Thursday, August 5, 2021
3 a.m. Our five-minute drumming session yesterday during our ILC meeting leads me to ask you for follow-up.
[Drumming Wednesday August 4, 2021:
[The question suggested by Dirk and Bill was: “What is the nature of spirit particularly as it relates to consciousness?” I returned from our five-minute drumming session with these things written down:
- Spirit per se is unknowable.
- As it relates to 3D, it is the animator of time as well as individual consciousness.
- It is the difference between potential and actual.
- It is aware of us, we are sometimes aware of it. If spirit were to forget us, we would wink out of existence as 3D souls.
- Spirit is not the vast impersonal forces, but is how they connect with us.
- It could be called the consciousness of all that is.]
I have numbered your statements. Commentary, please, either point by point or in general.
Point by point should deal with the matter efficiently.
- You interpret the world through a combination of sensory and intuitive input. But how can you form sensory analogies to something
False start. I can see I need to recalibrate. Maximum focus, then, maximum receptivity and clarity, and let’s try this again.
And perhaps we will respond to the statements not in the order they were received, but in the order we find convenient.
Very well. The statements seemed obvious as I received them, not nearly so much so, now.
That is to be expected. It is a matter of connection. As we look at them, you will find them growing transparent again, or at least translucent! It is a matter of alignment.
And in the background, I am aware of a scene supposedly set in Hong Kong, a scene from an episode of “Person of Interest.” The presence seems to center not on the plot nor on the central characters, but upon the recreation of a Hong Kong street neighborhood by the episode’s creators. All that background, all those extras, just to provide persuasiveness to the scene. Where a play would suggest, a movie shows, or pretends to show.
I assume this background image, and its associated thought, surfaces at just this moment because it is connected somehow to our discussion.
An under-reported and often scarcely noticed aspect of your mental life in 3D is the availability of seemingly irrelevant thought, memory, reverie, tunes, fantasy, etc. In effect, it is a way to add a gestalt aspect to what is otherwise only a linear process. It adds texture and suggests connections, in other words, along lines other than intellectually logical ones. It adds according to emotional logic, one might say.
So, here. We are about to consider the role of spirit in 3D lives, and you find yourself half-thinking about the creation of scenarios by background forces for the sake of giving you sensory cues to convey emotional/intellectual stories.
And how much I pay attention to it affects what I internalize and convey.
Exactly. If you ignore it or (less likely) remain unaware of it, your ensuing discussion proceeds without the benefit of the illustration or nuance or spark that might have been added. If instead you become aware of it, but don’t pursue it or mention it, any influencing it can do can only be beneath the level of your consciousness at the moment. If instead you notice it, give it a moment’s attention, but still do not mention it, perhaps it flavors your thought – perhaps adds clarity – but only to you, not to your interlocutors. In such case, your thought is less fully conveyed than it might have been, though the thought itself may be deeper. And finally, if you notice the background and mention it, you and your readers gain the possibility of a deeper sense than could have been conveyed only by argument or linear description. Of course, ordinarily you would not carry it to the length of considering it as a phenomenon, as we are doing now. But it is worth doing once, if only to put on the record something of how such background “distractions” may in fact be not distractions at all, but additional dimensions.
Come to think of it, I had set my slide-switches to maximum focus and receptivity. I suppose I might have trusted that unexpected elements would not be distractions, in that I had focused. Okay, I’ll keep in mind the desirability of paying attention when something is knocking on the door.
So, then, to the issue at hand. You can see perhaps that the unspoken theme is the continuous presence of spirit in the 3D drama, a presence all the more effective by being mostly not visible. The primary distinction we are drawing, remember, is
- Animating but not necessarily manifest.
- The manifestation within a 3D context of what otherwise would only be potential.
Have you in fact actually put it that way?
Does it matter? We’re putting it that way now. Consider the spirit to be the unmanifest and the soul to be the manifest. Now, bear in mind, this distinction occurs only within the 3D context. Outside of 3D, spirit and soul are not two things, nor are they, exactly, two aspects of any one thing. But let us stay with spirit and soul as you can experience them here and now. We want to keep this practical, rather than risk losing ourselves in clouds of ungrounded speculation or assertion.
Thus, to try to make more accessible the input you received during your brief moment of enhanced receptivity yesterday.
- (“Spirit per se is unknowable.”) A character in a movie has no possibility of knowing even the actor portraying him, let alone the screenwriter who wrote his lines and sketched out his actions and predicaments, or the director of the scenes or the producer of the movie. This is not by anyone’s intent, nor by anyone’s neglect; it is inherent in the nature of things that a created being cannot be directly aware of the elements that created it, nor of the creator that fashioned it. An electric lamp may be said to be aware of the effect of the electricity running through its wires, but it does not have the receptors that would make it able to understand the electricity, as opposed to feeling its effects.
- (“Spirit is not the vast impersonal forces, but is how they connect with us.”) Analogously, 3D minds receive the forces that affect them via the spirit, but those forces are not the spirit. The great impulses that shape your emotional life are not spirit per se; spirit is what keeps you and the world alive and functioning on an even keel (little though the keel may seem to be very even, sometimes). By nature, spirit does not fluctuate or show itself in this or that peculiar combination. Neither is it a question of your receptivity to spirit changing what you receive. Your varying receptivity to the vast impersonal forces flowing through you is what creates your personal fluctuations. You do not vary in receptivity to spirit, not does it vary in its flow through you (and the world).
- (“It could be called the consciousness of all that is.”) That is, you could say that all-that-is experiences the entirety of itself by means of spirit. But really, how much can this mean to you at this point? Other things are to be said. It is not a two-minute discussion.
As to statements 2, 3, and 4, each of these is at least an hour in itself. You were receptive, so you brought forth the statements. But feeling something, even to the point of knowing it, is not the same as having integrated it with thought to the extent that you are able to clearly think about it, let alone express it. Not everything that comes through is immediately obvious, nor is it necessarily just how it appears at first. you will notice that over the years, we have given you many a flat statement without elaboration. Often, they were quite cryptic. Seeds, planted for later.
What should we call this session?
Perhaps “Spirit as background” is as good as anything.
Fine. And next time?
Perhaps we will revert to the subject of opportunity costs, or perhaps something else will suggest itself. As your father used to say, though with a different emotional nuance, “It’s always something.”
Smiling. Till next time, and our thanks as always.