Sunday, June 2, 2024
4:35 a.m. Okay. Care to proceed?
Perhaps the hardest thing for people to remember, as they pursue such questions, is to continually apply the rule, “Man is the measure of all things.” When you come to questions that are beyond your conscious experience, ask yourself how it is with the life you know. You will sometimes go wrong because you will draw a bad analogy, but generally it is a reliable guide. So when you ask, “What is the purpose of life? Why can’t we begin at a more advanced level? What purpose does 3D life serve abstractly as well as individually?” look for understanding toward the life you know. Scale it up, scale it down, and try on different analogies.
Specifically, why can’t you start off at the point you eventually reach? That was your question yesterday.
It isn’t a silly question, though it can be read that way. What I meant is, why does every 3D soul have to go through the long learning and growth process that we call life? Why are we born ignorant and helpless?
If you will look at things differently, it will seem more reasonable, even obvious. You are discontented because it seems so wasteful a process, not to mention painful or uncomfortable at times. But what if you look at new life as new potential, rather than looking at it as endless reruns? Instead of thinking, “Oh, this again,” and imagining life to be tedium, think of it with a child’s eyes and see it as, “Oh, a new day, filled with possibilities.” Think of it as an artist’s sea of potential, a craftsman’s bench of tools and repertoire of skills to learn. Mostly, think of it as an absorbing task to be accomplished, an important role to play. Why in the world would you expect to be up to the task before learning how to be up to the task? And what fun would it be to begin at the same level you intend to continue at?
All I can tell you is, it doesn’t always feel that way.
But the feelings are part of the story too. Just as there isn’t only one role in a play, so there isn’t only one mood in a life, or only one kind of reaction to an experience, even if the experience is as vast as life itself.
So take this and draw your analogy to the life to come. In a way, you will be born into a new life after your 3D life is over, just as that life itself was something you had to be born into. That is, you will again be a new unit experiencing life.
I take that to mean, our newly-fledged life as a unit (a permanent combination of previously disparate strands) now living in new circumstances.
Yes, and rather than our spelling out analogies to your life in 3D, beginning as a physical baby having to learn the ropes, then as a child exercising and learning greater abilities, etc., we leave it to you to think about, depending upon how interesting you find the exercise. But just as your 3D life will look different depending upon the questions you bring to it, so your non-3D life.
Anent that: No two babies ever come into life identical in background and potential and intent. No, not even identical twins. Everyone’s life is a puzzle or an exercise for the person itself to figure out. Know only that it is literally impossible for anyone’s life to be meaningless, because the meaning inheres in the living. You are here to report on the life you make, and you are to make the life you want to make, so how can you fail to do that? “Make the life you want to make” does not mean, “Have what you want to, become what you want to, experience what you want to.” For one thing, which you? For another, which want? For a third, there is a difference between what you aim at and what you hit.
Should you think it will be any different after 3D? Should you think you will be any different after 3D? It will be and it won’t. You will be and you won’t. Analogies are never exact but good analogies can be instructive. “Think on these things,” as Edgar Cayce used to say. The thinking will orient you to experiencing mentally what you intend.
That needs to be better said, but it is an interesting insight. You just said our thinking on a subject – mulling it over – helps create a pull toward what we already know at another level. It helps make conscious what had been unconscious, or, as you put it, what we have been unconscious of.
Yes, and consider it in connection with what we have told you of the value of meditation and other ways of stilling sequential mind chatter so that you may move into gestalt processing. These wordless moments can bring you toward experiences that can only be experienced wordlessly. That doesn’t mean they can’t be talked about; it means the thing itself exists only beyond the realm of sequential processing such as language. And what is the value of 3D experience?
An experience of living with sequential processing!
Correct. That isn’t the only value of 3D life, obviously, but that isn’t the least important, either.
Feeling for your meaning here: Are you implying that the ability to live in 3D mode is somehow of value in non-3D?
You have conceptualized it in other terms. We have stressed that 3D allows you to learn to process things in tiny bites, and to experience cause and effect in delayed sequence. This was to reinforce you initially; that is, to enhance your sense of self-worth and purpose, for all too many of the more sensitive people are prone to feelings of futility. But saying, “You are here to choose,” though absolutely accurate, is not the whole story. Even adding, “You are here to experience, and to report your experience,” is not the whole story.
We are here to learn to create.
First to be created; then, to observe and absorb the process of being created; then to realize that “being created” can be restated as “helping to create” (which is what choosing is); then to move from apprenticeship to journeyman status.
As always, I find it hard to realize that I didn’t always see this, it is so clear now as you say it. But until you did just say it, I never put together “Here to choose” and “Life more abundantly” and “Creator gods.”
So you see, it isn’t wrong to say that 3D life is a school, but it is woefully inadequate. Life is an apprenticeship, and a trade school, and on-the-job training, and an artist’s studio, and an absorbing task. And more, of course.
Put that way, it certainly renders irrelevant most of the complaints about life that people offer. “Why is there no peace on earth, why is there pain and illness and suffering of so many kinds, why is there injustice, ” blah, blah, blah, as if this world were the only thing that counted.
It counts as preparation, but only in the way that boot camp counts, or schooling counts, or experience at anything counts. Its nature and objectives must be properly understood, if life is to be understood.
Now, be careful not to go off the deep end. The recruit in boot camp is still living each day. You can’t say that day counts only as preparation. Every day anywhere and anytime is itself, and is the result of what preceded it, and is the forerunner of what is to come. So don’t devalue each day per se as “only preparation.” Cherish the moment, even if the moment is painful. When you learn that, you will be a little farther ahead in your quest for mastery.
And no two combinations of strands begin at the same place, because the strands themselves were different combinations.
Exactly. So everyone’s experience is different. Should this surprise anybody? You see it all around you.
Our thanks as always.