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Thursday, May 10, 2018

More on the nature of the present moment?

We are sketching the present moment as trance, remember. It is real, it exists, but it isn’t what it appears to be. And the deeper one sees into its nature, the more the picture changes.

Any present moment has its own inertia

The complementary attributes of any given present moment are inertia and plasticity. For the moment, we will consider only these two. As you saw, or anyway felt, the number of attributes could be multiplied beyond the possibility of coherent consideration. Slow and steady wins the race.

Plasticity is how the individual chooses among potential realities.

Inertia is the quality that presents a coherent reality in the first place.

That’s enough for you to explicate, so do that briefly and we will expand upon it.

I get that we’re back to Castaneda’s tonal and nagual, or my own distinction between the world of the living present moment and of the dead present moment, in other words between reality as experienced directly and the same reality experienced 1/30th of a second later by the senses. The first is plastic and may be affected – chosen – by the individual will. The second is fixed and is there to be accepted by the individual will. I am sure it isn’t that simple, though, and even as I write it I get that it isn’t correct.

No, but it advances the argument, so it isn’t a waste of time. Do not allow yourself to forget that in describing reality as experienced by intuition and by the senses, we nonetheless describe the same reality. It’s easy, in dealing with abstractions, to allow them to sort out in your mind so that certain attributes are here, contradictory or complementary aspects are there, and in practice you are considering one thing as if it were several. Reality has plasticity and inertia, and that must be remembered, or the picture resulting will be distorted.

Let us consider the inertia of any given present moment, bearing in mind that although we have to consider any given present moment as if it were separate from the rest of reality, in fact there is only one moment, one present living moment, experienced in different circumstances.

I do know that, and I realize that it can’t be explained logically – at least, not in any way I know of – but only intuited. Once we realize that it is all one living present moment, many logical difficulties vanish – like how I in the 1990s could affect Joe Smallwood’s life at a moment in the 1860s, and vice versa. But our 3D circumstances argue strongly against the realization.

That is why mathematicians and other scientists who dwell in the realms of the abstract are closer to you than are those whose logical structures are based in sensory investigation. But we would rather not go down this side-trail, contenting ourselves with notching a tree to mark the place.

The present moment as you encounter it in any one instant of time has considerable inertia whether considered from the intuitive or the sensory.

Inertia from the sensory you should well understand; you experience it all your lives. It is a prime function of 3D to provide that persistence, that drag, slowing events down, slowing causality so that it may be experienced and lived. If you want things to happen in conformity to your will, just come out of 3D – but don’t expect to have it both ways. The increased freedom you experience will be exercised not upon a stable platform as in 3D, but in a wilderness (or playground) of unbounded freedom. It isn’t the same experience as you might expect.

I think you just said, unlimited freedom of will won’t be exercised against a stable background, so there won’t be the Superman effect of vast powers relative to the environment.

That’s right.

Now, we said the living present moment (the living present as experienced directly through the intuitions, which of course means also through your non-3D extensions) has its own inertia. What do we mean by that? Clearly we don’t mean that physical structures or forces or events act as drag upon non-3D forces. So, what do we refer to?

Well, I get that you mean that every mind that participates in that version of the present moment has a presence, a weight, so that any one of us is always vastly outnumbered. We can’t reshape the world mentally any more than we can physically. Or, to be more careful, we can’t reshape it instantly, without effort, without weighing our force against the force of everything else.

In other words, mentally, spiritually, psychically – however you wish to phrase it – the world has a solidity in the same way it does physically. This ought to be obvious, but is often lost sight of.

I get, “In fact, mental and physical aren’t even different things.”

They are different aspects of one thing, so how could they be different things? But that’s how they appear because of the difference in your intuitive and sensory input, and in your mental structures derived from the experience of living that way.

You know that every moment of historical time has its own persistent realty. You all have lived your lives in just that way, having no choice. So couple your experience to your concepts, and realize that although life is not exactly what it seems to be, neither is it entirely different than what it seems to be.

In other words, do the work of thinking these things through as you give us new concepts or new connectors.

That’s the only way you will make it yours. You can’t blindly accept or blindly reject and make any progress. You have to do the work. If the people listening to Jesus or Gautama went away saying, “cute story,” and did no thinking, no absorbing, what did they gain from being there?

So, the inertia of the present moment. You will always have to deal with the reality presented – held – by other people’s minds. It is like the continuity provided by mountains that do not move.

“Minds” wasn’t the expression you wanted, but I couldn’t find it, and decided not to fish for it lest I lose the thread of the statement.

Yes, it’s not an accustomed association for you. Sink into it.

[Pause]

Difficult. I’m getting a sense of people participating in a magical ritual.

Close. Continue.

If you had a group – a village, say – all performing the same ritual, you would in effect have a persistent temporary group mind.

That’s right. And –?

What they held would be in effect a magical creation.

Continue. We know it is slippery so far, but it will firm up.

The spell would somehow amount to the total of what (not who) they all were.

It would consist of all the properties contained in all the individuals, functioning as a group, in all their extensions. A very complex mixture, you see, rife with possibilities and contradictions and tensions creative and destructive.

Just like the life we experience here.

Not like it, it. This is one way of describing what your life is. Or, let’s say, a way of describing one aspect of your life. It is why external life (for that is how it seems to you, external) is so intractable. You can’t just will a thing into existence. If you bring it into existence, you do so by exerting effort against this inertia. You oppose or you steer or you manipulate or whatever, but you do not create against no background, any more than you jump into the air without kicking against the floor.

Think on this, and next time we’ll return to the plasticity aspect of the same unbroken living present moment.

You always go off somewhere unexpected. I can’t tell you how satisfying that is to me, even though I recognize it as, after all, my own accustomed mental life.

And that is a point we need to make now and again: Everything we point out is familiar to you in other contexts. You all are as much experts on life as we are, and you have as much access to what we know as we do. How could we succeed in reminding you, if it were not so?

 

Wednesday, May 9, 2018

We have arrived at the interface between personal and impersonal, or between any one specific consciousness in 3D and all the rest of 3D and non-3D reality that that consciousness interacts with. Your job in 3D is to widen your comprehension of yourself and of “the other.” Naturally you can’t do all of it at once, nor necessarily at the same time, nor necessarily in equal proportions. Every 3D experience is different. But the ultimate goal – not any proximate or immediate goal – is necessarily the same for all.

But it won’t seem that way.

How could it? Everyone’s position is too different. Everyone has different deficits to make up, and different past accomplishments to build on.

This interface is the reason we kept building up the concept of vast impersonal forces, because once one begins to see that one’s ability to shape reality is vastly greater than one had thought, there is a temptation to over-do it, and think one can do everything. But the world is always greater than the individual, even if the individual is greater than s/he had previously experienced itself.

Saying that reality has plasticity does not amount to saying that it has infinite plasticity, for that would amount to saying, “It’s all about you,” for everyone. There is a sense in which that is true, but only a sense. Life is always bigger than any one living thing or any collection of living things.

We got that the first time.

Maybe. And maybe as soon as we change context you lose it again. For instance, Jesus asks rhetorically, “What does it profit somebody to gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” Doesn’t that speak to the infinite value of your own soul to you, when weighed in the balance against the rest of reality?  So, doesn’t that say that it is all about you?

Of course it does. But it equally says the rest of reality exists; it isn’t a figment of our imaginations and it isn’t merely an extension of our own personalities.

True enough. Our point here is that changing contexts always presents the risk of one losing newly acquired perspective, and must be guarded against.

We have been at some pains to reinforce your sense of identity with the world around you and to reinforce your sense that nothing is as it seems. Only, be careful how you digest this. That things are not as they seem stems not from someone attempting to deceive you, but from the unavoidable inadequacies of anyone’s ability to perceive and comprehend.

I got that a while ago. We’ll never get to a “the truth,” only to the highest truth we are able to comprehend at a given time.

Well, having painted your personal dimensions as All-D creatures experiencing yourselves initially as isolated 3D individuals, now we proceed to paint the world

• as if it mattered, rather than you;
• as if it were primary, rather than you;
• as if it was real, rather than you.

And of course, this is how most people do see things, only they don’t see the world any more clearly than they see themselves, and for the same reason.

The reason being – ?

What you pay attention to, you get to know. But if the filters between perceiver and whatever is perceives are strong enough, no image gets admitted that contradicts the filter. A confirmed materialist cannot (usually) see spiritual influences. A Christian Scientist cannot (usually) see physical rather than spiritual obstacles to perfect health. Bear in mind, in citing these examples of filters, we are not taking sides. Each is a legitimate point of view. What they have in common is the limitation in admitted input that the filters enforce.

We have sketched repeatedly how larger parts of yourselves interact with (you might almost say interfere with) your strictly 3D experience. The hard-headed materialist’s convictions may be undermined by contrary knowledge flowing out of the non-3D component. You should be familiar with all that. But now continue with the idea of the world at large as resistance, as obstacle, as contradicter. Once you get to realizing your own internal contradictions, you may begin to downplay those of the reality around you. Nothing wrong with that as a stage in your development, but like every overreach, it needs correcting.

The world is going to influence your 3D experience at least as much as your own internal struggles.

Common sense tells you that the world actually exists, in the way that you do. It isn’t what it appears to be, but it isn’t nothing, either, nor an arbitrary creation of your own mind. It ought to be unnecessary to say something that is so obvious, only once one sets sail on the intuitive seas, it is a temptation to forget about the sensory shores.

Interesting metaphor.

Yes, provided it isn’t taken too literally. It isn’t as if there were one area of life that is intuitive and another that is sensory. It is rather a matter of qualities.

You will remember that we spoke of the present moment (any present moment) as a sort of trance. By that, we mean not that strictly material causes lead to strictly material results. But it is a sort of cumulative total of all forces at that given time. Clearly, times differ from each other if only in that.

You mean, I think, that every present moment is shaped by the cumulative force of everything in that moment, hence has a solidity and massiveness relative to any one of us.

Of course. That is your experience every day. Only it isn’t that simple, and the discovery of the ways in which it is not simple lead you to see that you are more than you thought you were, and that reality is more than you thought it was. At the moment we are going to concentrate on the solidity and force and mass of the external, rather than concentrating (as we do at other times) on its plasticity and impressionability and its phantom nature compared to the inner reality of any 3D being. Both ways of looking at it are true, so we move now to the underreported aspect.

And do we have time to begin?

Try this. You exist in 2018, at the moment. You and everyone in the world are affected by the 2016 presidential elections. It doesn’t matter if you don’t read the news or listen to the radio or discuss it with your friends and neighbors. Even if you didn’t even know about it, you couldn’t help be affected, because of all those around you who care. Can anyone in his right mind maintain that 2018 can be the same as 2014, say?

But to say this is not to say that things are as they appear from any given viewpoint. It is to say, merely – but a big merely – that any present moment has its own “objective” reality that affects one’s subjective reality because of its effect on so many other 3D minds, let alone its expression in 3D external reality.

The 1848 elections changed the country. So did discovery of gold in California. So did whatever was invented in that year, or put into execution. So did Emerson’s visit to Europe, and the revolution in France. So did The Year of Hope in general. And we could look at the world of painting, sculpture, scholarship, technology, whatever, and we would see the changes in that context. The Fox sisters, in New York, or Joseph Smith. I see that what we concentrate on affects how we experience it, and I see that it exists regardless how any of us experience it.

That’s right. The world is there, and is not to be talked away. The fact that it is deeper than it appears does not mean it doesn’t exist. Quite the contrary, in fact. But that is enough for today.

 

Friday, April 27, 2018

We are encouraging you to think of reality in a different way, a more comprehensive way, than is usually adopted. Rather than concentrating on human life as it is experienced in the physical world, we brought in the non-physical world which, for a long time, you considered separately. Then we helped you to integrate your thinking, so that your new normal “default” position was of human life as being lived in All-D, as All-D beings. No “normal” versus “psychic” life, but life, all one thing.

In fact, 3D-plus-Non-3D is not your larger being. 3D-plus-Non-3D is your accustomed being, what you might call your lower selves, not your higher selves. Reintegrating your non-3D components into your self-definition was an important advance, but the All-D self is still your accustomed self, not your higher self. You might say it is you as you live on earth, only with all your senses functioning.

Your higher self is the part of you that is not confined to your 3D existence, but is prior to it.

Spirit, as opposed to soul.

Yes, but it is well to remind your readers that those terms are not interchangeable.

• Soul may be considered to be spirit as it is bound in one specific 3D life situation. It is the Frankness of Frank, the mind of Frank.
• Spirit is the essence that is expressing this time as Frank, another time as Bertram, or Joseph, etc. Of course when we say “time” in this context, we mean “general situation.”

Yes, I get that. Spirit cannot be changed by the events of physical life (as far as I know), whereas the whole point of physical life from our perspective is to change the soul.

To allow the soul to determine changes, yes.

Now, in identifying “spirit” with “higher self,” we will be stitching together two concepts that many people have held in not-interconnecting mental boxes. For others, still recoiling from anything smacking of religion, the very word “spirit” may be suspect, or may be rejected out of hand. But this stitching-together is necessary if we are to sketch a broader view of what you are, and what you are doing here, and what it’s all about.

So, let us say your Sam – the origin and interconnection of so many past or other lives – is in effect your higher self. This will serve as effective scaffolding. Seen this way, you will see a couple of things.

• Sam as we define it is not God, not in any sense the ultimate creator, not in any sense the connector of all beings, the common field of being. Your Sam is the common denominator of Frank and Joseph and Bertram and so on, not the common field of everyone else’s lives. There are fewer Sams than human lives “past,” “present,” and “future,” but that still leaves room for plenty of Sams!
• A Sam, then, though not the ultimate creator or the ultimate source of life or form, is nonetheless a being at an entirely different level of existence than an All-D human.

It is our greater mind, to which we sometimes have access when we are particularly connected.

It is to you as you are to your kidneys, or your lungs. It is a higher order of intelligence and awareness, primarily concerned with other things.

How far can we push “As above, so below” in this instance?

Pretty far, actually. Consider your everyday mind in relation to your lungs.

• Your lungs do not read books or watch films. The things you think about or experience directly or vicariously are invisible to them, and would be meaningless to a lung if it could somehow perceive them.
• Yet, the state of your lungs affects your life. You depend upon their functioning, and if they malfunction, you are affected.
• Conversely, the lungs are sensitive to your condition. The effects of emotion may affect the lungs, but of course they cannot know what caused the change in their condition. Not only do they not know what changed the chemical balance, they cannot even appreciate that there is a balance to be considered.
• So, you, in connection to the higher self, the Sam. It is an indissoluble link, but it is also alien to your accustomed world.

I get that you said that just as we and our physical organs have different levels of perception and intelligence, and so in effect live in different worlds, so we in All-D are similarly separated from the next higher level up, which we are calling a Sam. We are intimately tied together, but we are of different levels of consciousness, hence live in different world, among different concerns.

Good enough. Now, can you imagine that your liver cares about your politics or your economic situation or the films and novels you ingest? Conversely, can you imagine even comprehending, let alone being fascinated by, the day-to-day mental life (call it) of your liver? They are two different worlds, and rightly so, and the fact that they can be seen as parts of one thing (as they are) does not change the fact of their difference.

Similarly, can you imagine that your Sam cares about your politics or your economic condition, etc.? Because it is a higher order of consciousness, your Sam can comprehend these things. It can be aware of your struggles and amusements and progress and regress, in the same way that you as an All-D creature can become aware of the vicissitudes a lung experiences. A higher level comprehends – includes, incorporates – a lower level, but not vice-versa.

As you say that, I am reminded of E. F. Schumacher in A Guide for the Perplexed discussing the medieval concept of adequatio.

That was in a slightly different context, but the concept is worth exploring, and can be found, presumably, by a search on the computer.

In short, it says you can’t comprehend something if your level of being is inadequate to hold it.

Our point here has been to caution you that it is a mistake to think that your higher self is merely you with a telescope, or you with fewer obstacles to your understanding. What you are describing in such cases is not your higher self but your All-D self when seen more completely.

Your higher self is qualitatively different from your All-D self, and the sooner you realize it, the sooner your vision will clear.

Again, we do not say these things merely so you may skim over them and nod approvingly. To benefit from new ideas – to even fully realize the newness in them – you must mull them, must ponder, must knead the dough to leaven the lump.

[Found this: https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/08/22/schumacher-adaequatio-understanding/]

Thursday, April 26, 2018

It is a mistake to think, “There is reality, separate from me, outside of me, and I am a latecomer to the program.” You as 3D individual came late to the show, but to say that is to ignore your connection to all the rest of you that co-exists with the reality of the 3D universe since its beginnings. This is not metaphor, not poetic license. It is fact, but requires explanation.

I assumed you meant that we in our individual lives are souls, but in our connection to our Sam are spirit, and not spirits plural but spirit singular.

Sometimes you surprise us with your leaps.

How can I surprise you? Don’t you know what I know? And before I do, myself, sometimes?

No, it isn’t that predictable. Your life in 3D is like peering out in a rainstorm. Much of the time, your vision is clouded by internal and external factors, and you can see only so far. Then there will be a sudden clearing – lightning, say – and for an instant you will get glimpses of things far away and usually hidden. That is what happened just now, or so it seems to us.

Interesting. Okay, so –?

So the part of you that is undifferentiated spirit knows things that you-as-fragment cannot, even in connection with your non-3D resources (when considered strictly in connection with your individual soul, rather than with your Sam).

I keep forgetting that we have to adjust our ideas about our non-3D component, ceasing to think that “non-3D = spiritual,” any more than “non-3D = infinite knowledge.”

It is a major readjustment, but it clarifies how you think about many things.

Now, what does it mean for you, in practice rather than theory, that you are in intimate connection with the one undivided eternal spirit? Does it not entirely change your world?

• How can the indefinable, eternal, undivided spirit, coexistent with the founding of the 3D world itself be threatened by contemporary (or past, or future) events?
• How can it cease to exist?
• How can it be harmed or even impeded?
• How can it be even opposed, given that it is part of the whole and – in a way – is the whole?

You as 3D mind see reality from the soul’s point of view. You identify with the body’s limitations, and to the extent that you learn to perceive your non-3D components, it is you incorporating a larger field of activity into the already existing, already defined, 3D personality. (There’s nothing wrong with this. It is an inevitable first step. We are not criticizing but analyzing.)

You as spirit existing mostly in the background of 3D mind is a thing to be considered separately. You as spirit know better than to think that life is merely 3D life, or that your soul is all you are. You as spirit identify not with any one character in the play, nor even with the playwright, nor even with the theater director, but with everything.

Well, how easily do you suppose that a point of view that identifies with everything can make itself clear to a point of view that identifies around one body and soul? You as spirit can hardly even be called a point of view; more like, a field of view. There isn’t the distortion of perspective caused by a single viewing-point.

So, I gather than the point is that if we learn to express, or experience, the undivided-spirit field of view, our way of experiencing the world, our lives, changes too.

What you said isn’t wrong, but it is far from the whole story. It isn’t so much about your potential to live a satisfying, less fear-filled life – though this is an obvious side-effect – as it is your potential to help all of you manifest rather than any of you.

I have been thinking of it as, “Growing to see things this way is important in our self-development.” I think you are saying, “Yes, that’s all well and good, but it isn’t about you as individual souls, really, but about the one undivided spirit.” Only, it’s difficult to apply that in practice.

But not so difficult in concept.

• In concept you can see that what benefits the whole may or may not immediately benefit the part.
• In fact, the immediate effect for some parts may be harmful, at least in its 3D manifestations.
• So, from your soul perspective, you will count the cost to your 3D persona.
• From your undivided spirit perspective, you will not only be willing that the cost be paid, you may not count it as a cost at all.

This is the psychology of religious martyrs, isn’t it?

That’s too broad a generalization, but that is a part of it, yes. Opinion, stubbornness, opposition, circumstance may all enter into it, but the martyrs who went cheerfully to their death obviously were identifying not with their one, 3D, contingent, liable-to-destruction selves but with the eternal sureness underneath, the eternal untouchable part of themselves. How they thought about it didn’t really affect what was going on, except that it gave them courage and sureness. But the identification did not depend on the definitions they put around it.

 

Wednesday, April 25, 2018

I left myself a note: “The objective reality of the weather we live among. The world not primarily in relation to us.” And even my own note seems cryptic this morning.

However, “cryptic” is not “meaningless,” nor “impenetrable.” So let us begin there. To examine the world as it exists, rather than as it exists in relation to you, or to us, is more difficult than you might think. That is what science thinks it is doing, examining everything from nebulae to geologic strata to subatomic particles. But the danger has been the temptation to divide reality between living and dead, just as it divides the living between conscious and not, and then between self-aware and not. One can do quite a lot of useful work of analysis that way, only, the basis being wrong, a systemic bias will run through every conclusion, every investigation, every division of reality into comprehensible parts.

You mean, I think, science will thus accumulate facts but not truth.

Well – not the truth, certainly. Knowing the limits of the possible is the beginning of the process of broadening the area included within those limits. There is always deeper truth that will invalidate any way of thinking (including this one) if carried far enough.

So let’s look at the world in its own terms, remembering that

• we are intrinsic to the world,
• yet it is also not all about us (non-3D, as well as 3D).

How do we do that?

How does religion do it? How does mythology do it? Take those two approaches and blend in how science does it, and you get is an approach that examines oneself as part of a greater whole, without pulling the center of attention back to oneself.

• If the world was created by God and man was placed in the garden and the adversary to God stirred up dissention – that is a story that accounts for the world without making it “all about us” and without making it “all about everything but”
• Or if the existence of the world is taken for granted and the various forces in the world are personified in the inhabitants of Mount Olympus, again we see an account that describes the familiar passions, discords and difficulties of our lives, and ascribes them not to an individual’s failings or marred nature but to the effect of our living among the gods and the consequences of the actions of the gods. Eris, the goddess of discord, doesn’t even think about humans, but humans are plenty familiar with dissention.

These are two ways of describing more of the world than the scenery, so to speak.

Science describes the setting, while religion or mythology describes our inner life in that setting?

No, A scientist, or for that matter, many religious or philosophical thinkers, might think that, but it is a product of the initial wrong division of the world into “this” or “that” rather than “this” and “that.” Carl Jung would not make such a mistake.

Should we invite him in to make his own statement?

Called or not called, Jung, too, will be here. [A play on Jung’s inscription on a stone that said, in Latin, “Called or not called, God will be here.”]

Very funny. Okay, Dr. Jung, would you like to comment?

Societies with an active religious awareness need no science of psychology. It was the poverty of the Western imagination in the 19th century that led us to begin to carve a way out of the dead-end in which Western civilization found itself. Freud and his pioneering work almost had to come from a non-Christian source – it led out of difference from the taken-for-granted mythos of Christianity, you see, even if what passed for Christian thought had lost its vitality in our time.

For me, a non-Jew, to join that movement enthusiastically was somewhat daring, looked at conventionally. This may explain to you why Freud adopted me so whole-heartedly, and why when our basic fundamental differences forced us apart, he regarded it as personal betrayal. Freud’s cultural background was Jewish, though he was not observant. Mine was Christian, though I was not observant. For a time our mutual pursuit of the unknown truths we were glimpsing held us together, but then our backgrounds limited the relationship, and this is not understood even in your time.

In your time, to speak of Jewish or Christian is considered bad manners, or bigotry, or primitive thinking. Therefore there are things you cannot see, because the unnoticed screen in front of your vision allows you only limited slots through which to peer. But you may turn that to advantage if you once set aside the screen. Resolve to exhibit bad manners, or display bigotry or ignorance, if that is how people will take it, and see what is.

It is not anti-Semitism to see that Jewish culture is not Christian culture, as neither is Islamic culture. To pretend that different things are not different is to lose the ability to deal with them. At the same time, it is not helpful to oversimplify in the other direction. A Jew in 19th century Austria is not the same as a Jew in 20th century America, nor in 21st century America! You are (as everyone always is) mixtures of cultures within you. Ethnically, you are one thing (or many things, depending upon how mixed your physical heredity). On a soul level you are other things, depending upon who and what you have been before this life. And on a social level, you are something else.

I got the sense of that as, my ancestry is Italian, with whatever unsuspected strands that may include, and my other lives include sojourns in England and India and Egypt, etc. When that mixed body-soul heredity is placed in mid-20th century America, the result is not going to be very typical of any of the three elements considered separately.

Yes. You are not stereotypes, and neither are you tabula rasa. Life is more complex than it is sometimes thought to be. And this is what I have to say on this topic. Consider three strands of influence – your body, spirit and soul contributions to the being that is you now – and from there look at the world you try to understand.

“Soul” in this case meaning, I take it, our life as placed.

Yes.

• Your physical heritage is one thing, a matter of genetics.
• Your spiritual heritage is another, a matter of your original composition as modified by past decisions (or, one might less accurately say, by past experiences).
• Your soul is less a heritage than an ongoing contemporary experience: It is the thing that is you, as it expresses here and now.

Did we go off on a tangent, discussing ethnicity, etc.? Was that leftover business for you, given the accusations of anti-Semitism made against you?

What would a tangent be? The straight line may be the shortest, but it is not the most comprehensive. To see various aspects of things, tangents may be very helpful. Use your background, don’t apologize for it, or ignore it, or think it irrelevant. (How could any aspect of your life be irrelevant?) And therefore use the same process of analysis on whatever you examine. Freud was more than a European Jew in a secularized tradition in middle Europe – but he was those things, and how can you understand him if you do not take into account his background? I was the son of a Protestant minister who had silently lost his Christian faith. If you don’t know about my father, if you don’t know I was a Swiss peasant as well as a European scholar – how can you know who I am?

I realize, this still seems to you to be digression. But it is not. It is, rather, preliminary clearing of the ground. Careful study of new material will do you little good if you insist that it fit into your accustomed framework, most particularly if that insistence is unconscious, hence not under your control.

 

Wednesday, April 18, 2018

All right, friends, we said the 3D and non-3D and its application to all this – leaving “all this” undefined. I assume this means something more specific to you than it does to me.

Of course. It serves as a place marker, because our problems of orientation are the – reciprocal? opposite? complement? – to yours. You wonder where we’re going, we wonder which bit to offer at which time. So, any place gets us started. The function of a “topic for next time” is mostly to alleviate your anxiety.

So, yesterday we set out the idea that

• all moments of time-space (as opposed to “all moments of time” which isn’t as accurate) are equally alive, equally active, and
• the difference between this moving present-moment you experience in 3D and every other moment – the “past,” the “future” – lies in the physical movement of the earth, locating your 3D body here rather than there.

This is a vastly important subject that will lead you far, but there are so many subjects to link it to! That is, the context for this new way of seeing your lives is so extensive, it may take a while to sketch.

So we will pick up this or that aspect of things, as we are so moved, and you see it won’t matter very much in which order we do so. If there are 26 letters to be discussed and today we pick H when we haven’t picked G beforehand, it will make a difference, but ultimately it won’t hinder anything.

However, this is going to require a tremendous amount of work, and the less work you do, the less readjustment you can expect. We don’t want you memorizing nor accepting on blind faith nor rejecting out of hand nor limiting yourselves to what may be logically derived from the material as we happen to present it. Rather, we want you to pay attention to us and pay equal attention – at least equal attention – to your own intuitive promptings, which are likely to catch sparks we throw off. You can fan those sparks into flame, if you pay proper attention, and thus you can learn more than we can teach. In fact, that is the only way you can learn (as opposed to parrot or believe). We can’t be saying that every time, but it isn’t like we can say it once for all, because you all forget.

Given that your lives are spent traversing a living conscious universe moment by moment, bear in mind that so does your non-3D component. Only, it isn’t that simple.

When is it ever? But I’m with you. On the one hand our non-3D must be here with our 3D, as we’re all one thing. On the other hand, our non-3D component is not confined to this present moment any more than to this present place, which means, neither are we. At least, that’s the inference I draw.

In other words, your self-definitions are inadequate. Correct. So let’s look at it.

• This 3D experience is limiting, but it is not punishment, nor ignorance, nor detour, no matter what religions or philosophies argue.
• It may be seen as any of these, because of course it shares the characteristics of any of those situations, but that is not all it is, nor even is it all of them together.
• And it is precisely to help you see these things in a new light that Bob Monroe and Seth and so many people in and out of 3D came to say.
• 3D life is a more interesting, more hopeful situation than may sometimes appear. If people sell it short, that is usually because they are in pain, are feeling isolated, are feeling disoriented, or for some reason are identifying strongly with a sense of inherent meaninglessness or of separation and the logical and emotional effects of separation.

Working from the assumption that anyone in 3D is in fact in All-D (of necessity, because everyone in any of the dimensions must be in all of them, perceiving them or not), you come to the realization that your non-3D components necessarily share your 3D limitations to some degree. We need a good visual analogy.

A deep-sea diver tethered to his life-support on the surface? We in 3D being the divers, our non-3D being our life-support?

It is an attractive metaphor, in several ways. We’ll try it out and lean on it until it breaks under the weight we place on it. If your non-3D is tightly coupled to its 3D components, as it is, then necessarily its awareness is going to be tethered to the awareness of its 3D, as well.

I think you mean, if I’m in January, 1953 in Mexico City, so is my non-3D.

Well – let’s say that your non-3D is temporarily centering itself there.

And I’m only in 1953 because the sun has pulled the Earth over a particular place in the time matrix which is the 1953 place, and as it pulls us beyond it, obviously I – and everyone else on earth – am pulled with it, willy-nilly.

Yes, but just as in your present moment your non-3D is centered in but not confined to the moment the 3D body is, so always.

I get the sense of a solid point – us in 3D – and a gaseous envelope tied to the point but not limited to it, that floats somewhat free of it.

That may do for the moment. The point to be gathered is that the 3D experience is fully shared by the non-3D aspects of the entire (All-D) being.

Which is why you aren’t all-knowing in the way we start out expecting.

• And why you are more than your physical bodies,
• and why you know more, can do more, and are of more importance, than you sometimes think.
• And why it is so important to break down this putting us on a pedestal, or defining us out of existence, or thinking we are “spiritual” (or even “mental”) while you are physical.

All those alternative errors serve to distance yourselves from a large part of your potential. Fortunately, in practice you often disregard the walls you construct, but you can do better now, and it is time to do so.

We aren’t on our own, and never have been.

That’s right. Living as if you were on your own has had its advantages in exercising independence and in stretching your capacities to function without conscious connection with the larger part of you. After all, that is only a slight extension of what’s going on in the 3D experience anyway. But so much more is possible once you reunify the alienated parts of the whole.

Alienated?

Your 3D component often acts as if the rest of it did not exist, or was irrelevant. We want you to try to envisage living not only in continuous conscious connection (you are already in non-conscious connection, of course) but in active cooperative connection, which is another thing.

And this is something that cannot be described but might be “imagined” – that is, you may be able to catch something of the sense of it by fanning that spark; you will not get it by further logical exposition. How would your life look if your 3D were in continuous active cooperative connection with your non-3D? What would this make possible, even inevitable? How would your lives feel?