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Saturday, September 22, 2018

All right, friends, open for business again, if you wish to continue discussing 3D as the conscious creation of its creatures. At least, I guess you could put it that way –

That is a sufficiently unusual angle of approach to open up new territory, perhaps.

Like I don’t know the phrasing was planted! It was certainly not thought out in advance.

How much of your life is ever thought out in advance? And, when it is, how much good does it do you? So don’t worry about it (not that you do).

Let’s look at creation as created by its own creatures. What sense does that make? None at all, if you begin from your conventional view of 3D reality as primary, including such 3D conditions as sequential time, as expressed by the perpetually moving present moment. But take that away and take a look at reality “as if” the 3D is not primary but secondary.

Paul Brunton touches on this. The universe (that is, all of reality) need not – indeed, in a sense cannot –come into existence; that only seems inevitable when we look at things as if sequential moving time was an absolute.

And as you well know, it is the taking for granted that 3D conditions are absolutes that derails so many attempts at theological understanding. It is the same with science. In any field of inquiry, the most difficult and most essential thing is to become aware of your unconscious mental limitations of the field. What you take to be “common sense” or “intuitively obvious,” you need to put a cold analytical eye on. It is your unconscious postulates that will trip you up.

So let us agree to set aside the idea of beginnings and endings except in the realm of sequential time. That doesn’t mean that outside of 3D, nothing changes. It means, outside of 3D, nobody is frog-marched by a seemingly external taskmaster.

Still, it is hard to imagine the non-3D realm changing without also imagining a change-agent – that is, time passing.

Time is a different thing here. The result is not the replacement of one situation by a succeeding one, so much as the standing next to the previous situation, the next situation. They all exist; it isn’t a matter of this ceasing so that that may come into being. It would be closer to imagine 3D reality as a spotlight, with every new present-moment moving the spotlight onto a new scene. The old ones don’t cease to exist; the next ones don’t await manifestation. They’re all there in potential and in a curious state of reality that is not easily explained.

The critical thing to remember is that 3D reality is projected, from a deeper level of reality. When you absorb that fact, you see why things are just as solid as they appear to be, and yet aren’t, and you see why things may exist beyond 3D without having been projected onto 3D at any particular time.

Now, look at the true basis of the true reality. Yes, in a way it is above your pay grade. Yet it may be grasped, intuitively, if you can get interfering assumptions out of the way. Creation is not exactly the same as ultimate reality. Surely you can see that.

I was taking them to be synonymous until you said that. But I suppose “creation” implies a creator, and raw materials, and purposeful effort.

Whereas reality does not. In this case let us agree to say, reality is what is. It is everything known and unknown, knowable and unknowable. How can the ultimate last layer of reality have been created? If it was created, that means it can’t be the ultimate layer, does it not?

Makes sense to me. Yet I still have a problem with the universe having always just “been here.”

Don’t allow yourself to fall into confusion by unconsciously moving from the universe as “all 3D plus non-3D creation” to the universe as “the entirety of everything.” It’s an easy unconscious slide. Stay conscious. Ultimately – no matter how far behind the scenes you need to go, intellectually, to feel like you are at the nub of things – ultimately there can be no “created out of something else,” or you are not at ultimately.

Agreed. So, reality, whatever it really is, exists, and that’s all we know about it.

• You know that it is the master, not the servant, of time and space and events. You know that it is all one thing, non-contradictory internally. That’s worth knowing.
• And you know more than that – and this is the gist: You know that reality expresses itself (there being nothing else to express), and that, as many “dimensions” as exist, everything is in all of them.
• And you know that there is no question of creation and destruction in any ultimate sense. What is, is.

“I am who am.” I never understood God’s statement to Moses, or whoever it was. But it would make sense in this context.

So now, imagine yourself to be Reality. Everything, manifest or implicit, is a part of you. The 3D world with its time-oriented dreams and melodramas is one part of what you are, and the creatures going through all that drama are – part of you. Not, like you, or as good as you, or potentially you. You, because you are all that is.

And this brings us back to where we started today. I see it. There’s no point in thinking we are only players when we are also management, stage, and audience. You gave this to us before, sometime, in a different context, but I get it now.

That is an advantage to always circling back; the same thing from another viewpoint shows previously unseen aspects.

If we look at ourselves as players, we may be tempted to look at ourselves as pawns, or victims. If we look at ourselves as God, or World-Mind, or whatever name you choose to give to the ultimate reality we are part of, we may be tempted to hubris and psychic inflation. Only when we have it in mind that we are all both, and more, can we keep it in reasonable and usable perspective.

That’s right. But if you look back at the long trail we had to travel to get here, you will see why so few people come to the same ideas. There’s a tremendous amount of redefinition involved along the way.

 

Wednesday, September 19, 2018

I get the feeling that “singing the universe into existence” went in a direction a little different than what you had intended. Care to revisit?

What we said was necessary, but of course there is always more to be said on any subject. That’s why sometimes it matters, where a discussion goes, and sometimes it doesn’t. Now, recalibrate, and slow way down, and we shall see if you can loosen the reins of your imagination sufficiently to bring in something outside your comfort zone.

[Pause]

You are creator gods, because everything in reality is made of the same stuff.

We have told you, the very rocks that compose your 3D geology are conscious, and, indeed, are the same thing as you, only living at different speed, for different reasons, filling a different role. When you come to see this, you will have penetrated a very powerful veil of illusion: that is, that matter is something different from spirit, or, in other words, that the 3D world is “real” in an exterior sense (i.e. absolutely, differently “out there” rather than being the same as you).

It’s slippery. I get it and lose it, even now.

That is because partly it is a matter of “Which you?” You as 3D creature are clearly different from rocks and woodchucks. You as a constituent of reality conforming to material pretensions are not different from the other elements of life that are conforming to material pretensions.

I think that means, we within our 3D roles are limited in ways that make us human, as woodchucks – why are we talking about woodchucks, particularly? – are limited in ways that make them animals, and rocks in ways that make them minerals.

You will find that this idea is now clearer to you (having gotten it from us by direct intuition) than to many of your readers who can only guess at the meaning.

Why? It’s clear enough, isn’t it?

No. We just said it isn’t clear enough. Restate it even if it seems repetitious to you.

If you say so. I got that we are all the same thing in the realm superior to the 3D/non-3D split, and it is only within 3D (and its non-3D extension) that differences between animal, vegetable, mineral, human manifest. That is, we aren’t essentially human-only. Rocks aren’t essentially mineral only. Fish, amoebae, virii, seawater, whatever, are not their physical 3D manifestations only. We are all part of the same thing. Differences are at a more superficial level.

That still won’t be clear, you’ll find.

That’s because people will slap “nothing but” labels on it. It’s “nothing but” pantheism or panentheism, or whatever.

And in applying labels they will thereby prevent themselves from really feeling the distinction. Perhaps. If so, that is not your affair. People can only hear what they have ears to hear – and if there is a cosmic hearing aid, we don’t know who is manufacturing it.

Very funny. But, I know the feeling, first hand. When I look back at my life, I see many truths that were presented to me that I could not see. I could not give them fair consideration. There was not enough common ground between the assumptions behind them and the assumptions I incorporated in my view of the world.

Talk a little about your experience of crystals.

That’s a good example of the process of opening up to a new understanding, as a matter of fact.

Yes, that’s why we suggested it. And, as usual, you phrasing things while in this ILC state will have certain advantages over our doing it. It will be more fluent, will require less to overcome, though the difference in effort may be imperceptible to you.

I do admire how you continually mingle content and process in these talks.

Okay, crystals. My entry into the New Age world was sort of sideways. I didn’t grow up in Southern California, so to speak. Although I had certain inclinations toward the mystical life, I was raised Catholic, and did not lay down that viewpoint when I left the church, so much as accepted it and rebelled against certain things – hell, God the policeman, the Church’s rules – and never even thought about the fact that I accepted and continued to accept the underlying truth of the fact that the spiritual world existed and was fundamental.

No, you are forgetting.

So I was.

[Because the rest is mostly me and not them, I am going to print it in Roman rather than italic, as that is easier to read in large doses.]

[Me:] After I consciously left the church – a process that occurred between the ages of 17 and 19 – the mental world I lived in accepted the world of matter as obviously real and (I don’t know that I ever thought of this) I searched for evidence that this obviously-real material world was not as meaningless as it appeared. Thus, I was more than open to reading of Edgar Cayce, and I probably would have been open to Seth. (It was too early for Jane Roberts and for Bob Monroe, as we are talking here of the last half of the 1960s, before either of them had published.)

So, I read Jess Stearn’s Edgar Cayce, the Sleeping Prophet, and Thomas Sugrue’s There is a River, and they kept a hope alive that the 3D world wasn’t the closed-off thing it appeared to be. But I was still thinking of it as primarily real, I was only looking for an extra-sensory escape hatch, or periscope, or something.

I think lots of people went through this in those days. Lots of people escaped or tried to escape their Christian or Jewish background by going to the relatively neutral refuge of Hinduism or, more commonly, Buddhism. We knew that materialism couldn’t be true; we knew it wasn’t enough. But we didn’t know what was true, and didn’t have any idea how to find it.

As I said, I came to the New Age movement sideways. I made a living and read history and waited for my glorious future or unroll itself. Such anomalous experiences as I had, I set aside in my mind or held for future explanation. Then came the Shirley MacLaine workshop, and teaming up with Bob Friedman a couple of year later, and Kelly Neff (Quattrin, then), and the Monroe Institute’s Gateway program, and I was living in a different world, but though it had points of congruence with what Monroe called the psychic underground, it had important differences too. I didn’t entirely fit in.

God, this is taking a long time. Anyway, when I discovered crystals, I did so from a mindset that centered on life as it appears, so on the one hand I experienced their energy (“or am I just making this up?”) and on the other, I had to try to fit it in with the idea that rocks were, quite obviously, dead inert matter, as opposed to the lords of creation, namely us. So experiencing the energy of crystals had to be pigeon-holed into the idea that they were somehow batteries, or – much later – were programmable. The physical world’s classification system still first, you see.

Okay, now I see it differently, only we’ve burned up so much time – do we have enough for you to continue?

Finish with crystals.

Well, I guess the point is this. As long as we think that the “obvious” divisions of the world are real and fundamental, it is going to be difficult or impossible for us to really see behind the curtain. If we see crystals as matter that happens to have certain properties that can be used to enhance or anyway interact with human psyches, we will see things one way. When we come to see that everything, no matter how “dead” or inert, is made of the same conscious living presence that we are, then the divisions are still real but they are no longer fundamental. They no longer present an obstacle to be overcome, merely an appearance to be understood.

And I better appreciate your difficulties in making clear statements that will not be misunderstood.

It can’t be done. But you do the best you can.

 

Tuesday, September 18, 2018

I guess maybe I won’t bother to talk to anybody – or, is that not only a mistake but an indicator of lessened internal pressure? Binge-reading, and not feeling like making the effort –.

Guys, what do you say? More specifically, Bertram and Joseph.

Holding the note, as it was phrased a while ago, is not the same thing as saying “holding oneself in a state of continual tension.” Indeed, that isn’t even desirable, isn’t even possible, and so such an attempt or expectation can lead only to disappointment, regret, guilt – all unnecessary.

Then, what does it mean? (And, as usual, don’t think I can’t detect a planted question, but I’m glad for it.)

Your whole life (anyone’s, that is) could be considered the singing of a note, the uttering of a single thought, the expression of a single complicated idea. You express the particular subdivision of the entirety that your qualities make you, by what you are and what you do and what you think, as Yeats said.

“The mystical life is the center of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.”

Which amounts to what we just said. Only, we are speaking not of your concern or unconcern with any one aspect of life, but of life in its fullness. That means 3D life, non-3D life, life beyond any one sliver of a present moment, life beyond any perceived boundaries of individual existence.

• You – anybody, everybody – are only a tiny bit of the whole;
• At the same time (think holographically) you have within you You do; everyone does.
• And in a different way, or let’s say to different effect, any and every combination of individuals has its own chord, let’s call it, different from, yet composed of, the notes it comprises.

I’ll need to remind people that the guys said some years ago that the three of us – Joseph the Egyptian, Bertram, and I – are somehow holding a note, each in our respective societies yet presumably together somehow beyond our communities.

You will notice, in summarizing what you were told, your new understanding said more than you were actually given at the time. Nothing wrong with that – quite the contrary – but worth noting. As you grow, your later self incorporates material retrospectively, so to speak.

Now, think of what this is getting at.

• Each individual may be regarded as a separate note.
• Each combination of individuals – and think how many combinations of individuals there can be – may be regarded as a separate chord.
• All those notes, all those chords, may be combined in different ways.

In effect, you – we – are always singing the world into continued existence.

That sounds right, yet I realize, I don’t really know what it means.

We don’t see how you could expect to. Let’s put it this way. Consider the variations that can be produced in 3D using a musical scale. Only a few notes, and those notes produced, in effect, as subdivisions of the one unity of sound. (Don’t worry that particular bone; you more or less know what we mean by it.) Now, if all the musicians in the world were playing all the music in the world – past, present, future – all at the same time (or non-time, or eternal time, however you want to think of it) – a couple of things would follow:

• Individual fragments would necessarily be unable to hear most of it, most of the time, for sheer volume and discord. In your relative deafness is the possibility of your perceiving any
• This relative deafness could be considered to be like a radio that can hear only one station. That one tune would be reality, because it would be a case not of “Which tune do you hear” but of “Do you hear it or not?”
• Radios that could be tuned to different stations would have new possibilities. The possibilities always existed in potential, but until the retuning, they did not exist in reality.
• Naturally, those with only one station would regard those who claimed (or even by their eccentricities demonstrated) an ability to hear other music as deceiving and/or self-deceiving.
• Those able to hear more than one set of music at the same time perhaps would be driven mad, or would adjust, or even thrive – but would in no case inhabit the same mental world as those who heard only one.

Now, we won’t beat the analogy to death, but there it is. You may extend it a little.

You aren’t so much talking about us hearing tunes, as notes.

Yes, and that is an important distinction, do you see why?

A tune can be played only one way. I mean, it may be interpreted differently, but the same notes are going to be in the same order.

So is your life more like a jukebox in which you choose a tune (if indeed you do choose), or like a jazz trio in which you are playing, improvising as you go along? It’s music either way.

Music isn’t my strong point; I don’t know much about it. Can we change metaphors?

No, let’s stick to this for the moment, because we aren’t talking about music, exactly, but about essential vibration. Your life, your essence, is, in effect, a note not that you sing (that is, consciously choose to express), but that you are. There is a difference.

But we can change that note, I gather, by our choices.

You can, but not as easily as by changing ideas or by changing what you do (that is, how you express). Do you see?

I suppose the note we are born as (to put it that way) is the predestination part of our lives and the note we may become is the free will aspect.

Is the result of  the free will aspect.

Now, the musical analogy breaks down – as does the harmony! – if you think of it only as any given individual changing notes in midstream. In pre-designed music, the result would be chaotic.

But wouldn’t that be jazz, improving as you go?

Well – yes and no. As we say, the analogy breaks down. Let’s just say that life is about finding as many tunes, harmonies, dissonances as exist; it isn’t about merely finding which ones are pleasant to the ear, even the non-3D ear.

[They meant “life is about…” not from the viewpoint of 3D individuals, but more in the sense of “what is the meaning of life” from life’s point of view. It was clear to me as I got it, but it didn’t get into words.]

You – everyone past present and future from your point of view – express what you are, singly (one 3D life) and multiply (the interaction of your 3D lives) and multiply in another direction (your various associations such as Bertram and Joseph and Frank). It is contradictory but true that you express as individuals and as multiples of individuals and as multiples of that, ad infinitum. Do you see what this amounts to?

I guess it amounts to saying, as we keep coming back to, that the universe has no absolute boundaries, and that individuality is only one aspect of a fundamental unity.

That, and that multiplicity is not disaster or the result of disaster, but an essential characteristic of reality, not to be deplored, not to be despised.

There’s more, but it will have to wait for another time.

 

This past week, I was at The Monroe Institute, doing a course called Conscious Coherence. This came in the course of an exercise on Thursday morning.

Thursday, April 6, 2023

[Doing a TMI exercise sitting at a desk writing, rather than lying down in a CHEC unit.]

9:45 a.m. So the idea of the exercise is, look over the week, see what surfaces. This tape is to be very intense  apparently. I was thinking I should reread my notes here, but maybe not. Guys?

[They had me draw a diagram.]

One way to think of 3D experience, a lot of pinpoints interacting.

Another way, lines of force and attraction and repulsion, interacting.

Same structure, different interpretations.

[Then another diagram, below the first, showing a core between magnets, that is, in a magnetic field, and they said. “only, many pairs of magnets, surrounding.”

Yes, I remember these diagrams from years ago.

Then apply them in a new way. Rather than still thinking of yourself as a unit, think of each part of you individually responding to such influences.

A tremendous amount of cross-currents, counter-pulls, instability, there.

That is the 3D condition. That is what you live, the difficulty and the challenge of it.

It’s a working-out of a way to coexist among conflicting influences.

Conflicting, ever-changing influences, yes.

So conflict is always within ourselves.

Well, a little slower.

Proceed.

External influences precipitate certain strains by pulling various elements in various directions. To the extent that you anneal various elements, you produce larger elements that then react as if units. Greater coherence in effect is possible, in the same circumstances.

But the external strains always have internal effects – and put quote marks around external and internal, of course, because that is only a way of seeing it.

[Then a drawing represent a central core of connected but varied elements, co-existing in fields created by pairs of plus or minus elements, not in one plane but in all planes.]

So “you” are not a unit being affected by external forces, even if the forces are “merely” force-fields. Instead, you are more like a chemical element (this is only analogy) with X number of protons, neutrons, electrons, each of which individually and each of which as a class (electrons, neutrons, protons) and each of which as subgroups, formed from whatever causes, are pulled differently by whatever “external” force-fields they are caught up in.

You can create or encourage certain kinds of subgroupings, by living your values, expressing your essence. A life spent radiating kindness will differ from the same life if it had expressed cruelty, or had alternated.

So what is coherence? It is not the welding-together of all your constituent elements into an inflexible unit. Rather it is like a murmuration of birds or fishes. The individual parts are still individual but they are in voluntary graceful cooperation with direction from a higher level.

[Murmuration may be defined as a large group of birds flying together, changing direction together, acting as one, rather than as many followers, one leader.]

There is advantage to being able to express and respond to and even join in with chaos. There is advantage to participating in a murmuration. The key is flexibility, not adhering to any one position, because you are faced with variation in the external world, and so need to be able to roughly mirror it.

You don’t mean “mirror chaos” by joining in with it, I imagine, so what do you mean?

In a way, that is what we do mean, but conscious mirroring is not the same thing as surrendering to a non-individual collective. It is, instead, a surfing of a wave, using discordances and cross-currents as well as correspondences and harmonies. Everything in life is part of each moment. There are no extra parts, no parts missing, no errors in construction. So when you are among chaos, the way to deal with it is not by rejection but by engagement.

But what do we mean, engagement? You know full well.

Yes, I suppose I do. We are in it and of it and not separate from it, but we remain ourselves, remain aware of our selves, our separateness, our identity.

Yes, separate and non-separate. A part of everything and individual. Living certain values but recognizing that these values are true for you, not for one and all. Every person combines different values to form, in effect, a community of one.

So – coherence?

Think of coherence as flexibility, allowing the tree to bend with the wind rather than being broken by it. Or think of it as a dynamic rather than static core within yourself. Every individual is a community of elements learning to function as an individual. Coherence is an aid to the process.

I’m getting that it is an attitude of approach.

Yes. If you are coherent, you are ready for whatever life brings you next. Not in a feet-planted way, not in fearful or aggressive anticipation, but of calm awareness, confident that nothing happens by chance, hence that anything that happens now happens now for a reason, or it would happen at a different now.

It is Emerson again: “Lowly faithful, banish fear.”

It is indeed. Nobody knows what tomorrow brings, and why should you care? You live your lives one moment of “now” at a time. Where is the need for fear?

Yet, things can make us fearful, or angry, or whatever.

Of course, and then the question is, how do you process your first-time reaction? Do you ratify chaos, or do you use experience to modify understanding? What ultimately counts in life is not your first-tier reaction (the immediate effect on you) but the second-tier reaction, what you decide about it. You may be surprised into fear or anger, and it is as well to shrug and say, “That’s just the kind of thing that happens in 3D.” but it is your second-tier reaction – your considered decision as to how you want to be, what values you want to uphold – that counts. Your life is your community learning to live as an individual. You do that by making innumerable decisions.

And coherence assists us to remember who and what we want to be.

Also, in a way, who and what you already are, in potential.

Thanks for all this. More, or do I sit quietly for the rest of the exercise?

We’re always available, you know that. It’s up to you.

I’m tempted to read this to the group, but I don’t know.

You will know. Trust the moment.

Okay. Our thanks as always.

[In the event, I did not read it to the group in debrief, but only to a self-selected group, later. And now to you.]

 

Thursday, July 26, 2018

Very well, humans as prisms, and as the results of prisms.

Let’s look at humans as the elementary light that has been so many times recombined. This may turn out to be easy to say, or difficult. Let’s find out.

The point we made is that any given 3D compound-being is made up of numerous strands that henceforth function together as a unit, and may, acting as a unit, enter another compound-being as one of its threads. However, any such being is not a unit in the way that people in 3D experience themselves to be units. And this is the slippery concept that may elude people. Usually does elude people, so that they wind up thinking things are one way or the other, not conceiving that they may be one way and the other.

The sense that I am getting is that we are at once finished products and sub-assemblies for further products. And, come to think of it, we are also the raw material. So, three aspects: Original material, sub-assembled material, input to further development.

Yes, only don’t let yourself be fooled by unconscious assumptions into thinking you are or ever could be only one or even two of three, rather than, always, all three.

As so often, it is a new clarity that seems like it ought to have been obvious all the while. We are the original material, or substance, or pattern, or energy, whatever we should call it to avoid misleading associations. We are also what we have made of it in our particular part of creation, and we are the result of past construction and part of future constructions.

Only, call it “play” as well as “construction,” and you will get rid of the grimmer overtones of your conceptualization.

Hence, we are individual only in a manner of speaking, just as you have said from the beginning. We are individual only as long as one puts limits on how far to look, how much to include. And, just as you have always said, we are all one; we are all units; we are all communities.

Now perhaps you can see more clearly how perceived divisions among humans, animals, vegetables, minerals (not to mention unbound forms such as other parts of the energy spectrum perceived and unperceived, and other parts of reality beyond that, usually lumped only in magical realms) can only be provisional, never absolute. Things retain their original “is”-ness.

The units within reality are only units because of the way we slice things.

Well, in the broadest sense of “we” that may be more or less said to be true. But in ordinary terms, such divisions are more or less fixed to your perception and you may (or may not) be able to transcend them momentarily, but you can’t really go beyond them or reshuffle the deck.

Laying out the cards is beyond our pay grade.

Depending upon how one defines “our,” yes. The point at the moment is this:

• You are you (the current 3D assembly reading or writing this), and
• You are you (the collection of strands functioning together that comprise that assembly), and
• You are you (the indefinitely large number of constituents of each strand, and the constituents of each of those constituents, ad infinitum.

Hence you are vastly more than you commonly experience yourselves to be, and have access to anything any part of you has experienced, which in effect is without limits.

This turned out to be easier to express than we had feared. The main thing is that, once created, nothing ceases to exist. But neither do the things it was made from cease to exist, either in their new form as part of the newly created unit, nor in their original form before that creation, which itself was the result of prior creation, and on and on backward until you come to the original creation which also is beyond your pay grade, as you say, only is still within your memory, potentially.

It is?

Potentially. The major obstacle in all such recapture is your own filters that prevent you from thinking certain things, or from seeing them in any way that seems self-evidently nonsensical to you.

But these can be overcome.

That’s the purpose of the process of becoming awake, to see clearly.

Huh!

Think of yourselves – our-selves, we remind you, for it isn’t as if we were divine and you human – think of yourselves as the eyes and also the creative hands of reality.

All that complication, all that play of elements, all that drama – do you think any of it is wasted, or meaningless, or tragic? Do you think, as some do, “God sleeps,” or “Life is a useless passion,” or “Man is only a collection of a few cents’ worth of chemicals”?

Given your own indifference to – ignorance of – past tragedy, how important do you think first-tier effects are today? And, if you think, “They’re happening now! Of course they’re important!” – then, how about those of 10 years ago, or 20, or 50, or 100, or 1,000, or 10,000? Anything that ever happened, happened in the now. Where else could it have happened? But if you are not all torn up by the Rape of Nanking or the sacking of Rome or the worldwide destruction in past floods or other cataclysms – What distinguishes any of them from your own dramas, except that you are here, now? Two years from now, you will see it differently. Which point of view is “right”? Today’s? That of 2020? That of 3020?

Be careful in your reactions, here. We do not say, “Be indifferent to suffering.” We say, “If you wish to be awake, you must see things clearly and not through accustomed filters.” If you allow drama to persuade you that your 3D reality is real in any absolute sense, how are you going to remember that it is only relatively real, that the players are only relatively units, that your life is only relatively what it seems to be?

All right, so we have expressed what we set out to express. We never claimed this was going to be another book. We had some redefining we wanted to do. This is enough for now.

 

Wednesday, July 25, 2018

All right, guys, I’m ready. Just scanned recent transmissions, to try to remember where we were. I hope that isn’t necessary, but I figure it can’t hurt.

No, can’t hurt. The intellectual thread we are pursuing at the moment is the immortality of lives that continues in a way you haven’t considered. Much of this whole long discussion was spurred by Bob Friedman asking you what people do in the afterlife, you remember.

That seems quite a few books ago. But yes, now that you remind me, I do.

We could not answer without showing you that your society’s many unspoken assumptions were wrong, that the reality of life is different from its appearance, and so the assumptions built into such questions prevent it from being answered. Members of your society have been given so many conflicting descriptions of life, death, afterlife. It is because people do not question their own assumptions.

For that matter, I suppose this series began with Rita’s questions in 2001.

It did, for you. Until the series of prep sessions in 2000, you had only patchwork ideas picked up here and there from whatever resonated in what you read. But, without Rita’s persistent questioning, you never would have begun to tease out the implications of what you had been given in the prep sessions. And without the information as a starting point that you got in the black box during those sessions, you never would have had access to answers.

So I suppose I may take it that you have been providing me with the resources as we went along.

It is the same for everyone, only they must keep their intent clear. By that we mean, not the path (for the path may seem nonexistent) nor the goal (for how can you know where you are headed, if you are exploring new territory), but what you want to be or become or continue to be. Have a clear ideal of self-construction, and the means to grow toward it will be provided, moment by moment.

We won’t take a lot of time on this, for it is almost tangential to our theme, but, a minute or two.

Consider Abraham Lincoln. Could anyone think that he lived his life expecting to be elected president and save the Union and finally settle the slavery question and, in the process, become a model of an upright uncommon common man? If he had had such an idea (and from where could he have gotten it?), it would have led him to delusions of grandeur. No, his day to day existence was an experience of living a raw life, very conscious of his social and educational shortcomings.

His continuing resolve was to better his condition; his continuing way of being was goodwill, charitable intent, tender-heartedness, melancholy, a love of fun (all traits that are so well known in him) shot through with a continuing ambition that saw law and politics as its channel, but saw no real outlet or obvious channel for what would really satisfy that ambition. He lived his life having to damp down his expectations to what seemed reasonable, regardless of other things within him that whispered that there were unnamed and unshaped prospects before him. And who would have been able to believe such a destiny as was Abraham Lincoln’s?

Our point concerns not Abraham Lincoln, primarily, but whoever reads (or, for that matter, writes) this. Clear intent is your gyroscope; it will hold your course true even though you cannot see any but the next step ahead.

Now, to continue on the unsuspected aspects of immortality.

Each new incarnation may be regarded as a new soul or as a continuation in new clothing of a pre-existing soul’s existence. Either view is true from a certain point of view, and neither is absolutely true. Neither is the only valid way of seeing it. Those who can see it only one way believe the facts prove that reincarnation does or does not exist, and that the soul does or does not have more than one 3D existence. But, beyond that, there is a further ambiguity, which is what we are attempting to clarify.

A soul is formed (or, if you prefer, resumes its journey in new clothing). It consists of a bundle of strands that the personality, the “ring” that is the 3D soul, holds together for the lifetime. Living that life, it chooses, chooses, chooses, and in the process decides (shapes) what it wishes to be. That is, it chooses which values and traits it wishes to emphasize, to live, and which it chooses to de-emphasize, or fight against, or disown. Depending upon the homogeneity or otherwise of the original mixture of strands, the soul has an easy or a difficult time, holding things together. But at some point it completes its 3D journey. Then what? Or, a better way to put it – what has that soul become, and what has its 3D life done to its constituent strands?

There are at least two ways to answer the question, aren’t there?

As usual.

• One way is to trace what those years of living together has produced that is new (and this is what we have concentrated upon until now)
• The other is to trace what has happened to those individual strands that continue to be individual strands, even as they also become part of something new.

People’s inability or unwillingness to see that both processes co-exist causes much confusion and dissention.

And, as always, I’m hearing, unsaid, “which is why religions etc. have to preach a simplified set of dogmas”; because who is going to be able to redefine everything for the average person who is not particularly interested in such questions, and is not particularly awake to non-3D explanations.

Well, also because religions – including the religion of materialism – are chiefly conducted by people who are not inclined to see things more than any one way. That trait closes them off from any but the most dualistic reading of the way things are.

So, you can see that a person’s decisions in a lifetime help determine the composition of character (call it) that is the result of that lifetime. Thus the soul that results is different in some way from the soul as it was when it entered that life. The combination of strands has lived together. Regardless of your opinion of whether that particular soul existed before the life, it exists now (either for the first time, or in a way altered by the lifetime). But – and this is our new ground here – let’s look at the pre-existing strands themselves. They did not lose their individual identity, living as part of a new bundle. They are still as individual as they ever were – only, remember, “individual” is a relative and not an absolute term.

You have to ask yourself, though, where did that strand come from? Suppose you adopt the view that says Bertram was one strand that went into the making of Frank DeMarco. The “Bertram” that is that strand is actually a form of shorthand representing a reality that might be termed – if it were not impossibly too long to use – “the strands that lived together in a particular place and time and therefore were available to function as a relative unit.”

You might more profitably look at an individual 3D life as a prism working not to diffract but to reconnect. That is, many waveforms entering, one waveform (containing them all) emerging. And each prism-focused lifeform may then enter as one strand into another prism-focused lifeform. Thus each new form may contribute to further developments without losing its own identity. But if you look at that, you see that you are faced with the question, what were these lightforms before they went into the focusing process?

 

What you called our inheritance of lives: I get that it means more than that each life continues to be alive in reference to its own time, but I can see we’re in for some redefinition.

It may become tedious, before we have spelled it out to our own satisfaction. So many changes in viewpoint require continual checking to be sure that people are still on board, and since such checking cannot be done orally, it can only be done by redundancy. Let us begin by using your own strands as example, bearing in mind that, as usual, our explanation is going to be less precise in the beginning, because terms will need to be more carefully defined and delimited as we go along. That means, initially we must use terms loosely, or else you could not follow us.

Rita’s old “To understand A, you must understand B, but…”

It is a fact of life, like alternation of consciousness, or perspective shifts, or gravity. It is just one of the constraints imposed by 3D existence. So, let’s begin where so many explorations begin in your life, with the continuously present but mostly taken for granted presence of David Poynter.

The Welsh journalist and psychic investigator, who I think used the name Peters as his pen name.

His tendencies, many of them, shaped your life, and he was the one who introduced you (at your suggestion) to Joseph Smallwood, remember. His continuing existence within you was manifest to you in London that time, when you experienced his grief and anger when you looked at the war memorial that said, merely, “July 1, 1916.” It was his voice you were able to capture on the tape recorder, standing on Dun I, on Iona. He had an interesting life, of much significance to you, but the life he lived did not cease when that body died. This, you know. It is the nature of its subsequent immortality that is somewhat different than you have been imagining.

Now I am thinking of Voltaire’s sardonic definition of the soul in the Christian concept as “an infinite stick with one end.”

Yes, the idea that a soul could come into existence and then remain in existence forever seemed ridiculous to him. It did not occur to him, perhaps, that this is the nature of creation. Notre Dame, the Roman Colosseum, the Parthenon, the Taj Mahal, even lesser works such as Monticello or some of the architectural masterpieces of Louis Sullivan, did not exist, and then they did. Once they came into existence, they could not cease to exist merely because they were damaged or destroyed. Creation is forever, in that sense, and it is as true of human souls as of intellectual constructions such as architecture or music or theorems.

But aren’t all creations merely the bringing into 3D existence of something that existed in possibility all along? Plato’s archetypes?

There is a difference between potential energy and kinetic energy, between what always might have been and what ever actually was. Everything – hence, anything –exists in potential, but only that which is made manifest in form exists in reality.

Now, you know that’s going to get us into trouble.

It is mostly a matter of slogging through, as usual. Most potential misunderstandings sort themselves out, given persistence and at least a modicum of Beginner’s Mind.

Anything is only potential until it is made manifest. This doesn’t mean, exactly, “until it is put into physical form.” It means, more, until somebody has thought of it. It isn’t the playing or the transcribing or even the initial notation of Beethoven’s Third Symphony that brought it into existence, but Beethoven’s capturing it in his mind. Once he had done that, something new existed in the world, and would have continued to exist even if no one had ever heard it played. Even if he had never written it down (but had it firmly in mind). We have been through the successive levels of manifestation with you before, and more than once.

Yes. Conception, realization, then various levels of sharing with the world.

You took that explanation to be an explanation of the various levels of influence one could have on the world, and that is accurate, but it is also an example of 3D creation of souls. Creation is creation, and it is very little different according to the materials one works with. Bach’s children were his musical works, no less than his physical offspring. Very different materials, very different results. But the same creation according to the laws of creation.

Here is the law that ought to sober you as well as encourage you, given that your entire lives in 3D are lives necessarily filled with creation: Once created, created forever.

But since everything exists in potential, how is our bringing it into manifestation a turning point? I mean, how can bringing anything into 3D existence really matter?

Creation in 3D is not merely material but intellectual and emotional. The non-3D is no less a part of the All-D in which you live than is the 3D, so things that you “merely” think or imagine or envision are no less real than those that can be cobbled together in material reality. That is, the Moonlight Sonata is as real in its intellectual conception (with its emotional properties) as in its notation on paper or its performance on instruments. Non-3D creation is creation, merely of a different order than 3D creation; 3D creation in the non-material (such as ideas) is as real as in the material (such as written manuscript).

Manifesting any given potential is choosing this over that. It is choosing.

Yes, I see. I hadn’t thought of it that way, but it is obvious enough now. What we create is what we prefer.

It is what you prefer to encourage into existence.

Hence the church’s admonition that we may sin through our thoughts, I suppose.

That was the original idea, when it was still realized that to live in 3D is to be an active creator. But when the idea decayed into a continuing test of obedience to a set of rules, you can see that it became an attempt to enforce conformity, rather than a guide to responsible creation.

And in resisting coercion we fell into undisciplined creation without any sense of consequences.

That you did. And that is one of the things we hope to correct.

“As a man thinks, so he is.”

Yes. That didn’t mean, “Think this way, or else.” It meant, “You are what you eat,” intellectually, and, even more, “Your fruits proceed from what you are in essence, not merely from what you choose to manifest.”

Now, consider. Once created, always created. It is true for human 3D lives no less than for human intellectual creations. The reason why you may communicate with Joseph the Egyptian or with Hemingway or Lincoln is not any connection with what you think of as “past” lives, but with a continuing present life. The various categories of lives that we said you could potentially communicate with were spelled out as a way of expanding your concepts. Now it is time to look more clearly at the subject, because to continue to be bound by those concepts would be to be constricted rather than expanded.