the meaning of life

Thursday, May 23, 2024

9:50 a.m. As I sat quietly pondering, I realized, what you’re doing is a quiet revolution that has nothing to do with overthrowing anything, but merely seeing them in different contexts – which is the most thorough-going revolution possible.

This is not really a new idea to you. It is perhaps the first time it has come front and center.

I would say so.

You might spell it out, lest it become less clear to you later.

It isn’t hard. All those self-help books people put out, all those confident formulas for success in one guise or another, every worked-out system of philosophy or religion or whatever attempting to explain the world and our place in it – all the things people have ever taught or believed – they aren’t wrong, but they are limited. We aren’t saying, “We’re right and you’re wrong”; we’re saying, “You are right as far as you go, as far as your axioms and definitions will take you – but if you will look at the world our way, you’ll see it all differently.”

Still think you wasted your life? Or met with insufficient success?

It’s breathtaking. That’s a cliché, but warranted. (And serious business, for an asthmatic! 😊) I could never believe that everybody else was wrong and we were right. “Everybody’s out of step but my Johnny.” But this, I can believe. What was true is no longer the ultimate in truth. The way things were seen is not the way they will be seen. And it will change everything and nothing.

Nor will it be the final word, of course, only a new way opening.

The teachings of the Buddha, and the Tao, and Jesus and life more abundantly: It is all the same and it is all different because seen from a new place.

Nor are the social sciences nor even the physical sciences unaffected. Nor psychology, nor anything anyone puts mind to. Christianity revolutionized the Western world, and is still revolutionizing parts of the world beyond, by seeing man’s relation to the divine differently. Actually, any religion, even those that exaggerate the distance between the human and the divine, see the relationship differently: That difference is what is at the root of their gift.

I will send this out, hoping it doesn’t sound like psychic inflation. (And hoping it isn’t!)

Remember that there is no ownership of ideas. Any way of seeing is open to any who are capable of adopting it.

And I will rely on it to make its own way, without the help of Madison Avenue.

 

Thursday, May 23, 2024

4:05 a.m. My neighbor Don DeBats, whose cat Lila I am hosting as I do when Don and Margaret Ann are gone, died yesterday in Australia of a brain aneurism. Quite a shock. Ordinarily I wouldn’t bring that to this on-going conversation, but something says I should. I take it you will have a thing or two to say?

He got the form of departure that you have in mind: swift, relatively painless, leaving the inevitable loose ends but not involving any long intermediate state of advanced care or prolonged suspense. You may take this – including your reaction – as a reminder of the effect on others of a sudden departure. It always comes as a shock to others, even it they half-expected it “sometime.”

What struck me was the uncompleted task, the book he had been working on for so many months, still many months away from completion. But a you say, always there are loose ends.

The background suspense of “When am I going to die? How? What will I leave uncompleted? How will that death round out the life, what meaning will it seem to leave?” always adds mystery to your lives, and reminds you that you are not in charge, not in that shaping way.

Is that important?

Let’s talk about The Eternal Now.

Very dramatic, but I wait and nothing more comes.

You always know your overall shape of your life.

I deny that. Or, you are using “know” in a different sense than the obvious.

More like, we are using “you” in a different sense.

Ah. Okay, I see that. Our larger awareness knows the shape of things to come, presumably including possible branchings.

You are yet immersed in the past->present>future way of seeing things. We repeat, let’s discuss it from the Eternal Now.

• Your life in all its potential variations is there, now. It springs forth as one

This is going to be difficult, isn’t it? Talking without time-flow getting in the way.

It ought to be easy, but yes, we are finding it difficult. In such cases it is usually a matter of finding the right approach. It is a difficulty inherent in language. We need an analogy. You have the problem: Can you reach to an analogy that will carry us over the difficulty?

An absurd analogy comes to mind, probably because I have been reading Eugene Manlove Rhodes. What about a roundup on the plains? The fate of any one cow is indeterminate – too many possibilities – but the fate of the herd is roughly settled.

We smile. Get along, little dogie. We don’t see how that is going to help.

­What if our entire cloud of possibilities in life is the herd, and the life we actually chose as we went is the individual cow?

Shake the hopper, try again.

Well, the word “precipitate” comes to mind, as when a chemical mixture results in something precipitating from the formula.

No, but the process is helpful. Again?

A jigsaw puzzle. The wholeness of the picture is inherent in the situation even as you attack it in the only way possible, piece by piece.

Not that either. Let’s try this another way. Say what you think we want to explain.

If I could do that, we’d be finished, wouldn’t we?

Humor us.

Well, I get that it is something to do with seeing our lives two ways at once, sequentially, the way we live them, and as a gestalt, the way I suppose they look from the non-3D.

Yes. Toward what end?

You always know the overall shape of your life. The microscope analogy, maybe?

Maybe.

• With the microscope adjusted to the 3D sequential level, the logic of your life is sequential and variable – that is, it may go this way or that, depending upon your decisions.
• From the non-3D, non-sequential view – the gestalt – your life is more like an accomplished thing, because it is not sequential except from the 3D perspective.
• At the same time, every choice produces a different gestalt, sometimes radically different, sometimes trivially, but different with each choice.
• All these variations are equally real, but equally evanescent, for they are closer to dreams or abstract ideas than like material objects.
• Thus, all changes are equally real at the non-3D level, but all but one are only theoretical, or anyway limited in date, in 3D.
• So, your life is seen as a whole, in non-3D, but that whole is not what you would expect by following 3D rules. It is closer to a probability cloud than a single exposure.
• And the thing that confuses the issue is that language tempts you to think of any complete life as one iteration, rather than all But things change all the time, and your life is the total of the change, and the interactions among the changes, and (bear this in mind if you hope to understand), an individual life is never more than one end of a process. The non-3D never writes obits; it notes situation reports.
• Inherent in this – implicit – is the fact that every life is and remains influenced by continuing changes in the constituent strands. Even if you in your present 3D life were to somehow come to a halt, making no decisions, no changes, still change would flow in from those other parts of yourselves in other 3D lifetimes.

The point here is that

1. There is no “Final result” and
2. Nonetheless there is an overall “shape” to your life inherent from the beginning.

Swedenborg knew the date he would die, to the day.

In that version of his life he did, yes. Do you think he was equally well connected in the versions in which he continued to occupy himself with the physical sciences only?

From the non-3D standpoint, presumably he took all paths.

Yes, but from any one 3D viewpoint, he took the one that fits with the variation you are in. Both views true, neither view complete and sufficient.

Once again, the key is to be able to change viewpoints so that you can understand. When you remember that your Ives are being lived out in the now – that the “now” is all that exists – any sense of doom or of lost opportunity has no place to root itself. It is only the 3D viewpoint that may lead to those. However, the 3D view provides the texture and the moment-by-moment drama that the non-3D cannot. As we say, change viewpoints. We don’t mean change from A to B and stay at B. We mean, go from A to B, B to A, as conditions warrant, remembering that perspective is the way things look from any one viewpoint, is necessarily limited, necessarily a distortion, though often a useful one.

I’m not sure what we accomplished today.

Potentially, it is one more bit of data telling you a way to approach understanding your lives. That it was difficult to get to isn’t a problem and may in fact be an indicator that it was worth doing. Just call this one “The Eternal Now” and we’ll move on to other aspects another time.

If you say so. Till then, and our thanks for this, as always.

 

Wednesday, May 22, 2024

3:40 a.m. Friends? I don’t have any more questions queued up, so it’s up to you.

[Pause] Nothing coming, I will sit quietly waiting.

Remembering that “Man is the measure of all things,” considering your more far-reaching questions: What is the process all about? Where is it going, why is it this way, how does it proceed?

In short, what is the meaning of life.

Any question you could ask will amount to a variant of that same question. It varies mostly in the details. It is really the only question worth asking, is it not?

To a certain temperament, yes.

We would say to all temperaments. The variants are mostly in manifestation – which amounts to saying, it’s all in the details. You get to the center by many routes, from starting-places far removed from one another. If you will remember that, and if you will dare to follow your inclinations in such matters, you will see that in your very individuality is your solidarity with all others. For as we have said, there are no absolute divisions in reality. Everything shades into its neighbors, every contradiction is part of a polarity, hence part of a sliding scale.

Perhaps you can see now that the universe has neither beginning nor end – not in space, not in time. How could it? “Beginning” and “end” are time-related concepts, space-related concepts, and so do not correspond with anything outside of 3D reality. Does a dream occupy a space? Does dreamtime have a beginning, an ending?

But although things don’t begin nor end, yet clearly they continually change – or do they?

That’s an interesting thought, and I’ll spell it out, as I think you want me to do. Just as we as individuals do not change what we are composed of, but change what expresses, so the universe. Do I have that right?

That’s the idea. How could the “everything” change its composition?

You make it sound like a hamster wheel, all movement and no progress.

The hamster isn’t trying to get anywhere; give it that much credit for intelligence. It is enjoying its functioning. It likes running. The hamster wheel allows it to do so in a safe and convenient space.

So you are implying that not only 3D but perhaps also the non-3D is designed to give us exercise?

Remember that who you are in 3D, not merely where you are or what you experience, is the hamster wheel. Your lifetime of self-development is itself part of the process. The universe doesn’t hinge upon your creating greater awareness, expressing yourselves more fully – and yet, in a sense, it does, in the same way that a play may be said to depend upon its painted backdrops, its rehearsed performances, its attentive audiences.

I think you are merely saying, everybody has a part to play, and one is just as important as the next.

The meaning is slipping out through the cracks, here. Let’s try again.

• The universe – reality – has no spare parts.
• Beginnings and endings are only relative to any given thing being considered.
• The world-dream is one of continuous unfolding of the consequences of everyone’s choices.
• Those choices need not be considered as steps toward a goal. They may be considered that way, but they can just as easily and as correctly be seen as flowerings in their own right.
• If 3D life is a slowing and a constricting for the sake of greater focus, greater awareness, life after 3D may be considered a Venturi effect, spreading and speeding the flow of just the same amount of fluid.
• As to the final meaning of life (in the sense of all life, of all the universe), how could you ever expect to comprehend it even if you could get the data? But as you were told, thousands of years ago, “As above, so below.” Look to analogy to give you the best hints available.

What it boils down to is, of course, the simple observable fact that people don’t do things without reasons. They may or may not be aware of the reasons, but the reasons always exist. Should you expect all of reality to be less coherent than 3D life?

You mean, I think: Trust that life and the world are not meaningless.

If you think it makes more sense, you could think they are meaningless, but we’d be interested to know how that belief served you. More to the point, we’d like to see the evidence for it. Everything you examine makes sense in its own terms and as part of something bigger and smaller, so why would life in general be any different? We would say it requires quite a strong emotional investment to believe that life is random or pointless or disconnected.

It can look that way, but I agree, the closer you look at it, the clearer its unity appears. But what is your practical point here?

Perhaps simply this: Each person will divine a different meaning to life (including, for some, no-meaning) and will be correct, automatically, in that what you see reflects what you are. So don’t be so shy about assuming that you know as much about the meaning of life as anybody else – only, don’t forget, that means “not much.” You “know” what you need to know, to be you. Whether you grow in your questionings all your life, or stay in one place, it is you, and you belong to the dream like everybody else.

So just happily keep the hamster wheel spinning?

Does the hamster seem bored, or tired, or frustrated, or put-upon, as it manically turns the wheel? The point of the exercise is not to turn the wheel. The wheel is to provide a way for the hamster to exercise full-tilt without hurting anybody.

This is an analogy to act as counter to the movie analogy.

Yes. Every analogy has its strength and weakness, and changing analogy changes the light in which you see things. The movie analogy centered on showing how everything works together. The hamster wheel centers on showing reality not as pointless but as constructed specifically to be helpful, once you stop thinking in terms of “getting somewhere” and move to thinking in terms of body-building by exercise.

So, you see, those who think that reality is a meaningless exercise are correct in their terms. Those who say it is suffused with meaning (even if the perceived meanings differ among them, as they will) are also correct. Every view of life is correct until it gets to the point of saying, “This is the only way to see it.” And even this attitude serves its purpose, for as you know, not everybody is able to leave things open-ended. Those who need defined, bounded, certainties will find them. It’s all part of the overall ecology.

I suppose you are saying, “Don’t forget that everything you know is based at some level on faith.”

Of course, and nothing wrong with it. Nothing hinges on your coming up with a Certified Absolutely Correct Summary. Good thing, too, since no one could ever provide it. All you can do – all we can do – is give it our best effort, and that effort itself, as much as whatever result we come to, is part of the perfection of the dream.

It feels a little disconcerting, as if we are happily spinning our wheels. And that expression is going to ring differently now!

Be what you are. Strive for what you are called to strive for. Rest when you feel like it. It is all life, and therefore it is all good. It isn’t a race and it isn’t meaningless. But what it amounts to depends on who you are, what you are. Be a little leery of anybody who tries to tell you, “Life is this.” Maybe so, but it is also all other things.

Enough for now.

Quite a ride. Our thanks as always.

 

Tuesday, May 21, 2024

4:25 a.m. Guys, if you don’t have something else queued up, a question occurred to me yesterday. Prompted, perhaps; I recognize that.

Feel free. It will not interrupt.

Well, it’s this: Why do we feel this urge to be more? And if I’m reading it rightly, not just 3D humans, but apparently everything. Why aren’t we content with being whatever it is that we are, if things are perfect as they are?

Do not construe “All is well” to mean “Everything is in a perfect condition at whatever stage it is, at whatever time you consider.” The meaning of All is Well includes the urge to improve, which as you note is innate.

“All is well” does not mean, “Don’t tinker with the formula,” any more than it means “This is the best of all possible worlds.” It means, “Matters are proceeding as they must and should.” It does not mean, “Here is paradise, all passengers disembark.”

I should have seen that. It is the difference between a dynamic and a static.

That is correct. If – as we have said – human function in 3D is, among other things, to be the trickster, the disturber of the peace, how would that make sense if the peace it was disturbing was already perfect?

This is now clear to me, thanks. Will others require more, or will their inner connection bridge over to the same understanding?

Some will, some won’t. but you are asking, do we need to say more here. Probably not. The key is to remember that striving, incompleteness, growth, longing, dissatisfaction are all part of reality, and nothing wrong with any of them as an experience. Lewis and Clark felt them all; it was part of the price to reach the Pacific.

You cleaned that one up economically. Let me press my luck. Tell us whatever you want to tell us about obsessions. Sexual, monetary, any way they manifest. This query came to me Sunday and it too had a vague flavor of having been prompted, that I might in turn prompt you.

This is a very big topic, that will come clear to the extent you keep in mind, as we discuss, that:

• A 3D human is a compound
• In 3D, nothing is complete and settled; everything is in process, if only because everything appears in different context as you move through time-slices.
• Incompletion and other uncomfortable emotions and conditions are – as we said – normal, natural, and therefore essential to the proper functioning of the system.
• You are an integral part of the rest of humanity by being connected to your strands and what they connect with.
• Nonetheless, there is the equivalent of distance in psychic affairs no less than in physical affairs. You are closer to some attitudes than to others. You occupy definite points on various polarities, and that may or may not change, but as a starting-place it is a fixed ratio.
• And, remember, everything affects everything, but there are rules for processes. Things don’t happen at random.
• Thus if you find yourself at war with yourself, it is only a small version of your situation, for in a way it may be said that all tendencies are contending with one another all the time, in many ways. Sometimes this results in peace, sometimes in a cease-fire, sometimes in guerrilla warfare, sometimes in World War III. In miniature, and in large.
• However, remember this is equally true of cooperation and reinforcement among strands, as among 3D individuals: You are involved in romances, alliances, partnerships, marriages of convenience – any form of cooperation you can imagine, you can experience. It is not this or contention; it is this and contention.  Don’t succumb to tunnel vision, seeing only one.
• And of course most important in the context of the question of obsession, remember that you in 3D are partly aware, partly not, with emotion being the boundary between the two.

So, you are obsessed. By what? It could be an emotion itself, or really let’s say by a character trait interacting with the 3D container.

Not clear yet.

You may be born a mixture of traits that cannot equalize.

I waited for more, then figured you wanted that sentence to stand alone.

We wanted it to stand out, yes, for the key to the subject is right there in the word “equalize.”

I was thinking yesterday, no wonder male and female yearn for each other: Each has lifelong access to, and familiarity with, and is personification of, what the other sex does not. I don’t mean accidental personality traits, I mean the essence of the feminine or masculine that is the basis of the 3D person. It is like each is starved for what the other is sated with.

And no way to equalize. That is one valid way to see the situation. And when young, the imbalance is experienced as needing a physical expression to equalize. That is, sex relations will bring what you need. But with time comes the realization that it can’t be found that way, that the yearning or call it the vector toward completion is not merely physical nor even physical plus emotional.

Colin Wilson often wrote that there is a sort of conjuring trick about the way sex works. It promises so much and then when the physical act is achieved, the promise is not kept, and we can’t figure out how it could have been kept. Some people keep looking for it in other people, some in other variations of the sex act, some in other variations of their emotional attitude toward it, but nobody solves the riddle.

That is true as far as it goes, but of course is only one aspect of a tremendously complicated subject. The specific application here is your question of obsession.

Michael Ventura used to write about how sexual obsessions had heir own law, their autonomy, so that they compelled the person to engage them in one way or another, if only to struggle against them.

And, as you noted, obsessions may come in many forms, not just sexual. It is a matter of impulsion toward the unfulfilled.

Well, yes, by definition.

But we have said more than you realize. Sink into it for a moment.

The implication I’m getting is that obsessions have a legitimate purpose.

Let’s say, they are useful indicators. If you are flying an airplane and your fuel gauge shows that you are low on fuel, is it the fuel gauge’s fault that things are other than you could have wished them? Is the gauge an obstruction, a temptation, or is it an indicator?

And an indicator doesn’t tell us what we must do, it merely tells us the state of affairs that exists.

Similarly – like any strong emotion – an obsession.

So then how do we deal intelligently with obsessions, particularly if they pull us toward something we don’t approve of?

One thing you don’t do is look down on it as something evil and unconnected with what you are. It is very likely to be representing parts of yourself of which you are unaware, or which you deny because you disapprove. Heed the fuel gauge! But that is not the same as saying, Do as it prompts you.

No, I get the distinction. Be as aware as you can be, and interact with it.

Yes. Give it the respect of your attention. Engage with it on a peer-to-peer basis, not you looking down from above to below. Do some active imagining.

We predict that if you “show willing” to be aware of it, to understand it, it will change from an obsession to something manageable. How it will change, what it will change into, is not predictable, but getting anything into consciousness is to bring it under control. That’s really all you need to know to deal practically. Theoretical considerations are for those interested; we will content ourselves with this much. Anyone can find herein the way to go deeper into the subject theoretically or practically. It is a matter of listening and paying attention.

Enough for the moment.

Our thanks as always.

 

Monday, May 20, 2024

4:50 a.m. I am beginning to queue up questions against the day you say you are out of ideas. Hopefully no time soon. We’ve gotten nearly 30,000 words so far, in 23 sessions.

Always remember that your bright ideas – in this, in anything – are not necessarily yours as opposed to ours together. We do not encourage you or anyone to distrust your impulses, thinking “That’s only me; it can’t be important.”

Well, as you know, I thought yesterday that sometime I might ask you how to distinguish between things we are being prompted to follow up on, and mere stray impulses, or misguided or even maliciously planted ones. I have always had a problem with this, from my very earliest days.

One’s attitude toward this will reflect one’s attitude toward life in general. Where does someone place faith v. doubt, love v. fear, confidence v. perplexity? In one sense, this is the same question posed in three manifestations.

I suppose that means, it is always a decision: toward further integration, or away from it.

Confidence v. shrinking back, yes. Put this in the proper context, and you will see that it is a question of what kind of future you wish to choose for yourself. Not, “are able to choose,” but “wish to choose,” because aspiration is by nature beyond one’s current perceived limitations.

That’s Thoreau again: Envision a fuller life and the world will seem to change in your favor.

Do you suppose there could have been a reason you were instantly captivated by him as soon as you picked up his book? But this same message has been delivered in millions of ways, millions of times, and this is one more repetition. Life can be seen as a tragedy only if you look at it as separated and truncated. The tale told by an idiot is not life, but the description of life by those who don’t see it straight.

This statement can be easily proved by experience. Remembering that “by their fruits you shall know them,” look at the psychological results of

a) Believing that the world (that is, reality) is whole, sane, purposive, benign, and that you are self-sufficient yet connected, sustained yet striving, curious, interested, or

b) Believing that the world is fragmented, divided, meaningless, cruel, perhaps malicious, and you are helpless or anyway besieged victims, without purpose

Does the question not answer itself?

However, we recognize that you are firmly placed in the camp of those who have faith in life – and therefore in what happens, and in one another, and in yourself. You weren’t born into that position: It is the end-result of a lifetime’s choices. Still, there you are now. This does not take away problems and perplexities, though. Life is always a problem to be worked, in the guise of many interlinked problems. So you are asking not a philosophical or abstract question, but a very practical one: How can you discern among impulses.

Obviously – we hope obviously – there cannot be one answer for every type of person and every predicament.

• Some people are very coherent, their strands cooperating smoothly and almost seamlessly, so that they never express self-division.
• Some are all self-division, struggling to live while in a perpetual internal civil war. What one strand approves, another hates. What one needs, another cannot abide.
• Most, of course, are between these extremes, but the “between” position is itself divisible into many, many different ratios.

Each psychological makeup (for that is how the coexistence of strands will be seen) requires and allows and prevents certain things, and results in many different ground-rules for that life. (In effect, each variety of relationship will experience its own rules of existence that will seem self-evident, and self-evidently true for everyone, which of course they cannot be in reality.)

We don’t want to make firm rules, here. You asked a practical question, and we want to answer it, but in a manner that will clarify the context, so as to be helpful to those of a different makeup.

If you are all of a piece, with no significant internal conflicts, trust comes easily. In such case, trust but don’t forget to verify. Trust is essential but not sufficient, because if you trust without looking out for the chance that you may be in error this once, you risk falling into Psychic’s Disease. (“I feel it strongly, so it must be right.”)

If you are habitually conflicted, your indicated course is the opposite: You need to judge and then trust. Never trusting would amount to an invitation to paralysis, certainly to an effective isolation from guidance in any conscious or semi-conscious form. So – since sooner or later you have to act out of faith – you need to use your judgment and then follow that judgment.

And, of course, those anywhere between these extremes, season to taste.

Now, here is the joker in the deck: What you are will change in effect. That is, what will manifest will change, which will look like a different you emerged. So the strategy that serves you at any one time may be inappropriate at any other time. So you need to bear that in mind.

So far this doesn’t seem all that practical.

It’s extremely practical. If you don’t understand the situation, how will you respond appropriately? Your complaint is that it is not a flat set of rules: “If A, do B.” If you want a flat rule, deduce it from what we have said, and we will criticize appropriately.

It’s circular. I hear you saying, the way to judge an impulse that may be sent from guidance is, trust guidance.

Does that formulation not expose the problem?

It does. I’m thinking of guidance as separate from myself, which it is and also isn’t.

Then try again.

If we are confronted with an impulse, sit with it, feel for it.

Even for split-second decisions to be made?

Well, I suppose split-second decisions express what we already are, since we don’t have time to decide.

Yes. What you are is what you have made yourself by a lifetime of decisions: It is what will express in the absence of deliberation. Your moments of choice come in the decisions you have time to make. That is, those you can hold and weigh in your awareness.

Mindfulness is all. What else have we been saying, all this time? The reason to take control over your hitherto unconscious mental functionings (robots, scripts, filters) is to broaden your effective scope of action. It is to widen the area in which you – and not merely the you that you have created to date – can manifest.

Life more abundantly.

Yes. The freer you are of automatic reactions, the better you can see your opportunities and the more clearly you can see them. That is, instead of seeing problems, you see opportunities embedded in the problems.

What they call the gift in the situation.

Mindfulness is all. And this is enough to be said. What you need is here.

Our thanks as always, then, and till next time.

 

Sunday, May 19, 2024

4:30 a.m. Ready if you are.

Recent conversations – lectures, if you like – have concentrated on the idea that reality is much more interconnected, interactive, than you may sometimes see it. Things relate in time, in space, in psychology, between forms, between differences in size, duration, nature. One of the effects of 3D restrictions is that it can be difficult to hold more than a few things in mind simultaneously, while ideally you would want to be able to hold everything in mind.

This is not to say that that would be possible. It wouldn’t. it is merely to show how far effective communication varies from what would be ideal. Because your RAM, as you call it [borrowing a computer term for available memory], is restricted, you necessarily use work-arounds, such as symbols to associate various elements concisely; such as logic to examine and retain one bit of relationships at a time; such as written or oral memory, to construct and recall sequentially what cannot be held simultaneously.

I’m getting that to some degree this applies in non-3D conditions as well.

That’s what we want to look at, and as usual we will try to keep things practical, sketching outlines only insofar as they will help illumine the nature of 3D life.

In non-3D as in 3D, restrictions apply, it is just that they are a bit different by nature. Still, the restrictions exist, or we should be formless, and nothing that is short of everything can be formless, or – we might equally say – beyond form.

• We range freely among times and spaces, associating as we please (or rather, according to the nature of the material). This is just like your mental process. In fact, it is your mental process, only with vastly greater RAM.
• Our range is huge next to yours, because of not having to overcome the drag of continuously changing time constraint – that is, what you call the passing of time. We cannot be “in a hurry” or “pressed for time.” For us, time does not “run out.”
• Our attention is not subject to distraction from unacknowledged pars of ourselves experienced as “exterior” or “accidental” or even “incidental.” We have only one source of interruption, oddly enough: you. Our connection to 3D tethers us, in a way.
• By that, we mean not that any of us is tethered specifically to any of you, but that we may respond to resonances. You in 3D don’t exactly “wake the dead,” as people say of disruptive loud behavior, but you do get our attention. Bear in mind, you and we are not strangers nor even neighbors nor family; we are part of the same thing.

You can see a few consequences. List them and we will add to them or dispute with you, as appropriate.

I wish you had continued. Things were coming to the back of my mind but I was concentrating.

Trust the process. This will help you categorize, sort, and retain.

Okay, if you say so. The resonance thing got my attention, of course. In fact, the turning of tables got it. We don’t tend to think of us affecting your processes. But after all, what is prayer but an attempt to connect with the non-3D for one reason or another.

Yes, but list applications.

• Prayer, then.
• Memory? Asking our “reference librarian” to access some bit of forgotten information?
• Aptitudes, in a way? Summoning someone who knows how to do something that we may learn it? One of my TMI roommates told me he set out to throw a pot, which can be a difficult skill to learn, and asked “himself” how it would feel if he had done it a thousand times – and threw it successfully, first time. And my brother, throwing a pot, did so keeping in mind stone-age artists like the men who had painted the caves in France, and experienced a sort of union with him, as if the other man were being allowed to flow through his hands as he worked the clay.
• Healing? Could our summoning healing spirits not be said to be the 3D employing non-3D organized energies – minds – to assist us?
• Communication, certainly. This process. One-way in trance-channeling (though perhaps less than we think, I get), and very much two-way in ILC, where active and receptive may alternate between 3D and non-3D many times, not only in which side initiates but also in which side is relatively more active. If I contact you with a question, that’s relatively active; if I begin receptive, the initiative is yours. But either way, we are going to go back and forth as need be, just as in any mind-to-mind communication.
• Flashes of insight. We think of them coming “out of the blue,” but from the non-3D I suppose it looks like “You’ve been asking and asking; here’s your answer.” Wilbur Wright, twisting a cardboard box absent-mindedly while talking to a customer in his bicycle shop, and suddenly he gets a flash answer to the question of how to control an airborne mechanism.
• Flashes of recognition. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain suddenly experiencing himself as part of a great unit called the Army. I can’t remember the details, and I don’t think it had to do with a battle, yet I don’t think it was parade either. For whatever reason, suddenly he identified as a part of this huge army, not only as himself as one unit. This may not be a good example, though.

Oh, but it is. All these everyday experiences are precisely what we want to show you from another angle. Naturally when you pray or dream or get an insight or extend beyond accustomed limits in any way, you will see it from the 3D slant. We merely invite you to see it also as it seems from the non-3D.

And further examples come to mind. Inspiration for plays, novels, scholarship, any of the arts and sciences. It is connection to something beyond ourselves! Obviously.

Don’t forget meditation, Zen, any form of mental alertness devoid of content. This is an extending beyond the (invisible but very real) boundaries of sequence. No words, no sequential processing; at least, potentially so.

How does that call your attention?

We are always ready to help. An attempt to transcend 3D limits always attracts us, always serves to get our attention and potentially our assistance. Don’t forget, we have skin in the game.

Bob Friedman used to say that. What’s your stake in our awakening? And of course the answer is obvious. We  are also you.

Correct.

We are helping you grow, or are hindering you, depending on how you want to look at it.

Correct.

It leaves me speechless, not in the sense of stupefaction, but by not having anything come to mind. So I take it that this ends our session, a little early. Our thanks to all of you, for all of this.

And ours to all of you, for listening. We haven’t said it in a while, but perhaps now our thanks will resonate differently.

They do. Till next time, then.

 

Saturday, May 18, 2024

3:45 a.m. Onward? Did you want to tell us what you meant by the universe making up its mind? Or did you have a different direction you want to go in?

By saying that, we meant merely that the universe is one thing, comprising many things. You will remember, we described the structure of reality as fractal, “as above, so below.” Man is the measure of all things.

I get it. That holds psychologically as well as physically.

We have to smile at that formulation. Don’t you think that’s kind of backwards?

I guess it is, now you mention it. Of course psychologically would be primary, given that the physical is mind-stuff.

So, at any level you care to examine, the same processes are going on, although their similarity may not be obvious. If the life of an individual is choosing, so is the life of any level above or below the individual.

That raises an image of the microbes within us choosing.

As we said, not always obvious. How do you suppose your health fluctuates, if not in response to fluctuations among the microbes that you are?

• They are affected by their environment, physical so-called and, mostly, mental.
• They are affected by their chemical composition, by every combination that surrounds or comprises them.
• They in turn make certain things possible or easy or impossible or difficult in the larger organisms they help comprise.
• And – remember, though this must seem counter-intuitive, given the continuous evidences of your senses – they too are mind-stuff, hence are part of the equation, not afterthoughts.
• Why else do you suppose that your physical health is affected by your choices? We mean, the physical directly responds to the mental: How? You see?
• Be careful not to be misled by the fact that a given phenomenon may be called by this or that name. That doesn’t mean it’s separate, it means it may be considered separately, the way an arm may be considered apart from a hand or a shoulder, but does not function meaningfully outside the context of arm and shoulder, and of course the same for them.

And, as usual, what goes when you look downward goes when you look upward. You may be considered a microbe in a larger organism you can scarcely conceive of. That doesn’t mean that’s all you are; it means you can be seen that way. Everything connects; everything is sentient in this same manner; nothing is unconscious or extra or insufficient to fulfill its function.

Plus, remember, this goes on continually, in the eternal present. It isn’t a matter of past, present, future, except in appearance. So in that sense the choices continue not only in all directions laterally but also temporally.

It’s all alive; it’s all in interactive motion. In that sense, the universe may be said to be perpetually deciding what it is, what it knows, what it is for.

You may want to explain that last. “What it’s for?”

If you as individuals repeatedly ask, “What is the purpose of life,” do you suppose you’re the only ones?

I hadn’t thought about it, but I suppose I would have said yes, we are.

Well, then you would be something unique in the world, wouldn’t you? Do you think that’s likely?

We’ve been told that humans are unique in 3D in that we are the ones who change the environment that creates us: mentally, I take it, no less than physically. If we are unique in that, why shouldn’t we be unique in other things?

There’s a difference. Changing your environment by your choices is your role. Trees, minerals, other animals, all have their roles. So in that sense, you are not unique. You are playing your specialized part as everything does. But if would be different for you to be the only ones concerned with the meaning of life.  You would be more conscious than the rest of reality.

Is that so impossible? I thought the purpose of the 3D environment or at least its result, is to increase our focus.

This is ranging a little beyond our intended scope, but since it comes up, we can pursue it.

As 3D affects mental life, it both sharpens and narrows your consciousness. You can perceive only here-now; you can experience only here-now. But that very limitation provides the ability to conceive, to virtually experience, what you cannot experience within the 3D environment. Thus you are brought to your toes, and are given wings. Does this make you more conscious, or less conscious, than those in non-3D?

Not sure where we’re going here. Both or either, I suppose.

And if you, why  not cats? Or elephants? Or fields of grass? They live in 3D constriction. They respond to life minute by minute. They function and their lives are “recorded” same as yours. Is there a difference?

It feels like there is, but I’d be hard-pressed to say what or how.

We would see it this way: Each kind of 3D creature has its specific function – its ecological niche, you might say – and in that sense is different. But they are all part of the same reality.

It’s the usual thing: Do we identify with the actor or the director or the movie as a whole.

Precisely. Where you begin limits how you cans see things. But the cure for that limitation is merely to see it from a different starting-place, and take in the new view, not forgetting or overriding the previous, but adding to it.

As you told us as long ago as Muddy Tracks.

Reality hasn’t changed.

To return to the mental life of microbes –

Here you can see the power of words to channel or limit your perceptions and reasoning. If we said “The mental life of microbes” it would seem artificial, almost ridiculous. But if we said, “The mind-stuff molded into microbes as it was similarly molded into humans,” would that seem such a stretch?

I see your point.

Reality is all one thing. You have to keep coming back to that. If you allow 3D dualistic bias to overcome your ability to intuit unity, you will never come to the greater truth that lies beyond sensory evidence.

So perhaps you can see, in saying that the universe if making up its mind, we mean (among other things) that everything is alive, it is conscious, it is aware, it is questioning, it is deciding (weighing) as it goes along. Each part of reality has its own specialization, but specialization does not mean separation, it means a different emphasis.

“Man is the measure of all things.” If you want to know reality, come to know yourself. You can’t know the mind of a planet, or a star, or a nebula. You can’t know the mind of a cat, or of cats as a group-mind, or a microbe or a piece of granite. But you can come to know you, and in coming to know yourself you can feel your way to the rest. We don’t know any other way to say this that will make it clearer.

I get that you’re ready to stop for the moment, and it has been an hour, but tell me, what do I call this session? What was its center of gravity?

“The universe deciding” would do as well as anything.

Okay, our thanks as always.