Sunday, October 2, 2022
6 a.m. Can we return to the specific questions I began with yesterday, and continue perhaps to more general descriptions of how the larger something within us wakes and sleeps, and how it affects our lives?
Concentrate, then. That is, center.
Presence, receptivity, clarity, yes.
Rephrase your questions as they seem to you now, rather than merely copying them from yesterday.
I guess I’d ask:
- Am I ever asleep while talking to you? That is, can I rely upon this process to be an indicator?
- Whatever the process is that I’m trying to look at, is it something necessary (similar to our body’s need for periodic sleep) or is it a sign of lack of development?
- In short, what does it mean, what does it accomplish, and should it be fought?
You see, your questions today are better. You take into consideration yesterday’s few points.
First question. Anything you ever do may be done consciously or by rote. Therefore, it is difficult to tell by external evidence alone whether you yourself are awake or not.
I suppose it would be too easy, otherwise.
You are being mildly sarcastic, but in a way, that isn’t so wrong. It is not in procedure per se but in struggle that opportunities for fundamental growth arise. Good thing, too, or else people’s externals would outweigh their internals, in terms of possibilities for growth.
If our activities don’t automatically show if we are asleep or not, is there a way to know?
You are really asking, is there a way, when you are asleep, to realize that you are asleep, so that you may wake up.
Yes, I suppose I am.
“As above, so below.” How is it in your everyday life? Can you move to lucid dreaming by will?
Not directly (as far as I know). We can set our intent before we go to sleep. But once we are asleep, I don’t see that we can exercise our will until we go lucid.
Then should you expect it to be different when you consider your higher mind? (And put an asterisk here, because we will need to define what we are talking about better than by calling it “higher mind,” but not now.)
So I guess the answer to my first question and follow-up is, no we can’t tell merely by what we’re doing, and no we can’t influence it if we are asleep.
What you can do is monitor your activities as a habit – as rote itself, you might say. Sometimes you will be awake enough to realize that you are proceeding by rote, and then you can sometimes bring yourself more awake by making an effort. It is the equivalent of shaking off sleep while slowly waking up.
Your second question is well phrased to demonstrate that you don’t really understand what’s going on.
Well, that’s familiar territory.
Again, “As below, so above.” In your life in 3D, different stages of development require different amounts, and different kinds, of sleep. Babies and teenagers require great amounts of sleep, greater than any other stages of life. But although both require a lot of sleep, the kind of sleep differs radically. For the baby, it is a form of prolonged womb-time, as it gradually moves into its new surroundings. For the teen, it is almost life life-support as the developed consciousness is escorted into its newer body and all that that transition implies. The child in the years between infant and teen sleeps hard and deep, but it is more in the nature of recharging than of managing any transition. The post-teen for quite a while sleeps routinely and uneventfully, more a drip-trickle recharge than a massive inflow of current. Then after a time, the older adult requires less and les sleep, in less and less of an ordered pattern, because the needs of the adjustment mechanism are different. You understand, these are all broad generalizations, subject to exception.
As we were writing, I thought, my experience of how asthma could interfere with normal sleep patterns is probably paralleled in many ways for different people.
Of course, but this is not centered on the stages of life and their variations. This is mostly an analogy, to show that your higher mind (as we are calling it for the moment) will have different needs at different stages of its growth.
I take it that your answer to my second question amounts to, Yes it is necessary, but the specific need varies according to the development of something we don’t understand (yet?), and so may look like lack of development, but this my be our ignorance.
A fair summary. Your third question may seem to have been answered by implication – as a part of a natural process, should it be fought? – but not so simple.
Which brings us, I guess, to the question about higher mind that you said put a star by.
Yes it does. Again, center, slow, engage, receive.
Go ahead.
You are well used to thinking of yourself as a community of Strands by now. This is good. But now take that conceptually flat model (that is, primarily seen as a horizontal array) and remember that all parts of it are three dimensional. Not only do we mean that they express in 3D, as of course they do, but also we mean that each of these minds is hierarchical, and although we don’t usually focus on that fact, it is always so.
Max Freedom Long, etc. again.
That is itself a shorthand for saying, the Hawaiian understanding of life. [Huna.] Three layers, not just one. Do you wonder that your life is so complicated? It is, horizontally, a federation of Strands, and vertically, a federation (sort of) of different kinds of mind. Each element in each mind in each Strand is itself three layers of mind.
It all interacts. It may be seen, remember, as one thing, subdivided, or as many things, working together. Either way, you are looking at any given consciousness as a junction of so many ways of experiencing the world. To the degree that you can absorb what we are pointing to, here, you will get the idea of how complex is the everyday situation you embody.
And it all changes, moment by moment.
Consisting of so many variables, all in play, could you expect anything else?
I looked for Long’s book The Secret Science Behind Miracles, yesterday, but couldn’t find it. I’m pretty sure I own it, but I don’t remember specifics.
Without definitions, leave it at this. Different layers of being require different means of coordination.
“Means” wasn’t right, but I couldn’t find the right word. Rephrase?
Let’s say the nature of different layers of self is going to be different, one by one. Just as your body consciousness knows how to process sugars but not how to read books, and just as you know how to read books but don’t know (expect perhaps academically) how to process sugars or how to read the Akashic record, so your third layer of mind knows how it relates to things you don’t even dream of, but is apt to be vague on the specifics of your politics or ideology or religious or other opinions.
Let alone processing sugars.
Let alone processing sugars – but if it weren’t keeping the whole show running, there wouldn’t be any sugars to process.
The answer the question you haven’t yet posed, “Waking and sleeping, three questions.”
Okay. More to come, I take it?
TBA.
Good enough for me. Our thanks as always.