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[Change of pace. My friend Dick Werling sent this, that his son wrote, and i found it so entertaining that I thought I’d pass it along.   In concept, it reminded me of “The Human Holiday,” which some of you may remember from many years ago.

[I hope you enjoy it.]

Consent Forms

By Rob Werling, M.D.

Are you still there? Okay. A representative from the organization is ready to speak with you and will be with you shortly. Be advised that this conversation is being recorded for training and legal purposes. I will remain on the line for support as needed. Please hold.

Okay, uh, your complaints have been escalated, and Org tells me we need to get to the bottom of this as quickly as possible. Can you briefly tell me exactly how long ago you ran out of consent forms and what steps you’ve taken to resolve this problem?

No, I’m saying. Listen…thank you for taking my call, but I’m saying—if you’d look at your documentation—I’ve been putting it in my reports all along. This planet never got any consent forms. From the beginning, there weren’t any. And what steps I’ve taken–

Wait, stop right there… Are you saying you’ve been sitting on this problem for four billion years?! Are you saying that you can’t document that any of the clients on this planet was ever informed of the risks, benefits, and alternatives of incarnation before being subjected to it?!

Well, of course we’ve been working on it! Looking for forms—we tried to adapt an income tax form we found, but it was too complicated for any of us to work with. We’ve tried various workarounds and stopgaps. I send a request every single time I file a report, and this is the first time I’ve had an inkling that Org was even aware of the problem, much less cares about it.

Oh, people care about this one. (Mm hmm…) You’ve been sending our customers willy-nilly into their mind-boggling existences, certain to be hungry, angry, and overwhelmed, basically against their will. Now people at Org know about it, and they care. (Mm hmm…) And if I were you, I’d be worried.…

I have been worried, as I’ve been reporting this whole time! This is a frighteningly fluid situation. It started out slow, but once it got up to speed—I mean, we’re just playing Whac-A-Mole here. Everything changes so fast! Honestly, we’ve been considering just filling out the paperwork to have the planet condemned, because it’s so badly infested with life.

Well, now, we’ll see about that. Let’s get the data first. Condemning a planet is a major undertaking. Can you start from the beginning?

Yes, of course. Sorry. Uh, let’s see. After the usual dust-gas cataclysm, etc., etc., there was a fairly standard Brownian soup. It was unusual in that it accumulated a lot of liquid water, and we did start seeing some interesting chemical anomalies, but it was nothing we hadn’t seen before.

Just so we’re all on the same page, “water” is an oxygen atom with a couple of hydrogen knobs at one end, if you aren’t familiar with it. Curiously, the thermal range between its melting and boiling points is pretty narrow, and coincidentally, this particular planet has had zones well within that range for most of its existence, due to its stable orbit at a peculiar proximity to the pleasant star it revolves around.

Right, and we knew that having an excess of liquid water is a risk factor, but we had all been through Org’s water-and-other-unusual-liquids management module, so we knew what to look for. Still, I think we were caught off guard when nucleotides started combining and actually replicating.

Nucleotides…

Nucleotides are often referred to as the “building blocks” of macromolecules known as DNA and RNA. (Right, right.) Depending on your perspective, they are like Pringles, or cars on an LA freeway, or Mentos. They fit together and make nucleic acids, which [as far as people on Earth reading this transcript know], are the basis of life. [Without which, there could not be potato chips or a city of angels, or puppies, or your mother.]

At one point, as you know, I was able to get set up with waivers for those little mindless macromolecules, because the risk of “getting into anything ethically problematic” (Org’s words) is just so small that it was a formality, really.

Right, standard, just waivers. No actual signatures required.

But once the polymerizing self-replicating macromolecules stumbled into lipid bilayer envelopes (oil bubbles) and iterated on that a beaucoup number of times (too numerous to count, literally), we were dealing with cells (self-replicating oil bubbles), and then I knew we needed help.

Right, because then they basically had self-replication and metabolism, which—mind you—almost never happens. So obviously at that point you were obligated to file the appropriate forms.

That’s when I started sending my reports with supernova distress signals on the covers. Evidently that wasn’t enough to get anyone’s attention.

Well, we do have documentation of responding to a supernova’d report on macromolecules.

Yes, and thank you—obviously—but when I finally learned there was a huge pile of macromolecule waiver forms supposedly en route, most of the replicating chemicals were either spinning themselves out in nonsensical infinite loops, or else they’d gotten themselves integrated into actual viable cells, and the horse was out of the barn.

The what was out of the what?

(This is a local metaphor for “it was too late.”) Horses are herbivorous ungulates, usually domesticated but not killed and eaten by humans, in contrast to their close relatives cows, who, together with their human domesticators, make up roughly 96% of mammalian biomass on the planet, and are just delicious. [Proc Nat Acad Sci, 2018-ish.] Barns are buildings where horses and cows usually stay, waiting to be killed or whatever.

But the pity is, I honestly think we’d have been okay if Org had gotten involved back then, because single cells are so simple. It was over a billion years of single cells just minding their own business, replicating and dying, leaving behind a carpet of dead cells, which nourished all the future cells, coming along. We were able to handle the ethics of that kind of life on our own for quite a while. We just kept using the macromolecule waivers, and everything seemed to be fine.

It was so quiet. Bacteria are such simple creatures. Each perspective is unique and clean. They have their tiny little selves and their infinitely humungous soup-world. They twinkle for a bit and then go out. They get hungry and move toward food; they get cold and move toward heat. They self-replicate, okay, whatever; it’s no one’s business, really, what happens in bacterial bedrooms.

Well, you sort of know pornography when you see it, don’t you? I don’t think this business of cell division qualifies, but it is mesmerizing to watch. (See for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbNp9DBbTkU). Sorry. Please, go on.

You get used to that quiet hum of hunger, and their little life-lights popping on and flickering out. Looking back now on that almost-contemplative serenity, I see that we may have gotten complacent. Maybe we could have pushed harder for a response from Org.

Maybe you should have, because who has ever been satisfied with being a grease bubble, eating nothing but old dead grease bubbles? Obviously. Can you blame them for wanting to introduce a little drama into their billion-year-old soup? And it’s a slippery slope from there. You simply can’t commit someone to the vicissitudes of the first-person perspective without prior informed consent! 

I see that now, because the shit really hit the fan when they stopped just eating the carpet and started eating each other, before the lights had flickered out, consuming the life force while it still had a perspective. Worse, they started enslaving each other, engulfing and expropriating other cells with impunity. Can I tell you about eukaryotes? Cells with nuclei? Each cell has a passel of slaves, mini-cells, inside of it! The nucleus for the genetic material, mitochondria for energy production, and all sorts of other “organelles.”

Those “organelles” were all originally separate single-cell organisms, humming quietly along, but they got systematically incorporated into bigger hungry cells,…

Eaten…

…but they didn’t get digested. Instead, they stayed alive and kept on doing their work, which was way better than just surrendering their nutrients to the eater. Well, the results were as satisfying as they were surprising! They ended up making these new super-cells, which we call “eukaryotes.”

And the eukaryotes then outcompeted the bacterial schmucks who still haven’t figured out this primordial expression of capitalism.

No one had time to consider the ethical repercussions of “slavery” in that context. That’s when it got confusing, and we could have used some help from Org.

Right. This does complicate the consent process. Because whose perspective is it, then, when you have the one big cell, but also a bunch of little industrious individual cells inside of that one, doing much of the work of metabolism for it? That would need to be referred over to Ethics. I’ll need to make some calls.

But it gets worse. The new super single cells weren’t satisfied with that level of complexity. They started to “team up.” They have these “teams” that we’ve taken to calling multi-cellular organisms, for lack of a better term. How they differ from slave colonies, though, is a distinction I’m not really prepared to make or defend. One cell may be in charge, but the question of perspective becomes tricky. Whose cell is it? Whose organism is it?

Do we consent each cell? What if some of the cells are willing, and others aren’t? Remember, it’s a team, an organism. It seems to “think” that it has its own single perspective.

Right, this is for Ethics. I was not briefed about any of this…

Wait, I’m just getting started. Once there were multi-cellular organisms, the asymmetries, enslavements, murders accelerated logarithmically. “Animals,” as we call the mobile complex organisms, are almost all cannibals, eating other animals as a matter of course, or else eating similarly complex but immobile organisms (“plants” and “fungi”). It’s abominable!

Right. Audaciously, “spider wasps” anesthetize their prey and keep them alive in their underground lairs for weeks at a time, while their babies eat them. But the most egregious are the peculiar clever animals that have entire civilizations of fellow complex life forms, maintained generation-after-generation (“domesticated”) for the sole purpose of killing and eating them. Leaf-cutter ants do this with fungi, and humans do it with plants and conspicuously, as noted above, cows.

Oh dear. So it isn’t just Ethics. We’ll have to get Coms involved… Probably Public Relations… There is going to be a lot of paperwork.

But it keeps going. Some of them get really complex. They get these internal communication networks, we’ve been calling them “nervous systems”.

(Not just because they make people nervous; that’s another story.)

With nervous systems, eventually they literally think. It isn’t just metaphor anymore. At first, they just feel their way around and process environmental information, but then they start thinking. When they start really thinking they’re thinking, then it’s chaos. Because imagine these hungry greedy cannibals actually making plans and acting on them.

Definitely PR needs to be involved. This is getting escalated…

By the way, regarding the problem of thinking life-forms specifically, we thought Org might want to know that we were at least able to create a software patch to make sure that most of them didn’t remember anything prior to the moment of incarnation.

A patch?

Oh, uh, please hold for a moment? …

…

…

Yes, yes ma’am. Uh, yes, I will. Okay. Thank you.

… Okay. This pre-incarnation memory-obliterating “software patch” you mentioned. Org has a problem with it. The interpretation is that you not only coerced the clients into living, but on top of that, your team also deprived them of any kind of perspective for the endeavor! Looks like Legal is getting involved, and probably Risk Management as well.

Transparency is central to any durable system of ethics. The subjects have to have perspective if they’re going to get anywhere interesting. [For Earth readers, why did you encourage your children to believe in Santa Claus if you did?] What are we doing here? If you have no idea why you exist, how do you know what you want? Where do you plant your flag? Do you even have a flag to plant? If you have planted your flag, do you maintain the flexibility to examine it honestly, to look longitudinally at what it stands for? What you stand for? What if you pull someone from a burning building, saving his life, but then he turns out to be Adolf Hitler or Ted Bundy? Now what have you done for the things your planted-flag stands for?

Okay, at this point, sue me for all I care, but as far as we’ve been concerned, the thinking is the least of our worries. They have other organs, too. Not just nervous systems, but digestion systems and breathing systems, hormone systems. Entire communities of like-minded cells in organs forced to do the will of the over-organism. It’s soul-crushing, what they’ve come up with.

And since the whole thing started with self-replication, it isn’t at all surprising that some of them developed a special organ system just for reproduction.

It’s diabolical…

Right! The things they do to each other! Inserting an organ from one complex organism into the body of another one and injecting nucleic acid? How can you even begin to make sense of it, ethically?

These amalgamations of slave-colonies rub against each other and recruit their reproductive organs to combine their perspectives into new, fantastically flawed copies of the instigators. (We’ve been calling the commingled organ systems “parents” in this situation. Some of us think the poetry of that terminology makes up for the off-the-wall insanity of it all.)

Okay, well, I think this qualifies as an Emergent Situation. I am going to see if I can expedite a Mitigation Team out to your planet. If Org approves, the team can usually be there in under a million years.

Finally! All due respect though, it can’t happen faster than that? A lot can go wrong in a million years. We have billions of these complex organisms popping into life every single year here (each containing, as noted, billions of individual cells), and none of them is getting consented. And with the advent of sexual reproduction (maybe a billion years ago), they do this evolution thing.

As bizarre as it sounds, taking two of them and mixing their genetic material up all skiwaddly into each offspring, means they’re constantly changing, from generation to generation. The time scale is literally over just thousands of years or even less. For example, the systematic civilizational cannibals mentioned earlier (humans and their food-colleagues), have covered the entire planet—like the bacterial carpet of quieter times—in less than a million years. Who knows what changes will happen on that timescale now?

Better let the Mitigation Team know, too, that once they started reproducing sexually, they also started forming into communities of complex organisms. So the problem is compounded yet again, see? Groups of groups of groups, with necessarily different perspectives and often-contradictory requirements and goals at every level. The enslavement and murder and cannibalism continue. And the rubbing.

But I mean honestly, in their defense, …the joy! The love, the contentment; eventually, for some of them, even laughter, and slow glowing sunsets.

Please hold…

Actually, come to think of it. With the sunsets and everything… You know, maybe we should just…

Hello?

 

Friday, May 11, 2018

Very well, shall we talk about the plasticity of the present moment? Remembering that it is always the present moment, and that somehow it is the same present moment.

And remembering to hold contrasting qualities in mind as we do so:

• The inertia that amounts to the drag of other minds holding an attitude toward it, and
• The quality that balances that inertia.

They must be examined while keeping in mind their essential unity, lest the idea arise that what is one thing manifesting two ways is actually two things each manifesting separately.

Understood, but – “the drag of other minds holding an attitude toward it”?

It should come clear as we discuss plasticity.

All right.

You know that someone described magic as the art of changing reality in conformance to the will. You have seen Dion Fortune’s lucid explanations of the use of magic, and have read many times in her novels her descriptions of how magical manipulation is accomplished. You have read other accounts, some lucid and many not, all having the air of someone honestly describing things experienced. And of course you have read accounts of magic that were not thought of as magic by the very author of the account. On a personal experiential level, which outweighs all reading (but may be brought into focus by such reading), you have had your own experiences.

You also know that you have always been drawn to history and magic both, although most are drawn more to one or the other, rather than both. Or so you have assumed. The reality is somewhat different. The reality is that you were looking equally outward and inward, and most people prefer to look inward or outward. That is the distinction you noticed, which appeared to you as their outward manifestations.

I see it as you say it. For me, history is the opposing pole. For some it was mathematics or science or fashion or money-grubbing or politics.

Yes. The opposition was – is – between looking inward and looking outward. For some the inward gaze manifests as psychology or religion or philosophy or abstract metaphysics.

Think of it this way: People gazing outward maintain the assured reality of the 3D world. Those gazing inward retain the possibility of altering it by altering themselves. Only – don’t expect this to make sense right away. There is more reorienting to be done, first.

Jung said those who gaze outward dream, and those who  gaze inward awaken.

That may be more a paraphrase than a careful statement of fact, but it is in line with what we are saying here, only that statement refers to the effect of such orientation on the individual aspect of reality, and here we wish to look at it on the communal aspect.

Jung was asked if the world could avoid nuclear war and he said it depended on whether enough people were willing to work on themselves.

That’s right, and our discussion here may shed some light on how that relationship between the two could be. He did not mean, It depends upon enough people getting together in coordinated group activity. He meant what he said, because he knew the indivisible unity of the human mind. He also knew that the overarching mind has local divisions, but he knew that the unity was there.

So if you will hold in mind our discussion of the inertia that holds the world in being, you will perhaps redefine plasticity as a different kind of inertia, the inertia that holds the world in being as it changes aspect.

Let me try.

Yes, go ahead.

Inertia may be defined as the force (or tendency, or whatever) that makes an object at rest want to remain at rest, but it is equally the force that makes an object in uniform motion remain in that motion. This is stated clumsily, but I can see that an object at rest and an object in uniform motion are actually the same condition, only language makes them seem like two different states. That’s why inertia covers them both, because they aren’t really a “both,” but a unity.

Good, so try again.

In terms of your present exposition, inertia v. plasticity doesn’t mean no-change v. change. It means, the continuity aspect v. the alteration aspect. That’s the best I can do at the moment.

Not so bad. The important distinction to be drawn is that it is not a matter of two forces – or even of one force seen in two aspects – enjoining either stillness or motion.

But the point here is that that living present moment has its inertia, a living moving thing, not a dead unmoving thing that must be overcome. “Drag” is a relative term meaning, in context, a tendency to be slower than the desired motion. This is not a scientific description, mind you.

So I guess the question at hand is somewhere between, “What causes change in the living present moment?” and, “How can any of us or several of us working together effect such change?”

And we say, in practical terms, look to scripture and magical practice. In theoretical terms, we’ll continue.

The scripture I had in mind was Jesus advising people to pray two or three together, though that wasn’t quite the context. Magical practice isn’t so different, I suppose – or maybe prayer should be considered to be a magical practice.

And what does prayer or magical incantation seek to do?

Yes, I get it. They seek to connect humans to a super-human level of power or awareness or state of being.

The vagueness at the end of your statement shows you the vagueness of your thought in that respect. Vagueness is always a flag indicating an area that could do with some thought.

A better way to say it would be –?

Prayer – any magical incantation – seeks to remind a 3D being of its essential All-D nature so that it may transcend the limitations that follow from its self-definition as a (merely) 3D being.

But to say that is not to say that there aren’t forces at a higher level.

Of course not. But it moves beyond the obvious “reaching for assistance from higher forces” to the more subtle fact that those “higher forces” are in intimate unbreakable relation to the 3D beings themselves. In a sense, everybody is connected not only laterally (so to speak) bit hierarchically.

Because 3D humans can focus, they are useful to the rest of reality.

Because they tend to get stuck in that focus, they require assistance.

And I guess this brings us to consideration of the vast impersonal forces you have been mentioning?

Not quite. It brings us to consideration of vast personal forces, which are not the same thing. These are not the weather but the raincoat, though that seriously diminishes their role. They are your allies in the battle, your assistance in bringing in the crops before it rains, your larger mind helping you function. Any number of analogies possible; season to taste. For the moment, say the personal v. the impersonal, and leave it at that, while remembering that all oppositions, all polarities, are ultimately part of one unbreakable unity.

Well, there’s our hour and a little more, and as so often, it doesn’t seem like we’ve gotten very far.

Yes, and do you know why it feels that way sometimes? It is because you get a sense of a larger field of view, and the contrast between what you vaguely sense and the little that we can spell out at the moment is discouraging.

I suppose. Very well, till next time.

 

So yesterday you said 3D is a way of seeing, and it led me to an insight that has now become cloudy again.

The central insight is of several parts:

• You are not victims, nor laboratory rats, nor even volunteers involved in some sort of experiment.
• Your condition is neither permanent nor deplorable nor even awkward.
• You are active, not passive; acting, not merely acted upon.
• There is a reason for the inconveniences of 3D conditions, a reason that makes 3D life worthwhile.
• The dichotomy between 3D and non-3D is really a connecting polarity. The two ends of the polarity are opposite extremes of one They are, you might say, the ends of a ranges bridged by a slide-switch: If there were no differences, there would be no range; if no connections, there would be not one thing, but more than one.
• Being, as you are, on both sides of the 3D/non-3D experience of reality, your awareness may flicker. To some degree, living in 3D has required that you pretend to know less, experience less, than in fact you do.
• And, naturally, perception follows conceptualization, just as conceptualization follows digestion of new perceptions. We realize this may sound cryptic or perhaps precious, but the reality is that perception and conceptualization are two parts of a reciprocating process.

That came out fluently enough, and none of it seems to be a stretch. I don’t think I could have itemized it like that, but it was easy to recognize as you were floating it.

So now you can see that the bottom line is merely the same thing, arrived at from a somewhat different route.

The world we live in changes according to our belief, and our beliefs are changed by our experiences combined with our thoughts and feelings, and it is a never-ending process.

Never-ending, but not necessarily proceeding without pause. Such moments of rest need not give you anxiety if you will merely have confidence that there is a difference between rest and stagnation.

But it is curious how our lives can seem to be such hard journeys. Our weather sometimes feels like it is always heavy weather. And of course it can feel so pointless, or tedious, or painful, or even insane.

When it feels that way, you can be sure that you are looking at your life from the 3D perspective only. When you view the “only somewhat real” as if it were absolutely real, it’s going to look that way. So let’s look at the martyrdom of saints, not in a pious way, nor in a debunking way, but as a fact attested to by history, not once, nor in only one time, but repeatedly, and in all times. Neither need it be confined to martyrs as religions may define them (and may seek to appropriate them). Life is full of known and unknown examples of people sacrificing themselves for others, and what is that but martyrdom, only without the element of malicious persecution.

I know where you are going with this, but that seems an excessively long approach.

We smile. It seems so because you do know. If you were not linked to us at the moment, it might not seem so painfully obvious.

Martyrdom is not explicable in 3D terms if considered only in 3D terms. Neither is religious enthusiasm, nor the transformation of fishermen into charismatic leaders of a new way of existing. But all this is easily understood, both in concept and in mechanism – how?

By the individual being somehow lifted from a 3D-only perspective to a 3D-seen-with-non-3D-understanding.

Yes, only “understanding” is too weak a word, too faint a concept. What happened is that these ordinary 3D people – ordinary, like all of you – learned to experience themselves as more than 3D-only. They came to believe, then realize, then live, not a sense-limited 3D life but a 3D life that was a truer life, in that it included parts of themselves that until then they had been unconscious to.

They didn’t cease to be what they had been. They didn’t suddenly become all-knowing, nor necessarily did they overcome all their bad habits. But what they had been was now part of a larger effective whole. They were much farther along the scale we defined a while ago. From having been simple 3D humans, perhaps asleep, they became closer to the superhuman beings that is the other end of the scale. How? By having awakened, but of course also by having been prepared to wake up, and willing to wake up.

I wonder how people will hear this. I suppose it depends upon how much they know of the history of religions in truth, as opposed to the history first glossed over by ignorant piety, then counter-glossed by ignorant prejudice.

You forget, everyone has an inner non-3D guide ready and willing to provide whatever is necessary, waiting only for the willingness of the 3D mind. But you might say a word about the history of religions from this standpoint.

Well, to me, the elephant in the living room is that every religion proceeds from a few changed people. Men, historically, but I think that is a bias introduced by the leadership opportunities afforded men in the past, and also by the selective rewriting of what actually happened, because I don’t think people actually change all the much over time, and in our day it is clear that the initial people who “get” a new way of seeing are mostly women. Think for example of the women around Carl Jung. I doubt it was very different for Gautama or Jesus or Muhammad except insofar as cultural norms would have made it difficult. But it is historically on record that Jesus treated women as equals, in a time and place where this was not the norm. and apparently in the early Christian church – that is, in the time when the initial followers were followers because they had been changed, not because they had been born of believers – this was so. We know that various women led congregations, in the days before the organized church adopted Roman forms.

But I didn’t mean to concentrate on gender equality, though it is an indicator of the level of consciousness of the believers, regardless of their cultural background. That is, if they couldn’t see that we are all part of one thing, are all “brothers and sisters,” they hadn’t been changed much!

The point I intended to make is that religions are spread initially by people who have been changed. They are almost literally different people. They live in a world with different rules and possibilities. It isn’t really a matter of belief; it is a matter of experience. It only becomes a matter of belief when it is not accompanied (preceded) by experience.

Therefore you all may wish to look at yourselves in a different light. Like Jesus, we say we have come that you may have life more abundantly. When? In some future life? In the between-3D-lives state? In the same tomorrow that promises “free pie tomorrow”? Or do we mean something real, something tangible, something attainable? Rhetorical question, this. You know the answer.

We do. By living our full being (or as much more of it as we are able to absorb) we can transform ourselves and in effect transform the world we live in.

Consider the conversations you have had centering on fear in people’s lives.

I do. You would think that a life without fear would be tremendously attractive, but I guess people think it is only a feel-good concept without practical application.

And that is why we mention martyrs. What does it take for a man or a woman – ordinary 3D mortals like yourselves – to go to torture and death willingly, uncomplainingly, sometimes even smilingly, like the man who joked with his executioners as he was being burned on a griddle. In purely 3D terms, it would be inexplicable. But they weren’t living only in 3D, and neither do you have to. They were closer to the superhuman end of the scale, and if that isn’t life more abundantly, we can’t think of a more striking example. You might say, “Not much of a life, given that they are in the process of being killed,” but that comment in itself would demonstrate that you are still looking at life from a 3D-only viewpoint.

This is something to think about. There’s your hour. Call this, perhaps, “Toward the superhuman.”

Okay. Our thanks as always.

 

Thursday, April 28, 2022

5:25 a.m. Shall we discuss energy beings, as half-promised yesterday? Focus, receptivity, clarity, presence.

Start with your remote viewing at Bruce Moen’s workshop that time, and we’ll see where it leads.

All right. Some years ago, when Bruce was doing workshops showing people how to connect with the non-3D [Afterlife Knowledge workshops, he called them], I invited him to do one in Charlottesville, and I was one of perhaps a dozen people attending. In one experience, I seemed to be in the middle of a  desert, nothing and nobody in any direction, just hot rocks and sunlight. No movement, no sense of life. Can’t remember the intermediate steps of my realization (I ought to have those notes in a file drawer, but I’m not going to look just now, and I don’t even remember what year it was. Early in the first 2000s decade, I imagine.) but at some point, I realized I was experiencing an energy-being – invisible, intangible, without any agenda that I noticed – whose function was to be the thing that makes a sacred site sacred. That is, it is the energy that is experienced around a site.

Yes, and that is part of what we want to look at, you see. We said (you’ll remember if you page back to yesterday), some energy beings’ role is to be here-now, and some is to be here without reference to time.

I was remembering that differently. I see you said some are here-over-time (meaning perpetually, I gather) and some are now-without-here.

“Now-without-here” meaning, attached to the ongoing present moment and not attached to a specific geography.

So, three classes of non-3D functioning?

You need to remember that the world is always (necessarily) more complex than it appears. Nothing can ever be as simple a it seems.

I’m getting that there’s a reason for that, rooted in our perceptual limitations.

Of course. When do you ever see so deeply into a moment or an object or a relationship that there would be nothing more to learn by further attention? In practice, you live by making rough approximations of what you experience.

My father always used to say, “Don’t get too fancy, there.” I later took it to mean that he was feeling that he had a quart’s worth of things to do, and a pint’s worth of time and energy to do them.

Isn’t that usually your case in 3D? Don’t people find value in occasional retreat from their normal routine, so that they may recruit their energies? Isn’t meditation recommended (as a specific form of mindfulness) in order to bring you back to center? But this is a point (that we’re coming to) that isn’t always thought of in connection to your psychic life: “The world” that you experience is among other things endlessly, deeply, symbolic. It may be used for the purposes of reflection and deepening of your understanding of self and of “other” and of the relationship between self and other.

I get it. Everything we look at will look different if we can hold in mind the things we know in different contexts. That is, “all is one,” for instance, while we’re thinking about something else.

Of course. That’s why it is useful and growth-enhancing to live these things, to absorb these ways of seeing things into your being, so that you will do the associating as a matter of course, and will not have to do it as a matter of conscious effort.

This is also one reason why people make such different reports as to the nature of reality. Every time you peel another layer of onion-skin off the film covering reality, what you see differs.

The analogy is clumsy, but good enough to convey the idea, I guess. Everybody thinks they think straight, see straight. No, that isn’t right. That’s too sweeping a statement.

It is, because you yourself are an example of someone who is perpetually feeling that “there’s more here than meets the eye.” Why else would you always be wondering the “why?” of a situation, beyond the “how?” of it? Still, whatever approximation suffices for you at any given moment seems self-evidently true. “The world is this way; it’s obvious.”

Millions of people go on lecture tours, or host workshops, to tell people “the way things are.”

They write books, too, or publish blog posts recording their conversations with Hemingway or the guys upstairs. Nothing wrong with any of it, provided that you remember that any understanding of anything is, as we told you 25 years ago, only an interim report.

We seem to be making only slow progress today. Quarter after six – 40 minutes gone – and only five pages.

Which is actually right on schedule. Don’t worry about it.

I can still hear Rita responding with mild irritation when you would say that: “I’m not worried about it.” That was a hot-button for her, for some reason.

It was merely an involuntary reaction to the word.

So let’s look at here-and-now, and here-over-time, and now-without-time.

Bearing in mind, these are merely entryways into your paying more attention to the inner workings of things that may appear obvious. As Thoreau said, there is always more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star. That’s what he meant. Another way to say it is, You can always have life more abundantly. But you must be willing to live there. Some receive it as a gift, some work hard to earn it,  but rare is the one who lives it without intending to.

Bronson Alcott lived it, I think.

Let’s not hare off into examples, though we can do so at another time, if you wish. Your three cases:

• Here and now. The world is energy in form. Some non-3D presences are form no less than bodies are. What is your non-3D component, but non-3D energy bound to your 3D form? In that sense, it accompanies you and only you, every second of your life. Calling it your spirit or part of your soul doesn’t clarify matters; the fact is, nothing in 3D form can exist without its non-3D structure maintaining it.

Plato’s archetypes, that some people think fanciful.

What is a “Platonic ideal” but a non-3D blueprint and animating principle for a 3D manifestation?

• Here-over-time. Some places have an accompanying non-3D presence that can be felt. The sacred oak groves of various pre-literate societies. The energy that fueled the spot where oracles could prophesize. The undefinable aura that grows around a place used for a given purpose over a long enough time: a prison’s miasma, or a cathedral’s aura of other-worldliness.
• Now-without-here. Ghosts, for instance. Things which persist over time but are not necessarily limited to one place. The zeitgeist, the spirit of the times.

All very interesting, and it has been equally interesting to watch my own process throughout this, half-knowing where you would go, half-puzzled as to what would come next. Today’s theme something about the strangeness of the world, I suppose?

“Richer than suspected,” perhaps.

Something like that, I guess. Our thanks as always for this continuous richness of association. It’s like being Jason on the Argo, without having to get wet or cold or storm-tossed. Very convenient. Till next time.

 

Thursday, February 24, 2022

7:10 a.m. Setting switches for maximum focus, receptivity, clarity, presence. Yesterday you indicated we would move to group karma, and I am anxious to have your views on it. I have heard of the concept for many years, but I have never known what to make of it, in two ways. A) I may not understand what people are meaning by it, and B) what I do think I understand, I can’t make sense of.

Let us peel off one layer of misunderstanding right away. Tell your second-hand story you told Jane Coleman.

Larry Lorence in his old age was an instructor at TMI who ran a morning exercise class, but in his youth in Czechoslovakia, he had been an athlete training for the 1940 Olympics [which did not take place, of course, due to the outbreak of World War II in 1939]. After the Germans invaded in 1938, he and his father were put into a concentration camp. He survived, and remembered one specific conversation or some act of kindness (I can’t remember which, though hopefully I wrote it down when Larry told me the story) from one of the guards.

After the war, and after the communists took over the country in 1948, Larry was working as a young reporter. He saw or heard an official pronouncement that all Germans were guilty of German crimes; that there was no such thing as an innocent German. He remembered the guard and that incident, and wrote up an opinion piece contradicting what he had just heard or read. But when his editor read Larry’s piece, he called him to the rim and tore it up in his face, saying that he was doing that for Larry’s sake; that is, because it wouldn’t be safe for Larry to express that opinion in the climate of the day.

And this tells you what?

That Larry was right, that you can’t tar everybody with one brush. That certain opinions have their moment when they are taken as undeniable truths, you being the bad guy if you contradict them. That – as you yourselves always say – you can’t really judge another’s life, not even necessarily their actions, as for instance that editor.

So you don’t condone the crimes committed by the Germans?

Of course not, and I recognize a cheap rhetorical trick when I see it, especially when it is my pen writing it.

Yes, well. But surely, if not all Germans, surely all Nazis are guilty?

Could we perhaps be a little less obvious, a little less heavy-handed, this morning?

You think it’s heavy handed. Has it occurred to you that for 70 years and more, this is exactly what people have been told , to the point of accepting it as obvious truth? All Nazis are bad, end of discussion.

The right-wing types pretty nearly turn it on its head and say the Nazis were right.

Should it surprise you that a one-dimensional portrait would call forth a counter-portrait, equally one-dimensional, and energized by the force of so long a suppression of the rest of the story?

It doesn’t surprise me, but it is true I don’t seem to have much success in telling people that liberal and conservative extremism generate their opposite and invigorate it. It sometimes seems that people prefer to look at the 3D world as if it were a huge football game, or series of games, in each of which we choose “our” side and excoriate the other side.

That same process happens when considering past events, and when fearing future events. Ideologies think they are founded in hope and ideals; emotionally they are founded in fear.

So, suppose you had to look at Nazis and Communists not as heroes or villains (depending upon your starting-point, your ideals) but as human attempts to steer “history” through group effort. Suppose you see them from their own eyes, rather than the eyes of their opponents, and see them from what they thought they were doing, and even wanted to do, rather than what they wound up doing? Wouldn’t that produce a truer portrait, because more nuanced? And suppose you then differentiated (conceptually, because how easy is it to see into the heart of another?) good men and women from bad? Suppose you recognized the good accomplishments and the bad equally? By “equally” we don’t mean, pretend that they balance out; we mean, look at the evidence with balanced view, being equally willing to see what you do and don’t prefer to see.

If you find that difficult to do – perhaps you are hazy about the actual history – try something that is both easier and harder, because closer to home both geographically and temporally. Apply your judgment to your own country’s actions, domestic and foreign, over whatever span of time you prefer. No honest view will see it as all bad or all good, any more than an honest view would see a given human life – one’s own, we mean – as all good or all bad. For one thing, there is the scale to be considered, the standards by which you deem a thing good or bad. If it were a fixed scale that everyone could agree on, it would be one thing, but it is not so and never could be so. One man’s good is another man’s evil. That is one example of the bitter fruit that grew on the Tree of Perceiving Things as Good and Evil.

You are thinking we have forgotten about group karma. Not at all. It is necessary to pose these questions before one’s prejudices can be exposed.

Take Germany as an example of an individual at a different level, as we were suggesting yesterday. The humans who inhabit the land of today are nearly all too old to have taken part in Nazi activities. 2022 minus 1945 equals 77 years. Add ten years for the age of innocence, and it means that no one younger than their mid-eighties could possibly have been caught up in Nazi activities even at its youngest manifestation, the Hitler Youth. So clearly on an individual 3D human level, there can be no responsibility due to their own actions. (Let us leave aside the question of one’s responsibility for the actions of one’s ancestors. It is an abstract question conducted mostly emotionally; very little logically.)

Can the individual that is known as Germany have responsibility for its prior actions? Can it not? It is a complicated question, if you look at it carefully, and as it happens (we smile) it is almost uniquely a good and instructive example, because it was divided physically and ideologically as the war ended.

Ah, I see what you are driving at. As one example, East Germany never paid reparations to the state of Israel for what Germany had done to its Jews, because in the East German view – the view of the Communists – it and they had had no responsibility for actions that they not endorsed and indeed had opposed. The East Germans regarded West Germany as the lineal and ideological successor to the Third Reich; they themselves were innocent of its crimes.

And your judgment of that opinion?

I’m more interested in your judgment.

Indulge us. The process of thinking-out your response will show you gaps in your logic, and unsuspected discontinuities in your thought.

Well, the East Germans had a point, though I never realized it till I read Markus Wolf’s book. [Man Without a Face. Wolf became the number two man in East Germany’s Stasi, after a childhood spent fighting the Nazis.]

End of subject?

Of course not, but I’m mobilizing my thoughts on the subject. It seems to me that the East Germans, in blaming West Germany for Nazi Germany’s crimes, are letting themselves off too easily and are at the same time scapegoating the West.

And here you approach our point.

Oh, I get it, or get part of it, anyway. What is important is not what our parents did, but what attitudes we inherited from them and carry on knowingly or unknowingly.

Yes, and that, you see, is group karma. Not some unpaid parking ticked, nor even some long-delayed trial heretofore evaded, but the living consequences of past moments of time. It is not what someone did but what you are, which means how you think, no less than what you do. It means how you see, to some extent.

I get tired of saying it, though it is always said with a sense of satisfaction, but – obvious, once you say it.

There’s much more to be said, but there’s your hour. Next time we can look a little closer at a country’s karma as opposed to the inhabitants past present and future. That is, treating a country as a unit, humans are the equivalent of – oh, ideas, or even perhaps neurons. What of karma on the country level from the point of view of the country itself? Not something individuals could easily imagine, but with our help, we’ll see.

Today’s theme?

Simply, “Group karma,” we’d say.

I agree. Okay, our thanks, and see you next time.

 

Tuesday, September 14, 2021

5:30 a.m. To proceed – ? Comments on Dirk’s comment on yesterday’s?

[Frank,

[Very good. This is the ‘tapestry’ I have attempted to describe.

[Caught as we are, we are unable to move easily outside of ourselves in our various relationships to ‘see’ the tapestry as a whole or even significant parts of it.

[We can do so – if we are able to realize as true and hold all of what you described, and then move entirely outside of or beyond all of that to a more opportune perspective.

[Now – take all of what they shared. Consider that “time” as it unfolds in that description is in a sense ‘static’. All of the points in time, all of the news for all of the individuals lead to the succeeding moments. So where is the opportunity for change? – for free will?

[This is where time-2 comes in. Take all of what said and shared. Now move outside that. Change something, anything, and all of the nows later in time-1, the time represented in the original – change. But that ‘external influence comes with a reaction. And that too changes things.

[So now as time-2 unfolds, not just our present moment, but all moments flowing in time-1 change, and in reaction , all moments prior to the changed present moment also change. All of everything is changed to some degree. All of the things we know about science remain entirely intact. Within the current realization in time-2 everything works exactly as it should.

[And since within time-1, we cannot directly experience time-2, everything balances. The contradictions vanish. It is in accessing outside of time-1 in the all that is that we can change everything. The past becomes a fluid and flexible as the present or the future. Except that, being grounded as we are in our time-1 present moment, if we are unable to release that, we are stuck as if to fly paper.]

[TGU:] We are not certain that Dirk sees thing just as we do (nor is there any need, that he or anyone do so), but certainly the grasp of it is there. You may remember that we once told you, a long time ago now, that rather than things changing in the way your sensory experience tells you they do, the reality is closer to replication than to replacement.

You didn’t phrase it that way, but, yes, I remember. You said instead of each moment of time disappearing, it was duplicated, in a way, but duplicated changed. Thus instead of there being one of me in non-3D there were an uncounted number of me, each slightly different according to changes. I’m not sure this is how you explained it then; it is as I recall.

You never asked, “Where is the template? Which is the central thread along which all these changed versions are being strung.”

Didn’t occur to me that it was a question.

Well, it should be looked at. You can see that Dirk provides such a central axis, in effect, by fastening on to the relative nature of each moment.

It feels like you are talking more to him than to me. I don’t really understand what you are saying.

In a way, we could be said to be doing just that. [Talking to him.] And in fact, let’s discuss that: It will serve to illustrate a facet of the situation.

Funny feeling: I can feel the slight pause as you gather your arguments, or your illustrations, or let’s say your lesson-plan materials. This tells me, this is a major theme you hope to pursue, and an opportunistic one that you hasn’t seen coming.

Much of what we do is in response to an unforeseen opportunity. What is different here, that you are noticing, is that the opportunity connects not to an interesting sidebar but to a major illustration. (And thus, by the way, you observe your progress in observation. You have come a long way, mostly by perseverance and receptivity.)

Speak of which, explicitly rather than implicitly, I set my slide-switches to maximum receptivity, focus, and clarity.

Let’s see if bullet-points will take us where we want to go.

• Frank is a 3D focus. Although of course he extends into non-3D because you all must, in effect he is a 3D intelligence that extends beyond 3D, rather than a non-3D intelligence that extends into 3D. In fact, of course, he is both: It is a matter of viewpoint. But in effect, he is a localized intelligence centered in one time/place, though of course that time/place keeps moving.
• Dirk, same thing. Each of you, same thing. You are all connected in non-3D but your distinctive characteristics, your personal addition to the sum, your practical value, one might say, is that you are a localized, focused, limited intelligence, despite the fact that each of these adjectives is relative, and varies from moment to moment.
• We in non-3D, on the other hand, are not localized in our own terms, but are localized in effect, as we deal with any or all of you. Whether you think of us as guardian angels assigned to one (or more, of course) for life, or as a sort of consulting group available for any who are on our wavelength, you cannot deal with our entirety; you can deal only with a subset, in the same way and for the same reason that you may study as much as you want, but you cannot learn everything.
• Communication is always a two-way street, of course. Attempts at communication may involve one speaking and the other not hearing, but successful communication is always a focused mind on either end.
• Well, what focus? Yours? Ours?

Your question stopped me, and threw me out of gear, so to speak. Sorry. Again?

It didn’t so much throw you out of gear as momentarily throw you out of receptivity, you see. The idea startled you and you paused to consider it, then realized that you had ceased listening.

The old perception v. interpretation problem. You can’t do both at the same time.

Yes, except it isn’t a problem.

Okay, a feature, not a bug.

Funny. Yes.

• Again, whose focus? The thought that stopped you was that it is your end of the line, quite as much as ours, that determines what and how we communicate.
• Therefore – and we should think it would be obvious, were it not for the persistent temptation on your end to blur differences on this end – every communication link is different on each end. From your point of view, it may look like “the guys” talk to you or talk to Dirk or talk to any one or more of you and it is the same group. This is true and not true.

Oh, I get that. Probably each of us elicits a slightly different set of interlocutors, maybe a different habitual spokesman.

And of course even on this end, a different spokesman is going to have a different “voice,” and a different vocabulary, specialization, set of responses, etc.

We don’t usually think of you all having different responses, but I suppose you are as individual as we are.

Your group-mind experiments ought to be showing you that the difference between 3D and non-3D is more notional than substantive.

• Now, given that different 3D individuals elicit different sets of non-3D individuals, and given that different individuals on either end speak different subsets of thought, perhaps you can see that this is one more way in which 3D individual minds help stitch the world together.

You paused, but I can’t say that I quite get your drift, beyond the obvious point that every conversation between people has its own flavor.

You could say that in talking to you (and being overheard by others), we are in one mode, speaking in one voice, and that when we attempt to speak both to you and, through you, to another (Dirk, in this case), we are moved to a mode that perhaps previously did not exist. That is, in effect, two overlapping parts of our mind cooperate in new ways. And this is the same process you observe in 3D.

This sounds important. I still don’t have it.

It is a simple point, and some will find it obvious. Just as cooperation and joint work in 3D welds new relationships – pathways you call friendship or fellow-feeling or brotherhood or sisterhood – it can work the same way in non-3D. So your associations in 3D have their echoes beyond the 3D illusion.

A specific example, even if a fictional one, would help.

You have seen how you, consisting of various threads, allow Bertram and Joe Smallwood, for instance, to coexist. They are not necessarily predestined friends, you might say. What they have in common may be more the coexisting within you than any other single thing. So there’s an example of a 3D life creating pathways by what it holds together. But you create pathways by what you are as you live, and what you are is shaped as much by your relationships as by anything else.

Aha, feedback loops. Some people we immediately take to by what they are and we are. Others we learn over time to appreciate. And others we work together and that is a link in itself.

Correct, and of course this is hardly an exhaustive list of ways in which 3D lives create pathways in non-3D.

So take my close link with my brother Paul, for instance. Clearly we came into this life with prior links, but a harmonious cooperative and mutually supportive experience in this lifetime presumably strengthens the bond even more.

Any and every relationship may or may not have its antecedents. Resonance – even close resonance – need not be forged by prior common experience, though it may be. And by the same token, any and every relationship in your life is going to leave its traces, so to speak. It will change you; it will change the other; it will link the non-3D in ways perhaps new; it will leave a smoothed path, let’s say, for further development by others of similar composition.

More than an hour now. A title?

Maybe “3D/non-3D links.”

And next time, more of the same, I take it. Very well, our thanks, and see you next time.