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Thursday, October 10, 2019

The energy aspect of the world – the definite but non-material-appearing reality that is as vital to maintaining the world as is the mineral or vegetable or animal kingdom – is, as we said, of two natures.

I think you mean, its nature stretches to two extremes, one more mechanical, the other more conscious.

That is a good way to put it. On the mechanical end, the “nervous system” of reality. On the other end, the “population” of the celestial kingdom. But remember to connect all this of the 3D with the non-3D to which it extends.

Every kingdom shades off in two directions. The mineral kingdom shades off into non-material energy at one end (radiation, atomic radiation, what one might call semi-non-3D interactions) and the vegetable at the other. The vegetable kingdom extends from manifestations scarcely more sentient than mineral, to manifestations practically animal (think, say, of the Venus fly trap). The animal kingdom extends from quasi-vegetative organisms through human beings into quasi-divine beings. There are no hard and fast divisions, no closed frontiers, no absolutely differentiated stepping stones.

Divisions are constructs, quite as much as perceived realities. You may think of our scheme for sorting out reality as one of an unbroken but differentiated spectrum, like the rainbow. Just as, in a rainbow, colors shade smoothly into one another yet still show their own individual specialized nature, so the things of the world in general. The celestial kingdom is the end of the rainbow-spectrum that is closest to intelligence-not-bound-by-form, while the other end of the spectrum, the mineral kingdom, may be considered form-least-bound-to-active-intelligence. However, do not become captive to an analogy. It may illustrate, it may spark, but it cannot exactly represent reality, or it would be reality rather than metaphor.

So, to funnel down to the celestial kingdom again, now bearing in mind that it shades from quasi-animal to quasi-non-3D – well, you may end up staring at the page. Merely label this as speculative, even though to do that cuts against your (and others’) assumption that “the other side knows everything.”

Yes, that’s the source of anxiety, isn’t it. How to bring forth information not “that can’t be proved,” for all of it comes under that label, but also “that I don’t feel sure of,” which is a different thing entirely.

And, bearing in mind that our communications with you are quite as much about illustrating the process as about conveying a view, you can see that venturing out into deeper waters together is itself worthwhile.

I don’t see how any of this can be speculative on your part.

No, nor do you see lies, nor fictions, nor self-aggrandizing fables, nor commands, nor any of the unreliable-to-pathological phenomena that have been reported over the years.

Joe Fisher’s hungry ghosts, for instance.

Certainly. Poltergeists. Malicious or stupid or playful spirits encountered via light-headed experimentation with Ouija boards, say. Evil spirits. Malicious ex-humans determined to exert the dominance they exerted in 3D life. All the nightmares any alcoholic ever experienced in his worst seizures, or a drug addict’s. The world is not good without evil. (If it were, how could you have the concepts?) Why would you expect every phenomenon not to extend between the two, similarly?

And it all shades off into the vast impersonal forces that populate the non-3D.

Greater clarity on any subject may be obtained by proceeding in either direction: more detail, or greater extension. Better than either, though, is both. But it is not a quick and easy process.

I cannot imagine that this is peculiar to me alone.

Thursday, November 9, 2023
7:30 a.m. Since I cannot work, perhaps it is time to listen. You gentlemen have something you’re trying to get into my head?

You are mourning – and encouraging – the idea of your creative time and energy being mostly gone. Use it or lose it.

Are you promising me a second wind?

Reminding you that your choice of reactions to every moment always remains. You have done a certain amount and can rest on that. Or you can complete what is not yet fully shaped. Or you can move on into new territory. Your choice – and that means whatever you want. There isn’t really a “should” attached to it, except in the sense that a different version of you will have a different attitude toward things, and so what do you want to be?

There is the ebbing of energy, though, which includes the ebbing of motivation.

And your second-tier reaction that is –?

Yes, I see the point.

Wednesday, October 9, 2019
Let’s keep talking about the celestial kingdom that is half the human environment, or inheritance. What is fundamental is that the world is less energy than thought. Thus we had you summarize Paul Brunton’s conclusions.

The world is not solid but ethereal. It is not matter, nor energy (which is matter); but something that precedes matter/energy. Brunton provided you a way to understand that the world is thought into existence, continually, and not by any one individual or group , nor even by everything taken as a whole, but necessarily must be by something greater than the whole.

That is so clear to me now, and still hard to explain convincingly.

Sparks, remember, not chains.

If the world is made of thought, it follows that the world in all its apparent solidity, in all its apparent reality, cannot be what it seems. The world is what everyone knows it is, yet what that is, is not agreed upon. Take your present political situation, which means, really, your present social situation.

Spinning out of control.

Yes, invoking fears of civil war, assassinations, conversion of institutional rule to rule by force majeure.

You still live in this society, even if you do not participate in its rituals of seeing the world through the same filters moment by moment. You use a different continuing thread to remain oriented.

Is that what the news cycles are? Ways for people to tell themselves a story?

The human brain functions as a reducing valve, excluding vastly more than it ever includes. No two people’s resulting input is just the same. There are significant overlaps, but never identity. No one’s picture is, or ever could be, identical to the actual big picture. It is too big a fish for anyone’s net.

It is true that you in 3D are part of larger beings that extend laterally in 3D as well as in non-3D. You are larger, longer beings in – and outside of – space and time than you experience yourselves to be.

The world is larger than individuals, than humanity as a whole, than the four kingdoms we have sketched, than the entire 3D from galaxies to the smallest energy swirls. It has its own independent existence, and is not a figment nor creation of anyone’s imagination. That ought to be obvious, though it may be lost sight of in flights of abstraction. But that is not the end of the story. The world is not your thought, but it is the stuff that thoughts are made of.

You in your 3D identities make sense of the continual bombardment of data as best you can, and no two of you put it together exactly the same way, because no two of you ever have exactly the same pieces. But you do put it together, and any given culture may be defined as a tent thrown up to include certain rules of thumb and exclude others. Thus different cultures live to greater or less extent in different worlds. And as above, so below. Within cultures are subcultures, each of which gathers around certain shared perceptions and (thus) values and ideals and assumptions. And each of these subdivide in turn.

And when each subculture acquires its own echo-chamber –

Precisely. Different news sources embodying different assumptions are going to produce different self-reinforcing pictures of the world, even if they attempt to be fair and impartial, because what is self-evidently true to one is damnable falsehood to another.

And both may be right at the same time.

Yes, but good luck bringing many people to understand that. It will seem an obvious contradiction in terms.

Don’t I know it. But we have strayed a long way from where I thought we were going today.

From where we thought we were going today, too. But, nothing lost.

Friends,

The Sphere and the Hologram, 15th Anniversary Edition

Here it is, a reissue of the book that started so much.

Available in paperback, October 30, 2023 – Amazon

Specs:
Trade paper, 6” x 9”
Page count: 562
ISBN: 978-1-7365536-4-0
SNN Books / TGU Books
Publication date Oct. 30, 2023
Trade paper: $21.95

A Kindle edition will follow, and I will provide a link when that happens.

If you came to this work by way of the blog or by other titles, I think you will find that The Sphere and the Hologram opens many new doors. The sessions between Rita, The Guys Upstairs, and me, were held over seven months in 2001 and 2002, but I didn’t get them published until 2008. Thanks to Chris Nelson, we have a new edition, with new cover, new typesetting (not just reproductions of the original typeset pages), and a new introduction by the author, namely me. Chris and I expect that this to be only the first of many projects designed to get all my stuff under one roof.

It was an extraordinary three-way partnership, and it produced extraordinary results.

The physical side of the collaboration involved Rita Warren and me. Rita was a professor of psychology who spent four years directing The Monroe Institute’s laboratory, helping volunteers achieve and explore altered states of consciousness under controlled conditions. I was an author and editor who had learned to bring forth messages from the non-physical world. For months, in weekly sessions, I entered an altered state and Rita asked important questions about life, the afterlife, channeling, the nature of good and evil, politics, history and much more. That was the 3D side. on the non-3D side, the minds we called “the guys upstairs” provided answers.

The Sphere and the Hologram is a record of these ground-breaking conversations. It is a work of thoughtful inquiry, rich with insights into the nature of reality and blended with humor and deep compassion. It invites you to explore alongside us, and to discover your own answers to the most profound questions of existence.

[I apologize but for some reason the site won’t convey italics from the original, as it used to do. Won’t insert extra leading between grafs either. Very annoying. Don’t know why, don’t know how to fix it.]
Tuesday, October 8, 2019
Let us consider the celestial kingdom in some detail.
Every time I write “the celestial kingdom” at your behest, I think of China.
Well, we could call it something else, but there isn’t much point, really. Any name will have associations that distract. Whatever we would call it, still we would need to describe a part of the natural order of things in the 3D world that are not to be perceived by the senses, nor by instrumentation, hence are invisible to common sense and to science.
Underlying the physically obvious aspects of the 3D world is the celestial kingdom, the fourth kingdom. We are stressing the multiple layers of discrete but interacting energies that go into the making of a stable environment. The world you live in didn’t just happen, and doesn’t just happen to continue, any more than, say, a subway system just happens, or just happens to continue to operate. Layer upon layer of interlocking function is required to produce and sustain the effect that your 3D vision sees as a solid material world that exists on its own.
You are giving me back Paul Brunton’s vision of how the world exists, only in different detail and assembled in a way he never did.
There is a reason why you didn’t quite finish The Wisdom of the Overself despite learning from it and finding it inspiring. You got what you needed, and sometimes it is important to not get someone’s completed thought. It is much more important that a book or a teacher or a friend or a situation spark you, than that they convert you, and particularly than that they convert you into a disciple.
Nonetheless, he helped enormously.
Yes, he provided logical pathways to connect what you knew intuitively, but not scientifically, to be true. Cite the logical conclusions you derived from Brunton’s thought, without worrying about accurately summarizing what he said. That is, regardless of what he said, tell what you heard.
That’s a very interesting distinction.
Brunton logically analyzed our experience of the world and demonstrated that we can know nothing except what our minds report. What this desk feels like, say, or the pen in my hand, or the hand itself, or the light that lights the page, or the coffee that fuels my awareness – all of it is known to us only second-hand. Even though you may have helped move the desk, and may be relying on it as you use it to hold the book you are writing in, you couldn’t prove it actually existed. All we know is a representation of reality; there is no way to know if it is real in the way it appears, even though in practice we rely on it being there moment by moment.
This seems like playing with words and concepts, but the fact remains, when you look at it closely (I can’t cite Brunton’s reasoning) the physical world cannot be proved to exist outside our own minds. But in that case, where are we? After all, in practice, there it is. The world can’t very well be billions of individually produced illusions that only happen to mesh.
Brunton convinced me that the world as we experience it can only exist in the way we experience it if it is, in effect, continually dreamed up by an overarching unblinking mind that encompasses it all. To posit anything less produces paradoxes and logical fallacies.
He showed why people concluded that
• there is a God; or that
• the world is mind-stuff rather than independent external reality; or that
• the world winks into and out of existence forever; or
• that if God were to forget us for an instant, we would cease to be.
Without subscribing to any of those views, he shows why they came into existence, what they explain and do not explain, and what larger view incorporates them.
In short, nothing is as it seems, but it cannot be meaningless either. We are not what we seem, and neither are our lives meaningless. And that is as much as I can do to show what Brunton’s lifetime’s conclusions meant to me. He carried me by evidence to what I already felt but could not logically demonstrate.
Not more than you wanted, I trust.
No, admirably done. As usual in such cases, you setting it forth as your own thought allowed you greater freedom than you would have felt if you had thought you were conveying our thought.
But I felt you in the background anyway, putting in your oar, helping me make a clear statement.
If one is in good connection with the “unconscious” mind, the non-3D component, one’s functioning is going to be smoother, easier, more reliable, because of just that sort of background facilitation. Your summary provides a concise statement of many assumptions that have been implicit. It helps make conscious connections that until now may have been only semi-conscious, or indeed undreamed of. You – we – are functioning as generator of sparks, remember, not as layer-down of the law.
Brunton’s exploration of what the senses can and cannot establish is essentially without flaw or gap. His further exploration of how “mind is the builder,” to use Edgar Cayce’s words, is equally flawless. And finally, the movement beyond the two pillars will lead to enlightenment any who are ready to enter in. Bear in mind, to become enlightened does not mean “to become an exalted one”; nor “to suddenly know everything,” nor even “to be endlessly wise.” It means, to be in light instead of darkness. It means, to see because the conditions (light) now allow you to see, whereas before, conditions (darkness) prevented you from seeing.
And I get as subtext, just because you become enlightened doesn’t mean all your opinions of things – even of the things you have just experienced as enlightening – are necessarily accurate.
That’s right. There is a distinction to be made between the process of seeing, and what is seen. What is seen has been interpreted, and interpretation is always a subjective thing. So one may become genuinely enlightened and yet remain pig-headedly or absent-mindedly stupid about some things.
That’s a very freeing thought. Thus we may follow someone’s footsteps without needing to believe every word, however convinced we may be of his or her sincerity and intelligence and knowledge.
Ultimately one has only oneself. However, used properly, the tool should be more than adequate for everyday purposes.
Very funny. Is this a pause, then?
It is. Nice work today.
I think it is very interesting – and it is very agreeable to me – that you continually remind us of our possibilities and our limits, both. You’re always saying, “Here’s how it is, only maybe not.”
It would be closer to say that we are always saying, “Depend upon yourselves, but remember that you don’t know everything, and might easily be wrong about any given thing. But, depend upon yourselves.”