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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.

Wednesday, July 21, 2021

1:15 a.m. So, my friends. I suppose I ought to include yesterday’s brief conversation, and my dream. I will decide whether to do so when I come to transcribe this. But in any case, let’s begin with questions Mr. Kornilov asked after seeing your statements of Monday. His email shows good understanding in general, I think.

[Received 7-20-2021, 6:33 a.m.

(1) [Frank… I was overwhelmed with emotions when I read the piece, so it took time to settle… I understand that, perhaps, that was my ego’s reaction, which felt kind of glorified by being involved in communication with the TGU. But still, on a deeper level I was moved… We all have that theoretical knowledge that we are all one, but to me this message is an example of how it practically works, and a call to try accessing the Guys on my own.

(2) [And, of course, their explanation and the advice helped me to look at the problem from a completely different angle. The general understanding I got from reading the text is that I should accept magic as an ordinary though often unnoticed part of our everyday life, and treat it like all other things, be it positive or negative. And that is what the TGU meant by “removing it off its pedestal” – it shouldn’t be seen as a bigger trouble compared to other daily troubles.

(3) [However, I struggle a bit with the part where you and them say that this was an experience of an interaction between my 3-D conscious self with the non-3D rejected (?) parts of the self. Does that mean that magic was part of my other 3-D lifetimes and is being brought to my awareness in this current lifetime because it resonates to a certain sector of collective consciousness (or subjectivity)? And is shared subjectivity the same as collective subjectivity, collective consciousness, or am I confusing the terms?

(4) [Once again, thank you for posing my question to the Guys, though I’m a bit curious: it seems that they themselves chose the appropriate moment to elaborate on the topic. Does that mean they had already been aware of the question by the time I e-mailed it to you?]

Your response?

We begin with the paragraph you have numbered as four, because simply dealt with. Yes, we chose the moment. But that may not mean quite what he may think it means. We’d put it this way: We became aware of the email when you did; we suggested responding to it when the general discussion and his specific questions formed an easy link. “The times” made it appropriate to segue from one topic to another, you might say. Nothing extraordinary about it, and nothing particularly noteworthy. We do it all the time, and so do each of you. There are reasons why thoughts and associations well up within you: “The times” and your personal consciousness produce moments of convergence.

I think you mean to say, our own mental world and the possibilities raised by the specific moment allow thoughts or associations to surface, in the same way our personal world and the “external world” come together to allow certain combinations of strands to be born as 3D babies.

Yes, that’s our thought, but we considered that we had expressed it. In any case, yes, that’s it.

But there’ no reason to assume that you knew of his question before I did.

That could happen; sometimes does. But it is hardly necessary, in that these conversations are a cooperative effort. We prefer to work with you on things you are consciously aware of; it’s far easier and allows discussion in greater depth.

Paragraph three is a misinterpretation. It is more correct to describe the interaction as between the self one is conscious of, and the parts of self one is not (yet) conscious of. The parts not recognized may have been rejected, but they equally may have been unnoticed, or not yet encountered. In this we are again reminding you that 3D life is not what it seems. It is a continuing interaction of the inner world you identify with and the “external” world (that may seem entirely alien to you) that we are calling the shared subjectivity, to remind you that the “external” world is not “things in space” – material somehow external and dead – but is mind-stuff like you, only collective and not merely individual. What you experience of the “external” world is what you connect to via your own known or unknown extensions beyond the familiar individual mental world you live.

Thus, what we said does not predict whether you did or didn’t have connections with magic in other lifetimes. All we know is that the subject is alive o you in this 3D lifetime for some reason, and therefore manifests as “external” things that catch your attention. You can probably attain greater clarity on the subject by careful unemotional meditation on the question of why and in what way magic affects your present life.

We trust that you now see that shared subjectivity = external 3D and non-3D world. Collective consciousness is closer to a description of the shared mental world rather than the shared mental and physical world, but perhaps this is only adding to confusion to address it.

Your understanding expressed in paragraph two is generally correct. In general, removing something from its pedestal means merely, see it as it is, don’t see it through a mist of awe, nor of detestation nor fear.

And finally, your first paragraph is exactly right. We are pleased that you see that it amounts to our saying, you have access to your own sources, specifically tailored for your use. Use them.

Again, productive questions that should be helpful to many.

Then shall we continue with the question of control and the surrendering of control?

It would be a better use of your time and energies to transcribe yesterday’s brief interactions, including the dream.

Which was followed by my receiving Dmitri’s email. Okay.

[Tuesday, July 20, 2021

[2:35 a.m. Controlling, and surrendering control. A dance, you said, with its own rhythm. Learning through joy rather than through pain. You said there is more to be said on the subject – but then you immediately hared off onto the subject of magic.

[The discussion had led you to just the right place to hear about magic as an interface between individual and shared subjectivity. And indeed there is more to be said – after you get a little more sleep.

[If I can. It will be welcome. I certainly am tired.

[3:15. Trying again. Can we first get rid of the pain? {Back pain was preventing me from sleeping.}

[You know what to do, do it. First, concentrate on the pain as if you want it to fill your consciousness. Then, in this case, since you know you don’t know why you hurt, you can’t merely explain to the body that you know what’s going on, and don’t need the pain. If you were interested in the “why” at the moment, this would be the time to ask.

It isn’t that I’m not interested, but that I get no answers, so have to move on.

The next step, as you well know, is to request that the volume of pain be dialed way back, so that you don’t forget that there may be a problem to address, but still are left okay to work or sleep.

[This worked.]

[5:30 a.m. For a while, I dreamed, thinking I was awake, thinking I was writing it down. All lost now, if there was anything to lose. I guess we don’t do a session today.

[6:10 a.m. A long dream, the punch line of which is that they ask us how we found them and I say, rightly, “We didn’t. We got lost too.” The boy was mentally handicapped, they were wandering around in the woods or somewhere. We – whoever “we” were – came across them not knowing about them (in other words, our finding them had nothing to do with having looked for them) and as we made our way back, to a city of some sort, perhaps in England, we naturally brought them with us. The older couple was very grateful. The mentally handicapped boy – a man chronologically – had become very attached to us. He wanted to know if he was going to see us again, or really I think he couldn’t understand that we were going to separate, until we were at the point of doing so, then he asked me if he’d see us again tomorrow, and I said I didn’t know. The mother said again, she didn’t know how we had found them, and I said again that we didn’t, that we got lost ourselves, which was true if you looked at thing a certain way.

[Somehow associating this with “Something’s Gotta Give,” watched last night.

[It feels like the dream refers to my life and its effects on some others who have profited from TGU’s advice and, perhaps, my example.

[2:35 p.m. Just climbed upstairs after having some lunch and some The Great Bridge, and realized, nothing is hurting. When my back stopped hurting, I didn’t notice.]

Little needs to be said. It is all examples of things you can do to have life more abundantly. Theory, health, dreams, discussions, “stray” thoughts – it all works together for good, only it works better, the more you actively cooperate.

And that is enough for now. The time saved from our discussion [this was at the 45 minute point] will be eaten up by transcription, and it isn’t worth overworking you. We can still get to control and surrender.

All right, well, thanks for all this, as usual. Till next time.

 

 

I do not know quite why it is that I keep believing: “Finally – I have found THE answer”. I long ago learned that is a fallacy. It is a statement that is nearly always wrong.

My journey to curing my arthritis is an example. It seems like a dozen or more times I felt: “Finally – I have found THE answer”. Each time has been hugely important. Each step filled in gaps. Each step accomplished a better solution. Yet each step was incomplete.

I am there again. Perhaps this is a part of why I have had difficulty writing my stories. More to the point – why I have had difficulty motivating myself to write my stories. The stories aren’t done yet. They haven’t finished with me.

I have been impatiently awaiting the arrival of several of Stephen Harrod Buhner’s books – two in particular. Both books cover co-infections for Lyme disease. The first arrived yesterday.

To the best of my knowledge I have never contracted Lyme disease. However, I was severely bitten by a cat when I was ten. My hand swoll to many times normal size. It hurt. The doctor gave me what seemed like a huge shot of penicillin.

I ‘knew’, or at the least I believed, for my whole life that that cat bite caused my 30 plus year battle with two rare forms of arthritis: Reactive Arthritis and Ankylosing Spondylitis. They are twins, slight variants on one another. I had both. They turned most of my spine and neck to solid bone. They fused my sacroiliac joints. My entire pelvis is one bone. This hugely limits my flexibility.

Over decades, I told every doctor I met about that particular cat bite. I attributed my arthritis to it. They were never able to “hear” me. I also told doctors over and over that I was experiencing “bone crushing pain”, especially shin pain. It crushed my soul. A lot of my life’s story centered around that pain and it’s impacts. I lived with it crushing me day and night for over 30 years.

I tried all kinds of things to cure the disease, and to relieve the pain. Some worked a little. Most did nothing. Many were extremely dangerous. The pain was savage. It was unrelenting. Opiates merely seemed to cut the edge. Only in the last few years have I learned that my body doesn’t process opiates as most people’s bodies do. I lack a critically important enzyme. In truth, the opiates never did anything at all. For me they were and are placebos.

After decades of research I believed I found answers. I did. It was caused by bacteria. I killed them. It worked. I cured my arthritis. The anti-inflammatories shredded my intestines. I healed them. My immune system misfired and thought I was the enemy. I quieted it. The story though was bigger than I thought. It was simpler too.

The key was in the pieces that never fit. The shin pain was a biggest clue. There were others. Endocarditis. Skin conditions. Swollen lymph nodes. A chronic unproductive cough that lasted a decade. Repeated bouts of eye inflammation. And many more.

I was right all those years ago. It was the cat bite that started it all. It was Bartonellosis, an infection with bartonella henslae.

Stephen’s book details that. All of the pieces finally fit. Cats are often infected with the bartonella bacteria. Cats transmit it to people most often through scratches. That causes ‘cat scratch fever’. It is more than that. They also transmit it through bites.

In many ways the disease looks like Lyme disease, with a twist. That twist comes from my genetics, genetics that make me susceptible to arthritis.

All of my puzzle pieces now fit. Finally.

Stephen details the mechanisms, herbs and nutrients needed to fully resolve the disease. I am likely cured already. But the bug is good at hiding and waiting. So I will now embark on a journey to finally clear any last remnants of the infections, infections from more than half a century ago.

Here I am once more thinking: “Finally – I have found THE answer!” I know that is not true. This is just another step. It is a big step.

The journey has been long. It has taken me far afield. It changed my life. It dominated my life. Yet, I am so very much the richer for it, despite the decades of pain and suffering.

— Dirk

Whatever I want, I cannot have.

In a program at the Monroe Institute, I learned a powerful lesson: “Whatever I want, I cannot have.”

The Institute is an amazing place. Its mission is to explore human potential, to learn for ourselves how much more we are than mere matter.

The core of the experience is first-hand learning. Ask questions. Challenge yourself. Challenge what others have told you. Question some more. Find more answers. Test them. Repeat.

Part of the magic is the Institute’s sound technology. Part is the beautiful rural setting, away from the hubbub of life. The largest part comes in the magic of the group of people who come together to share the week. And I do mean magic.

It is more than a collection of individuals. Often – very often in my experience – the groups are and were connected in magical ways before they ever arrived, though they had never physically met or ever heard of one another.

But, as I say, I eventually realized that “Whatever I want, I cannot have.”

Though I saw this in practice in myself and others repeated time and again, it took me half a dozen programs to put it into words. The core of it was realizing that the wanting of something, of anything, triggers powerful emotions and thoughts. Both are important.

By getting caught in that wanting, that desire, that insistence, I was trapped. So too were the others in the groups – trapped by their wants, as I was by mine.

In becoming focused on the wanting, I, and they, could not let go. I was trapped in my mind’s patterns. I was locked in on remembering what was, or what I desired, or what I insisted must be.

It was only when I could finally let go of that wanting that I could truly explore and find truth.

In 1984 at the very young age of 26, my dear sweet sister Shawn died of primary Addison’s disease. No one dies of Addison’s anymore. Her death was one of the greatest tragedies of my life and my families. It shattered us all. Shawn was a poet and an artist. And we lost her so early.

I had an unusual form of arthritis that was trying its utmost to kill me. It had nearly succeeded several times by then. Then Shawn died. How was this possible? Why her and not me? I was shattered.

When I first went to the Institute in 1995, I went because I was fascinated by the brain and the mind, as well as hard science of all kinds and the esoteric as well. Here they were researching all of that – together. Little did I know then how much my life would be changed.

What I did not realize is that in going I was searching for Shawn. That wanting haunted me both in life, and in my time at the Institute. I tried many times to “find her”, with no success. Others succeeded in finding ones they loved. I did not. Why? For a while, I set that aside.

In a Guidelines program I had an experience with an Owl in my visions. Nothing that happened told me anything directly. But I knew with absolute certainty that my cousin Kristi was dying. I was distraught. When I got home I called her mom and her and we talked. About a month later she was diagnosed with cancer. From then and for the next year I spoke with Kristi every night.

We talked a lot about my experiences at the Institute, about life, about healing, and about death. Kristi was an astounding young woman. She, her cousin Yvonna, and my sister were the best of friends. And like my sister Shawn, Kristi died young at age 27. Her life in that final year was glorious.

About a year after her death I was back again at the Institute in another Guidelines program. The group was amazing. It included two dancers from Paris.

As the program went along, I found myself in Paris on a particular street beside a café late in the evening. I had thought that I must be in Paris for some reason related to the two dancers. That wasn’t it at all.

In the next exercise, I found myself back in Paris. I heard someone behind me. When I turned around, it was Kristi. I was both overjoyed and overwhelmed with emotion. We could only talk for a brief time before I emotionally lost it and came back to full consciousness with tears running down my cheeks.

In the third exercise of the morning, I found myself back in Paris again. This time I was not surprised to find Kristi. We had a fuller conversation. Toward the end she surprised me by saying she had someone she wanted me to meet. She took me around the corner. There sitting at a table outside the café on the late evening streets of Paris was my sister Shawn. Even now 22 years later, I am overwhelmed with emotion just remembering that encounter.

I had “forgotten” that I was looking for her. Oh my! I cannot even begin to tell you how important that was, or how deeply it affected me. I can barely see to write this through the tears.

In time in that program and later ones I met Shawn many times.

As I thought about all of that and so many other instances I realized that in wanting so badly to find Shawn that I had become trapped in my own thoughts and feelings about her here in the physical. I was entirely unable to let go enough to actually go find her. And then through two diversions – the two dancers¬, and my cousin Kristi, I finally did find her.
“Whatever I want, I cannot have.” For it is in the very wanting that I am trapped and blinded, and thereby prevented from finding the very thing I want, the thing I most desire.

I am ever mindful now of that lesson. When I get stuck, I stop and ask myself – what am I wanting so badly that I am stuck?

I have found this truth has wider application. It extends to beliefs, especially deeply engrained ones, and to lessons learned in school and life. Often those are subtly wrong, or even seriously flawed. But in being trapped into believing they are true, in accepting them, I am and we are trapped.

Recognizing that, I have learned to let go. Let go of the beliefs that bind me. It is then that the magic truly happens.

— Dirk