Saturday, October 29, 2022
5:45 a.m. Very well, friends: Things as portals. Focusing for maximum presence, receptivity, clarity.
Obviously here is no need for us or for you to trace a history of psychometry. Anyone interested can find the trail. But no two people’s experience will bring to the material the same mindset; therefore, no two people will experience reality in identical fashion. They never do, but usually the differences shade off from nearly-the-same to utterly contradictory. If subjective bias were not a factor, would not everyone have come to agreement long ago? Even liars would have no room to maneuver, if that were true, for the sheer discontinuity of their reports with everyone else’s would be impossible to miss. Similarly, for any who made honest mistakes.
But as we said, such is not the case, because bias is built in to the reality of individual piecing-together of the world, so your task is much more difficult than it would be if everyone could come to one truth. This has advantages, as well as disadvantages. It allows you freedom to create, by bringing to the table the sum total of what you are.
Creation is never finished, presented to us on a take-it-or-leave-it basis.
Let’s say, human perception of creation is never complete, never without the possibility of new human contributions. And this is what you might expect, life being a dream. (Or, to put it more neutrally, reality being projected from a higher reality, and therefore any given fact being only somewhat real. Same statement, really.)
It is because no one in 3D can see everything, comprehend everything, that you are free to create your own subsets of reality. Think of yourselves as artists, not accountants. Not that anything that may appeal to you is going to be true, but that your likes and dislikes, your instinctive certainties and connections, are themselves elements in your personal construction of your picture of reality, and that – from the larger being’s point of view – all such constructions are creative elements.
There is a creative element in our grappling with incomplete pictures of how things are?
Yes. The universe knows (in a way) what it is, what ultimate truth is. But (you might say) the universe is interested in all the creations of its parts acting as disconnected pieces rather than as all one thing.
Hard to see the value in that, but as you say it, it feels right. Are we ever going to get to talk about things as portals?
Do you think it would serve your purposes to allow you – even to unintentionally encourage you – to think that any of you will penetrate the veil of imperceptibility and come to ultimate truth?
Well, can’t we take for granted that whatever we come to, it will be only one way of seeing things?
Long experience suggests otherwise. The truer the insight, the more persuasive to you that now you have the truth, even if in another part of your mind you know all about bias and limited perspectives and the changeability of reality under conscious scrutiny.
Okay, okay. But you know we’re going to remember and forget, remember and forget. Let’s get on with it.
The process-oriented paragraphs are never diversions, however impatient they may sometimes make you. (Any of you.) It is a way of keeping things grounded, we remind you.
Now, things as portals.
Any religious or philosophical position that amounts to “All things are holy” or “All things are numinous” implicitly recognizes that nothing is unconnected. The stone has no consciousness comparable to yours, any more than it has an everyday life experience comparable to yours, or a lifespan comparable to yours. But it is mind-stuff no less than you, with its own consciousness, its own nature, its own place in the scheme of things, its own connection to the sea of consciousness-creation that you swim in. This does not explain “things are portals”; it is a precondition to how they can be portals.
No thing in the 3D fails to extend into non-3D. How could it? No matter how many dimensions there were, you would all have to be in all of them. Everything does. (Therefore it is misleading, though unavoidable, to speak of 3D and non-3D. Everything is necessarily in All-D, all the time. But for the purposes of experience and analysis, it is convenient to concentrate on relative polarity and speak of 3D and non-3D.)
But you will remember that, as 3D is an experience of at least relative separation, non-3D is an experience of connection. Everything in 3D may be experienced as separate, but is connected. Really, that’s what you need to know about “things as portals.” Stone, plastic, radioactive waste, people, dead bodies – you name it, it is separate in one way, connected nonetheless. So what’s the variable?
Our consciousness. Just because the connection is there, doesn’t mean we can experience it.
There you are. What else do you need?
Conceptually, maybe nothing. But how about some clues as to how to extend into the knowing of connection?
You will pardon us if we snicker. What do you think you have been learning to do, in absorbing so many concepts? In practicing group mind? In learning to identify with your greater rather than only with your lesser self?
Still –
Really, as in most things, the biggest obstacle is an idea that you can’t do it, or even – in extreme cases – that it can’t be done. In such cases, every time you begin to glimpse it, you ascribe it to fantasy: “I’m probably just making this up.”
So, no special exercises, no helpful mindset, no tricks of the trade?
Only everything we have ever told you. You all know anything we could ever tell you. The only thing we do is unjam the gears now and again.
The light dawns, thinking of Thoreau. It’s a matter of seeing things the right way.
Thoreau, Hemingway, Thomas Merton, many others you know, and of course uncounted others that you don’t know, or whose heart you don’t know. An attitude of reverence for life (and we don’t mean by that mere antipathy to killing, nor even an attitude striving to keep people healthy and alive) is essential.
“I would worship the parings of my nails, if I could,” Thoreau said.
Yes. A saying easily misunderstood as pantheism or even panentheism, but in the sense he meant it, true and true north. Ordinary life, everyday things, undistinguished realty, is holy. Every moment, every inch. People talk of a “holy land,” or a “holy relic,” or a “holy man” or “holy woman,” and these terms are not meaningless. But in the larger sense they are not more holy, but more obviously holy. Life is sacred, and mundane, both, always.
And – I gather – if we bring that attitude to our explorations, we will be able to experience things as portals.
Your asthma inhaler is a portal. Your coffee cup. Your pen, your slippers. Your body.
It is easy to feel that as a concept, not so easy to make it real.
The key is emotional, not intellectual. We can give you the intellectual connector: We just did. The emotional connector must well up from within you. This is why some people can never (in this 3D life) get this, and why others come to it as naturally and inevitably as Thoreau and Alcott did, and why people such as you, between the extremes, struggle with it. But, knowing what you need, then it is only a matter of sincerity and integrity and righteous persistence, and the door will open, as promised.
One point: When you say emotional –
Not emotionalism, still less a sort of quiet hysteria. Closer to what puritans condemned as “enthusiasm,” but not quite that either. Perhaps the best way to put it is, you have an innate joy, a knowing that life is good and that you are a part of it. You may choose to dismiss or disregard or downgrade that innate joy, or you may warm your hands on it. Which attitude do you think will bring you farther?
Our thanks for all this, and for all that has come before. Next time?
TBA and don’t worry about it.
See you then.