Tuesday, March 8, 2022
3:35 a.m. Very well, my friends. Setting switches for maximum focus, receptivity, clarity, presence, as has become our habit. Shall we continue on the body as seen from your particular viewpoint? Embodiment (4), presumably?
Yes. And point four was, you remember?
Having its own needs and preferences; and point five was, integrating other aspects. Going back to Friday’s session, I see you were saying – what I had more or less forgotten – that we should think of the body as part of our mind that was performing several specialized functions, not as something operating for its own physical reasons.
Yes, trying to break down the idea that even in 3D, “soul” and “body” were two different things in any way. They may seem that way; it may be convenient, often, to think of them that way. But they are part of one thing.
Just as 3D itself is part of one thing that also includes non-3D.
That isn’t a wrong formulation, but even there, the idea of duality is sneaking in between the lines. It isn’t body and mind as two aspects of one larger unit, though, as we say, it can be useful to consider it that way. It is that body includes mind, everywhere. Mind suffuses body, everywhere. There is no part of body that does not include mind, nor any part of mind that is separate from body. To the degree that one separates the two for the purposes of analysis, that very separation may distort one’s understanding unless it is firmly remembered that it is an artificial, and in fact an impossible separation.
This is important, and is the difference between remembering, or not remembering, that everything material is in fact mind-stuff. So, when we say that the body has its own needs and preferences, you must remember that we are saying that the mind, expressing as body, has its own needs and preferences.
This is another of those simple points that are so difficult to express in a way that can’t be misinterpreted, isn’t it?
Yes it is. What’s worse, it is one of those points that to some will appear so obvious, such a trivial splitting of hairs, as to be not worth the time to read, let alone to write. But this is because they will have missed the profound – that is, deep, not-obvious – restructuring of thought that it is.
I can sense that, but I don’t have any helpful suggestions as to how to make it clear.
We can only blunder on, hoping to ignite sparks.
Here’s the thing. Looking at the body as a mechanism operating on its own to maintain itself in 3D is well and good; it is that. But it isn’t only that. It is also the densification, in 3D, of aspects of the non-3D totality that exist in non-3D.
Matter is mind-stuff, therefore has no independent existence. It is like the dilemma of Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice”: How do you get your pound of flesh without drawing a drop of blood, when they cannot exist in separation. (Yes, you can extract blood and store it in blood banks. Yes, you can drain meat of blood and store it, too. But neither one functions without the other. There never was nor every could be a living organism of flesh without its blood, nor of blood without its flesh.)
Well, if you remember that fact, you won’t accidentally revert to considering the body as only a mechanism. You will remember, we pointed out that your body seems to you sometimes part of you, sometimes part of the external world. That in itself ought to give you a clue. It ought to tell you that any hard and fast distinction you might draw is going to be an error.
So if, as we say, the body has its own needs and preferences, that is but a shorthand way of saying that the body is a definite – we would say concrete, if it wouldn’t lead to a series of bad jokes – expression of the mind’s needs and preferences.
It is a marker, in a way, a dynamic living marker.
That’s a good way to think of it. Just as an emotion, a mood, may be evanescent – here strongly in this moment, forgotten or in abeyance the next moment – so the body, contrariwise, represents more lasting conditions.
You said years ago that our health is a ratio between mental functions which are highly mobile and physical functions which are stable and harder to move.
Yes. The combination is more stable and flexible than either would be on its own. And you will recognize, even here we are pretty much forced to speak of the mind and the body as if they were two things. That’s why it can be hard to keep in mind their essential unity.
We have done our best to provide the spark that may carry understanding of this point. People will get it or they won’t. They’ll get it now or later or not at all. But we can only do what we can do.
There was one thing that flitted by, and I almost caught. Try that.
It was a rhetorical question, more or less asking: Why do you think it is, that changing your self-definition (making a second-tier decision) may result in your health spontaneously changing? It is because you can’t change only one half of an equation
I agree that we probably can’t go any farther with this one. Maybe someone will pose a question that would lead to a clarification. So, point five? Integrating other aspects?
You might quote our sentence from Friday.
“Continually acts to integrate, in the here and now, elements of you that you otherwise might experience only separately, only occasionally.”
And what do you make of that?
I take it to be restating point four in slightly different context. I hear it saying, the body acts as the stable center, the stabilizer, the equilibrium.
There’s a little more to it than that.
I never doubted it.
You could look at it this way: You came into 3D as a mixture of energies with their own separate and pooled potential. The body embodies that. It is the reservoir and the calendar and the appointment book and the inventory list. Yes, 3D is the realm of limitation, but do not forget that the very concept of limitation implies a store of things within the limits, not merely a “Do not enter” sign beyond the limits.
If I get you right, you are saying – well, I got distracted. What were you saying?
You have one kind of body type and not another. You have certain limitations and not others. These are not random and they were not determined by your genetic inheritance. (They were limited to the possibilities presented by your genetic inheritance, but that was a very large pool to choose from.) All of this, remember, is mind-stuff densifying in 3D. So your body is, among other things, the embodiment of your possibilities, which means also of your unfinished business. In other words, that’s why you experience it as both internal and external, depending upon context.
So now if you will go back and re-read the several sessions on the body, perhaps we will have made our point.
I hope so. Thanks as usual.