Tuesday, September 19, 2017
[The following entry reverses my custom of putting “my” words into italics and “their” words in Roman. I do that because I expect my words to be far fewer than theirs, and italic is harder to read in large blocks than Roman. But in this session, at least, my portion is the lion’s share, so we’ll flip the convention and leave my words in Roman for ease of reading.]
Stories and forces
While I was getting ready to communicate, this stray thought came to me, and I realized, maybe not so “stray” after all: All my reading of novels, of history and biography, and my frequent viewings and re-viewings of films may be seen in a different way, in light of the hint thrown out the other day by whatever force I was talking to. Behind all those stories of individuals are other stories of forces, of conflicts of forces, of ebbs and flows of power. And by power I do not mean power over others, but the power that flows through people for its own purposes.
This will strike some people as fanciful, as inappropriately concrete metaphor, so they will think either it is playing with words or it is being seduced by words into cloud-cuckoo-land.
That is because one level does not understand another.
And I can feel how inadequate language is. Trying to render what I just got there, the best I could do missed most of it.
Your practice has been to develop your skill, which has meant, to bend your habits in certain directions in order to compensate for tendencies that would interfere.
Okay, we’re going to have to work differently, aren’t we?
We are. Express it.
Well, “express it” says it in a nutshell. Let me try to say what I just got.
A long process of development
The whole sequence moved from my initial attempts at automatic writing (imitating what I thought I understood from what I had read), through communicating with The Boss, then a personified Evangeline, then The Guys Upstairs, then individuals such as David Poynter and Joseph Smallwood, then historically recognized figures like Carl Jung and others, then – interspersed through the process more as exceptions than as part of a progression – people I had known like my old friend David Schlachter and finally Rita.
[“The Boss” was my first attempt to personify unidentified and still only vaguely experienced forces. Evangeline and then The Guys Upstairs were more sophisticated conceptualizations. David Poynter and Joseph Smallwood (though the names may well be incorrect) were experienced as “past lives,” at a time when I had a much simpler view of reincarnation.]
That’s a long process, extending from about 1989. Viewed as a process, you could say it led me along by experience, with gradually accumulating experience continually or repeatedly not only modifying what I thought I knew, but modifying my practice. It was a long sequence of events aimed in part at changing how I went about things, correcting not only mistaken ideas but, perhaps more fundamentally, habitual traits that tended to interfere.
This latest course-correction was to get me to slow down, to settle in, more than I have ever done or been able to do. There are forces that can only be heard when we are still enough.
Well, just as my perceptions have changed, and my ability to work with those perceptions, so has my part in these discussions. It has been a good long time since I was only a scribe writing down whatever pearls the other side cared to (or was able to) share with us. With time and confidence and changes in interlocutors came changes in my role. Dictation became conversation. Conversation clarified into part instruction, part how-to. From the beginning, the process was never what I expected on the basis of what I had read. Instead, it was peculiar to me. It was quite disconcerting to Rita in 2001, I remember. She was not used to a process where the person communicating was right there, passing along humor from “them.” But she and I worked with the situation, and matters progressed accordingly. I don’t see how we could have done our work then, let alone our work subsequently, if we had tried to make what came to us fit into some preconceived box in format or content. And now, I think we’re changing gears once again. From the two words I’ve received this morning, I have a ream of information that I have to be able to say.
A new departure
It’s like we’re edging toward Bob Monroe’s “rotes,” where non-verbal transmission of information has to be unpacked into words, which can only be done by someone familiar with 3D restrictions of thought and experience. That’s fine, and I don’t mind, but it is going to be very different. If indeed that’s what is in store.
So, these paragraphs, all these words, have been in response to “Express it.” Earlier it was, “One level does not understand another,” and it was with that sentence that I realized that our manner of proceeding was going to have to change. Bear in mind, I am not complaining. I think it is a good thing. But it is different, and should be seen as a new departure.
By “One level does not understand another,” I got that we all speak at our own level of understanding, so not everybody speaks at the same level. Some are incapable of seeing any level but the one they are used to. Some move in their lifetimes from one to another, leaving behind not only the habit but even the memory of the former level. Some – I’m one – move from level to level, partly inadvertently or unconsciously, partly upon demand as they learn to discern different levels. I don’t think there is any implied “better” or “worse” about it, but it is a difference in the three states. Either (1) stable and relatively unchanging, or (2) stable, then transformed, then stable again, or (3) a stability consisting of fluidity.
Now, those of us who are able to move among levels – and I don’t think there are only two levels, in fact I think the concept of level is itself a metaphor – I think we are here as translators, stitching together different levels of understanding, so to speak. I’ll bet that anybody who has been following the Rita material is one. And as I was writing that, I started to look for a name for what we are, and I was reminded that the Indians called Joseph Smallwood the commuter, the man who alternated from one world to the other. [See Chasing Smallwood.] That referred to him going back and forth between Indians and white worlds, but that same habit of mind that could translate different ways of seeing things might persist, I suppose.
Or might be an effect of prior training.
Hmm. Such as Joseph the Egyptian, you mean?
[Pause]
Dramas as doorways
Well, the point I’m taking such a long time getting to is that what is obvious reality to one level is fantasy to another. We see it in our 3D lives and it is also “as above, so below.” It just depends upon how far you care to extend it.
So, an example. If I say that our 3D lives are only somewhat real because we are the embodiment of forces beyond the 3D level, some people intuitively get it. In fact, it is more like I am agreeing with something they already know than like they are hearing anything new. But others have to wrestle with it, at first having to take on faith that I am not speaking nonsense, then seeing what they can make of it. And others not only can’t make anything out of it, but you might say won’t. It is self-evidently nonsense, and they aren’t going to waste their time. The different levels don’t translate.
And this brings us back to the thought that came to me as I sat down to do this: Dramas in whatever form are stories, and stories are, shall we say, peepholes, or entry-points, or, better, doorways into other levels of meaning. But doorways are only doorways if you walk through them, and in this case a safety-valve (to severely mix the metaphor) is that those who are not ready to go through the doorways never even see them as such.
And I think that rounds out what we are going to get from these two cryptic expressions. This is a very interesting development. I will say, pro forma, to the energy system that is communicating to us, thank you. But my sense is that he is far beyond such human interaction.