TGU — Nobody needs help

Monday, August 27, 2018

4:45 a.m. Okay, guys, we haven’t talked in a while. I got the prod a few minutes ago, and I’m certainly willing. Your move, and if you don’t have anything, I do. But – your move.

It is important for you to note publicly that you are as prone as anybody else to depression, a feeling of wasting time, a sense that life has passed you by and continues to pass you by. You aren’t famous but you are somewhat known for your ability to connect and your willingness to teach and encourage others to do so – all the more reason to remind people that this particular asset or knack or secret is not the magic wand that miraculously makes your problems disappear.

I can do that. But acknowledging it in public – not for the first time – doesn’t necessarily do anything to help me.

Nor do you need help.

I beg your pardon?

Nobody needs help, ever.

I think you will find that concept to be a hard sell.

Experience and reflection will demonstrate otherwise. It’s all a matter of viewpoint. “Everybody needs help sometimes” is the same thing as “nobody needs help especially.”

Did I add that “especially,” or did you? That is, is it what you meant or did I modify your message?

Both, in a way. You are all – we are all – standing on our own two feet, 3D or non-3D. Nobody is a helpless or disabled or inadequate being, considered in and of itself. Yet everybody at some stage of life would have been entirely unable to exist without assistance, if only as an infant. What is true physically is true – is even more true – psychologically, despite appearances.

So, hark back to high school years – that is, teenage years. Everyone regardless of how well they could fit in with the crowd would like to – feel an urge to, a need to – do so. It is a time of being massively other-directed. So, for those who cannot fit in, it may be intensely painful. For those who do, it may be a time of extreme insecurity. It is never a time of being comfortable in one’s skin as other stages may be. Too many things are changing; too few things may be counted on, and inexperience provides too few ways to judge what may or may not be counted on.

In those years, one’s attention is drawn to the self and the herd, regardless of whether one is “in” or “out” or on the fringe. Later in life, regardless how one lives it, such a question tends to be taken for granted, as experience has shown what position is comfortable for any given individual. Other problems take priority, successively.

As you mention this, I am remembering, for the first time in a long time, the span of my own life that was my 30s, when entirely new problems and preoccupations replaced those of my 20s, which had replaced those of my teen years. And I suppose that a little introspection would remind me how my platform and my problems changed, decade by decade. There is less continuity seen in my internal life than I usually assume, I guess.

Everyone’s life has an arc of development. But we need to remind you – and by “you” we mean, anyone reading this or hearing about it: Nobody is capable of judging anybody else’s life, for the same reason that leaves you unable to accurately judge your own.

“We never have the data.”

Yes, but that means more than perhaps you have realized to date. It isn’t just “you don’t realize everything that was involved in the things that happened.” It is also “you don’t know the overall arc of development; that is, you don’t know the kind of things that may be supposed to happen to develop the theme that is that life.”

Are we edging back toward predestination?

No, and not toward free will either. We have said more than once that what looks to you in 3D as an either-or choice only looks that way because 3D conditions tend to push your mental apprehensions and perceptions into dualism. If everything has to become an either-or because your mental processing persists in seeing it so, then the essential unity of a process or situation will be seen as “this part” v. “that part.” It is a condition of life in duality, not a description of life as it really is.

Now, it is always good to offer assistance to another (though never good to force assistance), but the fact that one is offering and the other is (or is not) receiving says nothing about their relative independence, their relative

I got it (though I can’t find the word you/we were groping for). The image that came was the young Dalai Lama needing assistance to escape from the hands of the conquering Chinese in 1958 or ’59, whenever it was. He needed the assistance; that didn’t say anything about the level of being of the Dalai Lama vis a vis his CIA assistance or even the authorities who let him set up his government in Dharmsala. But doesn’t this cut against what you said a few minutes ago, “nobody needs help, ever”?

It cuts against one interpretation of what we said, which is why the analogy, or rather the historical example. But the statement stands, depending (as so often) on the question of, “Which you?”

You as a 3D individual in a given moment may well require assistance. (And, it will be supplied, recognized or not.) But you as an All-D part of a larger, mostly unperceived individual, cannot want, cannot be unprovided for, cannot be isolated or lost or in error.

The thought that comes to me I will record mostly because experience shows me that stray thoughts are not as stray as they may seem. As I was writing what you were saying, I thought, that’s what Jesus meant about us being as well provided for by God as are the sparrows or the lilies of the field.

When you see scripture that apparently contradicts your everyday experience, it is well to reconsider the meaning of both. Obviously people do starve, they go unprovided-for. And of course Jesus recognized this in reminding people that the way to honor him was to be charitable to those in need. But he wasn’t setting up a social service agency, nor a charitable enterprise. He was concentrating on opening up to people their deeper possibilities, not merely patching up their external circumstances.

In the larger sense, nobody needs help ever. In the immediate 3D sense, anyone may need help at any time. These are not contradictory statements and they do not describe contradictory aspects of reality. If you do not understand this, you don’t understand much that we have to say.

You are cribbing from Thoreau now.

We are cribbing from your cache of things read and absorbed. But a choice of example does not determine nor alter the things being demonstrated.

So give us something practical to help in moments of discouragement.

More practical than showing you the way it is?

Well, you know. something tangible for people to cling to. Or, not cling to (that sounds desperate) but, to remember.

The very first thing that changed your life was the vision that had, as its refrain, “You are not alone,” in a landscape in which no one else was visible. If you keep that in mind, as a symbol perhaps of the fact that you, yourself, are more than you know or can know, it should be all you need. Your life need not disappoint you.

Thoreau again. He said something like, don’t call your life hard names. It is better than you are.

He knew a thing or two. And he had the constant temptation to compare his fate to his friend and townsman Emerson, who was famous in two countries.

Point taken. We never know.

Nor do you ever need to.

Okay. Well, thanks for all this. Till next time.