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A change of angle of viewing will show entirely different relationships that are no less and no more true. in other words, there is no one way of seeing things; there is only every way, and this of course no one in 3D can ever stretch to encompass. Not only does a different viewpoint reveal a different aspect of a given situation: It alters what is possible, what is true. When you see life as fluid rather than static – as a dream rather than a collection of objects to be moved around – the ground-rules change. What you believe connects directly to what is true (and possible) for you. You know this from experience, many of you, but not all who have experienced it realize what they have experienced.

Beliefs bound your experiences; experiences expand or limit beliefs. As usual, a reciprocating process. One who will not be convinced is, from one viewpoint, firmly rooted in fact, and from another viewpoint, trapped in his own limiting beliefs. This is not an either/or – it is a both/and, as well as a neither/nor.

Choose your beliefs, change your life.

Yes, except that stating it that way implies a firm platform from which to choose. Your life is not as simple as a 3D mind making its decisions rationally and fairly. There isn’t really any point in thinking someone can set out the rules of life. The best you can do is to set out the rules of life as they are for you. Again, looking at life more as a dream than as a staged event will bring you closer intuitively to the reality. Only – some will be unable to adopt that view!

What we believe is what is true for us.

With an implied caveat, always, that no one in 3D knows fully who or what he is, and so never fully knows his own mainsprings. But, subject to that very important reservation, it is true that life will serve up what you expect – but remember that people do their expecting at various levels, not all known to one another.

I have never felt a need to ask for protection, but perhaps that is foolhardiness. I hesitate to make recommendations to others, for fear I may be wrong, or may be pushing my luck, only to discover one day that it runs out.

But regardless, this is your experience, your (inner and outer) world in conformity to your expectations.

So I suppose the answer is, if you think you need protection, act as if you do, otherwise not.

Who and what you are determines the need or non-need for protection, because malevolent forces do exist, in a way, and don’t, in a way. What is within your limits seems real to you, and other things do not, can not. But again, don’t confuse deciding that you believe something with actually believing. In practical terms, it’s always the same prescription: Get into close touch with all levels of yourself. Stay in touch. Reconcile to the degree possible, while remembering that you while you are in the body have the opportunity and responsibility to choose. That’s what you are doing here, choosing. Everyone lives in a different subset of the world tailored for them, of necessity. That is the opportunity; that is the predicament.

I received an email yesterday morning from a man named Hanns Oskar Porr, asking if strands upon strands and communities wrap around “like in a hologram, where each point contains all else and at the same time feeds into the others?” He had an experience of cosmic unity, “maybe best described as an analogy … like being part of a ‘cosmic hologram’ where the part contains the whole and the whole contains that part.”

I think I understand. “Does it wrap around,” meaning, is “higher” and “lower” only a spatial analogy, somewhat misleading? Here is what I think it means: Everything is all one thing not only in being all-connected, but in being non-hierarchical. If this is the meaning of his question, I’d say yes, although not intuitively obvious, that’s true. Reality isn’t divided into enlightened and unenlightened, king and pawn, superior and inferior, advanced and retarded – except in relation to any given point of view. Is this right, and am I reading the question right?

Yes and yes. This clarification may be important for some, and obvious for others. Reality, All That Is, isn’t divided into first class and cheap seats. It’s all one thing, as we keep saying. Reality is neither unorganized nor hierarchical. Instead, it is self-organizing and fluid; it is all one thing and at the same time it is segmented, or compartmentalized, or segregated, or organized in many ways at once, so that different ways of seeing it result in perception of different structures.

You once gave us the analogy of the interior of a crystal, looking one way when a laser shines through it from one direction, and different when shined through differently. Each angle of vision illumines different relationships that exist always but are not necessarily always evident.

You see the limitations of analogy. Words are more fluid than objects, but nonetheless far more static and unresponsive than are the realities they are used to try to capture. Images are somewhat more supple than words alone, but are also too static, too defined, to capture the quicksilver-like nature of the reality they attempt to reflect. Even the simultaneous overlapping of images cannot do it justice. If you were not intuitive beings, in touch with your non-3D natures, you would have no hope of grasping any of it.

Think perhaps of the ongoing process represented by kneading dough. The outside becomes the inside. Neighboring particles become separated; unmixed portions become part of other previously separate pieces. Not the dough, but the process of kneading, is the analogy. A change of angle of viewing will show entirely different relationships that are no less and no more true. There is no one way of seeing things; there is only every way, and this of course no one in 3D can ever stretch to encompass.

 

Return continually to Jesus’ helpful suggestions, all of which were meant to give you reliable ways to proceed. He preached integrity – that is, being the same thing inside and outside. Don’t do things behind your own back. Know your intent and hold to it.

When listening for the small still voice, or talking to the guys, or trying to know what the right thing to do is, the key is not to fool yourself. And how does one assure that he is not fooling himself? Not by judging the content, like the person who only accepts what is reasonable to his own previous definitions of what is possible. What you can judge is whether you proceeded honestly and consciously, as best you could. Good fruit grows from good stock: Good information proceeds from good intent and good execution.

In other words, we don’t need to worry as much about fooling ourselves as about wanting to fool ourselves, or being willing to fool ourselves.

That’s what it comes to. And you can always be aware of your own true intent if you are in the habit of being honest with yourself. If you were the units you appear to be, it would be relatively simple. But you are not units, but communities, and not even communities of units, but communities of communities. That’s a lot of cross-purposes!

Jesus’ saying about not putting new wine in old wineskins, nor old wine in new wineskins may not apply to our lives, our consciousness, our task of bringing our constituent parts into alignment during our life, but it seems like maybe it could.

Well, if you try to cram old perceptions into new circumstances, or new perceptions into old categories, you can see that it probably won’t work very well. Jesus need not have meant the analogy for it to be true nonetheless.

So how do we avoid being led astray by our internal contradictory elements? Some do it by adopting a rigid code, but for those who can’t or won’t?

A first step is to be clear about the distinction between you as present-tense keeper of the ring – the person who has the right and responsibility to decide – and you as arbitrator among so many constituent agents. Same you, different functions.

And how do we distinguish? Intent, I suppose.

Exactly. In your intent as to what you wish to be, you have your guide.

The way some people say What Would Jesus Do, for instance.

That’s an example. The fact that a technique may be misused, or may not fit you, does not mean it is mistaken or worthless. And after all, if Jesus is too exalted an example for you, the world is full of examples. Who do you admire? (We’re talking of character, not achievement or renown.)

And I see that we could take this trait from one, that from another. Lincoln for honest, clarity and humility, Washington for character and obedience to perceived duty. Jefferson for lucid intelligence and all-devouring curiosity, Teddy Roosevelt for sheer vigor and energy and determination, and so on. We could choose among any who were important models to us, regardless of their fame or obscurity, their field of activity, their nearness or remoteness to our actual lives.

Certainly. One’s grandfather or brother or cousin might serve, or a friend. There is no limit to who might serve as model, and, after all, the qualities one infers from observing may or may not be actually present in that other. That doesn’t matter. What matters is not the source of one’s ideal but the nature of the ideal. Choose what you want to be, and live toward it, retaining the sense that you will not attain the goal and shouldn’t (else the goal was not set high enough). If you do attain the goal, merely set another, higher.

In other words, no guilt or discouragement, but no self-satisfaction either.

Well, rules are misleading. Let’s leave it at this. In order to have a compass, you need to set an intent and live it. (Everyone has intent, if only accepted ready-made, as a social convention, or a religious creed. But for people like you, deliberate choice is the only practical path.) You may or may not know who you are, but it is essential to have some clear idea of who (and how) you want to be; who you want to become, who you hope to see in the mirror, looking back on your life. This isn’t for the sake of meeting an expected judgment, it is for the sake of keeping you oriented along the way.

As I look back on my life, it seems to me I didn’t stay conscious enough. I rarely turned the inner spotlight on me, except as a sort of non-introspective self-awareness. I was there, but not thinking about what I was doing or reacting to. I couldn’t learn from experience, because I wasn’t altering my reactions from having thought about past reactions.

You might consider yourself a society without regulation. Rather than by-laws, it’s always ad hoc adjustment. “How do I feel right now?” This isn’t necessarily a fault or a virtue, but it certainly opens some doors and closes others. Of course everyone’s bounds are different in nature and extent. One travels extensively abroad, another travels extensively inward. And beyond this difference, which is still an internal difference regardless of the fact that it plays out in the outer world, there is a difference in what one does with what one lives. So take Bob Friedman, quietly influential over a long lifetime and Colin Wilson.

The commonality being that they liked to think about psychic experience but didn’t particularly want to have it.

Not quite. They wanted to maintain. Both Bob and Colin were thinkers in a way that you are not. They reflected. They pondered. They learned from experience. This doesn’t mean that what they learned necessarily was right; we are concerned here with the nature of their process. Someone considering something new in the light of past conclusions may end up merely adjusting new perception to not contradict older conclusions. But on the other hand, they may learn something. Different ways of living produce different crucibles within the 3D crucible. So if Bob and Colin are intending to live their lives from a stable platform that will allow them clear observation (which is one way of looking at their lives), you cannot expect them to want to jettison that stable platform just when things get interesting. Instead, by not moving, they get front-row seats. And from those front-row seats, they were able to describe the view to others. You by contrast are more like a set of water wings on a lake, or sometimes a river, occasionally on the open seas. What you know is an idea of yourself shaped by your reaction to your surroundings. What you chiefly have to report is your own process, your own journeying.

As time has gone by, I have had a greater sense of my own journey being all I had to offer by way of instruction or commentary or even encouragement.

You share with Colin the reporting of what you think and do – in other words, your experience. Bob did not do that. You share with Bob your own vivid intense inner life, poorly communicated, often misunderstood or unsuspected. The three of you delighted in assisting others. Of the three of you, Bob was perhaps the most self-aware, in that he did not live in a continual whirl of mental and physical activity like Colin, and did not lose his inner compass by throwing himself into new circumstances (inner or outer) like you. He was the quietest of the three of you. And Colin was the one who made the greatest impact, by far, in the span of his life.

James Joyce said history was a nightmare from which he was struggling to wake up. I sometimes think my life is a nightmare, or anyway a dream, from which I am struggling to wake up.

That isn’t quite what you mean. It is more like, your drift is the lack of direction from which you are struggling to become aware enough to overcome. But, you see, the very thought of thinking about it drives you to think of doing something else.

Yes, I recognize that persistent drive to escape. It feels like self-sabotage.

Think of it as true north, and see where that brings you.

Huh! You mean, maybe what I’m seeking is the very thing I must not find?

No, what you are doing is not at all what you think of yourself as doing. That’s a very different thing.

So, in practical terms, what can I (ought I) do?

If toward the end of your life you can live a summing-up, it will be well.

Watching Peter Jackson’s 90-minute film “They Shall Not Grow Old,” comprising restored footage of British doughboys in World War I, I remembered an experience I had in 2001 or 2002. I was in London, walking near Trafalgar Square, trying to give David Poynter (experienced as a past life) a sense of modern London, knowing that he would recognize the buildings, which are essentially unchanged since his time. I walked down to the Embankment, the north shore of the Thames, reading the monuments, not particularly moved, but interested.

Then I came to one that said only “July 1, 1916,” and although I had no idea what it referred to, I was instantly filled with the most violent rush of emotion I have ever experienced: rage, grief, indignation, despair. I realized, this was David’s reaction I was experiencing, though I was pretty sure he himself had not been in the war. So after I saw the movie, I searched both “the Battle of the Somme” and “July 1, 1916.”

So, David, let’s talk about July 1, 1916. What was the nature and source of that upwelling of anguish that I experienced.

You felt correctly that I was not in the war. I was past the age of enlistment, and perhaps could not have stood the physical toll. But neither was I caught up in war fever. My sympathies were with the poor. The warfare that interested me was an uprising against the forces that were grinding the faces of the people. I don’t mean insurrection – that couldn’t happen – but organized resistance to the overwhelming combinations of force and law and opinion that held society in an unfailing grip.

You were a socialist, I remember thinking.

I was. But my socialism did not have its roots in a belief in materialism, so I was somewhat out of the socialist mainstream in the same way you have always found yourself out of the mainstream of political opinion – and for the same reasons. Any social movement necessarily presumes certain commonly accepted beliefs, and to the extent that you cannot share them, you find yourself having to go along unwillingly, or with mental reservations. This does not tend to make you an effective partisan.

When war broke out in August, 1914, there was a unanimity of emotion, an enthusiastic springing to arms. People didn’t realize it, but they were desperate to destroy the lives they were leading. They wanted to tear down the structure, but they thought they were tearing at something that threatened them from outside.

A socialist could see that, if he could keep his head against the group-think. Was I keen to fight for the King-Emperor and the social system I despised? Only it was not so simple. Is it ever? German autocracy as personified – almost as caricatured – by the Kaiser was clearly worse. Privately I deplored the war and did not believe in it – and yet, at the same time, I deplored Prussian autocracy even more, and certainly could not have rooted for a victory of Germany. I sat on the sideline. I observed, I remained conscious, but this only got more agonizing as time went on.

I got that you were an editor at the London Illustrated News.

We would call it a sub-editor. I was a selector of photographs and illustrations, a glorified caption-writer. It was not a glamorous nor an influential position, but it did keep me somewhat better informed than the average man in the street. I had been there for some three years, maybe four, by the time the war began, and I was there for a decade or so after the war concluded.

Surely you had to do some official drum-banging for the war.

Less than you might think. If I kept to describing specifics, there was no need to hint at the self-destructive futility of it, not that any such hints would have had any result beyond getting me fired. But the anguish cumulated as the months dragged on. You cannot envision the change from 1914, when the war would surely be over by Christmas, to 1915, 1916, 1917, 1918, when it clearly was going to go on forever. In 1914, even in 1915, it was possible to imagine that the end of the war would find us unchanged. By 1916, certainly by 1917, it was clear to those with eyes to see that nobody was going to win this war, and it was about who would lose it more thoroughly. The one date that marked that change more than any other was July 1, 1916.

I looked it up yesterday: 57,000 casualties in one day – 19,000 of them killed – the worst day for casualties in British history. The beginning of a 141-day battle that cost more than 400,000 British casualties and resulted in a six-mile advance over a 16-mile front. To my surprise, I saw that it was no longer considered to be useless butchery that accomplished nothing. Some think it led to the beginning of the end for the Germans, for reasons I won’t go into.

But you asked for the source of my reaction, which you felt that day, and my reactions had nothing to do with questions of strategy, nor even with the question of was it worthwhile even in its own military terms. Mine were rooted in something deeper.

I can feel a certain complication here, a reluctance to dip into it.

Yes, it is powerful, isn’t it, still? What you are calling first-tier and second-tier effects. And the third-tier effect went into the making of you, you understand.

In that you are a dominant strand comprising me.

Yes. You might be fascinated reading about military history (that was another strand’s influence, of course) but you could not enter whole-heartedly into such a career even if your health had allowed, because I knew better.

How do you think I felt, watching without being able to do anything, as a generation of young men was ground into the mud in France, and Gallipoli? Futility, official stupidity, dirty motives of politicians, economics behind it all, deliberate whipping-up of public hatred. It stank, and there was no way out except through it, by way of killing, killing, killing. Just as for many people Sept. 11, 2001, marks the end of one era and the beginning of another, so for me July 1, 1916, marks the end of a relatively innocent age. World War I destroyed Edwardian society.

So to focus in specifically on what I felt that day in London –

Imagine concentrating your emotional reaction to all the wrong-turnings you have witnessed in your life, and spraying them out in one burst, like a capacitor discharging. That’s what you were on the receiving end of. You are thinking of it as if I were sending you a message and you were receiving it. That’s the same idea people in my day had about what telepathy was. But, change metaphors and the nature of the event will become clearer. Think of something that equalizes with something else when brought into contact, the way water seeks its own level. Say you were in the Panama Canal and someone opened the gate between your lock and the adjacent one. The water might come in quickly or slowly overall, but it would come from the higher level to the lower as quickly as it could. The higher lock didn’t “send,” exactly, and the lower one didn’t “receive” in the way people think of telepathy as being sent and received. Instead, in the absence of a barrier, the water naturally sought its own level. A lightning bolt may be seen as the equalization of energy too, violently and suddenly.

So you are saying it wasn’t that you were trying to send a message, but that time and place created the spark?

As you intuited, place is an important part of this.

I have always wondered why ghosts haunt specific places, and why they mark anniversaries.

And now perhaps you see the answer. This is one world, not a physical and a separate non-physical world. Therefore place matters; time matters. Only, it is a matter of conceiving of things correctly. One might say the first of July, 1916 was in 3D on that date, and subsequently is in non-3D only. Yet it is not gone, as conventional thinking would have it. The non-3D version of events does not pass away, any more than other time-space combinations pass away when the living present moment passes on beyond them. But if you were to stand on the Marne battlefield today, it would be the same place (to all extents and purposes), which might facilitate your communication with that place-time that is otherwise difficult or impossible to reach.

When you reconceptualize the world to remove certain thought-barriers, sudden inflows of knowledge and being are enabled to occur. Such barriers include:

• I am only a 3D being
• Those in the non-3D are accessible only through effort and practice, and perhaps special talent.
• The past is beyond touching.
• The future is “the” future, and in any case does not yet exist.
• The world is physical and external, rather than mental and internal.
• We are each alone.
• “On the other side there is no time.”
• The 3D and non-3D worlds have little or nothing to do with each other.
• Mental, spiritual, and physical are three realities, rather than merely three words describing reality from different viewpoints.

 

I awoke from a dream in which I was Harold (from the TV show “Person of Interest”) on a bus listening to John helping a woman, promising her chocolate, something she longed for, against the life of taking abuse that she was enduring and would be going back to. Then I interacted, saying I was Harold, and she heard my laugh as Frank’s laugh and I realized we had been spotted. Forced open the bus doors, and John and I ran, of course in different directions. As I write this, I realize, it was near Sacred Heart High School, my Catholic high school before I went to public high school. I ran past a place offering air travel. I said, joking, I’d fly if I didn’t have to get into an airplane, and kept running.

Interpretation? Helpful hints, at least?

Harold is the introverted, bookish one. John is the man of action. Harold was observing John interacting, then he announced his own presence; then they had to flee as usual to avoid capture.

I was identifying with the man of action as well as the introvert?

Well, you were at least approving of him, and humorously announcing your allegiance.

John was being kind to her.

That is part of his job description, after all – the job description Harold gave him.

I have been thinking, lately, how unfitted I was to deal with the world.

Yet you did it. Well or badly, even by your own measurement, you did interact, perforce. And your Harold approved of your John, set him in motion, mandated kindness.

Yet John is a man of violence.

“Person of Interest” is a Western, set in futuristic terms. The lone cowboy, the marshal with his posse, the friends working together in the absence of law –

Harry Morgan. [Hemingway’s protagonist in To Have and Have Not]

And as you have pointed out, Harry Morgan is not a bad man, only a man in an unfavorable context, not well understood, a man on his own who learns that a man on his own can’t make it any more in a complicated society.

But John isn’t on his own. For one thing, he has Harold, and Harold’s resources.

That’s right, Harold.

And you in turn are my Harold, I suppose.

A good enough analogy, provided you don’t apply it to chasing crooks. But every man of action is backed up by an introverted, often unseen or even unsuspected link to greater resources, often invisible ones.

Defining “man of action” here, as individuals in 3D. So, running past SHHS?

That’s your past. You weren’t running to it, nor toward it, but by it. And your joke in passing – that you would fly if you didn’t have to get into an airplane – is representative. You want to fly, you can’t be cooped up in a defined space where you can be identified and detained. Think of the Harold and John analogy from time to time: It will illumine your situation.

You live at a remove from the physical world, mentally. Even when you spend your time reading of the world, understanding the world, conceptualizing the world, you aren’t really participating in it the way other people do.

Which is why I interact so badly with practical things, have such anxiety when faced with the prospect of looming events such as a trip or a meeting or even a social event.

You used to say, in a different context, that you were always playing “away” games. There’s something in that. It is difficult for you to do things in the way others do, for you can do things others can’t, and for the same reason. You live from a somewhat different standing-place. You are scarcely alone in that, but by nature you and others in that situation experience yourselves as alone in a world you share with others only by the narrowest of connections. It is difficult to state, because the words are not there to express it. The differences, not being widely experienced, have not come into common use in language. Start with Laurens van der Post’s analogy of the herd and the outliers.

He said that he had observed that herds would have one or more members who were not fully accepted but were not quite outcast. The outlying positions of these individuals made them hypervigilant, continually alert, and therefore provided the herd with an advantage.

Yes, because even though the entire herd experienced their lives as continually requiring alertness, the outlier sensed danger quicker than those who were to some degree lulled by the proximity of their fellows.

Only, van der Post’s analogy didn’t refer to danger specifically, but to increased sensitivity.

That’s right. The race’s sentinels don’t necessarily persuade anybody; they react, and their reactions alert the rest through a process of contagion. There are outliers in any society, and they serve a function, just as the relatively compact mass that forms a society’s center of gravity serve a function. That does not guarantee that either outlier or mass is comfortable. One’s 3D life is only a subset of All-D life, and the 3D portion of the world goes on within the larger All-D world. Difficult to express, even after so many months of exposition attempting to express the essential unity. But clearly, if your mental world is anchored in one place, it won’t be anchored in a different place. The way you see the world will necessarily be different from any other person’s way of seeing it, because you are all experiencing it as individuals. But beyond that, some experience it as outliers and others as part of the center of gravity. You won’t be living quite in the same world, nor quite in different worlds. You will be tenuously bound together.

We’ve said many times, everyone is, must be, in all dimensions. But that doesn’t mean you are all equally aware of the encompassing world we have been calling the non-3D. Everyone’s position on a scale of awareness of the non-3D in ordinary life facilitates their particular interim report.

All aspects of the world deserve and receive equal attention, which in effect means everything gets reported on, and these reports are collated and summarized and fed back to the participants, who go about their day in light of the developing situation. That ought to be an analogy that provides a flexible understanding without luring you to read it literally. You all feed situation reports to the larger beings of which you are a part. Those reports affect the non-3D being, and in turn affect our feedback to our 3D components. You understand, language is overemphasizing separation here and understating the degree of connection.