Thursday, July 28, 2022
7:35 a.m. I can see the appeal of rereading old journals looking for tips on the process and practicalities and implications of 3D/non-3D communication. I finished making notes from January, 2021 yesterday – only four notes, but a reminder of a very medically challenging month. More to the point than “externals,” though, was the reminder of where I was in my thinking and responding. I see that if I proceed in just the right way, this may be an entertainment and an education rather than a chore. Wish I’d realized that, decades ago, but things don’t sink in until they sink in.
So, guys, more today, or do I go my merry way? I know, I know, my choice – but do you have a preference?
To restate that, you are really in effect asking if “the times” have brought something to the top of the stack. Sometimes that happens, and we nudge you, lest the opportunity pass unnoticed. In such cases, you perceive us as having something we want to say. That’s true and not quite true, as hopefully these few words will illustrate.
Interesting. A nuance, but an interesting one. And of course sometimes you have begun an exposition and you preserve continuity, lest the day-to-day distract me.
That too.
And, I realize, we have a few things queued up, if I can find the sheets I printed out. Okay, here are four people’s emails, three of them from the 15th. Can we start with Martha’s (given that this is her birthday today)?
[Martha: In our small group yesterday we talked about how to live as though the things we see are only somewhat real, how to live without guilt and how to avoid habitual superstitious actions.]
But the gist of her email is what you do not cite, to wit: “It’s the getting from here to there that’s the crux of the issue.”
Well, respond to whatever part of it calls to you.
The answer to making any knowledge real, in advance of the experience which is the only way to bring it into your being, is faith, faith as the necessary halfway-house that will let you pull yourselves into the reality you wish to live in.
Of course, this does not mean, “Click your heels three times and say there’s no place like home.” It does not mean, “It’s all a matter of your conscious choice, and therefore if you are somewhere you’d rather not be, it’s all your own fault.” It is magic, but not that idea of magic.
I’m aware that you’ve said all this before. I suppose you get tired of telling us the same things, over and over again.
Actually, that doesn’t happen, and you know why.
Yes, as we write that, I do. (1) We are never the same person any two times running; (2) “The times” are always different, allowing and inhibiting different combinations of expression. (3) The shared subjectivity’s pop-up stack is also always different. So, every time is different in all three respects, either slightly or radically, and so repetition is also reframing.
Yes, exactly. Well done.
Well, you’re in a good mood today!
If you’d prefer, we could criticize.
No, that’s all right. So, about faith. Having restated what you don’t mean, perhaps restate what you do mean?
In your time, and for quite a while now, the word “faith” has been, in effect, privatized by religious terminology. It has come to seem like “blind faith,” or “faith despite lack of evidence,” or even “faith in preference to evidence, in defiance of evidence.” All these unconscious and semi-conscious associations make it hard for some to realize that faith is simply what your childhood religious instruction said it was: belief in the existence of the unseen.
I’m not sure it was presented that way.
You can look it up, but it doesn’t matter. Faith is listening to your non-rational conviction about the way things are. And yes, as we can hear you realizing, there’s more to be said on the subject.
Well, yes. If somebody has threads insisting that the world is meaningless, or is a trap, or is a tragedy – or whatever – that worldview is going seem to be self-evident, and the result will be that the person will have faith in something they don’t want to be true. As you said, we don’t have a saying that “It’s too bad to be true.” Forebodings of bad news carry their own conviction.
And the result is a sort of trap. But let’s not leave it at that. Some bullets called for, we think:
- If you feel that the world is a certain way, you will tend to act as if it were so. That’s only natural.
- But such actions reinforce the conviction! If you “know” the world is not a safe place, if you “know” that “they” are out to get you, and you act to defend yourself from that reality, you thereby reinforce that reality.
- Faith, thus, is itself a neutral tool. It may reenforce your convictions in any direction. That is, it may be used to constrict your horizons, quite as easily as to expand them.
- The way out of the self-reinforcing feedback loop is to believe what you don’t yet know from experience, but feel in your heart is true. And this is the positive use of faith. This is how you will pull yourself into the reality you prefer.
Only, “Which you?’ As usual.
Well, yes, “which you,” but also, which needs?
Ah.
Perhaps spell out your new understanding, and we will correct if need be.
I get that we sometimes forget to associate our current position with our deeper currents. (Hold on a sec, let me refocus.)
That is, we always want every moment to be smooth, productive, pleasant, whatever, and it is easy for us to forget that we are also (always) in media res. We – no less than the shared subjectivity of which we are a part – always have unfinished business. Our various strands often push conflicting agendas. “The times” often insist that we deal with this or that bit of deferred maintenance. So it isn’t automatic to move to where we want to be.
It is the result of continual second-tier decisions that do not cancel each other out, but reinforce each other.
“Righteous persistence brings reward.”
It does, and the reward is not what you want (or think you want) but what you become. Intend long enough, consistently enough, with confidence that life will give you what you need, and you will find yourself on the other side of that invisible boundary Thoreau mentioned. Rather than a miraculous overnight sea-change, you will likely realize that what you are now, you have been wanting to become. It is miraculous; it is mundane. Both; neither. But that’s really what faith is all about. It is living as if your highest instincts are true; as if you have a right to become what you want to become; as if the universe knows what it is doing. And one day you realize there isn’t any need for you to live “as if” because your life now makes it obvious that the possibility was there all along, only it required that you and the times be strongly in alignment.
Wait, that sounds like you’re saying we can’t necessarily have what we want to become until some external X happens.
Isn’t that your experience of life? But the key is to remember that internal and external are the same thing. If you can’t know that today, believe it, however tentatively, over enough time, and you will be pulled into what you want to be, what you want to live.
Our thanks for this, as usual. Our theme?
“Faith,” surely.
Maybe, “Faith and X,” whatever X would be?
“The practicalities of living in faith,” maybe.
How about, “Using faith.”
Fine with us.
Till next time, then.