An extraordinary moment

An extraordinary moment

Monday, June 29, 2020

5 a.m. A dream.

A very interesting experience. The specifics fade rapidly, but the sense of it remains. A few of us were at this college, meeting with various college officials, in a big hall – a mess hall, I want to call it, only there was no element of Army about it. Ed Carter was leading the questioning, I think. [Ed Carter became a friend in 1990 as I edited his novel Living Is Forever.] We would discuss a question and at some point a new question would arise from it, and Ed would ask for numbers and they would provide them and we would look into what that meant. I don’t think the process was planned in advance, it sort of grew. But it became a seminar, looking more and more deeply into practical questions. At some point I said, to someone we were with, that I was hungry, time for lunch.

But as I woke up, I knew that this wasn’t merely an “entertainment” dream, nor something made up of things suggested by recent reading. It felt like the dreaming itself had a purpose. The purpose wasn’t so much within the dream, as exemplified by the dream.

Guys? Any enlightenment for us?

Remember the ongoing seminar in the conference room in the upper world tree. [A place I sometimes go during a shamanic journey.] This is similar.

The process has present-world application?

Of course, and your Zoom meetings with your ILC group is an example of how collegiality may lead to greater depth of understanding. No one is in it for the sake of profit, because there is no profit in it; nor for prestige, nor one-up-man-ship nor any other externally oriented reason.; you are together for the thing itself, even if the thing itself is not yet clear.

Ed? Should I be addressing you directly?

Remember, everything you do from here becomes increasingly free-form. There isn’t so much “should” about things.

You say remember, but I don’t know that anybody has made that point before. If they have, I didn’t pick it up, anyway.

Well, either way, it is true. In a time of the breaking of old forms, it is to be expected that your personal freedom of action is greatly expanded for a time. The time doesn’t last forever, even judged against a human lifespan, so make the best of it.

Do you have any hints for us?

If you have only a limited time of greater freedom, greater possibilities, you should use it for the most important things. Don’t squander it; don’t fritter it away on inessentials.

Each of us making our own decision on what is inessential or not.

As always.

So if our ILC group, for instance, regards the acquisition of greater access as a priority, we shouldn’t be wasting our time on politics or economics or sports, say.

No, that is too broad, and also too one-pointed. Each individual knows or can know what is most important to the community he or she is. No two priority lists are likely to agree completely, and some will differ widely. But when people come together around some common interest, they don’t need for the rest of their lists to agree. All they need to agree on is whatever called them together. Think of it as a quilting bee. Do all the quilters have to have the same politics, prefer the same cars, watch the same TV shows? How would a herd mentality aid any of them, let along all of them?

All right.

The point here is that your group in the dream had a practical purpose beneath its superficial activity. You can’t even remember why you had all assembled there, but you saw how we began investigating the practical question of how much a full college education cost, then what made up those costs, then how could the costs be reduced, then the question of whether college should have one aim (and, you may not quite remember, we wound up dividing the result into three streams).

Because we had a practical set of questions, practicality led us to better and better answers, by means of better questions that elicited answers revealing more of the underlying reality of the situation. Everybody in the process – not least, those who had to find the data to answer the questions – learned.

I see the analogy about inquiry. I think I’ m still missing most of what you want to tell me.

Don’t hurry, it tenses you up and slows communication.

Okay. Recalibrating.

The first critical point to absorb is that you are right now in a long moment of extraordinary freedom from established form. That means, not so much social mores or even personal opinion, but something harder to describe.

Yes, I get the sense of it. We are accustomed to living within our own perceived limits, whatever we think they are, but right now we are in a moment where we may transcend those limits.

Where those limits cease to exist, because they were never more substantial than your ideas about things. But this moment will not last forever. If you want to take advantage of it, do so now.

And we do so how?

Encourage each other with true extraordinary stories, for one thing. Dirk is good at that, although his are so extraordinary (that is, his ordinary is so far removed from most people’s) that first must come the process of people learning to trust his accounts in the same way they trust him emotionally. Your own stories, pretty freely shared, are less extraordinary and therefore are more suited for some, and less useful for others. And this range will hold true for everyone. Everyone has a trove of extraordinary experiences and even extraordinary things taken for granted that they tell only to those they trust, and often not even to them. This is the time to go public. The result will be mutually invigorating and heartening.

This is the same process that occurs between the lines at Monroe, for instance.

Most of what happens at Monroe is that people experience a safe space to share extraordinary things, and when censorious or self-righteous participants attack that space, results plummet. In the absence of such constriction, though, extraordinary expansion occurs, in a very short time, not because the tapes produce it but because the tape, the undeclared mental environment, the trainers, the fellow-feeling of the participants, all act to create a magical moment.

Now that magical moment is at hand for anyone willing to claim it. It will shape your limits behind your back if you do not use it consciously. Some will “learn” that the world is dangerous and that they are surrounded by enemies, as they take their fears to be validated. But some will remember that they are magical beings surrounded by love and magical others (who are not as much “other” as you think). It’s a matter of time and attention and above all of daring to believe you are what you want to be.

This doesn’t have to have anything to do with externals. Many a rose blooms unseen. But it has everything to do with intent.

And, I get, with an intent to help and rejoice in each other.

Of course. Only, recognize that for those unable to sign on to that “of course,” it is an “of course not.” It’s all in your intent. You came to 3D to shape who and what you are. Take advantage of this more elastic time to do your shaping more effectively.

Thanks, Ed. Big day for me when Eleanor Friede sent us your manuscript! Be well.

I could and do say the same to you, and to Rich and to Joyce, who joins me in that wish. [Rich, Joyce, Ed and I bonded in Lifeline in 1995.]

Many thanks.

 

One thought on “An extraordinary moment

  1. This is the time of the Interlude, a pause between what was and what is next. The pause gives us time for reflection, and each of us will ponder this time differently and find our meanings therein.

    It seems that as the world around us tries to go back to “business as usual,” the pandemic seems to be pushing back. What did we learn during our time of introspection? Have we so quickly forgotten that as we rush to find a normalcy that is no longer there?

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