Month: October 2017

Wednesday. October 11, 2017

4:50 a.m. Shall we dance?

Try to hold in mind the continuing trend in our discussions, our argument. We know it is difficult to do over time. There is one world, not two. The physical and the spiritual, the 3D and the non-3D, are aspects of one reality, and cannot be considered as separate entities without serious distortion in your understanding. The internal world you experience through your direct feed and the external world you experience by way of your senses are the same world, not different worlds. They are two modes of experience seeming (until you transcend appearances) to be two cooperating or even non-connected environments. Your lives are internal, not external, or let us say the external reality you perceive as primary is really an internal reality perceived in distortion.

I was clear until that last sentence, but that one didn’t seem to come out straight. Try it again?

No, it wouldn’t get any straighter. It expresses a reality that must be intuited or cannot be grasped.

It seems to me an echo of something Rita said in her sessions about the way we perceive things differently after we drop the body [Awakening from the 3D World], but I can’t quite pull it up.

Again, no need. People – including you – can always re-read it, if it calls to them.

All right. And –?

If you can remember that framework, it will keep you oriented as we proceed. One world, not two. Everything connected, not separate or separable. We have said before, it is because people no longer have an intellectual and (even more) an emotional framework that holds together heaven and earth, so to speak, that they have ceased to be able to believe in anything beyond what their senses report, and the result is emptiness and despair. Faith in the unseen depends upon a framework that is itself believed in. We know that seems circular.

We don’t live in an age of faith.

Au contraire. The problem is that you all have too much faith, in too many things, and too little knowledge holding it all together.

Emerson’s quote, if I can find it.

Certainly. And these all have their modern equivalents, which you can insert here if you find the quotation.

[No need, they haven’t changed, just changed names.]

Emerson, age 44, August 1847:

The Superstitions of our Age:

The fear of Catholicism;

The fear of pauperism;

The fear of immigration;

The fear of manufacturing interests;

The fear of radicalism or democracy;

And faith in the steam engine.

“And faith in the steam engine” struck me particularly hard when I first read it, many years ago. Certainly true.

The basis of faith is always knowledge. But knowledge is not the same thing as facts, certainly not memorized facts or agreed-upon facts, or any body of logically connected facts and arguments. Those things are results, not building blocks.

I’m not sure that’s quite clear.

What you know is from direct feed. What you experience isn’t the same thing.

Man, this keeps getting fuzzier. I have a sense of what you’re getting at, but the words just keep confusing it, or is the thought itself, or my understanding of it, unclear, or wrong?

Have you noticed? – perhaps not – that abstract statements get us into trouble, and the more abstract, the larger the scale of abstraction, the greater the difficulty. That is why your dialogue format with Rita worked so well, it kept drawing you back to the personal and the specific.

Well, it seems to me I was just recording what I was getting, above. It doesn’t feel like I am the one steering the discussion.

It isn’t a matter of intent, or even of perception. What we’re pointing out here is that abstract statements are difficult to convey accurately, and they tend to attract a fuzziness. That’s an awkward way to put it, but that’s what it amounts to. When you try to convey something, the more abstract it is, the more likely it is that unconscious mental associations will find their way into the statement, clouding the result.

Jung said somewhere that the unconscious tends to come in via pompous language.

That isn’t quite what he said, but that’s the idea, yes. So, when it happens to you, perhaps use that statement from experience of his as a touchstone, and remember that the very difficulty of expression may be (may be) a sign of deep and meaningful content. That is, when you find yourself in difficulty, work where you are. Good advice in general, of course. So let’s continue trying to make a clear statement about faith and knowledge, internal and external, intuition and sensory experience.

There isn’t any use clinging to what you had, even if in fact you actually ever had it. Times change in order to provide the opportunity for new ways to understand the world and thus understand yourselves. Times change, you change. You change, times change. Like so much else, it is a reciprocating process, because that is one of the underlying laws of 3D life.

Only 3D life?

It is only in slowed-down 3D life that the process is that apparent. Delayed consequences assist analysis and experiences. But this is a side-trail that we don’t wish to divert ourselves onto.

Trying to retain old ways of understanding life may work for some – or we should say may seem to relatively work for them – but a changing civilization reflects and potentiates changing mass consciousness, which in turn changes the ecology of individual consciousness.

That word “ecology” is going to startle some people, as they relate it only to nature.

Ecology refers to the fishbowl in relation to the fish. In this case, we refer to the mental, spiritual, abstract fishbowl around the 3D personalities experiencing 3D life. The waters in which you swim are collective in the same way as the physical environment you experience is collective.

I think you mean, collective awareness holds our physical world, and in the same way it creates the boundaries of our mental world at any given time.

Yes, with hesitations. Those words are all loaded with misleading unconscious connotations and associations. But, as stated, and subject to interpretation, yes.

You are not living in a mental ecology that will encourage blind faith in a religious scheme without disastrous results, and the disastrous results themselves will further undermine attempts to live it. But this means two things, or let’s say it means one thing in two aspects.

1)

Started to list them, blanked out on them entirely. Waited, still nothing. Your move.

Sometimes the act of sorting that is implied in numbering moves you to a more analytical space and impedes flow.

Well, I tried to step aside.

What is, and what you try to make be, are not always identical, as you may have noticed.

Anyway –

You will not find your salvation (and by “you” we mean your time and your society) by any one blind faith. It can only be a faith built upon what you know. And that cannot be based upon sensory data, it is too unreliable and, worse, second-hand and superficial. But neither can it be built in active opposition to that sensory data. It must be firmly rooted in experience and it must successfully reinterpret the sensory data that people accept.

And that is what we are doing here.

Indeed it is. Put it into context.

I suppose I could draw a line, but it would always be somewhat arbitrary. Parallel to the accepted materialist interpretations of the world has been another very different interpretation of what is. Swedenborg to Emerson to Whitman to William James and Carl Jung, perhaps. The Fox sisters to Edgar Cayce and Jane Roberts, say. Rhine and Monroe and so many psychic investigators.

Yes and another line as well, religious mystics, hard-headed physics mystics, people who feel their way to what is real.

Frustrating, how slowly this goes, sometimes. Here’s an hour gone and I feel like we never got started on what you were intending to say.

Look at things a different way. When you re-read and you don’t find words or arguments that are not to the point, doesn’t that mean that what was said was to the point? Some things just require a certain amount of time and attention to be said and understood. Persevere and it will come forth.

I’ll take your word for it. Okay, till next time.

 

[Wednesdays, I am posting pieces of Chasing Smallwood, an early book now out of print. This is a book about four interconnected themes:

• how to communicate with the dead;
• the life of a 19th-century American;
• the massive task facing us today, and

the physical world’s place in the scheme of things.]

Following up on Joseph’s suggestion, on the night of December 29, 2005 I did a telephone consultation with Karen Storsteen, a talented psychic who I had met at the International New Age Trade Show (INATS) while working the show for Hampton Roads Publishing Co.

I took notes at the time, but didn’t reconstruct them into a narrative at the time, which I regret now. The fragmentary nature of my notes almost resemble the notes of a remote viewing – which, come to think of it, is more or less what they are. The difficulty in reconstructing is that I made no note of my questions, only her answers. So looking at them now, from this distance, I can no longer remember which of her answers came from my specific questions and which were just perceptions that came to her. Sometimes it is obvious, sometimes not.

As will soon become clear, much of the information that Karen got contradicted the story that I had gotten directly from Joseph. As the saying goes, I didn’t know where I was, but I did know that I didn’t have a paddle. All I could do was continue – “sojer on” – and hope that at some point things would clarify.

I think the best thing to do is to reproduce the notes and add any explanations within brackets. So here we go:

* * *

• 1842 significant date. Little boy then, like eight years old
• Born 1834
• Didn’t go to college
• Born in northwest Massachusetts
• Image of dentist. Writing, trying to be influential. “Like pulling teeth.” [Later when I asked if he was a Transcendentalist, Karen said yes. That may have been part of that dentist image, a pun.]
• Writing, trying to be influential. Writing and speaking. Opinions. Frustrated.
• Trying to influence – politics, “fairness,” and liberty. Not an abolitionist.
• Father called him Joseph, and he remained Joseph to his father and those older. Came to me as Joseph rather than as Dave because “Joseph sounds more prominent” and I might not have taken Dave as seriously.
• Went in as volunteer. Lived in Virginia from 1853-1855 to separate from father, then moved back to Massachusetts at age 21.
• Never went west
• Dictatorial father
• Enlisted in army
• Had the idea in Virginia, knew he was going to enlist.
• Regular army. Cavalry.
• Look in old books [to find him]
• Western army
• [I named several generals and asked if he had served under them]
• Sherman: yes
• McPherson: no
• Thomas: for a short time
• [I named several battles and campaigns and asked if he had been there]
• Chickamauga: no
• Atlanta: yes
• March to the sea: no; stayed with Thomas
• Franklin: no
• Shiloh: no
• Against Mosby: no
• Gettysburg: yes
• Fredericksburg: yes (chills) [Karen got chills when I asked about Fredericksburg]
• Serve in Army of Potomac: no
• Army of Cumberland: no
• Under Custer: no
• Under Stoneman: yes
• [Joseph would only have served under Stoneman if he were in the cavalry. Karen knew little about the Civil War, and had no idea that Stoneman commanded Union cavalry. Yet of course Stoneman was a part of the Army of the Potomac.]
• Wounded in leg, area of left knee
• Lower back, clubbed by rifle as I’d seen. Not at Gettysburg, at Fredericksburg.
• Did experience me [I will explain this at some length in the proper place. In 1994, I had an experience of contact with Joseph after he had been wounded in battle.]
• Went in before war began; up warrior ladder quickly
• General – four stars on shoulder blades (2 on each shoulder)
• Buttons of brushed gold
• What’s with the story he told? (Image of him backed off in a corner, scared. Embellished) [That is, Karen got an image of Joseph feeling backed into a corner, having been caught embellishing his true story.]
• Did he meet Emerson? No
• Henry? No
• Disabled by leg, wobbly. Senior in army. In army after war over. Retired from army.
• Married? No – but a woman beside him. Married on a soul level. Formally married? No. In love with her. Blond. Married to someone else. No children but wanted to have children with her.
• Died 1889, TB, age 55.
• “Embellished. I was painting a story. Stories sell.”
• Purpose is for me to tell the truth
• Meaning behind it is, for me to show though example, we’re human, sometimes not right on. It’s ok to go back and say gained new info. Not special.
• Scene with Emerson I saw in ’92? [I was asking about a vision I had had in Gateway, at TMI, of Joseph as a young man visiting Emerson’s house in Concord in 1842. I got no direct answer to this, but it seemed to suggest something to him, because it segued into a different scene in a different time.]
• Desk in library, in a big argument. Scotch. Drinking. Heated debate.
• Met John Muir? No [I can’t quite figure out how this fits in here but that’s where it was.]
• Heated discussion. Too much alcohol. “It’s about the people” – the rights of the people. The other, his superior, was concerned with how it looked politically. Something about bloodbath. Rounder face, lots of hair, fair, pointy nose. Arguing with someone who was in army a step higher. Arguing against orders, “No, then kind of.”
• Important argument
• About Fredericksburg. Arguing about orders.
• Michael Harkins – served with him
• Argued with him, tall, dark head of hair
• Harvard? No way, wouldn’t have lasted a minute
• Transcendentalist
• Knew Sampson Reed? No [Sampson Reed was an important transcendentalist figure.]
• Tall hat on father’s head. White hat, tall almost like chef’s hat, ties around bottom of chin. “sailing, sailing”
• Most important thing to ask
• Dave
• “I was a good guy, very humorous, still am. I’m funny; only closest friends know it about me.”
• Be more lighthearted about it [I think this means, I should be more lighthearted in my psychic explorations, but I no longer remember for sure.]
• His soul and my soul
• “Fort” something. Fort dub- something [supposedly his body lies in a graveyard in Fort something or other that starts with the syllable “dub”]
• He’s an open book but it’s a closed book [I have no idea what this meant, though I knew then]
• Soul in two places at same time?
• One was in afterlife dimension, one on earth, not two on earth at same time
• His brother William went west.
• Close in age. Close emotionally. Not in war except for short time
• “My brother is part of me”
• (I don’t know him in this life)
• William lived with Indians. Yellow Slipper, children
• Brother hear Lincoln? No
• In Iowa, not in Oregon
• Crossed country, could speak Indian
• “Dictionary” exists, a book Joseph wrote, working with his brother
• In a library in this country, not the only copy. Can’t find it using the internet. Under glass in a small museum in South Dakota (not on a reservation) near “corn palace.”
• So look for Dave Joseph Smallwood in regular army listings

* * *

And so there I was. If this is not a good example of the problems you can get into in trying to verify psychically obtained information, I don’t know what else it is. Either Joseph’s story or Karen’s story might be right, but they could not both be right, and both could easily be wrong. Hoping that time and more information would sort it out, I could see nothing else to do but continue talking to Joseph. Or was it Dave? Nothing like having your feet on solid ground!

Tuesday, October 10, 2017

4:55 a.m. You wish to continue on your own, or from the quote from yesterday that was called to my attention?

We can begin there. As usual, where we begin matters less than that we begin.

You said, “your reality can’t really depend upon observers.”

And we said it is a separate topic, not because it didn’t belong, but because it has so many facets if it is to be understood. This conversing sequentially in words that must be carefully defined and then explained anyway is cumbersome, as you have experienced, and makes it necessary to creep, because only the smallest bite-sized items can be discussed at any one time.

“Bite-sized” was clearly my phrasing, but it was a funny feeling, as if you or somebody came prying into my mind looking for it, rather than that I offered it. Just as, now, I was tempted to say “prying into my lumber-room,” even though that is a phrase out of Sherlock Holmes and I’ve never been really sure what a lumber room really was. I mean, I had the general idea from the context, but I didn’t understand why they called it that. So why would it pop up?

The process is still [that is, remains] more complex than you understand. Your end of the line is no more simple and unitary than our end.

I get, that was David Poynter, putting in his oar, and of course he would be involved; this is his own life’s work, carried on, using traits he developed in his lifetime.

And you might enjoy writing a story about me, “making it up” rather than trying for accuracy, as you did for Joseph and could do for others. But this isn’t necessary, only desirable as amusing and instructive.

I’ll keep it in mind. Thank you, David. I’m aware I owe you most of what I brought to this.

Which amounts to owing it to yourself, so it isn’t really worth the accounting. But in any case, to the point –.

Yes. To the point –

If reality depended upon observers in the way the phrase suggests, your lives would be remarkably contingent, hanging always by a thread. For, what if the observer were to be distracted? However, it just isn’t that simple, as usual.

In the first place, the sentence you just quoted wasn’t what we said, it was what you concluded when we said the level of one’s reality depended upon the level of the observer. We meant something different from what you heard, but that mishearing may itself be productive, so we mentioned it as a possible topic. If we can, we will address that first, and then expand upon what we meant.

Do you remember being told that everything in your 3D world is conscious, being made of consciousness, but that each form of consciousness is different, appropriate to various circumstances? A rock, having no external freedom, has absolute internal freedom, while an animal, say, has far more external freedom, which means that each individual manifestation of animal must pay attention to its environment and circumstances, hence requiring both a group mind and an individual mind, both “instinct” and individual alertness.

Well, those rocks hold the world together with their undeviating, unblinking attention. They are the stage scenery that prevents the whole thing from being free-form kaleidoscopic ungraspable swirl. They are the holders of stability. So that is one level of observer. This is not to say that rocks know what is going on around them, so to speak, any more than you as reality-holder for the microorganisms that live in your physical body have any knowledge of or interest in them. But the rocks – the external mineral level of reality, that is – hold the space. They keep things stable. They are a form of unwavering awareness, the energetic blueprint for the continual re-creation of the world so many million times a second.

The interaction of various forms of consciousness is the world as you experience it. Clouds, wind, rain, anything you experience may be said to embody a specific form of consciousness, and whether you can envision it, or even allow for the possibility, makes no difference.

However, that wasn’t the point we were making. We were discussing observers in the context of performances (call them) at a lesser level of reality.

“Lesser” is going to get us into trouble, I think.

Comparisons don’t have to, and shouldn’t, imply value-judgments. A tree is taller than a person; the person can walk and a tree cannot. Which is “better”? But if you cannot recognize differences, if you have to pretend that equality of worth means identity, means pretending that observed differences don’t exist, you will never get anywhere. You have to begin with what you observe, not with what you think are abstract truths.

So, to stay on the point, what is Hamlet (the individual) in the absence of Hamlet (the play), and what is the play in the absence of  performance? (Yes, it can be read, but for the moment consider that as a one-person-at-a-time audience.)

Are you saying –? Well, let me give you what I get, and you can tell me. I get that you are logically dividing the sense of “observer” into two. One is, the world is maintained by collective observation; the other is that there is also observation at the next higher level of reality. And if you keep giving me more insights while I’m trying to write up the old ones, I don’t know where we’re going to wind up. Is it faster this way?

If you can get it in a burst (which, by the way, is facilitated by your general attention to the subject and your specific attention to one aspect of it and our connection, so that sudden “aha” moments are possible), it is faster, yes, because then we don’t have to go through the long dance of getting you there by words and readjustment of words and correction and revision of words.

I see. So, while I was trying to express where I was, I got that the group-mind aspect of human life also maintains the world. Our collective underlying unstated agreement on what’s what assures that it remains what. As long as we all agree that Africa is where it is, there it remains, regardless what individuals or even groups may think. As long as we agree that water is heavier than air, that the various elements have the characteristics they have, that time flows as we observe it (though this one is more tenuous), that’s what we get. Our collective observation (or call it our collective continuous re-creation) maintains the world at a different level than the minerals do, but working with it. Different forms, flowing together.

And there is a lot contained in that observation that may be teased out by thought and intent. But now, let’s set this out carefully: This next higher level of reality we are talking about is, and is not, what you call TGU, or any one of us you are talking to.

I think I get the sense of it. It’s going to be hard to set out separately and also set out together.

But it can be done.

You – the TGU level we experience or can experience during our 3D lives – are part of us. You exist at our level of reality. As we said some time, energy is matter (since matter is energy), therefore the non-3D portion of All-D is, by definition, as real as the 3D portion and no more real.

That’s correct. And at the same time –

At the same time, you are part of a higher level of reality than the 3D world, so – we are too.

Of course, and you feel that in your bones. How many of you feel at home in your lives? Feeling that “this is not my home” does not mean you belong on Mars, or Alpha Centauri. It means you are not at home in 3D-only. You know it in your bones. You may not know where you do belong, but you know you are only voyaging on earth. (And as always, “earth” here means, physical matter, the 3D-only experience.)

So somehow we are players in the play and at the same time viewers from the stands.

“Audience” is the usual term. Yes, and that is why you often feel stretched, and why so many proposed explanations of the meaning of life do not resonate, or shall we say do not resonate forever, however attractive they may be at any given moment. As your self-definition, or let’s say your observation-point differs, so does what you see. So does the meaning of what you see.

And that’s enough for now.

Well, it never quite goes where I expect it to go, not that I’m complaining! Even when I think I have a handle on it, unexpected aspects surface. Thanks as always.

 

Monday, October 9, 2017

3:40 a.m. Ready if you are. You said we’d start by looking at what 3D life (as we experience it) implies about reality, about “the underlying reality it suggests and mirrors,” you said.

Meaning, merely, that the world you experience is not divorced from or in essence different from the realer world it is based in. In other words, you can extrapolate from your experience, you don’t need to accept a whole new scheme unrelated to your sensory-reported life. But it is extrapolation, it is not straight continuity. Your 3D experience of life is a useful platform for acquiring a deeper understanding; it is not in itself that deeper understanding.

Yes, I get that.

So, as we said, your lives are primarily passions – emotions, feelings, drives, compulsions, shading down to interests, fascinations, vocations, orientations. If you don’t instinctively (now, there’s a word!) understand what these seemingly quite disparate words have in common, a little thought and some internal questioning will repay the effort.

Remember, in all this, you cannot safely (that is, reliably) use the academic habits of thought to understand. Mere associating or classifying is not going to lead you to get what we are saying, it will, on the contrary, prevent you or at any rate interfere with your seeing familiar things in the new context that can revolutionize your understanding. The enemy of expanded comprehension is the habit of seeing things as “nothing but” variations of accustomed categories.

Your lives are drama. They are all forms of drama from morality play to farce. And they are this for the same reason that drama as art form was created within your life. [Within 3D reality, they mean.]

Fiction within the fiction. Hamlet’s play within a play. And I gather that this is another example of “as above, so below.”

Drama always encapsulates in miniature its encompassing reality.

In English, I think that means, drama as an art form shows us life in a condensed form, so that we can see it. A biopic may give us a person’s life and times in a couple of hours, or that same “life and times” may occupy a six-volume set of books, or may be conveyed in a Classics Illustrated comic book, or a children’s book, or in popular legend, or even a TV show.

Yes, that’s what we mean. So, since you are familiar with that process, extrapolate upwards, to see how the dramas you live may be miniature versions of something real. Just as a film is going to differ from the life itself by a huge factor of time and energy – a couple of hours’ worth of attention as opposed to decades of living – so your lives are but an illustrative blip on the record in comparison to what they illustrate.

Even more than ordinarily, I’m having trouble deciding whether what you’re saying will be clear to those who are not sharing the joint mind at the moment of transmission.

You can always expand and interpret. There is no great penalty to over-explaining to some, and there may be great benefit to explaining to those who begin from somewhat farther away, for whatever reason.

I don’t know, maybe it’s simple enough. I hear you saying that just as drama is our way of understanding life by putting it under a microscope, so our lives are the equivalent to the next higher order of reality.

That is accurate, and said perhaps more clearly than we did, so, as we say, potentially a useful exercise.

Well, if this is true – and it is true, as true as we can express given the limits of translation across conditions – you can see the point of your lives, perhaps.

Oh, I can imagine people coming up with all kinds of conclusions, some of which will seem to them to follow, but may not follow at all.

True, with the caveat that as usual, judgment of someone else’s conclusions is risky and not necessarily profitable. You can tell what seems true to you; that isn’t the same thing as saying that what is true to you is true in any absolute sense.

What I hear you saying, or rather, the implications I draw, are that what we get from drama is analogous to what another layer of reality gets from observing our lives.

Yes as long as you remember that it would be more carefully stated if you said something like, “What we ourselves realize at our higher reality by observing ourselves at the 3D level of reality.” That is clumsy, but it is important to try to avoid the “we versus they” polarity that continually sneaks in to the argument. “We versus they” leads straight to a sense of victimization and an attitude of distrust and paranoia. “One level of ourself versus another level of ourself,” though more difficult to envision, avoids that trap.

So do you begin to see your experience of 3D life differently? Do you see why it is only relatively real, why all possible versions of a situation (your life) are explored, why so much of it is inexplicably caused and not easily seen even after the fact? And can you see what is or is not important within the context of your life, and how what is or is not important changes as you change context?

Yes. Hamlet may be prince of Denmark, but he is not owner of a bank account, doesn’t have a refrigerator, doesn’t even use the restroom. In other words, as a character in a play, he is real. As a living person outside of the play, he does not exist except as an idea. Like the play he is a part of, he is relatively real, to us at our level of play-going reality.

Now, that isn’t the whole story, because as you have learned elsewhere, created characters live, just as you (created characters yourselves) do. So it isn’t as if they aren’t real, it’s just that they, like you, are only relatively real, and how real depends upon the level of the observer.

Since our reality can’t really depend upon [the existence of] observers, I take it you mean, how real we appear depends upon who is watching, from what level.

It is not literally, but only metaphorically, true that your reality “can’t really depend upon observers.” But that’s a topic for another time. It will bring us far, and meanwhile people may want to think about it. For now, let us stay with the question of relative reality.

What you experience is real to you, as it should be. But it is a pale shadow of what is real in realer dimensions. (So to speak: “Dimensions” – the very concept of dimensions – is a metaphor, an abstraction. We use the terms because it is widely understood in a certain sense, but as you see, every so often we remind you not to take it literally. There are no dimensions bounding reality, only ways of looking at things.)

Reread what we just said. Another way to say the same thing would be to say, “Passions, emotions, feelings, etc., are more real than you are.” They, like you, are closer to being shadows of a real substance than substances in their own right.

We cannot tell if you are with us, but we are saying, “You want to know why life is so dramatic and often painful, so seemingly unfair and so seemingly arbitrary? You cannot understand it if you look at it only in its own terms, any more than you could understand Hamlet if you were within it rather than viewing it.”

I know you are not explaining away our perplexities and sufferings here, but I don’t know if others will see that or not.

It can’t be calculated; there are too many possibilities. We can only make as clear a statement as possible, and trust people’s own internal compass to bring them to a right understanding.

So, this should explain to some degree why you don’t live in a world that is just as you want it. Be it Macbeth or Hamlet, the king is going to die, or there isn’t any drama. That doesn’t mean that every play is a tragedy, or that everyone within the tragedy is equally affected. It merely means, no story, no drama, and what is a better story than one with high stakes?

I remember my daughter once, when she was very little, saying with a sigh, “You know what I’d like? To have everything my own way.” I laughed and agreed that it would be nice. But I see now that this would limit us to our preconceived ideas of what would be good for us, or would be pleasant.

Prince Hamlet no doubt would have preferred that his father live. Certainly he would have preferred that he continue the life he was leading before the tragedy, and certainly before his father’s ghost laid a burden of obligation on him that he did not know how to fulfill. But it was in living those complications that Hamlet became more than any other person, even any other prince, and became himself a legend.

It is a wrench for people to come to see the pain and suffering of this world as only relatively real. It seems too much like explaining them away, even when you carefully explain that this is not what you are doing.

But, you see, their wrestling with this is itself good and profitable work for them.

It has been 70 minutes. Enough for now?

Enough. Little by little.

Okay, thanks, and we’ll see you next time.

 

Sunday, October 8, 2017

5 a.m. It is so easy to lose the thread of the argument. Glancing back at the previous few entries, I see that you were going somewhere, but I don’t know where, or how you propose to get there, so I hope you do. We didn’t leave bread crumbs last time, to tell us where to resume.

We recognize that it is difficult for individuals to hold on to a continuing theme while moving thorough the accidents and distractions of the ever-flowing present 3D moment, but remember, your anchor, your un-moving non-3D aspect allows you to remain oriented – if you orient to it rather than to your flowing mind.

Let me restate that. I’m pretty sure you mean, the ever-flowing 3D timestream carries the 3D part of our consciousness along with it, making us like a raft on a river, but the part of us that resides in the rest of All-D, the non-flowing non-3D, does not get carried along on a moving river, but rests firmly on solid ground, and the two aspects of us are connected but are not always conscious of each other unless we make the effort to make them so. Whew, that didn’t turn out to be so easy to restate, but I think that more or less gets it.

The point is, the “you” that you customarily, or let us say automatically, identify with, is not invariant. When it centers on 3D life and takes for granted 3D conditions, it is in effect limited in what it can do, what it can associate, what it can remember. When, instead, it connects with the non-3D and sees 3D life as a subset of All-D, it takes for granted an entirely more expanded view of 3D life, and it experiences limits that are significantly more expanded.

Just as Thoreau said in Walden, that I have quoted in the past.

That’s right. As we have often said – or, let’s put it this way. In the case of what we are doing, or let’s say in this kind of exploring, it isn’t traversing the terrain that is unique, it is in the reporting in modern language.

Yes, I got that. I don’t expect us to see what human eyes have never seen, only to maybe interpret what we see in language (and amid associations) that have never been used before, for the sake of translating to a new civilization.

Tell me this, why is my language so convoluted this morning? It seems to me that I am having a hard time making simple statements.

Sink in, relax, stop pressing.

Okay, I get that. Pressing too hard.

It is well to want to succeed, but inefficient to push the river.

Okay. So, your turn.

You feel the difference. It is a matter of trust, in a way. Trust that the information will flow even when you yourself (consciously, in 3D terms) don’t know what it is to be or even where it is to begin.

And as usual, this information-flow is part information on the subject at hand, and part on the process itself. I get that.

Correct. Very well. The underlying theme is your lives in 3D as conduits of vast impersonal forces. How can your lives be both personal and impersonal, both contingent, even accidental, and firmly rooted and determined? As we said, it is soul (pattern) flowing spirit (energy) through it. And the question beyond this is, why? What’s it all for? What is going on?

We began to sketch the impact on your lives of negative forces, only that is an awkward way of putting it. Let’s regroup.

As always, “as above, so below.” Looking at your third-tier lives, see the continuities.

I need to go back and find that description. Or, come to think of it, no I don’t: Just tell us again.

First tier, the 3D experience in its own terms.

Second tier, the internal reaction to the physical events.

Third tier, the effect on the being of that second-tier reaction. In other words, how the transitory becomes the continuing part of the fabric of the soul. (Of course that doesn’t mean this cannot be counteracted or modified later. We are only describing the classification scheme connecting the somewhat-real 3D experience to the more real All-D situation.)

Reassuring that when it was needed, you could provide it. It would have been disconcerting if it wasn’t there and I had to go looking. Okay, and –

Let’s put it this way. If you want to understand your lives, start with what is most familiar, the first-tier experience that happens to you firsthand and that is reported to you by the world around you – friends, news media, books and films, everything. In other words, begin with the world as it is reported to you. Not only wars and rumors of war, but passions and rumors of passions, predicaments and rumors of predicaments. Start with the dramas of everyday life at first-hand and at a remove. We want to explain life, not explain it away.

Surely it is obvious that life consists of negative and positive emotions and experiences. No need for careful definition here; you know what we mean. Those experiences and all their manifestations (or perhaps we should say, and every way in which they can be sorted into categories) are not incidental to life. They are life, or let us say they are the fabric of life, the essential background of life.

It is true that some people in their yearning for peace and for meaning would transcend all this if they could. And it is true that some religions and philosophies argue that such transcendence is the only worthwhile goal of a life, all else being Maya. It is also true that in a way this is an accurate perception, for certainly the 3D world as it presents itself is not nearly as real as the casual observer assumes. But there is a difference between seeing the only-relative-reality of the life you lead (on the one hand) and deciding that 3D life is a waste of time, so to speak, a fraud, a snare, a delusion. Just because you wake up for a moment and realize that the events of Hamlet are not the reality you have been experiencing it as (because of the excellence of the performance, perhaps), that doesn’t mean it wasn’t affecting you. Similarly, life.

For some reason – certainly not a logical association of ideas, at least if it is I can’t see the logic – I think of flight simulators.

A good analogy up to a point. A flight simulation machine gives you a somewhat-real experience that prepares you for the real thing. By simulating the first-tier experience (that is, simulating the physical sensations), it allows you to experience the second-tier experience (the intellectual, kinesthetic, emotional reaction to the first-tier data), so that in a sense you will form third-tier reaction-patterns based on what you have become by having done through that experience. This is not an exact analogy, remember, but it is a useful one. Don’t parrot it, but do chew on it and see what further analogies suggest themselves.

Well, I get, just because you realize that what you thought was flight is actually a simulator, don’t jump to the conclusion that flight itself is an unobtainable illusion.

Well, actually, isn’t it more logical to assume that if this is a simulator, it is a simulator in aid of something? Preparing you for real flight, perhaps? The conclusion that the world is only relatively real may lead you to conclude that it is a meaningless charade, but it doesn’t have to. It is, shall we say, at least equally probable that life means something, is in aid of something, is preparation for something. Otherwise it’s a lot of money, time, and effort to create a simulator just to fool you.

Smiling. I figure you guys (we guys, I realize) work for MGM or Industrial Light and Magic.

Not so unflattering a comparison. They do produce remarkably effective second-tier experience, even though they think they’re in business to make money.

As we say, start with what you know. Next time we will begin at this point: Looking at 3D life as you experience it, what does it hint at regarding the underlying reality it suggests and mirrors?

All right. Our thanks for this, as always. Till next time.

 

 

Friday, October 6, 2017

4:20 a.m. I am undecided whether to ask you Henry Reed’s somewhat involved question, or invite you to proceed on whatever track you are on.

Remember, “interruptions” and seemingly fortuitous interactions are as much a part of the pattern of events as any consciously formed plan. A good teacher uses what comes.

Very well, then, here is a long message Henry posted on my blog. I have my own reaction to it, and I gather that you’d just as soon I set that out so you can correct and comment as usual.

In this case it will be a matter of our commenting on your view rather than upon your attempted restatement of our position, but fine, go ahead.

[Henry Reed: A professional Intuitive posted this recollection, and it seems to relate. Perhaps Nathaniel might comment:

[The other day, after the Vegas attack, comedian Jimmy Kimmel was in tears making the comment that it used to be so easy to do comedy, but not so much anymore. He stated that it seemed like a window onto evil had been opened.

[This made me think of something my clairvoyant professor had said back in the mid ’70s. What he said makes total sense when you think of the many layers or dimensions of existence. So much has happened on finer levels that has affected us here on Earth.

[He said that the first bomb testing, and all the bombs that have followed, have actually “blown holes” in Earth’s spiritual layer of protection. Then he said something startling. With each ‘hole’ a tremendous amount of evil or dark forces has been able to enter. They have come streaming or flooding in. In his words it was like a “vacuum cleaner” sucking in tremendous amounts of negativity.

[Then the drug revolution went hand-in-hand with this. He explained that loosening one’s consciousness thru drugs allowed many of these dark forces to have access to them. To easily come into (either partly by influencing or more totally inhabiting) bodies. That with this much dark forces on Earth now it is no longer safe to do mind-altering drugs and he even discouraged social drinking. (You see literally the evil that literally comes into some people who drink often). Some people I know do peyote rituals, insisting it is fine and the native Americans did it. But here again, this creates a “loosening” of the finer bodies (etheric, astral and spirit layers etc.).

[With the prevalence and existence of SO much negativity on Earth now along with the heightening of energies our way of living cannot be the same as in the past. He said that Earth’s protective layer is now more like “Swiss cheese” — extremely full of holes, giving free access to negative forces. I don’t mean to sound preachy, but this makes so much sense. Indeed literally many ” windows onto evil” have opened. If only people more in general could understand the many layers of existence.

[Another profound thing he said back in the more innocent era of the ’70s was that as time went on closer to the millennium and after, good spiritual forces or beings would have to be streaming energy to the planet just to keep us functioning long enough for a major event or change to happen. And that these “speeded up” energies would be something that a segment of society would not be able to handle. Some people would become erratic. We are seeing lot of this happen…. Interesting that Jesus had said something like “except that things be ‘speeded up’ there would be no one left alive.”

[MOST SIGNIFICANTLY, as I see it anyway, weapons of killing SHOULD NOT be easily accessible to the public!! This should NO LONGER be possible! The human climate is changing and has changed so dramatically that this can no longer be possible, as I see it anyway. There is way too much instability now.]

My thinking is that this is all confused. I think it is inaccurate use of metaphor, for one thing, inappropriately concrete. Atomic bombs, being physical, can’t blow holes in something that isn’t. But – I don’t know, I suppose. I could be persuaded to think I am being too rigid.

Always a good attitude, if uncomfortable, being ready to be made to re-think.

All right, let’s examine it.

“A window on evil.” Doesn’t this metaphor suggest that you are on one side of the wall and evil on the other, and if only the window weren’t open, you’d still be separated?

For many years I have been quoting somebody, can’t remember who, who pointed out that the line between good and evil is not between people but within them.

Correct. But, a careless or ambiguous metaphor does not necessarily discredit an argument, still less an insight or position. So, let’s look farther.

At the most simple and physical layer, atomic bombs do not blow holes in a layer of protection that would by nature be non-3D and would be internal. Clearly at the literal level, this would be inappropriately concrete. But look at it symbolically, and there could be an argument. Certainly the implied devaluation of the sanctity of life that has followed the use and development of such weapons might be expressed that way. However, as a literal material description of reality, no.

The entire thought coupling atomic bombs and the current manifestation of evil rests on interrelated incorrect ideas:

• A physical event caused – and further such events continue to cause – rupture in a postulated spiritual protective shield.
• The spiritual shield existed in the first place, with one side being protected against evil on the other side.
• Proportionate to the number of explosions in the physical (3D) part of the world, “windows” have opened between the 3D and non-3D worlds. But when you remember that there is one world, and that 3D and non-3D alike are subsets of what we are calling All-D, where is there a place for walls and windows? (Yes, we recognize that the window was metaphor, but within the construct of the metaphor, that is the function, and, as we say, where is the possibility?)
• Great amounts of negativity were allowed into 3D by the disruption of this spiritual shield. Without the shield, without the separation of spiritual and physical, without the segregation of good from evil to begin with, what is left of this idea?
• Without a spiritual protective layer to be breached by a physical event, where is the potential for it to be full of holes? The analogy resembles the hole in the ozone that was detected decades ago, except that ozone depletion was described as resulting from physical causes affecting a physical substance and system (ozone and the surrounding atmosphere). No one suggested that the ozone interacted with or was adversely impacted by spiritual forces. However, bookmark this sentence, as you sometimes say, because there is a core of truth here that we should spell out.

To sum up the portion on atomic testing, we would say, no, this is bad theory, inappropriately concrete, and if meant only metaphorically, much more misleading than elucidating.

In relation to drugs, however, this is on firmer grounds. Notice immediately one difference.

This one is attributing a physical mechanism – drugs – to individuals rather than to society as an abstraction, and it has a more believable mechanism.

Believability isn’t the issue. Ever. Believability isn’t a constant, for one thing, and for another it is too closely related to “common sense” to be relied upon. In other words, what is believable to you today may not be tomorrow, and what is believable to one may not be to another, and what is believable may be so only because it accords with prejudice or background ideas.

However, the question of believability aside, it is true that drugs affect the individual mind. Do they therefore affect the individual spirit?

That isn’t a question I have thought to ask.

Think in terms of what we have been encouraging you to think of as the structure of the world.

So much easier to take dictation.

So it is. Think.

Well, if 3D and non-3D are two aspects of the same world, and everybody is in both, with our consciousness in different places, sort of, the differences between mental and spiritual aren’t necessarily even real. I mean, whatever spiritual means, we are it. And it can’t be something walled off within us, this much body, this much spirit, maybe this much mind. If there is a difference among them, we’re closer to raisin bread than separate bins of wheat, raisins, yeast, etc.

Does it affect your spirit when you take aspirin?

Does it affect my spirit when the headache goes away?

Exactly.

Well, “exactly,” only I don’t know quite where that leaves us.

Drugs, even psychotropics on one end of the scale and pain-relievers on the other end, are all physical substances. They affect the physical body by producing chemical changes. Those chemical changes may be mild or profound, and they may have effects on the 3D consciousness – which is really what we’re talking about here – ranging from disorienting to imperceptible. Where is the scope of action for the physical substance to affect a postulated spiritual barrier? What they affect is consciousness, and their chief effect there is indeed to lower the barriers, but they are internal barriers, they are not barriers between the individual and the outside (even if non-physical) world.

I have long said that LSD, which is the only drug I have any experience with except marijuana and a one-time wakeup experience of mescaline, does not bring chaos or harmony, clarity or confusion. It instead magnifies what you are, so you cannot miss it. You may be overwhelmed by it, but it is overwhelm by what you already are, unsuspected. At least, I think so.

That is substantially correct. Again, the metaphor implies invasion from without. Absent that, what remains?

However – and you should find this interesting – despite inappropriate metaphor and inadequate examination of premises, this is still a valid perception, that the current moment is one of heightened activity.

I was going to comment on perception versus interpretation, but I get that the point here is that this is a time when – oh, of course – when what was unconscious is becoming conscious (whether we would prefer it or not) and therefore the negative is coming forth full strength, having been so long repressed.

It isn’t that the negative has been repressed, it is that the awareness of, the acceptance of, the negative has been repressed. And like any long-repressed psychic content, it is now erupting full force.

Yes, I see that. And, because life is good – because we are good as well as evil – protection flows forth along with destruction.

It is your choice, always.

This is very helpful, and a lot more thoughtful than my reaction would have been.

It’s mostly a matter of slowing down, of sinking in, unafraid of what you may find. You do it by talking to us. You could profitably do it in your day-to-day interactions, as well.

I was about to say, “easier said than done,” but it is just a decision, isn’t it?

That’s what it is, and your lives are built upon a continual stream of decisions.

And as to the commercial for gun control at the end?

Change the consciousness, and the manifestations of the consciousness change automatically. There is much more going on behind the scenes than you can know – we are talking in 3D terms here, not speaking of non-3D manipulation – and the issue is not what it seems to anybody on any side of it. Stick to what you can do, rather than obsessing over what you cannot do.

Don’t go marching off to a pretended siege of Babylon, as Emerson says.

Some psychological situations never change, which is why older wisdom still applies.

Many thanks for all this.