Wednesday, August 4, 2021
2:25 a.m. Let’s continue. I get that we still don’t quite have the relationship of spirit and present-moment that we are reaching for.
No, not quite, because to get it, you will need to shed a couple of unconsciously held ideas about time and change and sequence. Your 3D experience leads you to expect certain relationships, and to some extent unfits you for going beyond those expectations.
[Having a hard time concentrating. The outside temperature must have dropped 20 degrees, and my body is somehow a sensitive barometer. I often have trouble when the temperature takes swooping drops like that. (It is 65 degrees at 2:45 a.m.) Even with the house closed off against that change (it is 79 indoors, according to the indoor/outdoor thermometer), somehow my body knows. My sinuses and nasal passages are filled, and so far they refuse to return to normal. It makes it had to breathe normally, therefore hard to focus. Maybe more later.]
4:15 a.m. Maybe try again, two crossword puzzles and several Minesweeper games later. I can breathe through my nose again. So, maximum focus, maximum receptivity and clarity of expression. You’re on.
Your every 3D experience tells you that time flows in a steady sequence, one moment after the previous, each leading to the next. It tells you that time is somehow “out there” – that is, objective, just as it tells you that the world itself is somehow “there,” connected to you only in mysterious ways. It offers no explanation as to why “this moment” becomes “that moment,” or why your life of many years becomes somehow divorced from the life you lead at the moment.
It is to explicate these puzzles that we have been engaging in these long conversations.
I know, and I appreciate it. Life never made much sense to me, not in the commonly accepted terms. But it’s one thing to say something makes no sense, and quite another to see a better way to understand things.
So let us talk a bit more about time and change and sequence and spirit. Remember – we realize this is a very long chain of conversations – remember, ultimately we want to give you an idea of your “afterlife” so-called. It is just that we can’t describe your life beyond your present 3D existence if we haven’t clarified what you are busy experiencing now. However, stay tuned, and if we all work at it, we’ll get there.
“We all,” I take it, meaning you and me and anyone who reads this and wrestles with it.
That’s right. So –
- The word as commonly used slides unpredictably among several meanings. It may mean a time, or the abstract idea of time, or it may mean the passage from one moment to the next. We’ll have to look at this more closely.
- Stemming from (enmeshed in) a certain conception of time, this implies a predecessor, a present-moment, and a successor. Of course it doesn’t need to be an on-going sequence, it can be a sequence already completed, but the steps will be the same, even if still in the pluperfect, or, for that matter, in the future tense.
- Sometimes forgotten in discussing this concept is the fact that it absolutely implies replacement. As ordinarily used, it does not imply duplication with alteration, it implies the destruction of something and its replacement by something different. Continuous change implies continuous destruction and continuous replacement. The more closely you look at that process, the less likely it will appear, but until you do stop to consider it, it will appear matter-of-fact and obvious, because that is what your senses tell you, day in and day out.
- Now what in the world can “spirit” have to do with change and time and sequence? You will note, we have been careful, these many years, not to use “spirit” in the vague way people often do use it, as a sort of counterbalance to the word “material,” or “physical.” (For that, we usually use “non-3D.”)
- We pair “spirit” with :soul,” as you will remember. Soul is life enmeshed in 3D, with all its complications. Spirit is life not enmeshed in 3D. It affects 3D, it animates it, but it is not itself affected by it.
Now, if you think about how we have defined spirit and soul, you will see that your soul – that is, your essence, whatever that may be, as it has been shaped in your 3D time-space experience – cannot merely go buzzing off by itself.
This isn’t coming out clearly.
You try it, and we’ll pick it up.
You mean, I’m pretty sure, that we souls, being communities of communities and being constituents of higher communities that we may or may not recognize, are and remain enmeshed in the times that shaped us, and that we shaped in return. That is, to envisage Joe Smallwood jetting off into space like Bob Monroe’s AA and BB, is to mistake appearance and essence.
Yes, only that last could use some spelling-out.
I mean, Joe Smallwood is a role played by whatever his “higher self” actually is. That is appearance, persona. That’s the character that his higher self set out into 3D to play. The essence – the spark within Joe Smallwood, the animating force – is not confined to that role any more than Leonard Nimoy was really Spock. That essence is free to move on to other roles, or to retire and play non-3D golf, or whatever. And unless I mistake you seriously, you are calling us in our roles souls, and us as actors spirit. It is logical (thanks, Spock!) that spirit and soul would have a different afterlife experience, given that they had different 3D life experiences.
Logical, but misleading. For one thing, in your 3D life your character may become more aware of its actor-ness. What are you doing right now, if not that? And of course the actor is affected by its experience on the role Ask Nimoy! We merely mean to say, do not divorce actor and role, nor personality and essence, nor non-3D and 3D, nor – and here is the nub of it – spirit and soul. To the degree that they become divided (by the soul’s barriers to awareness), problems arise. To the degree that they function ever more closely together, new opportunities arise. Why would you want spirit to forget its experience as Joe Smallwood (or anyone, of course)? Similarly, why would you want Joe Smallwood to lose effective connection with spirit, thus losing most of his awareness?
Aha, there is the nub of something. Care to explain?
Your connection with spirit is the breath of life, literally as well as figuratively. The broader the bandwidth, the richer your life.
Life more abundantly.
Or course. Now, the conditions of 3D life present problems in maintaining awareness of that connection, but they do not prevent it. and they continually give you one massively obvious opportunity to hone the connection.
The present moment.
What else do you have available to provide that extra energy (define it how you will) that makes you alive? If there is a way that we have missed to stress the importance of living in the present moment, we regret it. The present moment is the only place you have, the only place to stand, the only place to change. It is where you and spirit are closest.
But then what of all those past moments?
You mean, why can’t it be everywhen at once?
Well, I mean, why is spirit confined to any one moment, and that moment always moving, or seeming to?
Because time enforces sequence, and sequence serves a purpose. Perhaps next time we should begin with the concept of opportunity costs.
We have visited that concept often enough. It merely means, “If you are doing X, you can’t at the same time be doing Y, so the opportunity cost of doing X is that you can’t do Y.”
Yes, we know. but you may find it has unexpected uses when considered in the context of the question of why life proceeds moment by moment. Call today’s session “Change and sequence,” perhaps, or perhaps a better title will suggest itself.
Our thanks as always.