Saturday, October 5, 2024
5:50 a.m. Curious experience. I was taking down the words of someone purporting to be Nevil Shute – at least, that was my assumption, as he was talking about what he was doing in writing On the Beach, and I had written a page when I realized, with a bitter sensation, that I was sitting in the recliner with my eyes closed, and everything I thought I was writing was smoke, was non-existent. I had been visualizing myself writing, daydreaming it, you could say. The bitterness was for the wasted effort, and I felt what I imagine we feel when we are in non-3D trying and failing to get heard in 3D.
Come to think of it, this isn’t quite the first time I’ve had this experience. Whenever I find myself visualizing, feeling, myself writing, it turns out that I am actually dreaming it, not doing it. It is always accompanied (once I realize it) by a sense of “What a waste of effort.”
To return to the third point I was about to address yesterday when I ran out of gas: seeing things backwards.
At our ILC meeting on Wednesday, Christine had reminded me that I had advised her not to dismiss stray words and thoughts that came to mind, but to pay attention to them as potentially meaningful. The reason I had told her that is that I couldn’t see how anything can come to us meaninglessly. We may not be able to trace the meaning, but still it is there, for one simple reason: This is not a random universe, not a random life. Not that everything that happens is of show-stopping importance, but that nothing can happen without reference to us – else we couldn’t recognize it, couldn’t perceive it. Every moment is filled with omens, but only those that have some connection to us will be noticed.
This doesn’t yet get it. Let’s try again.
Our conscious 3D lives are only special cases of the universal life, the universal consciousness that we exist within but cannot perceive continuously because it is too big and we are too limited. The price of admission to 3D is a great constriction in how much we can perceive of what goes on. Most of our surroundings, and a good deal of our own being, is invisible to us, filtered out before it can become conscious, merely so we will not be overwhelmed. As we have been experiencing in our lives – some of us since childhood, some following a wake-up call – these filters can be modified, played with, removed, and the result is that our lives change.
Hmm. Still haven’t gotten it down. Why is something so simple so hard to say, this morning? The original image is of our looking outward, rather than inward. But I have lost the meaning.
Guys?
We were wondering how long it would take you to call.
Oh very funny. I notice you’re quick enough to horn in sometimes. What’s different this time?
You are trying your wings, and we are in favor of that. For you, for anyone. Just because a practice has become familiar doesn’t mean that’s the end of the line. It can be, if you’re satisfied, but it doesn’t have to be, in practice, and never is, in principle.
So help me out here. What am I groping to express?
Simply that you in 3D are not at the center but at the periphery. Yes, you are at the center of your 3D existence, but even here, not at the center of the 3D/non-3D being you are. And when you turn your sight to the greater world beyond you, you see that ideas, signs, omens, connections, inspirations, nightmares, daydreams, etc. – every possible mental experience – is at least half not engendered by 3D-you. At least half is engendered by the world around you. But this requires quite a bit of explanation, though it is a simple concept ultimately. Do not jump too soon to the conclusion that you understand what we’re getting at, just because our initial sentences spark ideas. Absorb our full commentary first, then there will be time enough to consider it as a whole, rather than as some hastily snatched impression.
- As long as you consciously or automatically consider yourself to be identical to the avatar-self image you and your life have constructed, you won’t be able to see the ways in which this is not and cannot be true.
- When you fully realize that Jung was not exaggerating nor dramatizing when he described the shadow, the unknown and somewhat unknowable part of yourself, you will know that your self-image is not and cannot be complete.
- As we have said many times, you do not have and cannot have the full data even on yourself, let alone others.
- A part of that “shadow” is specifically your umbilical cord to the non-3D and the part of yourself on the other end of that cord.
- Your functioning presupposes a continual flow across that cord, but your ideas about your functioning usually don’t even consider its existence.
- As we have also said, self-identification as 3D-only leads to fear, disorientation, helplessness. What perhaps we haven’t said or haven’t said clearly enough is that self-identifying as 3D/non-3D, though better, is still liable to leave you sometimes lost, directionless, leaderless.
- Consider this. Just as your avatar-self is 3D and non-3D both, necessarily in the nature of things, so that avatar-self as a whole is on one end of an umbilicus to the larger self, and that larger self to what lies beyond. There are no absolute separations in reality. As above, so below: Ponder that.
- The point you are feeling and not expressing: You as avatar-self feel your connection to something greater. That something greater is part of yourself. That “part of yourself” is not outside your mind, but inside This is why stray thoughts may be of value, because they are promptings, in effect, from a part of yourself to the part of yourself you recognize.
And that’s why you had me begin this entry with my experiencing it while on the recliner. Very clever.
Well, can you see that all the most unusual “coincidences” and “omens” and “fortuitous” things in your life may be looked at as promptings from a part of yourself that knows more and has your interests – which are, after all, its interests – in mind?
I work on that assumption, in this part of my life. Earlier parts would have been easier, if I had known it then.
But it is the traveling that provides you with first-hand experience.
So, our theme? Seeing things backwards?
Maybe, “More than you think you are.”
Or “More than we think we are.”
That too. Same idea.
Our thanks, as always.