Tuesday, November 5, 2024
4:35 a.m. Reading Jeff Shaara’s Last Full Measure, purchased yesterday at 2nd Chance Books. Why I am reading it through the night, I don’t know, but I am suddenly moved to interrupt that and do this instead. (At 11 p.m. I had wanted to continue on consciousness, but I got, “We would, but you cannot sustain it. Wait till you are again energized. It involves more than willingness.”)
So – consciousness. I got a sudden stab of insight that led me to put the book down, but of course by the time I got upstairs to my desk, it was gone. Presumably your filing system still functions? I get the feeling you haven’t really said what you want to say.
That’s true. If it were easy to convey, it would have been said – and heard – long ago, but as you will remember, Thoreau pointed out, it takes two to speak the truth, one to speak and one to hear. It is not enough to say something true in a way that you yourself understand it. It is necessary and not always possible to say it in a way that your auditor will hear. Since you never know if words mean the same to others as they do to you, some care is required, particularly since most people usually assume the words have only the meaning they themselves assign to them. That is, the words seem self-evident, so that any different meaning can only be fanciful or deceitful in nature.
How well I know it!
You know it, though, from both ends, because of course you are no exception to the rule of assuming you know what the other person means when you hear the words.
Hence the value of person-to-person contact, and non-3D to non-3D contact – of intuition complementing sensory data.
And hence the desirability of remembering that plodding has its valuable place in exposition. Since words cannot be pinned down to only one meaning, a second-best is to hedge them in by careful pointing out what is not intended. Bus as people see, it is a tedious process. Hence, first we plod, then later we condense, then sometimes we offer a symbol, a non-verbal equivalent.
So, consciousness –
It isn’t like we have forgotten!
But we don’t seem to get any farther forward, either.
A little plodding, as reminders:
- Consciousness is subtractive, in that reality is entirely consciousness, but no compound being can encompass it all.
- The rings of protection you have thrown around your conscious awareness are there not to torment you, nor frustrate you, but to foster and protect and nurture you.
- As you grow in – character, let’s call it – your ability to experience yourself grows, and so various defensive rings may be allowed to come down, widening your field.
- Every time you widen your field, effectively the world changes for you.
- Bruce Moen talked about belief-system crashes, and sometimes cascading belief-system crashes, resulting from one inexplicable experience or thought or realization too many. This is one way your world may change.
- Others experience an increase in consciousness gradually, like the sun rising peacefully in the morning.
- Some receive a jolt from the so-called outside world: an experience of psilocybin, peyote, LSD, whatever.
- Some receive a physically or mentally traumatic experience – an NDE, a debilitating stroke, a shattering loss – that forces them (enables them, as they sometimes realize) to experience the world – that is, experience themselves – differently.
There are a million ways you are led toward waking up. It happens all the time, even to those who think their lives are watching television and drinking beer. But not every opportunity is seized, and – perhaps this has not occurred to you – not every opportunity need be seized, even should be seized. The opportunities are inherent in your life of continuous choosing, and there are no wrong choices.
Perhaps you can see from this incomplete list of possibilities that the nature of someone’s “enlightenment” is going to be radically different depending upon how it comes. Trauma and gentle sunrise do not have the same flavor. And you should also remember that what you receive cannot be separated from what you are. It is the same thing. We repeat, for the sake of the studio audience: They are the same thing. What you are is what you get. If you cannot intuitively feel the truth of this, you have a few things yet to learn.
And I see that the same person may easily experience different modes of expansion at different times in his life.
Certainly. You are not who or what you were at 20, or 30, or 40, etc. Your life is not an endless repetition of the same song. If life offers anything beyond continuous change, it is diversity of experience.
You wouldn’t expect a person who had a mescaline-fueled awakening of the senses – as I did at age 24 – to experience further openings by other means (as I also did, and continue to do) that produce the same results, the same kinds of expansion.
Certainly not. Although, for some people, repetition of experience, progressive deepening of familiar grooves, may be quite appropriate. For you, no.
So what have you told us, here? Anything revolutionary?
What we gave you today will be quite revolutionary, for some. For others it will seem to be (will be) merely common sense, and the revolutionary aspects of seeing things this way will not be apparent. Some will shrug, being unaffected, and say, “Nothing new here.”
But they will be wrong.
Wrong, right – the words mean less than meets the eye. People find what they need when they’re ready for it. All is always well.
What I draw from this is that new sensations (peace, tranquility, assurance, whatever) may be enjoyed and need not be figured out.
Nothing wrong with figuring them out, if that’s what you do. But no, not necessary, either.
Well, I’m very grateful to have come to where I am. I couldn’t have done it alone.
OT1H, as Dana Redfield pointed out, “Nobody crosses alone.” OTOH, how could anyone ever be alone? You are individual and separate in a manner of speaking, only. You – we – “they” – are part of the All One Thing. Don’t you suppose that fact is going to come equipped with consequences?
I do, actually. Saying “alone” is mostly a manner of speaking. Yet, there is a sense in which we are alone. “Somewhat” alone, I guess.
Somewhat alone, in a world of 3D that is somewhat real, yes.
My thanks – and the thanks of others – for all of this. I suppose it amounts to thanking ourselves, and that – come to think of it – amounts to the thanking God for the day and the world that is at the heart of all true religions. Till next time, then.