Contributions

Wednesday, May 4, 2022

7 a.m. You gentlemen up for a session today? I guess I’m ready if you are, through I don’t know that we are in the middle of something.

You can always take a day off; it doesn’t matter if you took one recently. You are a volunteer, not a conscript.

Well, I’m feeling a little lazy, but I often do, and when I make myself make the effort, it always proves worthwhile.

If you will set your switches for maximum focus, receptivity, clarity, and presence, as has become habitual, we’ll see what we can do to provide you with an interesting topic.

Done.

Let’s talk about Bob Monroe and his legacy, which you have defined in a way that was true but is becoming less so.

I have said that he left us the technology to make the breakthrough, and the value-neutral language with which to discuss it, and, mostly though of course not immediately, a community of people who could discuss the same experiences in the same language.

And you know that the technology is of only fleeting importance – training wheels, as he described it – and the language, also, had a short half-life as a neutral medium of exchange. For a short time, it allowed people to discuss elements of reality that were beyond the range of the materialist world-view without being captive of any dogmatic religious system. But life goes on, and on the one hand long association has begun to attach emotional significance to descriptions of Focus 10 or Focus 34/35, etc. On the other hand, the need for a neutral language is greatly diminished as terms like out-of-body and near-death etc. have changed the mainstream view of possibilities.

Yes, I always say that the creation of a basis for a community of shared experience and perceptions was the greatest accomplishment.

And its importance, unlike that of the technology and the jargon, is increasing. If this were not so, Monroe’s contribution would be far less important. Participants and users of the technology to achieve breakthroughs would be in a sort of cultural ghetto, isolated from the mainstream and limited in their ability (singly and collectively) to bring about the change which is the real concern here.

In other words, Monroe may have had his own ideas about what he was doing and why he was doing it, but the larger being may have had ideas of its own.

You can replace those “mays” with definites. Who ever knows why he has come into the world? Who ever sees his lifework, or hers, complete in advance? You make it up as you go along, both in appearance and in reality. You may be following a blueprint, but that doesn’t mean the blueprint dictates how you go about every detail.

In other words – I think you’re saying – we continually interact with life, and it changes our actions, as ours change the actions of others.

Isn’t it obvious every day? The 3D is not a pretend freewill universe. Football players don’t trace out the steps laid down for them before the game; they’re doing improv too.

Well, that’s how it seems to me too. I don’t have much patience with schemes that pretend that everything we do is preordained.

Life is a combination of freewill and predestination, as we have repeatedly said. It isn’t anarchy and it isn’t rote performance. Monroe didn’t come into 3D life knowing every meal he would ever eat; neither did you. And he didn’t know the outcome of every friendship or acquaintanceship or chance encounter, and of course neither do any of you. Sometimes, it is true, you know certain highlights in advance. But think how dreary it would be, to live an entire 3D life tracing steps known in advance, pretending to a free will that was not actually free, pretending to emotion that was pre-scripted, to conflicts and outcomes that were pre-ordained.

What a waste of time it would be! The whole idea is stupid. I don’t see how people can see it that way. Even more, I don’t see how they can want to see it that way, take comfort from seeing it that way.

Well, perhaps they are congratulating themselves on seeing deeper into reality than surface appearances. Perhaps their alternative would be meaninglessness.

All right, I see that. Seeing only any one side of a complex reality is better than that.

And meaninglessness may be a sort of refuge for others  in other circumstances. Really, you shouldn’t try to judge other people’s viewpoints (we may have mentioned this from time to time) because you never have the data.

Okay, okay.

It’s just that judgment sneaks in every so often, unexpectedly. It’s as well to keep an eye on it.

Now, to center in again on our topic du jour: Anyone who ahs ever come into contact with Monroe’s cosmology forms part of a de facto community even if he or she never meets another.

You said that anybody who reads a book is directly connected to the author and to everyone else who reads it. You said that long ago, when Rita and I were first talking to you.

Yes. You accepted the statement though you didn’t understand how it could be true. (A good attitude to learn something really new, by the way.) Perhaps now it is more evident.

Well, I suppose it puts us on the same thread.

Yes. Well, the same thing goes for anybody who watches the same video, participates in the same chat room, cooperates on the same Zoom meeting, attends the same meeting of a local chapter, reads the same blog posts, etc., etc. These things barely existed when we mentioned the dynamic in 2001, so we left it as “books,” but the principle is the same.

So now here you are. Monroe has been gone from the 3D for 25 years and more. The seed has to die that it may germinate, right? And all around you, germination continues. It isn’t very evident yet. You’re still at the beginning. But your prophecy at the time of Monroe’s death was not extravagant.

I said that in 100 years, every educated person would know his name.

But it won’t be because he wrote three books or founded an institute or developed Hemi-Sync. It will be because he was the valve through which certain kinds of energies were able to be channeled into the conscious mind of humans, and lived, which put them into the unconscious mind.

You’re saying, I think, he affected the shared subjectivity’s unfinished business.

Yes, but that is a sloppy way to say it. Refocus and try again.

Monroe’s work lives through what people do with it.

Yes. Any contribution is important primarily for what it makes possible. In effect, that means a contribution is valuable in that it assists future contributions to occur.

It smooths the way.

Everything everybody does smooths the way for certain kinds of things and obstructs other kinds of things from manifesting. That’s what choosing does.

I get that you are building up to specifics, here, and I get that you may have in mind work such as Susan Smiley does, capturing and organizing and preserving information that otherwise might have been lost. And transcription such as Daniel Erickson and Jane Coleman have been doing. I name these three because they are known to me: They’ll have to stand in for all the people who are doing unheralded work that will extend the reach of Bob’s efforts.

Anyone who takes a thing seriously, contributes toward its continuity and growth. Anyone who goes beyond taking it seriously to contribute time and attention to anything specific adds value. And as we have said many times, it is an endless stack.

You haven’t exactly said it, but you have said, other times, that each new increment of effort is more valuable to the whole. I think you drew a progression from formatting an idea, to putting it into words, to saying it, writing it, publishing it, etc. Each stage has value, but the farther you go with it, the greater the value added. Yes?

Yes. Even being a part of a community adds. “Holding space,” you sometimes call it. But the person who prepares the meals that thus helps a program to continue is adding too, whether or not the contribution is recognized.

Very well, there’s your hour.

Our theme?

“Contribution,” perhaps.

Perhaps. Our thanks as always.