Sunday, July 17, 2022
6:45 a.m. Having difficult nights again. Tiresome. I did get through February’s entries looking for tips on communication, though. Just as predicted, as soon as I began to press, I began to resent it. When I reverted to doing it when I felt like it, the interest in doing it returned.
Guys, do we do a session today, or provide retreads (or nothing) to our friends?
Your choice, always. Want to talk about Janus? [A short poem I wrote yesterday.]
Sure, why not?
Janus
More time for work
On what had been spoiled:
How fortunate!
—
But, so much time
Awaiting release:
So many days!
What about it?
It merely reflects your absorption with T.R. Reid’s book. [Confucius Lives Next Door]. You felt the Asian influence even as you coaxed the poem out of you, or out of the ether, however you prefer to think of it.
It captured my ambivalence, I thought. [The ancient Romans saw Janus as the god of beginnings and endings. He is depicted as having two faces, one looking forward, one backwards.] Surely many people have a similar ambivalence once they reach a certain aga. OT1H, you appreciate life in ways you perhaps could not, previously. OTOH, there’s the “Oh God, another day to get through” factor.
Yes. Not one, but both. It was perhaps to express such ambivalence what you were born into your circumstances.
I’m not sure where you’re going with that, but I heard the clash of cymbals, or the beating of the gong, or whatever, announcing the main event. Setting switches for maximum focus, receptivity, clarity, presence.
There are so many aspects to the question of the mechanism of life and renewed life. We cannot go about it in a systematic way – that is not your strength – but we can, and do, continually relate one thing to another, hoping to help people see in new contexts. So here is an example of the interplay between personal and shared subjectivities, between returned 3D life and specific aspects.
Ah, that’s why “work on what had been spoiled” inserted itself into my little poem.
Yes, but let’s go more slowly. (Have we ever advised you of that?)
Very funny. I was born running. It took time and other things to slow me down.
Nothing wrong with running; nothing wrong with stillness – but each in its proper place.
Yes, understood. And so –?
Bullets, perhaps, to help show relationships.
- After First Life, you are never again a blank slate. Always there are the results of previous decisions, previous situations.
- Even in First Life, you were not in effect a blank slate, for you brought into 3D life a set of proclivities, preferences, aptitudes, connections – if only via your non-3D connections – that in themselves began to generate the unfinished business that you would carry forward later.
- After your First Life, as we said, you deal with the results of your previous decisions.
- In whatever place and time you are alive, you find unfinished business belonging not to you in particular but to that place and time. If you are born into Japan in 1942, you are born into a country at war. If in 1952, a country at peace.
- You work out your own salvation (as the Buddhists put it) and you also participate in the working-out of the problems set by the times. You do this all your life, by the same actions, the same decisions. You are part of the world, be you never so reclusive.
- Remember that our shorthand term “unfinished business” does not imply a finish to the business. We mean, merely, the imbalances that present themselves. The end of unfinished business would be the end of the world. (That is, the end of 3D reality, not just planet Earth.) How likely do you think that is?
So, “work on what had been spoiled” means, “always room for improvement.”
It also means, no need to think you are only marking time. Every day is a gift, even if sometimes a difficult gift. Every day offers opportunity to be a little better, a little more whatever it is what you want to become. None of it is waste-material.
No day is to be dreaded, no day is to be wasted.
More like, no day can be wasted, for even negative choices have an effect, even negligence produces results. But yes, certainly no day is to be dreaded – only, we need to split a hair. What the day contains, what it brings, what it threatens, may well be dreaded. A prisoner of war facing torture, a terminal cancer patient facing another day of physical agony, someone who suffered an emotional trauma (the loss of a child, say) who anticipates further suffering – yes, they may well dread what the day may bring. But!
But?
But it is a different thing to dread the coming of the day per se. You may have to struggle not to drown in the river, but it is the river that is carrying your forward.
I don’t think that came out very clearly.
Even if your life is filled with blessings, or is filled with torment, or is filled with placid boredom, you always can choose (and will choose, even if only by default) whether you will trust life, or not; accept what comes, or not; nourish a sense of grievance, or not.
We can’t choose what our life brings to us, but we can choose how we will meet it.
Actually, in choosing, you do choose, indirectly, what your life will bring to you. It isn’t as simple as “Wish upon a star and your dreams will instantly come true,” or your 3D life would give you little traction. But persistently wishing upon a star will change your life.
Well, I have learned that it is easier to trust life than to assume that it was up to me to make the sun come up. I notice it comes up without my help.
In practical terms, what we have said is aimed at assisting people with their personal business; the fact that it thereby affects the shared subjectivity does not cease to be true, but one’s life is always more vivid than “the world out there.”
Thanks for all this. Theme?
“Janus,” perhaps, and you add a brief note for those to whom the word would mean nothing.
Okay. Till next time, then.