Session five of ten

[This is a continuation of the transcript]

Friday, October 13, 2000

My chest feels pretty normal, so I think maybe his does too. At least, I hope so. [pause] As soon as I said that, I heard a wheeze, which made me go “not so fast.” [pause]

It’s still amazing how definite a feel of stone there is, that I’m lying on stone. [pause] Must have had plaster of Paris in the waterbed.

S: You talked about these different ages of expression and the characteristic, appropriate, harmonious ways of being in those. What is that lies beyond where we are now?

F: Beyond, meaning forward? Meaning future?

S: All right.

F: Or beyond, meaning deeper?

S: In what we know as a time line towards the future, is there a way of characterizing – you talked about the age of faith —

F: I see. I see.

S: Is there a way of characterizing into what we are evolving?

F: I think you might call it – the age of being all one. You might call it – oh, I don’t know, the INSPEC on earth, if you want to look at it that way. That is, full perceptual as well as intellectual and analytical awareness of the oneness of everything. Perceptual first-hand. Not only sensory, but whatever it is we’re doing now. I don’t like extra-sensory, but you know what I mean: the direct perception. I think – it’s a long way off – the whole – it would be like everybody alive –ooh, which means everybody – in other words, that’ll include us too. Ah! Right now, — well [laughs] okay, let’s figure this out outside of space and time.

Right non-now, if you want to look at it that way, that being that we call the future exists, and we are part of it, and we – our awareness and our struggles and our unawareness are all part of what it’s aware of, always. And that isn’t the end of it, but that’s probably as much as I can see. In other words, I mean, it itself is a small part of something bigger that’s – you know, it’s – You might just have to call it God-ness. And in that sense we already exist that way, but we don’t – that depends on who you’re talking about. If you’re talking about us Downstairs, — yes, there’ll be a day when the Downstairs awareness is like our Upstairs awareness now. On the other hand, we have that awareness now if we move to it. I don’t know what the variables are that stop us, or enable us. There’ll be a day when those variables won’t be a factor.

I’m saying that with great certainty, but who knows? [pause]

I think that’s the next – no, there’s one more between us and that, actually. The intermediate one will be – if you could imagine a society of people all of them learning to be what we really are, that is, using in an ordinary – well, in fact, the institute is a major part of this shift, learning to use all these tools in an ordinary way – that’ll be like an intermediate between that and what we just saw. Because, it takes a while for all that to percolate through all the various activities. For a while you still have schools and colleges and careers and all that, as perceived and lived as separate activities. It takes a while before it percolates down far enough that it’s really – it’s really lived as well as seen as one thing. There’ll be a long time where people will – I mean, a long time for us; generations – where people will lead their separate lives, but extended. And as they get used to that extension and they work with it, then it – gradually they’ll, without quite noticing it, cease to be individual – cease to be separate—cease to see themselves as separate, and they’ll see themselves as one.

S: And at that point, know that to have always been the case.

F: Exactly. Now, we can know it intellectually at this stage, but we can’t live it and feel it that way moment by moment. We – you see what I’m saying? We can get it at certain levels; there’ll be a day when it will not be possible to forget it even if you wanted to. Not that you’d necessarily want to. [pause] It’s like something shook down into a million shards, and the shards are somehow reassembling into a geode. Just for the sake of it, I suppose. Either that, or else we’re watching the movie backwards. [pause]

I feel a great compassion for Bertram – the English monk – because he had the – a Norman monk, I think he would have said – because he had such a sense of aloneness. And it’s justified and it is not justified. [pause] That was the church’s real – Oh! I wonder if this is true – that was the church’s real accomplishment. It gave people a – it gave them an emotional way to get beyond isolation to feel like they connected to something else. What I’m getting now, and I have no idea if it’s true, is that the Romans as an example would have had no such idea; that in the Roman and the Greek days, this would have looked like the sheerest fantasy to them, and they had no emotional connection to – well, God the way you do, Skip, or the INSPEC or the larger being or anything. Apparently they lived without that connection at all, and didn’t really believe it – well, I don’t even know if it was a matter of – I don’t know if they ever even thought of it – they had The Gods, but The Gods to them were not an extension of themselves or they an extension of the gods, it was a separate order of beings, basically who could play with them if they wanted.

And so, — again, I don’t know if any of this is true – and so the church, that is, the Christian experience, — ooh, look what’s coming to me now! It says the first people began to love each other – no, let’s see, let’s go back to –

All right, I’ll try again. You had this enormous experience with Jesus and his community in which they actually experienced this love for the first time, and it was so – it shook them to their being. They had no idea that anything like that could exist, and it was like moths to the flame, except without the idea of destruction. They naturally gave up everything in their lives to go with that, because that was all their – you know, nothing else was worth anything. It may be what Jesus was talking about with the pearl of great price. But because of that, you had this initial – um – you had this crystallization, if you don’t mind the word, of communities of people experiencing and transmitting this tremendous living in love which it feels like was not precedented. And this, over a few generations, maybe twenty of them – I don’t know; some time went by – this sort of laid the groundwork to allow them to begin to experience that connection more fully—

Oh, it’s sort of like – It was the tiny opening of a channel and the channel was gradually widened with time and experience? And then people began to feel the connection more, and at first they could only feel it as they did, as the Christians did; the love of God, the – here’s God way up there, who loves us somehow for some reason or other, and we can live in that. What I’m trying to say is, it was an extension of their own capabilities, and it came complete with an emotional context – that was the bait, the warmth of it was the thing that made it so attractive – as they did that, the experience of connection, and the expectation of connection, changed them. And after the empire was gone, —

Huh! Now, I don’t know if this is true either, but what I get is, in the west, anyway, you had in the five, six, seven, eight hundreds, the connection growing but it was overlaid in men’s minds by their despair or their – you know, life had become brutalized, so that was kind of a weight on them. And it was the, maybe the ten hundreds or the eleven hundreds, things began moving upwards more, so the weight was lifted. It wasn’t, it wasn’t – It was like you had a force lifting upwards and a weight pressing downward. The force lifting upward didn’t diminish or – didn’t necessarily grow. But the weight pushing downward diminished.

And in that situation, because you’re developing – oh, it’s just like TMI, isn’t it? Because you’re developing new abilities and new perceptions, you had people – you had a few at first who were more able or more willing to do it, and they self-selected, and so originally you had probably from the beginning – no. Well, hmm.

Let’s go all the way back. Initially the church was all initiates. It was all esoteric. They all knew what was going on and they all did it. As time went on, some where the children of people who had had the experience, but they didn’t get it, but they didn’t know they didn’t get it. And so you began to have an inner circle and an outer circle, speaking strictly in terms of the experience. So you had esoteric and exoteric. And then as that went on, as time went on, you had your esoteric center pushing forward, but now you had the weight of the —you had the drag of the official belief; the belief had been codified—and so now it became harder to push, harder to – it became actually dangerous to speculate –

Yes, that’s what’s – that’s – okay, and see that’s a major difference. In our age, speculation is our thing; that’s what we’re supposed to be doing. And it’s all been arranged, even the parts we don’t like, to allow the speculation, to encourage it. In the age of faith, speculation was actually dangerous – it was perceived as dangerous to the structure. I think what they felt was, if they allowed ungoverned – if they allowed reason to criticize faith, they might lose it all. And in our age, it’s the opposite way around. You can’t – It is? What would be the opposite way around? You can’t allow faith to criticize reason? Well, you can’t allow faith to dominate reason, that’s true. [pause] I’m going to rest for a minute. That was a lot of work.

S: This is an interesting problem to tackle. I’ve asked you, having a clear vision of the map of the ages of the past, I’ve asked you to describe the map including future, and yet it’s difficult to say where am I standing when I’m looking at that map if that all-knowing future being then is included on the map, you wouldn’t be able to project in front of you the map if that part of you becomes on the map itself, so it would be, a perspective might be looking around you at the different things, rather than looking down at “okay, now I will include the future concept on the map.” It seems to me the same intellectual exercise we can say, being a history buff you can say “World War II was 1939 to 1943” but if you happened to be standing in 1941 and I came to you and said, when is world war II, then the question is very difficult to deal with, because it isn’t contained on the map of time yet. So I might be asking you, when I’m asking you, “tell me about the essence of being in the next age,” it becomes a very interesting challenge.

F: I had a pretty good sense of it. I don’t know if I communicated it. But if you were asking me in the middle of World War II “when are the dates of world war II,” there’s a different reason I think why I wouldn’t be able to answer it, or why my answers might not seem right later. There’s an infinity of answers to that, all of which are true in a different reality, and we haven’t yet decided which one we’re moving into. I think. This is how Charles and I have talked about the Seth material. There are probably realities in which the third world war happened. Fortunately, we didn’t go there. It’s all speculation, of course, but it seems true.

[change side of tape. Continued in post for 5-24-07]