The Other World

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

Friday, May 10, 2024

5:50 a.m. Good morning, friends. It is an underappreciated aspect of this work, I think, the uncertainty as to how to proceed. I sit down to resume and I see a binder of previous sessions and I have almost a moment of panic sometimes. “Where is the argument going? How do we proceed? How can I continue when I don’t know where we’re going?” and this after all these years of practice and reassuringly solid results. It takes a certain resolution, sometimes, to live in faith that the next installment will appear and that it will all hold together.

And in earlier days you used to wonder if you were making it all up behind your own back. You will remember Rita reassuring you that it was not humanly possible to produce all that “out of your hat,” so to speak. You used to pretend she was saying, “You aren’t smart enough to do that,” knowing that she wasn’t meaning that at all. But this is worth keeping on the record here, even though we are now sticking closer to the material and less to the process, because after all one important aspect of the material is the redefinition of what is possible to the average person. It won’t hurt them to remember that doubt and even panic are part of the process. Doubt and even panic are not important obstacles – provided that you resolve to overcome them! – but it is well to be aware that they are liable to crop up, from time to time.

I suppose they help keep us honest. Okay, then, why do we bother to choose, given that nothing lasts?

Ah, but you see, that “given that nothing lasts” is how life seems to you, but it stands reality on its head. Haven’t you conceded that all moments of time-space exist forever, even if only one such moment at a time can be experienced as a 3D moment? So how can you say, “Nothing lasts”? Quite the contrary: Everything lasts.”

Everything lasts and yet one’s pathway through it changes continuously, millisecond by millisecond. Take a moment to absorb implications here.

It’s jaw-dropping. Boy, when you guys get to tying up loose ends, you don’t fool around. On the one hand, every moment lasts forever. On the other hand, by our decisions, we construct a path through all those moments, a path we can alter at any time. You’re going to have to spell this out some. I can feel my brain exploding.

Bullets, then.

• All paths exist. All paths are good. All is always well. You create your own reality. All is one.
• These things cannot be understood while people believe time disappears, people are separate, and 3D life is as it appears. At the same time, they cannot be said in any way that makes sense to people whose mental world is composed of the concepts built on 3D senses and their perceptions, and the logic that stitches it together.
• Note, we do not say these things cannot be said. We say they cannot be said and heard from a stunted view of reality.
• What is the purpose of life? We have told you, to construct yourself – to continually hone yourself – by what you choose within narrowly constrained (i.e. 3D) conditions.
• And what is the importance of that? To continually create and re-create the world. Not the 3D world alone, not even the non-3D world alone – for neither of them exists alone – but the All-D that is “heaven and earth.”
• And how is that possible? It is not only possible but inevitable, because “you” as you experience yourself as an isolated 3D individual do not exist. You exist only as a part of a larger being from which you were formed. You are part of larger beings, and they are part of still larger beings, just as you may be said to be a binding element for smaller beings, and they of still smaller.
• Reality is all one thing, as the galaxy is all one thing, or a nebula, etc. Any level of abstraction is a sort of layer which you consider a unit because it coheres.

That isn’t clear. You mean, I think, that reality as a whole contains everything (obviously, by definition) but everything within it has a different specific gravity, so that in effect it forms layers of common content which we experience as relative units.

Yes. So you perceive classes of things, and what hose classes are depends upon how you categorize them. In effect, you create the divisions by recognizing them. [It occurs to me, typing this, maybe that’s what it meant in the Bible where God has Adam give names to the animals: Adam was making and recognizing relative units. Maybe.] Change your system of definitions and behold, reality looks different. Animal, vegetable, mineral, etc., and nothing wrong with the classification. But then look at the same phenomena in a different way and they are atomic bundles; look again and they are mind-stuff, slowed down for convenience. In that sense, the world is as you perceive it. Change perceptions (and change con-ceptions) and you experience it differently. In effect, you think of it differently and it changes.

Or we have an anomalous experience and we experience it differently and then our conceptions change.

It isn’t an “or” in the sense of a different interpretation. Both motions occur – perception sometimes leads, sometimes follows. A reciprocating process, as in so many things.

Now, pause. We would suggest, re-read. As Bob Monroe used to say on his tapes, we will wait for you.

Okay, done, though I skipped the angst and the part after the bullets.

You got what we wanted fresh in your mind. You see the point, here? Every moment is precious and yet every moment is only one variant. Your work at creating yourselves is critical to the existence of the world, yet, again, is only one variant. Your lives as individuals – to the extent that you may be said to be individuals – are your own business, and yet concern everyone.

Christians seem to think this is all leading to an end. I’m fairly sure that’s why the church fathers included the Apocalypse at the end of the Bible. But it isn’t really about leading to something at all, is it?

It is, and it isn’t.

Ah yes, “Yes but no.”

Well, sometimes that’s the only way to evade what seem logical necessities but are actually misunderstandings.

• Life does “lead to something.” This is the nature of honing what you are. It is the purpose of striving, of bettering yourself, of helping others. If it didn’t lead to something, what difference could it make?
• Life is not about “leading to something.” Every moment is; every moment always is. A man asks God who he is and God says, “I am who am.” He doesn’t say, “I am who I always was,” nor “I am who I will always be.” He stays in the eternal present.

I assume you aren’t saying the Bible’s account is to be taken in its own terms.

The Bible, like all scripture, is a set of accounts of people encountering something transcendent and reacting to the encounter. It doesn’t matter if they (or we) call that transcendence God or Waldo. You as transcenders must get beyond your allergy to scripture (without becoming slave to it) if you are to obtain a more sophisticated understanding. Do you suppose that we in these sessions can provide you with what scriptures can provide? What’s the point of having several vast libraries centering on precisely the things that most interest you, and never consulting it?

Next time we can continue to look at how life does and does not “lead to something,” perhaps.

Our thanks as always.

 

Thursday, May 9, 2024

4 a.m. Very well, gentlemen, you’re up. Strands and ultimate time lines?

Remember we said “how you may wish to think of them.” We are revolutionizing the concept, but that doesn’t mean the new view is “right” and previous views are “wrong.” It is less about truth and error than about the new light shed on any subject by changing viewpoint. In practice, your view will be a combination of new and old. We’re encouraging you to make that the theory as well as the practice.

Viewpoint is not a zero-sum game. A new view needn’t discredit an old one, but may actually reinforce it, in a way, by adding nuance and explanation.

I’m certainly seeing that in my reading. I am bingeing on histories from the newly reopened UVA library, and as always it is surprising how a new view of a subject I felt I knew will show it in an entirely new light. I have come to see that we never really know more than an approximation, a shadow, of what really happened, and how, and why.

And if that is so of 3D subjects, how much more is it likely to be when dealing with subjects for which there is little or no sensory evidence. But this is not cause for mourning; it may equally well be considered to be Rita Warren’s definition of happiness, an endless research project with no need for writing reports.

However, having pointed out that a new way of seeing is not the same as a complete overturning of what you know, still it is true that it can be a revolution. So let us continue to revolutionize.

You have come to think in terms of alternate time-lines, alternate realities, creation or discovery of new versions of the future as created by your deciding this rather than that. This is somewhat true. However, it can be improved as a model. We could not have done this beginning with the generally accepted model of time nor the generally accepted model of what human life is. But now we can build upon the intermediate platform.

The change we urge you to try on is difficult to describe. We might say, exchange time for space in your model of how there can be infinite numbers of potential universes, each one created by choice – with, of course, everyone choosing. Consider that each of these versions exists sequentially rather than simultaneously. This isn’t right either, but we probably need to use this as a halfway-house concept.

• Begin with your current situation, whatever it may be. As a result of every background situation in your life, you are where you are.
• You make some decision, or someone else does, known or unknown to you.
• If it is you making the decision, the world changes (seen sequentially) or splits off a new variant (seen as simultaneously existing). This is you guiding your life by conscious or unconscious intent.
• If it is someone else making a decision that affects you, the world still alters in the same way (and may be seen either of two ways), but this is you being affected by “the world,” by life.
• In either case, you are now in a world different from the one you were in before you or someone made a decision. Did that new place appear from nothing? Or, did you move your awareness into a place that already existed? Or maybe, is it not a place at all, but a thought?
• We have occasionally described reality as a constantly changing light show, each flickering light being someone’s decision with its instant and its longer-range consequences. You will notice, we have not described it as an uncounted number of alternative light-shows.
• The world is mind-stuff, remember, not rocks in space. When you dream, does a change in the dream split off alternate versions of the dream?

You can see perhaps what we are now doing.

You seem to be tying up a lot of loose-end concepts that never fit together very well.

They each served a purpose of explaining this or that, but they lacked the over-arching concept that would make sense of them as a system. That is what we are about now. Only, don’t assume this new series will leave no loose ends. As we have said many times, you never get to The Truth; at best you get closer to it.

Now, perhaps some will be uncomfortable with a concept of perpetual flux rather than the seemingly stable collection of alternative realities. If you are one of those, deal with that discomfort: It will teach you something. But it is in the nature of life as experienced from a 3D background to change. Change, not stasis, is the default condition. That means that a model that considers alternative universes and parallel timelines to be simultaneously existing is less true than a model that we will try to describe. You might think of it as a level of reality in which any conceivable particular universe or timeline may be found in potential, not in actual.

I think you mean, it exists if we go looking for it, or happen to be plopped into it, but not otherwise. You seem to be saying alternative universes and timelines come into existence and go out of existence depending upon choices made. We never think of alternatives disappearing.

That isn’t quite the way to put it either, but perhaps between us we have sent out the spark that will lead some to an intuitive leap. The differences are more temporal than (in effect) physical. Yet this still doesn’t quite capture it. Perhaps best to say, consider the Buddhist emphasis on impermanence. It is not confined to 3D affairs.

It sounds almost like a two-dimensional table in a spreadsheet. If you read this one way, it is sequential, read the other way, it is simultaneous.

Yes, very good. And you have no good 3D models to use to get that concept across. Isn’t it interesting that you used as model an abstract concept that can be expressed in 3D logic.

Now, we recognize that this change in concept creates as many puzzles as it solves, but that is the nature of changing base camps. Given persistence, we will get to the goal nonetheless.

People may wonder what’s the point of life if it doesn’t create anything that lasts.

Yes. What’s the point of a kiss, or a sunset, or the taste of a ham and cheese sandwich, or the working of a crossword puzzle? And, indeed, to some people that question will seem to reinforce the doubt, because they already wonder why bother doing anything, when it won’t last.

And that’s our next installment? The purpose of choosing?

It may well be. We’ll see. But it is more important to clear away the aura of certainty that may grow around a concept than to replace the concept with another that will grow the same kind of moss.

And you are just the guys to set the stone rolling. Very well, our thanks as always.

 

Wednesday, May 8, 2024

6:50 a.m. “Our strands and how they change us, and vice versa, and why,” you said.

You tend to think of yourselves as individuals responsible for yourselves, and to some extent this is true. But it isn’t the whole truth. Once you grow into a wider awareness, you begin to recognize wider, deeper, responsibilities and opportunities. There is no useful generalization to be made as to how long this process may take, nor where it will begin, nor how it will manifest. Some are born knowing, you might say, and all their lives are a struggle for more clarity, wider application. Others may come in with little or no knowing, and have little or no interest or ability to draw connections. And, as usual, every intermediate position.

The differences among you don’t matter to your own “individual” task and opportunity. Wherever you begin, however you are constituted, however motivated you are to know more and be more, opportunities will be right there in your life, every day, and it is up to you whether you recognize them and choose to take advantage of them. This is one meaning of our saying that you are in 3D to choose.

(A word on choice: Choosing may be momentary or it may be continuous. If it is momentary, we call it a decision. If continuous, we call it intent. You all do both, of course, and one form does not obviate the others. Sometimes, it is true, they contradict each other, and this is not necessarily a disadvantage. There is such a thing as changing your mind, changing direction.)

But you do not choose in isolation, because there is no isolation.

Not mentally, no.

Well, not mentally, but what does that mean, when you look at it closely? What in you does the deciding? Is it not your mind, existing in non-3D and 3D both? Many factors in a decision relate to the 3D body, yes. But decisions are made and ratified and unmade by the indefinable you-ness of you, and that is not primarily physical, but mental.

Another way to say it would be that you are mostly mental, given that your body and its surroundings are also made of mind-stuff.

A third way to look at it would be to consider the physical component to be the slowest of the various elements comprising you. It is by nature more suited to function as drag than as pathfinder. It maintains the stability of whatever your life is at any moment; it does not, and is not designed to, pioneer.

Perhaps you have been reading between the lines, here, and  have intuited where we are going with this. Your life-shaping is much more complex than it appears at first glance. It goes on with the continual participation of everything you are, to greater or less degree, and to greater or less degree of awareness and choice on your part.

• “With the continual participation of everything you are,” in practice, this means the most appropriate, the most available, the most promising, for in practice nobody could actively incorporate everything, given that “everything” would mean the entire world, if examined closely enough. But to limit our examination to the most appropriate, available and promising extensions of yourself is not a trivial extension!

Whatever you are, however long you have been at this business of growth, however far you have to go to reach whatever goals you have set for yourself, you will still find more possibilities, appropriate, available, and promising. Surely this is an encouraging fact of life.

• “To greater or less degree,.” Not every moment is right for spurts of growth. Some times are times of consolidations. Sometimes you may feel that “Nothing is happening, and maybe nothing will ever happen again.” In such moments, merely live in faith that all is well. You will see that your life does not leave you in the lurch. When the grower is ready (we might say, paraphrasing the saying), the growth opportunities will appear.
• “To greater or less degree of awareness and choice on your part.” Just as “the times” are not always right for growth – at least, for any growth you can recognize – so your life’s rhythms are not always in tune with the form of growth you recognize. But, more than that, your baseline degree of awareness and choice will vary: by lifetime, by moments within that lifetime, by reaction to choices made. This is nothing to worry about, for it might equally be phrased, “You can have as much awareness as you really want, provided that you are open to waiting for it as well as working for it.”

Now, that lifetime of shaping yourself does not go on in isolation, as we said. This means 3D, not less than non-3D, interaction. Your everyday life continually feeds you opportunities to react in ways that aid your growth toward what you want to be, but they don’t force growth on you, you have to choose it.

Now let’s look at non-3D influences, which is what we have been building up to.

Your various strands are making choices just as you are, which means you and they are never dealing with a static situation, nor with a stable background. If the influences that yesterday pulled your toward A have changed what they want (in effect, have changed what they are), perhaps today they pull you toward B. And you have the same potential effect on each of them.

Consider this carefully. Take a moment, for it may not be at all obvious what a world-shaking redefinition of your life this is.

At one time, people believed that the earth, considered geologically, was solid, set, relatively unchanging. Gradually they learned that what seemed like interruptions – earthquakes, say – were in fact only particular manifestations of continuing processes of movement that had gone unsuspected.

It is the same with you. Your lives are not mostly static continuity with occasional disruptive moments. They are continual movement, adjustment, amid the pulling and tugging of various forces usually beneath your level of awareness.

Every aspect of your world moves. Every aspect chooses, moment by moment. Each aspect may at any moment influence your life, or it may not, but you can never be sure beforetime.

This has so many implications! Parallel universes, alternative life-streams, etc. you tend to think of another universe as “somewhere there,” but you could equally correctly see it as “sometime when.”

This is clear to me, but I doubt it will be clear to anyone who needs to get it via words rather than direct feed.

They have their own direct feed, of course. It is merely a matter of allowing themselves to heed it. Let’s just leave it that everything is in perpetual flux; there is no final state.

We’ve used up an hour, but have you gotten said what you’d hoped?

What we have said so far is not trivial. The longer you consider it, the more connections it will open up to you. Enough for the moment.

All right. As an aid to me, our next topic?

We will probably continue with this question of influences among strands as it affects how you may wish to think of alternate lives.

Our thanks as always.