More on the porous nature of consciousness

Monday, September 13, 2010

5:15 AM. Surprisingly, a solid night’s sleep. I’d have bet the other way, but I’m glad to have been wrong. But I’m sort of tired this morning, and blank, so I hope you guys have a topic in mind. I’m really tempted to skip doing this, but I know I’d be sorry in a few hours.

It wouldn’t be the end of the world if you took a day off. But there is support in routine. It’s usually worth pushing through a little reluctance or fatigue – or pain, if it came to that – to see how deep it is. Sometimes the weather isn’t propitious (internal weather or external weather for that matter) but so what?

Well, I’m here, I’ve got my coffee and have had my first couple of sips, let’s go, and we’ll see how it goes.

Do you notice the encouragement provided by the stack of paper that is your efforts to date?

I do indeed. Three thick binders so far. It’s very neat, very organized, a lot of source material waiting for me to find a way to hold it in my mind together long enough to sketch out an outline.

There isn’t any reason why you couldn’t use the time usually allotted to the sessions to organize, instead.

No, I’d miss this. Let’s proceed.

Very well. More on the porous nature of consciousness, by which for the moment we will refer to the fact that human intelligence is actually the meeting point of many kinds of minds. We spoke briefly of the simplicity that is shared by trees and –

But let us start again. Very difficult to say sequentially (that is, in words, which only function one after the other) what is better perceived simultaneously, right-brain fashion. If we could show you, you’d see that a whole lot of words are going to be expended to describe something pretty simple. It’s the old blind man and elephant thing. In this case the blindness is not because you are in the body but because you cannot intuit what is to be conveyed, but must laboriously construct from what we must equally laboriously describe, feature by feature. This obviously results in redundancy, as we have to go back time and time again to the same things and say, “Oh, but now look how this relates to this new thing.” A picture in this case would be worth about a hundred thousand words, not just one thousand. But – we hear you say – enough complaining, on with the show.

Only smilingly.

We know. Very well. In all this, we proceed from, and keep returning to, your person-mind, of which you are the ringmaster. We began by pointing out that you incorporate strand-minds, but not every strand-mind is a former person-mind. (Besides, “former” is a time-oriented word that distorts the relationship.) You as ringmaster have to balance and harmonize various strand-mind components as best you can. The degree to which you – to which anyone – is aware of the comprising elements varies from those who think themselves one unvarying thing, to those who think themselves one thing subject to moods and circumstances, to those who begin to suspect that they are influenced by complexes and compulsions etc. below the level of their awareness, to those who see themselves as blessed or cursed by the presence of other spirit entities, to those whose very sense of identity seems to hang on a thread among competing spirits, or minds, or personalities, however they conceptualize them. (To some they will be past lives, to others, contending spirits, to others personality fragments, depending, as we say, upon what they have been taught implicitly or explicitly, and what is most congenial to their habitual thought patterns.)

But of course this is merely one level of the things affecting your life. All the mechanisms that go into maintaining your body as a machine are another level, and again consciousness of these mechanisms varies widely. Some never given them a thought. They want their body to do something, it does it or can’t do it; it gives them health or illness partly depending on whether they follow the rules of good health and partly unpredictably. If something gets out of whack, they try to fix it themselves, or have some health specialist fix it, but in either case they never waver in their assumption that problem and cure are mechanical and nothing more. At the other end of the scale are people who are in continuous communication with their body’s intelligences, and balance so readily as to need spend little or no time at it. We will not take the time to fill in the dots; we have sketched it for you years ago in our description of the different levels of control of health that may be obtained by different levels of awareness. But what we did not go into then, and shall here, is what is being communicated with. At the time, we left untouched your assumption that you were communicating with your body’s intelligence either as a whole or as special areas, as, a shoulder. There was no reason to get into theory, and good reason to not do so, not wanting to lay out an extensive background. We will not sketch them today. That is the next level of detail down. Today is an overview.

Beyond the conscious strand-lines and the (so far unspecified) minds that maintain the physical organism, other kinds of mind enter in, as well.

I must say, I can’t imagine what they could be.

If you could, there wouldn’t be much use in your and our going to so much work, would there? We’ll say it again: Our work is to relate this to that, when you have been familiar with the this and familiar with the that, but haven’t ever thought to relate the two. Either thought or revelation consists in seeing new relationships when previously one saw only separation. Since you can’t easily think your way to some things, the easy way is to have them revealed to you; then it is up to you, to tie the revelation to the rest of your mental world.

That’s an interesting thought in itself.

Yes, isn’t it? But, to continue. You as human are an intersection of physical and mental and spiritual. Now here is where your readers are going to face amazingly strong resistances, worrying that they are to be led down the garden path, perhaps because of Frank’s personal agenda, as you have already seen. But the positive spin on that is, merely, if no resistances, not much new can have been said.

To rephrase: If the material doesn’t jolt us out of our accustomed mental habits from time to time, it can’t be accomplishing much.

That’s what we said. So, the spiritual, and this will complete our overview of the three kinds of intelligences that are available to any person-group. (Freudians might consider comparing this to ego, id, and superego, but we warn you that it won’t fit at all well.)

Spiritual influences may be looked at as non-physical influences, if you wish, but this is a dumbing-down of understandings that the world’s religions have long held and worked out in some detail. If you think angels are fairy-tales but the guys upstairs are sources of valuable information, this doesn’t show that you are modern, rational, and clear-sighted. It shows that you are still locked in to a system that sees the world as fundamentally material with perhaps a saving grace of non-material mental presence. If, instead, you think angels are a prettification of demons or nature-spirits or such-like, this is a different problem of assimilation, but probably less of a problem than the previous example. And, lastly, if you think angels are the conventional representation of beings with wings, all sugar-coated and “nice” this is a misunderstanding at the opposite extreme from the first example.

Spiritual forces are real, they are primary, and they are (therefore) everyday ordinary part of real life.

Almost finished the overview? It’s only eight pages, but 70 minutes, and I’m getting tired.

What we have said will do for a beginning. You have three levels of very different kinds of influence, what may be called human, material, and spiritual, but they may as easily be categorized in entirely different ways. You will notice, Frank, that you earlier confused physical spirits (let’s call them) and spiritual spirits, if that isn’t too awkward a phrase, thinking they must be the same thing because both non-physical. [Nature spirits versus TGU, would be a better way to put it.] But in the first case there really isn’t anything – we’ll say it but we’ll have to mostly un-say it later – there isn’t anything you can experience that isn’t partly physical in some way. But, as we say, we have to take that back immediately, for it is true that spiritual influences may be experienced by your minds that are nonphysical (else how are you receiving this, by the way?) but it is a tangled subject, best taken up in its own place, the description in greater depth of spiritual influence.

Now, in this case, someone versed in the lore of nature-spirits would be better able than you to translate what we will say about that level. But such translations will follow: We need to give you the outline as best we can, so as to make old things new again.

That’s the first time I drew the connection between this work and my publication of Robert Clarke’s books. That’s what he was doing, too, but from another vantage point.

Of course. And if you will look at your life and your friends and your influences like books, you will see that this is a major theme they have in common: making old things new by seeing them in a new way, in a new context.

Okay. Many thanks for all this.

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