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Saturday, September 21, 2024

6:45 a.m. Jon, talk to me about us all being partial yet (holographically) the whole, and what that can mean in practice. I know you told us to think about it, but this is how I do my thinking.

It isn’t, really. You do your thinking like a fisherman casting his line and hoping for the best. He may choose his time and place carefully, but he’s still left hoping for the best. In a way it is the difference between fishing and farming. The fisherman’s prey is invisible to him; the farmer’s is in a controllable environment, and he is as much nourisher as, finally, consumer.

So logic is a form of careful examination, and intuition is more like prospecting blind.

All of this is too abstract to be useful. Conversations provide you with a sort of structure, without depriving you of freedom of association.

So that thinking that everybody could do this if they would set their mind to it is wrong?

Let’s say it is more theoretically true than practical. They could. They aren’t likely to unless their mental makeup is something like yours.

Our ILC groups haven’t had any trouble doing it.

1. How do you know?
2. Group-mind energy provides an assist.
3. It is a self-selected group.

Still –

I’m certainly not saying what you do is unique, I’m saying it is very closely suited to how you perceive and interact with the 3D. Others will be different, able to do things you can’t do and unable to do some things that are easy for you. It is always that way, for everybody. Now, about what I said last time, you might quote it, rather than paraphrase.

“Your struggle … is to broaden the amount that can be experienced by you without breaking the bounds of the separated you that your birth created.”

By your struggle, I meant neither that it is everybody’s nor that it is uniquely yours. I meant, those whose being incorporates an urge to grow rather than to maintain. Obviously, there are lots of you, and equally obviously, not everybody.

Then what is the purpose for those who are here to maintain?

One question at a time. We are a long way from getting into this one. That split – I remember it well! So will you. It is not an incidental feature in our lives, it is the bedrock, if a fault-line can be a bedrock.

I just realized, our ILC discussion ought to be guided by someone, steered to address these things, and that person should not be me.

That is a good model, a group considering these ideas in a directed manner (that is, as if following an updated syllabus) so that the insights build upon each other and generate new ones. Such a group endeavor should not be led by the person primarily bringing in the initial information. This protects him and protects the group from haring off into dead ends, because no one’s 3D judgment is infallible. It also protects the 3D communicator from temptations offered by the ego-level self.

Maybe a communicator, or more than one, and a facilitator of discussion, and a recorder?

Perhaps also a summarizer. But any group would have to find its own natural way of functioning.

This sounds like a next step, a new development.

How long do you want to stay in third grade? Granted, you now know how to get 100 in every test, but at some point you’ll get restless.

Well, we’ll see if anyone rises to the bait. What you’re saying sounds right to me – but then, it would, which is why the communicator shouldn’t try to run the show.

Only, if the members of the group don’t rise to the bait, don’t try to push the river. One’s opportunities do not depend upon the acquiescence or cooperation of others. That is, if one door remains closed because no one opens it, there will be other opportunities in other directions. We’ve told you, there is always a Plan B, we always present new options after any decision you make.

You say “we” and I get the sense that we are suddenly segued away from Jon.

I’m here. But it isn’t as solitary or differentiated as 3D continually leads you to assume.

I knew that. I had forgotten.

So, as we were saying, anyone who experiences the struggle within themselves (and where else could it be experienced?) between what they experience themselves to be and what they intuit themselves to be, never forget it. In a sense, they have been partially awakened and are unlikely to go back to sleep.

“Sleep” here being believing in the 3D illusion, taking it unquestioningly as real.

Yes. What we are calling “maintainers” do not experience that self-division. (They may be self-divided along other issues.) it is the transcenders, call them, who can’t let it alone. Let them center on whatever they choose to – family, career, some profession or craft, some avocation, whatever – they cannot escape that nagging unsleeping sense that they are more than they appear, not only to others but to themselves. It is an uncomfortable feeling, knowing you don’t really know who you are.

Boy, that’s the truth!

Everything we’re talking about is the truth.

Very funny.

Not a joke. It’s an important point. Not everything said is going to resonate, but the things that do not resonate for this person or that are nonetheless still true, and should be regarded as a gift that has not yet unfolded for them. It shouldn’t be shrugged off as eccentricity.

Which is one more reason to be careful to avoid eccentricity, I get it.

No, there are dangers in the direction of avoiding eccentricity too. If all these years you had confined yourself to relating only the things that were respectable or comfortable or – God help us – that you knew to be true, how far could you have gotten? It is one of the purposes of group study to find the wheat and discard the chaff. But that is a delicate process, easily misused to reduce messages to what is most comfortable.

So, as usual, it is up to us to steer a middle course.

Any course will have complementary dangers, just as any line will have a left and a right not-line beside it, that defines it. It isn’t anything perilous, it is just the nature of boundaries.

So what has today’s theme been? How to organize a group to investigate better?

In a way. But more, it is how to get the distinction in your mind between ways of perceiving and associating. What is appropriate to a fisherman is not appropriate to a rancher, and neither one is appropriate to a farmer. Whatever particular talents you may have will have come with a particular best way to employ them, and it is well for you to find that best way.

I get that this isn’t where the discussion was intended to go..

All paths are good. Given sincere intent and perseverance, greater perspective is always available.

So, the theme?

Call it “Investigating,” if you wish. But some other title may come to you.

Thanks as usual, Jon – and unnamed lurking others. Till next time.

 

Change

Friday, September 20, 2024

7:30 a.m. Okay, Jon. After a false start 90 minutes ago, let’s try. Shall we pursue “What do you want to do?”

Earlier you listed the things you are keeping your cool about. Quite a list. Congratulations, and – Surprise! Maybe all this work has led to real changes, unbeknown to yourself.

Maybe. I’m always prepared to get an unpleasant surprise telling me I’m not as well off as I think I am.

But that is good too. Convictions held without reservation may be a matter of protesting too much; often are. The point is, if all this communication and thought and pondering and readjusting doesn’t lead to real change in the “you” that manifests, what good is it?

Well, I suppose it might have merit in and of itself. I mean, it’s worthwhile learning things, isn’t it?

Is it? Not always. Sometimes knowledge can retard awakening. You have heard that “A little learning is a dangerous thing.” One meaning of that very true phrase is that it can overbalance your larger purpose, by taking on unwarranted importance. That is, it can warp your judgment by insisting too strongly on one viewpoint over all others, thus trapping you in one perspective rather than allowing you to look around from different angles.

I’d think our non-3D components would guard us from that.

They may wish to guard you from that. They may murmur or shout advice – but will you listen? It is always the choice to be made by the 3D personality. That’s what it is there for. Not much point in creating someone to choose, and then disabling their choice.

Well, even if we make wrong choices, I’d think that would be an expected part of the overall pattern.

It is. But we’re talking about what is useful to the 3D being you experience as “you.” Plenty of 3D beings get stuck in one perspective; there’s nothing wrong with it, and in fact one man’s “stuck” is another man’s “ensconced,” or “home.” But for you, a fixed immovable perspective would be not a stabilizing factor but a crippling, an imprisonment.

Looking back, I see you said, “Sometimes knowledge can retard awakening.” I realize, I don’t actually know what that means.

In a sense, each person is potentially everybody. “All is one,” remember. Potentially there is no limit to how far a 3D being can expand its awareness. Practically, of course, there are always limits. But potentially, theoretically, no.

Now, it isn’t in everybody’s game plan to expand consciousness, any more than it is in everybody’s game plan to become a forest ranger or a safecracker. People come into their roles pointed toward a certain kind of life.

“Pointed,” I think you mean, not by someone else nor by that happens to them, but by what they are.

Those three things are less separate than they seem to you, but yes, by what they were created to be by the influences the astrology of their birth permitted, and by their own previous soul-experiences, and by the state of play they find on the board as they enter the continuing melodrama (soap opera) called history.

Some are hell-bent – heaven-bent? – on learning and becoming, on self-transcending, you could say. Others are bent on maintaining themselves as is, despite circumstances. And most are somewhere in the middle. We will confine this to those who want to expand.

But bear in mind, the universe needs all these various ways of being. It is in the nature of things for every moment, every situation, to be a combination of stability and change. Nothing lasts forever, but neither does everything change at once. So don’t in the back of your mind think the universe is secretly particularly pleased with your particular preference (or predicament). You have a valid and important part to play, but so do those representing opposite or tangential qualities.

So what does it mean, to say there is no theoretical limit to how much any given 3D facet may expand to become? Am I saying there are no hard and fixed boundaries? Or do I mean, you are already everything, and it is a matter of realizing it and embodying it?

Both, I imagine.

We have to keep going back to the few over-arching principles that guide this kind of exploration. All Is One. As Above, So Below. When you really sense as well as believe, that there are no fixed boundaries in life, your opportunities proliferate, naturally. And here’s the thing, which you’ve heard many times: it isn’t a matter of changing what you are (which would be impossible) but of changing what aspects you manifest, in what proportions, for what purposes.

Since all is one, you are everything, as is everyone else. And since 3D slows down and separates, you get to experience being separated-from-allness. Your struggle – or exercise, or game, or however you wish to think of it – is to broaden the amount that can be experienced by you without breaking the bounds of the separated-you that your birth created.

That’s very interesting.

It should be. Contained in it is why life is unsatisfying, why it is exciting, why it is interesting and boring and infuriating and inspiring. It’s all wrapped up in that one fact, that you who are all must experience yourself as partial, but can change the dimensions and even the coloration of that partial self.

A lot to think about.

End this here, and by all means, do the thinking, both alone and with your friends, and we can go farther accordingly. Remember, this is not to be memorized and kept separate, but absorbed, tested, lived.

Many thanks. I guess the unrecorded couple of pages from 6 a.m. can stay unrecorded. This is a little short, but plenty meaty. Till next time.

 

Thursday, September 19, 2024

6:15 a.m. Ken Kesey said somewhere that his father said the trouble with Ken was that he was always trying to unscrew the inscrutable. Seems to me that’s my disease too. I am not much interested in straightforward problems. I wind up wondering how a cat’s markings were determined. I know about camouflage and all that, but that’s why. How? How is it determined for any given animal what colors, what patterns? Yes, sure, DNA, but that’s like saying “heredity” or (my favorite) “randomness.” There must be a “how” to it, just as there must be a specific if very evanescent “how” to each ripple and pattern of ripples in a boat’s wake, and I wonder what it is, how it is done, and I know I’ll never get the answer, because – other than generalities – I doubt anybody knows or can know. We would have to be able to perceive so quickly, see relationships so deeply, I think it is beyond our ability. Maybe our mechanical and electronic enhancements of the senses can do it, the way microscopes have extended our understanding, but I don’t know.

Jon, I suspect you know more what I am groping for here than I do. You may be prodding the thought, for all I know.

You need to connect this thought to your life history. It will show you what you have been doing, and that will tell you what you’ve been looking for.

As usual, I get a vague sense of it.

You weren’t interested in science classes and labs because it seemed to you they were just laving you repeat what had already been discovered.

I wasn’t smart enough to realize what everybody else would have found obvious, that the labs were trying to teach technique, to give us a feel for it. Stupid of me.

Not stupid. You were never stupid. Disconnected.

Yes, that’s a better word. Never reasoning from A to B, let alone farther. Trying to intuit what needed to be reasoned to.

Yes, but let’s concentrate on what is to be learned. You weren’t interested in science as exploration for a couple of reasons that you never reasoned out, but took for granted.

Typically.

One, it was all disconnected into specialties and you wanted unity. Two, it was all superficial (to you) because it meant looking more and more closely at manifestations instead of investigating underlying meaning.

That’s a funny way to look at it, but it does seem accurate.

What you wanted, and didn’t know you wanted, was a metaphysical science, such as characterized the 1400s and 1500s and 1600s. and at the same time, you couldn’t take anybody’s word for what it all meant.

What it meant? More like, how it really functioned. What held it all together at the center, not all these peripheries.

And all that was impractical, of course. Who could do that? And, how could it be done scientifically?

Clear, even obvious, as you say it. I didn’t know it.

You didn’t analyze your impulses, values, motivations.

Didn’t reflect on my self. Rita first made me aware of that, in her intro to The Sphere and the Hologram manuscript.

Now, you see, what you wanted was beyond the grasp of anybody in 3D. You wanted the principles the universe runs along, and you wanted all the specific manifestations down to how is a specific cat’s markings determined. BTW that last question amounts to asking, How is randomness built into order. You will remember your initial fascination with chaos theory.

So then, why was I so made up as to want that? I mean, “why” in two senses of the question: What good would it do anybody, and how did it happen that I was the specimen?

Just that kind of question shows why you could have become a scientist, and also couldn’t have become a scientist. Your reach exceeds your grasp, which can be good, but can be futile.

As I think about it, I see that I should have studied psychology. That interested me in a way that examination of rocks or biology or physics, etc., did not.

You would have chafed at the limits of the study. If you could have survived within those limits, you might have thrived. But was it really psychology that drew you, or wisdom?

All right, very true. Jung, not Freud or Adler. Jung at his most exploratory, not Jung as everyday practitioner.

The science that was native to you didn’t exist in organized form in the time you were born into. Prior ages didn’t have a lot of the data and experience that would have allowed them more sophisticated concepts, and contemporary psychology was too timid, or anyway cautious.

Ah – because there were things I knew but couldn’t know how I knew.

There you go. Pursue it.

We’re back to 100% intuition as a preference. I guess some things leaked into my 3D mind from what I used to call Upstairs, and I couldn’t doubt them and couldn’t justify them. So, there I was outside the herd I would have liked to be a part of.

Not quite so stark. Let’s just say you were a little more on the edge than you sometimes wanted to be, but weren’t comfortable closer in.

Catch-22.

Just the way things were. You think it happened by coincidence?

I’m getting that life has been using my eccentricity to show less eccentric people a way to approach greater intuitive input on an on-going basis.

Or you could look at it that it is demonstrating to you that one may preserve an intuitive link without being so eccentric. Or – I would suggest – both. It isn’t like there is a right or wrong position. Life can use everything and anything, and usually does.

Can you, from non-3D, see the lines of cause and effect that I have always felt I ought to be able to see? Why specific markings on an animal, why this chain of consequences and not that?

You mean, since I have access to anything, do I have access to everything?

That isn’t what I mean. I’m asking, merely, since your perceptions are no longer bounded by time and space constraints, are underlying forces and interactions clear now?

There is a problem here that you are not considering. How do you use that combined telescope/microscope of your analogy both ways at once? A conspection and a microscopic analysis taken together would give you a better understanding, but that understanding is a construct, not a direct perception. Not that the construct is necessarily wrong or even fuzzy, but by nature it is not a perception. It isn’t much different from the laws and consequences 3D scientists deduce.

If I were to ask you how a specific cat’s markings were produced, could you tell me?

If I could tell  you, could you hear me, or understand me? if I had to go into quantum mechanics to describe the variables, could you, would you, follow me? You’d have to have a stronger interest than a mild curiosity.

And at the end it’s all mind-stuff anyway.

Well, it is, but you would be asking about the specific manifestation of mind-stuff in the 3D/non-3D system. Nothing wrong with that.

Not sure what this session has centered on, if anything.

There is a blurred area between physics and metaphysics, and we looked at one way it can manifest.

Namely me, as Daisy Mae used to say.

Specifically you, but everybody will see themselves either as analogy or by contrast. It’s not such a bad way to work.

And call it — ?

“Exploring the world,” maybe.

Maybe. All right, thanks and next time.

 

Wednesday, September 18, 2024

5:20 a.m. Jon, let’s go to town, assuming you have something queued up.

Don’t you have questions queued up?

Yesterday we heard that you are finding that whatever you wanted to know, you can find out instantly, together with branches of knowledge you didn’t know existed. And can you pass that along to us?

As you know, the better the question, the better the answer, and as you heard among yourselves, clarifying the question is a way to orient yourself toward the answer.

I will include yesterday’s drumming here.

You said: “The thing to remember as you go along is that life has its own plan, and it always complements yours – everyone’s. You wouldn’t think so, you’d think there had to be conflict, but maybe life includes conflict and uses conflict, and so sees nothing wrong with it. But if you trust that life’s plans and the individual’s plans dovetail somehow, doesn’t that amount to trusting life? As you are always saying.”

I said: “I’m getting practice this week,” referring to my inability to get Clear Rate Communications to provide the telephone service I paid for.

You: “But your very patience with the telephone situation amounts to not considering a major inconvenience as something out of left field that has nothing to do with you.”

Me: “Not much point in getting aggravated, since I can’t do anything about it.”

“But in the past you would have gotten aggravated. It is because you are seeing emotions in the way the guys described it, that you can sense that the external hooks up with the internal somehow, even if you can’t see how. And this is true for anybody. The less you take things personally, the easier the ride.”

Can you say something on the subject of how life uses conflict and, I gather, approves of it?

Life includes everything, does it not? It doesn’t include only the things you approve, or I approve, or somebody else approves. And you’re talking of billions of people, billions of facets of the one gem. How can there not be conflict? But conflict doesn’t mean warfare necessarily. It can, or it can mean competition, or creative interaction or anything as simple as a marriage. Could it be possible for life to be unable to deal with itself?

I know I didn’t get that last sentence right. Again?

Life is going to cope with all aspects of life, necessarily. This is what is meant when you hear that you must not think yourself smarter than the universe. The way life proceeds may or may not please you. You may think it should be different, should be better, but yours – anyone’s – is always going to be a limited, partial, view. Vegetarians might wish that no one eat meat – presumably including all the carnivores who are not human – but life is not set up that way. Did life somehow forget something? Did it fail to live up to the standards of some of its constituent elements? No, if you look at it closely, you have to realize that life knows what it is doing.

But life includes us, thinking it shouldn’t be “red in tooth and claw.”

Yes, and that is one legitimate response to one’s view of how things are. The trouble is, all views are legitimate, emphatically including the ones you – anyone – may abhor. If it exists, nature has a use for it, and it doesn’t depend on our approving it.

Cannibalism?

You know full well that what is lumped under the word “cannibalism” includes many different motivations. Sometimes it is a ritual homage to the dead opponent. Sometimes it is a different sort of ritual, using the individual as a stand-in for the almighty, the Great Spirit, in the way that communion serves as a symbol of human participation in the divine via Jesus the divine man. Don’t forget – we’re always having to say this, but it’s important in order to keep you oriented – it is all mind-stuff, and therefore motivation is far more important than a given action itself.

That’s an interesting take on things. As I think about it, we see people like Hemingway and his hero Teddy Roosevelt, dedicated and prodigious hunters of animals, and regardless what we think of hunting, we remember that that isn’t all they were.

What you’re meaning is that you are all mixtures of elements that are a little different or a lot different from each other. Someone who admired Roosevelt as conservationist might deplore him as a hunter – yet in Roosevelt the qualities coexisted without friction. Contradictions stem from viewpoint. How can nature have a viewpoint less than everything? But a viewpoint that is everything cannot be a perspective – a single place from which to order everything else, as if that place were the ultimate importance and everything else was subordinate to the perspective it imposed.

I see what you’re saying. Where does this leave reformers?

An impulse to reform is as valid as an impulse to keep everything as it is. An attempt to shape human affairs more to the liking of someone is as legitimate as an attempt to warp it. As legitimate, not more so. And of course this is where we will lose some people.

You didn’t lose me, though. I can feel it. I have always had a push/pull relationship emotionally with reformers. On the one hand I may share their repugnance at something – racism, when I was a boy – but on the other hand there was always a stridency that gave me pause; it wasn’t balanced.

You sensed that it was too partial, too emotionally driven, to see things clearly.

I have usually seen things more than one way at the same time; it makes it impossible to go off whole-heartedly on crusades. But at the same time, I am usually criticizing myself for being unable to act, unable to even decide what I would like to see happen.

Yet, being one facet of the gem, you could not be impartial, nor is it given to people to be impartial. Your values are your viewpoint and your viewpoint is what you offer to the larger self. That’s why they keep saying, “You are here to choose.”

But seeing many sides of issues that others see more from one or another side makes for ineffectiveness.

So what? Maybe you weren’t born to be an executive, but an absorber of viewpoints, a synthesizer of oppositions. Maybe life needs a few of these too.

It can be hard to remember that external life isn’t any less evanescent than internal life. It seems so real, so out-there. It’s one thing to realize abstractly that it is “only somewhat real,” but another to experience it that was as we go along.

Life is as malleable as you want it to be. Only –

I know: “Which you?”

Correct. People live in the world according to very different ground rules, but the difference is not in the world but in themselves.

And that should be enough about conflict. It’s part of life. Deal with it. It is the “dealing with it” that is the point.

Thanks, Jon, more another time, I hope.

 

Monday, September 16, 2024

6:35 a.m. Intimations of mortality, Jon. An awful lot of work I might have done and didn’t. More I might do, if I had (have?) time?

You are at least beginning to see the tradeoffs. Nothing comes free. If you are going to do one thing, maybe you can’t do something else – and if you are driven to read, read, read – or do crosswords, or sometimes to watch movies or TV episodes – maybe it is keeping you from doing other things.

Tell me something I don’t know.

You don’t know why.

Very true. And you can tell me.

I can tell you if you can hear. Avoidance is not merely inertia. It takes as much effort to avoid – sometimes more – than to do what you’re avoiding doing. So it isn’t just that you don’t have enough energy to concentrate your mind on something. It is that the “something” does not lend you that energy, where other times it does.

Jim S. would suspect interference.

And so do you, sometimes.

But not usually.

But there is a vast difference between sometimes and never. It is a qualitative difference, not a quantitative difference like less and more.

I see that. I may quote that sentence by itself. But, go on.

You find yourself again browsing through Bowers on Jefferson. You know things mostly forgotten or never even suspected by most of your contemporaries. There is a feeling “I ought to write this,” and a feeling of inability.

Ah, because I am always thinking in terms of books, not essays.

That’s part of it. If you have an insight, say it. It doesn’t have to be supported by – or suffocated by – all the detail you could put it to. Think of your many successful squibs about history on your blog. They are successful – even if nobody read them they would be successful – in that they make something living out of what otherwise had been dead.

You mean, they express something in an alive way that had been deadened by its treatment or by the silence about it.

Yes. But suppose you had to write a book about each blog post subject. (a) You couldn’t do it. (b) Who’d read it all? The books are on shelves. The bare bones information is in Wikipedia or other sites. None of your contributions is original research, it is interpretation, and as you know, those are the only two contributions an historian can make.

I’m getting that I could write an essay a day from whatever I happened to be reading, and post that.

You could, theoretically. What else did you do for so many years, beginning with Smallwood and continuing with Rita and others? The fact that you gathered it into books may have distracted you from the fact that each was, in effect, a thousand-word essay.

My horoscope did say that was my strength, small pieces. Naturally, cross-grained as I am, I determined that only writing books was worth doing.

You didn’t have the patience or the knowledge to go the magazine route. You didn’t know the market, didn’t know how to learn it, never thought to ask anybody.

All true.

But you can still write. Let others pick up the slack of getting the word out. In fact, let the material itself carry the word. People can always google the subject matter.

It still seems like writing on water, like writing editorials that wind up under somebody’s bird cage.

You’re missing the point, which is to give you a forum that will allow you – encourage you – to express what you know in a way that may encourage others to learn more. Isn’t that what you started out to do with your original blog? “Everyday explorations into our unsuspected potential”?

True enough. And I see that unless it was gathered into books, it felt like I was just passing the time.

So?

As I’m thinking about it, I see that in a way this is what Emerson was always doing, writing about this or that, gathering the essays together after a while and winding up with another book.

No!

No?

Yes the essays were made into books, but you’re missing the fact that he was continually lecturing. That material went into lectures, and was given to people first-hand, before it made it into the hard covers. That was his equivalent of a blog, you see.

So the missing link is not a publisher of my essays-into-books but a dissemination of the existence of the blogs.

Perhaps. But your end of it is to be the source of the information. Only you can put your spin on what you have read and thought about. Just as all your authors were the ones to distill source material into their interpretations, so you. That’s how it works.

That’s very interesting. Let’s go back to the subject of avoidance.

You know that authors have to work to a schedule. They don’t work just when they feel like. If they have to waste several hours not accomplishing anything, they do. It is the only way to defeat the avoidance mechanism that says, “This is more work than you have energy for. This is flat and not worthwhile. You aren’t up for this.” Sometimes you have to outsit that.

Why should we have to? What produces that mechanism?

Concentration means just that: centering. It takes an effort of will sometimes. When it doesn’t, when for whatever reason you are ready and able to go, you take it for granted. But when you aren’t concentrated, we’re back to the question of mood. In a sense, your mood says, “This is too much trouble right now,” and you mistake your self for your mood.

Say that in different words?

This is where will-power and habit and workmanlike methods come in. It is a matter of overcoming the mood of a moment with the sustained intent that overrides the mood and says, “Nevertheless, it’s time to work.” If you have a job or a profession that pressures you to work, that helps. If you are on your own, you have to be your own pressure, and that is going to involve will-power and sustained intent.

You make it very clear.

There’s much to be said about moods and how they shape people’s daily experience, and maybe we’ll get to it. That’s mostly up to you.

I’m getting that we sometimes say “moods” or “emotions” where we mean the other.

I’m laughing. You’d never let me get away with phrasing like that!

Smiling too. All right, let’s put it this way: The guys have told us that emotion is the interface between our known self and the unknown self that we experience as the outside world. But what someone might call emotion, someone else might call mood.

And this isn’t because psychology hasn’t clearly differentiated them – regardless what laymen know – but that everybody makes his own definitions, mostly unconsciously, and so everybody hears something difference even if the word is the same. The way around that is to do just as we’re doing – talk about it so people can do their own figuring out what each words means to them.

Well, it’s always a pleasure talking with you.

Likewise.

Next time, then.

 

Sunday, September 8, 2024

6:25 a.m. Jon’s final two points form last Monday: “All is one,” so all relationships of any kind are provisional or illusory, and yet in effect the world is as we experience it. Go ahead, Jon.

As you are feeling, in a way these are the same point, looked at from either side. It is essence versus “essence as experienced.” If you’ll let it sink in, you’ll see reconciliations where maybe you had seen puzzles.

All dualities are actually expressions of an underlying unity. Whether a person sees duality or unity is a reflection mostly of that person’s mental habits. But that is actually an encouraging thought, or ought to be, because how you perceive things is under your control if you do the things you have been taught that teach control.

It may seem circular, but it isn’t, really. How you perceive the world determines the world you will experience. But how you perceive the world may be either only a limitation, or a limitation that affords you the possibility of transformation.

Change your belief, change your perception. Change your perception, change your reality. Change your reality, change your possibilities. In the end it comes to what the guys have told you from the beginning: You are here to change yourself (shape, or reshape yourself) by means of the decisions you make. But it is deeper than perhaps you realized, because implicit is the fact that it is only by choosing – consciously and unconsciously – that you pull yourself up the great chain of being, by your own bootstraps.

Now, that’s really all we need to say about the final two points. List the seven as I gave them last week, not in my words then but in your words now, and see what you make of it.

I’m going to have to go back through the pages to do it, I couldn’t do it by memory.

Fine.

Life is not in any way dependent upon 3D concepts. It is neither material nor made of time.

Consciousness is subtractive, not additive. Our brains filter out most of reality, and we progress by removing filters.

Life is not substance in any way, regardless how it seems. It is made of mind-stuff.

Within the context of 3D/non-3D, what happened shapes us. Within its realm, the world is real.

All of life’s polarities are the result of our perceptual structures. They are true within a context, but not without it.

All relationships are provisional and illusory because divisions are provisional and illusory. But, we live within our world-view, which defines what seems real to us. Therefore, all possibility of growth depends upon our seeing differently.

Print these out without numbers or bullets, to lessen the temptation to memorize, and increase the possibility of grasping (which, as you know, involves letting go).

Okay.

Now, taken together, this will give some people all they need. Some won’t have needed it, and some won’t be able to profit from it, but for some it will serve. If people once get the reality of the fact that the 3D/non-3D system sits on a self-contained floating island in a reality that has very different rules, two things happen:

• Intellectually, they will see more clearly. But more importantly,
• They will know, not just hope or believe, that they can really direct their lives.

That second point is begging to be misunderstood.

Yes, and it isn’t easy to clarify. Clearly I don’t mean the ego-level self taking over and getting what it wants. Yet, in a way, that is a good description of the possibility. The key is the change in the composition of the ego-level self.

If you look at the ego-level self as the chooser of ways in the 3D wilderness (or fun house, or however it seems to you), a change in the sego-self’s understanding of the world is the only way to change the kinds of choices that are made, and the reasons for the choices. In other words, you aren’t trying to bypass the ego-self; you want to transform it. If you didn’t have a non-3D component, it would be hopelessly circular, because the ego would want what it wanted, and only rarely would it stop to question why it wanted what it wanted. But, you do have a non-3D component, so the indicated solution is to increase access, that the ego may get better perspective, and make better decisions.

The joker in the deck is that the ego-layer is very apt to misinterpret non-3D guidance, or defy it. In such case, increasing access may result in acute short-term disharmony far worse than previously existed. But, you can see, that is a short-term result. Longer term, it is the only possible way forward.

I suppose that is true at whatever level we are on. We’re never going to understand what we haven’t yet experienced, so with the best will in the world we’re going to warp the message.

You have been given enough instruction, over the course of human history, in how to gradually purify your perception and understanding. If you get out of the “sin and retribution and atonement” mode and look again at religious and metaphysical teachings, the helpful hints will stand out clearly enough.

“Though your sins are as scarlet, you will float over them,” etc.

Again, you have to look at things with new eyes. Humanity’s age-old scriptures will mean different things to different kinds of people, depending on where they are. You and I are talking about people who find no assistance or sustenance or even sense in older understandings of these things.

And that’s probably enough on this theme. You might suggest that people make their own summary in their own words, tailored to their own needs. That will automatically result in them taking what is most helpful to them.

At the risk of them taking only what fits in with what they already believe.

It’s always that way. You have to work from where you are. The reminder to watch over their own shoulders ought to be enough to help them guard against the ego-level self overreaching.

Well, it has been quite a week, Jon. Many thanks.

 

Saturday, September 7, 2024

1:10 a.m. “No place to stand and no need of one. Suspended, instead.” Jon, I presume you are ready to clarify.

I am. But it should be obvious what I meant.

Obvious I think to some, those who have gotten your meaning already. But others won’t find it means much, if anything.

But you know what it means. Set it out, as you would for the guys, and I’ll correct it if necessary.

I take it to mean, simply, “Don’t keep in the back of your mind the idea that the 3D/non-3D world really is primary. Don’t think it is real. Recognize that reality is not based in 3D/non-3D, but is deeper, not rooted in physical reality at all.

You might think of the 3D/non-3D as an island floating on nothing. Truly, it isn’t really real. Bu it can be hard to adjust your minds to realize that the concept really means something, and has practical consequences.

I know. There’s a sort of halfway house where we start to believe it, are intellectually convinced by it, but still live with our assumptions otherwise.

And it is to people in that place that I address myself. Those who think the idea is nonsense won’t listen, and those who understand it don’t need the explanation.

However –

I know. Well, try to sleep and return when you can. I’m not going anywhere.

5:24 a.m. Okay. Continue?

How can you be sick, how can I have died of a specific illness, if the 3D world isn’t real?

Surely people don’t think the argument is that thin.

Some do. Remember, to some it doesn’t make any sense. Think of your own reaction when you hear something that seems to you to be just playing with words.

Flat-Earthers, say? You get into a conversation with one of them and they can talk forever, giving you all these reasons why what we see is illusion, but they can’t explain why everything in the sky is round and not flat, and it doesn’t bother them. They have a need to believe what they believe, and logic and common sense and even intuition aren’t going to make any headway against it.

Well, what we’re saying sounds like Flat-Earthers, to some. It is too far from their experience. And, interesting you mention intuition. Their intuition tells them you are wrong. Why is that? How can it be? Are their guys lying to them? Are they perhaps unable to hear their guys or maybe believe them?

I expect you’re going to tell us.

This may turn into a sidebar, but that’s all right if it does, it is an interesting subject I don’t remember you ever addressing. You tend to take your connection for granted.

After all this time, I ought to!

But you always functioned this way. It is what made you different. It sometimes made you eccentric, sometimes entirely illogical, quixotic. You did things nobody would do, because it seemed right. (I don’t mean morally right, I mean accurate.)

Sure. Who runs for Congress without backing or preparation ten years out of high school? Who sees it as inevitable, years earlier? Who starts a shopper paper without considering economics? Etc., etc. And yet all those quixotic decisions led to something. They weren’t dead-ends at all, they were just curiously distorted ways to get somewhere.

You see, it was you in the hands of your guidance. Now, your example isn’t necessarily something people should imitate. You yourself probably wouldn’t do some of those things again if you had your choice.

Certainly I’d do some things differently!

A balanced use of intuition checks impulses against logic. Logic may still say, “Do it,” but at least you will have checked. But that isn’t the topic here, prudence. The topic is the absolute certainty that intuition can provide, that cannot be shaken by fact or appearance. Sometimes the certainty is right, and you look brilliant. Sometimes it is wrong, and you look not only wrong-headed but practically insane. It’s a dangerous way to live.

Churchill did it. Some reporter, writing about examples of Churchill’s prescience as a young man, asked rhetorically, “Does he have a demon that tells him things?” Yet Churchill was never trusted by his political partners even when they entrusted him with power, as they did over a fifty-year span, off and on.

And when you were young, your admiration for him was unbounded.

And ill-informed. It took a long time to see the other colors in the portrait.

But the point here is that you took him as a model, unconsciously. Why? Because he was British, or aristocratic, or imperialist? No, because something in you recognized something in him, and I’m telling you what it was.

I see. And as usual I took it for granted and never examined it.

You lived very close to unconsciously in certain respects. You did not calculate – which is the first requisite for a political career such as you thought you wanted. You did not plan, you never got your ticket punched. All this was the same trait manifesting in different ways. This is you scoring 100% for intuition and 0% for sensation on the Myers-Briggs.

And being pleased at that result, until I thought about it.

And it took you a good while to think about it! But my point is, all this led you to be able to do what you did. If you had been more balanced, maybe you wouldn’t have been able to do it.

A guy I knew did say, in effect  – this was 50 years ago, nearly – that someone who goes off half-cocked may be valuable because sometimes you need somebody to get things started.

Here’s the point, or anyway my point. People are often led by their intuition – their guidance – their guys upstairs – and sometimes the result is rational and sometimes it isn’t. Either way, the process is similar.

You’re saying, you can’t trust any process to bring you safely home, but it may.

I was saying, you can’t ever tell which process will take you to where you want to go, but the two statements go together. They’re both true.

Now, to return to the main point. People whose intuition tells them there’s nothing in this will not be convinced by argument, and that’s fine. Others will have an intuitive recognition, and that’s fine too. Sometimes you have to make the statement and let people come to it as best they can. Saying that the 3D/non-3D system is a sort of island in reality is one of those statements.

I started to write (thinking it was you), something like, “How are you going to prove it either way?” But, there’s Paul Brunton.

Who provided you with logical demonstration of what you already knew. Provided you; he won’t provide everybody. They have to be in a certain place.

His books were The Hidden Teaching Beyond Yoga and The Wisdom of the Oversoul, both available in a beautiful paperback edition from North Atlantic Books.

Nice plug, but again, not everybody will get from them what you did, because in every book the author is only half the equation. The reader is the other half. Again, Brunton didn’t prove anything. What he did, most skillfully, was point you in a direction and show the logical consequences of your beliefs. Not that he would necessarily agree that this is what he was doing, but that is the effect.

Feels like we mostly wandered, this time.

It has an inner consistency that may be more obvious to you when you type it up. In any cases, it says all that can be said about the 3D/non-3D being different from the underlying reality. What else could be said?

I’ll take your word for it. This has been quite a week. Our thanks.

We can take the two final points together, perhaps. We’ll see how it goes.

Okay.