From The Sea Priestess, p. 201:
There is more than one kind of truth. A thing that does not exist in our three-dimensional world may exist in the fourth dimension and be real in its way.
Mind on mind
From The Sea Priestess, pp. 296-8:
And in the dusk, when the moonlight fell on the wood-smoke, we saw, or thought we saw, the shadowy figure formulating; we built it out of our imagination in the shadows as one sees faces in the fire, as Morgan had taught, and to our eyes it took on life and spoke, for we were not imaging a phantasy, but the shadow of the real, and the real came down and ensouled it. Thus, I think, have the gods always manifested to their worshippers
…and though we knew his form was such stuff as dreams are made of, there came through that form the touch of mind on mind and that was the thing that counted, and no one who felt it could think that he was hallucinated.
… As for me, I would sooner have that sense of the touch of mind on mind, with its tremendously stimulating influence, than any amount of objective evidence.
A deepening
Whoever you are, you are not so much accustomed to words, are you? Yet, you are coming through my mind; why does that not command the language I know?
[A long pause. At least, it seemed long. Less than a minute, I suppose.]
That was quite an experience. The response I got was a deepening of communication, in a few waves of difference, as if my mind settled, bit by bit, into a deeper, calmer place. And this wasn’t during the reaction, or because of the reaction. It was the reaction. Whoever I am in communication with is well beyond words, and needs my access to words if it is going to communicate at all.
That is much better. Can you see how your assumption that you were talking to a human mind – or an ex-human mind, as you like to say – absolutely interfered with the communication process? Absolutely interfered, and, carried farther, might have absolutely prevented.
You are nearing a fundamental transformation of your understanding of the process, if you are open to it and do not prefer to halt at the relatively stable place you have come to.
No, actually, I look forward to it.
Only somewhat real
Very well. So, from a mind that has never been human, you cannot expect a human slant on things, even though the words and concepts have to come through yours. Remember, always, that you are in the process. Any communication to humans must have a human intermediary, obviously. This affords opportunities for mistranslation of concepts, but without it, there is no medium of transmission. And of course in speaking to humans, the recipients themselves are equally sources of misunderstanding, mishearing, even deliberate refusal to understand or to hear.
Yes, that’s clear enough.
It is clear, but it is almost immediately forgotten as soon as heard. So, try to bear it in mind.
I’m not writing scripture, I get that.
Oh, but you are! What is scripture but human attempts to convey messages? Any serious and relatively successful attempt to communicate is of the same nature as scripture. However, don’t take that to be elevating you in stature; take it to be reminding you and your readers not to elevate scripture to a level it cannot sustain.
“You do the best you can,” Bob Monroe said. I think he was trying to say something of what you’re implying here, that all communication involves distortion because it is a translation from one set of conditions to another.
Almost from one reality to another. Not quite, but almost. And it requires great patience, practice, sincerity and even a form of recklessness. All of which you have been practicing for as long as John Tettemer was a monk.
I take it that is encouragement for any who are impelled to take the same road.
They don’t necessarily require encouragement, but some may find it there.
Now listen, for time is short in the remainder of this session. You have been told that your life as experienced is only somewhat real. This is because your life as you are experiencing it is deeper, with stronger cross-currents, than a mere conflict of compound-beings. You got the idea: Try to express it.
We see history as it affects us, so it becomes a matter of individuals, such as MacArthur and Wilson and Roosevelt and Hemingway and John F. Kennedy and Churchill and Robert Henri, and W.B. Yeats and so on. And to us, this is reality. It combines the external world we experience, even at second-hand, and the inner world we construct or experience as we cooperate in shaping our ideas of what is going on. But a deeper level of reality involves the same events, the same individuals, but experiences them as forces, as – I don’t know how to put it. As manifestations, I suppose.
Try not to stop there, but continue, for when you return you will not be in the same place.
In a real sense, our 3D lives may be seen at different levels of reality, and our accustomed way of seeing them is relatively superficial. All the deadly forces that run through us, as well as the living forces too, could be said to live their own lives through us. No, that doesn’t get it.
Try!
If you were a playwright, you might try to express certain ideas. You would have to clothe the ideas in characters, and express them in conflict and interaction of the characters. There would be no other way to do it.
Perhaps not “no other way,” but continue.
It would be the interplay of forces that concerned you, and the interplay of the characters you had invented would be secondary.
Well, not exactly. You acquire a stake in the characters as you animate them. You should know that, as you think of those you have brought to life and then have seen having that life, with its own bounds and possibilities.
—
This is an excerpt from “Only Somewhat Real,” not yet published.
Information and process
TGU: This is still too vaguely expressed. Get your thoughts into gear, as they say. Or rather, apply yourself, don’t just drift.
F: Once upon a time, this work consisted of my willingness to act as scribe, trusting that I was not making it all up behind my own back (a suspicion I have never lost, though that too is too simply put). Then it became a dialog in which my part was as focused as expositor as it was as receptor. Then Rita began encouraging me to express understandings in my own words, so that my part in the enterprise came to be part radio receiver, part translator, part essayist. And now you seem to want me to use an insight conveyed to me as a point of view, and build on that.
From one point of view, what you just said is entirely mistaken. That isn’t what happened at all. But from your point of view, the progression seems natural. Well, it is part of your work to show that this is how you experienced it, and our work to show what it really was. From the beginning, you have been interested in information and we have been interested in process.
Yes, I guess I do know that, though it took me a while to catch on.
Well, where you are now is the skeleton behind the flesh of human activity.
—
This is an excerpt from “Only Somewhat Real,” not yet published.
Author-reader communication
Prologue to the forthcoming book, “Only Somewhat Real.”
Prologue
This book is the latest of several books compiled from more than 25 years of exploration into the nature of reality. After so much time and effort, naturally you come to see some things more clearly, more deeply. But the more your world diverges from mainstream assumptions, the harder it becomes to communicate with those still in the mainstream. It isn’t impossible to bridge the gap, but it requires certain things of the reader:
- Be open to new ideas. That means not being unwilling to be convinced. You don’t need to (and probably shouldn’t) start by believing; it is only necessary that you start by not adamantly dis-believing.
- Reserve judgment until those ideas are fully understood. Resist jumping to conclusions. Don’t allow yourself to brush aside an unfamiliar argument as “nothing but” something more familiar. Wait and see where it goes.
- Wrestle with the ideas presented, to see whether they ring true. It would be as bad to automatically accept what you read as to automatically reject it. Neither reaction can change your life. Test what is said here; think about it; question whether your own life-experience supports it. Only when you wrestle with it will you know how much of it is relevant to the life you are making.
But communication requires things of the author too. It’s up to the author to provide a precis of any necessary background information, including specialized terms, so that the reader can dive right in. That’s the purpose of this prologue.
* * *
Years of explanations have left me with the following understanding of the reality behind our lives. This is not the place to explain or justify these ideas, only to set them forth clearly so that you may understand where we’re coming from.
The world is constructed of consciousness. Before matter, before energy (and, after all, matter is only energy bound into relatively stable forms), comes consciousness. All the world is alive, even the things we think of as dead. Animals, vegetables, minerals; all made of consciousness. That includes synthetic fibers, radioactive waste, and even Congressmen.
Our familiar world of three dimensions is only a subset of a larger reality which we call the non-3D world. Although we speak of them as separate, and usually experience them that way, they together form one thing. Call it the All-D.
The 3D aspect of All-D experiences three very distinctive conditions: separation in time and in place, delayed consequences, and one ever-moving present-moment. It was created (out of the All-D) specifically to provide that combination of conditions; together they constitute a crucible in which new souls may be forged, developed, matured, and passed along to the non-3D.
The non-3D aspect, by contrast, is much more fluid in its movement through time and place, experiences immediate (and immediately malleable) consequences, and allows one to range in time in the way we in 3D range in space. In other words, its prevailing characteristic is non-locality (both in time and space) and extensive inter-communication.
The two realms are usually seen as separate, but they interpenetrate, being indivisible. Together they constitute our outer and inner reality, the 3D world being experienced through the senses, the non-3D world through intuition.
Humans are souls animated by spirit; that is, we are structured intelligence animated by vast impersonal forces. Although we experience ourselves as individuals, it is equally true to describe us as communities of other threads of being, some of which some call “past lives.”
Finally, in investigating both the visible and invisible properties of the world, we find it useful to remember the ancient adage, “as above, so below.” Apparently reality is constructed to scale, with similar architecture at all levels.
Together this view of the world explains many things.
The grail
When a man is said to be searching for the Holy Grail within the mysteries, he is really looking for two things: his own spiritual essence and his own spiritual purpose. This in turn gives him the d rive from his spiritual self, which is necessary to carry out his particular part of the divine plan. Strangely enough, in searching for this innermost spiritual reality within himself (it sounds like a rather egocentric exercise) he is actually finding the nature of God, because in practice the two cannot be divided.
Essentially the search for the Holy Grail is a search for the most intense, inner reality of the individual. When you are looking for the Holy Grail outside, you are having a quest or adventure, and you are really seeking the type of experience that the spiritual nature actually needs. So all quests for the Holy Grail put the objective in a position where people have to overcome their own deepest fear to get the vision of that which is sought. It always hits at the weakest point. In practice the search for the Grail is really the quest for the self carried beyond the normal dimensions, and in looking within and finding the self, one has to find God because one is impossible without the other.
- The Story of Dion Fortune, pp. 125-6
A place to stand
[From my self-published book of transcripts, A Place to Stand]
In September, 2000, life brought me to do ten sessions in the black box at The Monroe Institute. I began that series in search of inspiration, and ended it with a new sense of life’s possibilities. What I received – and what I have tried to pass along in the years since – was not a blueprint or a timetable but an orientation. I didn’t exactly go looking for answers, and I didn’t exactly receive answers. What I got was better than answers. I got a a new starting-point, a place to stand.
A Place to Stand
The ten sessions, seen as a whole, outlined a world with very different rules than those commonly believed in. It goes more or less like this:
Everything is connected
Reality is not divided. Energy and matter are not disconnected, but are extensions of each other. Everything affects everything else, not only in space, but backward and forward in time.
All times exist
Past, present and future coexist and interact. An inner dynamic connects us to others in other times and places. We can learn to make that connection conscious.
Physical and more than physical
The other side is here, always, as strange and as normal as anything in the physical world, and as close. We are non-physical as well as physical. Our lives here in physical-matter reality may be seen either as “real” (which in practice usually means what-you-see-is-what-you-get) or as “only a play” (which quickly becomes “nothing really matters”). Both ways of seeing our lives are somewhat true, somewhat mistaken. The physical and non-physical apparently continuously interact, forming a feedback loop. We create possibilities, somehow, by how we live. That’s why life matters.
Our limits
Any given era is shaped by the possibilities and limitations of what its people can experience. Thus ideas invisibly govern the world. I got the sense that there are at least three ways to experience the physical and non-physical world as one connected entity: by direct connection, as in ancient Egypt; by faith, as in medieval Europe; or by reasoning, which is most natural to us in our time. If that is true, if our “modern” way to life depends upon our reasoning things out, so be it. This is not the Age of Direct Connection nor the Age of Faith. But if science is our way, it is going to have to learn how to manipulate energies in ways that we have forgotten, but can recover.
Learning to communicate
We are living in the first days of radio, extending our range of experience by learning to use our new crystal headsets. Better communication with our non-physical components helps us to establish stable relationships among ourselves, which allows us to create something that can endure. We are each communities of different frequencies, and similar frequencies can communicate. It occurred to me, in editing this record, that when we get a sudden inexplicable knowing, it may be because we are in touch with others. (How we define the connection doesn’t much matter. We may think of those others as “past lives,” or as other parts of a group soul, or as merely others with whom we share a close resonance. Regardless, the experience of the connection matters much more than its definition.The use of the magical ritual of building the crystal around ourselves would be worth someone’s exploration, to see if it is an image and a practice peculiar to me, or universally applicable.)
How we shape our lives
What we concentrate on, we activate. We can look on our lives from “upstairs” or from inside, or we can learn to alternate those viewpoints. We are much more than we usually think. We are packed with more than we dream of. We need to widen our sense of what we are. How do we learn to extend? Surely, by extending. There are two ways to improve communication with the other side. One involves the sort of internal travel described here. The other involves external travel to sacred places. Either kind of travel – or a combination or alternation of both – has its uses.
The future
We have the keys to the candy store. We have the tools with which to reshape ourselves. The sessions produced a vision describing the next two stages of human development. Whether that vision is accurate remains to be seen. We won’t live long enough, in our current lifetimes, to see firsthand. But, we don’t need to. It is enough to know where we are, and what our possibilities are.