Gentlemen, anything in particular for us this morning?
Nothing in particular. We are available, as usual.
Sometimes you get moving on some topic, and things flow.
From our perspective, we could say the same of you. Perhaps neither perspective is complete in itself.
Hmm. Okay, I felt the gears engage as soon as you said that, but the act of mentioning it may have disengaged them again.
You shifted position slightly. Merely move back to receptivity rather than formulation.
Okay.
You experienced the slight feel – the subtle feel, we should say – of connection. There are moments when you can feel yourself as part of a larger consciousness than your usual, habitual, experience.
Before we had scarcely gotten into that paragraph, I remembered Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain’s sudden feeling of identification with the Union Army one day. It had nothing to do with battle, as far as I remember, but something in the visual perception of this vast organized mass of men, and he a part of it, struck him.
Yes, same idea. People experience it many ways, usually mystically, but not always (in fact, rarely) intellectually worked out. It is easier to feel than to understand, and easier to understand than to put rules and bounds to.
I get that it is the sort of knowing that is very much dependent upon what a person’s society allows for.
A little slower. You have the idea, but take the time to express it more carefully.
Some forms of society take our connectedness for granted, though each society may conceptualize differently what is happening. Others assume it is not possible. The degree of freedom that an individual feels and experiences to communicate such experience makes a difference.
No, you are still divided. Spit out the distracting thought so you may continue.
As I used to do in grad school, opening my journal for stray thoughts so they would not distract my reading. Okay, I merely thought I should post something on Facebook suggesting that people talk about the society they would want to live in, rather than what they feared. Positive, not negative. I think they’d find that many people on opposite sides of various issues were seeking the same thing; it would lower the tension within whatever individuals chose to refocus their attention that way.
Now resume.
If a society – a church, say – encourages its members to expect to receive messages from spirit (no matter how they define spirit or define messages), those members will be more open to the experience and will be more open to sharing the experience, which in turn will open the way for others. It is a virtuous cycle rather than a vicious cycle.
The bump in the road may be that the terms in which the experience is described may be unfamiliar, and so may be suspect. The usual confusion of tongues.
That’s where we are today, isn’t it?
Not exclusively “today,” but yes. In the change from one era to another, much is lost in translation. However, realize that losing things in translation also allows for – encourages, almost enables – things to be found in translation.
I suppose it is an advantage of ILC that it comes with little cultural baggage.
Such baggage as it carries is of course transparent to you, because it is in the air you breathe. But let’s say it is encumbered with little previously generated baggage, as was Bob Monroe’s system, similarly. The less of the past one has to drag around, the more nimble one may be. However the opposite danger (at least, seemingly opposite) is that if one disconnects from one’s past entirely, the result is not so much freedom as ungroundedness.
And the happy medium?
You yourself live there naturally. You are personally well grounded in the history you know and feel. (Others may be well grounded in the contemporary society they know and feel.) You being grounded, your expression of what you experience will be grounded, provided you intend it to be.
Meaning, provided we make our meaning as clear as we can, considering our readers.
Yes. As in literary style, so in this: Write as clearly and simply as you can, so that who and what you are comes through, and that is all you can do, and all you need to do.
Now, let us return to the original point. You happened to become aware of the different “feel” of being in connection and not being in connection. Given that we are in connection always, what can that mean, said more carefully?
Well, I thought we were saying it is a matter of being conscious of the connection. It is one thing to breathe; another thing entirely to be aware of the fact that we breathe. Ask any asthmatic!
And is there any particular advantage to being aware that you are breathing?
Immediately I want to say, “Yes, of course,” though I might be pressed to say what it is. But I “heard” you ask, “Then is there a disadvantage to not being aware,” and I remembered that lovely affirming vision I had during Gateway 27 years ago: “You are not alone.”
Precisely. Do you not suppose that the sense of never being on their own –. Or, let’s state it positively: St. Columba on Iona, the Apostles in their wandering, any hermit or monk or nun or cloistered being; any mystic, any person devoted to an art, or to living, may feel this, and be sustained by it, and it does not in the slightest degree depend upon their idea of what – or who – they are experiencing. This is the reality behind any religious or artistic or scientific or philosophic conceptions.
I don’t think that came out as clearly as it might have.
You are welcome to edit us, and we will edit you if need be.
I believe you just said – and I fully agree – that this sense of communion with a non-3D reality may come in many forms
May be experienced in many forms.
May be clothed in many belief-systems, but is the same enabling force.
It may lead to fanaticism, mind. It may lead to self-righteous certainty; it may even encourage someone in disastrously misguided directions. It isn’t a panacea.
No, it is the Age of Aquarius.
Very good. It is that.
By which I mean, the Age of Pisces had its own characteristics, and so will the Age of Aquarius, but there is no excuse for thinking that this new age will manifest only positively, any more than the old one did. That isn’t how duality works.
Yes. Very good. Very good. That is a long stretch from “I feel the gears engage.” Good work.
I guess we’d better quit while I’m ahead.
We’re smiling too, but this insight, though not entirely new and seeming not particularly important, may take us far.
I look forward to it. Our thanks for this communication and for our being in communication, as always.