how the world works

Tuesday, June 18, 2024

5:40 a.m. Several possible places to continue:

1. Judging by our intent rather than by our actions seems backwards.
2. “As you change your mind, you change your effective being.”
3. The mechanism for internal readjustment.

Your choice, guys.

All good questions. Shows you are paying attention, not merely transcribing.

1. Judging by intent rather than by actions seems backwards.  Yes, it is backwards from how you naturally judge things when you regard 3D as real and non-3D as theoretical at best. And the same point of view would see the moment as transitory and the effects as at least relatively permanent. But do you want to see your lives from outside, or not? If you do, you must at least temporarily lay down your accustomed judgments.

It is very true that the road to hell is paved with good intentions – if you look at life from 3D assumptions. The saying means, merely intending change sometime in the future is the same as clinging to what you already are, for the present.

It is – as so often – the difference in meaning concealed within the use of the same word for different things. “Good intentions” sounds like “sustained intent,” but of course they are very different things. Sustained intent has nothing vague about it, nothing of delay. And it is your sustained intent that leads you to the future you pull toward yourself, for the astrological moment cannot be modified; the only thing that can be modified is your attitude toward “what happens” around you, your sustained intent.

The difference is very clear as you spell it out. Thanks.

2. “As you change your mind, you change your effective being.” We have replaced our previous scaffolding of “laying down some strings, picking up others.” Now we would have you think of it as less material an analogy, less concrete. You are a complex balance of internal dynamics, affected not only by your initial “setting” (determined by your physical and non-physical heredity and the astrological moment and social environment), but also by your intent. In a sense, you decide how to intervene in your own life. You choose among your possibilities.

Yes, that is clear now too.

3. The mechanism for internal readjustment. The question is, how does this occur? How do you turn intent into change?

And I have no idea where you want to go with this one.

Actually, you didn’t have much idea of the two previous, either. You forget what you didn’t know, usually as soon as you now know it. You didn’t know, then you knew, then you disremember the earlier state of not knowing. It’s normal. But this third question is unexplored territory, which is why you feel blank, approaching it.

Some bullet points:

• You comprise all those strands, each of which is a complex energetic pattern, each of which – if acting by itself – would replicate in you the pattern it established in the life it leads elsewhen.
• But they don’t act by themselves. They inter-act, smoothly or otherwise. Your internal life, your impulses and compulsions and contradictions and confusions, all stem from the fact that you are living all those pattens simultaneously in every new moment.
• There is a hidden problem here. Each of those strands exists within you as it existed at a given moment, at death, which was the culmination of that life. That is the pattern. But nothing is frozen, so as that life changes, the pattern you are partly made of changes. How?
• The astrology of your life clearly can’t be the astrology of the various strands’ lives. They’ll all be different., from you and from each other. The living present moment that each is experiencing will have a quality different from any other. How can all this be reconciled?
• Only your intent can reconcile the various clashing or meshing energetic patterns. And the same is true for each of the strands. Is it astonishing that the 3D world is full of conflict? What ought to astonish is that it has as much harmony as it does have.
• Bear in mind, the result is not chaos meaning shapeless, meaningless disorder, but chaos meaning infinite potential expressing in all possible combinations.

And everything boils down to free will exercised within a given framework that itself changes and is changed by the free will of others.

Circumstances are often, perhaps always, produced by others. Your part is always to choose, and of course in choosing you are changing the circumstances for all you connect to in any way, 3D or non-3D.

It’s a little dizzying.

Some time spent pondering will bring you along. Merely the readjustment from physical or energetic analogies would be an advance, freeing up your understanding.

So what can you tell us about the Gates of Horn?

Nothing. Do the work, observe the results, and at some point it will be profitable to talk about it. At this point it would be front-loading.

At any point, it’s going to be front-loading for somebody.

Just mind yourself; that’s your true business. As usual, people will come to it at the proper time for them. Those who come to it before-time will not notice; it will make no impression on them. Perhaps three years later, at the proper moment, it will sink in.

I am feeling we have left too much unaddressed on this third question.

That is true, but it seems best. There’s time. And no harm in a slightly shorter session.

Very well. Next time?

It will have to emerge on the moment.

Thanks as always, then.

 

Sunday, June 9, 2024

5:35 a.m. Gentlemen, yesterday I had an idea and decided to ask you about it. [Here I had left a pair of brackets, intending to insert the question, but in transcribing, I decided to enter that information at the end, for reasons that will become apparent.] Is it true? Somewhat true? Entirely in error?

It is a speculation, and as such is worth considering. But probably it is best that we not respond. Take it as the basis for further thought-experiments.

Because of my possible anxiety over your response?

Not particularly. It is the kind of reorientation that is best done without external validation or invalidation, either of which would result in your having to take our word for it.

How is that different from all the scaffolding you have provided over the past 25 or 30 years?

Well, for one thing, would an answer be useful?

Always useful to learn how things work, isn’t it?

Is that what you would learn? Or would it not be – at best – one way to see things? At worst it might encourage a bad habit of taking things on faith that cannot then be supported by evidence or reasoning.

I don’t see the distinction yet. How is this different from your describing us as compound beings combining threads, or saying that our lives are shaped in the beginning by physical genetics and the cosmic moment and the social conditions and our combination of strands?

We see the similarity as it appears to you. The concept serves to reorient you to see things differently. It shows you the things you have always seen, but relates them in a different fashion, and the new view changes you. So, why not look at the view from one concept rather than another?

“In addition to,” anyway. Not necessarily “rather than.”

[Pause]

And I find that I get nothing. Maybe try again Later.

9:30 a.m. Shall we try again? Your lead. I had had an idea of a theme. Why did it not work out?

Maybe we don’t exist. Maybe we’re making it all up. Maybe you are making it all up. Take your pick, they are all your background worries.

Only in certain directions, I notice. Some themes – and some of them pretty wide ranging, too – we have no problem. Other things we run dry. Why is that?

Should it surprise you? Do you know everything? Does everything interest you? Why should it be different for the information that can come in, given who and what you are?

I hear you saying – and I think you’ve said it before – that information transfer has three parts: sender, receiver, and the intermediate filters between them.

We didn’t put it that way, but that is one valid way to see it. If you were to ask us for a sentence in Mandarin, how could we provide it? There needs to be receptor cells. If you wanted detailed schematics of a nuclear plant, could we provide them in any way you could understand? Yes, there is remote viewing, you think: RVers routinely bring through information that they do not understand. But is ILC the same as RV?

That’s true, I didn’t think of that. In RV one deliberately leaves the mind receptive but without content; ILC is receptivity combined with an active mind concentrated on whatever the subject may be.

You will remember your friend Dana, who was moved (mysteriously to her, at the time) to begin to study quantum mechanics, when she had had no interest in the subject, and no background in physics or mathematics. After she studied the subject, she was able to receive certain kinds of information.

We have long noted that when it comes to history and a few other subjects, I’m your boy, but most of human knowledge is outside my range.

True for everyone, of course. Nobody is familiar with even the rudiments of everything. Thus by nature, every receptor is a specialist.

Only we don’t know in advance what our limits may be.

No, plus they may change over time, as Dana’s did.

So if I wanted information beyond my natural range, could I try to remote-view it?

How do you propose to double-blind your targeting?

I could get someone to help, I suppose.

You aren’t thinking it through. If you have a subject you wish to explore, how can you suggest to someone that at some point he task you “unbeknown to yourself”?

Then perhaps I could task someone else.

A possible halfway-house procedure would be for you to do a shamanic journey on the subject.

Interesting idea. Subject specified in advance, procedure involving no words, or anyway a different mental state than this. Maybe. Maybe I’ll just put out the idea I had and see if anybody picks up on it.

That’s an idea too. In fact, beginning with your idea, a group exploration might produce interesting insights.

Let’s do that. And maybe wrap this up early, unless you have something on your plate.

A short session is fine with us.

Thanks as always, then.

[On Saturday, I had made this entry in my journal, looking to this morning:]

6:10 p.m. I get a sense that there is a certain “quantity” of a given energy that has to enter the world at a given time – envy, say, or hatred – and the astrology of the moment determines how much; the combination of the individuals and their decisions determines how much will be expressed through which people. I will ask about this.

 

Saturday, June 8, 2024

7:10 a.m. Guys? Your move.

You have lost track of the argument, and you are worried that we have lost track too.

Well, yes. It puts me in mind of Rita reassuring me that I couldn’t be making it up as I went along, regardless of how it felt, because the material was consistent and was from a consistent point of view, though she didn’t phrase it that way.

Yes, and you feel the invisible pressure of imagined others disapproving of your uncertainty, though they don’t have the comparable experience.

It doesn’t help.

And, as you noted recently, to the degree that you have become used to feedback, you are less self-reliant than you were when you worked alone.

It feels like that’s the trade-off, yes.

And, finally, you are again oppressed by the sense of time passing fruitlessly.

I am.

And the indicated treatment for all these symptoms?

Ignore the nagging doubts and keep working.

We didn’t elicit this only for the purpose of making you fully aware of half-submerged feelings. It serves as an example of the power of decision.

Hmm. I get that. I’m in situation X and as usual it is up to me to choose what path I will take, if only by default.

Yes. This is hardly a problem particular to you. It is what everyone in 3D faces and was designed to face. It is the opportunity contained (shaped) by the problem.

This may be regarded as a subset of the larger motif of problems being opportunities. A situation (public or not) requires you to choose. Perhaps you usually choose by default, settling for whatever happens. Or perhaps you work rigorously to hack your path through the woods. Either way, it is a pattern of choice and is what really goes on while you are defining it otherwise.

“Life is what happens to you while you are making other plans”?

Yes. You concern yourselves with making the best of your opportunities or with creating opportunities for yourselves, or with managing overwhelming circumstances as best you can. Do you think you (or anybody) will care what positions you held, what possessions you accumulated, who and how you loved and hated, once your 3D life is over? You won’t care nearly as much as you will care what you have become as a result – seemingly, as a side-effect – of all that choosing.

That’s viewing your life from a personal, individual, viewpoint. But don’t neglect to consider it from other viewpoints. You are the child of many strands; you are the opposite end of many relationships of all kinds. You are even a part of the world-drama both 3D and non-3D. if you disregard these roles, your summing-up of your life will be wildly inaccurate, because incomplete. And, even more difficult to keep in mind, because it is so complex and overwhelming: all the other people are choosing all the time, just as you are.

I get that you are finally ready to talk to us about the flickering light-show.

We described reality that way in order to loosen certain assumptions you bring with you, out of your 3D sensory experience, and the unconscious metaphors it spawns. Let’s have a look at them:

• What’s done is done. The past is definite and unchangeable.
• Individuals may be compound beings, but what hey are compounded from is static, like the past they existed in.
• Life progresses from this to that, and progress implies replacement of one thing by another.
• The Akashic Record is fixed, not malleable.
• There is a permanent, stable, underpinning to the world – that is, to 3D life.

These assumptions are at best relatively true.

“Somewhat real.”

Yes, and only somewhat. In reality:

• The past changes continuously, as the things that make it up change.
• You as compound beings are ratios composed of ratios, or let’s say are subtotals that are the result of subtotals – and there is no fixed and final sum.
• Life is not progress but progression; that is, it is not a course with beginning and end points, but a journey that is its own purpose (We can talk about this.)
• Nothing in 3D is stable or permanent, except as seen from within a 3D moment.

Tell us about life’s journey, then.

Envision a database, packed with information and relationships. Now suppose you want to explore every possible relationship, and wish to see what the total picture looks like as each variable changes. Envision every time a different color according to its state, so that a change in state becomes a change in color. Write a search program to explore the whole thing, and sit back and watch the display.

There is and is not a beginning point. There is, because you have to start somewhere. There isn’t, because there was no particular point that had to be the first. So, first by circumstance, not first by nature. There is and is not an end point, for the same reason. But every single possibility will be displayed, sooner or later. And it will be later, for two reasons: complexity and change of characters.

• You don’t’ have numbers high enough to number the possible configurations resulting from everybody everywhen interacting and changing and interacting some more.
• Change of characters. Every time new combinations of strands are created, there is an initial effect consisting of adding a new player, which is included among the possibilities of the situation as the search pattern begins. There is also a sort of expansion of the database as all these new characters add to what is, not merely to what might be.

That’s a new wrinkle.

We can only add what the scaffolding will bear. All this exposition takes time, if you haven’t noticed.

Is this why I am still around?

It is one reason. It has taken a good deal of work to produce a mind that has been brought through so many changes of scaffolding and can record the changes as they process continues. Every time someone retires, there is a certain amount of possibility foresworn. Everybody goes through on-the-job-training, obvious or not.

But the view from a new window is valuable in itself, is it not?

It is, but we are not talking about irreplaceability, but of overlap. Redundancy. What you get, someone else will get somewhat differently. Comparing the two produces binocular rather than monocular vision, a net advantage.

And of course these conditions apply not only to you, and not only to those willing and able to do the work you do: They apply to everybody, no matter what they do or don’t do or do only unconsciously. We have to keep emphasizing, reality has no spare parts. Everybody contributes, and every contribution is unique and of value. Only, don’t go imagining that your contribution or anybody’s is unchanging. It changes as you change. You may be only a tiny part of the pattern, but you are a part, as is everybody else.

What was our theme here?

“Opportunities and changes” might do.

I guess we’ll see. I wish I had a firmer grip on where we’re going.

Just ride the moment. It has worked out so far, hasn’t it?

I suppose. Thanks for all this.

 

Friday, June 7, 2024

5:20 a.m. Shall we continue?

If you begin to look at your 3D life as being exactly what it seems and nothing at all as it seems, new insights arise. But this is by no means an easy attitude for some to acquire. To some it may come naturally; to others it may not be possible.

And this is why I have always been drawn equally to history and to psychic stuff.

Others, to science and psychic stuff, or – anything. It is a matter of transcending what appear to be fixed and even exclusive categories.

We have detailed the attitude toward life’s phenomena that will prove most helpful to you in transcending the one-viewpoint-only frame of mind. No need to repeat it here. Only, don’t settle for remembering it, or understanding it. It helps to actually put it into practice!

One of the very first things you gave me was that we should learn to see things more than one way, either simultaneously or alternately. I have not forgotten.

Libra on the horizon made that easy for you. For some it will be a struggle.

So what do we mean, that life is and is not what it seems?

• Life is not a coded message understandable only by interpretation. No one ever lived or ever will live who did not experience its essence every day. You can’t be in 3D, and of it, without experiencing it.
• At the same time, nothing is ever one thing only. Everything extends, and depending upon how you follow those extensions, the picture you assemble changes.

All landscape is merely landscape. At the same time, all landscape is sacred mind-stuff. Both true.

I once had an experience, in an altered-state exercise that was meant to contact someone needing a retrieval, in which what I contacted was not a person or even a thing, but an energy. The energy, I gathered, was what made a power spot powerful, or a sacred spot sacred. It was an invisible factor that was powerful, unknown, aware, entirely not human, yet intricately connected to our experience of that spot.

And you proceeded to liberate it from a obsolete attachment, that is, to a spot that no longer had human significance, being now desert. What does that tell you?

Somehow the inhuman energy was connected to humans, could be affected by human intent (mine, in this case), and was somehow directed originally, by what I don’t know, to do something helpful to humans.

Not necessarily helpful, but yes, aimed at interaction of human life with what they may perceive as either inanimate nature or as immanent supernatural phenomena. The difference between the two is viewpoint.

I begin to see where you are going with this. All views of life are right, none is completely right.

No view can be completely right, because every view is a view in a certain direction, and automatically – and, you could say, systematically – disregards its opposite. If you see the material-ness of something, it’s harder to see the spiritual-ness of it. The mundane and the divine coexist, of course. Everything in life connects. Have we ever mentioned that?

Very funny. Once or twice.

Yet this essential fact is easily disregarded from moment to moment. The 3D conditions make it harder to remember connection than to remember separation. So, keep it in mind as best you can.

Now, if you begin from the thought that everything is mind-stuff, it is no stretch to see that everything is holy and nothing is holy.

I see that, but you may want to say another word or two of explanation.

It’s all in your point of view. Everybody can see the holiness or the mundane reality of the world. Fewer can see it both ways at the same time. But surely it is obvious if you remember that everything is of the same substance – and we don’t mean matter, we mean that “matter” and “spirit” are the same in essence, just as “object” and “energy” are both. Therefore, as we keep saying, All is One. There are no absolute divisions.

I’m getting that “Nothing is holy” means the same thing as “Everything is holy.” Either way, it erases the supposed difference between one thing being holy and another not.

And between one thing being mundane and another not, yes, same thing.

But we perceive certain spots as power spots or holy places.

You also perceive differences in the world when you are in the presence of your beloved, or of an enemy, or of dear friends or irritating colleagues. Same thing.

I think you are saying the background remains the same, maybe even we remain the same, but there is some energy superimposed on the situation that affects us.

That’s the idea, though probably you would find it hard to come up with a unifying theory.

Isn’t that your job?

Our job. We are thinking together, remember.

I suppose that energy being I encountered has something to do with this.

You are energy beings, are you not?

We are, but this one wasn’t tied to a body.

So therefore it was something separate? You see how hard it is to remember, when dealing with anything specific, what you easily remember as a generality?

It couldn’t have had no point of connection with me, by definition.

No, but it was not the same as you, either, any more than a tomato plant or a cat or the soil you walk on is the same, though they all connect.

It’s a way of drawing connections, isn’t it? If we look in one direction, we see connections along a certain line of sight. If we look in another direction, or at another angle, we see the connections revealed by the new line of sight. But the connections don’t go away when we change sight-lines, and they aren’t made any stronger by our attention to them.

That’s right. Your attention to the world is vital to you, not to the world except insofar as you are part of the world.

If we see the world as magic, that’s what reveals itself. If mundane, we get mundane.

And if both sacred and mundane, you get that richer, binocular, view.

This session seems diffuse, somehow. Feels like rambling.

That means, freely translated, “I don’t see the point you are making.”

It does.

Beyond the obvious, we are cautioning and promising that your attitude limits what you experience. Now, “limits” need not be seen as a bad thing. Limits define shapes, and shapes promote clarity of vision. Only, remember that you shape the world you see. You can’t just blame the universe for your troubles. (Well, you can; we just advise that you don’t.)

Thoreau said somewhere, “Don’t call your life hard names, it is better than you are.” I take that to mean, we don’t live up to our opportunities, one of which is our troubles.

Yes, that’s our point. Whatever you see life as, that is what it is. So if you want to change your life, don’t start by wishing that your life circumstances were different. (How could they be different, you being whatever you are?) Certainly don’t start by thinking yourself a victim. Start by living “as if” your most hopeful vision of the way life is were true. Envision the world as sacred opportunity and that’s what you get. That’s the only way you get it. Or you can look at it as a garbage pit if you choose.  Garbage is mind-stuff too, and the world always has room for victims.

Getting a little acerbic, aren’t we?

Once in a while people need a boot in the tail. Those who need it will feel the truth in it.

And that is enough, this sacred and mundane morning.

Thanks, as always.

 

Thursday, June 6, 2024

4:40 a.m. Eighty years ago today, it was D-Day, back when everything seemed more black and white. If ever there was a just war, it was the war against the Nazis, but we didn’t yet realize the truth of the psychological saying, “You become like the worst in those you fight.”

All right, friends, you have our attention.

Your noting the anniversary leads very well from where we left off yesterday, that your view from the 3D is inverted. All those deaths and injuries and maimings, all that concentrated misery that culminated in what people called the “fighting forties”; all the bitter fruits of thirty years of civil war beginning in 1914 and continuing into your day, always a hair’s breadth from disaster, a disaster that may still play out. Surely reason to despair? Surely reason to assert that all is not well? Surely reason to see yourselves as victims?

Not like you to indulge in sarcasm.

Not sarcasm, exactly, more like sketching the extreme opposite position, recognizing that it exists. Our view is on the record by now, and if anyone doesn’t know it, it is not for lack of clarity on our end, but from lack of willingness to acknowledge it, on the other.

As we said, all is well, always, because the point of life is not to create some idyllic realm of peace and joy and impossible harmony, but to clarify, and develop, and create.

As you were sending that, I was hearing that Jesus said, “I have come to bring not peace, but the sword.” It seems to relate, but I’m not quite sure how. It is like a link in the chain is missing, leaving an impression but not quite an understanding.

It is mostly toward the end of an era that certain defining themes reveal themselves in a different light. Just as Jung was one of the last remaining members of his generation with the educational and linguistic background to unpack the riddle of alchemy, which was at the very verge of being lost, so your generation. You yourself are young enough that he could have been your grandfather. You are among the remaining people who were raised in a religious atmosphere that has now nearly vanished. Only, all this needs to be said much more carefully, more systematically, as it pulls from many fields and many seemingly unconnected bits of information.

• The 3D world is, above all else, impermanent. It always seems to be the realist thing around, but where is the present moment, one moment later?
• That present moment endures – all present moments endure – but in a realm inaccessible to the 3D crucible, as we have described.
• Nothing is destroyed, yet within that permanence, everything changes, continually.
• The 3D world with its urgency and persuasive presence is not what it appears, yet is not negligible either. It is somewhat real, real in its own terms, but something very different, seen from a little distance.
• If the 3D is not what it seems, then of course neither is life. What is critically important at one moment is nonexistent in another. If 3D were what it seems, could this be so?
• Every religious teacher faces the same dilemma that we do. Seth did, Cayce’s sources did, every great soul like Jesus or the Buddha did, every less-developed but awake soul, known or unknown, did too. It is always the same necessity: You have to meet people where they are, and yet show them that their own idea of themselves is hopelessly inadequate.
• Fortunately, every intended audience is not unitary, but multiple and complex, as you would expect of a compound being. So each of them will have one or more “you”s that is more closely aligned to the message, and can help other constituents within the person to understand.
• Unfortunately, this amounts to inciting a civil war within people. Only, it isn’t unfortunate that it happens, only that it is needful.
• What is 3D but an environment where change is made possible and the alternatives are made manifest? Does it matter who got killed on June 6, 1944? Yes it does, because every life matters. And no it doesn’t, because death to that soul isn’t what it appears to those who remain anchored in 3D, taking it as real.
• The Allied armies that contended in 1944 represented nations that still believed in God in the way they had been taught by their culture. Even Stalin was forced to reopen the churches, in the same way he redefined the war as protection for “Mother Russia” rather than communism. Prayer was still a living possibility then, in a way that would not be possible for communities as communities now.
• Do you – can you – imagine that sincere prayer, which is directed intent, can be ineffective? Only, it isn‘t what people thought it to be. Yes, tell of your mother.

I was visiting her sometime in the last years of the Soviet government. I think the specific event in the news was the time they canceled all history exams because, as they acknowledged, history as it had been taught was a pack of lies. It was clear that communism in Russia didn’t have long to live. I mentioned it to Mon, and she immediately and emotionally said, “All those prayers!” I knew that she meant the prayer for the conversion of Russia that had been said at the end of every Mass, for so many years, all over the world

You could scarcely imagine your own generation praying in that manner and expecting results. How much less your children’s and grandchildren’s generation.

And I get your underlying theme now, at least I think so. You are giving us a place to stand because all previously existing places are crumbling beneath our feet.

They are, and that is neither a bad nor a good thing, it is what the turning of the cosmic wheel has brought about.

Jung said the gods never reinhabit the temples they once abandon.

No, they don’t. But that doesn’t mean the divine energies cease to exist. (How could they cease to exist?) it means, every culture learns to reinterpret, to recognize the gods in whatever new guise they adopt.

I trust that we are not setting up a new religion here, despite my jest about The First Church of Superficial Plausibility.

We have been recalling people – beginning with you! – from vague conflicting ideas and emotional conflicts and emphatic myopia. We are merely giving you certain facts. Or, let’s say, we are giving you a way to put together certain facts, some of which were opaque to you and some obvious but unconnected and some disregarded.

Seems to me you have been saying, “Here is one way to make sense of life and the world, bearing in mind it can be seen differently.”

That’s right. The uncertainty is an intrinsic part of it. Nobody ever views the entire picture, with everything in just proportion. Who could do that? How could they do it? What platform would they stand on while making their observations? But just because you can’t ever see everything doesn’t mean you can’t see anything. We want to help people to see as clearly as they can, and whether what they see is as we would see it is of little importance. And you see why.

Sure. We’re going to keep changing, and yesterday’s opinions aren’t necessarily today’s.

That’s right. Remember, not peace, but a sword. Not repose but striving.

Thanks for this, as always.

 

Wednesday. June 5, 2024

8:55 a.m. It has taken me to now before I felt able to begin – if indeed we can begin even now. Guys?

You are right not to take the day off merely because you don’t feel up to it. Carpe diem, you won’t live forever. If you are only good for an hour or so, that is still enough for a conversation.

At other times, you have encouraged me to take time off.

Different circumstances, though seeming similar. When you are tempted to push, push, push, you may need to slacken the reins sometimes. But when you are tempted to shirk the task you really want to do, merely because it seems like too much effort, that is the time to find a way to keep going. Ultimately it works out better that way.

Say a little more on that?

Your health like everything else in life is reflection of your intent. Your intent is your base state plus “external” conditions and internal conditions. Like so:

• Base state. Who you are at a given moment. What you have made yourself to date, including mental habits, physical condition, emotional balance-point.
• External conditions. Everything not under your conscious control, including the cosmic weather, environmental circumstances, any source of friction.
• Internal conditions. Your immediate attitude, your “mood,” your emotional state as boundary between what you know of yourself and what you do not.

These three types of factors combine to form the background of your intent. The intent per se may be more or less than the total of these.

We can pull ourselves up by our bootstraps.

Or you can let yourselves down by choosing defeat.

To be clear, you aren’t saying, “Bad health is your own fault.”

Nothing is your own fault, in a sense. You – the “you” we are discussing at the moment, the “you” deciding what to do, how to be – always finds itself in a situation not of its own making. In a sense, it arrives at each moment as if it only just stepped into someone else’s shoes, inherited someone else’s messes and possibilities.

Not sure how to make sense of that.

You are free in every present moment. At the same time, every present moment consists of the situation left over from the previously present moment. Free will and predetermined starting-place, as we have said.

Thus you are and are not recipients of karma – or, as we call it, unfinished business. You are, because the combination of your character traits and what seem external circumstances is karma; that is how karma interacts with you. (And we phrase it that way deliberately.) You are not, because you do not choose your circumstances but you can and do and must choose your reaction.

Every obstacle is an opportunity, and we mean that literally. Just as one may learn more from failures than from successes, because failures compel you to second-guess what you did, while successes may merely reinforce bad habits that you happened to get away with, so rough sailing produces better sailors than does smooth sailing. And 3D life is practically the definition of rough sailing.

So, the larger and less tractable the obstacle, the greater the opportunity. But opportunities must be seized, if they are to be turned to advantage. Thus the most outsized “flaws” you find in someone may indicate that they are engaged in a great task.

 

Yesterday you said you might continue looking at how the 3D is a representation of the non-3D. Not sure I understood what you meant.

You would have had to pick it up as a spark transmitted – which, of course, does happen – as we haven’t begun on the subject. We have enough time left to cover it, probably.

Remember, we have defined the 3D as a slowed-down version of reality. Its primary characteristic is to represent an ever-changing, instantaneously changing, reality, in such a way as to demonstrate and facilitate the process of choice, and therefore creation. It is also a realm defined by separation rather than connection, also for the purpose of demonstrating by showing.

So, extrapolate. You are well aware of what life in 3D is; now go on to imagine your present life if it were taking place at warp speed, without separation in time or in space.

We asked you once what you do in non-3D, and you said, “We relate.”

If you can find a more meaningful description we are willing to adopt it. But what is it you do in 3D but relate? Only, you do so at a much slower pace!

We have wars. I can’t see how you can have wars in non-3D, or poverty, or isolation, or desperation.

Don’t be too sure. Think, now. If our life is like yours, only instantaneous and seamless, what might it look like?

I don’t know that I have anything useful to contribute.

Think.

If you are all connected and aware, and you change without delay, I suppose what we experience slowly and separately may have their analogies. You can’t have warfare in the absence of bodies, but I suppose you have conflict of wills and values. In fact, I’m pretty sure you said that, sometime. It may be that our passions are actually your passions as they manifest in 3D conditions.

Good so far. Your external actions, even murder, are secondary, remember. Primary is your intent.

As Jesus said? Lusting in the heart, anger held even if not manifested?

“Thoughts are things.” They are, in fact, realer than the actions that demonstrate them. Continue.

Poverty, isolation, neglect, I can’t see how they can exist without 3D conditions to manifest in.

Say they can’t. In what way can they manifest?

Oh!

Yes. Once again, you see.

I do. Even in 3D, we often harbor feelings and convictions that are not necessarily warranted by physical facts, but are real enough to those feeling them.

We keep telling you, your idea of 3D life inverts things. What is important is the psychic reality. What is not important, or anyway less important, is the 3D arena in which that reality manifests.

Thought experiment: A soldier is killed in battle. His 3D death is relatively instantaneous, even if he takes hours or days to die. How long does the non-3D echo of that death last?

Forever, I suppose.

Well, let’s put it that that death is a part of that strand’s unfinished business. Perhaps its effects are neutralized in the life that the strand enters into next. Or perhaps it goes on and on, in effect haunting individual after individual until it is finally dealt with. You can see that the non-3D effect of that death may have much greater impact, ultimately, than did the 3D death, which involved only the individual and those who knew him. Even though the effects of that death may continue in his family, say, still it is going to be a limited impact next to its non-3D impact.

So this tells you what we wanted you to realize: Your idea of your 3D life is inverted. Seeing it straight gives you a sense of the non-3D’s nature. Now, we advise you: The more you ponder this, the more avenues of thought it will open up to you – particularly if you absorb it so that it begins to automatically revalue everything you think.

And that will do, for the moment.

Our thanks. Next time?

TBA.