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Saturday, July 24, 2021

Yesterday’s information seems to me to have been quite densely packed. A tremendous lot there, if someone is ready for it. or maybe it’s all something everybody already knows. You said, think about it and ask any questions that arise. The only question that surfaces for me right now is the nature of the living present moment, that you described two weeks ago as the organizing principle.

Recalibrate now. Receptivity and focus are different activities than looking to remember something.

Okay. Slide-switches, as usual.

Now, stop looking at the clock! Be here, now. And, by an odd coincidence (we smile), that directly ties to the theme.

• Your experience of time divides into two: (1) the living present moment, and (2) everything else.
• We have said, many times, there are no absolute divisions in the universe.
• You have accepted that all moments continue to exist, and somehow exist living, rather than in a state of preservation like museum dioramas.
• We remind you that “life is but a dream,” projected from a “realer” reality, and therefore the laws governing it are those of the psyche, not of mechanistic 3D interactions.
• You know yourselves to be immortal and invulnerable; and you also feel contingent and helpless, often enough. That is, either you haven’t decided or the reality is self-contradictory, or what you are living is – as we have said – only somewhat real.

Does this carry you over the difficulty?

It may begin to. I get that you are saying that how we experience life depends upon what part of the overall experience we concentrate on.

Well, you got a lot more than that! Expand on it a bit. Nobody will be able to follow the jump without intermediate sign-posting.

Okay. I got that our life at this level is a dream of a larger reality, and that we are both actor and audience. Whether we are also scriptwriter, director, stage manager, etc., I don’t know, but for the moment the important thing is that we are actors doing improv, and audience losing itself in observing. Both elements are equally real within us.

Yes. Good so far. Continue.

Another way to look at it is as our being both insiders and outsiders. As outsiders, we accept the play, the scenery, the cast, even our part in the improv, as objectively “there.” That is, we participate and cannot help participating, just as physically we cannot help having our body being in any one place at a time. As insiders, we know better than to take any of it at face value. We cannot wave our hands and wish the world into non-existence, but we aren’t taken in by its appearance of solidity, either. My sense is that we, at some level way above 3D consciousness, are in connection with the dreamer dreaming the dream. Probably we are that dreamer, to some extent, though I think it would be too simple (and too inflated) to think we are it in any sense in which 3D intellect would participate.

Again?

I just mean, Jung could get glimpses and it enhanced his wisdom; Nietzsche identified with the divine level of things and it destroyed him, the level of forces cracking his vessel like an iron bar against fine porcelain.

Continue.

I doubt there is any absolute division here, any more than anywhere else in the world. We probably partake in divinity just as we partake in 3D restriction – partly, not entirely. Thus we are somewhat at home in either aspect of reality, but not entirely.

Isn’t your whole life one of uneasy coexistence within you of elements that are never entirely “at home”? This is so not only (not even primarily) because of the coexistence of strands, but because within each strand was the same uneasy living on borrowed time, in rented quarters, so to speak. 3D life is inherently a “settling for,” among things that are not only contradictory sometimes, but are out of different realities that have little to say to one another.

Now, the important point here is that you, living at this moment, are alive, you are real, you can choose. You are not dead, nor an abstraction, nor a puppet. As you concentrate on those living features, your life expands – you have life more abundantly – and it has no reference to “externals” of any kind. Being more alive does not necessarily alter your social position; it does necessarily alter what of you can be experienced at that moment.

Annoyingly, it seems to be slipping away.

Stop watching the clock and counting pages. Merely focus and maximize receptivity. But actually, let us use this process as an example. Through all these journal entries, every letter written was written in the living present moment, which in effect moved on, or moved you on, so that you could write the next letter. So in effect you could say

1. Your entire entry, every time, was written word by word in the living present, but
2. The whole thing is part of the past, and became part of the past as fast as it came through.

Is this not your life, all of you? Moment by moment you experience this uniquely alive feeling, and moment by moment that feeling detaches and moves along, carrying you with it. Do you not see something strange in this? Doesn’t it strike you as strange?

It does me, as well you know. If it does others, I don’t know.

Well, this is a huge clue to reality, staring you in the face at every moment. What could be stranger? If you accept life as a past, present, future progression, in which the past continually disappears and the future is continually not yet created and the present moment is the only thing that is real, you can make a sort of sense of life. But once that becomes impossible, then what?

Impossible, I take it, as we experience or acknowledge contact between times, between lives, etc.

Among other disturbing anomalies, yes. But it is no advance to say “On the other side, there is no time,” or, for that matter, “Life is but a dream,” if you don’t understand in what way what you say is not true. Life is so arranged that during your 3D existence parts of you may experience things that don’t fit into any scheme you devise. That is, there are always distracting, niggling, irritating things that don’t quite fit but can’t be dismissed. The biggest of these is the nature of the present moment.

 

Friday, July 23, 2021

Just as we in non-3D are not quite as we are commonly defined, nor you in 3D, so neither are you in your 3D/non-3D entirety seen correctly, usually. Thus your nature, your limitations, and your potential are misunderstood, for how much correct understanding can filter through so much wrong definition?

I have been feeling for your meaning, and I began to get a sense of a very common-sense picture, but it relies upon so many interlocking definitions. The result isn’t complicated, it’s elegantly simple, as I suppose we should expect. Truth usually is elegant, simple, straightforward and self-evident, but only when seen straight. Until seen straight, it will look like a mass of contradictions, side-trails, irrelevancies, and unknowablities.

Thus, Newton’s laws, and the re-visioning of Copernicus, and Einstein’s mathematical pulling-together of the two concepts of matter and energy. Thus Jung’s grasping exposition of psychological types. Any clarification of previously known but mystifying phenomena depends mostly upon seeing them from a new point of view.

But although I can more or less feel it, I couldn’t yet express it, which is the same as admitting that I don’t really have it.

No, it is the same as saying that you have done the spadework, immersing yourself in various aspects of the problem, and you are Wilbur Wright standing in his bicycle shop, talking to a customer while absent-mindedly holding a flexible carton and twisting it in opposite directions.

Even after he had the clarifying bit of insight, he had to do a lot of work testing what he suddenly knew, intuitively, was the key to control of a vehicle in flight.

Genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration, you know that.

Well, this would be a good time for you to throw in your 1%.

We smile. So you tell us.

I guess I’d say, we don’t go anywhere when we die. We don’t become anything we aren’t already. We continue.

Yes. Nobody and nothing is disconnected. There is no individual unit to exist or cease to exist or come into existence. What there is, is one vast whole, of which you and we are part, and “you” and “we” are relatively individual, communities of communities, and ourselves parts of larger communities. If you once grasp the reality of this interconnection, you see that “you” cannot die because “you” never existed in the way you usually see yourselves.

• You are combinations of strands.
• Each strand is a combination of strands.
• Each moment of time exists forever, and thus so do everything in those moments.
• However, all time may be divided in effect into the one present-moment as experienced, and all other moments.
• Everything interacts! One strand may connect many different centuries or territories. It is not possible to affect any one thing without affecting every
• 3D existence does not exist in the absence of non-3D connection. It couldn’t. The difference between the two states is a relative difference, not an absolute.
• Existing within 3D constriction, you yet exist outside of it, as well.
• Physical death, like physical birth, is a moment of transition, the culmination of a process, not a change from one thing to another, but from one set of environmental ground-rules to another.
• As a thought-experiment, consider yourself a bundle of strands existing equally after as well as before the process of bundling. You will see the superficiality of 3D existence as a physical unit.

I think you mean we’ll see that the only thing that changes is our experience as a relatively isolated unit.

Yes. You will watch as the superficial lining of 3D definition falls away, leaving and revealing (and, in fact, liberating) all the elements of yourself that 3D existence tended to obscure and submerge.

I’m still not sure we have conveyed the “aha!”-producing insight.

It is a Copernican shift, and you have known it for more than 20 years, but you have been unable to fully appreciate the idea as long as you remained enmeshed in the idea that a 3D body was the same as evidence of individuality in the sense of isolation.

Yes, that’s it, isn’t it? I see.

You see because you were born seeing it, groping your way to it. But although it is clear at the moment, perhaps it will be less so after we pause. It will be worth your while to spell out your understanding.

Every description of life or the afterlife is misleading in so far as it is based on the idea (usually implicit) that there is the unit (a “me” separate in some real way) and there is everything else. Thus any first-hand experience of the afterlife, or retrievals, or the meaning of life is all incorrect in so far as it is based on wrong definitions. But change the definitions, and the experiences remain, but they can be seen to be something different than we thought them to be.

Yes.

• You don’t have to step off a high wire when you die.
• You don’t have to find Charon or not get across the River Styx.
• You are not required to appear in court and be judged.
• You are not sentenced to rebirth, and neither are you liberated from the wheel of life and rebirth.
• You do not cease to exist.
• You do not leave Earth and the things of Earth;
• neither do you have to pretend to continue a 3D existence by what Monroe called belief-system territories and Moen called hollow heavens.

In short, anything people have posited or concluded or experienced or feared or looked forward to is true or not true, accurate or not accurate, reliable or misleading – depending upon the one definition that everything hangs on.

I get it. Either we realize that there are no absolute divisions in reality, or we don’t. If we think there are, then there are all those projections that appear real. If we see that there are not, then clearly we already are what we are.

Let’s put it this way: Just as the “external” world is not separate from you, regardless how 3D conditions make it appear; just as the “material” world is mind-stuff, in the same way your psyches are, so the present-moment is as much a part of everything as are all the other moments, but 3D conditions mask the reality.

And this hour has been very productive indeed. At least, we hope your friends will find it to have been. There is more to spell out, but this is the crucial insight. Change this one idea, and see how things that seemed chaotic and disconnected fall into place, or rather, are seen to be what they always were, harmonious parts of an undivided reality.

I take it we resume from here, but how, I don’t quite see.

Merely concentrate upon questions that arise as you think about your perpetual existence as part of all that is. We will help you, to the degree that your receptivity allows.

 

Thursday, January 26, 2023

6 a.m. Gentlemen, yesterday at our ILC meeting it was decided that I should ask you for exercises our group could do in re retrievals. That is, taking into account all you have told us over the years about the true situation, how can you help us think about the process? This is to improve our efficiency, I gather.

You are not focused.

No. Hard to concentrate on it. Hard to see the point of it, really. What we do, works. It’s – oh, I suppose the analogy would be remote viewing or anything that has been redefined for our mindset. Shamanism a la Michael Harner, for instance.

It is a process of translation, so that people in the midst of transition may learn to think of a thing in a new way, hence take seriously what they could not take seriously in the old context.

Prayer. Talking to spirits, all that.

You have moved away from the past and you are in a halfway-place to the future, so there will be difficulties of understanding. But of course you are always in a halfway-place; life never stops. Your time, though, has the shared subjectivity in a halfway-place, not merely many individual subjectivities.

Hmm. I think I understand that. The renaissance was such a bridging, as Koestler well described in The Sleepwalkers.

You’ve known it a long time, consciously, and of course everybody in a body has known it since before they entered 3D. That unconscious knowing is one source of their discontinuity with the times they were born into. We’ve said all this.

Yes, and we’ve hard it, I think. But everything is different when considered in a new context, I’ve learned that much. Tell me, this thought that just flitted through as I was writing that last sentence. Is that your prompting? I got that it is time that Dirk, in particular, begin posting in my blog.

There is that “ownership of ideas” thing again. The question is less “Where did it come from,” than, “Is it a good idea.”

Is it?

That isn’t for us to decide (ever). It is for you to feel, and reason. We can and will and often do respond with our opinion of your opinion, but really, these things are for you to decide about. That’s why you are in 3D, did we ever happen to mention it, to choose?

The idea came as a corollary to a blip I got, that Dirk’s responses to drumming questions at ILC meetings have come to be quite articulate and smooth, as have Bill’s. The thought came that perhaps it is time for Dirk and perhaps Bill (and others so inclined) to begin posting at will, converting the blog relatively seamlessly from centering on me to centering on communication with you. We’re talked about it from time to time.

And you are wondering if it is time to give people another nudge.

I am. Dirk has talked about writing books: This would be a step toward it, and he already has administrator status, so could post without any middleman. Whether Dirk or Dave or Jane or others wish to move in that direction remains to be seen. But maybe Dirk posting on an occasional basis would segue into his posting on a regular basis, and he would show the way.

The variable being, time. To do this work, it cannot be last on one’s to-do list.

The more I ponder it, though, the better I like the idea. We aren’t asking Dave’s question, but let’s pursue this a bit.

People will face the author’s proverbial three obstacles:

• I don’t have anything to say.
• I don’t have the ability to say it.
• Nobody will care anyway.

All they need to do is face the obstacles, and they will see them as illusions.

• People don’t have the urge to write without it being a concomitant of having something to say.
• “Ask, and it shall be given.” If you have something to say and you work sincerely at saying it, the ability will develop, or rather, will be recognized as being there already.
• Just as no one has the urge to write without having something to say (known to the conscious mind or not), so no such urge manifests in the absence of a potential audience.

And we have created a pretty good venue for them to practice in:

• A protected defined space with a small number of interested readers.
• A venue open to a few sentences, or a few paragraphs, or a full-length essay or series of essays.

Yes, you’d think someone had been shaping the possibility behind your backs.

Oh, we’d never think that. Okay, very funny but very encouraging too. I think I’ll send this to just the list rather than posting it.

You should stop and think first. What do you hope to accomplish by doing it that way? That is, what is the advantage of not posting on the blog what amounts to a call for papers?

The idea keeps morphing. First I thought we were going to discuss reworking our understanding of the retrieval process.

Then as a stray thought came the realization that Dirk has been silently, casually, growing in his ability to articulate in mini-essay form what is shown to him.

Then the renewed thought that he might start posting, and the hope that others in our group might, as well, and the remembrance that at one time I had hoped to set up a forum for many people to share posts, then the sense that we have already done that, and now it needs to be consciously recognized and used.

And you are wondering, should this be kept within your present group of list recipients, or put out to one and all via the blog.

And now I get, what’s the advantage in shutting out those who are not already in what could be seen as a self-selected inner circle?

That is not a self-answering question. Any course will have plus and minus aspects. A self-selected inner circle has its place in the nurturing of new ways of seeing things, or they would not continually appear as patterns. What is the pool of Monroe graduates, if not a self-selected inner circle? The balancing act is to cooperate without closing ranks against those with similar by different backgrounds.

So maybe I should post this as “A call for papers.”

You haven’t done the thinking, so far. So far, you have reacted.

As usual. All right, well, here’s my thinking.

• The forum is in existence physically. Dirk and Dave have gotten it in hand. It exists, it is administered, it has a track record going back to March, 2007, nearly 16 years.
• Till now, it has been nearly entirely conducted by me, with technical assistance from Rich Spees, and Larry Giannou before him. But I have done nearly all the writing.
• Clearly I am going away, however long the process. When I am gone, it will be far better if the forum is already a forum and not a monologue.
• I have watched Dirk learn to bring his guys through, I having had almost nothing to do with it after the initial experience. I’m getting that it is time for him and others to develop the habit of transferring understandings to writing, and this is a good halfway house between ideas and books or even essays.
• There are several others I have in mind, and doubtless some I have not yet in mind, who are poised to be contributors, but seem to lack the final ounce of self-confidence, or perhaps of motivation.
• Those reluctant to seem egotistical may be persuaded if they think of it as perhaps helping people. Certainly that worked for me!
• I’m really getting the sense that it is time, now. We can move from individual effort as it has been understood, into a new model of individual cooperative effort, both between 3D beings and, within them, between 3D and non-3D components, actively, consciously
• This requires (repays) the desacralization, the mundane-ization, if you will, of the process of passing on information received non-physically. This may aid the process.

So your conclusion is?

This should go out on the blog, so that – among other things – people who do not yet consider themselves part of the inner circle may begin to reconsider their possibilities.

You will find that making the implicit explicit is the equivalent of Jung’s “making the unconscious conscious.” That is one function of writing, whether it is you or those of the inner (and outer!) circle.

Maybe we’ll get to Dave’s question next time. This was worth the effort. Thanks as ever.

 

Wednesday, June 20, 2018

You will note that some of your readers have gotten the point of all this, and have said so, emphatically. The same passage that strikes some as theoretical and others as mildly interesting strikes some to the core, and they wake up. But what does that mean, to wake up? Is that to imply that the rest of humanity sleeps?

I don’t see what else it could mean.

Well, say that is so, we have yet to explain what we mean by the difference between waking and sleep. It may seem obvious, but, as with so many matters, the closer you look at it, the more facets it presents, and the more potentially contradictory implications.

Gurdjieff said humans were asleep, and that no work on oneself could be done in sleep. I begin to see what you may be driving at.

Your friend Colin Wilson often used the analogy of a neon tube under insufficient power, that flickered rather than glowed, or a pot of water under insufficient heat, that couldn’t quite be brought to the boil. The image is of discontinuity. Twilight, then a momentary illumination, then twilight again, a repetitive but not regular alternation of states. Your own long quest began when you were first exposed to the idea, and you went in search of a way to connect those moments of lucidity.

His novel The Mind Parasites made me aware of the problem, but I didn’t know what to do. It is hard to pursue mental clarity and continuity when beginning from a position of flickering awareness.

And if you will – slowly, ploddingly – sketch out the situation as you experienced it, we will get where we want to go.

If you say so. It seems obvious enough.

I wanted that clarity of mind and continuity of consciousness that he had brilliantly suggested in that book. But I was not yet 24 years old, and I felt I had already missed so many opportunities! I had drifted through my college years, drifted into an early marriage, drifted into a job, all the while waiting until I should be old enough to run for Congress and emulate John F. Kennedy’s career. My internal life was mostly divorced from my external life. That is, I was waiting to begin what I felt was going to be my career, but I did nothing to bring it about.

Yes, but go even slower, allow yourself to sink deeper. Don’t skim over the surface of the subject; don’t go into Story, but feel your way through it.

I was living a pretty meaningless external life, while dreaming an entirely different internal one. I read incessantly, but what I read wasn’t aimed at anything, even vaguely. I can’t remember what kind of books I was reading. Anything by Colin Wilson, but beyond that, what? Anyway, I was leading one life externally, a different life internally.

Look at that more closely. This does not involve you alone, nor even you as an unusual case study. It is closer to you as a typical example of a not-so-widely-understood phenomenon.

My mental world and my physical world didn’t really coincide. Externally I was a young news reporter trying to do a job for which he was entirely untrained (and would receive no training), a young husband with no idea of what married life should be and no imagination to envision the emptiness of my wife’s days back when we had only one car and she had no job.

Internally I was dreaming, though I can’t quite remember any more what it was I dreamed of. I expected to be a writer and make my living by my writing, but I did nothing to connect that internal dream, or expectation, even, to reality. Similarly, my political career-to-be, I –. Oh, now I get what you’re after!

If you can hold it. Go ahead.

I never knew what it was all about, no matter what “it” we refer to. In politics, I could see results but no causes, could respond but not initiate, could relate anything to my dreamy ideas and feelings, but could not relate any of it to the core of me.

Still more carefully.

Well – I guess it was like I was trying to play a game without knowing the rules or the objective, and without insight into the other players’ motivations. I don’t know that I ever felt the reality of other people. They and the world existed, but I existed sort of next to them, not with them or among them. Is this what you’re wanting?

Let us take it from here. We would say that the nub of your problem was that although you were experiencing your life as disconnected from the world around you, really you were disconnected from your own inner motivations. You had ideas about your life. That is not the same thing as participating in it. Now you might say, “How can anybody live without participating in their life?” And we would say, “Look around you. For that matter, look within you.” That is the source of people’s sense of futility.

Take someone who has found the only thing for him or her to do :

• Picasso painting,
• Hemingway writing,
• Churchill attempting to steer society,
• Georgia O’Keefe painting,
• Jacob Riis or Lincoln Steffens trying to bring social reform

Anyone in any field who was consumed with a task not as a means to achieve fame and fortune, or even to keep body and soul together, but because they knew that this is what they were put on God’s earth to do. It doesn’t matter how messy the rest of their lives may have been, nor what else they may have spent their energies doing, nor even how successful or not they were. Examples are usually success stories because they are known, but the reality isn’t any different for those who do not become known.

When someone knows what they are in 3D to do, their life has a continuity of consciousness not between moments of time, nor between themselves as individuals and their fellows. It is continuity of connection with their deepest self. This is why they are single-minded about what they do.

That may not be as clear as you think it is.

The difference between being engaged in something and merely going through the motions has little to do with one’s relation to the external world, and, consequently, little to do with success or failure of their efforts in any particular thing. It has to do with connection.

This is what you are considering as continuity of consciousness. You quote Carl Jung to the effect that he who looks outward dreams; he who looks inward awakes. Does that really mean anything to you, or is it just words? For, you can look outward while dreaming that you are looking inward, and that is the most difficult trap to emerge from. If you dream that you are awake, what will spur you to awaken in real life?

Your connection with your non-3D component, presumably.

We don’t know what else could do it. But suppose you live in such a way as to be not in conscious connection, then what?

Then a feeling of lostness, I suppose, a feeling of marking time and losing ground.

But you often feel you are marking time even today. Would you say your internal life is what it was at 24?

No, not even close.

The difference being?

Somehow I am more here, now. It feels like I wasn’t really there, then, not fully formed. Hard to put it into words.

You had not had the experience of being consciously fully present. A child is fully present as its natural state, but with the coming of the age of reason, at year seven or so, its world divides into inner and outer in a way difficult to define but familiar to all. To return to that childhood state of non-division, consciously, is the point. And you did not experience that until your experience with mescaline in 1970 and then not again until your Gateway experience 1992.

Yes, I see that. And the penetration into reality is what has made the difference. Not that it made my life any easier, but –

Oh come! Of course it made your life easier. What you mean is, “Not that it made my life automatically without problems, and not that it made me able to function smoothly and flawlessly.”

Correction accepted. You’re right, that’s what I did mean. Life still had difficulties and I made no end of embarrassing and even painful mistakes, but from that point I had a touchstone.

 

Part two

Monday, June 18, 2018

We realize that it will become difficult to keep all of the argument in mind. At some point it may become useful to construct a skeleton, so that the essentials can be grasped visually all at the same time. Sequential exposition, instantaneous recapitulations. But for now, let’s look into the question of how it is that you can (and do) affect the world magically, not merely directly.

Certain distortions result from considering yourselves as if you were 3D-only, and to consider yourselves as “3D-only individuals interacting with 3D-only surroundings” compounds the distortion and produces a sense of helplessness in a hostile or indifferent world. Our present enterprise is about considering yourselves as All-D beings experiencing 3D limitations.

I have long been feeling for the “why” of existence, and the “how” of it.

“Ask, and you shall receive.” Any thirst deep enough will provide the means to slake it. We have suggested alternate ways of understanding tailored to your personality and essence. Your repeating these in turn provides enlightenment for those whose being is close enough to yours to respond to the same “flavor” of information. Those sufficiently different will not respond to this but will not be left unfed.

There are many ways to suggest people toward the truth, and each way must be suited to its audience. Not any truth applies to everyone. What may look like entirely contradictory descriptions may still represent steps toward truth for those at a certain position. After all, neither you nor they are going to find a “the” truth. At best you are going to find the truest truth you can relate to.

So, to continue. You as All-D beings, experiencing yourselves primarily as 3D beings, naturally experience an external world. That world, though, is external to you only insofar as you experience it as 3D-only. In reality you and it are not separate. You are all part of one another, and of us, and therefore of the “external” world. There is an external world only in the sense that reality may be experienced as it would be if 3D were all there is.

The fact is, All-D – all of  reality, not merely the stripped-down version of it that may be experienced directly by 3D senses – is not divided. All-D reality has different rules. We could equally well say, All-D reality is different essentially from 3D reality. (There is only one reality, but it seems different, depending entirely upon the vantage point from which it is considered.)

In the All-D there is no “other,” no “external world.” You affect the world directly by what you are, at least as much as by what you do. What you do may be paraphrased, “What you actually intend.” But that in turn depends upon what you are, for what you are determines what you wish, and in turn is determined by what you were, which is determined by a combination of where you began at a previous instant and what you chose at that instant.

We are the result of past decisions, which our free will exercised upon pre-existing conditions.

And thus, what you are at any given moment is as important as what you specifically will. Another way to say it: Your unconscious will (what you have made yourself to be) is as important as your conscious will (any specific immediate intent). And this is how you affect external reality by adding your vote to any issue. You as All-D beings affect other All-D beings directly, which means you can affect All-D reality directly, for the 3D trance is a result of All-D beings, in concert and in discord. How you affect it depends primarily your level of being and your intensity of application at any given moment, and how well or ill your intent fits with that of others. But that is where you affect your 3D external reality, and not (as seems to 3D eyes) directly in an “external” world.

 

Tuesday, June 19, 2018

Everything we have said to this point leads to this: The world is magic and is to be influenced by magic. You, as humans, are magic and are to be influenced by magic. Now it merely remains to show you magic when it is right in front of you.

I don’t get that you mean “magic” in any metaphorical way.

No, quite literally. Everything is alive, conscious, interconnected. Of course it is all magic; it is only the limitations of thought and feeling imposed by 3D conditions that prevent you from knowing something so obvious. But it isn’t magic in effect if the 3D trance is deep enough. The trance says “What you see is what you get,” and the philosophies hung from it argue that what can’t be measured cannot exist, and the religions argue that there are two worlds. But the world – reality – is magic. One more time: Alive, conscious, interconnected.

We often consider magic to be the interfering with the laws of nature by the application of directed will.

That is the wider world seen through a crack in the 3D trance. It is the materialist who allows for an afterlife, or ghosts, or effective witchcraft. It is the assumption of the primacy of 3D rules, only with bewildering exceptions. It is an allowing-in of contrary evidence, but only the least degree.

Now, look at what clears up, if what we are saying is true.

• Those things that fly directly in the face of common sense, that cannot be explained in terms of accepted physical laws but are fitted in, badly, to a materialist context.
• The many deep ends off which various religions drop: demons, hobgoblins of all kinds, invisible traps for the unwary, celestial wars over the fate of helpless individuals.
• Most of all, the endless contradictions in the evidence.

All these problems stem from attempting to understand All-D reality from an assumption, implicit or explicit, that 3D reality is the known quantity. The problem can’t be solved at the level it is posed. It resolves only when seen from a higher understanding. Reality is All-D rather than 3D-only; it is experienced by humans as 3D-only until they learn to experience with their whole being, rather than with only their 3D senses.

From the more unified point of view, you see that

• Of course the wellsprings of the 3D part of the world are not limited to 3D causes and manifestations.
• Of course events transpire in 3D only after they are precipitated from All-D conditions.
• Of course – in short – the world and all its workings is magical in nature.
• And of course that can only mean that you are magical in nature, unless you are somehow different from everything else in the All-D world!

It doesn’t feel like it, perhaps, or feels like it only now and then, or only as an exception to the rules. But “what it feels like” amounts to “as it is interpreted to me by my particular mixture of sensory and non-sensory apprehension.” Not a reliable guide! The result may be sensory disorientation and non-sensory nonsense.

When Jesus said that someone with even a miniscule amount of faith could tell a mountain to move and the mountain would move, he was expressing something that totally contradicted sensory experience. If he was not speaking metaphorically, and not speaking nonsense, what was he pointing to?

I get that “faith” isn’t quite the right word.

It could be, but so much depends upon what the reader understands by the word. It did not mean “faith in me,” nor even, quite, “faith in what I am saying.” More like, “attunement to reality, perception of what the laws of nature really are.” The “laws of nature” in this case means the laws of All-D nature, not merely the laws of a special case such as 3D-only.

If you really see how things are, you see, you will be able to perform incredible feats of magic. Not that the ability to do magic is the point. It isn’t. The point is that seeing clearly shows you the real nature of yourself and the world and the larger world beyond the 3D trance. Everything Jesus said and did aimed at providing a wake-up call for those ready to respond to it. “He who has ears, let him hear.”

Instead, they made him a god. Easier to deal with that way.

That isn’t quite fair. Those who were ready to wake up, did wake up. Those who somewhat woke up changed their attitudes and their behavior (“See how these Christians love one another”) but they continued to regard 3D as self-evident and separate from the “spiritual” or “celestial” or “afterlife” reality that would only be experienced after death. They interpreted the words of Jesus as if he had been giving laws rather than helpful instruction; lived in fear of punishment and hope of salvation – that is, they lived in expectation of an external judgment – rather than in joyful, even playful, freedom. They experienced a new birth of freedom, but only within a 3D context. What they did experience and to some degree transmit was enough to transform the world. But perhaps it was only a halfway-house understanding, after all.

But what about you? You are at the end of 2,000 years of that message being passed down, even if often enough in distorted form. Can you say that your mental and emotional world has been liberated by that message, or have you, too, not mostly missed it? Reality is magic, and magic may be defined as the ability to affect your surroundings to reshape them in conformity with your will. But that definition contains a whole host of terms themselves requiring definition.

We almost despair of making our point and having it heard. For, you will read what we say and maybe assent and maybe assent with reservations, but you will not apply your assent. You will not realize – make real – your greater freedom. And if you do not apply what we have given you, it is just an outpouring of words, nothing more.

I suppose some concrete practical down-to-earth suggestions would help.

That, they would not. This is not a theory to be explored, or an equation to be solved, or even a working hypothesis to be lived. It is an insight, or it is nothing. We have already made the only practical suggestion necessary, and we have made it many times. Concentrate on waking up. Jesus said unless you become like a little child, you can’t enter into heaven. He said the kingdom of heaven is right here, right now, not somewhere else or somewhen else. Those two statements give you all you need.

If we have ears to hear.

Well, can you deny it? It is the parable about sowing seed on fertile or rocky ground: The harvest depends not upon the seed, but upon the receptivity of the soil it falls on.

 

Part one

Saturday June 16, 2018

Let us look at the different ways humans – that is, citizens of the All-D experiencing a span of consciousness limited to 3D perceptions in 3D conditions – interact with what we are calling the weather.

You could look at it in three ways:

1. External events are the weather,
2. External events are affected by the weather,
3. External events are produced by the weather (via our reactions to it).
4. External events are the weather you live in. First, you must remember and grasp (not merely accept) that there is no “external” as such. External may mean “seemingly unconnected to one’s direct being,” but that is about as far as the meaning can be stretched. You are of the same substance as the rest of the universe; it’s all one thing. We are all one thing. There is no “disconnected” any more than there is an “elsewhere” or an “other.” All distinctions are approximations, not exact descriptions of relationship or – still less – lack of relationship.

Now, to say that “all is one” is not to say that all the parts are experienced as one. Your own experience every day tells you otherwise. How could any two things interact if there were no relative separation into units? Anything may be seen as individual or connected; sometimes it is useful to think one way, sometimes the other way. But, extremes are never true except as one end of a polarity. Ultraviolet light may be separated out of white, but it does not exist as an absolute, only as part of the spectrum.

We may be over-stressing the connectedness of everything, but we doubt it. The concept is easily agreed upon but only applied now and again, because sensory evidence argues otherwise.

So, external events seem exterior; seem to be disconnected from interior events: that is, your inner world. To that extent, exterior events may be said to be the weather you exist in. Your inner life is affected by events, and you cannot control them. If you don’t like the election results, or disapprove of a war, or wish you had clean air and water, or grieve over the continued existence of suffering in the world, or even want this or that external influence on your life to go away, well – too bad. External life exists and you must live your life within its confines.

2. External events are affected by the weather. They have their own logic. If you have not already built the pyramid, you cannot look at it, nor write on the walls, nor tear it down. If you are in the middle of World War II, your next moment obviously will begin from – the middle of World War II. There are no magical discontinuities in events. You do not experience in external life (as you do in dreams, perhaps) a building suddenly appearing or suddenly disappearing. Things happen in the context of the stream of events that produced them.
3. External events are produced by your reaction to previous external events. Certainly as a description of the 3D world as experienced commonly, this is a truism. That’s what you do! Events produce an effect upon you, and you react, and your reaction helps set up the next set of external circumstances. Billions of humans react to the events of the moment, and that’s how pyramids get built, or get torn down. That’s just common experience.

However, when you look a little more closely, you see that this applies on an inner as well as an outer level, and accounts for psychic influencing of external events. This third definition is the main point here, the primary interaction of inner and outer worlds, of subjective and objective reality.

When people first escape from the 3D trance, they face a lack of theoretical structure for what they nonetheless feel is true. This is the bird emerging from the egg. The 3D aspect is confused at the change in situation. The non-3D aspect knows full well what is required. Birds, unlike humans, do not suffer from an interruption of sure connection between 3D and non-3D, so you don’t see birds pausing while trying to get out of the shell, wondering, “What’s the point of all this? Why should I have to go through this? Why am I not somewhere else or something else or some-how else?” Birds don’t suffer 3D-only consciousness any more than they suffer envy that they are not jaguars or otters or humans.

But the human’s situation is different. As a baby, yes, as a young child, usually the connection is uninterrupted, and so the baby can rely on what are called instincts. It breathes; it sucks; it systematically and enthusiastically exercises the various functions of the body as it conducts its pre-flight tests. But as a slightly older child, or a teen, or an adult, the connection is broken, usually by those with whom the new individual interacts (who have themselves been shaped by their society) insisting that sure connection is illusion or even illness.

To those no longer in conscious touch with their non-3D components, the world is internal or external, inner or outer. When people first begin to realize that the 3D trance is only a strained attention on this rather than on this and that, they are tempted to go off the deep end. They are tempted – you should know! – to build theoretical structures to support their new experiences, and perceptions, and such structures cannot hope to be as sophisticated and elaborated as those that have been constructed previously over many thousands of years. Religions, philosophies, shamanic practices, all are available, all would serve somewhat to express the new experiences and perceptions. But, only somewhat. New wine requires new containers. We are talking now about magical interaction with the external world.

Sunday, June 17, 2018

You said, “We are talking now about magical interaction with the external world.”

Yes, in the context, remember, of two other aspects of external reality as you experience it. It is the fact that external events have these three aspects, rather than any one of them, that confuses the issue. Anyone seeing clearly only one aspect, or even any two aspects, will have a firm but incomplete idea of the nature of reality, and this will lead him or her to draw incorrect conclusions excluding certain aspects of what is real.

You mean, I think, they will become materialists, or spiritualists, or whatever, as a result of not seeing how the other aspects can be equally true.

That’s right. They will have lost beginner’s mind, in that respect, and so certain doors will be closed to them. They will be pushing on doors that open toward them. So, as we discuss magical interaction with the world, keep in mind that the other modes of interaction remain true. They don’t go away merely because this one is also true.

And that is analogous to the levels of control over our health that you once sketched out.

Yes. Don’t go into it in any detail, but give the general idea in a sentence or two.

Our level of control over our health depends upon the ground-rules of the world we live in – and that depends upon the level of integration of 3D resources. I put it into Imagine Yourself Well as a table of five levels of interaction, ranging from no effective access to the miraculous abilities of someone on Jesus’ level. That is a concrete example of what you’re talking about here.

Yes it is. And the central point is: Your interaction with the external world is not under your total control (obviously), but it is potentially qualitatively different depending upon your effective level of integration with your non-3D components. Some people live in a constricted, determined environment; others live in a world of magical potential. Same world. Some people’s every wish is frustrated; others get what they really want, as if by automatic pilot. Same reality. And, even more importantly, some people at a high level of integration nonetheless do not get things they very much want, and no one, even at the highest level, the most magical and miraculous level, gets everything they want.

The highest levels of integration produce miracles, not merely experience them, and even these levels do not get everything they want. This is just common sense, but it tends to get lost as one explores these rarified realms of speculation. In other words, it is an aspect of reality that gets lost when one discovers the truth of other aspects. We don’t want you to be among those who lose sight of it, or you won’t go any farther than established thought has gone long ago.

The world is larger than any of its parts. Dion Fortune’s group – and Hitler’s, for that matter – had certain ways it wanted the world to be, but for all their magical abilities, they had to fight for them; they could not merely will them into existence, nor did their going into battle assure their success.

Again, this is only what your experience of the world tells you every moment, only you must integrate what you know in one part of your mind with what you know in another. External reality is as real as internal reality, even though neither is quite as simple as they may appear. They may either one be ill-defined; they do not thereby go out of existence. They must be taken into account, or your mental construction (deduction) of the world will be seriously distorted.

Yes, you magically affect externals. No, externals are not under your sole control. Really, we can see that the first statement might not be obvious, but we should have thought the second would be. Only long experience says otherwise. But let us spend a moment on the question of how and how far and under what conditions your individual selves affect external reality magically.

How. Remember, it is an All-D individual affecting an All-D world, and cannot be otherwise. Although you may be entirely unaware of your non-3D component, still it is there. Although you may be entirely unaware of the world’s 3D component, still it is there. The difference in your level of integration determines the difference in your conscious control of the situation, not the nature of it. Your full being is only partly in 3D; to treat 3D affairs as if only the 3D mattered is to – well, find an analogy.

Someone thinking that the physical radio set produced the message rather than reproduced it.

Good enough. Not bad, in fact. The transmission over the airwaves is invisible to one who places his faith only in what he can see. The radio exists, the program is experienced, so obviously it would be superstition to assume that the radio program can have been produced elsewhere and transmitted without wires. A valuable analogy if not over-stretched.

But let us defer further consideration of how, so that we may dispose of how far, and under what conditions, if possible.

How far. The limitation is partly within the individual and partly inherent in the time the individual lives in. One’s level of integration clearly determines one’s ability to command one’s innate resources, but even here, individuals vary widely. Two people each in full communication with their non-3D components will not be identical. They will each be their full selves, but that full self will be different. Obvious, isn’t it, once pointed out? You came to 3D to express your difference, to see out of your own private window and make your unique contribution. And, at the same time, the canvas upon which one paints one’s life is not self-created, but in existence before one makes an entrance.

As to “under what conditions,” remember, again, that you are All-D creatures affecting an All-D world. External reality could be looked at, for this purpose, as the entirety of all the affected All-D creatures, taken together. Again, a common-sense understanding, though here somewhat unusually defined. External reality isn’t some animate or inanimate “thing”; it is the product of so many individual All-D reactions and interactions to what is presented.

We will resume with more on the “how” of individual integration with the external world, next time.

 

Thursday, June 14, 2018

It occurred to me to look at the 3D world from outside rather than under the impression that it is its own raison d’etre.

Looking at the 3D world as if from outside may assist us to find a helpful image. We had come up with the image of a light show, remember, with all the lights continually flashing, changing color, forming new patterns, as individual minds fluctuated. We would like to find an image of that sort, and tie it in with the concept of the vast impersonal forces affecting the light show. In other words, the light show changing not so much in terms of interactions among its own components, but of interactions of the entire show with forces from outside it.

You’re seeking to integrate larger and larger aspects of reality, in other words.

It is always a two-part process, now building up from individual building-blocks, then looking from a higher synthesis to see how the blocks interrelate to form a system. The world can never be understood merely by adding to an inventory of parts; nor by sweeping generalizations that cannot be illustrated. So, first one way, then the other. We don’t know any other way to proceed.

That’s what an image does, then. It summarized previous understandings.

The world cannot be captured in words, in sequential processing. An image is closer to a gestalt.

Does this imply that what cannot be summarized in an image or metaphor has not yet been properly understood?

That’s a pretty flat statement. We’d want to think before signing off on it. While we wait for the proper clarifying image to suggest itself, let us return to the question of the weather you exist in and the non-3D elements of the situation. After all, considering the 3D as if it were a world unto itself is only somewhat true.

We tend to think that this is the world, and we’re of realizing that we extend into the non-3D.

Nothing wrong with that; one’s surroundings always loom largest, whether in space or time. “Here, now,” is what 3D is all about! But it is truer to life to say that the non-3D is primary and vastly more extensive, and the 3D secondary and only a local phenomenon. It is even truer to say that the All-D is all-encompassing reality, and both non-3D and 3D are specialized expressions. Neither the 3D nor the non-3D is an entity that can exist.. Each is only an abstraction.

Ah, got it! We constructed “non-3D” as scaffolding to help us see that the “3D” we commonly experience is incomplete. The non-3D means all the aspects of reality that are not obvious in 3D.

All that do not obviously manifest, yes. So this is a reminder that the reality of things is neither material, as 3D appears to be, nor only non-material, as non-3D was defined to be, but, always, All-D. Reality is never in pieces. Do not confuse the scaffolding with the stonework.

What we have been telling you to clarify relationships also, inadvertently and necessarily, distorted larger relationships by ignoring them. This couldn’t be helped. If we could say everything at once, we would, gladly, but saying “All is one” is useful only to move people out of a sense of things as separate. Once you see that everything is connected, “All is well” does not necessarily bring you any farther in practical understanding. So, rather than soaring over the landscape, we plod. Then we soar again to give you a sense of the terrain from the air. Then we plod so that your feet will feel the changes in elevation, the roughness of the path, the view from ground level. This repetitive alternation may seem frustratingly slow, but it is the only way we know.

People have the idea that if they could find the proper guide and reach enlightenment (whatever that means to them) they could then begin to live. But that is a confusion of ideas. It assumes that enlightenment is a “there,” rather than a way of being while one travels.

So, we are always saying, “Now, how your new viewpoint reinterprets what you used to perceive.” Not so much “used to think,” as “used to perceive.” Your world changes as you see it differently, and you see it differently as it changes. As so often, a reciprocating process.

When you begin from the thought that reality by definition involves all dimensions and not only some of them, then what you have learned, have experienced, have seen with new eyes opens yet new vistas. Spending time in an older framework was not time wasted. It is what allows you to move on from a higher base camp.

• You see that the 3D world is a subset of the entire world.
• Then you see that the separation is only for the process of analysis, and must be reunited to take account of the larger reality.
• Now you begin to see that neither 3D nor non-3D exists as such, but only as abstractions.

And I think you’re about to say, “And the very concept of dimensions is only an abstraction, something unreal but useful for the purposes of analysis.” I have had this thought more than once.

This will be a stumbling-block for some, because their senses tell them that height, depth, width obviously exist and compose the substance of the 3D world.

But they don’t, of course. They are merely ways of describing orientation in space.

Yes, but go slowly now. The spatial dimensions are similar to the temporal dimension in this respect: They are measured, hence are assumed to be real, as if they were objects rather than relationships.

Time is measured in seconds, minutes, hours, in the same way we measure inches, feet, yards. In both cases, the measuring medium could be looked at as merely a measurement of relationship. You can’t box up a dozen dimensions, whether height or minutes. They don’t exist; they measure.

It might be better to say, “They don’t exist as such; they are inferred from relationships in time and space.”

So if dimensions are abstractions, they cannot be barriers or destinations. We don’t move to the 4th, 5th, 6th, etc. dimension. There isn’t any place to move to. It would be like moving to seconds or minutes.

However, that doesn’t render the metaphor invalid or even, necessarily, misleading. It only reminds you that a metaphor is a metaphor and not a road map.

 

Friday, June 15, 2018

You suggested that we begin with a description of how life in 3D looks from an All-D perspective.

In a way, you might say that this is what we have been doing all along.

I see that. A double translation – 3D into All-D perspective and then back to us.

Except that you are in both “places,” always. If we could once get across how this is, most of the translation errors would go away automatically.

But let us look at 3D life as a thing only partially seen, partially understood, because strictly speaking the 3D world is only a subset of the All-D world. The 3D world you experience could never exist by itself, as neither could you exist as bodies that had width and height but no depth. It isn’t that it wouldn’t be likely, or hard to imagine: It is that it would not be possible. It is an error in translation, an error in perception.

The 3D world that you experience is part of the world. It is a special set of conditions supported by the framework of the rest of the All-D. Clearly anything understood in isolation is going to be understood differently, depending upon where the boundaries are drawn. This should not be a difficult thought. Everything is understood in isolation, and everything is understood in relation to the boundaries drawn around it.

So that any subject is defined in advance by how we choose to think of it. “This belongs to this subject of examination, this does not,” and so we define a subject into existence and then think that the limits we put on it in advance are the natural and inevitable limits.

Of course. When Galileo decided to study only the observable properties of objects, he defined away in advance certain attributes that he decided could not be of interest because they could not be measured. This decision made possible a science of celestial mechanics – but it shaped, rather than revealed, that science. If celestial mechanics had been required to include properties such as color, it would have come to very different results. We are not saying this could have been (or even should have been) done, only that definitions affect what is to be examined in powerful and often unnoticed ways. That process has resulted in the powerful but one-sided civilization that is in its terminal flourishing state in the world.

The Western worldview that began with the Renaissance and the Protestant Revolution resulted in creating a global civilization, first by empire, then by trade and technology. The non-Western world is currently enchanted with the new possibilities, so it looks like that world-view is not only triumphant, but still gaining strength. But it is gaining strength in the way the Roman Empire expanded, not as an outgrowth of strength but of an unhealthy hypertrophy of certain traits at the expense of more human possibilities which will reassert themselves, even if it requires the overthrow of the empire and the institution of an age of feudalism. This is all analogy, but not a far-fetched one.

Correct, only remember that these processes require time. Meanwhile, your whole lives are to be lived. So let us continue with our larger, but scarcely irrelevant, field of inquiry.

You incarnate into the 3D world. You live, you make choices as to how and what you wish to be. Then, you die, you reunite your 3D-limited consciousness with the unlimited consciousness of your Sam. You have thus added a new bit of awareness to your Sam’s total. Then you enter another life, perhaps as one strand of many. Regardless how prominent or non-prominent a part you play in this new intelligence, this new soul in formation, you play some part. Therefore by definition your previous experiences play a part in that new soul’s repertoire. Then that soul returns, and is used as a thread in another existence, and so on. You see our point? What was experienced continues. It doesn’t necessarily dominate, or even emerge now and then, but it is always there, always flavoring the soup.

When John F. Kennedy won the presidential election of 1960, massive consequences followed. The hundreds of millions of people affected by the New Frontier idea, and by the assassination of the president and by the long consequences of that action, would have been affected quite differently if the 1960 election had gone the other way. Can the alteration of so many hundreds of million souls be of no consequence to the library of souls that is your Sam, and all the other affected Sams? Yet it can hardly be said that the external events in and of themselves matter, except in so far as they affect people.

Depending upon where you set your boundaries for this investigation, that sentence will seem tautological, or nonsensical, or arguable. Surely, an external event matters in itself, if only because it is the bridge between external circumstances. But that doesn’t mean it matters because what happens externally matters in and of itself. Instead it – external reality – matters because of the changes it produces in the souls living in that event. In a sense, external events are the weather you live in.