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Friday, October 20, 2017

When one differentiates carefully between the personal and impersonal, a clearer understanding of one’s position in the world results.

Your lives are pre-shaped, we might say, by whatever internal baffles and conduits and intersections you bring to them by what you are. You know you are not psychologically simple. This may lead directly to that, in defiance of intellectual logic but perfectly following emotional logic laid down by past experience. If something reminds you of something else because they are linked in your mind by an unpleasant experience, the connection may not be otherwise obvious or logical or even sensible, but it will be no less strong for that. You know this; it is your experience of life. Many a psychoanalyst or psychotherapist makes a good living helping people manage under circumstances caused by these often subterranean relationships.

But life is the working-out of such problems, and the problems are where the treasure is. Just as you wouldn’t like a movie or book without tension, or a crossword puzzle without difficulty, or a game without adequate competition, so a 3D life without internal problems to be resolved if possible would be empty. Instead of pain or trouble or annoyance, think intricacy. You are in 3D life to work out (by living them) the problems you bring to it. In the living, you often enough add more problems, or different ones, or new dimensions to older ones, but this is not a failure nor even a marching-in-place. Again we say it is not in result but in process that reality inheres.

Well, you say “again,” but I don’t know that you’ve ever quite put it that way.

But you understand the gist. Just as we said that it is not what happens to you but what changes in you that counts? This is the same thing. Emotionally, mentally, physically, the living of the thing is the real work. The reshaping of yourself is the real result. The process by which the reshaping occurs may be said to be of lesser importance, or of overall importance, depending on how you look at it.

That isn’t real clear. It is either a tautology or it is cryptic.

Well, it isn’t complicated. From one point of view, how you get to a new place is incidental, and what is important is where you get to. From another, the journey itself is the important thing, and it makes less difference where it ends, as any end is only temporary anyway. We have told you, often enough, that we’re always on Plan B. That doesn’t mean that we’re always settling for second-best (or worse), but that we concentrate on continuing the journey, and if the winds blow us here instead of there, that’s no loss.

But the contrary view – that the incidents of the journey matter less than the arrival – is somehow also true.

Correct. Logically self-contradictory, but then, so much of life is. Contradictions are always resolved at a higher level of understanding. As you have been told, the universe contains all contradictions within it, but it cannot contradict itself.

So let’s go back to the point. Are the emotional events of your life personal or impersonal? It’s a matter of viewpoint, but it isn’t a matter of indifference which viewpoint you adapt. Your choice will affect how you see the world (and of course will affect your life in the world) and therefore will alter what comes to you.

That last may be more obvious to you than to us.

Surely it is obvious that how you see the world affects how you react to the world. Someone convinced that life is a series of unconnected random events would be continually in a defensive stance. Or, if convinced that life was actively hostile, or actively (if we could put it that way) meaningless, or actively benevolent – surely you can see that each attitude would produce differences in interpretation, and that different interpretations provoke different responses which in turn elicit differences in the next sequence of events.

Yes, I can see that. I don’t know that I have ever drawn it quite that way in my mind.

If a hurricane blows through, are you responsible for the lost palm fronds? Yet, if the hurricane blows through and you have left the lawn furniture out, and a chair smashes a window, are you blameless? Your attitude toward the world implies your attitude toward your place in the world, and that attitude has consequences. When the hurricane arrives, you have some responsibility for what it finds, because you have had some ability to shape or reshape it, ahead of time.

And the point is not to avoid hurricanes – as that is beyond our scale – but to prepare for them.

No, the analogy breaks down. Preparing for them is a side-effect; that isn’t what we mean here. We mean, what you can do is work on yourselves; what you cannot do is assure that all will be peace and prosperity, and John F. Kennedy will not be killed, nor Abraham Lincoln, and your own days will not be troubled.

I get that. Again Emerson’s “marching off to a pretended siege of Babylon” after “raising my siege of a hencoop.” Or Thoreau’s mention of “cowards who run away and enlist.”

It is usually easier to aim one’s discontents and outrages and aspirations outward rather than inward.

And I hear an implied caveat: Don’t take this to mean implied condemnation or commendation of a public life or of concentration on external affairs.

That’s right. What you do doesn’t really matter. How you do it (mindfully or otherwise) will be found to matter a great deal.

 

 

Time	Perceptions	Inferences
	Dedicate session to Higher Self and appropriate Lower Selves of  DW, of ‘Max Weber’,  and any others who may appear, for use at appropriate time(s) – or for non-use if that is in the best interests of all concerned. Confident of, and grateful for, all needed help to identify, clarify, understand, and if appropriate heal issues presented, recognizing that it is an unusual session.	DW begins to enter extra-ordinary states of consciousness
	July 3 2022 9:48 pm EDT DW:  “Is the soul; that was embodied in Max Weber in Prussia in the late 1890s available for a short conversation?” 9:50 pm MAXW:  “Ja, who are you and why do you call at this time?” DW:  “Herr Weber, I am an American, embodied in 2022, who has learned to communicate with souls such as yourself.  For the past year or so, since I learned that I could be heard, understood, and responded to, I have concentrated on those who had a Near-Death Experience during their embodiments and were forever changed in some ways.  Many of those souls had been composers of classical music; like Beethoven, Richard Strauss, Jean Sibelius, Piotr Tchaikovsky, and so on.” MAXW:  “Very interesting.  And were you drawn to me because of my ‘NDE’?” DW:  “No, sir.  I was not aware that you might have had one or more. Perhaps I was drawn by a similarity in our research interests.  For example, right now I am following a High Level Project which is evolving the soul of our species, Homo Sapiens, to enlarge the role of Love in our grouping ourselves.  I knew, because of my career work, of your creation of the formal “Bureaucracy” concept.  But, unless you called me, I had no other clue that we might converse.” MAXW:  “Well, perhaps I did call you.  In my last embodiment I believe I did have one or more ‘NDE’s, as you term them.  But more, I am now involved in the project you mentioned, concentrating on potential ways to bring our souls’ Love into the physical ‘3-D’ world in ways that do not re-emerge in various forms of Hate.  Your recent fumbling with TzarPiotr came to my attention.” DW:  “I hope my efforts have not imperiled the project.” 10:12 End Segment [24 minutes at Focus 27]   June 4, 2022 1:24 pm EDT MAXW:  “No.  On the contrary, they have been beneficial.  But you should realize that the project is much bigger than we have thought until very recently.” DW:  “Can you tell me more?” DW:  “Perhaps you might share a bit about NDE’s in your life.” MAXW:  You read my biography this morning and learned that there were several periods of great productivity and several of prolonged depression in that embodiment. DW:  “Yes, what you created became ‘Sociology’, a topic of great and growing interest for me at this point in my career.”   DW:  “MAXW, I might add that your work came to my attention more than fifty years ago, when I was working on research that led to an advanced degree, Doctor of Public Administration.  The significance escaped me completely at that time and has only re-surfaced again within the past year.” 1:32 pm End segment [8 minutes at Focus 27]   June 4, 2022 5:56 pm EDT DW:  “MAXW, I’m back after reading a digest of your work bridging religious traditions and practices with economic actions.”  “It looks to me as though your analyses brought you to one or more ‘Belief System Crashes’ – perhaps with effects analogous to those of Near-Death Experiences.”   “Does that make sense to you, in long retrospect?” MAXW:  “Very much so.  Yes, my careful analytical work undercut so much of the belief system popular in my times [in which I was marinated], and that I had been raised within.  That happened several different times during my professional career and was followed each time by a period of several years’ recovery from intense depressions.” DW:  “In your present situation, has it become clear how that path of rationalisation developed before you?” MAXW:  “Yes, and now I’m several years ahead of YOU, DW!”  “I see that you were surprised to learn about my analyses of the religious-economic interactions in Occidental, Chinese, Indian, and Judaic societies.” DW:  “Yes, I have to go back and read about those again.  The societal structures that led to caste systems are still beyond me.”  “The differences of educated-elite segments of the Chinese and Indian societies seemed quite clear.  Now I need to understand better how that the educated-elite segment in today’s U.S. society is leading toward a new ‘Awakening’ in our society and how it relates to the ‘WOKE’ group.” DW:  “MAXW, do you know of the recent analyses of ‘Generations’ done by a William Strauss and Neil Howe here in the U.S.?” MAXW:  “I have heard of it, but have not met the Strauss Soul or considered how it might continue the analyses I wrote about a century ago.” DW:  “Is the soul referred to as ‘WMS’ available for conversation at this time? WMS:  “Yes, and I’m very interested to converse with ‘MAXW’, one of the heroes of my last embodiment.” MAXW:  “Happy to meet you, WMS.  I see from your work that mine was one example of a recurring pattern, a fragment of a century-long cycle.” WMS:  “Interesting, isn’t it.”  “MAXW, perhaps we can cogitate on these relationships ‘off-line’, by ourselves.” DW:  “Please do, if it is of value to you – and I firmly believe it will be!” 6:26 pm End Segment [30 minutes at Focus 27]       June 4, 2022 5:15 pm EDT DW:  “MAXW, here is a graphic I’ve drawn in attempting to show different levels of “Focus” – as developed by ‘Explorers’ using Monroe’s hemi-sync technology.  I have come to believe that communication we are conducting now occurs at “Focus 27” in the graphic, in Focus areas similar to those experienced in Near-Death Experiences.”  Please look at that and give me a reaction.”   DW’s rendering of ‘Focus Levels’ identified by Monroe ‘Explorers’ 5:26 MAXW:  “Very interesting presentation.  Obviously not limited to sensory channels in the physical body.  I have not experienced any of these levels for myself but the concept is certainly feasible.  Let me roam for a moment or so.  I’ll be right back.” DW:  “I’ll wait, happily.” MAXW:  “Checking out the ‘Reception Center’ and the ‘Healing and Regeneration Center’ now.  Familiar.  I think I’ve been there, in that vibratory range.” MAXW:  “It may be that we here, in this environment, experience other spirits or ‘souls’ as you term them, at a level closer to ‘Focus 42’.”  Still within the space of this planet, ‘Terra’.”  “We have freedom to experience others unlimited by ‘Earth-Time’ or ‘Earth-Space’.  Very interesting, DW.” DW:  “Thanks for checking.  Now, MAXW, I’d like to call for the soul of Robert A. Monroe, who first explored this area while embodied.  Would that be okay with you?” MAXW:  “I’m eager to meet that soul.”  “Yes, by all means.” DW:  “Is the soul that was embodied in Robert A. Monroe in the 1900s available for conversation with another  advanced (and developing) soul?” 5:41 pm EDT RAM:  “Is that THE Max Weber?”  “Well, I’m astonished and pleased to make your acquaintance.”  “You are a great Thinker, MAXW.  We may have studied and explored much of the same ‘Soul territory’ in a sense.”   DW:  “Gentlemen, I will bow out now.  Please feel free to call if I can be of use to you as you progress.” 6:00 pm EDT End Segment [34 minutes, interrupted, at Focus 27]   June 7, 2023 11:06 pm EDT DW:  “Gentlemen, I  hope you have enjoyed sharing insights and new ideas with one another.  Have you anything that I could understand at this time?” RAM:  “My God, DW!  You seem to be following – maybe constantly pushed by – the energies of the Project!  Amazing!  And to think it’s all a result of hemi-sync.  I, RAM, feel HUMBLE now.” MAXW:  We are continuing to work in this line.  Thank you for bringing us together at this ‘inflection point’ in the Project.” 11:11 pm End Segment [5 minutes at Focus 27 and Focus 42]	He responds                 Did he have one or more??               MAXW called DW?                               Anything like a ‘Near-Death Experience’?                                        Very impressive accomplishments that DW is now beginning to notice.     ‘Belief System Crashes’, ‘Somewhat  like ‘NDE’s.           New to DW                 Seveal books, including Fourth Generation.       Interesting, across generations and centuries…         End DW’s role in this meeting                                                                                                   Totally NEW Insight!!

 

 

Thursday, October 19, 2017

Let us continue describing your lives in the context of forces beyond the obvious, beyond the transient and apparent.

Deeper than what is seemingly common sense.

That’s right. Hard offhand to find a way to describe the difference. If in 3D you see a murder, or a screaming argument, or even an icy silent confrontation, it can always be ascribed to circumstances, from “He made me do it” to “It was inevitable, given the circumstances.” But there is a deeper causation that may be discerned and described, and this is among the things we have been working up to.

If you are anything like an instrument, you are a pipe with various stops. The winds that blow through are modulated by your interaction with them. If you play a flute, your fingers determine the notes emitted by which holes they cover and which they don’t, and in what combinations and in what order. The structure of the pipe does not change, but the effective passage of the wind through the pipe does change.

Your free will in 3D circumstances is the point of your existence, after all. Merely being the passive spectator of impersonal forces has nothing to do with free will. Further, the importance of the events of a life is not what happens, but how you are changed by what happens. If your ability to react and choose were not there, what would your life be?

But we would like to poke a little deeper than that. What you are as you find yourselves is not adequately explained by your circumstances, by your 3D heredity or even by what may be called your non-3D heredity – your strands, past lives, extensive connections.

What you are is explained by circumstances beyond the 3D world. Just as your present-day self must be seen in context of its past, so your physical being cannot be explanation for itself, but must be seen in context of the larger being from which it springs – only, observation of that level of being is not possible.

Cannot our non-3D communications provide us the data, just as you are doing?

But remember, we – your non-3D components, and their friends and relations, so to speak – are at your level. We remind you, the 3D and non-3D aspects of yourself, the All-D creatures, are not separate. So in a sense, higher levels are as much a mystery to us as to you.

Plenty of people talk about them, though. But don’t know what they’re talking about?

Let’s say, our information and theirs are not the same.

So say clearly what you mean, here.

If you ask someone for a description of a far country where he has been and you have not, how do you judge the accuracy of the description you receive? You weigh the known biases of the traveler, for one, and if possible you compare his “traveler’s tale” to those of others. But various stories are not always comparable, as they may not be describing the same things. A description of the Sahara desert and another of Cairo and a third of Naples would not necessarily resemble each other, not because any or all were inaccurate, but because they were describing different aspects of the same world. What is the difference between a traveler’s tale and hearsay, in the absence of any way to verify them?

The difference is not in the reports, nor in the reporter, but in your own decision about them. That is, you decide what is reliable and what isn’t. Your decision isn’t necessarily accurate either; it’s just that you have to make it. You can keep that decision tentative, you can suspend judgment, but at some point you will have to make it, if only by default.

And we never have sufficient data to base a decision on.

You don’t have sufficient evidence; you don’t have sufficient evidence for a logical fact-driven conclusion. What you do have is a feeling, one way or another, a sort of centering in. This may be Psychic’s Disease, depending upon how reckless you are at coming to certainties, but it needn’t be. It is a perfectly legitimate method of judging things you cannot decide on evidence.

My friend Ed Carter told me that at the highest levels of management, decisions are made on intuition, because if they could be made on logic they would have been made at lower levels of management.

This is to remind you that there are areas in which we know, and others in which we don’t, just like your own lives. Nobody knows everything, and nobody’s range is precisely the same as anybody else’s.

So, our take-away here, besides the reminder of fallibility?

It is more than a reminder of fallibility. It is a reminder of levels of being. If you were to ask a cell in your stomach muscle of its opinion of an afterlife, even if it could convey the opinion (or even have one), how likely is it that its reality and yours would overlap sufficiently to provide you with guidance? It is as immortal as you, in the sense that its non-3D existence is not threatened by the termination of its 3D existence, but that doesn’t mean your reality and its are translatable one to the other. And as above, so below.

I am more than ordinarily in the dark about this morning’s talk.

Perhaps we made too big a leap. Sometimes connections that are obvious to us are not so to you, just as sometimes you intuit a lot from us that needs spelling-out for those who were not there at that moment when the spark jumped. Remember our larger theme, your souls as conduits of vast impersonal forces that are experienced as personal drives.

You hadn’t added that last phrase before.

We would have thought it went without saying. Perhaps that is part of the gap in communications. It is because you necessarily experience, but less necessarily conceptualize, impersonal forces as personal, that much confusion arises.

Why?

Why does it cause confusion? We can hardly imagine why it isn’t obvious. If you think a penguin is an albatross, won’t it cause confusion? They’re both birds, and they both like cold water, and that is about all they have in common.

Well, spell it out for us.

[Pause]

It is a difference in responsibility. If you think the impersonal is personal, you are likely to assume responsibility for things that are in fact beyond your control. Thus you may blame yourself for an eclipse of the sun. Alternatively, you may blame the Gulf Stream for your own hasty decision. You see? It is true that sometimes the confusion makes no difference, isn’t even evident. But sometimes it matters.

All divination systems have as their basis the connection between inner and outer worlds. Astrology, tarot, I Ching, to name three, translate the impersonal forces of the world for the individual querent. In short, “How will I likely be experiencing (as personal forces flowing through me) the winds flowing through the world (the impersonal forces)?”

That is a sorting-out, you see, only it is implicit rather than explicit, at least in practice. The person using the system is interested in the factors impacting his, or her, life, not in the factors as an abstract description of the world’s weather. Nonetheless, it is indeed a weather report, and the wise querent is the one who explicitly recognizes that there isn’t anything personal about whether it’s raining, and yet at the same time it is very personal in an entirely different sense.

Wednesday. October 18, 2017

Let’s talk about motivation and emotion.

I know where this is going. I had a thought while making coffee. I take it you sometimes put out teasers, like theatrical trailers.

Think of it as an aligning nudge, to smooth communication.

Or like a left jab, to position me for a punch?

We’re smiling too. All right. You look around you, sometimes, and you wonder, how it is that people want things so badly? How can so many things be so important to them? How can they believe so thoroughly and passionately? Why are they so driven?

Very true. And you don’t need to tell me that others would say that somebody who fills dozens of notebooks with early morning dialogues is driven in his own way. It doesn’t feel like it, to me, it feels natural, but I can imagine that that’s how it looks. So I don’t exactly think I’m the only exception to what I’m nevertheless puzzled over.

It is a good point, that one person’s obsession is another’s natural way of being. But at the moment we are interested in the underlying question of motivation.

What makes Sammy run. What is it with us?

It is that what you used to call 3D Theater is for the playing-out of – well, we are going to say of conflicts, only that needs explaining.

More like confluences, I think. Or just interactions.

That is true once the context is understood, but it requires spelling-out first, to eliminate potential misreadings.

Life in 3D, we remind you, amounts to saying “consciousness restricted in its awareness to 3D conditions of perceived separation, delayed consequences, and constricted experience of time as an invariant succession of present-moments.” Life in 3D allows the play of forces to be experienced from within, as it were. It makes it real at an entirely different level than one of somewhat chilly abstraction, which is All-D life as you would perceive it. (In saying that, we are not accusing ourselves of being cold. We are showing you the difference between 3D consciousness and the larger All-D consciousness as it would appear to you.)

If you will remind yourselves that in a very real way, you are all part of one thing, it will be easier to understand. 3D life is the experience of many small parts of all-that-is experiencing themselves as separate. This is not (we keep reminding you) poor design, nor Original Sin in the sense of a culpable act or an error of judgment. It is the result of the eating of the fruit of the Tree of the Perception of Things as Good and Evil – that is, it is the result of the voluntary descent into perception of duality – but it is not punishment nor even an escape from punishment. It is the sine qua non of the experience. Without more than one actor, more than one stream of thought, more than one set of motivations, there isn’t much elucidation going on. Monologues and soliloquies only take you so far.

You are implying that our drama is somewhat artificial.

Let’s call you a repertory company doing improvisational drama. (We have used the analogy repeatedly, because it is expressive.) You are assigned roles in 3D by being born into a certain time, place, heredity, and being given baggage (what some call past lives, others, inherited traits, which amounts to the same thing) but are then free to – and required to – make it up as you go along. This is because the theater management, and for that matter the audience, is less concerned with plot than with character revelation and character development. It is the playing-out, less than the play, that is of interest.

No Big Script, no Ultimate Resolution, no Armageddon.

Not except in the sense of the entire working-out process being the script, no. People tack on the idea of a final resolution, for fear of meaninglessness.

Yes, that is a haunting fear many of us come to, once we are beyond believing in the surface appearance of things.

It requires greater consciousness and therefore involves more self-consciousness, when you are doing improv knowing it, than when you just follow your impulses less consciously, “doing what comes naturally.”

Living life instinctively, I take it. “Doing what comes naturally” leads to thoughts of the birds and bees, and I can’t think of much that is more instinctive or stronger than the sexual instinct.

Sex, survival, flourishing, all aspects of life as divided beings, yes. Powerful motivators, desire and fear.

I take it that is different from the Course in Miracles: love and fear as the two forces motivating humans.

Yes. That refers to attraction and repulsion. We are referring to a slightly different way to see 3D life, one in which desire and fear are two motivating forces within the perception of multiplicity.

I feel the distinction, but we haven’t put words around it yet.

• Love vis a vis fear refers to forces leading you either from, or further into, a sense of multiplicity.
• Desire vis a vis fear refers to forces within the sense of multiplicity.

Neither one tends to lead you out of it, they manifest it within you (or, you might as well say, they manifest you).

Desire and fear make drama. Drama makes for enactment and, in a sense, awareness of, resolution of, the forces themselves, through manipulation of the agencies though which the forces manifest.

You just said, the forces themselves can be felt but not represented except either by abstractions or by characters feeling them.

We didn’t quite say that, but that is the sense of what we meant, yes. What cannot be directly represented can be personified, observed, experienced vicariously, emotionally understood. This transforms the observer and we go on to whatever follows, to be transformed further.

So even when we live our lives feeling them pointless, even intolerably so, we are performing improv and there is a reason for it.

Well, “a reason for it.” We know what you mean, but to assent would be to mislead. Life is. It doesn’t need a “reason for it.” What you mean is, it isn’t ever meaningless, and this is true. However, a sense of it being meaningless is well within the range of emotions being expressed by this or that actor in the troupe.

Does that imply a need to have every possible mood expressed, so that, we might say, “somebody has to do it”?

That isn’t quite wrong, not quite right. Let’s say, the forces are there. the situations are there. the players with their baggage are there. It’s pretty likely that sooner or later everything inherent in the structure will be acted out by somebody.

 

Tuesday, October 17, 2017

It’s interesting to see the difference between what I experience and what people read into that experience. Yesterday’s exchange, for instance, I experienced as smooth, even flow. Statement, response. Question, response. One leading to the next, no emotion involved. But people read into the record, anger, chastisement, even (yesterday) cantankerousness. Since I can occasionally detect suspicious fingerprints when they are smudgy enough, I suspect that you encouraged me to mention this for reasons of your own. Your move.

Take that same difference between communication as you experience it essence to essence, and the record it leaves, the effect it produces, when people read it via 3D clues (written words, inferred attitudes, analogies to what would be if it were a conventional person-to-person interaction), and you get a sense of the difference between All-D and 3D perspectives on 3D life.

I almost get it, but not quite.

That’s all right, because there is quite a lot to say. Let’s make it easy to follow, by coding it. So, in our interactions,

• you, the 3D-plus-non-3D intelligence, we’ll call A.
• We, the non-physical intelligence you communicate with, we’ll call B.
• Your readers, separately or together, we’ll call C.

So,

• physical – A.
• Non-physical – B.
• Observer – C.

Over-simplified, but it will do. But A and C extend into the non-3D and know they do, yet continually forget they do. So let’s call

• your non-3D component A2 and
• your readers’, C2.

A interacts with B, and C observes. But really, A and A2 interact with B, and C and C2 observe. As you have noted, interactions tend to be experienced this way: A2 and B, and experienced by C as if A and B. Well, why should that be? Why (since C and C2 are the same) should it not be experienced by C as A2 and B?

It depends on how we observe, doesn’t it? If we observe using sensory cues, it appears to be A and B. Only if we observe giving intuition primacy over sensory do we perceive it as A2 and B.

Close enough for the moment. All right, draw and extend the analogy. Look at the world around you.

Yes, I see it. If we only read the evidence using our sensory apparatus and its reporting, its logic, its deductions – the world looks one way. If we read the same thing in an intuitive way, it reads differently.

Again, not quite. But you’re on the trail. The point remains that the world you experience is only somewhat real, even in its own terms. It is more real, seen through C2 lenses.

It’s difficult to grasp. We can get it abstractly, but to apply it, it can seem like explaining things away.

We understand. We are trying to give you an intellectual connecting principle, to tie in what you experience within yourselves and what you experience outside of yourselves, because it is so hard for you to perceive (as opposed to knowing abstractly) that inner and outer are the same reality experienced through two different filters.

The world hurts! You, observing the world, hurt, because you take it as real. But – it is real and it isn’t. What C experiences is qualitatively different from what C2 experiences, and the difference inheres in C, not in the world.

In a way, that’s saying what Hemingway said? That we’re making a mistake in thinking that others react to their situation in the way that we would react if we were in it?

Everybody who reads this, present or future, has seen it. One’s “personal experience” can never be translated accurately. You can’t express it and the other person can’t absorb it, because there are too many unnamable variables within each 3D individual to make translation possible. Because you extend into non-3D and you experience partly intuitively, something of the emotional reality and the inexpressible experience can arc over, but only some. The actual flavor of everyone else’s life can only be guessed at. Who understands how asthma has flavored your life? Who understands the combined effects of asthma and reading and hero-worship and early Catholicism and emotional incentives and motivators and disincentives and anti-motivators? Who can add in ambitions and disinclinations, insights and prejudices, penetration and blindness? Nobody.

This may not seem a very valuable insight, until it clicks in. You are all infinite mysteries to each other, you know that. Even when the other is known to the point of boredom, the core will remain a mystery, to others and even to yourself. It’s one thing to say “know thyself,” but it is another thing to know how to go about it. Yet, you assume you know what the napalmed child feels. We choose a horrible example purposely; there’s no point in using only easy cases.

It doesn’t take any great insight or empathy to know that the child hurts!

Of course not, and the ability to empathize is part of being human. A very valuable part. However, let’s extend our analogy.

• C is the observer,
• C2 is the observer plus its non-3D component.

Another way of putting it would be that C is the observer using only sensory input, C2 is the observer observing with intuition as well as sensory data.

• But what watches C’s progress through 3D life with interest and involvement, but does not interfere, because to interfere would actually impede? Call that observer C3.

What we called B is really B3 as observed by A and C. We, here, do not exist as 3D-only, obviously, and we cannot even be said to be B2, which would imply that we were 3D using intuitive means.

Well, from the C3 level, life looks, feels, is, different. It is the difference between watching an execution or a gunfight or a car accident in person (or on a news program), and watching them in a story, characters portrayed by actors. Anyone with empathy is going to be stirred even by drama – that’s the purpose of drama, after all, to stir emotions – but no sane person confuses drama with reality. Matt Damon doesn’t get shot just because Jason Bourne does. Tom Hank doesn’t die in Normandy just because the schoolteacher does.

Well, I don’t know, drama can carry a powerful kick, and some of us can confuse it with reality. I can well remember being heart-sick as a little kid at the ending of Tarzan of the Apes, and I can remember being rapt with tension at some TV show and my father laughing and telling me, “it’s just a story,” and my complicated reaction to that – regretting being taken out of it, and becoming aware of where I had been, and retaining the consciousness of that awakening. And I still get thoroughly involved with characters in some novels and videos, especially in a continuing series. Hornblower, Castle, Inspector Grant.

And you make our point for us. Remember, these are created beings, like yourselves but at another level removed. Real but not as real. Embodying characteristics made plain by their adventures. To the degree that you care about them, and you can come to identify, in a way, even with characters who embody characteristics opposite to your own (in fact that can be the strongest identification), you enter into their reality. The surroundings and the plots don’t need to be realistic, because it isn’t as if you were identifying with their external experiences. You identify with their reactions. You feel their reactions as if they were yours. They enliven an existing but slow-flowing current within you. Hence the popularity of mysteries and romance novels. As art, they usually come to not much. But as doorways to your own interiors, well, that’s why they appeal.

So we are a TV series to the next highest level of reality?

Let’s say you are actors who are pretty intense, and often get lost in your roles. It is the surfacing to breathe, remembering that you are an actor with, perhaps, a mortgage or a favorite car, that reminds you that life is realer than the drama you are (legitimately) engaged in, immersed in. And that’s enough for now.

 

Monday, October 16, 2017

You said, descent into duality is only a relative thing. What did you mean by that?

Remember always, there are no hard and fast divisions in the universe. In a manner of speaking, yes, but not absolutely. Just as it isn’t 3D here, non-3D there, so it isn’t duality here, non-duality there, except relatively.

Well, we are willing to be instructed, but that isn’t immediately obvious.

Duality isn’t a physical or mental ghetto, a low-rent district. It is a state of mind, in a way, a state of acceptance.

Of acceptance. You mean, only the result of seeing things a certain way?

That sounds to you like your own thought at the moment, but yes, the result of seeing things a certain way, of Perceiving Things As Good and Evil.

And does that imply that escaping duality is a matter of deciding to see things as one, and there we are?

If it were that simple, wouldn’t you have done it as soon as you first heard the idea, or at least when you first began to believe it?

Easier to fall in than to climb out? Is that it?

In a sense. But you are ignoring the second half of our statement, that there is a good reason for it.

I hesitated between “is a good reason” and “was a good reason,” and finally chose “is,” but I don’t know why.

The “why” is because duality wasn’t a one-time error or even a one-time experiment. It is on-going, and the reason for it is on-going, and you know why.

I know it is about prisms, but I don’t know why that is necessary or desirable.

Why don’t you explain, and as usual you will find insight flowing in as you put your mind in the current.

I get it is the difference between many colors and one all-encompassing white light. Our very flaws and difficulties act as filters, so that the light of spirit shining through us does not come out clear white (though I gather it remains clear white), but in whatever color results when you shine lights through us. So I can imagine that if it is useful to have colors, duality is a way to produce them.

That description makes it all seem pretty futile. There are other ways to see it.

• It could be looked at artistically, for instance: Duality is being used to produce light shows, visual displays, ever-changing patterns.
• Or, scientifically: It analyzes reality by dissecting it, saying “white contains blue and green and deep red and very delicate violet, et cetera,” showing the innate complexity of existence.
• Or dramatically: Duality demonstrates tension and resolution, continually flowing.
• Or religiously or philosophically, so to speak: Inherent in the nature of things are these possibilities.

You will forgive me saying that still seems pretty futile. In a way, why bother?

That is world-weariness speaking. Ennui, one of the seven deadly sins. Sins, you will remember, are defined as errors, as “missing the mark.” They do not lead toward truth and understanding, but away from them.

Well, I’ve said we’re willing to be instructed. But what you have said so far today is not appealing to me. It makes me feel like a gladiator in a pit, fighting for the amusement of others.

Even if you are at the same time one of those “others”?

Even if.

Then let’s see if we can do something about that. I don’t suppose it does any good to remind you that anybody in duality is there of their own free will, volunteers.

Even taking your word for it, that leaves us in the position of a Marine partway through in boot camp, with a long stretch still ahead of him. He may have volunteered, but that seems a long time ago, and it doesn’t make his current reality any easier. I can’t imagine why the world beyond duality needs veterans of duality boot camp.

This is perilously near theory, as opposed to something you can use. But, recognizing that it is a real obstacle, let us say just this. The product of a spell in duality is a being that:

• Combines otherwise disparate elements
• Understands unity in a new and more sophisticated way
• Is, in a sense, denser, tougher, more concentrated.

In short, an ex-civilian who is now a Marine, and once a Marine always a Marine.

It is only an analogy, but not a bad one.

We use Marines for difficult combat. Are you implying combat goes on beyond duality?

That isn’t a question that can be answered yes or no without serious distortion. Let us say that life of any kind potentially involves contention, relative readjustments. But this does not imply warfare. Don’t carry the analogy too far. And let’s drop mere theory (anything that doesn’t affect your lives may be said to be mere theory in effect) and refocus on what you are living, hence what you can do.

All we have accomplished so far is to remind you that duality exists among non-duality, and that the world doesn’t have a damaged section, a war zone, a ghetto. By reminding you that there is a purpose, we implicitly tell you that there is not only meaning but creation within it, and creation being a part of your nature, therefore there is joy. Remember Hemingway and the fireworks.

Hemingway and his wife Martha were in China in 1941, and she was revolted and distressed by the conditions of Chinese life. At one point he said that just because it affected her that way, didn’t mean it affected them that way, or they wouldn’t keep having babies and shooting off fireworks for enjoyment. I take it you are saying, don’t be distracted by the misery of the world, everything is fine.

Minus the sarcasm, more or less. Hemingway’s insight was deeper than her emotional reaction. Again, remember – and keep bringing yourself back to the fact – 3D existence is only relatively real. It isn’t the whole story. Remember too that you don’t, can’t, know anyone else’s inner reality. You don’t know their response to their own private experience of boot camp. You don’t know what it satisfies, what it develops and matures. Blind, shrill compassion is not compassion at all, but a rejection of the universe, the same old “I know better.”

And where does that leave reform? What good is it to see what’s wrong, and sometimes why it is wrong, if the end is to be “you don’t know better than the universe does”?

There is a difference between understanding and condemnation. In fact, they rarely run together.

Understanding slavery doesn’t make me any less inclined to condemn it.

Bear in mind, always: Understanding something involves neither condoning nor condemning. Either of those attitudes is to a degree a falling-off from understanding. To understand something is neither to become a partisan nor to become a condemner, a partisan on the other side.

Understanding liberates, condemnation isolates, Jung said.

Rightly.

We are out of time, but I don’t know that we have gotten very far.

You rarely do. Have faith, and persevere.

That’s the motto of the firm, I guess. Very well, see you next time.

 

Sunday, October 15, 2017

Don’t be offended that we remind you that you tend to reach for more than can be grasped before further preparation. No harm in it, provided that you compensate for the tendency once it has been pointed out.

Your lives are not lived as reasonable beings. You like to think of yourselves that way, but even the most placid and self-contained among you are driven by emotion, and even by the absence of emotion. And, yes, we realize we shall have to explain all that this short statement means.

Think of any story you have ever heard or read. Think of any event from your past that sticks with you. Think of any long-running trait or interest or characteristic of yours that arose, flourished, and died down. Think of the transient things in your life, and the enduring ones. What do that all have in common?

I was going to say that you were proposing that what we have in common – what the things you listed have in common – is that none of them are determined by thought or decision.

You aren’t far wrong, but it needs, and will repay, a more careful statement. You are not, fundamentally, reasonable beings, living as Sherlock Holmes tried to live, a life embodying logic and order. Look at the life he is painted as living, and you find that he got bored, that he used cocaine to change his mental state when boredom got unbearable, that he had prejudices, blind spots, and animadversions. The man he was (as painted) was radically different from the man he thought he was, or rather, the man he would rather have been. Now, it is true that Holmes is only an invented character, but it is an illustration, as creatures resemble their creators. The important things in your life are always associated with feelings (even though sometimes strong feelings are disguised as lack of feelings).

Emotions

There is so much to say on this subject! Your lives are not yours to mold in the sense that you start with a blank slate and may go anywhere, do anything, change in any way, that you like. You just don’t have that much freedom. If life were the way you sometimes unconsciously assume it is, wouldn’t you all be living quiet reasonable lives, even if you were skydiving or trapeze-flying? That is, regardless whether you wanted a physically quiet or a risky life, you wouldn’t be thrown about emotionally the way you are. You would do things for reasons, and not because you had to. You would do what you wanted to do, not what something else within you forced you to do. Or, to put it slightly differently, you wouldn’t always be struggling within yourselves, suppressing this, encouraging that, outliving this, regretting that.

I get your point. Our lives are battlegrounds.

Fields of contention, anyway. You want this one moment, that, another moment. Or you want two or more incompatible things at the same time. Or you want this action but with that result that cannot follow. You pursue an interest with diligence and even obsession – and then the interest is gone as if it had never been. Or, one or more interests seize you at an early age and last you your entire life, and the same, each possible variation, for

• personal relationships,
• emotional habits,
• categories of thought,
• even forms of physical environment (you may tend to live in the same kind of physical or energetic surroundings) and
• forms of circumstance (you may tend to create and re-create, or “find yourself in,” similar relationships or habits of life)

As we said, these may manifest in various ways: sudden changes, or continuity through life, or any variation between the two extremes.

You may ask, Why is this? Why do sudden gusts of anger run through your lives, or fits of unreasonable and undeniable yearning, or steady unquestionable and immovable certainties? Why are you prone to the seven deadly sins and the Eighth Deadly Sin (the one preceding and enabling the other seven) of “Not Knowing What You Are, Or Why You Do and Feel and Think As You Do”?

Not a very catchy title.

Call it Unconsciousness of Self, then. The point is the same.

Jung quoted a Gnostic gospel as saying that if we bring forth what is within us, it will save us, but if we don’t, that same content will destroy us.

That’s applicable, but a little off-point. The point at the moment is, why is your day-to-day existence not the thing of reason and calm that perhaps you imagine it ought to be? And the short answer is that you are not as you imagine yourselves to be.

Which of you knows yourself as your acquaintances know you? Yes, you know things they cannot, but they know things about you that you cannot, or cannot anyway know in their way. And none of you, separately or together, can have a complete picture. The wellsprings of your 3D existence are mostly hidden.

You live as conduits of vast impersonal forces rendered as personal; that is, the animating forces illuminate and enliven the shape of your lives.

I hear you saying, the forces of spirit may be impersonal and even neutral themselves, but the structures they blow through are the result of so many past entanglements. I can see that. But it begs the question of where these entanglements come from in the first place. Are humans malfunctioning? Did some equivalent of Original Sin warp the pattern, setting in motion conflicts that keep building, generation after generation, as each new soul is born embodying past karma?

You could look at it as progressive complexification, but to assume that this is a large malfunctioning is to overlook the fundamental question of where these tangles came from before Adam and Eve ate the apple. Remember, the original sin was to eat of the tree of Perception of Things As Good and Evil.

Which, someone pointed out, was an obvious set-up. Tell a child it can do anything except one thing, and the psychological pressure to do the forbidden thing becomes enormous and eventually irresistible.

Yes. Pretty efficient myth, wouldn’t you say? It encapsulates psychological insight into easily memorable form, as myths do. So, remembering that descent into duality is only a relative thing, and assuming that there may be a very good reason for it –

But it has been an hour, and so we’ll resume another time. Am I right?

You’re the one holding the pen. But yes, this is a good time to pause.