Practical, focused, limited, hopeful

Saturday, January 21, 2023

7:20 a.m. All right, guys, a little help?

Your thought – “your” thought! – that you are thinking to explain too much, is valid. Much of it has been explained in other books, and you don’t need to be saying it all again. This time, concentrate on life more abundantly: that is, the promise and the problem and the way forward. You are expressing a point of view, it doesn’t have to be perfect.

My point of view?

Let’s say, ours. We have poured out, as best we could. You have absorbed, as best you could. Now you need to translate, as best you can. How could such a three-part process not be personal? To make a comparison that may illumine by its very audacity, would Islam be the same if it had come rom someone other than Muhammad? Would Jungian or Freudian or Adlerian psychology have come into the world in some abstract way, unconnected from the humans who translated?

This is precisely the inflated view that I have feared and resisted from the beginning.

It is not. To illustrate anything, we use historical examples, because that is your alphabet, your dictionary. As Newton might have understood via mathematics, or Upton Sinclair via observation, or the Webbs via statistics, so you see through the lens of story. But that means that we must use examples that are known to history. We cannot use your friend Louis, for example, because the example would need as much explanation to others as what we were using it to explain.

We are not comparing you to Muhammad, nor your task to creating or revealing the elements of Islam. But we are comparing the process through which non-3D understanding must enter 3D terms. It always comes through an individual, and grows from that one small seed. Therefore, no new way of seeing things could ever be free from viewpoint, from personal bias. This is a part of the reason why ideas become contended over: Equally serious people see the truth of it and the individual peculiarity of it, and of course different people slice it in different ways.

So, the Catholic position of group understanding of revelation, and the Protestant position of individual discernment.

Both, yes. And of course both Catholic and Protestant organizations contain both positions, to varying degrees at various times.

Only, we aren’t trying to start a religion.

Oh, it could be seen that way. Every new understanding is the underpinning of a new religion. But in the sense you mean, yes, of course we aren’t. What we hope to do is to instill a little specific yeast into the dough of the worldview that is emerging in your nascent global culture. And, lest that worry you, we remind you that millions of other injections of yeast are taking place all the time. It isn’t like it’s all that important that any one specific vision “succeed,” whatever that would mean. It is merely that some versions of the truth are more accessible to certain groups than are others. A phrasing that is appropriate to 21^st century America is not necessarily equally relevant to 21^st century Peru, say, or Ghana, or Italy, or China. Every place, every culture, every time, will have its own expression of truth available to it, just as Emerson said.

[Emerson, February, 1855: Munroe seriously asked what I believed of Jesus and prophets. I said, as so often, that it seemed to me an impiety to be listening to one and another, when the pure Heaven was pouring itself into each of us, on the simple condition of obedience. To listen to any second-hand gospel is perdition of the First Gospel. Jesus was Jesus because he refused to listen to another, and listened at home.]

We repeat: our point of view, yours and ours. Every thing within you, every active Strand, every emotional response to conflict, every story absorbed, fiction or non-fiction, every mental construction – it all made you you, as it all makes anyone. That’s what we have to work with; that’s what you have to offer.

I recognize, but want to make clear, that in saying “have to work with, have to offer,” you aren’t saying “must” but are saying “what is available.”

Correct. And of course what is true for you is true for everyone, only not everyone writes.

We don’t all write, but we can’t help living.

Precisely. It is in living that you write on the Akashic record, put it that way. Your input into the development of the shared subjectivity comes not primarily from what you do but from what you choose to uphold. Actions are the manifestation in 3D of decisions arrived at (consciously and subconsciously and unconsciously) by a non-3D intelligence functioning within 3D constraints. Actions are not negligible, but they are secondary to the mind itself. The 3D world, remember, is not things in space; it is an expression of mind. Which is more important, Caesar’s day to day life, or his legacy? Which is more important, his specific actions or the trend of his vision? This will not be clear to one and all, but for those to whom it is clear, it will perhaps open the way.

So, to speak specifically to your task.

• You want to keep it practical. Therefore, bring in “the way things are” only as need be. Don’t go explaining everything just because you have a clear view of it. Leave some work for others who have a slightly different center of gravity.
• Keep it focused on human life as experienced here and now. The ancient Egyptians spoke to their own time. Use them as illustration if appropriate, but not otherwise.

I’m hearing, make more flat statements as background, rather than trying to explain, justify, convince.

People will absorb that for which they have receptors, nothing else, regardless how it is packaged. Take this as a relief.

Well, it will be, if I can do it. But I have always had a hard time with people’s flat statements.

You can only do your best, and trust.

• Sketch the human situation and leave it for people to weigh it. Concentrate on revisioning things people are overlooking.

Envision a great weary sigh. We are writing a religious book, when you come down to it.

Should you have ever doubted it? If religion is not about life and the meaning of life and how to live, what is it about? Certainly not rules.

People would say it is exactly about rules!

That is because they would confuse the essence with the manifestation of it. Or, to put it more plainly, they confuse truth with attempts to organize truth in society. The latter is no more a possibility for you than it is a desire. You really can’t create anything useful if you worry how it may later be misused. People misuse fire! They misuse water! They’d misuse the very dirt under their feet if they could do so. That doesn’t mean those things shouldn’t exist. It means merely that they too may be used to help people grow up by living their 3D experiences, choosing.

So here is one way you would structure it:

• A sketch of the condition you find yourselves in, interpreted by what you have learned over the years: the constriction into one time/space, etc.
• Possibilities arising from this way of seeing life. Old obstacles dissolving, new bridges appearing.
• Methods of deepening awareness, including
  • Removing obstacles
  • Developing abilities
  • Clarifying vision

That is one way, not (by far) the only way, and not necessarily the way best suited to you. The point remains: Keep it practical, focused, limited, hopeful.

I have been thinking this would go out to the blog. Now I am not so sure.

Your choice, always.

Thanks for all of it. Till next time.