the meaning of life

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.

 

Monday May 6, 2024

5:40 a.m. Stitching reality together?

That was probably a misleading way to put it. What we mean by it is that extensive and wide-ranging connections tend to coordinate the effects in one place of what occurs in another place, and of course the same with times. It isn’t as if ancient Egypt were something unconnected to your time, or either time to medieval England, etc.

You seem to be saying that what happens to the people of a given time affects the age itself.

This is language, causing difficulty by making an abstraction seem solid. The people are the age. Remember – though we have not said it here, we made it clear enough in other conversations – material reality is mind-stuff; it is not rocks in space the way it appears to 3D senses. In reality, the difference between a desk in a certain time-space and a person in that same time-space is mostly appearance. The desk is spun from thought no less than the person is. So the distinction that arises in your minds between “living people” and “inanimate objects” is mostly illusion.

I suppose this is why we can be mentally and emotionally affected by our physical surroundings. There is interaction between the human and the non-human, but at base they are the same, or anyway are close kin.

You see what happened just there? You got it, but then it seemed far-fetched, so you backed away from it. Yes, the same, not “close kin.” This stretches your accustomed way of thinking about yourself and the world (accustomed by life as interpreted through the senses), so the closer approximation seemed too abstract, theoretical, unlikely; you instinctively fell back on a less disruptive way of thinking about it.

That’s very interesting. I do see it.

But we don’t want to stray too far from our starting-place. Let’s begin again.

Each of you is composed of strands that may be considered to be individual lives, each of which is similarly composed of strands of other lives. Rather than the disconnected individuals you usually experience yourselves to be, you are actually branches of the human tree. This is less figurative than it sounds. You are not disconnected, and the things you connect to are not disconnected, so in what way could you be considered separate merely because you each have independence of motion, and have the ability within limits to choose your future development?

At the same time, hold in your minds the fact that the human-tree is itself not independent from its surroundings and we do not mean because you must breathe etc. It is not a merely physical connection – oxygen-breathers depending upon the air they breathe – but also a deeper connection, because the physical world is all one thing in the same way the metaphysical world is.

So you – anyone reading this – are an integral part of the human race, and thus an integral part of human existence on 3D Earth, — and this has implications worth pursuing.

• You connect to all others. That means you affect each other, directly or less directly.
• You extend through time (though you would likely say “across” time, as if it were a matter of spanning distance). Thus you affect each other in time as well as in space.
• The mental world is the non-3D world of non-locality, fluidity of movement, relatively instant creation and re-creation, freedom from 3D constraints. And you in 3D bodies are also 3D minds. Hence, you play by two sets of rules, and can transcend either.
• Your mental world tends to be heavily affected by what your 3D senses tell you, so you tend to invent rules for yourselves (thinking you are perceiving them) that narrow your focus and limit your possibilities.
• Thus, you have the ability to grow into something superhuman; it is a matter of reconceptualizing what you are.

But with your senses reporting one set of rules of existence, and your intuitions reporting a different set, how you define yourself is less a matter of circumstance than of choice. The family and time you are born into will largely shape your sensory perceptions of the world.; your own composition (your strands) will react to that idea of life, sometimes agreeing with it, sometimes not. Thus you are in a position to choose. What do you want to believe about yourself? What do you want to believe the world is? How open are you to change, and to believe in change? How open are you to hope or despair, confidence or fear?

You could look at this two ways, and either way is somewhat true:

1. All your non-3D connections – your strands immediately and, via those strands, all of humanity – act as a drag, as inertia, making it harder for you to become something different from what you experience yourself to be.
2. Those same conditions act as support, holding you in their cradling arms, wishing you well, profiting from your advances and suffering from your losses.

As we say, it is your choice how to see it. Depending upon time and place and your own intent and ability, either condition is a better way to see it. But maybe three minutes later, the other looks more realistic.

It is always up to you.

Have you ever thought of life this way? If not, why not? Haven’t the world’s scriptures told you, you are all brothers and sisters? Didn’t Jesus quote scripture to say, “I tell you, you are gods”? Hasn’t the promise been given time after time, in many different ways? Haven’t the words of mystics reporting their own first-hand experiences told you all you need to know?

Once we get over thinking them special, which means, different.

Yes. That is a confusion, looking at result and jumping to the conclusion that the essence must have been different. People do that most particularly with the greatest success stories: Jesus, Gautama, etc. Well, it’s time to get over that. Once you know that what you experience follows from your intent, you have no ready-made excuse to settle for anything less than you desire.

Only, you don’t want to be making people feel guilty, or feel like failures.

No, of course not. But as you sometimes say, a good boot in the tail is sometimes helpful

Somebody said sometimes it helps and sometimes it just hurts.

We decline to be responsible for what people do or do not do with our words, once we have done our best to clarify our meaning. Our point remains:  You are not on your own, regardless what it looks like. You couldn’t be alone, by the nature of things.

There are further implications which perhaps are obvious, but which we state for clarity: What assistance you receive depends on what you seek. If you prefer a downward course, you will have plenty of connections that will be glad to lead you that way.

That isn’t the best was to put that, but to say it carefully will require some space. Perhaps we will resume there next time. But what we are trying to get across here is that if your aspirations are high or low, you can connect to others who will accompany you upward or downward. The key is your intent, and since your strands will include disagreements, you may feel torn. It is the common human condition, after all, to be tempted. (You can be tempted by good as well as by evil.) It is always your choice, your intent, but it isn’t always easy to know what your intent is. That’s another possible starting-place.

Until next time, then.

Some very interesting stitching-together of concepts going on here. Our thanks as always.

 

Friday, May 3, 2024

4:30 a.m. The mental life connects; the physical life separates.

That isn’t quite the way to put it, though it is what we said. Phrased more carefully, it would say, the physical circumstances lead you through the experience of isolation, but your mental life, carefully observed, provides you the evidence of continual connection that otherwise might not be noticed, not indeed believed.

It may seem to be a paradox. As always, any paradox may be resolved by considering the elements comprising it from a higher or deeper level. Here, the paradox resolves easily. (In fact, many will not even see it as paradox, seeing the resolution instinctively.) It is mostly an example of separation of function. A matter of specialization, one might say.

Your mental world functions from (connects you to) the non-3D from which you emerged. It continuously provides you access to abilities and perspectives you could not achieve if you were confined mentally, as you are physically, to 3D conditions. This is why some people discover liberation in meditation or prayer or any discipline that frees them from 3D sequential thinking.

Your physical existence in a separate body lives by very different rules, in very different conditions. This is not poor design, nor the result of bad choices, nor punishment, nor accident. Your 3D life is designed to place you in 3D conditions of seeming isolation in one time-space moment at a time. An illusion of separation is a part of that isolation. It functions as it is supposed to function.

However – and if you are reading this, you almost definitely know this from personal experience – this illusion of separation, of isolation, may be overcome by a realization of a deeper unbreakable connection, and that realization will certainly change your experience of 3D. The same conditions that provided a painful isolation now support a very different situation, in which physical confinement to one time-space moment may be connected to mental awareness of connection, to provide the best of both worlds.

You understand? At one level of consciousness, the phrase “All is one” will be seen to contradict everyday experience. How can all be one when conflict and cross-purposes and painful isolation are so evident? But then you achieve a higher or deeper awareness, and you see, you experience, that in fact both halves of the seeming contradiction are one.

When that occurs, you perhaps restate the situation in your mind as “Life is all one thing in its origins and in its non-3D manifestation, and it appears in 3D as separated elements because of 3D conditions.” Later perhaps you restate it more concisely. “Diversity in unity,” perhaps, or “Unity disguised by an appearance of multiplicity.” Any rephrasing is going to distort the fundamental understanding, because selection in 3D always does that. Sequential exposition – which is what language is, after all – cannot present all aspects at once, and even if it is able to list every single attribute of a situation, it cannot help but imply a hierarchy of importance even by the order in which things are listed, or by the length at which various things are discussed. With this in mind, you see the value of holding an image, or a feeling or a memory, so as to preserve your connection to the reality behind such statements as “All is one” or “All is well.”

We are tempted to digress, and perhaps it is as well to make note: The saying “All is well, all is always well” is so contrary to everyday experience in 3D that it can only be accepted provisionally (that is, on faith that it will prove true), or recast as a pious wish, or denied outright. If your being assents to it, it does so not on logical grounds, nor exactly in defiance of logic, but because something within you recognizes the truth of it. Of course, that may be said of anything we say, but it is particularly true for statements that seem to contradict experience so flatly.

How is everything always well? Phrase your understanding and we will assent or dissent or modify.

I’d say that the 3D can never be understood as a unity by logic based in sensory experience. Judging it by how it appears, we see joy and we see suffering, but we do not see an underlying unity, just as when we look at a family or any group from a 3D level, we see diversity and conflict and cooperation, but never unity. It is only as we look at life from a non-3D perspective that we see that the diversity proceeds from the fact that our consciousness of underlying unity is split by 3D conditions chopping life into time-slices and space-slices. This being so, it is clear that the appearance of diversity has to be rooted in one non-divisible underlying unity that we can mentally see but cannot physically experience.

Yes, that is a good summary. Your senses report on the world at any one time-space moment; your intuitions report on the underlying unity of time, and of space, and of life.

How could something that is one thing be self-contradictory? How could it be random? How could it be chaos, or divided into opposites such as good and evil, knowledge and ignorance, etc.? It may easily, almost inevitably, seem that way, when perceived at the level of consciousness that 3D conditions encourage, but beneath this appearance is the reality, and your deeper selves, your higher selves, will show you that, once you quiet your 3D logic and its insistence on presenting evidence of diversity.

So to return to the main point, not yet quite made: Your mental/physical outlook determines the nature of the world you live in. this does not – could not – depend upon the action or inaction of anyone else. It doesn’t and couldn’t depend upon political or economic or societal events of any kind. (Well, in one sense it may be said to depend upon physical externals, but only in one sense. To the degree that anyone allows external evidence – “the news” or ideology or religion or scientism – to shape their understanding, then yes, it could be said that only certain conditions allow people to get to the point where they can see the underlying reality, because it will keep them from doing the meditation or yoga or prayer or whatever that will quiet the sequential chatter and allow the deeper wisdom to emerge. But even this caveat depends upon sequential logic, you see. It assumes a lack of coherence in the interaction between the individual and its external circumstances.)

Do you really think that most people are precluded from achieving such contact until the world is at peace, or everybody learns to think alike, or all the stoplights across America turn green at the same moment? Such – slightly exaggerated here for emphasis – is 3D logic, saying, “This is how the real world is, as opposed to your pleasant fairy tale of unity and all being well.”

But if the life you experience may change as a result of a change within you – a decision to concentrate on the perception of underlying unity, rather than the appearance of chaotic diversity – what a hopeful fact! It is within your ability to choose how to see the world, how to see life. Your choice, no one else’s. Your choice, and it is not dependent upon wars and rumors or wars, nor upon the next election for city council. Your choice, and it need not wait for supportive others, and need not first clear out non-supportive others.

Could there be a more promising situation than to know that the life you live rests upon your own decisions, your own efforts? Jesus didn’t say, “I have come that you may have life more abundantly, once we’ve cleared the Romans out of here.” He said, “The poor you have always with you,” meaning not that this is a good thing, but in effect saying, “Don’t wait until social conditions are perfect (in your opinion); work on yourself now.” Or perhaps we should say more carefully, not “work on yourself” (which implies a long process) but “Decide now to be what you want to be.” This does not rest on results, but on your acquiring a surer basis to life.

Now, this is enough for today, and because it makes it easier for you to begin again, we’ll say that next time we may (or may not) begin with the effects on your lives of the fact that you are composed of strands – other Ives – which continue to live as you are living, even though from your vantage-point they are not in the living “present moment.”

This is wonderful material, and we are grateful for it. I am, particularly, given that I had thought we were done.

Thursday, May 2, 2024

4:15 a.m. So, to continue. Not sure how to proceed.

Relax the reins; let us worry about exposition. Remember, you can always shuffle the resulting passages if need be.

Let’s talk about choice as it can and cannot be manifested in 3D life. You will remember, we have said that providing the possibility of choice is the very reason for the existence of 3D conditions. By forcing your consciousness to concentrate on one time and space, 3D conditions provide the ability and the de facto necessity of choice. But what does it really mean, to choose? If human life were the relatively unitary, relatively separated thing it appears to be, choice would be nearly impossible, for it would involve changing the result of so many conditions that brought you to where you were.

But you are not what you appear to be, and therefore neither is choice. Because you are not the solitary individual units you appear to be, change involves not change of what you are, but change of emphasis among the many strands that you comprise. It is easier to change relative emphasis than it would be to bring in new elements.

This isn’t coming our clearly yet.

No. We see we will have to move to a more remote starting-point. Leet’s look at what a soul is, and which ways it can be considered to be continuing from a prior point and which ways it can be considered new in each incarnation. That will show how it is that choice represents a choosing among elements rather than an introduction of new elements. It will also show how different theological tenets arose from people seeing one but not other aspects of the human condition.

To do this, we will need to make certain flat statements of fact that the reader will have to accept or reject or hold in suspension, depending entirely upon whether the statements resonate. We remind people, there’s nothing wrong with accepting an idea provisionally and then later changing your mind if need be. Exposition is our part; judgment is the reader’s part.

So:

Into the making of a 3D human, many things contribute. The physical heredity has its analogue in what we may call the spiritual heredity. The two shed light upon each other and (as we shall show sooner or later) interpenetrate.

A 3D being created via sexual reproduction is necessarily a compound being, not a unitary one. This should be evident. One’s father’s line provides certain characteristics; one’s mother’s line provides certain characteristics. The resulting child is a compound of the two lines, every child different not only because of circumstances including time and place, but primarily because the possibilities for inheritance from both lines are so numerous, no two people (other than identical twins) are likely to share them all. And this is true all the way back along each parent’s line, and all the way forward along the lines contributed to by each descendant.

Thus, physically you contain characteristics taken from  each of two lines, each of which lines is composed of countless individuals who were equally composed. In short, you are the latest in a long series of mixtures, a very complex result that can be considered individual only in that you each live in separate bodies.

This is so, physically. It is equally so spiritually. When the spiritual (the non-3D) elements came together in the new baby, they too were the result of mixtures going back to the beginning of human life. (And farther, but we will not concern ourselves with that at this time. The exposition is complicated enough as it is!)

Some people believe in reincarnation, the return to 3D of souls that have lived there before. Others believe that each new body receives (or contains, let’s say) a new soul. Both are correct as far as they go, and neither goes far enough, because each considers the 3D human is if it were a unit, when in fact it is a compound.

Reincarnation is valid, in that the same elements live again. It is not valid, in that it is not the case of one unit dying to 3D and being reborn to 3D. If you were units, it would have to be one way or the other: Either the unit came back or it did not. Thus, reincarnation would be true or it would not.

Individual souls being created for each 3D incarnation, similarly, is valid and not valid, depending on how you look at it. When you see that each new soul is a combination of souls that have lived before, you see that yes it is new, in that that particular combination never existed together before, and no it is not new, in that the elements that comprise it are not new. As in so many things, it is all in what factors you include as you consider the matter.

So we propose this scheme, which is somewhat simplified but is accurate enough to be going on with.

• The human body is a compound, not a unit. It may be said to be a collection of characteristics that have to learn to live together. This is true physically and also spiritually.
• Physically, the characteristics from either line are so manifold that there is little possibility they will all mesh smoothly. In greater or lesser degree, what one piece needs, another piece may suffer from. Hence, illness, incapacity. Hence also, certain remarkable seemingly superhuman abilities.
• Spiritually, the same. You are composed of many strands of – shall we call it non-3D DNA? If several different combinations of previous lives go into the making of a new 3D consciousness, you may expect conflict, cooperation, and overlap among them, just as in the inherited physical characteristics.
• In a sense, it could be said that both body and soul enter this life with unfinished business. By this we mean, not a conscious agenda, but a vector arising out of what the elements in combination create. Your life is a drama, you might say, and both in physical and spiritual terms, it involves the conflict and cooperation of elements that have come from different places, have different needs, have different aptitudes.

Does this clarify our description of life as choice? You know this by your experience. You live the conflict and cooperation of your constituent elements every moment. You choose among available options, all of which are equally you. It isn’t a matter of changing what you are, it is closer to changing the order of precedence of your various constituent elements.

You may ask, “Why?” Why is life this way? Life is often painful, or boring, or liberating, or ecstatically joyful – or any other possible state of being – but does it mean anything more than the passing of time?

Recognize that some questions cannot be answered too soon, or they get falsified by lack of context. But keep the question in mind; it will give point to further exposition. For now, consider the idea that you are not a unit in any sense but as a separate body. Your physical and nonphysical composition is a combination; your mental life is not separate –

In fact, that is where we should resume, with the fact that your mental life connects you, even as your physical life separates you. This should follow logically from the fact that the mental functions in non-3D; you would expect it to follow different rules and exhibit different characteristics. However, the idea may not be obvious until stated. We will go into it next time, probably.

Wonderful. Our thanks, today, as always.