Saturday, September 10, 2022
3:50 a.m. I guess I’m ready if you are. I wish I had a better idea of how you want to proceed, and where.
Trust.
Oh, I know. F R C P.
We have pretty extensively described you as 3D individuals/communities. We have somewhat sketched the shared subjectivity that you experience as “the world beyond you,” both mental and physical, and we showed how the emotions you experience may be looked at as the interface between the you that you know and the you that you don’t know – or, between the personal subjectivity and the shared subjectivity. Within the model, the major thing we have not yet described is the nature of “the times” you live in.
It is easy to jump to the conclusion that “the times” refers to external events, but we hope that this is no longer so misleadingly self-evident, in that “external events” have been shown to be not external at all, but internal.
I had to go back to yesterday’s, to find the sentence that struck me. “The aspects of life that are realest are those that appear (to the 3D mind-set) the least real.”
That’s the one. That is, in a way, the key to what we’re to say. If you will remember that your so-solid reality is really mind-stuff, at some point you realize that mind-stuff is the strongest, realest, most vital building-block of reality, and everything else that it appears to be – energy, matter, especially “dead” or “inert” matter, the “things” you live among (including your body) – is just appearance, however convincing it may be. When you once realize that, many things become seen in their proper relation. Until then, though, things will continue to be seen in the materialist distortion, even if that materialism is overlain by a religiosity that thinks it is at war with matter.
I’m with you so far. But then, I would be: This is the journey I’ve lived at least from the days beginning in 1970 when Colin Wilson showed me a way forward from the sort of blank rejection of religion I had fallen to. He – nor his intellectual hero Shaw – ever quite got beyond the idea of “life inserting itself into matter,” as far as I know. But it was that particular scaffolding that helped me for many years. But if we hadn’t done those black-bx sessions in 2000, leading to Rita’s and my sessions over several months of 2001 and 2002, I don’t know if I’d ever have gotten beyond the base camp where Colin and Shaw wound up. (As far as I know, they did, anyway.)
We remind you of the value of other people’s life-journeys – most especially, their mental and spiritual journeys – in providing base camps for those who follow. Paul Brunton, in your case, most recently.
Yes. It helped crystallize many things, reading his two books, The Hidden Teaching Beyond Yoga and The Wisdom of the Overself. Like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams “thinking for us all” at the convention that declared independence, Brunton’s distilling the intellectual arguments that underpinned his view of reality in effect thought for you; he provided you with the logical chains that explicated what you had come to know.
(Again I began a graf and you finished it. That would have been terribly disconcerting, once.)
Well, all this said, what is the next logical examination but the “how” of your 3D experiences?
I am seeing why you kept bringing in religion, and astrology too. To ignore them as facts would be to at least partially remain mired in the view that paints the physical world as primary, or, at least, as at war with (or anyway, in opposition to) the living.
We said it many times: You cannot afford to ignore or reject any belief that has been sincerely held by substantial numbers of people. It may be necessary to reject any given manifestation as you find your way, but anything you reject ultimately will result in a less-than-complete understanding.
Even materialism, say?
If you cannot sympathetically understand something, how can you weigh it fairly? This will take more than a word, probably, but it is necessary to be clear: There is every difference between choosing fairly and rejecting arbitrarily.
That ought to be self-evident, I should think. The one is discernment, the other is prejudice.
Yes, very good. Still, we will spell it out a bit.
- If one is a materialist, one may be that in different ways, ranging anywhere from rabid rejection of anything that cannot be measured to milder forms of “common sense” that cannot believe that appearances lie to the extent of disguising the nature of the world.
- Religious belief varies at least equally widely, form the tightest, most bigoted set of beliefs to the broadest, least structured set.
- Most people are something of a mixture of incompatible beliefs, due in part to the coexistence within themselves of so many conflicting strands. You are churches, in effect, comprising believers whose beliefs differ extravagantly.
- Given that no one can see the entire reality no matter how talented their “guys upstairs,” equally sincere, equally intelligent people will come to conclusions about reality that may have very many points in conflict. Which one is “right”? Which one is “wrong”? We would say there are many different right approaches to learning greater truths, but one wrong one.
Contempt.
You’ve known it for a long, long time, even though you repeatedly forget it in practice. Contempt, yes, the dismissal without fair consideration of facts or of entire fields of knowledge or experience. It is in refusing to take into account such sources of data that people often cripple themselves.
Now, this does not mean that every sincere seeker is obliged to investigate every field of study. No one could do that. It does mean, though, that a sincere seeker must not make the mistake of refusing to consider things that appear in the path, merely because they have been dismissed in advance. If they were not relevant to the moment, they would not be there.
I get that you aren’t quite saying, everything we meet has something right in it, but –
That is exactly what we are saying. If Jung could force himself to listen to the inner knowing that said study alchemy, you can listen when you are told that Mormons, or Amish, or Muslims, or various kinds of Christians, or animists, etc., etc., all have a piece of the truth. If you think you know in advance that they don’t, so much the worse for your discernment.
So, to wrap this up for now: In order to get closer to the truth, you will have to find the unnoticed things that bind you to this or that variant of the materialist illusion. Snip the right cords and you will free your balloon to rise. But how are you to know what to snip, if you proceed “at random”? Granted you may be protected by a part of you that has a broader view – still it is still possible to make mistakes. The more careful you are, the more aware you are, the fewer mistakes you are liable to make.
I will be interested to reread this, see what it comes to. Our thanks as always, and see you next time.