Saturday, May 11, 2024
5:20 a.m. You said you may perhaps continue on how life does, and does not, lead to something. Shall we proceed?
The point to be seized on is the nature of the eternal now (“I am who am”) as opposed to the nature of the eternal flow of time through the 3D. or we might better say, the flow of the 3D through time. You are always in the eternal now; you are always experiencing it in two contrary ways.
Intuitively you can tune into the boundless sea as it is and remains. Sensorily you can only experience the current, carrying you down the river. It isn’t time that changes, it is your experience of time, and that depends upon which of your reporting systems you tune into.
For some reason, that is very clear to me. I can’t say it was previously.
You had the concepts separately; we merely provided a way to understand how contradictory manifestations could have a common nature.
Yet it didn’t seem to come as a big “Aha!”
We smile. It doesn’t always come with fireworks. You had the big Aha when you got that times always remained but were not in your sensory grasp except for one moment at a time, as your senses conveyed it.
So is that all we need to say on the subject?
For some, yes. Others might profit by a few words more. As always, people’s ability to readjust concepts depends upon the concepts they hold beforehand.
You might consider how your 3D lives are affected by your understanding or lack of understanding of your place in time. A lot depends upon your grasp of the concept of the eternal now on the one hand, and your tentative grasp of an ever-changing experience of that eternal now, on the other. A lot of the frantic fanaticism of your time stems from people thinking, “It’s all going to hell,” followed by either “and I can do nothing about it,” or “and I have to do something about it.”
You understand? If time is what it appears to be, then anything that happens in your 3D experience of the world is real, and terribly important. It is life or death, you know? That’s the saying, “a matter of life or death.” But if you break through the crust of the apparent, you see that in fact nothing is at stake, there is no “life or death,” and there is no movement that could bring anyone to hell, or to heaven either.
So there is your paradox, and it will be resolved here in the only way a paradox can ever be resolved: by taking it to a higher or deeper level, to see what brings forth the appearance of paradox. We have said many times, paradoxes do not exist in reality, but the appearance of paradox does, often enough. In such case, it is no use to be choosing one horn or the other of a dilemma; that merely amounts to accepting as true what is only appearance.
So let’s set it out carefully, trying to represent each side of the argument in a form those caught in it would recognize.
- Time is eternal, unflowing. Meditation, mental stillness, anomalous experience, the product of the eight right understandings (call it): They let your non-3D mind convey a sense of eternity to your 3D mind. In effect, they carry an awareness to a place that can experience it only second-hand. Eternity is not “a very long flow of time.” It is all time, or timelessness, whichever way you wish to see it. It is the quality of time without the constriction that inevitably accompanies your 3D experience.
- Time is flow, as your 3D body is carried from one moment to the next, oblivious of any other. Anyone living in the world is aware of the present moment’s urgency. You must breathe, you must in general maintain the body; your existence and welfare depend to some degree upon your vigilance and upon what happens around you. Threats, difficulties, predicaments, can not be merely brushed aside as being unreal. Within that 3D context, they are as real as you are.
Now, both these things are true, and you in 3D are living at the intersection of the two. Some of you at any given time live closer to one end of the polarity, others live closer to the other end. You may or may not move along that line between the two; you may even oscillate. Doesn’t matter. The point here is that it is a line between polarities, not a choice of one being real and one being unreal. As usual, in 3D everything is somewhat real; that is, real in one context, unreal in another, and never as simple as any one viewpoint would see it.
So you see, Jesus said “The poor you have always with you.” He said you must not be taken in by “wars and the rumors of wars.” Do you think that meant he didn’t care about human suffering? This man whose entire ministry was to teach that you are all brothers and sisters, products of a living eternal presence that is aware of you and loves you?
But if he did care, why tell people not to concentrate on social problems? The answer, of course, is that he was teaching them to get to the reality beyond what their senses could report, so that then they could live more effectively. That is one of many meanings of “I have come that you may have life more abundantly.” A freer person, a calmer person, is more effective in the world. But that effectiveness is mostly by-product. It is a beneficial side-effect, but a side-effect nonetheless.
Do you want to correct the world’s injustices? The paradoxical truth is, you can’t do it by being immersed in 3D as if non-3D did not exist. Try to rework the world that way and you will not cure the world’s evil; you will probably increase it. Always you must act from love, if you don’t’ want your actions to recoil against you – and if you act without reference to the reality of the non-3D, how will you act from love whenever it appears to conflict with self-interest, with “realism”?
Now, we know this will meet resistance, but we want you to consider this anyway. On the one hand, you had George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and even Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. Like everyone, they had their flaws, they made their compromises among evils. Nonetheless, in extremis, they prayed, particularly the first two in an earlier time in your civilization, but so did the latter two, in a different way, a way closer to desperation than to connection: When they had exhausted their resources, they prayed for help.
Superstition? Some of you will think so. But consider on the other hand Stalin and Hitler and Mussolini. Can you envision any one of them praying, even superficially? Stalin famously asked, “How many legions does the Pope have?”
Be careful in your assumptions here. We are not taking sides in 3D affairs in the way you might think from seeing this listing. Another example may make it clearer. Robert Lee prayed for his enemies as well as for his cause and his armies, and he prayed every night. He was a strong warrior, no dweller in cloud-cuckoo-land, and he prayed as devoutly as did Lincoln. As Lincoln said, both sides prayed and the brayers of both could not be answered, and prayers of neither was answered fully. But the result is not the point here, it is the nature of the men. They wouldn’t have thought of it in this way, but in effect they were recognizing that 3D reality is affected by something that can’t be quantified but nonetheless exists.
What we are getting at is that it matters less what you believe (that is, the form in which your belief is clothed) then that you believe (that is, that you remain aware that 3D is only part of a larger reality).
There is more to be said on this, but perhaps a little distance between this and any continuation will be well, that the concepts will have time to penetrate where necessary.
So, next time?
Next time perhaps we can look at what good it does reality in general (that is, when considered from an All-D perspective) that people go through 3D experience.
Ed Carter told me once that 3D graduates were considered graduates from boot camp, which I took to mean, toughened, more self-reliant.
3D life does harden you, in the sense that glass may be annealed. That doesn’t mean the glass is being prepared for warfare.
Our thanks as always.