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Friday, June 1, 2018

We are interrelating private and public worlds, you see; personal and impersonal forces; free will and circumstance. You in 3D create your reality but not anybody else’s reality. We know that seems paradoxical, and, as always, paradox is a sign that something is being misunderstood somewhere.

Yesterday I had a thought that I figured applies, us acting out of character/

The insight was less an insight than a specific application of what we had been discussing. You realized, “That’s what is going on sometimes,” and yes, it is, sometimes.

You are a bundle of threads in a specific time-place. You are spending your life making decisions as to what you wish to be, or to become, or to continue to be, or to cease to be. This is how you create your character, your bedrock essence. By the end of your life, you have modified the elements you began with, and have molded them into a functioning unit, or haven’t. Either way, you don’t do it in a vacuum. You function amid weather. If we can come up with the proper analogy or metaphor or image, we can make this very clear. Otherwise we will have to hint at it with words.

The image we seek would show the interaction between the individual and the weather that results sometimes in the individual acting “out of character,” so that he or others say he “wasn’t himself.” We will use words and perhaps the image will emerge.

Your life in 3D seems to you internal and external; intuitive and sensory; self and other; subjective and objective. You do create your reality in what you accept and respond to; you don’t in what exists despite your wishes, or what resists your efforts. Surely this is clear by now. Well, then, what happens when inner world and outer world interact, as happens every moment?

I get an image of a whirlpool, but that is too smooth; a hurricane, but that is too ordered; tornado (closer) only too violent.

A swirling interaction, though, yes. Continuing, fluctuating, gusting. That’s close to the image we want.

Not destructiveness, so much as an overwhelming disparity of force, so that the individual must somehow adapt to the vast impersonal forces, for the forces are not going to adapt to it. Storm winds, maybe.

There are places in the world where the wind blows unceasingly from one direction for days, weeks, at a time. There are places where the weather fluctuates moment by moment. There are power spots and centers of calm, places of danger and places of safety. The same individual would experience itself differently in different conditions.

You are affected by the weather even strictly physically (whatever that means). Barometric pressure, heat, humidity, etc., have their effect on the physical organism which means, as well, on the mental / emotional life. Your minds and emotions are not independent of the body. How could they be, and what sense would it make to even have a body, if they were?

There is more we could say, if only our image served better. Weather isn’t bad, but it is too impersonal.

Aha, another flash. It doesn’t include the sense of good and evil forces.

Yes, that’s true. it doesn’t make sense to speak of good or evil in connection with weather. The hurricane winds that destroy an island, or the tornado that tears up a town, are not evil, merely destructive in effect. They do not call up the evil within a person, and that is what we have not yet been able to get across.

What about some environmental factor like a shrill noise, or an annoying static buzz, or something else that riles anyone in the vicinity?

That is closer to it, in a way. The stress here is on the cause-and-effect interaction between “objective, outer” forces and anyone’s “subjective, inner” response.

Music! Ambient music that is either raucous, or soothing, or exciting, or inspiring, or – any of the range of effects music can produce.

Yes. That is a good image, and we can begin with that, next time. Excellent.

You don’t wish to continue, even if our hour is up?

The intervening time will serve to clarify and suggest. It will be easier to continue.

 

Saturday, June 2, 2018

Sometimes the music can drive you mad. Sometimes its sheer volume and intensity and unremitting persistence will beat down resistance, and people do things they don’t even approve of, or don’t remember in other “moods” as they are called.

The world isn’t really divided between good guys and monsters. The difference between the best and the worst is very little, and has more to do with awareness (or lack of it) than with soundness or rottenness. But that is why it is so important to see the intricate and unbreakable connection between inner world and outer, between individual and environment, between one’s own sails and rigging and the weather. We wish we could make it clearer why evil exists and people who do evil, and even intend evil, approve of evil exist, but “evil people” per se do not exist.

A lot of tangled definitions to be remembered, if we are to get and hold your meaning.

Too many, we sometimes think, but that is why educating you is a process rather than an event. Until you come to live these understandings, so that you do not have to make a conscious effort to see in a certain way, you can’t hold it all. However, we can itemize, from time to time, and unpredictably some of you will get it at any given moment.

• That we speak of evil doesn’t mean we accept it as an absolute. We are defining within your perceptions.
• We distinguish between the doing of evil and the being
• You are, remember, communities practicing cohabitation in the process of becoming an entity larger than the comprising threads.
• We speak of background noise, or music, or weather, or vast impersonal forces, and implicit in citing them is the fact of their relationship to you as 3D / non-3D beings.

Now put it together, as best you can. Think your way into it; feel your way into it. You have to be in a certain frame of mind for this to be real and not merely words. If it is just words to you, you will have to wait until it comes alive, and there is little you can do to speed that day. Intend, perhaps. Persevere in intent. Live your ignorance without denying it. Travel hopefully, knowing that intent will be rewarded.

Is that what Jesus meant by “knock and it shall be opened to you”?

He didn’t promise that it would open in thirty seconds. What he was saying was, Righteous persistence wins reward.

My favorite line from the I Ching.

Gee, do you suppose that means something, that the line appealed and gave hope?

Very funny. It is interesting to me – looking over my own shoulder – how often I think in terms of Jesus’s words, even though I don’t sit and read them to keep them in mind.

You did the reading as you did the yearning and the intending. You know the saying you recently came across, “No seed ever sees the flower.” You are on the flowering end of your life, benefitting from the planting and tending of the seed so many decades ago.

Sometimes I feel like, “Well, can’t be long now,” and other times like, “If we wrap it up now, it’ll be something of a waste, it took me so long to get here.” Either way, a hopeful journey, in retrospect. I might have lived it smoother if I had had consistent faith that it would all work out.

That may be said by anybody. The point is to set your intent and live it, for what you intend will determine your possibilities.

If people will sit with what they have been given, here and in their lives, connections will occur and will seat in. If they will not do that, all this will be the equivalent of a novel or an instruction book in how to write a screenplay: words, true words, but not transformation. And transformation is the name of the game. Not, taking a thing and turning it into something else, but assisting the seed in its process of dying to itself so that it may become the flowering.

 

This is pretty long, but I think some people may benefit from overhearing another person’s extraordinary experience. A reader (whose privacy I protect by leaving off his name) recently emailed me asking  if I would be willing to ask questions on his behalf, and added:

“Also, you mentioned on your “Contact” page that thing you like hearing most is firsthand experiences. If you want, I can tell you the story of a certain jaw-dropping mystical experience I had which totally defied the “laws” of “reality” and cemented for me a growing inner knowledge of Unity and my own multidimensional nature.”

I answered that I’d be glad to ask, and would be very interested in his experience.

[From him]

My experience. Sorry, but you’re getting the long version. Don’t know how else to tell it. Here goes.

Well, to start, this is the only time something like this has ever happened to me. A peak experience. I’m tempted to call it “once-in-a-lifetime” but avoid it because to do so may make it true. The story sounds a little paranoid-schizophrenic at times, but all I can say is, no, that’s not it. Through my profession and degrees, I’m fairly qualified to say that, as qualified as anyone is to judge their own sanity. (Though I gather that such officialdom is of little consequence to you… I can’t remember if it was Jane or Seth who called academic degrees “badges of ritualized ignorance.”)

Anyway.

2 nights before: In meditation, I try to contact my connection to the divine, the “sacred inner heart.” I don’t or can’t feel anything, and I feel frustrated, hurt, and rejected.

1 night before: For the only time in my life, and after about a year of craning my neck up to look on a near-nightly basis, I see a UFO in the sky. (Well, could be our own government, but whatever. It was not plane, helicopter, or drone. 3 lights flying up extremely high in triangle formation, each pulsing its light in unison.)

The day of: I go to a stand-up comedy event with my friend. I talk to the girl stationed at the front to admit people and tell her I’ve already bought my ticket, I selected Will Call, I ask her where Will Call is. Even though this is her whole job, she’s never heard of Will Call. So our conversation is like: “WIll call.” “Will call?” “Yeah, will call. Where’s will call?” “Will call? You’re saying that you will call?” “No, to pick up the tickets: will call.” “Will call? Your name is Will Call?” On and on like that, a real Who’s On First scenario. So we end up saying back and forth to each other the words “Will call” at least 10 times.

Also, on the way back from the event, I forget to put my lights on. So gradually as it gets darker more and more other cars on the road notice and are flashing me. For some reason I run through every possible reason for this except the most obvious one. So we’re both driving home like dumbasses going “They’re definitely trying to communicate something! They’re trying to give us a message! What are they trying to communicate? Do we have a cat on the roof?”

(I only piece it together after the fact that the above 4 events all seem to be a big drum-roll/ countdown with the message: “You’re about to get a return call from the universe.”)

Now, at this point I’m home. 10pm ish. Walking around outside by myself, in the area around my neighborhood, listening to a Seth audiobook. (As I am wont to do.)

The inner side of the experience is this, and this is going on throughout the whole outer side to follow: In the Seth book, he gives directions to contact your higher self. Imagine yourself as a single cell in a larger being, imagine sending that larger being energy and receiving energy back from the being. I do this, and wow, I feel overwhelmed with this feeling of divine love. Never have felt such an upswell of unconditional love or positive emotion of any kind without an apparent objective stimulus. So, feeling this, I almost lose touch with my surroundings, so I’m laying on the grass shirtless (it was a hot night), just basking in this cosmic love. I would probably look quite foolish if a neighbor were to walk by, but I’m not in the mood to care.

I continue my walk, on this emotional high. And in the sky I think I see a UFO. Not sure, but it’s suspicious. I have the feeling I’m really about to meet some ETs, so now my elation is mixed with real fear, because at this moment it seems like an immanent possibility. And I quickly realize that the thought of actually meeting an ET now is quite scary and overwhelming. Well, no flying saucer materializes, so I continue my walk. But still I’m keyed up with this mix of divine love and mystical fear. And I have the sense that something is telepathically trying to communicate with me. Of course, every other second I’m thinking “No, that’s crazy” but I’m persistently getting that impression and I’m communicating back. With what exactly, I’m not sure, but mostly I think I had it framed as “ETs”, physical or non-.

This maybe-real telepathic communication continues, I still feel on the edge of something contacting me, I’m on the lookout, and I come to an area on the path where I have a view of a high treeline at the edge of some woods, about 70 feet away. I see a small, bright, yellowish light floating high in the trees! In a position where I can’t see any natural reason for a light to be. I’m extremely excited at this point, and I telepathically say something like “Are you really there?” And instantly when I say that, a second light appears next to the first, a gust of wind comes toward me from the direction of the two lights, and as it reaches me and whooshes by all the crickets beneath my feet start singing. I feel the presence of something. I telepathically agree with whoever this is, “Let’s meet back at my house and talk.” As I start walking back I think, “Holy shit, can this be real?” And then instantly after thinking that, two bats swoop down straight for me and circle my head twice, inches away from my face. On the short 5-minute walk back to my house, directly on the path I always take, animal after animal is stationed like a breadcrumb trail. A deer. A cat. A fox.

I get to my backyard and I’m thinking, Wow, Holy shit, the ship is coming. I’m expecting my telepathic guest, whoever or whatever it is. Feeling connected but also some fear because, holy shit what’s happening. The sky is mostly clear, except I notice a bit in the distance a medium-sized cloud, wide enough to cover the area taken up by around 4-6 houses. This “cloud” seems to make a beeline for me sitting there on the grass in my backyard looking up. It seems to come over to me fast, then pauses directly above me/my house for 15 minutes. As this is going on, there’s all this wind and what feels like “energy.” The cloud is stationed above me now, and I clearly see throughout the whole thing flashing lights. All throughout the cloud, as if it were filled with hundreds of fireflies. At this point, I literally think “I must be dreaming.” It’s the only time in my life I have believed it was more likely that I was dreaming than that what I was witnessing was reality. I check, and nope, I’m definitely awake, extremely awake.

After about 15 minutes, the cloud starts moving again and flies off fairly quickly, like it came. I then tried to channel whoever or whatever this was that I was communicating with, because why not. Normally I feel a lot of self-doubt with channeling and it feels like I’m making it up. This time, I got into a trance and felt I was just being fed one word at a time, not knowing what the next would be, not knowing at all if what I was saying was actually forming real sentences and coherent thoughts. Later, upon transcribing, indeed it made sense.

Of all the elements of this whole experience, the channeling part is what I put the least stock in, partly because the resulting material feels a bit too generic for my credulity, but I’ll just give one quote from it for completeness:

“Your selves are loved, protected, and fed by the grace of “us over here” all the time–meaning really only an army of what is essentially You. Yet we are alive and active in deeper parts of yourself: loving, healing, bringing the light. I can’t stress enough the importance of generating for God, or what you could call the Most Whole Overself. This being is at once rapidly evolving and eternally One, and you are reflections of that. Take the time to notice the ways in which your body generates physical manifestations such as touch, taste, hearing. And you will know what God feels in all the parts of His–Its–soul. We are essentially one and yet many. Your continuous self is continuous with All That Is. Never is there need to be frightened for you are whole and insoluble to the everlasting nth degree!”

Oh and I should mention. Ever since that night (about 8 months ago), starting the day after and continuing up to the present, I’ve had a new sense installed. Don’t know what else to call it.

Basically, every time my mind/heart is in a place of peace and stillness, I get a warm pleasant pressure/tingling sensation in my 6th chakra/ 3rd eye area. The more of an intensely peaceful state, the more intense this feeling gets. On the medium-to-high end, it is not subtle in the slightest. It’s unmistakable, like to the point of being the strongest, most noticeable sensation in the whole body/mind.

The way I interpret this “new sense” is something like a consciousness frequency level indicator. As if I said to the universe: “Could you please give me a concrete way to surmise moment by moment whether I’m in the right state of mind for my goal of awakening?” And that’s how I experience it, like a constant feedback system to let me know whether I’m on the beam. When it’s active, I’m instantly 50% more calm and focused, and any anxiety I had been feeling disappears. Sometimes I will intentionally “turn it on” (which I have taught myself how to do) during a therapy session with a client, and it seems to instantly make me more calm, present, and helpful.

For me, this “new sense” is the most evidentiary element of the whole experience. A parting gift from the universe. If it weren’t for me continuing to experience it on a daily basis, I probably would have written off the whole experience by now as overactive imagination.

[I responded as follows]:

This was worth waiting for! A couple of comments first on your remarkable experience. (May I share it with my lists, omitting your name?)

• I only piece it together after the fact

The fact that you only pieced it together after the fact ought to help reassure you that it happened to you, not by you.

• … Seth …. Imagine yourself as a single cell in a larger being, imagine sending that larger being energy and receiving energy back from the being.

I can think of no better way to destroy the obstructive assumption that you would somehow have to overcome distance, would have to “go somewhere” in order to contact your higher self. And that it worked, you can not be in doubt.

• … the thought of actually meeting an ET now is quite scary and overwhelming.

The difference between daydreaming, or thinking of something in the abstract, and confronting the possibility for real. Very graphic and concise description. MY anticipation of change in my upcoming Gateway program, in 1992, was accompanied by a bit of dread, as well, which a psychic friend of mine assured me was actually a good sign, that something within me was worried as to what might happen to it as a result of the change. That is, it was a sign that something inside knew full well that it wouldn’t be a case of “nothing happened.”

• This maybe-real telepathic communication

Yeo, that’s the way it works. You can’t be sure it is real, you can’t dismiss it out of hand. You have to go with maybe. Another indicator of a non-imaginary and non-normal experience.

• I’m expecting my telepathic guest, whoever or whatever it is.

You couldn’t know what to expect, but you – something within you that couldn’t be denied – did expect.

• … it feels like I’m making it up.

“Probably I’m just making it up” is a phrase heard so often in Monroe debriefs! It has become an in joke, really, it is heard so often. I have come to think that the phrase is a sure sign that something real happened, because the person saying it can’t deny that something happened, but had no handle on it, and knows only that s/he didn’t deliberately invent it, but is not ready to claim it as an actual, valid, occurrence.

• … channeling part is what I put the least stock in, partly because the resulting material feels a bit too generic for my credulity…

In 30 years of experience, I find that one never really knows at the time to what degree an experience is “mine” and to what degree “other.” Once I ceased trying to be sure of what one could never be sure about, it released a brake on my ability to communicate.  Given that you and whoever you communicate with are sharing a temporary joint mind, the results are going to come out in a flavor somewhat you (because after all it has to proceed through your linguistic centers, except for images) and somewhat other (in that the content will reveal itself to be other than you would have expected, though that recognition of otherness may not occur until after you are done communicating).

One thing for sure: Don’t judge the content by your expectations either before or after the communication. There is no reason for you to assume that a message will conform to your expectations, and plenty of reasons to be unsurprised when it doesn’t.

• … had a new sense installed.

That’s a very good way to think of it. Trust it and cherish it, and it would be as well to have a fiduciary attitude toward it, something between reverence and stewardship. It is, after all, what you wanted.

• … consciousness frequency level indicator

Not only a valuable sense, but a concise and helpful name for it, very non-woowoo.

• …continuing to experience it on a daily basis

“Use it or lose it.”

• I probably would have written off the whole experience by now as overactive imagination.

Good that you don’t. It will help move you to another world, with wider boundaries and greater possibilities, a la Thoreau’s statement in Waldon.

[From him]: After saying it was okay to share, he added this comment on my answers :

• Once I ceased trying to be sure of what one could never be sure about, it released a brake on my ability to communicate.

Recently, thanks to the Rita books, I have made a big step in this direction. Getting it that “this side” and “the other side” are One changed things for me. I had imagined channeling/contacting spirits being a major feat requiring superhuman psychic discipline. In light of your/Rita’s work I realized there’s no separation, everyone is right here, closer than my nose. No more difficult than picking up a phone and listening to the voice of whomever I call.

Also, reading between the lines it appeared to me that your reception style does not involve hearing words pop clearly into your head, and so once I applied this to my own attempts, I realized that the access was right there waiting, it just wasn’t in the form I had anticipated.

 

Friday, March 16, 2018

All we are doing in this small series is coordinating two ways of seeing the world, so that they may illumine each other.

The large-scale view is “What is the structure of life as we know it; what is The Big Picture?”

The small-scale view – not in any way less important – is, “What is my part in the grand scheme of things?”

One says, What is the overall picture. The other says, How do I make sense of what I experience locally.

The point is, we want this to be intellectually satisfying (and challenging) and no less emotionally engaging. We are for building the castle in the air and putting the foundation under it, a la Thoreau. It has much less to do with any of you at this time than on what is to come.

You are providing us with a way to see that will clear the way for new perceptions, hence new experiences. This developmental process will broaden with time beyond what we here and now experience. And a part of that rejiggering is to call our attention to the living elements of the old mythos.

Well – that is one way of looking at it. Let’s put it this way. Seth’s major impact upon society will be the casual and effective undermining of the contemporary position of meaninglessness. His work – which, notice, has yet to reach its full effectiveness, being barely 50 years on the scene – came at a time when the decay of the old mythos was clear to some (not yet to most) but no way forward was indicated. Seth’s intent and effect was to help clear the ground by creating an intellectual path forward. You see?

I think you are saying that Seth’s work was for the people whose intuition led them to recognize the truth, but that most people will take much longer to appreciate what the early adopters got intuitively.

Like Carl Jung’s work, or the work of any true pioneer, it is mostly unintelligible at first, because people necessarily come to it while functioning from their precedent assumptions, which makes it difficult to apprehend or incorporate anything sufficiently different. Only with the passage of time does some of that new influence move into the culture, hence giving new people a vantage point closer to that of the pioneer like Jung, or like Picasso in art, say. The slow diffusion of the innovator’s influence makes it easier for later-comers to see what is there to be seen.

Necessarily, therefore, the innovator’s initial influence will be limited, in two senses.

• in the number of people who can apprehend it,
• in the amount of his innovation they can apprehend.

Initially, only a few will be able to follow, and those few will be unlikely to see the accomplishment in its full extent. There is nothing wrong with this; it is how innovation diffuses without unnecessary upheaval. Note we said without unnecessary upheaval. That is not that same as saying, without any upheaval at all.

But when someone comes in and accomplishes something, you may be sure of two things. It will not have been finished, and it will not be continued in exactly the same form as it was begun. So Jung said, “Thank God I am Jung and not a Jungian,” and Seth would have said something similar.

Understand this well. Imitation is the opposite of innovation. To imitate one who has brought something new is not flattery and is not contribution. To continue the work, it is necessary to continue in the spirt of the original, which was fearless exploring of the path which presented itself. Jung’s path, Seth’s, anybody’s, will not be yours. Your path will arise out of your own humdrum boring unsatisfying puzzling life, just as everybody else’s did.

I think we have the idea.

But it is easy to lose sight of the fact, because admiration for the innovator, combined with self-deprecation and undervaluation of the familiar, may tempt you to unknowingly leave the pathless path of the explorer, and wind up instead following what seems to be the path of the admired predecessor.

So, to return to the primary point. The old mythos, call it the Age of Pisces, centered around a way of seeing the world that no longer leads forward because imitation is not pioneering. You see?

I do. The content of the Age of Pisces was an advance as long as it was a pioneering. As soon as it became an imitation of itself it began to die.

That’s a little too broad, but it will serve as orientation. The Age of Aquarius will explore a different world because it will bring new eyes to old scenes. What it will not do is bring a return to the Garden of Eden. It will not bring the events of the Apocalypse, the last battle against evil and all that. It will pose old problems and opportunities in new guise, and will pose new problems and opportunities, arising from new ways of seeing.

And – here is the nub of it; here is why we went over the sins and virtues glancingly along the way – new ways of seeing do not come about by ruthlessly discarding everything that has been seen and experienced prior to date. They come about by seeing those same things with new eyes. Note that: New eyes, but not new facts.

So, to throw away the spiritual heritage of humanity – the scriptures, the philosophies, and the unallocated wisdom, call it, that doesn’t fit into any of these structures but nonetheless has captured truth – would be not so much pioneering as imitation-by-rejection.

The Age of Aquarius is going to be much more head-centered than the Age of Pisces. Knowledge, not just belief. Does that mean it would be wise to discard what the human heart learned, these two thousand years?

At the same time, the past 500 years began a transition. What is the scientific and materialist revolution of the past 250 years but a seeking for truth outside of religious structures and strictures? What was the Protestant revolution that enabled and preceded the scientific revolution by 250 years but a seeking for truth in individual conscience rather than institutional consensus?

The dominant characteristic and the rebellious counter-characteristics are all to be accounted for, subsumed, in what is to be created, only they may be unrecognizable, in that they will be seen in a different light.

So, you see? You can’t throw out science, or materialism, or piety, or religion, or art, or poetry, or human passion or anything, if you wish to understand life and your part in life. You don’t need to be able to see ahead of time what the new mythos will  be – which is just as well, given that you wouldn’t be able to! – but you can live your truth, discovering it as you go, and this will serve you as 3D individual, and you as All-D individual, and you as collocation of strands from various epochs (who of course will change as you change) and you as part of a 3D first-tier civilization that will be the established “given” for future generations. That’s enough of a life-purpose, wouldn’t you say?

 

Wednesday, March 14, 2018

You are receiving feedback from unknown individuals, indicating that this material has been helpful to them over many years, unsuspected by you.

You mean the woman who wrote that she discovered my blog years ago.

Yes. For you and for everyone, the situation is the same: You never know the full effect of what you do; neither do you necessarily know what is your “real” work and what is “just filling the time.” The kindness you extend to a stranger – possibly only a passing smile – may be used on behalf of that person at a critical time, you can’t know. The slightest thing you do, for well or for ill, may have a great effect on another, and then who can estimate the effects of the changed other, or those changed by those who have been changed? Your opportunities to do good or evil are constant, extensive, and their effects usually veiled from your conscious 3D awareness.

Again, this is said for all to hear! There is no alibi in saying, “I am only an unimportant person who cannot change the world.” Of course you change the world! Your presence changes the world. Even if you sat in a corner all day, you would be changing the world by what you didn’t do but might have done. This fallacy of insignificance is a major crippler of potential, the “what’s-the-use” factor.

In  your day to day lives, do you want to spread disappointment or hope and confidence? Give them your case history.

Yes, I was just thinking about that, big surprise.

In late 2005, I left active participation in Hampton Roads Publishing Company and thought I was going to write a book (a book)  about healing and guidance. I got sidetracked, so I thought, into talking to Smallwood, then other specific entities, as opposed to “The Guys Upstairs” that I had gotten used to talking to over the previous dozen years or so. This was, I thought, entirely private, but I shared it with the Voyagers Mailing List, a Monroe-oriented list that I had indirectly helped create, which is a different example of the same point you’re making, come to think of it.

No reason not to mention that.

Okay. I was on a list in the early ’90s that centered on Castaneda, and got to talking about Bob Monroe. List owner Tony Sanders got interested in Monroe and created VML even before he himself came to do a Gateway.

Unintended consequences.

Very much unintended, though of course I was delighted. Your point, I take it, is that I touched Tony, Tony created VML and that list touched many, and of course Bob Monroe touched not only me and others who actually met him, but many thousands who did not.

However, stay with the obscurity theme.

So, in 2003 I had become friends with Melynn Allen, at a TMI program, and in March 2007 she emailed me that I should start a blog because that is what I was doing in effect on VML anyway. So I did, and now this morning I find that a woman I have never met has been receiving assistance from that blog which only existed because Dirk Dunning and I extended a kindness to Melynn in the 2003 program, and so on and so forth.

The theme should be clear enough. At no time did you see the importance of your day to day activity that you were not concentrating on, that you did as an overflowing of what you are. And neither did Dirk, and neither did Melynn, and neither did Tony, and neither did Bob.

And Bob was helped in crucial ways by, for example, Charles Tart. He was the only academic (so far as I know) to encourage him. He encouraged Bob Monroe when no one else in academia would have. So, anyone touched by Bob Monroe, no matter how indirectly, owes something to Charles Tart.

It is a good example. And Bob probably did not seem to Charley like the main reason for his own existence, nor the major thing he was there to accomplish. They touched, and enriched each other’s lives, and each went on to do his own life’s work, perhaps never really knowing the extent of his own effect on the other.

It is an endless chain, and any given link would have its own chains stretching in various directions. So you wrote your books and wrote your blog and even in doing what you are concentrating on, have little idea of the links connecting to links connecting to links. And this is disregarding the parts of your life you aren’t concentrating on. Friendship, family, casual meetings, remarks on Facebook, name it.

You all exist in a mostly invisible but indestructible web of relationships, and always will. As we say, the alibi of “I’m not important” does not wash. The true distinction, and it is not an important one from our view, is visible v. invisible. Each has its advantages.

To round off the theme, we should add that there is no final accounting, no end of the chains. While there is life, there are consequences, and consequences of consequences. Those who you have changed, even ever so slightly, by your good or evil actions remain changed as the starting place for their future beyond your interaction.

I get that you are saying, not that they are changed forever, but that the consequences that flow from any one such contact flow from a person who was – slightly or significantly – changed by it.

Yes. Actions have consequences, and, by the way, thoughts and intentions are as potent as overt actions, for remember these interactions take place in All-D, though you perceive them (usually) only within 3D limitations. So, even if you never meet the person again, still you did meet, and perhaps neither of you is unchanged. All the rest of your lives may be affected.

And presumably other lives to come, we being strands.

What is “past life influence” or “Karma” or ingrained tendency, if not that?

 

Tuesday, March 13, 2018

It should be clear from experience that no one’s life is lived as merely a dramatization of what s/he already is. Life is conflict of forces, and if the conflict were only exteriorization of what is there already from the past – well, how did it get there in the past?

This is just common sense, but common sense applied in an area often subject to absence of common sense, due to the prevalence of speculations, logical conclusions from inadequate premises and data, and unrecognized prejudices and preferences.

You have been on a very long guided tour of a way of seeing life that emphasized life as a working-out of existing problems, possibilities, tendencies, etc. We are now allowing the pendulum to swing to the other extreme, that of the world as you do not exemplify or animate it.

I can see the polarity, though I can’t say I gave it any thought.

We were busy rearranging your view of yourselves as being your own universe, so to speak. If we now move to discuss your position vis a vis the rest of reality, we beg you not to immediately forget every insight you have learned about yourselves. Instead, fold it all together.

I got an image there of island universes, vast swirling clouds of stars existing in relative isolation, yet seen – via a change in scale, as part of a vaster whole.

No, center.

Trying again. We have been described as individuals who are yet communities. We have been told that this is true at every level: “As above, so below.” Thus the collection of strands that is an individual is, in effect, a community learning to function as an individual. That individual, in turn, is part of a larger community. And now you intend to concentrate less on our internal constitution and more on our external interrelation.

Isn’t that a better description of the very clear visual you were given?

It is. Always a continual reminder, to make haste slowly.

So now you see the beginning of connecting our discussion of the vast impersonal forces in the universe, with our correction of various ideas about your lives in and out of the 3D world. With so many definitions – mostly not conscious, hence not easily corrected – how can anyone expect such understandings to be conveyed by means of a simple logical exposition?

In other words, that’s why understandings of the world are carried by myths rather than textbooks.

Correct. But for those to whom myth is evidence of ignorance and superstition, a lengthy explanation will be necessary, or nothing can be done. But after the explanation, you will find it easier and more productive to remember it in terms of myth.

I am beginning to see it. Myth is a dense collection of symbolic representations, each very dense in itself. Myth holds relations between qualities.

Only, don’t limit your idea of myths to those of the ancient Romans, or the Egyptians, or to the Christian religion. Human intelligence connects via myth; myth expresses and also shapes your reality, so don’t imagine that you are not living by, and amid, myth. Myth when still living is so all-encompassing that it appears to be straightforward description of reality. Obvious, evident, description. But myth, for all that.

What John Anthony West called the Church of Progress, for one.

Well, more what the Church of Progress took – takes – for reality.

I thought maybe we were going to list a few of the contemporary invisible myths, but we aren’t, are we.

No, and it is not myths plural, but myth singular. To make an economic and ideological analogy, capitalism and communism are not separate but part of one myth, each choosing different parts to emphasize and exemplify. Both believe in the primacy of economic and material facts and are blind to the larger reality beyond. But taken together, the myth they share is only part of a larger myth outside of which neither could exist, and inside of which both become apparent as alternate choices.

And once a myth loses its quality of appearing self-evident, it loses all power.

That is sort of reversing cause and effect, or seeing only one part of a reciprocating process, but yes.

I come back to what Carl Jung said: The gods never reinhabit the temples they have once abandoned.

Perhaps now you can see why this must be so. Once a myth has lost its ability to enchant, it cannot be re-adopted by an act of will.

“Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the dream?”

That’s one context. Another, closer to home, would be your own experience of the Catholic church.

As a boy I experienced it almost in a medieval sense, alive, undoubted, somehow not contradicting the reality around me. Then came a sort of halfway position (the halfway position being rebelliousness, I suspect, as one only fights against that which has one still struggling in its toils). Now I am entirely outside the myth and could not “recover the gift of faith,” as the good sisters would say, even if I wanted to. What is dead to me is dead to me. Some it will serve into the future, nonetheless, as no doubt some families continued the Roman worship well into the Christian era. But when an individual emerges from within the myth, there is no going back.

No, and of course that is a good thing, but there is no need to forget or repudiate the truths told by the discarded myth merely because you are now living in the light of common day, so to speak. Only, you will then consciously or, more probably, unconsciously walk into a new myth to order your life, for no one can life without a myth, even – as it was for Sartre – a myth of meaninglessness.

So we proceed to create our own myth.

It cannot be consciously created. It can only be intuited, lived into existence. And nobody has more than a small part in something so large and significant. One planet – one moon! – does not a solar system make, much less a galaxy or an island universe. Still, it is not a matter of size or weight but of – color, let’s say, or taste. In other words, one’s contribution to the myth is more a matter of quality than any quantity.

I get that. Columba’s life on Iona helped shape not the central Christian myth, perhaps, but the part of the myth that refers to a human living in it.

That is a serviceable shorthand. We do not pursue it more carefully only because that would be a side-trail, though one of interest. Only, this is enough for now. As a last word, lest we leave a mistaken impression: We are not talking about deliberately creating a new myth for the world. No one could do that. But what is possible is to help others see as clearly as possible, and in the process the myth will emerge on its own, will capture us, and free us to be more ourselves.

 

[A session that came in sort of sideways, and then went on far longer than usual.]

Sunday, March 11, 2018

A dream. He is at his desk. His superior comes by. He realizes he can’t do his job any more, at least he’s afraid that’s true, and is pretty sure it is. He tells her he is getting things ready in his mind, because he doesn’t want to jump in prematurely, as he used to do when younger. She accepts that – at least apparently, but maybe really, too – and leaves him alone. But he is in white-hot panic.

Preview of coming attractions? Flashback to earlier days? Analogy to Hemingway’s last years? All of the above?

I never had the confidence I would have needed, to accomplish what I was nonetheless impelled to attempt. And then I not only didn’t have the confidence, but was discouraged by the feedback as well, and did not have the confidence I would have needed to press on regardless. I needed brashness, or calmly implacable purpose, and instead I had – what? A perpetual feeling for what might be the way?

[Unexpectedly, for basically I had been writing to myself:] Don’t be so hard on yourself.

And within I had a traitor as well, someone always saying, “You can’t, you shouldn’t, you shouldn’t have, you don’t deserve it, you aren’t worthy.”

Maybe everyone has such angels, and maybe everyone has to decide whether to listen to them.

Maybe so. It didn’t make my life any easier, nor any more productive, to not know what to do.

Maybe nobody knows.

That isn’t how it looks.

Look at how some people look at your life. To them it appears a miracle of good fortune, natural gifts, luck possibly unmerited. Just as you have thought of the lives of others.

So – what? It’s just a trick of perspective, how I’m feeling?

It is a feeling, one that may be overcome by doing the work you can do, while you can do it, rather than being overwhelmed with sorrow that you did not do what maybe you could have done and maybe you could not have done. Which leaves you happier, doing what you can, or lamenting what you cannot?

Am I supposed to put this out in public, as well?

Everybody has his own path, or non-path, and breaks trail in his own way, shaping his life in the process. But it’s more about breaking the trail than about getting to the destination, for there is no destination, ultimately, only traveling.

I’ll think about it. Meanwhile, shall we continue?

That is just what we have been doing here. If we are going to produce something of use to people, it can only be something that marries all the high-flying speculation to the slogging through the mud. Conflicts, emotional overwhelms, depression, despair, hatred – all the expression within a life of forces beyond control: It is real, is it not? It is to be explained. It is to be placed into context. You don’t want – we don’t want! – one more representation of human life as if you were calculating machines (homo economicus) or reasoning beings, or ideologically determined ones, or pawns in the hands of God or the devil. Neither descriptive extreme is helpful. Only both extremes of any range, all extremes of all ranges, if it could be done, will help anybody face and transmute his own private despair.

Is everyone in despair, then?

It is not a question of everyone, nor of all the time. It is a question of helping those who can be helped, when they need the help.

I read years ago that greatness consists of touching both extremes at once.

Isn’t that what your heroes have in common? Hemingway particularly?

I have had many heroes over the years, and I notice that they have changed. That is, the qualities I value most – as embodied in individual lives – have changed within me, so that the heroes of one time become merely estimable men.

Hero-worship is a useful and a limiting tool, both. Examination of one’s own life may be done at any of several levels, and the more levels, and the more in relation one to another, the more productive the insights. Only, no one can understand one’s own life without feeling it.

And as it said in the movie “Ordinary People,” feelings don’t always tickle.

No indeed. But feelings alone, examination of events and motivations alone, treating your life as if it were lived in isolation – as one usually does – produces a curious weightless distortion, leaving the picture floating in air.

I’d better go start the coffee. I get the sense that although we’ve been going more than half an hour, the most important part is about to begin.

Observe how your mood lightened as you had the prospect of productive work. It is meaninglessness and drift that make people’s lives torment, and isn’t that precisely what we have been trying to help you dispel in others? And by the way it is very important that you not let them put you on a pedestal (thus creating a very convenient gap which they can use to excuse themselves from making their own efforts) if only by omission.

Not everything is anyone else’s business, let alone everyone’s.

No, but the fact that dirty laundry exists is all that’s needed. Everybody will have their own secrets, their own shortcomings, regrets, shames, embarrassments to conceal. They’ll understand very well, and, you’re right, the specific contents of anyone else’s skeletons in the closet is nobody else’s business.

And we are 45 minutes in, but on the other hand the coffee is at hand. So, we may proceed for some time if you need to.

Again, notice.

I do. I don’t know why I don’t spend all my time creating, either this way or another.

But you no longer have the energy you did when you were young. It is an inevitable process, so it becomes a matter of using what you have, in the light of your experiences, to do so more efficiently. The results may be more or less the same, for quite a while.

“Old age and treachery can defeat youth and skill,” they say in tennis.

A better analogy would not involve competition with others, nor even with oneself, but would express how the compensating knowledge and wisdom of age may keep up with, and often outdo, the sheer energy and impetus of youth.

As we were saying, your lives may be examined as if in a vacuum, and often are. Or they may be examined in the light of the times they were lived in: a “life and times of” book of someone famous. Or, they may be examined from inside (autobiography) or from outside (biography) or, very rarely, from a spiritual perspective. Even the words “spiritual perspective” scarcely mean anything to your time.

No, it sounds like The Lives of the Saints.

Now, this is a slight digression, but a relevant one, perhaps. Tell of Adomnan’s Life of Columba.

I bought it when I was on Iona, 15 years ago, and I like it very much, but it struck me how different it is to the way any biography would be written today, or even, almost could be written today. The things that scholars value so much as facts don’t interest Adomnan at all. When Columba was born, where, the name of his dentist (so to speak), the family tree, the record of his life chronology – none of that interests Adomnan. What does interest him is to show why Columba was held in such high regard; what qualities he possessed and how they manifested. The physical facts that enter the narrative are wholly subsumed in that purpose. And what we are left with, I recognized very well. It was a straight recounting of what might, I see, be called “the spiritual facts,” if the phrase be properly understood.

You should say a little more.

My own experiences, and those of my friends, especially those centering around our Monroe Institute experiences, if only because those combine community with specific group and individual endeavors understood within a common context. What specifically happens is often less important than what it indicates, what it illustrates or hints at or provides feedback to or encouragement for. And I think that’s what I find so simpatico in the viewpoint I read into the life Adomnan wrote. He sees the way I do, although his is firmly Christian in a seventh-century way that is not available 14 centuries later.

All right. Now, take a moment to gather your strength, and center, and we’ll see how far we got.

Okay. We have over ten pages – and our 65 minutes – already. But I take it that you have something specific in mind. [Pause.]

Proceed.

To examine what is called the spiritual heritage of mankind is not without its value, and may be done in any of various moods and methods. In-depth examination of any one religion’s scripts and traditions will lead in one direction. Comparative reading and study among many will lead in a different direction. Skimming or deep immersion, in either case, will, similarly, lead in different directions. Learning in any of these ways, and then actively relating them to one or more philosophies or disciplines, similarly, will lead in various directions. Will Durant leads one way, Carl Jung another, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and Emerson each in his own direction.

Of course, nothing worth doing is ever done in the spirit of imitation. Of emulation, yes, but not of imitation. You see the distinction?

Yes. Imitation tries to be someone else. Emulation tries to live up to the best in someone else.

Well expressed.

Yes, I’m a little surprised myself. I didn’t know that until I said it.

Probably you’re just making it up.

Clearly. So –

So in the days to come that you will not live long to see, new ways of seeing will produce a new type of history, a new biography, a new spiritual memoir, that will not have existed because they could not have been created out of the conscious vision of the world that is passing away. We are not here talking about a project for you nor your friends; we are talking about how you may reshape the boundaries and possibilities of your lives by absorbing this material and transmuting it into whatever it is that you, yourself, living where and when and how you do, produce when you incorporate your own being into it.

That will sound a little backwards, inserting ourselves into the understanding.

Seem, perhaps, but not be. It is said correctly, and the work needed to rearrange your minds to absorb it is work that will make it yours.

Now. There is a problem. Over 25 years, you have been led from the more commonly accepted view of things (your view may have been unusual, but it was well within the common stream) into something actually new even though seemingly an echo of things that have been said. It is too much to expect others to retrace that path, set out in how many books?

 I don’t know. Muddy Tracks, Chasing Smallwood, Sphere and Hologram, Rita’s World, A Place to Stand, Awakening from the 3D World – six or seven, anyway.

Nobody is going to go about living your life again, so it would be as well to produce another precis.

And that can’t be done this way? Is that what I get?

We’ve been telling you right along. But here is what we’re adding now: To write a book is to fix your understanding in time, and so the objective becomes to render each previous book out of date; otherwise you only imitate yourself. The previous books remain as stepping stones, but perhaps ultimately they will be of little importance except (big “except,” however!) to show others a way that the pathless path may be walked, in hope of encouraging them to do their own journeying in their own manner.

So now that you are aware that we intend to weave your lives-stories into the larger story of life lived among the vast impersonal forces of the universe, you see two things perhaps.

• One, you must be willing to give up an unpredictable part of what you believe and understand and think you know;
• two, you must live your lives as bridges from what you were to what you are becoming, even while realizing that you are what you are; you express what you express, which is a very different thing.

And after an hour and a half, that is enough for the moment.

 

Friday, March 24, 2023

6:35 a.m. Finished re-reading Jefferson in Power, skipping somewhat, and am moved to ask a question – not rhetorically – that has often puzzled me. (In fact, I suspect prodding, here.) What do I get out of so much immersion in history, given that I also see life as only a dream in a world made of mind-stuff? It’s all important somehow, I can feel that, but – Why? How?

Gentlemen? How has a lifetime of reading and daydreaming history served me? What is it for? Why is it important? Counting from about age 11 or 12 (Daniel Boone and the Opening of the Wilderness) and certainly from my introduction to Abraham Lincoln by age 13, I have spent what, 65 years, immersed in history, and then in alternative history and pre-history. In other words, all studies that take the 3D world seriously. Yet something within me knew there was more than meets the eye, and gradually I came to see that what meets the eye isn’t at all what really is.

I don’t want to point the question, and thus curtail the answer. So, I’ll leave it at this. That’s the background. Commentary and clarification, please.

Within the context of a dram, all is meaningful, is it not? Why would you expect that it would be different in the case of the larger dream that is 3D life?

Let’s put it this way: It is in geology that you will find the stabilizers of the dream, and in your individual and collective choosings that you will find the plot and characters of the dream narrative.

I get that you are going to try something different here. Verse?

Not quite. But your brother pointed out that your recent publications of your journey-notes were like poetry and evoked responses. Let’s see how that goes.

[After the fact, I added bullets]

• Life is but a dream; hence, more than 3D, or rather,
• 3D is more than appears.
• External is internal, objectified; hence, drama plays out at an observable distance.
• Every kingdom plays its part in the dream: mineral, vegetable, animal, human, celestial. Nothing omitted, nothing extra.
  • Mineral conveys stability
  • Vegetable provides expression of life, of living, of growth and decay
  • Animal shows and enables the individual element separating from, cooperating with, the overarching whole.
  • Human adds consciousness of self to the rest, and sees in the 3D something of the context as well as the manifest.
  • Celestial maintains the 3D in the matrix of non-3D realities.
• No one individual, no one group, can know everything, specialize in everything, stretch itself to encompass everything. Hence, all views are partial views, not comprehensive.
• Yet, all together are part of one thing, of course non-3D as much as (if not more so than) 3D. One might say that any one individual or group serves as one reporter, scanning its own chosen field and forwarding the information (as well as receiving reactions to the forwardings).
• Therefore, any one individual or group may concern itself with what it will, and how can the result be irrelevant? If you are called to do something, to focus your attention on this rather than that, how can the call be an irrelevance, or a whim?

So much for why a thing may concern you: It is enough to know that it concerns you; perhaps the why cannot be explained, or at any rate will not be explained. But beyond the question of why this or that is important to any one person or group, how is it important at all? The answer should be obvious.

It sort of feels obvious, though I couldn’t yet state it plainly. I’d say the 3D world is how the world-soul, the all-that-is, battles things out.

Why not think of it as where the all-that-is thinks things out, envisages, daydreams, blue-skys, what-ifs?

That’s an interesting way to look at it.

Life is but a dream. Does a dream feature real battles, or dramas? Is it intended to engage you physically, or emotionally? Think on this.

3D life feels plenty real.

How could it not? It is real within its own terms, and within its own terms is where you live – only, you also bridge to the celestial kingdom, so you somewhat see through things to the larger, realer, reality underlying and underpinning them.

What you say makes sense. I’m not sure it addresses why studying history has been so vital to me.

It could have been biology or geology or anything. It could have been the experience of the moving body; sports, for instance. It could have been the practical manipulation of circumstances: politics, salesmanship, propaganda, mechanics. Many things. But whatever occupies you in 3D life, something will occupy you.

Even if you’re a junkie? Or a sex fiend?

“Nothing human to me is alien.” Do you suppose unsavory activities have their place in life as the result of some mistake in the celestial architecture? What is, is necessary, or it wouldn’t be. If you wish to be rid of it, remove the necessity it fills. But failing that, yes, any human activity fills the individual’s needs, or the individual would do something else.

And nobody ever said every part of a dream is uplifting.

You could say “Life is but a nightmare,” if you wished, and some weaker or jaded individuals have adopted just that attitude. But we do not see the advantage in it. Why assume the worst when you can as easily assume the best?

As you said, we never say a thing is “too bad to be true.”

You don’t, but perhaps you should begin to do so. Your world of possibilities would enlarge.

In effect, life more abundantly does not follow from an assumption that life is wrong.

How could it possibly? An attitude of trust is an attitude of openness. One doesn’t receive gifts with a closed fist, but with an open hand, a receptive palm.

Have we said what you wanted said?

More or less. Remembering that

in a sense life is but a dream, and that nothing is by chance, and that the external is the internal made manifest,

Remembering that 3D drama has a purpose, is not a mistake, and is not as final and stark as it appears,

Remembering that you have a right and a duty to live what you are, choosing as seems best to you,

Remembering that the world’s “unfinished business” is your business but also everyone else’s business, no two people being quite the same,

Where does this leave you, but to live your life unafraid, following your deepest intuitions, not thinking you need to make things come out right, yet retaining the right and duty to have preferences?

So, if you want to spend your life – or, we might almost say, if you feel compelled to spend your life – in this or that pursuit, how can it possibly be a mistake to do so? Even if it leads to results disastrous in 3D terms, sincere integrity will assure that all will be well for you, for “you,” remember, is not an entity confined only to 3D.

And that’s enough.

All right, thanks for all this.