Tuesday, October 4, 2022
7:40 a.m. Next on the agenda was going to be a look at the nature of the gates of specific times, you said: what they let in and what they don’t. Yes?
All this is in the context of you all being connected in so many ways more than your senses suggest.
- You and everything and everybody are all mind-stuff; you are not some alive and some dead; some connected and some not; some conscious and some not.
- Of course, within the dream that is life, many relative separations exist, but they are relative, not absolute. A cat is not a hat rack, and neither of them is a cloud, nor are they you. But as you probe more carefully, you see that everything is of the same substance, and must stem from the same source.
- There is, and there is not, randomness and chance at play. Is, in that leaves don’t each fall in predetermined spots on the sidewalk. Is not, in that all processes are subject to law, and the role of chance is within
Pattern within chaos, chaos within pattern.
Yes.
- The one-ness of everything does not start nor stop at the human level. Everything from beneath sub-atomic to beyond galactic is part of the one everything. Each specialized part will have its own law, but that law will be part of the great overarching law. Reality is not a house divided.
- To keep our attention at a human scale, everything that happens, happens within law. Personal subjectivity and shared subjectivity interact by way of the times they are lived in. The qualities those times allow are no more “random” than any other factor in life. Neither is there – nor could there be – meaningless variation.
Now, to bring this specifically to disease and illness.
I get that you were saying yesterday that sometimes we can’t see things straight because we are instinctively labeling things good or bad.
Should it be any different when considering health than in considering any other aspect of life? Some people automatically consider death bad. Does that make it so? Does that help them understand or appreciate the cycle of life? Does it help them understand the process or direction or meaning of their own life? Similarly, with anything else.
Eating the apple had more devastating effects than giving us a racial bad conscience.
It did indeed. It stops you from understanding. Condemnation always does that. You may impartially judge something to be unworthy, or whatever, but when you condemn it, in the sense of saying, “This is alien to me,” you lose any chance of actually understanding it from various viewpoints, because you will be unable to see it from any viewpoint that does not coincide with your sense of it being alien to you.
Thus we should look at anyone’s actions from a sense of “There but for the grace of God go I”?
At least let us say you should do well to avoid saying or thinking, “I could never have done that, regardless of my background or provocation.”
Now, carry that caveat to the examination not of people’s actions but to natural processes such as illness or accident or death. You cannot understand the nature and necessity of anything you insist on looking at as if it were evil, or even unfortunate. You must look for the gift in the situation, as people used to say. To put it another way, metaphorically, whenever you see dragons, you ought to look to find the treasures they guard.
And I expect you’re going to show us how to do that.
You already know how to do it; we merely encourage you not to let yourselves forget what you know.
So now – what possible purpose can illness serve? Or widen it to anything that restricts a person’s life in any way.
Immediately, I get that restrictions channel energies. Someone thwarted in one direction may work with added force and effectiveness in the directions left open.
This is true but not quite on point. We are not concerned so much with work as with being. Your lives are not worthwhile in proportion to the work you accomplish, even if it is splendid work, like Beethoven’s, or Newton’s, or Joan of Arc’s. It is what you are (seen or unseen by others or even by yourself), not what you do, that weighs in the realer world. Your deeds are bound to the 3D; your being, isn’t.
So then, illness or injury may help us channel our energies in certain ways?
Yes, they may, but we are not concentrated here with their effects, so much as their nature. It wouldn’t advance your understanding of water much, to know that it may be used to clean your skin.
I see. Still, you said this would center on us in our 3D lives. And you said restriction in one place might channel energies elsewhere.
Yes, those are effects. But why must there be illness or – to broaden the focus slightly – maladjustment of any kind?
That word “maladjustment” seemed to illuminate things a little. I can’t quite put it into words, but the sense I get is that there is the total situation and there is our part of the situation, and we don’t always quite fit with it. I mean, there are ragged edges.
That’s rough, but not too bad. It is in the right direction. But we don’t have the illustrating metaphor.
Rocks in a tumbler?
The purpose of the tumbler is to smooth and polish the rocks. That may be one effect of illness; it is not its reason for being.
Not quite sure how this can apply, but I thought of sedimentary rock, how it’s formed.
That has the quality of things finding their place and thereby contributing to the shape of the result. But still not right.
A lightning strike, in a storm?
That’s closer, but what it strikes is more random seeming than we are looking for.
Well, sticking to “As above, so below,” something we see in everyday life?
Genetics may be an example that will serve. Compound beings can pick and choose only from the total genetic traits of the parents. The combinations chosen by the child cannot include something that was not there in the bloodline, and the only way to add a trait to a bloodline is to mate with one who includes it. But until it is there, it isn’t there. You can’t use what you don’t have.
Conversely, what is there, may or may not express. If it does express, it may or may not be dominant or may be relatively unimportant. If it does not express, you call it recessive. It is still available in the bloodline.
Obviously – we hope obviously – not everything in the two merged bloodlines is gong to be coherent, or smoothly interacting. Just as in your mental life, you may have strands of DNA that carried physical traits that fight each other.
But doesn’t the 3D individual have some say in what expresses, and how?
What do you think freewill is? But like everything else in life, it has its law and its limits and its possibilities. Depending upon your conception of those limits and possibilities, your say varies.
Our time is up and we haven’t gotten very far.
We told you, it’s a big subject. As always, slow and steady wins the race. Or, to put it another way, righteous persistence wins reward. You will benefit from these discussions – as you well know – only to the extent that you wrestle with them and make them part of you.
Whatever will we title this?
“Restrictions” might do. Or “Restrictions and possibilities,” something like that.
Well, we’ll see. Our thanks for all this, as always.