Wednesday, April 20, 2022
6:15 a.m. Setting switches, as has become habitual: focus, receptivity, clarity, presence.
Nancy sent me some sessions from 2012 and I can’t even remember having heard of the concepts, let alone remembering the sessions themselves. Even the binder I am currently filling with printouts beginning January 1 of this year contains so much material, it is overwhelming. Yes, wonderful to have been the conduit for so much information, but – wouldn’t it be nice to be able to remember it! I do understand your point about absorbing it in the moment, and living it by actively reacting to it and thereby experiencing further life as someone changed by what preceded it, but still!
Same old story, same old predicament, same old worry, so, same old advice: Don’t worry about it. All you can do is all you need to do, and that is, live each moment with integrity and awareness. Given that base, anything you add to it will be sound and wholesome.
Let that sink in, a moment, because that apple [from the garden, of course] leaves you all prone to making judgments about your own lives and the lives of others. We will state it more explicitly:
Provided that you live each moment with integrity and awareness, it matters not whether you concentrate on
- 3D matters such as career, “advancement,” any form of social-status oriented endeavor, or
- 3D matters such as your own individual obsession, be it a hobby or a fascinated study of something, or the dedicated pursuit of something, whether or not socially sanctioned, or
- 3D/non-3D matters such as this kind of communication, or
- Non-3D obsessions such as theology or cosmology that are aimed toward the accumulation of knowledge and wisdom, or
- Non-3D obsessions such as occult investigations aimed toward the acquisition of power over self, or the world, or others.
However, keep firmly in mind what we said: provided integrity and awareness. Every pitfall 3D life provides may be traced to a lack of (or, more accurately stated, a wavering of) integrity or of awareness.
I take your bullets to amount to a summary of possibilities, and it seems to me they could be parsed as inner, outer, inner, outer. Or, no, I see that isn’t right. More like – well, you do it.
You intended to parse them as inner-driven or other-driven, and that is one way they could be divided. People who begin with accepting, as a given, the circumstances they find themselves in, will begin by playing the game. Hence, they will pursue the parts of 3D life that appeal to them, and (also, “or”) the parts they feel they must pursue, like it or not. That is, you may have strong likings for this or that, and at the same time you may feel constrained to make a living by doing something that leaves you cold.
Similarly, in dealing with non-3D matters, consciously or otherwise, you may not see possibilities beyond “being good” or at least “following the rules” that God presumably laid down. Or, you may feel called to look behind the curtain, either in a spirit of inquiry or of piety or of lust for acquisition of knowledge or power.
But any of these paths will be one thing if pursued in integrity and presence, and another if not.
I see that.
It should be obvious – is obvious, we hope – that there cannot be only one path, or even only a few paths, for all humanity. Diversity is not a design flaw, but a desired and desirable result. Endless recombination of elements takes place as a result of sexual reproduction. Should you expect those recombinations to funnel their experiences into a vanishingly small tunnel producing uniformity? Uniformity is the very last thing nature wants, whether you look at 3D or non-3D.
Sitting with that, I get that even the boundaries we assume are fixed – such as boundaries between species, say – are actually only relatively fixed, and perhaps are fixed only in the context of a given span of time.
Certainly. That was Darwin’s insight. 3D life is a river, and as it flows, it flows through different forms, and in the process alters the forms and creates new ones and allows older ones to die away. Nothing is forever in the sense of being permanently part of the river. (It is forever, in the sense of always being in the span of time it is in, but that is something else in meaning.)
I suppose my quarrel with the idea of evolution was always with the unstated assumption that it was unguided, without purpose, chaotic.
Well –
Yes, I hear it. It is and it isn’t.
As with most things, it’s mostly in how you want to (or need to) see it. And that is part of our point at the moment. The scientists who need to see the world as chaos leading to unguided intermediate results that then lead to further results as the chaos continues to affect them are not wrong. They are right from their point of view. So are you, from your point of view. And this is true for everybody and everything.
It’s hard to see how contradictory things can be equally true, but I suppose you’re going to say, “somewhat” true.
In a way. It would be closer to say, you get the world you expect. It’s like the little story.
A man comes up to a couple of men on the street and says he’s new, what kind of town is this? He is asked what people were like where he came from, and he describes a lot of negative traits, and is told he’ll find people in this new place pretty much the same as what he was used to. And a second man, asking the same question and responding to the same question about what people were like where he came from, gave a lot of positive traits and was told the same thing.
Well, not only is this true, you can see that it has to be true, because the filters you bring to experience determine what you can make of your experiences.
And you are saying it isn’t merely our deciding if something is pleasant or unpleasant that is determined by these filters, but also whether a thing is real or fantasy, accurate or inaccurate, worthwhile or a waste of time.
Doesn’t your experience tell you that’s how it is?
Yes, it does.
But your particular filters were also telling you, between the lines, “Oh, and you can trust us! We’re giving it to you straight!”
And our only hope of overcoming this hall of mirrors is integrity and presence? But how does that work?
Integrity keeps your 3D-mind connected to your non-3D compass. Awareness stops you from falling asleep, or reminds you, when you wake up from a nap.
We tend to think of integrity in terms of whatever moral code we subscribe to, but by your own showing, there may be as many moral codes as there are people.
That’s right, and you aren’t going to approve of all of them, and why should you? How could you? Is the rest of the world obliged to pretend that your own chosen values are absolute? A gangster may have a strict code – is likely to, in fact – centering on a sense of group loyalty. A peace activist and a career soldier may have moral codes very similar to each other, though the specific values they see themselves as upholding may be poles apart.
The important thing is to be true to what you are (integrity) and to make your decisions as to what you want to be as consciously and continuously as possible (awareness). What you as 3D mind think you are, and think you are doing, may have little to do with what you actually are, and actually are doing. You can’t really know. But what you can know, and should try to remain aware of, is your ongoing sense of who you are and who you want to be. It isn’t important that this is objectively accurate (whatever “objectively” means); the important thing, if you want life more abundantly, is that you know what you are doing and wanting and intending, while you are doing and wanting and intending them. Just as there can be no work while you are sleeping, so there can be no conscious living while you are fooling yourself because you are reluctant to see yourself as you really are.
You are better than you think yourselves. You are worse than you think yourselves. So maybe instead of seeing everything as good or evil, it would be worth your while to see what is, as clearly and consistently as you can, and all will be added to that.
You never cease to amaze me, the connections you make. So, today’s theme?
“Integrity and awareness,” surely.
Yes, I think so. Very well, our thanks for this and so much already given.