Working with the material

Saturday, August 28, 2010

4:30 AM. Last night’s program had 22 people, and all but one seemed to me to experience the receiving of guidance in a two-person exercise. Very satisfying, particularly as I had done no special preparation, but had relied on notes from previous programs and the inspiration of the moment. So now the next program will be one on robots, and sometime between now and the end of September I have to figure out how to teach what I have discovered.

All right, my friends. It is all coming together nicely – which I suppose should be an indicator that it’s about to be pulled to pieces, or blown to bits.

Would we do that to you? We smile.

You mean, would you do that to us – again. But I’m certainly not complaining! I thought yesterday’s material was just wonderful and again I thank you for it and for this whole series. I joke with you – and about you – a lot, but you know how greatly privileged I feel to be in such a connection.

As well you should – to use your own joke. But – seriously meant, too. The connection is available to all; it’s just a matter of desire and application. But not everyone will or should live their lives as you live yours, and not anyone will or should experience just what you are experiencing, any more than you can live anyone else’s life, or would enjoy it if you could. So – it is always well to understand the particular ways in which your individual lives have been blessed, and to be grateful for it. Far better be grateful than to confuse blessings bestowed with rights earned! In other words, with thanks goes humility. And humility is always a productive state of mind, far more than any sense of entitlement or any sense of appropriation of credit for gifts.

That may not be clear. May I?

Certainly.

They’re saying, simply, that it is fitting for us to be grateful for our blessings – for what we are, for the gifts we have been given to express – and it is better to feel that way than to assume that we somehow deserve credit for the gifts we have been born with.

It seems to us that this is just what we said.

Perhaps it was. At any rate, you have the floor.

We are more or less at the point where you need to do the work of summarizing the past few sessions so as to hold it more in your mind. This sharpens your focus which makes it easier to sharpen our focus.

Care to expand upon that?

You might look out at this way. We have said, your limited RAM forces you to try to make efficient use of symbols if you are to be able to hold complex associations in mind long enough – simultaneously enough – for you to process them. Writing does that by substituting permanence – or, we should say, persistence – for momentary awareness. But as you absorb information, as you process it and make what was new into an accustomed part of your mental library, you – in effect – cease to need RAM to process that particular information, and can therefore associate it with new information. You understand?

You only absorb new material, beyond a certain point, by having previously absorbed and assimilated the material received previously.

That’s right. And material received in right-brain fashion particularly requires left-brain processing, for it will not have received it in the way information received in other ways would have been received. You know from your experience that information given out in this way does not go into short-term memory unless recalled via conversation or via re-hearing from a recorder or re-hearing from a written record. But – more than that – neither you nor anyone reading this will be able to absorb this material by reading it and then going on to other things. It is to be thought about – not remembered, certainly not memorized, but thought about – so as to incorporate it. We’ll say a couple of words about that.

Your mind, we have said, is in the non-physical, and your brain in the physical. While you are functioning in the body your access to information must be filtered to you in one of two ways (usually, in both, actually, but that would not assist the analysis, so we will proceed for the moment as if only one or the other). You may receive intuitively – that is, directly, without the interference or intermediation of thought processes – or you may receive sensorally, which for our purposes at the moment (not forever) we are going to define as employing the habits of cognition.

You mean, I take it, by association or deduction or induction. But why call that sensorally? I recognize, you want an opposite to intuitive, but is that the proper opposite term in this case?

We are open to suggestion, as you say.

Well why not simply oppose intuition to thought? “Thought” could include induction, deduction and association, surely.

We’ll accept that scheme, subject to later correction if necessary. It overlooks for the moment the part that your sensory apparatus plays in what seems to you a process of thought unconnected to the senses, but we can always discuss that at another time. Make a note.

So, then, intuitive and thought-filtered reception. If you come to a new place via thought processes, the procedure itself will assure that the new material associates with the old, at least in the context in which it occurred to you. You study a subject, you learn it by systematizing your knowledge in one way or another. If, though, instead of studying systematically, you receive a thought (for that is how it seems to us, reception rather than production, for you should not take the credit for that which you did not deliberately produce) that does not have any context but the one that produced it – if it is what you call a “stray thought” – you will probably lose it, perhaps forever, if you do not in some way associate it with other thoughts beyond the momentary context. This, after all, is a main function of a journal, to store such thoughts against a later time in which they will find another more permanent or more significant context.

Such stray thoughts are not what we mean by intuitive reception, however similar to it they may be. They share the quality of evanescence, but they are received via a quite different process. In fact, that word “process” well describes the difference.

You are, in your left-brains, word processors. You process sequentially, first this, then this, then this. It is the nature of the left-brain.

In your right-brain (typically; not of course universally or even strictly speaking, but as a useful generalization) you process non–verbal gestalts; entire irreducible relationships; things that can only be grasped whole if they are to be grasped at all. Landscapes, photographs, road maps (disregarding the processing that must follow the initial reception of the spatial relationships).

For the purposes of illustration, the right-brain material may be looked at as that which is more easily grasped than expressed, and, for that matter, more easily felt than grasped. There is nothing more fleeting than an unexpressed, on absorbed, feeling. Nothing but direct intuition.

The work you are doing in studying material that has been received intuitively is the associating of its component ideas into a coherent system for yourselves, so that it may be fitted into the rest of your lives. Else, what good to you could it be? It might serve as encouragement, true, but it could not do much beyond that. If it is to transform your life, it will do so by transforming your mental life. And this it can do only if you do the work of absorbing it and its implications.

What we are saying here is only common sense and common experience. You never own anything until it has become a part of you, and this never happens until you take it into yourself. Doing the work of sitting with new material, absorbing the “feel” of it, and thinking about it, and applying it, is the price you must pay if it is to be yours.

I heard, more or less between the lines, that everybody is going to hear something different in this material, that no two people are going to construct the same mental model.

No, and how could they? It is in the association with the rest of your life that this material is made yours. Given that by design everyone’s life is very different, how could or should the end-result be the same in any two instances? But – that is not a weakness but a strength. Just as variety in plants is safer than genetic monotony, so variety in the application of insights is more reliable, more versatile, more enduring, then any lockstep memorized catechism could be. It is in the unvarying adoption of uniform expression of thought, that thought dies. What is as dead and deadening as petrified thought? Be, instead, living wood, growing, assimilating, connecting sky and earth and the deep underground.

Nice image.

We’ve done this before.

Seems like a place to stop, and it has been an hour and a quarter. Anything you’d like to say about last night’s program?

Only that, you see, this is the time. You and others spent many a long year yearning for the time to come round, and here it is. You are within it. Enjoy the time.

Sounds like a plan. Okay, till next time. Thanks as always.