Wednesday, November 20, 2019
All right, gentlemen. You said you had a larger topic queued up. Still have it?
You might consider it fairly major. But you need to relax about it. The key question for many, sometimes assumed, sometimes assumed to be unanswerable, is: Does your life matter and if so, how?
Sure. You’ve been talking about that right along.
We have, for that is the question we set out to answer, long before you consciously posed it. It will have looked like we were conducting a tour d’ horizon: human life; things you can’t know first-hand; the meaning of things you do know when seen from another perspective, etc. But this has been in the service of showing you (not telling you) how your lives matter, and to whom.
And I hear, now we have cleared away the shrubbery, we can get to the heart of the matter.
More like, now we have told you the things you were likely to find easiest to accept, we come to the things you have real resistance to. Here you cease being spectators or students, and choose to become participants or practitioners.
You can choose. In fact, in 3D you cannot help choosing; that’s what 3D is. But you may choose at random, or by default, or inconsistently. Better to fasten on to an ideal and choose in accordance with that ideal. Not every impulse is beneficial, not every habit leads toward your goal. (This of course presupposes a goal, or, as we put it, an ideal.)
You have long reminded us that an ideal can only be lived toward, it cannot be encompassed.
It is your pole star, keeping you oriented. You need to know where North is. Maybe you don’t intend to go anywhere near North, but North tells you not so much where you are, but which direction you are facing. And that is the important part! You could know exactly where you are, but head off in the wrong direction. You could be mistaken as to where you are, but if you know which direction is where, you can find your way eventually. Tendency matters far more than any place you happen to find yourself.
Like Dante waking up and finding himself lost.
Precisely. The trick is finding Virgil to orient you. [As in “The Divine Comedy.”]
And the bitter medicine you are preparing to administer?
It isn’t bitter medicine nor non-bitter medicine. But it requires mental and – shall we call it moral? – effort. It isn’t anything we haven’t been asking of you right along, but it is in an area more sensitive.
The familiar part is the effort to readjust our mental categories to incorporate a new viewpoint which includes some elements previously excluded.
Yes. As we have said, a new view will include things excluded by the previous view: Not all of them, but some, and it will require an effort, like Carl Jung forcing himself to study alchemy and eventually finding the solid productive generative core that had been buried.
The unfamiliar part is that you are exhorting us to take religion seriously.
That’s a shorthand way to put it, but really we don’t care what you think of religion in general or in terms of any given religion. What we do care about is your openness or otherwise to the things religion concerns itself with! And here we know we will encounter massive resistance precisely from those who are potentially most able to receive what we have to say and to benefit from it.
When your conscious mind has one firmly settled idea or group of ideas, and an unconscious part of your mind has opposing ideas, it creates a tension. The greater the internal (unacknowledged) tension, the more intolerant the expression. People half-convinced of a political argument are among those denouncing it most hysterically. Believers in “reason” may become screechingly irrational at external opposition that happens to reinforce their own unacknowledged doubts.
So. Look within. You want to come to the root of things. You want to discover who you truly are, what your limits and possibilities truly are. You want to grow. Well, we guarantee you, there are counter-forces within you that want the exact opposite, or a slightly or greatly diverging goal. The first step in dealing with them is to become aware that they exist. And how do you do that?
Simple. You observe what pushes your buttons.
That isn’t the whole story, but it certainly is a strong first step. Only, because your buttons are pushed, it becomes hard to remain present enough to observe it.
Which is what our non-3D is for.
It is if you don’t ignore it, yes.
And some of these button-pushing words are God, Jesus, Allah.
Sin, duty, surrender, sacrifice, sure. To permit ourselves a vast generalization, we would say that anything people label “religious” rather than “spiritual” offers the opportunity for growth because it presents button-pushing structures and allows them to be examined. Saying you are “spiritual but not religious” is one thing when you mean you take the spiritual world seriously but you can’t be, or won’t be, bound by any religion’s rules and dogmas. It is another thing, and not a helpful one, when it morphs (unconsciously, usually) to become “I take the spiritual world seriously, so long as I don’t need to learn anything of how it interacts with us and don’t have to limit my actions.”
That may not be quite a fair summary. For many people it is a fear of drifting into a situation where they find themselves bound by the rules and dogmas.
The reality is this. Truth comes with a duty toward the truth. Once you know the truth, you have a responsibility to live it. You will never get to “the” truth, but you always have “the truth as you know it.” You can’t go beyond that, but you can get closer to deeper truth, higher truth, if you put in the effort. But you can only attain more truth by living the truth that you have already come to.
Is that perhaps what Jesus meant by saying that the only sin that can’t be forgiven is a sin against the holy spirit?
If you rephrase it, it will become obvious: You can’t move North by moving South. You can’t benefit from wisdom by ignoring it, or by contravening it. Or, to put it another way, nobody is going to turn you around. You have to do that, and the preceding step is to decide to do it, or, let’s say, to decide to cease to resist doing it.