[Continuing from yesterday’s post]
R: Okay. Changing the topic. We’ve talked about all sorts of phenomena like fairies and elves and werewolves and so on as phenomena that have been part of our cultural observations over the years, and one of the additional concepts, even more powerful, is that of Satan. And we have satanic cults operating. I guess you could say we have god cults operating, too, as churches.
F: Mm-hmm. And the symmetry is not accidental.
R: So we have issues like God versus the dark angels in the last chapter of the Bible. And I wonder if you could comment some on these concepts.
F: Well, we’ve given you probably all the clues you need, actually. If you go back to the concept of all pluses or all minuses are impossible, that is to say, an imbalance is impossible, that there have to be as many pluses as minuses. What is Satan and what is God, after all, but the localized congregation of pluses on one side and minuses on another side? Now, in so saying, we’re not talking about God meaning the ultimate source of life or what is above creation, because you don’t have any first-hand knowledge of that anyway. Neither do we. But in terms of good versus evil, that really says it all.
Now, we need to say this carefully. It could happen that as your pluses congregate, your minuses congregate, and you wind up with a more and more clear-cut antagonism, civil war down the middle. However, it could happen that one side will congregate whereas the others remain diffuse. The totals are always going to balance, but some could be real intensely gathered and others, not as intense, cover a more widespread space. And some could congregate at some times, and others at other times. So that things could get worse and worse and worse from one point of view because the only way they could get worse and worse and worse from one is that the opposite ones are congregated at other times.
Well, both pluses and minuses in your time are feeling the tension of the opposites get more intense. Your god-cult and your devil-cult each have lots of energy being given to them, because they feed each other. Each fears the other, and the fear adds the emotional fuel to the fire, and they watch each other’s excesses and that fuels them to do prosetlyzing, so to speak. Ultimately, there’s no good, there’s no evil, but locally there certainly is. The difficulty is, what’s good and evil to you is different to someone else. You will therefore wind up congregating with people who think that good is the same thing that you do, and that evil is the same thing that you do. And if you don’t, you’ll be uncomfortable, and you’ll move until you are if you can.
Now, granted, in physical matter, that’s not as easy to do, because you could live your whole life in psychologically physically uncomfortable territory. You could wind up living your life among people whose beliefs are radically different. But that’s only geography, because you’ll also be living among people whose beliefs are the same as yours, even if they don’t live near you. That’s not obvious to you in bodies, but someone in China and someone in Virginia who have the same feel for things are together in ways that those in a body don’t understand. You’re together spiritually, so to speak. It sounds airy-fairy but it isn’t, at all, it’s downright practical, but not provable; not even observable. We’re just saying that for completeness.
R: Well, when we talked about elves and fairies and so on, you said that we ought not to dismiss anything that had been so often observed in our culture over many years. And certainly the concept of the God and the Satan energies have been most extreme in this regard.
F: That’s right. And good and bad angels, same way.
R: Yes. So I’m asking, are there those forces that operate, aside from whatever we’re doing with our definitions of good and evil?
F: Well, we thought we had said that. Yes, there are. That is, the forces that pull together the negatives, that cluster because they’re negative, that are at the extreme, may be 99 or almost 100 percent negatives. And on the other side, 99 or maybe almost 100 percent positives. Those are the respective commanders of the army. And they have around them some that are 80 percent, and some that are 60 percent, and they fight over the ones that are 50 percent. Just to give you a rough idea.
There’s no reason not to see them as sentient forces. There’s no reason not to see them at war, if you care to. But we would say, when you get to something that’s all negatives, probably it will be evil to everyone. But when you get to something that’s a mixture, it will strike you differently depending on what you are, and you might be more struck by the pluses in that mixture than your are by the minuses in that mixture.
That’s very vague, but it’s difficult to make a non-distracting and non-misleading analogy here. Overall, all good and all evil, all pluses and all minuses, must balance. There’s no other way out of that. Just look at it electrically. But in any given time and in any given place, there’s no formula that says that the balance must be within x range. So you might live in evil times, and if you live in evil times – if you’re in Central Europe in 1942 – even if you are a fanatical Nazi soldier, you’re still living among negatives, so to speak.
We don’t want to go too much further, because people immediately begin placing examples, as we’re drifting into doing too, where they say, “see, well that one really was evil.” But take the Kaiser’s troops and the French troops fighting in World War I. Which of those were good and which were bad? Go to the various ministers. All the ministers were fighting for their own country and their own interests. And one side wasn’t angels and one side devils, although each side saw the other that way. So perhaps Hitler is a bad example, but we could give you Japan in the same war. Viewed from America, Japan’s actions were evil. Viewed from the colonies which were freed forever from the Europeans by the Japanese actions, it’s a mixture. They don’t see the Japanese as good, necessarily, but they don’t see that action as necessarily bad either. So —
R: There’s a tendency because of the way you’re talking about seeing things as evil, to think that that the definitions of good and evil forces simply come out of our definitions. And I’m saying do those forces exist in nature aside from our interpretations of things.
F: Well, the pluses and the minuses exist. And on the one hand you’ll have the forces of good, and on the other the forces of evil. Probably it would be better to say the forces of attraction and the forces of repulsion, or perhaps the forces of optimism and the forces of pessimism, or the forces of hope and the forces of despair. We’re trying hard to avoid making it just good and evil, but really that’s what it amounts to. You see, attraction and optimism and hope are all positives, and repulsion, pessimism, and despair are all negatives. The attractive, hopeful, loving side versus the repulsive, non-hopeful (we don’t want to say hopeless; it gives the wrong impression) not-loving side. The people (not only in the body, of course) who are by their nature unable to believe in love, unable or unwilling to act in love become the opposite of that, there’s no middle ground.
[pause] It’s difficult here. It’s funny, it shouldn’t be difficult. Oh, you know, what makes it difficult is that we’re looking over our own shoulder and trying to see the ways people will distort this. And that makes it quite difficult. So we’ll just state it frankly.
There is the positive, which is hope and love; there is the negative, which is basically lack of hope and lack of love, and there is the bell curve, in the middle, of those elements mixed. Those who are at either pole could be considered to be the dark angels and the light angels. And they have their followers in various mixtures of the pluses and minuses. They are at war in the way that matter and anti-matter might be considered to be at war, or two electrical particles of opposite charge might be considered to be at war. They are fighting in the only place where they can fight, they are contending in the only place where they can really contend, and that is in matter, because it is in matter that you have people of various specific gravities interacting (because they’re in bodies); you have them choosing, because they’re in bodies seeing things in time-slices and experiencing the consequences over time, and therefore those choices will affect what those individuals go back to.
Now to show you how things loop back and shed light on each other, look at it this way. You, Rita, are here choosing. As you choose, you add or subtract pluses to your full being. You’re choosing to be different. As you’re doing that, you are by definition, and necessarily, changing the composition of the amoeba in which you are a part. Now, it might only be a tiny change.
[change sides of tape]
F: You, Rita, are a mixture. Let’s say you’re 73 percent plus and 27 percent minus, when you come in. By diligent choosing throughout your lifetime, you become only 25 percent plus [they laugh] and 75 percent minus. Or, you become 90 percent plus, and 10 percent minus. Whatever.
Now, let’s take “percent” out and let’s just say 97. You become 97 one and 3 the other. Now, you’re added back, and your total alters the total of the amoeba, and maybe the amoeba is numbered in the billions, or the millions. Nonetheless, you’ve changed the equation slightly. There are millions of people living, there are millions of people all voting, there are millions of people all having their cumulative effect on the amoeba. As that amoeba changes, that is to say, as it experiences life in various bodies, all of those lives choosing, and all of those lives becoming a part of it, particularly those that crystallize and become more influential, and the ones that are going to be the slide through which energies are projected, which means that the new energies will reflect them, to some degree – this is how the dark and light forces, or the positive and minus forces contend. They can contend in earth, and remember, by “in Earth” we mean physical matter, not just one planet. They can contend in physical matter for the reasons we’ve said, and they can’t contend very well outside of physical matter because we are what we are.
So physical matter could be considered to be a flank attack on us outside of physical matter. Remember, we could maybe go between 51 and 49, but you could go between zero and a hundred, so to speak. It isn’t one versus the other, but we’re just concentrating on how you, as an individual choosing, affect the overall design and how you really do affect this contention between pluses and minuses. From your point of view, minuses are always going to be evil, but anything that’s a mixture will depend on where you are as to how you see that mixture. It will depend on your compassion, on your insight, on your – well, on your point of view.
So there’s two things going on. We’ll summarize this again, just for clarity. We are, shall we say, diehard moral relativists in the sense that we don’t believe in any firm code of ethics that’s absolutely right. We don’t believe in any firm set of individual values that is absolutely right. Because everything is a mixture, and in different circumstances, different things are right and wrong. You can’t just say you shan’t kill, and have that be an absolute, because sometimes killing is in the service of life, or in the service of the good. It’s obvious enough.
Now, having said that, on the other hand we also recognize that there will be, ultimately, some resolution of the tension between pluses and minuses. [pause] Well, we’re getting into something entirely different here, actually, and that is – remember we’ve always said that pluses and minuses balance out in all of creation; they don’t necessarily balance out in any given part of creation.
R: So what part of creation are you meaning? Time spans, or space dimensions, or –?
F: Any way you care to slice it, as long as you’re within the totality – and everything by definition is. You might as well say, it’s up for grabs. Ultimately it’s all going to balance out, but “ultimately” doesn’t help because you don’t live in “ultimately” any more than we do. If there’s a time-space at one point where all the pluses are clustered, that means it’s going to be grim somewhere else. But if it’s grim somewhere else, that means it’s going to be less grim some other somewhere else.
So on the one hand we say, you can’t make the pluses overwhelm the minuses except locally; but on the other hand, you might as well try it locally. But on the other hand while you’re trying it locally, recognize that what you’re doing is forcing the necessity for minuses to cluster somewhere else. How’s that?
This is why, you see, you can have Zoroastrians who see the world as a fight between good and evil; you can have Buddhists who see the whole thing as being not reality, you can have Christians who see it as a battle between the good and the bad in a different sense, where God is the ultimate victor but first he has to fight, you see. That’s different from the Zoroastrian. You can have all these endless permutations because it’s people picking up a certain portion, but only a portion, of the reality and building a logical structure around only that portion, just as we’re doing. It can’t be helped.
R: [pause] Okay. I think I understand your talking in terms of the pluses and minuses and forces that get attached to those. I started the question out with the elves and the fairies, and the way I’m understanding our discussion tonight, it feels to me like somebody is going to misunderstand what we have to say about elves and fairies.
F: [chuckles] We guarantee they’ll misunderstand everything we say!
R: Because if we see elves and fairies in the same non-concrete forms that we’re talking about now, I don’t think that got communicated before. When I asked about elves and fairies, you said by implication “well, they’re there, of course. People are seeing them.”
F: Oh yes. We don’t mean to take that back. They are. Just as they see people.
R: Yeah, but I’m asking about God and Satan and we’re balancing positive and negative forces here.
F: Well now, bear in mind, no one has ever claimed to see God and Satan as bodily beings. That’s the difference between that on the one hand and elves and fairies and trolls on the other hand.
R: Well, in the art world they certainly are very real figures.
F: Well, now, wait a minute. The art world is representing, for the senses, something which is understood to not be a sensory reality. But people who see fairies and elves and trolls do see them as sensory realities, but just not quite on the same frequency that you live. To our mind those are entirely different realms of being. If you were to see an angel – and you do see angels — Well [pause] Well, after all, if you see angels, you see them. There’s no difference, really, between seeing an angel and seeing a fairy, or a troll. All right, we’ll concede that. And if you can see an angel, you can see a devil. Many people have seen what they think to be God, and perhaps we shouldn’t say that they don’t. We would incline to say they’ve seen representations, but we may be wrong. Where does this leave us? Do you feel that we’ve contradicted ourselves at some point? Not impossible, of course.
R: Not really, I just needed to clear that up because I think people need to be able to understand the extent to which we’re personifying things, and the extent to which we’re describing things.
F: Given that we’ve told you that there aren’t any such things as individuals, if you find a way to make that distinction, do let us know! [they laugh]
R: All right, that’s it for my questions tonight.
F: Okay, that’s it for your prepared questions tonight. Now let’s have a conversation.
R: All right. What do you want to talk about?
F: Whatever you want to talk about. We’re trying to show you something, and we think this will work; maybe not. Just say what comes to mind, and watch the process. It’s no different from when you ordinarily talk, but it’ll – Well, we’ll see. Let’s try it, anyway. Let’s just have a conversation.
R: It isn’t too different from the way I ordinarily operate, which is I do ask a lot of questions.
F: You ask a lot of questions, but you don’t ordinarily talk from notes.
R: No.
F: So how do you clarify what the questions are going to be?
R: How do I clarify?
F: Well, in other words, when you talk, you don’t talk from notes. You ask a question and then you lead from wherever that goes. You’re able to follow where it goes, and you are able to formulate your questions as you go along. Writing a book’s no different from that. Needn’t be. If you were a mechanic and had been taught to explain things in terms of mechanics, you would have a lot of superstructure that you wouldn’t need if you were just going to tell people where you went for your summer drive. Okay?
R: Our sessions here have been a combination of some thoughts I had in mind prior to the session and follow-ups on whatever came up.
F: Mm-hmm. And if they had not been, they wouldn’t be alive. The one is the pump-priming, but the other is the breath of life, so to speak. Nothing wrong with either one, it’s a nice mixture. Let’s talk about Frank.
R: All right.
F: You’ve stirred the–
R: I’ve stirred this up.
F: You’ve stirred it up.
R: What’s going on with him here, all this speculating
F: Well, he’s daring to hope.
R: And is that good for him?
F: Hope’s always good. [pause] It isn’t bad, let’s put it that way. But it stirs things up. It unsettles him.
R: Mm-hmm. And I told him I feel like I got somehow involved in that and I wanted to back out., not because I thought I was manipulating him in any way or anything like that, but just because it really has to do with choices that are not mine in this world. And so I wanted to back out of something that I thought was pretty emotionally loaded.
F: Well, we figure that you’ve set yourself up to get the total blame on both sides. [they laugh] No, it was a good thing to do. And it wasn’t yours, any more than it was his, really. You both felt the flow through of what looked like an impulse, even almost a quixotic or an inexplicable impulse. And you know what that usually means. Perhaps you know. You ought to have a clue, anyway. It wasn’t a bad thing. We say this despite the fact that nobody on earth knows what’s going to happen because it’s a matter of choices on all sides. But that doesn’t matter as much. Aliveness is always better than deadness.
R: I can easily see that. Well, I – [pause]
F: Nothing to say to us. We’re insulted. [they chuckle]
R: All I have to say is I bow out of that discussion. Well, this sort of thing is very interesting, and very human, and when it’s going through my mind, I’m thinking about how much I care about a couple of people and how I’d like to think of their having wonderful lives and rewarding to them personally in all sorts of ways, and this gets me into territory where it’s ridiculous. I don’t have any role to play in that, and —
F: Now. Now, you come to the interesting part, okay? Why do you suppose that you got into that territory? You clearly wouldn’t have done it from foresight, because you would know ahead of time that it would be uncomfortable territory; why do you suppose you got there?
R: The devil made me do it.
F: Close enough! [prolonged laughter from both] With a little help from your friends. And there might be – we say this tongue in cheek – there might just be something in it for you. That is, being in the situation emotionally may have its own –
Well, there’s no point in our saying any more, really. Nothing we can say that’s going to shed any light, but to say that it’s not necessarily meaningless, but you don’t need to hear that. You already know it’s not meaningless.
[Yawn] Oh well, we think we should stop.
R: All right.