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.
Sunday, May 12, 2024
4:55 a.m. Yesterday you said you might continue with the question of what’s the purpose —seen from the overall perspective – of people going through the 3D experience. I’m sure one or two of us would like to know!
Yes, because life in 3D can be hard, and nobody wants to go through something hard thinking it may not mean anything. Who would?
In a way, everything we have ever told you has been leading to this question of “Why.” We began there, we’ve continued there, and we’ll wind up there, because “Why” is what it is all about. By the same token, and without contradiction, you could say everything has been about “How,” because there’s no explaining why without explaining how things work.
You could justly say it has all about healing, about communicating with non-3D and with 3D (that is, each other). You could say it is all about love, or all about gravity. Do you see? It’s all one thing, and the less you feel that, the less sense things make.
Did we not have to show you first that you are not alone? That is one of the inevitable illusions common to 3D life, that you are each alone, that life is transitory, that “accidents happen” and no one and nothing is safe. Can you see that all those illusion s breed fear, and that fear is destructive to sure communication with life’s wellsprings? If you are alone in the woods and you think you are lost and it’s nighttime and you think there may be wolves or bears or banshees or whatever perils, how well do you suppose you will be thinking?
Ah! “Perfect love casts out fear.”
It isn’t quite that love and fear cannot coexist. It is closer to say, the more of one, the less of the other.
Well, I always did wonder how various martyrs went to their deaths so calmly and how some submitted tortures so calmly, even gaily, like the one who was being roasted on a grill and told them to turn him over, he w as done on that side. Can’t remember who that was, but it wasn’t some dim legend, it was attested. American Indians, too, were known to be pretty immune to fear of death or to torture, so it isn’t as if the thing were dependent upon a given faith, the way people often assume.
You could almost look at life in 3D as a ghost story, full of perils, scary experiences, gruesome episodes (a la Hansel and Gretel, for instance), and exaggerated division of characters into good and evil, stupid and clever, fast learners and slow. What’s the purpose of a ghost story, beyond reminding you that you are not trapped in that reality, not tortured by witches who want to kill you, not at the mercy of the merciless?
[They said ghost stories, but it seems they meant fairy tales.]
That’s an interesting take on it. So are you saying 3D functions to the non-3D as a ghost story, telling them they’re to thank their lucky stars they aren’t in 3D form?
You think you are jesting, and in fact you are half-serious. It can be hard to remember, in the face of the difficulties of language with its division into “me” and “them,” but you cannot keep things straight until you remember that you in 3D are also in non-3D. It isn’t a “me” versus “them.” Nor is it a matter of plurals, except relatively. But it is perhaps a matter of a part of the overall consciousness splitting off to play a role for the greater consciousness of the whole.
That some part of the all-that-is experiences 3D limitations enlightens us all? Isn’t that what Charles Sides was telling me is some religion’s view of human life, that God split himself so as to experience himself more consciously?
Doesn’t Carl Jung say the same thing? Not in so many words, not in the same mythic container, but it amounts to that. And why should it surprise anyone that the same truth is experienced by people treading different paths?
Only, look at some of the obstacles people face in attempting to even consider such a reality. Too many facts contradict it – if they were facts and not persistent illusion.
We could go on, but you see the point. What in this list of beliefs would inspire trust that All is well, or All is one?
But that’s part of the experience! How could anyone in non-3D experience doubt, lostness, isolation, fear – let alone all the things in 3D life you find pleasant and so call good?
At any one slice of time-space, you will find part of the universal consciousness experiencing everything that can be experienced. Does that mean some are winners and some losers, when you look at it overall?
Everything works out over time, you mean?
Even that implies there are some individuals who won and some who lost. But if you and we are all part of all-that-is, how can a gain or a loss be more than somewhat real? If a soul goes through a horrific life, how much does that mean to it overall? We don’t mean, “Any one soul is only a tiny bit of the whole and may be sacrificed for the greater good,” but more like, “One toothache does not define a lifetime.” What is a man’s threescore and ten against eternity? Or to put it another way, what is being the conduit of a given experience against being the conduit, equally, of every experience?
I’m thinking about it. Are you meaning that pain and suffering (even if nothing more than a life lived in personal isolation and meaninglessness) sharpens the consciousness of the whole somehow?
That is one effect; it is not exactly the reason why. What you just said is somewhat the fact, and the deduction from the fact, that Dr. Jung observed, translating his 3D medical observations and his non-3D intuitions and explorations. It is a valid statement, but it is not an adequate statement. It doesn’t take into account why self-awareness is desired and used by the All-that-is.
Transcendence!
If you don’t want to stay as you are – if you wish to grow, to improve – you have to move in some way, and it is better to move from knowledge than to move from ignorance, as much as possible.
So all-that-is isn’t perfect.
Better to say it isn’t perfected, and why should it be? Indeed, how could it ever be?
We don’t commonly think of reality as growing, changing. We in reality, yes, but not reality itself.
So would you prefer to think of reality as accomplished, without purpose, an endless treadmill?
Hmm. Not perfect and nothing wrong with not being perfect.
Not being over, and nothing wrong with being still in process.
Interesting thought. Where do we go from here?
Do you have any reason to be sure that what you can perceive, what can affect you – what you consider All-that-is – is in fact all?
Sounds like you’re planning to bring back the question of how “everything” can be unfinished.
Our examination of everything is what is unfinished.
Well, I’ll have to assume you know what you’re doing. This wouldn’t give me a starting-place. Our thanks for everything so far.
Saturday, May 11, 2024
5:20 a.m. You said you may perhaps continue on how life does, and does not, lead to something. Shall we proceed?
The point to be seized on is the nature of the eternal now (“I am who am”) as opposed to the nature of the eternal flow of time through the 3D. or we might better say, the flow of the 3D through time. You are always in the eternal now; you are always experiencing it in two contrary ways.
Intuitively you can tune into the boundless sea as it is and remains. Sensorily you can only experience the current, carrying you down the river. It isn’t time that changes, it is your experience of time, and that depends upon which of your reporting systems you tune into.
For some reason, that is very clear to me. I can’t say it was previously.
You had the concepts separately; we merely provided a way to understand how contradictory manifestations could have a common nature.
Yet it didn’t seem to come as a big “Aha!”
We smile. It doesn’t always come with fireworks. You had the big Aha when you got that times always remained but were not in your sensory grasp except for one moment at a time, as your senses conveyed it.
So is that all we need to say on the subject?
For some, yes. Others might profit by a few words more. As always, people’s ability to readjust concepts depends upon the concepts they hold beforehand.
You might consider how your 3D lives are affected by your understanding or lack of understanding of your place in time. A lot depends upon your grasp of the concept of the eternal now on the one hand, and your tentative grasp of an ever-changing experience of that eternal now, on the other. A lot of the frantic fanaticism of your time stems from people thinking, “It’s all going to hell,” followed by either “and I can do nothing about it,” or “and I have to do something about it.”
You understand? If time is what it appears to be, then anything that happens in your 3D experience of the world is real, and terribly important. It is life or death, you know? That’s the saying, “a matter of life or death.” But if you break through the crust of the apparent, you see that in fact nothing is at stake, there is no “life or death,” and there is no movement that could bring anyone to hell, or to heaven either.
So there is your paradox, and it will be resolved here in the only way a paradox can ever be resolved: by taking it to a higher or deeper level, to see what brings forth the appearance of paradox. We have said many times, paradoxes do not exist in reality, but the appearance of paradox does, often enough. In such case, it is no use to be choosing one horn or the other of a dilemma; that merely amounts to accepting as true what is only appearance.
So let’s set it out carefully, trying to represent each side of the argument in a form those caught in it would recognize.
Now, both these things are true, and you in 3D are living at the intersection of the two. Some of you at any given time live closer to one end of the polarity, others live closer to the other end. You may or may not move along that line between the two; you may even oscillate. Doesn’t matter. The point here is that it is a line between polarities, not a choice of one being real and one being unreal. As usual, in 3D everything is somewhat real; that is, real in one context, unreal in another, and never as simple as any one viewpoint would see it.
So you see, Jesus said “The poor you have always with you.” He said you must not be taken in by “wars and the rumors of wars.” Do you think that meant he didn’t care about human suffering? This man whose entire ministry was to teach that you are all brothers and sisters, products of a living eternal presence that is aware of you and loves you?
But if he did care, why tell people not to concentrate on social problems? The answer, of course, is that he was teaching them to get to the reality beyond what their senses could report, so that then they could live more effectively. That is one of many meanings of “I have come that you may have life more abundantly.” A freer person, a calmer person, is more effective in the world. But that effectiveness is mostly by-product. It is a beneficial side-effect, but a side-effect nonetheless.
Do you want to correct the world’s injustices? The paradoxical truth is, you can’t do it by being immersed in 3D as if non-3D did not exist. Try to rework the world that way and you will not cure the world’s evil; you will probably increase it. Always you must act from love, if you don’t’ want your actions to recoil against you – and if you act without reference to the reality of the non-3D, how will you act from love whenever it appears to conflict with self-interest, with “realism”?
Now, we know this will meet resistance, but we want you to consider this anyway. On the one hand, you had George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and even Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. Like everyone, they had their flaws, they made their compromises among evils. Nonetheless, in extremis, they prayed, particularly the first two in an earlier time in your civilization, but so did the latter two, in a different way, a way closer to desperation than to connection: When they had exhausted their resources, they prayed for help.
Superstition? Some of you will think so. But consider on the other hand Stalin and Hitler and Mussolini. Can you envision any one of them praying, even superficially? Stalin famously asked, “How many legions does the Pope have?”
Be careful in your assumptions here. We are not taking sides in 3D affairs in the way you might think from seeing this listing. Another example may make it clearer. Robert Lee prayed for his enemies as well as for his cause and his armies, and he prayed every night. He was a strong warrior, no dweller in cloud-cuckoo-land, and he prayed as devoutly as did Lincoln. As Lincoln said, both sides prayed and the brayers of both could not be answered, and prayers of neither was answered fully. But the result is not the point here, it is the nature of the men. They wouldn’t have thought of it in this way, but in effect they were recognizing that 3D reality is affected by something that can’t be quantified but nonetheless exists.
What we are getting at is that it matters less what you believe (that is, the form in which your belief is clothed) then that you believe (that is, that you remain aware that 3D is only part of a larger reality).
There is more to be said on this, but perhaps a little distance between this and any continuation will be well, that the concepts will have time to penetrate where necessary.
So, next time?
Next time perhaps we can look at what good it does reality in general (that is, when considered from an All-D perspective) that people go through 3D experience.
Ed Carter told me once that 3D graduates were considered graduates from boot camp, which I took to mean, toughened, more self-reliant.
3D life does harden you, in the sense that glass may be annealed. That doesn’t mean the glass is being prepared for warfare.
Our thanks as always.
Friday, May 10, 2024
5:50 a.m. Good morning, friends. It is an underappreciated aspect of this work, I think, the uncertainty as to how to proceed. I sit down to resume and I see a binder of previous sessions and I have almost a moment of panic sometimes. “Where is the argument going? How do we proceed? How can I continue when I don’t know where we’re going?” and this after all these years of practice and reassuringly solid results. It takes a certain resolution, sometimes, to live in faith that the next installment will appear and that it will all hold together.
And in earlier days you used to wonder if you were making it all up behind your own back. You will remember Rita reassuring you that it was not humanly possible to produce all that “out of your hat,” so to speak. You used to pretend she was saying, “You aren’t smart enough to do that,” knowing that she wasn’t meaning that at all. But this is worth keeping on the record here, even though we are now sticking closer to the material and less to the process, because after all one important aspect of the material is the redefinition of what is possible to the average person. It won’t hurt them to remember that doubt and even panic are part of the process. Doubt and even panic are not important obstacles – provided that you resolve to overcome them! – but it is well to be aware that they are liable to crop up, from time to time.
I suppose they help keep us honest. Okay, then, why do we bother to choose, given that nothing lasts?
Ah, but you see, that “given that nothing lasts” is how life seems to you, but it stands reality on its head. Haven’t you conceded that all moments of time-space exist forever, even if only one such moment at a time can be experienced as a 3D moment? So how can you say, “Nothing lasts”? Quite the contrary: Everything lasts.”
Everything lasts and yet one’s pathway through it changes continuously, millisecond by millisecond. Take a moment to absorb implications here.
It’s jaw-dropping. Boy, when you guys get to tying up loose ends, you don’t fool around. On the one hand, every moment lasts forever. On the other hand, by our decisions, we construct a path through all those moments, a path we can alter at any time. You’re going to have to spell this out some. I can feel my brain exploding.
Bullets, then.
That isn’t clear. You mean, I think, that reality as a whole contains everything (obviously, by definition) but everything within it has a different specific gravity, so that in effect it forms layers of common content which we experience as relative units.
Yes. So you perceive classes of things, and what hose classes are depends upon how you categorize them. In effect, you create the divisions by recognizing them. [It occurs to me, typing this, maybe that’s what it meant in the Bible where God has Adam give names to the animals: Adam was making and recognizing relative units. Maybe.] Change your system of definitions and behold, reality looks different. Animal, vegetable, mineral, etc., and nothing wrong with the classification. But then look at the same phenomena in a different way and they are atomic bundles; look again and they are mind-stuff, slowed down for convenience. In that sense, the world is as you perceive it. Change perceptions (and change con-ceptions) and you experience it differently. In effect, you think of it differently and it changes.
Or we have an anomalous experience and we experience it differently and then our conceptions change.
It isn’t an “or” in the sense of a different interpretation. Both motions occur – perception sometimes leads, sometimes follows. A reciprocating process, as in so many things.
Now, pause. We would suggest, re-read. As Bob Monroe used to say on his tapes, we will wait for you.
Okay, done, though I skipped the angst and the part after the bullets.
You got what we wanted fresh in your mind. You see the point, here? Every moment is precious and yet every moment is only one variant. Your work at creating yourselves is critical to the existence of the world, yet, again, is only one variant. Your lives as individuals – to the extent that you may be said to be individuals – are your own business, and yet concern everyone.
Christians seem to think this is all leading to an end. I’m fairly sure that’s why the church fathers included the Apocalypse at the end of the Bible. But it isn’t really about leading to something at all, is it?
It is, and it isn’t.
Ah yes, “Yes but no.”
Well, sometimes that’s the only way to evade what seem logical necessities but are actually misunderstandings.
I assume you aren’t saying the Bible’s account is to be taken in its own terms.
The Bible, like all scripture, is a set of accounts of people encountering something transcendent and reacting to the encounter. It doesn’t matter if they (or we) call that transcendence God or Waldo. You as transcenders must get beyond your allergy to scripture (without becoming slave to it) if you are to obtain a more sophisticated understanding. Do you suppose that we in these sessions can provide you with what scriptures can provide? What’s the point of having several vast libraries centering on precisely the things that most interest you, and never consulting it?
Next time we can continue to look at how life does and does not “lead to something,” perhaps.
Our thanks as always.
Thursday, May 9, 2024
4 a.m. Very well, gentlemen, you’re up. Strands and ultimate time lines?
Remember we said “how you may wish to think of them.” We are revolutionizing the concept, but that doesn’t mean the new view is “right” and previous views are “wrong.” It is less about truth and error than about the new light shed on any subject by changing viewpoint. In practice, your view will be a combination of new and old. We’re encouraging you to make that the theory as well as the practice.
Viewpoint is not a zero-sum game. A new view needn’t discredit an old one, but may actually reinforce it, in a way, by adding nuance and explanation.
I’m certainly seeing that in my reading. I am bingeing on histories from the newly reopened UVA library, and as always it is surprising how a new view of a subject I felt I knew will show it in an entirely new light. I have come to see that we never really know more than an approximation, a shadow, of what really happened, and how, and why.
And if that is so of 3D subjects, how much more is it likely to be when dealing with subjects for which there is little or no sensory evidence. But this is not cause for mourning; it may equally well be considered to be Rita Warren’s definition of happiness, an endless research project with no need for writing reports.
However, having pointed out that a new way of seeing is not the same as a complete overturning of what you know, still it is true that it can be a revolution. So let us continue to revolutionize.
You have come to think in terms of alternate time-lines, alternate realities, creation or discovery of new versions of the future as created by your deciding this rather than that. This is somewhat true. However, it can be improved as a model. We could not have done this beginning with the generally accepted model of time nor the generally accepted model of what human life is. But now we can build upon the intermediate platform.
The change we urge you to try on is difficult to describe. We might say, exchange time for space in your model of how there can be infinite numbers of potential universes, each one created by choice – with, of course, everyone choosing. Consider that each of these versions exists sequentially rather than simultaneously. This isn’t right either, but we probably need to use this as a halfway-house concept.
You can see perhaps what we are now doing.
You seem to be tying up a lot of loose-end concepts that never fit together very well.
They each served a purpose of explaining this or that, but they lacked the over-arching concept that would make sense of them as a system. That is what we are about now. Only, don’t assume this new series will leave no loose ends. As we have said many times, you never get to The Truth; at best you get closer to it.
Now, perhaps some will be uncomfortable with a concept of perpetual flux rather than the seemingly stable collection of alternative realities. If you are one of those, deal with that discomfort: It will teach you something. But it is in the nature of life as experienced from a 3D background to change. Change, not stasis, is the default condition. That means that a model that considers alternative universes and parallel timelines to be simultaneously existing is less true than a model that we will try to describe. You might think of it as a level of reality in which any conceivable particular universe or timeline may be found in potential, not in actual.
I think you mean, it exists if we go looking for it, or happen to be plopped into it, but not otherwise. You seem to be saying alternative universes and timelines come into existence and go out of existence depending upon choices made. We never think of alternatives disappearing.
That isn’t quite the way to put it either, but perhaps between us we have sent out the spark that will lead some to an intuitive leap. The differences are more temporal than (in effect) physical. Yet this still doesn’t quite capture it. Perhaps best to say, consider the Buddhist emphasis on impermanence. It is not confined to 3D affairs.
It sounds almost like a two-dimensional table in a spreadsheet. If you read this one way, it is sequential, read the other way, it is simultaneous.
Yes, very good. And you have no good 3D models to use to get that concept across. Isn’t it interesting that you used as model an abstract concept that can be expressed in 3D logic.
Now, we recognize that this change in concept creates as many puzzles as it solves, but that is the nature of changing base camps. Given persistence, we will get to the goal nonetheless.
People may wonder what’s the point of life if it doesn’t create anything that lasts.
Yes. What’s the point of a kiss, or a sunset, or the taste of a ham and cheese sandwich, or the working of a crossword puzzle? And, indeed, to some people that question will seem to reinforce the doubt, because they already wonder why bother doing anything, when it won’t last.
And that’s our next installment? The purpose of choosing?
It may well be. We’ll see. But it is more important to clear away the aura of certainty that may grow around a concept than to replace the concept with another that will grow the same kind of moss.
And you are just the guys to set the stone rolling. Very well, our thanks as always.
Wednesday, May 8, 2024
6:50 a.m. “Our strands and how they change us, and vice versa, and why,” you said.
You tend to think of yourselves as individuals responsible for yourselves, and to some extent this is true. But it isn’t the whole truth. Once you grow into a wider awareness, you begin to recognize wider, deeper, responsibilities and opportunities. There is no useful generalization to be made as to how long this process may take, nor where it will begin, nor how it will manifest. Some are born knowing, you might say, and all their lives are a struggle for more clarity, wider application. Others may come in with little or no knowing, and have little or no interest or ability to draw connections. And, as usual, every intermediate position.
The differences among you don’t matter to your own “individual” task and opportunity. Wherever you begin, however you are constituted, however motivated you are to know more and be more, opportunities will be right there in your life, every day, and it is up to you whether you recognize them and choose to take advantage of them. This is one meaning of our saying that you are in 3D to choose.
(A word on choice: Choosing may be momentary or it may be continuous. If it is momentary, we call it a decision. If continuous, we call it intent. You all do both, of course, and one form does not obviate the others. Sometimes, it is true, they contradict each other, and this is not necessarily a disadvantage. There is such a thing as changing your mind, changing direction.)
But you do not choose in isolation, because there is no isolation.
Not mentally, no.
Well, not mentally, but what does that mean, when you look at it closely? What in you does the deciding? Is it not your mind, existing in non-3D and 3D both? Many factors in a decision relate to the 3D body, yes. But decisions are made and ratified and unmade by the indefinable you-ness of you, and that is not primarily physical, but mental.
Another way to say it would be that you are mostly mental, given that your body and its surroundings are also made of mind-stuff.
A third way to look at it would be to consider the physical component to be the slowest of the various elements comprising you. It is by nature more suited to function as drag than as pathfinder. It maintains the stability of whatever your life is at any moment; it does not, and is not designed to, pioneer.
Perhaps you have been reading between the lines, here, and have intuited where we are going with this. Your life-shaping is much more complex than it appears at first glance. It goes on with the continual participation of everything you are, to greater or less degree, and to greater or less degree of awareness and choice on your part.
Whatever you are, however long you have been at this business of growth, however far you have to go to reach whatever goals you have set for yourself, you will still find more possibilities, appropriate, available, and promising. Surely this is an encouraging fact of life.
Now, that lifetime of shaping yourself does not go on in isolation, as we said. This means 3D, not less than non-3D, interaction. Your everyday life continually feeds you opportunities to react in ways that aid your growth toward what you want to be, but they don’t force growth on you, you have to choose it.
Now let’s look at non-3D influences, which is what we have been building up to.
Your various strands are making choices just as you are, which means you and they are never dealing with a static situation, nor with a stable background. If the influences that yesterday pulled your toward A have changed what they want (in effect, have changed what they are), perhaps today they pull you toward B. And you have the same potential effect on each of them.
Consider this carefully. Take a moment, for it may not be at all obvious what a world-shaking redefinition of your life this is.
At one time, people believed that the earth, considered geologically, was solid, set, relatively unchanging. Gradually they learned that what seemed like interruptions – earthquakes, say – were in fact only particular manifestations of continuing processes of movement that had gone unsuspected.
It is the same with you. Your lives are not mostly static continuity with occasional disruptive moments. They are continual movement, adjustment, amid the pulling and tugging of various forces usually beneath your level of awareness.
Every aspect of your world moves. Every aspect chooses, moment by moment. Each aspect may at any moment influence your life, or it may not, but you can never be sure beforetime.
This has so many implications! Parallel universes, alternative life-streams, etc. you tend to think of another universe as “somewhere there,” but you could equally correctly see it as “sometime when.”
This is clear to me, but I doubt it will be clear to anyone who needs to get it via words rather than direct feed.
They have their own direct feed, of course. It is merely a matter of allowing themselves to heed it. Let’s just leave it that everything is in perpetual flux; there is no final state.
We’ve used up an hour, but have you gotten said what you’d hoped?
What we have said so far is not trivial. The longer you consider it, the more connections it will open up to you. Enough for the moment.
All right. As an aid to me, our next topic?
We will probably continue with this question of influences among strands as it affects how you may wish to think of alternate lives.
Our thanks as always.
Tuesday, May 7, 2024
2:45 a.m. Aspirations and intent? Or, perhaps, how to know intent?
You like to think of yourselves as good. You aren’t good. You sometimes think of yourselves as evil. You aren’t evil. Those are conditions – extremes, you might say, or poles. But you don’t live at a pole. You live suspended between them.
Your entire life is suspended between all possible polarities, and, as Swedenborg saw, you are suspended in a condition of freedom, that you may choose. But the subject of good and evil, of choice and necessity, of cause and effect, has been clouded for people by their assumption that life in 3D is what it seems to be. It isn’t.
We can only sketch suggestions toward the truth, because the truth is too complicated to be able to be spelled out, but use your intuition – your own truth-seeking judgment – and what we can say should be enough to get you to what can’t be said in sequential exposition.
Because you are interconnected directly to so many strands, and they to their strands, and so forth, your decisions affect them, and theirs you. Ultimately this means that all humans are one thing in a state of dissociation, but, as we say, this is too complex to sketch. So let us confine yourself to a sketch of you and your strands, to show in little how it works in large.
Take the seven sins, or the seven virtues. These are itemizations of the tendencies that lead downward (away from self-awareness, self-control, self-direction, expansion toward all others) or upward (via active decisions on how to live, what to be). It doesn’t matter whether the individual knows of them by name; they manifest in life, as temptations or possibilities. Other cultures name them differently because they conceptualize them in different systems, but human life is human life, after all.
Well, you in your life are continually tempted up or down – but, throughout your life, so are those you are intimately connected with. You are they; they are you. Don’t let the necessities of language make you think of separation where there is really continuity. Do you think you can ever be isolated from what is your very core of being? “You are not alone” is a very hope-giving statement, but it has its down side, as everything does. That down side is that you are not alone mentally, spiritually – for good or bad. You are always one in a neighborhood.
Can you see how many features of everyday life this sheds light on? The passions that overwhelm you, the “out of character” impulses you sometimes give in to? The traits that are your besetting sins, that you repent of but cannot overcome? The bad in the best of you and the good in the worst of you? All this looks different when you see it as family contention, rather than individual quirks.
It isn’t just good or bad. It is any polarity you can think of. You are never the isolated being you may think yourself to be. You couldn’t be, it would be like a finger considering itself in isolation from the hand, let alone from the rest of the body.
But you are not a helpless pawn, either. You may think of yourselves as swimmers dealing with strong or weak currents. You may choose to go where the current is taking you, either passively floating or swimming with the current. Or you may choose to swim against the current, or at an angle to it. Your lone efforts will not determine the result for your strands ad infinitum, any more than whatever you do in the world will overcome all obstacles or inertia. But your efforts will determine what direction you move.
Again, we could wish that knowledge of theology were more widespread, because what is theology but the working out of life’s ground-rules from whatever assumptions one begins with. That is what you do, it is what we do, and it would allow you to get more sophisticated understandings by examining the explorations and conclusions of others, even though – or perhaps because – their beginning assumptions are so different from these.
Similarly, psychology. The science that studies the mind can report many a phenomenon that will shed new light on your experiences, once you translate the assumptions. Of course we recommend Carl Jung as closest for Westerners. William James, too. You will need to translate their concepts by accepting the result but postulating different causes. We assume that is clear.
I think so. I hear you saying, if someone is talking about dissociation of personality, say, we can trust their observations but will profit b recasting the origin and continuance in the terms we recognize. Not one isolated unit, but a connected unit that is really a community. That sort of thing.
Correct. Similarly with theology. You will disregard the logic that proceeds from assumptions we do not share, and will profit from connections that have been drawn over time by a combination of logic and intuition.
Of course this kind of cherry-picking has its hazards.
What does not? But it is a way to proceed.
I see that. Did you have more on this, or do you want to talk about how to determine our intent?
It is more a change of emphasis than of topic. It still comes to the question of your life among invisible but real influences.
Those who are conversant with astrology will recognize that the internal relations in people form different patterns. Some are concentrated, some scattered. Some are torn between competing impulses, some move from one to another as life proceeds.
Mary Jones and his seven (I think) underlying patterns: bundle, locomotive, basket and handle, etc., It has been a good while, but I get what you are saying. Of course he expressed these relationships considering the individual in isolation.
And, you see, you all will find yourselves translating knowledge in many fields. It isn’t that your predecessors were wrong, it is that you are proceeding from a new viewpoint which puts things in different perspective.
Our point here is that some people are born knowing what they are and what they want and what they want to do. We would say they are in the midst of forces that line up harmoniously.
Others start out confused, or let’s say torn, and never do get their feet on the ground, but are pulled from enthusiasm to enthusiasm, or perhaps from plight to plight, and never have any sense of control.
And, as usual, everyone else is in between these two extremes. You may have great sureness in one aspect of life and little or none in another. You may be sure now, then change and be sure of your different opinion. You may spend your life altering viewpoint and values without being disoriented or discouraged.
In whichever of the three conditions you find yourself, remember this: You always have access to your truth (which will lead you to what you want to do and be: that is, to your intent). However, neither you nor anyone else has access to The Truth in the sense of truth that can only be seen one way.
Your truth is your polestar – but it is only for you. Others may or may not come to the same place, but this won’t be because they share your truth; it is because their truth and yours coincide.
I had thought you intended to give us tips on how to discern our own intent, when it is not evident.
Rather, we call your attention to the fact that you often leave your intent unclarified. You don’t need any helpful hints on how to find your intent: Listen to your own non-3D component (which means, you realize, to your own mind) and it will give you your road map.
I keep getting the impulse to list the sins and virtues. Is that for next time?
You may and it won’t hurt anything, but next time we will probably look at your strands and how they change you, and vice versa, and why.
That should prove interesting. Okay, the virtues: Prudence, Temperance, Justice, Fortitude, Faith, Hope, Charity.
The sins: Lust, Envy, Gluttony, Covetousness, Anger, Price, and Sloth or Ennui. (My mnemonic LEG CAPS or LEG CAPE.)
I don’t know why I should list them, but that was the urge I had, from the time you mentioned them. Thank you for all this. Till next time.