Saturday, October 2, 2010
6:40 AM. All right, amigos, I’m ready if you’re ready. Are we ever going to talk about spiritual influences on our consciousness? That is to say – let’s.
Yes, you did hear the difference in the reaction the two different ways of putting it would elicit. It is true that the form of words used has an effect. It is also true that intent comes through, but why allow form and intent to conflict? It only throws sand in the gears.
It may be prudent to call them non-physical influences, rather than spiritual influences, in order to avoid educated people’s strong prejudices against anything that smacks of religion and previous religious training. But on the other hand it is worth something to deliberately arouse people’s resistances so that they may become conscious of what they may not have realized within themselves.
When you say that, for the first time I understand the logic behind Abraham Lincoln’s definition of politics as the art of inducing a reaction and then fighting that reaction. How did he know that?
Luckily for the world, people come in knowing things they would never be taught in schools, and they learn from the world.
Isn’t that interesting! As soon as you said it and I thought of Lincoln, I could see, clearly, that when we say things that people don’t have resistances to, in one way or another, there is nothing much to impel them to bring the thought into consciousness with associated thoughts. It may happen or it may not, at many different levels. But if you provoke them, and do it in such a way that they are not personally attacked yet must consider what you said, there is the chance that they will discover robots holding beliefs they weren’t quite aware of.
That’s too simple, but you have the idea. We can set it out at a little more length if you prefer.
Please do.
The key to life – one key to life, but an important one – is that only that which is conscious can be changed by you. Anything that is beyond the range of consciousness shapes your life in many significant and subtle ways, but does so without much reference to you as ringmaster. Thus, external circumstances. But, if you bring them into your consciousness, you can interact with them and reshape them to your greater satisfaction. Thus, miracles.
The difference between life at the mercy of outside forces and life as a master of oneself is nothing but consciousness, for, as we have said, “outside forces” do not and can not exist.
Does this mean that your everyday life is affected by fluctuations in gravity on one of Jupiter’s moons? Well, it means there isn’t anything that may not affect you if it matches your internal reality. You might say, external reality, external forces, stand in for the internal reality that you cannot experience in itself. In this sense the entire creation is a mirror for you to use to see what you are. To put it more carefully, creation acts as if it were a mirror for you, and for everybody else, because it offers all possibilities and each interact only with those possibilities contained within. Your “velcro” concept.
I have said that the outside world only affects us when we have velcro connecting us to it. No velcro – no internal connection – no external connection.
The externals that affect you change as your internal life changes. Different strands coming to the forefront attract different corresponding externals. Your interests change; your reactions change; your very being seems to change. Think of teenagers, obsessed suddenly with sex! The world is the same as it was before their internal programming manifested their hormones (external to their consciousness because beyond conscious control), but they experience it entirely differently, because their velcro has changed. This kind of thing happens throughout life, which is why life has predictable stages, and why no two people necessarily experience those stages in the same way or at the same age.
Do you want greater freedom? Become more conscious. Do you want an expanded consciousness? Decide to live more in the present. What do you suppose happened to you, Frank, at your Gateway in 1992 but that you lived for a week in the present moment? Anything and everything else that happened, happened around that fact.
So – if for some reason you feel a call to change your fellow humans, how should you go about it in order to have the best chance of success? First, change yourself! No words of Lincoln’s about compassion and malice toward none are even faintly as persuasive as the memory of how he was. So with you; so with anybody, necessarily. Preaching one thing while exemplifying another may be effective, but the way it will be effective will be in raising people’s resistances (they perceiving the contradiction in you) and thus offering them a chance to become conscious of what was aroused within themselves. It won’t be effective in any other way, and it isn’t likely to be very effective in any case, because few people will translate their irritation into self-examination.
All right. So – spiritual influences on us?
Every influence on your consciousness is a spiritual influence. If you don’t see that, you don’t yet understand the picture we have been painting for you and with you.
That’s cryptic enough. Care to say more?
Everything in life is spirit, because everything, no matter how “lifeless” or “inert” or “material” it may appear to be, is of course emanated from the underlying non-physical – just as you yourself are! There is nothing dead in the world, not stone, not air, not hydrogen molecules, not anything. If it exists, it exists alive.
In an absolute sense, therefore, every influence upon you is spiritual – and of course what it is influencing is equally spiritual, because what else could you be?
Now, if we move into perception of duality, and accept matter/spirit as one such duality, of course we know your everyday rough-and-ready definitions of the difference. But various phenomena that would be otherwise inexplicable – boundary-line experiences, call them – become less enchanting and perplexing in so far as you realize that really it’s all one thing. We keep coming back to it because we want you to keep coming back to it – as above, so below. As without, so within.
Acting (or thinking, anyway) within the matter/spirit division, we can say that any ringmaster has three levels of influences to react to. The spiritual level (the non-physical level in however strict a sense of the word) has been well described over many millennia; it is for your time to translate this well-articulated knowledge into terms acceptable to you. If you cannot delve into religious thought because your own resistances prevent you from risking your prejudices (that you may cherish as your knowledge, or your wisdom, or even as your maturity and intellectual freedom), you cannot go far.
The example to follow is Carl Gustav Jung, physician and psychiatrist, forced by impulses he did not understand (but was wise enough not to ignore) to study alchemy! His educated, scientific side was outraged that he would waste his consciousness on obvious nonsense. But others within him held him to the task, until he discovered the truth behind the disrespected façade. It was not the Gnostic texts that brought him wisdom, nor was it his association of Gnostic texts with his on-going medical experience. It was his struggle to give Gnostic texts a fair hearing. It was the struggle that freed his consciousness, you see. Similarly, it is the struggle with anything within yourself that has an attraction/repulsion to you that offers the potential to move you along. Sticking to what you know is not a formula for progress.
Now, a word about your time and religious dogma. You have seen and of course we have seen how many of your friends have said they had religion “rammed down their throat” – but they do not complain of having had evolution rammed down their throat, or materialism, or nihilism, or – what shall we call it? – polarities by opinion (rather than community of action) as a norm. Why is that?
There’s resentment there; not sure why.
It is, we would suggest, because any religious training people received occurred in the context of childhood and, especially, adolescence. This is not the best time to be told to believe something or else.
Hmmm. Why didn’t I react the same way? I certainly left the church in my teens mentally and then outwardly.
For one thing, you were so much into the spiritual underpinnings that you hardly noticed the religious structures. For another, you never really thought about it. The third reason is that the religion you were born into fit you emotionally, intellectually, and (so to speak) physically (in that your entire environment took it for granted). It was only when other strands of your person-group came to the fore that you had to go off on your own.
Interesting. That’s why I don’t have velcro that makes me bristle at the very idea of the church, but can look at it somewhat dispassionately as a human institution with the usual human mixed motives and mixed performance.
Yes. You can consider it without it threatening any significant strands within you. This makes you more comfortable with it as an abstraction, though it wouldn’t make it any more comfortable if you had to try to live within it. But for those who find the very subject raising violent resistances, we would point out – here is a key to greater consciousness, greater wholeness.
It is true that “what you resist, persists.” Perhaps you can see that this is only a partial statement, which could be filled out to say something like, “what you resist, persists so that you may remember to pay attention to it as an opportunity.”
As I say, interesting. Well, it’s eight o’clock, so I’m going to quit for now. Thanks as always.