Saturday, September 15, 2018
4 a.m. All right, guys, you’re up. More on Joseph and Bertram and Frank as one thing?
You keep receiving hints, as when Hemingway was quietly amused when you were speculating over a past-life relationship with him. Or course he could not give you a straight answer. How could a straight answer be given, when the answer was too wildly different from the background assumptions, and any answer at all could only mislead? It isn’t the kind of question to pursue as an “Oh, by the way” sort of thing.
And, I get, a neither impersonal nor strictly personal relationship.
None of our relationships is either personal or impersonal. That’s what is hard for people oriented in 3D to understand. We have been telling you that for decades, now, and although you do have the idea, the idea can always be understood at deeper levels. Outside of the artificial situation created by 3D conditions, individuality as you are accustomed to thinking of it does not exist. That doesn’t mean “the mind you are” ceases to exist; you do not become like the sea that swallows the wave. But it also does not mean that you are as individual as you experience yourselves in 3D – and you never were.
This is a sort of halfway world, you are hinting at, one with fluid boundaries that are nonetheless boundaries.
Remember, it isn’t that things in non-3D are so much different than they were in 3D, only that they may seem so. The 3D world continually reinforces its impressions of separation – in time, in space, between minds as between bodies, between now and then or when, as Bob Monroe put it in that tape you liked to listen to. That is, between perceived past, present, future.
Here – in the realer (because less bounded, less artificially separate) world, it is meaningless to say “how many,” and even, to a large degree, to ask “who.” Rita was told right away, number and individuality was not the same. But “not the same” doesn’t mean non-existent. And it is the difficulty of not jumping to one or the other extreme of the polarity that keeps you from experiencing this ambiguous state of affairs.
And if you cannot realize it easily about non-3D, how much harder to realize that it is true within 3D! Yet it should be obvious that it must be so. Reality doesn’t have compartments.
So, on a day by day basis, you assume that you are one being. After all, that’s what your bodies tell you, isn’t it. Only – why is it that your bodies also tell you that you are incomplete? Why is it that neither living single nor living mated do you feel entirely at ease? Why, for instance, do you need friends? Why do you sometimes meet instant friends, instant antagonists, instant lovers? Why are you drawn to want to help certain people – or they you – for reasons that may be beyond either of you? And this doesn’t even touch the question of blood relationship.
But if your bodies tell you that you are not the absolute units you may think yourselves, your experience of “your own” minds tell you even more loudly and clear. You may have different voices in your head, or different complexes (call them) coexisting and taking their turn at the wheel. You experience different “moods,” accepting each in turn as reality even though they contradict each other. You see the point.
Yes, our concepts of who and what we are overrule our experience.
Only – be careful. Neither extreme position in the polarity is accurate. The polarity itself is accurate. You are individuals; you are a collection of many; at the same time, that doesn’t mean that your collection excludes what it does not include.
That sentence makes more sense than it ought to.
Only because you are – temporarily? – living above the contradiction, and are seeing the continuity. In another moment, perhaps it will seem to be nonsense contradicting itself.
So, if you are neither individual nor undifferentiated community, even in 3D, how much more so in non-3D where the illusions of separation are not existing. Only, what does it mean?
Are you not in the process of explaining how Joseph and Bertram and Frank can be part of one thing even though separated in time and space?
Not “part of” one thing. One thing.
I can’t seem to get that.
This is more elusive than usual, because not only is sequential language inadequate and misleading (in that it is the product of prior assumptions, if nothing else), but so is logic and your sense of possibility. How can something be singular and plural at the same time, depending upon how viewed? How can a relationship be both exclusive and porous? What – in such case – does relationship even mean?
I do admire how you stack up the difficulties to be considered, so that we see them in advance.
It would do no good to bring you to a partial view by ignoring difficulties, only to then have to break down the new understandings. We prefer to try for larger movements of thought, even if each larger step is more difficult than many smaller steps would have been, considered one by one.
Well, that way of working suits me, which I suppose is why you chose it.
Is why we chose you. Only, look at “we” and “you” in these sentences and see the unexamined assumptions they contain.
In a part of my mind I keep remembering that “you” are a part of “me.” It can be hard to remember, given that you are also not me as I ordinarily experience myself.
Or, more accurately, as you used to experience yourself.
Yes, that’s true. and it is the changing how we experience ourselves that is the work to be done, isn’t it?
Always. It is the only work there is.
Care to elaborate on why?
Because you – each and all and any of you – already contain the universe! You are all everything, only you are separated from the realization of it by various ideas, experiences, emotions, prejudices. You are the universe; the universe is embodied in you, no matter who you are. This is no reason to become inflated, because it is as true of the drunk in the gutter, and the psychopath or sociopath who is ruining things for others, or the hopelessly insane, or mentally defective, as for anybody else – but it is true, and could hardly be a more important statement.
You mean, I think, “The sky’s the limit.”
In the sense you mean it, yes. More literally, there are no limits save those you accept. The universe does not have absolute boundaries or separations. However, intellectual acceptance is not the same thing as removing limits. Life is more intricate than that.
Still, as we change who we experience ourselves to be, the world we live in changes, in effect.
In effect. And all anyone can do for anyone else – in 3D or out of it – is suggest and encourage. If it could be done more directly, it would be not assistance but interference.
All right. So, sticking with three of us being one thing –
Start at the other end and look at it as one thing manifesting itself as three. It will give you a better sense of the reality of it, of how it is possible.
Interesting. So it does. I suppose because it begins by taking the unity rather than the multiplicity for granted.
And here we should pause, even though not yet an hour. More next time.
All right. Many thanks as always.