Condensed from five sessions, Dec. 21 through Dec. 25, 2021
Until now, in discussing the temporary joint mind, we have talked about the sharing of ideas and, to a lesser degree, of feeling. Let’s look a little deeper.
We will use as our entry-point the idea of your being open to influence by other minds not in the sense of invasion, or even of infection, but of diffusion. Water that is heating on a stove does not have one molecule feeling imposed upon because adjacent molecules are affecting it. Each molecule warms as part of the general warming-up process, and how that occurs may be a matter of viewpoint, but, it occurs.
If I read that right, you mean, the process may seem either like one molecule being affected by another, or as each molecule being affected by the general process, and which way one sees it is likely to be mostly a matter of opinion.
In the discussion to follow, we don’t want you (any of you) to hare off into discussing mind control or distant influencing or anything of that nature. Attempts to tamper with natural processes will be better understood once the material processes themselves have been explained, discussed, and assimilated.
So let’s look at the situation.
- “We’re all one thing.”
- Yet at the same time, the world is made up of divisions: 3D v. non-3D; you v. other people; you v. “the world” (the shared subjectivity that seems to be “other”); many other polarities.
- You are all individuals, you are also communities.
- “You” are also “we,” but if there were no distinctions, we wouldn’t be saying “you” and “we.” Similarly with distinctions between “this side” and “the other side.”
- Most notably, there is the difference between those living in the living present moment, and those living elsewhen. The living v. the dead; this life v. other lives; 3D v. non-3D (as long as you consider only the present moment “real” in a way other moments are not).
These background facts must be taken into consideration together if you are to understand what we will sketch. But the largest fact to be borne in mind is the effective division between what you are conscious of and what you are not conscious of. As long as your focus is in 3D, you will have in effect two minds. Living in 3D and non-3D, you will be balancing between two modes of perception and therefore between two coherent realities. Which world you live in depends mostly upon your mental balance. If you are entirely unaware of anything but what your senses report and whatever grist your conscious mind grinds – memories, fantasies, free-associations, chains of logic – that’s a world with no space for other lives, for the non-3D reality, for anything but the shallowest presentation of “what is.” (Bear in mind, for some people this is an appropriate stage of development.) At this stage, one’s awareness of most of reality does not exist as a factor. It influences them, of course, but they are not aware of it. To them, the shared subjectivity is merely “the world out there,” very separate. Other people, other times, other lives – it’s all “other” to someone at this stage of development.
(2)
We began by sketching the mental world of those with no awareness of any connection beyond the sensory. The bottom rung of perceptive awareness to be one that takes for granted that what you see is what you get. Even there, remember, actual connection is far broader and deeper and more exotic than perceived connection.
At the opposite end of the bell-curve of perception would be someone well beyond your ability to imagine. This would be a truly magical being, aware of celestial influences (which include the demonic) and every variation of 3D-level interaction, and everything that stems from connections along all threads, and all natural awareness of non-human forces including the other kingdoms. A fully alive 3D human lives in a world so much richer and stranger than yours, it beggars comparison: It resembles shamanic perception, except continuous rather than episodic, and natural rather than having to be reached for via ritual or psychoactive substances. A truly human existence, fully awake. It is the opposite extreme from what we sketched first, those who live their lives asleep to most of reality.
So now, without trying to sketch various levels between the two extremes, let us consider your situation, remembering that you are, at one and the same time:
- 3D beings
- Non-3D beings connected to 3D beings
- Individual insofar as a melded community may be considered as individual
- Part of “all-one-thing” because, obviously, “all one thing” implies everything without exception (or how could it be all?)
This being true, you perceive using
- 3D senses
- 3D reasoning (we’ll explain in a minute)
- Non-3D-based intuitions
- Data from every source you are not closed off from. Other lives, resonances, 3D relationships of blood, etc.
Understand this: None of this is one-way flow. You are not alone. But that means more than “you are not an orphan in the universe.” It means, too, you are not without responsibility for your influence on the rest of the noosphere. At the same time, you are not necessarily the source of what seem to you to be your thoughts, ideas, propensities, impulses, etc. Being part of “all one thing” as you are, your somewhat autistic ideas about your situation are only an interim formulation, while you gather experience, and wisdom through reflection upon that experience.
Now, see how this affects your understanding of the models we have constructed for you as interim scaffolding. The shared subjectivity v. the personal subjectivity, say, or the consciousness v. the rest of you, with emotions being the laminal layer at the boundary. These are helpful concepts as long as you consider yourselves as individuals existing among others. But when you look at the same situation as part of all one thing, they are less so; may in fact be misleading.
It gets sticky, because either way of seeing ourselves is more or less true. We are individuals; we are part of all one thing.
Precisely. That’s what we said: Models may clarify one aspect of things but they may distort in that very clarifying, if they lead you to think that any one way of seeing it is the only way, or even the best way. The goalposts, rules of the game, composition of teams, etc., is all fluid in the sense that it can all be made to make a coherent picture, but only at the cost of reducing your awareness of other equally valid way of seeing. We told you this when you had us write the ending to Muddy Tracks 20 years ago.
Yes you did, though I didn’t understand it in quite this way then.
How could you have done so?
(3)
Gentlemen, I notice that yesterday you left a thread hanging. In your iteration of the ways we perceive, you said, “3D reasoning (we’ll explain in a minute).”
So we did. By “3D reasoning,” we mean, reasoning taking into account the rules of the 3D world you inhabit.
Which means, if I read you right, whatever set of rules seem to apply to our lives, which depends upon where we are. Magical beings do not experience the world in the same way sleepers do, nor those in the middle.
Your understanding is correct.
You made a point of saying that none of our input was one-way flow. Do you mean, inter alia, that the nature of the input depends upon how other 3D persons experienced the rules of their world? I suppose it would have to.
Yes, and take the next step: How they experience the world – known to you or mostly not – may be altered as a result of how you change. They are integrally connected to you, obviously, if you are integrally connected to them. So if you alter the nature of what they are connected to, must this not influence them?
If it were not for my experience of healing Joe Smallwood’s back on the fourth of July, 1863 his time, I would find it harder to credit this as being more than just words.
It wasn’t the healing of his back that was the main impact: It was being contacted by a powerful being, per se, that changed his world in a way only reinforced by the fact that his physical healing offered testimony that the encounter had been real and not fantasy or fever or wishful thinking.
Yes, I see that. When we’re experienced an angelic visitation – which is how I think he interpreted it – your life pretty nearly has to change.
So let’s move beyond that one experience that you remember, and realize that in all your lives there are many other experiences that you may not remember, or may remember with other explanations. You very calmly did an exercise in a Monroe program that you felt had changed you, but you aren’t associating that with this, until now that we associate it for you.
That’s true. In some program they had us do a tape with the purpose of sending a helpful message to our younger self. I wound up sending a message of great emotional importance to my 10-year-old self (or thereabouts), telling him not to give up, that things would work out, that all was well. As you say, an intervention (from the boy’s point of view) from elsewhen.
We mention this experience because, though it was done matter-of-factly, this too was a deliberate intervention by your conscious self that took for granted relatively magical abilities, and took them for granted rightly. It didn’t matter how you thought of yourself habitually, at those two moments, you expressed a tiny bit of your magical potential.
And if I get you correctly, you are as much as saying, we all do it every so often, to greater or less degree, whether or not we are aware of it.
Yes. You do it and you receive it, on an on-going basis. That’s our point. And one aspect of having “life more abundantly” is being ever more aware of such interconnections.
Our lives are already more magical than we realize.
Yes, and we’re going to interject a word of clarification that may or may not go down well. Quote Thoreau.
“There is nowhere any excuse for despondency. Always there is life, which, rightly lived, implies a divine satisfaction.” I used that as an epigraph on my Master’s thesis 50 years ago.
Yet you don’t or didn’t and perhaps may not again always believe it, always feel it. You – anyone – could make that sentence a touchstone. When you are feeling despondent, it is not evidence that you are experiencing something that is wrong with life, but that something is wrong with the way that you are living your life. Here’s a rule of thumb: If you want to measure where you are on the scale of awareness, that is somewhere between sleeping your way through life (at one end) to magical being (at the other end), check what you believe and what you feel and what your experience.
You had an intense experience of your mind flowing with Hemingway’s, over a period of more than a decade. So you know that it can happen. You have had many conversations with ex-3D humans from their 3D-individual perspectives. Again, you know, now; you don’t have to settle for belief. Generalizing from these experiences, you can see that you all, unpredictably, may connect with others in productive and life-enhancing ways. You are all part of all-that-is, obviously. You are individual, obviously. It is the living both halves of the polarity simultaneously that is the skill to be learned, the new world to be living in.
(4)
Perhaps the context begins to shed some light on aspects of Carl Jung’s thought that some have thought to be mystical speculation, and on scriptural statements that have not been obviously grounded in fact. A racial unconscious, an admonition to be your brother’s keeper: Do they not ring true, do they not suggest further connections, when examined in light of your (our) being both individual and part of all-one-thing?
Certainly they seem self-evident once we remember that what appeared to be separate was and is actually invisibly interconnected in uncounted ways.
If anything you do, think, feel, experience, may alter others in unpredictable fashion, and if at the same time you will be – and are – influenced similarly by others, then “No man is an island” is the merest statement of truth, not exaggerated, not high-flying, not even impractical or without consequences. “Love your neighbor as yourself” has a profounder reasoning behind it.
It was clear that interpenetration of minds means that emotion may be transferred, not merely thoughts. But I hadn’t considered that statement in connection with your earlier analogy of emotions being the laminal layer between an individual’s conscious and unconscious components.
And thus, in effect, any of you may at certain times be affected by emotions that are caused not by your own specific situation but by, let’s call it, spillover from those closest to you in some way.
Hence, crowd panic, group hysteria, psychic contagion.
Hence, too, and not so different, political movements, ideological convictions, fads, manias, shared political hallucinations.
We said earlier, you are not primarily rational beings. Perhaps that statement will seem more evidently true now. Any given individual may be quite rational, but that isn’t going to be true of people in general nor of any of you except now and then. Your periods of being driven by rationality blend invisibly (to you) with periods of being driven by group emotion, even of group thought, which by definition means, by motives not stemming from your individual mental constructions.
None of this is accidental; none of it is an interruption to your program; none of it is static in the recording. (Pick your preferred metaphor.) It is true that there is always chaos within the pattern, as there is always pattern within the chaos. Think of the yin-yang symbol, if you wish to have a symbol of the situation. No polarity is other than relative; life is not a divided thing but a unity, only the unity is not uniform but is endlessly diverse. Intricacy is far more interesting and productive than a sea of Jello would be, you will agree. And the logical corollary, if it is not accidental, is that it proceeds according to laws. The laws are not necessarily obvious, but their effects will be evident, once you learn to look for them.
You are saying, I think, that the sources of disruption in our individual lives proceed from the overall situation in some way.
And now we bring in the vast impersonal forces, you see, linking two concepts after a long, long separation in 3D time. But once you link them in your minds, it will seem clear enough.
That is very interesting. It’s true, I hadn’t connected the ideas. I have been accepting the existence of the vast impersonal forces, mainly on your say-so, but I have had not much of an idea of where they came from, what they were doing, or anything much more than initial consideration of how they affect us.
And now you begin to see. Like every other aspect of reality, they are necessarily “other” only as long as you define them that way; they are necessarily part of you, individually and as groups, only as long as you define them that way. Only, as it happens, you are less likely to assume the latter connection than the former.
Now, we suggest that you all spend some time thinking about the implied connection between discussing the interconnection of minds and the existence and effects of the vast impersonal forces. If you are in the habit of thinking with pen and paper – either writing words or sketching, or both – we suggest that some summation of this topic – and subsequent sharing of ideas and reactions among one another – will pay dividends. If we may offer a word of advice on procedure, don’t wait until you think you can demonstrate a thing logically; don’t think that because it came to you, you are somehow required to defend it; don’t fall in love with it and refuse to let it modify itself as you go along.
(5)
Everything connects to everything, so it is often convenient to comment from wherever you happen to be. A different starting-point wouldn’t necessarily offer any particular advantage. We suggest, BTW, that you all consider this fact in your exploratory endeavors.
Thoreau said the work to be done is always right where we are, we don’t need to go count the cats in Zanzibar.
And that is a part of what he meant, yes. So when you look at your own particular situation, and you bemoan the fact that you are not somewhere else, in some other condition, facing some other opportunities, bear in mind that you are being ridiculous. If you had come into 3D to be Rembrandt, or Helen Keller, or Wilbur Wright, or Joan of Arc, you wouldn’t have come in as you!
All this is obvious, but it has implications that are less so. What you are may be considered to be a discrete individual. Yes, you are a seamless part of all-that-is, and it is well to remember that, but mostly you think of yourselves as individuals. Well, as an individual, you are a combination of wave-lengths. State your understanding of what we’re getting at, and we’ll correct if necessary.
I get that you are saying that we are each, in effect, unique transmitters of energy, each with our own combination of frequencies. I suppose every thread within us contributes its bit to the composite signal. We are each a unique combination of elements. Maybe that’s what an individual is, a particular composite signal.
Each of you (each of us, remember) radiates. You don’t just exist; you don’t just receive. You broadcast.
Instead of “I think, therefore I am,” maybe Descartes should have said, “I exist, therefore I broadcast.”
Actually, though said lightly, that demonstrates a point that is well to hold in mind: In his day, how was he to think in terms of broadcasting, when there was no 3D equivalent? This is one of the ways in which whatever times one lives in expand or limit the mind’s possibilities. In your time, it is easier to think of telepathy and distant influencing and non-3D connection, because so much in your physical surroundings offers analogy. Your grandchildren, growing up in a world in which virtual reality is taken for granted, will have their ideas of what is possible similarly affected by what they take for granted in 3D.
So, we said, you broadcast. Obviously, so does everybody else. Why is not the result chaos?
I would assume that the mind filters non-3D input in the same way it filters 3D input. Faced with a huge volume of potential input, it necessarily filters out the vast majority of it, so that it has only a manageable amount to deal with. Our minds must be layer after layer of successive filters, beginning with the grossest and ending with the finest. At one end, potentially everything, at the other end, a finite amount.
So now consider some of the implications of the model you just sketched. Just noodle.
Okay, let’s see. Our 3D minds still connect to our non-3D components, so it isn’t as if we are on our own. We are open to suggestion, so to speak. That’s what these conversations are, after all. But we are open to some kinds of suggestion more than others, just by what we are, what we have made ourselves. A lifetime’s habits are going to count for something, in terms of what we do or don’t easily accept.
I’m thinking about those grossest filters. I suspect it would be easier to start from this end and work outward.
You are finding this difficult. Ask yourself why.
I know why. It is much easier to be receptive than to be proactive. For me, anyway.
That is more of a “how” than a “why,” but all right. A paraphrase would be, you find it easier to understand our thought than to generate the thought. But that deserves more careful consideration, for what is the difference, really?
I suppose being in non-3D makes it easier to see gestalts, so of course relationships would be more obvious to you than to us.
True as far as it goes, but who is “you” and “us”? We are not only non-3D; you are not only 3D. In fact, at some levels of closeness you and we are the same thing, as we keep reminding you. So why can’t “you” see what “we” can?
We do, sometimes.
Correct. And life more abundantly involves greater ability to do so at will.
In a way, that’s saying, it involves learning to reprogram our filters.
Clumsily expressed, but the nub is there, yes. To a large extent, what you can’t perceive is what would be chaos to you. As you improve your ability to make sense of things, your perceptive ability grows correspondingly. It isn’t that the mainsprings of the world are being hidden from you, it is that you are unable to see. As your vision clears – well, you see it happening in your lives, do you not?