The living present moment

Saturday, July 24, 2021

4:10 a.m. Yesterday’s information seems to me to have been quite densely packed. A tremendous lot there, if someone is ready for it. or maybe it’s all something everybody already knows. You said, think about it and ask any questions that arise. The only question that surfaces for me right now is the nature of the living present moment, that you described as the organizing principle. I see, looking back (and it took me several minutes to find it) that this was July 10 and 11, already two weeks ago, though I would have thought it was within only the past few days.

Recalibrate now. Receptivity and focus are different activities than actively looking to remember something.

Okay. Slide-switches, as usual.

Now, stop looking at the clock! You spent several minutes looking; so what? Be here, now. And, by an odd coincidence (we smile), that directly ties to the theme.

• Your experience of time divides into two: (1) the living present moment, and (2) everything else.
• We have said, many times, there are no absolute divisions in the universe.
• You have accepted that all moments continue to exist, and somehow exist living, rather than existing in a state of preservation like a fly in amber, or like a series of museum dioramas.
• We remind you that in one sense, “life is but a dream,” projected from a “realer” reality, and therefore the laws governing it are those of the psyche, not of mechanistic 3D interactions.
• You know yourselves to be immortal and invulnerable; and you also feel contingent and helpless, often enough. That is, either you haven’t decided or the reality is self-contradictory, or what you are living is – as we have said – only somewhat real.

Does this carry you over the difficulty?

It may begin to. I get that you are saying that how we experience life depends upon what part of the overall experience we concentrate on.

Well, you got a lot more than that! Without trying to logically justify why what we said sparked over to you in the form of what you got, expand on it a bit. Nobody will be able to follow the jump without intermediate sign-posting.

Okay. I got that our life at this level is a dream of a larger reality, and that we are both in it and out of it. That is, we are both actor and audience. Whether we are also scriptwriter, director, stage manager, etc., I don’t know, but for the moment the important thing is that we are actors doing improv, and audience losing itself in observing. Both elements are equally real within us.

Yes. Good so far. Continue.

Another way to look at it is as our being both insiders and outsiders. As outsiders, we accept the play, the scenery, the cast, even our part in the improv, as objectively “there.” That is, we participate and cannot help participating, just as physically we cannot help having our body being in any one place at a time. As insiders, we know better than to take any of it at face value. We cannot wave our hands and wish the world into non-existence, but we aren’t taken in by its appearance of solidity, either.

Don’t let it become mere words.

No. Well, my sense is that we, at some level way above 3D consciousness, are in connection with the dreamer dreaming the dream. Probably we are that dreamer, to some extent, though I think it would be too simple (and too inflated) to think we are it in any sense in which 3D intellect would participate.

Again?

I just mean, Jung could get glimpses and it enhanced his wisdom; Nietzsche identified with the divine level of things and it destroyed him, the level of forces cracking his vessel like an iron bar against fine porcelain.

Continue.

I doubt there is any absolute division here, any more than anywhere else in the world. We probably partake in divinity just as we partake in 3D restriction – partly, not entirely. Thus we are somewhat at home in either aspect of reality, but not entirely.

Isn’t your whole life one of uneasy coexistence within you of elements that are never entirely “at home”? This is so not only (not even primarily) because of the coexistence of strands, but because within each strand was the same uneasy living on borrowed time, in rented quarters, so to speak. 3D life is inherently a “settling for,” among things that are not only contradictory sometimes, but are out of different realities that have little to say to one another.

Now, you see, the important point here is that you, living at this moment, are alive, you are real, you can choose. You are not dead, nor an abstraction, nor a puppet. As you concentrate on those living features, your life expands – you have life more abundantly – and it has no reference to “externals” of any kind. Being more alive does not necessarily alter your social position; it does necessarily alter you. That is, it alters what of you can be experienced at that moment.

Annoyingly, it seems to be slipping away.

Stop watching the clock and counting pages. Merely focus and maximize receptivity. But actually, let us use this process as an example. Through all these journal entries, every letter written was written in the living present moment, which in effect moved on, or moved you on, so that you could write the next letter. So in effect you could say

1. Your entire entry, every time, was written word by word in the living present, but
2. The whole thing is part of the past, and became part of the past as fast as it came through.

Is this not your life, all of you? Moment by moment you experience this uniquely alive feeling, and moment by moment that feeling detaches and moves along, carrying you with it. Do you not see something strange in this? Doesn’t it strike you as strange?

It does me, as well you know. If it does others, I don’t know.

Well, this is a huge clue to reality, staring you in the face at every moment. What could be stranger? If you accept life as a past, present, future progression, in which the past continually disappears and the future is continually not yet created and the present moment is the only thing that is real, you can make a sort of sense of life. But once that becomes impossible, then what?

Impossible, I take it, as we experience or acknowledge contact between times, between lives, etc.

Among other disturbing anomalies, yes. But it is no advance to say “On the other side, there is no time,” or, for that matter, “Life is but a dream,” if you don’t understand in what way what you say is not true. We will resume on this point: Life is so arranged that during your 3D existence parts of you may experience things that don’t fit into any scheme you devise. That is, there are always distracting, niggling, irritating things that don’t quite fit but can’t be dismissed. The biggest of these is the nature of the present moment.

Well, thanks for all this. It has been 80 minutes, but that includes time spent rooting through past entries. I don’t feel any more tired than usual, so I suppose the effect is caused mostly by the sustained effort of receptivity – if indeed is isn’t “all in my mind.”

In any case, a good effort.

Next time, then.