Tuesday, October 25, 2022
6 a.m. All right, friends, I’m beginning to get the idea, I think. Should we proceed to part three of The Future of the Individual? As always, written or spoken or even only thought, I intend presence, receptivity, clarity.
Your equivalent of faith, hope, and charity.
Very funny. But can we continue?
We are continuing. Do you notice how you can feel the understanding gelling inside you?
I do, sort of. I read what we get, and I feel like I get glimpses of what you’re leading us to. I get an anticipation of concepts you haven’t yet laid out. In earlier years, this would have made me suspect that I was making it up behind my own back. Not “would have,” did. Now I’m seeing that sometimes we think we’re making it up when in fact it’s coming into view, the answer appearing before the question.
You will remember – something you have often told others – that often in Monroe programs you would hear someone say, “Probably I’m just making this up, but – ,” and you would know that a real experience was about to be related. Knowing they weren’t consciously inventing something, yet half-experiencing it slightly ahead of themselves, so to speak, they experienced it neither as their own nor quite other, so they were tempted to tag it the product of imagination – “imagination” being considered to be something somehow theirs and somehow not theirs.
It’s a problem due to our mental categories, then, isn’t it?
Most things are, if you can’t see them straight. Or, to say that better, whenever you cannot clearly categorize or experience, the fault is going to be not with the experience but the category. It is a case of round pegs and square holes.
Yes, clear as you say it. So, then –.
What we have been driving at, this long time, and what is finally emerging from the mists, you might say, is that half-human half-divine 3D individuals are journeying toward some goal that cannot be in the 3D, yet uses 3D to help get there. Your future as souls is not to become ever-better, ever-stronger, ever-more-fulfilled 3D souls, but to participate in the flowering of what you are into an entirely new order of being. The goal of a caterpillar is miraculously different from what any caterpillar might imagine on the evidence of its life to date. It is not living so that it may become a sort of super-caterpillar, but so that it may fulfill its perhaps unsuspected nature by leaving behind creeping on vines and eating leaves.
I have always wondered at Thoreau’s paragraph at the end of Walden about the bug that was – well, I’ll quote it when I transcribe this. It seemed uncharacteristically impractical, a little too high-flying, though of course very characteristically idealistic.
But now you see what he was getting at.
I do. Our future is to become an entirely new order of being that nonetheless fulfills our nature.
It seems divorced from reality, does it not? Every church, every spiritual and esoteric tradition, has faced and will face this same difficulty. If people cannot intuit their real nature, and cannot imagine any future but a 3D-bound slogging, followed by vague bliss, they cannot, as Thoreau put it, “understand much that I have to say.” Even you did not, until now it has finally hatched within you.
Bob Friedman was always asking me, “But what do they do over there.”
And when we were asked, we said, “We relate.” What should we have said? If we could have substituted a clear, understandable sentence or two – or even paragraph or page or chapter or book! – for so much successive building and removing of scaffolding, would we not have done so? It is so hard to communicate without being misunderstood. But, even harder, it is so hard to communicate without reinforcing existing misunderstandings. If the hearer is determined to hear A when we are saying something that is neither A nor B, or is A but also B – what are we to do?
Persist, I suppose. You do the best you can, and then you keep trying.
Which is why when we can find someone working in the way you do, we are grateful. That of course does not mean your virtues are the only ones that count, nor that what others bring to the table may not be equally valuable. (Nor do we think you think that.) But it is of great value to transcribe faithfully, to strive to understand without prematurely deciding meanings, to tolerate ambiguity, to accept open-ended outcomes. As we say, there are other virtues – but these are valuable, in trying to bring forth what can never be fully said.
As our perspective changes – as we get another inch up the mountain – we see new meanings in what other people have said. Bob Monroe, for instance. He said, in effect, that our larger being experiences completed larger beings winking out of existence in the plane they lived at. The implication was that uncompleted larger beings are caterpillars and the completed ones became butterflies. And he said, explicitly, that his words were a translation of a translation of a translation.
Yes. “You do the best you can.” In practice, this means that you speak your truth as best you can, even knowing that everyone will read what you write from where they are. Where else can they read from? That means, they are going to misinterpret, but it also means that – this is something you may not have thought of in quite this way – misinterpretation is scaffolding. Thus, it is not exactly labor lost. It is a bridge flung over a gap, even if neither bridge abutment is as solidly grounded as one may think.
We misunderstand our way toward the truth, in a way.
When you allow yourselves to be guided, you do, yes. Not when you insist that whatever new you learn be conformable to your existing patchwork of beliefs.
So can you give me that final bit of clue that will help cement this latest understanding?
Yes, only remember that our very best explanation will be patchwork, in that it must necessarily rest on wherever you happen to be. It isn’t quite building a house upon sand, but there are analogies.
So:
- You are body, soul, and spirit.
- Body is as “spiritual” as the rest of you, much of its intelligence and composition unsuspected by you, taken for granted, but its firm purpose is to act as temporary – that is, time-related – platform for the soul’s journey.
- In that sense, body is of course as holy and as matter-of-fact as soul and spirit. It is the taken-for-granted servant that allows the rest of the show to proceed.
- Soul is the solidification of various Strands within time, to provide an unceasing but continually changing platform for spirit. Soul is to spirit as body is to soul.
- Spirit is the purest essence of the higher being, participating in – making possible – the concretization that is body and soul. That is, spirit is not confined to any timespan or place, but is what makes such manifestations possible.
- You – body and its intelligence, soul and all its extensions along various Strands, all of its choices within a defined span of years, spirit as a part of the higher being – are in effect one cell of a larger being that is not primarily 3D (though it extends into 3D through you and all your fellow beings).
- Your destiny is as a cell and as a part of the whole. That is, in fulfilling your human nature, you are also fulfilling your divine nature.
- Be careful not to slide into confusing your higher being with God (whatever your definition of God may be). Your higher being is divine to you, but is not “divine” in the sense of being the creator of all things. Infants probably regard their parents as divine, too. With time, they learn better.
And there is your hour, and that is as much as we have to say about The Future of the Individual.
But of course you are open to questions.
Always. It is how we can tell how our expressed thought is clear or is subject to misinterpretation or is obscure. Do not neglect to quote from Walden.
Our thanks as always.
& & &
The final two paragraphs of Walden, published in 1854, when Thoreau was 37 years old, with fewer than six years more to live in 3D:
“Every one has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree wood, which had stood in a farmer’s kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut, and afterward in Massachusetts — from an egg deposited in the living tree many years earlier still, as appeared by counting the annual layers beyond it; which was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn. Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality strengthened by hearing of this? Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society, deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree, which has been gradually converted into the semblance of its well-seasoned tomb — heard perchance gnawing out now for years by the astonished family of man, as they sat round the festive board — may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society’s most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last!
“I do not say that John or Jonathan will realize all this; but such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can never make to dawn. The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.”