Jon Holt on focus and access and health

Monday, August 12, 2024

5:10 a.m. Several things. Can I put them together?

• Breathing. Sneeze impulse. By extension, control over the idea of the body, just as I always dimly knew, if not how to direct it.
• “Thinking is the hardest work there is, that’s why so few people do it,” as Ford said. It applies to metaphysics, spirituality, every aspect of life and reality.
• Blogging – as diversion?
• If I have only so much energy, I can still use it if I don’t fritter it away.

But even this faint summary taxes me.

Jon [Holt], you ought to have an enhanced view of the human body now. Am I wrong to think as I am thinking this morning? Or – better – any input of any kind would be appreciated.

You always resisted the common-sense approach, but I admit, now I see why. It is as you thought, and forgot, earlier this morning: What you want to do, and think you are doing, isn’t necessarily what you wind up doing. You plan one thing and it has a very different result.

You tended to see interference or at least indifference from the non-3D side.

I did. And some people see life as a huge well-woven plot against them. That isn’t any righter than people seeing everything as coincidence.

Can we confine the argument to matters of health – or, let’s say, confine it first, so we get at it before my energy wanes?

Well, even the idea that your energy may wane is an idea. It is an idea formed out of your experience, but it is still an idea, not a law of nature. At one level you always knew that, but it doesn’t help you live until you understand what it really means, because only then can you use that understanding in the right way.

That idea of waning energy truly has taken hold of me. Hard to wish it away, or “see it not there,” or however I should think of it.

You understand, focus is the point of 3D limitations. So when you’re in non-3D, you sort of have to depend on the limitations – the focus – of whoever you’re talking to in 3D.

If I had known that, I’ve forgotten it.

Well, keep it in mind. It is the prime limitation, focus. In 3D you experience the limitation aspect of it, in non-3D you experience the focusing aspect. Same thing, seen from opposite ends. So it is up to you in 3D to do the work of keeping your energy and attention focused. You do that, and you can get whatever you want to know. But it isn’t as easy to do as you might think. It takes intention, and practice. In other words, willpower and practice, willpower and the application of skill.

All right, well we’ll concentrate on health first.

In your book [Imagine Yourself Well] you sketched out the different worlds people live in depending upon their beliefs. That sketch was true. What id didn’t go into so much was how to change your beliefs.

“As a man thinks, so he is.”

Yes, but you think according to what your experience seems to teach you, so the question is, how do you learn to reinterpret your experience to justify a different set of beliefs. You didn’t know it, but that is something I always admired in you: You were always ready to believe in advance of evidence, provided it led in a hopeful direction. If the evidence led in a direction away from hope, you wouldn’t see it, or wouldn’t accept the conclusions. That exasperated me sometimes, but I always admired it. Common sense isn’t everything in life.

I suppose it was particularly hard in that it went against so much of your training as a doctor, let alone as a psychiatrist.

How about as a fellow human being living in the same world and drawing very different conclusions?

I’m smiling. Okay, so how does it look now?

As you said, people are different, and different rules apply according to their psychological makeup. What some can do, others can only hope to do, or maybe can only shudder at the thought of doing. But I know what you want. If you can hold focus and deny that voice that says, “You don’t have enough energy for this,” we may be able to get into it.

When you were a boy, some experienced part of you knew that you could be well if you could just adjust – something; could just tweak some dial you couldn’t find. It had the practical effect of leaving you in rebellion against the limits that practical medicine seemed to prescribe. And that led you to question so many common-sense rules. It shaped your attitude to life.

What if you had been able to find that dial?

You tell me.

Don’t let yourself fade away from this. It is a running away.

As a psychiatrist I imagine you saw a lot of that.

I did. And now it is easy to see from the inside as well as from the outside. Hold your focus until you get what you want, or anyway what you need.

That is an aspect of “knock and it shall be opened” that I hadn’t considered.

If the door doesn’t open right away, keep knocking! Don’t hit it once and then give up. Perseverance is an aspect of focus.

You thought finding that dial involved willpower, and you weren’t wrong, but it involves more than that, as you found out. If you could get anything you wanted as soon as you asked for it, what would be the point of being in 3D?

I’m laughing, almost, thinking of you reacting against just these limitations.

That isn’t exactly what was going on, but let’s stick with you. You willed to be well, but you did nothing physical except whatever you were given – pills, shots, emergency measures when need be. Later you tried to think your way to what you still knew (irrationally) was available somewhere. You read of Cayce’s work and you were intrigued by his access, on the one hand, and by the promise that the access would provide the answers you needed. And behind your back, that morphed into a desire to become connected, not necessarily as a means of acquiring health, but for its own sake.

But I assume that came from other times, other lives.

In practice it doesn’t make any difference where it comes from. I see now that people are potential containers of certain kinds of energies. Some are open to some, others to others. It isn’t like anybody can hold the whole universe, except in the sense that everything is contained in everything.

The world in a teacup, eternity in a moment.

Yes. You are limited.  You don’t have to like it, but you might as well accept it. The thing to do isn’t to spend your life wishing you weren’t limited, but to expand as much as you can within the limits that shape you. You’ll find that more than enough to fill your time! Saying that everybody is limited, and everybody’s limits are different (even if unknown) is only saying what everybody knows. It is those limits that make individuals. It is what is beyond these limits that holds everything together.

Now, for those who can hear it:

• Belief is a halfway house to your new life. Until you have had the experience, the best you can do is believe – so be careful what you choose to believe.
• But not all beliefs are a matter of choice. Some come with the package, and if you don’t like them, you’ll need to struggle against them. But “struggle” is not merely about willpower. Partly that, yes, but not solely.
• You have to learn to live “as if” in a certain way. Pretending won’t do it. Walling-off won’t do it. You have to dare to believe that life is broader than you are experiencing it, and then find ways to tentatively live that belief.

I don’t see how that asthmatic boy could have been helped by living as if he wasn’t sick.

No, you do see that clearly enough. What you can’t see is how he could have done it. In practice, the best he could do was ignore consequences. That is a sort of crippled form of “as if.” You will remember, you knew you didn’t know where to find the dial. But even not repudiating the idea that the dial existed was an achievement. It made many things possible as your life flowed.

It is only now, this month, that I am getting a new handle on this.

Maybe your life isn’t over yet.

Enough for now?

This will do for a start. Remember, it is always your part, in 3D, to focus. If you can hold the focus, we can provide the connection. Our little group on Wednesdays already demonstrated this, although that isn’t what anybody thought we were doing.

Well, Jon, it is very good to talk to you. I didn’t know if it would happen.

To quote a friend of mine: “Ask.”

Very funny. Till next time, then.