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Monday, May 5, 2025

7:10 a.m. Anything, this morning?

A friend once noted that “You don’t call them anything,” referring to your lack of salutation often enough when beginning a session. That may be worth a word or two. You know the reason, though you are not always aware of it.

I suppose it is because I never liked ritualized “necessities” that I never believed were necessary.

Now, that is a short statement, and a short subject, but it has instructive nuances.

We’re all ears.

The simplest part is, indeed, that you resist ritual that may devolve into superstition.

Then, you continually stress that the process is too simple and straightforward to require much attention, let alone a careful preparation.

Then, you wouldn’t know whom to address! In special cases, yes: Carl Jung; one of your lives; one of your [dead] friends; anyone you might be drawn to in particular at a particular time. But in general, saying, “Hey guys, what’s up?” doesn’t seem to require a devoted routine.

Mostly, though, it is simply this: As you experience this, it is a matter of you turning your attention to a certain way of being, and there you are. Any written acknowledgement would seem not only unneeded but perhaps theatrical.

“A certain way of being….”

Yes, this is what we want to bring to the fore. Perhaps it will not take long, perhaps it will.

“We’ll see,” I know. A very familiar phrase.

And nothing wrong with it. It is a way of acknowledging that you are willing to be not in charge, to be merely a partner, not the boss. Same on our end, though that may not have occurred to you.

So what do we mean by “a way of being”? what are we contrasting it to?

I’d say, taking it for granted as a state of mind that can be chosen, as opposed to something requiring effort or technique.

Let’s spell that out a little. If you look at your lives, you have periods of sleep, of alertness, or daydreaming, of concentration, etc. These are all normal fluctuations of consciousness, each with its own advantages and drawbacks. We merely point out that a state of active receptivity is one possible state of being, like any of these. it isn’t unique, isn’t limited to a gifted few, isn’t accessible only by particular efforts or practice or secret knowledge.

As you said, simple and not requiring much exposition.

Some things are so simple as to be taken for granted, which may render them invisible. In such cases, it is sufficient to point them out, and the cloak of invisibility turns out to be (or rather, is finally seen to be) inattention, as much as anything else.

So the take-away is that you used someone’s once mentioning that I don’t have a formal way to address you (or others) as a way to remind people that it is easier done than said, as I sometimes put it.

Opportunism on our part. and if you wish only a short session, this would provide it.

If I wished more?

You could think how this provided companionship, and how it could offer that to others.

Hmm. I live alone, by choice and by circumstance. But “alone” and “lonely” are not the same thing. I imagine that if not for my taken-for-granted connection to you – to my own non-3D component, I suppose – I would feel quite lonely often, rather than from time to time.

Surely it is obvious – or perhaps it is not obvious, come to think of it; it would depend upon the person – but we were about to say it should be obvious that everyone is in the same position, no matter if they live alone or live among others. The 3D experience is such that it nearly forces you to feel alone sometimes. Those who are most at home with living alone may feel this loneliness-of-being less than those who live among others, because for the latter the realization can be a shock, or an undermining.

I think you’d better say more on that. I don’t know that it is obvious if people aren’t getting it essence-to-essence as I am.

Living in 3D is a matter of attention. You build your own picture of the world, using your predilections, your second-hand perceptions (ideas from books or conversations or video, etc.), your conclusions as you review your life to date, and many other inputs. If the picture you build includes easy communication with the unseen world, you live in a world very different from those who live assuming that the 3D is all there is, or live thinking the non-3D may exist, but is not to be communicated with, or can be communicated with only by means of others or by means of a given ritual.

Different worlds, different rules, different possibilities. Well, if you take the 3D world to be all there is (asterisk here: other than the mysterious world “inside your head”), you may find that communication with other 3D souls is insufficient, and you are lonely without any idea how to overcome the loneliness.

I think I saw that between the lines in many a John D. MacDonald novel. It rose sometimes almost to the level of despair, but even at its calmest was a sort of resignation.

You needn’t confine yourself to MacDonald, of course. Think  of Hemingway, or Fitzgerald. It isn’t that these writers were experiencing something uncommon, it is that they were uncommonly good at expressing it even as they lived it.

Hemingway was a good Catholic, a convert and therefore, as they say, more Catholic than the Pope, even though he didn’t pay much attention to the rules other than when he was married to Pauline, who was a conventional Catholic. He seems to have taken the “spiritual” world for granted, unlike Fitzgerald, say, or MacDonald. Of course, one source of his greatness is hat he took the physical world equally for granted. Unlike many, he was fully at home in both. How I wish he could have had the chance to consider life in the framework you, or Seth, say, offer. But his mother’s conventional piety stood between him and such a stance even if he had heard of you, I suppose. His mother asked about him in a question to Edgar Cayce during the Second World War. What would Hemingway have said if he had known? It wouldn’t have been complimentary, and it wouldn’t have reflected well on Cayce in his mind.

You can see the difficulty Hemingway had in the conflict between his religious instincts and his intellectual assumptions. Like so many, he was forced to believe in one part of his mind, disbelieve in another part. He lived that tension, but didn’t have a way to obtain a composure that might have been his if he had had a way to form what you might call an intellectually respectable form of faith that would have allowed him full access to both compartments of his mind without having to suspend part of his knowing in order to accommodate another part.

But the point here is that for people who do not experience a continuous non-3D presence as part of what they are, their only connection will seem to them to be other people (or some substitute like scholarship or artistry of some sort). Failing that – or, let’s say, when that fails them – they feel alone, and often enough feel despair. Some bear this valiantly; still, it is despair.

Why wouldn’t their non-3D component remind them that it is otherwise?

Do you always listen? Did you always listen? Did you even know that some of your deepest certainties were anything more than something you “made up”?

Touche. Well, thanks for this. Our p.s. is longer than the original letter, and I am glad of it. We’ll call it –?

Perhaps something like, “Accompaniment.”

Okay. Many thanks for many things.

 

Saturday, May 3, 2025

7:40 a.m. Not sure how to proceed, so over to you. I think we ought to be continuing something begun or touched upon, but I don’t remember what it is.

Would you like to revisit that experience?

[I knew immediately what they were referring to.]

As a matter of fact, I would. I can’t remember the details around how it happened, though. I’m not sure I could even place it within any given decade, except that of course it had to have been within the past 30 years. Gateway was December, 1992; obviously it was after that.

In general, one remembers the aspect of a thing that is important. Important to the one remembering, that is. There is no other meaningful relationship.

In other words, no one can impose a meaning on anyone else’s memories or experience.

That’s right, and no one can establish any rules about it, either. Just as the same elements in two different dreams may “mean” different things, and even more so the same elements in different people’s dreams – so in the dream you are living. You all necessarily pull your metaphors from your life, and no two people will find the same meaning in a given symbol, nor will the same individual necessarily find the same meaning at different times.

Sometimes we can see things that the person telling us his dream cannot.

Yes, of course, and as we have said, this is one way one’s Upstairs (non-3D) component can assist someone else, by passing on in speech what the other person may not notice or may undervalue when heard only from within. But this is not to say that you know each other’s inner reality. You don’t. You can’t. You get glimpses of certain aspects, and if you are minded to be helpful you can use those glimpses to suggest connections – but even at your most helpful you will be swinging blindly, never knowing if your insight is accurate or helpful. However, this aside is a diversion. Relate your experience as you remember it. Only, do it this way: Note the overall plot, so to speak, then return and fill in texture and detail. You may get a surprise.

Okay. Well, it was an important experience to me. I haven’t forgotten it and I’m not likely to forget it. But what I remember may be hard to set forth.

As we said. Perhaps begin with a one-paragraph summary and then resort to bullet-points.

It was an altered-state experience, perhaps in the context of a Monroe program, but perhaps not. I suddenly appeared in a room that seemed like a council room – a big table, with people around it, all on one side of it, and I on the other side, where “the public” might be. They were surprised to see me appear, but not astonished: Appearances apparently were rare but not unheard of. I spoke to them briefly, then said, “I can’t hold it,” something like that, and dropped back into the reality I was accustomed to, the reality I am writing this from.

Bear in mind the main advantage of resorting to bullets: You need not concern yourself with sequential exposition or logic. You can follow what appears as it appears. This sometimes alters the sequence, and hence the connections made peripherally, hence in effect deepens and alters the context.

All right. So, as they occur to me:

• It was a deliberate act on my part, an exercise of some kind, but I didn’t set out to have that particular experience. How could I have done so? I didn’t know it was possible.
• I think this was a second stage of whatever I was doing. It built my energy somehow, or perhaps tightened my focus. The irruption into that room was entirely unsought at any conscious level. It was a surprise.
• Surprised them, too. It was as if a board of directors were having a meeting and suddenly an outsider popped up from beneath the flooring. Two elements: (a) outsider. (b) suddenly appeared.
• They knew that such things sometimes happened, though whether they or any of them had had such an experience, I have no way to know. They were surprised but not astonished.
• They were curious, too, come to think of it. One of them (if the idea of “one of them” rather than all of them together is appropriate) asked how long I had been in 3D. When I told them X years, however long it was then, they were impressed, apparently considering living in 3D as quite a feat of endurance.
• Did I ask them anything? You’d think I would, but I don’t know, I was entirely unprepared for this, and maybe I didn’t. It was all I could do to hold on.
• Yes, that’s an important part of it. I knew while it was happening that merely maintaining myself in that space was taking all I had. It was a great effort even to do nothing more than remain there.
• And I told them – after not very long – “I can’t hold it, it takes too much,” or something like that, and it was as if I had been doing a chin-up and let myself fall back.
• Then and afterward I had no doubt of what I had so briefly experienced. It was real. Where I had been, was realer than where I am now. I doubt it was people around a table; that was my mind providing a context, I think. But the reality of a space realer than this one was evident, convincing, and left a permanent certainty.
• Could I provide evidence for anybody, or even for myself? Yes, but what it is worth, each will have to decide for himself, The evidence is that the experience changed me, and I stayed changed. What it meant may be entirely different from what I conjecture, but it happened and was not an illusion. Christopher Columbus may have been on Watling Island when he thought he was in the Orient, but even though his interpretation was wrong, his experience was real.

You have forgotten or never noticed your impression of wood.

That’s true, and I never thought it was important, because I assumed that the shape of what I experienced had been provided by my mind creating an interpretation. But I did experience the room as being paneled in some dark wood. Certainly the floor that I seemed to come through was wood. Does this mean anything?.

Everything in a dream contributes to meaning, you know, and conscious life is not any different, except that one tends to pay less attention to it. [That is, to all the elements in a given situation as contributing to the overall meaning.] And you might give more emphasis to the collegial nature of the meeting.

That’s true, it felt like deliberations conducted in harmony and in a spirit of helpfulness. I seem to remember – now that you remind me of it – that at some point then or later I wondered if this was not a representation of my own guys upstirs, or perhaps my own past lives (as I thought of it then) or some similar council whose task was to guide me. But I never decided, and how could I have done?

Now you wonder – in part of your mind – whether you were experiencing the non-3D as we do. And merely reminding you of the question is enough to indicate the answer.

Yes it is: No. We experience the non-3D every day. It is – as you have maintained repeatedly – integrally related to our 3D life. This was something entirely different in feel. It had to have a connection to me, or how could I have experienced it? But what it was may or may not go on all the time, without my knowing it. All I know for sure is that it is not a level of reality I had ever experienced consciously. And I have yet to experience it again.

Which leaves only the question, Why? You can’t know the “how” of it, but you can at least speculate on why you had this brief, significant, non-repeated glimpse into another layer of the reality of which your – our – common reality is only a subset. Your answer may or may not be correct, but the very asking will be important. So – why?

The answer that comes to mind is, after than I could never be in doubt that reality is more than we commonly think it. I came to all this with great belief, great doubt, great determination. Maybe that glimpse – if planned by anybody – was merely or mainly to reinforce the “great faith” part, against the pull of “great doubt.”

And that is enough for the moment. Call this, “An experience,” perhaps.

Cryptic enough. All right, and thanks as always for this.

 

Thursday, May 1, 2025

7 a.m. My question deferred from yesterday: Don’t large parts of the non-3D exist only in non-3D and not 3D?

That’s looking at it sort of backwards. It is more like, it requires a special orientation to exist in 3D at all. Everything in 3D is necessarily also in non-3D, but not everything in non-3D is in 3D.

An image or analogy would help.

All the burners on your stovetop are part of the stove, but not all the stove is burners.

Not sure that is going to do it.

The 3D is a created space, remember. It is a collection of qualities exaggerated in order to produce certain effects held to be desirable.

I felt we almost had the analogy, but it disappeared between one word and the next, you could say.

Patience. It will emerge when we provide enough negative space.

A created space. You all said that at the beginning, two dozen years ago, but not much since.

The order in which concepts are considered can be as important as the content. The student will be creating tentative structures throughout the process of instruction, and those structures may later assist or hinder greater comprehension. It makes a difference if we teach A, B, C rather than M, N, O, let alone teaching A, C, D and later having to explain why we initially disregarded B. And the order we use in one situation is not the same as we might in a different relationship, for of course the relation of teacher to student is an active factor in what can be conveyed. No one can teach a stubborn materialist in the same way as a flighty scatterbrained idealist, say, or a feet-on-the-ground, intelligently skeptical person, or a convinced intuitive, or any of these with this or that particular intellectual and emotional background. The facts don’t vary, but the presentation must, if there is to be any meeting of minds.

All right.

Let’s try it at a generalized level, and see if the idea comes through. As usual, we expect that some will find the question trivially easy to see, and others may wrack their brain for a bit.

Every generalized condition may have specific variances. In fact, it is very likely to have them, if it is to be complicated enough to provide conditions of much interest.

Nature differentiates into species after differentiating into an animal or plant kingdom. Humans differentiate into races, races into sub-races. Amoebae divide and produce only more amoebae, nothing else. The rest of nature flourishes by experimentation, subdivision, etc.

Any machine is made up of parts. All the parts of a car are part of the car, but the car is not the sum of its parts.

Perhaps not so good an example.

No. Well, let’s try this: A desert is an environment, a specialized combination of elements, All deserts are part of earth, but not all earth is desert. All creatures within the desert are dependent upon it, but the desert is not dependent on their being there.

A better example, it occurs to me, you gave us long ago: Humans need to breathe air. Air doesn’t need to be breathed by humans.

That is true but not quite to the point here. We may be misleading you by mentioning dependence.

Let’s try it this way. What we are calling the non-3D has as its invisible linguistic counterpart the idea of a “3D” to be the non-3D of. What we call the All-D was to give the idea of 3D and non-3D being parts of the same system, rather than as in any way independent of each other. But in the present case, it is almost a mistake (and is at least confusing) to say that non-3D can exist without being part of 3D. The statement misleads in that two different conditions are being referred to under the same “non-3D” label.

I begin to see that. There is a specific part of non-3D that is bound to 3D – you, for example. And 3D and non-3D together make up this earth life we experience. You are saying there is a form of non-3D that is not bound to 3D and it has different qualities.

Not quite, but you are on the trail. It is more the other way round: The non-3D that is not bound to 3D is vastly larger than the specialized form that is bound to 3D. To return to our stovetop analogy, we could say that all non-3D is metal, but only that part of the non-3D that is integrally connected to 3D is a burner.

Is this worth coining a new term to reduce confusion?

Perhaps. Try.

Well, what if we continue using non-3D as we have been using it, to depict the part of reality that we in 3D can experience – via ILC, for instance, or remote viewing, or unaided intuition or whatever. Then we need invent a word only to mean the non-3D as it exists without this close connection to the 3D implosion.

Yes, that is the idea. And you would call it, what?

Cosmic non-3D?

There are difficulties with that.

Yes, I can feel it. Well – I don’t know, uncoupled non-3D?

Closer but still not yet suitable.

External? Unaffiliated? Natural? Uncompressed? Ah! Uncoupled?

Uncoupled may work, but it will be decipherable only to those who already know what we mean.

I suppose we could say “non-binary,” meaning, not coupled to the 3D condition.

Non-binary is not an improvement over uncoupled. Either may serve.

So then, let’s have your capsule summary using this clarifying phrase.

Most of non-3D is non-binary (uncoupled), in that it has no limitation on it by any close relationship to a 3D condition. However, specialized cases in which non-3D provides one pole and 3D the opposite pole do exist. Non-coupled non-3D is vastly more common than coupled non-3D – but how would you experience it?

That sounds close to a division in reality.

Our rhetorical question has an answer, if you will pause to ponder it.

Oh. Through our own non-3D connection, of course.

Exactly. As you say, there are no absolute divisions in reality. However, remember that there are steps. The higher reality you once briefly experienced is kin to yours, but is not identical to it, as artwork you create is kin to you but not identical to who and what you are.

There’s always more to learn.

Yes, isn’t it good? You never need to be bored, never need to sigh and say, “I’ve seen it all.”

I for one have no criticisms of reality. I did, and for a long time, “but that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.”

You like Abraham Lincoln’s quote and he was right, most people are about as happy as they are determined to be. It is a good world, a good life, and those who don’t know it now will know it at some point.

Our thanks for this, as always. What do we call it?

“Clarifying no-3D,” perhaps

Till next time, then.

 

Wednesday, April 30, 2025

6:30 a.m. Shall we resume?

Beginning with the idea of consciousness as being elimination of input quite as much as inclusion of input, let’s look at your lives. A baby needs protection not only because of physical weakness but because it does not yet know how to orient itself in the 3D world.. It doesn’t know where it is, you might say. It can’t predict, can’t very well understand, in short can’t cope. But what it can do, and do very well, is receive psychic input from all directions and build a picture of this new world it is experiencing. That doesn’t mean it builds an accurate picture, but build one it does. It has no choice.

Builds that picture from what elements? Some bullets:

1. Its 3D input through the senses.
2. Its 3D input through the intuitions.
3. Its non-3D input from various threads, in varying importance one to another.
4. Its non-3D input from non-3D sources as well as what flows from its own threads.

That is enough to be going along with. For convenience we could group them as 3D (1 and 2) and non-3D (3 and 4), or as internal (2 and 3) and external (1 and 4). But it is all input.

The ingredients do not change as you live your lives, but of course the proportional importance of each element changes, both moment-to-moment and over time according to preference and circumstance.

We will spell it out, at the risk of belaboring the obvious. Your polarities in life:

• Internal or external
• Sensory or intuitive
• Self or other
• Understanding or action

Obviously you will experience the entire range of the polarity, rather than merely one or the other side of a polarity. And, the four polarities overlap. We are less concerned with presenting a neat and tidy scheme than with offering you new glimpses into your reality.

So, internal or external. Which source of input do you pay the most attention to? (Again, remember this is a moment-to-moment choice as well as an overall-bias choice.) Is your inner world so brightly lit that you pay as little attention to external affairs as you can get away with? Alternatively, is the evident “realness” of the external world so blinding as to lead you to forget or be unable to perceive your own non-physical connection? These are extremes, but the polarity is real.

Sensory or intuitive. Which do you trust? Which is realer to you?

Self or other? Which is your proper orientation, and which is diversion? Not everybody is meant to concentrate on the state of their soul. Neither is everybody meant to concentrate on the state of the world in which they find themselves. Again, not an either/or. How could it be? But, a matter of proportions.

Finally, understanding or action. (As we say, the themes incorporates overlap.) Put it this way: Which seems like real work to you? Which seems worth doing and which not? Understanding puts together a map of the world – as we are doing right now. Action sets forth to make improvement on what exists – as we are doing right now. You couldn’t really do only one and not the other, but few people – and you are not one of them – can hold the two in balance. Nor is there any particular reward for doing so.

Now put it together:

1. You are 3D and non-3D
2. You receive input from both sources, and each input-strain is made of two elements, and expresses in two dimensions
3. Your mind – which is the only real expression of you, the realest part of your “somewhat-real” existence – forms an on-going system that we once called a habit-pattern. That is, it works in predictable ways that vary, but are nonetheless orderly and distinctive.
4. Nonetheless, whether you realize it or not, remember it or not, you as habit-system are only one node in a greater being that expresses partly as a network of threads. Therefore in reality you cannot exist in isolation.
5. The more you concentrate on the here-and-now, the sensorily obvious, the more prone you are to forget that vastly the larger part of life – even the 3D life you are fashioning – is non-3D, invisible, nearly imperceptible.
6. However, concentrating on the here and now is what you are in 3D to do! Sleepwalking through your life is not, in general, particularly productive. (That doesn’t mean never, but we are setting out generalizations here.)
7. So, there is a built-in contradiction. Should this surprise you? Look to your lives, and see if many of your perplexities do not stem from your disregarding or not realizing the fact that you are suspended between conflicting necessities.
8. Hence, consciousness!

I waited for more, but you seem to think that final bullet is self-evident and self-explanatory.

Is it not?

Not to me.

Consciousness is choice. Life is repeated choice. Choosing is what shapes the gift you give to life (that is, the life you create and hand back as a new habit-system). And what informs choice?

I think I get it. Choice may be well-founded or not, and how well it is founded depends on how well we process input and manage output. The more we get, the better we function, and the better the choices we make.

Jesus said that the more you have, the more you will be given, but if you bury your own talent, you will have wasted the opportunity, and your higher self will not be pleased.

Interesting take on a parable that many people think seems to approve arbitrary and unfair distribution of wealth.

We keep telling you —

Yeah, yeah. You don’t need to persuade me.

This isn’t only for you, though, is it? We say it again: Your spiritual heritage will give you valuable clues if you can once relate them to your present work. (And, by work we mean not any particular process you may be involved in, but the construction of your lives.)

I get that this is not quite finished.

No, one more thing. The nature of consciousness isn’t worth investigating in a vacuum. You will get results of considering it not as a thing but as a condition, as a relation of one thing to another.

That isn’t clear.

Let’s say, consciousness always relates to purpose. A cloud’s consciousness is real, definite, changing – but that may be said of you. What is a cloud’s purpose? It is the same as yours, to relate itself to the world, 3D and non-3D. (We know that sounds counter-intuitive, but if 3D and non-3D shade into each other, how could anything exist in only one and not also the other? And, existing there, how could it not have some form of awareness of that realm?)

I’ll defer consideration of the question until another time, but I want to note to ask, don’t large parts of the non-3D exist only in non-3D and not 3D?

This would be a diversion at this moment, so yes, let’s look at it another time. Our point here is that consciousness stretches between your self-awareness and some seemingly external object or event. But words tangle this up.

They certainly do. Self-awareness and consciousness sound like the same thing.

A baby is aware of itself, but has no concepts; hence it is aware but not conscious that it is aware. It has no basis for self-reflection.

Hmm, you tie consciousness to concepts.

Think of “clicking out” in the Monroe world. You perceive something for which you have no concept, no experience, no way to connect it to your accustomed world – and so you return from a real experience but you have no idea what happened. If later you experience the same thing again, or if for other reasons you are able to build a bridge to what happened, perhaps what had been clicked out becomes perceptible. You have extended your range of consciousness. You can “make sense” of something that previously you couldn’t even bring to mind.

I can see the confusion that language makes, given that we all use “awareness” and consciousness” and such terms loosely and interchangeably.

It is a problem, but not an insuperable one, provided that you are conscious of it! We smile.

A very interesting session. What shall we call it?

“More on consciousness” would do.

Our thanks as always.

 

Tuesday, April 29, 2025

3:40 a.m. We were talking about consciousness, but that was a couple of mornings ago, and I have since completed that journal book and don’t have it right here. I suppose you can remember where we were. Jon? Dr. Jung?

The central concept is that consciousness of the 3D world of time-slices is not additive but subtractive. To live in the world, you must concentrate on one time, one place. Centering, though, may be looked at equally rightly as blocking out the periphery. Let’s see if we can come up with an image or analogy that will provide a gestalt recognition, rather than attempting only a sequential – logical – understanding.

• All reality is emanated from a higher-order reality of which we know little.
• Everything in this reality (non-3D as well as 3D) shares the properties of the higher-order reality of which it was made.
• Let’s use the concept of densification in an unusual context, see if that clarifies our view. In this scheme, our level of reality proceeds from the least concentrated to the most concentrated.
• Hence: Undifferentiated aether (the essence of everything at this level) -> separation into 3D and non-3D -> 3D continuing the process: -> gas -> liquid -> solid.
• But remember, every physical (3D) substance includes a non-physical (non-3D) component, and thus we see a progression by kingdom, as in the old scheme, only, in effect, reversed for our purposes. That is, the mineral kingdom’s concentration is less than the plant kingdom’s, which is less than the animal’s, which is less than the human.
• The human level begins the return from the densest, most concentrated, upward toward the whole again; hence, the next step up from human concentrated consciousness is the angelic kingdom, which, like the human, is a mixture of elements.
• By this densification scheme you can see that increased concentration is – like most things – a two-edged sword. One gains and loses.
• Looking more closely, this shows that states of consciousness differ by kingdoms, as we have always said. The mineral kingdom’s consciousness is not individual but is not non-existent either, and as you go up or down the chain of being, you see progressions.
• Even within human consciousness, you see the same thing. Everyone, even babies who are unaware that they are in any way separated from their surroundings, enjoys a basic flow of energy. As one grows, the awareness of being one with the world decreases; awareness of being individual increases.
• Special states (autism, for one) provide special experiences of life, some readily communicable, many not. Deliberately achieved states of meditation or awareness of oneness also provide special experience, this time voluntarily. But even states of bliss are not unmixed blessings except in that they are seen as such, because desired. Every increase in concentration – even if it is concentration on awareness – is a step farther from the original universal (relatively unconscious) awareness.
• That seems paradoxical, but again, movement in any one direction is necessarily movement away from other directions.

You don’t think of yogis as striving to attain the same view of the world as mountains have, say, or oceans or clouds.

Nor is it the same. There is every difference between simplicity that has never changed and simplicity that has been achieved by incorporating and overcoming complexity.

I can’t understand how it can have taken us 50 minutes to go only this far. It has flowed smoothly.

Doesn’t matter. This is a beginning. Call it “densification,” perhaps. It is necessary that people begin to understand that “consciousness” and “altered states of consciousness” are not what they tend to think they are.

I have an impression of having gone over this many years ago, though not so clearly.

Reiteration is a valid technique. Every time you step into the river, it is a different you, a different river, although equally it is the same you, the same river. Retracing your steps is not lost motion.

All right, well, our thanks as always.