Tending your fire

Thursday, September 25, 2024

7 a.m. I think I’ll start my blog entry by quoting the results of yesterday’s drumming session in our ILC meeting. [ILC: Intuitive Linked Communication.]

“How do we nurture ILC and what does that mean?

“Rather, how do you maintain yourselves through the use of ILC, and what follows?

“The ILC meetings – its future as a technique – will take care of itself, as the times permit. But what is more important is what does it do for you, what do you do with it, as an individual – remembering that in this context “individual” means “the totality in a nutshell.” Holographically, what happens to all happens to one, and vice versa. You are never alone even when – we would almost say particularly when – you are alone in appearance and feeling.

“Tend your own fire. Keep yourself on your own inner beam. Intend the best version of yourself that you can intend – and thereby you will be doing the most effective things possible. This, regardless if it is combined with quietism or activism. The tending your own fire is the essential, and it is all you can do and all you need to do.”

But, having decided to quote the drumming result, I find I have no idea how to continue. I will assume someone – Jon? – does.

At this point you need to spend some time re-reading the material you have been bringing in, and pondering it. You will find that it pays to change your daily routine now, to change the ratio of time spent pondering and the time spent reading or doing crosswords or whatever. You are at a time when you can make a good deal of progress by working the material you once brought in.

I get a sense of rhythms, like the tides going in and out by the law of their being.

Assimilation and digestion, yes. It is one thing to bring a blank slate to each day’s sessions; it is another to bring questions. There is a time for each aspect of the process.

I have asked for others to pose questions, but haven’t had much response.

Well, this is an interesting topic, perhaps: How much value is input from your own pondering and how much is input “from left field,” as anyone else’s will necessarily be.

I’d think they’d both be of value. Mine result from digesting what I think I know. That from others serves as inspiration from an unexpected viewpoint.

Yes, but the percentage of the mixture makes a difference.

That doesn’t sound like a stop-the-presses insight. Clearly someone who works alone is going to differ from someone in a newsroom.

Anyone thinking is thinking alone. Anyone choosing input (which book to read, which program to watch, which person to associate with) is thereby creating a unique mental environment. It can’t be avoided and need not be avoided. But by the same token, anyone thinking is thinking as a part of the whole, equally inevitably.

Again, no big “aha!” We are individual and we are part of all-that-is”; of course we are going to function in a way that could be seen as either solitary or communal.

But what changes the way it appears to you?

Our point of view at the moment.

Certainly. Which means – ?

You’re going to say something about our awareness, but I don’t yet have it.

In a sense, your life is what you think of it. Or you could say, your life means what it means to you when you look at it in a certain way – and the way you look at it depends on where the momentary mental “you” is standing. And that tends to change. Are we beginning to get through to you that we’re moving to new ground?

I’m willing to take it on faith. Still don’t see where you’re going.

Tending your own fire doesn’t mean sticking your head in the sand. It does mean, extend your awareness as avatar-self into territory previously obscure and light it up

Deal with our shadow.

Yes, but the point here is that dealing with your shadow is work that concerns not only you as avatar but everyone, for it is truly said that you are members in each other. Everything you do shapes you, and you are always a part of the general equation, hence your changes affect the rest, as theirs do you. This is why people experience what is called “mass consciousness” as if it were something else, yet they experience it.

[I see in transcribing this that “Something else” may not be clear. In context it meant “something other than themselves.”]

We experience ourselves as only a tiny bit of a huge thing.

Size is a false characteristic, a misleading idea. Quality must not be confused or melded with the nature of Quality. Quantity is a 3D term. Quality is a 3D/non-3D term.

Say some more about the distinction between 3D and 3D/non-3D.

You experience it all the time. Something strictly limited to the time-space restrictions imposed may be seen as 3D-only, even though in fact nothing is disconnected. In fact, never disconnected, but in effect, they may appear so, and may be investigated so. Thus, the non-3D implications of color or sound or substance may be ignored and even unsuspected, and so may be investigated as if 3D only.

Galileo, stripping off any characteristics that could not be measured.

Roughly, yes. Different eyes would see that color and sound and substance reverberate, let’s say, in non-3D, resulting in correspondences in 3D that may be experienced but not seen.

I think you meant, experienced but not recognized, not noticed.

Dismissed as accidental, yes. Quantity per se is always a 3D measurement. Let it pass into non-3D as well and you will find you are discussing quality. Thus, in 3D you are one in seven billion, a negligible factor. Seen from non-3D as well as 3D, you are unique but you extend in ways that cannot be measured quantitatively.

Sagan and others – Asimov – always irritated me with the stupidity of us being insignificant because we were on a fourth-rate planet circling a third-rate star, or whatever it was they said. It would be like comparing Einstein unfavorably to an elephant because he was so outweighed.

But they were saying that for effect, trying to correct what they thought of as errors exaggerating human significance.

I know that. They were still irritating.

And you yourself said, a few minutes ago, that you experience yourselves as tiny.

Touche.

Either way is a somewhat valid way of seeing things. Somewhat, because limited. An argument that does not appreciate and accommodate its opposite is always going to be merely partial, hence somewhat wrong.

To return to dealing with our shadow –

This has the advantage of always being immediately to hand. You never have to go across the ocean to count the cats in Zanzibar: You always have your own intricate and infuriating and fascinating puzzle to work, which you experience as “you in the world.” And working that puzzle, as we say, is never egotism or autism. It is your proper work. Some will work it alone, some will work it through engagement with the world, but either way, working the puzzle is the real work.

Today’s theme?

Nothing wrong with “Tending your fire.”

No, I like it. Thanks as always.

 

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