Monday, October 31, 2022
4:40 a.m. Shall we proceed? I think you intended to resume by talking about the difference between what people think 3D life is about, and what it is really for. That is, the nature of life after 3D. Or the nature of the greater life. My very inability to phrase it shows that I don’t really know where you intend to go.
Well, focus, remembering your overnight experience, and we shall proceed in whatever direction the moment leads us.
Okay. Presence, receptivity, clarity. Last night I realized I was lying quietly between waking and sleep, and various scenes were playing, not of my conscious doing. I thought, “I could contact Joseph the Egyptian!” That is, I was in a state that sometimes we seek, and I had come to it naturally, merely by being mentally and physically quiet. It occurred to me, we can always extend to our Strands; it isn’t like we have to go anywhere to do so. I was unable to control the contact, but that may be (we’ll see) merely a matter of getting to Carnegie Hall: practice, practice, practice.
Yes, you see, you already know everything you will ever seek to learn. You already do anything you will ever seek to learn how to do. The problem is not learning in the sense of acquiring a new skill, but learning in the sense of reconnecting to something already well known. That may seem only theoretical, only an impractical abstract idea, but it is very real, very doable. It is less a matter of one growing into something than of removing the artificial barriers that prevent one from being, knowing, doing, living, what one really is.
This should be a very encouraging statement, if you can bring yourselves to believe it. You can’t be too stupid, or too ignorant, or too feckless, to attain the greater wholeness. You already connect to perfection, and that means perfect knowledge, perfect balance.
None of your problems, of whatever kind, exist by accident or ill-fortune or by the malice of the universe. They exist as opportunities to be overcome, and it is the overcoming (not the getting to the other side of the problem) that is the gift.
Now on the one hand you say, we don’t need to do anything; on the other hand, you say, obstacles exist for us as opportunities. Opportunities must be seized, must they not? Isn’t that a doing?
You will remember the scripture that says that though your sins be scarlet, you can fly over them? That is to say that life is decisions. You can decide to be other than what you experience yourself to be. (Yes, a decision is a “doing,” in a sense. But don’t let language prevent you from grasping the point.) Life need not be plodding. Neither need it be plodding interrupted by magic. It can be as easy as your experience of realizing that you are already in a mental state that, at other times, you have had to strive for.
I think this will strike some people as playing with words. Our experience is of struggle.
Your experience is of struggle mixed with ease, or call it luck, or good fortune. What you concentrate on will seem to you to be your reality. Change your idea of yourselves, and it will seem (and will be) as if your life magically changes accordingly, either instantly or slowly according to what you unconsciously deem possible.
It is true that my life began to appear magical after about 1987, but it took me a long time to believe fully in what at first I was almost pretending (to myself) to believe.
Well, you see that was you working out your destiny. That is, your life-pattern began you in one place, with certain tendencies, and led you along the logic of the problems/opportunities those characteristics manifested in interaction with the changing moment. Your decisions along the way helped determine which way you would go as you proceeded in your canoe down the river. They couldn’t move you to another river, but they could move you to this or that part of the river, this or that current or ripple, avoiding this or that rock or shallows. Perhaps not the best analogy, but perhaps it will serve.
Your life and everything in your life, which includes all the noise of your contemporaries, all the “news” (and the “olds”!) that illustrates and frames your life, may run smoothly or rough, may be consistent or wildly varying, may tempt you to despair or exultation or confusion. It doesn’t really matter. What force could make you other than you are? What could get between you and your non-3D community, or between All-D you and the higher larger being to which you are inextricably connected? What misfortune could damage your immortality? Many things could throw you off balance, could leave you feeling isolated or abandoned, could tempt you to think that you are at the mercy of events. In the truest sense, that is not true, because it could not be true.
That is the true meaning of the Book of Job: not that it is up to you to bear whatever affliction comes your way (though obviously that is true as well), but that things cannot happen by chance; you cannot be abandoned by your larger being, only, you sometimes need unwavering faith that life is good, despite the evidence, despite world news, despite personal tragedy or disappointment or persuasive feelings of ennui.
The Book of Job says this in the form of a story, which people can remember more easily than an abstract principle. It casts it in the form of a contest between God and Satan, as if man were a pawn between them – for life often enough does seem that way, as you all know. And, it tacks on a fairy-tale ending that actually not only obscures the point but contradicts it – but this was superstition being tacked on to a teaching story by those who thought they understood but did not. We cite the story to remind you that we aren’t telling you anything no one ever realized; we are merely reinterpreting into contemporary language and concepts, as must be done every generation, and will need to be done again, forever. Still, you are here now. Hear it if you can. Life is good and you are not an orphan, not a disfavored child.
Having said all this, it ought to be unnecessary (but isn’t, we fully recognize) to add that the purpose of 3D life is other than what many people assume it is.
Can it be meant to be a life of universal happiness? Contentment? Mutual assistance? Love? Continual growth? Fulfillment? Life does contain all those things, but as you well know, it also contains their opposites. Does that mean that life itself is struggling? That this is a Manichean universe in which Satan fights God for dominion? Certainly it can look that way. When it does, are you looking profoundly enough?
When we see a world of suffering and cruelty, it is very tempting to see it just that way, as a battle of good and evil, with us in the middle.
Yes it can, but look at all life in the light of your own life. You yourself are not all “good” nor all “evil.” You are not all knowledge nor all ignorance. You experience your times, whether or not you follow world news. You are not isolated from your fellows, even if you are a hermit in the desert someplace. So look inside yourself and ask if the meaning of your life lies in 3D developments.
I don’t know if I am or am not typical, but I’d have to say no. I live among a climate of what we might call institutionalized fear, after Sept 11 and now the invisible virus, but although it affects my life, it does so from the outside, not from who I am.
This is more common than you think. People may fixate a certain kind of attention on “the news,” but their own life is curiously divorced from what is being reported. And even if they are in the midst of an epidemic or a water shortage or a war to the death, still it all is external to them though they have to deal with it. You can’t exactly say that World War II was an interruption to the lives of the people caught between the armies – yet, in one sense, it was not internal but external.
I get that, but you haven’t yet said it, quite. You mean, I think, that anything we live through is the shared subjectivity manifesting within ourselves, for us to process however we are able to do.
Yes, that is a very concise way to put it.
And that’s our hour. What was our theme?
You might call it “Life and events,” but that wouldn’t really express it.
Maybe, “Your life and times”?
Maybe, “Your life and why.”
I kind of like that. Very well, our thanks as always, and till next time.