Consciousness

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

1:15 AM. Asthma again. Well, it is September, after all. Since I’m up, you guys care to continue where we left off?

The volatility and porous nature of consciousness, and how (as well as why) the individual may be looked on as a convenient fiction.

Volatility, because no two moments of time necessarily have the same components. Porousness, because you can’t necessarily know or control who is coming in, from what level. Convenient fiction, because the features that provide continuity within a given individual are often not as strong as the things that separate the component parts.

You – not you personally, but your time, including even the most advanced “New Age” thought – have some very ungrounded concepts coexisting uneasily, adding up to a very fuzzy picture. Thus, spirit guides, past lives, ET’s both physical and non-physical, saints, possession….

Many concepts that don’t seem to have anything to do with one another, or that seem to contradict one another, require merely a certain orienting principle in order for their inherent inter-relation to become clear. Such an orienting principle usually – perhaps always – requires the destruction of a previous orienting principle that prevents a new way of seeing. In this case it is the unstated and usually unconscious assumption that people are individuals, and that individuality means separate mind and body, [and] continuity as that same personality, from life to life or, if reincarnation is not in the picture, a separate destiny, be it heaven or hell or some other idea.

When you realize how greatly the idea of you as individuals depends on one way of seeing things, one consistent set of rules as to what to notice and what to ignore, the arbitrary nature of the concept becomes inescapably obvious, as we have been pointing out.

If you as a person-group comprise many strands, each of which is a person-group, and if your person-group considered as a whole forms one strand of a higher-level person-group, and if, as we have said, these relationships continue up and down the chain of being so that everything is inextricably part of everything else (as only makes sense, from our viewpoint), there is your porousness. Your momentary consciousness holds the ring and attempts to impose a consistency. Regardless whether it succeeds largely or little or not at all, the nature of its contents does not change. Multiplicity is multiplicity. And since the effective active composition varies moment to moment, there is your volatility.

It will repay effort – for you, for anybody who reads this – if you go back over your personal experience and see if it doesn’t look different in light of these concepts. Past lives, you’ve already seen, look different. So must the guys upstairs whether named or unnamed. So do elements of telepathy. But maybe we should start with what you call robots.

Robots are your term for what we would describe either as split-off bits of consciousness or as pieces of strand-mind.

I’m muddling this, aren’t I?

Just continue as you can, quit when you must. You don’t have to do this now, and you scarcely have the energy to do so. The alternative – trying to go back to sleep – won’t necessarily be as difficult as you think.

We’ll see. I’ll try, and I’ll be back hopefully on all cylinders.

6:30 AM. Well, that’s remarkable. I got several hours of sleep, not having to fight asthma at all. How did you do that – and why not 60 years ago?

We didn’t do it, you and we did it. As a large part of you knows. Have you ever been prevented from doing something you really wanted to do?

I don’t know. I would have assumed so.

Well, as so often, we will continue to talk about the topic, using as illustration something topical.

You know – because we, and your experience, and your thoughts about the experience, which somewhat means “we” again, taught you – that a person’s health is a relationship between mental and physical factors. If they change their mental body, they may experience quick, even instant, change, but it is unlikely to persist because mental states fluctuate by their nature. If they change their physical condition, it is likely to require effort and time, but any change is likely to persist, because the body structure may be said to have an inertia to it

These are clues that can be better understood when you realize that none of you is a unit, even physically, so much as a coalition. Naturally if your health depends upon your mental and physical states, and if those states are actually the prevailing compromise among a congeries of what might seem to be smaller-scale individuals, you’re going to be at the mercy of many temporarily prevailing conditions – and, on the bright side, you’re going to have many a resource behind you, once you learn how to use them.

Yes, it’s pulling together. And you were just about to talk about robots when we broke off a few hours ago.

And that is where we could have gone then perhaps, and will go now. You taught yourself (which means, you let yourself be guided by seemingly external forces and seemingly autonomous inner forces (us) and then thought about and applied what you had been shown) you taught yourself how to deal with the physical and emotional problems of others by envisioning the forces in play as doing what they thought was right for the individual, but doing it mindlessly, repetitively, and so at last inappropriately. You learned how to reprogram those robots, and learned, through the experience of your friends as you worked with them, that not only could reprogramming stop negative behavior, it could be redirected back to positive channels.

You must for the moment regard your consciousness not as a thing, not as solid in any way, not as permanent. Your consciousness is not the same thing as you, any more than the volatile and temporary contents of a computer’s RAM are the same thing as the computer, or as the computer’s software, for that matter.

There is nothing permanent about a state of consciousness, and this is because it is not designed to be permanent, and could not do what it does if it were permanent. As we said, one permanent state of consciousness would be the equivalent of a computer locking up. Consciousness fluctuates. It is supposed to. It was designed to. It is in those fluctuations that it expresses the fluctuation of the forces exerted upon it from various and changing agents including external circumstances, the nature of the given moment, the effective pressure of other consciousnesses, and the effective participation of its strands and group-mind, moment to moment.

If instead of identifying with your momentary state of consciousness, you realize that it is an interim summing-up of your life at that moment (for so it may be seen) or as the result of your past choices (for it may be seen that way, too) or as the interplay of your known and unknown inner and outer components (a third way it may be seen), you will see both how at the mercy of other forces your daily life is and how vast an array of abilities you may command merely by realizing the fact.

There is a lot packed into that paragraph, and we advise that you re-read it more than once, and wrestle with it until (in connection with your ever-helpful guys upstairs, of course) you have anchored it to your practical everyday life. Ultimately it will ground and anchor many a free-floating concept, rendering the whole more coherent and usable.

As to porousness. Again, you must let go of the idea that you are the unit you think yourself, any more than that your emotional makeup is the same at age 8 and 15 and 28 and 60. It just isn’t so, and the attempt to see as consistent and unitary what is neither can only be made by slurring over all the detail and by resolutely forgetting vastly more than you remember. And this is what is customarily done, of course, but it does not serve you.

Remember that your consciousness at any given moment is the person-mind comprising many strand-minds and participating in a group-mind. This, remember, is over-simplification, but it is complicated enough until you have anchored the concept among your other mental orienting concepts; perhaps later we can then add nuance and exception and complication.

But what is true for your person-mind is also true for the group-mind of which you are a strand-mind, and equally true for the strand-minds that make up your person-mind. Again – always – as above, so below.

Therefore all is movement, and change, and interaction – and is this not your experience of life? This porousness is why and how you do not stagnate. At one and the same time, life is freedom and fate, and it does not depend upon viewpoint in this case. That is, we are not saying that life may be viewed as freedom or fate, depending upon the point of view. We are saying, instead, it is both, always, in the same way that there cannot be an up and no down, or an inner and no outer. The two – freedom to create; being created with – are inextricably linked because the same. If you pull on a string, the string also pulls you.

My thanks, not least for your assistance in getting a night’s sleep.

Quite all right. Given that you consciously lay there relaxing and not letting yourself tense up, as you learned, you may also thank yourself.