34. Redefining who we are

Thursday, May 30, 2024

5:30 a.m. I think we can proceed now. We’ll see.

Seeing yourselves more as process and less as artifact will help you get the sense of temporary form that is more like bounded energy than like a physical object as it appears.

Fluid, not solid. Energy, not solid form.

That’s the idea. You will remember that Buckminster Fuller said “I seem to be a verb,” and defined human life as a sliding knot in a rope.

I didn’t understand what he meant, but I am beginning to. We are patterns, although we experience ourselves as solids.

Yes. If all 3D reality is mind-stuff slowed into an appearance of solidity and relative permanence – well, you are part of 3D reality, are you not? You could hardly be more solid than your surroundings.

Obvious as you say it.

So, not the rope but the slipknot, not the ripple or even the water, but the pattern of the water. You are far more temporary than you experience yourselves to be, and far more superficial – in the sense of being a phenomenon on the surface of things.

You are saying we are riders, but I’m not sure what we are supposed to be riding on.

This is a very good lead-in, if we can find a way to phrase it. You try – use what comes to mind – and we will criticize.

Funny how well that works sometimes. Okay, well, we’re riding the moment, clearly. Sometimes we’d like to get off, but this particular amusement park doesn’t offer that option.

Riding the moment is true enough. Try again, find another possible image.

I suppose we are riding the momentum of whatever we’ve been doing. We are always at the far end of our life to date – by definition – and that means we are reacting to what we have done, what we have made ourselves. Every moment has its own self-definition, you might say.

Another way of saying “riding the moment.”

Yes, I suppose so. Do you need more?

Perhaps not. The sense we want to give is that you are transient, yet are definitely shaped during that time. You are slow-motion shape-shifters, you might say. You change continually, yet in that very changing is a continuity by which you recognize yourselves and recognize each other.

And why is this important? Because again, you tend to over-emphasize your permanence and solidity, and under-emphasize your transience and fluidity, just as (and for the same reason that) you overemphasize the “realness” of 3D and underemphasize the “somewhat realness.” Merely by changing the emphasis in your mind, you can change your possibilities.

Now, changing something in your mind is not as simple as deciding to change it. Change cannot come by an intellectual (or abstract) decision alone. If the emotional body (as Monroe called it) is not engaged, nothing changes. This doesn’t mean it is an emotional decision in the sense of hysterics or even excitement. It means, the change goes deeper than an intellectual decision.

I almost get where you are going. It is a picking up of some threads and a laying down of others, and somehow the emotional body is required.

The real sense of it is not that the emotional body is required: it is that all of you, not only part, is required. Self-divided people do not make effective changes. It is only when you come to a point – when you are exactly in one spot – that you change. Sometimes an “external” crisis is required, before you can be concentrated; sometimes it comes as a result of fast or slow willing growth, but it’s like the old song, “all of me,” not merely some of you.

You should be able to see that this is a good thing. It prevents you from going off half-cocked fifty times a day. In fact, it is a s light exaggeration of the function 3D provides in the first place: slowing things down so they may fix.

It is a balance, you see. You are fluid but while in 3D you experience yourselves as relatively solid, relatively slow to change. If you remember that both halves of the contradiction are true (as usual), you will see how to better take advantage of your condition.

This is what you’ve been working toward! At least, that’s how it suddenly strikes me.

Yes. Our emphasis is always on the practical, it’s just a deeper layer of practical than most people will stay still long enough to absorb. We want you all to see, 3D is an advantage, not merely an ordeal. “All is well” not because everything is as we or you would want it, but because 3D is providing you with what you need. All of you, all the time. The obstacles, the pain, the striving, the achievements, the frustrations, the yearning, all of it. But it works better if you don’t fight it. And fighting it is a continuous 3D temptation.

Well, doesn’t that mean that temptation is part of the show, that it comes with the territory?

It does, but we are pointing out that complaining doesn’t serve you. Feeling like a victim (which says, “I’m helpless and this has nothing to do with what I am”) doesn’t help. Wanting to change doesn’t help. Praying for an outside agency to drop salvation of any kind into your lap doesn’t help.

What does help is your intent, and nothing hampers, impairs, intent quite as much as a sense of helplessness. Even a state of resolute courage amid adversity, though admirable in its way, does not really help, though it does stop things from getting worse. What helps is faith that somehow “All is always well,” that you are the center of your universe, that your life has meaning and is important.

And if we absorb your redefinition of what our lives are, we will have greater chance of living as if All is Well until we get to actually believing it.

That’s what faith is, is it not, evidence of something believed in but as yet unseen? And doubt is that same middle position, only facing toward dis-belief.

Now, if you are a transient phenomenon riding the moment, the center of your universe, among others in the same situation, this is a very fluid situation, you will concede. Add to it that every moment connects to every other living moment and your chessboard now extends vertically as well as horizontally. And all the points in every plane are free to decide, all the time. Do you wonder that we sometimes describe reality as a flickering light-show?

Can you see how this more nuanced point of view is more accurate than those constructed as though reality were solid, fixed, slow to change, relatively disconnected?

Oh yes.

Well, get as firmly as you can the sense that your 3D life – right now, and it is always right now – is a pattern, a sort of shape, and is not an object nor a fixed portrait nor a permanently written page. You are not a puppet, nor a victim, nor a perpetrator, nor the ultimate cause of the good and evil that flows through your lives. Once get this firmly in your being – that is, not merely as an idea, but as a felt reality – and you come that much closer to realizing yourselves to be the creator gods you are.

Ah. We get to turn 3D conditions to advantage, rather than having to fight them.

Precisely, and that is where we will resume next time.

Well, this is always very interesting. Our thanks as always.