Wednesday, January 26, 2022
7 a.m. I know full well that I keep hoping that these sessions will amount to the form and content of units complete in themselves. After all, they have done so many times. And I also know that what you want can’t be done that way – though why you can’t proceed like Seth, escapes me. He even provided chapter titles, internal breaks, punctuation – everything.
And you of course would be perfectly happy, being an amanuensis and nothing more.
Well, it would be easier.
It would not, even if it were feasible.
Would you care to explain?
Everyone is connected to the non-3D, as we have said. But as we have also said, everyone is connected in different ways. Perhaps we have not stressed sufficiently – because it was obvious to us but now it occurs to us that perhaps not obvious to you – that just as 3D individuals are each different, so their non-3D components. I mean, isn’t it obvious?
Striking, that “I mean.” I hesitated before transcribing it, tempted to change it to “we mean,” only that would change what I distinctly got. And I even suspect that the logic behind “I mean” is as important as that behind the rest of the graf.
You talk to Hemingway, do you not? To Jung, on occasion, to various others on your threads? Do you experience any of them as only part of an anonymous “we”?
I almost get that it was the intensity of the thought that brought out the “I” rather than the “we.”
That’s true enough. Intensity of conscious focus has that side-effect. And, speaking of focus –
Yes, I hear it. Okay, switches set. I can usually tell a difference as I do so, my vision seeming to come from a different point, somehow behind and above me, though obviously coming through my eyes.
Several small points to be made here.
- Your thoughts on Jesus, earlier.
- More on collective v. individual, in non-3D as in 3D.
- The body’s variations insofar as they are not related to mental states.
All right. I was thinking, as I poured my coffee, how they had to make Jesus into a god, thereby explicitly contradicting his message. And I thought how Gautama had somehow escaped being killed for trying to help his fellows.
And earlier than that –
Yes, I was remembering Hemingway’s “Gladly the cross-eyed bear,” which is how he as a very young child misheard one of the hymns they sang in church. It reminded me of the cant and the fairy tales they spun around Jesus, and led to other thoughts, such as, no wonder Christianity is finally dying. The gingerbread goody-goody sugar and spice, and all the superman legends, and every damn thing people have done to reassure themselves that they wouldn’t have to do anything, if they just decided to worship Jesus as if he were someone and something totally out of the range of our experience. They made a hero into an idol, and then insisted that people had to believe (or at least pretend to believe), rather than listen to what he actually advised, and do it.
And now you have, behind your own back, come to share Emerson’s view of Jesus, which initially surprised you, almost shocked you, so many years ago.
That’s true. If I can find Emerson’s quote in my quotations file on the computer, I’ll drop it in as I transcribe this. Otherwise, I’ll paraphrase.
[Emerson, February, 1855, age 52: “Munroe seriously asked what I believed of Jesus and prophets. I said, as so often, that it seemed to me an impiety to be listening to one and another, when the pure Heaven was pouring itself into each of us, on the simple condition of obedience. To listen to any second-hand gospel is perdition of the First Gospel. Jesus was Jesus because he refused to listen to another, and listened at home.”]
And Thoreau’s?
Yes, it makes me smile whenever I think of it. “It would be a poor story to be prejudiced against the life of Christ because his book was edited by Christians.”
So sketch what this means to you. Obvious though it may seem to you, it will be far territory to some, as Emerson was to you initially.
Well, I have said to people who take Jesus seriously – fewer people than you might expect, actually; most people either accept the fairy tales or reject Jesus and his message entirely – I have said that I can’t know anything about him directly. I may assume he was divine, sent to Earth to redeem us, etc. Or I may assume that he, like the rest of us, was both human and divine, only he was obviously considerably advanced next to us. Or I may assume that the miracles and other supernatural manifestations reported were true, or were lies, or were exaggerations, or were misunderstandings. Of none of this can I be sure.
But one thing is clear, and that is that something changed a few (relatively few) individuals. They came into contact with something so powerful, so benign, so compelling, that it changed them into men and women who proceeded to change their civilization and, in fact, gradually changed the definition of what it is to be human.
“By their fruits you will know them,” Jesus is reported to have said. Well, if that transformation of a generation by means of an initial few who were transformed does not qualify as miraculous, I don’t know what does. And unlike the reports of multiplication of loaves and fishes, or walking on water, or even returning from the dead, there can be no question of the transformation, only of the nature of the cause.
Now, we ask you gently: Given that you have come to accept that you can directly contact Hemingway, Lincoln, Jung, Bertram, etc., etc. – is there any reason to think you cannot connect directly with Jesus, and on a continuing basis. Totally without the cookie-cutter sentimentality that has gradually surrounded Christianity, does he have nothing to say to you, or you to him? And of course by “you” we do not mean any one individual but potentially anyone so moved.
You told me early on, don’t go autograph-hunting.
We stand by that advice: Don’t go ringing doorbells if you don’t have anything to say when the door opens. But is that your condition, if you are aligning your energies with his, so as to express what he expressed?
That’s an interesting thought, though I don’t quite see how it would play out.
Religious people are not necessarily superstitions people. Some of them align their lives with an ideal, personifying the ideal (consciously or otherwise), and use it as a pole-star.
But by that logic, we could choose anybody as a pole star, and get the same effect.
Indeed you could, and indeed you do. What are heroes but role-models, unless you use an imagined difference between them and you as an excuse for your own inaction? But the difference in your life made by choosing one over another is the difference between emulating a rock star or a philosopher, or following a hatchet murderer or a philanthropist. It makes a difference, if you choose Hitler or Gandhi as your pole-star – and the difference is not in what they did, so much as in what they were.
Clear enough. And if we don’t choose consciously, I imagine we choose without knowing it.
Certainly. Your various threads will have something to say about that, or why did you find yourself spontaneously saying, “I still serve Ra”? Were you meaning you adhered to an ancient Egyptian religion, or even that way of seeing things? Clearly not. But it does imply that certain sets of values, even perhaps certain codes of conduct, live within you.
And naturally they sometimes conflict.
You couldn’t expect otherwise. But after all, free will is deciding conflict; putting your conscious weight on one side of scales and not the other, or holding the scales level, perhaps.
We have gone 50 minutes. Do you want to address the second point you raised?
No, let’s return to this point:
- You are each of you 3D extending into non-3D.
- You are each of you collections of threads, each of which contain individuals who extended into non-3D.
- Your life consists of deciding who and what you want to be – which values you choose to uphold or fight against.
- Therefore, each life changes the non-3D as well as the 3D, or what would be the point?
- That being so, how could anybody think the non-3D populated by homogenous beings? Non-3D is as differentiated as 3D, and for good reason.
- Non-3D sends its differences into the 3D by the bundles it assembles; it receives further differences by what those bundles decide during their 3D lives. You see? A reciprocating process with no end, no beginning.
Nevertheless, “All is one.”
Of course. But “All is one” isn’t as simple as people may think. The closer you look at it, the more nuances you will discover.
So, today’s theme?
Oh, “Jesus as pole-star,” perhaps, or “Choosing your non-3D companions.”
Neither sounds just right. Something will come to me, no doubt. Thanks for all this; very interesting.