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Now remember that at the moment we are looking at your 3D life as an experiencer of the interaction of soul and spirit: soul, the shaped collection of traits, and spirit, the free-ranging animating force. You may find it easiest to begin with negative manifestations. Let us start with hatred.

Which, I presume, begins with fear.

That’s a “yes but no.” But explaining why it is a “yes but no” may take some doing. It isn’t simple.

Your ideas about things are based on a combination of input and prior ideas, mostly.

Input is determined, or let’s say skewed, by perception, and your sensory perceptions by themselves are obviously limited to a tiny percentage of the physically existent spectrum. Even the electromagnetic spectrum recognized by science – which is to say, sensory data extended by instrumentation and inference – is mostly far beyond your ability to experience directly by sight, sound, smell, taste, touch. That limited input is interpreted by ideas of how things are, ideas formed from prior first-hand and second-hand experience, all of it also subject to those same limitations.

If this were the whole story, your possibilities would be very much more limited, for how could you break out of the self-contained idea-system and experience-system delivered and limited by sensory data? You can get an idea of what your world would be like by looking at the mental constructs of people who do believe that sensory data is all there is. Of course, these people themselves do not live in the world they deduce; no one could. But they ignore and deny experience to the contrary, so you can get an idea of that mental reality by overhearing their mental reinforcement of their ideas as they ty to persuade others.

The compensating factor in your lives is, of course, what you would call direct feed. Call it intuition, divine guidance, extra-sensory knowing, instinctive wisdom, inexplicable useful connection – however you think of it, it is the other part of your being – that makes possible your limited 3D existence. No one and nothing could exist without an unbroken connection to its larger self centered beyond the 3D construct. The birds that build nests may not be able to say non-3D, but they rely on it, as all animals and vegetables do, to enable them to make sense of incoming sensory data and, particularly, to make sense of it in advance. You call it instinct, in animals, in babies, in yourselves sometimes, but that’s what it really is, connection. And remember, that isn’t connection to a something else; it is connection to another part of yourself.

Aha! And the two forms of perception are sometimes at war with one another.

Not the forms, but the results of having contradictory ideas about the meaning of the data from two different kinds of sources.

—

This is an edited excerpt from “Only Somewhat Real,” not yet published.

 

Decision-trees

Ready if you are. Where were we?

You had just realized why you live on a timeline where everything you don’t like nevertheless exists.

Perhaps you could spell that out again?

Even on any given timeline, decisions have consequences. Even though other timelines follow opposite decisions, and thus assure that every decision is explored – which means the fate of the universe never depends upon anybody making the “correct” decision – in each timeline, the decisions that have been made determine the reality being experienced, and determine which opportunities exist (or, as it appears to you, which opportunities are thereby created).

The sense I’m gradually getting is that our lives are the demonstrating of the consequences of a decision-tree. Each version shows what would happen along a given chain of decisions – ours as individuals, but within a context of uncounted others’, which means within what seems like a firm matrix. It begins to seem that life is the showing of uncounted possible paths, the showing being the main thing, for some reason.

That won’t be as clear to your friends as it is to you at the moment, and won’t be as clear to you later as it is now. So we should press on and provide context.

Seems like we are switching roles.

The roles were always arbitrary, if serviceable. Do you remember how Rita ascribed greater intelligence and knowledge to what you were calling TGU because you two were always asking the questions and they were always answering them?

They said our lives were the answers to their questions.

That is a way to see the meaning of your lives – but it requires that you hold firmly in mind that you and we are not different entities. We keep reiterating it; you all keep losing sight of it. If you think there is a “we” and a “they” you are going to continually misapprehend the situation – and yet language continually works to reinforce that false impression.

We are more like different parts of a dissociated consciousness.

Minus the pathological connotations, yes. There is only one reality, and everybody in it exists in all parts of it. We keep repeating that, too. 3D individuals nonetheless exist in All-D. Non-3D individuals nonetheless exist in 3D. It is much more a matter of where your consciousness centers, than any other single difference. Every religious or philosophical teaching that works from the assumption of a division in the universe goes wrong precisely because of that assumption.

—

This is an edited excerpt from “Only Somewhat Real,” not yet published.

 

Seems to me you have a good opportunity for teaching us how “all is well” coexists with all not being well, in the latest terrorist incident [in October, 2017], in Nevada.

Yes, it will serve.

My way is that once I know that something like that happened, I avoid anything more than the bare fact itself. I don’t immerse myself in the detail and the analysis that is sure to follow. I suppose that is somewhat ostrich-like, but it seems to work best for me.

Not your reaction to the JFK murder, however. Could your subsequent reaction to tragedies have been molded in reaction to your reaction to that event?

Interesting thought. I didn’t even want to know anything about various theories as to who really killed him. I accepted the official story, and my mourning was too deep to allow me to touch the questions, for decades, literally. It must have been 25 years before I emerged from that shell-shocked condition.

And you weren’t about to allow yourself to be equally traumatized again.

No. I walled it off. I remember that. I felt Bobby Kennedy’s murder deeply, but I stayed away from reading about it after the first week.

Now consider the situation. In the 3D world, there was your suffering and there was the resultant habit to deal with the possibility of similar shocks. What about in the All-D, where your 3D reactions were only a part of the reality? Outside of time and space, what was real? Your day to day movements of your body? Your moment-by-moment words, thoughts, emotions, reactions? It probably seems like it, but no.

It is true that every moment of your lives is real and enduring and vividly alive. That is what the Akashic Record is, really, each moment held like a fly in amber, except alive. But it is equally true that this could be considered your soul’s record, while your spirit’s record is in what you sometimes call the completed self.

I think you mean, the spirit’s record could be thought of as the end-of-the-story record, rather than the moment-by-moment record. It is how the spirit was changed by the events and by my reactions to the events, from the point of view of “that life is over and done with; here’s the net result.”

Yes, that is the sense of it.

Which as usual begs the question of how there can be a net effect when every possible path in my life is taken, including any paths in which JFK wasn’t killed in Dallas. As usual, the question is, why wouldn’t they all cancel out.

And as usual the answer is, they don’t cancel, they add. The result is not a result of attrition but of addition. The very plethora of results is the answer.

I keep forgetting that. My tendency is to think that a life will produce a result that will be built upon, and I keep getting reminded that a life produces a huge range of results, all of which considered together, and only all of them considered together, is the result.

It makes a difference. Many a conundrum in logic disappears when you realize that common sense is misleading you by over-simplifying the situation.

What is real in your life from the non-obstructed All-D perspective is the result in you of going through such experiences either directly or vicariously. Your moment-by-moment reaction is as real as the 3D world, but in a way, it isn’t any realer.

To put it in a hierarchy of reality:

1) The 3D experience itself, including bodily impact, anything sensory.

2) The psychic portion of the 3D experience; what enters the Akashic Record.

3) The net effect on this version of your life of having gone through the experience.

The first tier hurts; the second tier has meaning; the third tier contains the potential from that life forward.

Well, what about the time I healed Joseph Smallwood’s injured back? [I, working in an altered state from 1994, changed what had happened in 1863. Impossible, according to conventional views of reality. Not so unusual, according to the scheme sketched out by our non-3D friends.] Didn’t one life move to the Akashic Record version of another life and alter it, thus opening a new path for that version of his life?

And perhaps you might have been able to – still could – cause him to move his body [during the battle] to avoid the crippling blow. That would be at the first-tier level of reality. Wouldn’t that be a good thing?

I’m sensing a trap. I don’t know if I would still be me if he didn’t have his altered-state experience of an angel healing him. If that is a true risk, I don’t suppose I would change things even to spare him. But, is it a true risk?

Remember, you are considering one given time-line. It isn’t like it would remove even one of  the other possibilities.

Ah, but in effect I would be creating a new possible time line, and I would be somehow tied to it.

Haven’t you spent years wondering why you couldn’t live in a timeline in which Kennedy did not get killed?

I’m beginning to understand. Not all timelines lead to the same place, of course. From your third tier of reality, where we come out is more important than what we go through to get there.

That’s the idea.

Can’t avoid the speed bumps if we want to traverse the road.

That’s a little too simple, but close enough.

—

This is an edited excerpt from “Only Somewhat Real,” not yet published.

 

Physical train wrecks and psychological debris and vast impersonal forces flowing through us.

This will go better, the more each reader brings to mind specifics as we discuss the general principles. You all know how these forces sweep through your lives; you see it first hand, you see it in dramas and histories and twice-told talks. Passion and conflict is at the heart of story, after all. No conflict, no story. But is conflict as simple a thing as self-interest colliding with self-interest? We would say that would amount to “nothing buttery,” and would clarify nothing.

Lust manifests! Anger, envy, swollen pride manifest! You see them on all sides. Conversely, anybody could tell first- or second-hand stories of noble actions, of self-sacrifice, of quiet unnoticed heroism. Scratch any story and you will find people acting out of motivations, and scratch the motivations and you will find desirable or undesirable passions, maybe quiet, even placid, but passions. An old woman may be invisibly passionate over her flower garden, or her pets, or – anything, really. The key here is not “old woman” but “invisibly.” Although passion is at the heart of all drama, not all passion expresses itself in a dramatic fashion.

The point is that these forces make up your life. The man who sacrifices his life day by day at a meaningless job, that his children may live and hopefully may live better than he, is acting from conviction, and what is conviction rooted in, if not some passion?

We will not continue to pile up examples. Look at other aspects of your life, the events around you and those you only hear of. Wars, cooperation, disasters and disaster relief, millions of private enterprises commercial and otherwise, and millions of pointlessly destructive activities like vandalism. Music, art, poetry, technology, finance, scholarship – all the forms of human activity you can think of. At some place they connect to passion.

So where does it come from? In trying to answer that, realize that plugging in a word like “instinct” is not an answer (because not a linking-together of things, but a word implying “nothing but”); it is a decision not to inquire. So – inquire. Where does this force come into your life from?

You may think, “I was born with it,” and that is certainly true, but it doesn’t actually answer anything. All it says is that you have never lived without it. (Nor could you.) But we knew this: Soul without Spirit is not living in the 3D world; it is closer to being a ghost of itself.

All right, but that sort of answers the question, doesn’t it? These forces are the forces of Spirit.

Fine. And what are the forces of Spirit?

I take it the answer is not as simple as “The light that shines through the fiber optics.”

That would be merely to restate in other words what was said. Resist the temptation to consider the Soul as in 3D and the Spirit as coming from the non-3D somehow. Try to see both inhabiting the All-D, so that, although they coexist in the same space, Spirit is mostly not comprehended by Soul. You could say, pretty accurately, that Soul is bound to its 3D limitations in which it was founded, while Spirit inhabits all of reality, not only the 3D portion of it, hence is invisible to greater or lesser extent depending upon how conscious the Soul is or becomes. Spirit is always here, always functioning, but is it not always perceived, and rarely is perceived in the same way at different times by different Souls.

The next step is to realize that since Spirit interpenetrates your being, its vagaries are going to affect you, often directly.

I didn’t realize that Spirit has vagaries. I think of Spirit as – well, as a vast impersonal force, the way you have been describing it.

You are thinking of Soul and Spirit as two different kinds of things that happen to intersect in human enterprises. But Spirit created Soul. It animates Soul. It shares its essence with Soul.

I thought we were saying that a Sam creates a soul of its own essence.

Do you think a Sam’s essence (even in so far as it is personal) is somehow different from Spirit? That we have Spirit on the one hand and Sam on the other?

I guess I don’t know what I thought. I never thought about that as a problem at all.

Well, let us give the kaleidoscope a shake and see if anything emerges more clearly. Look at it this way. Sam = Spirit creating and incorporating and developing and fostering Souls. In being so engaged, it loses some of its freedom of action (somewhat as a parent does to a dependent child) and becomes part of a compound being. So the difference between what we call Sam for convenience and what we continue to call Spirit is whether one is or is not part of a compound being.

—

This is an edited excerpt from “Only Somewhat Real,” not yet published.

 

If you take external events to be self-evidently real, if only because they seem to be perceived and accepted by everybody around you, they will seem realer to you than the many thoughts, feelings, emotions that make up your life. It is crazy but natural: What is remote from your experience will seem more real than what is immediately at hand.

And don’t think this means only events you may see on the news. The things that happen to you – the innumerable things not necessarily of any importance that make up the external interface with the world also may seem more real, because more undeniable and more unmalleable, then the internal events. So, tying your shoe, eating your breakfast, driving your car, reading your mail, talking on the telephone – that kind of thing – is all going to seem realer to you than your own thoughts! It’s crazy, seen from our viewpoint, except that we do understand the underlying dynamics.

So do I, now that you come to explore them: We are used to crediting our senses more than our intuitions. Sensory data seems objective, intuition or call it non-sensory data seems at least debatable.

Does this seems like a stretch, then? To say that 3D life is a life that systemically inverts the order of importance of things?

I can see it. But seeing it doesn’t overrule the reality I experience. My lungs still function correctly or they don’t, and my part in that seems secondary to environmental forces.

Well, we aren’t trying to say that people in 3D conditions ought to be able to overcome them; just the contrary, in fact. 3D life was designed to work, not to be superseded or outmaneuvered. Our point here is that this systematic distortion in how you understand the world, rooted in how you experience the world, helps explain how “all is well” and “all is not well” can coexist, both being true depending upon viewing point.

It still comes perilously close to saying, “It’s all a show; those mangled bodies don’t mean anything.”

No, what we are really getting to is that the reality is the energy flowing through those lives, it is not the external incidents that you can see, that result from energy flows, and redirect energy flows.

—

This is an edited excerpt from “Only Somewhat Real,” not yet published.

 

How can all be well when all is not well, at the same time?

And you heard the answer even as you wrote.

Well, I heard the analogy: How can we be individuals and communities at the same time?

Mostly it is a question of focus. “What You See Is What You Get” is an expression you use sometimes. Perhaps this is true in a sense not intended by those who invented it.

No, In computer terms, WYSIWYG (pronounced wissywig) means transparency: Literally, whatever you are looking at is the result. It means there won’t be translation errors, you might say. But you are using it to mean, depending on how we choose to see things, that’s how they are.

Well – not quite. Depending on how you choose to see things, that’s the aspect of them that seems to you to be real. That often seems like the only aspect that is real. In this case, closer to “Choose your own reality” than “Create your own reality.” It isn’t that you are shaping reality by how you choose to see it, but that you are shaping your reality, which after all is the only reality you can know; you can’t know the ultimate reality any more than we can. Our perception of reality is always going to be less than whatever reality really is in essence.

Life is always our personal subset of reality. We never see the entire picture, only our subset which we often take to be the entire picture. I am clear on that. Even the fact that each of us has uncounted versions living different timelines tells me that reality has to be bigger than anything anyone or any one timeline can apprehend. By definition, really.

All right. So then it shouldn’t surprise you – though we suspect that it will – to hear that the shape the world is in is no more fixed than anything else, except in any given timeline.

That makes perfect sense, and you’re right, it never occurred to me. Not sure why. Or, actually I suppose it has been obvious all along, but in a different context that I didn’t happen to associate with this one.

Most of learning is less the acquisition of new facts than the associating of what you already know in different contexts.

—

This is an edited excerpt from “Only Somewhat Real,” not yet published.

 

But there is a larger point to be made, and a more difficult one, that is closer to our central concern. Life is good, no matter what it looks like to you. Human life on earth in 2017 is not mostly a failure, no matter how it looks to you. Your political and social and economic and ecological troubles – not to mention the huge spiritual vortex stirring up everything, ramping up the intensity of all conflicts, and not merely in the United States – all of this could tempt you to say, “All is obviously not well. We are doomed. The injustice of the world is suffocating us all.”

Here’s the thing: Can you hold that thought and feeling – which is not wrong – and still realize that all is well because all is always well?

I think people would be glad if you could help them with it.

We can, probably making them angry in the process because it involves associating two lines of thought that they typically are careful to keep separate, even if they shuttle from one to the other several times a minute.

Exaggeration for effect, I take it.

Not much of one. On the one hand, follow the news, with its unending serial of disaster upon problem upon intractable conflict. You mostly do it all the time, scarcely even noticing. Studying it in history isn’t all that much different from allowing it to flow through you via television or computer or gossip. Even sagas of heroism, altruism, even success stories, take place against a background of on-going train wrecks. Or, if you prefer to believe in the existing state of affairs as desirable, you see it as a past record of achievement now being threatened by the forces of (the left, or the right, depending upon your villain of choice). Either way, this half of your mind is pretty firmly mounted in a setting of on-going unfairness, stupidity, incompetence, malice and – in general – a throwing-away of all good possibilities, and unnecessarily.

True enough. That has been my experience since Nov. 22, 1963 [the day the assassination of President John F. Kennedy changed everything].

Certainly. You compare what did happen with what you think might have happened, or should have, could have happened, and it all looks like waste.

It does.

So you understand half of the dilemma, the half that looks around and says all is certainly not well, and anybody who thinks so is blind or stone-hearted. And by nature and on faith you nonetheless hold to the conviction that somehow all is well, regardless.

I hold to it, I feel it, but I certainly can’t explain it or even defend it.

And, unlike many, you are able to hold both incompatibles at the same time. Do you know why?

I do since you just conveyed it. It’s because I got “all is well” not from somebody else, either first-hand or second-hand, but from essence. The guys flowed it through me, telling Rita in 2001, and I never doubted it, even if, as you point out, it is incompatible with everything else I know.

That is where we can go next, then. How can both be true, and what does that tell us about those vast impersonal energies flowing through you, which we remind you is our main focus at the moment.

—

This is an edited excerpt from “Only Somewhat Real,” not yet published.