Tuesday, February 15, 2022
5:20 a.m. Well, guys, anything on today’s agenda? Setting switches, just in case.
A couple of points might be mentioned, from your paragraph after we finished yesterday.
Here it is:
“9:50 a.m. A similar phenomenon is remembering scenes from movies or novels or stories, I think. I replay scenes or even single lines from certain movies, and I don’t always know why they come to mind – most of the connections we make are made in a subterranean fashion, I suspect, not necessarily concealed from us by anyone’s or anything’s intent, but more by the way things work – but return they do, and this is a hidden richness in my life, I suppose in everybody’s life. Like George in “Phenomenon,” which was just in mind, or like Henry Warren in Ruined City or the protagonist in Trustee from the Toolroom, whose name I can’t recall offhand, but whose personality is firmly fixed. So many friends, so many memories of things that never happened except in the minds of their creators.”
This will seem a lot less different from remembering what did happen to you in “real life” if you remember that 3D life is somewhat real, not absolutely real. The difference between a thought put into action and a thought that exists “only” in the imaginal realm is very little. So of course a fiction might ensconce itself in your memory as firmly as – or, often enough, more firmly than – details from your enacted life. Most of your life takes place outside your conscious awareness.
In fact, a few words about that.
I sort of lost focus there, petting the cat who is sitting on my desk monitoring my activities. Proceed?
Two things suggest themselves, the role of fiction and other non-physical experiences in your lives, and the fact that most of your life takes place outside your awareness. In neither case is anything wrong with the situation. Neither one involves malfunction, nor poor design, not bad choices. But life is stranger, more intricate, more poetic – more dream-like, we should say – than a prosaic view of life might assume.
- Dreams, unnoticed connections, what we can only call phantom construction.
“Phantom construction,” I like the sound of that. Meaning which? Construction by phantoms, or construction of phantoms?
Both, and here is the connection between the two points we mentioned.
I can feel the connections widening as I sit here, even though I can’t tell what they are, exactly.
Yes. You are learning to feel our process.
I am?
Indeed you are. Some people are born feeling it, some never do, and most (as usual) are in the middle somewhere. You are learning it now, in time to express it so that others may recognize it in themselves.
So we’re going to hare off in that direction?
It all connects; we keep telling you that.
How do you think your mental processes work, anyway? There is logical construction, as you know, which is the kind of work Henry Ford described as the hardest work there is. There is associative thinking, voluntary or involuntary, in which each thing suggests the next in an endless chain. When unnoticed and therefore beyond your control, this is what is called “monkey mind.” When noticed and followed with active or passive interest, this is entertainment and, often enough, instruction. When noticed and unwanted, it manifests as obsessions such as the song tune that won’t leave you, or some emotionally connected cluster of memories and associations that haunt you. When noticed and stopped, the sudden absence of the drunken monkey leads to an experience of peace and presence perhaps never before experienced or even considered as possibility.
So – that is your mental experience, usually considered as if you and only you were involved. But there is no separate 3D you; you know that by now. Even at your most isolated, you extend beyond one 3D body into non-3D. and, as we have pointed out many times – your mind functions through your brain in 3D, but it exists in non-3D, and therefore is not confined to you in the way you usually assume it to be.
- You are connected mentally to all those lives you resonate to, regardless if considered to be a “past life” or not.
- You are connected to those you may not resonate to, but interact with on a 3D basis. (This is a variant of strands coexisting within a body to learn to live together.)
- And, you are connected to your own mental constructions and those of others that you have adopted. We know that this is a strange way to think of it, but it is so. Where do you think the souls of machines come from? How does the zeitgeist arise? How, in short, does the shared subjectivity step down (so to speak) to individual lives?
Interesting thought that could use some expanding.
At another time, maybe. Here’s the more immediate point: You, as a 3D consciousness, can’t possibly be aware of most of what is going on. Even as a 3D consciousness that has learned to pay more attention to its non-3D aspects, most of it is going to blow right by you. But it will affect you! It is one thing to know something; it is a far different thing to avoid being affected by what you don’t know.
I had to look back to remember where we started, 40 minutes ago. We have come quite a distance, seems to me.
Or no distance at all: It will depend upon one’s starting point and one’s receptivity to readjustment of ideas. But now you, anyway, see why you may be affected quite as much by a fiction as by a fact.
And of course, it’s only common sense, after all, looked at in another light.
That is true of everything we say or ever could say. We aren’t saying what no one has ever known; we are saying, look at your experience in this new light and see if it is clearer to you.
Now, another word on the fact that most of your life takes place beyond your awareness. This too is common sense, but it is worth saying explicitly: There is nothing wrong with the situation. Most of your life will take place behind the scenes, or beneath the surface, or however you wish to think of it. It should. That is what background is. To make an anatomical comparison, your body processes sugars, transfers oxygen, fights disease, sorts out neural input, etc., etc. Like the sun rising in the east every morning, it does so without your assistance. You aren’t in 3D to help the sun come up. The sun comes up to help you function in 3D.
Got it. Of course, there is a sense in which we are here to help with the on-going play.
Yes, but actors don’t usually also paint scrims, or position cameras, or keep track of continuity. It is because these things are taken care of – automatically, from their view – that actors can concentrate on acting. Most of everybody’s life takes place on a background that seems to magically appear. Higher awareness has nothing to do with helping the sun come up. It deals with broadening and deepening your consciousness of the things that concern your task of choosing who and what you are going to be.
All right, I think you’ve made your point.
We’ll see. You are well aware from your own experience of decades ago that what some people think is clear is in fact clear only to those standing in a certain place. So, talk of the “drunken monkey” can be – often is – misinterpreted as meaning that a blank mind, or a mind that always refuses associations, is desirable. But in fact, what is desirable is that you be aware of the process and become in control of the process. That’s a very different thing from assuming that the process itself is either immaterial or undesirable.
And we should call this session – what?
“Fact and fiction,” perhaps. Or maybe, “Background processes.”
Maybe “Beyond our awareness”?
Your choice.
Well, our thanks as always. See you next time.