Friday, August 6, 2021
3 a.m. All right, then, resuming.
[I had begun a session a few hours earlier:
10:45 p.m. [Thursday] Perhaps we can have our session tonight instead of tomorrow?
Perhaps. You intend for us to discuss spirit and the present moment and opportunity costs.
That’s what you suggested, but I think it is a good idea. You said time enforces sequence, and sequence serves as purpose. What does that mean?
It is our attempt to give you a way to conceptualize something you can’t really understand, but need to conceptualize anyway. How are you supposed to understand reality from within 3D? Yet you can’t leave 3D except conceptually. That is, you can get an idea of it; you can overhear your non-3D getting it, so to speak. You can intuit the shape of it, in other words.
“In other words”? Are you saying that that is what intuition is, the overhearing of our non-3D’s understanding?
Can you think of a better way to put it? What is intuition but direct feed? It may feel, sometimes, like a sudden deduction, but it is more a sudden connection, and what is it but a connection between your already-integrated material and something new and usually surprising? Well, where did that new element come from? Not from logic, nor from deduction, nor from careful thought – valuable though all those processes may be. Trace it back closely enough, and that new element will be seen to stem from some thought that is non-sensory.
Let’s try that again. You mean to say, any intuitive leap involves something necessarily non-3D?
Perhaps not always, but overwhelmingly so.
Well, say that’s so. (I don’t know how we’d go about trying to prove or disprove it.)
Let’s try this after you sleep some more.
Maybe we’d better.
[So:]
Friday, August 6, 2021
3 a.m. All right, then, resuming. Maximum receptivity, focus, clarity.
You have to try to visualize something for which there is no physical equivalent. That’s one problem. Then, you have to envision a process that is quite counter to anything your sensory experience seems to say is possible. That’s a second problem. Then, you have to overcome a terrific amount of subconscious programming from your culture – not only contemporary culture but the culture of each of your dominant strands. That is the largest (and least obvious) problem of the three.
Least obvious because least conscious?
Yes, but more than “least conscious.” Least conscious because numerous pre-conscious filters actively prevent you from experiencing things contrary to your agreed-upon cultural reality.
The consensus reality being not the same thing as the shared subjectivity. (I know it isn’t. Just to be clear for others.)
Quite different things. The entire “external” world is what we are calling the shared subjectivity. It is mind-stuff turned into the appearance of physical matter, and time, and space. That is, “the world” (meaning not only earth, of course, but all physical, 3D, reality in all its facets) is really the sum of all minds – human, animal, spiritual – from all times, together cooking up and maintaining the 3D as a sort of slowed-down manifestation of the minds themselves. It is not the creation of any one mind or any combination of minds but of all minds. It is not bounded by cultures or agreements or understandings. It is not exactly all souls together but it does include all the parts of all souls not consciously bound in temporal awareness. It is continually fed by new material from souls, but not so much by those souls’ conscious contents as by what the souls are not conscious of.
Consensus reality is merely a superficial understanding within subsets of 3D cultures. Every civilization, and every subdivision of every civilization, has its own understanding of reality, and each such shared understanding allows for certain things and implicitly discourages or disregards certain things. The world of the American Indians of the 1700s, or of the Incas of the 1400s, or of the Spaniards of the 700s, or of the Russians of the 1900s, or of any group in any geographical area of any time, each will have its own way of seeing the world that will seem to it to be self-evident. Consensus reality is not chosen, it is lived within. If you were to try to live within the consensus reality of ancient Egypt, say – how well could you do it? You couldn’t. They didn’t choose to see the world a certain way; they saw it that way. If they ceased to see it that way for some reason, they to some degree left that consensus and began to experience the world as having different rules.
Thoreau again, in Walden.
If you can find the quotation without much effort, do cite it again.
[“I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings.”]
It is a good example of what it is like to begin to leave a consensus reality. But we hope that this makes clear the difference between consensus reality and the shared subjectivity.
Well, there’s no telling. It will or it won’t.
So to revert to discussing the three problems involved in obtaining a different understanding of spirit and the living-present moment:
- There is no physical equivalent to provide easy analogies.
- In fact, your sensory experience in 3D argues against what we wish to sketch.
- And, worst, your own mental processes not only do not assume these things, but actively fight against them, at a pre-conscious level.
Thus what you have to tell us will seem like nonsense or fantasy?
It may. But our point is less that than that the barriers to your intuitively grasping the points will be great. That is, you may not have any particular emotional resistance to the concepts. (Though, you may! Some will.) But you may very likely be baffled, unable to make sense of what we say even if you are willing to assume that it does make sense.
You mean, even if we are willing to assume that the sense is there to be found, if we can only find the key. How well I remember the feeling from the 1970s, when I used to read Gurdjieff or Ouspensky, say, wondering what in the hell they were trying to tell me. I could feel that the sense was there, I felt they were doing their best to convey it (Ouspensky more than Gurdjieff, perhaps), but I knew I didn’t have the key to what they were saying, and I had no idea how to find that key.
But when you set your intent to know, with a pure intent, not set in self-aggrandizement or any form of social or economic gain, eventually the world provided what you needed.
Only, it came in ways I could not have predicted.
Necessarily. Anything you could have predicted would have stemmed from your 3D understanding which was itself the problem. (That is, the limitations of which were the problem.)
Yes, I understand that, now. I didn’t then.
Your experience of bafflement combined with sincere intent, leading to unexpected resources coming to your aid over time, led you to trust, and of course trust is the key to openness to intuition.
Some of your most interesting side-trails come marked with the words “of course,” as if they were obvious. Trust, the key to intuition. Why (and how) “of course”?
We should think it would be obvious.
Well, it isn’t.
Why isn’t it? How isn’t it? If you cannot trust, you have to live in a guarded manner, second-guessing everything that comes your way, internally no less than “externally.” But if you live hedged against unjudged thought, as the Puritans did, you thereby inhibit access to intuition. Indeed, Puritans would have regarded intuitive certainty as probably the work of the devil. Openness and trust are two aspects of the same attitude.
As you said, obvious. Only, until you said why, it wasn’t.
Now, you will be thinking, we haven’t made any progress toward our theme, but perhaps we made more than appears. The very act of approaching these things in an attitude of trust (even if only tentative trust) is itself a great step toward coming to an understanding. Remember, a new understanding of life and the world can come only from you connecting to things your non-3D knows. Anything from any other source is merely an assist.
So, the next day’s theme continues to be spirit and the living-present moment and (perhaps) opportunity costs, but perhaps our next session will go as far afield as this one did. If so, no loss. Righteous persistence brings reward.
Today’s title?
“Inherent difficulties,” perhaps. Or whatever you decide.
Our continued thanks for all this. It occurs to me, at some point we are going to want a clearer idea of who you are, how you live, what this process does for you and with you (and perhaps to you), as part of our understanding life beyond the 3D.
It’s about time that occurred to you! We’re smiling, but we’re serious, too. In more than 20 years of active interaction, it never occurred to you to define terms, so to speak. This was good, in that it left you free, but it will be better in terms of added clarity.
Well, good. Looking forward to it.