Filters

Monday, October 7, 2024

5:45 a.m. It occurred to me last night, we could do a session on filters theoretical and practical, if you like.

Your idea of asking your friends to each contribute a list of every practical suggestion they can remember having been made is a good one. Many heads are better than one, in the same way that many hands make light work.

I’ll put out the call. Some, at least, may respond.

They could equally list the theoretical explanations we have played with about filters.

That would be more work than listing practical applications.

You can’t know that. For some, it may be easier. It is a matter of how their minds work.

Okay, well, we’ll see. Meanwhile –

It will serve you all well if you quietly change your idea of what you are into something at once more malleable and more persistent than you sometimes think yourselves. That is, it is easier than you sometimes think it is, to manifest differently. Yet at the same time, it is safer than it may sometimes appear, because your greater life center of gravity cannot be easily thrown off the rails. You can change how you relate, how you experience. You cannot accidentally lose yourselves, nor any part of you that is vital.

Is fear a part of this, then?

Fear is always a factor. Bob Monroe’s brilliance consisted in centering in removing the fear from the process of exploration. Just as life is impossible without the force of love, so life in 3D is impossible without the balancing force of fear. The defining question is always, what is the ratio of either and both that you allow into your decisions conscious and unconscious. It is fear that teaches you about hot stoves, but it is fear that populates your childhood nights with imagined monsters. It is a useful force that is to be kept within manageable limits. What those limits are, only you can decide. As you decide, so your life will be. Change your decisions (conscious and, mostly, not conscious) and your world changes. As we have said many times.

I think we get confused sometimes hearing – and believing – that love is all, that all is love, that “perfect love casts out fear.” It makes us think that experiencing fear in any form is a sort of failure.

This is a linguistic difficulty, not a logical one. All is love; that is like saying that everything is held in place by gravity. But what you feel and express is the balance – as we just said – composed of love and fear (expansion and contraction) in productive and protective interaction.

As example. You may have a fear of heights (which is really a fear that you will be unable to prevent yourself from casting yourself off your place of safety into the abyss before you). It need not affect your life badly, or it may. The difference is the control you exert. Can you see that one effect of such a fear might be that it serve as a continuing examination into how far you are controlling fear in that form? Like any limitation, it has its productive aspect, being there – as is everything in your life – to show you to yourself and to give you something solid to push against.

I see that. But I thought we were going to discuss filters.

Someday it will occur to you that everything connects. Our fault for never mentioning it, perhaps.

Very funny. So, connect.

Is the connection between fear and filters not evident, once you think about it?

In that fear can create filters? Or, in that filters can result in fear? Which?

Look a little deeper. That is, sit quietly and dredge, see what surfaces.

I can see clearly that some filters may create fears, whether or not we intend that.

We’d better take this explanation. We can see it would be hard for you to straighten out the connections.

Yes, why is that? I felt it too.

A new approach with several elements is more easily set out by means of stream-of-consciousness bullets. Otherwise it over-stresses your logic, forcing you to concatenate variables, leaving you gasping, so to speak.

Inarticulate, anyway. Very well, take it.

• Filters are by definition outside of the range of conscious awareness. By what they filter out, they shape that awareness, hence cannot be seen.
• And yet, in the right circumstances, and certainly when you exert intent, they can become clear to you. It is of course only when you become aware of them that they can be modified or at least compensated for.
• Dealing with anything that has been beyond your consciousness is always going to be a surprise, of course, and sometimes (not always) a very unpleasant one.
• The filter’s very existence can complicate efforts to modify or remove it. It helps define your reality, so, to modify it or attempt to remove it may well seem to you to be nonsense, a sort of wishing-away of something real.

Yes, I can see that as you say it. It may feel like playing pretend. I often see that reaction in others (easier there, of course, than in myself) when I suggest they do something that I know perfectly well, from experience, is practical and even sometimes easy (that is, requiring only a decision to see things a certain way) but that is not only outside their experience, but outside the experience that a given filter or set of filters allows them.

Quite right. That is what is happening. In such a case, might you not experience fear? Something is proposing to remove one of the props of your reality: How far can you trust them to know what they are doing?

I see this in an unexpected connection.

It was what you call “a long time ago.”

Well, 50 or 60 years isn’t just yesterday.

No, not experienced in time-slices. But, mention it. It will serve as a good example.

When I was first drawn to study the occult, as it was called, or New Age thought, or the perennial philosophy, call it what you will, I really struggled. Like Carl Jung studying alchemy, come to think of it. Something told me, “There’s truth here, there’s life here.” But what a pile of undigested and indigestible superstitions around it! Or – were they superstitions? Just because I couldn’t see why things should be connected the way this or that tradition insisted they were, didn’t mean they weren’t. But in the absence of a teacher, and I being unwilling to find and follow a school (especially one demanding a vow of silence over anything learned), what was I do to do?

In many ways, the connections taken for granted were the very connections and kinds of connections that science had severed centuries earlier. Was I smarter than science? On the other hand, was science necessarily smarter than the occult science it supplanted?

Yes, and now you see how it was resolved for you.

Well, not quite. I begin to, maybe. I’m thinking now that I had filters preventing me from believing the materialist view of the world. Implanted by my Catholicism, I suppose (or maybe, the Catholic surroundings were provided in order to support the filter. I hadn’t thought of it that way.) And other filters cut against this, leaving me fully in 20^th century materialist America at the same time, however logically impossible this was.

Now, can you see that complementary filters may act to support your freedom?

Yes, I do. They help keep us suspended, leaving us free – or, if you want to look at it another way, forcing us – to choose who and what we want to be.

So you see, by this process we come out at an unexpected fact.

Yes, that filters may be useful to growth, not only to maintenance.

Should that surprise you? Life is many things, often contradictory things, all of which have their place. Naturally every tool has more than one use, every plan has more than one Plan B.

Moral of the story being, be a little careful what you discard?

Moral being, keep your eyes on the ball as you proceed. If your intent is clear and your integrity is preserved, you won’t be disappointed. And if you are disappointed, there’s always next time, and we don’t mean “Next life,” we mean, next decision, next intent.

Do encourage your friends to send what ever occurs to them as examples of filters and practical steps to affect filters.

Till next time, then. Thanks.