Author: Frank DeMarco

Wednesday, May 8, 2019

You have seen us using words like soul and spirit that many people in your day shy away from.

Your time will transcend religious, and anti- and non-religious, thought. “Your time” does not mean the next ten minutes, nor ten years, but you are in process. As the inner lives of those in the 1000s in Europe are not the same quality as yours, so neither will that of your linear descendants be. But this does not mean that you will be going into entirely uncharted waters, nor that you will be moving in oscillation to the past. New, but familiar. Familiar, but not identical.

We will live in knowledge, rather than belief, that we are part of something greater than our 3D selves.

If you will begin to apply one insight, things will gradually begin to clarify for you, and that is this: Life, even specifically human life, does not center in 3D.

And, I take it, you propose to set out for us what that means in practice.

Obviously if it were clear upon our first stating it, it couldn’t be very new, nor so very important. So if human life does not center in 3D, where does it center? And, in what way can we say it does not center where you are, as it seems to?

And that is what religious thought centers on, isn’t it, when it is not setting out rules and splitting logical hairs.

It will be a prime mistake and an unproductive diversion, to give in to the temptation to criticize religion. Remove the beam from your own eyes first, as is said. However, you are not wrong to see that the central concern of churches (also of philosophies) is the question of where the center of human life is. It seems clearly bounded: birth, life in its stages, death. This is the life you seem to see all around you, this is the appearance you perceive, and it is tempting to conclude that if there’s one thing 3D life demonstrates, it is that physical life is limited.

I would have said, our lives show us that there is an inner life to match the outer. What that inner life amounts to is debated, but I don’t know of anybody who actually denies that we experience it.

The perceived limits to physical existence (your outer world) tempt people to conclude that the inner world is equally limited. Some think the inner is dependent on the outer, some don’t, but in any case people tend to work from the assumption that the 3D world is the center of life.

If the 3D life we lead is not primary – if the center is elsewhere – why are we so fixated on things of the flesh? Sex, for instance. As I write that I feel that it is prompted, so, explain please.

You experience inner life and outer. Some think they are unconnected, some think connected only somewhat, some think they are the same thing perceived one through essence (through direct feed), one through personality (through the senses). Say it’s so. Then what happens to the inner world when the outer world goes away? You think you have addressed this in Awakening from the 3D World, but you haven’t.

The 3D body dies. What further connection can you have to the 3D world? Yet, you do have such connections. What are ghosts, what are lost spirits who don’t realize they are dead, or spirits reluctant or unable to “move on” after the death of the 3D body, if not a person’s inner world maintaining a distorted connection with the outer world? Yet if it is possible for this to happen, clearly the inner world cannot depend upon the outer (else they would vanish) but neither is it self-directed in the way that seems obvious.

We established, years ago, that the inner world is created by elements from beyond the 3D. The larger being is clearly not centered in 3D, and we are each extensions of it.

Then act like it!

What do religions teach, if not that humans are created by, and part of, something antecedent to and greater than themselves? The fact that they then differ on different aspects of that larger reality does not change the fact that this is the nub of religious life. So let us take that seriously, and many things will change in the world that no longer recognizes religion as the proper way to go about maintaining the relationship.

Tuesday, May 7, 2019

When we think of the 3D  as a dream, we don’t usually think in terms of galaxies and nebulae and all that as being ephemeral. But they would have to be, of course. Given that you probably prompted the thoughts, you want to take off on it?

Yes. As a general rule it is important periodically to go back and connect ideas that have been kept in separate buckets. Some ideas won’t be reconciled, but it’s worthwhile to find your inconsistencies. Other ideas may shed light upon one another, and this is all to the good. Not everything even within one context will automatically sort itself out. You will need to do some work at it – but it is very productive work.

So reincarnation and quantum mechanics and evolution and coincidence theory and the concerns of everyday life, and consultations with the guys – it is all input, it is all data, it all provides clues. Or (same data, different way of looking at it) it is all sand in the gears, all confusion twice compounded. But even confusion twice compounded may be turned to account! There isn’t any such thing as bad luck or dead ends except in a context that expects or demands certain results that the universe declines to provide.

A factor that comes to the forefront is the disparity between the temporal limits of 3D life and the lack of such limits outside of 3D. Life in the world v. the afterlife; time v. eternity. And (so you won’t have to say it), Eternity is a word meaning not “a very long time,” but outside of time, superior to time, existing in a dimension beyond time.

This is a religious question. We have been bringing you along for years to get you to the point where you can consider religious questions as religious questions, without falling into reflexive dismissal or (most unlikely) retreat into sectarian dogma.

We would have you connect to religious thought as it has been expressed over the centuries. There is no use pretending that things that millions of people have believed over thousands of years are obviously ridiculous, or fatuous, or superstitious. Any given teaching may be any of these things, but that is true of any avenue of thought. If you will not mesh your own metaphysics with religious teachings through the ages, you cannot progress toward truth beyond a certain point. Judging how far a given teaching differs from where you begin, and condemning it proportionate to the extent of the difference, isn’t coordinating and it certainly isn’t learning. It is merely reinforcing one’s own prejudice. No one is as impartial as he thinks himself, it is merely that he defines his position as the rational, reasonable center. But to become aware of a defect is to begin to see how to overcome it.

No one is impartial, because that would require a lack of preference that is impossible in 3D conditions. But one may be partial without hating what one does not extend to. (One can love one’s country without hating or fearing foreigners. ) To move to another level of understanding, you must to some degree sacrifice your comfort with your religious (or anti-religious) preferences. The world is wider than your idea of it. When we advise you to begin to absorb religious tenets, we are easily misunderstood. Perhaps we should begin by detailing what we do not mean.

Religions are compounded of a view of reality, and prescribed rules of conduct. Not the same thing. Are we agreed?

Of course. The Catholic Church held certain views that did not have to result in all its rules. Some of them were (are?) arbitrary. If there is a God with certain attributes and expectations, it does not necessarily follow that one should not eat meat on Friday.

And does it necessarily follow that one need follow the ten commandments, even if one remembers them?

I expect you are about to tell me.

No, we are not. We’re making a different point entirely. Our point here is, Don’t go picking and choosing among a church’s rules and prohibitions. Some may be arbitrary, some may stem from a misinterpretation of reality, some may have become inappropriate through changes in human condition, some may have served validly to distinguish a sect from its neighbors but had no greater purpose.

Well, by that token, I can’t see that we can pick among their tenets, either. One religion will pick one aspect of divinity (whatever `divinity’ may mean) and another a different, perhaps contradictory, aspect. Islam centers on submission to fate. Christianity, on living in love. Judaism, on living up to a compact with God. Manicheism, on living in a dualistic world. And so on.

True enough, but as soon as a church springs up, it has to minister to people of many different levels of development, with different needs, different responses. Codes of law emerge, and direct experience with the divine (again, whatever that is) may become exceedingly rare, and may be actively discouraged. And, as with any human institution – as you have often pointed out – politics soon enters, and compromise. All these factors will affect any religion, even before one considers corruption, or hypocrisy, or any of the human failings that inevitably infect any human endeavor. Scientists in their organizations follow the same pattern. So do politicians, mathematicians, professionals, club members – anything. It is just human nature.

So, no picking and choosing among a given church’s prohibitions.

It is deeper than that. You yourself can’t exist in a church. You can’t regress to living by belief in the same way you did. While it is true that your knowledge will always be limited, thus leaving you living in faith de facto, the word “faith” needs looking at, to sort out confusion among meanings. Faith cannot be mandated. You cannot just say “I am going to believe” and that’s that. It can look like you can, but it is closer to abandoning resistance to faith. You see the point?

Sometimes life pushes you to a conclusion that you don’t want to come to. You fight it tooth and nail until you are too tired, and when you give in, you wonder why you weren’t able to do so long before. I take it that is what you mean by abandoning resistance.

Surely you can see that this is a very different psychological process from willing yourself to believe. Until recently, most people who could not live by faith wound up living what you might call “faith in nothingness” or “faith in absence of meaning.” They couldn’t have faith in God or their religion, but they couldn’t live without faith either, so they transferred it to other things – to chance, to Evolution, to Progress, to the coming revolution, whatever. It’s still living in faith, if you do or don’t know what you have faith in. Some believe that their faith is in Knowledge. But this is a dangerous pitfall. Beware of making idols of abstractions. Your task is to learn to live in a very different kind of faith. Perhaps we should say, living in trust. They sound similar but are very different.

I’d say it’s the difference between talking to someone in the non-3D only if you can call it a name and identify it as a person, or talking to TGU and instead of asking for bona fides, taking what comes and then trying to weigh it.

A very good analogy.

I am not in the same state of calm focused concentration I was in when I returned from Egypt. Time to return to that state. In general, I feel I have been sloppy and undisciplined. More than that, wasting my life, still without a clue. How can this be?

How do you expect to justify your life?

Is that the right question?

It is. What makes you cling to the idea that lives can be, should be, must be, justified? Your life is your experience, and it is whatever it turns out to be, without your needing to judge it. What you did not create, you cannot fully understand. What you cannot understand, you cannot fairly judge. How do you know – how should you know – what your score would be on the great cosmic scoreboard?

If you feel that you are wasting your life, shouldn’t that feeling count as evidence? If you get advice from your guys upstairs, and don’t follow it, shouldn’t that indicate that you might be doing better things than in fact you are doing?

Nobody dies content with what they have lived, perhaps. Their own opinion of the life they lived may not be the only way to see it, though.

We don’t seem to be talking about the same things. The pattern of my life is to want to do great things and not really try to do them, and feel dissatisfied that I do not, yet be unable to use that dissatisfaction I feel.

Maybe you aren’t doing what you think you are doing.

Look, I’m not talking about external achievement, here. I’m thinking more of my internal life.

And we are pointing out that internal and external are more matters of viewpoint than different realities. Caesar’s life was enormously significant for the world, but it was at least as significant for himself! Do you think Caesar had accomplished everything he wanted to accomplish?

You continue to revert to what seems to me to be a focus on external. The real question would be, was he satisfied with the choices he had made as to what to be?

Would you like to ask him?

I have no confidence that I could. What links can I have with him? Oh, my admiration for him, I suppose, as with Lincoln.

Plus, facilitation from the non-3D may be available at this moment that is not available at every moment.

Well, I guess we can try this entre nous. I don’t think I’ll be sending it out!

Why not? Do you not tell people to discern for themselves?

I guess we can try. If it wouldn’t sound flippant, I would say Hail Caesar. If that much-admired man is willing to speak, I am certainly willing to listen.

You labor under a mistake if you think the dead and yourselves speak as one island to another. There are endless chains of connections, link by link. How would Caesar move people still, if there were not? After you are no longer in 3D, you remain as a link to all those whom you valued. If they wish to reach Abraham Lincoln or John F. Kennedy or Ernest Hemingway or Caesar, your established habit-pattern would serve. And this is true for everyone, of course. Plato, for instance, Sophocles, Homer. Their influence has spread enormously over the years, because generation after generation has forged links of affection, admiration, identification with them and their works. After a time the external works are less important than their function as conduits.

Another aspect of the “All is one” and “Everything is alive” that I had not considered.

There are always more connections to be made, as older connections are better seated and absorbed.

I’m getting the suspicion, suddenly, that people like me who read widely in history and biography may serve as connectors. I hadn’t looked at it like that.

Someone suffused in the world of science or of sports or of any given pastime, trivial or otherwise, serves as a node. This is one of the invisible things people accomplish merely by living.

Caesar serves as an enormously wide node.

In Caesar’s sphere. No one embodies all the arts and sciences, and no one connects closely to everyone or everything. However, it is true that one’s significance may broaden after death, depending upon how others make use of the connection. Lincoln, for instance, would have been unrecognizable to the 3D Lincoln, yet the transformed legend is not untrue to the man as he was.

Let’s talk about Caesar, unless you prefer to talk about something else. When your consciousness connected with your larger being after you died, what can you tell us of where you were?

A sudden death is convenient, but it is also a shock, you understand. So what you ask may not be exactly what you want to know.

Tell us whatever is appropriate, then.

Inherent in the nature of the man Caesar was dissatisfaction. Omar Khayyam was not yet born, but his sentiment about wishing to remold the scheme of things entire expresses Caesar’s nature perfectly.

[From the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, quatrain 88:

“Ah Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire,
Would not we shatter it to bits – and then
Re-mold it nearer to the heart’s desire!”]

You were awake among so many stupid people!

You have said yourself, in the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is regarded as an hallucinated lunatic. The same may be said of a man half-awake.

From what I know of your life, you had enormous charisma, which I take to be the result of an integrated personality. But how did you appear to yourself?

Clear-sighted. I could see situations not only from my own vantage point but, you might say, as they were, in and of themselves. Few others could do that. Politics is the art of seeing events from the point of view of what can and cannot be done: at any given moment, and in the short term, and in the longer term. It repays the ability to see, to understand what you have seen, and to act upon that understanding.

But what is politics? At one level, a game played by the ambitious. At another, a struggle among interests, those interests being represented by the ambitious. At another level, but rarely very consciously, an attempt to reconcile forces so as to produce a desirable result. Therefore, political success may come either to the most ruthless, or the cleverest, or the clearest-sighted, or the person moving in the direction that events are trending. To put that last another way, the person whose personal ambition and vision enables him to see openings that others do not.

As in your conquest of Gaul followed by extending Roman citizenship to them, which resulted in extending the republic to the Atlantic without thereby incorporating a nation of embittered rebels.

Yes, a good example. It required thinking of citizenship in a different way. To Caesar’s opponents, it was an opportunistic perversion of an historical right. To Caesar, it was a practical measure.

You saw yourself as clear-sighted, commonsensical.

I did.

And would you say so now?

Why should I not? If I pursued visions others could not grasp, why would that make me other than methodical and commonsensical in my approach to them?

So when you died, what was your summing–up?

Here you may envision a shrug of the shoulders. I had succeeded in some things, I had failed in others. I had lived as fully as I could, had tasted pleasures and absorbed responsibilities and had amassed deeds I was proud of and deeds I was ashamed of. How it is different for anyone?

No sense of gnawing incompletion, such as the projected invasion of Parthia?

Do you expect to die with no unfinished business? But you will find that you see things differently when you are freed from so many constrictions in your viewpoint.

I sense that we have scarcely begun, whatever it is that we are beginning.

Only move with confidence. You don’t know the shape of your life, who ever does? You don’t even know the date of your death, which is the first thing people after you will know about you, and your view of your life is always prospective while that of others will be retrospective, so how can you expect to see it clearly? On the other hand, you can see, looking back, that your lives do make sense, so, your life makes sense. So, move confidently.

 

Gentlemen, you said something that struck me:

[“The better you deal with your own demons, the greater the effect you may have on society. It isn’t a matter of social position, but of effectiveness. Herman Hesse made no attempt at a political career, but had a much greater effect upon world thought and culture after he went into analysis with Jung than before. In freeing his will from his karma (so to speak) he vastly increased his effectiveness as a writer, which was only a side-effect of increased effectiveness as a man.”]

Although I think I know what you mean by “freeing his will from his karma,” I get the feeling there’s more to be seen.

Here is a simple way to put it. One way to see any individual is as a society of other lives, many previous individuals getting to know each other more intimately. They are cohabiting a new structure (you) rather than being the new structure, as when they were containers themselves.

That is, after I die, if I return to 3D life, it will be as a strand in some new 3D individual.

Although that description contains a few distortions, it is close enough to be serviceable.

Now, you all know from personal experience that you are born with (and need to learn to deal with) contradictions within yourself. No one is born an empty slate. Everyone is born with patterns of inner behavior built into the structure.

We are born with certain automatic reaction-patterns – the equivalent of instincts, in a way – and what we are born with obviously can’t be caused by events and our reaction to choices that haven’t yet been made. Our life is the intermingling of whatever traits comprise us. If they all fit together harmoniously, we will have one kind of temperament. If they don’t, we’ll have a different temperament.

In a way you could say that an individual’s karma is formed of

• the unfinished business of its strands, plus
• the results of the interaction of its strands.

This forms patterns of automatic behaviors, which interacts with events. (Remember, this is all “in a way.” It isn’t exact, it’s a pointer.)

You are a personality, interacting with a world that you experience as “external.” The personality is not exactly you, it is more like a ratio between you and your life in the world. Your personality expresses your internal tendencies in various circumstances.

This is one reason to choose your associates, your media-driven mental environment, your aspirations. To be conscious is to choose rather than drift, and choosing is done within limits, which are, initially, the baggage you bring into your life by who your strands were. That initial pattern may be called your karma. It is a valuable resource and a source of difficulties, depending on what is happening.

But you are not helpless, here, if you choose not to be. Herman Hesse, in analysis, learned how to make what was unconscious (and hence out of his control), conscious (and hence malleable). In learning who he was, he gained the freedom to choose rather than be buffeted by the winds. And haven’t we been stressing the duty and value of choosing, from the beginning?

The more you gain control of unconscious forces within you, the wider your areas of choice; the freer you are to choose to be this rather than that. We have talked about this in terms of values, but it is at least equally true in terms of personal evolution. And your own personal evolution cannot be separated from any larger abstraction like “humanity as a whole,” or “the greater good,” or whatever.

Your personal task is always conducted within the context of everything you are connected to, which, if you look at it widely enough, is everything.

 

You said, “At different times, your mind forms a differently charged field, attracting different potential and thus effectively living in a different world.” I feel like I almost understand this statement as it stands, only, not really.

It’s simple enough. Spatially-oriented analogies leave the unnoticed impression of being more solid, more permanent, less volatile, than the reality. Beyond limitations, analogies often have unnoticed tendencies to distortion, and every once in a while it is well to have them corrected. Thinking of yourselves as charged fields will lead you to associations more dynamic, more transient, and just as effective and transformative as thinking in terms of physical movement. The idea of a polarizing or attracting electrical field will tend to have you thinking of attraction from various directions, directions that may change often and rapidly, rather than the somewhat straight-line movement other analogies suggest.

The field changes, and as it changes attracts different kinds of things, not merely different samples of the same kind of thing. And the very vagueness of my description here ought to show that I don’t really have a handle on any of it, just an inkling.

But you were moved to ask about it, so you aren’t exactly in the dark. More like in the twilight.

Leading me to think of the movie “Twilight,” and the fact that it did reminds me that our detours are as meaningful as our pursuits of an idea or an argument.

The interruption caused by using the word “twilight” served to illustrate a natural process of the mind. But, be slow to decide the implications of this. Give us time to explain without your pre-judging. Pre-judgment will result in your needing to revise your judgment or – much more seriously – will result in your being unable to receive what does not fit in with what you will have decided. (This is what prejudice does, after all; it defends against revision.) If you think of things one way, certain conclusions will suggest themselves so strongly as to be seemingly self-evident. Think of them another way, or a third, and what is self-evident may be entirely different. So it is important not to create unnecessary obstacles for yourselves.

First, here is our statement. Try to receive it neutrally.

As you process life moment by moment, your mind functions as a charged field, attracting certain objects of attention.

• The mind attracts certain kinds of thing, and the kind, as well as the specific content, can vary from moment to moment.
• Through interaction, the thing received and the mental state that had received it will alter. The mind will go on to the next “thing.”
• An uncontrolled process (“monkey mind”) will produce a long chain of associations without direction or purpose. The person living in monkey mind may have a very active mental life, but the mind’s contributions to the life would be mere chatter, sometimes entertaining, sometimes annoying, sometimes maddening, sometimes neutral, but in no case directed by the 3D consciousness.
• The 3D consciousness experiences the monkey mind in the same way it experiences the “external” world, as something that “just happens” for reasons and purposes unknown, by mechanisms unknown. The 3D person may seem to be a consumer, or a prisoner.
• Any day’s consciousness is a chain that diverges, slowly or immediately, as you choose among the bright shiny objects that present themselves. If you train yourself to think high thoughts, or to think low thoughts, the paths you choose in terms of relatively free association are going to be quite different!
• A word about “monkey mind.” There is nothing wrong with the mind functioning as an association-machine. That is how you get ideas, how you move into new territory. The “wrong” is in using a hammer as a screwdriver, or in letting a high-powered car drive itself. You are there to drive it. Do so.

Which means, I take it, choose what the association-machine chews on.

Well, in practice, isn’t that what you do, directly or indirectly? If you choose a movie or a book, or you meditate or go for a walk in soothing circumstances or surround yourself with raucous music, are you not providing alternate beginning-points for chains of association? Only, it may be done more consciously or less, and it is to your advantage to make it “more.”

Anything that gives us more control of the starting-point, or the volume-control, or the on-off switch, indirectly gives us more control of how we experience the external world, because the external world and our magnetized inner world are the same thing. Hence meditation is not a goal but a halfway house.

Clearing the mind is one thing. Trying to live with it empty would be another. Similarly, learning to recognize the association-machine is one thing. Trying to function without it would be another.

So, it isn’t a matter of “our” affecting “your” mental processes. We don’t force any card on you. Often we say, in effect, “Choose this thought; the resulting chain is better for you,” but nobody can choose for you. That is what you are in 3D to do.

Now perhaps you can see that your choosing is not among paths of action, but (usually) among paths of association of ideas. It is about what you want to attract to yourself.

If we choose different paths of mental association, the “external” world we magnetize to will be different. Just as Thoreau said in Walden: “I learned … that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him … and he will live with the license of a higher order of being.”

Yes, only now you have a way to see why it should be so.