Continuity in form and pattern

Friday, December 4, 2020

5:20 a.m. This email from Bob Washburne came more than three weeks ago. It is in two parts, the second of which perhaps we can address at another time. Guys, do you have anything to say about this interesting question?

[Bob Washburne 11-16-2020

[I have purchased and read all of your non-fiction books….  While trying to get my head around it all, I came up with a question for which I don’t see an obvious answer. Several times TGU tells us that the body is more of a colony than a unit with all of the major organs having their own minds and consciousness. I took this literally rather than allegorically – that the liver has its own mind and consciousness. But if that is the case, where does the liver go when the body dies?  Or the individual liver cells who each have their own minds and consciousness?  I am having trouble applying “As above, so below” to this one as the body per se doesn’t appear to extend beyond the lower astral.]

We do, as it happens. As you know, this is the kind of response we would encourage: He read, he pondered, he tried drawing inferences, and, failing to find a satisfying answer, he asks for clarification.

Yes. Rita’s method.

Hence your transient importance. While you are here, he can ask you to ask us. When you are not here, finding a source of connection may not be obvious, like someone seeking clarification from Seth, say. The information is still there; potential access is still there; plenty of people will be able to access the material both from your point of view and independently. But the question will be, How do you know who to listen to?

And the answer will be, you’ll just have to decide for yourself.

A more careful answer will be, “Righteous persistence brings reward.” It will be up to each one to hone the skill, just as it was for you. You did not learn to ape Cayce. You do not contact Seth, as far as you know. (We don’t mean, by that, that you are contacting Seth unknowingly, but that you are not reaching specifically for that particular source.) You developed your abilities, which often feels like “not doing it right” until you find your feet. You tapped into sources of information suited to your interests, your emotional and mental processes, your known and unknown connections. Things that are easy for you will be hard for others. Things impossible for you will be possible, even easy, for others. There is nothing new in this; it is always that way. Perhaps Swedenborg wouldn’t have found it easy to channel musicals, let’s put it that way.

This amounts to saying, we are all important, all unique, and at the same time all limited, all dispensable.

Isn’t that your experience of life? Only, “dispensable” doesn’t in this context amount to “throwaway.” It means, nobody’s absence will cause the world to come to a halt.

Understood. So about the question specifically?

Applying “As above, so below” is exactly the approach to take here. The difficulty is to find the proper analogy.

I immediately thought, “Trees, animals, any form of consciousness not individuated like our level.”

Yes. Just as any particular maple tree may be regarded as one cell of a larger thought-form known as Maple Tree, so with livers or kidneys or lungs. And this leads to some interesting information we have never wandered into, if you want to hear it.

We do, of course. And in passing I would say (as I suppose we must have said before) that this sounds like Plato’s Ideal forms.

It should.

Now remember, we are looking at the world not as dead (or even living) “matter,” that is, as chunks of things sitting in space interacting, but as concretized thought. If you keep that in mind, many things change. A tree, a brain cell, a bacillus, is real; it exists. It is not a figment of your imagination, but is as real as you are (which, we remind you, is “only somewhat” real). As real, but not necessarily real in the same guise as you.

In other words, it would be a mistake to think that an individual maple tree or liver or liver cell had an individual destiny.

The only reason we would hesitate to agree with that statement is because of the second half, not the first. Your own destinies are not exactly “individual” in the way you are thinking. But subject to that caveat, yes, we agree. The pattern of slowed-down energy that is a liver does not need to (nor can it) evolve. When the 3D body dissolves, as when the tree is chopped down or dies of some infestation, the energy is released. The pattern continues to exist as pattern, and thus shapes future livers or maple trees, but the specific consciousness that the liver or the tree exhibited during life is not bound to repeat as a “more evolved” liver or tree. It is not bound to continue a genetic or a non-3D line, any more than the atoms and molecules and tissues that constitute your bodies are bound to continue in your genetic line. How could they, when your 3D body at any given moment consists of material borrowed for the moment?

Meaning, I take it, that our bodies continually shed cells, acquire cells.

Continuity is in form, in pattern, not in the same old cells proceeding on together.

So, you see, you as an individual are real in one sense, only an abstraction in another. You are permanent in pattern, temporary as manifestation. You can be considered as the holder-together of all the elements that go into your 3D life – physical, mental, personal, impersonal – and at the same time as only temporary from the 3D viewpoint. Your fingernails are not immortal as fingernails. There is no non-3D museum displaying them as relics or examples of you. Just as the physical atoms served and moved on, so the archetype itself may be said to have served as pattern but not been enmeshed in the specific creation. How does a blueprint become a part of the structure it shapes and describes? It doesn’t. The blueprint as blueprint remains in being, but no matter how essential it was to the creation of the thing, it is separate because it is of a different order of things.

You could almost say the cel is not the cartoon. Absurd comparison, but since it came to me, I throw it in.

Let’s say the cel, and the entire construction of the cartoon, is not the same as the projected image, but yes, we agree.

So then the swirl of consciousness that is someone’s liver is a manifestation of a pattern, produced for the occasion and dissolved afterwards.

There’s a little distortion there, but not enough to worry about at the moment.

BTW I questioned Bob’s use of the word “colony” but decided it is a minor quibble.

Welcome to our reality. We are always doing that, deciding which slight misconception needs to be cleared up and which can be slurred over for the sake of making a different point. Nothing wrong with it, that’s just the process, and the closer you look, the wider you will see the examples of it, in 3D as well as non-3D. No, you aren’t a colony as much as a construction. But it is a minor point.

I was intrigued by your saying that this could lead to more interesting information. I suppose we are out of time to even hint at it?

Mostly yes.

A hint, even? A bread-crumb for next time?

All layers of reality exist equally but do not exist in the same way. Hornblower is real in the sense of a mental archetype but not in the sense of a physically existing 3D human. Isn’t now, never was. He was created (or perhaps we should say abstracted) by a 3D creator-being named C.S. Forester. Who created Forester, who lived at another level of being?

That’s a hint, only, and that is enough for the moment.

Hmm. Well, to be continued, I guess. Thanks for all this.