Nathaniel & co.: All is well? Really?

Sunday, October 1, 2017

6:15 a.m. We as 3D beings may be receiving different-colored input (so to speak), as well as coloring it ourselves?

You are part of a process, not only the result of a process. Creation isn’t finished, and creation isn’t something that was done to you, so to speak. It is something done with you, and is forever being done with you, not merely to you. Remember this, if you can.

As I was writing that, I got an image of people watching television, passively receiving input.

That may be how it seems to them, and it may be how it seems to you, but in reality even “passive” is active, in a sense. You might as well describe plants in a garden as being passive to input like water. Receiving is transforming, conscious or not.

I think I’ve gotten that, but you’re going to want to expand upon it, I think.

Of course. The point is that it isn’t really possible for you (that is, for anyone) to remain unaffected by anything that flows through you. Even an active decision not to be changed would be a change, you see.

The resolution would itself be a change from a prior state.

Even if it were a continuing resolution, yes, it represents an effect of an interaction.

Moral of story, be careful what you allow in as input?

Well, that could be a long subject if we followed it out. After all, what you choose to allow in can’t exactly be said to be random. But yes, you need to choose as much by what you won’t consider as by what you consider and decide upon. The point at the moment, though, is that you are never inert recipients; you are by nature, and inevitably, creators. That one particular aspect that you attribute to your God or gods is the one single descriptor that best includes all humans. Creators. But creation is not merely a matter of imagination, of focused thought, any more than it is of skilled hands, or channeled willpower. It is your essence, your continued and uninterrupted and uninterruptable effect upon the world around you and within you. Every moment, you create by what you are. You are creating your flower, remember; you are creating a habit-system (your mind); you are molding the possibilities of the present moment in the context of past moments and future moments. And of course it all proceeds in a broader context – past lives, other versions, interactions with all the parts of your Sam, and so on  and so forth.

I don’t know, that sounds kind of high-flying. Too mystical to still have any practical meaning, almost.

Oh do you think so? Then you tell me (so to speak) the meaning of uncounted lives that last maybe 10 or 15 years in the middle of some African war-zone, or in semi-starvation somewhere in Asia, or in meaningless drudgery in middle America. We are not here referring to poverty or suffering or even a sense of ennui or depressed frustration, though there are plenty of exemplars of those. But, in general, how do you make sense of the world if you think (implicitly, as you often do) that the measure of a life is what one does with it?

All is well, then? Is that why you can say all is well? Because no matter how miserable a life people may have, it is a creation somehow?

You see, we just pushed a button you didn’t quite realize was still wired up.

You certainly did, I take it deliberately.

Well, we aren’t sorry to have done so. the more you are aware of, the larger your options, as you know.

I put it, if it’s unconscious it controls you, and if you make it conscious, you control it.

It comes to the same thing. It is always well to have compassion for others and to do what you can for those who touch your life. But it is a hasty person who concludes that life is poorly designed because the world is full of suffering and – an even more common, if unconscious reason – because the world does not conform to our expectations of it, or our desires for it. Here’s an experiment: Why don’t you do something to prevent the slave trade of the 17th century? Or, why not prevent the Roman Republic from degenerating into the Roman Empire? Or stop the Opium War of 1842? Those are all worthy causes, and your ability to affect them is exactly the same as your ability to affect things halfway around the world today.

Between the lines, I get, “unless your life calls you that way.”

Well, unless your life brings you there, or brings them to you, yes. Explain.

They aren’t saying don’t help when you can; they’re saying don’t confuse feeling bad over a situation with actually doing something to help, and don’t spend your life feeling guilty that you are leading your life instead of somebody else’s. I get that the people who formed the anti-slavery society, for instance, were doing something that came to them, or they were finding a way to affect something that was affecting them. This isn’t a contradiction to what they’re saying, but an illustration of it.

That’s right. If you are called to a crusade, all right. But if you are called to every crusade, well – not only do practical objections arise, but what you are doing with your self-creation is not perhaps what you think you are doing. Look, all paths are good; we aren’t saying, “don’t do that, it’s futile,” any more than we would say, “don’t do that, you’ll make God mad at you.” We are saying what you decide will be what you do, and what you do (internally as well as externally) will be what you are. And it is “what you are” that ultimately will count.

But there is a larger point to be made, and a more difficult one, that is closer to our central concern. Life is good, no matter what it looks like to you. Human life on earth in 2017 is not mostly a failure, no matter how it looks to you. Your political and social and economic and ecological troubles – not to mention the huge spiritual vortex stirring up everything, ramping up the intensity of all conflicts, and not merely in the United States – all of this could tempt you to say, all is obviously not well. We are doomed. The injustice of the world is suffocating us all.

Here’s the thing: Can you hold that thought and feeling – which is not wrong – and still realize that all is well because all is always well?

I think people would be glad if you could help them with it.

We can, probably making them angry in the process because it involves associating two lines of thought that they typically are careful to keep separate, even if they shuttle from one to the other several times a minute.

Exaggeration for effect, I take it.

Not much of one. On the one hand, follow the news, with its unending serial of disaster upon problem upon intractable conflict. You mostly do it all the time, scarcely even noticing. Studying it in history isn’t all that much different from allowing it to flow through you via television or computer or gossip. Even sagas of heroism, altruism, even success stories, take place against a background of on-going train wrecks. Or, if you prefer to believe in the existing state of affairs as desirable, you see it as a past record of achievement now being threatened by the forces of (the left, or the right, depending upon your villain of choice). Either way, this half of your mind is pretty firmly mounted in a setting of on-going unfairness, stupidity, incompetence, malice and – in general – a throwing-away of all good possibilities, and unnecessarily.

True enough. That has been my experience since Nov. 22, 1963.

Certainly. You compare what did happen with what you think might have happened, or should have, could have happened, and it all looks like waste.

It does.

So you understand that half of the dilemma, the half that looks around and says all is certainly not well, and anybody who thinks so is blind or stone-hearted. And by nature and on faith you nonetheless hold to the conviction that somehow all is well, regardless.

I hold to it, I feel it, but I certainly can’t explain it or even defend it.

And, unlike many, you are able to hold both incompatibles at the same time. Do you know why?

I do since you just conveyed it. (At least I imagine that’s what just happened.) It’s because I got “all is well” not from somebody else, either first-hand or second-hand, but from essence. The guys flowed it through me, telling Rita in 2001, and I never doubted it, even if, as you point out, it is incompatible with everything else I know.

That is where we can go next, then. How can both be true, and what does that tell us about those vast impersonal energies flowing through you, which we remind you is our main focus at the moment.

Okay, thanks. And I think it does help for you to announce the next episode of our on-going serial at the end of each one. It helped this morning, anyway.

That was the idea.

Okay. Till next time.