I hope I’m equal to what I’m sensing you want to give us this morning. A series of dreams in the night, and they had the same trend: something about our road forward, though I don’t remember most of them. Can we skip recording the dreams and just go to the point?
If you will set your slide-switches
Okay. Focus. Receptivity. Clarity. Presence. I see a difference when I say them distinctly and slowly, rather than rattling them off.
It is merely a matter of attention. Anything you do with presence is going to have an enhanced effect on you.
You were given dreams. (Or, we could say you were in the vicinity of factors that produced dreams. It works either way. And you could conclude either that the dreams are leading you, or that they are the result of where you are. The difference in concept is perhaps of interest, but not at this time.) The point here is that indeed something is happening in your vicinity.
I presume that “your” refers to us, not only to me. That is, many people, maybe even all people.
All, only of course to different extents. It must be all, obviously, if we are all one thing. It must be to different extents, obviously, if each individual-community has its own situation, its own past, its own part of the overall equation to work out.
Everybody works out his own salvation, I think the Buddhists put it.
In practice, isn’t this obviously so?
- You are part of one thing; you are a part of one thing.
- You are individuals who are also communities. Everything in your 3D and your non-3D environments should tell you so.
- You are not everything, nor are you nothing.
- You cannot live in isolation and you cannot live in denial of your individuality. Even on the animal level, you are responsible for maintaining your existence, and even on an animal level you require others for you to be able to do so.
Yesterday I became aware of a disturbing interpretation that is being put on your words as penned by my hand. It makes me shiver, in a way.
There is nothing to be done to prevent misinterpretation but to be as clear as we can be, and as clear as you can translate us. When we told you many years ago that people who misled others are responsible for what those others do, we were referring to those who deliberately mislead. There is all the difference in the world between setting forth an honest message with honest intent, and lying. Lying comes in many forms, including pretending to know when you don’t know, but is always is based in a lack of integrity; that is, in a difference between what one is and what one pretends to be.
Aren’t we all guilty of that?
No, you are not all guilty of not being what you pretend to be. But we can see why it looks like that, and it is well worth going into.
- You are a bundle of threads, right?
- Your job in 3D life is to continually choose among them, which to manifest and which to discourage, right?
- And you as an individual and as a community are part of the one thing that comprises us all, right?
What part of the human mind can be alien to you? You may wish you were all good. You may strive to be all good. You may consistently make choices that have as their third-tier effect to move you consistently toward goodness, or toward greater goodness. But you will do this in the context of a bundle of threads that contain the entire human spectrum. No one is only good threads or only bad threads. How could they be, and still be human? (And bear in mind, the division into “good” and “bad,” though necessary for the analysis, is only one way of seeing things, though a very persuasive one.)
If your chosen values include certain characteristics, they are perforce going to reject, if only by default, the opposites of these characteristics. If honesty, perhaps dishonesty, or perhaps subtlety, or perhaps tact, or perhaps awareness of nuance. What we are meaning here is that the qualities are not the binary choice they may at first appear to be. What the opposite of a given quality is, will depend upon the angle from which the quality is lived.
But let’s keep it simple. Suppose your value-system rejects cruelty. That still isn’t as clear-cut as it appears, because in such matters what is important is not the action but the intent behind the action. Is a surgeon cruel when s/he cuts into living tissue? The difference between surgery and torture is not inherent in what is done to the body, but in the intent. Surely that is obvious once stated.
Obvious, but of course difficult of application in 3D. We can judge our own intent (to the extent of our self-knowledge), but not that of others, not very well.
True, but let’s stay within the compass of the individual. You choose – and not just once, but on a continuing basis – to eschew cruelty. This is a pole-star of your morality. Nonetheless there will be within you every impulse, or let’s say the source of every impulse, that would lead anyone to the cruelest acts. It is not that you do not include in your makeup such characteristics, it is that you choose not to manifest them. You see the point here? Restate it for us.
Well, I get that you are saying, “Nothing human is alien to me,” meaning that I myself include within myself everything, good, bad, and indifferent. It’s all in my palette, and what I paint depends upon which colors I choose. It isn’t like my palette (or anyone’s) consists only of bright colors.
Now this has been merely to show the difference between pretense and integrity. One might pretend or even believe that this or that characteristic was not in one’s makeup, but this would be at best sloppy observation, and at worst hypocrisy. (Parenthetically, this goes for good qualities, as well. It is just as easy for you to not give yourselves credit for certain virtues as to deny yourselves certain vices. You are none of you as good or as bad as you may think. How could you be? You are part of one thing, as we keep pointing out.)
So, integrity does not (because it can not) mean that one is devoid of certain traits. It means that you don’t encourage internally what you discourage openly. Integrity has less to do with “image” or with one’s relations to one’s followers than it does with one’s relations with one’s self.
That won’t be immediately obvious, I think.
We don’t quite see why not. Your 3D life is choosing among qualities. By implication that means there must be alternatives to choose from. All the alternatives cannot be equally desirable, or what are you accomplishing by choosing? So if integrity meant, being free of certain characteristics, it wouldn’t refer to choice but to happy circumstance. And if it referred to one’s dealings with others rather than one’s dealings with oneself, that would be placing social relations above individual self-creation. It would pretend that influencing others could be of greater importance than the one job you are there to do.
I think the difficulty is that when we hear the word “integrity” we think of it as how it expresses in life, which is between people.
But that is not how it expresses. That is a mere side-effect. The real danger of lack of integrity is that it creates a civil war within the individual, pulling both sides of a tug-of-war.
I’ve never seen it put that way.
If you notice, everything Jesus said about how to deal with your fellows actually stems in what those dealings do to you.
Can’t say I did notice.
Well, look, and think about it. You aren’t in 3D to reform the world or to reshape each other or to do anything that is primarily 3D-oriented. You are there to use 3D conditions to do what can be done only in such conditions. If in the process you help each other, that’s well and good, but we have said more than once, it is easier to want to help than to know how to help. All you can really know is your intent, and even to know that much can be an accomplishment.
We’ve gone a little over; I hope we got across what you wanted to get across.
It’s all seamless. Everything connects. Don’t worry about it.