The larger mental world

Friday, May 28, 2021

5:45 a.m. A very interesting, intelligent, entertaining dream, still in progress as I woke up, and of course gone. So much of our life proceeds beyond our conscious awareness. I wonder why. In fact, I wonder – hard to phrase this clearly – I wonder if non-3D awareness doesn’t have a lot more to do, “day by day,” than we commonly suppose. Does our non-3D awareness have its entertainments, its creative fantasies, its long-running fiction or even non-fiction sagas – beyond Earth and 3D concerns? I wonder.

And of course part of that wonder is, “I wonder if this is an idea suggested by the guys so they can talk about something.” Not that I would mind if it were. Well, is it?

You yourself learned to defuse the meaningless questions, the questions whose answers cannot be determined and in any case would not have any practical effect. Isn’t “Whose idea is this?” one of those useless questions.

I don’t know, it’s all so self-referential. You say I myself came to that conclusion. What would “I myself” even mean? If my 3D and non-3D components are both part of “me,” and if they can’t even function separately (which, I have become convinced, they can’t, despite appearances), it’s really a meaningless question, asking if it were my idea or yours.

Then why pursue the question?

Probably just to reassure myself that it can’t be answered. Sometimes it’s worthwhile to prove to yourself that something really is as you think it is. Except, “prove” is too strong a word, in the circumstances. Let’s proceed to the subject at hand.

It is a wider-ranging question than you might at first think. It has the potential to refashion your somewhat vague ideas about the larger part of life that is not led in 3D circumstances. The non-3D precedes, and accompanies, and continues beyond, your years in 3D. Your real life, as opposed to your “only somewhat real” life as seen in 3D-only terms, is broader, longer, deeper, in a way similar to how your 3D life is broader, longer, deeper than the 3D life of a cat or dog. And, just as a cat or dog would be unable to see your life as you experience it, so your 3D mentality cannot see the non-3D life. However, we can make a few suggestions for you to use, which is something you cannot do for even your most beloved cat or dog. There is an immense difference between two components communicating (on the one hand) and two individuals, or, even more, between members of two different species. Yes, “All is one,” but that doesn’t help you to remember how to make valid distinctions. A distinction may be only relatively real, within an overall unity; still it is there. If you define it away with a formula, you will define it away and come out of the process none the wiser.

Understood.

Now, we’ll start by saying, you, Frank, have been very good about not reacting to new ideas by defending older or more accepted ones. We remind your readers, you don’t learn new things by immediately trying to associate them with older things. That step should come only after you finally consider and absorb the newer idea, otherwise you don’t really consider it per se, you consider it only in so far as it doesn’t or does agree with what you already think.

That’s what mostly happens, I think. People presume that where they have come to is a firm base, and anything new has to prove itself. I can tell in a minute those of my friends who have absorbed your material and made it theirs and then associated it with what they had lived, and on the other hand those who taste what you offer – in effect scan it, or skim over it – and judge it by what they know from their own experience.

That is a common divide, and it occurs within each of you, not merely between any of you. You can’t, in practice, revolutionize your thinking every day. Fortunately, it isn’t necessary. Only be observant of sparks, and be prepared to follow where your spirit leads. That is, pay as much attention to hunches, intuitions, “external” “co-incidences” as to logic and inertia.

So, now, consider that each of you has a combination of conscious, semi-conscious, and entirely unconscious ideas about non-3D life. Anyone’s scheme of things – ours, a religion’s, a metaphysician’s, a nullifier’s [by which I think they mean, someone who thinks there is nothing beyond 3D life] – will contradict at least some elements of that combination, because the combination is not consistent or thought-out (felt-out, we should say); it contains contradictions, vaguenesses, ungrounded and perhaps unfounded certainties. How is anyone to come up with something to satisfy all such heterogeneous convictions?

Plus, notice, most descriptions of non-3D still center on 3D life.

I was just thinking that. Paul Brunton’s brilliant two-volume analysis of the reality behind appearances proves (or proved to me, anyway, I being very willing to see things that way) that 3D reality is a projection from a higher space. He does not, though, attempt to give us a glimpse of non-3D life in and of itself, unrelated to our 3D experience.

After all, most such explorers are attempting to bring back something of use for people still living a 3D life. One could argue, with Thoreau, “One world at a time.” And those who have tried to give a glimpse – Monroe in Far Journeys, Swedenborg in various volumes, others throughout the ages – have been seriously handicapped by the amount of translation required.

Monroe said so, explicitly: “You do the best you can.”

We’re doing the best we can (as are you, we recognize). But it is a slow process at best. Every sentence – practically every word – needs context, and the context needs context. It can be done, but not in ten words or less.

This is the beginning of a long series, isn’t it? While I work on summarizing Alcott’s first 50 sayings, I take it.

You wanted the best of both worlds – daily conversations with us, and something productive for at least a couple of all the other hours in a day. We can try it, anyway.

The subject could be begun from far away, but how would you ground it? So we will start up close, in what you “almost-experience”: Let’s put it that way.

Dreams.

Dreams, but not only dreams. Let’s call it the larger mental world you inhabit but are aware of only intermittently: Dreams, fantasies, explorations, tendencies.

You experience them as disconnected, episodic, often meaningless, often devoid of context. But that is how you experience them, not how they are inherently. Your 3D-conscious mind cannot maintain itself, doing chin-ups to see over the wall, so all you get is disconnected glimpses.

I always remember the few seconds I was in a realer reality, interacting with the somewhat surprised inhabitants, ending with my hearing myself say to them that I couldn’t  sustain it, and dropping back into this reality.

Yes. That more commonly happens with recreational drug use, or certain religious or esoteric routines – occasionally by particular kinds of illness. Glimpsing that a greater reality – a realer reality – exists is common among such experiences. What is seen in the glimpses varies according to the 3D person’s beliefs, experiences, and capacity to absorb the unfamiliar. In any case, one’s 3D mind is going to associate it with whatever it can find in 3D life to try to make sense of it.

Now, you see, there is your hour, and we have scarcely made a beginning. But you will at least see the drift: We shall begin to explore the larger mental world, probably beginning with dreams.

It occurs to me, surely Seth has covered this ground.

Have you needed to know what Seth said, to get this far?

No, just the opposite. All right, till next time, then, and thanks. And I’ll work on summarizing Alcott.

—–

Frank DeMarco, author

Papa’s Trial: Hemingway in the Afterlife, a novel