Saturday, November 11, 2017

I know it’s Saturday and you like me to take a rest once a week, but maybe a short session? Answering Bob’s question shouldn’t be all that complicated, should it?

[Bob Friedman: I’ve been reading Rupert Sheldrake’s 2012 book Science Set Free, which is a fascinating study of the materialist versus what is called the “vitalist” philosophies. The vitalists believe in the separation of mind and matter, mind being non-3D. But the vitalists cannot explain how the non-3D mind can attach to the 3D body. The materialists cannot explain the origin, nature, and composition of consciousness either. I wonder if Nathaniel can address this apparent dilemma.]

Most things can be answered in a few words, but then explaining and hedging the words takes a little more, and perhaps the basis of the explanations needs more, and you go ever-deeper into the swamp. But we can begin, and we shall see. Maybe it won’t amount to much, as such explanations go.

The short explanation is that vitalism and materialism are two sides of the same mistaken coin, much as capitalism and communism were in the political/economic sphere. When you start off with a wrong premise – particularly an unnoticed one – many a logical antithesis amounts to pointing out the errors of the opposite position, not realizing that one’s own position is equally undermined, because not recognizing what the two have in common.

I am almost perplexed that people can’t instinctively understand that there isn’t any material world, in any absolute sense, so there isn’t the basis for any such contradiction. Of course I realize I lay myself open to charges of being a philosophical idealist, but, given the company that puts me in with – the Transcendentalists first of all – there is worse company to be placed among.

Well, that is the nub of it, of course. In a universe formed out of consciousness, in which every atom and molecule partakes of consciousness, where is there room for what people call dead matter? Where is there room, even, for unconscious matter? There isn’t. What there is, is a world entirely composed of elements all of which are conscious, each form of consciousness different, according to the physical form’s possibilities and constraints, but all conscious. The fact that human 3D consciousness cannot communicate with that of plants or rocks does not mean that there is nothing to be communicated with – particularly given the fact that in some circumstances, people do communicate in such ways. You have experienced it yourself, Frank. Many of your readers will have experienced it in what are called anomalous experiences, usually doubted because not resting firmly and comfortably in a theory.

Jeremy Narby took some hallucinogen – ayahuasca, maybe – and found himself communicating with DNA itself, if I remember correctly. I think it was he (and I think it was in response to that experience) who realized or anyway theorized that this is how indigenous peoples knew the pharmacological properties of plants: The plants told them.

The setting-aside of obstructive beliefs (no matter how “scientific” they are supposed to be) is sometimes enough in itself to allow one’s mind to realign things – seemingly spontaneously sometimes.

Ideas may divide reality into seemingly solid compartments, and once you see that the walls of the compartments are merely arbitrary and theoretical, new and more fundamental relationships become evident.

So, once realize that reality is not “mind” and “matter” – because there can be no matter divorced from mind, no matter not made out of consciousness – and you see that both vitalists and materialists are believers in the same mistake, only differing from each other in which pieces of data they wish to admit from the real world beyond their theories.

Short and sweet, as advertised.

And, as advertised, it could be expanded upon as one things leads to another.

“As we ramble into higher and higher grass,” as Thoreau put it.

It was undoubtedly a coincidence that led you to honeymoon in New England and visit Concord and Walden before you – as opposed to your bride – even knew who Thoreau was, other than knowing his name. Undoubtedly coincidence that your thesis supervisor suggested a topic that led you to Thoreau, and equally a coincidence that one moment’s acquaintance with his writings instantly and permanently captured you. Undoubtedly a coincidence that your wife – who was afraid of the kinds of mental exploration you would enter into – gave you as a gift the complete set of Thoreau’s journals in that same year of graduate school.

Yep, pretty coincidental life I lead.

It was only the co-inciding of the many strands of your life that led you where you are. And it was only your larger self’s guidance that repeatedly brought you into the orbit of this or that pole-star. Thoreau, Melville, Emerson, etc. No need to count them. The things you come to in “sinfully strolling from book to book,” as Emerson put it, are as much a part of your experience as anything that happens to your body. Where is there division between mind and matter, except in philosopher’s or scientist’s categories?

 

Friday, November 10, 2017

Louisa Calio posts a query on my blog that amounts to, Can you give us an interpretation of 3D events that will make sense of the stupidity we live among, or some way of seeing it that will make us feel better about it.

Answering your rough paraphrase rather than her original, we probably should say, “No, we can’t.” But we can give you a few clues, to help you arrive there yourselves. We can suggest interpretations; how you react is always an individual reaction, a merging of new data with old patterns and assumed relationships.

Sure, we can see that. But, subject to that proviso—

Your ways of making sense of things often put the cart before the horse. But explaining how you are doing that isn’t always so easy, given that it involves looking at the same thing from a different point of view, rather than altering or adding to the thing being observed. So you will perhaps be tempted to say, “That’s just talking around it,” when we show you how it looks from another perspective.

We’ll try not to do that.

Louisa says – quote it –

“…the nature and purpose of some of these extreme conflicts within the individual…”

It isn’t so much that the conflicts have a purpose as that they express a result. You come into 3D embodying conflicts, precipitating conflicts around you by what you have within you. That’s one thing that 3D is, an arena, a place and time in which conflicts (and harmony, but we’re talking about conflicts at the moment) come front and center to be transformed. You wouldn’t expect a football game to be tranquil and harmonious; you wouldn’t expect a piano concert to be cacophonous. You expect each event to express in its own way.

The thing that makes it hard for you to see, sometimes, is that your football game and piano concert are taking place at the same time, along with drag racing, aerial acrobatic exhibitions, family feuds, three different melodramas being filmed, prolonged mattress testing, and half a million other events including the depths of non-social interactions with yourselves such as monasticism, intense study, illnesses, and other preoccupations. It can get a bit crowded. With all that going on, what could you say is “the point” of it?

Meaning, it won’t have just one point?

Meaning, too, that the purpose of a football game or a concert isn’t just for producing the cheers of the fans or the ovations of the audience.

Aha. Meaning, Loosh may be produced but that doesn’t mean it is more than a by-product.

At this point we advise people to re-read Far Journeys to refresh their memory of what Bob actually said. The Loosh analogy was not, by far, the end of the story, but the beginning of Bob’s deeper exploration.

I won’t quote it, but if I can find the place easily, I’ll indicate the relevant chapters.

Not necessary. Tell them, as you told Colin Wilson, to begin at Chapter 12.

Okay, so –

Bearing in mind this great assortment of activity taking place around you, remember that it is also taking place within you. Selective attention is a powerful tool to overcome the effects of cacophony. You can tune yourselves to live more harmonious lives, and those who prefer to live more on the edge can tune to do that, instead.

It isn’t exactly a matter of ignoring larger parts of the world’s events, but of deciding which events are going to be allowed in to fill our RAM [the available workspace in our metaphorical computer] at any given moment.

Not so much that you must tune certain things out – that doesn’t work very well – but that you can tune other things in.

In a sense, that amounts to saying that the world’s miseries and problems mostly aren’t our concern and needn’t bother us.

Any true statement may be made to seem uninviting or shallow or even silly. Look at it a little more slowly. Most of the world’s problems, conflicts, tragedies, perplexities, generation-long tangles, etc. are not everybody’s business, in toto. Nobody can be concerned with more than a small fraction of what goes on in the world, any more than one can be a professional in all fields, or a master of all sciences. Your lives make you specialists; one time, one place, one heredity, even if that heredity is complicated. You can’t be really – as opposed to superficially – concerned with everything wrong in the world. Don’t count the cats in Zanzibar unless you happen to be called to do it, but even if you are, you may be sure that you can’t do that and tend to every other possible task in the world.

And if it isn’t up to you to do something you can’t do, why would it be up to you to suffer because you can’t do it? That suffering is not externally-mandated. It is, in a way, the product of a decision. You decide to suffer (and of course, as always the question arises: Which “you”?) or you decide not to. Or, easier than that, your own makeup prevents the conflict from arising in the first place.

Feeling for people, even feeling for the Earth: nothing wrong with it. But allowing yourself to feel guilty for not doing what was never within your power to do is a waste of energy and potential that could go elsewhere and produce something more satisfactory.

We realize that  this argument has centered on what you call “world affairs” or “social problems,” and Louisa specifically used as example a situation very close to home, concerning her own family. That is the complement of the “social problem.” It is the very personal conflict that does deserve and even demand your engagement. But we wanted to trace the social aspect first, so as to gain perspective from the contrast between the two.

So – in cases closer to home?

There is still the same dynamic: Plenty of things are going on, and only a few of them will fill your RAM, the others automatically being swapped out. So – what do you want, what do you concentrate on?

I know you don’t mean to imply that we can choose only smooth events, but I can’t get what you do mean.

If you come into 3D life embodying certain contradictions, it is for a reason, and those contradictions may express. They may not; you may choose to defer dealing with that particular karma (so to speak), but, they may. Anything that does express may be regarded as material presenting itself to be worked. Even if you can see no way to alter events, you still can choose your attitude toward them, like Viktor Frankl in the concentration camps.

You can always choose to see yourself as victim or can live in faith that it all makes sense, or you can alternate or even do both at the same time. But you will express an attitude toward the events of your life.

Now, a thought and we will end for now. Your external events in 3D won’t mean much to you once you have transcended those limits. Your internal events – the way you shaped yourself by how you reacted to external events – will remain with you, because they will be a part of you. Which do you think is going to be important, once you have dropped the 3D body?

 

Thursday, November 9, 2017

Let us return to the question of your place among others in the 3D universe, remembering that 3D is a subset of All-D, and not a world in itself.

That amounts to saying, remember that 3D is more than it seems to be.

That, and that not only are its limits larger and wider than may appear, but its apparent isolation from other parts of itself is only apparent and not actual.

Invisible connections, yes.

Between worlds, no less than between individuals. When you keep that fact front and center in your mind, many things look different. You are never isolated, really, but 3D conditions lead you to define all situations in isolation: The very process of analysis consists of taking certain factors and considering them in isolation. There is no point, and no need, to bemoan something so universal. Being aware of it as an influencing factor is enough. But, that awareness is necessary, or you’ll never be able to draw the connections that hold the world together.

By “world,” you don’t mean just Earth, I know, but 3D in general. Learned that years ago.

Some people concern themselves with what they think of as an “alien threat” to Earth, as if you were American Indians being invaded by Europeans.

Well, you have to admit, that is a discouraging analogy.

Perhaps a productive one, in fact. But for the moment we wish to stress interaction over isolation.

I’m getting a sense of what you want to get to. More or less: We already aren’t alone, we already aren’t racially pure, so to speak, and we aren’t necessarily even the original inhabitants.

An assumption of isolation assumes

• either “we are alone” or “we were alone, and now we are threatened with newcomers.”
• “We are the human race, and they are alien.”
• “Earth is our home and others are impinging on what was always ours.”

But realize that no one enters the world alone.

We don’t give birth to ourselves. We don’t nurture ourselves, or feed and clothe and toilet-train ourselves. We come into this world into a family, into a society. Somebody takes care of us, at least for some years, or we cannot live.

Life is interdependent. There is no isolation, though often enough there is the appearance of isolation. As with the individual, so with the human race. An assumption of isolation is mostly a comforting (or, perhaps, a chilly) illusion.

In a very real sense, humans are part of a cosmic family. You have other “species” in your personal family tree; you have lifetimes in other places in your personal history. The people in 3D Earth that you love and interact with also have the same extensive invisible links, which means once again that you here are all one thing, therefore you are part of the overall “all one thing.” There is no separation in any absolute sense. We just have to keep coming back to this. In All-D, in non-3D, in 3D, you are part of all that is. There are no absolute divisions in reality.

I can imagine some people saying, “Yes, but what does this have to do with anything?”

If there are such, they should realize that any form of fear stems from a sense of isolation and difference. Apply that fact to the question of ETs and what do you see?

I think I begin to see what you are driving at. It is labels that cause fear (or even ungrounded anticipation).

That’s where we’re headed, correct. If you label people “Jews” in Nazi Germany, if you make them wear visible labels, if you distinguish them in ways that never distinguished them before, so that honored professional soldiers, doctors, scholars, whatever, were now seen as Jewish soldiers, etc., that is the first step toward segregating them from the rest of society. If that had been done, even in the absence of Nazi terror, still the damage would have been done in that they would no longer have been an accepted part of society, but a perceived “other.”

That’s the situation of blacks and Latinos in our society, of course, and of most immigrants from Europe at least until they learned the language and / or changed their names, and lived here for a generation or two.

There is a biological instinct to reject the other. A significantly different individual may be driven to the fringe of the herd, as you saw in the schoolyard. There is no use railing against it, and there is sense in suspecting that the race is wiser than the individual. But on the other hand, it is the task of the individual to see things differently. The better s/he does this, the greater the gift s/he gives to the herd.

Now apply this to ETs. Work on the assumption that they too are family. You can have little idea how close or distant the inner relationships may be, but consider, these are your family no less than your fellow Terrans.

That implies that they may have rights here that we don’t recognize.

Do you know if you have rights in the worlds of the Pleiades? Maybe everybody who is family has a right to share in the estate. Maybe a given world is inhabited by squabbling clan members. Maybe you, as individuals, are part of larger beings some of whose substance exists on other 3D worlds.

I am wary of our going off on some flight of fancy, as so often seems to happen on this subject.

Remember, words as sparks, not as law.

All right.

So, some people see flying saucers etc.

When some people come to accept the possibility or reality of flying saucers etc. they naturally think in terms of invasion by “the other.” Some, facing the same possibility, are excited at the idea of a larger community. Some, generalizing from Earth history, view the prospect as a mixture of good and bad possibilities.

And – see yesterday’s discussion – none of these positions is “wrong” or “right.” They are alternative positions that one may be led to take. What leads you to take a position is your own composition and experience (which is saying the same thing twice, in a way). The evidence is always going to be ambiguous. Even if you stand there talking to an admitted ET, thus setting to rest the question of “Do they exist” and of “Are they here,” you still must decide, “Who is this person? What is s/he? Can s/he be trusted? Can s/he even be understood?” (Motives, background, etc.)

And if we reconceptualize them as family – family in a biological sense, almost – everything is the same and everything changes.

In the first place, not “almost.” In the second place, it isn’t that externals change, it is that you change, which is part of the equation, therefore the equation changes. We know you know that, but it is just as well to state it clearly.

 

Wednesday, November 8, 2017

My friend Jim is convinced that we in 3D are – what? Victims? Laboratory animals? He sees human suffering as being designed by non-physical powers to cause suffering so as to produce what Bob Monroe called Loosh, which can be used by these higher beings (call them that) for their own purposes. Everything you have said that I take as evidence of our interaction he seems to take as evidence of our being manipulated for the benefit of others. I think this is a fair summary of his position. I’d like to show him that that isn’t how I experience it, but words are so clumsy that we all attach our own meanings to what we read. Plus, I have come to see that there isn’t really any persuading anybody about anything. As you have pointed out, words are sparks, not law.

So, where is the problem?

Yeah, I know. He has a different view of things and so what? But I can’t help thinking if I can’t say anything helpful, still maybe you can.

But why would we want to do that? If his life has led him to his own conclusions, presumably there is a reason for it.

[!] There ought to be a way to show the this-then-this-then-this process that happens somehow. We need some kind of super exclamation point, to show when we experience a fast concatenation of realizations.

Lacking that, center, slow down, and trace them out, not trying to reproduce the sequence, only to sketch where you came to.

Well, when you said that, I connected several insights, each of which led instantly – faster than memory could record – to new ones. It didn’t take more than a flash, but reoriented several previously unconnected ideas.

• We don’t come to our ideas without a reason.
• Our ideas express our own psychic realities; they are not really data-driven.
• They are necessary to our overall development; they cannot be accidental or irrelevant.
• Our lives are not meant as expressions of some ultimate or abstract truth, but as expressions of who and what we are. As part of that, we entertain only the ideas we can and (one might almost say) should, ought to, entertain.

Now why do you suppose a simple question would realign all that?

Because I was ready, I suppose, and your question sparked it.

And that is all you can do, need ever do, should ever do. Your ideas, your ways of seeing the world, your prejudices, your hunches, your unreasoning or seemingly baseless certainties, are all part of you, and you embody them for a reason. No ideas are better than any other ideas for a given person.

I think you mean that for any given person, some ideas are going to seem right and others wrong. So there’s no judging another person’s ideas without in effect judging the person – and we have been told for years that we never have the data to judge anyone else, or even ourselves. We are here to express what we are, and of course our ideas are part of that expression.

Correct so far.

Whether our ideas are more accurate or less is something we also can’t guess, because we don’t have that data either. A heliocentric view of the solar system is right in terms of physics and a geocentric one is right in terms of psychology, say.

You will find, when you look at it, that most of your social and ideological and political problems stem from the idea that there is a right and a wrong, a correct and an incorrect, and everybody and his position should be judged by how closely their position agrees with somebody’s idea of what is right. Since everybody’s ideas are different, anything other than “live and let live” – which is itself an idea – leads to chaos, which is what you are experiencing. (This ignores, for simplicity of statement, complicating factors such as greed, manipulation, etc., but they too stem from what people are, both individually and in packs.)

I can sort of see it. This assumption that there is one truth leads to assumptions that (of course) wherever we are is nearer the truth than anybody else, or we would move. And, it invalidates other ideas, hence invalidates other people themselves who hold these ideas.

Well, isn’t that what you see all around you?

It is, for sure, particularly in what used to be America. Liberals and conservatives are tearing it to pieces in the name of fighting to preserve it. I hadn’t seen, until now, that it is fueled by each side feeling that the other side is invalidating them as what they are. Obvious, but it wasn’t obvious before.

And this leaves you in something of a dilemma. By nature, you are going to believe in some things. You couldn’t function without beliefs. Naturally you want to defend those beliefs, or live by them, as best you can. So how can you at the same time live your beliefs – in tolerance, or in everyone’s right to life, or in freedom of action, or in the value of community – and at the same time respect beliefs of others that may be directly contradictory, especially if those “others” place no value on tolerance or “live and let live”? In any dilemma, remember context. Dilemmas, like paradoxes, always resolve at a higher level and (like contradictions, usually) only at a higher level.

So here, you need to remember:

• you exist beyond 3D limitations,
• the 3D plane is only somewhat real, but is somewhat real,
• no accidents, no coincidences, no ultimate separations; that is, everything is one.

That is almost too concise, and could do with some unpacking.

Feel free. We will assist, if necessary.

I guess your first point means, whatever we manifest in 3D stems from our All-D being, which implies a greater awareness. I’m not sure how this applies.

It has many ramifications.

• Who you are connects to who you are not just in this one lifetime, but to “past lives” in all their
• Your actions and thought are less under your conscious 3D control than you sometimes think, because of what psychologists call “unconscious” content and we might call beyond-your-3D-only content.
• This isn’t interference by some “other” – in that it is part of you, after all – but it may frequently seem so.

Your second point, I take it, is that what we do here does have consequences, but isn’t the whole story. We can’t ever see the whole show, for reasons we’ve gone into more than once.

That’s right; and it also means that the rights and wrongs of a situation look different when seen from a longer or deeper perspective.

And I guess your third point is merely that we have to try to remember and keep real to ourselves the fact that “us v. other” is at most a relative distinction.

As I think about it, the implications keep growing, and the actual change in ideas required is less. All it amounts to is seeing ideas differently, but that changes everything it touches, which means, our entire 3D existence. You gentlemen care to help me out on this?

If ideas are abstractly right or wrong according to some absolute standard, then anyone and everyone – not least, one’s own self – may safely be judged by how far their ideas diverge from the truth. But this is much the same as postulating an absolute standard of morality.

My own background and childhood (and therefore my unconscious thoughts to this day, probably) were formed within the Catholic Church of the 1940s and 50s. There is no more absolute standard than that. I never questioned the existence of an absolute standard of good and evil, only the human error involved in comprehending and applying it.

Meaning, you agreed with some Church doctrine and disagreed with other.

That’s what it amounted to. I went my own way, trying to use my own thought and judgment (in practice, my own feelings), but I did not ever question that there was some such absolute. Even when I came to see that situational ethics were not only defensible but inevitable, I didn’t doubt that the issue was our adapting that inner code to specific 3D circumstances. In other words, who would want to adhere to the accepted code of Tudor England, or Ancient Greece or Rome, or Tsarist or Stalinist Russia? Socially accepted codes could be no firm anchor. Yet it seemed clear that in adapting our behavior to the time, we were still doing so in reference to an absolute that I would now say came from our All-D awareness rather than our specifically 3D-bounded awareness.

If there is a universal, there are degrees of error in perceiving it, in living it, in attempting to comply with it and enforce it. You can see this in the history of every society, church, association. Scientists are perhaps more to it than priests, in that they admit no mechanism for repentance and absolution.

It boils down to, this is the ultimate result of eating of the fruit of the tree of perceiving things as good or evil. In other words, 3D Theater is inherently partial, partisan, relatively intolerant, uneasy, even, in a sense, hysterical. (And I don’t mean funny!)

That may be stretching it a little. Yes, it may tend that way; it needn’t stay there. As you change perceptions, you change your reality, as you have been told more than once.

We can undo the effects of the descent into perceived duality? Is that what you mean?

You can’t do it for others; you can perhaps do it for yourself and leave a trail of bread crumbs for others. Think how many, many loaves of bread have been crumbled to bring you (plural) to this point. The work of realigning your perceptions won’t get done automatically; you need to work the problem that is your life. But it can be done; you have vast supportive forces of which you are usually unaware, some of which you will never be aware of. It can be done. Only – don’t then judge those whose path leads in other directions! To judge them would be a demonstration that you haven’t yet changed directions yourselves.

This has moved a long way from my initial perception, which was that we can look at other people’s opinions as an indicator of where they are, rather than where they ought to be.

Not so far, just in a direction you didn’t expect.