Sunday, September 12, 2021
6:40 a.m. Very well, guys, what’s your preference? I’d say choose between strands and specialization, but the other two remain possibilities. It’s your call, really.
The difficulty here is merely that the passage of time blurs the continuity of the message: You find it hard to hold it all in mind, over so many days. However, that is always a problem in your lives. Even if you read a book or watch a series of films, there is the lapse-of-time factor to blur things, and if you read a book all at one sitting, still the passage of a few months will blur the memory.
You don’t need to tell me! I was reading a session from two years ago and it referred to my reading a book about a man Hemingway knew – Regner, something like that – and I couldn’t even remember taking the book out from Alderman, let alone reading it. Yet it made quite an impact on me at the time.
As a rule of thumb, we would suggest that anything that happens consistently, and happens not to only a few people but to people in general, ought not to be considered a disadvantage (or an advantage, for that matter), but merely a fact of life. That is, if that’s the way it usually happens, maybe that’s the way it is supposed to function.
The bug that can’t be fixed becomes a feature.
No, it’s more that every quality has its corresponding defect, necessarily. Your RAM is not unlimited, but your ability to admit new input is unlimited, relatively. So how else should you function, but to input, process, and move on. This means, though, that you will have an optimum speed and method, and exceeding it will diminish your results.
I know what you are saying. If I read too much, too quickly, too incessantly, and do not allow the material to digest, it cannot change me.
Reflection is important: Being able to call it to mind later is much less so. You might think that is backwards – you might think that what you can quote (or at least actively remember) is all that is left, but in fact what you retain is what you make part of you. It is the present-tense time with a book that may open new windows for you; you can’t get that experience by reading automatically, with half your attention. We state it perhaps a hair too sweepingly, but in general it holds.
So the application here?
Growth is not a function of memorization or of total recall or of accumulation of experience or memory. Growth comes from assimilation, and that may happen in a flash, or slowly, or only in retrospect. However it happens, you can bet that it will be mixed with awareness. That is, you will be present. It may come as a gift, but the gift will be delivered in person, it won’t be left at the door.
Got it. You could add, I suppose, that what we read may or may not be important to us, and we will never know ahead of time.
Never is a long time. Your non-3D occasionally steps in, says, “Read this, you’ll find it interesting.” People who develop the habit of listening to such nudges find it smooths the way. But in general, yes, like the rest of your life, important events or books or influences of any kind rarely come announced by brass bands. It pays to be awake. What else are you there to do?
Now, bearing in mind what we just said about the relative unimportance of remembering, and the relative great importance of being present while it is being said (whatever “it” you may be concerned with), let’s continue about strands, remembering only that all this relates to our overall theme of life more abundantly. If you can remember the goal, you will find it easier to associate the parts, one to another.
We could use a new image of strands, to illustrate what I saw recently.
We’re open to suggestion. This is one subject that is easier to discuss in words than to illustrate by a drawing or mental picture.
The closest I come is an image of a plant’s roots, with each root having tendrils in all directions.
This is a case where a seemingly solid thing may be a better image than an electronic one. Talk about it, letting us silently suggest as you do so.
Well, I get that from the point of view of any of us in 3D, it looks one way, but it’s misleading as a general description. So, I see myself as incorporating – or, say, tapping into – strands from Bertram and the Egyptian and Joseph Smallwood, say. Each of these strands I experience as part of me. They are channels within me, like astrological aspects in a way: They channel the vast impersonal forces that we see as the energies of life. So sometimes my experience of 20th and 21st century life is filtered through Joe Indian’s eyes, and he shows me how it looks “from the outside” while still “from the inside.” He told me, once, our lives as we lead them seem to him like living inside a watch, everything interconnected, schedule-driven, contingent on so many factors out of our control. As soon as he said that, I saw it, and have not forgotten it.
I suppose each of our constituent strands affect us that way, to different extents. So from our point of view, the strands are filters, in a way, and certainly are sources of familiarity or alienness, and sources of our judgments about things.
And in experiencing them that way, you are not wrong, but you are in somewhat the same position as the baby who assumes that everything in its newly discovered world is for the baby; is only important insofar as it relates to baby; is, in a way, an extended part of baby.
When my brother’s child was born, he used to say, humorously, “Yes, your babyship.”
We can relate!
Very funny. Bit I suppose we in 3D strike you as entirely self-centered.
Let’s say, appropriately self-centered, but it easily gets out of control. As in this instance: The strands are within you, so to speak. They do provide you with sources of judgment, with alternative perspectives, and, not least, with inborn affinities and skills. But this is looking at them as if they were appendages of a given 3D individual. Yes, together they make up the community that is functioning together and may or may not do so permanently – but what about their existence seen not from one 3D person but from a more objective, uncentered, view?
That’s the root, with each 3D life a tendril extending at right angles from the root’s length.
That’s a way to see it. We need a better image, but this will do for the moment. The strand, the root, is experienced by any one 3D life as if it existed in the “now” only in that 3D person, the others on the root being safely “past” or even “future.” And of course this is true for every tendril on the root: That’s the “eternal” end of the term “eternal now.” Everyone experiences life as now. How could you experience where you are as “then”? Do you think after life you sit on a shelf? No, you are still alive in the time you lived, only that is not the only way you are alive, and not the only “place.”
Wrap your mind firmly around this concept: Strands have a life of their own, superior to the 3D minds that feed them. Yes, they allow feedback between and among 3D minds sharing the strand – and that flow can be enhanced if you wish it to be – but this is not the primary function of the strand. A plant’s roots center on the plant, not on the various tendrils that are part of the root. Your 3D lives center on whatever you center them on, but it probably isn’t individual skin cells or fingernails.
Flattering analogy, thanks.
We smile as well, but to some extent your root and tendril analogy is helpful. Next time we will discuss interaction among tendrils on a given root, remembering that you are of more than one strand, with all the productive complications that produces. And once again remember, all of this is not mere discussion for the purpose of passing the time. It is centered on what each of you can do to have life more abundantly. As we mention it, you say “of course,” perhaps impatiently, but you’d be surprised how easy it is to forget.
I’ll call this “Strands: Roots and tendrils,” maybe.
That would do. Till next time.
Till next time, and thanks as always.