Monday, December 4, 2017
Still pursuing the question, why are we on this timeline. I don’t really have it in my head. I trust you have something to tell us today.
The key is to stop considering the subject as if the key to it were 3D-you. It isn’t. The key is connectivity. Once you alter your viewpoint to consider yourself and your own awareness as only a small part of the picture, things straighten out. Thinking of yourselves as autonomous units causes the disorientation.
We continue to come back to one key: “As above, so below.” You are beginning to see how many things this rule of thumb illustrates, but we encourage you to apply it continually, creatively, in exploring, because the universe is coherent, structured, predictable, once you have the approach. In this case, the fact is that the being under discussion may always be considered both as part of a higher community and as the higher self of a community of beings at a lower level of organization.
Once you adopt this point of view, you realize that considering any individual as if it were a totally free agent, able to do whatever it wished, unconstrained by circumstances beyond its own will, is a misunderstanding. Nothing exists in a state of disconnection, either of lostness or of absolute freedom. It can’t possibly be the case that, in a universe without absolute divisions, there could be any absolute separation of anything, no matter how large, no matter how small – and in saying “large” and “small” we refer not so much to physical dimensions as to any and all ways of looking at things. Surely this is obvious, once stated?
Well, if this is so – and we assure you, it is – it should also be clear that nothing can be understood without understanding the context within which it exists. That context is an indivisible part of the thing being considered.
If set out to analyze anything, you are going to have to examine it in isolation. But the better you understand its context, the better you understand it. Looking at a ball bearing in itself will tell you nothing of a particular use for the ball bearing in a machine, for instance.
So if that much is clear, extrapolate. You can’t tell much about a blood cell if you examine only the blood cell (in however much detail) without having in mind its function in a circulatory system. A red blood cell is a unit, and like everything in the universe has consciousness particular to itself, but it is unlikely to comprehend itself as a tiny transient part of a vastly larger function that is comprehensible only on a larger scale. The blood cell’s nature, function, purpose, is only discernible in the context of the higher being whose purpose it serves.
Now, does this mean the cell is being “used” in the sense of being manipulated? Obviously not. You cannot argue that a subsystem is abused or cheated by functioning as it is designed to function. If your blood cell were to achieve “freedom” and isolation from the body it served, what good would that do the cell? It would be of no use; its existence would be literally meaningless and in fact absurd.
You’d wind up with a bunch of little Sartres, exclaiming, “Blood cells are a useless passion.”
Of course you would. And at the other extreme, blood cells who imagined that they would be judged by the higher being that they intuited serving would be likely to set up rules for their behavior – as if those rules were not innate and unalterable in the nature of things.
Using blood cells as example does make our own position clear by analogy.
It always will. Do you want to understand something in your life? Find the appropriate analogy at a lower level or higher level, and extrapolate. Not that this won’t steer you wrong sometimes, but that is a function of fallibility, not of an inadequate guide.
Do we need to consider the “freewill” aspect of the blood cell’s situation? I think the context shows us pretty clearly the determining limits of its existence.
The “free will or no free will” debate at your level is meaningless because it assumes an impossible isolation. Tell of your experience with the microscope.
My friend Jim Meissner had a dark-field microscope, which allowed us to examine living blood cells, not only dead cells. A drop of blood on the slide was a fascinating array of mutually interacting creatures, red and white cells. You could see the occasional white cell devour things, for instance.
The white cells appeared to choose, to be attracted in certain directions and then choose how to react. Free will? External direction? The white cell cannot choose to be in a different drop of blood; to a degree it cannot choose whether to react or how to react to the sensed presence of its natural prey. And yet, within these limits, it can, does, and in fact must choose its exact movements, even its larger strategies, so to speak.
Taking a jump here, because this popped into my mind as I was writing that – disobedience?
Continue the analogy. A white cell has its own nature. It lives in an environment it could never escape (and why would it? What would it do, outside the blood stream it was fashioned to play a key role in?) It follows instinct (or, call it the higher self’s purpose) and is fulfilled. But if the white cell turns upon its fellows and begins to rend the cells around it, it ceases to follow its nature and ceases to function as part of a balanced system. There isn’t much point in accusing the cell of moral failing, but in effect it becomes a rogue element.
The same thing happens at your level, and you may if you wish amuse yourselves trying to determine if criminal elements are so because they were born that way or society mis-shaped them or they deliberately said, “Evil, be thou my good.” The fact remains that elements of any system that begin to function as if they themselves were all that mattered become an obstacle to the system and a problem to themselves. However, this doesn’t mean they are an inexplicable error in the system’s design. Any manifestation that is so persistent and that analogously appears in other systems must be considered a part of the system.
Trickster, again.
That’s right. And we will resume from here. Bear it in mind: connectivity.
Thursday, December 7, 2017
A major stumbling-block is that you tend to think of the system – any system you analyze – as if it were more static than it is. View it in motion, and things change. Relationships and consequences clarify. So, if you look at 3D life, or “the afterlife,” or “past life reviews,” or past lives themselves – or anything – they look one way if considered as a one-time event, another way if seen as continuing process.
Isolation in space, isolation in time, always distorts the reality you examine. It may be necessary to examine a thing in isolation, but it distorts. So, once you’ve looked at it closely, look at it again in broader context – in time (that is, in repeated sequence), no less than in space (that is, extension).
That is easier to assent to in principle than to comprehend in practice.
Still, it is worth bearing in mind. It will help you understand anything better.
So, in this question of particular timelines. We need to sketch out several things needing to be sketched out in turn.
- What is a decision, and who makes it, for one.
- What a decision actually does; that is, how it affects timelines.
- Why decisions are possible, why they are made, for another.
- How they are made.
- And, not least, how all this is affected by, and affects, other layers of consciousness.
That’s a lot to accomplish, but it seemed better to set out the problem so you would have some idea where we’re headed. How long it takes us to survey the field is of much less concern.
I get that orienting us somehow makes the task easier on your end.
If only in that it reduces anxiety, certainly. Perhaps anxiety isn’t the correct word, but something akin to it, anyway.
I’m not insulted. I get it. It’s easier to trust that you know how to get where you want to go if there is a road map, and it’s easier to believe in the road map’s existence if you cite some landmarks.
So, what is a decision, and who makes it? Probably it won’t astonish you to hear that it makes a difference where you view the situation from. Look at it first from a 3D individual’s point of view, then from the All-D self, then from the larger being of which the 3D being is a part, and watch things change appearance.
- you in 3D are living your life. There comes a moment of choice, large or small. Depending on the magnitude of the apparent immediate importance of the choice, you pay no attention or little attention or really focused attention. Then that decision leads to the next, continually. This process may be paraphrased by saying the choices are made in varying degrees of a mixture of predisposition and deliberate conscious weighing of options. In the nature of things, most choices, even quite important ones, are made more or less by pre-existing disposition; that is, by habit, by accustomed inclination.
In other words, mostly we don’t do much deciding at all.
Considering yourselves as conscious, aware, individuals, that’s right. Mostly you run along the rails your life has set down for you. And this is not only not a problem, it’s how things have to be (considered as a system), if you think of it. To consciously decide every little detail of your life would be exhausting, like having to concentrate to tie your shoes or write your name or sip your coffee. That’s what habit is, after all, Colin Wilson’s robot that helps you live your life.
- But now look at it a little more deeply. Consider how your day-to-day drifting looks to your All-D self. Its view of your life is wider, longer, in greater depth, in fuller potential extent. Whereas you in 3D mostly do not see your life in perspective (being overshadowed by the perpetually moving present moment), the All-D self always sees it in perspective, even though the perspective is perpetually in motion.
Your All-D self does pay attention to all the little things you can’t be bothered with consciously. It, your wrongly named “unconscious” self, pays attention. It sees future consequences; it keeps in mind past pre-existing conditions. It knows when a step to the right or to the left will make a difference in your life, and it also knows which way you tend to move when it makes no particular difference. You might say that your larger-than-only-3D awareness is always making your decisions for you according to past demonstrated predilections unless you overrule (or confirm) its judgment by 3D-oriented willpower.
- Now look at it from your Sam’s field of view. Sam continually balances input from all its lives. Therefore in effect it has preferences, moment to moment, that your All-D self picks up.
Why “therefore”?
“As above, so below.” Envision your daily life, balancing input. Sam reacts, as you do in your sphere, with preferences for greater or less change, in this or that direction, of this or that level of intensity. It isn’t just one-way feed. Sam is not sitting at the City Desk reading reports and doing nothing. Like a City Desk editor, he reacts to what he reads; he makes decisions, and issues instructions and queries. Don’t carry the illustration too far, but it may help correct the unconscious idea you have (people have) that Sam just sits there reading reports, and doesn’t interfere.
Seems to me that is how Sam’s function has been portrayed to us.
No, it is that only part of the relationship has been sketched, till now. Sequential exposition is a painfully long process.
Now there you have three different levels entering into any potential decision.
- You in 3D mostly don’t decide consciously.
- You as part of your All-D self decide continuously, but mostly by default – “steady on course, straight ahead.”
- And Sam intervenes only at important moments, like you in 3D in a sense, only the moments are likely to be different, and the factors entering into the decision are likely to be very different, and Sam’s preferences have to be expressed via your All-D self, which has to get your 3D attention or acquiescence for at least non-interference.
And that’s enough for the moment.