Wednesday, April 30, 2025
6:30 a.m. Shall we resume?
Beginning with the idea of consciousness as being elimination of input quite as much as inclusion of input, let’s look at your lives. A baby needs protection not only because of physical weakness but because it does not yet know how to orient itself in the 3D world.. It doesn’t know where it is, you might say. It can’t predict, can’t very well understand, in short can’t cope. But what it can do, and do very well, is receive psychic input from all directions and build a picture of this new world it is experiencing. That doesn’t mean it builds an accurate picture, but build one it does. It has no choice.
Builds that picture from what elements? Some bullets:
- Its 3D input through the senses.
- Its 3D input through the intuitions.
- Its non-3D input from various threads, in varying importance one to another.
- Its non-3D input from non-3D sources as well as what flows from its own threads.
That is enough to be going along with. For convenience we could group them as 3D (1 and 2) and non-3D (3 and 4), or as internal (2 and 3) and external (1 and 4). But it is all input.
The ingredients do not change as you live your lives, but of course the proportional importance of each element changes, both moment-to-moment and over time according to preference and circumstance.
We will spell it out, at the risk of belaboring the obvious. Your polarities in life:
- Internal or external
- Sensory or intuitive
- Self or other
- Understanding or action
Obviously you will experience the entire range of the polarity, rather than merely one or the other side of a polarity. And, the four polarities overlap. We are less concerned with presenting a neat and tidy scheme than with offering you new glimpses into your reality.
So, internal or external. Which source of input do you pay the most attention to? (Again, remember this is a moment-to-moment choice as well as an overall-bias choice.) Is your inner world so brightly lit that you pay as little attention to external affairs as you can get away with? Alternatively, is the evident “realness” of the external world so blinding as to lead you to forget or be unable to perceive your own non-physical connection? These are extremes, but the polarity is real.
Sensory or intuitive. Which do you trust? Which is realer to you?
Self or other? Which is your proper orientation, and which is diversion? Not everybody is meant to concentrate on the state of their soul. Neither is everybody meant to concentrate on the state of the world in which they find themselves. Again, not an either/or. How could it be? But, a matter of proportions.
Finally, understanding or action. (As we say, the themes incorporates overlap.) Put it this way: Which seems like real work to you? Which seems worth doing and which not? Understanding puts together a map of the world – as we are doing right now. Action sets forth to make improvement on what exists – as we are doing right now. You couldn’t really do only one and not the other, but few people – and you are not one of them – can hold the two in balance. Nor is there any particular reward for doing so.
Now put it together:
- You are 3D and non-3D
- You receive input from both sources, and each input-strain is made of two elements, and expresses in two dimensions
- Your mind – which is the only real expression of you, the realest part of your “somewhat-real” existence – forms an on-going system that we once called a habit-pattern. That is, it works in predictable ways that vary, but are nonetheless orderly and distinctive.
- Nonetheless, whether you realize it or not, remember it or not, you as habit-system are only one node in a greater being that expresses partly as a network of threads. Therefore in reality you cannot exist in isolation.
- The more you concentrate on the here-and-now, the sensorily obvious, the more prone you are to forget that vastly the larger part of life – even the 3D life you are fashioning – is non-3D, invisible, nearly imperceptible.
- However, concentrating on the here and now is what you are in 3D to do! Sleepwalking through your life is not, in general, particularly productive. (That doesn’t mean never, but we are setting out generalizations here.)
- So, there is a built-in contradiction. Should this surprise you? Look to your lives, and see if many of your perplexities do not stem from your disregarding or not realizing the fact that you are suspended between conflicting necessities.
- Hence, consciousness!
I waited for more, but you seem to think that final bullet is self-evident and self-explanatory.
Is it not?
Not to me.
Consciousness is choice. Life is repeated choice. Choosing is what shapes the gift you give to life (that is, the life you create and hand back as a new habit-system). And what informs choice?
I think I get it. Choice may be well-founded or not, and how well it is founded depends on how well we process input and manage output. The more we get, the better we function, and the better the choices we make.
Jesus said that the more you have, the more you will be given, but if you bury your own talent, you will have wasted the opportunity, and your higher self will not be pleased.
Interesting take on a parable that many people think seems to approve arbitrary and unfair distribution of wealth.
We keep telling you —
Yeah, yeah. You don’t need to persuade me.
This isn’t only for you, though, is it? We say it again: Your spiritual heritage will give you valuable clues if you can once relate them to your present work. (And, by work we mean not any particular process you may be involved in, but the construction of your lives.)
I get that this is not quite finished.
No, one more thing. The nature of consciousness isn’t worth investigating in a vacuum. You will get results of considering it not as a thing but as a condition, as a relation of one thing to another.
That isn’t clear.
Let’s say, consciousness always relates to purpose. A cloud’s consciousness is real, definite, changing – but that may be said of you. What is a cloud’s purpose? It is the same as yours, to relate itself to the world, 3D and non-3D. (We know that sounds counter-intuitive, but if 3D and non-3D shade into each other, how could anything exist in only one and not also the other? And, existing there, how could it not have some form of awareness of that realm?)
I’ll defer consideration of the question until another time, but I want to note to ask, don’t large parts of the non-3D exist only in non-3D and not 3D?
This would be a diversion at this moment, so yes, let’s look at it another time. Our point here is that consciousness stretches between your self-awareness and some seemingly external object or event. But words tangle this up.
They certainly do. Self-awareness and consciousness sound like the same thing.
A baby is aware of itself, but has no concepts; hence it is aware but not conscious that it is aware. It has no basis for self-reflection.
Hmm, you tie consciousness to concepts.
Think of “clicking out” in the Monroe world. You perceive something for which you have no concept, no experience, no way to connect it to your accustomed world – and so you return from a real experience but you have no idea what happened. If later you experience the same thing again, or if for other reasons you are able to build a bridge to what happened, perhaps what had been clicked out becomes perceptible. You have extended your range of consciousness. You can “make sense” of something that previously you couldn’t even bring to mind.
I can see the confusion that language makes, given that we all use “awareness” and consciousness” and such terms loosely and interchangeably.
It is a problem, but not an insuperable one, provided that you are conscious of it! We smile.
A very interesting session. What shall we call it?
“More on consciousness” would do.
Our thanks as always.