Thursday, September 5, 2024
12:50 p.m. Jon’s third point is that life is actually a dream, without weight or substance. But if you can’t sleep or can’t breathe or can’t shut off your endlessly revolving mind, if you are in physical or emotional pain – it sure seems real enough. And I know you know what I mean, Jon.
Of course. Doesn’t everyone? In fact, you will remember I would sometimes protest what I saw as your tendency to believe things were well when they clearly weren’t. but even then, I knew what you meant, of course. But that contradiction is itself a part of life, and you can’t talk it away. Life hurts, your guys told us many times. They knew it. But it sure didn’t feel like they did.
So what is your new perspective?
It isn’t so much of a shift in perspective – a change of ideas or of understandings – as it is a falling-away of certain obstacles.
You can see better now.
You could almost say that now I can see the some things I thought I saw weren’t real. Just as your guys were saying, but the world was contradicting. I’m saying, I was obstructed by phantoms, by illusions. And so are you, and so is everybody. The specifics of the illusions vary by the individual, but in general nobody sees absolutely clearly. At best you see pretty clearly and you rely on faith for the rest. But 3D doesn’t really provide an opportunity for you to live behind the scenery rather than in the midst of the movie.
For instance, gravity’s effects are real, regardless if your understanding of gravity is entirely wrong; that is, even if what appears as gravity is actually a misunderstood something else, the way phlogiston wasn’t real but could nonetheless be used conceptually. Anything in your life that your body insists is real, is real as far as you are concerned until you realize better.
Everything in our 3D life is “somewhat real.”
Your 3D life, and therefore your non-3D life, remember. But yes, real in its own terms, absolutely not real in a wider perspective.
Yet what good does this do if your kidneys fail, or you can’t breathe, or your very bones are trying to kill you? What is the relevance if you are in such acute mental and emotional pain that every day is a struggle and every night a temptation to end it all? As you usually say, how is knowing this practical?
I suppose it is helpful to believe, even if we can’t yet know, that all is well and all that. I know it has helped me.
You once sent a message to your 10-year-old self saying, “Don’t give up, it’ll work out.” Your non-3D selves are giving people that message all the time. Some can hear it, some can’t. Of those who hear, some can believe it, some can’t. Of those who can believe it, some can live it, some can’t. It’s one of those situations where a decision to believe something that may seem “too good to be true” changes your life.
I’m getting a sense of where you may be going with this, but it’s not clear yet.
As long as you believe that the world you live in is real (meaning, is as you think it is, the center of life), you have no chance of penetrating to a deeper layer of reality that may free you.
You see? Your growth, your freedom, depends upon an act of will, which depends upon your ability to believe in the grounds of that act. As long as you think you are in an escape-proof prison, you aren’t going to be setting out on a scenic hike somewhere. For some people, escape means they first have to conceive of themselves as escaping. (No longer an escape-proof prison, you see, so offering chances that can be seized.) But if a need to escape is not part of your fantasy, still you may not know how to use the freedom that you sense you have. Everybody’s path is different.
But it is crucial to realize that our lives are at most only somewhat real, so we can believe in our possibilities.
You could put it that way. Only don’t let yourself think, in the back of your mind, that believing that the world isn’t real in the way that it appears to be is a parlor-trick, a sort of trying to fool yourself. It isn’t that it is true because useful; it is useful because true.
And that’s all we need to say, to give people the clue.
Well, I’m tired anyway, so I’m just as happy to make it a short session. Thanks, Jon.