Wednesday, September 20, 2017
The initial insight was that our lives are only “somewhat” real because this level of reality we experience is not in any way an ultimate level. Since it isn’t, we aren’t. We are, in a way, characters in an on-running drama, created for the purpose of being conduits of forces greater than us, realer than us somehow, preceding us and, I gather, destined to outlive us. They may be eternal, whatever eternal means.
Compound beings. Humans. Constructs that live in an abbreviated version of reality, knowing only what can be known while constricted to a present moment that is a moving pinpoint. Yet, eternal beings no less. We are made of eternal stuff, but our particular guise is more transient than that. No, that isn’t wrong, but it doesn’t get it, either. Let’s try again.
Our part-of-Sam nature is as eternal as Sam, and relative to any one earth life, certainly a Sam is eternal, immortal. We, sharing that essence, are equally so. Not much different from religion saying we share the essence of God (whatever God may be). But if we are made of the undying essence of a Sam, the combinations we form are not unchanging or necessarily eternal. Joseph, Bertram, Frank, etc., all have a limited existence in 3D. Do they necessarily have an unlimited existence beyond 3D?
Essence and personality
Our essence is Sam’s essence. Our personality is the 3D expression of certain combinations of traits, etc. Essence is real and unchangeable. Personality is more like a mask or a costume or a role in a drama, and is real only in its own terms, as Han Solo is real only in the Star Wars movie context, while Harrison Ford is real beyond the movie, in 3D life. But Harrison Ford is real only in the 3D context. The actor who is playing Harrison Ford himself is real beyond the 3D context, in real (realer?) life.
That’s the difference between spirit and soul, come to think of it.
- Spirit is unchanging, unchangeable, unconstrained: the actor playing Harrison Ford.
- The soul is born into 3D, experiencing all the emotions of life, affected by what happens to it: Harrison Ford as played in 3D Theater.
We are both actor and character, and that combination is source both of great confusion and of great opportunity for growth. Religions see us as both divine and human, do they not? And Jesus is reported to have said that anything he had done, his followers would do and would do more, or greater. (I often wondered if his calling himself “son of man” meant that he was what we could become.)
In any case, if we are both actor and character, it is as if Han Solo became aware of being the creature of Harrison Ford, and began speaking and reacting as Harrison Ford rather than as himself, not knowing the link between them, and perhaps not sensing the confusion as actually a breakthrough.
It might play hell with the movie being shot, unless the movie was about Han Solo discovering he was a creation of (part of) Harrison Ford. But we aren’t in a movie, but are doing improv.
And it comes to me, maybe one reason for the improv is for the actors to see through the drama (knowing there is no plot) to see:
- that they are actors (i.e. only relatively real in that their roles are added on to their essence, not intrinsic to it) and
- that the purpose of their acting is to give expression to the forces that flow through them. The cardinal virtues, the deadly sins: real forces, expressing in 3D.
Why? As a sort of safety valve? A puppet show? Why?
The cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude. (And some add faith, hope, and charity.) The seven deadly sins, whose initials I years ago made into an acronym so I could remember them: LEG CAPS. Lust, envy, gluttony, covetousness, anger, pride, and sloth (or ennui).
[Returning to the usual format in which my entries are in itals.]
[TGU] All human life may be considered as a playing-out of those forces among varied circumstances.
But the forces pre-exist human life.
They are realer than human life, as you are realer than your human roles.
Hard to see how they could manifest outside of 3D conditions. Gluttony? Lust?
That is how they manifest in 3D conditions. But the underlying forces exist or they could not manifest.
I suppose not. All right, so where do we go from here?
Think of these forces as your 3D environment, and resume here.
Thursday, September 21, 2017
The question is, how does 3D life express forces that are realer than 3D life itself. This collaboration may be a little bit complicated. It is as if there is systematic interference between what we want to express and what you understand us to say, or mean, or intend.
Yes, I think it comes from the differences between your experiences and our assumptions. Why not continue to use Rita as intermediary, or anybody whose human experience will enable them to make allowances and understand how to compensate for differences in assumptions?
That has been done, for millennia. The advantages of the proceeding are obvious. But there are disadvantages: the unwanted associations of ideas, of the sounds of the words, of logically unrelated but emotionally connected incidents or thoughts, mostly unnoticed, almost always incompletely traced.
This is even on the non-3D end?
What else are we talking about? The obstacles on your end are constant, it is the obstacles on the other end that are variable.
Oh, I get it, I think – the vagaries of the temporary joint mind.
We cannot add unwanted assumptions if they are not there to be added.
That’s an interesting complication that had not occurred to me.
Keep firmly in mind the larger theme: Why is 3D life only “somewhat” real? But bear in mind that this is going to bring you a long way seemingly afield, and will involve what seem to be extraneous matters, and contradictions, before we can bring in enough context to allow you to see things sufficiently differently. We need to associate many things in your mind that have never been consciously or coherently associated by you. Much of what you need to know you do know, only you don’t know you know it, or you know it only in a seemingly unrelated context, or you know it distorted by other people’s reports.
While writing that, I had the thought, “You’re finding it easier to speak,” and then I had a flash of “You’ve connected to Rita somehow and learned how to do it,” though I don’t think that’s quite right. But, something has changed.
There are others in the mental world, call it, besides Rita, you know. But your intuition was mostly correct.
You are somehow communicating through Joseph, or someone!
That’s right. This still involves distortions, but using personalities even closer to you provides the link with language and assumptions, but with fewer confusions. In dealing with you through Joseph Smallwood, we are dealing essence to essence on your end.
All right. This kind of communication is always essence to essence in that it bypasses the personas that are our pre-established interfaces with “the other.” So it is mind to mind, not mind to verbiage to reception to mind. But mind-to-mind between X and Joseph, say, is different from mind-to-mind between X and me, or X and Bertram. It is as if each of us is a different mood of our over-arching being.
Yes, and that is enough for the moment. The point is that whoever we contact, bias will have been thereby introduced. The process cannot be helped, it must be allowed for.
I get the feeling that if I pursued this correctly we’d learn something about why spiritualists used to think they needed a conductor to bring them to the one they wanted to speak to.
Don’t forget, those were early days. Their ground rules never applied as universals, however helpful they were to their times.
So, are we good?
Yes, we have a way to proceed. It will have its disadvantages, but we will work around them.
I take it that who you connect with may differ depending on where we go.
Depending on many things, many of them unsuspected on your end.
had been thinking the guys had said that they took turns speaking to us – that sometimes even in the middle of a sentence, one phased out and another phased in, usually unnoticed by us. It strikes me now, they may have been saying that the intent remained constant, but that the minds that they were silently connected with as intermediaries might fluctuate. Small difference, but significant. Did I get that right?
Remember always, in this work: Many, even most, of your misunderstandings and misstatements will go unchallenged. In the course of time, contradictions and errors will emerge to be corrected, but if we were to be correcting every misstatement, it would involve so much tedious restatement and spelling-out of context as to make any coherence impossible. When you get something wrong and it is going to make a big difference, we have to correct the statement, and the correction itself is part of the learning. But if it is minor and has no great consequences, we let it go, in the way that you, say, might not correct every slip of someone’s grammar for fear of inhibiting them from saying anything at all.