A deeper experience

Friday, January 5, 2024

7:15 a.m. I got the feeling you wanted to do a session, and I connected it to a thought I had just had, reading Kenneth Whyte’s Hoover. (“It occurs to me, reading Hoover, that I read history and biography as drama, as the most intricate and varied and character-filled drama there is or ever could be. Seems so obvious now, I don’t know why it wasn’t until just this moment.”) You wanted to tell us something. By all means, proceed.

First you should remember the question, as it will help point the conversation.

That seems a little backwards, to me. It was your impulse, as far as I can tell, why do I need to remember it? Why isn’t receptivity enough?

Receptivity is fine, and of course is essential. But if you are to do something more than the minimum, you need to work more skillfully, using what you have learned in practice.

I think you mean, the more we use our experience and our deduced rules of the road, the better the answers.

Not exactly “the better the answers.” More, “the farther you can travel; the better you will see detail and context both.”

Okay.

Each of you is a specialist – in your own life. In your being. In your point of view. In the result of a lifetime’s choosings. You understand? In that sense, the more consciously you have lived – and, note, the more consciously you are living at the moment – the more specialized and valuable an observer and interpreter you will be. Consider yourselves (among other roles) reporters to your higher selves, and to the non-3D in general (to the Akashic Record, in a sense) from one particular window in 3D life. Now, bear in mind, such reports, such interpretations of life, are being filed continuously by everybody. So at one and the same time, you are uniquely valuable, and so is everyone else, as we have always said. It doesn’t matter whether you appreciate each other, you are all individual, you are all part of the overall oneness.

Like members of the cast and chorus of a Broadway production or a film: individual yet meaningful within that context only as part of the entire production.

And we are aware we have said this before, and more than once. However, now consider: Anything that interests you has been built up through people.

No, I didn’t get it and still don’t quite have it. I know, I know: Slow down, recalibrate. Give me a moment.

Okay. Try again?

All history is drama. All biography, all anything, is drama, in the sense of a vast potential narrative packed with interesting and diverse characters in every attitude of cooperation, conflict, mutual indifference, ignorance of each other’s existence, and of reverence or detestation of those who have acted on stage beforehand. But this is equally true of the sciences, little though you might think it. Geology, ichthyology, you name it, the facts being studied were discovered and arrayed and interpreted by human 3D individuals, and interwoven with the specific drams of their everyday lives.

I don’t think you mean that to understand the study of fishes we need to understand the scientists’ lives who study them. Are you saying that we can get at a deeper understanding of those sciences by coming at them through our connection with the scientists themselves?

Does talking directly to Lincoln or Jung provide you greater insight into whatever you discuss? How should it be different in any line of research or investigation?

I’m still groping for the spine of your argument. Are you implying that we can best understand reality by moving through the minds of others who have done so? That makes a superficial sense, but why isn’t a live dog better than a dead lion, as I think Thoreau said.

The point is simple: You approach reality – no matter what it is you are studying – through the human experience. Obvious, yes, and yet perhaps so obvious as to be forgotten from time to time. You cannot see reality except from a 3D human viewpoint. Your senses, even your intuitions, assume and stem from that base. Yes, this is a limitation, but a productive one, which is why the limitation exists. You are specialists in being human.

“But.”

Oh yes. But, how you self-define has consequences. How you self-limit has consequences. Same statement made twice.

So as we learn to accept continuous communication with our non-3D selves, we remain human, but what “human” means changes, in effect. Grows.

Certainly. Only, continuous communication is not the only productive mode. Occasional, even sporadic communication is valuable as training wheels. Isolation followed by (or following) communication may be equally instructive – or, let’s say, transformative.

Sure. So the point here is what?

Whatever you do, be it woodworking or art or scholarship or drudgery or anything, do with whatever consciousness you can bring to it, and your life will be richer and more interesting even if not one external thing changes. (As if there could be anything truly external, but you know what we mean.)

And this is a sort of decision, isn’t it?

Yes! Yes. Yes. It is exactly that, a decision. That’s why you are not [illegible] or victims or spectators or useless extras. It is a decision, and once you decide and execute the decision, you are living in another, deeper, richer, less disconnected, world.

This will not be obvious to everyone.

So what? It can’t be logically convincing because those resistant to the idea can and will always come up with ten good reasons why it’s impossible. So what? Anybody who actually makes the experiment will know, and what difference will contrary opinions make then?

I think I can offer a homely example. (At your prompting?) How we deal with suffering alters our experience. When I went to the hospital a couple of years ago and calmly observed what was happening, instead of getting emotionally involved, everything went smoothly, but really the point is, I had a very different experience.

Yes, and of course suffering comes in many forms, and no one’s life is immune to it (nor would you want it to be, if you could see it as we do). As we have mentioned, even the word “suffering” is too dramatic, but we use it to avoid the accusation that we are concerned only with trivial matters. A schoolboy receiving a reprimand can’t really be said to be suffering, and yet it is on the same scale.

No, you mean, and yet it is the same kind of thing in that it is something unwanted and outside of his control.

Yes. Just as health issues, or accidents, or financial reverses, or the death or disability of loved ones. Just as war and earthquake and any kind of civil disaster. Just as anything – even ageing’s problems, even boredom, even loneliness – is similarly something unwished-for but not, nevertheless, tragic except in a limited context.

I know from experience that many people think that’s taking too blithe a view of human life.

To be sure – from the 3D person’s viewpoint. But we have not been engaged in this long conversation for the sake of supporting the 3D person’s viewpoint, but of undermining it.

There’s something else. I can feel it but can’t quite get it.

Your approach to your life – which means to each moment of your life, of course – determines the holiness of life that you will experience. Everything is holy, including nuclear waste and politicians’ speeches, as we have sometimes reminded you. The holiness inheres in reality, not in specifics. But you have to have eyes to see. As you clear your mind of emotions, of complexes, of unwanted free-associating, you see more clearly. As you slow down, as you expect to see more deeply, more clearly, so you do.

I get that this is it for the moment. Thanks as always.