved.

Okay.

So now you can see several interacting awarenesses, if only potentially.

I won’t be able to follow up on them, but others will once it has been called to their attention, and that’s what you are using me for.

Correct, except it is “we” using you – that is, you and us together. But that is one function of the ILC process, and one reason to spread the usage, to provide more people willing and able to strike sparks.

So let’s make it practical for me, and for those of my friends experiencing chronic health challenges. Rather than consider illnesses as 3D-caused (only), or as “spiritually” caused (as if it is one’s fault for hosting illness because illness can be overcome), what is the story seen when we consider our mental world to be a field generated by and suspended from the interaction between 3D and non-3D fields?

You mean, what’s the panacea?

I’ve waited 70 years. Surely long enough?

We smile. Yes, long enough, and in one sense you never needed to wait at all, only it served you well.

I suppose it did, but it gets tiresome. For me, for others with their own problems. And kindly don’t say that life is problems, we all know that first-hand. But maybe we’d like to shuffle the deck, deal with some other problems instead.

As you wish, only remember that there’s a reason why some people choose the devil they know over the devil they don’t know.

Well, there is that, and I admit, it does give me pause. However, if you’re in the mood to explain, I’m in the mood to listen, and everybody can make up his or her mind.

Fair enough. All right, first, recognize that customarily you all regard yourselves as primarily mental, no matter how attached to physical sensations you may be.

Do you mean “experience,” rather than “regard”?

A valid correction, and experiencing yourselves one way leads to regarding yourselves that way, of course.

I would have said (judging second-hand) that most people experience themselves as inhabitants of bodies.

That does not contradict what we said. The person who is most sensuously oriented still does not identify with the body as a collection of cells and organs, but as the horse it (the person) rides. A beautiful girl may identify with her beauty and her appetites; still she identifies as the person who, you see. Similarly the athlete or the lover or anyone concentrating on primarily physical activities still experiences himself or herself as the person who. They don’t identify with the muscles; they identify with having the muscles.

That probably could be expressed more clearly, but I get it.

It is easier to see in the case of those who experience the world primarily emotionally or intellectually, but it is the case always. You have bodies; you tend to and you use bodies; you may even think that you think of yourselves as bodies, but when you look more closely you see that it comes down to you using (living in) bodies. That is a small but important difference.

So now when something perturbs the body, does it really feel like it is perturbing you, or like it is perturbing something you are integrally bound to?

You know the answer to that. That’s why some of us are not afraid of death as an end but potentially welcome it as, you might say, an end to interference.

Yes. The interference has made clearer to you who you really are, body or mind. Then it is only a matter of whether you consider the mind to be an attribute of the body, which it is, in a way, or an independent entity, which it is in a way.

You mean, I think, “or an entity not dependent upon the body.”

Yes. In fact, not wholly dependent would be a more accurate statement.

And the definition we choose (or perhaps which seems obvious to us) determines how much we can or cannot affect things like health.

Like many things. But then let us penetrate a bit farther. The way in which one conceptualizes the mind as somewhat independent of the body also helps determine what is or is not possible.

Dammit, I’m getting too tired to do this.

You haven’t had breakfast, for one thing.

But I’m afraid if we leave off, you’ll never come back to this.

It is merely for you to ask.

Well, okay. A tremendously powerful image, the mind as a suspended field. I wish one of my friends would follow up on it. Meanwhile, thank you.

— And, as I think about this, I get that the next part may be too complicated to be tacked on to the end of a session. I guess we’ll see.

— I was doing the dishes when it occurred to me that, as so often, the distance analogy has snuck into the illustration. We tend to think of 3D and non-3D as separated in space, or anyway separated by something, rather than occupying identical or even overlapping spaces. If we could visualize every moment of time/space separately and simultaneously, it would be easier to see it as it is, maybe.