Sunday, July 25, 2021
3:40 a.m. Maximum receptivity, maximum focus. Let’s add, maximum fluency. Maybe at some point I ought to find a switch for maximum access to the right word at the right time.
In any case, I have been thinking, off and on, about extensions of yesterday’s theme. One thought was recurrence. Another was the entwining effect of contact from elsewhere (elsewhen).
Let’s begin with the latter. But to do so, you are going to have to stop your mind from wandering, at the same time.
But maybe that wandering could be to our advantage.
It’s a two-edged sword. Wandering could provide unsuspected connections. But it could also result in your not letting us get beneath relatively superficial levels.
Why don’t we see how it goes? If my focus or lack of focus becomes a problem, we can always readjust. Besides, isn’t the process of focusing – or the porousness resulting from lack of focus – a topic in itself?
It is, but not for today, probably. Very well, let’s look at contact among moments of time-space as it sheds light upon the nature of the present moment as experienced. Bear in mind:
- The 3D reality is projected from a greater reality. Matter is not the independent thing it appears to be, nor is “external v. internal.” Neither is “past, present, future.”
- The dream-like nature of reality means that everything interpenetrates in unsuspected, unpredictable ways. Nothing is fixed as it appears to be.
- Nothing comes into existence, nor ceases to exist. Everything exists equally, as indeed must be true if you remember that it is all mind-stuff. But equally, nothing exists unchanged. Reality, like consciousness, is continual flux, with each part continually being affected by each other part.
- And, as we said, and as you experience continually, time itself seems divided between the living present moment and all other moments. No matter how you think about this, or try to wish away the distinction, you cannot help experience it. Always, there is the present living moment on the one hand, and every other moment, on the other.
- Now ask yourself, What makes the difference? Looking at all of time as one two-dimensional map, you’d see almost all the map one shade of color, and one point – only one point – brightly lit from some mysterious off-the-map source. That point would be continuously moving, but it never spreads out, never is extinguished. Always only one point, always moving, always following some invisible but apparent logic.
And there are moments when you – anybody – seem to fall between the cracks. Or, let’s say, when reality bends around you. Or, another way to look at it, when you change belief-systems about the nature of time, and experience the living reality of other moments (and other versions of reality; we’ll get to that). You reach across time and heal Joe Smallwood, and the healing heals you. People do retrievals of others who have gotten stuck in their self-definitions, and the moment of contact heals both sides, agent of change no less than ostensible recipient of assistance. In everyday life, you all receive assistance from parts of yourself you would have to label “past life” influences; you have intuitions, knowings, moments of extended awareness that you cannot know the source of, so you casually attribute it to whatever concept or agency you believe in: divine providence, the oversoul, whatever.
Here is the underlying mechanism: The division in reality between the living moment and the – let’s call it the less-living moment – is the amount of energy that moment exists within.
Okay, I get the idea, but let me try to phrase it, and save us both a bit of trouble. I get that there is the present-moment that we are all aware of, with its unique property that suspends us in free will – frees us iron filings from our magnetic orientation, so to speak – until it passes us by (looked at from the chronological point of view), after which our moment continues to exist, but exists in a more static, less dynamic, manner. We iron filings are no longer able to overcome the magnetic field we exist in; our existence and nature is fixed. Thus the preciousness of any present-moment: It has possibilities no other moment can have. Hence the advice, be here, now. Stay in the only mental reality that offers freedom from necessity. Hence, too, the advice that it is only in life (that is, in the present-moment condition) that change is possible, that choice is possible.
Yes. Except –
Except when any moment is enlivened from elsewhere (elsewhen), that moment then has choice, for as long as the extra energy is provided.
Yes. Joe Smallwood in 1863 is in a moment long removed from its living-present moment. It is 1994 – that is, the living-present is rolling over 1994 – and Frank extends deliberately to 1863, thus providing Joe with the extra energy needed to overcome the stasis of the moment without that living-moment quality. And Joe’s life changes, miraculously. The fact that the miracle also flows to Frank’s physical condition is incidental, though desirable. The universally applicable thing is that the contact provided Joe his moment of freedom to change, and from there he followed a different timeline predicated upon the newly established condition.
And I gather that such cross-temporal contacts are not miraculously rare, but are in fact common, if unnoticed.
Let’s say they are noticed (experienced) more often than they are considered or thought about.
This still doesn’t explain the difference between the living-present and other times.
One explanation at a time, if you will forgive us putting it that way. For the moment, hold the knowledge that there is such a distinction, and let’s keep looking at some explanations that arise. And remember the context we began this with. If life were what it usually appears to be, if you were what you all usually appear to be, none of this could be true. But mind-stuff has its own rules. Dreams have their own rules. And life exists within the ground-rules governing dreams, more than within the ground-rules governing physical life as you usually conceive them.
Now, we will need to explain the relevance of this view to Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence, and for this you have inadequate preparation to assist us, as you well know. But you have read The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin [by P.D. Ouspensky], and that gives you enough of a starting-point. You will have to trust, but we can use that to get our point across.
All right. I take it to mean, “Next time.”
Yes. It’s too much exposition to begin in the final minutes of a session. Meanwhile, we hope that you and others will lightly let your minds wander on the topic of the extra energy provided by present-moment attention.
I have the idea firmly in mind. I hope we have conveyed it. I guess we’ll find out. You’ll notice, we didn’t lose any ground by my wandering.
And perhaps you will notice, you didn’t do any wandering. Your mind was very tightly focused indeed, which helped. But don’t try to hold so tight a rein throughout the day. You couldn’t maintain it, and your bowstring remaining strung so tight would fatigue the bow itself.
Till next time, then, and thanks as always.