This long thread originally appeared as eight posts between April 19 and May 3, 2007. I have put it back together to make it easier for readers to go through. I will probably do the same for other major threads.
Thu 19 Apr 2007
This long thread began with my request to my friends upstairs to help me tell people how to get into touch with guidance, at least as I personally have understood and experienced it. I shuddered to think of beginning an epidemic of Psychic’s Disease, but still it is no less dangerous for people to rely on external authority when they will have to choose which authority, not having any basis to do so! It amounts to them depending on their guidance to find a source of external guidance. Perhaps not so bad a plan, but not without its eccentric points.
[Wednesday, January 18, 2006]
So – friends – I don’t know quite what has been going on this past week – is it just a funk, or what? For whatever reason, I certainly haven’t done much work. I did note, yesterday, a decision point early on, when I picked up a John Sandford novel to finish re-reading it, rather than buckling down. And I suppose there was another, later in the day, when I picked up [Joshua Lawrence] Chamberlain’s The Passing of the Armies rather than work. A lot of reading as in the old days. I don’t much like it, though: It is as if I have a bad choice, of wasting time reading, or reading what may be worthwhile (Robert Johnson) but it’s still a diversion, or anyway killing time – or doing work that has lost its savor. I suppose the easy obvious answer is just to do the work – yet it can’t be that simple emotionally, or I would do it, ever if after some hesitation and delay.
That is right. People don’t do things without reasons – as we have often reminded you. But the reasons may be obscure to them; they may be contradictory, or self-defeating. Still, to turn the machine, find its mainspring.
Terrible metaphor.
You aren’t all that focused, for one thing.
Well – you know why. But then why is something else also in my mind?
It is an example of how little your lives are in your consciousness. You will recall that Albert Einstein complained late in life that he could no longer think on many levels at one time – and his hearer did not know from experience what Einstein meant. He thought he did; he thought it was an ability of Einstein’s that he did not share. He was partly right. But it would be more nearly accurate to say that Einstein was more aware of, more connected to, the process. You all have many strains flowing at the same time. You are relatively unconscious of most of them.
Take, for instance, the drunken monkey, or the disk jockey. Two examples (though they seem one, to you) of processes going on within you that proceed on their own rules, occasionally interact with consciousness, and continue to proceed regardless whether you are in contact with them.
Let us re-state that. We are saying something very different. Try to actually hear what we mean.
Your model of consciousness is wrong, and so you understand things wrong. Of course, your model is wrong because you understand things wrong, too – it is a feedback loop, and models reflect understandings from experience, while distorting or at least molding understandings from experience, which means, in practice, in effect limiting possible experience.
But never mind that. The point is that your model of consciousness is wrong. We will give you another model (if your fear of contradicting authority does not disable you as intermediary) and the new model will enable you to see things differently, by freeing you from exclusive reliance on the old inadequate models.
Get some coffee and we will proceed, and – by the way – you will see that your past week was not wasted. Faithfulness is all – but it is all.
All right. It is just seven a.m.
Begin with the image we gave you, of the individual being actually a container of many threads. Now, don’t get nervous about all this. If it doesn’t work out you can scrap it! It isn’t that big a deal!
Sure. Go ahead.
You are not a unit, except seen a certain way. The less you see of your situation, the more you seem to be a unit. The more clearly you see, the clearer various divisions and amalgamations become to you.
You have a body. You are confined physically to the time and space that your body occupies. If you think that neither soul nor mind exists, you think that the physical conditions surrounding the body determine what seem to be mental and spiritual processes. This is the extreme position – that you are only a body; that anything you think is the result of what your body experiences, and if you could know everything it experiences, you would account for everything you think you think; everything you seem to feel; everything you seem to intuit.
We will reserve argument about the various levels, merely saying that any argument, even the most ridiculous, has at its base some kernel of truth, as people call it, some grounding in a true principle. However, that same true principle, that same kernel of truth, may serve to construct very different appearances, when seen from different viewpoints. Viewpoint, like faithfulness, is all. And there is a sense in which viewpoint is faithfulness. We leave you this cryptic gem to examine for yourself.
Now, people who are unable to subscribe to the idea that the body accounts for everything split into two camps. (At least, it may be seen that way.) One camp adds mind, another adds mind and spirit. We cannot conceive of a camp that would in theory add spirit and not also mind, but in practice this does occur, as we shall see.
Well, mind. Seeing the individual as body and mind is in theory a difficult position to maintain, as it implies a dualism that wonders which is master, which is servant. Someone who believes in body and mind – only – does not really believe this, but only deceives himself – herself – that s/he thinks this. Because in a two-fold scheme, one is primary and one secondary; there can be no equality of being in any mixture. So one is driven to the position of saying one is primarily a body, upon which mind has grown, or one is primarily a mind that has manifested a body. Historically both ways of seeing it are represented.
Either way of seeing things tends to unconsciously assume that two things are being discussed – a body and a mind – even though in more analytical moments the same person thinking about it recognizes that the body is actually a collection of cooperating systems and the mind is –
Well, actually, this gives too much credit for discernment that in fact is not all that common. For the moment let us leave it at this: the points of view that see only body and mind tend to see a body and a mind, and they differ as to which is primary.
Psychological experience convinces others that the scheme is inadequate. Not from theory but from life they say that they are composed of body and mind and spirit. In your society they very loosely mix the terms spirit and soul, not knowing the difference, hence not knowing how to distinguish between them. But this anticipates. The third level is body and mind and what is termed either spirit or soul.
By spirit (or soul in this mistaken view) is understood something primary, something that precedes or at least is co-equal with the body and mind. We are not aware of a tradition or even a thought-form that considers spirit to be the result of body and mind – or either one by itself. Anyone who would be temperamentally liable to think spirit the creation of body and mind would – is it not obvious? – be more liable to discard the concept of spirit entirely. And indeed this is only sense. Spirit dependent upon body and mind is a contradiction; it is a –
Well, in short it is a misunderstanding of the difference between sprit and soul. But before we discuss the soul, let us say briefly that there are those who think the spirit is created at the same time as body and mind. This, too, is a misunderstanding of the distinction between spirit and mind, to which we now proceed.
Those who perceive spirit as one of the elements of a human being see it as an immaterial “something” that is necessary to life. No spirit, no life. Extinguish life, destroy the bond between body and spirit.
We have no quarrel with that view. In practical terms, “it works.”
There is a difference between spirit and soul. The spirit is the “something” that gives life; for the moment leave it at that. No one shapes spirit; nor – it may be said – does spirit shape our lives. Spirit animates us, it provides – it is – the vital link that “keeps body and soul together,” as the old saying is. But it is not particular to us in any detail. Like the wind, to which it is often compared, spirit blows where it wants to blow, according to its own laws of being. There is nothing personal about spirit. Yet – you must hold the contradiction – spirit is a closer part of you than anything else, and so may equally justly be described as entirely personal in the way we experience it. To put it again, because we are part of spirit, we experience it entirely personally; because spirit is so vast and apparently animates everything, it is in its essence far beyond personality.
So – personal and impersonal. The breath of life – how often have you heard it called that, and not really heard what was being said – and yet the animation of worlds. This is stuff of the gods. We will return to it.
Where the spirit animates, the soul personifies. Those who perceive body and mind and spirit and soul see now (at least) a four-fold being, not nearly as simple and unitary as first appeared.
What is a person’s soul? You might look upon it as the flower you create in the living of your life. All your life, you choose what you are going to be. You learn this, you bypass that, you encourage these threads of behavior, you chose (deliberately or otherwise) not to encourage others. You do, and so you be. You choose, continually, from the many choices presented to you – for any situation presents choices, if no more than a choice of how to react to the inevitable. As you continually choose, you continually shape your soul.
Now you must not think that this “soul” you shape is something concerned with heaven or hell. That is but superstition compounded of misunderstandings of what was believed. Look at it this way: the soul is the photograph of your being. It is not a static photograph, because it changes as you, by living, change it. But it is who you are. It is the template by which you could be recreated if one had sufficient skill, materials and tools.
Where the spirit is impersonal in that it cannot be shaped by your life, the soul is entirely personal, and is entirely shaped by your living of its potentials.
The body holds you in one time and place at a time, and drags you (kicking and screaming sometimes!) to the next moment, and the next.
The mind observes, participates, directs, learns, reacts, concludes, resolves – and in short provides the awareness needed for the body to function in its surroundings.
The sprit provides the energy that fuels body and mind moment by moment. Unseen, unfelt, unfailing, it is the background that is unseen because it is the universal support. Being universal, its presence in has to be inferred, practically, for in time-space there is no place where it is not.
The soul is the local manager of the body-mind-spirit combination. It is the universal record of this particular expression of life. It records every moment – perhaps we shouldn’t say records, as much as incorporates every moment first to last. This is not merely what you may have heard, or heard about, church doctrine. Hear us: We are describing something real, not something deduced or invented. We have no agenda provided by a church or religion. (Indeed, they will likely regard us as illegitimately poaching on their privatized soil.) Your soul has as much to do with the color of your hair and your taste in paintings and the kind of jokes you prefer as it does how “good” or “evil” you are. It concerns your weight, your talents, your amusements, your illnesses, your irrational preoccupations. It incorporates the effects of your home life, your commuting to an office, your paying taxes, your playing games. It includes your best and worst moments, your pets, your car, your house –as they interact with you – and, in short, your life.
Your life is not (as Shaw once said) a moral gymnasium. Life is about living. It is about choosing whoa and what you want to be. All of this becomes the soul, so that it might be said, truly enough (from one viewpoint) that a lifetime begins with spirit and body, adds mind, and grows soul. True enough for rough estimates.
But now, having come this far, have we come to the limit of differentiating among the pieces of what to some seemed a monolith, comprising body alone, with all else subordinate or illusory? We have not.
The model – we repeat – is wrong. This model we just sketched is entirely wrong (from our viewpoint) because it assumes solidity where there is only flow, and identity where there is only community.
A little more and we will stop for a while to let you get more coffee.
Take the body. You have learned to separate it conceptually into four – physical, energetic, mental, emotional. As working definitions these work well enough. The more closely they are examined, however, the less they will seem separate or, indeed, existent as separable entities.
The physical body is made up of a huge number of sub-systems, each of which functions autonomously and well. Is it one body with subsystems or many intelligences cooperating to produce a functioning whole? Either view is true enough. Hold the thought a while.
The energetic body is really a subsystem of the physical body – looked at that way, anyway; that is, this is one permissible view. It is a subsystem large enough, autonomous enough, that it is worth considering separately for specific purposes. But of course by definition it has no purpose but to provide the energetic superstructure of the physical body. It is true that without the energetic body the physical body could not function; it is equally true that without the physical body the energetic body would have no reason for being.
The mental body actually maps where in the physical body certain –
No, try again.
The mental body is a representation of an interaction between “mind” and “body” that is more or less unsuspected by the culture at large – even though body-workers for instance are well aware of the connection. Touch a spot inside the brain with an instrument, and a memory appears, as fresh as the day it was imprinted. Whether the spot is actually the carrier of the memory or the gateway to storage elsewhere is immaterial. For practical purposes the brain could be mapped, if one knew how to do it – so that the memories were located and labeled. Well, similarly, the body. Traumas of all sorts are located at different parts of the body, so that a massage therapist may press on a calf muscle and find that the client responds by breaking into tears at the strength of a suddenly remembered even from long before. Thus conceptually one might map the body’s stored areas of trauma and other experience.
The emotional body, similarly, is a representation of where the body stores emotional memory.
Now, all these substructures, these subsystems, are what we might call logical derivations of function. In a way they do not exist except as useful abstractions. In a way they do exist in that as conceptualizations they offer a way to work with the underlying reality. And what do you want beyond something that works? The trick is to prevent useful tools from becoming superstitions.
Again, before we stop to let you catch your breath – you have been doing this 90 minutes, somewhat longer than usual but we wanted to get this all out in a breath, so to speak, so that it would have the same feel — remember that this entire model even with the sophistications and the nuances we have just provided, is in our view not a good model for what humans are. It is true enough but now you will require better tools, better models, and this we propose to give you.
Whew! Wow. I’m drained. Thank you for this. I want to be used, and I hate to feel like I’m just wasting time. I was building steam again, wasn’t I?
Go have some coffee and a light breakfast.
Okay.
(9 a.m.) Beautiful day, and not only because of this splendid contact. All right, friends, so what is your proposed model.
The elements of this model have been given to you in bits and pieces over the past five years and more. Now we propose to put them together in a way much of which will be familiar to you (now) and some not.
We begin by moving your point of reference. Much of what is wrong with current models –when we say “wrong” in this context we mean that they do not serve you, they do not lead to larger understandings; there is nothing morally wrong with a point of view nay more than with red hair or left-handedness or a taste of marmalade instead of peanut butter – much of what is wrong with current models stems from beginning with the idea that the physical body is primary. This stems from the idea that the physical, itself, is primary. It is not.
Bear in mind, in the course of this argument we are going to ignore or merely deny certain points of view that would otherwise entangle us in argument to no purpose. Let those who wish to deny the existence of the non-physical do so. It is not necessary, in order to put out another point of view, that everyone subscribe to it. Indeed, if everyone did, what could be new in it? So we will not worry ourselves or you about how to “prove” that the physical is not primary, or, indeed, that the non-physical exists. Those unable to entertain our point of view will go elsewhere – will remain elsewhere – and no harm will be done.
The physical is dependent for its existence upon a deeper level of reality that by definition is not physical. It is not subject to time and space, in short. Please try not to jump to religious categories of thought as soon as you find yourselves considering the non-physical. It is true that religious thought attempts to convey that reality, but it is equally true that it fails. It fails, as we shall fail, because “three into two doesn’t go,” as the old saying is. That is, translating the greater into terms of the lesser must necessarily result in serious distortion. Symbols distort less than precise language, but distortion cannot be avoided. We prefer to deal with this fact by using a couple of strategies. One is to create analogies and then alternate, quite different analogies, so that the only point shared by the two may be better intuited. It cannot be said and conveyed, or we would do so. We would in fact not need to do so: It would have been said long since. Another strategy is to set up a viewpoint, then set up a competing viewpoint, so that, again, the unsayable truth may be somewhat perceived between the lines. Of course two analogies or two viewpoints is saying much the same thing, for our most careful statement must yet be an analogy, just from the nature of things.
So. The physical realm is defined by certain characteristics. It is your job to attempt to imagine the reality of our world which does not share those characteristics. We will do what we can do to suggest; we tell you in advance, again, that unavoidably we cannot give you an undistorted version of the truth. The very structure of your language necessarily contains the assumption of the reality of forces and conditions that (in our view, from “where” we are) do not exist, or do not anyway much resemble your experience of them or your conclusions from your experience.
Among the characteristics that condition the physical realm and not the non-physical:
Time divided into slices
Space divided into slices
From those two conditions flow the experience of separation and of delayed consequences.
Let us begin simply with these. The relevance of all of this to your – and our – model of reality will “in time” become more apparent.
Time divided into slices. You experience the world as past, present, future. How you experience these three varies by culture, by language, by mental state, by emotional state (mental and emotional are by the way less separate than they appear to you). Still, past, present and future seem to you to be real conditions within which you must live. Examine your language and see if you could express a thought – we know that we can not! – that the structure of language does not insist on structuring into a sense of time passing. The exact structure may and will vary, but it will be there.
Similarly, space.
These innate physical-existence characteristics determine how you experience your world, of course. As we said, you experience delayed consequences – separation in time – and what might be called delayed connection – separation in space.
Because you experience your lives this way, certain realities are fundamentally distorted.
Because of separation in space, you experience yourself as one body and others as other bodies. If you are aware of energetic transfers this sense of separation will be somewhat modified, but it cannot be eliminated. If you are aware of your non-physical connections, again, your sense of separation will be somewhat modified – your ideas, your theoretical life, will be changed – but still your sense of yourself will continue to be of a separate body functioning in a world that is primarily “other.” Now, if you lose an arm or a leg in an accident, your sense of yourself is truncated – it isn’t like a part of you goes on to experience life apart from you. That arm, that leg, has become part of the “other” – and if you were to regenerate a new limb to replace the one lost, the new arm or leg would not be considered something “other” that had joined you but just – you. Inconsistently, you say “you are what you eat,” which logically means that the “other” becomes part of you and what part of you you excrete becomes “other” again. If you look at this closely you will see how arbitrary are the distinctions between self and other.
Again, as a reminder, different abilities to perceive lead to different definitions of reality. If you perceive that the heart gives off electrical impulses that interact at a distance of as much as ten feet, this changes your definition of separation – it modifies it so that for, instance, some might now say that no two people within a few feet of each other function entirely separately. This is true as far as it goes but it will make no difference in the fact that people will go on considering themselves to be separate even so. They may admit to being influenced by many subtle forces, but they cannot experience themselves as other than separate beings. They may believe, they may conceptualize, they may emotionally experience unity but in fact and everyday, they feel themselves separate and cannot help but do so. It is in the design of the physical world and therefore there is nothing wrong with this. But it does not define ultimate reality, either.
This bias must be taken into consideration. It cannot be eliminated, and will sneak in behind every discussion. You experience yourself as a “you” – as a person – as an individual. How else could you experience yourself? So long as you are separated in space – that is, so long as you are in physical matter – you cannot experience yourself in any other way. Once more: This is how it was set up to work, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that it works this way.
However –
Now we invite you to convey yourself beyond what your physical life convinces you is real. To do so – given your surroundings, which most emphatically includes your language! – requires thought-experiments. First we will set up the experiment. Then, do the experiment! Try. You will not succeed, perhaps, but the effort will help you to understand and appreciate and see beyond the analogy we will suggest beyond the experiment.
So – here is the first experiment. Assume that you are in actual literal fact part of everyone and every thing else; that only your spatial environment is convincing you that separation is reality. How could you conceive of that in a way that you would find intellectually respectable? Perhaps you can’t feel that lack of separation; how could you theoretically imagine it?
Do the experiment.
No, we mean really, do the experiment. The printed words aren’t going anywhere, but this is the only time you will be able to do the experiment with exactly these mental and physical conditions surrounding you. Do the experiment. If you were to imagine yourself and all the “other” as part of one thing, what could you imagine as the situation and connections that hold it all together.
Last chance. Did you do the experiment?
Perhaps you will do the next one.
All right, here is what we would say to you. You are all assembled from the same huge table of ingredients. You all contain the same chemicals, the same materials; you are assembled according to the same diagrams and schematics; you have similar mental emotional and energetic structures. Well and good; nobody would quarrel with this. But this is not wherein your unity resides, and your diversity. And the key to your unity – and diversity – is hidden from you superficially by separation in space and to a lesser degree in the examples we will use to begin with, by separation in time. We call this key the concept of threads.
And that is enough for now. We appreciate the willingness but you are tired to a degree you do not yet realize. This is a marathon, not a sprint. Just come to the work each morning early and it will get done. Other things like making notes or even typing this may be done later in the day.
Okay. This is wonderful. Thanks.
[Thursday, January 19, 2006]
7:95 a.m. Starting again, not without apprehension. Can today’s transmission possibly measure up to yesterday’s? Can it continue and flow into a seamless and meaningful whole? Stay tuned.
You are doing fine. Faithfulness is all. It isn’t up to you to provide the content. If it falls down, it falls down – but yesterday didn’t turn out so bad, did it?
Yesterday was wonderful. I’m ready if you are.
We proceed. Again, much of what we have to say, you and Rita will already have heard and absorbed. So much the better – it will aid in the process of transmission from us to you.
Separation in space produces the illusion – or perhaps it would be better to say the condition – of separation, of individuality, of non-belonging, of difference, in a way that would not be possible otherwise. There is separation in a way non-physically but it is not as it is in the physical world. As a rough analogy you might think how your world would be if you – and everyone – were continuously and unpredictably teleporting though time and space both. Nothing would seem as solid as definite or as sequential to you as everything does now. It is only an analogy but not so bad a one.
Well, if space produces the illusion of separation, time produces the effect of delayed consequences. Time in the way you experience it sorts out everything just as space does. Last Tuesday is so definitely a different space from a given date three years ago that you could (and do) stack different people and things in the same space and different time and not have them collide.
We’re going to repeat that, so that you know that we meant it say it that way, and why. In space-time, you can be in one place at one time. Two people cannot be in the same place at the same time: They can be in the same place but not at the same time; they can be in the same time but not the same place. Same time and same place is not possible. This ought to tell you that space and time are indeed (as science is currently telling you) functions of each other. They are the same thing seen slightly differently. Now notice – when we say it one way it is almost obvious; when we say the same thing another way, it is so strange as to be scarcely comprehensible.
Time is not different from space, in that each separates, sorts out, the world around you. But time is experienced radically differently than space, of course: Nobody is frog-marching you in space, inch by inch by inch in one direction your whole life.
People who say we have no time on “this side” mean by that (though they often do not know what they mean, mostly parroting others who have said that on this side we have no time) – they mean that we are not subject to that unvarying tyranny, moving us along. That is true, sort of, in the same way that it is true, sort of, that we have no space. Neither statement is true except in reference to your experience. We have time, we have space – how else could we structure experience? But they are not what they seem to you to be. They are neither prisons nor constrictions – but they are real limitations. Try to envision a life without limitations and you will end up with fog. But there is all the difference in the world (so to speak) between our world and yours.
No, that isn’t how to put it. It is the same world. Canada – the physical Canada – exists “here” as it does “there,” because we are not someplace else! The non-physical components of the physical world are – right here! Why would you think they are elsewhere? It isn’t even true that you cannot perceive it; it is true only that you cannot perceive it in the same way or using the same faculties that you do the physical world – we might almost say the rest of the physical world.
We know that this is a radically different thought for many, so we will try to say it carefully. The non-physical world is right “there” with you, and right “then” with you. How far do you think it is from Baltimore to the non-physical equivalent of Baltimore? And why do you think it doesn’t have it’s non-physical equivalent? What do you think you build on earth, anyway? But because you misunderstand time, you think that things “pass away” on earth and do so presumably in the non-physical earth. Not true in either case – but it never was the way you assume it to be.
Where is ancient Rome, say March 1, 250 b.c.? That would on that day is where it always was and always will be. We on this side can “go” there at will; you on your side cannot (normally). This is the chief difference between our experience of the world and yours – and will help you perhaps to see why on this side you do not get bored yet on that side you get to play with greater consequences.
We are moving your quickly here, we know, but we will stop periodically to pick up stragglers. And, with words on a page, you have a time capsule that helps you to retrieve information when you have been moved beyond it in time. (That is a side-trail. So many entertaining side-trails we never have time enough – that is, you never have time enough! – for us to follow.)
It is a simple concept, but foreign to your usual ways of understanding. We are trying to express it in simple terms devoid of jargon. Frank is good at that – should be; he was shaped for this work!
When a moment of time “passes” – that moment does not cease to exist: You cease to exist in it. You have been carried smoothly to the next moment of time. If you are standing still for five such moments, it looks to you that you moved in time and not in space. But it could equally truly be said that you moved in time-space. That is, moment one exists next to moment two, and you moved from one to two. Then you moved to moment three, then four – and your movement is continuous, predictable and not under your control, so when you get to moment five you assume that the “previous” – which really means previously experienced – moments have somehow ceased to exist.
Your experience tells you that you hop like little Eva from ice-floe to ice-floe across the river, and that each previous ice-floe ceases to exist as soon as you jump from it – and – even more startling, more hazardous – the next ice floe doesn’t even come into existence until you land on it! Plus, you never can pause, nor can you do a thing about the situation except to jump in one direction rather than another. If you wanted to rest at any given floe you couldn’t, not only because you don’t know how to do it, but because what will you do when the floe presumably ceases to exist in the next moment?
What a situation! If it were a true description, you’d be in a pretty bad fix – and, we know, this is how many of you do experience your lives. But there’s a better way to see it, that will relieve the insecurity and remove the below-surface panic. There is no need for terror, any more than on any other pleasure cruise.
What if we told you that the ice-floes do not cease to exist just because you jump from them (or, more closely, are smoothly catapulted off them)? And what if we told you that the icebergs “to come” are not uncreated but actually exist, as common sense would tell you, were we in a strictly physical-geography metaphor? And what if we told you that we on “our side” – which is to say you on our side – visit the terrain however we please, rather than being tied to a conveyor belt? Disregard for the moment the fact that you can’t see how that could be; hold the theoretical possibility. All you are doing – all you need do – is creating a space in your mind for a new way of seeing things.
Now we are doing quite a bit of hopping ourselves! We are touching on this, touching on that, and not tying up anything. But it is necessary to present several ideas before we can create a model. Continued patience, please.
It is the nature of the physical world – and by “world” we mean not one planet but all of physical creation – to lead its inhabitants in experience. You experience one time, one space, then movement certainly to another time, perhaps to another place. You may move spatially in any way you can figure out how to do: forward, back, right, left, up, down. To Cleveland, to Greenland, to Mars, wherever. The restrictions on movement are in the nature of obstacles. Overcome the obstacle – whether it be sheer distance, or the nature of the terrain, or whatever – and you may move there. Temporally, however you may move and must move in only one direction – “forward” – and you seemingly cannot vary the speed or direction in which you are carried. In fact, because you are carried, it seems to you that you have no control whatever over your movement in time.
Now, that is a fair representation is it not, of your plight on earth? Freedom in three dimensions, no freedom – even to stop! – in the fourth. Not an incorrect model, but not a very helpful one either. Let us see if we can improve upon it.
We have said that “Canada exists” over here. By that we do not mean that we have a sort of Disneyland version of Canada for people to play pretend in. We mean – Canada here and Canada there are extensions of the same thing, just as you extend “over here” and we “over there.”
It is a continuing distortion that you are just going to have to factor in to these discussions, that spatial and temporal analogies continually sneak in between the lines. Given that language reflects your concept of reality, how can it be otherwise? If you had a language that did not reflect that reality – other than mathematics – you would use it, but if you were using it, it would mean that you were already living in that reality and hence would not need our attempted translations!
By the way, the note on mathematics was inserted for those who can properly appreciate it. The answers to many dilemmas about mathematics are included in that aside. This is the reason why only mathematics has forced scientists to see the world closer to how it truly is, rather than through the time-space distortions and illusions. They don’t necessarily like what they are forced to conclude, and many of them can continue to do so only because they divorce it from their daily lives keeping theory rigidly separated from application, but the logic of the mathematics leads them and they follow. This is because mathematics treats time and space differently than any other language does, or (at present) can.
Enough about mathematics. And – 80 minutes having gone by – enough for the moment. Take a break. A light breakfast, again, and some more water and coffee.
Okay. This has been a bit more strain as I don’t have much idea where you’re going – so I’m taking it on faith.
We know. You’re pretty good at that.
(8:30) Not a very long break – just time enough for a toad in the hole – but hopefully enough refueling that I can continue. I don’t particularly want to wait.
No, go look out the window and quietly have some coffee for a few minutes. Come back at 9, say. These things have their own rhythm and you need to learn to discern and respect it or you will do your body damage as Cayce did.
All right.
(9:10 a.m.) Having obeyed the command to shave and shower, as well – as much to kill a little more time, I think, as for reasons of efficiency – here I am again. When sitting in the living room I could really see, looking at TGU’s painting of us, where I think they’re going. And I had a better sense of kinship with Cayce and Roberts.
What we attempt to convey is so simple! So simple that when we do get the sense of it across, it is as though we haven’t said anything. People’s response tends to be, “well sure and so what?” In a way that is a perfect response. In a way it is a misunderstanding – a lack of comprehension – of what we are about.
There isn’t any “there.” There isn’t any “there as opposed to your “here.” It is all here (and it is all “now,” but we’ll get to that).
Just because you’ve heard it before doesn’t mean you understood it! Just because it is a familiar sounding idea doesn’t mean you are getting what is being sent.
There isn’t any “there,” anywhere! It is all here, and this despite the fact that within a sentence, probably, if not sooner, the spatial analogies will creep back in, due to the stringencies and deficiencies of language. We are right here with you. You are right here with us. Monroe came as close as nay when he defined the difference as a difference in wave-length, allowing two “things” to be in what seems to be the same space at one time without interfering with each other or even perhaps being aware of each other.
That is a metaphor, wave-lengths, but it is close enough, and we have nothing better, so will go with it. Within that metaphor, we ask you to visualize your condition. You are here at a certain wave-length suitable to life in time-space (slowed down, it is usually said). We are here at a certain wave-length suitable to life outside of time-space – speeded up, so to speak, It is only an analogy, but a useful one. You can “speed up” we can “slow down” and – communication occurs. We aren’t sending to you from far away because we aren’t far away. We are here! Just as you are here! There is no need for you to assume that non-physical reality is somewhere “far away” despite jokes about intelligence in New Jersey, for instance. We are here; you are here. We are separated by the vibrational difference ( though – it is an analogy!) between space-time and non-space-time. It is simple. We can’t say it any simpler than that. But – can you hear it?
You see, if you live in Alberta, say, or Peru, or Hawaii – we live there. It doesn’t seem so to you because we have the ability to move else-where and else-when at will, and thus one might ask what that does to the concept of residing anywhere – the answer is, we live where you live.
Now, a definition or two. What you call The Guys Upstairs do not comprise merely all of “your” “other” lives. Your guides and helpers are of many wavelengths and it cannot be sorted out here and now (so to speak). So for the purpose of this discussion we are not going to attempt to show you the nature of such guides that are not distinctly bound to you. In fact, what we have said to this point in this paragraph is probably more misleading than not. Let us leave it at this: We wish to show you that the situation is more complicated than simply “we” are part of “you” — but cannot at this time pursue the theme. It is an important trial but, for the moment, a side-trail.
You are here (by definition) always, and where you are, we are. That you cannot always experience us does not make us cease to exist. Therefore, in a very real way, we live where you live. If you build paradise, we inhabit it with you. If you build hell, or by neglect build a wasteland, we are there with you. It cannot be otherwise, nor would we wish it to be.
Closer to the nub of things – you, in the physical, living here-and-now regardless where you think you live – that is, regardless whether you live with your attention elsewhere – you can act. You shape the physical world, and we live in the extension of the world that is beyond the physical. You injure yourselves or each other and we live with the result – in fact, we experience it in more-than-3D-realism!
Does this begin to give you an idea of why 3D Theater is important to us?
It doesn’t matter what else you have read! While you are with us, stay with us. You can always re-think and counter-think later.
The physical is the place where one can act in a way that one cannot, outside the physical. This does not mean that the physical is the only place that is “real”; it means it is the place of delayed consequences, which has its advantages and disadvantages.
We have said that your health is a ratio between your mental states and your physical states, and that mental states can be moved instantly but do not easily persist, while physical states tend to persist and cannot be moved easily. You could make the analogy between the non-physical and the physical. It is only in 3D Theater that we see the phenomenon and results of delayed consequences. But his does not mean that 3D is the only game in town, just that it is a particular and peculiar venue.
Enough for now. Proceed to your day and perhaps we will see you tomorrow.
Yes, I had tired. Tomorrow, I hope.
[Saturday, January 21, 2006]
So perhaps I should work. Disappointing yesterday that I couldn’t really get my head right to start – and I think I knew it ahead of time….
All right. We have spoken of time and space and separation and delayed consequences. All this was to lay the groundwork so that you may see more clearly that there are other ways of seeing yourselves than as individuals.
Remove separation because you remove space-time. Remove delayed consequences because you remove space-time. What do you now have? You have a situation in which it is harder to draw hard and fast – and arbitrary – boundaries between “this” and “that,” between “I” and “other.” You have a situation in which to envision is to do; yet to do is not to do anything any more permanent than had existed before it was changed. This is a very long discussion – this question of consequences without delay, and we set it aside for now, merely marking the place, as it were, so that we may concentrate on what you are like in that aspect of yourselves that is not individual and solitary.
Again – everything we say is a setting-out of at least two potential viewpoints. To see anything only one way is to force it into a strait-jacket, or rather is to force your ideas into a strait-jacket. It is not a sign of mental weakness or slovenliness to see multiple viewpoints. It is a precondition for truer understanding. Given that it is not physically possible to translate existence outside time-space into existence within time-space – that is, given that the greater cannot be comprehended by the lesser – all understanding is merely an approximation. Any view is necessarily a partial view which may be profitably complemented by other partial views from other angles. We do know that we repeat ourselves on this. We also know that merely because we repeat something several times does not mean that we are heard.
So we proceed again to five an alternate partial portrait, leaving you the task of reconciling it with other partial views of the same subject – for if you do not do the comparing and contrasting, you will merely be visiting a view, which will in no way later influence your life. To the degree that you begin to see a thing from multiple, rather than from alternate, viewpoints, your actual world will change and you will to some extent acquire mastery of what you examine.
To us you appear less as individuals made up of something solid and different than you do as hollow containers holding together many disparate threads. These threads are characteristics of all kinds. Every thing that marks you as a physical body, as an animated body, as an animal, as a human, as a ember of all the sub-categories of human, as a member of your particular clan and family, and, finally, as the particular expression of the time and place into which you were born – all these things may be seen as characteristic threads that have been gathered up within the container that you regard as “you.” Now, by this analogy – it is an analogy, remember – we mean this.
Imagine a black background, and on it, a huge number of rinds. Each ring is threaded through, and each thread connects different rings, seemingly at random. That is, a thread may pass through rings A,B,D,J,Q, and Z while a second may pass through A,J,S,T, and V, and a third may pass through only O and P and a fourth through J,S,P, et cetera. What we mean to suggest is a loose network of rings connected by threads, with each thread passing though innumerable rings but not, by far, all or even most of them. Each thread passes through many rings – but skips many. Similarly, each ring gathers many threads, but far from all or even most.
To us you in bodies are the rings, and characteristics are the threads, and to us the threads are as real and as individual as the rings. Outside time-space, you see – that is, escaping the impression of separation – there is not the same clarity of distinction between “individuals” and there is not the sense of continued flow, that space and time impart. Thus, it isn’t that we do not perceive the rings, but that we also perceive the threads. It is as if we on “our” “side” can perceive as solid and tangible something that you on “your” “side” can perceive only as abstract and theoretical. Thus to us it is permissible to say that left-handedness includes George and Sam, or that drunkenness has Bill and Charlie. This is unfamiliar to you, but after all that’s what you are seeking here, is it not, the unfamiliar way of seeing things?
When you learn to see the threads that are characteristics running between individuals, you begin to see that it is merely arbitrary to consider individuals as – individual. If what seems a “unit” cannot exist without thousands – tens of thousands – millions – of components each of which is shared with uncounted other “units” – it is as true to see that “unit” as one node in a network as it is to see it as a separate item. Either way of seeing it is somewhat correct, and either way will allow you to deal with it adequately – but neither description alone is as adequate as both descriptions together.
As your society’s environmental awareness has grown, it has begun to become evident to you, or at least to some of you, that it is as accurate to describe yourselves as sharing the same necessities like air – that is, as peripheral to the centrality of air – as to describe yourselves as central, with air being merely one of your requirements. If air can get along without you but you cannot get along without air, which has a more independent existence? If water, if food, can get along without you, but not you them, where is the primacy of the human – or rather, where is the independence? For, clearly, human activity is primary, in that it could affect and perhaps even destroy the conditions needed for its own continuation – but primacy is not the same thing and does not at all have the same meaning as independent.
A human might be described – strictly in 3D terms – as an appendage to the environmental systems that sustain life, and animal life, and finally human life. No air, no water, no relatively stringent temperature range, no chemical preconditions – no humans. That equation cannot be reversed. It is not true to say that removing humans would make impossible the conditions that allow human life.
Now, this is not a lesson in environmentalism or ecology or social science or hard science, so we ask you to return your attention to the point being made. What seem to you in time-space to be individuals – including yourselves! – do not look so separate when seen outside time-space. What seem to you in time-space merely abstractions seem a bit more solid and tangible (so to speak) outside time-space. One might say that where you see the individual rings and mostly do not see the threads except as abstractions, we see the threads as easily and as solidly as the rings.
If you will hold this image of rings and threads, it will bear fruit – if you will pardon the severely mixed metaphor.
Time for a break, we think.
Perhaps so. It’s 7:30 now. Yesterday I didn’t begin till 7 and didn’t get very far.
Faithfulness is all. What you cannot do or do not do one day you may do another.
I’m struggling, a little.
Yes you are, but look at it from another angle. You are struggling. That is, you are struggling on.
Yes. Thank you.
(8:05) All right. So where are we going with this?
The purpose of the description of the way we see things is two-fold. For one, it helps you to get a clearer image of your situation, and for another, it sets the stage for the next step.
You are mixing metaphors pretty severely today, but I’m with you. What next step? And what happened to talking about (beyond demonstrating) guidance?
The next step is to move from description to tracing consequences. And those consequences involve a description of how and why you may develop access to guidance – conscious access we mean. Perhaps we should say, more conscious access, or even ever more conscious access. For it is potentially an unending process, or a process without an endpoint, whichever phrasing and nuance you prefer.
Your conversation yesterday was with a skilled professional psychic who can read cards and tea leaves with skill sufficient to be worthwhile – yet she envies you your access. This skill has been developed in going on 20 years of off-and-on effort. You are farther along than you sometimes think. We say this not for your self-esteem, though that is always a good cause for anyone, but so that you realize more fully that what you have to say will seem elementary to you but not perhaps to your audience, whether they are readers or listeners. In other words
Sorry – wandered, lost contact. You were saying?
When you speak of guidance you are describing what has become obvious to you is an everyday reality. It no longer is a matter of questioning and believing, for you, but of experiencing and probing for ever-deeper levels. Therefore there is some danger of your losing touch with your audience unless you hold in mind the fact that you are not the novice you think yourself.
All right. It is true, this seems very natural to me now.
Then we must lay the groundwork for people to see it that way. Not everyone will be able to do it blind and trusting. Many prefer at least a tentative outline of the territory, an excuse to begin, a theoretical sketch, anyway.
Okay, why do I hear David about to chime in? At least, I think I do? What makes the difference between a subject for “the guys” and one for an individual?
Can you not even feel the difference for the first time, laddie? It is like I am a higher tension wire, isn’t it? As Joseph Smallwood’s elements are heavy, steady, and even thinking of him changes the energy. Now, you see, it’s specialization by being as much as by skill or by experience. Some “rings” as you may now begin to call yourselves are at a higher frequency than others; some are at a lower frequency. Well think, are you in a body always the same, or do you go up and down even in the course of a session, let alone a day, let alone the time it takes to write a book, let alone a lifetime! So – as you change, you are in closer resonance to first one, than another, you see?
Now by definition you’ll not find any of your gentlemen upstairs outside your range of frequencies. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist – it means you’ll not find them! If something is outside your range – it’s outside your range, unless and until you extend your range, or change it, through “accident” or illness or the result of some life decision.
You see, who you contact is not so much a matter of when or who or where or what. You in a body are the focus of all things –from your viewpoint. And of course for each of us in our time it is the same. So I, David, can come to you, Frank, only as a disembodied voice, so to speak, and at your behest or – to state it more broadly – with your consent. But it is also true – and this is the reason for changing people’s view of time and space as constraints – that you can come to me in my time only as a disembodied voice at my behest and with my consent. For my time in the body did not pass away. Did not, does not, will not, can not. Except – it does from the point of view of the relative marker that moves bodies forward. There is only one “now” and there is only one “here” – from any given point of view. It is the confusing of the relative for an absolute that causes all the conceptual problems.
If you talk to Joseph in Egypt, or Bertram, or Joseph Smallwood, or Katrina or me or the German soldier you have yet to meet, or Evangeline whom you barely know – or any of the others – each of us is at a different frequency –
Well, it would be better to say each of us, as you, averages out to a given frequency. Electrical theory is no more my field than it is yours, so we’ll both hold firmly in mind that this is but an analogy – but if you were to say that each of the millions of threads that comprise you – or that you comprise; you may look at it either way, but the former seems closer to accurate from this side – if you assume that each of those threads vibrates at a given frequency, you might say – quite unscientifically, I have no doubt – that the sum of all of them, divided by the number of them, produces an average number that you might call your particular energetic signature. It should be clear that many people will have averages close to many others – and that average may have come from individual bundles of strands that are actually quite unlike.
That is, take two individuals whose signature is, say, 12. One may have come to 12 by adding 12, 13, 11 and dividing by three – this is a vastly simplified example – and another may have 5, 19, 2, 22 and divide by four. You see? The signatures are the same, and they can communicate easily. But the components of the signatures have little or no similarity to each other.
And you might just as easily have two individuals with very similar component characteristics whose signatures yet are too different for easy communication. And you may have those where neither components nor signatures are close, and those in which both are close.
You see these combinations all the time in your everyday life. Looked at just as an amusement – for I can think of no practical purpose you would put it to – you could keep this scheme in mind as you observe your interactions with your fellows day by day. Birds of a feather – but sometimes seemingly quite different kinds of birds find themselves strongly drawn together by a magnetism both inexplicable and undeniable.
This mix-and-match feature of physical existence allows the diversity and interchange of life to be vastly greater than it would be if we were to interact – that is, if our component threads were to interact – without being held within the ring of physical-matter existence.
In fact, without physical-matter reality to hold the rings and threads in intricate relationship, there would be no interaction at all. Every thing would sort to its own vibratory level and communicate only in slow-motion, so to speak, with whatever is adjacent. The sparkle, the flash, the fireworks – the unpredictable carom shots – all would not exist, would not be possible if they hadn’t been fashioned into patterns by earth-life – by which I mean life in physical matter.
The net result is that the connections of otherwise incompatible frequencies that occur when a life is put together to be lived in matter turn our nicely stratified, even, predictable non-physical reality into a swirl like marble cake, or like a kaleidoscope continually being shaken – and we love it! For energy is eternal delight, as has been observed.
It is true that on “this side” there is no movement; it is also true that on this side there is ultimate movement. It is only a matter of perspective. Oddly enough (from your perspective) the result is the same. No movement, infinite movement; same thing.
Our hidden agenda – not very hidden! – is to send you back to books on theology. If you will disregard the rules and attend to the descriptions, much will be seen in a different, far more productive, light. Theology is your guidebook to this presently overgrown path and field. Only – don’t take it as God’s rules for you; rather, as people’s records of their own experiences, put into words as best they can. Every new generation requires translation of the works and words of their predecessors and ancestors – doubly so when we are discussing the birth of a new civilization, which means a new way of relating to what is.
Tired now.
Yes, enough for now. More later.
…8:50 a.m. I was about to see if finally I might feel like painting but realized I am feeling a slight depression, and it occurs to me, maybe because I haven’t done my accustomed work, which is coming to be a comfort to me day by day. As I write this I am aware of another train of thought running beneath, and see how impossible ever to say all we mean. So my friends maybe we should begin. What have you for me today?
A bit of advice, for one – you don’t need to begin at any given time. If you don’t feel quite awake, maybe you aren’t ready, even if on the previous day you were working before this.
I understand. And reading pointless mystery novels doesn’t help.
How can you know? It takes all sorts of things to make up a life, and you have found many valued attitudes and aptitudes as a result of reading what to many might have looked like pointless waste of time.
All right. So where were we headed?
We started by saying that when one is outside time-space, neither separation nor delayed consequences apply. Since you – we – everyone – exist part in, part out of space-time – everyone you are likely to meet while you are still in a body, we mean! – it is helpful if you realize that a vital part of your nature exists there. It will save you from the superstition of thinking you are an orphan of the universe, marooned without connection on a pointless and mysterious ride from nowhere to nowhere.
It will also make clear to you the nature of guidance as it may be experienced. And yes, of course take these entries, re-arrange them to remove our presence and put them into the book – they are meant to be the spine of the book, or anyway the part on guidance. Our deal, you will recall, is that we will provide the insight and knowledge and wisdom and you will do the work of recasting it and will accept the reward – which will follow, worry not.
So now you see your next step – and a welcome return to the composition that you enjoy and are good at. You in taking these entries will be able pretty easily to shape up the core of the guidance section, and then it is a matter of next steps for both sections – but you will have your core, your starting-place.
I do see it, at least in concept. Don’t know yet if it will actually work out all that easily. But I’ll see.
And don’t worry about taking time off if you feel so inclined. Don’t want to become a dull boy –
[Dull boy or not, this brought this long thread to an end, at least for now]