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Hanns Oskar Porrs asks if it is true that in the sum of our variant lives, some paths carry more weight. To me it seems obvious that some paths are more popular than others. Am I missing something?

If one assumes a zero-sum game, then lo and behold, that is what the results will seem to show. But it is a deeper divide than that. It is more the difference, again, between a motion-picture still and a photo.

In that our lives are a continuing stream that never ceases to interact and choose.

More, that never ceases to rewrite, as you did Joseph from 1994/1863, thus creating new versions.

[To prevent misunderstanding: Yes, all versions possible are inherent in reality when it is created. But inherent doesn’t mean manifest. Possibilities are not actualities until someone actually treads that path.]

If your life leads you to value kindness, or if it hones skills like conveying healing energies, or it connects certain dots that lead to a new awareness, not only is your present life affected, but potentially so is everything it connects to – and you all connect to everything, sooner or later, to greater or less degree.

What you decide on a continuing basis changes you, and you become a person of more, or of less, gravitas, consequence, presence. No two people are equal in this, and this leads to unequal results when one person’s opinion is weighed against another’s. George Washington’s lifelong character development made him a vastly more consequential person than others of his wealth and fame would have been. And consequences cannot be restricted to the personal, regardless if the person is known to history or is entirely unknown. A very short way to say it is: What you make yourself helps determine the fate of everything. Only, it is true of everyone else as well.

In effect our decisions change us not only now, but also back and forth in time, occasionally creating new versions as in 1994/1863 that in turn continue to affect us.

That is why – and how – seemingly insignificant decisions, by seemingly insignificant people, change the world. Cumulatively, the total weight of various traits, habits, embodied decisions (that is: actions), weights some potential paths heavier and others lighter. That is also why there’s no reason to give up even when all is lost. Lost in one instant is not necessarily forever, and in any case, it isn’t like the game is broken, or reality is ruined. Remember, if you can, reality is more like a dream than a construction site. Nothing is ever set in stone.

Hanns-Oskar Porr reminds me that I have forgotten to take up something that TGU said they would examine:

• what good is guidance to the individual,
• how does affecting individuals affect the larger reality in which they exist,
• how does it not all cancel out, given that all decisions are taken one way or another, and most importantly,
• the difference between examining a photo as a still picture or as one frame of a motion picture.

We have already addressed most of it, but let’s clean it up, if you would.

We can do that.

• Guidance is radar, extending the range of the senses, a reliable friend offering advice whose intent may be trusted, even if it is not infallible. It is reassurance for the 3D-bound individual that s/he is not alone. Guidance supplements, extends, reinforces the 3D individual’s judgment; it does not supplant it.
• Affecting the matrix individuals exist within. Surely this is tautological once you remember that “individual” is a word which strictly speaking is a misnomer. You are all part of one another. How could affecting one part not affect the other parts?
• Aristotle’s simplistic logic overlooked two intermediate conditions between A equaling or not equaling Non-A. It may be both and it may be neither. It is in those non-binary conditions that organic growth takes place. Life is larger than logic primarily because logic is a stepped-down abstract definition that cannot take into account the intangibles that were lost as seeming precision was gained.
• The difference between examining a photo as a still picture or as one frame of a motion picture is the most important thing to be discussed. If you think you are examining a photo when in fact you are examining a still from a movie, on one level you are absolutely right, for a photo is a photo. But on the level of accurate interpretation of the object in context, you are not

Same photo, same observer, same reality, but the interpretation is the variable. Not what you look at, but what you see. So if we examine an account of what people call the afterlife, or of an NDE, or of any state of being, it will look one way if you take it to be depicting a static situation and another way entirely if you see it as an instant in a continuing process.

And I suppose, another way yet, if we alternate how we look at it.

Haven’t we been encouraging that habit, all these years? Yes it will, and by doing that you will see things that no one seeing it only one way will or could.

I take it we want to keep this in mind in context of guidance.

Yes. Living your life choosing, with continual access to a non-3D source willing and able to advise you (the motion-picture analogy) is very different picture from seeing yourself as on your own (the still-photo analogy) except perhaps for miraculous inexplicable moments of additional clarity.

There is an immense difference in treating an entire life as if it were a self-contained unit or treating it as one still in a movie. There is an equally great difference between a moment of time as self-contained or as part of an unbroken stream.

You can examine the span of the New Kingdom – or of America since Columbus, say, roughly the same amount of time –as one moment of time, or as the wrapper for innumerable moments of time. It isn’t the data that change, it is the context you examine them in. Any conclusions you might draw, in examining whatever field of time you were examining, would be tied to the context you looked at the data in.

 

I begin to see how to reconcile two views: one timeline at a time, and all together.

Who says the probability clouds experience closure? Who says everything closes off, like a play ending an act and beginning another? What if every new split-off stream continues endlessly? In effect, we as individuals would be experiencing ourselves living on one stream that we could jump to another from – that is, one at a time. And that is how we experience it. Thus we’re always voting by what we are, but I don’t know if there is a cumulative election-day, Armageddon or Eden. Maybe more like an on-going Gallup Poll.

We suggest that you think on paper now, even though you just copied your initial thoughts, for every moment is its own quality, and things will come out differently now than they would have then or would 10 hours or 10 days hence. Where you are affects your ability to see.

Okay. Well. I realized while transcribing that I had been assuming, for some reason, that each of our lives was a limited thing, with not only a termination but a summary.

And a judgment at the end, regardless whether followed by a sentence to heaven or hell.

Hmm. Did I? If so that would be an unconscious leftover from my religious indoctrination as a boy, I suppose. But, at least consciously, I was not thinking of judgment.

What is a summing-up but a discernment, whether or not discernment is accompanied by condemnation or approval?

In any case, I had assumed that the end of a physical life marked the end of separate paths. I suddenly saw that this isn’t the way to look at it. A theoretical example, using names from my “past lives” while remembering that “past lives” is a linear concept, almost certainly a distortion of how things really are.

Let’s start with Joseph the Egyptian. We don’t know anything about his external life except for the strong feeling that he was a priest of some sort in his time, and, I think, someone solid and respected.

Joseph lives, choosing, and choice after choice leaves two paths where there had been one. By the time Joseph’s life terminates in 3D, he could be seen more as a probability-cloud of Josephs than as any single individual treading any single path. Only, he doesn’t stop there, and his consequences don’t stop there, and neither do the consequences of his consequences – including all his mental or soul-carrying descendants.

There is no need to assume that a 3D life is a closed loop. The probability-cloud does not collapse upon our 3D death. In effect, it goes on forever. All the versions of Joseph continue because all the versions of his life-circumstances continue. Every decision that affected others – should those alternates disappear? And if they did, what would happen to the others who had been affected?

For the first time, I can make sense of what happened to Joseph Smallwood, whose back injury in 1863 I healed from 1994, who then went on to lead another version of a life that was already 130 years in the past from 1994 when it became possible in 1863. How could any of that make sense? But it makes sense if all possible paths exist and continue to exist regardless what happens to any given person.

But finish your example, for you have left it mostly unsaid.

Have I? In living we tread all possible paths, and there is a version of us for each path. These versions, and the reality they fit into, do not disappear when we die to 3D. Each goes on to further adventures. The version I know (that is, my life) stitched together Joseph the Egyptian, Bertram, Joe Indian, David Poynter – but it’s easy to see that versions that made different choices may have magnetized themselves into different situations, perhaps contradictory or unimaginable to me here, and yet we are all related. It is, come to think of it, another aspect of “we are all one.”

 

Pole-stars

I’m a little worried about coming down and being unable to obtain lasting benefit from what starts to look like a momentary acquisition.

That is a form of doubting us and doubting yourself. If higher consciousness depended upon a given state of mind not fluctuating, there could be no hope, for consciousness is fluctuation; it is alternation and lack of continuity. (What is sleep, after all, but an interruption of conscious processes and moods, etc.?) Nor can anything permanent depend upon uninterrupted maintenance of a given emotional state. Emotions succeed each other, in the nature of things. But intent can be cultivated, and sustained, and renewed. It can become your pole-star. And if it does not, your pole-star is likely to be unconscious intent. Not that this is necessarily good or bad, but it is so.

Live toward our ideals.

That’s what ideals are, pole-stars.

I think I’ll cite the two Brunton quotes I copied last night from notebook eight, “Reflections on My Life and Writing.” He’s talking about himself, but he’s talking about my life.

“It is the business of my books to act as awakeners rather than as teachers, to make people aware of their higher possibilities, and of the obstacles or limitations within themselves which hinder their realization.” [#86, p. 34]

“I do not wish to clothe men in a new faith but rather to get them to stand as giants and shake off the ropes which keep them imprisoned. I want to get them to depend on a fourth dimensional life now that the old existence has utterly failed them.” [#114, p. 38]

 

 

[After a week of illness following return from Egypt.]

So then, friends. Talk to me.

We’re always talking back and forth. Mostly it doesn’t involve words.

“People are always praying, and their prayers are always answered.” The hired man Tarbox said that to Emerson.

That’s what it amounts to. In a way, we outside 3D are always praying and it is you in 3D answering or denying what we would have you (us) do.

I suppose that is one way to look at the result of the vast impersonal forces, and the vast personal forces, contending.

Contending by what we are, not necessarily by what we wish.

It is difficult to hold on to: We in 3D are always at the center of things, and at the same time are nearly insignificant in the larger scheme of things.

Isn’t that true of your lives in general? Anyone’s? God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.

That’s the first time I’ve understood that saying in that sense.

As you change, everything you know changes aspect. It is just natural.

I feel like this is our first reset after Egypt, after a sort of forgetting.

You didn’t forget, you were unable to maintain. There’s a difference. The spirit may be willing and the flesh weak. That isn’t the same as the spirit deciding, “It’s too much trouble.”

Okay. Why the theological language?

You are going to merge understandings, are you not? They might as well get used to it.

This is for the public, then.

Take it that from now on, pretty much anything is or may be for the public. You’re long past self-consciousness at this point.

When you returned to your home, before you got sick you had a day of functioning in unified fashion. You felt as you are feeling now.

That’s so. I hadn’t quite realized I was feeling it again now till you mentioned it.

Which is why we mentioned it. Describe it, for others and for your own later purpose of comparison.

Everything quiet inside. Almost a need to balance, physically. The body quiet but not lethargic, energy-filled but not buzzing in the sense of uncomfortable urging to random motion, the way one is when trying to sleep through jet lag, say. Awake and alert, without static or competing programming. A nice state to be in.

This was your state, and you got sick. Being sick, you did not forget your intent to remain connected, but you were unable to bring the energy to physical endeavors. Your physical illness did not lead you to forget the connection, you see. You couldn’t do anything, but you knew what you wanted to do, and, more important, wanted to continue to be.

It is like the sexual analogy you drew: The woman is always able but not always willing; the man is always willing but not always able. Like any broad statement, it could do with some qualifying, but it is true enough, and like most analogies, it may be applied in more than one way. You in 3D may be always willing but not always able. More commonly, you are always able but not always willing.

Relative to doing the will of the larger being rather than insisting on doing the will only of the localized 3D consciousness as if it had no larger context.

That’s a decent way to understand it. and now you are more likely – hence, more able – to continue to serve Ra.

Yes, that’s what came to me in Egypt, and not for the first time. Something within said, “I still serve Ra,” and I understood that to mean, not that 21st-century-me served an ideal formulated thousands of years earlier, nor that I am divided among various beings each of whom serves gods of their own, nor that it is strictly a metaphor for willingness to serve the part of ourself larger than the 3D self. It is a little of each of those things, but it amounts to something more.

It amounts to a 3D-shaped consciousness aware of itself not as a unity but as a community, and now proceeding to a sense of itself as an integral part of something that transcends itself and yet depends upon that 3D awareness. Both, not one or the other.

A life spent “serving Ra”, “doing God’s will”, “remaining connected” to the guys or the higher self or call it what you will, amounts to living a life you will find most satisfying, and the way you think about it will be tacked on after the fact, mostly, as usual. Only, don’t be afraid of words, or of other people’s misunderstandings. Lead the life you are called to lead, knowing it will be mostly incommunicable anyway. Your life – anyone’s life – is what you are, not so much what you do. What you do is a pale wavering misleading shadow of the life you really lead. How else could it be?

 

So, guys, for me to stay on track, and not lose this connection – any suggestions?

A better goal is to remind yourself to re-connect, whenever you lose it.

And how do I do that? Intention, I know – but what about when I forget?

You aren’t the only end of the rope. Your non-3D self knows hat you want, and does not forget. That is why it is so important for a person to know what he wants.

Even if the wanting is wanting to be open to whatever comes?

It is still a clear intention. So concentrate not on not forgetting but on clear sustained vision.

All right. Now, how do I use this new clarity and access to do our work?

“Our” work, good. We like that. If you had said “your work” or “my work,” it would have been an error.

I guess everything is “our” from now on, and always has been, but not consciously.

You see?

You mean the ease and swiftness of understanding, picking up the continuation of thought without your having to prod me. So, next question, how do we teach people how to move through whatever barrier they experience? And the answer to that, I guess, is that everybody’s path and possibilities are different, so there isn’t any one road map, only one attitude.

Intent is everything. Give them a sense of what it feels like, let them see that it is theirs for the intending. What else do they need?

How does being in touch with my larger self help anything?

How does not being in touch help anything? The point is not to make your life easier – though it may – but to enrich and orient and stabilize whatever your life happens to ring you.

So it remains up to me to get through whatever happens.

It does, but remember, an emotional over-reaction of any sort merely wastes energy and creates regret. Eliminating that is not trivial.

 

So, gentlemen, open for business, perhaps for the final time in Egypt.[That is, at the end of a two-week excursion.] Open to anything you’d like to convey, if I can receive it

You may congratulate yourself on several levels. You systematically faced and overcame obstacles to do the trip. Of course each obstacle appeared to be external, but of course each was also representative of internal circumstances. Is it a surprise that your health is more or less able to be taken for granted, this trip?

Much more important to me is the increase in my ability to lead people to healing, and my ability to connect to something by not-quite-touching it.

And of course it all connects. Expansion is expansion.

As always, I want to return changed, not unchanged. I wish I felt more confident about my life after I return.

You mean, you wish you could envision new habits and a life built around them. Then begin not with the roof and exterior decoration, but with the foundation and structural underpinnings.

• You
• Your mode of being changes.
• What you wish to do and enjoy doing changes.
• It ripples out.

Start by being concentrated in one time, one place, and that implies living without split focus. Then, remember, without tension or straining, the feeling of heightened perception.

How do I structure my life to not fritter it away because I lose sight of what I am doing?

Simple. Live without split focus. Do one thing, putting out of your mind all other things. Then, periodically stop and ask yourself what it is that you might do, and, among those, what is it that you choose to do.

An alternation.

To us it is a single directed focus, now aimed this way, now aimed that way. Work single-minded, survey and choose single-minded. The alternation maintains needed flexibility and preserves focus.