Tuesday, September 28, 2021
5:15 a.m. Setting for maximum focus, receptivity, clarity, objectivity. In re-reading “I am awake at the moment,” I awakened again, and I hope to remain objectively here, watching as I live. Yesterday’s awareness lasted for hours. I don’t know quite when it wore off. Overnight, maybe. But the change is now perceptible and can be accomplished at will (at least, I think it can), and this reminds me of learning Monroe’s focus states, 30 years ago, and how that became a permanent acquisition, as he promised, available once learned. The fact that I rarely invoke them explicitly (i.e. via tapes or CDs) doesn’t matter; they were scaffolding, designed to be discarded once no longer needed. But of course this new acquisition is subject to my remembering. A bit circular: I have to be awake in order to reawaken, unless I am already awake. 😊 That, or leave post-it notes everywhere reminding myself to check. But that would work only as long as I was conscious of them. Once they became background, unnoticed, I’d have to find a new method. Better to retain consciousness than to have to be perpetually regaining it.
So, guys, how do you want to proceed?
Your continuing struggle to hold asthma in check ought to remind you – does, we know – that one’s relation to one’s body is a curious thing. Your body, as we have said, is experienced both, and alternately, as part of you and part of “the other,” the external world that we are calling the shared subjectivity. (In doing this, we attempt to routinize in your mental picture a sense of the solid, material, objective world being actually the same mind-stuff as your own internally experienced life.) Obviously it fits into either category, depending upon context. Sometimes it seems one, sometimes the other, occasionally both.
Yes it does.
Regard it as a beacon, as on Monroe’s tapes.
Interesting analogy. Bob put on the tapes, in the middle of long stretches of silence, the very faintest sound of a foghorn, designed to bring us back if we were wandering. It was soft enough not to startle, and was unvarying enough to serve to remind us rather than to elicit the “What was that?” response.
Well, asthma or any physical affliction may or may not be gentle, but it will get your attention. The key is to give it the right kind of attention. Cursing it, or groaning about it, or even mutely suffering, will have a very different effect than thinking of it as a reminder. Everybody has such reminders, some physical, some emotional, some ideational. The trick is in turning them to advantage.
I don’t quite hear you saying that such conditions are there for the sake of helping us to wake up.
Not for that sake, but they may be used for that purpose. You are experiencing them anyway – pain or illness or grief or loneliness or despair even – why not turn them to advantage, at least to that extent?
Any anything is easier to deal with if we can do so without anger or helplessness or bewilderment.
Certainly.
Just to underline: You aren’t saying our problems are there for the sake of waking us up.
No, nor for chastising you for your sins (read Job), nor because, as the Greeks put it, “Like flies to wayward boys are we to the gods: They kill us for their sport.” Nor because the great god Chance, also known as Accident or Coincidence, just happened to run you over. But we are saying that problems may be turned to advantage. The very fact that everything is mind-stuff, and that it is all a seamless pattern (not chance) and that you are creator gods in a deliberately restricted environment, should tell you that.
I see we have used nearly half an hour. I hadn’t expected illness to occupy us today.
Everything is grist for the mill: the things you don’t talk about, as well as what you do; the things you usually don’t notice, when they come to your attention. “It’s all one world” applies mentally, of course, not merely in terms of its 3D manifestation.
Speaking of which, we were exploring the effects of living in 3D with strands that held differing values – which of course implies different views of the world, for your values depend upon what you think the world is, what you think reality is. It is in the conflict among strands that you experience conflicting impulses.
I think you mean to say, the conflict among strands produces competition for our attention and our action.
And each strand’s opinion may be experienced as the small still voice, and it is for you to decide.
Decide which is authentic?
They are all authentic, but they contradict each other sometimes. You decide which to follow.
That’s very interesting. That’s what it feels like, all right.
Obviously this will be felt by different people at different times and to different extents. Some people’s strands are pretty coherent, pretty compatible, so such people will receive fewer cross-currents. Others may have a full-time job merely existing among warring elements. And – as always – everyone else exists between these extremes.
And I see how this connects with what you were just saying about “external” problems. Those with a bumpier ride have the opportunity to turn it into greater consciousness.
In effect. Note that we do not say this is why they have “a bumpier ride.”
Understood. But the harder the problem we have set for us, the greater the potential achievement. Yes?
We pause, thinking about that. As so often, it isn’t wrong per se, but it tends to be misleading. Or, let’s say it can easily lead to misleading unconscious conclusions.
Everything that exists, exists on its own, for its own sake. It is often tempting or convenient to say that a thing exists for the sake of something else, but that is at best only relatively true. Just as it is a mistake to think that anything happens “at random,” so it is a mistake on the other end of the spectrum to think that anything happens “for the sake of something else.”
I’m getting that it’s a little slippery to express.
It is. Obviously one thing leads to another. But regardless of appearances, the one thing did not come into existence for the sake of making the other possible.
Do we close up shop a little early (as I am feeling), or do you want to say more about connecting strands and their effect on us?
The central point is made: Depending upon the coherence or competition among your constituent strands, you may experience conflicting impulses, conflicting “messages,” in effect. Which is the authentic voice? Which is the guidance you seek? For that matter, which voice offering messages under the general rubric of TGU is “the real thing” and which is an imposter?
I see. These are all simplistic ways of seeing the situation. In reality, they are all potentially the real thing, and it’s up to us to choose among them.
It is up to you to choose, but it is not so, that any of them is only potentially the real thing. The point is, they are all the real thing, but that doesn’t mean you can or should follow all of them. We keep saying, you are in 3D to choose. Well, you choose not merely by your physical actions but by which thoughts, impulses, desires, emotions you encourage and which you discourage. “As a man things, so is he.” You understand?
I do, and I wish this had been clear to me a few decades ago. I have often felt the conflict and experienced the confusion. With the best will in the world, I couldn’t find a clear path to follow. Even receptivity can lead you astray, or seem to, if you’re being receptive to competing radio stations.
But now the situation is clearer, good. We should discuss will power.
Today’s?
Perhaps “Dealing with conflict.” Something on that order.
Thanks as always.