Clearing, receptive, development

Sunday, November 3, 2024

2:15 a.m. (Standard time again). I had the feeling earlier that you wanted to talk, and I put it off till later. The extra hour caused by changing back from DST means I have slept as much as I am going to for a while, so let’s go. What is on your mind?

What is on your mind, is the question. You are experiencing the ragged edges of an advance in consciousness, and you don’t know what to do with them.

A primer: Clear your mind of active thought, holding an intent to communicate. Remember to not press, but allow. Follow anything that then arises. If you have once cleared your mind, things that arise will not be chatter but will be the matters of the immediate moment. And it is this process that is what we want to talk about, either in passing or at length, depending upon how we go.

Again: Clearing. Receptivity. Development of what appears.

Clearing. As we indicated earlier, the goal of meditation is not to leave you with a mind devoid of thought; it is to give you control over the association-machine by making you aware of its presence and characteristics. You want, not to kill the drunken monkey, but to get it sober. Thought-association is of course a valid method of mental functioning; you wouldn’t want to lose the ability to construct (or even to follow) chains of associations of ideas and sensations and memories. But ideally you will want to be able to experience this on your own terms.

Once you realize that this mental behavior even exists, you are better off, because this allows you for the first time to realize that most of the time you are not really present-tense so much as daydreaming. That is, you are in the present moment (there being no other place one could be) but you are not actively functioning, neither receiving nor constructing, but are being carried down an unending river, tossed by its currents, at its pace. It may be an interesting ride, even a fascinating ride, but it is not participation so much as spectatordom.

As we say, there’s nothing inherently wrong with this, but it is far better to be aware of what you are doing. You paid for the ride – why not take it with eyes open?

Receptivity. Once you have learned to discern the difference between being carried automatically downstream and paddling, or at least steering, you see how new opportunities arise. Let’s look at why this is so.

I’d guess it is that stillness – an absence of the continuing torrent of thoughts-that-generate-thoughts – allows quieter, more profound associations, rooted in the moment, to assert themselves.

You are in the right direction, but it should be said more carefully, because this is not as obvious as it appears to you in this moment, and may become distressingly vague to you later if not tied in.

I get that you are right, but it does seem obvious at the moment.

To some it will be, to some not. Think of it in terms of momentum. (This is analogy, remember, and must not be pushed too far.) If you travel at great speed, your ability to even notice, let alone deal with, your passing surroundings is vastly less than when you drift by slowly, or are at rest. In effect, you have less time at your disposal to look at anything. It is a trade-off, and again, not in itself a disadvantage. Sometimes you want to be traveling at speed, associating things ordinarily far removed from one another. But when you slow down, you regain the ability to see at greater depth of connection, greater detail.

And we can hear fainter voices.

And you can hear fainter voices, yes. It is the difference between a cocktail party and a quiet tete-a-tete. Neither is an absolute, but they are very different, offering very different possibilities.

You cannot come to the third state, the ability to develop what you hear, unless you first can hear it! And you cannot recognize the difference between being carried in a stream of associations and consciously choosing which connections to make, until you have recognized by experience that there is a real difference between the two.

So, first comes clearing. Even if you have been communicating consciously for decades, you will want to clear. This requires no ritual, nothing special, merely the awareness that your intent at the moment is a sort of heightened receptivity to the things of the moment; that is, to the thoughts and feelings and perceptions that are particularly acute at that moment. This gives focus.

Receptivity follows clearing. (And there need be no perception of separation between the two; they are, after all, inherently part of the same state.) Once you learn the trick of being actively receptive, you regain your freedom of choice.

Then comes the question of what you do with the input you are now allowing.

Interesting, I just got an example of this. I had to pause  and as I did I realized, people that I respected (Ed Carter, for one) told me right along that I needed to slow down, but I was proceeding at the speed that was normal to me, and I was even proud of that speed. It wasn’t so much that I disregarded the advice; I had no idea how to put it into effect, and I suppose nobody ever realized that I didn’t know how to slow down. That’s why you had me put down our talks in penmanship rather than typing, I know; it slowed me down.

And gradually you had the conscious experience to traveling more slowly, and then could deliberately adopt that speed if you wished, without sacrificing the lightning-speed imparted by intuition whenever that was appropriate. But you had to experience the difference, not merely hear about it.

Yes, and this happened just now, when I was interrupted. I realized, less speed may allow greater depth. If I could write twice as fast, or if I were dictating into a machine, the quality of whatever I got would be different. I would lose some of the advantage of going slowly.

You see us use bullets sometimes: It is a way of using a sort of shorthand to preserve relationships among far-flung items that offers the possibility of later, slower, development.

Development. Anything may be developed farther, but not everything need be, nor even deserves to be. It is a matter of choices. But that is the point here, isn’t it? Your life is choice. Your greater ability to choose is one more aspect of the life more abundantly that we wish you to be able to claim and to live.

I see it. Thanks as always.