[I was re-reading the novel I am currently writing, to keep the rhythm of it, and this excerpt seemed to call out to be shared, for various reasons. Our ILC groups, for one thing, should find this interesting.]
Chapter Nine: A Wider View
“All right,” George said. “Let’s all get comfortable.”
Dinner over, dishes done, they were again sitting around the table, using it as connector. George had Eddie turn on the tape recorder. “Ready? All right, let’s center ourselves. Moving inward, releasing any distracting thoughts and associations. We are here, we are now. We are centered on this time and place.”
He let the energy clarify for a few moments. “We are centered on this time and place, and centered on each of us as we share this time and place.”
Again he paused, waiting for the energy to align. “We center on this time and place, and on each other in this moment, and on the shared presence within us of the monk called Joseph.”
Ceasing to speak, he established a silence that was more than a mere absence of sound. Like the other three, he sank into an inner place that had no words. After another few minutes, he emerged again. “Eddie, you seem to be the conduit here. Can you see how to proceed?”
They waited.
Eddie said, “I’m getting a sense that we aren’t deep enough. Somebody has something in mind for us, I think, but whatever it is, we need to go deeper.”
“All right, let’s do that. This time, this place.” Again they concentrated on an internal stillness. After a moment or two: “Eddie, when you feel so moved –.”
Eddie’s face was closed in concentration. He nodded, but said nothing and made no other movement. They all centered on maintaining an inner silent connection, waiting for direction.
“It’s – I am going to try to let Joseph speak. I think that’s what’s going on.”
They waited.
“Joseph, if you are wanting to communicate with us, you will know we are willing to be of service. I offer you the use of my mind and voice. Speak to us.”
A very brief pause. “Okay, I think I can feel him. He’s saying – well, I guess this is coming through me, rather than –. No, wait, okay, I get that. He’s telling me – not in words, you understand, I’m getting a knowing – he’s saying there isn’t the difference between him and me that I am assuming, so the contact won’t look like I assume it would. You know? He’s more like my own thinking, than like somebody else talking to me.”
They were all accustomed to these sessions. They knew not to answer rhetorical questions or comment on descriptions or indicate that they understood what was being said: not if it would interrupt the flow.
“We – we are still thinking about it wrong, and our ideas about what it is are interfering with what could be done. What they want done. Almost, what has to be done. A sense of urgency there.”
A pause. “I get that it is very important that we all keep focusing. We will do this together or we won’t be able to do it at all. But – what? What is it you want us to do?”
A longish pause.
“We are each a part of Joseph. He is a part of each of us. He is a part of others, too, of course, but the fact that we are the ones right here and now is important somehow, it makes – sort of a unit out of the four of us – five, I guess, if you count Joseph as one. Yes, that’s what he is trying to get across: We are all part of one thing, in a real sense, not just some abstract idea. Joseph, CT, Regina Marie, George, me – we together are forming one thing right here and now, and if we can fully allow that thought, we can – can what? – can move to another level, I guess you’d say. We have a chance to experience ourselves differently but we have to – open the way for it.”
George, softly: “How are we thinking wrong about it?”
A short pause. “It isn’t thinking, exactly, more like feeling. You need to feel that you aren’t what you have always felt yourself to be. Feel my presence as a part of you.”
(It was only later, when they listened to the recording, that they noticed Eddie shifting from identifying as Eddie to identifying as Joseph. At that moment, they were in the flow, and the perspective shift was something that had become very familiar to them, first-hand and second-hand, over many years of practical experimentation.)
Silence, as they attempted to feel Joseph’s presence within them.
“It will be easier,” Eddie’s voice told them, “if instead of holding an idea of what is happening, you cast back to a time when you experienced Joseph knowingly. Yes?” A pause. “And how do we do that? I get, the feeling of a monk observing our everyday life, the strangeness of it to him.”
Nobody spoke, concentrating. If they had spoken, they might have wondered, aloud, if the four of them would have experienced him in the same way. George and Regina Marie had been raised Catholic. CT and Eddie, though nominal Protestants, had been raised without any active sense of a non-3D presence underlying the world. The silence protected them from distracting thoughts like these.
Regina Marie said, “This is very familiar to me, this presence. I have felt it, though I did not think of it as male.”
“Male or female is not relevant here,” Eddie’s voice said. “You are each of you masculine, each of you feminine, and the proportions within you vary according to the moment and the situation, have you not noticed? You are less constant, less consistent, than you think yourselves. In any given moment, what you think of as ‘you’ changes, as one or another strand emerges into prominence for that moment. Usually this is not evident to you, because you identify with each moment’s feeling, and so do not observe the fluctuations within yourself.” A pause. “What is important here is that you remember the feel of the connection. Sink into that. Or, let’s say, rise into it.”
The tape unit continued to record silence as the four of them continued to concentrate.
“Yes, I see it,” CT said. “You have been with me all along, I see. Only – you are so much a part of me, there isn’t much use in thinking of you as different.”
“There is a use,” Eddie’s voice said. “It is very much a matter of how a man thinks in his heart, that is what he is. Did you think Jesus meant, Don’t pretend to be what you aren’t? Or, well, yes, that is what he meant, but he also meant, for those who were able to hear him, that how you think about yourself helps determine what your limits are going to be.”
CT was nodding.
George said, “Sounds like we all are in the same place now.”
“You are right to think that you must not allow this new view to overwhelm other insights you will have come to over many years. But a close connection with a common thread will open up new possibilities.”
A very brief pause, almost imperceptible. “Let us now take the next step.”
.2.
Again the quiet anticipation, the waiting for a drop of water to disturb the still surface. Again, a state very familiar to each of them, from long years of practice at maintaining an active consciousness without specific content. They were prepared to wait for as long as it took for the alignment of factors invisible to them.
(“We on a conscious level are not in charge of the process,” CT had told them long ago. “We can provide the necessary conditions by our willingness and our acquired skills, but beyond that, we must be willing to settle for holding the space.” He had said this many times, beginning with his book Extraordinary Potential. But this often met resistance. Many who eagerly responded to his argument that they could change their experience of mental states were less receptive to hearing limits to what could be done by willpower alone.)
Joseph, coming through Eddie’s mind, using Eddie’s voice: “Until this moment you have lived your lives in the only way open to you. Within that way were many gradations, some more conscious, some less. Hear this now: Your life henceforth will be bounded differently. This is not an improvement; it is not an achievement; it is not a skill nor an acquisition nor a gift. It is life in a new form and so you cannot expect it to be familiar or comfortable. You will need to expand to fill your new possibilities, even while carefully conserving your present individual state of being.”
CT, quietly: “This is not yet clear.”
“No, of course it is not. As you have experienced, new orientations come only at the price of initial confusion. What wells up within you from the deeper consciousness will have an inhuman overtone, often phrased in pompous, inflated language: That cannot be helped. Your individual conscious localized awareness requires time and familiarity to become able to synchronize with newer patterns. You know this, even as we know this, but knowing about a necessary phase does not in itself provide one the ability to avoid having to go through it.”
They waited.
“Hear this. This is not continuation, nor modification, nor addition, nor alternation, nor alternative. This is a new state of being you are called to enter into. Do not expect to experience it as anything less than a redefinition. This not our command, nor our desire, nor even our accustomed comfortable expectation. It is the straightforward expression of the truth we call you to live.”
“All right,” CT said. “To the extent we are able, certainly we are willing. We are gathered here in trust.”
George added: “In trust, and expectation, and willingness to be of service.”
Eddie’s voice said, “We recognize the trust and the willingness – and one factor more, the first essential.”
“Love,” Regina Marie said. “We are gathered in love.”
“As you will shortly see, in the absence of love, you could not proceed. We could not proceed.” A moment’s silence, while the tape recorder spools silently rotated. “You will bear in mind, change requires loss if it is to be able to provide gain. This is not a test of character, but a necessity of the process.”
George: “As we move toward the West, we move farther from the East.”
“Yes. Life is vastly larger than anyone’s conception of life. No one individual can encompass all of life. At certain periods, in order to be able to grasp a new concept, you must first release other aspects, perhaps aspects you hold closely.”
Sensing them at the verge of restlessness, Eddie’s voice said, “We proceed. Will you each take the hands of those beside you, and lightly maintain this contact. That is, hold hands in your circle around the table, and do not let go. Be sure that your arms are comfortably supporting the contact, so that no background discomfort results.”
Regina Marie reached out to CT on one side of her and George at the other. Each of the men reached out to Eddie.
“Now. We need you to bear in mind, this comes from beyond you and yet from within you. You will experience this by way of what you call ‘each other’ and also by what you are thinking of as Joseph, as a shared common strand within. Therefore be prepared.”
(They might have asked: Be prepared for what? But, as Eddie said later, what good could words have done?)
Eddie’s voice said, “CT, begin making a statement, whatever comes to mind, even if you do not know how you will finish your thought. George and Regina Marie will interrupt you, and then will interrupt each other, as we indicate, or as they feel impelled, and you in turn will interrupt them when you yourself feel moved to do so. Begin, and we will do our best to guide the process.”
“Very well,” CT said. “I’m sure we all approach this opportunity you –“
“Regina Marie. Continue.”
A very short pause. “We appreciate the opportunity, trusting that you have our best interests at heart. We proceed in faith, in light of –“
“George.”
Promptly: “Our faith is rooted in experience. We have learned to live in trust, and we have never been disappointed.”
“CT.”
A moment’s blankness. “You are escorting us on a long journey. I feel that much. If it has taken –“
“George.”
A pause. “If it has taken this long for us to get to this part of a new beginning, it must be a long –“
“CT. Continue your thought.”
“Yes, that is where I was going. It must be a very long way we have to go. It feels like I have been on the road so long al–“
“Regina Marie.”
“I can only conclude that you are altering us somehow by this process. I was raised that it is rude to interrupt. Yet –“
“George.”
“Ah, but this isn’t interrupting, is it? It is closer to finishing each other’s sentences, each other’s thought. And that suggests that we’re oiling the wheels somehow.“
George stopped but Eddie’s voice did not indicate that another should begin, and no one felt moved to step in. They sat in silence and the tape recorder’s reels revolved.
“Now,“ Eddie’s voice said. “This, that you feel: Trust that the others are feeling it no less.“ They glanced at each other, George, Regina Marie, CT, and then they turned their eyes to Eddie. “Sink into the feeling. Rise into it. Trust the feeling, it is not delusion. Now, working carefully, walking on eggshells, carry on, learning to converse within the shared awareness you are feeling. As you learn the trick, you will see there is no need for interruption. We will withdraw from Eddie’s operative consciousness so that he may participate. When you arrive at the next stage, you will know, and we will proceed from there.”
.3.
A receptive minute, as they looked around at each other, still connected by the touch of each other’s hands.
“Not sure what we’re doing, here,” Eddie said.
“It will emerge,” CT said. “At least, I am confident that it will.”
“That is what Joseph promised, anyway,” George said.
Regina Marie said nothing, staying in the space.
After a moment, CT said, “I get the impression that we are being prodded to recognize the quality of the moment. I imagine we have all felt it before.” The others nodded, words seeming almost disruptive. “Then, this has to be a redefinition of some sort.” Again, nods rather than words. “A different way of interpreting something we have become familiar with.”
(The discussion that followed cannot be understood if seen – as it usually would be seen – as an alternation of individual views. Think of it, rather, as a central swirl of interaction, added to by this or that person’s contribution at any given point. Later, when they listened to the tape, Eddie was to say that the image that came to his mind was of ice cream ingredients mixing in a tub, the mixing forming patterns that gradually gelled into place, thus freezing a momentary pattern into something more permanent. “More relatively permanent,” George had said, and Eddie had accepted the modification.
(In order to give you a feeling of the change they experienced, it seems better to reproduce a sense of the movement without identifying who said what, so that in this report, as in that event, emphasis will move to what was said, rather than who said it. A small change, perhaps initially disorienting, but necessary. Also, for ease of understanding, much awkwardness and many side trails and dead ends are silently eliminated. This was their first attempt, after all. Initial attempts at anything are likely to be laced with dead ends and awkwardness. For the same reason – easing understanding – we silently elide many pauses as well, some quite lengthy.)
“We have been looking to create a joint mind. I had always thought of it as me contacting a group.”
“No, it is more like me talking to myself.”
“I suppose we all have these voices in our heads.”
“Oh yes! A running commentary!”
“Back seat driving.”
“Not to mention, sometimes endless nagging, carp, carp, carp, all negative.”
“But sometimes very supportive, saying to me, ‘You can do this.’”
“Yes, and sometimes saying, you shouldn’t do this.”
“Maybe this is what the church called guardian angels?”
A pause.
“I get the idea that conscience is more like a ship’s pilot, saying ‘Rocks over there, clear sailing in this direction, weather is building, you might want to reef your sails.’ But I guess most people think, Traffic cop.”
“Sometimes it’s saying, ‘Brace yourself, we’re going to hit the rocks, and nothing to be done about it.’”
“That too.”
A pause.
“I always hear that all is well in my world and in the larger world, and that there is nothing to fear.”
They sat absorbing that.
“I think there must be many voices, like listening to people arguing something out. One says, ‘In my experience, this.’ Another says, ‘My experience says that.’ And we get caught in the middle.”
“Well, ‘caught’? For that matter, ‘in the middle’? Maybe it’s more like we are the sum of all the points of view.”
A silent moment.
“Maybe so. That would make sense of something I have observed. Sometimes I am torn among all these voices, and I think there’s something to be said for all of them, they all deserve a voice. And yet at the same time I have the feeling that it is up to me to decide which point of view to adopt.”
“Even though, deliberately deciding to adopt one view is to do violence to the truth of the others.”
“Yes, exactly. And yet it still seems necessary!”
A pause as they waited for something to emerge. (Already, though they didn’t quite notice it until later, they had begun to function more as one unit with cooperating pieces than as different units cooperating.)
“I get that we are here to choose.”
“Yet –?”
“We have all heard that, over many years. But now I am getting that we choose not so much by logic or even by emotion as by what we are.”
George, from a sudden slight distance: “”Yes. Say more about that.”
The others registered the slight change in the energy, but as they did not resist it or concentrate on it, George’s energy returned to the group it had momentarily emerged from.
“More about choosing by what we are?” A pause. “Every moment is a choice-point, I guess. We are always choosing.”
“We are pulling ourselves into this future or that future.”
“Yes. Yes, that’s a good way to look at it. We pull ourselves along by our choices –”
“– like climbing a wall of rocks on a mountainside –”
“Yes. We choose this or that, and our path is set for the next moment’s choice.”
“Maybe we go back and retrace our steps, but even that is choosing.”
“And every choice defines us somehow. Not quite sure what that means.”
“I think you are saying, we become quite different versions of ourselves, depending upon what we choose. Every choice builds upon who we created ourselves to be by prior choices.”
A pause.
“But then, these voices. They are definite enough, individual enough. Should we consider them to be past lives?”
“You mean, threads within us, like Joseph?”
“I don’t say it is so, I pose the question.”
They considered it, not creating thought but holding themselves receptive to whatever might surface.
“I don’t get any sense that the voices represent something finished and ended. They seem as alive as I am.”
“Maybe that is the point. Maybe our choosing in the moment affects their continued choosing.”
“Outside of 3D, you think? Or, maybe in their 3D lives?”
“Rewriting what they lived, you mean?”
“I don’t know. The thought was out there, and I was moved to voice it.”
There was much more in this first experience, but perhaps this is enough to give a sense of the transition. Before the tape ran out – with a “click” that seemed startlingly loud – they had absorbed, by experience, what they needed to do to consciously participate in a group mind. But then – and George voiced it – there arose the question of how they were to proceed in the future. The same thought came to them all, and after Eddie flipped the tape, they looked to Regina Marie. “I gather that you are to lead us,” George said.
“Yes, I received the same impression. However, I have no idea what I am expected to do.”
“Well let’s ask, shall we?” George glanced at Eddie, and Eddie set the tape unit to recording again.
.4.
Regina Marie was not by nature an assertive person. She much preferred the background to the spotlight. But her father had often stressed to her, as she was growing up, that it was important to accept whatever legitimate obligations the moment may bring. “One does first what the situation requires, not what one’s preference would be.” How many times had she heard him say that? And whenever he heard her doubt herself, he would repeat to her that each person is given certain gifts at birth. “We are expected to employ them, develop them, and not be like the unworthy servant who buried his talent, out of fear of being unable to use it properly or profitably.” And (in order to maintain a proper balance), he had often reminded her that gifts were to be employed with humility, in that they were gifts rather than things earned. “But,” she had once argued, “perhaps we earned such gifts in prior lives. Perhaps what we are today is the reward earned previously.” Her father had smiled and said, yes, perhaps so, but in that case, surely the pride of accomplishment attached to that prior life, not this one. (Not that Henri du Plessis believed in “past lives” as a concept.)
Very well, she thought to herself, this is where the moment has brought us. We will presume that the powers we cannot see know what they are doing. She looked at each of the three men in turn, and she, and they, enjoyed a quiet moment of affection and trust and expectation. She, and they, waited for whatever would come.
“We are expected to find our own way,” she said at last. “I know only one way to do that, and it is to be open to the moment. One assumes that there was a reason why I rather than one of you was asked to be the one to translate intent as we proceed, and one assumes that the reason will become evident. I believe this journey begins with our living in love and trust.” (And only later, listening to the recording, did she notice how quickly her everyday consciousness began to merge with something other.)
“Let us concentrate on a new center,” she said. (The words surprised her. She had no idea where this was going, but she freely went with it, trusting. Her willingness and ability to trust was not the least of the reasons she had been chosen to take the lead role.) “In life we center on ourselves, and this is appropriate, for it is oneself for which we are responsible, and no one else can relieve us of that responsibility. We may have – we do have – additional responsibilities, but this one we have always. We are the stewards of our lives.”
She paused, waiting for more to well up.
“Now we are called to expand our sense of self. We are each the individual we experience ourselves to be, but we are also more than that, and this is what Joseph intends to demonstrate to us.”
Another pause, another download.
“It has been said that we need to make a shift like Copernicus, placing the center of the solar system where it belongs, rather than thinking everything revolves around us. This is true and not true; it is enlightening and misleading. We as planets are separate. We as members of the solar system are not separate. One point of view does not cancel another, but adds to the total understanding. Is this much understood?”
CT said, “I understand that I am part of everything else. I learned that in my NDE.”
George: “I understand you to be saying we are both individual and not individual, depending on how we look at it. Certainly that makes sense to me.”
Regina Marie, or rather, whatever was welling up through her: “Yes, you are all accustomed to the concept. But now to make it real experientially.”
That sounded like a preamble, but nothing followed. Eddie said, “I suppose what happens to us in the box, or whenever we go deep, is a sign that we connect to something beyond what we know.”
The consciousness expressing through Regina Marie produced a sigh. “You will see that concept is not experience, not is experience readjustment. We need you to realize yourselves, to remain separate and yet to realize your inherent, unbreakable connection.” Regina Marie, as her normal self, said, “I understand now what is wanted. And perhaps this is how to proceed.” Instinctively turning to the man most intimately connected to her, she said, “George. Visualization may assist. Picture yourself extending to Joseph, and tell us when you seem to touch.”
(That wasn’t expressed very clearly, but he knew what she meant, and so did CT and Eddie. In the moment, such clear intuitive understanding seemed natural. As, indeed, it was.)
“All right.”
She intended love, envisioned sending love from her heart through her arm to her hand, and from his hand to his heart. “Now follow the – the resonances, you might say – from Joseph to me.” It took only seconds, and it was as if the energy formed a vivid, vibrating, pulsing triangle, Regina Marie to George via physical and emotional touch, and at the same time, through Joseph in the non-3D world – up and then down, so to speak.
“Yes,” George whispered. “I get it. This links us in 3D and non-3D.”
“It does more than that, as you shall see. CT, while George and I maintain this link, you do the same with me.” She sent love to CT in the same way she had done to George. “I send love to you, and so does Joseph. Extend in both directions, so that you connect in the same way to me in 3D, and to Joseph, not in 3D.”
CT concentrated. The process took longer, probably because he did not have the intimate connection to Regina Marie that George did, and perhaps also because he had other preconceptions to overcome. “Think of Margaret,” Regina Marie said. “Think of your son Chris. Think of anyone you have loved, and me, and Joseph.”
When CT made the connection, he and Reginia Marie both knew it.
“Now Eddie,” she said. “George, CT, extend to Eddie the love you feel from Joseph and from me. Eddie, call up your connection to Patty.” That did the trick, and immediately! It startled them all.
“Now,” she said imperturbably, “one step more. Each of us extends to Joseph” – a pause to make it sure – “and to one another. Now register what you feel. This means, not emotion, not concept, but – where are you in toto? Who are you?”
A moment’s silence as they processed this.
“There are more,” George said. “I suppose I ought to have anticipated it, but there are more of us connected through Joseph. My brother Angelo, for one. The priest, Francois, Angelo’s friend from Open Door, for another.”
“Many others,” said whatever was speaking through Regina Marie. “Now ask yourselves, what mental habits prevent you from functioning in continual awareness of your membership one with another?”
Good question, that. The answer would launch them on a longer journey. Or, said more properly, would bring them to awareness of the journey they were on already, had been on all their lives in 3D, and earlier.
.5.