21. Creating flowers

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Friday, May 17, 2024

4:10 a.m. All right, my friends. Do you want to follow up on things begun but not yet ended, or do you have something else in mind? Yesterday’s certainly was great, and unexpected.

Remember, overall we are intending to summarize the salient points and the unmade connections from material given you over 25 years. So massive a task needn’t fit into a strictly logical progression. But we could and probably should clean up as we go along. Perhaps we should talk about how life is, and is not, creating something permanent.

In the interval since you first posed that, I guess an idea has coalesced while I have been thinking about other things. We aren’t able to create anything permanent until we do – and then we are something other than we were while creating it, so you could say it either way. We did or we didn’t, depending on how you define “we” before and after.

As you have been known to say, “That isn’t clear.” But it will serve to start us off.

We trust that we have established that the creation cannot be in any way physical. Even in 3D terms, you are not constructing something that thieves could break in and steal, or rust or other physical process attack. Since 3D itself is mind-stuff, how could anything real be created of something only somewhat real?

Nor could it be particular to any individual. How could it be, when individuality itself is a form of horseback tentative definition, not really accurate?

And, could it be confined to what you see as one species – humanity? The concept of humanity as separate from the rest of nature is another merely approximate definition. You realize by now that part of your mental being consists of plants, clouds, minerals, animals: Where is the boundary line, the frontier, between “human” and “other”?

So then, where is a line that can be drawn? Could it be drawn by time-slices? The Age of Exploration, etc.? There is more to this than first appears, though it cannot be divided any better than can individuals or species.

Still, I’m getting a vague sense of it. We are different in different eras. Our ideas, our ways of experiencing the world, our possibilities, are different.

Yes, and this is what we’re moving toward describing. Just as “Thoughts are things,” so a world-view is a thing.

Ah! And just as an individual life may be seen as creating a flower by what it shapes itself to be (and is shaped), so with civilizations!

Yes, and all the niches between individuals and civilizations.

My, my! I can feel the idea beginning to flower within me, speaking of flowers.

Well, Mr. Amateur Historian, spell it out a little. It will grow as you express it.

Well, take Toynbee. He spent a good deal of time looking at history as the record of different civilizations and how they competed, coexisted, overlapped, succeeded each other, were influenced by each other consciously and unconsciously. He wasn’t concerned with wars and commerce, but with the situations leading to and following wars and commerce. That is, he developed a sort of biography of a given civilization and then it became a chronicle and analysis of the interaction between and among them. He developed a set of laws of interaction that are much more sophisticated than the popular idea of his work allows for.

In light of what you’re saying, I’m seeing this a little differently. Each of those civilizations could be looked at as an individual gathering. Within that gathering are all the ways that civilization could be seen: its moods, you might say.

Provide a few examples, to make it clearer, the distinction you are seeing.

Let’s stick to the West, then. One subdivision is America. I guess bullet points are our best bet here: It’s a good deal of information.

  • The Spanish Empire throughout South and Central America.
  • The Incas and Aztecs and others that preceded it.
  • The nation-states that succeeded it.
  • In all periods, the subdivisions that coexisted: castes, classes, religions, linguistic communities, traditions, etc.
  • Over time, the gradual transformation of all of these, whether smooth or violent, consistent or erratic, as “the times” changed around them and other influences had their effect. (Foreign intervention by example or invention or conquest, say.)

In any given time, any given place, you could define a group that is smaller than a civilization but larger than an individual family. And you could multiply these subdivisions, or could make larger and larger groupings, depending upon which way you go.

Yes. And you see, this cannot be nailed down by logic nor by careful analysis nor by extensive documentation, because there are no fixed and permanent boundaries. The boundaries are in the eye of the beholder, and in the imagination of the perceiver of relationships. Nonetheless, these are all flowers.

And you could continue to subdivide by less tangible lines of inquiry. People’s attitudes toward plants, toward various animals, toward nature in general. These are very important distinctions, invisible until searched for.

Some people love cats, and some hate them, and some are indifferent to them.

And you could discern similar fault-lines anywhere you cared to look; exactly. Well, every such division  marks a grouping, and every such grouping is a flower.

And, as you say, we could discern such fault-lines in any direction we looked.

Yes, but at the moment the emphasis is not upon the observer but upon the fact itself. You live within a certain way of experiencing the world. You contribute to it, as well, by your choices visible and invisible, tangible and – mostly – intangible.

If we choose to see things one way, we are voting for a change? Ed Carter thought our voting would determine what happened to our civilization. I don’t mean voting in voting-booths, of course.

You might try looking at it this way. Given that all possibilities always exist, your choices vote on which reality you wish to be in.

But that has problems.

Of course it does. No model can escape the limitations of its argument. Change context and you change the facts to be contended with. But it is nonetheless a productive way to see it. Feel your way into it, don’t try to logic it. You choose which reality you wish to inhabit.

Now, choosing isn’t the same as wishing. If you are in the East in the 1840s and you want to go to Oregon, or California, you don’t get there by saying, “Wouldn’t it be nice? I’m going to get there by intending that I’m there.” If you want to go to the Pacific, you have to take steps. On the one hand, every action begins with a decision or an implied intent; on the other hand, that intent is just turning the tiller or turning the steering-wheel. It doesn’t get you there by itself. Sustained intent is essential, but it is not sufficient.

And the same goes for civilizations and sub-civilizations and cultures and communities, all up and down the scale.

Indeed it does. A place to pause. Satisfied we aren’t lost yet?

I’m smiling. Maybe you got lucky. Our thanks as always.

 

20. Extension and growth

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Thursday, May 16, 2024

4:05 a.m. Gentlemen, your choice. You said yesterday you wanted to discuss giving freely vs. charging for information we get for free. But I counted three other things you began and have not finished:

  • Creating something permanent
  • The universe “making up its mind”
  • Life’s meaning

What’s your pleasure?

We haven’t lost track. That said, it’s good for you to keep track as well. It is a complex argument to set forth, and we’re easily side-tracked. However, it all evens out.

What we want to say about freely giving isn’t actually an interruption. It proceeds from our motivation of expansion through giving. You understand, we’re talking here about life more abundantly, not the acquisition of things or of talents or of accomplishments or of the love of others.

I am seeing the distinction ever more clearly as a distinction between self-definitions.

Very good. Yes. Life more abundantly means, expansion of who and what you experience yourself to be. It does not mean a smoother track of the life and the self-definition you have already.

Discussion of the pleasant helpful exchange with the man who was concerned for a stranger led to this. But so do so many things we have discussed over the years. Our sketching of emotion as the boundary between the known part of you (the ego-self) and the not-yet-grown-into parts (the unconscious, according to Jung, which we would say is what you are unconscious of; your unknown functioning that is also potential). The redefinition of 3D humans as communities of strands rather than as the units they seem.

Your friend John Nelson had his character in the novel say (in effect), “It’s always the same thing. They come to me to learn how to change without changing.” We would say, yes, that is the problem, seen one way. Seen another way, it is more that the idea of having to change is the problem. You don’t need to change what you are (you couldn’t anyway); you need to change which parts of yourself express, which makes it look like you changed, but in fact what changes is expression. If your life has been the living-out of ten things, and then becomes the living-out of those ten plus two more that you had previously not suspected you also were, will your expression to the 3D world not change? Yet you will still be what you were, only more so.

I think that could be said more simply.

It is usually easier to restate concisely than to feel your way into an initial expression. Feel free.

I get that you are meaning, we are always more than our idea of ourselves, and that the more selflessly we act, the more of ourselves we can come to know. I gather that this is because love, expansion, leads naturally to growth, while self-absorption merely reinforces the definition we begin with.

Stated a little too flatly, but more or less on track. It is in the nature of things that reaching out is the way to growth. Think of the children you once were.  Can you remember the outflowing energy, avidly interacting with the world? The state of expectation? The free enthusiasm? All that is consistent with a default state of growth. Children expect to grow. They have no other experience of life but growth. Although they are very aware of what they learn to do, the learning isn’t the center of their attention, it is the new wonder that each year brings.

“Except you be as little children, you can’t enter the kingdom of heaven.” Is that the meaning?

That is one meaning. Obviously a grown-up cannot return to a state of ignorance, but can return to a state of innocence. You can’t go back to not-knowing; you can go back to a default state of expectation.

Ah. “Life is good. All is well.”

Every child begins with that knowing. What child ever came into the world grumbling, or depressed, or lost, or jaded? It is true, a harsh life may soon warp them, but they didn’t start that way. And neither – o grownup human reading this – did you. And you can return to that earlier state.

It is a decision, as much as anything.

Haven’t we been advising you, from the very beginning with Rita so many years ago? “All is well. All is always well.” Now see it in this new context.

Let me connect a couple of dots. I’m getting that the underlying key here is, “Life is good.” Not, “Life would be good if only,” nor “Life will be good as soon as,” but “Life is good,” period. That feeling of affirmation – somebody called it the Everlasting Yes – is the key to our growth.

Not just to your growth (which implies a future state) but also to your functioning right here, right now.

Will you allow world affairs or politics or natural disasters or tax difficulties or physical problems or relationship issues or mental stagnation – or anything – to persuade you that life is anything but good? That all is anything but well? To the extent that you allow that feeling in, you hamper your own natural flowering.

And our reaching out to others is a way to preserve that knowing?

You aren’t wrong, but we offer a caution here: Be careful not to devolve into doing good for someone in order to get something, even merit. Jesus said the person who does good and gets praised for it has had his reward. One thing he meant by that little parable is that there is a big difference for you in giving for its own sake and giving in hope of some return. The latter is still good, but it isn’t the same order of thing as the former.

Your wellbeing is in growth, always. But what does that mean?

That no matter what happens to us, we can use it.

Superficially, yes. Looked at more closely,

  • Nothing “happens” to anyone. Life is not chance, no matter how it seems.
  • Therefore by definition nothing “happens” by accident. You know this with one part of your mind, but connect it to this:
  • Growth has patterns, possibilities. Therefore, different sequences of events (inner and outer) are part of different patterns.
  • Therefore – and how many times have we said it – it is up to you to choose what you want to be, what you want to grow into.
  • By 3D logic, this is a future-oriented process. But really, it is about the present, of course. Your choice is now, always. When else could it be? It will affect present, future, and past, though that may seem logically impossible. Choosing is how you create your own reality.
  • “Choosing your own reality” may be restated, “Choosing your own growth path,” or “Choosing your own ‘external’ influences as you go along.”

If you will go through the Gospels reading what Jesus said and interpreting it by way of these thoughts, you will see that you were given a trustworthy and subtle guide to growth in awareness. He did not explain any of it in these words: How could he have done so? Who could have followed? It would have been only words, and inexplicable words at that. But you have the way to read him that the very apostles did not have. Use it. Do for him what you did for the Gospel of Thomas or for Bronson Alcott. Instead of criticizing (as many do), seek for the inner thought, and use it.

Enough for the moment.

Yes, thank you. Till next time.

 

19. Permanence, meaning, and impermanence

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Wednesday, May 15, 2024

6:35 a.m. “What’s it all about,” from yet one more viewpoint, this time the interaction of points of view among time-spaces. At least, that’s what I think you meant, last time.

You are accustomed, most of you, to think in terms of future, when you consider questions of purpose. “What is this leading toward? What may we become?” but it is a little more productive to consider the same question of meaning in past and present tenses, as well. It isn’t only, “What does this lead to?” It is, also, “What did this lead to?” And, “What are we actually doing now?”

You see? To understand anything, you need to consider what and how, or you cannot understand why.

It has always seemed to me that this is one of the things wrong with slogans like, “The end justifies the means,” or “Doing evil that good may come,” or even “This is necessary for the greater good.” Besides being convenient rationales for self-serving, they are also short-sighted. That is, wrong morally and wrong factually.

We won’t go into that now, so that we can proceed to the point we hope to elucidate, but perhaps we can look at that in another time. It boils down to: “You ignore context at your peril.”

So, what does the interaction do? What did it do? What will it do?

(Bear in mind that structuring it this way, though it may seem strictly logical to you, seems so mostly because it conforms to your ideas about flowing time. You have changed those ideas in one part of your mind, but the senses and your previous indoctrination preserve the more conventional idea within you, to a greater or lesser degree, depending.)

  • Past. You live as you were “assembled.” You are composed of strands each of which “lived” its life, made its choices, became what it became, and serves as partial template for your life.
  • Present. You make your choices among these elements within you, and you influence them as they influence you. We will need to say much more about this, but the point is, every element in the equation is functioning now, changing now, becoming the basis for its future now.
  • Future. You are shaped by past decisions, but the future you that has been shaped has its input into the decisions that were made, because, again, it is all alive, it is all the eternal present.

The one feature that is obvious, no matter how you look at it, is –?

Impermanence.

Impermanence. Therefore, elementary logic tells you –?

The desired result cannot be to build something permanent. Or is it that, until we build something permanent, the game goes on?

Very good. Both, and neither.

I know, I know: It’s all in how you want to look at it.

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves. We smile. So let’s look at it both ways, first one way at a time, and then, if it proves feasible, both ways at once, and if that proves impossible, one way, then the other, then the one in terms of the other, but this goes on and on, an endless process of what you call stepwise refinement. Better – if we can accomplish it – to show the two aspects singly and together, and leave further refinement to the interested individual.

Permanence. If life is building toward a goal, a structure, what could it be? Given that everything is mind-stuff, it cannot be something that 3D would recognize as a material structure.

That isn’t clear logically.

No, but let’s proceed. The setting-out of the reasons that it is logically defensible would be a longer process than is justified. Take it as given for now.

If life is but a dream, what “solid” result can that dream be after? Couldn’t you say that, in a way, reality is the universe “making up its mind” about something?

That’s both breath-taking and irritatingly vague.

It is, isn’t it? Do you suppose that may be why this hasn’t been spelled out once and for all, long ago?

Or let’s suppose that in fact no such permanent result can be achieved. Does that amount to the universe spinning its wheels? Is it all as the poet had one of his puppets see it, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing? Treat this as a real question, not a rhetorical one. Your response will help point the way.

Well, you could argue it either way, I suppose. The point of life certainly isn’t obvious to us as we proceed through it. Mostly we have to take on faith the idea that there’s a point to it that isn’t just a fiction in our minds. But for me, anyway, I find the evidence against the “tale told by an idiot” idea to be stronger, and I’ll tell you why. It isn’t any way scientific, but it is experiential. Life feels real, particularly when we experience it emotionally, and particularly when we experience it in positive emotions in terms of others.

Describe your experience.

Well, you know, even at the time it felt like that little moment meant something. I take it this was a set-up.

No, other than helping you experience it consciously, fully, rather than half your attention elsewhere.

I see. That sounds right. Well, I was returning some books to the UVA library, Sunday. From the parking garage to the Clemons library entrance is a good number of outside steps upward – the equivalent of at least two stories, maybe three. I had a lot of books in my bag, eight I think, and it was a lot of steps. I had to pause a couple of times on my way up. I was perhaps two-thirds to the top when a voice from near the bottom asked if I was all right I said, as I do, “I will be,” meaning when I get my breath back, and I thanked him for asking. At the top of the stairs, I was sitting on a bench waiting the few minutes for Clemons to open, so he caught up with me. He asked again if I was all right, and where did I want to go (he not realizing that this was where i was headed). I told him what was going on with me, and no big deal, and in a couple of minutes the library opened and we were inside and went our separate ways. The point here is that I noticed the genuine concern this stranger had. That happens to us all the time. Sometimes we are the recipients, sometimes we are the extenders of the concern, but in either case what is it but a selfless act of love connecting two people for no ulterior purpose and with no tangible result other than the connection itself. I am a white man in his late seventies. He is a black many probably in his fifties. We know nothing of each other but the moment, and the moment both was and was not anything special.

And, you see, the real in that moment is invisible, intangible, and is without setup or result, but it is what was real.

That’s  how it feels, yes. And that’s how it always feels when I’m moved to try to help somebody, or somebody helps me. It is the realest part of reality, but I couldn’t and can’t say why or how.

Ah, but we can. That’s what we are doing.

Oh! I get it!

Yes indeed. It is when you extend beyond yourselves that you experience more of yourself than your self-definition. That is why selfishness is self-defeating. It is a form of fear, a shrinking. Love is expansion.

As simple as that. Obvious, as you say it.

Obvious after we have spent quite a bit of time laying groundwork!

Well, we’re grateful for it, you know. Now, does this answer the question about the point of life? I mean yes, expansion is via love. But still, does that prove anything about life’s meaning?

We smile. It depends entirely upon what you means by “prove.” Logically, of course not. It doesn’t begin to prove it. But viscerally? You tell us.

Of course it does. It resonates. But I’m in the position of knowing what I cannot demonstrate logically or even tentatively.

And this is an obstacle, how? Given that no one persuades anyone of anything, what do you need logical proof to do? Setting out your truth is all you can do, all you need to do. Those who have ears will hear. All you can do – or anyone can do, very much including us – is try to clarify relationships, to hint why what is so is so. That’s all that can be done or need be done, because every individual is a world to himself or herself. That is, you live in whatever world you resonate with. Reality in effect confirms your expectations.

“We create our own reality.”

That is the sense of it, yes.

I think that isn’t the way most people interpret that saying of Seth’s.

So? Interpreting the ideas others express says more about where the interpreter is than it does about what is interpreted.

We’re well beyond an hour, but I feel impelled to say what has been in my mind for this while: “Freely you have received, freely give.” What’s the relevance?

Setting forth your best understanding is a form of love. Turning it into commerce would alter its character. In fact, we will discuss that next time, though it may seem an interruption of our exposition.

Okay. Our thanks as always for all this, a quarter of a century’s worth and more.

18. Coexistence and feedback

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Tuesday, May 14, 2024

6:25 a.m. Shall we proceed? The interaction of threads through time, you said, and among different ages and organizing principles.

The world – reality – is more of one piece in its diversity than may appear, and one reason for it (or one consequence, if you wish to look at it differently) is that all ages, all points of view, are alive. It is not mostly dead or as yet uncreated except for one sliver called the present moment. It is all alive, all the time. And this has consequences, some of which are not obvious. It is a continuous contention among influences. The way of seeing things that died out ages ago (as seen through 3D time-slices) is still alive and well. The way of seeing that has not yet formed in your moment is still alive, or you would say is already alive.

Obviously there is no way of making sense of this if you think time moves, as it appears to. We trust that no one reding this is still captive to that way of seeing things, or nothing of this can make sense.

There are so many unsuspected complications, that add richness to life:

  • Your “past life” components – the threads that flourish in a different time-slice – bring to your mental life the assumptions and formulations and predilections of their age.
  • It isn’t that they are hitch-hiking on your life, watching. They are contributing.
  • What is the contribution of another point of view? It is another way of experiencing the world, it is not merely opinions and preferences.
  • You are made up not only of opinions but of visceral responses, many of which may clash violently, some of which may be closer to mutual incomprehension, and up and down the scale of cooperation and conflict.
  • As a boy you liked cufflinks and what you would now consider overly dressy clothes. You were equally at home in dungarees and flannel shirts. You may look at this as different preferences, or you may look a little deeper and ask why the preferences.
  • Similarly, your political attitudes. The surface manifestations varied by time and circumstance, but you came from the same place [this meant, the manifestations reflected the same values] despite contradictions. How is that?
  • And different people are combinations of different values, similarly. How is that, that everyone’s combination differs? Yes, it is because everybody is different, but – why are they different? And – how are they made different?

So let’s do some abstract thinking.

What is the practical effect of the simultaneous existence within you all of different ages?

Interesting way to put it, “different ages,” but I see why you put it that way. If I have a caveman in my family tree of strands, he isn’t just a point of view – he is an active vote on what I am and what I can do and what I may wish to become.

Yes – and you are an active vote within him. You will have to ignore the cognitive dissonance here, if you wish to explore this. Take in the argument first, and criticize it later. Or, if you can’t help criticizing as we go along, remember to stop while you criticize, and resume only when you are ready to perceive again. Perception and analysis: both necessary, but you can’t do both at the same time. If you try to do so, probably you will end up carping at our argument as you go, poking holes. It will do you no good at all. First play along, then see what you feel about it.

Now, it will probably help you to remember at this point that reality is all mind-stuff. It is not an uneasy alliance between mind and matter. Many of the hardest obstacles to understanding disappear if you hold in mind that what seems like physical reality – the journal book, the pen, the computer, the coffee – are mind-stuff; that you and everything are mind-stuff, rather than the separated material you appear to be.

I think we’ve gotten that. As you have said, we’re real, but only somewhat real. Reality is deeper than 3D appearances.

Still, you’d be surprised how often the idea of “things in space” recurs, because your sensory experience is continually assuming it. A reminder every so often seems worthwhile.

The fact that all of reality is mind-stuff rather than some of it being one thing and some being another will be best held in mind as you consider the idea of contact across time and across space and across your mental worlds.

The fascist or Nazi or Stalinist or Maoist world-view is alive and active. The faith in the common man of Lincoln and Jefferson is alive. The belief in the divine ordination of human slavery is alive. The sense of the world as a pit of horrors, or a den of perpetual temptation, or a garden of delight, or a valley of tears – it is all alive.

Anything that anyone ever experienced is alive. This is not a metaphor, not a figure of speech. Just as you are not units but are communities, so those communities are not divided between an active link and passive observers, but are true connections.

I get that you are saying communities in more ways than associating. I get hierarchies, structures? Classes, castes, almost? Specializations?

Yes provided you do not allow your thought to become too concrete. Don’t think in terms of trade unions or political movements or social structures in the sense of fixed organizations, but what is there, always, is hierarchy, organization.

Fluid, though, I take it.

Fluid but not shapeless. Are your lives in 3D shapeless? Could they be? But fluid, to be sure. The most stable among you still experiences flow in what you are.

I was about to ask, when you answered before I finished phrasing the question in my mind, let alone putting it on paper. The question was going to be, Why. The answer I got was, Regulation. I had the sense of a vast machine maintaining itself via feedback from all its components.

The fact that an analogy pretty much has to be either mechanical or organic is an unfortunate constriction of language. Either one has its suggestive and its misleading points. Life is not a machine (lifeless), but it is not exactly organic either. It is above either end of that polarity. Perhaps the best way to think of it is indirectly. You know how sometimes people explain the body as if it were a machine. That is more or less the case here. Not really mechanical, but with analogies to a machine’s active and interactive subassemblies working together to a pattern and for a purpose. But the machine has no will of its own, and here the analogy breaks down.

Does it, though? What about artificial intelligence, as an analogy? Isn’t that a sort of machine becoming ever more sophisticated?

That’s a good question for another time. The point here is that every bit of reality serves potentially as feedback for every other bit of reality. As always, no absolute divisions. A thing once thought, once imagined, once experienced, once fantasized in connection with something else – remains. It lives. It is a part of reality evermore. Cayce said thoughts are things. He didn’t mean they are objects. He meant they are real, and have real consequences. Mostly, people think of this in terms of present-tense action, but it is far deeper than that.

We are at a place to pause, I think. But where do we go from here?

Well, where do you suppose all this contention and cooperation and coexistence leads? What is it for? We’ll probably continue from that question, though not definitely.

This is quite a ride. Very well, our thanks as always, for all this.

 

17. Organizing principles

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Monday, May 13, 2024

4:30 a.m. Yesterday it seemed you intend to continue by saying that what we’re dealing with is not everything.

That isn’t the best way to put it. Let us just say that there is no way for any discussion to include everything. No mental space, however abstract what it is dealing with may be, can hold everything. There is no possibility of expressing a final Truth that can’t later be seen more clearly. This is not a flaw nor a punishment nor a lack of skill; it is merely a fact of life. The finite cannot comprehend – that is, embody, even mentally – that which is not bounded. Anything that is not limited has no sharp edges. You understand? It has no endings. It is like asking “Where does space end, or where does time end?” the question as posed cannot be answered, not because you don’t know enough, but because the questions silently compound incompatible assumptions.

Like, “How many angels could dance on the point of a needle.”

Yes. You might as well ask what color Heaven is, or how much does it weigh, or what is its tensile strength, or what is its monetary value.

We repeat, there’s nothing wrong with not knowing everything, especially if you are aware that you don’t know everything.

I think you are saying, by indirection, “Stick to what you can know.”

Well, you like to keep things practical. And why not? What is the advantage to going into the im-practical? By “practical” we don’t mean “useable.” It is a perfectly valid function to learn something that can’t be put to some practical use. What is not worthwhile is to pretend you are gathering what can’t be gotten. And of course the joker in that particular deck is that you can’t always know what is or is not within reach.

So let us return to the question of The Meaning of Life, remembering that from a higher perspective than we can attain, perhaps it all looks quite different. And of course, at a practical level, The Meaning of Life always means “The Meaning of My Life.” Could there be a general meaning that did not include the specific? And, if that were possible, what good would it do anybody to satisfy idle curiosity?

I can think of a reason.

To demolish competing error? Perhaps. But what good would that do, finally? Knowledge either is or is not practical for a given person.

But can’t that change over time?

What is or isn’t practical? Yes, of course it can. Why else would the same old story need to be put into new form as the ages roll on?

  • A given age acquires an understanding of how the world is. That understanding is not learned by individuals, as much as absorbed through the cultural atmosphere.
  • Folk tales, traditions, superstitions, attitudes, habits, assumptions – everything in life reflects that understanding.
  • It is not a matter of conscious creation: It is a matter of sensitivity to the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the age.
  • Now, people living in that age think, perhaps. They begin to be dissatisfied with the myth they have been raised on. Their thought may not be more profound than the myth; it may be, and often is, shallower. But it is different.
  • For whatever reason, one age of development passes into another. The myth by which people live changes, to greater or lesser degree. Effectively, the world changes, because of course all you can know of the world is filtered through your beliefs.
  • This altered understanding permeates the social life in the same way as before; it is in the air people breathe. And again, over time, thought, external circumstance, many things, go into the alteration of the zeitgeist.
  • Externally, the times change, as measured by astrology. Internally they change, measured by anthropology or sociology or psychology. The change is real, and not less so because it is not of strictly internal or strictly external origin. Indeed, that is a measure of how real a thing is – how far it extends.
  • All this talk of change and of different understandings involves non-3D and 3D interaction both, of course. That is the nature of 3D life. But it is easy for you as observer of life to underestimate one or the other factor.

We have said more than once that any new age is going to incorporate different materials than did the previous one. It will resurrect some things from the taint of superstition – the mantic arts, for example – and will relegate some previous beliefs into the category of superstition – the idea of meaningless coincidence, for example. Until the new view coheres, it will feel sometimes like a jumble. Until the proper organizing principle appears, you will live in several worlds, changing your viewpoint perhaps every few minutes.

And you have been providing us the organizing principle. I got that.

Not the organizing principle, but one of them. No age has only one organizing principle. It is the conflict among organizing principles within a common worldview that makes an age. For instance, in your present age that is passing away, any of several organizing principles may be a person’s anchor, while yet all people share a common approach.

  • A religious person may believe in God, may see reality through that lens.
  • A materialist may believe what can be experienced by the senses, by “common sense.”
  • A politically active person may share either of the two beliefs but center on the question of how to shape or reshape society.
  • A scientist, too, may be either religious or materialist and may be interested only in understanding some aspect of the world more completely.
  • And on and on. You can extend the list merely by thinking of the kind of lives people live, and of course there is no need to restrict refinement to what people do for a living. It is approach, not how that approach is channeled, that we refer to here.

As it is now, so it has always been and will always be: No matter what the age, it will comprise multiple organizing principles and will be all the richer for it.

So, we are providing you one way to better understand the world and your place in it. The fact that contradictory or overlapping or complementary views will also thrive is not reason for worry, nor a sign of failure. This is not a zero-sum game.

And I gather that it is not only among us but within us that multiple viewpoints may contend.

Of course. And this ties in with the various threads you comprise. Bertram the Norman monk has a very different view of life than you do, or than Joseph Smallwood does, or than does the other Joseph – the Egyptian priest. You all share certain values; that doesn’t mean you see them in the same way or in the same context.

That seems obvious a you say it, but I hadn’t yet put it together.

Everything we have said today is obvious once you see the connection, and may be obscure until then.

This feels now like a long lead-up to seeing threads differently.

Not differently, perhaps, so much as in a different context. This shows you how threads not only help shape you, but how, in so doing, they bring something of other ages into your active psychic space.

Enough for now. Next time, perhaps we will say more about the interaction of threads through time and among different ages and organizing principles. We are tying you as individuals in 3D to you as part of the non-3D mesh, you see.

Well, I do, sort of. I’ll take your world for where we’re going. Thanks as always.

 

16. Why and How

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Sunday, May 12, 2024

4:55 a.m. Yesterday you said you might continue with the question of what’s the purpose —seen from the overall perspective – of people going through the 3D experience. I’m sure one or two of us would like to know!

Yes, because life in 3D can be hard, and nobody wants to go through something hard thinking it may not mean anything. Who would?

In a way, everything we have ever told you has been leading to this question of “Why.” We began there, we’ve continued there, and we’ll wind up there, because “Why” is what it is all about. By the same token, and without contradiction, you could say everything has been about “How,” because there’s no explaining why without explaining how things work.

You could justly say it has all about healing, about communicating with non-3D and with 3D (that is, each other). You could say it is all about love, or all about gravity. Do you see? It’s all one thing, and the less you feel that, the less sense things make.

Did we not have to show you first that you are not alone? That is one of the inevitable illusions common to 3D life, that you are each alone, that life is transitory, that “accidents happen” and no one and nothing is safe. Can you see that all those illusion s breed fear, and that fear is destructive to sure communication with life’s wellsprings? If you are alone in the woods and you think you are lost and it’s nighttime and you think there may be wolves or bears or banshees or whatever perils, how well do you suppose you will be thinking?

Ah! “Perfect love casts out fear.”

It isn’t quite that love and fear cannot coexist. It is closer to say, the more of one, the less of the other.

Well, I always did wonder how various martyrs went to their deaths so calmly and how some submitted tortures so calmly, even gaily, like the one who was being roasted on a grill and told them to turn him over, he w as done on that side. Can’t remember who that was, but it wasn’t some dim legend, it was attested. American Indians, too, were known to be pretty immune to fear of death or to torture, so it isn’t as if the thing were dependent upon a given faith, the way people often assume.

You could almost look at life in 3D as a ghost story, full of perils, scary experiences, gruesome episodes (a la Hansel and Gretel, for instance), and exaggerated division of characters into good and evil, stupid and clever, fast learners and slow. What’s the purpose of a ghost story, beyond reminding you that you are not trapped in that reality, not tortured by witches who want to kill you, not at the mercy of the merciless?

[They said ghost stories, but it seems they meant fairy tales.]

That’s an interesting take on it. So are you saying 3D functions to the non-3D as a ghost story, telling them they’re to thank their lucky stars they aren’t in 3D form?

You think you are jesting, and in fact you are half-serious. It can be hard to remember, in the face of the difficulties of language with its division into  “me” and “them,” but you cannot keep things straight until you remember that you in 3D are also in non-3D. It isn’t a “me” versus “them.” Nor is it a matter of plurals, except relatively. But it is perhaps a matter of a part of the overall consciousness splitting off to play a role for the greater consciousness of the whole.

That some part of the all-that-is experiences 3D limitations enlightens us all? Isn’t that what Charles Sides was telling me is some religion’s view of human life, that God split himself so as to experience himself more consciously?

Doesn’t Carl Jung say the same thing? Not in so many words, not in the same mythic container, but it amounts to that. And why should it surprise anyone that the same truth is experienced by people treading different paths?

Only, look at some of the obstacles people face in attempting to even consider such a reality. Too many facts contradict it – if they were facts and not persistent illusion.

  • Every person is a separate unit.
  • You are born, you live, and you die. Then either you reincarnate to do it all over again, or you go to heaven or hell, or it’s over.
  • Time passes. What’s done is done.
  • The world is full of good people and bad, in perpetual conflict. Alternatively, it is full of people part good and part bad, and the conflict is within as well as without.
  • “Things happen.” The world is cause and effect with its consequent accidents.

We could go on, but you see the point. What in this list of beliefs would inspire trust that All is well, or All is one?

But that’s part of the experience! How could anyone in non-3D experience doubt, lostness, isolation, fear – let alone all the things in 3D life you find pleasant and so call good?

At any one slice of time-space, you will find part of the universal consciousness experiencing everything that can be experienced. Does that mean some are winners and some losers, when you look at it overall?

Everything works out over time, you mean?

Even that implies there are some individuals who won and some who lost. But if you and we are all part of all-that-is, how can a gain or a loss be more than somewhat real? If a soul goes through a horrific life, how much does that mean to it overall? We don’t mean, “Any one soul is only a tiny bit of the whole and may be sacrificed for the greater good,” but more like, “One toothache does not define a lifetime.”  What is a man’s threescore and ten against eternity? Or to put it another way, what is being the conduit of a given experience against being the conduit, equally, of every experience?

I’m thinking about it. Are you meaning that pain and suffering (even if nothing more than a life lived in personal isolation and meaninglessness) sharpens the consciousness of the whole somehow?

That is one effect; it is not exactly the reason why. What you just said is somewhat the fact, and the deduction from the fact, that Dr. Jung observed, translating his 3D medical observations and his non-3D intuitions and explorations. It is a valid statement, but it is not an adequate statement. It doesn’t take into account why self-awareness is desired and used by the All-that-is.

Transcendence!

If you don’t want to stay as you are – if you wish to grow, to improve – you have to move in some way, and it is better to move from knowledge than to move from ignorance, as much as possible.

So all-that-is isn’t perfect.

Better to say it isn’t perfected, and why should it be? Indeed, how could it ever be?

We don’t commonly think of reality as growing, changing. We in reality, yes, but not reality itself.

So would you prefer to think of reality as accomplished, without purpose, an endless treadmill?

Hmm. Not perfect and nothing wrong with not being perfect.

Not being over, and nothing wrong with being still in process.

Interesting thought. Where do we go from here?

Do you have any reason to be sure that what you can perceive, what can affect you – what you consider All-that-is – is in fact all?

Sounds like you’re planning to bring back the question of how “everything” can be unfinished.

Our examination of everything is what is unfinished.

Well, I’ll have to assume you know what you’re doing. This wouldn’t give me a starting-place. Our thanks for everything so far.

 

15. The Eternal Now and the flow of time in 3D

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Saturday, May 11, 2024

5:20 a.m. You said you may perhaps continue on how life does, and does not, lead to something. Shall we proceed?

The point to be seized on is the nature of the eternal now (“I am who am”) as opposed to the nature of the eternal flow of time through the 3D. or we might better say, the flow of the 3D through time. You are always in the eternal now; you are always experiencing it in two contrary ways.

Intuitively you can tune into the boundless sea as it is and remains. Sensorily you can only experience the current, carrying you down the river. It isn’t time that changes, it is your experience of time, and that depends upon which of your reporting systems you tune into.

For some reason, that is very clear to me. I can’t say it was previously.

You had the concepts separately; we merely provided a way to understand how contradictory manifestations could have a common nature.

Yet it didn’t seem to come as a big “Aha!”

We smile. It doesn’t always come with fireworks. You had the big Aha when you got that times always remained but were not in your sensory grasp except for one moment at a time, as your senses conveyed it.

So is that all we need to say on the subject?

For some, yes. Others might profit by a few words more. As always, people’s ability to readjust concepts depends upon the concepts they hold beforehand.

You might consider how your 3D lives are affected by your understanding or lack of understanding of your place in time. A lot depends upon your grasp of the concept of the eternal now on the one hand, and your tentative grasp of an ever-changing experience of that eternal now, on the other. A lot of the frantic fanaticism of your time stems from people thinking, “It’s all going to hell,” followed by either “and I can do nothing about it,” or “and I have to do something about it.”

You understand? If time is what it appears to be, then anything that happens in your 3D experience of the world is real, and terribly important. It is life or death, you know? That’s the saying, “a matter of life or death.” But if you break through the crust of the apparent, you see that in fact nothing is at stake, there is no “life or death,” and there is no movement that could bring anyone to hell, or to heaven either.

So there is your paradox, and it will be resolved here in the only way a paradox can ever be resolved: by taking it to a higher or deeper level, to see what brings forth the appearance of paradox. We have said many times, paradoxes do not exist in reality, but the appearance of paradox does, often enough. In such case, it is no use to be choosing one horn or the other of a dilemma; that merely amounts to accepting as true what is only appearance.

So let’s set it out carefully, trying to represent each side of the argument in a form those caught in it would recognize.

  1. Time is eternal, unflowing. Meditation, mental stillness, anomalous experience, the product of the eight right understandings (call it): They let your non-3D mind convey a sense of eternity to your 3D mind. In effect, they carry an awareness to a place that can experience it only second-hand. Eternity is not “a very long flow of time.” It is all time, or timelessness, whichever way you wish to see it. It is the quality of time without the constriction that inevitably accompanies your 3D experience.
  2. Time is flow, as your 3D body is carried from one moment to the next, oblivious of any other. Anyone living in the world is aware of the present moment’s urgency. You must breathe, you must in general maintain the body; your existence and welfare depend to some degree upon your vigilance and upon what happens around you. Threats, difficulties, predicaments, can not be merely brushed aside as being unreal. Within that 3D context, they are as real as you are.

Now, both these things are true, and you in 3D are living at the intersection of the two. Some of you at any given time live closer to one end of the polarity, others live closer to the other end. You may or may not move along that line between the two; you may even oscillate. Doesn’t matter. The point here is that it is a line between polarities, not a choice of one being real and one being unreal. As usual, in 3D everything is somewhat real; that is, real in one context, unreal in another, and never as simple as any one viewpoint would see it.

So you see, Jesus said “The poor you have always with you.” He said you must not be taken in by “wars and the rumors of wars.” Do you think that meant he didn’t care about human suffering? This man whose entire ministry was to teach that you are all brothers and sisters, products of a living eternal presence that is aware of you and loves you?

But if he did care, why tell people not to concentrate on social problems? The answer, of course, is that he was teaching them to get to the reality beyond what their senses could report, so that then they could live more effectively. That is one of many meanings of “I have come that you may have life more abundantly.” A freer person, a calmer person, is more effective in the world. But that effectiveness is mostly by-product. It is a beneficial side-effect, but a side-effect nonetheless.

Do you want to correct the world’s injustices? The paradoxical truth is, you can’t do it by being immersed in 3D as if non-3D did not exist. Try to rework the world that way and you will not cure the world’s evil; you will probably increase it. Always you must act from love, if you don’t’ want your actions to recoil against you – and if you act without reference to the reality of the non-3D, how will you act from love whenever it appears to conflict with self-interest, with “realism”?

Now, we know this will meet resistance, but we want you to consider this anyway. On the one hand, you had George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and even Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. Like everyone, they had their flaws, they made their compromises among evils. Nonetheless, in extremis, they prayed, particularly the first two in an earlier time in your civilization, but so did the latter two, in a different way, a way closer to desperation than to connection: When they had exhausted their resources, they prayed for help.

Superstition? Some of you will think so. But consider on the other hand Stalin and Hitler and Mussolini. Can you envision any one of them praying, even superficially? Stalin famously asked, “How many legions does the Pope have?”

Be careful in your assumptions here. We are not taking sides in 3D affairs in the way you might think from seeing this listing. Another example may make it clearer. Robert Lee prayed for his enemies as well as for his cause and his armies, and he prayed every night. He was a strong warrior, no dweller in cloud-cuckoo-land, and he prayed as devoutly as did Lincoln. As Lincoln said, both sides prayed and the brayers of both could not be answered, and prayers of neither was answered fully. But the result is not the point here, it is the nature of the men. They wouldn’t have thought of it in this way, but in effect they were recognizing that 3D reality is affected by something that can’t be quantified but nonetheless exists.

What we are getting at is that it matters less what you believe (that is, the form in which your belief is clothed) then that you believe (that is, that you remain aware that 3D is only part of a larger reality).

There is more to be said on this, but perhaps a little distance between this and any continuation will be well, that the concepts will have time to penetrate where necessary.

So, next time?

Next time perhaps we can look at what good it does reality in general (that is, when considered from an All-D perspective) that people go through 3D experience.

Ed Carter told me once that 3D graduates were considered graduates from boot camp, which I took to mean, toughened, more self-reliant.

3D life does harden you, in the sense that glass may be annealed. That doesn’t mean the glass is being prepared for warfare.

Our thanks as always.