Monday, September 14, 2020
I am pretty discouraged, as I look back on my life. In so many interactions with people, I see that I was misunderstood, and that I misunderstood myself. There was a level of sincerity that I never approached. Or do I mean integrity? At a deep level, how sincere have I ever been? Meaning well, in a vague way, has always come naturally to me. But following through? Really engaging? If I had to say, one way or the other, if my nature was warm or cold, I would be hard pressed to answer. It is all very unsatisfying. So is my track record of interactions. Some people I have benefited, others I have probably injured, more by inadvertence than ever by design. I don’t know what I’m asking for, but, something.
You must remember to distance yourself from your own ideas of who and what and why you are. Living a life is not the same thing as understanding it or directing it or conceptualizing it, and certainly it is not the same thing as criticizing it.
It looks like a record of futility, from here. I couldn’t even be good.
That is the sort of half-blind comment that is totally useless to you except in so far as it helps you understand others who make the same mistake. If (when) your own internal biases do not allow you to properly record certain types of interactions and effects, how can you expect to be able to see your life in perspective?
Which leaves me just nowhere.
No, it leaves you at any given moment of the eternal present deciding what you want to be from here on. In a way, your track record (anyone’s) would only blur your vision of what is available. It would say, “My life is X and such; it has no room for anything beyond these bounds; it is to be scored according to these measurements.” Plenty of people try to live like that – and that is a core of deadness. When Jesus said, “I have come that you may have life more abundantly,” he meant that he came that people could learn to live in the moment, rather than to live according to past resolves, past ideas, past strictures. He meant to show them that living mostly automatically was not living, but existing, and that life could be far more.
Well, I have always experienced you as encouraging me (against the evidence, it often seemed), and I do appreciate the support.
Yes, but you aren’t valuing it properly. This is an instance in which the implied distancing between “you” and “us” misleads. You “connect” with only that that reflects a part of you. So in effect, we in non-3D are, and only are, part of who you are, known to yourself or not. So, “encouraging you” is not the product of some well-wishing bystanders giving you the benefit of the doubt. It is not an ignorant assessment of what you are. If anyone is ignorant of the true nature of a 3D individual, it is that individual itself. Most of what you are is hidden from you by circumstances. This is what makes 3D life so difficult, so rewarding, so potentially productive, so frustrating.
To which, a long sigh, and “Live in faith.”
Certainly it works better than discouragement and bafflement.
I often wonder if it isn’t merely a sliding through life among the path of least resistance.
Oddly enough, it is just the reverse. The path of least resistance is to identify with whatever mood presents itself.
Are we using the same yardstick here? I’m talking about drifting.
You think drift and living in faith are synonyms or at least similar, because both imply a letting go of the controls. If you were drifting, do you think you’d be having this kind of conversation?
I don’t see why not, necessarily.
You have absorbed that “faith” and “doubt” is the same intermediate position between knowing and unknowing, and that which aspect appears depends upon where you view it from. So experiencing doubt is not necessarily departing from living in faith. It is, let’s say, a position check, to see if a course-correction is warranted. But pray tell, if you are drifting, what do you need a course correction for? What would even raise the idea for you?
Seems to me you are arguing that living in faith and drifting are the same thing.
You want to know drifting? Drifting is taking for granted whatever your mental construction serves up in connection with “external” events. It means letting your mental robots, your moods, your scripts and mirrors and projections, color your reality, you not offering counterpoise to them. It means existing, not living.
I sort of see what you’re saying, only you haven’t quite said it.
Au contraire, we have said it loud and clearly. To the degree that you are conscious, you are alive. But consciousness is a sort of friction against the tide of inner and outer events. That’s what 3D was designed to provide, after all. Next time we do a regular session, we can take up where we just left off: the 3D as the background allowing the friction of the “external” against the taken-for-granted internal.
It is in keeping the discussion practical, grounded in experience, that any real enlightenment can be provided. If you lose some skin in the process, it may be uncomfortable, but it is scarcely important even to you, let alone to the greater picture.
Tuesday, September 15, 2020
Okay, the 3D as friction.
Not the 3D itself as friction, exactly. Let’s call the 3D environment the background that allows for the friction. The existence of 3D conditions allows a non-3D creature to confront itself and thereby have the opportunity to polish itself.
The 3D allows the “external” world to show the subjective 3D soul what it is that it doesn’t suspect. We remind you:
- We in non-3D experience a very broad, relatively unlimited consciousness that is not highly focused, in contrast to 3D consciousness, which is tightly limited and highly focused.
- The 3D conditions of isolation in time and space, under the incessant and unvarying pressure of the ever-moving present moment, produce or allow the tight beam of awareness.
- The upside: intensity. The downside: limitation. However, circumstances alter cases. Sometimes (that is, for some purposes) intensity may become a disadvantage and limitations an advantage. It’s all in what you want to do.
- Initially non-3D extension into 3D was clean and straightforward, and over time the system acquired drag: Individual 3D souls, and the system itself, experienced degradation.
- Well, how does a system arrange to clean its elements? There can be no other way but to take advantage of what exists, or else to design something else.
- The pre-eminent characteristic of 3D is concentration in isolation. So, how to use that to self-correct? It isn’t necessary to change the system, merely to change the uses of the system.
I’m getting, to look at it in a different way.
Well, to experience it in a different way, yes. It’s mostly a matter of turning that massive concentrated intelligence onto the problem. Once it becomes aware, it will auto-correct. But we cannot gallop past this point. At the risk of boring some, we must assure that no one who is willing to understand is left behind because of inadequate explanation on our part.
Only first-time visitors to 3D come without baggage. Your mental world includes things you are unaware of, because they never crossed the threshold into your conscious awareness; and things you prefer to be unaware of; and things you are not yet able to discern.
Your life in 3D allows you the possibility of retrieving and reintegrating all this, and we will now look at why and how. Remember however that whether you do so, or the extent to which you do so, is your choice. And remember, the question of “which you” is to be borne in mind. Your 3D self may wish to escape discomfort, while your non-3D self says, “No pain, no gain.” But let’s look at how and why.
- What you experience as the external world, a world beyond your control, continuously interacts with your subjectivity, breaking your isolation, if you would ever realize it, and preventing you from losing yourself in a hall of mirrors. If not for an external objective world for you to interact with, your own fantasies and misconceptions and self-protective games would forever isolate you from any reality you didn’t want to deal with. But you can’t just wish away the external world. You can’t wish it away, nor talk it away, nor live as if it did not exist, and because you can’t, you have the possibility of learning who you are beyond what you accept; you have the possibility of seeing what you’d prefer to change, and deciding whether to change it or merely bemoan it.
How else could an isolated 3D consciousness realize all the things it was not? How realize all the things it could develop? How mend old wounds, close unfinished business, awaken to what had been overlooked? You see? The 3D world is the land of possibilities.
- The 3D self you experience is limited in its awareness of connections. It never sees its potential. At best, it sees the next available increment. Carl Jung reminded you that the shadow, the unknown parts of yourself, contain what is better than you, not only what is worse than you. To the degree that you assimilate your shadow, you incorporate unsuspected potentials.
My sense of this is that 3D conditions force us to see ourselves more as we are than as we think we are.
Well – not “force,” so much as “enable.” An unseized opportunity will feel like an affliction, and many people at any given time – and everybody at one time or another – find themselves unwilling to feel the discomfort as the price of the enhanced awareness.
Haven’t we said all this before?
Implicitly, perhaps. We remind you that the same information conveyed at a different time in a different context is itself implicitly different. Same information, different potential impact.
But let us hammer this home one time more. Your lives in 3D can be hard; they can hurt; they can feel unsatisfactory, futile, even deliberately perverse. That doesn’t mean your judgment of your lives are accurate. We won’t say, flatly, “No pain, no gain,” but we will say that in this world you don’t usually get something for nothing. In fact, you never do, in reality, though it may appear that way.
For that matter, neither do you get nothing for something. “Righteous persistence brings reward” – and that goes for righteous perseverance in any direction, aimed at any goal. It is impossible for the universe to reward you improperly or inadequately or tardily. However, that doesn’t mean you always have eyes to see. Indeed, in the nature of things, usually you don’t. That’s why your life makes better sense to you in hindsight: What was there to be seen is seen easier with perspective.
It is this invariant relationship between effort and result that makes 3D so valuable as a compressed system for learning who you are, and what you need to, or prefer to, tune.
In context, I suppose “living in faith” means living in faith that life is just.
More carefully said (though what you just said is not wrong, and is admirably concise), “living in faith” means presuming that what life brings you is what you need. However, that still implies intent on your part. You don’t correct your flaws or develop your potential accidentally (regardless how it may sometimes appear); intention is everything.
Let’s reiterate that: Intention is everything. It directs what you will allow yourself to realize; it orients your internal radar toward the next thing; it overcomes any tendency to drift. This is why we say you are in 3D to choose, and choose, and choose.