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Sunday, August 18, 2024 5 a.m. Ready to talk, Jon, if you are. Clearly the block over the past two days has been on my end.

Yes and so what? There isn’t any obligation. It is a free gift or it is nothing at all.

Well, I feel vaguely guilty when I don’t make even an effort.

Ask yourself why.

Why? It feels like a shirking, I guess.

Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t.  “Shirking” implies an obligation. When did you oblige yourself, and who did you oblige yourself to?  Is this any different from feeling guilty that you haven’t written your novels?

I’m trying to find the most honest answer. It’s hard to sort things out.

Yes it is. That’s why the world has rabbis and priests and psychiatrists, to help people sort things out. So what is your answer?

I don’t know, Jon, I was sort of born with the sense of obligation. I don’t know where it came from.

Your family?

My brothers and sisters don’t seem to have it. We were all helpful to others, I’d say, but that isn’t the same thing. I’m not pretending it’s rational.

No, you think it’s exaggerated.

I do. But that doesn’t change anything.

Is it a compulsion?

You’d know that, better than I would.

It’s very simple. Is it something you have to do, for whatever reason, even if you don’t want to?

It’s something I always think I should be doing, anyway. That doesn’t mean I always do it.

You don’t do it for reward, but for its own sake.

I think I can honestly say no, not for the reward. I did think there would be response and maybe a big success, but that was long ago.

So why do you do it?

Because it is satisfying and because if I don’t do it, I feel like I’m wasting my time, being here.

So you can’t expect others to react the same way, even when they see how easy it is.

Well, I don’t know, it always seems to me they ought to be doing it too. It’s like, Why should I be the only one?

Even though it is a compulsion of yours and there isn’t any reason to expect others to share it.

Jon, the one feeling isn’t any more irrational than the other. If I feel I ought to do it, and I feel others ought to want to do it, what’s different? And of course I hear it immediately: One is about me and one is about others, and others aren’t my business in the way I am my business.

Try this on for size: If other people don’t start doing it, it means you failed to inspire them to do it, so you failed what you came to do, so all your work was more or less for nothing, because of course on non-3D level you already knew how to do the things you spent your 3D life remembering how to do.

And that puts my meaning in the hands of others.

A common mistake. It is hard enough to justify your own life, without having that justification depend on what other people do.

And besides, we never know the full effect we have on others.

You took the words out of my mouth. So, leaving other people out of it, where are you?

I suppose there’s a vague sense of resentment.

Yes. Does this ring a familiar chord?

Oh, I get it. It’s like you thinking your life was stunted because you couldn’t experience the growth you wanted.

And if you assume that somebody somewhere is to blame for it, what is more rational than a certain resentment? After all, whoever it is, they’re messing up your life.

I hope you’re enjoying this.

Not particularly. Did you enjoy watching me suffer from the results of wrong ideas?

No, I sure didn’t.

Did you feel able to do anything about it?

Nothing very successful.

It may help if you remember that the intent to help may easily become interference. We all have to work out the puzzle of our lives. You didn’t interfere and you did listen and give your counter-view. That’s what I’m doing. That’s what anybody’s non-3D component is always doing.

And you spent your professional life trying to help people untie the knots they found.

I did. It’s also easier to help others than to help yourself, and you know why.

Because you can see their situation from the outside, not just from the inside.

That’s right. You are supposed to be inside your life. That means inside your moods, your irrational compulsions, your obsessions, your illogical connections, your disconnects between who you want to be, who you feel you ought to be, and who you are in practice. You might get a bird’s-eye view of your life in addition to the view from inside, but you’re never going to get outside that sphere. (a) How could you, and (b) what would it accomplish if you could? You are there for a reason.

How about you say a little more on that. We have come to realize that our ideas on life are still mixed up, inconsistent, contradictory even.

We aren’t going to clear that up in ten minutes. The confusion and the inadequate analogies and explanations stem from the fact that you have two alternative and incompatible starting-points:

1. An individual soul that wanders from 3D life to 3D life, hopefully growing and progressing.
2. The coalescing at any birthtime of what you’re calling strands or threads – that you might describe as past lives entering with other past lives into a new 3D existence that will merge them.

That’s it exactly. The guys spend the better part of 25 years building up a new model and we see that it’s still just scaffolding.

But don’t forget, “just scaffolding” was required to build the highest cathedrals.

Is this the carrot, to match the stick of boredom and guilt, a promise of a new and even more interesting scaffolding?

You are losing sight of your audience. “Think of your reader,” your editor-boss told you. It isn’t only about how you pass your time. It is also about what only you, or mainly you, or – let’s say – you better than the next available candidate, can bring across.

So my sense of “ought to” is connected with an intuition of irreplaceable opportunities. That rings true.

But in that case, why can’t you be given the help you need?

Exactly.

Why don’t you just assume that you automatically have the help you need?

You’re a fine one to talk!

Do as I say, not as I do.

So what was the theme here? Seems to me we moved from personal to general. I’m going to send it out and not worry about what kind of reception it gests – if any. But usually there is a theme and I don’t always notice it.

Maybe it was about irrational senses of obligation – bearing in mind that “irrational” doesn’t mean crazy, it means, you don’t necessarily know what’s going on or why.

One thing. Don’t you think it’s time for others to be doing this?

Doing what? Leading their lives the way you have led yours? How could they? Why should they?

That isn’t what I meant. I mean, now that they know how, from a solid base of experience, shouldn’t they be able to bring the same kind of information, from their own angle? Wouldn’t that be good for everybody?

Nothing is ever good for everybody, but I know what you mean. My very best advice – and you know I mean this for you specifically as well as in general – is to do what you have to do and not concern yourself with what others do or don’t do. Worrying about the actions of others is a leftover from the idea that everybody is separate and things happen by chance.

Yes, I hear that. Well, it is going to reinforce my worst autistic tendencies, but I can carry on without depending on feedback. I’ve done it all my life.

To you that seems a true statement. You might reserve judgment.

The voice of experience speaking, eh? Okay. And thanks for being here.

 

Thursday, August 15, 2024

4:50 a.m. I don’t know if this will work, but maybe. Jon, I wonder what we can say about yesterday’s disappointing session.

You mean, what do we dare say, or what can we attain clarity on?

Either. Both. Maybe keep it to ourselves.

We don’t have to. You can if you wish. One setback isn’t a defeat unless you give up.

No, of course not. But still it was a disappointment.

Maybe you’re just expecting too much.

Was it a difference in the number of people involved? I half expect that was part of it.

Number, composition, sure – but are you thinking that anything about it was an accident?

I felt the people were withholding, that they were reluctant to expose the partial contacts they made, because they were partial, or inconclusive. And I didn’t know what to do. The more I intruded myself, surely the more they would hold back. Maybe I ought to let them do it on their own.

So think about Pentecost and don’t worry about blasphemous comparisons. We aren’t saying you’re Jesus, we are saying certain situations have similar dynamics.

Hmm. Well, what I got is that Jesus said the Paraclete (the holy spirit) couldn’t come to them while he was with them. I hadn’t thought of that as meaning, “While I’m here, you’re naturally leaning on me because I showed you the way. Once I leave, you’ll be able and willing to stand on your own feet.”

You could say he showed what was possible by living it, and the example was contagious, but nobody wanted to set up as competition with him, which is how they might see it.

I can see that if I had been fortunate enough to study with Jane Roberts or Edgar Cayce, say, or Carl Jung or William James, it would have been a great opportunity that might have had two contradictory effects: encouragement and discouragement. I would have been able to see what is possible, and I would have doubted I could match what I saw.

And it might have been complicated by your seeing their human flaws. You would have had to reconcile the message and the messenger. It might have added dissonance.

The effect is less with a smaller group. Why?

Isn’t it obvious?

Not to me. Not yet.

In a smaller group, the bond is stronger, one-to-one and also one-in-all. Every person you add to the group dilutes that bond and at the same time adds to the group energy, so you wind up with a different kind of dynamic. It is the difference between a group of two or three truth-seekers and the congregation of a megachurch listening to a televangelist. It is the difference between a prayer meeting of two or three and a football stadium of people exulting in the group-enthusiasm but unable to do so while retaining their individual judgment.

Are we saying that 10 or 12 is already too many people to work together?

Not at all. It’s a good number to experience together, as you have seen. But think of your rule of thumb about conversations.

Yes, I see. I always say that conversations get shallower as they include more people, even if the people are the same. You just can’t – I can’t, anyway – have as deep a conversation with two as with one, nor of four as with two, nor of six as with four. I don’t know where the limits are. So what do we do in practice? And as I ask the question, I hear the answer: Let people choose for themselves.

They’re going to anyway.

Split the group into subgroups so that everybody is in one?

Are you going to force somebody to do it?

I didn’t mean instead of the big, group, I meant in addition to it.

The larger group – and the shadowy even larger group that listens to the recordings but does not attend, that you tend to forget about – will have a purpose of its own, and will take care of itself. But people who want to work more intensively can group themselves, just as you have already done in practice.

And I get, some will and some won’t.

Isn’t that true of everything? Are you back to helping the sun come up in the morning?

As a practical matter, I don’t see how I can be a member of a group, fully connected, yet withhold a lot because I don’t want to take it over. As it is, I’m never sure where the line is.

What is clearer to me than to you is that everybody, in every group, faces that same dilemma. That is one of the things that makes larger groups harder than smaller: Everybody has to judge, should I contribute this or not? Am I speaking too much, or not? Is this only my opinion, or am I getting a message? All these hesitations add up.

So this is about group dynamics.

Partly. Partly it is about how everybody has to decide for themselves, all the time, what is appropriate and what isn’t, what is authentic and important, and what isn’t. and the more people you have doing that at the same time, the more complicated it gets.

Monroe programs are usually two dozen people.

And how many people speak during a debrief? And how long is the debrief compared to the individual tape experience?

Maybe that was the step too far? Trying to do with the large group what we did with the small group?

“Make haste slowly.” You might think about tattooing that on your forehead so you can see it in the morning when you’re shaving.

So maybe suggest to the larger group that we do a drumming, and then report, as we have been doing?

Or maybe alter it. Do the drumming and discuss rather than sequentially reporting. People will have to be careful not to step on each other, but interaction will be a step up in understanding over merely hearing one after one.

A step up because active rather than merely passive?

All I can say is, you might try it. There’s nothing wrong with trying things and failing. You know what Edison said.

“That’s one more thing I know doesn’t work.” That’s how he finally figured out what light filaments could be made of.

I assume you continue to be ready to assist in the process.

Who do you think is there by accident?

Very funny. And I get, you aren’t the only one.

You have all been accompanied – shadowed, if you like – all the way. This is of great interest here as a practical way forward.

This isn’t a natural segue, but I’m moved to ask – maybe by you, for all I know – what can you say now about your connection with your guys who you used to say betrayed you? I assume things look different now?

You assume that naturally I’m now going to see it your way.

Laughing. Yes, I guess that was my assumption.

Well, I don’t. But of course I don’t’ see it the same way I did when I was under the pressure of 3D constrictions and expectations. It didn’t occur to me, what I mentioned the other day, that restrictions are focus. I never thought about it this way, but frustrations can be very powerful focusing devices. I was a concentration of frustrated aspiration, and that energy form remains.

That last isn’t quite clear.

I never thought it would be. Let’s let it lie for a while.

So are you saying your guys really did “underinvest” in you, as you used to say?

Let’s put it this way: My composition and the events of my life and my perseverance in desire led to 3D frustration; that was obvious enough. What I didn’t consider was that frustration can be used to fuel the engine. Just because the ego-level consciousness isn’t getting what it wants doesn’t mean it isn’t getting what it needs at a larger level. This may sound strange, but I don’t regret my anger and frustration and sense of disappointment and betrayal. Those feelings were right in a way, wrong in a way.

We spend so much time sorting things into right and wrong, desired and not desired, it makes it harder to see things neutrally. I would say now I am seeing it neutrally, seeing that everything has the defects of its qualities, as everybody knows, but the defects are as valuable as a qualities.

Shouldn’t you have figured that out, as a psychiatrist?

Psychiatry assumes desired and undesired. It assumes an intent to help people cope. It doesn’t necessarily say, “Well, sure, that hurts, but so what?”

Well, thanks for all this. I’ll sent it around and we’ll see how many people think I think I’m Jesus.

They’re more likely to be relieved to see that you don’t.

We’ll see. Thanks again.

 

Tuesday, August 13, 2024

5:30 a.m. Lila got me up at about five. Lungs feel on the edge of trouble, yet I am able to prevent it. Do I have energy enough to continue with Jon? It’s only 5:30, why shouldn’t I have it? Jon?

Start with the concepts of limitation and perseverance. Considered together, they provide a way in.

Yes, I got that yesterday. Intend one thing, but don’t intend it for a moment and go on to intend something else, but intend it, fasten your life to it. That is both limitation and perseverance, come to think of it.

“Hitch your wagon to a star.”

Emerson. I got the aspiration end of it, but I guess I never fully appreciated the perseverance and limitation end. “Limitation” meaning, focus.

And you’re always quoting Jesus, didn’t he say to sell everything you own, to buy the pearl of great price? Isn’t that limitation m- giving up everything else – and isn’t it aspiration and perseverance?

Clearly.

Anybody has only so much energy, time, attention, talent, interest. I am not saying “specialize” meaning do only one thing. For some people, that’s fine, but for others, it isn’t. Nothing wrong with being a Jack-of-all-trades, if that’s how you’re made. But whatever you do, you can do it in a focused way or an unfocused way, and the results you get are going to be different.

I see where you are going, but it hasn’t been clearly stated yet.

It is difficult to state as an abstract saying without leaving it so wide-open for interpretation that it leads directly to mis-interpretation.

Well, let me try. I think what you’re getting at is that our lives have an important spine and many unimportant alternate bodies. Though, that’s pretty clumsy.

But that’s getting there. You mean to say, your life is going to have one central preoccupation, and maybe it can be put into words and maybe it can’t. Maybe you know it consciously, maybe you only sort of feel it, maybe you don’t have a clue about it. Regardless, it is there. It stems from what you are. You are going to live this out whether you’re aware of it or not. That’s a given.

But how you live it out is up for grabs. Maybe you do this, maybe you do that, maybe you go back and forth. The how of it is up to you, in a way that the essence of it can never be. You live your essence, you choose among potential expressions of it.

So the predetermined part of us is our underlying mission, and the freewill part of us is how we go about living it.

Wait. Slow down. I said it is easily misinterpreted, and that means that even a true statement has to be carefully defined, or it will lead people astray.

It is important that people know what we aren’t talking about, if they’re to have any chance of confining themselves to what we are talking about. This is not about intent versus deeds. It isn’t about internal versus external. It isn’t about unlimited potential versus limitations in practice. All of these things enter into it, but they enter into it, they aren’t it, and they aren’t the essence of it.

We come into a 3D life to express the interaction of the traits and characteristics that are combined in our birth moment. At least, it could be seen that way. It would be equally true to say that we have to wait for the proper moment to roll around that will allow that particular combination. But the difference in theory doesn’t matter in practice. In practice, we enter a life as a bundle of traits and characteristics, and our life is the living of those things through what seems like an unending series of external events. This won’t be news to you; you’ve been getting the picture with increasing clarity all these 25 or 30 years. That is what looks like predestination to you: It is the hand you’ve been dealt. But the way you play that hand is the freewill part of it, and what does that mean in practice?

Our attitude toward whatever happens to us.

Yes. It isn’t what we do; that is effect, not cause, and it is manifestation, not impelling force. (That’s the same thing said twice.)

Your friend Viktor Frankl.

He wasn’t a friend, and I didn’t appreciate him sufficiently, being put off by his mannerisms and his emotional barriers, but yes, Frankl. Our freedom is our freedom to chose how to react to what happens to us. In other words, freedom is choosing how to be molded by external events.

And if I understand you, you’re saying the shaping of our – character, call it – is what is real, rather than whatever results manifest externally.

No! Well, yes, but not the way you mean. You are still leaving too much out. The world is more than stage scenery.

Go ahead.

I could see this in 3D, but it is even clearer now. There is such a thing as pursuing something true to the point of it becoming false, because it is too out of context.

The shaping of your character by events is what is real, in the larger sense, and in the longer run. But that doesn’t mean that the rest of your life is negligible. You can strew a lot of wreckage around just by carelessness. The 3D world counts because it is the world of others too, not just yourself. If you’ll think about it, you’ll see it has to be that way, because you – we – are all one. We consider ourselves individually as a sort of convenient shorthand, and for practical purposes, but the wolf is part of the pack. The outlier is part of the herd. As you sometimes say, nobody changes his own diapers.

So if you leave out the effects of your life on the 3D world around you, you are automatically leaving out some of the effects on you of your own life. So what I object to in your statement is the idea that, in any context, the 3D results don’t matter.

But the rest of it is right – that the shaping of our character by our decisions is what is of central importance in life.

It is right as long as you don’t forget that the 3D world is more than stage scenery for anybody’s particular drama. It is that, but it is not only that.

Yes, I get it.

You do at the moment, In any case, remember the paired concepts of limitation and perseverance, and it will give you an insight into the underlying nature of 3D life that will save you from delusions of helplessness.

I’m enjoying this dialogue, and I hope you will continue it, not just with me but with others.

The restriction is never on the non-3D side. You should know that by now.

I do. Next time, then.