Wednesday, September 15, 2021
10:10 a.m. Why is playing hookey from something you love doing nevertheless satisfying? I first began trying to hold today’s conversation four hours ago, nearly, and I have been consciously fooling around ever since, doing anything and everything but signing on. I wonder why. Gentlemen, what’s on your agenda today?
The reason for your reluctance may be – often is – uncertainty where we’re going next. That is, we notice that when we say, “Next time, let’s talk about X,” you are quite easy with it. When we don’t and you have backlogged questions or we are in the midst of a continuing discussion, similarly you are easy. But when you don’t know what comes next – or, no, when you are unconsciously afraid that you have lost the trail or that the trail has petered out – then you sometimes clutch.
Well, we do have the four topics you suggested: strands, which we began and for all I know finished; the specialization that we are; the meaning of life; the meaning of any one life. I have a post-it note on Sept. 2, or I would not be able to remember them. When I change journals in a few days, I’ll have to recopy them, I guess.
Discussing specialization may not require a lot of words, though, who knows, perhaps it will. Everything depends upon what takes us where, and what connects to what, and where you are, quite as much as anything else. Nobody is always in a position to receive any given bit of insight. You may think of yourselves as entirely receptive, but there are limits not tied to your will or even to your consciousness.
Speaking of receptivity, I now set my slide-switches. I suppose if I had thought to do that at 6:30, I might have found myself more “in the mood.”
Record what just happened, and we will discuss.
As I wrote the sentence about “if,” I felt my awareness shift, and I am again looking at my body writing to my dictation. Again, it is as if my consciousness had moved physically higher in my skull, but the more important part is the shift I perspective, I think.
We get this on the record as a symbol of what happens to you mostly unknown and therefore unrecorded. You all think of yourselves as relatively stable platforms for consciousness, but in fact you move continually. Indeed, in your circumstances (3D) you have to move in order to stay in place relatively.
Does my new awareness of it signify?
A gain in awareness is always a good thing in itself, but better if put into context.
[Pause]
Isn’t that what I just asked? Why the pause?
There is an inherent conflict between your remaining in an unaccustomed state of mind (on the one hand) and bringing in new material at the same time. The work involved – mostly but not entirely at a pre-conscious level – tends to activate parts of you that compete, you might say, for the attention you are giving to the unfamiliar sensations and – more importantly – the unfamiliar place you are in. (We said unfamiliar; we did not say unprecedented, of course.)
Is this new place connected to my setting the slide-switches?
It is, in the sense of a tightening of your focus while already engaging us. It is not tied to the switches per se, of course.
Now, let us use this as a jumping-off point to make our simple points about specialization. Intuitively you will have picked up just where we are going.
I think so.
- Frank is highly intuitive, very skilled in the use of words, prone to think about certain abstract questions, connected to a strand with a genius and a delight in interpretation. He is also skeptical of panaceas, impatient with what he calls herd-thinking, untrusting of either the accepted wisdom or proposed substitutes for that accepted wisdom. He loves to read history, biography, fiction, and speculation religious, metaphysical, scientific and social.
- All these traits produce someone willing and able to do exactly what it is he does. Should this be a surprise?
- Frank has many friends and friendly acquaintances, some of whom he has interacted with in the flesh, some only at a distance via electronics or print, and some he never met or could meet, via the books they wrote or the traces they left on the world.
- Is it to be expected that Frank will meet anyone who exactly duplicates his characteristics? Would it be even possible?
- As with him, so with everybody, of course. Your history, your predilections, your skills, your friends – who could duplicate thiam all? Of course some run parallel, and that is always a joy of 3D life, but who could duplicate them?
- So when we say you are all unique, we mean more than the fact that your birthdates and birth places and life circumstances are different. (For one thing, the fact that the externals are different is not incidental. They are different because you are different, not only the other way around.)
- But the 3D universe is thought, remember, not objects in space. It is a dream, in a way. It is spun by consciousness.
- Nor does it have loose parts, dead ends, meaningless coincidences, nor contradiction nor paradox. Any or all of these things it may have relatively, within its limits, but not The world is all one thing; it all hangs together.
All that being so, what does it mean that each of you is unique? We flatly deny that this – or anything – is what is called “by chance.” So what does it mean?
Well, I take it to mean that we are all filling niches. The universe needs us to witness and experience, or so it seems, though God knows why. What good does it do anyone that some gangbanger in New York reports to the non-3D that murderous thugs continue to thrive? Why does it need to hear that yep, another X thousand undernourished babies died last night, and more on the way?
Your question answers itself, even if it poses another.
I guess it does. The universe, unlike us, prefers to be aware of everything that is happening, not merely the parts it approves of.
That would be our response. And the question it suggests?
Why does it need that reality to exist in the first place?
And you can answer that one, too.
My answer doesn’t bring us very much farther, I’m afraid. It’s a freewill universe and this is what happens when you leave the children unsupervised.
Report again.
Yes. As I started to write, I realized I had dropped out of the observer stage, and realized it only because I was moving back into it, which is where I am now. It isn’t going to make transcription any easier!
You could write more legibly if you wrote more slowly, and you could write more slowly if you added a switch for greater confidence in your ability to hold the thought long enough to get it written. But it isn’t important.
To revert to the point: The 3D world is one of polarities. Good luck having good without evil, up without down. Only remember, there is no injustice, there is no imbalance. None of the gangbangers or starving infants will disagree, once beyond the very convincing 3D illusion. These niches, as you call them, were to be filled, and there were combinations of strands that could profit by filling them. To you they look like statistics – interchangeable pieces. But they are no more interchangeable than is any of you. The infant who dies of crib death seems to you the same as any other infant who dies of crib death, so remember, the soul that animated it for however many months was unique, and this experience will add to its unique identity.
There’s your hour, more or less, and we have said what we want to say about uniqueness, unless questions arise. Next time, perhaps the meaning of any one life. It is a natural segue.
So it is. Our thanks as always.