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Saturday, October 14, 2017

You might type in the thoughts and realizations that came to you after yesterday’s session. It all comes together, and there isn’t any reason for you to assume that guidance or insight goes off duty when you cap your pen or pick up a book to read. Indeed, part of the lesson of life is living in connection at all times. It enriches your life and changes your ability to be who you really want to be.

[Friday afternoon: Re-reading Rita (3-7-16) I suddenly got that people who see the afterlife as an endless research project, endless learning, are merely projecting an earth-oriented attitude that equates curiosity with part of human nature, and assumes that such curiosity is going to be aimed at “the nature of things” just as it may be while in 3D. But there’s more to life than understanding the nature of things. More even than to understanding our own nature. Even the kind of work I’m doing now is only part “what the world is really like”; it is also, “how can we help those who read it?” In other words, love still trumps brain. We are here – and there – primarily to love. But I don’t know how this works out in practice.

[Later: Re-wiring! That is what moral training is, what discipline is, etc. Where the winds blow, we don’t want to have to react as programmed. We want not only to be able to resist but, in a way, not to have to. Things happen. We react according to our OEM wiring as modified by our software wiring. Over time we can change our reactions, as Washington and Marshall did.]

[OEM = Original Equipment Manufacturer. Software wiring = our own changes in the original configuration. George Washington and George Marshall are two outstanding examples of men who molded their character by rigid self-discipline.]

“Re-wiring,” you see, is a summary of your task and potential in 3D life. You have the potential to be one branch of the decision-tree that changes, that becomes an alternate path for the winds blowing through. If you were the only real timeline, you can see that this would mean you were, to a tiny degree, helping to shape the passage of those forces; to a tiny degree you would be participating in a war of good against evil, say. But, as all possible niches are filled and are equally real, as all paths exist and all paths are taken, this cosmic warfare is only one way to interpret what people would call “spiritual” reality. This is the result when one looks at these forces, and your ability to choose how to channel these forces – if there were only one reality, one time-line, one set of choice-and-results. So you get Manichean warfare of good and evil; Christian and Jewish warfare of God and Devil, same thing; secular versions of fighting for a better world against the forces of evil, same thing.

And those who see or intuit that all paths are taken are tempted to see it all as meaningless play, or chaos.

Meaning and meaninglessness

Neither of these extreme views is correct. The world is neither an on-going Armageddon nor a tedious self-indulgent spectacle.

Well, that’s how I feel, but I admit, I have a hard time justifying the feelings. I mostly have to live on faith that my knowing isn’t wrong. Logic cuts against it. What is the point of re-wiring if it doesn’t matter even to my own moral character, much less its effect on the rest of the world?

You do realize, there is less difference in those two parts of your sentence than appears?

Oh, abstractly. Yes, we’re all so interconnected, I forget sometimes when I’m thinking in other contexts. But even if changing myself amounts to having an effect on all that I connect to – and vice-versa – it is hard to understand the point of it, when all other versions of the decision-tree, mine and everybody else’s,, cancel out. If we are only printing-out the tree in detail, so to speak, what does it mean really? What are we accomplishing?

Go with your deepest feelings, always. They are the “you” of you. Note, we don’t say go with your emotions, your transitory waves of feeling, we say feelings, your nature as it may be felt by you. There is a difference.

Your feelings tell you it is not meaningless. Cling to whatever your feelings tell you. It is a mistake – a natural one, but a mistake – to think that reality translates into human terms, even with respect to humans.

Suppose you were to try to explain the purpose of the universe – and reality-streams, and the passage of waves of emotion through 3D compound beings – to the cells comprising your body. Or to a cloud, or a flower. You couldn’t. They all embody consciousness, as everything does, but it is a different kind of consciousness, each living in effect in its own universe (in that each has its own very different range of inputs).

Just as you couldn’t explain a baseball game to an amoeba, nor the processing of blood sugars to a muscle cell, so we can’t explain things beyond your range. Willingness to explain, and willingness to have it explained, have nothing to do with it. It is a matter, as you often say, of having or not having receptors for the information.

If you weren’t minds existing in the All-D as well as effective consciousnesses living within 3D constraints, we couldn’t even say this much. We would be obliged to try to explain your lives strictly in 3D terms.

I hear you saying, life does have a purpose, but there’s no explaining it, you can’t understand.

Limits to understanding

No need to be quite so taken aback. There is a difference between explaining everything and explaining some things. Just because you cannot expect to understand everything, don’t jump to the conclusion that you cannot understand anything, nor that the amount you can understand must be trivial.

It does seem that way.

That – we say to you bluntly – is because of your intellectual arrogance. You will not understand your potential until you understand that your potential has limits, however ill-defined they may be.

It shouldn’t need saying – but it does! – that in using the words “intellectual arrogance” we are not addressing them to only one of you, or to some of you, but to all of you, without exception. And we have no slightest doubt that each of you will be tempted to exempt yourself, and say, “In my case it isn’t intellectual arrogance, it’s just that I am curious and I am searching for the truth, whatever it may be.” To which we say, in vintage American, “Oh, yeah?”

Surely you are not discounting or criticizing the yearning for understanding that brings us to these conversations.

Indeed we are not. We are criticizing – by bringing to the light of your consciousness – the unacknowledged limits of that sincere yearning, the point at which yearning for truth becomes (unnoticed) clinging to the familiar.

You are saying we tend to think the universe can be comprehended in human terms. But – can’t it?

Certainly it can, but no more so than comprehending it in terms of flowers or rocks or horses.

Each of which would be a truncated version of reality – I get that. So what’s the use of what we’re doing here?

Remember, stay with your feelings. Your feelings tell you this isn’t meaningless and is not a description of meaninglessness. Listen to them. Don’t let an idea overrule your feelings. That is a very common intellectual mistake.

You know, for the first time I feel as well as think and hope and believe that in bringing this information in, I really am in contact with something beyond my own mind.

Well – that difference is less than you realize. Given that everybody and everything is connected, anything you get could be seen as a message from a remote portion of “your” mind. However, in the terms you mean, yes, good. And we think we will leave you for the moment with that shock to the system still fresh. You understand, it wasn’t meant as an insult but as a description.

I do. And, it was a very illuminating one. Very well, till next time, then.

 

Friday, October 13, 2017

Does it ever strike you that the external conditions in which one works reflect internal conditions, hence – mean something?

The thought has crossed my mind, but I don’t know how to read the message. If I am working through a headache, or other aches, or am wheezing, or sleep-deprived, or any other possible annoyance that may be there, yes I can see that it may mean something, but how are we to read the story they tell? I have known people who carry on through unbelievable constant pain. It isn’t so much that they live in pain as that their lives are pain. And others who live their lives dragging a handicap – Christopher Reeve after his fall from a horse left him a quadriplegic, say. We can see the quiet day-to-day heroism so often around us, but other than as opportunities to build character, what do you mean, “mean something”?

Life is the testing, you might say, of prefabricated construction in real-life conditions, with the structure being able to modify itself as it goes along. When you hear a building creak and shudder, it is reasonable to deduce that it is in the presence of high winds. If you live in the structure long enough, it is reasonable to acquire a conscious or unconscious knowledge of the prevailing winds, so that you more or less automatically learn to read and even predict the weather.

Say we do. What good does it do us to sense the forces around us (which I suppose is where you’re going with this), and what would it do to help somebody in Reeve’s condition, where the wind was strong and unrelenting?

Pull back a little from the physicality of the analogy. Our point is that there is you – the pre-formed continuing structure – and there are the seemingly external forces that interact with it, stress it, compel or allow it to modify. Treating those forces as external can bring advantages, but realizing that they are not really external brings other advantages, more appropriate to this stage of your development.

It can be difficult to make simple distinctions, when appearance and customary thought channels tend to blur them. Consider a few facts:

• The soul is a collection of strands living one life together.
• Spirit, we have been describing as the animating force, separate from the soul but essential to it.
• Life, we said, for 3D compound beings, is choice. It is the lifelong moment-by-moment process of reacting to every moment.
• Every heads-or-tails decision is another path down the road, another timeline, all but the current timeline seeming un-
• Your soul’s life is thus a probability-cloud rather than a battlefield, in that every choice is automatically taken both ways.
• 3D reality may be seen as a vast kaleidoscope shining with the result of all those choices, able to show any timeline.

Perhaps it is time to take these facts and ask “why?” Why should it be this way, or, if that question is too hard, what does it mean for us?

If we thought there were only one timeline, the way appearances would suggest, we might say life is a testing, a trial in which we might succeed or fail, and of course many religions have come to just that conclusion.

Or, if you thought that all choice was meaningless, in that some version of you would take every path, you might conclude that life is itself meaningless, mere play, perhaps.

Only, it doesn’t feel meaningless.

Nor is it. But knowing there is a meaning is not the same as knowing what the meaning is, and that knowing may be beyond any 3D logic because you don’t have the framework to make it comprehensible.

Yes, I do know that. I used to think we could learn the meaning of things. Now I think, we’ll be lucky to see the meaning of our own lives in the context we know, let alone in the context of the worlds larger and smaller than us, or the world beyond the All-D at our level. Even our non-3D component can only tell us as much as it knows, even assuming we are capable of understanding that much (which I doubt), but there is no reason to assume you-all know everything.

Indeed we do not. But it is not necessary to know everything to know something. Not necessary for us, not necessary for you. As Rita told you, you’ll never get to know everything, and then be bored.

Testing

There is more than one meaning to the word “testing,” you know. It isn’t always pass/fail; sometimes it is more like assaying ore, a matter of finding out what a given thing is composed of. Your lives may be considered to be subjects for assay, rather than subjects for passing or failing an exam.

“Even the drunk who dies in the gutter created a flower.”

Exactly. You don’t fail a life, you shape it. And you don’t shape it by making this or that choice, but by making all of them. The resulting probability-cloud is more like a decision-tree, as we said, with the tree, not any one branch, being the result. And 3D logic and experience suggests that the only way a decision-tree can be created is to be lived, moment by moment, choosing.

And according to All-D logic?

You know the answer to that. At the very moment of creation, all potential is automatically nascent. All equally real, all equally evanescent. All waiting for the finger of God to touch it, a la the famous painting.

The vast impersonal forces you keep talking about, the animating forces – that’s the equivalent to the finger of God giving Adam life.

No spirit, no animation, correct. And that reality has to be conceptualized some way or the other. It is always going to be an analogy: It is always going to follow 3D logic, even when to do so requires postulating miracles.

So are we talking about forces, or a force?

Dealer’s choice.

It’s all in how we choose to see it?

It’s all, let us say, in how your life to date leads you to see it. Nothing you conclude is going to be 100% right, how could it be? But every conclusion leads onward.

And every version of reality has its place in the scheme of things.

By definition. Could there be a junk reality? Could there, therefore, be meaningless sets of choices?

And this is a convenient place to pause, not only because it has been your accustomed hour.

Okay. I’m going to have to think about this, as I type it up, and see if we really got anywhere.

Not the first time you will have posed that question.

 

Thursday, October 12, 2017

You began a painting yesterday, not knowing its structure or what it is to portray, or anything except “start with four colors and see what happens.” You don’t know yet if it will work or will be another uncompleted or failed painting. You know only that like most of your paintings it tries to express something you haven’t ever seen. Is that any easier than this? Here at least you have intellectual substance, and it draws on your life of reading and thinking, and above all it involves words, as painting does not. What do you have to lose?

Nothing at all, and I’m not complaining. Far from it.

We were using you as an example to others, actually. When you go looking for something new, you can’t expect to know what you’re going to get. At best you will have a technique to lean on, perhaps a legacy of practice from other fields, perhaps the inspiration of the work of others. Not least, you will have invisible support, if you can learn to rely upon it.

“You are not alone,” that vision in Gateway told me 50 or 100 times. In words.

And it was a turning point for you when you gradually came to believe it, and then rely on it, and then live it. As it was for you, it would be for anybody, only they need to let themselves believe.

I do know that.

Forces and structures

So, back to energy flowing through structures.

Is that what we are talking about?

It is one way to look at it. The vast impersonal forces – we’re going to keep repeating the phrase until it sinks in to one and all – precede you, animate you, and postdate you. Like the 3D world, they don’t depend on you for their existence and they don’t depend on you for their activity. They are. They exist. The fact that they animate humans is not the same as saying that they exist for the purpose of animating humans.  Almost the other way around; you might almost say 3D compound beings exist in order to provide channels for these forces. (However, note the word “almost.”) You will never understand your place in the reality, any more than you could understand your place in the world, by assuming that it centers on you. There is a sense in which it does, but only “in a sense.”

“You’re special, just like everybody else.”

That’s right. It’s a truth; it’s a joke; it’s an obvious self-contradicting impossibility. All at once. But for the moment let’s concentrate on one aspect of things, the aspect in which you are not the center of the world.

This is one of those log-jam moments where I feel three or four caveats leading in different directions, and don’t feel which one to follow.

In such cases, staying centered, choose one. It will lead us somewhere, and other aspects will emerge if they are important enough.

But that tells me why any statement from anybody anytime is going to be incomplete. Choosing, we in effect overlook other aspects, equally true, perhaps equally important, and they may never be expressed, because paths lead onward.

True and no harm done, because the purpose of communication is to get the person on the other end of the line to move on his own, her own. It is not to provide a complete statement of the world, which could never be done anyway.

All right. Well, we are the center of the world in our on-going existence. As a practical necessity, just as every cat or tree is the center of its own world, because that’s where its responsibility and awareness lies. But that isn’t the same thing as saying that the world centers on us.

Let’s continue with where we were going. It’s time to discuss the nature and appearance, the essence and the shaping, of those vast impersonal forces as they manifest in compound beings.

Your lives, we have been pointing out, if not in so many words, are experienced not so much in thought or abstraction, in effort or achievement, in seemingly external events, but in feelings. Not events, but your reaction to events. Not thought or intellectual structure. Certainly not in intentions good or bad, and not even in actions good or bad, but the feelings that underlie or contradict them.

To some of you this will be obvious. Others will find it seemingly backwards, perhaps incomprehensible. As always, we proceed in an attempt to provide a staging-point accessible to all. That is, not so slowly as to exasperate those for whom the point is obvious (or agreeable), not so quickly as to lose those for whom the point is difficult to grasp or emotionally hard to accept. If you all get our statement, that’s all we want; from there you are on your own in terms of what you do with it.

If you experience the feeling of lust, say, or anger, are you experiencing something that exists in that form beyond you? That is, does it exist as lust, or anger, regardless of the individual it visits or manifests in? Or are you experiencing a gust of wind that animates what is already in your own being? In other words, does the spirit not so much shape your response as be shaped (in effect) by what it blows through?

Big question.

Yes it is. And as usual the answer is, it depends upon how you want to look at it. That’s usually the answer, because if a thing were only to be seen one way, the question would never come up. As soon as you perceive a question, know that that is a sign that it may be seen more than one way. In such cases, there is never any one right answer, though there may be any number of incorrect ones.

So, in this case. Yes, the animating forces are impersonal, being so far beyond the limits of any one compound being. So you can’t say there is a force of lust, a force of anger, and the individual may happen to be in the way of it and be influenced.

On the other hand, no two individuals are alike, and so what the animating winds blow through has its own characteristic mixture of vices and virtues, and depending upon how strongly the winds blow through, the results will differ moment by moment. So it will seem that the individual compound being is somewhat at the mercy of those forces, as, in a sense, indeed it is. It (he, she) may choose to fight the manifestations, or flow with them (encourage them) or may go back and forth, but the reaction will be in reaction to  the forces, obviously. No amount of clever tacking will move a sailboat in the absence of a wind, even a contrary wind.

Let’s pause here. You want to keep on and fill more pages, which is ambitious, or energetic, but, a little at a time.

 

Wednesday. October 11, 2017

One world

Try to hold in mind the continuing trend in our discussions, our argument. We know it is difficult to do over time. There is one world, not two. The physical and the spiritual, the 3D and the non-3D, are aspects of one reality, and cannot be considered as separate entities without serious distortion in your understanding. The internal world you experience through your direct feed and the external world you experience by way of your senses are the same world, not different worlds. They are two modes of experience seeming (until you transcend appearances) to be two cooperating or even non-connected environments. Your lives are internal, not external, or let us say the external reality you perceive as primary is really an internal reality perceived in distortion.

I was clear until that last sentence, but that one didn’t seem to come out straight. Try it again?

No, it wouldn’t get any straighter. It expresses a reality that must be intuited or cannot be grasped.

It seems to me an echo of something Rita said in her sessions about the way we perceive things differently after we drop the body [Awakening from the 3D World], but I can’t quite pull it up.

Again, no need. People – including you – can always re-read it, if it calls to them.

If you can remember that framework, it will keep you oriented as we proceed. One world, not two. Everything connected, not separate or separable. We have said before, it is because people no longer have an intellectual and (even more) an emotional framework that holds together heaven and earth, so to speak, that they have ceased to be able to believe in anything beyond what their senses report, and the result is emptiness and despair. Faith in the unseen depends upon a framework that is itself believed in. We know that seems circular.

We don’t live in an age of faith.

Faiths

Au contraire. The problem is that you all have too much faith, in too many things, and too little knowledge holding it all together.

Emerson’s quote, if I can find it.

Certainly. And these all have their modern equivalents, which you can insert here if you find the quotation.

[No need, they haven’t changed, just changed names.]

Emerson, age 44, August 1847:

The Superstitions of our Age:

The fear of Catholicism;

The fear of pauperism;

The fear of immigration;

The fear of manufacturing interests;

The fear of radicalism or democracy;

And faith in the steam engine.

“And faith in the steam engine” struck me particularly hard when I first read it, many years ago. Certainly true.

The basis of faith is always knowledge. But knowledge is not the same thing as facts, certainly not memorized facts or agreed-upon facts, or any body of logically connected facts and arguments. Those things are results, not building blocks. What you know is from direct feed. What you experience isn’t the same thing.

I have a sense of what you’re getting at, but the words just keep confusing it, or is the thought itself, or my understanding of it, unclear, or wrong?

Abstractions

Have you noticed that abstract statements get us into trouble? And the more abstract, the larger the scale of abstraction, the greater the difficulty. That is why your dialogue format with Rita worked so well, it kept drawing you back to the personal and the specific.

Well, it doesn’t feel like I am the one steering the discussion.

It isn’t a matter of intent, or even of perception. We’re pointing out that abstract statements are difficult to convey accurately, and they tend to attract a fuzziness. When you try to convey something, the more abstract it is, the more likely it is that unconscious mental associations will find their way into the statement, clouding the result.

Jung said somewhere that the unconscious tends to come in via pompous language.

That isn’t quite what he said, but that’s the idea, yes. So, when it happens to you, perhaps use that statement (from experience) of his as a touchstone, and remember that the very difficulty of expression may be (may be) a sign of deep and meaningful content. That is, when you find yourself in difficulty, work where you are. Good advice in general, of course.

So let’s continue trying to make a clear statement about faith and knowledge, internal and external, intuition and sensory experience.

Times and opportunities

There isn’t any use clinging to what you had, if in fact you actually had it. Times change in order to provide the opportunity for new ways to understand the world and thus understand yourselves. Times change, you change. You change, times change. Like so much else, it is a reciprocating process, because that is one of the underlying laws of 3D life. It is only in slowed-down 3D life that the process is that apparent. Delayed consequences assist analysis and experiences. But this is a side-trail.

Trying to retain old ways of understanding life may work, or may seem to relatively work for some, but a changing civilization reflects and potentiates changing mass consciousness, which in turn changes the ecology of individual consciousness.

That word “ecology” is going to startle some people, as they relate it only to nature.

Ecology refers to the fishbowl in relation to the fish. In this case, we refer to the mental, spiritual, abstract fishbowl around the 3D personalities experiencing 3D life. The waters in which you swim are collective in the same way as the physical environment you experience is collective.

I think you mean, collective awareness holds our physical world, and in the same way it creates the boundaries of our mental world at any given time.

Yes, with hesitations. Those words are all loaded with misleading unconscious connotations and associations. But, as stated, and subject to interpretation, yes.

You are not living in a mental ecology that will encourage blind faith in a religious scheme without disastrous results, and the disastrous results themselves will further undermine attempts to live it. But this means two things, or let’s say it means one thing in two aspects.

• Your time and your society will not find your salvation by any one blind It can only be a faith built upon what you know. And that cannot be based upon sensory data, it is too unreliable and, worse, second-hand and superficial.
• But neither can it be built in active opposition to that sensory data. It must be firmly rooted in experience and it must successfully reinterpret the sensory data that people accept.

And that is what we are doing here.

Indeed it is. Put it into context.

I suppose I could draw a line, but it would always be somewhat arbitrary. Parallel to the accepted materialist interpretations of the world has been another very different interpretation of what is. Swedenborg to Emerson to Whitman to William James and Carl Jung, perhaps. The Fox sisters to Edgar Cayce and Jane Roberts, say. Rhine and Monroe and so many psychic investigators.

Yes and another line as well, religious mystics, hard-headed physics mystics, people who feel their way to what is real.

Frustrating, how slowly this goes, sometimes. Here’s an hour gone and I feel like we never got started on what you were intending to say.

Some things just require a certain amount of time and attention to be said and understood. Persevere and it will come forth.

 

Tuesday, October 10, 2017

Levels of observation

You said, “Your reality can’t really depend upon observers.”

And we said it is a separate topic, not because it didn’t belong, but because it has so many facets if it is to be understood. This conversing sequentially in words that must be carefully defined and then explained anyway is cumbersome, as you have experienced, and makes it necessary to creep, because only the smallest bite-sized items can be discussed at any one time.

If reality depended upon observers in the way the phrase suggests, your lives would be remarkably contingent, hanging always by a thread. For, what if the observer were to be distracted? However, it isn’t that simple, as usual.

In the first place, the sentence you just quoted wasn’t what we said, it was what you concluded when we said the level of one’s reality depended upon the level of the observer. We meant something different from what you heard, but that mishearing may itself be productive, so we mentioned it as a possible topic. If we can, we will address that first, and then expand upon what we meant.

Do you remember being told that everything in your 3D world is made of consciousness, but that each form of consciousness is different, appropriate to various circumstances? A rock, having no external freedom, has absolute internal freedom, while an animal, say, has far more external freedom, which means that each individual manifestation of animal must pay attention to its environment and circumstances, hence requiring both a group mind and an individual mind, both “instinct” and individual alertness.

Well, those rocks hold the world together with their undeviating, unblinking attention. They are the stage scenery that prevents the whole thing from being free-form kaleidoscopic ungraspable swirl. They are the holders of stability. So that is one level of observer. This is not to say that rocks know what is going on around them, any more than you as reality-holder for the microorganisms that live in your physical body have any knowledge of or interest in them. But the rocks – the external mineral level of reality, that is – hold the space. They keep things stable. They are a form of unwavering awareness, the energetic blueprint for the continual re-creation of the world so many million times a second.

The interaction of various forms of consciousness is the world as you experience it. Clouds, wind, rain, anything you experience may be said to embody a specific form of consciousness, and whether you can envision it, or even allow for the possibility, makes no difference. However, that wasn’t the point we were making. We were discussing observers in the context of performances (call them) at a lesser level of reality.

“Lesser” is going to get us into trouble, I think.

Comparisons don’t have to, and shouldn’t, imply value-judgments. A tree is taller than a person; the person can walk and a tree cannot. Which is “better”? But if you cannot recognize differences, if you have to pretend that equality of worth means pretending that observed differences don’t exist, you will never get anywhere. You have to begin with what you observe, not with what you think are abstract truths.

Maintaining the world

So, to stay on the point, what is Hamlet (the individual) in the absence of Hamlet (the play), and what is the play in the absence of  performance? (Yes, it can be read, but for the moment consider a reader as a one-person-at-a-time audience.)

I get that you are logically dividing the sense of “observer” into two. One is, the world is maintained by collective observation; the other is that there is also observation at the next higher level of reality. And if you keep giving me more insights while I’m trying to write up the old ones, I don’t know where we’re going to wind up. Is it faster this way?

Getting it in a burst is facilitated by

• your general attention to the subject and
• your specific attention to one aspect of it and our connection

It is faster, yes, because then we don’t have to go through the long dance of getting you there by words and readjustment of words and correction and revision of words.

I see. So, while I was trying to express where I was, I got that the group-mind aspect of human life also maintains the world. Our collective underlying unstated agreement on what’s what assures that it remains what. As long as we all agree that Africa is where it is, there it remains, regardless what individuals or even groups may think. As long as we agree that water is heavier than air, that the various elements have the characteristics they have, that time flows as we observe it (though this one is more tenuous), that’s what we get. Our collective observation (or call it our collective continuous re-creation) maintains the world at a different level than the minerals do, but working with it. Different forms, flowing together.

Existing at different levels of reality

And there is a lot contained in that observation that may be teased out by thought and intent. But let’s set this out carefully: This next higher level of reality we are talking about is, and is not, what you call TGU, or any one of us you are talking to.

You – the TGU level we experience or can experience during our 3D lives – are part of us. You exist at our level of reality. Energy is matter (since matter is energy), therefore the non-3D portion of All-D is, by definition, as real as the 3D portion and no more real.

That’s correct. And at the same time –

At the same time, you are part of a higher level of reality than the 3D world, so – we are too.

Of course, and you feel that in your bones. How many of you feel at home in your lives? Feeling that “this is not my home” does not mean you belong on Mars, or Alpha Centauri. It means you are not at home in 3D-only. You know it in your bones. You may not know where you do belong, but you know you are only voyaging on earth. (And as always, “earth” here means, physical matter, the 3D-only experience.)

So somehow we are players in the play and at the same time viewers from the stands.

“Audience” is the usual term. Yes, and that is why you often feel stretched, and why so many proposed explanations of the meaning of life do not resonate, or shall we say do not resonate forever, however attractive they may be at any given moment. As your self-definition, or let’s say your observation-point differs, so does what you see. So does the meaning of what you see.

And that’s enough for now.

Well, it never quite goes where I expect it to go, not that I’m complaining! Even when I think I have a handle on it, unexpected aspects surface. Thanks as always.

 

Monday, October 9, 2017

Drama

You said we’d start by looking at what 3D life as we experience it implies about “the underlying reality it suggests and mirrors.”

Meaning, merely, that the world you experience is not divorced from the realer world it is based in. You can extrapolate from your experience, you don’t need to accept a whole new scheme unrelated to your sensory-reported life. But it is extrapolation, it is not straight continuity. Your 3D experience of life is a useful platform for acquiring a deeper understanding; it is not in itself that deeper understanding.

So, as we said, your lives are primarily passions: emotions, feelings, drives, compulsions, shading down to interests, fascinations, vocations, orientations. If you don’t instinctively (now, there’s a word!) understand what these seemingly quite disparate words have in common, a little thought and some internal questioning will repay the effort.

Remember, you cannot reliably use academic habits of thought to understand. Mere associating or classifying is not going to lead you to get what we are saying. On the contrary, it will prevent you or at any rate interfere with your seeing familiar things in the new context that can revolutionize your understanding. The enemy of expanded comprehension is the habit of seeing things as “nothing but” variations of accustomed categories.

Your lives are drama. They are all forms of drama from morality play to farce. And they are this for the same reason that drama as art form was created within 3D reality.

Fiction within the fiction. Hamlet’s play within a play. And I gather that this is another example of “as above, so below.”

Drama always encapsulates in miniature its encompassing reality.

I think that means, drama as an art form shows us life in a condensed form, so that we can see it. A biopic may give us a person’s life and times in a couple of hours, or that same “life and times” may occupy a six-volume set of books, or may be conveyed in a Classics Illustrated comic book, or a children’s book, or in popular legend, or even a TV show.

Yes, that’s what we mean. So, since you are familiar with that process, extrapolate upwards, to see how the dramas you live may be miniature versions of something real. Just as a film is going to differ from the life itself by a huge factor of time and energy – a couple of hours’ worth of attention as opposed to decades of living – so your lives are but an illustrative blip on the record in comparison to what they illustrate.

Even more than ordinarily, I’m having trouble deciding whether what you’re saying will be clear to those who are not sharing the joint mind at the moment of transmission.

You can always expand and interpret. There is no great penalty to over-explaining to some, and there may be great benefit to explaining to those who begin from somewhat farther away, for whatever reason.

I hear you saying that just as drama is our way of understanding life by putting it under a microscope, so our lives are the equivalent to the next higher order of reality.

That is accurate, and said perhaps more clearly than we did, so, as we say, potentially a useful exercise.

Well, since this is true (as true as we can express given the limits of translation across conditions) you can see the point of your lives, perhaps.

I can imagine people coming up with all kinds of conclusions, some of which will seem to them to follow, but may not follow at all.

True, with the caveat that as usual, judgment of someone else’s conclusions is risky and not necessarily profitable. You can tell what seems true to you; that isn’t the same thing as saying that what is true to you is true in any absolute sense.

Relatively real

What I hear you saying, or rather, the implications I draw, are that what we get from drama is analogous to what another layer of reality gets from observing our lives.

Yes as long as you remember that it would be more carefully stated if you said, “What we ourselves realize at our higher reality by observing ourselves at the 3D level of reality.” That is clumsy, but it is important to try to avoid the “we versus they” polarity that continually sneaks in to the argument. “We versus they” leads straight to a sense of victimization and an attitude of distrust and paranoia. “One level of ourself versus another level of ourself,” though more difficult to envision, avoids that trap.

So do you begin to see your experience of 3D life differently? Do you see why it is only relatively real, why all possible versions of your life are explored, why so much of it is inexplicably caused and not easily seen even after the fact? And can you see what is or is not important within the context of your life, and how what is or is not important changes as you change context?

Yes. Hamlet may be prince of Denmark, but he is not owner of a bank account, doesn’t have a refrigerator, doesn’t even use the restroom. In other words, as a character in a play, he is real. As a living person outside of the play, he does not exist except as an idea. Like the play he is a part of, he is relatively real, to us at our level of play-going reality.

Now, that isn’t the whole story, because as you have learned elsewhere, created characters live, just as you do, who are yourselves created characters. So it isn’t as if they aren’t real, it’s that they, like you, are only relatively real, and how real depends upon the level of the observer.

Since our reality can’t really depend upon the existence of observers, I take it you mean, how real we appear depends upon who is watching, from what level.

It is not literally, but only metaphorically, true that your reality “can’t really depend upon observers.” But that’s a topic for another time. It will bring us far, and meanwhile people may want to think about it. For now, let us stay with the question of relative reality.

What you experience is real to you, as it should be. But it is a pale shadow of what is real in realer dimensions. (The very concept of dimensions is a metaphor, an abstraction. We use the terms because it is widely understood in a certain sense, but as you see, every so often we remind you not to take it literally. There are no dimensions bounding reality, only ways of looking at things.)

Beyond drama

Re-read what we just said. Another way to say the same thing would be, “Passions, emotions, feelings, etc., are more real than you are.” They, like you, are closer to being shadows of a real substance than substances in their own right. You want to know why life is so dramatic and often painful, so seemingly unfair and so seemingly arbitrary? You cannot understand it if you look at it only in its own terms, any more than you could understand Hamlet if you were within it rather than viewing it.

I know you are not explaining away our perplexities and sufferings here, but I don’t know if others will see that or not.

It can’t be calculated; there are too many possibilities. We can only make as clear a statement as possible, and trust people’s own internal compass to bring them to a right understanding.

So, this should explain to some degree why you don’t live in a world that is just as you want it. Be it Macbeth or Hamlet, the king is going to die, or there isn’t any drama. That doesn’t mean that every play is a tragedy, or that everyone within the tragedy is equally affected. It merely means, no story, no drama, and what is a better story than one with high stakes?

I remember my daughter once, when she was very little, saying with a sigh, “You know what I’d like? To have everything my own way.” I laughed and agreed that it would be nice. But I see now that this would limit us to our preconceived ideas of what would be good for us, or would be pleasant.

Prince Hamlet no doubt would have preferred that his father live. Certainly he would have preferred to continue the life he was leading before the tragedy, before his father’s ghost laid a burden of obligation on him that he did not know how to fulfill. But it was in living those complications that Hamlet became more than any other person, and became himself a legend.

It is a wrench for people to see the pain and suffering of this world as only relatively real. It seems too much like explaining them away, even when you carefully explain that this is not what you are doing.

But, you see, their wrestling with this is itself good and profitable work for them.

 

Sunday, October 8, 2017

We recognize that it is difficult for individuals to hold on to a continuing theme while moving thorough the accidents and distractions of the ever-flowing present 3D moment, but remember, your anchor, your un-moving non-3D aspect allows you to remain oriented,  if you orient to it rather than to your flowing mind.

I’m pretty sure you mean, the ever-flowing 3D timestream carries the 3D part of our consciousness along with it, like a raft on a river, but the part of us that resides in the rest of All-D, the non-flowing non-3D, does not get carried along, but rests firmly on solid ground, and the two aspects of us are connected but are not always conscious of each other unless we make the effort to make them so.

The point is, the “you” that you customarily, or let us say automatically, identify with, is not invariant. When it centers on 3D life and takes for granted 3D conditions, it is in effect limited in what it can do, what it can associate, what it can remember. When, instead, it connects with the non-3D and sees 3D life as a subset of All-D, it takes for granted an entirely more expanded view of 3D life, and it experiences limits that are significantly more expanded.

Just as Thoreau said in Walden, that I have quoted in the past.

That’s right. In the case of this kind of exploring, it isn’t traversing the terrain that is unique, it is in the reporting in modern language.

Yes, I got that. I don’t expect us to see what human eyes have never seen, only to maybe interpret what we see in language (and amid associations) that have never been used before, for the sake of translating to a new civilization.

Trust that the information will flow even when you yourself (consciously, in 3D terms) don’t know what it is to be or even where it is to begin.

What is it all for?

The underlying theme is your lives in 3D as conduits of vast impersonal forces. How can your lives be both personal and impersonal, both contingent (even accidental) and firmly rooted and determined? As we said, it is soul (pattern) flowing spirit (energy) through it. And the question beyond this is, why? What’s it all for? What is going on?

As always, “as above, so below.” Looking at your third-tier lives, see the continuities.

• First tier, the 3D experience in its own terms.
• Second tier, the internal reaction to the physical events.
• Third tier, the effect on the being of that second-tier reaction. In other words, how the transitory becomes the continuing part of the fabric of the soul. (Of course that doesn’t mean third-tier reactions cannot be counteracted or modified later. We are sketching a way to connect the somewhat-real 3D experience to the more real All-D situation.)

If you want to understand your lives, start with what is most familiar, the first-tier experience that happens to you firsthand and that is reported to you by everything around you: friends, news media, books, films, everything. In other words, begin with the world as it is reported to you. Not only wars and rumors of war, but passions and rumors of passions, predicaments and rumors of predicaments. Start with the dramas of everyday life at first-hand and at a remove. We want to explain life, not explain it away.

Surely it is obvious that life consists of negative and positive emotions and experiences. Those experiences and every way in which they can be sorted into categories are not incidental to life. They are life, they are the fabric of life, the essential background of life.

It is true that some people in their yearning for peace and for meaning would transcend all this if they could. And it is true that some religions and philosophies argue that such transcendence is the only worthwhile goal of a life, all else being Maya. In a way this is an accurate perception, for the 3D world as it presents itself is not nearly as real as the casual observer assumes. But there is a difference between seeing the only-relative-reality of the life you lead (on the one hand) and deciding that 3D life is a waste of time, so to speak, a fraud, a snare, a delusion. Just because you wake up for a moment and realize that the play “Hamlet” is not the reality you thought it, doesn’t mean it wasn’t affecting you. Similarly, life.

For some reason – certainly not a logical association of ideas, at least if it is I can’t see the logic – I think of flight simulators.

Flight simulators

A good analogy up to a point. A flight simulation machine gives you a somewhat-real experience that prepares you for the real thing. By simulating the first-tier experience (the physical sensations), it allows you to experience the second-tier experience (the intellectual, kinesthetic, emotional reaction to the first-tier data), so that in a sense you will form third-tier reaction-patterns based on what you have become by having gone through that experience. This is not an exact analogy, remember, but it is useful. Don’t parrot it, but do chew on it and see what further analogies suggest themselves.

I get, just because you realize that what you thought was flight is actually a simulator, don’t jump to the conclusion that flight itself is an unobtainable illusion.

Isn’t it more logical to assume that if this is a simulator, it is in aid of something? Preparing you for real flight, perhaps? The conclusion that the world is only relatively real may lead you to conclude that it is a meaningless charade, but it doesn’t have to. It is, shall we say, at least equally probable that life means something, is in aid of something, is preparation for something. Otherwise it’s a lot of money, time, and effort to create a simulator just to fool you.

Smiling. I figure you guys (we guys, I realize) work for Industrial Light and Magic.

Not so unflattering a comparison. They do produce remarkably effective second-tier experience, even though they think they’re in business to make money.

As we say, start with what you know. Next time we will begin at this point: Looking at 3D life as you experience it, what does it hint at regarding the underlying reality it suggests and mirrors?