TGU — Scaffolding and base camps

Friday, July 20, 2018

3 a.m. Gentlemen, you were going to be redefining our ideas on the nature of the guys upstairs.

Perhaps we should begin with you laying out your current understanding of the situation.

All right. Well, I have had the impression that I in 3D extend to the non-3D as well, and that the non-3D parts of me constitute part of my guys upstairs. Clearly any part of myself that is the rest of my All-D totality cannot be alienated from me. Whether that constitutes what some call our guardian angel or not, I’ve never felt a need to decide. But in addition, I gather that anybody whose nature I resonate to, in whole or in part, may be accessible to me temporarily or for all I know permanently, depending on how deep the resonance and how essential [that is, of the essence].

Then, I was told that all my blood relatives are part of my guys, and past lives – though that concept seems to keep fluctuating – and I guess anybody that anybody I resonate to has as their own guys upstairs. The way I’ve seen it, that means that pretty soon you’d have to say that in effect I connect to everybody, and everybody else also extends to everybody, so – as you’ve told us more than once – we’re all one thing.

All right, that will serve as a jumping-off place. You will agree that your previous mental world experienced quite an expansion by these ideas.

Oh yes. It seemed to make much more sense than anything I’d been taught before.

Cleared up a lot of perplexities.

Oh yes.

Reinterpreted things you had heard, to make sense of them, and introduced ideas that were entirely new to you that also made sense.

You know they did.

Scaffolding, nonetheless. Anything you or anyone can ever learn in 3D is scaffolding, though. You realize this.

Abstractly. I think I get it in reality, but I suppose there isn’t any way to use scaffolding that doesn’t at least in part rely on believing that it is truer than just a provisional way to see things.

Perhaps we should change the analogy, and think of staging camps [I decided later, they meant base camps] on the way up a mountain. You hike and climb and gain new perspectives at the cost of lengthening the distance from your source of supplies. If you are on a long enough climb, you establish staging camps, where you can rest and bring up more supplies (or really, where you can walk into a nourishing situation prepared for you in advance), so that you may proceed again when you are able. Nobody in his right mind would come to a new staging camp and complain that it was not (what it had never pretended to be) the ultimate destination. They would be glad for the assistance – for their salvation, sometimes, if they were at the end of their resources – and would leave off climbing until they had recuperated, even if their rest was only brief. This is only an analogy, but perhaps it is a somewhat less stiff and static analogy than scaffolding, which was less discouraging than previous ones.

I can’t tell you when it was, but I remember being at such a staging-place some years ago, and you guys (or your stand-ins) telling me that if I wished to leave it at that for this lifetime, I could.

And you said no, let’s push on, and we were pleased, and as you see, by pushing on we pretty thoroughly redefined what you had thought you knew. And another time, previously, you had said, “I think I’ll pause,” and we did that. It’s all in what you’re willing to do.

All right, so now this latest opportunity to push on comes courtesy of your Mind Mirror experience, you see.

I see that it’s so; I don’t yet see why or how it’s so.

That experience firmed up your understanding of the situation emotionally, we should almost say, as well as intellectually. Another way to say the same thing: It changed you. But a better, more careful and ultimately more descriptive way of saying it: Different parts of your compound being were activated, or rather, the entire equation was rewritten. And this in turn not only allows but mandates changes in how you experience the world physically, mentally, spiritually, emotionally, because the very “you” of you is not the same.

I’m not with you yet, but I’m following. Go on.

A born-again Christian, a materialistic deterministic scientific atheist, a mainstream Christian, a practicing Hindu, a Hassidic Jew, a secular or socialist or devout Muslim, a Western modern living without religion but without a strong anti-religious bias (the potential combinations are endless): Can they all live in the same world? It is hard enough for them to live in the physical world together when they are pushed closely enough into proximity – but can they live in the same mental world? Surely not.

I guess we tacitly assume that our non-3D components take a broader view of things than our 3D personalities that are shaped by our genetic and social surroundings.

Yes, but this is only fuzzy thinking on your part. Could a devout practitioner of Shinto really live in the same mental world as you?

Presumably he can live there Upstairs, considering that his past lives may include any or all of the others.

Well, here you begin to bump into the results and causes of cognitive dissonance. And it is going to take a while to sort through.

Are we suddenly embarked upon yet another book?

Whether you collect it or not is of les interest to us than that you absorb and process it, a la Dion Fortune’s character saying that she came to enter an idea into the mind of man, and that is done not by talking about it but by living it.

But in any case this isn’t a detour nor a short day-trip.

Not unless you get tired or scared and decide to return to your familiar campfire. If you do – for a while or for the rest of your life – there is no penalty nor any implied or express criticism involved. It truly is up to you.

Well, I’ll tell you the penalty that would be involved: I’d know that I had chosen to stop exploring.

It needn’t mean that. A pause is not permanent until you run out of time to continue.

I have become a little too concerned with the problem of getting the message out, haven’t I?

These are your criticisms, not ours.

But I mean, it diverted my focus.

No, we’d say it diverted your idea of your focus. But maybe what you have in mind isn’t what your larger pattern has in mind. If we had to choose between you continuing to explore silently and alone, or you ceasing to explore in order to clarify and expound upon what you have come to so far, why should we have a preference? It’s up to you, and what you don’t do, someone else will do differently, but that doesn’t mean better or less good, only different.

Well, I say let’s keep going, and I’ll do what I can to keep at least a cadre of like-minded souls with me if possible.

Even Jesus didn’t try to change the world by changing the world, remember. He changed a few people he lived among, and they changed others who changed others. None of those successive ripples of change came from what anybody said, particularly; it was what they radiated, what they were. Jesus didn’t have to do prime-time TV. He worked in a remote corner of the Roman Empire, for only a few years. Wrote no books. Founded no movement. Organized no protest. But what he was, overflowed, and changed everything.

Today his prospective publishers would tell him he needed a platform if they were going to take him on.

But you see, that is precisely the mental barrier you have allowed to be constructed ahead of you. You say to yourself, “The road to the success of my message is barred until I become a salesman.” So in other words, the structure of the book-selling part of your society is holding up the message the non-3D wants to put out. Does that make sense, put that way?

No, not really.

When you saw that the electronics validated the idea that you were actually doing something, and not (as you sometimes still suspected) “just making it up,” it consolidated the ground you had covered all these years. Now you can start living without another layer of apologizing.

That won’t be clear to anybody. I know what you mean. I was working on Rita intuitively, continuously saying, “I don’t know why I am move to do this or that,” and when she told me to stop apologizing, it began to flow much more freely. You’re saying my own improved level of confidence will improve what I can bring through.

Well, that and something you haven’t yet considered. It will also improve your level of confidence in the things you – not we – know. That in turn smooths the way for further advances, because it means we have less doubt to overcome, or, let’s say, we can deal with you while you are on firmer footing.

It has been an hour, but now I’m wondering why I shouldn’t be able to just continue. If I’m merely in an alpha state and I can stay there basically all the time, why shouldn’t I be able to emulate Swedenborg and write on and on?

If you wish to skip the transcription stage, or defer it to later in the day, probably you can.

Well, let’s see. Let’s go back to “cognitive dissonance.”

We referred to the fact that at some point our new information is going to conflict with what you have become accustomed to, and that may cause difficulties for you.

And I get, mostly if I try to tie things up prematurely.

That’s right. We have warned of the pitfall of tacking new material on to an accustomed framework and forcing it to fit. Ultimately, reality doesn’t contradict itself, but at any given moment it may seem to, and if you let the fear of contradictions overwhelm the new insight, things go badly.

I also get that the farther ahead we push, the greater the reluctance to give up what we think we know, hence the greater the temptation to add new material to an unchanged structure rather than to reevaluate the structure.

We wouldn’t say temptation. It’s more like a scarcely evitable process. That’s why it is so difficult to preserve, or regain, Beginner’s Mind, and why alternation of exploration and consolidation is necessary. At some point it becomes practically impossible – that is, impossible to practice – to keep adding material to a previous position. At some point – to violently change the analogy – you need to tap the kaleidoscope and see it all anew. And it is difficult to do this while on the march.

Is the next stage, then, you reinventing the wheel for us?

Maybe it is for us to divert you from the wheel to the airplane, or from 3D to non-3D, or from relativity to magic, or from what you know to what you think you know is not so.

Eighty minutes, and we haven’t really begun to redefine the concept of the guys upstairs.

Which is to say, “We haven’t really begun to tack on some new ideas to our comfortable existing structure.”

Ouch. Okay. But maybe we ought to quit here. I don’t think it is staying in alpha that is the source of fatigue. Maybe it is as simple as dragging the pen all this way.

But it is only 12 1/2 pages. Swedenborg would have been just hitting his stride, and in Latin!

Very funny. Okay, well, we’ll see where this takes us. It’s always fun talking to you. Till next time.