A friend sends me this interview by a Columbian of an Egyptian architect who studied in Zurich. I haven’t listened to it all yet, but it is important.
About an hour and 30 minutes into it, Dr. Karim discusses the human-AI interface and offers some disturbing thoughts about what it portends. (Regardless you position on AI, this is probably not what you have been thinking.)
Absorbing new material intellectually is satisfying, sometimes exciting. But how hard it can be to actually live it!
It is good to become thoroughly familiar with the Cayce work, or Seth, or scriptures, or the guys upstairs. Certainly all that wisdom can enrich our lives. But if we can’t apply it, what good does it do us? We know so much more than we know how to live. But every once in a while…
Last month, my friend Charles and I were shown a simple concept to overcome a stubborn underlying problem.
Charles is very rational, very intellectual, quite at home with metaphysical concepts. He has done extensive reading in metaphysical and philosophical subjects. (Also, he has a positive genius for explicating complicated concepts by clothing them in entertaining stories. For instance, Motorcycle Enlightenment, the novel that Hampton Roads published.)
But sometimes life and matters of feeling and human relationships leave him baffled. [Gee, I wonder what that would feel like!]
On the one hand, he knows that things don’t “just happen” in our lives; that problems are opportunities, in that they are manifestations of things within us that need attention. But on the other hand, sometimes he looks back on his life and has to ask himself how he could have made this or that bad decision.
From years of introspection, he had come to identify a pattern. As long as a problem involved the rational mind, he could deal with it, and usually quite easily. But anything that involved the emotions – and what human relationships don’t involve the emotions? – led his rational, thinking mind to flee, turning over the helm to an emotional part that reacts – as one would expect – emotionally.
The result was bad decisions made impulsively and regretted at leisure when the thinking part came back. He knew that this pattern developed as a result of an early childhood trauma (which is his business, not ours). But knowing it is not the same as overcoming it.
Talking about it, we found an insight forming, and a practical way to apply it.
Charles is a Virgo, God help him. 😊 He is at home with spreadsheets and anything practical. Business was always easy for him, because, as he says, “numbers made sense.”
As we discussed his situation, the metaphor arose. I said, in effect, “You have two spreadsheets, one intellectual and one emotional, and the problem is that the two don’t communicate. When one enters the room, the other leaves. What you need to do is to sync the two, so that they will learn to work together.”
(Charles points out that the understanding seated in for him when I said that when the emotions were triggered, his IQ went to 0. He says, “That’s what registered first for me. I guess it was because my mental-rational part found it both humorous and partly insulting, so it wanted to understand how it could improve itself…I don’t know. I just know it worked.”)
He tried it, and that began a cascade of positive changes. We can see the results already, sometimes in minor things, sometimes in things that are not so minor. I don’t’ see any reason to think it won’t continue to work for him.
Now, this idea of syncing your emotional and rational spreadsheets may not seem like any big deal, but, if you sometimes find yourself making bad decisions for reasons that baffle you, you might try it. I offer it for what it is worth.
Yesterday may turn out to have been a big day. I’m thinking that my session with psychic / healer Jane Mullen is continuing to show results. That was October 30, and it seems to me it was a turning point. Certainly, a lot has happened, mostly but not entirely internal, in the two weeks since then. And, as we know, “internal” is probably a meaningless distinction from “external.”
And you, my friends, seem to have been an integral part of the process of change, or development, and I am grateful.
The theme at the moment is the practical application of so much investigation. Naturally, practice is going to result in change, or did you do so much work over so much time with the idea of manifesting no more than you already were?
We both know better than that. John Nelson pointed out in one of his novels that so many people want to “change without changing.” I know better than that. I feel better than that, let’s say. But of course change always involves moving into the unknown.
It does and it doesn’t. Let’s talk for a moment about the “doesn’t,” for in a time when sweeping comprehensive change is all about you (“you” plural, you understand), it is well that people be reassured that they are not being swept away by a tornado of unbound and unbounded forces. To change metaphor, they are not wandering, lost in the desert, or adrift on the sea. They are, and they aren’t, depending entirely upon their connection to their larger self which they experience.
It strikes me, that is what this whole long story is about, in a way. Muddy Tracks, first draft written in 1997-98, had as its theme my own stumbling efforts to conceptualize life as connection to what I was calling the larger being. Everything in the time since is variations on a theme. Connection, expansion, reorientation, exploration, consolidation – it has been going on a good long time now.
And finally you are at another culmination point. You as an individual, Frank, and you as a part of a small open-but-closed society, and you as a part of a civilization spanning the globe. These are times of gathering and manifestation. They aren’t the end; there is never a “the end,” but they are a pause for
I can’t find the right word. Not “consolidation,” not “reorientation.”
Call it rolling readjustment, maybe. Not the end of the line, not the end of movement. Not a pause, even. More a moment of recognition, a reorienting.
And, I know, not just me. I do know that.
So. for those who are ready to make such preoccupation practical, we have been providing the specific tools. For those who are not yet ready (including those who will never be ready in this lifetime), nothing wasted; no one can know what seed will germinate at what time, in what circumstance. And it takes many iterations, sometimes, for a given statement to suddenly (or gradually) penetrate layers of dullness or misinterpretation or resistance. But for those who are ready when they read this, or re-read it, or think about it later, our theme-song has been, “You are not alone, you are not lost, you are not damned, or forsaken, or stymied.” You have not foreclosed your future by your past action or inaction.
Some scripture says “though your sins be as scarlet,” you can be lifted above them not so much by divine grace (in the sense of an external agency that offers you a lift) as by your divine nature (in the sense of an innate part of yourself that you can at any time choose to identify with).
[To my surprise I find, it is from Isaiah 1:18: “Though your sins be like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red as crimson, they shall be like wool.” I would have bet it was from the Upanishads. If I properly understand the sense of the chapter, Isaiah, who was a prophet, not a lawgiver, was saying, in effect, that God told him that God wasn’t interested in sacrifices or externals, but in repentance – that is, in voluntary individual reform.]
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This is an edited excerpt from “Only Somewhat Real,” not yet published.
Louisa Calio posts a query on my blog that amounts to, Can you give us an interpretation of 3D events that will make sense of the stupidity we live among, or, really, some way of seeing it that will make us feel better about it.
Answering your rough paraphrase rather than her original, we probably should say, “No, we can’t.” But we can give you a few clues, to help you arrive there yourselves. We can suggest interpretations; how you react is always an individual reaction, a merging of new data with old patterns and assumed relationships.
Sure, we can see that. But, subject to that proviso—
Your ways of making sense of things often put the cart before the horse. But explaining how you are doing that isn’t always so easy, given that it involves looking at the same thing from a different point of view, rather than altering or adding to the thing being observed. So you will perhaps be tempted to say, “That’s just talking around it” when we show you how it looks from another perspective.
We’ll try not to do that.
Louisa says – quote it –
“…the nature and purpose of some of these extreme conflicts within the individual…”
It isn’t so much that the conflicts have a purpose as that they express a result.
I know that seems helpful to you, but to us, not so much. A little more explaining?
You come into 3D embodying conflicts, precipitating conflicts around you by what you have within you. That’s one thing that 3D is, an arena, a place and time in which conflicts – and harmony, but we’re talking about conflicts at the moment – come front and center to be transformed. You wouldn’t expect a football game to be tranquil and harmonious; you wouldn’t expect a piano concert to be cacophonous. You expect each event to express in its own way. The thing that makes it hard for you to see, sometimes, is that your football game and piano concert are taking place at the same time, along with drag racing, aerial acrobatic exhibitions, family feuds, three different melodramas being filmed, prolonged mattress testing, and half a million other events including the depths of non-social interactions with yourselves such as monasticism, intense study, illnesses, and other preoccupations. It can get a bit crowded.
Makes me tired just thinking about it.
Yes, but it’s intriguing. Remember how Bob Monroe said AA dived in, because he was fascinated by the raw energy of it all?
I do now that you remind me. Far Journeys, the best of his books.
Well, with all that going on, what could you say is “the point” of it?
Meaning, it won’t have just one point?
Meaning, too, that the purpose of a football game or a concert isn’t just for producing the cheers of the fans or the ovations of the audience.
Aha. Meaning, Loosh may be produced but that doesn’t mean it is more than a by-product.
At this point we advise people to re-read Far Journeys to refresh their memory of what Bob actually said. The Loosh analogy was not, by far, the end of the story, but the beginning of Bob’s deeper exploration.
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This is an edited excerpt from “Only Somewhat Real,” not yet published.
My friend Jim is convinced that we in 3D are – what? Victims? Laboratory animals? He sees human suffering as being designed by non-physical powers to cause suffering so as to produce what Bob Monroe called Loosh, which can be used by these higher beings (call them that) for their own purposes. Everything you have said that I take as evidence of our interaction he seems to take as evidence of our being manipulated for the benefit of others. I think this is a fair summary of his position.
And your part in it?
I’d like to show him that that isn’t how I experience it, but words are so clumsy that we all attach our own meanings to what we read. Plus, I have come to see that there isn’t really any persuading anybody about anything. As you have pointed out, words are sparks, not law.
So, where is the problem?
Yeah, I know. He has a different view of things and so what? But I can’t help thinking if I can’t say anything helpful, still maybe you can.
But why would we want to do that? If his life has led him to his own conclusions, presumably there is a reason for it.
[!]
There ought to be a way to show the this-then-this-then-this process that happens somehow. We need some kind of super exclamation point, to show when we experience a fast concatenation of realizations.
Lacking that, center, slow down, and trace them out, not trying to reproduce the sequence, only to sketch where you came to.
Well, when you said that I connected several insights, each of which led instantly – faster than memory could record – to new ones. It was nearly instant, didn’t take more than a flash, but reoriented several previously unconnected ideas.
Now why do you suppose a simple question would realign all that?
Because I was ready, I suppose, and your question sparked it.
And that is all you can do, need ever do, should ever do. Your ideas, your ways of seeing the world, your prejudices, your hunches, your unreasoning or seemingly baseless certainties, are all part of you, and you embody them for a reason. No ideas are better than any other ideas for a given person.
I think you mean that for any given person, some ideas are going to seem right and others wrong. So there’s no judging another person’s ideas without in effect judging the person – and we have been told for years that we never have the data to judge anyone else, or even ourselves. We are here to express what we are, and of course our ideas are part of that expression.
Correct so far.
Whether our ideas are more accurate or less is something we also can’t guess, because we don’t have that data either. A heliocentric view of the solar system is right in terms of physics and a geocentric one is right in terms of psychology, say. (I’m not sure I actually agree with this example, but let’s go with it.)
I think you will find, when you look at it, that most of your social and ideological and political problems stem from the idea that there is a right and a wrong, a correct and an incorrect, and everybody and his position should be judged by how closely their position agrees with somebody’s idea of what is right. Since everybody’s ideas are different, anything other than “live and let live” – which is itself an idea – leads to chaos, which is what you are experiencing. (This ignores, for simplicity of statement, complicating factors such as greed, manipulation, etc., but they too stem from what people are, both individually and in packs.)
I can sort of see it. This assumption that there is one truth leads to the assumption that (of course) wherever we are is nearer the truth than anybody else, or we would move. And, it invalidates other ideas, hence invalidates other people themselves who hold these ideas.
Well, isn’t that what you see all around you?
It is, for sure, particularly in the poor excuse for a country that used to be America. Liberals and conservatives are tearing it to pieces in the name of fighting to preserve it. I have been saying for months that they’re all crazy, acting identically only around different ideas. But I hadn’t thought, until now, to see that it is fueled by each side feeling that the other side is invalidating them as what they are. Obvious, once I see it, but it wasn’t obvious before.
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This is an edited excerpt from “Only Somewhat Real,” not yet published.
Friday, October 27, 2017
We have a few questions queueing up, but I’m anxious to hear you on predestination and free will.
Very well, it’s very simple – or very complicated, depending upon which end of the stick you pick up.
It doesn’t seem so to us. To us it looks like it ought to be an either/ or.
But, remember what you noticed repeatedly whenever Rita would find a contradiction. The universe contains all contradictions, but does not contradict itself.
Free will means, in essence, that in a given set of circumstances – at a given moment in the ever-flowing river of time carrying you along in your 3D life – you seize choices. That is, you have the real, not theoretical, ability to go this way or that way, like the lassie in the old song. You have a real, not a theoretical, choice. You really can choose heads or tails, A or B. You and Rita were told, first thing, that free will is the point of 3D existence, so that you will develop as you will, not as puppets, not as chips floating in rapids.
Predestination means, it’s all well and good to say you have freedom to choose, but your whole history leads you to choose one way rather than another. Not only your past but your future pulls you in a certain direction – or, one might say, holds you as a piece of iron might be held in an overwhelmingly strong magnetic current. That piece of iron won’t even be able to tumble end over end, though it might perhaps rotate on its forward-aft axis. To say that you have choice is to consider yourself as if you were in isolation; to say you are predestined is to see yourself as one tiny element in an overwhelmingly powerful, continuing organizing system; a rapids; a hurricane; a magnetic field. (Organizing systems aren’t necessarily calm or even apparently stable, but they channel immense forces.)
Swedenborg said humans were artificially suspended between equalized forces in order that they might have real, effective, free will. I think that is a fairly accurate summary of what he said.
Let’s set that way of seeing things to one side for the moment. Swedenborg was a great seer; so was Cayce; so were uncounted individuals known to the world and unknown. But nobody else’s experience and thought and conclusions can ever prove anything for anybody else. What they may do is spark a recognition, and of course that is what we are trying to do here, say things that some will recognize and profit by.
Thoreau said something similar once, that nothing was ever true to him because somebody else said it, but only because it whispered itself in his ear.
And that thought in itself appealed to you, you see. It sparked a recognition. That’s why people find favorite authors; their minds run in parallel.
Now, bear in mind, free will and predestination – seeming opposites – both depend upon one way of seeing things, namely that there is one time-stream, one consciousness, one individual will, for each person. When you change those assumptions, everything changes; consequences differ as circumstances differ.
In a reality in which the physical world was what it seems to “common sense” people, there would be only one time-stream. The physical world would be solid, substantial (as it appears) and obviously could not be multiplied millions of times every day as all those people made all those decisions. One reality-stream; real and irrevocable consequences.
In such a one-timestream reality, the free will/predestination argument would naturally arise as people seized on this set or that set of unarguable facts that cannot be reconciled, for in such a system, there could be no reconciling them. It would have to be an either/or, and yet the evidence would be too great on either side for the contrary assertion to be sanctioned. Deadlock, you see.
So the clue is that the world is projected thought.
Projected consciousness; formed not so much into thought as into awareness. There is life without thought; there is no life without awareness.
Okay. The world is projected consciousness, and all possible paths exist; all are waiting for us to walk them, and somehow we do walk them all, choosing heads and tails, time after time, with our awareness restricted somehow to only one path, the others remaining only theoretical to us. It often seems only a fanciful idea, even after nearly 20 years.
That is because you have the wrong idea of who “you” are. You are identifying with the Pac-man eating obstacles, rather than with the player playing the game. Or if you don’t like that example, another analogy would be that you are identifying with the character and not the actor, or the movie-goer viewing the final film rather than with the film editor choosing among possible scenes.
We get the idea. Pretty hard not to identify with what we experience every moment, though.
You also experience the other level, when you don’t filter out the evidence as impossible or fantasy or hallucination or merely inexplicable.
Yes, I have a few friends who experience alternate realities poking in, every so often.
A more accurate statement would be that you have friends who are occasionally conscious of it, for you all experience it; only they do not always screen out what they experience but may have no framework for.
In any case, when you realize – or even, for the moment, theorize, pretend, envision – yourselves to be the one, single, undivided you that takes all paths, rather than the fragment-you that you customarily experiences as taking one path only (whether or not free to choose), you see that there is no real contradiction at that level. Of course you are free, but not free to take only one path: free to identify with this or that part of yourself. Of course it is all predestined: the paths existed from the moment the world was created; all you could do was fill them, or as it seems to you, walk them.
And all this has ramifications.
Because all paths exist, it is easy to see and even visit the future. (And how could anyone see the future if it was not already pre-formed?) Because you change timelines – reality-streams, if you will – it is easy to cease to have one future and have another. (How else could real seers nevertheless predict futures that “don’t happen,” like Cayce predicting so many physical catastrophes that did not occur, instead of World War II, that did?)
We keep coming back to the same simple (but not necessarily easy) statement: You are not what you think you are; the world you exist in is not what it appears to be.
We do know that. Our questions mostly amount to, “But who are we, then, and what is the world?” And we’re glad for your assistance in orienting us.
Bear in mind, it is a continuing enterprise, because you – and we – may come to a resting-place, a comfortable way of making sense of things, and that’s all well and good, but ultimately there is always more to learn, always a deeper way of seeing things.
So we’ll never be bored, I know.
That isn’t the purpose, but it is the effect, yes.
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This is an edited excerpt from “Only Somewhat Real,” not yet published.
[Watched “Terminator 3.” Thinking about the story. The visuals show how much people hate our civilization, and want to see it smashed – trucks, cars, buildings, people, cities. I don’t even know if the movie makers know they are expressing that. Maybe they think people just like “action.” (Even that would show how boring and unsatisfying people’s lives are.) But there is a deeper theme, for me: sitting on the sidelines watching the inevitable catastrophe. That’s what I have been doing my whole life, with the exception of a half-hearted attempt to enter political life. If it is inevitable, you waste your life trying to stop it – even if you know what to do. But how do you know it is inevitable? Well, I guess the answer to that is simple: You know. I can’t help wondering what form the catastrophe will take, and how much it will leave us alone. I don’t mean Skynet, I mean the progressive destruction of the republic. No way to know. Work while I have time, and hope that something survives.]
You know that the physical brain reacts to depictions nearly as strongly as to the real physical event. Your brains are always playing virtual reality, and the difference in input is less significant, less discernable, to it than you might assume. So, all those depictions of mass destruction, of lethal conflict, of raw emotion (that is, the scenes themselves, and the reaction they were created to produce) are real. As real as the rest of your lives, that is. Or, let’s say, a half-step less real, as your physical life is a half-step less real than the reality above (and below, and around) it.
So media presentation of a portrait of your world is not limited to “news” broadcasts with their own peculiar bias toward the dramatic and away from the analytical; it includes the overt drama and all its subtexts. It includes the fiction and non-fiction that you read. It includes second-hand experience at roughly the same level as first-hand, depending upon your intuitive/sensory mix. Someone like you lives as much in secondary reports as in primary experience; more, sometimes. Others may live only in the primary, as far as they know, and yet they will be suffused by secondary reports absorbed unconsciously and uncritically stored as data.
But surely even the least self-conscious persons have their unbroken link to intuition – to their non-3D component – to keep them aligned.
The unbroken and unbreakable link between conscious and unconscious, between 3D awareness and All-D awareness, let’s say, is not meant to produce homogenous 3D results. Quite the contrary. It is meant to support the existence of the 3D being; it is, as a parallel function, the repository of the record of all 3D experience. (It is your feed to the Akashic Record, you might say.) But although it is always acting as a receiver, it is experienced by the 3D being as transmitter only under certain constraints. The 3D being may choose to shut off any messages it finds uncomfortable. It tunes out its bad conscience, you might say. Or, it tunes out thoughts and realizations that contradict what it chooses to think or realize. Or it tunes out intuitive input in general, as distraction or as hallucination or as fantasy.
“It isn’t real.”
That’s one version, yes. “It isn’t real, I don’t want to hear about it, it produces uncomfortable sensations.” For any of those reasons, and there are more, any 3D being may shut itself off from receiving some of the input available to it. But, a couple of points.
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This is an edited excerpt from “Only Somewhat Real,” not yet published.