Non-3D influences: Three sketches

Thursday, March 1, 2012

The other night, sparked perhaps by something Facebook-related (it reminded me of high school, I think) I had absolutely crippling pain just beneath my rib cage, and my back too. Just now occurs to me, maybe I blew out a blockage at the solar plexus.

So, I joined Facebook the other day (Monday) and now have some 90 friends and we’ll see where this goes. I gather from Nancy that people go hog-wild on this, at least at first, but I don’t quite catch the excitement. I want a venue, an avenue, and maybe this could be it or part of it. I don’t need it for my social life. Guys?

Blowing out the blockage is true enough as a way to look at it. But more, you are brushing aside the cobwebbed obstacles, preparatory to doing your work in another phase. As you say, you want a venue. You are fortunate in not needing to make money – but, are you in fact free of that need? You see sometimes how thin a margin you have. Living small disguises that, but you have less margin than you sometimes think.

So I should think about making money?

When it does not interfere with your work, why not? Did you see Hemingway working for nothing? The difference between selling and selling out is where you draw the line. Emerson lectured and sold books. Should he have done so in whatever time was left over from working as a clerk?

Nancy thinks maybe the blowing out the blockage fits in with my changed attitude.

Who would have thought?

Very funny. You couldn’t find some less painful way of going about it?

This calls for some definition, if you can still quietly enough to receive it.

I suppose I can.

You will have to watch lest your view move too far outward, in reaction against a lifetime of being too inward.

All right, I see that. I’m here, so go ahead.

We didn’t do anything. We are tempted to underline both “do” and “anything,” only you’d read the words together. So we’ll put it this way. We didn’t do anything. We didn’t do anything; we didn’t do anything. Hear that. Shorthand is all well and good for speech to friends or to yourself, but it must be unpacked, as you say, if it is to bring clarity.

Thus you say you “talk to the guys,” or you “hear from the guys” or “they are pushing me to do this” or “I think they had me do X. and such.” None of these statements is or needs to be precise, provided that you really understand the reality for which they are a shortcut.

To express that reality in every conversation is impossible, obviously. So we have been giving you a vocabulary and a shared understanding so that more may be said within manageable limits. So, we can say person-group and imply all that you have learned about strands, affiliations, etc., in a phrase. We can’t express it but we imply it. Language is sequential and limited; what else can be done but pack and imply?

So. We do not do. Not in terms of choosing. You do by choosing. You, in the body, expressing what you are and choosing what you will continue to be or will cease to be or will become. (These by the way are three ways of saying the same thing).

It would be closer to say that we are. We are a continuing presence in your psyche. So if we suggest, or inspire, what is really happening is that we light up an element within you and it comes into your consciousness and then one of several things happen. (Or, really, the same thing expresses in one of several ways.) Our responsibility lies in our being responsive to your being.

Not at all clearly said, though I think I’m getting the picture.

An excellent illustration of the process! Your intellect cannot parse the information, but your being has felt the resonance.

That’s not an awful lot clearer.

It isn’t so easy. [Drawing #1.] The drawing may remind you of the connections. Many, many more complexities, of course. But conceptually this image implies all you need. Anything is available as impulse, or prompting, or resonance, or memory, or urge (which is a term that itself will require and repay some unpacking) or “stray thought.” But only the ringmaster decides!

[Drawing #2.] And this too may be illustrated to advantage. You see, as you have always been told, the inner and outer are the same. You as “individual” are the entire non-physical world, sorted and resolved into threads; also amalgamated and combined into a ring.

All influences are potentially in reach (only theoretically, though; in practice everyone has limits based on the composition of that person-group. Limitation is the purpose of physical reality, after all – only within limitation can there be choice). You – the master of the ring – decide which influences to resist and which to encourage, as with the story of the two wolves.

[The wise old man told his grandchild that he had two wolves within his chest, one that loved and one that hated, and they were always at war. The grandchild asked which wolf won, and the old man said “the one I feed.”)

Well – isn’t it clear that we don’t do anything? The most we may be said to do is reinforce aspects of yourself that may be contending. But for us to tip the balance, even, let alone say “do this” or “do that” would be to interfere with the whole point of your being in the body, which is, to shape yourself by your on-going process of choosing.

Yet it isn’t that simple.

No, it isn’t. There remains the question of what we (or you) mean when we use the word “you.” You, as in the ego-self, the ringmaster? You, as in the over-arching being of whom you were fashioned, the oversoul? You, as in what you want, feel, perceive, fear, this moment, or you as in what your highest and lowest aspects desire to make of yourself?

Nonetheless, we trust that we have cleared up that point. It isn’t “the guys upstairs” who do or choose or impel anything; we don’t even suggest or give clues, not strictly speaking. But it looks that way to you because of what we might call non-contacting influence.

[Drawing #3.] This is a way of showing that what we are may reinforce one or another part of what you are, merely (merely!) by resonance, without our intention. Intention is in the realm of the physical! Let’s repeat that for the sake of the studio audience: Intention is in the realm of the physical. You are the artist; we are the palette from which you choose colors.

This is very interesting. There is still something sort of quivering in the balance, something not yet said that is an important nuance. Or not?

The nuance would require some time to get across. In short, it is the apparent (much more than real) difference between our desiring to see you making choices in certain directions and our respect for free choice. You are right that this dichotomy is a contradiction, but as we say, it is apparent more than real. Who and what you are was decided when you were shaped and brought into birth. That is the determined element of your life. It includes your innate strongest desires and goals, and your life is among other things the living-out or betrayal of those values. You might be said to be continually deciding how much and how ardently you wish to express your truest self – and hence bring it from potential into actuality – and how much you allow yourself to be diverted from that innately known goal by distractions and temptations, among them the seven deadly sins.

By your choice among external and internal impulses, you reinforce or interfere with the process. Is in that sense that you sense our preference – for of course we wish you well in your process and cannot but regret your choosing the lesser. But it would do harm to interfere even if we were so inclined.

Now, to this as to every rule there are exceptions. Still, ponder the rule and we will get to the exceptions and other day.

Extraordinarily helpful diagrams. Thanks for them and for all.