Ouspensky on our lives in time

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

My friend Charles Sides writes me: “I thought the following quotations might be of interest to you as you are going through your journals.”

They are, and i think they will be of interest to many. From A Secret History of Consciousness:

P 48 Ouspensky realized that at any time our picture of ourselves is limited by the moment in which we see it, but that the ‘real’ individual is one’s life extended through time. Like Bergson, Ouspensky was aware that all we can study at any separate moment is a ‘snapshot’ of a person’s life, never the whole of it, which, like the rest of the world, is a constant process. And, of course, each snapshot is different. From birth to death, we are in a condition of constant change.

 

Pp 48-9 The key to higher consciousness, Ouspensky understood, lay in a changed perception of time, in an ability to escape the limitations of the present moment and see deeper into the past and future. Just as what is ‘behind’ us or ‘before’ us is still ‘there’ although we no longer occupy its space, in his heightened state Ouspensky could see that the past, which we believe to be obliterated, still exists, and that the future, which in our ‘normal’ state we believe has not yet happened, is already taking place. We are so used to the idea of ‘now’ being the only time we can be aware of that the idea that the past and the future are in some way ‘with us’ seems absurd.

Jon Holt on focus and access and health

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Monday, August 12, 2024

5:10 a.m. Several things. Can I put them together?

  • Breathing. Sneeze impulse. By extension, control over the idea of the body, just as I always dimly knew, if not how to direct it.
  • “Thinking is the hardest work there is, that’s why so few people do it,” as Ford said. It applies to metaphysics, spirituality, every aspect of life and reality.
  • Blogging – as diversion?
  • If I have only so much energy, I can still use it if I don’t fritter it away.

But even this faint summary taxes me.

Jon [Holt], you ought to have an enhanced view of the human body now. Am I wrong to think as I am thinking this morning? Or – better – any input of any kind would be appreciated.

You always resisted the common-sense approach, but I admit, now I see why. It is as you thought, and forgot, earlier this morning: What you want to do, and think you are doing, isn’t necessarily what you wind up doing. You plan one thing and it has a very different result.

You tended to see interference or at least indifference from the non-3D side.

I did. And some people see life as a huge well-woven plot against them. That isn’t any righter than people seeing everything as coincidence.

Can we confine the argument to matters of health – or, let’s say, confine it first, so we get at it before my energy wanes?

Well, even the idea that your energy may wane is an idea. It is an idea formed out of your experience, but it is still an idea, not a law of nature. At one level you always knew that, but it doesn’t help you live until you understand what it really means, because only then can you use that understanding in the right way.

That idea of waning energy truly has taken hold of me. Hard to wish it away, or “see it not there,” or however I should think of it.

You understand, focus is the point of 3D limitations. So when you’re in non-3D, you sort of have to depend on the limitations – the focus – of whoever you’re talking to in 3D.

If I had known that, I’ve forgotten it.

Well, keep it in mind. It is the prime limitation, focus. In 3D you experience the limitation aspect of it, in non-3D you experience the focusing aspect. Same thing, seen from opposite ends. So it is up to you in 3D to do the work of keeping your energy and attention focused. You do that, and you can get whatever you want to know. But it isn’t as easy to do as you might think. It takes intention, and practice. In other words, willpower and practice, willpower and the application of skill.

All right, well we’ll concentrate on health first.

In your book [Imagine Yourself Well] you sketched out the different worlds people live in depending upon their beliefs. That sketch was true. What id didn’t go into so much was how to change your beliefs.

“As a man thinks, so he is.”

Yes, but you think according to what your experience seems to teach you, so the question is, how do you learn to reinterpret your experience to justify a different set of beliefs. You didn’t know it, but that is something I always admired in you: You were always ready to believe in advance of evidence, provided it led in a hopeful direction. If the evidence led in a direction away from hope, you wouldn’t see it, or wouldn’t accept the conclusions. That exasperated me sometimes, but I always admired it. Common sense isn’t everything in life.

I suppose it was particularly hard in that it went against so much of your training as a doctor, let alone as a psychiatrist.

How about as a fellow human being living in the same world and drawing very different conclusions?

I’m smiling. Okay, so how does it look now?

As you said, people are different, and different rules apply according to their psychological makeup. What some can do, others can only hope to do, or maybe can only shudder at the thought of doing. But I know what you want. If you can hold focus and deny that voice that says, “You don’t have enough energy for this,” we may be able to get into it.

When you were a boy, some experienced part of you knew that you could be well if you could just adjust – something; could just tweak some dial you couldn’t find. It had the practical effect of leaving you in rebellion against the limits that practical medicine seemed to prescribe. And that led you to question so many common-sense rules. It shaped your attitude to life.

What if you had been able to find that dial?

You tell me.

Don’t let yourself fade away from this. It is a running away.

As a psychiatrist I imagine you saw a lot of that.

I did. And now it is easy to see from the inside as well as from the outside. Hold your focus until you get what you want, or anyway what you need.

That is an aspect of “knock and it shall be opened” that I hadn’t considered.

If the door doesn’t open right away, keep knocking! Don’t hit it once and then give up. Perseverance is an aspect of focus.

You thought finding that dial involved willpower, and you weren’t wrong, but it involves more than that, as you found out. If you could get anything you wanted as soon as you asked for it, what would be the point of being in 3D?

I’m laughing, almost, thinking of you reacting against just these limitations.

That isn’t exactly what was going on, but let’s stick with you. You willed to be well, but you did nothing physical except whatever you were given – pills, shots, emergency measures when need be. Later you tried to think your way to what you still knew (irrationally) was available somewhere. You read of Cayce’s work and you were intrigued by his access, on the one hand, and by the promise that the access would provide the answers you needed. And behind your back, that morphed into a desire to become connected, not necessarily as a means of acquiring health, but for its own sake.

But I assume that came from other times, other lives.

In practice it doesn’t make any difference where it comes from. I see now that people are potential containers of certain kinds of energies. Some are open to some, others to others. It isn’t like anybody can hold the whole universe, except in the sense that everything is contained in everything.

The world in a teacup, eternity in a moment.

Yes. You are limited.  You don’t have to like it, but you might as well accept it. The thing to do isn’t to spend your life wishing you weren’t limited, but to expand as much as you can within the limits that shape you. You’ll find that more than enough to fill your time! Saying that everybody is limited, and everybody’s limits are different (even if unknown) is only saying what everybody knows. It is those limits that make individuals. It is what is beyond these limits that holds everything together.

Now, for those who can hear it:

  • Belief is a halfway house to your new life. Until you have had the experience, the best you can do is believe – so be careful what you choose to believe.
  • But not all beliefs are a matter of choice. Some come with the package, and if you don’t like them, you’ll need to struggle against them. But “struggle” is not merely about willpower. Partly that, yes, but not solely.
  • You have to learn to live “as if” in a certain way. Pretending won’t do it. Walling-off won’t do it. You have to dare to believe that life is broader than you are experiencing it, and then find ways to tentatively live that belief.

I don’t see how that asthmatic boy could have been helped by living as if he wasn’t sick.

No, you do see that clearly enough. What you can’t see is how he could have done it. In practice, the best he could do was ignore consequences. That is a sort of crippled form of “as if.” You will remember, you knew you didn’t know where to find the dial. But even not repudiating the idea that the dial existed was an achievement. It made many things possible as your life flowed.

It is only now, this month, that I am getting a new handle on this.

Maybe your life isn’t over yet.

Enough for now?

This will do for a start. Remember, it is always your part, in 3D, to focus. If you can hold the focus, we can provide the connection. Our little group on Wednesdays already demonstrated this, although that isn’t what anybody thought we were doing.

Well, Jon, it is very good to talk to you. I didn’t know if it would happen.

To quote a friend of mine: “Ask.”

Very funny. Till next time, then.

 

Every day a gift

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Sunday July 21, 2024

8:35 a.m. Guys? A conversation.

Another beautiful day in the neighborhood.

It is a beautiful day. Why are you channeling Mr. Rogers?

Why not? Did anyone ever hear him say it would be a beautiful day, “if only”?

Every day is a gift, I know that now. My life would have been easier if I had learned it earlier, but I did learn it.

We have a serious point to make, not a particularly profound point, but an important reminder. Life can be looked at in two ways while you are immersed in 3D. (1) Life is an external drama in which you live, or (2) Life is an internal drama carried on through an external setting.

Of course really there are not two ways but three, the third being that life in 3D is both external (a drama with its own complicated plot line, or perhaps its own continuing improv performance) and internal (a process of development that takes place in 3D but not for the purpose of advancing any external agenda).

Feels to me like you are floundering.

You say it, then.

If the world is mind-stuff, and therefore every bit of it, including us, is literally part of the same only-thing-there-is, and if the non-3D’s seeming externality is only relatively external to us, and if emotion is our experience of the known-self meeting the unknown-self, and if we are truly both herd and outlier –

Well, I don’t know where you were going with it, but I’d tend to say that all can’t help being always well, despite appearances.

Nothing to criticize in your precis. Only, people should take it a little farther, should chew on it, should connect their thought with their feeling.

Specifically?

At one time, people went crazy with undefined fears centering on divisions within Christianity. Another time, it was the initial disruptions caused by the industrial revolution, as opposed to the familiar, slower, more rural life – with all the social changes nobody intended but everybody experienced. Then it became ideology, “left” and “right” repeatedly redefined and becoming more murderously opposed as time went on. Then culture wars, the counter-culture, etc. You can name them for yourselves, you have all lived in them, though each of you in your own subset, greatly or subtly different from others depending upon your own makeup, which is a way of saying “depending upon what you needed.”

As a child puts away childish things, each of you put away previous needs, beliefs, assurances. Every day is new, and this may be experienced as a blessing or a curse or both. Every day offers something new, if you want it, and often enough, if you do not want it. How do you react? Anticipation? Joy? Caution? Fear? Disassociated terror? Your instinctive reaction is not yours to choose: You respond out of what you have been. But your acceptance or rejection of that instinctive response is yours to choose: That is the “free will” part of your life.

Yes, you have said predestination is the result of the past, free will is the situation in the present.

We didn’t put it that way, but, true enough. So, pick the worst day you ever lived.

That’s easy. November 22, 1963.

For others it will be something else. But everybody will have one, by definition. There is always a “worst” and a “best”; they are comparative terms. Well, on November 22, 1963, did you have any reason — looking back from who you are today, we mean – did you have any reason to say, “All Is Well”?

That’s hard. I know the response you want. Can I really say it?

But if you cannot, then you do not believe that all is always well, which, we keep reassuring you, it is.

I know you don’t want me to parrot what I am supposed to say, nor to pretend to feel what I don’t. But I haven’t ever looked at it this way.

That’s what we’re offering you the opportunity to do. Dredge, remembering that nothing but your truest perception will help you. (Naturally, we mean this for any who read it, as well.)

The best I can do is divide it into real and somewhat real. Really, absolutely, thinking of things in All-D terms, certainly all was well that day as every day. No event personal or social could disrupt the world that exists so that we may express ourselves in limited surroundings and continue to create ourselves by successive choices.

But –?

But in 3D terms, catastrophe is catastrophe. Life hurts. Living in the aftermath of trauma, be it personal or social, hurts. The 3D world is real in its own terms, as you have so often said.

So, seeing Kennedy murdered was worse than being murdered myself. It was a shattering of many futures I had taken for granted, as well as the killing of someone I loved and admired. In 3D terms, it was the worst day I ever had, if only because I had such slim inner resources then. I don’t see how it would have been possible to be in conversation with you then, but it would have helped.

You are rewriting your emotional history. If you hadn’t turned from God and your religion – in effect saying, “If you can allow this to happen, I’m done with you” –you could have used the religious connection from this life and other lives and found grieving and solace and acceptance. In effect, you would have been feeling our presence, and accepting what emotional help we could give.

That sounds true. It took me many years – discovering Carl Jung in 1970, I think – before I began to find an intellectually acceptable way to move toward connection.

Here is the point. On the worst day you ever had, did it leave you unaffected?

Ah, the light comes. When my friend Charles told me, a few years ago, that the death of his dog had broken his heart, I instinctively responded that it had broken his heart open.

Haven’t we said that we do know that pain hurts, but it is so useful? It isn’t useful to us except insofar as it is useful to you. But remember, we have also said, you don’t need to learn through pain, you can learn through joy. And what better pathway to experiencing everyday joy than “All is well” regardless what happens? It isn’t cloud-cuckoo-land, it isn’t Pollyanna, it isn’t even the three princes of Serendip. It is merely practical.

And this is regardless of what else we get out of it.

Every day is a gift. Viktor Frankl knew that. Survivors always know that, however mingled with other emotions their reaction may be.

Have we gotten what you wanted to say, or is there more?

Don’t concern yourself with what this or that person may think of it. All you can do is say your truth.

Gandhi was asked why he said something when the week before he had said the opposite, and he said, “Because this week I know better.”

There is no all-encompassing be-all-and-end-all Truth accessible to 3D minds. The best you can do, and it is enough, is to find the truest thing you can find from the point of view you were created as. You may change viewpoints, and therefore may see things differently, but right here, right now, there is a truest true to be found. Why settle for less?

Thanks. This was good. I live in hope of more.

Hope is always good.

 

Tides and choices

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Wednesday, July 3, 2024

5:40 a.m. All right, let’s go. How is it that I can want to work and at the same time absolutely not want to work? Conflict of strands, sure, but does that really explain anything? After discussing this problem yesterday in two different small ILC groups, something seems to have freed up, and I don’t understand why that should be either, though I suppose it may be that talking about it brought unconscious factors closer to consciousness. In any case, your advice? Commentary? Assistance?

We gave you the answer in a nutshell in yesterday’s drumming. Quote that.

[“What is the best thig we could be doing now? What obstacles are in the way?”

[The hardest thing to remember can be that All Is Well while you are experiencing things you don’t like. Live in trust but live what you experience, not judging prematurely; not judging at all, if you can do that.

[Everything in life is tides and choices. You are responsible only for the choices; life provides the tides. Emotions are the laminal layer between them, as we have said.

[In short, trust and relax and become ever more aware of your motivations and processes. All not only will be well, all always was and always is well.

[That’s all you really need, trust.]

Tides and choices, you see. And the longer you ponder this, the clearer the situation will become. You are all balanced between outer forces that seem to come at you regardless, and inner forces that can and must respond (if only by default) to the challenge and opportunity of each new moment. Conceptually it isn’t difficult, nor complicated.

But the living-out of the situation is!

It can be. And what have we been doing, all these years, but giving you strategies and tips and conceptualizations designed to help you along the way? Living in faith, believing that All Is Well, identifying yourself as a 3D/non-3D being, reassuring you that you are never alone despite appearances – it is all to remind you that there is never reason to despair, and at the same time there is always work to do, opportunities and challenges to be met.

What is “life more abundantly” if it is not greater opportunity to live? What is higher or deeper consciousness if it is not awareness that goes ever deeper than appearances? What is reassurance that you are here to choose, if not an affirmation that your life matters, that no life can be inconsequential to itself? What is our perpetual reminder that you never have the data to properly judge tour own life, let alone that of others, if it does not tie back to the theme of living in faith that all is well?

Or, you can prefer to believe that things are as they seem, even though you know better. You can believe that you are a “useless passion,” with Sartre – but you know better! Even pretending that you have no meaningful choice is of course a choice. So why not choose what is hopeful and life-affirming, rather than what leads you to despair and ennui? And ennui, remember, is one of the seven deadly errors.

Your energy is still low; there is no need to prolong this session  which still has to be typed into the computer. We have said what can be said at the moment.

I expected more and expected a full session, but this helps. Thanks as always.

 

31. Structuring the world

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Monday, May 27, 2024

5 a.m. Gentlemen?

You will see from your effort just now to help your friend that this material has put everything into question, just as it did for Rita. Describe it when you transcribe this, so that people will have the context.

I woke up from a dream in which I was telephoned (by a hospital, I think) and urgently told to bring my neighbor Don there. (He had died Wednesday morning) They gave me an address which I thought was close but which turned out to be at the other end of the state. When I knocked at his bedroom door, he was surprised, not ready, and I think that’s where the dream ended and I woke up. So I thought, maybe this was a call for a retrieval. But when I came back a few minutes later, I still didn’t know. I think I did contact him, but rather than go through the usual drill, I told him if he wanted to stay around for a while, fine, but when he is ready to move, he should consult his instincts (rather than his reasoning) on how to go home. I don’t know why I was moved to put it just that way, but it seemed appropriate.

It cannot be expected that a new view will revolutionize any one neat division of your life and not all. How could it? What we are looking at here is a revolution of your psychic interpretational structure – we know this term doesn’t mean anything to you yet – and not merely a rearrangement of data, nor even a rearrangement of how past and present and future data is to be interpreted.

“Psychic interpretational structure.” You’re right, it seems to have meaning, but I don’t know what it will prove to be.

Nor will you understand it from any one session. It will reveal its meaning in layers, which of course means, over time. Just as Jung’s terms took time to percolate to the outside world, just as any trade has its specific argot, so any new way of seeing things will generate a new vocabulary perforce, because you cannot well describe a new thing using only old vocabulary. In fact, not only vocabulary but sometimes grammar and other framework need to be tortured into a new ability to express what had been inexpressible for lack of supporting context.

You have always gone out of your way, it seems to me – I know I have, on this end – to avoid generating specialized vocabulary beyond the bare necessity. We have been keeping it simple, and that has served.

Yes, and serves still. The ones who will apply this new way of seeing to their respective specialties will generate specialized vocabularies as the developing situation requires. Our job was to keep it simple stupid. But OTOH you don’t stay at the beginner’s level forever. Little by little, things more complicated, more nuanced, less obviously connected, need expression. It’s natural.

So what do we mean in referring to a psychic interpretational structure?

It sounds like “the mental habits that structure the world to us.”

Not a bad place to start. Very well, let’s think together. How do your habits structure the world you perceive?

It’s obvious enough. In fact, you have told us more than once. We have filters that allow certain input into consciousness and not other input. This, on a pre-conscious level, obviously, means we only see as much as we have previously determined to see.

You might better say, you see only as much as predetermined limits allow you to see. But who and what set these limits? We don’t mean, Name the person responsible. We mean, What are the factors involved? How does it happen that you can think this but not that, can perceive this but not that, can credit this but not that idea?

Can’t you just spell it out?

We could (and will) set out some hints, but it is always better if you work at it, construct your own bridges.

I get:

  • Our heredity via strands
  • Astrological limitations on our psyche
  • Societal shared beliefs unconsciously accepted.

I imagine there are more, but these come to mind. And, I’m not sure how any of them operate to create a structure in the psyche. I know little about psychology and nothing about the physiology of consciousness.

This is a good starting-place – and, don’t neglect to ponder how you want about answering our question.

Oh, as usual I just dredged. I held the question in mind and waited for something to surface. I didn’t construct chains of logic, if that is what you mean. I don’t do that very well.

Au contraire, you do it very well, but you do not do it at the beginning. First you let things surface, then you examine them to see how they may make sense. This is one way to think, and it works well for those fishing in the dawn or in the twilight. Those who fish at midday use other techniques better suited to those conditions.

Nor is this a detour. The question of how one thinks relates closely to the question of how one does or does not admit date into consideration.

I see that. The midday thinker wants (needs?) things plain and simple, well-defined. The half-light thinker is drawn to interpreting half-seen, indeterminate, ambiguous possibilities.

And midday thinking, as you call it, is impatient of half-light data. Half-light thinkers are bored with midday data that is interpreted in an inadmissibly flat take-it-or-leave-it way.

Could the human race, or any part of it, do well by not employing both strategies, or is it better served by having both at its disposal? And what more convenient than to have the two functions unevenly distributed among individuals, so that the usual competition/cooperation may manifest?

I can already see that I will title this conversation. “Midday and half-light thinkers,” or perhaps “thinking.” It is a clearer view than I have had of a division that is surely obvious to everyone.

Maybe not. Wait till the session is over, and look back at it, as usual. Perhaps the center of gravity will be elsewhere.

So your initial description of what factors set the limits of what you perceive included three factors. But even by now, only a few moments later, further possibilities will have occurred to you while you concentrated on this discussion. (Physical heredity, for instance.) How can this happen? How is it that your minds can work on more than one level?

I gather that this “working on more than one level” is distributed quite unevenly. Einstein in his old age lamented that he was no longer able to think on more than three or four levels at a time – dumbfounding his interlocutor, who drily wrote that he himself had no experiences of such diminishment, never having been able to think on more than one level at a time.

Yes, now write your suspicions.

Well, as I was writing that, I thought, probably we do think on many levels, but aren’t aware of it, unlike Einstein, who was. I mean by that, maybe Einstein was different more in his awareness of various levels of thinking, and not merely in the exceptional ability he also possessed.

Everybody who reads this (or read anything) has the experience of ideas popping up as they read. Mostly they ignore them. Sometimes they get diverted by them and need to return their attention after proceeding down the garden path. Some are able to entertain both at the same time, and some are able to entertain more than two, some more easily than others.

It certainly happens to me, here. I would be getting something from you, and getting a thought reacting to it perhaps, or anticipating it, and having a side-trail open up as something suggests something else, non-logically, but not at random, and hearing my next question or statement well up. And all the while, sometimes hesitating between expressing your thought by this word or that one. It’s really quite intricate as you look at it, but it’s mostly automatic.

One prime use of meditation is to break the trance that persuades you that your moment-to-moment conscious mind is linear and logical.

Next time we should start by looking at your proposed factors in setting your mental limits:

  • Strand heredity;
  • Astrological limitations;
  • Social understandings.

Are you still sure you want to call this “Midday and half-light thinking”?

I’ll need to look at it. Our thanks for all this, as always.

 

20. Extension and growth

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Thursday, May 16, 2024

4:05 a.m. Gentlemen, your choice. You said yesterday you wanted to discuss giving freely vs. charging for information we get for free. But I counted three other things you began and have not finished:

  • Creating something permanent
  • The universe “making up its mind”
  • Life’s meaning

What’s your pleasure?

We haven’t lost track. That said, it’s good for you to keep track as well. It is a complex argument to set forth, and we’re easily side-tracked. However, it all evens out.

What we want to say about freely giving isn’t actually an interruption. It proceeds from our motivation of expansion through giving. You understand, we’re talking here about life more abundantly, not the acquisition of things or of talents or of accomplishments or of the love of others.

I am seeing the distinction ever more clearly as a distinction between self-definitions.

Very good. Yes. Life more abundantly means, expansion of who and what you experience yourself to be. It does not mean a smoother track of the life and the self-definition you have already.

Discussion of the pleasant helpful exchange with the man who was concerned for a stranger led to this. But so do so many things we have discussed over the years. Our sketching of emotion as the boundary between the known part of you (the ego-self) and the not-yet-grown-into parts (the unconscious, according to Jung, which we would say is what you are unconscious of; your unknown functioning that is also potential). The redefinition of 3D humans as communities of strands rather than as the units they seem.

Your friend John Nelson had his character in the novel say (in effect), “It’s always the same thing. They come to me to learn how to change without changing.” We would say, yes, that is the problem, seen one way. Seen another way, it is more that the idea of having to change is the problem. You don’t need to change what you are (you couldn’t anyway); you need to change which parts of yourself express, which makes it look like you changed, but in fact what changes is expression. If your life has been the living-out of ten things, and then becomes the living-out of those ten plus two more that you had previously not suspected you also were, will your expression to the 3D world not change? Yet you will still be what you were, only more so.

I think that could be said more simply.

It is usually easier to restate concisely than to feel your way into an initial expression. Feel free.

I get that you are meaning, we are always more than our idea of ourselves, and that the more selflessly we act, the more of ourselves we can come to know. I gather that this is because love, expansion, leads naturally to growth, while self-absorption merely reinforces the definition we begin with.

Stated a little too flatly, but more or less on track. It is in the nature of things that reaching out is the way to growth. Think of the children you once were.  Can you remember the outflowing energy, avidly interacting with the world? The state of expectation? The free enthusiasm? All that is consistent with a default state of growth. Children expect to grow. They have no other experience of life but growth. Although they are very aware of what they learn to do, the learning isn’t the center of their attention, it is the new wonder that each year brings.

“Except you be as little children, you can’t enter the kingdom of heaven.” Is that the meaning?

That is one meaning. Obviously a grown-up cannot return to a state of ignorance, but can return to a state of innocence. You can’t go back to not-knowing; you can go back to a default state of expectation.

Ah. “Life is good. All is well.”

Every child begins with that knowing. What child ever came into the world grumbling, or depressed, or lost, or jaded? It is true, a harsh life may soon warp them, but they didn’t start that way. And neither – o grownup human reading this – did you. And you can return to that earlier state.

It is a decision, as much as anything.

Haven’t we been advising you, from the very beginning with Rita so many years ago? “All is well. All is always well.” Now see it in this new context.

Let me connect a couple of dots. I’m getting that the underlying key here is, “Life is good.” Not, “Life would be good if only,” nor “Life will be good as soon as,” but “Life is good,” period. That feeling of affirmation – somebody called it the Everlasting Yes – is the key to our growth.

Not just to your growth (which implies a future state) but also to your functioning right here, right now.

Will you allow world affairs or politics or natural disasters or tax difficulties or physical problems or relationship issues or mental stagnation – or anything – to persuade you that life is anything but good? That all is anything but well? To the extent that you allow that feeling in, you hamper your own natural flowering.

And our reaching out to others is a way to preserve that knowing?

You aren’t wrong, but we offer a caution here: Be careful not to devolve into doing good for someone in order to get something, even merit. Jesus said the person who does good and gets praised for it has had his reward. One thing he meant by that little parable is that there is a big difference for you in giving for its own sake and giving in hope of some return. The latter is still good, but it isn’t the same order of thing as the former.

Your wellbeing is in growth, always. But what does that mean?

That no matter what happens to us, we can use it.

Superficially, yes. Looked at more closely,

  • Nothing “happens” to anyone. Life is not chance, no matter how it seems.
  • Therefore by definition nothing “happens” by accident. You know this with one part of your mind, but connect it to this:
  • Growth has patterns, possibilities. Therefore, different sequences of events (inner and outer) are part of different patterns.
  • Therefore – and how many times have we said it – it is up to you to choose what you want to be, what you want to grow into.
  • By 3D logic, this is a future-oriented process. But really, it is about the present, of course. Your choice is now, always. When else could it be? It will affect present, future, and past, though that may seem logically impossible. Choosing is how you create your own reality.
  • “Choosing your own reality” may be restated, “Choosing your own growth path,” or “Choosing your own ‘external’ influences as you go along.”

If you will go through the Gospels reading what Jesus said and interpreting it by way of these thoughts, you will see that you were given a trustworthy and subtle guide to growth in awareness. He did not explain any of it in these words: How could he have done so? Who could have followed? It would have been only words, and inexplicable words at that. But you have the way to read him that the very apostles did not have. Use it. Do for him what you did for the Gospel of Thomas or for Bronson Alcott. Instead of criticizing (as many do), seek for the inner thought, and use it.

Enough for the moment.

Yes, thank you. Till next time.

 

Writing, not typing

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

I don’t do the science of it. All I can tell you is my own experience. For a quarter of a century I have noticed the difference between talking to the guys via handwriting and via typing. Typing is vastly faster and involves less effort. But writing it out first seems to improve the depth of the message.  Maybe this is a case of “you get only as much as you pay for,” I don’t know.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/05/11/1250529661/handwriting-cursive-typing-schools-learning-brain