Thursday, December 11, 2014
F: 7 a.m. Feeling a little stretched, Rita. So, missed yesterday deliberately to concentrate on Papa’s Trial. Shall we continue? I’ll glance back at the material first unless you don’t think I need to.
R: Always a good idea to give yourself a reminder on an extended topic. Some need it, some don’t. Jane Roberts, other trance mediums, didn’t need to, and in fact who knows, perhaps it would have interfered with their getting out of the way. But people who are going to be part of the on-going process, as you are, may or may not want to bolster their own confidence by taking a sneak-peek at the material.
F: Then I will. Back before you know it. [A fast look.] But, I see I hardly have the energy to absorb anything. Maybe just as well. So, over to you.
R: You will notice, Michael [Langevin]’s suggestion that you try for something tangible that could be proven does not appeal to you.
F: No. And I’ll explain when I transcribe. [Michael suggested I ask Rita for information that she would know and we would not until we checked, as a demonstration that it was really her I was in contact with.]
R: There is a reason why it doesn’t appeal, and it is more than a matter of lack of self-confidence. It is a terrible example to set, to set oneself up to be judged on anything but the intrinsic resonance of the material for this or that individual. You’ll notice this resonance subject came up in your comment to the TMI Explorers list.
It is important for beginners to build their own – shall we call it “provisional confidence”? You have to try it, treating it as if confident of the process and result, then let it sit and go back and judge later. As you have told people in groups [such as Guidelines programs], information received is usually going to appear to be from yourself while you are receiving it; if you try to judge too soon, you are likely to dismiss valid material without weighing it properly, because of how the process felt to you. it is only later that you will be able to have enough distance on it. Well, setting yourself up to produce verifiable material “or else” only puts you under more pressure and increases the temptation to abandon the whole process. That’s one objection. A deeper objection is that it results in your trying to direct the process from your end rather than accepting what comes through.
F: Well, I don’t know – how different is that from our asking questions? Doesn’t that direct the process?
R: There’s a subtle difference. Asking for information on a given topic isn’t the same as asking for information that will provide confirmation. The one is asking for the sake of knowing, the other is asking for the sake of demonstrating.
F: Can’t say I really see the difference. I’d love to know from you or from anybody where my lost set of keys is.
R: No doubt. And if this were only a product of your subconscious mind, the information would surely be there, would it not?
F: The whole thing is a mystery to me. I concluded long ago that there is a knack or orientation that others may have but I don’t, that might produce such things.
R: Pray to St. Anthony.
F: It’s funny you should mention that; my friend Michael Grosso mentioned that practice – in a different context – the other day. How different is the tradition of praying for assistance from a saint, on the one hand, and seeking assistance from any other disembodied source”
R: The difference would be in the person making the request, of course. Whatever you believe it, it will tend to work, or at least work better.
F: This has taken us far afield.
R: Has it?
F: Well, come to think of it, it was you that mentioned Michael’s suggestion.
R: And you who made a semi-conscious decision to glance at your emails before opening the journal. You would not have seen the message otherwise, and it might have been more difficult to steer the subject this way.
F: Proceed, I’m listening.
R: It is a simple everyday example of the fact that individuals are individuals only so far. At a deeper level, that both is and is not a valid way to look at it.
Jung saw an individual consciousness surrounded by the unconscious. In other words, what we are aware of in the body is like a flame, a small flame like a candle flame, in the middle of a great external darkness. At least, that’s how the exterior appears to the flame, relatively darker. “Flame” is not a bad analogy, if you will bring the image to mind. The boundaries and shape of a flame are ever-changing, and it doesn’t look the same very long at a time. Even disregarding its coming into existence and its being snuffed out, its lifetime is perpetual change with an overall continuing identity.
F: A flame. Not a bad analogy for a consciousness in body.
R: But when you look to see what is outside the flame, it gets more interesting. Jung’s thought was of conscious minds as a more or less stable thing sitting atop the things in their lives that had not come to the conscious mind’s attention, or had fallen out by inattention, or had been repressed for whatever reason, and beneath the personal layer, deeper connections such as family, ethnicity, race, humanity and still broader connection to other parts of reality, but parts too far removed from the immediate problem of the living to be explored in his short lifetime. (That is, any one lifetime is short.)
But let us change the analogy and see the individual as one flame, say sitting on a twig of a campfire. Maybe the fire has a hundred such flames. They could all be considered part of the greater flame or could be looked at individually as a hundred twigs burning.
Either way, you will see that the flames at some level are the result of the conditions for fire: heat, air, and fuel. So, although the flame could be considered only in itself, to do so without remaining aware of the conditions of its existence is to misinterpret what you see. A flame is the twig is it burning; is the air it is transforming; is (because equally dependent upon) the heat beneath which it cannot operate.
So it there an individual flame at all? Even taking that campfire as one thing – which is another arbitrary division – can it be said to exist in and of itself? Only if you disregard the air, fuel and heat that are absolutely a part of its existence. But how often do flames think to include twigs in their genealogy?
F: I’d add, how often are they even aware of them, being concentrated as they are on flame-dom, fire-hood.
R: That’s right. That’s the point. It is all well and good to assent intellectually to the proposition that all is one, and the individual is a convenient fiction – as the guys told us – or a provisional hypothesis. It is a more emotionally stable thing to have an image such as a fame, to bring the idea home.
And this is the direction we must go. Is it any wonder that materialists can’t see how the individual survives the conditions of death? The flame has no more twig to burn! There may or may not be air and heat, but the twig is demonstrably gone! So how can life continue?
F: That’s very striking. It gives me for the first time the emotional sense behind the idea of death as the end. That may not be news to others, but I never quite saw that before.
R: Yes, because it hasn’t occurred to them that the heat is provided not by physical conditions of existence but what we have been calling non-physical. Heat, and air both. But we’ll get to that later. You will notice that when Nancy [Ford] asked about physical and non-physical, she got the word and concept “density,” and that – although an entirely different analogy – gives the sense of it very well. Again, a continuum, not an either/or.
F: Well, as Car Talk used to say, we’ve done it again, we’ve wasted a perfectly good hour –
R: We’re ready to waste another, whenever you make the opportunity for us.
F: That reminds me, here’s an idea. You, Rita, will be familiar with the idea of cross-correspondences. Why couldn’t we bring your material forth that way – centering on the TMI Explorers list, say – and thus bring it quicker, with less wear and tear on one particular scribe, and in the process providing a real demonstration of what you’re talking about.
R: The only obstacles to such a process would be among you individualists. (A smile.)
If you can persuade yourselves it is possible, and
If you allow yourselves to think yourself inherently worthy, and
If you take the results as provisionally true – that is, neither Gospel nor evident fraud or error –
You may surprise yourselves.
F: Well, I’m willing if anyone else is. I guess we’ll see. Thanks, Rita. More another time.