Every day a gift

Sunday July 21, 2024

8:35 a.m. Guys? A conversation.

Another beautiful day in the neighborhood.

It is a beautiful day. Why are you channeling Mr. Rogers?

Why not? Did anyone ever hear him say it would be a beautiful day, “if only”?

Every day is a gift, I know that now. My life would have been easier if I had learned it earlier, but I did learn it.

We have a serious point to make, not a particularly profound point, but an important reminder. Life can be looked at in two ways while you are immersed in 3D. (1) Life is an external drama in which you live, or (2) Life is an internal drama carried on through an external setting.

Of course really there are not two ways but three, the third being that life in 3D is both external (a drama with its own complicated plot line, or perhaps its own continuing improv performance) and internal (a process of development that takes place in 3D but not for the purpose of advancing any external agenda).

Feels to me like you are floundering.

You say it, then.

If the world is mind-stuff, and therefore every bit of it, including us, is literally part of the same only-thing-there-is, and if the non-3D’s seeming externality is only relatively external to us, and if emotion is our experience of the known-self meeting the unknown-self, and if we are truly both herd and outlier –

Well, I don’t know where you were going with it, but I’d tend to say that all can’t help being always well, despite appearances.

Nothing to criticize in your precis. Only, people should take it a little farther, should chew on it, should connect their thought with their feeling.

Specifically?

At one time, people went crazy with undefined fears centering on divisions within Christianity. Another time, it was the initial disruptions caused by the industrial revolution, as opposed to the familiar, slower, more rural life – with all the social changes nobody intended but everybody experienced. Then it became ideology, “left” and “right” repeatedly redefined and becoming more murderously opposed as time went on. Then culture wars, the counter-culture, etc. You can name them for yourselves, you have all lived in them, though each of you in your own subset, greatly or subtly different from others depending upon your own makeup, which is a way of saying “depending upon what you needed.”

As a child puts away childish things, each of you put away previous needs, beliefs, assurances. Every day is new, and this may be experienced as a blessing or a curse or both. Every day offers something new, if you want it, and often enough, if you do not want it. How do you react? Anticipation? Joy? Caution? Fear? Disassociated terror? Your instinctive reaction is not yours to choose: You respond out of what you have been. But your acceptance or rejection of that instinctive response is yours to choose: That is the “free will” part of your life.

Yes, you have said predestination is the result of the past, free will is the situation in the present.

We didn’t put it that way, but, true enough. So, pick the worst day you ever lived.

That’s easy. November 22, 1963.

For others it will be something else. But everybody will have one, by definition. There is always a “worst” and a “best”; they are comparative terms. Well, on November 22, 1963, did you have any reason — looking back from who you are today, we mean – did you have any reason to say, “All Is Well”?

That’s hard. I know the response you want. Can I really say it?

But if you cannot, then you do not believe that all is always well, which, we keep reassuring you, it is.

I know you don’t want me to parrot what I am supposed to say, nor to pretend to feel what I don’t. But I haven’t ever looked at it this way.

That’s what we’re offering you the opportunity to do. Dredge, remembering that nothing but your truest perception will help you. (Naturally, we mean this for any who read it, as well.)

The best I can do is divide it into real and somewhat real. Really, absolutely, thinking of things in All-D terms, certainly all was well that day as every day. No event personal or social could disrupt the world that exists so that we may express ourselves in limited surroundings and continue to create ourselves by successive choices.

But –?

But in 3D terms, catastrophe is catastrophe. Life hurts. Living in the aftermath of trauma, be it personal or social, hurts. The 3D world is real in its own terms, as you have so often said.

So, seeing Kennedy murdered was worse than being murdered myself. It was a shattering of many futures I had taken for granted, as well as the killing of someone I loved and admired. In 3D terms, it was the worst day I ever had, if only because I had such slim inner resources then. I don’t see how it would have been possible to be in conversation with you then, but it would have helped.

You are rewriting your emotional history. If you hadn’t turned from God and your religion – in effect saying, “If you can allow this to happen, I’m done with you” –you could have used the religious connection from this life and other lives and found grieving and solace and acceptance. In effect, you would have been feeling our presence, and accepting what emotional help we could give.

That sounds true. It took me many years – discovering Carl Jung in 1970, I think – before I began to find an intellectually acceptable way to move toward connection.

Here is the point. On the worst day you ever had, did it leave you unaffected?

Ah, the light comes. When my friend Charles told me, a few years ago, that the death of his dog had broken his heart, I instinctively responded that it had broken his heart open.

Haven’t we said that we do know that pain hurts, but it is so useful? It isn’t useful to us except insofar as it is useful to you. But remember, we have also said, you don’t need to learn through pain, you can learn through joy. And what better pathway to experiencing everyday joy than “All is well” regardless what happens? It isn’t cloud-cuckoo-land, it isn’t Pollyanna, it isn’t even the three princes of Serendip. It is merely practical.

And this is regardless of what else we get out of it.

Every day is a gift. Viktor Frankl knew that. Survivors always know that, however mingled with other emotions their reaction may be.

Have we gotten what you wanted to say, or is there more?

Don’t concern yourself with what this or that person may think of it. All you can do is say your truth.

Gandhi was asked why he said something when the week before he had said the opposite, and he said, “Because this week I know better.”

There is no all-encompassing be-all-and-end-all Truth accessible to 3D minds. The best you can do, and it is enough, is to find the truest thing you can find from the point of view you were created as. You may change viewpoints, and therefore may see things differently, but right here, right now, there is a truest true to be found. Why settle for less?

Thanks. This was good. I live in hope of more.

Hope is always good.

 

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