Fishing

Saturday, September 21, 2024

6:45 a.m. Jon, talk to me about us all being partial yet (holographically) the whole, and what that can mean in practice. I know you told us to think about it, but this is how I do my thinking.

It isn’t, really. You do your thinking like a fisherman casting his line and hoping for the best. He may choose his time and place carefully, but he’s still left hoping for the best. In a way it is the difference between fishing and farming. The fisherman’s prey is invisible to him; the farmer’s is in a controllable environment, and he is as much nourisher as, finally, consumer.

So logic is a form of careful examination, and intuition is more like prospecting blind.

All of this is too abstract to be useful. Conversations provide you with a sort of structure, without depriving you of freedom of association.

So that thinking that everybody could do this if they would set their mind to it is wrong?

Let’s say it is more theoretically true than practical. They could. They aren’t likely to unless their mental makeup is something like yours.

Our ILC groups haven’t had any trouble doing it.

  1. How do you know?
  2. Group-mind energy provides an assist.
  3. It is a self-selected group.

Still –

I’m certainly not saying what you do is unique, I’m saying it is very closely suited to how you perceive and interact with the 3D. Others will be different, able to do things you can’t do and unable to do some things that are easy for you. It is always that way, for everybody. Now, about what I said last time, you might quote it, rather than paraphrase.

“Your struggle … is to broaden the amount that can be experienced by you without breaking the bounds of the separated you that your birth created.”

By your struggle, I meant neither that it is everybody’s nor that it is uniquely yours. I meant, those whose being incorporates an urge to grow rather than to maintain. Obviously, there are lots of you, and equally obviously, not everybody.

Then what is the purpose for those who are here to maintain?

One question at a time. We are a long way from getting into this one. That split – I remember it well! So will you. It is not an incidental feature in our lives, it is the bedrock, if a fault-line can be a bedrock.

I just realized, our ILC discussion ought to be guided by someone, steered to address these things, and that person should not be me.

That is a good model, a group considering these ideas in a directed manner (that is, as if following an updated syllabus) so that the insights build upon each other and generate new ones. Such a group endeavor should not be led by the person primarily bringing in the initial information. This protects him and protects the group from haring off into dead ends, because no one’s 3D judgment is infallible. It also protects the 3D communicator from temptations offered by the ego-level self.

Maybe a communicator, or more than one, and a facilitator of discussion, and a recorder?

Perhaps also a summarizer. But any group would have to find its own natural way of functioning.

This sounds like a next step, a new development.

How long do you want to stay in third grade? Granted, you now know how to get 100 in every test, but at some point you’ll get restless.

Well, we’ll see if anyone rises to the bait. What you’re saying sounds right to me – but then, it would, which is why the communicator shouldn’t try to run the show.

Only, if the members of the group don’t rise to the bait, don’t try to push the river. One’s opportunities do not depend upon the acquiescence or cooperation of others. That is, if one door remains closed because no one opens it, there will be other opportunities in other directions. We’ve told you, there is always a Plan B, we always present new options after any decision you make.

You say “we” and I get the sense that we are suddenly segued away from Jon.

I’m here. But it isn’t as solitary or differentiated as 3D continually leads you to assume.

I knew that. I had forgotten.

So, as we were saying, anyone who experiences the struggle within themselves (and where else could it be experienced?) between what they experience themselves to be and what they intuit themselves to be, never forget it. In a sense, they have been partially awakened and are unlikely to go back to sleep.

“Sleep” here being believing in the 3D illusion, taking it unquestioningly as real.

Yes. What we are calling “maintainers” do not experience that self-division. (They may be self-divided along other issues.) it is the transcenders, call them, who can’t let it alone. Let them center on whatever they choose to – family, career, some profession or craft, some avocation, whatever – they cannot escape that nagging unsleeping sense that they are more than they appear, not only to others but to themselves. It is an uncomfortable feeling, knowing you don’t really know who you are.

Boy, that’s the truth!

Everything we’re talking about is the truth.

Very funny.

Not a joke. It’s an important point. Not everything said is going to resonate, but the things that do not resonate for this person or that are nonetheless still true, and should be regarded as a gift that has not yet unfolded for them. It shouldn’t be shrugged off as eccentricity.

Which is one more reason to be careful to avoid eccentricity, I get it.

No, there are dangers in the direction of avoiding eccentricity too. If all these years you had confined yourself to relating only the things that were respectable or comfortable or – God help us – that you knew to be true, how far could you have gotten? It is one of the purposes of group study to find the wheat and discard the chaff. But that is a delicate process, easily misused to reduce messages to what is most comfortable.

So, as usual, it is up to us to steer a middle course.

Any course will have complementary dangers, just as any line will have a left and a right not-line beside it, that defines it. It isn’t anything perilous, it is just the nature of boundaries.

So what has today’s theme been? How to organize a group to investigate better?

In a way. But more, it is how to get the distinction in your mind between ways of perceiving and associating. What is appropriate to a fisherman is not appropriate to a rancher, and neither one is appropriate to a farmer. Whatever particular talents you may have will have come with a particular best way to employ them, and it is well for you to find that best way.

I get that this isn’t where the discussion was intended to go..

All paths are good. Given sincere intent and perseverance, greater perspective is always available.

So, the theme?

Call it “Investigating,” if you wish. But some other title may come to you.

Thanks as usual, Jon – and unnamed lurking others. Till next time.

 

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