Friday, November 12, 2021
1:15 p.m. I think it is time to ignore body problems for an hour or so, and return to something interesting. In the middle of the night – last night or maybe the night before – I had a flicker of an idea about continuing our last conversation. Gone now. Exploring strands and past lives, I see, looking back. Glancing at Wednesday’s, I still don’t see what I had flashed on. So, over to you, I guess.
We will say this again and again, and not in a chiding way (which you have not deserved) nor in an impatient or worried way (for we see the progress of your lives in a different way than you can, of course), but as a helpful reminder. In all your explorations, aim to be practical more than theoretical. If you explore a given phenomenon or tendency or if you are tempted to see what is behind a suddenly opened door, do so in the context of how it will (or may, anyway) help you live your life.
Now, what does that mean? Presumably it means, how will it help you to have life more abundantly? That is, how will it increase the resources you bring to the puzzle that is your day-to-day living? If you were to decide (or even, let’s say, to know) that you had been Cleopatra in some “past life” and all the knowledge did was to squash you with a sense of present insignificance compared to past glory – how would that help anything? Or, if you dredged up life after life of achievement inner or outer, and allowed that knowledge to inflate your ego, what would that be but leaning on past glories to glorify yourself today? That’s called “pulling rank,” and it is rarely helpful.
Any resource may be grasped in the right or the wrong way. Any gift may be misused – and “gift,” by the way, means something given to your 3D being. It may be talent but it may be inability. It may be health but it may be illness or injury. It may, in short, be something you’re glad to have, or it may be something you’d gladly do without. Doesn’t matter: If it is conferred upon your life, rather than springing from what you already are, it is a gift and should be treated as such.
Not to dislodge your train of thought, but I suppose our preferences affect how we react to these gifts, and I suppose that limits what we can get from them.
Let’s not make it a flat statement, but that is a common tendency, yes. Looking at a gift as an affliction is going to tempt you to try to wish it away, instead of trying to profit from it.
So, to continue. Psychic gifts, strictly mental gifts (abilities), anything you may pursue may be pursued in the helpful or in an unhelpful way, and the way to judge your attitude is to remember to ask, “Will this lead to life more abundantly if carried out in the right manner, with the right intent?”
Ah, the difference between white and black magic.
That’s one, yes. A primary distinction between the two is that white magic is intended to bring blessings to all, and black is intended to bring blessings to oneself alone. That’s too binary a statement, but within reason it is true. Anther distinction, probably easier apprehended and, we would say, more important, is that white magic intends harm to nobody, and black magic is often used to harm or at least deprive. But keeping on the question of the individual and the practice and the objective: How can you go wrong if you keep in mind the objective of having life more abundantly? Such is never at the expense of another; it never depends upon depriving someone of anything. It has to do with overcoming one’s own nature, to the extent that that nature acts as a drag upon one’s intent.
Now to return to you the thought that came to you in the wake of our previous conversation, though not precisely as a result of it: Your choosing affects all who share your various threads, as theirs does you. But have you considered what this means? It means that often enough each of you is taking sides in a civil war, or at least a tug-of-war, being conducted “elsewhere.”
And of course the scenario is constantly changing.
Yes, but leave that aside for the moment. Dion Fortune, say, or William Yeats, or Bertram, or you. Not one of you is or ever could be monolithic. You are the product of sexual reproduction; that is, of the combining of different combinations of threads. You are not angels, made of unchanging substance: You are battlegrounds, or playgrounds, or laboratories – think of it how you wish – among many tendencies, some of which contradict one another, some of which are in occasional or frequent alliance, and any or all of which may receive reinforcement from “other lives” that are on the same thread. Thus in one more way it is true that We Are All One Thing. Individuality is a useful concept, but it is only an approximation of what is.
Is there ever a final vote, or is it always in flux?
You will have to decide to accept or reject the underlying idea that the 3D world is only relatively material, only somewhat real. If you cannot accept that starting point, little that we can say (have said, will say) can penetrate the filters your mind will maintain. If you can accept it, it is a short step to realizing that the very idea of a “final vote” is a 3D-based concept. And even in 3D, you know, there is a saying: “In politics there are no final victories.” If there could be a “final vote,” it would imply that all the ballots had been cast (or, even less to the point, that some arbitrary deadline had been passed). But life is growth, life is change, and as you change, so your past life changes in retrospect even if not in fact. (And of course it often enough changes in fact as well, though usually unnoticed).
We return to our theme: What in all this is practical?
I’d say it can have practical effects, what we think the ground rules are, in that it changes our ideas of what is possible.
True. And as you experience an access of greater power, you feel your way toward further advances. That is a way of obtaining life more abundantly. But for the moments – years, perhaps – between such moments of illumination, the way to achieve life more abundantly is to make a habit of cultivating certain ways of seeing, of living. Life in 3D is only very occasional glimpses from the mountainside. Mostly it is walking – or running, or slogging, whatever – through the lowlands. If you cannot remember the view from the mountaintop except when you are there, you cannot expect to live a more expanded, confident, joyous life. More likely you will feel buffeted by contrary winds and sudden upheavals and blank periods of near-despair. Being “stuck” is not “life more abundantly.” But only you can unstick yourself. We will gladly help, but it is a decision, and we beyond 3D cannot and will not decide: That is your prerogative, your responsibility.
Enough for now. Not your usual hour, but well done.
Thanks for all this, as usual.