Author: Frank DeMarco

Monday, June 17, 2024

4:50 a.m. Did I have one of those dreams? [I had gone to sleep intending to have a true dream from the Gates of Horn, as will be described below.] I was expecting something like a film, a narrative, but maybe I got something more like a presentation of memories and thoughts. In the little while between finally getting up at the cat’s behest, and now, all details or even outlines are gone. But I think I’ll try again tonight. I wish I’d stop thinking Lion’s Gate (a film company) instead of Gates of Horn.

I am going to copy Jane Peranteau’s email of Saturday, as I get the feeling it is directly connected to the question of our relating to ourselves, whatever that specifically means, that you ended with yesterday.

[Seth:

[There is something that I would like you to do. During the week, before you sleep, tell yourself, if you want to, that you will have a true dream that will come from the Gates of Horn. Now that is an ancient suggestion given by the Egyptians.

[The Gates of Horn.

[I do not want to tell you what it means yet, simply to ask you to give yourselves the suggestion – those of you who want to – a true dream that will help harmonize the portions of your being. Now that is part of the suggestion. Ask for a true dream that comes from the Gates of Horn, that will help harmonize the portions of your being.

[Now such dreams will help you recognize some of your beliefs and will charge your being with energy. The class is quickening. I am giving you assignments. Some of you will follow them, and some will not.

[But the means will be here for those of you to follow who want to badly enough – I should say, goodly enough – but those of you who are willing to take the time and the energy, those assignments that you have not as yet discussed in class are important.

[It is important that you do them, whether or not they are discussed in class, though many of them will be. The time of quickening is here for many of you, so take advantage of it.

[I return you, therefore, to yourselves. And those of you who will trust…give the suggestion that I have told you…will find some excellent and even astonishing results.

[It is very important that you read the undersides of class…that you read the undersides of class…and not skim along what you think of as the surface.

[I return you therefore to the integrity that is your self, and I challenge you joyfully to recognize it!’’

[ESP Class, May 28, 1974. © R. Butts 2010]

If you want to leave this at that for the moment, that would be useful enough. Those interested would have time to make a preliminary experiment before we comment. But if you wish to continue now, that is all right too. There are always valid alternate routes toward the same goal.

Well, how about a clue or two?

You don’t quite have a way to put into words your image.

I do now, and oddly enough it is someone’s description of General William Sherman as a powerful engine with a few screws loose. Today when we say somebody has a screw loose, we mean he’s a little crazy, or at least eccentric. But I think that guy meant that the soldier who was sometimes called Old Brains had a very powerful thinking apparatus and worked under high pressure that loosened the things holding the machine together. The excess steam blew off as temper, and if it had had no way to be released might have blown the boiler. But I get that image of us as having many large component parts only loosely coupled, thus leaving great play between and among them. It is as if we are makeshifts until the connections can be tightened and tuned.

That image will do very nicely. Combine it with the underlying idea of many previously independent strands coexisting in a new unit. You can see there would be friction involved.

And the Gates of Horn exercise is designed to help aid the connections?

There are disadvantages to using mechanical analogies to describe 3D living, yet in some ways it is very appropriate, for 3D conditions by their nature require and produce rules, routines, grooves. You don’t just wing it. So it can be instructive to think of yourselves as mechanisms, so long as you do not carry the analogy too far. You are not machines; your lives are not mere cause-and-effect obedience to pre-programmed instruction. There is an element of this, but only an element. It is, once again, the difference in nature between 3D and non-3D, and you partake of both.

Looking at your lives mechanically, you could say you are packages containing ingredients that come in bundles. But it’s confusing if you let the analogy become too specific, because, for instance, the bundles have things in common that might be viewed –

I see your problem. If one life had X percent of a given trait, and another had a percent of the same trait, if you look at the total one way, it is this previous life and that one, etc., but if you look at it another way, it is this cumulative percent of this trait (adding from all strands) etc. Same reality seen from different angles.

Yes, that’s right. So the analogies should be kept loose. As usual, multiple analogies or images for the same thing brings clarity, but you need to do the thinking: What do the analogies have in common, where to they differ.

Consider your lives:

• Multiple strands contribute to the making of a new individual. But this is not stacking bricks to make a wall, it is more like finding inspiration in various models.
• A strand is not a thing, even as much as you might be seen as a “thing.” It is a pattern, a template, a set of predilections.
• Different patterns coexisting will each respond somewhat differently to inflowing energies of the changing astrological moment. (You understand, we are using “astrological moment” as shorthand for the combination of energetic conditions moment to moment.)
• How can the emerging consciousness of the new unit experience these coexisting patterns save as multiple? They are multiple. It is the individual’s task, and fate, to coordinate them well or badly by successive decisions.
• But people change. Indeed, that’s what you are there for, to change. How does change come, but by rebalancing of internal energies? We have said “putting down some strings and picking up others,” but you can see that is pretty crude. Really, change is rebalancing of relative strength.
• As you change your mind, you change your effective being. Think a moment on this statement.

Now, just as life is not about peace and quiet but about expression and growth, so your internal changes are not necessarily aimed at harmony and order. For all you know, your ideal result will be very one-sided. Balance is all well and good, but balance overall is not the same thing as balance in every part. An imbalance one way here may compensate for an imbalance another way there.

Indeed, we could almost say that imbalance is desirable for movement. Just as physical organisms move away from pain and stress, so mental – spiritual, if you will – organisms move away from what is less desirable to what is more desirable. Perhaps not the end-point but the movement is what is important at any given time.

And what is the mechanism for such readjustments? We will resume there next time. Meanwhile we encourage you to experiment with the “Gates of Horn” exercise.

Thanks as always.

 

Sunday, June 16, 2024

4:20 a.m. The year got off to a bang-up start, but now we are stalled. Some practical advice, gentlemen?

Since when do you take practical advice?

I know. Well, something theoretical, then?

Not much point in it: It would be like telling Cayce to slow down, or telling anybody stubborn to do what doesn’t match their inner nature.

Fighting fate?

There is no more one fate than there is one future. A moment’s thought should convince you of that. People have a range of fates as they have a range of futures. Not unlimited – implied in the word “range” is boundaries on either end – but wide enough to encompass all your possibilities.

I can’t become a bird, for instance, nor an athlete, nor many things prior choices and the accumulation of time have foreclosed. Doesn’t the range narrow severely as we age?

It narrows: It doesn’t quite close. But the narrowing isn’t the unfortunate necessity you are thinking of it as. It is a necessity with pleasant and unpleasant causes and effects. If you are shaping a bowl on the potter’s wheel, as you approach an aesthetically pleasing shape, your options narrow. Is this an unfortunate necessity, or merely a natural part of the creative process?

If you’ve been molding a bowl, at some point it’s too late to reshape it into a pitcher, or a teacup.

And sometimes your efforts produce failure. Not every throwing results in a success.

To put it mildly!

You could look at it as Omar the tentmaker did, as God being the potter, not you.

I’ll try to find the verse in the Rubaiyat, and enter it here it I post this.

[And suddenly one more impatient cried –

“Who is the Potter, pray, and who the Pot?”

…

None answered this; but after Silence spake

A Vessel of a more ungainly Make:

“They sneer at me for leaning all awry;

What! Did the Hand then of the Potter shake?”

 

“Why,” said another, “Some there are who tell

Of one who threatens he will toss in Hell

The luckless Pots he marred in making – Pish!

He’s a Good Fellow, and ‘twill all be well.” ]

There is no blame for failure, and perhaps the merit for success is misallocated. Your lives are more than the truncated segments you see in 3D. Even your intuitions of an afterlife are somewhat shaped by your 3D expectations. You may think one way, and still unconsciously expect another way.

The accounting won’t be based the way we think of it, you mean.

You naturally judge your lives by what you know, which is 3D data. But from beyond 3D, the picture looks different. It is something like handicapping, in racing.

You mean we take into account the invisible factors we had to contend with, as well as whatever we in 3D were aware of.

Yes, and that isn’t exactly a free pass. If we were judging your life as a separate unit (and no reason we shouldn’t, if we care to; it isn’t like a trial with consequences), we would also take into account the many supportive influences and opportunities you might have made effective and didn’t. We wouldn’t only say, “Well, let’s cut him some slack, he was contending with X, Y, and Z”

As you keep saying, we never have the data to judge.

You never have the data to make a definitive judgment. You can always make provisional ones, and in practice you usually must.

I get the sense sometimes that we re-run our lives until every option in the possible range has been examined. I go back to that image of reality as an ever-changing light-show, with everything being affected by everything else, changing as other things change.

Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence has been misunderstood, and perhaps he didn’t quite understand his own intuitive hit.

So what of us here, now? We do our best but if nothing is permanent, what’s the use?

Isn’t that the question that obsessed your early life? Didn’t you have to proceed against a background chorus saying, “useless, useless”? And don’t you know that life is impermanence – which ought to tell you that there’s nothing wrong with impermanence?

I suppose the moment-by-moment creation itself has to be the point.

You need to realize – you, meaning all of you in 3D – that the doing is real, and in a sense permanent. The having done is less real, and is certainly not permanent even as it appears more permanent than the doing.

You’re saying, the living moment is real; the record of it is less so.

Someone judging your life from the outside, as of course they would have to do from outside, would see only what was done, to the extent that there was a record of it. They wouldn’t see the cross-currents that led to the actions, but even it they could see them, they would still see only what was done, not the doing.

I read of George Marshall’s life and I read what he did and we get some intimations of why he did it, and intimation of how he conducted himself, his character pluses and minuses. But of course nobody can know what it was like to be Marshall.

No, not really. You are mysteries to each other, regardless whether you realize it. But this goes for yourselves, as well! You are to some degree a mystery to yourself, because you know only what it looks like from inside (rather than from outside as others see you), and you do not have access to the parts of yourself of which you are not conscious. How could you have? But you do the best you can, and whatever you do fits into what everyone else does, and as far as 3D vision goes, you see it as a fixed pattern, a thrown pot. From outside, looking at the never-ending eternal living present moment, it looks different. There, we’re back to the light show, and that thrown pot is only one possibility within whatever range of possibilities exists for you.

The practical upshot of this is that just as there is no use crying over spilt milk, so there is no use worrying that you’re going to spill milk. You probably will, and so what? The important thing, paradoxically enough, is less your result than your intent, because the result is a “having done,” and the intent is a “doing.”

Even though we may change intent.

The new intent will be the alive, active, enduring thing. It is paradoxical, as we said, but what seems least permanent, least tangible, is actually what is the real in your lives. The deadwood you accumulate as you live, deciding, is just that, dead wood. Outside of 3D you will not care who won Little Big Horn or Wounded Knee or whatever: Those are all “having done” situations. What you will care about is the reality of everyone concerned, none of which can be put into a historical record.

Sounds an awful lot like, “All is well, all is always well.”

It does, doesn’t it.

Noe of this addresses the storms and doldrums of our inner weather while we are experiencing the long living in 3D.

We mean this in the kindest, most helpful way: Everybody has to make his own way in the world, emotionally no less than physically. We can’t give more direct help without interfering with your life, because life is about deciding. We can and do advise. We can and do encourage this or discourage that. But it is always up to you , what your life is going to be. Nobody can live your life for you, and “living your life” is much more about perceiving and deciding than it is about anything external. When your life is over, do you think you are going to care if you kept your car washed? But you are going to care how you related to others, and – hear this! – how you related to yourself.

Is that a topic for another session?

It could be.

I think this is a good time to stop, then. Till next time, and as always, our thanks for all of this.

 

The following short transcript (very slightly edited, for smoothness) deserves a word of explanation.

Five of us met via Zoom, talked about the subject of how we as 3D individuals deal with the energy that pours into the system moment by moment, then we each did a short shamanic journey, to the background of drumming, and compared notes.

the format sort of evolved itself, but the result seems to me to be a very good tool for exploration, combining discussion,  journeying, and comparing notes.  if we were doing it in person, or had more time, there is no reason we couldn’t go through the cycle a second time, or even a third, if interest and stamina persisted.

What we call the Engineers’ Small Group discussed this issue on June 11: “With the waves of energy entering, what is the purpose? How do we discern the purpose and learn? How do we better react to the waves of energy entering the earth plane?”

when we returned from our journeys, Dirk asked, Who’d like to go first?

Peter: Well, I might go first, because  I’m not completely sure I understood the topic at all. And I think they got that. I just wrote down joyride on waves of energy entering this Earth plane. And how do we discern?  Just when it started drumming, I said, discern what?  And then I just started to write, and I got, “As you seem completely lost on where this topic is going, relax. There are, indeed, waves of energy entering the earth at various frequencies all the time. Think of how behaviors are influenced by full moons or orbits. sunspots or flares or climate changes, storms, and more. Humans do react to these. You can see a connection when you find yourself in a particular mood, for no apparent reason. Learn how to flow with it. Bring yourself back by simply allowing the feeling without judgment or emotional response. Breathe easy.

Frank:  “How do we better react to the waves of energy entering the earth? And how do we discern purpose and learn? “Openness, receptivity is all you need to ride the waves. But where you ride them is a combination of where they want to go and where you want to go, like surfing. Your choices are constricted, but they do exist, and this is the interaction of character and fate. Discernment relies upon receptivity and subsequent analysis. Self examination. The neutrality of entering energy is accurate, but for each given individual, it will not seem neutral, for it will be an interaction through the invisible filters of the individual’s habits, tastes, values, is character. Much more to be explained here, and we encourage you all to do so.

Bill: “How do we best react to the energies that flow through the universe?”

The energies are effectively neutral. How you react to them and what decisions you make based on your reaction is what determine the result. The decisions you make determine what happens next. There is no best reaction, it is your reaction that counts for you. Each decision results in another perception, which again leads to a decision. Each decision is up to you, there is no better or worse.

Jane: Answer – stop for a moment. Go neutral. What would it be like if your default position was, “All is well. . .” and you ran any event through that, any event, and trusted that this was so? What if that could become your default position, rather than, “It hurts, it’s bad”? To get there, you have to practice. Go into meditation. Create the lucid dream where something unfun happens. (Aargh, language!) See what happens when you look at it and react from, “All is well. . . ” Practice on the holodeck of your mind. Consciously rewire yourselves. You can do this. You have the tools.

Dirk: Mine went in a slightly different direction and actually echoed back Frank to some earlier things you had.

We would suggest you consider this differently. The waves of energies you feel don’t so much come from beyond (what ever you imagine that to be), as they do from the reactions of and between yourselves.

Think of it akin to the function of a transistor as an amplifier. The source energy (and earth energy) are always available to you. Your collective and individual responses act like the control signal on an amplifier, turning that up or down.  It is more complex though than that. You might think of it like a sound board of transistors each involving a single or suite of energies from source, from earth and from each of you. This is where Frank’s guys ideas about emotions being the interface comes into play. And it is how they come into play.

Most often, though by no means always, the emotions come into play with this interface augmenting, or tempering the incoming energy. When this is done in such a way that the energy turns inward, mania, depression and worse can manifest. When it is outward, all manner of group things may happen. This is what you see involved at sporting events, riots, wars, love-ins, and all manner of other mass events. And these can be concentrated, or disperse.

They had much more to say, but the drumming ended.