Straightening out concepts

Monday, July 23, 2018

12:15 a.m. An image of a hand politely knocking on the door – knock, knock – and I am awake and ready to go. Of course, given that I slept much of yesterday, I’m not exactly sleep-deprived. Okay, guys, the separate-but-connected eternal life of strands.

In a while. You’re jumping the gun, here.

So it wasn’t you?

We’re smiling. Ironic question, given the topic. Get some more sleep and come back to it.

Well, okay. I thought it was a clear summons.

1:25. Well, it’s disorienting. I guess I was dreaming, thinking I was journaling it. Gone now. I think still wearing the sleeve I use to stop my arm from sticking to the desk set up a physical memory that led me to think I was journaling. Funny feeling. Anyway, let’s resume.

You won’t remember, probably, but the process of your coming to the strands theory was not as straightforward as you think. In fact, the process was a mixture of us and you, as is almost always the case except in trance channeling, and even to an extent there, we could say, for the information still has to come through the channels the mind’s familiar processes will have set up.

That is, in trance channeling, the 3D conscious mind does not participate in the way it does during ILC or during ordinary consciousness in its less well perceived aspects. Still, it is the structure through which information flows. Thus Cayce’s information is couched in archaic Biblical language, and Jane Roberts’ material is still bounded somewhat by what she could admit, and by what was a natural trajectory, one might say. As a side note, the fact that she and Rob and Seth were friends before Jane and Robs’ physical 3D lives smoothed connection considerably, as did your prior association with Rita.

By contrast to trance channeling, your ILC practice involves the active participation of the conscious 3D mind, which is an advantage and a drawback. OT1H, you can increase the clarity if only by objecting that something is not clear. OTOH, as you know, there is always the question of whether this or that element has been added by you, slightly or greatly altering the meaning we intended. You have become pretty good at watching for this, but of course it is always going to be a problem.

The problem is particularly acute when the information is farthest from your expected or familiar understandings. And the concept of strands is a good example of such a problem.

I don’t feel we are making things very clear, here.

Stick with it. It will clarify. You will notice that clarity usually increases as we get better into the flow.

So, we wanted to explain to you and to Rita – this was in 2001, you remember, near the beginning of your joint explorations – that, and how, you in 3D are not what you assumed yourselves to be. Not individual, not separate. We began by saying that to us, the connections between separated units appear as obvious as the units.

You used the analogy of the threads in a tapestry, I think. On the front side – the 3D side – color appears as different non-connected dots. But this is matched by the threads on the reverse – the non-3D – side, connecting the dots that appear on the obverse.

That’s right. And we encouraged you, assisted you, to paint the painting illustrating the concept, only by then the concept had subtly changed, and now we were talking about the 3D individual as the dot and past-life connections being the invisible connecting threads.

I remember.

And at first you were taking the threads to be individual characteristics such as red hair or bad temper or artistic disposition, with the individuals being, in a sense, strung along the threads of all the traits.

Yes. I got that we comprise millions of such threads, not all of which are, or ever could be, active. Our choice as to which of them to activate is what shapes our life.

And this idea shaped your ideas about life in general, and after a time you grew dissatisfied with it and began to consider each past life – rather than the traits each might have – as the threads.

I have been alternating between the two concepts, haven’t I?

You have been silently wavering, yes, and the usual reluctance to make a firm decision has served you well, because it prevented you from deciding that a base camp must be – would have to be – the destination.

So now we are going to redefine not only the distinction between traits and what we might call 3D units – “past lives” to you, and also present lives – but between the elements of a given 3D life and the group nature of that same life.

The latter being the insight or the beginning, anyway, that I got early yesterday morning. Separate but connected eternal life.

Let us begin by straightening out the confusion between choices of traits and inheritance of lives.

Itself a clarification. Very illuminating way to put it.

Less so, without explanation, to those who can only read the words rather than getting it directly.

All right. So, choice of traits: Yes, each of you comprises millions of potential choice points and millions of predetermined choices, many of which may be re-chosen, that is, reconsidered and altered. Your physical characteristics are not quite as stubborn as you might think, but in practice, stubborn enough that you may take them as irreversible. People don’t usually change the color of their eyes, say, or their height or body type. However, examples of people whose eyes do change color, in connection with multiple personalities, may demonstrate the point, not central here, that, as we say, things are a bit more fluid than they commonly seem.

Among those millions of traits are many that are subject to change by choice. So, by careful training, by willpower, by established habit, by selection of environment, one may become more what one wishes to be and less what one begins as, in certain categories, particularly mental and emotional, though expressing as behavioral. This is all true, but not the point here.

The difference between you as a 3D unit and you as a 3D community is what we wish to focus on, at the moment, and this bears on the insight that came to you in a moment of clarity.

Inheritance of lives, you called it a moment ago.

Yes, and here we redefine what you understand in one way, to show you that you must also understand it in another way. Not this instead of that, but this and that.

The “this” is the concept of your 3D existence as a ring holding together strands each of which was a life. As we told you in those earlier sessions, your choices in this life determine to what extent one or another strand expresses. You form who you are going to wind up being by your choices as you go along. By now this concept should appear natural, even obvious, but it wasn’t always so. At one point it represented a major readjustment.

The “that” is the concept you came to yesterday, that we have never expressed till now, which is that each strand that was a 3D life continues to be a 3D life even though contained within another life as one strand.

And that is a big redefinition.

It is, but we have scarcely begun to spell it out or even clarify it. That can wait till next time. It has taken till now to clear the shrubbery, as you like to say, so that we can see the ground we’re going to work. We will continue next time.

Okay, well, thanks for this. Till then.