Saturday, July 7, 2018
A moment to describe what just happened, then back to the council room, I hope.
I lay down with sleep mask on and assumed the eagle, flew up to the council room in a tree, shifted to a point of awareness, and when I got the Jessica Williams piano tune to stop playing in my mental background, I was back in the calm space I experienced at the Discovery program. I tried to talk to my council, and found it hard to stay there. The temptation to give in to sleep was strong. Judith Pennington had explained that this sleepiness was delta waves, overcoming the alpha bridge that allowed continuing consciousness of such states. Her advice was to bring in some sensual experience, to reinforce the alpha bridge. So by pressing my fingertips against the bed, envisioning myself as pressing them against the tabletop, I held on. But it was difficult rather than easy, and I realized that this process, writing sitting up with eyes open, gave me the sensualization I need – as long experience demonstrates.
So here I am at the desk again.
Now, gentlemen and ladies of the council, let me bring my awareness back among you. What is it that I realized, and realized I would lose if I continued to try to do it the ordinary shamanic way?
You would lose the whole proceedings, for one thing. You were thinking of yourself as the executive officer of the ship, or alternatively as the most junior officer, invited to speak first so that his opinion would not be inhibited by prior expressed opinions from his superiors.
Yes, so I was. I don’t even know what should be on the agenda.
No, but you’re excellent at listening, despite what you and others sometimes think.
I’m willing to listen, anyway.
If you begin to visualize our sessions differently, they will of course change correspondingly.
Is that in our best interest?
We like the “our.” Yes, it is, because you are at a new stage, a point reinforced when you listened to tapes of yourself from more than a dozen years ago.
All right. Should I give over to you?
You can’t really do it, and it wouldn’t be good if you could do it. But you can be guided.
Well, that’s the name of the game, isn’t it, guidance?
It is if that is what you accept, if that is what you want. It could be other things.
Such as?
Pure information to assist you on a pre-determined course, for one. It isn’t for us to choose for you, though we may set out the choices.
In setting them out you may make my choices all but pre-determined.
You might think so, but free will is more to us than a buzzword or a sham. The goal is for you to choose. What you choose is not nearly so central.
Then let’s go about it in a different way. What is the most valuable thing you can offer me today? How do we proceed?
You don’t yet quite realize it, but this change in procedure is itself a new departure.
Immediately, I think, “I’ve got to share this with Dirk and Jim.”
That is part of your function, networking awarenesses and understandings.
So, today’s agenda?
Your long-held desire is closer contact with other parts of yourself. “Past lives,” at first.
Yes, and the difficulty has been (1) knowing, rather than visualization, which makes verification impossible, and (2) no over-arching concept to help me get a sense of it.
No over-arching concept? What have we been doing, all these years?
Clearing ground in preparation, I would say.
Yes, true enough – but it is somewhat staggering to think that you really have no idea.
Why should that come as a surprise to you? You know my mind from the inside, presumably.
Well, yes and no. The effective points of contact aren’t the same as the sum total of theoretical points of contact.
You mean, it never came up. But even that surprises me. How could I be aware of it for nearly two weeks, and you not? Am I getting bad information here, or making bad interpretations or something?
Who you are is one thing. What you think is another, and what you feel is yet another.
Sort of like Bob Monroe envisioning the mental and emotional bodies separate from the physical and energy bodies.
It was a way to experience different aspects differently, yes. Well, your mental categories come to us in the context of where you are at any given moment.
It still doesn’t explain why you wouldn’t know where I was or am mentally.
Let’s drop the subject.
Really?
It can’t be productive. Let’s move instead to a useful structure for you to use as scaffolding, in place of previous scaffolding which, we see, has evaporated in the light of recent experience. You had flirted with this new awareness in Luigi and Thomas’ class, but it did not hit home until you sat down to work last month.
I have been thinking of 3D-me as part of All-D me, an emanation from an All-D Sam.
Good enough as far as it goes.
Yes, but when I came to consider past lives, etc., where do they and I fit together? I may be a ring comprising strands that are other lives, and I in toto may be a strand for other lives, but that now seems both too simple and too complicated.
The difficulty surfaced when you began to see yourself as a point of awareness.
Yes, so it did.
So who is this around the table?
Precisely.
All right. But you do realize? The difficulty you are experiencing is due to incongruities in an accepted framework, and will change if we change framework. You are still you, think of yourself how you will.
Still, a new scaffolding ought to be useful.
We’ll see.
Anything to make my new acquisition more permanent, and more useful?
We can do that. Consider first, who is it around this non-3D table?
Various members of my guys upstairs, I presume.
Suppose you couldn’t presume that. Then whom?
Past lives, I assume. Any part of my total self that I am not consciously aware of.
You see – or rather, feel – the problem?
I am beginning to. If I do the defining, I cannot transcend my own conceptual limitations. So why don’t you do it for me? That’s more or less what I’m asking.
But this requires thought, and a fresh mind.
I’m still suspicious of how you can not know what I know. Your preliminary statement strikes me as doubletalk.
We are aware of it. Perhaps we can fold that explanation into the new scaffolding, whatever it turns out to be. Remember, from the beginning we have turned out to be other than what you expected – which is the same as saying, than how you had conceptualized us.
Yeah, I hear your wisecrack: “Remarkable, given that we may not exist.”
Not entirely a wisecrack. Enough for now.
[Later]
Your move, guys. [Vague visuals and associations from the visuals. A round table, Camelot, the musical, reflections of the faces on the tabletop]
Mistake to think of them as individuals – more like representatives of qualities. So, Hemingway in his fifties, writing (the picture on my wall) is more certain aspects than him as a package. Not packages at the table, so much as personifications, qualities. By listening, we can absorb those qualities for the moment. The longer we listen, the longer we borrow the qualities. At some point they are also your own.
You are a point of awareness surrounded by influences and resonances. Not one individual and other individuals though that is how it seems. One focus of consciousness among all others. You personify what you are, and thus represent those qualities for others. They don’t exactly experience you as an individual but more, your qualities that resonate with them.
But – relatives and friends we connect with?
That’s different. Compound beings are both individual and yet representative of qualities.
We interact differently depending on if we seek out (for conversation) the individual or the qualities (for guidance).
That’s roughly correct.
So the mistake is in seeing ourselves and others as too individual.
As exclusively individual, and as too particularly individual. Frank and Margaret did not share lives in Spain, but they are connected to those who did. Drawing on the connection, they draw upon the lessons and wisdom of those lives; that doesn’t make them “past lives” in the way people think of past lives.
You’re going to have to make it clearer than that.
Give us a clearer conduit.
All right, delta was flooding up, only now I know to fight it. Forcing myself back awake may do it.
You have new tools and can learn to employ them. But it may take time.
Still., it is a new tool, that knowledge. I’ll have to tell Judith I’m grateful for it.
So now when you envision yourself as a point of awareness, think not of self as a point in a vast cave or bag or total, but as the entire container whose
Geode!
Good image. Your awareness extends to the whole thing, but you are one concentrated part of it. You can extend without changing.
Still fighting waves of sleep. There is much more to get if I can learn to fight it off, isn’t there?
You don’t need an answer to that.
No, I don’t. But I need a way to remain here without struggle.
This can be part of your next novel, once you master it.
That doesn’t help me now, though.
Still you got what you need. You may have to work it a bit – and realize that an understanding that suits you won’t necessarily suit everybody.
I’m fighting these waves of sleep, and I think just pausing may do it. But it is a struggle.
What comes up?
The council room,, the delegates – just an approximation, an image, a visualization of what really is.
Do you need a visualization?
It would help, I think.
Will the geode help?
Colin talked of waves of sleep in The Outsider, I think, or in Religion and the Rebel.
Yes, it isn’t effort, it is transcending energies inflowing, that brings the delta.
I don’t think geode will quite work.
It could, if you remember the split geode Dave Garland brought you long ago, filled not with space but with crystals.
Maybe.
Now flirt with sleep – with hand in the air, maybe, to wake you up – and see if there is more.
A bit from Colombo – the diver’s car.
[Then as I held myself on the edge, my hands were filled with energy. I turned them toward each other, and they were buzzing, so to speak. I thought, healing hands. I used the energy experimentally, and I’m sure it’s what I need. At this point I had a headache, as I have had at other times at the edge of sleep. I wrote: “Need to release the energies, I think,” and just as I wrote that, the CD from Discovery ended, and I stood up and walked around, awake, if a little spacy.]