Base camps and cognitive dissonance (from July, 2018

Friday, July 20, 2018

Gentlemen, you were going to be redefining our ideas on the nature of the guys upstairs.

Perhaps we should begin with you laying out your current understanding of the situation.

I have the impression that I in 3D extend to the non-3D, the non-3D parts of me constituting part of my guys upstairs. Clearly any part of myself that is the rest of my All-D totality cannot be alienated from me. I gather that anybody whose nature I resonate to, in whole or in part, may be accessible to me temporarily or for all I know permanently, depending on how deep the resonance and how of the essence.

I was told that all my blood relatives are part of my guys, and past lives – though that concept seems to keep fluctuating – and anybody I resonate to. That means that in effect I connect to everybody, and everybody else also extends to everybody, so – as you’ve told us more than once – we’re all one thing.

All right, that will serve as a jumping-off place. You will agree that your previous mental world experienced quite an expansion by these ideas. Cleared up a lot of perplexities. Reinterpreted things you had heard, to make sense of them, and introduced ideas that were entirely new to you that also made sense.

You know they did.

Anything you or anyone can ever learn in 3D is scaffolding, though. You realize this.

Abstractly. I think I get it, but I suppose that using scaffolding relies at least in part on believing that it is truer than just a provisional way to see things.

Perhaps we should change the analogy, and think of base camps on the way up a mountain. You hike and climb and gain new perspectives at the cost of lengthening the distance from your source of supplies. If you are on a long enough climb, you walk into a nourishing situation prepared for you in advance, where you can rest and may proceed again when you are able.  Nobody in his right mind would come to a new camp and complain that it was not (what it had never pretended to be) the ultimate destination. They would be glad for the assistance, and would leave off climbing until they had recuperated, even if their rest was brief. This is only an analogy, but perhaps it is a somewhat less stiff and static analogy than scaffolding, which itself was less discouraging than previous ones.

I remember being at such a staging-place some years ago, and you guys told me that if I wished to leave it at that for this lifetime, I could.

And you said no, let’s push on, and we were pleased, and as you see, by pushing on we pretty thoroughly redefined what you had thought you knew. And another time, previously, you had said, “I think I’ll pause,” and we did that. It’s all in what you’re willing to do.

This latest opportunity to push on comes courtesy of your Mind Mirror experience, you see.

I see that it’s so; I don’t yet see why or how it’s so.

That experience firmed up your understanding of the situation emotionally, as well as intellectually. A better, more careful and ultimately more descriptive way of saying it: Different parts of your compound being were activated; the entire equation was rewritten. And this in turn not only allows but mandates changes in how you experience the world physically, mentally, spiritually, emotionally, because the very “you” of you is not the same.

I’m not with you yet, but I’m following. Go on.

A born-again Christian, a materialistic deterministic scientific atheist, a mainstream Christian, a practicing Hindu, a Hassidic Jew, a secular or socialist or devout Muslim, a Western modern agnostic, living without religion but without a strong anti-religious bias…. The potential combinations are endless: Can they all live in the same mental world? Surely not.

I guess we tacitly assume that our non-3D components take a broader view of things than our 3D personalities that are shaped by our genetic and social surroundings.

But this is only fuzzy thinking on your part. Could a devout practitioner of Shinto really live in the same mental world as you?

Presumably he can live there Upstairs, considering that his past lives may include any or all of the others.

Well, here you begin to bump into the results and causes of cognitive dissonance. And it is going to take a while to sort through.

Neither a detour nor a short day-trip.

Not unless you get tired or scared and decide to return to your familiar campfire. If you do – for a while or for the rest of your life – there is no penalty nor any implied or express criticism involved. It truly is up to you. A pause is not permanent until you run out of time to continue.

I have become a little too concerned with the problem of getting the message out, haven’t I? It diverted my focus.

No, we’d say it diverted your idea of your focus. But maybe what you have in mind isn’t what your larger pattern has in mind. If we had to choose between you continuing to explore silently and alone, or you ceasing to explore in order to clarify and expound upon what you have come to so far, why should we have a preference? It’s up to you, and what you don’t do, someone else will do differently, but that doesn’t mean better or less good, only different.

Well, let’s keep going, and I’ll do what I can to keep at least a cadre of like-minded souls with me.

Even Jesus didn’t try to change the world by changing the world, remember. He changed a few people he lived among, and they changed others who changed others. None of those successive ripples of change came from what anybody said, particularly; it was what they radiated, what they were. Jesus didn’t have to do prime-time TV. He worked in a remote corner of the Roman Empire, for only a few years. Wrote no books. Founded no movement. Organized no protest. But what he was, overflowed, and changed everything.

Today his prospective publishers would tell him he needed a platform if they were going to take him on.

But you see, that is precisely the mental barrier you have allowed to be constructed ahead of you. You say to yourself, “The road to the success of my message is barred until I become a salesman.” So in other words, the structure of the book-selling part of your society is holding up the message the non-3D wants to put out. Does that make sense, put that way?

No, not really.

When you saw that the electronics validated the idea that you were actually doing something, rather than (as you sometimes still suspected) “just making it up,” it consolidated the ground you had covered all these years. Now you can start living without another layer of apologizing.

I know what you mean. I was doing healing work on Rita intuitively, continuously saying, “I don’t know why I am move to do this or that,” and when she told me to stop apologizing, it began to flow much more freely. You’re saying my own improved level of confidence will improve what I can bring through.

Well, that and it will also improve your level of confidence in the things you – not we – know. That in turn smooths the way for further advances, because it means we can deal with you with you on firmer footing.

Let’s go back to “cognitive dissonance.”

We referred to the fact that at some point our new information is going to conflict with what you have become accustomed to, and that may cause difficulties for you.

And I get, mostly if I try to tie things up prematurely.

That’s right. We have warned of the pitfall of tacking new material on to an accustomed framework and forcing it to fit. Ultimately, reality doesn’t contradict itself, but at any given moment it may seem to, and if you let the fear of contradictions overwhelm the new insight, things go badly.

I also get that the farther ahead we push, the greater the reluctance to give up what we think we know, hence the greater the temptation to add to an unchanged structure rather than to reevaluate the structure.

We wouldn’t say temptation, more like a scarcely evitable process. That’s why it is difficult to preserve, or regain, Beginner’s Mind, and why alternation of exploration and consolidation is necessary. At some point it becomes impossible to keep adding material to a previous position. At some point you need to tap the kaleidoscope and see it all anew. And it is difficult to do this while on the march.

Is the next stage, then, you reinventing the wheel for us?

Maybe it is for us to divert you from the wheel to the airplane, or from 3D to non-3D, or from relativity to magic, or from what you know to what you think you know is not so.

Saturday, July 21, 2018

So, guys, more on cognitive dissonance?

Yes, but in a direction you haven’t much thought about: cognitive dissonance among your (everyone’s) non-3D components as they interact not only with the 3D but with each other. But this requires that you be able to see things differently, in order to understand. The misunderstanding that persistently warps people’s understanding is that you keep thinking “we and they” in inappropriate situations. It is important that you realize that things interact, and that “all is one” does not preclude conflict, but assures it. Just look around.

The second point I get intuitively, but the first point is not yet well stated.

Well, think of it. You define yourselves in contradistinction to the rest of the world. Whatever “we-ness” you are thinking in terms of, the rest of reality is made to serve as the “they-ness.” If you say “we men,” the they is women. If “we humans,” it’s non-humans. If we channelers, or we roofers, or we Democrats or we fans of Colin Wilson or whatever, choosing a “we” automatically constellates a “they.”

I’m with you so far.

You do it with “we in 3D” versus “they in non-3D”; “we Terrans versus ETs”; “we of one persuasion, of one ethical value system, of one set of rules of conduct,” etc. It may not have occurred to you: As long as you are defining yourself or others, in any one way, unintended corollaries are going to come into play.

So, you’re thinking of yourself for the moment as an American, say, or a student of history, or a fanatical or mild or indifferent participant in politics or religion or science. While you are thinking of yourself in that context, it makes a difference if you think of yourself as 3D only or as All-D. If the former, you are never going to consider the ramifications in the non-3D; if the latter, you are going to see any distinction, any source of conflict or separation, differently.

It isn’t that suddenly conflicts will be defined away as nonexistent or meaningless: It is that suddenly they will be seen to extend farther than you used to dream.

You are not what you think you are. Yes, you are more than your physical bodies; yes, you are an extension of something greater than your present 3D persona; yes, you are part of All That Is. But now it’s time to look at things a little differently. It is at once simple in concept and difficult to explain in a way that is not likely to be instantly misinterpreted. That is to say, it may take a while.

The thing I got right away is that war on Earth is a reflection of war in non-3D. Conflict of values means conflict of being, in a sense, and that is not a matter of conflict among 3D puppets but of conflict in non-3D spilling over into 3D, since non-3D is primary and 3D secondary.

That is a precipitant way of putting it, but perhaps it will advance the argument. Remember what we told you, a good while ago: Reality contains all contradictions, and must balance every negative and plus, with nothing left over. We don’t mean “negative and positive” only in moral or emotional or any other terms, but we do mean it in each of them. There is no point in papering over the discord and seeing only the harmony. There cannot be only one half of any dichotomy.

Nor can you have love and light without fear and dark, or how would you recognize them? Conflict is built into all situations other than homogeneity, although it is also true that conflict implies cooperation, another set of linked opposites dependent upon one another.

This being true, remember that you are not denizens of 3D only, but of All-D. Your own consciousnesses are not confined to 3D only, but may expand beyond it at any time to experience more of the rest of your being. Then, how can you be subject to conflict in 3D and not also in non-3D? Conflict is not a matter of limited perspective and perception of separation, alone. It is also a matter of being what you are, in a reality largely consisting of beings who are not what you are.

In other words, the afterlife is not going to be harps and clouds, love and light and perpetual rest.

It is not going to be only those things.

How long would you want perpetual rest? How long will love and light satisfy you, given that fear and darkness continue to exist and have their rightful place in things? How long before harps and clouds – that is, harmony and non-material non-shape – satisfy someone who remembers the joys and sorrows of an ecstatically pointed 3D existence? “Heaven” as a way-station, sure. “Hell” as a place of (self-inflicted) punishment for one’s sins, sure. “Purgatory” as the burning-off of dross so that one can get back to the pure metal, sure.

But these are processes, not destinations.

Life is movement, growth, choice, change, development. It is also conflict, cooperation, every emotion, every intellectual achievement, every stage of self-mastery. Is love and light, clouds and harps, going to top that forever? Should it?

Anything less than everything is going to be partial. This is as true of non-3D as 3D and should be obvious, if you will keep in mind that “spiritual” and “physical” are not separate but are merely relative polarities within a greater unity. Your 3D self is part of a greater All-D self. What affects you in 3D affects you in non-3D, and vice versa. What you become by your choices affects the non-3D in turn. These are not hard concepts, but may be unfamiliar, hence require being spelled out a little.

War in the non-3D among the adherents of different values doesn’t mean armies and weapons, any more than it necessarily does in 3D. But it does mean conflicts of values, of views, of advice and counsel and assistance. Ultimately all is love, all is one, all is well. Only, neither you nor we live in “ultimately.” So hold on to the reassurance, but don’t count on experiencing it before you become one with All That Is. And that implies surrendering your sense of individuality, which you aren’t ready to do yet, and why should you? And who is going to make you do it?

 

 

 

Leave a Reply