Month: October 2017

[For convenience’ sake, I reprint the first page, then tack on these later thoughts.

Monday, October 23, 2017

2:15 a.m. Just for a moment, it came clear. Can I hold it long enough to express it? We are real as characters, but not as what we think we are. We are, as was said yesterday, a half-step less real than the next level of reality. And I suspect that that half-step away from reality is another of those “as above, so below” progressions.

I have been reading a life of Ernie Pyle, and specifically have been reading about Hollywood trying to get a handle on him, in making “The Story of G.I. Joe” in 1944. They took the facts and tried to turn it into myth, which is, after all, what story-telling does. And as always I have been reading a steady diet of light fiction, only with new eyes now. And suddenly, as I say, just as I was getting back to bed, for a second everything crystallized, and I understood, or I suppose I should say I saw, only sort of understanding. And the process of putting something seen, or felt, or intuited, into words – well, it’s easy to lose the nub of it, or in fact to never quite grasp it.

We – our essence – are one thing. We – the characters we create and play in this improv performance – are not the same thing, not quite as real, not quite us, just as we appear while we are doing the improv.

It may sound like playing with words. It isn’t. But it’s slippery to hold on to. I’ll check it with Nathaniel and company, but maybe not just now.

5:50 a.m. Nathaniel?

That’s the sense of it. It is one way to see who and what you are. It is not analogy or metaphor or fairy tale or “let’s think of it this way.” It is accurate, factual, plain. Only, it isn’t the only way to see yourselves.

But as a corrective to other views –

Yes, excellent corrective. It’s hard to put this clearly enough to be sure you have both halves: It isn’t the only way to see yourselves; it is one, valid, illuminating way.

But you are too tired to have a good session, plus you haven’t been taking time off. Type this up, send it off, and be on your way for a while. If you ring us too soon, maybe we won’t answer the phone.

“Your call is very important to us –“

But not important enough to pick up the phone. Right.

Okay, well, maybe later today, maybe not. Thanks – and thanks to whoever it was sent me that clarifying thought in the night.

Nice try, but you won’t be tempting us into conversation at the moment. Go away for now.

Okay.

Monday, October 23, 2017

6:25 a.m. There is something I am trying to remember though – and, in trying to remember it, I see even farther, before finally finishing the sentence!

I knew it had to do with fictional characters and situations. I see now it leads to further thoughts on our essential nature as creators. Hornblower, say, or Sam Spade, aren’t real in the sense of having an independent existence. They can’t go where they aren’t imagined to go, they don’t extend to real-life dimensions, the everyday things we never think about. They don’t really breathe or grow up.

No, that doesn’t get it. They can be imagined, and if their character has been conceived with enough life, they can be imagined in various situations, and the imaginer will know how they might be imagined to react. So, they have a sort of life, and it can be extended. But there is no possibility of Sam Spade or Horatio Hornblower, or Harry Morgan, say, ever seeing themselves as really only an invented character. This is a dimension of reality closed to them, because it is the dimension they were created from.

We, at this level, can envision ourselves as creatures of another level of reality. It leads to sci-fi dystopian nightmares like “The Thirteenth Floor,” but it is the beginning of awakening.

Conversely, movies like “The Matrix” assume that we are real and our environment is not. That takes a vague sense of things and expresses it in totally distorted fashion, but it is the sense that things are not as they appear that attracts people. They blend it with paranoia, they miss the question of whether the personality they identify with is real, but they know that something in everyday understanding of life is amiss.

We know we are creators, created by creators. We can see that we, creators, created Hornblower and millions of other characters at a lower level of reality who are still somehow somewhat real. But it does not occur to us that we, 3D creators, are the creations of the creators at the next higher level of reality, and they are who we really are. The 3D characters we experience being are real, obviously. We live, we breathe, we suffer and enjoy. And yet at a higher level of reality, what seems like everyday life to us is only a sort of stepped-down life.

The thought is clear to me. As a way to put it into words, not so clear. I wish I could paint it, but even if I had the skill, I doubt I could. Some things don’t translate easily into visuals.

9:40 a.m. It is in passing the creative element on through the various levels of reality that continuity exists. No, that’s an awkward mis-statement. I mean, the elements of the characters we create are the same elements we possess, the same elements our creators possessed, because one creates only out of one’s own substance. (I doubt that is a totally accurate statement, but it isn’t wrong, either.)

Just as all matter is energy, and all energy is consciousness, and so consciousness pervades “animate” and “inanimate” matter alike, in the same way, creations, structures, assemblages, are all made up of non-material consciousness, which also permeates all layers. That’s the best I can do at the moment.

11:40 a.m. But I don’t know how far to push it. Hornblower can’t actually feel emotion, but he can be observed (as if) feeling it. We actors do feel emotion; what is the comparable “but” seen from our next-realer level? I suppose at that level we see our actor selves as letting the forces flow through our already established channels and not realizing that our consciousness is partial and the events somewhat symbolic, because to us as actors they can only feel real, sometimes painfully real. But, as I say, I don’t know how far to push it.

 

Monday, October 23, 2017

2:15 a.m. Just for a moment, it came clear. Can I hold it long enough to express it? We are real as characters, but not as what we think we are. We are, as was said yesterday, a half-step less real than the next level of reality. And I suspect that that half-step away from reality is another of those “as above, so below” progressions.

I have been reading a life of Ernie Pyle, and specifically have been reading about Hollywood trying to get a handle on him, in making “The Story of G.I. Joe” in 1944. They took the facts and tried to turn it into myth, which is, after all, what story-telling does. And as always I have been reading a steady diet of light fiction, only with new eyes now. And suddenly, as I say, just as I was getting back to bed, for a second everything crystallized, and I understood, or I suppose I should say I saw, only sort of understanding. And the process of putting something seen, or felt, or intuited, into words – well, it’s easy to lose the nub of it, or in fact to never quite grasp it.

We – our essence – are one thing. We – the characters we create and play in this improv performance – are not the same thing, not quite as real, not quite us, just as we appear while we are doing the improv.

It may sound like playing with words. It isn’t. But it’s slippery to hold on to. I’ll check it with Nathaniel and company, but maybe not just now.

5:50 a.m. Nathaniel?

That’s the sense of it. It is one way to see who and what you are. It is not analogy or metaphor or fairy tale or “let’s think of it this way.” It is accurate, factual, plain. Only, it isn’t the only way to see yourselves.

But as a corrective to other views –

Yes, excellent corrective. It’s hard to put this clearly enough to be sure you have both halves: It isn’t the only way to see yourselves; it is one, valid, illuminating way.

But you are too tired to have a good session, plus you haven’t been taking time off. Type this up, send it off, and be on your way for a while. If you ring us too soon, maybe we won’t answer the phone.

“Your call is very important to us –“

But not important enough to pick up the phone. Right.

Okay, well, maybe later today, maybe not. Thanks – and thanks to whoever it was sent me that clarifying thought in the night.

Nice try, but you won’t be tempting us into conversation at the moment. Go away for now.

Okay.

 

Sunday, October 22, 2017

6 a.m. Dreams of drama, and I awaken thinking of Richard Bach, who certainly knew or knows how to dramatize his inner life.

Several journal entries that I am tempted to include here, after yesterday’s extraordinary session, and ask for your comments.

By all means. And we’re glad you are finally able to read The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events. We know you have been wanting to for a while.

A while, yes. About 20 years. Right after The Nature of Personal Reality, and then I got the strongest feeling not to, not yet. And of course I see why, and that was accurate: It was too early in my process. I would have been prey to “I’m just making this up because I have read it in Seth,” and, worse, I would have had to believe or disbelieve; I didn’t have the background context that the ensuing years have provided. I couldn’t have wrestled with it, as you always put it.

So enter your notes from yesterday.

[Reading The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, I see why I shouldn’t have read it, and thus was prevented from reading it, 20 years ago. What I’m reading makes perfect sense to me today. Then, I would have had to be accepting it on faith, which wouldn’t have done any good and would have perhaps hampered my own exploration.

[No two people do it the same way. Rob and Jane worked together; Rob researched, cross-referenced, annotated. Jane pursued other lines of research and thought. Very different even from Cayce, who also had someone transcribing his voice, but did no research nor cross-referencing. Different from me, certainly, typing up my own material, putting it out for question and comment, but – at least since Rita passed over – not analyzing or cross-referencing. Pretty good results so far, though.

[Another difference between my process and either Jane Roberts or Cayce, of course, is that mine is interactive, not merely receptive.

[Am I getting a little puffed up, comparing myself to them? And yet, the material is there, and it came through via my agency. I guess it is a valid comparison. But Neale Walsch did it the way I do, come to think of it, and had far more – incomparably more – impact than I am having. Remember that, if you tend to get impressed with yourself, o scribe!]

Comment?

Accurate enough, as we see it. It is important in one’s relation to one’s own life, not merely in relation to others, to avoid the twin pitfalls of too little and too much estimation.

“Too much respect is as distancing as contempt,” I was told.

Yes, only in the case of one’s own life and work, the latter is likely to be the greater error. It is easy to misjudge how well or how badly – how much or how little – one’s life’s work amounts to. Not only do you have no external perspective, but at least half the data is invisible to you.

Say a little more on that?

The only perspective you have on your effect is reputation and observable impact, both very second-hand sources of information, easily misinterpreted. Not only that, you can have no such data on your future reputation and impact. It may be far greater or far less – and in any case is likely to be far different in shape – than you suppose. Nor can you easily weigh the invisible, the impact on a soul who then proceeds in its altered life to impact others, and so forth.

Yes, I see all that, and I am very aware that you are speaking directly to our readers, not just to me. I mention it in case it doesn’t immediately occur to them.

It is, of course, applicable to everybody, yes. Not everybody is as one-sided as you were created, so their impact is likely to be distributed among various points of their horoscope, so to speak. But everybody has impact. (Or, as that is almost a violent word, let us say everybody’s warmth affects others.) And what about your other entries?

I hadn’t decided whether to add them.

[Watched “Terminator 3,” found in alphabetizing my DVDs and tapes. Thinking about the story. The visuals show how much people hate our civilization, and want to see it smashed – trucks, cars, buildings, people, cities. I don’t even know if the movie makers know they are expressing that. Maybe they think people just like “action.” (Even that would show how boring and unsatisfying people’s lives are.) But there is a deeper theme, for me: sitting on the sidelines watching the inevitable catastrophe. That’s what I have been doing my whole life, with the exception of a half-hearted attempt to enter political life. If it is inevitable, you waste your life trying to stop it – even if you know what to do. But how do you know it is? Well, I guess the answer to that is simple: You know.

[I can’t help wondering what form the catastrophe will take, and how much it will leave us alone. I don’t mean Skynet, I mean the progressive destruction of the republic.

[No way to know. Work while I have time, and hope that something survives.]

It is in the dreams of the future that you find your magnetic pull–. No, let’s start again.

You know that the physical brain reacts to depictions nearly as strongly as to the real physical event. Your brains are always playing virtual reality, and the difference in input is less significant, less discernable, to it than you might assume. So, all those depictions of mass destruction, of lethal conflict, of raw emotion (that is, the scenes themselves, and the reaction they were created to produce) are real. As real as the rest of your lives, that is. Or, let’s say, a half-step less real, as your physical life is a half-step less real than the reality above (and below, and around) it.

So media presentation of a portrait of your world is not limited to “news” broadcasts with their own peculiar bias toward the dramatic and away from the analytical; it includes the overt drama and all its subtexts. It includes the fiction and non-fiction that you read. It includes second-hand experience at roughly the same level as first-hand, depending upon your intuitive / sensory mix. Someone like you lives as much in secondary reports as in primary experience; more, sometimes. Others may live only in the primary, as far as they know, and yet they will be suffused by secondary reports absorbed unconsciously and uncritically stored as data.

But surely even in the case of the least self-conscious persons, they have their unbroken link to intuition – to their non-3D component – to keep them aligned.

Ah, but that is a vast and different and quite apposite line of inquiry. (Apposite, yes, not opposite. This for those who are challenged by the vocabulary.)

That’s the first time I’ve seen you do anything like that. Or was it me bleeding through?

No, actually it was our doing, and for a good reason although we know it seemed like sarcasm or derogation. [I think they meant condescension.] It is important, very occasionally, to remind people that your extensive vocabulary includes words not in common parlance, which they should not assume to be typographical errors.

Even though sometimes they are.

Because sometimes they are. It is a way of saying, “stay alert.”

That implies that “apposite” was chosen by me rather than you.

It is a meaningless distinction, in context, or we could come through in Swahili or Urdu. Vocabulary, grammar, syntax, cultural inferences, analogies, etc., etc., can only come by way of the conduit. You know that full well. As you say, don’t expect science or music to come through you, as you don’t have it in your data banks.

All right, I see that. I guess I did know it, in a slightly different context, though. So, you were about to say – ?

The unbroken and unbreakable link between conscious and unconscious, between 3D awareness and All-D awareness, let’s say, is not meant to produce homogenous 3D results. Quite the contrary. It is meant to support the existence of the 3D being; it is, as a parallel function, the repository of the record of all 3D experience. (It is your feed to the Akashic Record, you might say.) But although it is always acting as a receiver, it is experienced by the 3D being as transmitter only under certain constraints. The 3D being may choose to shut off any messages it finds uncomfortable. It tunes out its bad conscience, you might say. Or, it tunes out thoughts and realizations that contradict what it chooses to think of realize. Or it tunes out intuitive input in general, as distraction or as hallucination or as fantasy.

“It isn’t real.”

That’s one version, yes. “It isn’t real, I don’t want to hear about it, it produces uncomfortable sensations.” For any of those reasons, and there are more, any 3D being may shut itself off from receiving some of the input available to it. But, a couple of points.

• This isn’t a It is a function of free will, and nobody has any objection to it.
• Overwhelming need may cause (or enable, depending upon how you choose to look at it) the non-3D component to flood the 3D with input that can not be ignored and may be life changing.

I see.

And that is enough for now. With the additional material to transcribe, you will find this enough to do, and this is a convenient place to stop.

Okay. Till next time.

 

Saturday, October 21, 2017

6:30 a.m. You’re up. [Meaning, “you’re at bat.”] I have no idea where we’re going, and we left no bread crumbs.

Working on yourselves. That’s the theme. What the situation is. That’s the theme too. You can’t understand one without the other.

I do understand that. It is the specific application I don’t always know.

No, but that’s our job.

Isn’t that what I just said?

Yes, in a sense. Very well, look again at the situation we are describing. You, shaped souls continually reshaping yourselves in the face of on-coming circumstances seemingly external, seemingly unconnected to your own needs and opportunities. An unending sweep of animating force, varying in intensity from one moment to the next, vast and impersonal, as we keep stressing. The interaction of the two – spirit and soul – in 3D constricted circumstances produces the potential for change and, in context, produces the necessity of change either by your decision or by default, in that nothing ever stands still.

Thousands of years’ worth of scripture and philosophy have left you a legacy of instruction on effective ways to cope with your possibilities and dangers. All we are doing is alerting you to a way to reinterpret words that may have gone dead on you for lack of context. That context mostly involves redefining what a human existence includes, and what the 3D and non-3D world adds up to.

Only that.

Yes, you smile, but, “only that.” It is a big job, and obviously no one in 3D could live long enough nor work hard enough to convey what needs to be conveyed. That’s why we remind you, again and again, that the needed material exists. You don’t have to live your lives waiting for it to be written or spoken, or sung or whistled or hinted at. It is there, and you have your own inner guidance system to help you stumble over it; it is mostly a matter of feeling the hunger, having faith that where there is a hunger there is what is hungered for, and keeping your eyes open for it. That isn’t more than anybody can do. Whenever a task seems too extensive, whenever it is so extensive as to be daunting, we advise this: Narrow it down. You can’t do everything; that is not the same as saying you can’t do anything. You don’t read Sanskrit, or Assyrian, or whatever: Why assume that whatever you need has not been translated for you somewhere? You don’t know where to look: Does that mean your non-3D assistance doesn’t either?

Rhetorical questions, but you see our point.

Stumble along with integrity and faith, and you’ll do all right.

Well? Can you with your experience deny it?

Can’t, and wouldn’t dream of doing so. This is what I tell people myself.

Maybe we’re making you up.

All right, that got an actual chuckle, not just a smile. Maybe you are. I can see that my best hope is that I am Charlie McCarthy and not Mortimer Snerd. (Dating myself there, I realize. Will anybody remember Edgar Bergen?)

To illustrate how life works, we will guarantee that everybody old enough just got side-tracked for a moment.

Is that a reason not to make such allusions? Alternatively, do they serve a purpose?

You might say it is like telling a joke in the middle of a serious disquisition. It may help to seat in the material with the rest of one’s mental life, or it may distract. There is no way to know, and it isn’t anything to worry about. People will remember the Mortimer Snerd allusion when they have forgotten the context.

That’s what I’m afraid of!

Yes, but, you see, you don’t want people trying to hold the material in their conscious mind continually. It isn’t possible anyway, but in any case it wouldn’t be desirable. The purpose of instruction is to change the person’s ground rules and observation posts (to mix metaphors), not to be encapsulated and set aside. In fact, perhaps you should underline that, because that is one of the dangers of over-reverencing scripture or anything.

Expand on that, maybe?

If you come across something new and you think about it, wrestle with it, test it on your own truth-detector, your own assaying apparatus, by the time you have done so, you will have gotten from it whatever it has to say to you now. Perhaps later you will look at it again and it will or won’t tell you something new, but right now, whenever that “now” is, you will be changed not by it, not by encountering it, but by your struggle with it.

I know you don’t mean that quite in the way it sounds. For instance, if we hear something and it immediately resonates, we don’t necessarily need to struggle; it is as though it drops into a slot pre-fitted for it.

Yes, we don’t mean by “struggle” or “wrestle” that it will necessarily feel alien or antagonistic. But even when it goes “clunk” and drops into place, still you benefit by testing it. Not everything that immediately fits into place deserves to be accepted without question. Or rather, put it this way, if it is important, it deserves to be questioned, examined, wrestled with, so as to seat it in to your mental world more firmly.

Conversely, memorizing bible verses and citing them at whatever occasion calls them forth may be productive or may be a form of superstition, depending upon how the material has been dealt with by you. Did you wrestle with it? Do you know whether it rings true for you? Do you see how it illumines or fails to illumine your own difficulties and opportunities in life? It doesn’t matter if sixteen angels swear “this is the inspired word of God” if it doesn’t resonate with you. Nor was it sent to you in order that you should worship it.

I have said that fundamentalists set out to worship the Word and wind up worshipping the Page.

And you as a publisher had a problem with that?

Funny. But yeah, I as a publisher had a pretty good sense of the difference between the message and the conveying of the message, or, let’s say, the limits of translation.

And of course that is our point. If you begin to think of words as pointers rather than as landmarks, you will begin to see that their function – unsuspected by many, obvious to a few – is not to convey meaning (which cannot be done), but to provide sparks to allow the reader’s guidance system to nudge them in the appropriate direction.

And that’s the function of poetry!

Of course it is. And of scripture.

My, my. If I have had this insight before, I had forgotten it. I don’t think I have had, actually.

So you see the futility of memorizing scripture as a way of absorbing its purport. Memorization as a means of having it on tap, fine. As a means of argument – that is, bible verses as ammunition – not so fine. And in either case, it is never enough to passively (or even eagerly, which can still be passively) accept. It must be encountered. It must be made a part of you either by connection with other things you believe, or by contrast with them. Memorization and idolatry does nothing to help you along, and that is always the touchstone.

And I get, two complementary errors: worshipping the word, and ignoring it.

Bearing in mind, always, that your minds will bring you to what you need, if you don’t persuade yourselves not to drink.

There’s a joke there somewhere. You can lead a human to inspiration, but you can’t make him think. Something like that.

And, people are more likely to remember that, because it is pithy, than the words of the extended argument. And that is as it should be.

So, that rounds it off for today. The message is, you can trust that inspiration will always be made available to you, but it is up to you to trust the process, keep your eyes open, and then work with what has been freely provided. And in the working, guidance will continue to be freely available, of course.

It’s a very freeing sense. Thanks for this, and see you next time.