the meaning of life

Friday May 31, 2024

4:15 am.. let’s go to town. How we get to turn 3D conditions to advantage?

A little more than that: how you get to live as the creator gods you are. It isn’t about making the most (or the best) of 3D. it is about letting 3D make the most – the best – of you.

Turning it on its head, moving the center from 3D life to the greater life of which it is a part.

Not quite. That isn’t wrong, but the emphasis is wrongly placed. Just as “Man was not created for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath for man,” so man wasn’t created for the 3D, but the 3D for man.

Boot camp. Or a gymnasium, so to speak.

No, no, wrong idea still.

Well, we’re open to instruction.

You will remember that Jung came to realize that in centering yourselves on your ego-awareness (that is, what you are conscious of), you were making a mistake, that your true center is the Self, the total being, not the localized part of it. Well, similarly, we have been showing you that the same “centering in ego” could be described as “centering in 3D,” and is as off-center that way: You are 3D and non-3D beings. But once you have been created into 3D, it is as wrong to think of yourselves as non-3D-beings-only as to think of yourselves as 3D-beings-only. So to call 3D boot camp is to think of it as a transient experience a 3D being must go through on its way home to non-3D.

You never stop surprising me. That is pretty much how I do think of it.

And that is a 3D perspective speaking, you see.

I didn’t, but I do now. Only by identifying with the 3D personality could we think of it as “being created, living in 3D, then dying and being set free to live in non-3D again.”

Exactly. Where is the movement coming from? Think about the non-3D part of that proposed scenario. It would be living in non-3D, cut off or connected or semi-connected to the part of it that was in 3D, then reconnected to the formerly separated part. But think, now. The 3D individual is made up of many strands. All those strands: Did they necessarily come from the same larger being, as you are conceiving it? If –

No, we need to regroup. This is a vert fruitful subject, and needs to be taken carefully.

I could feel myself getting in the way, involuntarily trying to reason it out.

And that’s what we want all of you to learn to do routinely, to reason rather than merely accept – but the reasoning must be deferred until after the receiving, if the process is to be able to continue. First perceive, then analyze.

I know that, of course. The reasoning in this case was sort of involuntary. I was trying to see how to make sense of what you were giving us.

Let this stand when you transcribe. Rather than an interruption to the argument, it may serve as example that your minds work on more levels than one, and sometimes you have to consciously suspend peripheral operations if you wish to focus tightly on things. That is what hypnosis does, sedates all but one level of operation, only in that case it is bypassing the will and in this case we wish the will to be engaged, and the reasoning faculty, but in smooth coordination with the perception-enhanced channel.

Well, try again and I’ll try to let it come through unfiltered. To me, it always feels like I have to be willing to write nonsense, which is why sometimes the reasoner comes in uninvited. But I do know enough to try again.

We can always discuss and you can edit. Very well, we were saying, you in 3D are combinations of strands. New combinations; that’s the point. Hence you did not exist in non-3D in your present form, and now you do. If you try to keep this straight while thinking of yourselves as individuals, you won’t be able to do it, for you will be silently mixing categories. But to think of it from an all-inclusive viewpoint won’t be easy for you. You probably will have to settle for a vague sense of it, rather than any image as definite as “going back to the non-3D like a homecoming.”

Begin not with 3D but non-3D. It isn’t one unit (so called) that contributes strands, because we don’t exist in units in the same way you do as separate bodies having separate experiences. We are more like sentient clouds, not differentiated but able to be considered separately. And of course, therefore so are you.

If you will think of us in non-3D as all one thing, instead of thinking of us (as your 3D analogies continually tempt you into doing) as bodiless individuals, you will begin to see the difficulties in your thought this causes. Logic says A and B and C contribute to form D in 3D, and D when it leaves 3D rejoins – what? A? B? C? Two or more of them? It could present a tangle of theoretical possibilities, but it’s all wrong because the assumption of non-3D individuals is wrong..

It is hard for you to keep in mind unconsciously as well as (occasionally) consciously, but in non-3D as in 3D, all is one. This doesn’t mean everything is homogenous; it means there are no absolute boundaries nor fixed positions, just as is so for you mentally (because, of course, your “mental” is your non-3D component).

It is as misleading to think of us as absolutely separate, though we may be relatively separate, as to label clouds A, B, C, etc. They can be perceived as separate and you could perhaps even say they sometimes function separately – some bearing rain, some providing shade, some appearing as a mere haze – but in nature they are the same, and should they drift into each other, the mixing is seamless and subtle, and, really, meaningless, for the only difference among them was one of temporary appearance and perhaps immediate function.

Did we not tell you, early on, that when you talk to non-3D, different voices fade in and fade out, usually without your noticing?

I begin to see that ex-3D souls may function as focusing devices.

Very good! Very good. Indeed you do, and that’s one of the functions of 3D, to provide training for just that focus, for what is focus but self-identification?

I can’t hold in mind the journey we have made here today. The best I can do is remind us that you said you were going to discuss us as creator gods.

Don’t you think it might be helpful for you to begin with the right idea of who you and we are? The primary reason it is so hard to get through these concepts is that there is so much background to explain, and so few people (relatively) who are willing to take the time. It doesn’t lend itself to bumper-sticker slogans, and when it does, the slogans tend to be true but misleading, or true but opaque.

“All is one. All is well.”

Not to mention your one-time favorite whipping boy, “On the other side, there is no time.” Now, you need to be able to put these things into short pithy statements. “God is love.” “Love is all there is.” But what is meaningful to one who has gone through the explanatory process and come to it as a boiled-down precis is not necessarily meaningful to one who comes to it cold. Worse, it may convey entirely incorrect meanings because of 3D reasoning about what it seems to say, and therefore probably must mean.

For us to discuss you as creator gods, we need to have you bear in mind so many things, now reducible to shorthand, but how much exposition was required to reduce misunderstanding? We won’t list them, and your difficulty in enumerating them ought to tell you that our “get smart slowly” program has its reason behind it. You can’t remember all these things. You must have come to embody them, for them to guide you.

 

So, for now, concentrate on thinking about your situation. You are made up of strands of ex-3D beings; these provide you the specific points of focus that are shaped by your time and place of birth and are affected by your early upbringing.

When your 3D existence ends (seen from a 3D time perspective), you yourself are ex-3D. like other ex-3Ds, you recognize that you are:

• what you were “separately” before 3D (the strands haven’t gone anywhere; they still have their relatively separate existence), plus
• what you became (that is, the 3D person you just shaped), and
• the extension of the non-3D that you never ceased being.

If we in non-3D are not what you might imagine, well, neither are you. For one thing, you are one of us. For another, you still do not quite understand what you’re doing while in 3D, nor what more you might do.

 

We’re out of time. I take it we will resume here?

Probably. Let’s see how the moment feels.

Very well. Our thanks as always.

 

Thursday, May 30, 2024

5:30 a.m. I think we can proceed now. We’ll see.

Seeing yourselves more as process and less as artifact will help you get the sense of temporary form that is more like bounded energy than like a physical object as it appears.

Fluid, not solid. Energy, not solid form.

That’s the idea. You will remember that Buckminster Fuller said “I seem to be a verb,” and defined human life as a sliding knot in a rope.

I didn’t understand what he meant, but I am beginning to. We are patterns, although we experience ourselves as solids.

Yes. If all 3D reality is mind-stuff slowed into an appearance of solidity and relative permanence – well, you are part of 3D reality, are you not? You could hardly be more solid than your surroundings.

Obvious as you say it.

So, not the rope but the slipknot, not the ripple or even the water, but the pattern of the water. You are far more temporary than you experience yourselves to be, and far more superficial – in the sense of being a phenomenon on the surface of things.

You are saying we are riders, but I’m not sure what we are supposed to be riding on.

This is a very good lead-in, if we can find a way to phrase it. You try – use what comes to mind – and we will criticize.

Funny how well that works sometimes. Okay, well, we’re riding the moment, clearly. Sometimes we’d like to get off, but this particular amusement park doesn’t offer that option.

Riding the moment is true enough. Try again, find another possible image.

I suppose we are riding the momentum of whatever we’ve been doing. We are always at the far end of our life to date – by definition – and that means we are reacting to what we have done, what we have made ourselves. Every moment has its own self-definition, you might say.

Another way of saying “riding the moment.”

Yes, I suppose so. Do you need more?

Perhaps not. The sense we want to give is that you are transient, yet are definitely shaped during that time. You are slow-motion shape-shifters, you might say. You change continually, yet in that very changing is a continuity by which you recognize yourselves and recognize each other.

And why is this important? Because again, you tend to over-emphasize your permanence and solidity, and under-emphasize your transience and fluidity, just as (and for the same reason that) you overemphasize the “realness” of 3D and underemphasize the “somewhat realness.” Merely by changing the emphasis in your mind, you can change your possibilities.

Now, changing something in your mind is not as simple as deciding to change it. Change cannot come by an intellectual (or abstract) decision alone. If the emotional body (as Monroe called it) is not engaged, nothing changes. This doesn’t mean it is an emotional decision in the sense of hysterics or even excitement. It means, the change goes deeper than an intellectual decision.

I almost get where you are going. It is a picking up of some threads and a laying down of others, and somehow the emotional body is required.

The real sense of it is not that the emotional body is required: it is that all of you, not only part, is required. Self-divided people do not make effective changes. It is only when you come to a point – when you are exactly in one spot – that you change. Sometimes an “external” crisis is required, before you can be concentrated; sometimes it comes as a result of fast or slow willing growth, but it’s like the old song, “all of me,” not merely some of you.

You should be able to see that this is a good thing. It prevents you from going off half-cocked fifty times a day. In fact, it is a s light exaggeration of the function 3D provides in the first place: slowing things down so they may fix.

It is a balance, you see. You are fluid but while in 3D you experience yourselves as relatively solid, relatively slow to change. If you remember that both halves of the contradiction are true (as usual), you will see how to better take advantage of your condition.

This is what you’ve been working toward! At least, that’s how it suddenly strikes me.

Yes. Our emphasis is always on the practical, it’s just a deeper layer of practical than most people will stay still long enough to absorb. We want you all to see, 3D is an advantage, not merely an ordeal. “All is well” not because everything is as we or you would want it, but because 3D is providing you with what you need. All of you, all the time. The obstacles, the pain, the striving, the achievements, the frustrations, the yearning, all of it. But it works better if you don’t fight it. And fighting it is a continuous 3D temptation.

Well, doesn’t that mean that temptation is part of the show, that it comes with the territory?

It does, but we are pointing out that complaining doesn’t serve you. Feeling like a victim (which says, “I’m helpless and this has nothing to do with what I am”) doesn’t help. Wanting to change doesn’t help. Praying for an outside agency to drop salvation of any kind into your lap doesn’t help.

What does help is your intent, and nothing hampers, impairs, intent quite as much as a sense of helplessness. Even a state of resolute courage amid adversity, though admirable in its way, does not really help, though it does stop things from getting worse. What helps is faith that somehow “All is always well,” that you are the center of your universe, that your life has meaning and is important.

And if we absorb your redefinition of what our lives are, we will have greater chance of living as if All is Well until we get to actually believing it.

That’s what faith is, is it not, evidence of something believed in but as yet unseen? And doubt is that same middle position, only facing toward dis-belief.

Now, if you are a transient phenomenon riding the moment, the center of your universe, among others in the same situation, this is a very fluid situation, you will concede. Add to it that every moment connects to every other living moment and your chessboard now extends vertically as well as horizontally. And all the points in every plane are free to decide, all the time. Do you wonder that we sometimes describe reality as a flickering light-show?

Can you see how this more nuanced point of view is more accurate than those constructed as though reality were solid, fixed, slow to change, relatively disconnected?

Oh yes.

Well, get as firmly as you can the sense that your 3D life – right now, and it is always right now – is a pattern, a sort of shape, and is not an object nor a fixed portrait nor a permanently written page. You are not a puppet, nor a victim, nor a perpetrator, nor the ultimate cause of the good and evil that flows through your lives. Once get this firmly in your being – that is, not merely as an idea, but as a felt reality – and you come that much closer to realizing yourselves to be the creator gods you are.

Ah. We get to turn 3D conditions to advantage, rather than having to fight them.

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

Well, this is always very interesting. Our thanks as always.

 

Wednesday,  May 29, 2024

4:55 a.m. Very well, shall we continue? The filters as they function, you said.

Suppose for the moment you consider 3D reality as having as its purpose the creation – the enablement – of uncounted points of view. Think of it as a unity expressing every bit of itself separately, for whatever reason. Can you think of a more effective way to do that than to temporarily suppress the awareness of unity and have each shard fend for itself in what seems to be an external environment governed by its own laws?

We aren’t quite saying that reality is this way; we are saying, as so often, that it may be profitably seen this way. This is one valid way to see it. For as long as you stay within this vision of things, consider that these things are true, but in the back of your minds, remember that there are no absolutes to be had while in 3D, no matter who you are talking to.

If you are setting up a system for enhancing (indeed, for producing) so many individual points of view, you will want to set up automatic mechanisms to do so. The alternative would be to have to keep your attention on the mechanisms all the time, or to allow things to proceed chaotically. But it is useful – if you must personify the creator and maintainer of the world – to think of it as both artist and scientist, both dreamer and mechanic. If you want to soar, and to enable others to soar, it is best to establish the rules of flight, so you don’t have to carry people separately.

The metaphor is getting strained.

It is. Suffice it to say, the world functions within rules: not arbitrary fiats, some emperor’s command, but mathematical laws (indeed, mathematics itself).

This is why we had you intuit three factors that create and define individuals in 3D:

• The interaction of the strands that have combined to produce the new soul.
• The cosmic conditions that allow certain traits and relationships and suppress others.
• The 3D social interactions that provide initial beliefs and assumptions.

They aren’t the only factors that could be cited, but a complete list is not important; we want to give you a way of thinking about things, and these will do. Once get the idea, and you can carry it as far as it interests you to do so.

All right, I’m getting that you want us to think of cosmic clockwork (the influences symbolized by the movements and relationships of planetary bodies) routinely, regularly, altering conditions. At any given moment, particular combinations of strands will find it propitious to enter 3D. (I don’t know the laws or limits, but I’m gathering that there can only be so much variance between what “the stars” allow and what the psychic mixture is.) And once the new soul is in 3D, it is enmeshed in a network of beliefs and values that it takes on as givens.

Yes. And this is your starting point, you see. This is how we triangulate individuality, you might say. The same psychic mix in a different society or a different time would have an entirely different type of experience. Different psychic mixes placed into the same society at the same time will be different. Et. Cetera. As we say, if you assume that the goal is to produce myriad viewpoints, this is a very good way to do it. And of course – obvious but easily forgotten – this could not be done in non-3D, for how are you going to limit consciousness? Yet at the same time, you in 3D connect to non-3D, so why doesn’t leakage destroy the desired condition of isolation and amnesia?

Collusion, I imagine. Our non-3D component is careful not to disorient us?

We smile. Not quite so simple, or where does the ability to develop relationships such as ours with you arise?

I wait, and what comes is a sense that this has something to do with conscious and unconscious.

It is one aspect, yes. You got the sense of it, as you started to write the previous sentence. Can you  tease it out?

It needs a better image than came to me: I got a stone splashing into still water. But I know what it meant. If we as individuals are ponds of water, our conscious awareness may be compared to a small circle such as would surround a stone’s plop.

Yes, and everything outside that circle is unknown to the specific state of awareness that is inside the circle. This image has the advantage, too, that there is no need to determine if the circle is surrounded by its own private pool, or is shared with other circles, or for all you know, is millions of circles in a vast sea. The individuality of it is the circle caused by the momentary disturbance; the commonality is the area outside the circle which cannot be and fortunately need not be defined. And, as a bonus, the image allows for the possibility of ripples from each interacting with one another, to reinforce or interfere, or pass unnoticed.

Within the image, consider that what you call the unconscious mind (which, we remind you, we consider every part of your mind of which you are unconscious) controls most of the automatic functions of your life: your health, your guidance systems, your cruise control. You may look at this as the non-3D supporting its 3D component. But this image of a temporary circle caused by an event that defines it away from its surroundings also has the advantage of not requiring definite fixed boundaries, which, we assure you, do not exist in nature.

I take you to mean that this is why we can learn to extend the boundaries that are effective for us. We can grow without having to change our nature (which, for all I know, would be impossible). We can choose to be aware of more of the surrounding opacity.

You can follow the ripples out, yes, until you reach whatever limit is set by time and place and desire. But you see, the barrier between 3D and on-3D was never more than provisional. Once the 3D soul has established itself so that too much awareness too soon wouldn’t overwhelm it, there is no reason it shouldn’t remember while in 3D that it is also in non-3D. and after all, what else have we been doing, these many years, but nudging you toward that awareness?

You are sort of changing the rules of the game.

More like moving the goalposts. The next civilization will see how it can do with a wider interdimensional awareness. Given how much intellectual power it has attained, it is going to need non-3D guidance if it is to survive.

And that’s what you (in general) have been up to for the past 60 years or so, helping prepare for a different way of experiencing life.

You could safely say we’re always doing that. It is the same thing, by the way, as saying, “We’re always on Plan B.” It isn’t some master plan, it is a set of goals to be moved toward while all the players are exerting free will, some more consciously than others. That’s the chaos within the plan, and the plan within the chaos.

“Games within games,” as Monroe had somebody describe 3D life.

Enough for the moment. We are still moving toward explaining the phrase that tantalizes you.

And that I keep needing to look back to remember. “Psychic interpretive structures.”

We’re getting there. Take a little time to sample the visual metaphor of a circle of ripples in water, caused by the entry of a stone. Remember, you aren’t the ripple, exactly, nor the water. You’re more like the transient phenomenon that is the circle formed within the ripples.

That’s cryptic. Very well, our thanks as always.

 

Tuesday, May 28, 2024

3:35 a.m. Yesterday’s session started quite a few hares running. I am still pondering the meaning of “psychic interpretational structures.” But you said we should begin today with the three factors I mentioned as limiting our view of the world as we come in. that is, the factors that provide the initial filters through which we see the world. What came to mind was our heredity of strands, the astrological conditions prevailing when we were born, and the beliefs accepted by whatever society we are born into. Thinking it over, these still seem valid.

As we said, a good place to begin.

• Your inheritance via strands. This is merely a special case of your over-all heredity. Physically you inherit your body, and that presents limits and opportunities. Mentally, emotionally, the same, for it is all one package. But then add to this physical heredity – which Yeats called your inheritance of race – the other inheritance, which he called your inheritance of soul: your “spiritual” limits and potentials. These come from the strands that make you. You might accurately say, you inherit ideas, attitudes, values, vulnerabilities. None of it is destined, in the sense of being rigidly and permanently fixed. But, like your physical heredity, it is a set of limits and possibilities that shape you.
• The astrological conditions. This would have been much better understood by the educated of many centuries ago, when it had not been relegated to the ranks of superstition. Because its nature and functioning are not widely understood today, the “scientific art” will need to be studied in order to see why a natal position will play out seemingly arbitrarily, to those who are not aware of the ground-rules. Year by year, a person’s life is a sort of moving interference pattern. That is, the birth-time (and place) conditions “set.” They fix. The rest of the person’s life is an interaction between that set pattern and the continually changing patterns it encounters day by day. If you were born on January 12, 1876, say, your pattern set, hardened, to the conditions prevailing at that moment; then that pattern encountered the conditions –the cosmic weather, so to speak –every moment thereafter. Obviously, every moment will produce a different interference pattern. We could go into this at some length, and perhaps at some time we may. The point here is twofold: 1) Life presents as an unending series of changes along regular determinable patterns, and 2) Everyone’s interaction with those patterns is structured by their time of entry.
• Societal constraints. Clearly, a person born at a given time into the United States will meet different conditions than a person born at the exact same moment into China, or Peru. Your family, your clan, your fellow citizens, all have unconscious and conscious beliefs that they inculcate into new arrivals. We don’t mean deliberate indoctrination: Is it indoctrination to believe and teach that things do (or that they don’t) “just happen,” or that life can be explained best, perhaps only, by the given accepted belief structures, or that God rules the world, or that chance does, or that the world is a set of impersonal laws, a great clockwork?

Any and all of these three types of constraint may be overcome by the individual in the course of life, but everyone, always, begins with limits that are unconsciously experienced, unconsciously accepted. There is no way to shape anything but to limit it. There is no way to accept form, but to accept limits. There is no way to act, to experience, without accepting form, which means accepting limits. Your destiny is what you are born into. Your freedom is what you can do within those limits or can do beyond them.

Some thought will connect this sketch with hallowed beliefs held by people over the ages. Karma, for instance. Can you see that karma could be seen as the new individual accepting the limits inherent in the strands’ emotional patterns?

I think you mean, at the end of a life, we are a certain way, as a result of our life’s decisions, and that pattern becomes part of the life we join as a strand. And of course this would hold for every strand, so the karma of the new individual would be a combination of past karmas.

Or, “unfinished business,” as we once said, but not quite as simple as “One unit becomes another unit, bringing its baggage with it.”

Another example would be, “The stars impel; they do not compel,” a recognition that we are born into patterns, but what we do within those limits is up to us. Astrology without free will would be the ultimate in wasted motion, for what is the good of determining the cosmic weather if there is nothing you can do with the knowledge?

Viktor Frankl said you can at least determine to have one attitude or another toward whatever comes at you.

And that was very insightful of him, for that is your true freedom – hence, your true responsibility. This is how you shape the karma that you will pass along.

And you can see, with a little thought, that societal beliefs create a good deal of variability. Someone born into the Jewish slums of New York City in the 1890s will experience a very different set of expectations and conditions than one born into Beacon Hill in Boston, or Nob Hill in San Francisco, or into the well-to-do or middle class, or the poor of other ethnic extractions in the same city. All these locations will imprint different ideas of the world, just as every moment will imprint different possibilities, gift, disabilities, and just as every strand will contribute psychological patterns.

The point of this analysis of conditions is to provide an understanding of the possibilities provided b the nature of the strands that combine, and the time they initially manifest into as a baby, and the place (physical and mental) they manifest into. As with astrology, if you couldn’t then do something with the knowledge, what use would it be?

Ponder this, because this is a good place to pause,. Think about it, get a firm sense of these three factors as determinants of the unconscious filters you begin with. Then we will resume probably with a look at the filters as they function, all of this aimed at providing you an understanding of what we mean by psychic interpretational structures.

Our thanks as always, for all of this.

 

Sunday, May 26, 2024

4:20 a.m. I have been tempted to ask about Monroe’s concept of Loosh, and have been reluctant at the same time. Would that be a productive direction to go?

A better direction would be the question of source and interpretation, for this is a special case of that, and the general problem will arise continuously as time goes on.

Remember, understanding has nothing to do with convincing. Exposition, too, is about sparks, not debate. Sometimes you will want to supply logic to help guide your listener in a certain direction, but it is not your responsibility to persuade anyone to follow the bread crumbs. In the case of Loosh, specifically, you can refer those interested to the chapters in Monroe’s Far Journeys. But if they read what is there and decline to come to the conclusions that seem obvious to you, what can you do? What should you do?

You do the best you can. Still, it is a queasy feeling to guess how our own dialogue may be misinterpreted.

Yes, let’s look at that question of interpretation. What is it but connecting the dots? But aren’t patterns of dots always de facto Rorschach Tests? Take comfort in the fact that people will be drawn to the things they need. If they need to see a tiger, that’s what they will see. If a lamb. They will see lamb. And in a way, that is just what will be there. It isn’t that reality is a clear tiger, a clear lamb. Reality is a blurry set of impressions like a scene at dusk: Your mind works to make sense out of inadequate data.

Isn’t that your entire life? Do scientists not spend their careers making patterns from inadequate data, then amending the pattern as new data seems to change things? Do not psychologists, theologians, artists, change their views in light of greater experience? Even in terms of strictly personal lives, do you not see life differently as new experiences add to and alter your understanding? Are not many young adults likely to be more intolerant than older ones, largely because they have not yet had enough mutually contradictory or conflicting experiences to soften their judgments?

“And” – I can all but hear you say – “nothing wrong with it.”

Well, is there? If patterns of behavior persist, is it not likely there’s reason for them?

Let’s bring back to the center certain facts that may tend to get lost in the argument. That is, remember context!

• Life is somewhat real It is never as clear-cut and definite as it will appear.
• Life is flexible and ambiguous. Cause and effect goes only so far. Meaning is only so definite. Everything can always be seen differently.
• You are not a separated bit of awareness except  relatively. Your individual 3D input is valuable to your larger being, and thus to the whole, but it is valid as your experience, not as evidence of accuracy.

Here is what it comes to. If you were to define things strictly, you would have to conclude that almost everything you “know” is only somewhat true. It may be true in some circumstances but not in others, or in some perspectives, but not others. You yourself – who you are really – will show different aspects of yourself according to the context you examine yourself in, and so in effect you are different according to how you see yourself.

“As a man thinks, so he is”?

Let’s not get sidetracked. The point here is that the very things you may find difficult about life in 3D are integral to the experience: They “come with the territory.” So why fight them? It would be like bemoaning your need to continually breathe an oxygen-nitrogen mixture. Yes it is a necessity, yes it can have its inconvenient or limiting aspects, yes it tethers your possibilities. But even if your list of objections were valid, what practical purpose would it serve to complain about their existence? It is well to know the constraints, if only for your own safety, but what good would it do you to complain about them, or resent them?

It is just as easy to change your attitude and give thanks for what that same dependency makes possible in life. Do you suppose the deep-sea diver resents the supply of oxygen that keeps him alive? He may wish he had gills; not having gills, he is likely to be glad for a way to carry his oxygen-breathing habits beneath the surface of the sea.

We know that 3D life has its difficulties, of course. The 3D conditions were created specifically to allow you to accomplish certain things that cannot be done outside those conditions, as we have often said. It is not that the scuba diver, who cannot survive beneath the surface without that equipment, is there in order to be forced to rely on the air supply; the air supply is provided so that the diver may dive.

This sounds like, “Quit whining, there’s nothing wrong with life except the way you’re thinking about it.”

It sounds nicer to say, “All is well, all is always well,” but yes, that’s the tenor of our remarks. Life is what you make it. There are always things to object to. There are always things to rejoice in. Your attitude is not dependent upon objective evidence. Rather, your attitude reflects the evidence that reinforces it.

Now, having said that very true thing, remember nonetheless that you have a right to your attitude. We are not saying, “If you don’t see things our way, you are wrong.” (Though in a way, we are!) We’re saying, “The way you see the world is an integral part of the gift to reality that is you.” Reality generates optimists and pessimists as it generates and populates every other polarity. So, whatever your emotional makeup leads you to select as evidence, by definition it cannot be “wrong.” That doesn’t mean it will be or won’t be accurate. It means you have the right, as well as the responsibility, to be you, to come to your conclusions. Only, remember, your viewpoint is only one viewpoint among so many. Don’t confuse your right to an opinion with a guarantee of accuracy. And the same goes for anyone else’s opinion. So, don’t set yourself up as all-knowing and don’t set up anybody else as all-knowing. Remember that in every case you are selecting what you need, mostly unconsciously.

A word about that? I hear you saying, our emotions are driving what we allow into our belief-system.

You will remember, we said that in 3D you are primarily emotional beings, not intellectual. It cannot be any other way, because most of you is beneath the threshold of conscious activity, necessarily. The input is too vast, too unremitting, for a conscious mind to encompass. If you didn’t filter out most of the input, you’d be overwhelmed. But you didn’t design those filters consciously; usually you aren’t even aware of them.

I think a problem here is the word “emotional.” People may tend to think of emotion in terms of outbursts, of strong currents.

We understand, but there’s only so much we can do while confined to language. As a rule of thumb: If something seems wrong or seems inexplicable, ponder it. Meditate on it. Try to see how it could be seen that would make sense of it.

The skill that reading Thoreau taught me.

It is always important to be able to go behind the word to the underlying idea. Enough for the moment.

Our thanks as always.

 

Friday, May 24, 2024

3:55 a.m. Ready if you are. Still reading Jung on Active Imagination, a work compiled by Joan Chodorow from different things he wrote here and there. I never realized that “the transcendent function” he wrote about meant connecting conscious and unconscious  – or, in our terms, 3D and non-3D, in a way.

This is an example of your seeing things differently in light of what you have been given. It would take a foolhardy person to claim or pretend that Jung didn’t know what he was talking about, and an equally foolhardy one to say, “Yes, he did, but it doesn’t have anything to do with this.” No, if what we have given you over the years is a true way of seeing, it must change the context for everything, enriching it, as for instance in the way  Jung revivified and explained the subject of alchemy by understanding it in light of the new emerging science of psychology.

We don’t always say it explicitly, but I bear in mind what you pointed out sometime, that we aren’t after any “The Truth,” which is beyond  attaining, but a closer approximation, a “Closer to the truth.”

Let’s look at that subject.

[Long pause.]

I may not be together enough for this at the moment.

It isn’t that; you are paying more attention to the fantasies and flashes that come to you, attached to a stray word or thought or line of thought, just as Jung’s book said. It is distracting you, but – kept in its place – will become as helpful as any other techniques and awarenesses that have come to you during this long process.

Let me perhaps talk to Dr. Jung himself.

Yes, better. Notice that if we had jumped in when you thought we were ready, this might not have occurred to you. And in such case, either we would have had to suggest it, or Jung would have had to come in unannounced, as he did originally.

[Different “voice”] You will see that one’s learning carries one along at its own pace, in its own way. It may perhaps exact a toll for crossing the river. Knowledge rarely comes for free. If you wish to buy the pearl of great price, you will have to pay for it; saying “Thank you very much” will not suffice. You may pay by work, or attention, or forfeiture of alternative opportunity, but in some way you will give value to obtain value. That is the law of life.

Like the supposed invisible motto of the Senate: Nothing for nothing.

You must keep in mind, anyone is agent for the whole. No one’s life is his alone. No one’s work is his alone. You are each on borrowed time,, using borrowed resources, paying with borrowed value to receive something of borrowed value, and that temporarily. As your friends often say, “and nothing wrong with it.”

Everything I learned – including the great deal that I learned but did not find occasion to put into works published – came to me and I went to it. It did not descend from the clouds as a free gift. I did not construct it from my own intelligence and application. The work and I met in the middle, one might say.

In another time, in another place, you wouldn’t have come up with the same thing.

That is one way to see it. Equally, if I had been in another time, another place, the information would have had to find someone else, or would have had to wait, perhaps forever. Just as there is no ownership of ideas (from the 3D standpoint), so from the non-3D standpoint receptive minds are not interchangeable. It makes a difference.

We can clearly see how important it was that Freud and you initiate so vast a revolution in the West’s view of the psyche. I think you aren’t quite saying, “It’s always like that,” but are saying something like, “You can never know.”

You will remember Emerson as an older man, reflecting that he as a younger man had entertained ideas that were radically different from those accepted at the time, yet had lived to see them accepted widely. How can anyone know the value of the gift? How can they know that anybody else can and will nurture it, if they do not? More than anything, how can they know what they are doing, what it will lead them to, and what it will lead others to? There is a valid psychological reason why Moses cannot quite enter the promised land.

I take that to mean, roughly, that pioneers are still shaped by the beliefs and experiences they started from, and only those who get to live by the newer understandings can go farther, because free of the earlier pioneer’s cultural baggage.

To make a mundane example, a very isolated individual, an Emerson, a Bob Monroe. They help free successors who continue along that road, a Thoreau for Emerson, a Bruce Moen for Monroe. And even these are what you might call first-generation descendants. Nor of course did Emerson or Monroe spring into the world without antecedents.

And a much larger example would be one Carl Jung and his intellectual and spiritual descendants.

Yes, yes, but the number of potential examples is endless, because that is how the world proceeds. Any new truth, or we should better say any new way of grasping truth, any new facet of the gem that may appear, will be apprehended singly. One man, one woman will get a glimmer, and will follow it, mixing that idea with everything within them. I do not mean to say that this will happen only to one at a given time, there could be many. But to each it will be a private struggle. And of course, as each person is different, so each way of seeing that same idea will be different.

Understand this well. Bringing fire to humans is always a private affair, and is always likely to exact a cost from each Prometheus. Yet what better fulfills man’s nature than fidelity to a great task, undertaken not for external (one might say extraneous) reward, but for very love of the endeavor? If your work is not a gift of love, whatever else it may be, then God help you.

And of course worse for us if we shrink from the struggle, thinking ourselves unworthy.

“Struggle” is perhaps over-dramatic. Simply, “the task” will do. But yes, if you bury the one talent you have been given, for fear of being inadequate to it, things will not go well for you. Much better a thousand blunders and backslidings than a confining of yourself only to what you are sure you can do skillfully and successfully.

I think of how hard it was for you to take the subject of alchemy seriously, but how you persevered.

Well, you know, I had to! I was being urged in that direction, and I knew by then that such persistent urges are not to be denied or ignored. But yes, it was very difficult for quite a while, trying to find the pearl hidden in the dunghill. I would think, “Why must I waste my time and effort on this nonsense?” But another part of me knew better. The ego self can be quite opinionated, and is very ready to raise objections and emotional barriers against anything it does not understand, or disapproves of, but it must not be allowed to prevail. Its legitimate function is to work the material that comes into your life, but it is not its legitimate function  to decide in advance what is or is not worthy of your time and attention. That is for a wiser, more experienced, more broadly connected part of you.

I know that you do not mean this only for the few who are in a position to revolutionize people’s thought, but perhaps the wider implications for us all haven’t yet been spelled out.

Well, it is simply that you never know. Just as you never know when your death-date will be, and you never do find out until that day, so you never know just what of your efforts may turn out to be valuable to yourself and your fellows. The doodles you make while on the telephone may prove to be the point, and the conversation merely the occasion, as was pointed out.

By Gurdjieff, I think, or perhaps Ouspensky.

The authorship doesn’t matter. The content matters. And this is the point here: You never know what you or anyone else may be capable of doing, and you never know what may hinge on your own efforts. Bear it in mind.

Thank you. Enough for the moment?

Yes. Pay attention to your life; it is only lent to you, and you will have to account for your stewardship.

Sobering thought/

Also, perhaps, an encouraging one. Very well.

Our thanks to you and all, as always.