Friday, May 3, 2024
4:30 a.m. The mental life connects; the physical life separates.
That isn’t quite the way to put it, though it is what we said. Phrased more carefully, it would say, the physical circumstances lead you through the experience of isolation, but your mental life, carefully observed, provides you the evidence of continual connection that otherwise might not be noticed, not indeed believed.
It may seem to be a paradox. As always, any paradox may be resolved by considering the elements comprising it from a higher or deeper level. Here, the paradox resolves easily. (In fact, many will not even see it as paradox, seeing the resolution instinctively.) It is mostly an example of separation of function. A matter of specialization, one might say.
Your mental world functions from (connects you to) the non-3D from which you emerged. It continuously provides you access to abilities and perspectives you could not achieve if you were confined mentally, as you are physically, to 3D conditions. This is why some people discover liberation in meditation or prayer or any discipline that frees them from 3D sequential thinking.
Your physical existence in a separate body lives by very different rules, in very different conditions. This is not poor design, nor the result of bad choices, nor punishment, nor accident. Your 3D life is designed to place you in 3D conditions of seeming isolation in one time-space moment at a time. An illusion of separation is a part of that isolation. It functions as it is supposed to function.
However – and if you are reading this, you almost definitely know this from personal experience – this illusion of separation, of isolation, may be overcome by a realization of a deeper unbreakable connection, and that realization will certainly change your experience of 3D. The same conditions that provided a painful isolation now support a very different situation, in which physical confinement to one time-space moment may be connected to mental awareness of connection, to provide the best of both worlds.
You understand? At one level of consciousness, the phrase “All is one” will be seen to contradict everyday experience. How can all be one when conflict and cross-purposes and painful isolation are so evident? But then you achieve a higher or deeper awareness, and you see, you experience, that in fact both halves of the seeming contradiction are one.
When that occurs, you perhaps restate the situation in your mind as “Life is all one thing in its origins and in its non-3D manifestation, and it appears in 3D as separated elements because of 3D conditions.” Later perhaps you restate it more concisely. “Diversity in unity,” perhaps, or “Unity disguised by an appearance of multiplicity.” Any rephrasing is going to distort the fundamental understanding, because selection in 3D always does that. Sequential exposition – which is what language is, after all – cannot present all aspects at once, and even if it is able to list every single attribute of a situation, it cannot help but imply a hierarchy of importance even by the order in which things are listed, or by the length at which various things are discussed. With this in mind, you see the value of holding an image, or a feeling or a memory, so as to preserve your connection to the reality behind such statements as “All is one” or “All is well.”
We are tempted to digress, and perhaps it is as well to make note: The saying “All is well, all is always well” is so contrary to everyday experience in 3D that it can only be accepted provisionally (that is, on faith that it will prove true), or recast as a pious wish, or denied outright. If your being assents to it, it does so not on logical grounds, nor exactly in defiance of logic, but because something within you recognizes the truth of it. Of course, that may be said of anything we say, but it is particularly true for statements that seem to contradict experience so flatly.
How is everything always well? Phrase your understanding and we will assent or dissent or modify.
I’d say that the 3D can never be understood as a unity by logic based in sensory experience. Judging it by how it appears, we see joy and we see suffering, but we do not see an underlying unity, just as when we look at a family or any group from a 3D level, we see diversity and conflict and cooperation, but never unity. It is only as we look at life from a non-3D perspective that we see that the diversity proceeds from the fact that our consciousness of underlying unity is split by 3D conditions chopping life into time-slices and space-slices. This being so, it is clear that the appearance of diversity has to be rooted in one non-divisible underlying unity that we can mentally see but cannot physically experience.
Yes, that is a good summary. Your senses report on the world at any one time-space moment; your intuitions report on the underlying unity of time, and of space, and of life.
How could something that is one thing be self-contradictory? How could it be random? How could it be chaos, or divided into opposites such as good and evil, knowledge and ignorance, etc.? It may easily, almost inevitably, seem that way, when perceived at the level of consciousness that 3D conditions encourage, but beneath this appearance is the reality, and your deeper selves, your higher selves, will show you that, once you quiet your 3D logic and its insistence on presenting evidence of diversity.
So to return to the main point, not yet quite made: Your mental/physical outlook determines the nature of the world you live in. this does not – could not – depend upon the action or inaction of anyone else. It doesn’t and couldn’t depend upon political or economic or societal events of any kind. (Well, in one sense it may be said to depend upon physical externals, but only in one sense. To the degree that anyone allows external evidence – “the news” or ideology or religion or scientism – to shape their understanding, then yes, it could be said that only certain conditions allow people to get to the point where they can see the underlying reality, because it will keep them from doing the meditation or yoga or prayer or whatever that will quiet the sequential chatter and allow the deeper wisdom to emerge. But even this caveat depends upon sequential logic, you see. It assumes a lack of coherence in the interaction between the individual and its external circumstances.)
Do you really think that most people are precluded from achieving such contact until the world is at peace, or everybody learns to think alike, or all the stoplights across America turn green at the same moment? Such – slightly exaggerated here for emphasis – is 3D logic, saying, “This is how the real world is, as opposed to your pleasant fairy tale of unity and all being well.”
But if the life you experience may change as a result of a change within you – a decision to concentrate on the perception of underlying unity, rather than the appearance of chaotic diversity – what a hopeful fact! It is within your ability to choose how to see the world, how to see life. Your choice, no one else’s. Your choice, and it is not dependent upon wars and rumors or wars, nor upon the next election for city council. Your choice, and it need not wait for supportive others, and need not first clear out non-supportive others.
Could there be a more promising situation than to know that the life you live rests upon your own decisions, your own efforts? Jesus didn’t say, “I have come that you may have life more abundantly, once we’ve cleared the Romans out of here.” He said, “The poor you have always with you,” meaning not that this is a good thing, but in effect saying, “Don’t wait until social conditions are perfect (in your opinion); work on yourself now.” Or perhaps we should say more carefully, not “work on yourself” (which implies a long process) but “Decide now to be what you want to be.” This does not rest on results, but on your acquiring a surer basis to life.
Now, this is enough for today, and because it makes it easier for you to begin again, we’ll say that next time we may (or may not) begin with the effects on your lives of the fact that you are composed of strands – other Ives – which continue to live as you are living, even though from your vantage-point they are not in the living “present moment.”
This is wonderful material, and we are grateful for it. I am, particularly, given that I had thought we were done.