Blog

[This entry progressed rapidly. First I was talking to myself; then I thought I’d talk to Hemingway if he was available; then I was talking to – someone. Who it was, hardly matters. Attributing a specific source is unnecessary, which is just as well, given that it can never be proved.]

Tuesday, February 27, 2018

I got a real sense this morning of how Martha Gellhorn was a major bad influence on Papa’s career. If they hadn’t met, he wouldn’t have been tempted farther to the left than his center of gravity naturally was; wouldn’t have found the Finca; wouldn’t have left Pauline, maybe; wouldn’t have been so trapped at the end of his life in a life too comfortable to leave, to constricted to be really good for him. I don’t know where he would have wound up – not Key West anyway, maybe, given how the causeway had changed the island – but maybe the right version of To Have and Have Not, and no For Whom the Bell Tolls, true, but maybe something even better.

Not living in Cuba, maybe no Q-Boat operations, certainly no Crime Shop. If no Spanish Civil War involvement, perhaps he might have been accepted in US Army Intelligence in World War II. No China tour in 1941, but maybe other things, better things. Maybe a second safari before the war broke out, though maybe not. Maybe he would have ended his days in Africa or, like his son Pat, lived there some years.

I do wonder, Papa, what those possibilities would have been.

Okay, here is a lesson in how things are, if you want it.

Certainly.

When you go to thinking about how things might have gone, it is always vague and fuzzy, never crystal clear and never even as precise as your current version of your own life seems to be. (I say seems to be, because it’s a lot hazier than you ever realize while you’re in it, but that’s another discussion.) Why is that, do you suppose? It is because you are trying to take a precise picture of what is actually not an object at all, but a cloud.

A probability cloud.

Yes, but that isn’t the end of the discussion but the beginning.

Where you are at any given moment seems a fixed point. You came from a past, chose among a cloud of probabilities and even possibilities and made one choice or combination of choices your reality. In so doing, you established the launching-point for your own next choices – that is, for your future possibilities. Choices foreclose some paths and open others.

That’s how it seems. But it’s more productive to factor in what Seth said: When you decide to change timelines you pull in a different past as well as different futures. There is no way to make sense of that – if you really think it through – and still reconcile it with the way things seem to be. Your sensory reports tell you that you are in a fixed point emerging from a series of fixed points, with the possibilities ahead of you waiting to be chosen and fixed in turn. That’s the only common-sense way to see your lives.

So how can the two be reconciled, the appearance and the reality Seth tries to explain to you? The answer is, you have to (or get to; it depends upon your attitude whether you see this as a constriction or a freedom) give up the idea that you are on a fixed point or ever were; that you are a point of definiteness among a cloud of probable other-realities; that you exist in order to choose not who you wish to experience being, but who you are going to be, absolutely.

Instead?

Instead recognize that a cloud is a cloud and doesn’t become a pinpoint. But what you perceive, may.

Our vision funnels down from the cloud that exists to one path?

Think of your life – we’re going to go back to an image you were given some years ago now – think of your life as a laser beam focused through a crystal. The angle at which the beam is aimed determines what is illuminated. Change the angle of vision, the crystal remains what it always was, but the illuminated appearance differs, perhaps radically.

Did changing the angle of vision change the crystal even temporarily, let alone permanently? It did not. It changed what you saw, it changed what you experienced. But all the other ways to see it remain, because the only thing that changed is your energy focus, slicing into your sum of possibilities, lighting up one possible path.

You are so accustomed to thinking of your lives as fixed points, it can be hard to understand that the sum  of the possibilities of a life is fixed; the individual appearances, depending upon how the beam is focused and directed, are essentially countless. Thus, a cloud, thus a fixed reality. As so often, it is all in how you look at it.

So, you see, the limits of what can be perceived are not so much in any external, but in the habits of the person trying to perceive. If you can’t think of your present moment as other than the only way things can be, given past decisions, you can’t go any farther in understanding.

What you assume about reality limits what you can experience. This isn’t a tragedy or even an unfortunate fact of life. It is just life, for life is limitation, else it is shapeless. The question is, which limitations do you allow to shape your lives?

If you think the present moment is a fixed point, the product of past fixed points, you will feel that either you are the child of predestination or, at best, that your choices will create a series of future fixed points. This lays great stress either on predestination or on free will, or on some combination of the two – usually a very uneasy combination.

If you see that what Seth said means that your past changes with your present decisions, you may be drawn to think of life as a plethora of alternate time-lines, sort of parallel, that may be chosen – jumped to – in the process creating a zigzag path that is a given version of a life. It still has a tinge of predestination in it, in that it is a form of choosing among pre-existing futures. It has the very real disadvantage of seeming theoretical rather than actual.

Yes, I’ve experienced that. This is more or less the view I have been holding.

And it isn’t a bad halfway-house. But the image of the laser shining through the crystal is a more serviceable one, only it requires that you give up certain ideas that for a while seem essential.

The idea of making progress through making choices, for one thing.

No, the idea that a given 3D first-tier experience is real, while your second- or third-tier reactions are not, which is precisely wrong way to. The change in you as a result of your decisions is the reality; the scenarios in which you chose are the stage-setting. We know it doesn’t feel that way; it isn’t supposed to in 3D, after all. Think of reality as the exploration in simulation of all possible permutations. That being so, how can choice be momentous, life-changing, apocalyptic – except in the context of that particular laser-beam illumination of

Yeah, I hear the problem, finding that word. If we say “possibilities” it sounds like we mean, it isn’t real. If we say “reality” it implies that other angles of vision will show things that aren’t equally real. If we say “timeline” we’re back to that disconnect.

In any way of seeing things – put it that way – things may occur that are life-shattering and seemingly cosmically important. What you need to put your minds to, if you can, is that, at the same level of reality, all other angles of vision, with their consequent crises and challenges, equally exist. Thus all contradictions exist and don’t even interfere within one another. The crystal that is all of your life-possibilities doesn’t move, doesn’t change. What changes is your angle of vision, which seems to change everything. And the changes in that angle of vision must come from a different level than the angle itself, obviously.

You say obviously, but it wasn’t obvious to me until you said it. But yes, obvious now.

And that’s why you are well advised to connect to your non-3D component. That’s why your All-D you is well advised to connect to the next higher level it connects to. Freedom cannot be attained at the same level it is sought from. Freedom comes from above, so to speak. If you wish to become aware of the fishbowl and transcend its limitations, your consciousness has to transcend that of the part of you that is the fish. It’s only common sense, after all.

 

Wednesday, February 7, 2018

I haven’t had enough experience of long-term responsibility to be able to say confidently that what I want at any given moment is the best thing, for me, for anything larger than myself. A lack of external rules means leaning on nothing.

Still, it is an option. Any way of living is an option, and it is for you to judge how it suits you. Things like delineating seven prime errors are designed to help you avoid pitfalls that living has made obvious to your predecessors. They can save you from traveling many a wrong road, like street signs saying this road leads to here, not there.

Which is all well and good if you trust the authority that put up the signs, and if anybody ever takes the time to explain to you why this road brings you here and that one, there. Instead we get, “Don’t go down that road, because it’s wrong. And it’s wrong because we (or some others) say so.” It becomes a matter of feeling pushed around, especially when a part of us very much wants to see what’s down that road. Maybe feels a need to go down that road.

Understand that here you are talking about yourself in particular, because not everybody is puzzled or at sea until the “why” of things is explained to them. But, that said, neither are you the only one.

I take it, then, that some personalities or psychological structures benefit from, prefer, hard and fast rules on an understood (i.e. taken for granted) absolute authority. And of course, writing that, I see I do know. My own fundamentalist son gives me the example.

What suits some is hell for others. But rules tend to be made by those who require that rules exist to guide them.

I have long known that churches may be founded by mystics, but are carried on by organizers. It’s the same process that may be seen in business, I suppose: The traits that lead to initiating a thing are not those required to maintain it.

Well, you see, that is one of the things we are doing here, building bridges of understanding between two ways of seeing. Your mystics (though that isn’t really the right word here) want to know “why” before they follow rules. Your organizers want to know “on whose authority.” At first this is not a sharp conflict, because at the onset of any new understanding, the non-3D source of the understanding will be felt rather than only heard about. It is only later that it may become a matter of experience or submission to authority, which quickly becomes submission to authorities – that is, to human representatives of an institution organized around those original experiences and understandings that are no longer universally shared by those who are nevertheless willing to believe.

Inspiration translated into social action seems to have a limited shelf-life.

That is saying, “My way of apprehending reality is the only solid way,” which it certainly is not. What would you do with the great mass of people who would find it impossible to grasp these understandings? You can give them rules of thumb, knowing that their natures will lead them to codify and calcify them, or you can give them nothing, knowing that others with different measures and visions will provide what you will not. It really isn’t as simple as saying, “My way is right and theirs is wrong,” and it never is. Your way will be right for you – best case! And it will be no way at all, or will be a dangerous or even harmful way, for others.

Don’t they have their own non-3D guidance to lead them?

What do you think is leading them to be so certain they must follow rules?

You are saying, those of a certain nature will be so because their guidance leads them to be that way, not despite their own guidance.

Why should you expect it to be any different? People tend to downplay or even fear the tendencies opposite their own, but it is only prejudice, or, to be charitable, it is only preference. You who walk in places without paths may scorn those who stay carefully to whatever path they find, and vice-versa. You’re both acting naturally and you’re neither acting your best selves, in your scorn. It isn’t necessary, in order to follow your own bent, to condemn those whose bent lies in another, even a contradictory, direction. It is a great perpetual temptation.

All right, I see all that. The difficulty, though, is that believers in rigid rules always want the rest of us to adhere to them, and would enforce our consciences if they could, for our own good.

And there you have the Protestant position as it evolved five centuries ago. You in your loyalty to your Catholic heritage under assault from mistaken directions have tended to underestimate the degree to which right was on the side of those who rebelled in the name of freedom of conscience.

I suppose that’s so. Most of the Protestant criticisms of the Catholic church that I have seen in my time  –. Oh, that’s interesting! Of course! They aren’t well aimed because they are aimed against a church that relies on temporal power to enforce its views – and that view of the church is centuries out of date.

But when it was not out of date, it was not inaccurate, and if you in your present configuration had been involved in religious struggles then, you would have been firmly on the side of individual guidance –conscience – and hence would have been either a Protestant.

Very interesting! Of course I would have been. And the reason I am not, today, is because the flaws in the argument are so obvious to me. The need for an institution to avoid the wild excesses caused by individual eccentricity is evident to me, as is the need for individual freedom from such institutions. It’s a balance – an impossible tension of opposites – and I don’t like fanatics who take only one side and refuse to see the merits and necessities of the other.

So maybe you have learned something.

Maybe so. Though, I knew all this. I hadn’t put it together in just this way.

Remember, you are a long way from living in a civilization with a common, coherent, accommodative point of view. You will never see it. Your job – all of you alive now and for some time to come – is to explore possibilities, to find truths and not “the truth.”

I got the strongest impression – very nearly a visual image – of someone in ecclesiastical robes, and thought of Bishop Sheen, who used to teach on network television in the 1950s. What’s that about?

Although he was teaching doctrine, was he not attempting to explain, to set out, to reach individual minds that he could never meet, let alone have any authority over? That is the proper procedure for this period of history, only with the emphasis on the provisional nature of knowledge (even of conscience) rather than emphasis on the reliable nature of the source. It is always going to be a tension of opposites – the message as its own authority, the message as endorsed by someone or some body of persons conferring that authority.

Your own psychological makeup may all but force you to choose one or the other, but best if you can preserve knowing that both halves of any duality have legitimacy. You’ll be less of a fanatic, less unbalanced, the more you remember that.

Well, I’ve always said that the reason The Monroe Institute suited me was that you didn’t have to profess even a tentative belief to get in the door and proceed to have experience. Clearly the trainers knew things, but there was no attempted indoctrination. In fact, there was an on-going resistance to people generalizing from their experience to form rules. It suited my disposition.

Yes, very Protestant of you.

All right, I’m smiling too. Well, we never got to faith hope and charity, but very interesting as usual. Till next time.

 

Guidance and conscience (from February, 2018)

Wednesday, February 7, 2018

I haven’t had enough experience of long-term responsibility to be able to say confidently that what I want at any given moment is the best thing, for me, for anything larger than myself. A lack of external rules means leaning on nothing.

Still, it is an option. Any way of living is an option, and it is for you to judge how it suits you. Things like delineating seven prime errors are designed to help you avoid pitfalls that living has made obvious to your predecessors. They can save you from traveling many a wrong road, like street signs saying this road leads to here, not there.

Which is all well and good if you trust the authority that put up the signs, and if anybody ever takes the time to explain to you why this road brings you here and that one, there. Instead we get, “Don’t go down that road, because it’s wrong. And it’s wrong because we (or some others) say so.” It becomes a matter of feeling pushed around, especially when a part of us very much wants to see what’s down that road. Maybe feels a need to go down that road.

Understand that here you are talking about yourself in particular, because not everybody is puzzled or at sea until the “why” of things is explained to them. But, that said, neither are you the only one.

I take it, then, that some personalities or psychological structures benefit from, prefer, hard and fast rules on an understood (i.e. taken for granted) absolute authority. And of course, writing that, I see I do know. My own fundamentalist son gives me the example.

What suits some is hell for others. But rules tend to be made by those who require that rules exist to guide them.

I have long known that churches may be founded by mystics, but are carried on by organizers. It’s the same process that may be seen in business, I suppose: The traits that lead to initiating a thing are not those required to maintain it.

Well, you see, that is one of the things we are doing here, building bridges of understanding between two ways of seeing. Your mystics (though that isn’t really the right word here) want to know “why” before they follow rules. Your organizers want to know “on whose authority.” At first this is not a sharp conflict, because at the onset of any new understanding, the non-3D source of the understanding will be felt rather than only heard about. It is only later that it may become a matter of experience or submission to authority, which quickly becomes submission to authorities – that is, to human representatives of an institution organized around those original experiences and understandings that are no longer universally shared by those who are nevertheless willing to believe.

Inspiration translated into social action seems to have a limited shelf-life.

That is saying, “My way of apprehending reality is the only solid way,” which it certainly is not. What would you do with the great mass of people who would find it impossible to grasp these understandings? You can give them rules of thumb, knowing that their natures will lead them to codify and calcify them, or you can give them nothing, knowing that others with different measures and visions will provide what you will not. It really isn’t as simple as saying, “My way is right and theirs is wrong,” and it never is. Your way will be right for you – best case! And it will be no way at all, or will be a dangerous or even harmful way, for others.

Don’t they have their own non-3D guidance to lead them?

What do you think is leading them to be so certain they must follow rules?

You are saying, those of a certain nature will be so because their guidance leads them to be that way, not despite their own guidance.

Why should you expect it to be any different? People tend to downplay or even fear the tendencies opposite their own, but it is only prejudice, or, to be charitable, it is only preference. You who walk in places without paths may scorn those who stay carefully to whatever path they find, and vice-versa. You’re both acting naturally and you’re neither acting your best selves, in your scorn. It isn’t necessary, in order to follow your own bent, to condemn those whose bent lies in another, even a contradictory, direction. It is a great perpetual temptation.

All right, I see all that. The difficulty, though, is that believers in rigid rules always want the rest of us to adhere to them, and would enforce our consciences if they could, for our own good.

And there you have the Protestant position as it evolved five centuries ago. You in your loyalty to your Catholic heritage under assault from mistaken directions have tended to underestimate the degree to which right was on the side of those who rebelled in the name of freedom of conscience.

I suppose that’s so. Most of the Protestant criticisms of the Catholic church that I have seen in my time  –. Oh, that’s interesting! Of course! They aren’t well aimed because they are aimed against a church that relies on temporal power to enforce its views – and that view of the church is centuries out of date.

But when it was not out of date, it was not inaccurate, and if you in your present configuration had been involved in religious struggles then, you would have been firmly on the side of individual guidance –conscience – and hence would have been either a Protestant.

Very interesting! Of course I would have been. And the reason I am not, today, is because the flaws in the argument are so obvious to me. The need for an institution to avoid the wild excesses caused by individual eccentricity is evident to me, as is the need for individual freedom from such institutions. It’s a balance – an impossible tension of opposites – and I don’t like fanatics who take only one side and refuse to see the merits and necessities of the other.

So maybe you have learned something.

Maybe so. Though, I knew all this. I hadn’t put it together in just this way.

Remember, you are a long way from living in a civilization with a common, coherent, accommodative point of view. You will never see it. Your job – all of you alive now and for some time to come – is to explore possibilities, to find truths and not “the truth.”

I got the strongest impression – very nearly a visual image – of someone in ecclesiastical robes, and thought of Bishop Sheen, who used to teach on network television in the 1950s. What’s that about?

Although he was teaching doctrine, was he not attempting to explain, to set out, to reach individual minds that he could never meet, let alone have any authority over? That is the proper procedure for this period of history, only with the emphasis on the provisional nature of knowledge (even of conscience) rather than emphasis on the reliable nature of the source. It is always going to be a tension of opposites – the message as its own authority, the message as endorsed by someone or some body of persons conferring that authority.

Your own psychological makeup may all but force you to choose one or the other, but best if you can preserve knowing that both halves of any duality have legitimacy. You’ll be less of a fanatic, less unbalanced, the more you remember that.

Well, I’ve always said that the reason The Monroe Institute suited me was that you didn’t have to profess even a tentative belief to get in the door and proceed to have experience. Clearly the trainers knew things, but there was no attempted indoctrination. In fact, there was an on-going resistance to people generalizing from their experience to form rules. It suited my disposition.

Yes, very Protestant of you.

All right, I’m smiling too. Well, we never got to faith hope and charity, but very interesting as usual. Till next time.

 

Very different understandings (from January 2018)

Monday, January 29, 2018

Given the context of what you are, and who you are, relative to the rest of reality, given that your non-3D component has its hopes and wishes just as the 3D component does, and that sometimes they clash, and given that what happens in 3D affects the rest of the All-D creature – that is, affects your non-3D components no less than your selves – perhaps you can see a bit more clearly this entire idea of sin.

• Sin as missing the mark;
• sin as obstacle to your fulfilling your natures;
• sin as choice of response to the winds that blow through the structures that you are.

It is true that you are in 3D to choose as you will. It is not true that all choices are equally desirable, or that there is no absolute standard. But it is true that there is no way to codify that standard more specifically than in terms of your goal of fulfilling your nature and clarifying your solution.

I hesitated over that final word, because I knew you meant clarifying in the sense of removing the sediment from a liquid, but I didn’t think the meaning would necessarily be clear.

Presumably it is now. So let us talk about lust. What is it, what is it not? How can it be considered to be one of only seven major channels of error? And isn’t it, after all, only what may be expected of creatures in bodies?

Your rhetorical questions; your responsibility to answer them. But I get the sense that it is going to be more difficult for you this time than it would have been if not for our digressions. Why is that?

Not more difficult, but we had to break stride, and now it is a matter of syncing up with you again.

Weren’t we in sync in the digressing?

We were, but where we are and where you are when we begin a discussion makes a difference in possibility. So we have to re-align ourselves. This is true of anyone dealing with their own guidance, of course, and it is a process that usually goes on automatically, but not always.

Would it be easier if we changed to discuss a different sin, or one of the virtues?

No. It would be easier if you could have slept longer so that you could be at a different place.

It’s too early to make coffee.

Yes it is, but perhaps you should read or do something routine until you can fall asleep for a while.

Things will realign while I sleep?

More like, your energy wells will refill. This requires a greater level of alertness than you realize, which is one reason why it is fatiguing.

 

To resume –

You might think lust a matter of sexual attraction between – or even among – bodies, and nothing more. Not so. In fact, not even that much. Look at it while remembering that sin is a natural quality that, when mixed with the wrong kind of pride in the wrong kind of way, leads you astray from where you want to go.

And, I imagine, “Which you?”

Of course, which you. We hesitate among alternate ways to proceed, each of which will present to view different nuances, and hence will seem to present slightly or even significantly different results.

Let us begin with the aspect of how you in 3D see yourselves. There more variance than perhaps you realize.

• Animals in a material world with no non-3D dimensions and therefore no hereafter, no purpose. “A useless passion,” to quote Sartre.
• Animals in a material world with a spirit that somewhat mysteriously continues into another realm after physical death, there to meet either judgment, and hence heaven or hell, or, shall we call it self-judgment or judgment by impersonal standards, and hence reincarnation on earth for another try.
• Animal manifestations of spirit, in a world that is material but is not the be-all-and-end-all that the previously named views assume. A testing ground, a shaping force, for unspecified future endeavors.
• Spirit manifesting as creatures in a world equally spiritual in nature, equally manifesting in physical creation.

You can see that each view of things comes with its own set of implied limitations, which, being mostly beneath the level that would come to consciousness, will be very resistant to being changed by mental persuasion or physical (so to speak) experience. The very existence of the interplay of mental structures and vast impersonal forces will be unsuspected in some views, or greatly misunderstood. Each set of limitations will have its own set of effective or ineffective restraints, guidelines, encouragements, reinforcements, dangers, opportunities. You see?

The world at any given time is occupied by people at all these levels of being, each of which has its own appropriate conditions, many of which contradict each other as one moves from one to another.

Not “moves from” in the sense of one’s personal journey, but “moves from” in the sense of traveling in foreign parts.

Yes, that’s what I meant, and I see that wouldn’t have been clear.

Let this context serve as a reminder that any new insights we are able to provide will be helpful, will make sense, will offer new possibilities, only to those who begin at a certain place. To the others it must appear to be nonsense, possibly as satanic misdirection.

More importantly, it is vital that you and those who read this realize that more sophisticated understandings do not obviate the need for less sophisticated, even outmoded, ones. Yes, for you they will no longer do, but what about those who are unable to reach the starting-point from which you proceeded? Should we leave them with nothing? If we offer views understandable only to a relative few, the many must be lost or must cling to what conceptualizations will serve. And, lest you be tempted to think yourselves special (Pride, again), consider how many levels of understanding are still well beyond yours, and people quietly living them. The goal is never uniformity, but individual experience.

We always live in the world among others who perceive and judge it very differently; thousands or millions of different world-views, quietly or silently held, motivating behavior in very different ways, toward often very different ends.

Life in 3D – and in non-3D, necessarily, you see – is always a matter of disparate forces intermingled and interacting. Do not expect to come up with any one code suitable to one and all. Hence, the existence of organized religion and of shall we say organized philosophies; hence, too, the fact that they are always to some degree compromises, for they are riding many horses at the same time. By the same token, do not expect either personally or collectively to come to a natural stopping-point, beyond which no one will proceed. There is always more.

Now, you will recall that the question was, “Which you,” and you will perhaps see now that this meant not only, which of your centers of gravity (3D or non-3D) should take the helm, but also meant the same in rather an impersonal way. Each of you is your society – your time – in miniature. In a holographic universe (a metaphor, but a useful one), all your times and incarnated fellows reside within each of you, experienced mostly as qualities, and occasionally as inclinations or even impulses.

I see. Fairly radical thought, that.

Is it? It is the same thought you have been able to hold about our lives in the non-3D world. If true in non-3D, necessarily true of you in 3D, for you extend into non-3D and non-3D into 3D, as we seem to need to occasionally remind you.

• You are all members one of another.
• You are all holographic representatives of All That Is.
• You are all communities as well as individuals.

Only now, we shall begin to move beyond the understandings of these facts that you have come to. We shall continue to do so until you find yourself unable to continue for one or another reason.

Lay on, Macduff, and cursed be he who first cries, “Hold, enough!”

So you say. And, we concede, so you have acted, at least to this point.

Very well, you are all part of one thing, in ways you may not have considered until this point. That connection, scarcely comprehended, often mis-apprehended, manifests in various ways throughout your lives. Your 3D existence is continually affected by your own imperfectly experienced non-3D experience. And sin consists of the deliberate sabotaging of the interrelationship. That sabotage, that interference, may be seen as an incorrect perception leading to harmful results, manifesting in one of seven ways, as has long been outlined.

Lust, envy, gluttony, covetousness, anger, pride, sloth (or ennui). LEG CAPS, or LEG CAPE, as I encapsulated them, for easier recall.

It is not that these are forbidden as unseemly, nor that they are wrong because forbidden, nor, in fact, that they are forbidden at all, but that they are warned against, as in navigation one sites markers to warn against shoal waters. The water may look no different from deeper, safer waters, but the rocks below will be unforgiving of the hull that encounters them.

 

Wednesday, January 24, 2018

1. You can learn more sometimes from books that don’t quite make it than from more successful ones. An Old Captivity [by Nevil Shute] is interesting enough in that it details all the things that go into a long flight. It doesn’t quite have enough emotional conflict or development in it to carry it. The conflict doesn’t rise to meet the necessary plodding. It is Babe’s description of Gateway without the description of what happens to people in Gateway. [Refers to my novel Babe in the Woods, now republished as That Phenomenal Background.] I’ll keep it in mind.

But here I am at 71 still thinking of writing stories about life, when I haven’t lived and never shall.

You say “never lived” as if that were a possibility.

You know what I mean.

We do, and you might as well mourn for never having played professional basketball. There’s many a kind of life. Did Daniel Boone consider that he hadn’t lived because he never saw the ocean? Did Helen Keller, because she never saw the world around her, no matter how near?

It’s an interesting disconnect. Intellectually I know that everybody’s life is a unique lens on existence, valued by life for just that uniqueness. But emotionally I can’t help noticing that the most of life has passed by, unnoticed.

It is always that way, for everybody. Arctic explorers don’t live the life of suburban commuters, nor either one of them the life of a soldier, or scientist, or professional actor, or farmer, or homeless person, or professional student, or anything. It is as impossible for any two lives to be identical as it is for any two souls to be, and for just that reason. When one gets discouraged about one’s life and how one has lived it, it is because one is looking at life as if the word “external” meant anything, in that context. Your – anyone’s – life is you, writ large. Your difficulties and smooth stretches, your inclinations as they interface with your opportunities – it all amounts to you looking in the mirror and acting from there.

You mean, we live our lives sort of awkwardly sometimes because we are moving in reference to the mirror, rather than from within. Something like trying to cut your own hair and finding that the scissors move in the wrong direction when you try to move them the way the mirror makes it look like you should.

That’s what we meant, yes. Life can get awkward when you judge it – still more when you try to control it – second-hand, so to speak. Athletes don’t think their movements; they couldn’t possibly. All that practice is to enable them to move automatically. Their thinking is about strategy, not how to make the movements that will execute the strategy.

Clear enough – although, some people do seem to live from sensory rather than intuitive promptings.

No, that is beginning to muddle things.

I’m sure we would all appreciate your un-muddling them.

Everyone’s life operates from a combination of sensory and intuitive intelligence. Psychics still need to remember how to feed themselves. Hard-headed materialists still function from their own center, aware of it or not. Your lives express your souls; your external circumstances are precipitated by what you are: None of this is dependent upon what your opinions of it may be.

The specific texture of your life – what you pay attention to, what you dismiss, what you scarcely notice, what you never dream exists – is a different mixture for each of you, and if you didn’t have communication at the non-3D level, perhaps you would never be able to get any two people to cooperate to do anything.

So, for each of us, the text is something like, “Don’t go thinking yourself so unusual”

Much less, so weird, so unsuccessful, so indolent, so hyper-active, whatever.

Well, you have consistently said, we don’t have the data with which to judge ourselves.

You have enough rough data to take fixes on your position, but as to what it amounts to, no, you never do.

“All be the same in a hundred years,” Shute has Turner say, habitually.

Yes, and The Chequerboard is a good parable of the intricacy of ordinary life, how every life is ordinary and extraordinary.

 

2. It was suggested I ask, “Who are you to me?” I can tell a planted question by now. So?

You know already; it is the putting it into words that causes confusion.

I know. I have done what I could to say that in my opinion the people we interact with are those we resonate to, and that the difference between being them and resonating with them (if it even exists) isn’t very big. But people seem to want to make the non-3D as divided as the 3D. So, can you address that?

It will clarify for people if we can come up with the right metaphor, the right non-verbal image. Everything needful has been said, but saying it divides it, because the image is chopped up into words that are then strung together, which isn’t ever very satisfactory.

You came up with ice cubes and water, once. [I.e. we in 3D are like ice cubes, the non-3D like water; same substance, but different appearance and different qualities.]

Yes, but if that doesn’t do it, we’ll have to try something else. Do you have any ideas?

That’s an odd question. I always get the impression that the bright ideas I come up with are from you.

Given that we and you are part of the same thing, wouldn’t that be a bit circular?

I suppose so. But then where do they come from?

Your receptivity is a crucial part of the process of snagging ideas and relationships (which is saying the same thing twice). The 3D positioning makes it possible to bring forth this idea now, another idea then. And of course difference among receivers means different possibilities. So in effect, three variables: time, space, receiver. Together they produce the potential to receive ideas. What you (anyone) do with the potential depends on you, of course.

I see. And that’s one reason why civilizations and ages differ in quality – different kinds of orienting ideas are available in one, unavailable or unpersuasive in other.

That’s right. So, your image of the relationship between us and you?

Well, fishing for it. I get that I’m somebody holding a bunch of balloons on strings. Strange sort of image. Is that what we want?

It’s a beginning. Keep trying.

I think of radio, but that imposes the idea of distance.

Keep trying.

Really, I come back to my Cosmic Internet idea. I, here/now, can connect with anything if I have the right URL for it, or the right search engine, or, say, the right keywords. I don’t know that we’re going to get any better than that.

Oddly, you gave one to us. How about – your own brain, as analogy?

That’s very interesting. I as one brain cell and you-all as others.

A much more intimate analogy, is it not?

Yes it is, and immediately persuasive, too.

You see the difficulties it hurdles.

Oh yes. One doesn’t feel compelled to name or personify other brain cells, and at the same time the question of identity or non-identity is overleaped. I can arbitrarily name you Nathaniel or TGU or George, but that doesn’t signify any more than a name change to an IP address does to the computer, though it does of course to the user.

So for the purposes you put it to, we could say you and we are all cells in the same brain, you centered in 3D orientation, we not. It’s still only analogy, but the analogy may enable you – may encourage you – to think in different ways.

It’s only a slight extension of what I’ve come to long ago. You and we are part of the same thing.

That’s right, only we’re again reducing the distance.

 

Thursday, January 25, 2018

We substituted a new analogy – neurons in a great brain – as a way of bringing you to new understandings. The closer you conceptualize the relationship, the easier you will be able to reconfigure accepted ideas that stand in the way of realizing a closer relationship in effect, that is, de facto.

Why have we begun exploring the concept of sin and virtue, the interaction of vast impersonal forces and what we might call mental structures, but to help you see deeper? You don’t want a bloodless metaphysics; you don’t want an ethereal religion that doesn’t compel your belief and therefore your allegiance and support, by virtue of the truth it contains. You want truth, as much truth as you can comprehend, and perhaps a bit more. And you want it in order to live by it, no to admire it in a glass display case.

I have always wondered about the Bible verse “Buy the truth and sell it not.” Did it mean, “Once you have paid for it, keep it,” or did it mean, “Don’t buy it and don’t sell it”? One could wish the King James, though a masterpiece of stylistic prose, were a little less ambiguous sometimes.

Ambiguity has its uses. To get toward truth, toward truer,  one does need to pay something. It is also true that truth cannot be obtained nor retained by bargaining of any kind.

What does one pay? It depends upon what the “you” is that you bring to the exchange.

• A proud man may need to sacrifice his pride, and come in a spirt of humility.
• A willful man may have great difficulty in accepting implied rebukes innate in the unwelcome truth that comes to his reluctant eyes.
• A man wedded by habit and inclination to any of the seven cardinal errors may feel torn apart between the comfortable and familiar (even if also harmful and futile) and the allure of knowing, of being closer to his true course.

We need hardly add that for “he” you may freely substitute “she.” The point is the same.

And, I get, truth is more than a matter of explanations and fact.

Truth makes demands. It may comfort or it may afflict or it may do both at once or both alternately, but it will have its own imperative which will not be those of any human or all human wills together.

If that seems harsh to you, or strange, consider. How can truth be anything but universal? What is true, is true. it does not depend upon the agreement or even the comprehension of the observer. You may say, “Obviously: I never expected to hear something that would be true for me alone.” You don’t. But probably you do expect something that will be true for humans, say.

And what of rocks and trees and animals and ex-humans and unitary beings? The same truth exists for all, only of course different levels of being will respond to different aspects of the truth. The bacteria in your gut, the cells comprising the organs in your bodies, the atoms and molecules comprising your “inorganic” structures in the 3D world – these are all specific levels of consciousness, with consciousnesses appropriate to their particular position. The same truth must be true for all; and at the same time, it would not be possible for different levels of consciousness to apprehend or conceptualize things similarly. Or are trees now to read baseball scores, and angels to maintain crystalline structures?

Thus, necessarily a great part of the truth of things will always be beyond your comprehension even abstractly. You can’t expect to understand everything and you shouldn’t waste your time attempting to – except (important proviso!) insofar as you are inclined to. That is, you are free to try; that doesn’t mean any good will come of it. It may, who knows? But we confidently predict that anything that comes of it will be different from what you expect ahead of time.

That’s just common sense, after all. You don’t have maps before you do the exploring, so if you find only what you expect, maybe you haven’t been as venturesome as you’ve been thinking you are.

Well done; you’ve learned that lesson.

Truth isn’t just ideas, it is life, it is reality. But it isn’t obvious reality. It isn’t what your senses report, and what your senses report, even when the reports of your intuition are added.

You aren’t as much good to us – or to yourselves – if you are operating not from an instinct to truth but from an instinct for the comfortable, the attractive, the seemingly easy, the least common denominator, the broad downhill slope.

Oh. So this is the strait and narrow versus the broad pathway to hell, so to speak?

It is a truth that the right thing to do in any conflict is always the more difficult path.

Sure, I learned that from John D. MacDonald. It’s one of Meyer’s laws.

It is also accurate psychology. If the easy and agreeable thing to do is also the right thing to do, where is there any conflict? So the existence of a conflict ought to alert you and serve as a rule of thumb as to what you ought to do.

And you ask – what does this have to do with sin?

No, I see the relationship clearly enough. If sin is missing the mark, these habits or traits or decisions or whatever they are constitute obstructions in our living toward truth.

Of course they do. It has nothing to do with them being wrong because forbidden. They are wrong because they lead the wrong way.

Only maybe not everybody is going in the same direction, or wants to.

But, you see, that’s getting mixed up in words. If you wish to live toward truth, these are signposts saying “wrong way.” But signposts do not determine your destination, still less interfere with your right and ability to choose. They merely serve to tell you where you are. Those who want to go to hell (metaphorically speaking) will always find the way broad and unobstructed. They need only follow what is easiest in any conflict of inclinations. All the signposts in the world cannot deter anyone from doing anything. The best they can do is assure that what might have been unconscious is made conscious, where people can either fight the awareness (because it is uncomfortable), or can pull up with a shudder and say, “No, no, that isn’t what I intended to do with my life.”

It’s always up to the person.

 

[I have a large crystal on my desk, weighting several pounds. On Sunday March 19, 2023 I sat quietly and intended a journey into the crystal. Rather than a journey I emerged with a description. My notes:]

Into the crystal

Repository of thoughts, emotions, transactions

Holding the timeline fixed

Stability, endurance, continuity, connection.

The mineral kingdom, its function:

Holding relationships,

Preserving the structure of life events,

3D and non-3D.

Access.

The alternative polarity to formlessness,

Chaotic change

The Akashic record, as pertaining to 3D

Our minds, objectified.

Alive as everything is alive,

Fixed, in service,

Conscious but not self-conscious

Not merely a record of the shared subjectivity,

But the matrix for it, the basis of it,

The reliable structure preserving it.

It is all there. Nowhere to go,

Nowhen to go.

Ask, and it will be answered,

Only, do not beg or grovel,

Do not presume difficulty,

Do not make a special thing of it.

Just ask and listen

And consider what results.