Guest Posting: Ruth Shilling on the Joy State

[Ruth Shilling takes me up on my offer to post people’s offerings. I hope she will submit more, and i hope others will, as well. I think many will find this of great interest.]

 

Dialogue with the Mentors/about the Joy-State

from Ruth Shilling

5 June 2024

M: You are here. We are now. You can begin anywhere, but now is always the time.

R: There is no other.

M: Yes, you know this now, but there are more layers to this. There is the indescribable present as spoken in your conscious memory bank of experiences, and there is the “real” present, the one to which we would care to address in our dialogue with you here today. The understandings – as you perceive them – are a multi-layered sense of things as you have organized them in your own “cataloguing” of what you deem to be true in any given moment or time period of your awareness.

R: I am finding this transmission unsteady. What could improve this?

M: Just stick with this. It will even out with time.

R: OK. Please proceed.

M: The matter-of-fact-ness of what you assume is true in any given instant is “clear” to you at any given time, but the processing time has not been acknowledged or accounted for. It behooves you, now, to change this paradigm or way of processing of the information/insights which drop into your awarenesses, often in an unexpected manner. You believe, and we emphasize “believe” here, that all is thus and so in your world because that is just how the perceptions have come through to you. But, believe it or not experience of the oneness in manifest forms here. This is just one method of having this earthly

There are other ways to be participating in this ongoing experience(s). You can and will have other options, should you choose to avail yourself of these. You can, for example, begin each experience of the cosmic oneness with a playful attitude or stance, an unexpecting, a newness.

R: Beginner’s mind?

M: In a sense. However, we find that phrase to be laden with disciplinary associations. Those associations, in and of themselves, will muddy the joyfulness that we intend to impart with this example “for your perusal,” so to speak. Like a new bicycle or a toy train that lights you up for pleasure and investigations simultaneously. This is closer to that which we wish to impart with this analogy. A delight is much more powerful, tantalizing and uplifting than a steady-as-you-go approach (which is one we are not recommending here now in this instance).

R: How do I actually do this?

.M: Good question! We are delighted that you have “taken the bait,” so to speak, and are now an inquiring mind that wants to know Of course your actions throughout your day can tend to fall into a number of general categories.

  • You can mull something over, make a decision, and then act on it.
  • You can describe something within yourself and then push it aside – create a non-action stance with it.
  • You can simply savor the moments as they “come down the pike” and wait to see what happens next.
  • Or – we hear you thinking now – you can wait for an impulse and fly with it.
  • Or (as you are thinking now) an intent can be set. This figures into #1, but has perhaps a slightly different flavor in that there is overall intent but not pre-planned specific actions attached to that.

All in all, you have a number of different modes that you will operate in throughout your day. What has not been articulated here, however, is this other “3rd mode,” this other expansion-mode that we are bringing to your attention today.

R: Is this like expanding my awareness out so that I have a wider perception, a bit like a combination of the detachment state and 360-degree awareness that permeates everything in my surroundings as well as within myself?

[Note the Glossary of Ruth’s Terms below]

M: Yes, this is closer to what we are intending to explicate.

Re: More like the witness-experiencer state?

M: Yes, this is our intention.

R: I remember it was joyous.

M: Yes! And delicious, as well. Why not tempt yourself with this pleasure each day? Enjoy! Appreciate, immerse, pledge your present experiences to this expanded state of unity that does not lose the personal-self one iota.

R: Thank you! I am surprised I have put this so far into the back burner, when I could be enjoying my life so much more.

M: Yes! Have FUN! What can deter you from such ecstasies? Only your humdrum ideas about ought-tos and shoulds and shouldn’ts!

R: OK. Great. I think this is good for today. Thank you, thank you.

===========

Glossary of Ruth’s personal terms

Detachment state: When I move my point of perception outside of my head, either to the side or behind and up a bit.

360-degree awareness: At one point when I was meditating a lot, I was able to spread my awareness out into everything around me. It was like every molecule of air or object in the room had thousands of eyes and could see everything from that point. I could see what was behind my head and also what was on the opposite side of objects in front of me. I read later that this 360-degree awareness sometimes happens to soldiers in the battlefield. So it is a way of perceiving that is possible for us.

Witness-experiencer: This state first happened for me spontaneously about 30 years ago. I leaned sideways and 3 ribs popped out of their place in my backbone. I went into a dual-perception state where I was aware of two radically different experiences happening simultaneously. One was me crying and screaming in pain, and the other was me feeling totally at peace and happy, even joyous. Everything was just fine. Afterwards, I experimented with going into that witness-experiencer state voluntarily. The steps I came up with were 1) suspend thinking, 2) move the focus into my heart and absorb my experience there, 3) move my point of focus up and to the right side in the air. Once I “tuned my radio dial” into that way of perceiving, my experience was perpetual joy. From this state EVERY experience was delicious and interesting. Everything was completely focused in the exact moment. No past, no future, except as a thought in the present. And every experience was new, like it had never happened before.

Even if I was in pain, like with the ribs accident, there was no sadness or upset. Everything was just fine. The only experience other than the up-beat joyous experience was a sort of compassion when I was in pain. My guess is that many meditation practices are attempting to help people access this state. It was abundantly clear at the time that everyone is actually having this experience all the time, but our focus is just not tuned to that part of our radio dial.

 

44. Obstacles to bringing it through

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.

 

43. Opportunities and changes

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.

 

42. Sacred and mundane

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.

 

41. Not peace but a sword

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.

 

40. 3D obstacles, non-3D relating

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.

 

39. Vectors and growth

Tuesday, June 4, 2024

4:35 a.m. Psychic interpretational structures, finally. At least, I hope so.

Is the meaning not clearer, in light of the previous discussion?

Maybe. At the moment it sounds like this: Our constitution establishes patterns in how we perceive, and therefore helps determine what we can perceive, and in relationship to what else.

That’s the idea. Your composition is more fluid than you usually realize, and your orientation is less fluid than you usually realize. You are more a point of view than a structure. Your task is more to report what reality looks like to you than to find some theoretical absolute truth. And, of course, while you are doing this, you are experiencing sequential processing, a very valuable skill in itself which is of use later.

How is “experiencing” a skill?

[They may have meant that sequential processing itself is the skill , but they took my understanding of their words and ran with it.]

What you have experienced becomes a part of you, and therefore becomes a resource that you can call upon when necessary.

I have had it vaguely in mind for  a week or so, now. I think you are saying it is valuable to the non-3D to have minds that can process sequentially even when not in a 3D environment’s constrictions.

This is exactly what we mean. You all have a tendency to think that your 3D experiences refer to the condition of the 3D field that results from (or despite) your efforts. It rarely occurs to you that your 3D experiences create new units (new combinations of previous 3D units) with the ability to function in non-3D in the way they learned while in 3D.

But in the back of my mind I hear, “By now the non-3D ought to be filled with ex-3D minds. If they are all able to process sequentially, why a constant need for more?”

Your world is full of scientists, doctors, engineers, teachers, police, maintenance men – what is the need for more?

Okay, I get it, it is an on-going process.

The world grows. Not only the 3D world (though surely you can see that if the 3D grows, the All-D grows) but the non-3D.  The world is always new; always being created; always a work in progress. Depending upon how you choose to see it, reality is never perfect (because there is always room for growth, always new possible arrangements) and is always perfect (because functioning just fine). It is only when you would prefer to settle for whatever you have (plus one or two trifling improvements) that you think you know better than the universe. When you come to realize that you don’t know what’s best for everyone and everything, you can begin to appreciate the perfection of continuing imperfection.

Well then, say some more about how we brighten the non-3D’s life.

You are jesting, or half-jesting, but in at least one sense, it is true that this sharpened, focused, concentrated, inured 3D consciousness is relatively brighter than those who have not gone through the 3D experience. That itself is a reason to enter 3D.  From a systems viewpoint, it is a reason for various elements to go through 3D. It produces brighter, more concentrated elements of “everyday” non-3D life.

It’s true, we don’t usually think in such terms, probably because we have such a hard time envisioning life not driven by time, the way our 3D life is, nor by necessities that must be tended to.

But why assume that we have nothing we need to do? Life is always purposive, it’s just that you can’t easily envision it that way while you are thinking in terms of solids in space. That is, once you are beyond the idea that the non-3D can’t exist because by definition it has no things, you are left a bit at sea as to what it can consist of. Often you tend to think of it like outer space: somehow there, but more characterized by what it isn’t than by what it is.

You said, “Life is always purposive,” and I get the feeling that this would be the basis of a long disquisition in itself.

If you will remember to apply “As above, so below,” we can provide a few orienting hints based in 3D life.

  • Every life has a unique composition of the elements all have in common. This is true psychically no less than physically.
  • Every life meets circumstances that, too, are unique mixes of elements experienced in common.
  • Your makeup provides you automatically with your vector. No one is everything; therefore everyone is by definition not in balance, and balance is what you naturally flow toward.
  • Thus, by being born – by being combined, if we are talking about 3D beings – you are automatically created with tendencies toward some things, away from other things. This, quite regardless of your conscious purposes.
  • Your lives may be seen as long attempts to move toward balance, attempts usually mostly or entirely unconscious.
  • And when can you or anyone grow to encompass totality? Therefore, when should you expect to cease striving and yearning?

That’s very interesting. And if everything in the universe is similarly incomplete, well, that is what we see in 3D, everybody striving, contending, cooperating, and therefore loving and hating and growing and shrinking. Good self-portrait. But if the 3D world is not really the end to which 3D life is aimed, what is non-3D’s end?

For one thing, you are overlooking the fact that 3D life contains more than merely human life: It is everything in it, all kingdoms. They all have their strivings, and nothing is unimportant.

Hard to think of mountains or oceans or clouds having strivings.

Have you ever heard of entropy?

Hmm. I guess “striving” calls to mind intention.

Your innate nature is your intention. Your conscious motivation may or may not reflet your deepest intention.

So a mountain intends to become rubble?

It strives to be mineral, and whatever happens to mineral is its life. When prospectors pan for gold, or dig deeply into a mountainside and extract ore, do you suppose the mountain objects? Or cheers? Or even takes note? It doesn’t have that kind of consciousness. Nor does it experience itself as a unit. That doesn’t begin to happen until the plant kingdom. Its life is what happens to it, and maybe the only meaningful thing that happens to it is that it endures, it helps hold the psychic space, as we said to you some while ago. “Man is the measure of all things,” but that doesn’t mean that everything man measures ought to be measured as if it were man. It means, draw your analogies.

I thought this session would center on psychic interpretational structures, but it has gone off in another direction.

Yes and no. Consider this, see if you can make sense of it. Mountains have their own psychic interpretational structure. So does every link in the chain of being. Different for each link, and different for each individual in each link, at least as you move up the chain, but still each link has its characteristics.

So, mountains have a life in non-3D?

Don’t over-generalize. By being in 3D, they are automatically in non-3D too, of course. But in the sense you mean, all we will say is that everything is mind-stuff. You may wish to see minerals as mind-stuff frozen into form, and angels as mind-stuff entirely without form, and all the intermediary kingdoms in between.

Perhaps we will resume by taking a closer look at the representation of non-3D that is the 3D world.

Looking forward to it. Thanks as always for all this.