Which you?

Friday, January 10, 2018

5:15 a.m. All right, friends. I have been busy editing the book I’m thinking of as Only Somewhat Real, comprising our conversations from September through November. But in so doing, I have lost the thread of any current conversations. I’ll glance back, but I hope you have something in mind.

You don’t need to continually entertain your friends, nor we you. So don’t take on that kind of pressure.

Well, we’re always interested in learning more, and I can’t imagine you running out of things to tell us.

No, but there is a difference between idle curiosity and what we might call directed curiosity. It is one thing to tune into your computers and view things at random, another to have a purpose in mind.

I have been assuming you wouldn’t run short of purpose!

Yes, but that is confusing roles! Your specialty is focus, ours is access.

That doesn’t seem to square with experience.

Sure it does. You just aren’t recognizing it. Sometimes, in 3D, your purpose is seen in what you’re open to, what you’re interested in. So, you might not have a specific question or even a specific area of questions, and yet your life orients you to a certain form of questioning. We are always happy to oblige, but it is up to you to pose the subject of inquiry. Only, as usual –

“Which you?”

Correct. And it should scarcely be necessary to add that this is not a problem or condition peculiar to any one individual, but to 3D focuses-of-awareness in general.

It seems a little circular – except, as I begin to write this, I get one of those “!” moments.

No reason your whole life can’t be a string of aha moments, if you choose it to be. It’s up to you.

A decision, on our part?

A choice of attitudes, let’s say. You can choose to be perpetually interested, perpetually astonished or let’s say suddenly better understanding of something previously seen.

Sounds like my friend Dirk.

Only it need not be connected to science, or metaphysics, or for that matter religion or art or genetics or carpentry – to carry the illustration to an extreme. It is in how you choose the world to be for you, or – same thing – how you choose to encounter the world.

Sounds like our theme for the morning.

It can be, let’s see. It depends more on your sustained interest than on our available information, obviously.

Well, you say “obviously,” but until you did, it wasn’t necessarily obvious. But sure, I can see that now. We on the 3D end aren’t likely to exhaust your knowledge on a given subject, but we can easily hare off in some other direction.

As can we, and it will not necessarily be obvious which end of the barbell fell first, ours or yours.

Glad you didn’t say dumbbell, which I suppose is sometimes closer to the truth.

In any case, the insight you had –

Let’s see if I can remember what it was.

Just start, even if you have to repeat a sentence to prime the pump.

You said it was up to us to choose what to ask about, only as usual, that begged the question “which you” of us, meaning, A1, A2, A3? And I said it seemed a little circular, thinking that we extend from 3D into non-3D, so we’re asking ourselves. And maybe that was the “aha,” or more like an “of course.” We are always on both sides of the equation. In a sense (perhaps I should write it “in essence,” just as accurately) we are always talking to ourselves.

It does clarify some things, does it not?

You know what it clarifies chiefly? All the perplexities one goes through, or may go through, as to whether “I’m just making this up.”

Of course. And like every “aha,” once stated it looks more like a routine statement of fact than an earth-shaking revelation. That’s how you know you have absorbed it.

Interesting way to think about the process.

Well, if you are still in awe of a thought – and your life can give you examples of when you have been in awe of a thought – it’s a sign that it’s still “other” to you.

So – I guess this shouldn’t be any big deal, but it certainly took me long enough to get here. All the perplexities of learning to deal with The Big Computer In The Sky (so to speak) are because of our society’s way of thinking about things, rather than anything intrinsic in the way the world is set up.

You knew that, in other compartments of your mind. What happened in your “aha” moment is that you established or recognized a link between two sets of ideas that hadn’t functioned together before that.

I’ve even taught people how to connect, but even though I have said we’re all one thing, in practice I have taught it as if it were a matter of clearing our reception and of recognizing our ability to engage in two-way radio traffic. Implied, but mostly only implied, is the fact that we’re on both ends of the conversation. When people experience that fact, they tend to assume it means that they aren’t yet doing it right!

You will continue to find that the simplest things keep coming back to reveal unsuspected ramifications. If you let them.

Okay, so then, where did the impetus and steering of any of the conversations that have become our books come from? If I experience Rita as coming forth day by day for six months, and again later for another period of several weeks, isn’t it Rita? Is it me pretending to myself to be Rita?

Are you pretending to yourself to be the people reading and responding to these conversations, including those you haven’t met?

Hmm. Good answer. Okay, so –

So don’t forget one end of a polarity because you’re concentrating on the other end. Yes, you’re on both sides of the conversation; no, you aren’t the only one on the line.

Another way to think of the temporary joint mind!

Yes. You might say your mind and Rita’s ran together, and leave it at that. Beyond a certain point, definitions may decrease understanding, by decreasing fluidity.

Abraham Lincoln’s stepmother said that her mind “what there was of it” and his seemed to naturally run together. Same sense of it, I take it.

A continuing theme with us – which is another way of saying, with you – is that this is your experience of everyday life, reconceptualized. There is nothing “woo woo,” as you say, in seeing the world straight, and any given “aha” moment ought to line up with your own everyday experience. In fact, we might almost say that is a definition of an “aha”: a recognition that an abstract relationship has been experienced in other contexts.

Going back over this – a few pages ago you said we could choose our attitude toward the world. But that still begs the question of “which you.”

And every question will. How can you avoid it? The way forward isn’t to worry the question but to be aware of it. And of course the more willing you are to express the full “you” – the fullest “you” you can access in a given moment – the less the question will matter. After all, if you decide to travel to China, will it matter in practice how you came to the decision? How much of the impetus came from 3D-you, how much from non-3D you? And if you begin examining even more closely, how much from this strand, how much from that? From this “past life,” from that one? How much because vast impersonal forces blew through the pan-pipe just at that moment, coinciding with impulses let loose by astrologically influenced alignments? You can get lost in such investigation. (And, if that’s what you choose to do, who’s to say you shouldn’t? Maybe it is your path or part of your path to pursue such speculations. Only, know that this too is a choice.)

Really, I’m getting somewhat like you-all. Every spot leads off in many tempting directions, and it’s a job to keep to any one train of thought.

That’s the inherent structure of your habit-patterns (your preferred mode of operation): It is why you are an INTP or INFP and not an INTJ or INFJ. [Myers-Briggs categories: P for perception, J for judging.] You leave things open. Not so good a trait for an executive, but a very useful trait for a pioneer, a wanderer.

I tacked on “a wanderer” lest pioneer seem inflated. I did catch myself doing that.

Which “you” did that?

Very funny. Anything else at the moment?

No, that’s your hour. A good place to pause, recognizing that all life is merely places to pause, places to resume.

Thanks for all of this.