Monday, June 1, 2020
5:40 a.m. Gentlemen: “Joint endeavors”?
Conceptualization precedes change of active circumstances; at least, it does sometimes. Once you have overcome prior conditioning, new possibilities arise.
Put plainly, you are saying that once we know enough to discard past limitations, they no longer bind us, and we are free to live differently.
Free to – and responsible to. Knowledge not lived is sin.
Edgar Cayce, I think it was. I haven’t thought of that quotation in a long time. “Sin” meaning what the conventional Edgar Cayce would have conceived of it, or sin as missing the mark, or some other way of thinking about it?
Cayce’s source had to use the vocabulary, syntax and grammar Cayce had developed in his life, but did not need to limit itself to his concepts and definitions. How could anything new have come from doing that? So no, not “sin” as Cayce’s fundamentalist church would have defined it, nor quite as his more mainstream church of his later years either. But “sin” as deliberately choosing not to do what you know you should do, or as choosing to do what you should not do, yes.
A lot of definitions packed into that sentence, especially around the word “should.”
Yes, but it is a side-trail. The point is, when you know something, you have a responsibility to live it. Whether you live up to that responsibility is another matter – but you do have it.
I take it that doesn’t mean a responsibility to live it in a certain way. Or – what does it mean?
That answer will depend upon each of you. Different circumstances amount to a different mission. One of the laws of life we keep reminding you of: One size does not fit all. Let each person consult its own conscience.
So what is it you are referring to at the moment?
What is the next step from functioning separately? Functioning jointly.
Since that doesn’t necessarily follow logically, I assume you mean to just state it flatly.
Take it or leave it, yes. Or would you prefer to waste time and temper defining smoke?
This seems very unlike your normal teaching mode.
We aren’t in the mood for playing around, you might say.
You have me wondering. I’d say, whatever mood you are in, it is a bad mood, impatient, dismissive. I don’t know that I like it and I certainly am not used to it. So it may be a quality of the moment, or it may be connected to my speculation about the wheels within wheels behind the chaos erupting on America’s streets, but for whatever reason, I get the feeling that I am tuned into a station I don’t much like. I think I’ll try again later, see if I can get a better station.
6:05 a.m. Interesting. Thought I’d go back to sleep, but not sleepy. I realized I had a slight headache, rare these days, and I also realized I hadn’t used any formula such as “at my own level or higher.” Now, I rarely do, but that doesn’t mean it can’t help or in fact may not be needed sometimes.
So, let’s try again. I wish to connect to whatever sources are available and willing to communicate information that will be for the highest good of myself and those who read it. Any sources resonating to my “lower strands,” call them, are not to interfere or try to communicate directly, but may communicate by way of strands that have my best interests at heart.
And while that formulation may itself be logically suspect, I think it will serve. And – circularly enough – I had the feeling that it was being as much dictated as discovered.
Well done, on several counts
- You always have the right to choose among sources.
- You always have the right to reject offerings, and are well advised to do so when they come as dictates rather than as suggestions.
- However you are also well-advised to listen to parts of yourself (as reflected in voices such as you just “heard”); therefore the question becomes how to listen safely and comfortably.
- Headaches may be as informative as anything else, and are better heeded than chemically dissolved. One insight may be worth as much as many aspirin, and may work quicker.
- Asserting control is preferable to living in fear, and of course far preferable to allowing yourself to be dictated to. That isn’t the sense in which we mean you to take dictation!
Well, it’s all pretty circular. Using guidance to protect myself from guidance. Developing a mantra (in effect) by relying on guidance to give me the concepts that will let me keep guidance within bounds.
Yes, but from our point of view, it isn’t any different from your listening and then saying, “I’m probably just making this up.”
So why did our dogmatic mutual friends surface around the question of how we are to use what we have learned? Or am I in error, to feel that they sort of emerged during the discussion?
It came more or less when the question of functioning jointly raised your anxiety levels. That brought in distrust of the information, which amounts to distrust of the process. Distrust is more or less the same as self-division, and that concept should look different to you when seen in the context of an individual who is also a community, rather than the concept of individual as unit.
Hmm. And if self-division opens the door, that is another thing that the Energy Conversion Box, or a protective mantra, or meditation, may protect against.
You’re learning!
Very funny.
Well, we’ve been holding up that realization for a long time, but you couldn’t or wouldn’t see it because it conflicted with your strongly held belief in freedom from rules and rituals.
But one size doesn’t fit all.
Nor does it necessarily fit any one person at all times, no.
So let’s go back to “functioning jointly.” Kindly give me the source and nature of their objections to the topic. And as I write this, the headache returns, so I’ll follow Skip Atwater’s advice from 2000 and will ask what I may be learning from it.
Every time you have left a familiar state to become someone new, anxiety has accompanied the move. After all, the old was well-known, even if uncomfortable or unpleasant. The new is terra incognita.
Something within fears a form of death?
More or less. You might look at it as relegation to the sidelines, or being voted out of office, or being jilted. Everyone wants its place in the sun.
I remember Kelly Neff reassuring me, just prior to my entering Gateway, that a sort of dread accompanying all that anticipation was a good sigh; something inside knew there were going to be big changes, and feared them. In other contexts, acknowledgement has served to allay such pressure. As Dion Fortune said, it is enough to “show willing.”
Not enough, exactly, but that is the key, yes: respect.
So, to return yet again: functioning jointly.
Can you see that this implies a really major redefinition? Not necessarily for everybody; Some may take it in stride. But for you at least.
From lone wolf to part of the herd?
Greater. More like from cat to dog, or from amphibian to bird. It is shape-shifting in its true meaning, not putting on and putting off bodies but natures.
This is more than learning a new skill.
It is dying and rebirthing, not trivial.
And you are going to want a fresh start for that discussion. Very well. Quite an unexpected development today.
Yes, when you had your life so well figured out and pre-planned.
Very funny. Till next time, our thanks.