the meaning of life

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

Monday, June 3, 2024

4:30 a.m. When I realized, yesterday, that one of the reasons for 3D life is that it teaches the experience of living with sequential processing, it felt like a giant lightbulb turned on. It connected so many things, most of them unspoken. I’d like you to spell out some of them, if it does not interfere with whatever else you have in mind.

That was one of those intuitive leaps that are possible only via this ILC process, because, you see, it needed the reasoning mind to be active on another channel while you were actively linked intuitively.

That sounds like you are saying, using the whole brain.

It has taken you since 1989 or so to reallocate your mental processing to embody Monroe’s admonitions, but yes. The connected use of serial and parallel processing, or sequential and gestalt, or reasoning and intuition. You were given two means of perception for a reason. Some cultures teach you to use them correctly, effectively. Yours did  not, but its one-sidedness did serve a purpose. The difference in perceptual strategies is one difference between your current civilization and the one being born. The times have rolled around, and new possibilities are active.

By that, we do not mean that no past civilization enjoyed the use of an integrated approach; we mean to say, merely, that first there was a mountain, then there was no mountain, then there was.

I resisted that sentence, recognizing it as a quotation from Charles Sides’ blog entry of yesterday, but I got that this is what you wanted. Care to explain?

No two civilizations are the same, just as you can’t step twice into the same river. Two cultures using identical perceptual strategies but separated by eons of human experience will be far from identical. They may recognize one another’s kinship, but they will be different in many ways.

As opposed to the idea of “progress.”

Yes. It isn’t a movement from lower to higher (nor from higher to lower) except in certain respects. Different cultures are different experiences, not stages of growth or declines. Each culture will be better able to express some things and less able to express other things.

Here we finally come to where you tell us what you meant by (I had to look back to recall the phrase) psychic interpretational structures!

Is it not clearer, from what we just said?

Perhaps it is. But, pray tell us.

[A pause of a few minutes. It felt like my brain was in idle.]

When we figure out how to approach the subject, it will probably have to involve bullet-points. And as an initial attempt at formulation, it is likely to be clumsy. But, here goes:

• You as an individual see the world in a unique, non-repeatable way. Each of you, necessarily, as a result of your individual journey in 3D and your “past” journeys (your strands’ journeys) in their portion of 3D.
• You also see the world somewhat as your family does or did, and your various groups to which you belong – race, class, geographical area, etc.
• You see the world somewhat through the filters shared by your political and economic and ideological community.
• Implied in all this is a larger, less visible, filter shared by your times. Imperial Japan and Communist Russia and revolutionary Ireland and the various societies coexisting in the 1930s, say, or the 1960s, or 1990s, all to some extent saw things through what you might call the astrology of the times. The same cosmic energies affected them all.
• Confusingly, you and everybody, all the time, are also affected by the patterns being broadcast within you by your various strands, each of which was formed in different circumstances and is experiencing different “weather” in its own time, while you are experiencing your weather in your time.

Can you feel the tremendous complexity of it? Is it surprising that an overview of human life would be characterized by what Monroe called M-Band noise?

He described it as cacophony made up of endless numbers of patterns and rhythms. That sounds like a way of seeing what you are expressing.

There you go. And every one of you has to find a way to make sense of it all, usually by filtering out most of it.

And I get that you do too!

Nobody’s capacity for input is endless. Just as Thoreau said you are all provincials in the universe, so might we say it of us in the non-3D, tied as we are to you in the 3D.

So we have to decide what we are going to address, even before we address it.

That is a clumsy way to put it, though no clumsier than our own approach, perhaps. But yes, that is the problem. You – and we – continually have to decide to judge what we have not yet encountered. “Judge,” of course, meaning “perceive,” not “condemn.”

In our case, in 3D, I’d expect that we are being guided by our non-3D component. But in your case – I’ve asked this question more than once; I remember Rita asking it, early on – are there hierarchies in non-3D, thus providing you with a relatively wider view, a relatively wiser source? And as I write that, I see yes, of course there would have to be.

If you keep in mind that there are no hard and fast divisions in the world, you can also remember that there are, necessarily, relative divisions, relative concentrations. Always there are wider associations and narrower, wiser heads and less experienced ones. It’s all in what you tune to, what you experience.

And perhaps now you can see that in order to make sense of the world that is flowing into our perceptions at any given time, we employ strategies, whether effective or ineffective or in between. And if we need to, how much greater the need for your end of the equation! You are at the same time experiencing 3D reality (time-slices) and continuing to experience non-3D reality to the extent that you remained open to it, or reopened access to it.

And you can’t be doing it – as you often put it – horseback. You can’t be reinventing the wheel at every moment.

Ah. So we create or anyway employ structures.

Certainly. Most of life is structuring. Much of the difference in people’s experience of life centers on how fluid or rigid the structures they choose to adopt.

Our psychic interpretational structures.

Correct, and that is where we will resume next time.

You thought you’d have a hard time bringing the idea across, but it doesn’t seem to me you did so badly.

Yes. We smile. This is akin to your saying, “That wasn’t so hard,” you not having to do the work. But yes, it did clarify fairly smoothly, as it turns out.

Till next time, then, and our thanks.

Sunday, June 2, 2024

4:35 a.m. Okay. Care to proceed?

Perhaps the hardest thing for people to remember, as they pursue such questions, is to continually apply the rule, “Man is the measure of all things.” When you come to  questions that are beyond your conscious experience, ask yourself how it is with the life you know. You will sometimes go wrong because you will draw a bad analogy, but generally it is a reliable guide. So when you ask, “What is the purpose of life? Why can’t we begin at a more advanced level? What purpose does 3D life serve abstractly as well as individually?” look for understanding toward the life you know. Scale it up, scale it down, and try on different analogies.

Specifically, why can’t you start off at the point you eventually reach? That was your question yesterday.

It isn’t a silly question, though it can be read that way. What I meant is, why does every 3D soul have to go through the long learning and growth process that we call life? Why are we born ignorant and helpless?

If you will look at things differently, it will seem more reasonable, even obvious. You are discontented because it seems so wasteful a process, not to mention painful or uncomfortable at times. But what if you look at new life as new potential, rather than looking at it as endless reruns? Instead of thinking, “Oh, this again,” and imagining life to be tedium, think of it with a child’s eyes and see it as, “Oh, a new day, filled with possibilities.” Think of it as an artist’s sea of potential, a craftsman’s bench of tools and repertoire of skills to learn. Mostly, think of it as an absorbing task to be accomplished, an important role to play. Why in the world would you expect to be up to the task before learning how to be up to the task? And what fun would it be to begin at the same level you intend to continue at?

All I can tell you is, it doesn’t always feel that way.

But the feelings are part of the story too. Just as there isn’t only one role in a play, so there isn’t only one mood in a life, or only one kind of reaction to an experience, even if the experience is as vast as life itself.

So take this and draw your analogy to the life to come. In a way, you will be born into a new life after your 3D life is over, just as that life itself was something you had to be born into. That is, you will again be a new unit experiencing life.

I take that to mean, our newly-fledged life as a unit (a permanent combination of previously disparate strands) now living in new circumstances.

Yes, and rather than our spelling out analogies to your life in 3D, beginning as a physical baby having to learn the ropes, then as a child exercising and learning greater abilities, etc., we leave it to you to think about, depending upon how interesting you find the exercise. But just as your 3D life will look different depending upon the questions you bring to it, so your non-3D life.

Anent that: No two babies ever come into life identical in background and potential and intent. No, not even identical twins. Everyone’s life is a puzzle or an exercise for the person itself to figure out. Know only that it is literally impossible for anyone’s life to be meaningless, because the meaning inheres in the living. You are here to report on the life you make, and you are to make the life you want to make, so how can you fail to do that? “Make the life you want to make” does not mean, “Have what you want to, become what you want to, experience what you want to.” For one thing, which you? For another, which want? For a third, there is a difference between what you aim at and what you hit.

Should you think it will be any different after 3D? Should you think you will be any different after 3D? It will be and it won’t. You will be and you won’t. Analogies are never exact but good analogies can be instructive. “Think on these things,” as Edgar Cayce used to say. The thinking will orient you to experiencing mentally what you intend.

That needs to be better said, but it is an interesting insight. You just said our thinking on a subject – mulling it over – helps create a pull toward what we already know at another level. It helps make conscious what had been unconscious, or, as you put it, what we have been unconscious of.

Yes, and consider it in connection with what we have told you of the value of meditation and other ways of stilling sequential mind chatter so that you may move into gestalt processing. These wordless moments can bring you toward experiences that can only be experienced wordlessly. That doesn’t mean they can’t be talked about; it means the thing itself exists only beyond the realm of sequential processing such as language. And what is the value of 3D experience?

An experience of living with sequential processing!

Correct. That isn’t the only value of 3D life, obviously, but that isn’t the least important, either.

Feeling for your meaning here: Are you implying that the ability to live in 3D mode is somehow of value in non-3D?

You have conceptualized it in other terms. We have stressed that 3D allows you to learn to process things in tiny bites, and to experience cause and effect in delayed sequence. This was to reinforce you initially; that is, to enhance your sense of self-worth and purpose, for all too many of the more sensitive people are prone to feelings of futility. But saying, “You are here to choose,” though absolutely accurate, is not the whole story. Even adding, “You are here to experience, and to report your experience,” is not the whole story.

We are here to learn to create.

First to be created; then, to observe and absorb the process of being created; then to realize that “being created” can be restated as “helping to create” (which is what choosing is); then to move from apprenticeship to journeyman status.

As always, I find it hard to realize that I didn’t always see this, it is so clear now as you say it. But until you did just say it, I never put together “Here to choose” and “Life more abundantly” and “Creator gods.”

So you see, it isn’t wrong to say that 3D life is a school, but it is woefully inadequate. Life is an apprenticeship, and a trade school, and on-the-job training, and an artist’s studio, and an absorbing task. And more, of course.

Put that way, it certainly renders irrelevant most of the complaints about life that people offer. “Why is there no peace on earth, why is there pain and illness and suffering of so many kinds, why is there injustice, ” blah, blah, blah, as if this world were the only thing that counted.

It counts as preparation, but only in the way that boot camp counts, or schooling counts, or experience at anything counts. Its nature and objectives must be properly understood, if life is to be understood.

Now, be careful not to go off the deep end. The recruit in boot camp is still living each day. You can’t say that day counts only as preparation. Every day anywhere and anytime is itself, and is the result of what preceded it, and is the forerunner of what is to come. So don’t devalue each day per se as “only preparation.” Cherish the moment, even if the moment is painful. When you learn that, you will be a little farther ahead in your quest for mastery.

And no two combinations of strands begin at the same place, because the strands themselves were different combinations.

Exactly. So everyone’s experience is different. Should this surprise anybody? You see it all around you.

Our thanks as always.

 

36. Working from our true center

Saturday, June 1, 2024

4:10 a.m. All right, do we resume with what we do in 3D, and might do?

Remember, we are out to describe you as creator gods, rather than spectators at a tragedy or comedy. Also rather than heroes or villains. It’s all more nuanced than that.

And eventually you are going to get around to describing psychic interpretational structures.

We haven’t forgotten, though the term keeps eluding you. But try to relax. We know what we’re doing, and it isn’t up to you to drive the argument, or keep it on track.

Yet I do get the sense that my keeping track does help somehow.

It helps you connect with us, but not for the reason you think. Let’s say it helps you find us, helps you get to where we want to go. It helps you to put your concentration on the place in the argument where we are.

You’re still not quite saying it. It seems to be a matter of resonance with the idea, somehow, rather than with you as conduits of the idea.

That’s a way to put it. A geographical analogy – and only an analogy, of course: If the information of the day is in Cleveland, and you begin by assuming we are going to be in Atlanta, it can cause some inefficiencies. It is worse, of course, if you are east of our desired starting place and you insist on going farther east (or north or south). That is, you may think of it as a three-part process. You in resonance with us and we in resonance with the material. The closer the resonance, the easier to convey information. So, keeping up with the argument doesn’t necessarily give you a sense of where it’s heading (though sometimes it does), but it does give you a way to anticipate where we are.

But this is describing process.

Useful  sometimes. We don’t intend to dwell upon it. A simple way to hold it in mind is, you don’t do brain surgery by thinking about sports, nor do you do well at sports if your mind is on music or international events. For efficient transfer of understandings, nothing beats focus.

Now, to continue. You have absorbed the idea, presumably, that each of you may be considered to be a specialized communication device between 3D and non-3D. You experience input from either side; you produce output to either side. Through you, the non-3D knows your 3D experience. Through you, your 3D component receives instruction, guidance, help, from non-3D. You are links between the two conditions, 3D and non-3D. and of course this is not limited to humans. Everything, by nature, reports to non-3D on its 3D life, and expresses non-3D vitality to its 3D component. Rocks, trees, kangaroos, humans, energetic 3D forms unsuspected by you: You are all part of the same 3D trance, you are all participating mind-stuff.

Just as there is continuous interaction among 3D creatures, so there is continuous interaction between 3D and non-3D.

How else could it be? You are all the same thing. We are all the same thing. Of course there is continuous interaction. Nothing is static, nothing is disconnected.

Well, this is one more reason for you to see yourselves not as isolated 3D ego-selves, but as inherently connected non-3D-and-3D selves. Your center of existence is not the ego, nor is it the part of you that is beyond 3D. it is between the two. The Self that Jung described is not a non-3D abstraction, nor a 3D time-and-space-limited thing encased by a physical body. It is between the two; it is neither-nor and both-and. If you cannot change your definition, you will not be able to change your perception, probably. But if you do change your definition, several unconscious assumptions will fall away, and you will be living a life with greater possibilities of everyday magic. Perhaps we shouldn’t use the word “magic,” as the word may lead you unconsciously away from the everyday-ordinariness of what we’re meaning. Yet, magic it is, next to the limitations imposed by wrong definitions.

Do you want life more abundantly? You will prevent yourself from living it, if you insist on defining yourself as smaller than you are. Yet you will equally well stunt your growth if you try to see yourself in impossible ways. Aim too high, too fast, and you will be trying to believe something that the rest of you insists (silently, perhaps) is only a pleasant fantasy.

If I understand the sense of what you just said, it is that at any stage in our growth, we can move so far and no farther. We can easily grow too little, but we can also fail to grow by trying to take larger steps than we are ready for.

You may look at it as a process of self-education, only remembering that everyone starts off from a different place, with a different mixture of aptitudes, experiences, drives. But you never go two steps ahead. No matter how big or how small the next step, you can’t skip it. You may take several steps in such rapid succession that they seem like one giant leap, perhaps, but you only get from A to C by absorbing B.

Thus, our long and tedious exposition of so many facts of life, lest anyone miss a step essential to their particular development. (Of course they will have their own non-3D assistance as well.) It is never a matter of your memorizing anything. In fact, memorization would deter. It is a matter of your coming live the information, and that requires time and attention. How much time, what form of attention, varies by the individual, but the necessity is a constant.

And, just to remind you that it isn’t “all about you,” remember that the non-3D is affected by how you each and all develop. We have a vested interest in our creator gods awakening to their fuller potential. As far as we are concerned, the sooner the better. It isn’t like we have an interest in keeping people ignorant and disconnected.

But how is it that that’s where we seem to start? I have long wondered, why the long process? Why can’t we start off however it is that we wind up?

We smile. You want to begin the footrace at the final tape. You want to get the PhD first and go to school afterward. You want to begin as a grown person without having been baby, child, teen. You want to be a Z without having experienced A through Y. Does any of that sound reasonable?

It sounds like somebody sputtering because he doesn’t have an answer, or doesn’t have an answer he wants to admit to.

Yes, we suppose it does. Well, let’s put it this way: Life is about the journey, not only about the destination. If we needed to know what a fully realized being looks like – well, we have seen fully realized beings. But if we wish to see the process by which newly created combinations become fully realized beings, how else can we do that but by setting things in motion and observing? Yes, we participate, but so do you, and we all learn as we go. Or, let’s say, not so much “learn” as “experience.” There’s a difference. You can experience without learning, though it isn’t particularly desirable. You can learn without experiencing, but only at the risk of the learning remaining theoretical, encapsulated, you might say, rather than becoming part of you.

I get that the most important part of that is the “newly created combinations.”

That’s how the universe grows, after all. Or would you prefer that the whole play took place before you went on stage?

Very funny. Next time?

There’s more to say about your life in 3D and non-3D, and what is being created, and what good it is, and how it works. Mostly “how it works,” as we want it keep it practical.

Our thanks as always.