Wednesday, June 8, 2022
4:40 a.m. Bill Ebeltoft asks if dreams are sometimes recall of alternative lives – alternatives created by our choices. Care to respond?
Not exactly “recall,” not exactly “alternative.” Yes, worth discussing.
This dovetails with the memory I half-recalled yesterday with Jane and Jane, doesn’t it? Should I look up the detail in Muddy Tracks? Or in my journal from July, 1995?
No need. As we pointed out previously, what you recall will be the point of the story, and anything relevant will naturally emerge. Telling stories is not the same thing as following the threads of related items.
So, unlike Sgt. Joe Friday, you don’t even require the facts.
We don’t – you don’t – require all the facts, merely enough of a starting-point to put us on the trail.
Well, since I don’t really know where you are going to take this once I mention Focus 23, that’s just as well.
Try to remember our recent sessions on memory, and on life as itself a dream, as you pursue this.
Okay. When I did Lifeline in July, 1995, my first experience of Focus 23 did not match Bob Monroe’s description. I experience it as a place where people were waiting, and something – can’t remember what – convinced me that Focus 23 was where people lived out what they didn’t live out in normal life. It wasn’t feverish, like F22, and it wasn’t a stable belief-system territory, like Focus 24, 25, 26. It was sort of intermediate, more stable than 22, not gelled like 24 and above. It had its own function; it was not merely attic space.
Yes, and that dream-like quality is enough of a hint, in this context, is it not?
That’s very interesting – as I find myself repeatedly saying to you. Although I had associated F23 with alternatives, “dream-like” hadn’t occurred to me, yet that is exactly what it was.
Now – as we said, associating this discussion with dreams and with memory – let’s look at it. In fact, let’s invert your usual assumptions about life’s reality:
- What if your real life is in the dream-world, and what you experience as real life is one specific version of that life, created as you go by your choices in the dream-world?
- Thus, what if what you call F23 is actually closer to reality than ordinary consciousness – C1 – that seems so obviously real despite its many inexplicable features?
- Thus, what if “life is but a dream” might be accurately rephrased as “life is but a specific subset of life’s dream”? Not as catchy, but perhaps suggestive.
And the dreams we experience of other lives –?
Messages? Memories? But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
The short answer to Bill’s question is yes, but the expanded answer is, “But life itself is not quite what you assume it to be.” You normally assume that the only life you know is the baseline, and anything else is a deviation from it. We are suggesting that it may be beneficial to think of the life you know as one specific subset of your greater life. But that doesn’t separate it from your greater life, it merely distances it a bit, distances your awareness.
This isn’t anything you don’t know in a different context. You already know that your conscious sphere is smaller than the total you, even restricting our definition of 3D-you. But you have to invert the order just as you have had to invert the order of consciousness v. unconsciousness in order to make sense of things. The facts are the same; the interpretation is opposite.
I keep coming back to Dion Fortune saying in one of her novels that modern psychiatry has gotten things backwards.
It makes a difference if you think a thing is primary or secondary, or if you think cause is effect.
So, to sketch out how you see it –
In 3D, you dream, and the difference between dreaming and waking is mostly that in dreaming, the ground-rules adopted by the 3D personality are loosened; hence dreams provide the illogical, the magical, the metaphorical, more freely than everyday living does. Other than that loosening of bonds, there really isn’t much difference.
Another way to say this is that dreams allow you to perceive things by emotional logic, and allow you to perceive what your conscious mind would exclude. If your truer, realer, more multi-dimensional life is actually F23 (or, to be more careful, if F23 allows you to more closely perceive that realer life), it is only to be expected that dreams give you a window to truth that thinking does not.
So you are saying, I think, that every version of our life exists in F23, and that as we choose, we sort of drop down into C1.
That’s distorted, but not impossibly so. The net “feel” is correct. You can see that the sense of motion between the two is only a sensory analogy.
I see it as you explain it.
In reality you are living “here” and “there” simultaneously, all the time. Your awareness fluctuates, that’s all.
So the practical effect of this?
As we have been saying, you choose, and any choice is legitimate. Your choices define who you are and what you bring to the enduring life after First Life is over. But we have never said that any one set of choices is the only version. (Indeed, we have pointed you in just the opposite direction.) As you expand your awareness of yourself, you learn how much more you are than you ever suspected. And the way to expand your awareness of who and what you are is to resolve the various knots that make you identify with victimhood and disability.
“Life more abundantly” takes on an even greater meaning.
It does, when you are ready for it to do so.
A little short – only 45 minutes or so – but this feels like a good resolution. Today’s theame?
“Dreaming as experience,” perhaps.
Perhaps. Thanks for this.
[Afterthought, thinking about today’s conversation with the guys:]
9:40 a.m. We tend to think of ourselves as the top of the pyramid of consciousness, but what if it’s the other way around?
Not, in descending order:
C1 ordinary consciousness
Various unconscious states
Vague other realities
But:
Focus 27, a stable non-3D situation
The stable belief-system territories
Focus 23, the dream that dreams us
Focus 22, an unstable boundary layer
Focus 21, the stable boundary
Focus 20 down to C1, variations of 3D-oriented consciousness.
That puts us in 3D at the periphery, not at the center. The only way we are at the center is in relation to our non-3D component. And perhaps we could see each of us (our 3D personalities) as the far end of spokes emanating from the non-3D center I am calling Focus 27. Thus, the lower our level of consciousness, the more individual, the more isolated, we feel. Bu the higher we go, the more connection we experience. Hmm, at one end, “all is one,” truly, at the other end, “we are all individuals.” Over-simplified but there’s something to it.