Passion and conflict

Physical train wrecks and psychological debris and vast impersonal forces flowing through us.

This will go better, the more each reader brings to mind specifics as we discuss the general principles. You all know how these forces sweep through your lives; you see it first hand, you see it in dramas and histories and twice-told talks. Passion and conflict is at the heart of story, after all. No conflict, no story. But is conflict as simple a thing as self-interest colliding with self-interest? We would say that would amount to “nothing buttery,” and would clarify nothing.

Lust manifests! Anger, envy, swollen pride manifest! You see them on all sides. Conversely, anybody could tell first- or second-hand stories of noble actions, of self-sacrifice, of quiet unnoticed heroism. Scratch any story and you will find people acting out of motivations, and scratch the motivations and you will find desirable or undesirable passions, maybe quiet, even placid, but passions. An old woman may be invisibly passionate over her flower garden, or her pets, or – anything, really. The key here is not “old woman” but “invisibly.” Although passion is at the heart of all drama, not all passion expresses itself in a dramatic fashion.

The point is that these forces make up your life. The man who sacrifices his life day by day at a meaningless job, that his children may live and hopefully may live better than he, is acting from conviction, and what is conviction rooted in, if not some passion?

We will not continue to pile up examples. Look at other aspects of your life, the events around you and those you only hear of. Wars, cooperation, disasters and disaster relief, millions of private enterprises commercial and otherwise, and millions of pointlessly destructive activities like vandalism. Music, art, poetry, technology, finance, scholarship – all the forms of human activity you can think of. At some place they connect to passion.

So where does it come from? In trying to answer that, realize that plugging in a word like “instinct” is not an answer (because not a linking-together of things, but a word implying “nothing but”); it is a decision not to inquire. So – inquire. Where does this force come into your life from?

You may think, “I was born with it,” and that is certainly true, but it doesn’t actually answer anything. All it says is that you have never lived without it. (Nor could you.) But we knew this: Soul without Spirit is not living in the 3D world; it is closer to being a ghost of itself.

All right, but that sort of answers the question, doesn’t it? These forces are the forces of Spirit.

Fine. And what are the forces of Spirit?

I take it the answer is not as simple as “The light that shines through the fiber optics.”

That would be merely to restate in other words what was said. Resist the temptation to consider the Soul as in 3D and the Spirit as coming from the non-3D somehow. Try to see both inhabiting the All-D, so that, although they coexist in the same space, Spirit is mostly not comprehended by Soul. You could say, pretty accurately, that Soul is bound to its 3D limitations in which it was founded, while Spirit inhabits all of reality, not only the 3D portion of it, hence is invisible to greater or lesser extent depending upon how conscious the Soul is or becomes. Spirit is always here, always functioning, but is it not always perceived, and rarely is perceived in the same way at different times by different Souls.

The next step is to realize that since Spirit interpenetrates your being, its vagaries are going to affect you, often directly.

I didn’t realize that Spirit has vagaries. I think of Spirit as – well, as a vast impersonal force, the way you have been describing it.

You are thinking of Soul and Spirit as two different kinds of things that happen to intersect in human enterprises. But Spirit created Soul. It animates Soul. It shares its essence with Soul.

I thought we were saying that a Sam creates a soul of its own essence.

Do you think a Sam’s essence (even in so far as it is personal) is somehow different from Spirit? That we have Spirit on the one hand and Sam on the other?

I guess I don’t know what I thought. I never thought about that as a problem at all.

Well, let us give the kaleidoscope a shake and see if anything emerges more clearly. Look at it this way. Sam = Spirit creating and incorporating and developing and fostering Souls. In being so engaged, it loses some of its freedom of action (somewhat as a parent does to a dependent child) and becomes part of a compound being. So the difference between what we call Sam for convenience and what we continue to call Spirit is whether one is or is not part of a compound being.

This is an edited excerpt from “Only Somewhat Real,” not yet published.

 

Energy flows

If you take external events to be self-evidently real, if only because they seem to be perceived and accepted by everybody around you, they will seem realer to you than the many thoughts, feelings, emotions that make up your life. It is crazy but natural: What is remote from your experience will seem more real than what is immediately at hand.

And don’t think this means only events you may see on the news. The things that happen to you – the innumerable things not necessarily of any importance that make up the external interface with the world also may seem more real, because more undeniable and more unmalleable, then the internal events. So, tying your shoe, eating your breakfast, driving your car, reading your mail, talking on the telephone – that kind of thing – is all going to seem realer to you than your own thoughts! It’s crazy, seen from our viewpoint, except that we do understand the underlying dynamics.

So do I, now that you come to explore them: We are used to crediting our senses more than our intuitions. Sensory data seems objective, intuition or call it non-sensory data seems at least debatable.

Does this seems like a stretch, then? To say that 3D life is a life that systemically inverts the order of importance of things?

I can see it. But seeing it doesn’t overrule the reality I experience. My lungs still function correctly or they don’t, and my part in that seems secondary to environmental forces.

Well, we aren’t trying to say that people in 3D conditions ought to be able to overcome them; just the contrary, in fact. 3D life was designed to work, not to be superseded or outmaneuvered. Our point here is that this systematic distortion in how you understand the world, rooted in how you experience the world, helps explain how “all is well” and “all is not well” can coexist, both being true depending upon viewing point.

It still comes perilously close to saying, “It’s all a show; those mangled bodies don’t mean anything.”

No, what we are really getting to is that the reality is the energy flowing through those lives, it is not the external incidents that you can see, that result from energy flows, and redirect energy flows.

This is an edited excerpt from “Only Somewhat Real,” not yet published.

 

WYSIWYG

How can all be well when all is not well, at the same time?

And you heard the answer even as you wrote.

Well, I heard the analogy: How can we be individuals and communities at the same time?

Mostly it is a question of focus. “What You See Is What You Get” is an expression you use sometimes. Perhaps this is true in a sense not intended by those who invented it.

No, In computer terms, WYSIWYG (pronounced wissywig) means transparency: Literally, whatever you are looking at is the result. It means there won’t be translation errors, you might say. But you are using it to mean, depending on how we choose to see things, that’s how they are.

Well – not quite. Depending on how you choose to see things, that’s the aspect of them that seems to you to be real. That often seems like the only aspect that is real. In this case, closer to “Choose your own reality” than “Create your own reality.” It isn’t that you are shaping reality by how you choose to see it, but that you are shaping your reality, which after all is the only reality you can know; you can’t know the ultimate reality any more than we can. Our perception of reality is always going to be less than whatever reality really is in essence.

Life is always our personal subset of reality. We never see the entire picture, only our subset which we often take to be the entire picture. I am clear on that. Even the fact that each of us has uncounted versions living different timelines tells me that reality has to be bigger than anything anyone or any one timeline can apprehend. By definition, really.

All right. So then it shouldn’t surprise you – though we suspect that it will – to hear that the shape the world is in is no more fixed than anything else, except in any given timeline.

That makes perfect sense, and you’re right, it never occurred to me. Not sure why. Or, actually I suppose it has been obvious all along, but in a different context that I didn’t happen to associate with this one.

Most of learning is less the acquisition of new facts than the associating of what you already know in different contexts.

This is an edited excerpt from “Only Somewhat Real,” not yet published.

 

Life is always good

But there is a larger point to be made, and a more difficult one, that is closer to our central concern. Life is good, no matter what it looks like to you. Human life on earth in 2017 is not mostly a failure, no matter how it looks to you. Your political and social and economic and ecological troubles – not to mention the huge spiritual vortex stirring up everything, ramping up the intensity of all conflicts, and not merely in the United States – all of this could tempt you to say, “All is obviously not well. We are doomed. The injustice of the world is suffocating us all.”

Here’s the thing: Can you hold that thought and feeling – which is not wrong – and still realize that all is well because all is always well?

I think people would be glad if you could help them with it.

We can, probably making them angry in the process because it involves associating two lines of thought that they typically are careful to keep separate, even if they shuttle from one to the other several times a minute.

Exaggeration for effect, I take it.

Not much of one. On the one hand, follow the news, with its unending serial of disaster upon problem upon intractable conflict. You mostly do it all the time, scarcely even noticing. Studying it in history isn’t all that much different from allowing it to flow through you via television or computer or gossip. Even sagas of heroism, altruism, even success stories, take place against a background of on-going train wrecks. Or, if you prefer to believe in the existing state of affairs as desirable, you see it as a past record of achievement now being threatened by the forces of (the left, or the right, depending upon your villain of choice). Either way, this half of your mind is pretty firmly mounted in a setting of on-going unfairness, stupidity, incompetence, malice and – in general – a throwing-away of all good possibilities, and unnecessarily.

True enough. That has been my experience since Nov. 22, 1963 [the day the assassination of President John F. Kennedy changed everything].

Certainly. You compare what did happen with what you think might have happened, or should have, could have happened, and it all looks like waste.

It does.

So you understand half of the dilemma, the half that looks around and says all is certainly not well, and anybody who thinks so is blind or stone-hearted. And by nature and on faith you nonetheless hold to the conviction that somehow all is well, regardless.

I hold to it, I feel it, but I certainly can’t explain it or even defend it.

And, unlike many, you are able to hold both incompatibles at the same time. Do you know why?

I do since you just conveyed it. It’s because I got “all is well” not from somebody else, either first-hand or second-hand, but from essence. The guys flowed it through me, telling Rita in 2001, and I never doubted it, even if, as you point out, it is incompatible with everything else I know.

That is where we can go next, then. How can both be true, and what does that tell us about those vast impersonal energies flowing through you, which we remind you is our main focus at the moment.

This is an edited excerpt from “Only Somewhat Real,” not yet published.

 

Inevitably creators

You are part of a process, not only the result of a process. Creation isn’t finished, and creation isn’t something that was done to you, so to speak. It is something done with you, and is forever being done with you, not merely to you. Remember this, if you can.

As I was writing that, I got an image of people watching television, passively receiving input.

That may be how it seems to them, and it may be how it seems to you, but in reality even “passive” is active, in a sense. You might as well describe plants in a garden as being passive to input like water. Receiving is transforming, conscious or not. It isn’t really possible for you (that is, for anyone) to remain unaffected by anything that flows through him, or her. Even an active decision not to be changed would be a change, you see.

The resolution would itself be a change from a prior state.

Even if it were a continuing resolution, yes, it represents an effect of an interaction.

Moral of story, be careful what you allow in as input?

Well, that could be a long subject if we followed it out. After all, what you choose to allow in can’t exactly be said to be random. You choose as much by what you won’t consider as by what you consider and decide upon. The point at the moment, though, is that you are never inert recipients; you are by nature, and inevitably, creators. That one particular aspect that you attribute to your God or gods is the one single descriptor that best includes all humans: creators. But creation is not merely a matter of imagination, of focused thought, any more than it is merely of skilled hands, or channeled willpower. It is your essence, your continued and uninterrupted and uninterruptable effect upon the world around you and within you. Every moment, you create by what you are. You are creating your flower, remember; you are creating a habit-system (your mind); you are molding the possibilities of the present moment in the context of past moments and future moments. And of course it all proceeds in a broader context – past lives, other versions, interactions with all the parts of your Sam, and so on  and so forth.

This is an edited excerpt from “Only Somewhat Real,” not yet published.

 

How forces flow through us

let’s consider your lives as you know them. In all their infinite variety, still they have patterns common to all. No need to enumerate them, you know life. But for the moment, concentrate on your internal life. When the morning’s energies flow though you, how do they flow? Do they flow through unshaped space?

I think you are meaning some illustrative images, like wind flowing across a field, unobstructed; or funneling through terrain, perhaps through and between trees, or being channeled down the streets of Manhattan, or blowing into windows on one side of a house, blowing through and emerging on the other side, things like that.

Yes only more intricate, more obstructed, more convoluted, and at the same time under less pressure and more pressure.

Harder to find an image for that. [Pause] All right, the analogy came to me, but I think it will end up causing us some confusion of ideas. Instead of wind, let’s think of the forces as electricity moving through a neural net. The configuration of the net determines the direction of flow and, to some extent, the strength of the flow (in inverse proportion to the obstacles it throws up, the tortuous pathways it requires). The configuration is determined not by the electricity but by the controller of the net, however we wish to envision that.

A much more elastic, serviceable analogy. We congratulate you.

I can’t decide whether that is sarcasm. I’m well aware that what I did was wait, receptively, holding the requirement in mind, until it surfaced.

No need to fear sarcasm. When something has been achieved, it has been achieved.

Okay. So then—?

All right, so look at what we have. Energy flows through you. If it did not, your computer would not work, so to speak. But how it flows through you is not the same as what flows through you.

A better analogy comes to me: Light shines through a vast maze of fiber-optic threads, and the configuration of the threads is what channels the light.

Now, bear in mind the contradictions in what we have said, for it is in reconciling contradictions that greater understanding is produced. We have described these vast impersonal forces – and we repeat these words for a reason – as representing or even exemplifying what you know as sinful or soulful attitudes, negative or positive biases, predilections that dominate and complicate your lives. We have also described these vast impersonal forces as being, in effect, causative and neutral, like wind, like channeled air, like electricity, like light. That is contradiction, and in contradiction, if faced and (so to speak) faced down, is greater understanding to be found.

In effect, you are asking us to be Rita when she was in the body, posing questions and pointing out ambiguities and contradictions.

Wrestling with the material, yes. Taking it seriously. That’s the invitation.

Well, how do you reconcile the two positions?

We don’t reconcile them, we use them to show that they are contrasting points of view. And in such case, resolution always comes only by moving to a higher, more encompassing perspective.

The analogies are still too simple. They are good as halfway houses, to position you, but they contradict the facts somewhat. The resolution is in realizing that the terms are too simple. It is as if all the light shining through the fiber optics must be white light, or all the electricity must be at the same amperage or voltage.

All light may have been white on the morning of creation (so to speak), but that was a long time of experience ago. All voltages may have been uniform initially, but, again, not by now. Remember, these are analogies. Try not to get caught up in the logical problems caused by the nature of the analogy; center on the logical problems posed by what the analogies are trying to convey.

I get that by this act of the play, nothing is pristine; everything shows the result of prior use.

An interesting take on what we are trying to convey. Not that the forces of the world are shopworn, but that the very energies that flow through you are themselves the product of much that happened before you arrived on the scene. It isn’t white light, but light some of whose qualities have been enhanced or hampered. (That is a definition of color, you see.)

So that we as 3D individuals may be receiving different inputs, as well as treating our inputs differently?

Next time.

This is an edited excerpt from “Only Somewhat Real,” not yet published.

 

Wake-up call

We remind you, as you seem to need to be reminded periodically, that all of this effort, on Frank’s part, on our part – and of course that includes everybody who has participated, not only Rita and other named individuals, but the many lumped in the category of “guys upstairs” – all this effort is not so that we may draw castles in the sky or that you may daydream “what if” pictures to compare with other schemes, but so that you may change your lives. In other words, work with this, don’t merely be entertained by it. You don’t have to accept it, or reject it, but, work with it, wrestle with it. See what you really think.

Of course, this too is within your choice, but the reminder is there. We don’t mean this as a chastisement, but think of us as an alarm clock, set to go off at unpredictable intervals, lest you fall asleep and have no one to nudge you.

This is an edited excerpt from “Only Somewhat Real,” not yet published.