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Energy and opportunity

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Talking with Jon Holt just now, I realized something that perhaps I have never said, and that ought to be said. That is, there is a time in one’s life when things are possible and a time when they cease to be possible. Keeping that fact in mind may serve as an antidote to the temptation to give in to the idea of putting things off until manana.

Specifically, Intuitive Linked Communication. For several years, I was able to sit with pen and paper for an hour at a time, sometimes for as much as 90 minutes, then transcribe it. Can’t do that anymore. It struck me, talking to the other side requires a certain quantum of energy, and if you don’t have it, you don’t have it. Despite my occasional physical troubles, I was always endowed with a great deal of energy. Perhaps if I hadn’t had that naturally high energy level, talking to the guys would never have been a realistic possibility for me.

Moral of the story – one possible moral, anyway – is not exactly “use it or lose it,” but more, “use it before you lose it.” If something within you leads you to toy with the idea of trying your hand at talking to the other side on a regular basis, maybe it would be as well if you were to listen to the prompting.

Cosmic tides and us

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

[Came across this while editing (for the final time, one hopes!) the forthcoming “Only Somewhat Real” manuscript.

Tuesday, November 7, 2017

All right, since I have to be up anyway, I suppose we should begin. I know that doesn’t sound particularly gracious; you know I love doing this, but I’d be just as happy to do it under fewer physical constraints.

It does not occur to you perhaps that this maximizes the use of those constraints. That otherwise you would have the constraints but nothing productive to do within them.

You think I don’t know that, after a lifetime of sitting up reading, rocking forward and back, painful breath by painful breath? I’m not going to go into it, but I’m damn well aware of the advantages of being able to use physical problems as a sort of platform to kick away from. And if uncomfortable nights were the price I had to pay to be able to do this, I’d be perfectly happy to make the bargain. Only, why should it be? It’s the same unexplainable contradiction I’ve always lived within: I know that I should be able to just – turn something, adjust something – and be well, only I can’t find it. And this isn’t just about me, obviously. Everybody wrestles with something; why can’t awareness overcome it?

You have been down this line of thought more than once. Worth looking again, as you are in a different place now than before.

Then let’s look, by all means.

If you could wish away your problems, so to speak – that is, if you had Aladdin’s lamp to grant you even one wish, let alone three – what good would it do you? In fact, look how much harder it would make your lives. It is much like you were told once, if you had an infallible source of knowledge of what is going to happen, wouldn’t you then be prone to Psychic’s Disease? As long as you function in 3D, you function under limitations, and if it isn’t one thing, it will be something else.

Well, my father always used to say, in exasperation, “It’s always something.”

Yes, we smile too, but of course it is always something. That’s life. And by that we mean, not just “That’s the way life goes,” but, more, “that is the essence and fabric and value of life.” And not just limitation, but conflict, problems, difficulty. The very things you may be prone to think of as drawbacks to life are, in fact, demonstrations that all is well, all is always well.

So much easier to see that in other people’s situation, but I do see it. If we are here to choose and to create ourselves (if only by choosing among versions, which one we prefer to live, moment by moment), then obviously there must be things to choose between, and for the choices to matter to us, one must be more attractive, one less attractive. Which implies problems.

That is taking things a little too much at a gallop. Let’s look at it slowly.

I know, I know. Concentrate: con-center-ate.

Centering

And you see the first thing that happens?

It seems my breathing improved, only it isn’t quite that, is it?

The overall feeling improved because although the wheezing continued, the circumambient tightening of the muscles relaxed, reducing the discomfort.

I had a definite sense that you wanted me to use “circumambient,” which ordinarily I wouldn’t. Why?

It is more precise, more descriptive, than merely saying “surrounding.”

And that is important, why?

Perhaps your habits of thought and expression are not so uniquely and entirely yours as you may think.

Okay. And I get that that is a real point, not just a comment. In other words, we’re all in this together; 3D and non-3D, individual and what we might call our mental or at least non-3D community.

You see, anything widens out, at least potentially, if you concentrate. Slower isn’t necessarily deeper, but it may be. It’s up to what you do with it. Faster may get you safely over thin ice; not necessarily, but maybe. It is, as we say, all a matter of how you live it.

So, to return to my statement that was made too much at a gallop?

No need for us to spell it out for you. Sink into it. That is the advantage of writing, after all; the words don’t move.

It isn’t quite a matter of setting up problems so we will have things to choose among.

No, not Shaw’s “moral gymnasium.” So then, what?

I am forgetting the universal in thinking of the individual.

That’s the right idea, but – slower.

Tides

Well, in thinking of the choices and problems we face in life, it is tempting, or maybe I should say it is habitual, for us to think of our situation in isolation, because that is of course how it will present itself. And I see the relevance of the allusion to speed. In our day-to-day situations, we are usually skating, just having enough to deal with, moment by moment, and perhaps little enough time – even if we have the inclination – to examine what comes more closely, slower. Because maybe any situation, any set of choices, offers insight into larger things, if we have the time and inclination to feel our way into it.

Your lives are never accidentally dropped into circumstances. Inner and outer are the same thing seen differently, remember, one through direct feed via intuition (or, non-3D link), the other through sensory apparatus and extensions. So where is the possibility for meaningless occurrence? Not every choice is momentous; that doesn’t mean that it and its context are meaningless.

Slowly, feeling my way into it, as you suggested. So, our lives are bound into the times we live; we know that about our outer circumstances. That means we are equally bound into the times we live internally. Have to be, since it is the same thing. Which means our thoughts and feelings and all are caught in a tide. Have to be. We are not independent, though we think we are; we are independent to a degree, and social to a degree.

This should be obvious to someone who has studied astrology and seen the tides running through the lives of everyone on Earth, not just any one given person. What the tides react on, or let’s say individually affect

Let me.

Go.

The cosmic tides, call them, are what they are, and they are that as a sort of background for us all. But that isn’t what we experience. We experience the result of the interaction between the tide and the individual we are, shaped at a particular moment of time and place. [That is, shaped at birth.] So, we all live in the same – circumambient, since you like that word – cosmic tide, but the individual is affected by that tide differently depending upon what that tide works on; that is, what it finds pre-formed [by previous decisions] at any given moment.

Didn’t we posit vast impersonal forces on the one hand, and individual complicated pipes for those winds to play through?

Yes, clear enough now, in this context.

So was it worth while to be rousted out of bed?

I may cease to answer rhetorical questions.

Yes, good. We smile too. But you see.

Well, I see further implications, too, accurate or not. It seems to imply that certain problems can only be worked with at certain times.

Again, just a little slower.

What I mean is, it’s just what astrology would tell us: At any given moment, certain things are easier for the given individual (depending upon his or her composition) and other things harder. Does this quite imply that whatever problem or opportunity surfaces at any given moment is the best thing to concentrate on?

Easiest, anyway. “Best” is a matter of value and judgment.

And there’s our hour. Well, it turned out to be pretty productive, I think. Not what I would have expected.

There is something to be said for taking what comes.

I do know that. At least, for my kind of person. Other types tend to shape things more, it seems to me.

Hammers make poor screwdrivers. Wrenches make poor drill-bits. Every implement to its own uses.

Thanks as always.

[And as a sort of PS, I had already closed the book when it occurred to me – with help? – that this entry is an example of taking what comes. They began where I was and continued as they were able to. Maybe from their point of view they’re always doing that.]

Nothing at all. Okay, thanks.

Evil in life (from “Life More Abundantly”)

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Wednesday, October 16, 2019

Shall we do more headlines, this morning?

We can try. You will find this easier, and harder, than our usual plodding. Let’s see how it goes.

When we speak of evil, remember that we refer not to appearance of evil, nor personal preferences rooted in one’s values, nor things that seem evil until seen in greater context. Beyond all these categories, there is real, objective, evil, the twin to real, objective, good.

We know that many people have argued that evil is only appearance but it is not so. In a binary universe, good is paired with evil, and the fact that many things that are not evil are called evil does not change the fact that some things are evil, and you know it in practical life, even when your philosophic position or your intellectual preference would argue it away.

Yes, this is ground many times gone over.

Well, it is important, for if all choice is a matter only of personal preference, then values hang in the air, anchored to nothing, and then life would be, in truth, the meaningless arbitrary game it sometimes appears to be.

• The basis of life in duality is good v. evil in tension.
• Like all 3D phenomena, these are realities of the larger All-D reality, manifesting in 3D’s special circumstances.
• It isn’t that you are born ignorant; you are born with tendencies and preferences and potential.
• Life is thus not a school but a chance (and a necessity) for you to choose what you will manifest. It is boot camp in that you are being forced by circumstance to develop and use certain skills. It is a gymnasium in that it provides you an environment in which to exercise them.
• Life in 3D is not isolated from life in the greater sense, no matter that it appears to be so.

Are we divided into armies or families that are good or evil, or all we all a mixture?

Both, at the same time.

Can we change sides with different incarnations? I seem to get, immediately, that as our mixture of elements varies by incarnation, the answer is, “It can be so.”

Again, look to your spiritual and religious traditions. You needn’t be bound by their rules nor pledge your allegiance to them as corporate bodies, but you would be foolish to ignore so large and well-examined a body of information.

I take that to say that we are mixtures of good and evil; that we often do evil almost against our own will; that we are sometimes tempted; that one on either path may be seduced from it into the other.

The left-hand and right-hand path aren’t quite the same as evil v. good; closer to selfish v. all-encompassing. But close enough. In practice, you will find temptation enough on all sides, and even the lure of being all good may be a temptation from the proper path of wholeness. Any one of you is a mixture of prior individuals who were mixtures of qualities.

If our mixture in this life were merely mixtures of qualities per se, life wouldn’t be nearly as rich as it is. I, having 10 other “past” lives, say, have 10 definitely-formed rocks in the bag. If I had only the sum of the qualities they encompass, it would be a bag of sand.

Less structured, correct, and not a bad analogy. Your lives are more structured internally than you sometimes realize. More headlines:

• “Past” lives and psychological complexes are often the same reality differently described.
• “Past” lives, remember, are not finished, completed, polished, portraits or statutes. They, and you, interact.
• That interaction takes place seemingly in 3D, actually in All-D, and the difference is significant.
• The 3D is for choice in constricted circumstances; it is for shaping, or let’s say for self-shaping. You are the spindle and 3D is the lathe, only in some respects the spindle operates the lathe it is being shaped by.
• But 3D is not an end in itself. It is a means toward an end, not “3D life for 3D life’s sake.”

It is not a meaningless show, nor an illusion without substance, though this does not mean that you can see it clearly. Perhaps we might call it reality veiled by illusion.

So give us some more headlines about good and evil.

That might mislead, because larger subjects easily tend to float in midair, slipping away from practical concerns and becoming just mind-play. Nothing wrong with that, but it is not what we are after.

So then how do you anchor the subject?

In human conduct, always; in human experience inner and outer.

So, for instance?

• Anything you are ashamed to admit may or may not be evil (it may be merely social conditioning), but it is the first place to look.
• Things that you know are evil but that you feel within you do not convict you of evil; they convict you of being human. No one can live in duality without incorporating some of the evil in the world. But: Do you express it? Do you consent to it? Do you identify with it?
• If you say to yourself, “Evil per se does not really exist,” into what category do you place torturing animals, children, other innocents, even the guilty?
• Some of life is a choice of values, but other aspects are a choice between real evil and real good, or at least between real evil and neutrality.

We’re going to meet resistance on this point. I can’t quite see why; The same people who deny the existence of evil usually (in my experience) would never dream of committing it.

And there is your clue. It is in the imagination of evil that you can see the potential in real life, just as with any other manifestation.

I think you just said, it is important somehow that we form an active picture of the existence of evil.

In its absence you cannot form an accurate idea of life. The Transcendentalists tended to wave it away – but then the question of slavery hung in the air to remind them that life trumps theory.

Headlines (from “Life More Abundantly”)

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Tuesday, October 15, 2019

A chief source of confusion for people is how the “external” world can be really only an expression of unknown parts of themselves; and can be existent in and of and for itself. If this is once understood, many things clarify, because who and what you are clarifies. As long as you can’t see yourselves as both individual and not-individual, you are going to have to choose between what seems to be a divide. When you see one thing as if it were two things, obviously you won’t be able to see it whole.

We trust that by this time our description of reality as without absolute boundaries has been absorbed.

I get that you want to recap many things like reality being projected rather than existing as “real” in the way it appears to us. You may be able to trot all that out again, though I couldn’t, but how are you going to spend the hour recapitulating and then have any time for anything new?

We understand the frustration. Do you have a better idea?

What about just putting out the headlines, and let people use their own search-engines?

Interesting idea. Bold idea, even. But can you transcribe the headlines?

I don’t know. Let’s try, and we will or we won’t get something.

All right. Headlines:

• “Life is but a dream.”
• “All is one”;
• “As above, so below.”
• “As a man thinks in his heart, so he is.”
• “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life, and you will call it fate.
• ”Beyond this mortal realm, there is another, not mortal; yet the two are one.
• You are not primarily 3D beings and yet you are. Which way you define yourself (con-fine yourself) determines who you appear, how reality appears.
• The only permanent thing is eternal unceasing change, and yet eternal change is itself a form of changelessness.

And you see the problem as well as the possibility: Too concise a statement emerges as paradox or cryptic allusion. Our habitual slow process of exposition avoids that pitfall.

Maybe worth alternating. I get tired of plodding exposition, continually half-repeating previously established views so as not to let them fall into oblivion.

Well, then, another headline or two, and then we will pause.

• You are the entire world, yet you are only the tiniest part of it, rather like a hologram.
• As a “divine spark,” that is, stemming as you do from something that is not of the 3D level of reality, your nature cannot be satisfied with 3D reality alone.
• Earth is not a school; it is closer to a gymnasium, or basic training.
• You are neither ignorant nor isolated nor limited, and yet your 3D experience continually tempts you to see yourselves that way. Why do you suppose that is?
• Life is vastly greater than the 3D version of life that you are living in one part of yourself.

Interim Report

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Chapter 13. Interim Report
So what does this whole book amount to? It doesn’t amount to proof of anything, that’s for sure. For all you know, I’m deliberately deceiving you, or am deceiving myself. My data may be wrong, my reasoning may be wrong, my “knowings” may be wrong, my conclusions may be wrong. As always, you’re pretty much on your own, and you’re pretty much going to believe whatever you allow yourself to believe. The only other choice is to find an authority to follow, trying not to remember that belief in authority is itself a belief, not a known.
I wrote this, not to persuade you of anything, but to present a clear statement of first-hand experience that might suggest to you that your life is more magical than you may have thought. I have seen, first hand, that there’s a lot for us to learn about many things that have been reported for centuries and denied only in the past few hundred years. These phenomena, if taken seriously, cast serious doubt on the materialist fantasy that has passed for science and common-sense in our day. Among those inconvenient reports: ghosts. out-of-body experiences, spirit possession, witchcraft, telepathy, afterlife experiences, the power of prayer, the ability to heal by touch or and at a distance… and plenty more.
Do such things happen? Is the commonly accepted view of the world significantly different from real life? There’s only one way to know. You have to investigate. You can’t just take another person’s word for it, except as an interim report. I know that stepping off the beaten path can be somewhat scary. But the land beyond the beaten path is not a featureless wilderness. I hope that my few muddy (not, I hope, muddled) footprints in the grass will give you whatever excuse you need to go find out for yourself. Herewith, a summary of my own interim report.
.2.
My own experiences (including reading and thinking, trying to make sense of these experiences) convince me of 10 interrelated points.
1) We are immortal spirits temporarily inhabiting bodies. Although by habit we identify with our bodies, this is a mistake, or a partial mistake. We are somewhat material; somewhat mortal; somewhat human. The identity we call ourselves — Downstairs, as I call it — is linked to the Earth in many ways, some known, some not. Our bodies are of the earth. Our genetic memories, our physical ancestry, our everyday interests, are all firmly rooted in the earth. To our physical bodies — the human part of us — earth is home. It is rightly said that we are spiritual beings having a human experience; that human experience is an experience of living “in the earth”, that is, in 3D Theater–physical matter reality. Therefore it isn’t “spiritual” to hate our bodies or our lives, however much our moments of deepest homesickness may tempt us to.
But we are more than our physical bodies. We are spirits, forming and maintaining and living in physical bodies, and neither this beautiful earth nor any other physical place, here or in the next galaxy, can be home to a spirit. We come from Elsewhere (or perhaps I should say Else-non-where); we’re just visiting here. Therefore, neither is it “scientific” or “realistic” to think that the body, or even human existence as body/mind/spirit, is all there is. Too much experience flatly contradicts this. Therefore,
2) This life is not our only life. As immortal or relatively immortal spirits, we lived before we were born this time, and will live after we die this time. Before and after this one physical-matter-reality life, we exist. It seems likely that we’re somewhere (physical or otherwise), doing something (whether imaginable to us now or not). And in fact explorers before and since Monroe have found just this.
3) We “individuals” are all connected one to another. The lives we lead seem to be separated between Me and Not-Me, with the dividing line seeming to be our physical bodies, but even science now knows that the division is illusory. We touch each other and are touched both in and out of body. Our scents, our auras, our thoughts, all touch at a distance. We often know each other’s thoughts, and “spontaneously and fortuitously” intervene in each other’s lives when needed. We engage in dance-like, perfectly executed interactions in ways that do not originate Downstairs and cannot be understood strictly in Downstairs terms. I think this is because
4) We as individuals are fragments of a larger being that cares about us and can be trusted. What Monroe called the INSPEC, what religions call God, what New Agers sometimes call The Universe–something vastly greater than us is yet an intimate part of us, as we are an intimate part of it. It is our connection to the larger whole that makes our lives possible, and gives our lives meaning. We are as fingers of an immense hand–which analogy demonstrates why the intentions of the larger being can be trusted. Does a finger distrust the hand it is part of? And if the finger comes to grief for whatever reason, does it suspect that the misfortune came from the hand’s malice? Obviously not. Where there is identity, there is identity of interest.
5) Nonetheless, this larger being sees things differently. Down here, immersed in 3D-Theater, we can’t help identifying with the here-and-now. Indeed, that’s what we’re here to do! But naturally anything that had its being in a framework outside of time and space would see things differently. What is desperately real to us would be a dream to it, and what was important to it might be nonexistent to our consciousness. We almost always forget the larger reality when we enter this one. Mythology had it that we forgot as we crossed the River Styx. Monroe says the noise of unfocused human mental and emotional activity is too great for us to function if we were to stay at the level of awareness natural to us outside 3D Theater (that is, in the non-physical realm he called Locale II). Other mythologies and cosmologies explain it in other ways. Different ways of saying the same thing. We forget. But the larger being remembers, and it is there to remind us.
6) The larger being is a source of foresight and wisdom. The larger being cannot live our life for us. This would deprive us–and thus itself–of choice and growth, which is the result of choice. But it sees outside of time, and it knows our purpose for this lifetime, as we cannot, and it has insights that can help us stay “on the beam” and live this life to the fullest. Think how wise we would be if we could remember the experiences and conclusions of thousands of other lives from the inside. Think what wise counselors we could then be to one who was within such a life, with its sensory and other constraints. Access to wider knowledge, combined with intimate insight and identity of interest, makes the larger being a trustworthy source of unlimited wisdom, relative to even the wisest and best of us fragments.
7) The larger being contacts us, sometimes sending dreams, sometimes visions, sometimes hunches or “knowings” or precognitive flashes. It works through intuition, regularly, and sometimes automatic writing, spontaneous recall, coincidence, you name it. Any time you hear or see something that resonates, your larger being may be taking advantage of an opportunity to get something across. Monroe said non-corporeal beings communicate exclusively by non-vocal communication rather than by words. Isn’t this precisely what dreams do? Dreams usually set up pictures, scenarios, symbols, leaving us to decode them as best we can. Sometimes, it is true, we get words; sometimes words, even sentences, of great power. But primarily dreams send symbols, which we can learn to read. (Let me say in passing that all means of divination, including Tarot decks, the I Ching, and those not yet devised, seem to me to work by helping the larger being to communicate with us, if only by concentrating our attention on symbols.) And this is not a one-way street.
8) We can contact the larger being. Some call it prayer; some, meditation; some, asking for guidance. The names vary according to time, culture and tradition, but the means of access are well known. Regardless of context, the underlying reality is that we as fragmentary individuals have access to a trustworthy source of relatively boundless knowledge and wisdom, ours for the asking. We need only to learn how to communicate, and to practice doing it.
9) Thus our lives need not be disconnected and solitary. We are always in intimate connection with the larger, wiser being we sometimes call “our” higher self; because we are part of this higher self, as fingers are a part of a hand. (Is a hand a finger’s higher self?) Without this intimate connection, we could not live, any more than a finger could live apart from its hand, or the hand away from its arm, etc. Therefore it is impossible for us to be alone in this sense.
10) Nonetheless, we may often lose communication. The intimate connection cannot be severed, but communication may be, and often is, distorted, neglected or forgotten. Many never even learn of the possibility of such intimate communication, having been taught otherwise. Obviously if you don’t believe it exists, you don’t try to communicate with it, and don’t listen when it communicates with you. And even those who know about the larger spirit sometimes forget, mostly in those times when “the world is too much with us.” At such times, be it a period of forgetfulness or a lifetime, everything you might have learned from that source is closed to you, not as punishment but as a consequence of your own forgetfulness or disbelief. But regardless of belief, we can contact the larger being, using many tools internal and external. Thus our lives don’t have to be disconnected and solitary. Thus we need not live our lives alone, even if all contemporary society says otherwise.
It seems to me that thinking in terms of our connection to a larger being clears up a lot of mysteries. It opens up unsuspected possibilities for us as individuals as well as collectively as a species. It means more, suggests more, than the words God or Higher Self. If the concept still poses perplexities, and if it still leaves vastly more unexplained than explained, so what? That leaves all the more work — and fun — for us and those who follow us. But it does give us a point of departure.
.3.
The experiences I have shared with you in this narrative cease to be inexplicable when viewed in this context. They become what is only to be expected. They become (dare we say it?) ordinary. And the things religions have tried so hard to tell us, these many generations and centuries, make sense in an entirely new way.
We are immortal spirits temporarily inhabiting bodies, and so this life is not our only life. We “individuals” are all connected one to another, if only as fragments of a larger being. This larger being cares about us and can be trusted. It is a source of foresight and wisdom, but nonetheless, it sees things differently. The larger being contacts us, and we can contact it, and so our lives need not be disconnected and solitary. Nonetheless, we may often lose communication.
Immortal spirits, temporarily inhabiting bodies? My contacts with living beings who no longer live on this earth –including some who I did not know when they were alive here–would be enough to convince me, if I needed convincing, that it is demonstrably untrue that “one life is all you get.” The only way that saying is true is in the limited sense that a given personality in a given historical time is somehow significantly different and distinct from other personalities and lifetimes that are embodied by the same soul. Thus, one might reasonably argue that a given life is not really a “past life” of another, but “another life” of some common-denominator soul. Or, one might make the counter-argument that all beings are at bottom part of one great being. It’s only a conflict of viewpoint. I can’t see how it ever could be resolved, and I don’t see that it would be important to do so.
As to this life not being our only life, here are a few of the lives I have found to date: Bertram, a Norman monk of the middle ages; John Cotten, the 18th-century Virginia farmer who married Clara; Joseph (or Josiah) Smallwood, the Vermont nature mystic; David Owen Poynter, the Welsh journalist and seeker of hidden knowledge; Katrina, the Polish Jewish girl; Also Clio, a Roman diviner in fire; Senji-san, a Japanese monk, and unnamed others, including at least one (if the evidence may be believed) on another planet. I don’t expect it to convince anyone else, but it goes a long way toward convincing me.
As evidence of our connection one to another, I might cite every instance of so-called telepathy mentioned in this book, and–more to the point, perhaps–all the mutual assistance so freely offered and received. Think of the interaction between Mary and me, for instance, or Suni and Ed and Dave and so many others named and unnamed. We tend to take love and friendship for granted, considering them to be part of ordinary life. So they are. But the very prevalence in our lives of love and friendship may blind us, sometimes, to how very strange and interesting they are as symptoms (not merely symbols) of our deep interconnectedness.
That we are fragments of a larger being that cares about us and can be trusted has always been an axiom of religion. My experiences, inner and outer, convince me that this is a straightforward description of the way things are. And although Monroe calls that being INSPEC and others call it God, Monroe made it quite clear in his book Far Journeys that INSPEC (on INSPEC’s own say-so) was not God. Yet he also said that he could see how people in the past, catching just a momentary non-physical glimpse of INSPEC, might decide it had seen the deity. Just so, Carl Jung once described what he called the racial unconscious in terms that he explicitly said resembled the traditional conception of God, including, among other attributes, (relative) omniscience and omnipresence.
Certainly a larger being connected to all of us, and existing outside time-space, would be a source of foresight and wisdom. Certainly it would see things differently from those of us enmeshed in 3D Theater. Yet it would be willing and able to contact us, and would encourage such contact. I have given many examples in this book of the simple process of establishing and deepening connection with the larger being. What else was it, when I learned to talk to (listen to) The Boss, or The Gentlemen Upstairs? When, before that, I connected with my Higher Self in the image of a unicorn? The information I have gotten has proved reliable on matters mundane and practical, no less than philosophical and abstract. And when I listen to hunches, it is the same thing.
But you must be willing to connect. What is leading an exclusively Downstairs life, if not loss of communication with Upstairs? This is the long hard solitary Downstairs road, with a vengeance, and it is no fun.
This new overview is all right there within the context of my experiences. I promised, in advance, to speak of what I know of my own knowledge. The same knowledge, by way of different experiences, is available to you. It is merely a matter of going after it.
.4
Every religion I know of testifies that we are spirits in bodies, and that we are an integral part of an eternal being that guides us and cares for us, and is essential to our moment-to-moment existence. “In Him we live and move and have our being.” Religions have greatly discredited themselves by their quarreling over the way they see things. Nonetheless I think it would be a great error, almost a laughable one, to ignore the existence of so many thousand years of religious testimony, testimony that coincides.
Experience unites; opinion divides. Those who give testimony to personal experience of what they call God describe what happened to them as best they can. Of course, their testimony is going to differ as to detail and emphasis. But the reports are similar. It is when we get into opinion about what that experience means that we meet intolerance, the construction of logical prisons, and the laying-down of rules, and the beginnings of religious wars. Little minds attempt to interpret great experience, and the inevitable result is distortion, and quarreling over the nature and attributes of God, and the nature of humans, the nature of reality, the nature (and existence or non-existence) of heaven and hell, and of the afterlife in general.
Different religions emerge, shaped by different types of people, for different types of people. They place their emphasis so drastically differently that they seem to be describing differences in essence when in fact they are describing difference in nuance, or in interpretation. What they cannot spread and often do not share is the experience of the very real existence of the larger being of which we are a part.
One of the greatest Christian mystics and seers in history, Emanuel Swedenborg was also the most famous European scientist of his day. For more than 27 years, beginning in his fifties, Swedenborg conversed with spiritual beings he called angels and was granted visions of heaven and hell. He interpreted his entirely in a Christian context, but they sound remarkably like what Lifeline participants experience. Shared experience does not imply shared interpretation. Yet the experience is real.
.5.
We are in one of those historic moments when a civilization’s old way of seeing things is breaking into fragments, and a new way is not yet born. It is exciting, challenging, liberating–and also disorienting, frightening. No matter. This world we are moving into was not called forth by us and it won’t be banished by us. All we can do is meet it well or badly. And the only way to meet it well is to live our greatest truth as see where that brings us. Neither materialism nor fundamentalism contains enough truth to be worth the distortion they include. Neither offers us firm ground upon which to found our new lives. Only experience, followed by reflection, does that.
So it becomes a matter of personal exploration. My Upstairs link provides me with whatever assistance I happen to want, along with quite a bit that I need but don’t have sense enough to ask for. Do you have reason to think your Upstairs is any less interested in helping you? Is yours any less practical than mine? Why not ask your own questions?
Of course, any process of interpretation includes distortion. As an example, I suspect that often people experience the larger being as an external spirit, because it seems to them to be something outside themselves. In a sense, it is outside themselves: it extends far beyond the bounds of their own personality. In another sense, it is not at all outside themselves: it is an integral (and often unsuspected) internal part of the larger being that they are. Each viewpoint is sort of correct; neither is exactly correct. The distortion caused by viewpoints can be recognized and allowed for, but not prevented.
And the same thing goes for this overview. It is (at best) sort of correct, from a certain point of view. As far as I can see, “sort of correct, from a certain point of view” is about as good as we can do while still being in physical-matter reality. Even at best, anybody else’s ideas and experiences are no more than an interim report.

As things change (from “Life More Abundantly”)

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Saturday, October 12, 2019

Evil is part of us, and yet that doesn’t excuse anything. Really, this is nothing new to religious thought, and it is ridiculous that contemporary society should need to have it explained yet again.

Contemporary society is in the process of redefining its understandings, bringing them to a new level of sophistication, and the process unavoidably involves losing ground. You recall that we explained that a new civilization’s assumptions are going to include some that the prior civilization took as fact and some that it took as fancy or superstition. Well, that is twice as true for religious thought. No new civilization accepts the prior civilization’s way of seeing things, and no new one receives the older one’s religion or religions unchanged. It may not intend to change it, or replace it; it may not realize that it has done so; it may even disapprove of the fact. Nonetheless, new wineskins and old wine. It is a reciprocal process: A new culture produces new individuals; new individuals change the culture. New individuals in a new framework are not going to fit into previous schemes of understanding the world and interacting with the older world’s gods.

To state it in crude outline, the Roman Empire was not the Roman Republic. The older Roman religion, excellent as it was for the older Roman civilization, died out in new circumstances, all the more definitely because it was not by anyone’s design. A Roman Emperor himself could not stem the tide, let alone reverse it, for neither he nor anyone else knew why the new Christian tide came flowing in. The Christian religion in turn changed its nature as the Roman Empire fell in the West and was replaced by the primitive but vigorous creators of its successors. In the East, where the Roman Empire clung to existence for another thousand years, the Christianity that lived in the civilization became almost unrecognizably different from the Christianity existing in the West. Both sides saw the difference, and each accounted for it by ascribing it to evil or stupid theological distinctions and/or by politically motivated corruption.

Similarly, in the West, when the Protestant revolution split the apparently whole fabric of Western Christianity. “Apparently” because a religion that is given only lip service by most of the population most of the time has already at least greatly changed, if it has not withered and died on the vine. But notice that Protestantism could not arise until certain societal conditions had changed things to prepare a congenial surrounding for it.

And, finally, Protestant Christianity flourished for 500 years, in turn lost its vigor and its societal support by further changes in the social world around it, and, certainly by World War I and its chaotic and catastrophic results, had actually died and was left standing, like dead trees.

This is not about religion. It is about interactions between society and the individual and the enveloping technological and scientific convictions that result in a certain way of seeing; that is, a certain way of being. Any given individual may be a communing member of a religion and live it quite sincerely and productively. But that is not the same thing as saying that that individual’s religion is (or isn’t) appropriate for the times.

We in our time of huge global change have outgrown our skins, and are in the in-between phase.

True enough but we would say more. What science is, what religion is, what art is, is changing, has changed, must continue to change, as older partial civilizations come under the continued bombardment of living among other partial civilizations that are themselves enduring the same process. A new global civilization will not universally adopt Christianity, nor Islam, nor scientific materialism. It may express itself in English as a language, in Buddhism as a philosophy, in this or that stance regarding human relations to the 3D world, but it will not adopt the prior scheme of things. How could it? It being different, how could the old ways fit it?

But do not take this to be confined to the conditions under which humans will agree to be governed or organized. We refer to the way you will see the world. And, change that, everything changes. Not just a religion, or even all religions, but religion per se. What science is seen to be; how science is to be practiced and experienced. Not “art for art’s sake” or, say, “socialist realism,” but a new conception of what art is, and therefore how it is to be pursued and experienced.

Every single manifestation of change will be, in itself, trivial. Every single problem that seems to flow from this or that policy decision will be seen, eventually, as symptomatic rather than causal. If you are in the middle of an earthquake, probably the falling crockery cannot be justly ascribed to your neighbor stamping his feet.

Vast impersonal forces and us: an analogy

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

I was lying in bed, drowsing, when an association of ideas produced an image of my kitchen sink, with some dishes in it. The water was in spray mode (as through nozzles) rather than in one undivided stream. It occurred to me, that’s a visual representation of the non-3D and 3D worlds interaction.

* The sprays are the non-3D, the Vast Impersonal Forces, streaming in.
* What the water falls upon is the 3D world we live in.

What the water finds as it rains down has nothing to do with the source of the water, or the volume, or whether it’s hot or cold. The forces just are, for whatever reason.

The 3D situations they meet just are, for whatever reason.

The interaction of the two is what we experience.

Not a perfect analogy, of course, in that we (the dirty dishes? :-)) are changed by the water, and the water flows through us, it doesn’t just go down the drain. But still, even if slightly absurd, an interesting analogy, I think.