Friday, November 5, 2021
7:20 a.m. So, guys, I’m ready to try a session if you are. I don’t really have a question. Looking back, I don’t see a session since Monday the 25th. Ten days; seems an eternity. Over to you.
You have been hearing the prompting, this morning, “Back to work.” It need not be something major like an introduction to the Alcott material (though that need not be elaborate). It could be as simple as resuming headings for your 2018 sessions. It could be housekeeping literally as well as metaphorically. The utility of working is less in what is accomplished externally than in the gearing-up “mentally” that must accompany it.
It is true, I have had an immensely hard time trying to remember – to feel – that I am non-3D as well as 3D.
Pain or even illness is one way to super-concentrate one on the 3D level. This can be good or bad, or rather, the results may be. There is some use in resisting the compression, using the physical difficulty as a thing to pull against, or push against. These are metaphors, of course.
I get that things in other strands may be activated, either as cause or result, but as I write this I get that I haven’t really understood.
So many aspects to be connected. Via bullets probably, given that you cannot sit calmly writing, your body interfering with concentration.
Surely you aren’t saying this is an advantage.
It is a circumstance. Anything may be used, if you can find the right approach.
I trusty you, you know that. But in this case it’s more or less blind trust.
We understand, of course. Nothing wrong with blind trust provided that you are always ready to reconsider in light of whatever fruit the plant produces.
So, elements to be considered in thinking of your own 3D health (or indeed your 3D circumstances in general). Only, switches.
Yes. Focus, clarity, receptivity, presence. And I like the calmness that descended as I set them; thanks for the reminder.
- There is your 3D life in the present moment, the circumstances that lead you to wonder about possible connections.
- There is, embedded in the present moment, all your life lived and unlived, consciously experienced and otherwise.
- There are all those ties to other lives via strands. For simplicity we will probably restrict consideration to relations along any one strand, but remember, you are many.
- Each “other life” – or each personification of psychological traits, if you prefer to see it that way – is as complicated, as many-faceted, as you, of course. You are not a simple unit; neither is any of them.
- Here is a sticky one that we haven’t really explored, for the sake of not over-complicating: Time is time for all times, not only “your” time. That is what astrology measures, beneath its specific symbolism.
I think I know where you’re going with that one, but it is not nearly clear.
No, but we are busing bullet-points to hold together a far-ranging interconnection. Hold that objection and remind us if we lose sight of it. For now, everyone’s life is subject to time, within their own life and in interactions with other lives.
I think you mean that “time” is somehow an external mechanism that operates on every life, not only during but after the life.
This is very difficult to say clearly. From within the point of view of any given life, time marks the spot. You are always here, always now. You know that. But – paradoxically appearing – that is true for everyone. Now, you have no difficulty, in 3D, seeing that another person is in their own “here,” and you assume they are in the same “now” as you, if only because you take “nowness” for granted. But there is a constraint that 3D experience lays on your thought: You expect others to differ in place, but not in time. It requires thought to remember that other lives differ in “here” and in “now”; sometimes in “now” and not “here.” (Ghosts would be an example.) Beyond 3D rules, “now” may be regarded as a variant of “here.” We’ve said all this, many times, but in different context.
Now put this together for the first time, if you can make it make sense:
- “Time” is the external objective factor that is intermediary between the personal subjectivity (“you”) and the shared subjectivity (“the world”). As time moves you along, your interactions with yourself (which appear to be interactions between you and “other”) change in nature, not only as a result of your choices or non-choices but as a result of what is possible in that time and what is not. Every moment of time has its limits, you know. Not everything may be done anytime. (“You snooze, you lose” expresses this, though snoozing may in fact be the better choice sometimes.)
- But every life experiences itself in terms of that time. That is, everyone assumes, experiences, “now” as – well, as now, not as “now for me alone.” Put together these two points – “now” as imposed externally and “now” as experienced in strict relation to one’s biography – and you see that there is a third, reconciling, factor to be considered, namely
- It isn’t merely viewpoint. It isn’t arbitrary. It isn’t different for one than for another. There is an overarching dimension that Ouspensky called “all times” and it is from this dimension that what we are calling the impersonal time must be seen.
I get a sense of a sweep second-hand of a watch, moving around the dial, and everything directly beneath the hand is alive in a way the rest of the dial is not. I can feel that the image is a distortion, but that’s the best I can do.
It is a good image if you can imagine an uncounted number of watches, stacked one atop another, and that moving hand animating the identical spot on each watch. Thus they are all individual, thus they are all synchronized to the same non-3D rhythm.
This means that for each life as experienced, there will be times that are less propitious or more propitious for doing any given thing. This is obvious in your daily life; it is equally true though not obvious in your inner life as it connects to all those other equally alive parts of yourself.
When the moving finger writes, it is true that nothing you can do can change one word, as Khayyam said. But of course it also isn’t true. It’s a matter of versions. Or in other words, remember:
- This is all mind-stuff, and therefore malleable. Nothing is written in stone except temporarily, one might say.
Nice play on words.
This has been hard for you. Would anything have been any easier if you had spent the hour strictly tending to your physical pains and difficulties?
No, and I see your point. I knew it long ago, actually, but I have allowed myself to forget it. We can work through anything, and usually we feel all the better for doing so, even if the situation itself is unchanged.
Call this “Work as therapy,” if you wish to stress that aspect of it, or perhaps “Time and timing.”
The second is closer, but I will hope to do better. Thanks for all this.