Sunday, May 30, 2021
4 a.m. I wake from another absorbing dream, one built, I think, on a Netflix drama I saw last night. Gone instantly upon my getting up. The mere act of standing up and watching to be sure I had my balance was enough to move my mental focus, and while I knew for sure that I had dreamed, I no longer remembered what I had been dreaming. And I’m getting the sense that this is as much demonstration of your point as it is anything else.
So, over to you. You were saying?
We are not under the illusion that most people will find what we have to say very interesting, even if we are able to shed some light upon our subject, which is, we remind you, the nature of non-3D life when not considered in reference to 3D life. Still, it is worth attempting, and there are a few for whom it will be productive (even, perhaps, revolutionary) and there will be more as time goes on and shifts the base from which people come to it.
You say that as though it were a sure thing that what we’re doing will be remembered.
Yes, we do.
I hear, “You worry too much.”
Well? Don’t you? Whatever will happen, will happen entirely independently of anyone’s worries over it. Thought, intent, concern, action, decision, sure; together or separately, they may have an effect. Worry? Never. Worry’s only function is as a place-holder, assuring that you don’t forget about whatever you worry about. Any other side-effect is negative, and even the place-holder effect is often enough negative. Let the universe take care of itself; it has done this before, no matter what “this” you can think of. And remember, your 3D life consists of your 3D consciousness encountering the shared subjectivity in just such a way as to be given the opportunity to choose to continue or to change on whatever issues arise.
Okay, so we will take for granted that the work we are doing will not be wasted.
How could it be? No matter what the work, how could anything be wasted? That can happen only when you look at a thing incompletely.
I think you’re saying, “that can seem to happen when…”
Yes, of course. The impression of waste is always an ignoring of at least some context. Just as there is no “away” into which to throw away something, so there is no disconnection between any one thing in your life and all the rest of your life. You may not draw the connection, but it is there. How could it not be? So to the extent that you worry, it is almost comical, or would be if one considered the worry outside of its context of pain and fear.
And even pain and fear may be useful, I get.
Nothing is wasted. However, you can choose to live in joy and expectation, or in fear and shrinking-away-from. It is always your choice; it is never dictated by circumstances.
As an example of non-wastage, take our sessions, that usually are only partly concerned with what they are purportedly about, and partly with procedure, or with any seemingly irrelevant side-topic that suggests itself. Considered as if a logical proposition being demonstrated, the sessions would seem ludicrously ill-thought-out, even, you might say, unedited. They look like stream-of-consciousness (which in a way they are) ramblings (which they are not).
Yes. I’ve gotten, over time, that you mix content and context and procedural tips and encouragement and course-correction and what-all, and you do it deliberately as part of a technique. I have taken it to be that you were pursuing two goals at once. Or, not “goals” but – well, what?
Let’s say pursuing two lines of instruction. Not “goals” as that would imply an end-point, but “lines” implying vectors. And it is not exactly two lines. It is more that we are encouraging you to move your center of gravity by changing your view of many things.
So that we may have life more abundantly.
Yes. Life more abundantly stems not from a change in specific beliefs or even habits, but a change in how you experience the world – which, you understand, means how you experience yourself. That’s the only real revolution possible, or needed. That’s why what we show you is less important for you than how we show you. And of course far more important than how we show you something is how you receive it. The universe doesn’t care if you learn from us or from Seth or from observing your neighbors’ lives. The only thing is for you to remember that you are the center of your universe, and that everything, in effect, was created for your sake, like it or not. That doesn’t mean you like it or don’t like it; it doesn’t mean things were created only for your sake; it doesn’t, in fact, mean that all your experience was created for your sake at all, in any exclusive sense. It means, it is as if it were created only for you.
Because it always has in it exactly what we need.
It has to, by definition.
Yes, I see that, and I usually feel it, too.
That’s the process of changing your life, or let’s say that’s the indicator, that you more and more feel the truth of something that at first may be only a dry intellectual belief that nonetheless has a certain allure for you, a certain hint that here is something real for you.
So, your dreams. Doesn’t it strike you as odd that so much of your life’s time and energy should go to something closed to your normal consciousness? you know that sleep is essential to sanity: Almost nobody can live without sleeping. You know that experiencing altered consciousness in one or another way is similarly essential to most people’s consciousness. Day-dreaming at the very least is necessary as a relaxation of effort that enables you to shift gears, know it or not. Fantasies compensate for missing expressions of completeness.
I interrupt to say, I’m pretty sure you are saying the Walter Mitty effect helps us overcome the lack of something we need in our mental lives.
Let’s say it provides, without needing to be expressed among the external subjectivity that is the 3D “external” world, something that balances the experience of the life being lived.
And beyond daydreams and fantasy?
Many other states. No need to itemize. The point is that consciousness is a pretty continuous process of alternation of states, which is why prolonged concentration (for example) can be painful and in any event requires development as a habit. You could say that consciousness is the process of continuous change. Or – same thing – you could say that 3D consciousness is the continuous process of readjustment to the present moment. If you will think about that, you may be led far away into productive “side-trails.”
It makes me see us as delicate needles registering change, not so much by what we notice as by what we experience.
As we say, thinking about our statement may lead to productive results, unsuspected in advance.
So, are dreams, etc., indicators of these changes? Indicators of our noticing these changes? What?
Let’s say they are halfway-points between your accustomed awareness and the quality of the present moment that you always participate in, know it or not, like it or not.
And if we don’t notice them?
They are not produced for you to notice them or not notice them. Your attention on them will reflect your own attitude and momentary possibilities; it will not affect the world other than however it will affect you.
That is, if it happens to affect us, fine, but it exists for reasons of its own.
Not so much “for reasons of its own” as – well, an aurora borealis: Can you say it exists for the observer? Can you say it exists for reasons of its own? It exists as a natural effect of natural causes. So do your dreams, or rather, so do the effects of which your dreams are a sort of reflection.
And there’s our time.
Yes. It is a natural place to pause.
Our thanks as ever.