Woodrow Wilson

[Working backward from the year 2000 toward America’s beginnings.]

Perhaps at some point I will fill in Woodrow Wilson’s place in America’s rise to world power. Suffice it to say here that he kept us out of the war as long as could – certainly longer than nearly anyone else likely would have done – and proposed relatively equitable peace terms. The punitive terms that were finally imposed on Germany in June, 1919, were punitive at the insistence of the French and British, who had, after all, suffered most. (The French lost an estimated 11 per cent of their population, a staggering injury.) Psychic Edgar Cayce said much later that the Christ spirit had sat at the peace table, but had not been listened to. Wilson’s League of Nations proposal was adopted by the allies, but ironically not by his own country, for reasons good, bad, and arguable.

For a while, the people of Europe regarded Wilson as a savior; disillusion came with the hard wrangling over the peace treaty. (He attended the peace conference in Paris, the first president to leave the country while in office.) To put it in short words, he was outmaneuvered, and the peace that was made was about as bad as the war it ended – and it assured that the war would be resumed as soon as another generation of boys grew old enough to be sent to the slaughter.

Still, Wilson did his best, and if his best was not good enough to spare the world the further misery of World War II, perhaps no one’s could have been. In keeping us out of war an additional two years, he saved American lives that might have died uselessly in the trenches, in the way that a generation of French and English troops, along with subjects from their respective empires, were dying. And in bringing us into the war in response to Germany’s resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare, he brought the American republic that much closer to the center of world power.

But in promising more than he – or anyone – could deliver, he disillusioned Europeans who were hoping for a deus ex machina, and in his lack of success in wrangling with British and French vindictiveness and greed, he disillusioned the American idealists who had believed, with him, that this could be made into a war to make the world safe for democracy, or (even more high-flying) a war to end war.

Thus arose the myth among the Europeans that America couldn’t be counted on, that it came to the war “late” – as if it was America’s business to save them from the results of their own ancestral hatreds and rivalries – and that Uncle Shylock was grasping in demanding that the Allies repay the war debts they had incurred to America while neutral America was providing them with the armaments and foodstuffs that were keeping them in the war.

Correspondingly, there arose American determination to never get caught intervening in European affairs again, regardless how effective the propaganda that would pull us into another of their quarrels. Thus, the isolationist movement of the 1930s; the refusal to sell arms to the legitimate government of Spain to help it defend itself against the Franco insurgency, even in the teeth of obvious intervention by Italian troops and German pilots; the political impossibility of making common cause with the western democracies against Hitler’s clever and audacious diplomacy. World War II was a tragedy for the west, to be sure. But in a sense, the chickens that were Woodrow Wilson’s broken dreams were coming home to roost.

 

Nathaniel — the limits of understanding

Saturday, October 14, 2017

6 a.m. Ready?

You might type in the thoughts and realizations that came to you after yesterday’s session. It all comes together, and there isn’t any reason for you to assume that guidance or insight goes off duty when you cap your pen or pick up a book to read. Indeed, part of the lesson of life is living in connection at all times. It enriches your life and changes your ability to be who you really want to be.

[Friday afternoon:

[Re-reading Rita (3-7-16) I suddenly got that people who see the afterlife as an endless research project, endless learning, are merely projecting an earth-oriented attitude that equates curiosity with part of human nature, and assumes that such curiosity is going to be aimed at “the nature of things” just as it may be while in 3D. but there’s more to life than understanding the nature of things. More even than to understanding our own nature. Even the kind of work I’m doing now is only part “what the world is really like”; it is also, “how can we help those who read it?” In other words, love still trumps brain. We are here – and there – primarily to love. But I don’t know how this works out in practice.

[Later:

[Re-wiring! That is what moral training is, what discipline is, etc. Where the winds blow, we don’t want to have to react as programmed. We want not only to be able to resist but, in a way, not to have to. (Watching “Rear Window” with Christopher Reeve suggested this.)

[Things happen. We react according to our permanent or OEM wiring as modified by our software wiring. Over time we can change our reactions, as Washington and Marshall did.]

[Typing this up, I can see that what were notes for my own use may not be clear to others. OEM = Original Equipment Manufacturer; in other words, how we are fashioned at the time we enter 3D life. Software wiring = our own changes in the original configuration. George Washington and George Marshall are two outstanding examples of men who molded their character by rigid self-discipline.]

“Re-wiring,” you see, is a major summary of your task and potential in 3D life. You have the potential to be one branch of the decision-tree that changes, that becomes an alternate path for the winds blowing through. If you were the only real timeline, you can see that this would mean you were, to a tiny degree, helping to shape the passage of those forces; to a tiny degree you would be participating in a war of good against evil, say. But, as all possible niches are filled and are equally real, as all paths exist and all paths are taken, this cosmic warfare is only one way to interpret what people would call “spiritual” reality. This is in fact the inevitable result when one looks at these forces, and your ability to choose how to channel these forces – if there were only one reality, one time-line, one set of choice-and-results. So you get Manichean warfare of good and evil; Christian and Jewish warfare of God and Devil, same thing; secular versions of fighting for a better world against the forces of evil, same thing.

And those who see or intuit that all paths are taken are tempted to see it all as meaningless paly, or chaos.

We, and hardly just “Nathaniel and company” or Rita or Seth, are here to say that neither of these extreme views is correct. The world is neither an on-going Armageddon nor a tedious self-indulgent spectacle.

Well, that’s how I feel [i.e. agreeing with what was just said], but I admit, I have a hard time justifying the feelings. I mostly have to live on faith that my knowing isn’t wrong. I mean, logic cuts against it. What is the point of re-wiring if it doesn’t matter even to my own moral character, much less its effect on the rest of the world?

You do realize, there is less difference in those two parts of your sentence than appears?

Oh, abstractly. Yes, we’re all so interconnected, I forget sometimes when I’m thinking in other contexts. But still, even if changing myself amounts to having an effect on all that I connect to – and vice-versa – it is hard to understand the point of it, when all other versions of the decision-tree, mine and everybody else’s (impossible to really absorb how vast that must be) cancel out. If we are only showing what happens in each case – if we are only printing-out the tree in detail, so to speak – what does it mean really? I mean, what are we accomplishing?

Go with your deepest feelings, always. They are the “you” of you. Note, we don’t say go with your emotions, your transitory waves of feeling, we say feelings, your nature as it may be felt by you. There is a difference. Your feelings tell you it is not meaningless. Cling to that. (We don’t mean cling to the conclusion. If the conclusion changes, still cling to whatever your feelings tell you.)

Look to the first paragraph you copied from yesterday, that you thought unconnected to the second and third. It provides you a clue. It is a mistake – a natural one, but a mistake – to think that reality translates into human terms, even with respect to humans.

Is it?

Suppose you were to try to explain the purpose of the universe, and reality-streams, and the passage of waves of emotion through 3D compound beings – to the cells comprising your body? Or to a cloud, or a flower? You couldn’t. They all embody consciousness, as everything does, but it is a different kind of consciousness, each living in effect in its own universe (in that each has its own very different range of inputs). Just as you couldn’t explain a baseball game to an amoeba, nor the processing of blood sugars to a muscle cell, so we can’t explain things beyond your range. Willingness to explain, and willingness to have it explained, have nothing to do with it. It is a matter – as you often say – of having or not having receptors for the information.

If you weren’t minds existing in the All-D as well as effective consciousnesses living within 3D constraints, we couldn’t even say this much. We would be obliged to try to explain your lives strictly in 3D terms.

I see. That’s pretty – well, I can’t think of the word. Not off-putting, though that word keeps suggesting itself. It almost puts me into neutral. I hear you saying, life does have a purpose, but there’s no explaining it, you can’t understand.

No need to be quite so taken aback. There is a difference between explaining everything and explaining some things. Just because you cannot expect to understand everything, don’t jump to the conclusion that you cannot understand anything, nor that the amount you can understand must be trivial.

It does seem that way, at first blush.

That – we say to you bluntly – is because of your intellectual arrogance. You will not understand your potential until you understand the limits of your potential, or, we should say more carefully, until you realize that your potential has limits, however ill-defined they may be.

It shouldn’t need saying – but it does! – that in using the words “intellectual arrogance” we are not addressing them to only one of you, or to some of you, but to all of you, without exception. And we have no slightest doubt that each of you will be tempted to exempt yourself, and say, “In my case it isn’t intellectual arrogance, it’s just that I am curious and I am searching for the truth, whatever it may be.” To which we say, in vintage American, “Oh, yeah?”

Surely you are not discounting or criticizing the sincere yearning for understanding that brings us to these conversations.

Indeed we are not. We are criticizing – by bringing to the light of your consciousness – the unacknowledged limits of that sincere yearning, the point at which yearning for truth becomes (unnoticed) clinging to the familiar.

If I get you right, you are saying we tend to think the universe can be comprehended in human terms. But – can’t it?

Certainly it can, but no more so than comprehending it in terms of flowers or rocks or horses.

Each of which explanations would be a very truncated version of reality – I get that. So what’s the use of what we’re doing here?

Remember, stay with your feelings. Your feelings tell you this isn’t meaningless and is not a description of meaninglessness. Listen to them. Don’t let an idea overrule your feelings. If we may say so, that is a very common intellectual mistake.

You know, for the first time I feel as well as think and hope and believe that in bringing this information in, I really am in contact with something beyond my own mind.

Well – that difference is less than you realize. Given that everybody and everything is connected, anything you get could be seen as a message from a remote portion of “your” mind. However, in the terms you mean, yes, good.

And we think we will leave you for the moment with that shock to the system still fresh. You understand, it wasn’t meant as an insult but as a description.

I do. And, it was a very illuminating one. Very well, till next time, then.

 

Henry Reed: Thoughts on “Nathaniel on testing”

Nathaniel is making a lot of sense, if that is the word for it.

Consider:

  • The soul is a collection of strands living one life together.
  • Spirit, we have been describing as the animating force, separate from the soul but essential to it.
  • Life, we said, for 3D compound beings, is choice. It is the lifelong moment-by-moment process of reacting to every moment.

The second two are statements that Edgar Cayce could make. Some correspondence there. Since the introduction of the “committee” idea, or “strands” making up the soul, it made me wonder about the idea of reincarnation, if there were really a single identify that goes through each life, thus my earlier question about boundaries between souls in the all-d world.

Then there is the theme of the external “forces,” that we live a life of being propelled by emotions, steering the process as best we can, or are inclined to do… that seems so much like the Greeks talking about the gods, and Jung turning them into archetypes. The hardest thing for Jung to get across for us, that there exists the “objective psyche,” a reality prior to things, and would exist even if we got rid of all the brains. Here is how Nathanial put it:

“the vast impersonal forces – we’re going to keep repeating the phrase until it sinks in to one and all – precede you, animate you, and postdate you. Like the 3D world, they don’t depend on you for their existence and they don’t depend on you for their activity. They are. They exist. The fact that they animate humans is not the same as saying that they exist for the purpose of animating humans.  Almost the other way around; you might almost say humans – 3D compound beings – exist in order to provide channels for these forces.”

Here Nathanial seems to provide a “purpose or meaning” for existence: how are you going to channel these forces? Jung and Cayce both would say that the purpose of being blown about is to see what you are made of, so that you’d grow in consciousness of your relationship to “all”….

…don’t know if I’m appropriately tagging patterns here…

Escaping the prison cell

Re-reading my messages from Rita, I came to this:

Now, none of this is a detour or a side-trail. It is important for every person who is reading this or ever will read this, because one of the most important concepts they need to absorb is that “the way the world is” is the most efficient prison ever constructed, but the door of the cell has the key on the inside!

Vivid metaphor.

And that is precisely what I’m talking about, today. You don’t move people by argument or by intellectual understanding alone. You do it by vivid images, easily grasped, easily remembered. The complication is that you also move people by a vivid image who haven’t heard, or wouldn’t have been able to follow, the arguments leading to the more sophisticated understanding. So in their case they have traded in one belief and drawn another belief from the deck. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that – people are too quick to criticize the way the world maintains itself – but recognize, that is a very different situation.

A belief snatched at is a superstition, as opposed to a belief grown into?

Let’s say, in the absence of internal guidance that would be a true enough description. Let’s say rationality plays a smaller part in people’s mental world than they sometimes think it does – and there’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, it is often their saving grace, leading them to act better than their conscious beliefs would lead them to.

All right. I’m a little at sea as to where we’re going, here.

Surely you don’t think the ex-3D soul’s experiences as it reorients itself are unaffected by the beliefs that shaped it in its 3D years, do you?

[Pause] I’m having to ponder that. Meaning – so be careful what you let yourself believe?

No, not at all.  You won’t have all that much control over what you find yourself believing. Meaning, so maybe there is a purpose to the creation of various environments for 3D life (and not just on earth, either, I remind you). Maybe the creation of certain environments allows the formation of certain types of minds, and maybe the existence of different belief-systems in the 3D minds that result are valued in and for themselves.

I’m sitting here pretty much in neutral, trying to grasp so many implications. One of them is – our 3D experiences are meant to help shape or reshape the non-3D environment.

That’s correct. The 3D isn’t just an amusement park.

And that implies that the non-3D feels a need for 3D-shaped souls with certain biases, for some reason.

How often do people go to so much trouble to build something, if they don’t expect to profit from it? I don’t mean milk it, but get some good out of it?

That’s sure not the way we’re accustomed to thinking of it – either this world or the next world.

No, and look how “the next world” has gone dead on you. It doesn’t inspire, it doesn’t seem real and comprehensible. Some people desperately cling to the hope of another world, some cling to the hope of another 3D life, some cling to the idea of living their one life with their achievements as a legacy. Some can’t believe but need to, and so they overlay a frantic fanaticism over their disbelief. And, of course, some conclude that life is meaningless, and console themselves by the thought that they are the only grown-ups in the room.

So, we’re doing our bit to alleviate the symptoms by addressing the causes of a sense of meaninglessness. But you can’t expect new understandings to spread in an instant. Well, you can, in a sense: People sometimes catch new understandings like wildfire, but don’t expect it to be a rational process, more like the flooding of the plain when a dam bursts, or like the annual flooding of the Nile. (That is a closer analogy, because not in context of a catastrophe but of a natural, regular, necessary, productive phenomenon. Egypt used to be called The Gift of the Nile, you know, for just that reason: The annual floods left topsoil.

Nathaniel on testing

Friday, October 13, 2017

5:35 a.m. All right. I don’t feel 100%, but ready if you are.

Does it ever strike you that the external conditions in which one works reflect internal conditions, hence – mean something?

The thought has crossed my mind, but I don’t know how to read the message. If I am working through a headache, or other aches, or am wheezing, or sleep-deprived, or any other possible annoyance that may be there, yes I can see that it may mean something, since external and internal are the same thing according to you, but how are we to read the story they tell? I have known people – nurses, say – who carry on through unbelievable constant pain. It isn’t so much that they live in pain as that their lives are pain. And others who live their lives dragging a handicap – Christopher Reeve after his fall from a horse left him a quadriplegic, say. We can see the quiet day-to-day heroism so often around us, but other than as opportunities to build character, what do you mean, “mean something”?

The expression of the interaction of pre-formed conduits channeling high pressure, be it wind or water. Life is the testing, you might say, of prefabricated construction in real-life conditions, with the structure being able to modify itself as it goes along.

Yes, so –?

So when you hear a building creak and shudder, it is reasonable to deduce that it is in the presence of high winds. If you live in the structure long enough, it is reasonable to acquire a conscious or unconscious knowledge of the prevailing winds, so that you more or less automatically learn to read and even predict the weather.

So, say we do. What good does it do us to sense the forces around us (which I suppose is where you’re going with this)? And what would it do to help somebody in Reeve’s condition, where the wind was strong and unrelenting?

Pull back a little from the physicality of the analogy. Our point is that there is you – the pre-formed continuing structure – and there are the seemingly external forces that interact with it, stress it, compel or allow it to modify. Treating those forces as external can bring advantages, but realizing that they are no really external brings other advantages, more appropriate to this stage of your development.

You have our attention, I’m sure. Everybody surely wants to understand the interaction.

It can be difficult to make simple distinctions, when appearance and customary thought channels tend to blur them. Consider a few facts:

  • The soul is a collection of strands living one life together.
  • Spirit, we have been describing as the animating force, separate from the soul but essential to it.
  • Life, we said, for 3D compound beings, is choice. It is the lifelong moment-by-moment process of reacting to every moment.
  • Every heads-or-tails decision is another path down the road, another timeline, equally real but all but the current one seeming un-
  • Your soul’s life is thus a probability-cloud rather than a battlefield, in that every choice is automatically taken both ways.
  • 3D reality may be seen as a vast kaleidoscope shining with the result of all those choices, able to show any timeline.

Perhaps it is time to take these facts and ask “why?” Why should it be this way, or, if that question is too hard, what does it mean for us?

If we thought there were only one timeline, the way appearances would suggest, we might say life is a testing, a trial in which we might succeed or fail, and of course many religions have come to just that conclusion.

Or, if you thought that all choice was meaningless, in that some version of you would take every path, you might conclude that life is itself meaningless, mere play, perhaps. “Walking each other home,” as one person put it.

Only, it doesn’t feel meaningless.

Nor is it. But knowing there is a meaning is not the same as knowing what the meaning is, and that knowing may be beyond any 3D logic in that you don’t have the framework to make it comprehensible.

Yes, I do know that. I used to think we could learn the meaning of things. Now I think, we’ll be lucky to see the meaning of our own lives in the context we know, let alone in the context of the worlds larger and smaller than us, or the world beyond the All-D at our level. Even our non-3D component can only tell us as much as it knows, even assuming we are capable of understanding that much (which I doubt), but there is no reason to assume you-all know everything.

Indeed we do not. But it is not necessary to know everything to know something. Not necessary for us, not necessary for you. As Rita told you, you’ll never get to know everything, and then be bored.

Yes, I remember that.

There is more than one meaning to the word “testing,” you know. It isn’t always pass / fail; sometimes it is more like assaying ore, a matter of finding out what a given thing is composed of. Your lives may be considered to be subjects for assay, rather than subjects for passing or failing an exam.

“Even the drunk who dies in the gutter created a flower.”

Exactly. You don’t fail a life, you shape it. And you don’t shape it by making this or that choice, but by making all of them. The resulting probability-cloud is more like a decision-tree, as we said, with the tree, not any one branch, being the result. And the only way a decision-tree can be created (according to 3D logic and experience) is to be lived, moment by moment, choosing.

And according to All-D logic?

You know the answer to that. At the very moment of creation, all potential is automatically nascent. All equally real, all equally evanescent. All waiting for the finger of God to touch it, a la the famous painting.

I’m struggling, here. The next line was going to be something like “and the spirit –

Get it?

Now I do, at least I think so. The vast impersonal forces you keep talking about, the animating forces – that’s the equivalent to the finger of God giving Adam life.

No spirit, no animation, correct. And that reality has to be conceptualized some way or the other. It is always going to be an analogy: It is always going to follow 3D logic, even when to do so requires postulating miracles.

So are we talking about forces, or a force?

Dealer’s choice.

It’s all in how we choose to see it?

It’s all, let us say, in how your life to date leads you to see it. Nothing you conclude is going to be 100% right, how could it be? But every conclusion leads onward.

And every version of reality has its place I the scheme of things.

By definition. Could there be a junk reality? Could there, therefore, be meaningless sets of choices?

This feels a bit theoretical, a bit divorced from the lives we lead.

Little by little, as we continually remind you. And this is a convenient place to pause, not only because it has been your accustomed hour.

Okay. I’m going to have to think about this, as I type it up, and see if we really got anywhere.

Not the first time you will have posed that question.

Not quite the first, no. All right, see you next time, and as always, thanks.

 

Nathaniel : Forces and structures

Thursday, October 12, 2017

6 a.m. This is all very satisfying as it comes, and each day I can only hope there is more. Your turn.

You began a painting yesterday, not knowing its structure or what it is to portray, or anything except start with four colors and see what happens. You don’t know yet if it will work or will be another uncompleted or failed painting. You know only that like most of your paintings it tries to express something you haven’t ever seen. Is that any easier than this? Here at least you have intellectual substance, and it draws on your life of reading and thinking, and above all it involves words, as painting does not. What do you have to lose?

Nothing at all, and I’m not complaining. Far from it.

We were using you as an example to others, actually. When you go looking for something new, you can’t expect to know what you’re going to get. At best you will have a technique to lean on, perhaps a legacy of practice from other fields, perhaps the inspiration of the work of others. Not least, you will have invisible support, if you can learn to rely upon it.

“You are not alone,” that vision in Gateway told me 50 or 100 times. In words.

And it was a turning point for you when you gradually came to believe it, and then rely on it, and then live it. As it was for you, it would be for anybody, only they need to let themselves believe.

I do know that.

So, back to energy flowing through structures.

Is that what we are talking about?

It is one way to look at it. The vast impersonal forces – we’re going to keep repeating the phrase until it sinks in to one and all – precede you, animate you, and postdate you. Like the 3D world, they don’t depend on you for their existence and they don’t depend on you for their activity. They are. They exist. The fact that they animate humans is not the same as saying that they exist for the purpose of animating humans.  Almost the other way around; you might almost say humans – 3D compound beings – exist in order to provide channels for these forces. However, note the word “almost.”

You will never understand your place in the reality, any more than you could understand your place in the world, by assuming that it centers on you. There is a sense in which it does, but only “in a sense.”

“You’re special, just like everybody else.”

That’s right. It’s a truth; it’s a joke; it’s an obvious self-contradicting impossibility. All at once. But for the moment let’s concentrate on one aspect of things, the aspect in which you are not the center of the world.

This is one of those log-jam moments where I feel three or four caveats leading in different directions, and don’t feel which one to follow.

In such cases, staying centered, choose one. It will lead us somewhere, and other aspects will emerge if they are important enough.

But that tells me why any statement from anybody anytime is going to be incomplete. Choosing, we in effect overlook other aspects, equally true, perhaps equally important, and they may never be expressed, because paths lead onward.

True and no harm done, because the purpose of communication is to get the person on the other end of the line to move on his own, her own. It is not to provide a complete statement of the world, which could never be done anyway.

All right. Well, we are the center of the world in our on-going existence. As a practical necessity, just as every cat or tree is the center of its own world, because that’s where its responsibility and awareness lies. So in that sense, nothing wrong with the idea. But that isn’t the same thing as saying that the world centers on us.

Well –.

Is it?

Let’s continue with where we were going. It’s time to discuss the nature and appearance, the essence and the shaping, of those vast impersonal forces as they manifest in compound beings.

Your lives, we have said, or anyway have been pointing out if not in so many words, are experienced not so much in thought or abstraction, not so much in effort or achievement, not so much in seemingly external events, but in feelings. Not events, but your reaction to events. Not thought or intellectual structure but the feelings that underlie or contradict them. Certainly not in intentions good or bad, and not even in actions good or bad, but in your feelings about them.

To some of you this will be obvious. Others will find it seemingly backwards, perhaps incomprehensible. As always, we will proceed in an attempt to provide a staging-point accessible to all. That is, not so slowly as to exasperate those for whom the point is obvious (or agreeable), not so quickly as to lose those for whom the point is difficult to grasp or emotionally hard to accept. If you all get our statement, that’s all we want; from there you are on your own in terms of what you do with it.

If you experience the feeling of lust, say, or anger, are you experiencing something that exists in that form beyond you? That is, does it exist as lust, or anger, regardless of the individual it visits or manifests in? Or are you experiencing a gust of wind that animates your own being in such a way as to activate what is already there? In other words, does the spirit not so much shape your response as be shaped (in effect) by what it blows through?

Big question.

Yes it is. And as usual the answer is, it depends upon how you want to look at it. That’s usually the answer, because if a thing were only to be seen one way, the question would never come up. As soon as you perceive a question, know that that is a s sign that it is a question; that is, that it may be seen more than one way. In such cases, there is never any one right answer, though there may be any number of incorrect ones.

So, in this case. Yes, the animating forces are impersonal, being so far beyond the limits of any one compound being. So you can’t say there is a force of lust, a force of anger, and the individual may happen to be in the way of it and be influenced.

On the other hand, individuals are no two of them alike, and so what the animating winds blow through has its own particular color, its characteristic mixture of vices and virtues, and depending upon how strongly the winds blow through, the results will differ moment by moment. So it will seem that the individual compound being is somewhat at the mercy of those forces, as, in a sense, indeed it is. It (he, she) may choose to fight the manifestations, or flow with them (encourage them) or may go back and forth, but the reaction will be in reaction to  the forces, obviously. No amount of clever tacking will move a sailboat in the absence of a wind, even a contrary wind.

This has been slow. An hour, and we’ve only filled seven pages. So – looking back – we are the structures being filled with the energies?

Let’s pause here. You want to keep on and fill more pages, which is ambitious, or energetic, but, a little at a time.

Okay. Till next time, then.