Month: October 2017

Thursday, October 5, 2017

11 a.m. Again I am hearing time’s winged chariot at my heels, so to speak. A sense of “no time to lose,” even despite the need sometimes to cool our heels till the time comes around (if only to give ourselves time to recharge).

I’m getting a sort of visual, force issuing as from a high-pressure firehose, then as it enters the matrix of channels being diverted and channeled by the nature of the terrain. Not a very good description. Can you amplify and correct?

What you are getting is that human life is a combination, an interaction, of two forces. One is, as we keep saying, these vast impersonal forces, flowing through you (and around you, and all but engulfing you), each one to his or her own carrying capacity.

And do the forces ever exceed that capacity?

They do, and those vessels break. But let us finish describing your situation. The other force is what results when your quota of these forces run through what you are. Because each of you is different, the appearance of the force flowing through you will be different. It may be classified by various schemes, but those schemes will be reporting averages. Thus Leo energy is different from Scorpio energy, and both are different from Gemini energy. But the commonalities do not amount to identity. One Leo is not interchangeable with another. You are all individuals. That is the point of your existence, after all.

You, who you are, what you have made of yourself at any given point, are unique, and so the forces flowing through you are going to be colored by your essence.

Temporarily, you mean. While they are flowing through me.

Well, it requires careful saying. The forces – let’s think of them as white light – are no less white after they have shined through the maze of obstacles, baffles, redirections and contradictory paths that you are. But you shine with the energy of that light, but the color of your own pattern. You see?

Yes, that’s very clear.

Good, but let us stop there, and you do other things, even if of less allure.

Okay. Thanks as always.

 

Thursday, October 5, 2017

12:40 a.m. Ready if you are. Where were we?

You had just realized why you live on a timeline where everything you don’t like nevertheless exists.

Perhaps you could spell that out again?

Even on any given timeline, decisions have consequences. Even though other timelines follow opposite decisions, and thus assure that every decision is explored – which means the fate of the universe never depends upon anybody making the “correct” decision – in each timeline, the decisions that have been made determine the reality being experienced, and determine which opportunities exist (or, as it appears to you, which opportunities are thereby created).

The sense I’m gradually getting, more clearly with time, is that our lives are the demonstrating of the consequences of a decision-tree. Each version shows what would happen if a chain of decisions – ours as individuals, but within a context of uncounted others’, which means within what seems like a firm matrix. It begins to seem that life is the showing of uncounted possible paths, the showing being the main thing, for some reason.

That won’t be as clear to your friends as it is to you at the moment, and won’t be as clear to you later as it is now. So we should press on and provide context.

Seems like we are switching roles.

The roles were always arbitrary, if serviceable. Do you remember how Rita ascribed greater intelligence and knowledge to what you were calling TGU because you two were always asking the questions and they were always answering them?

They said our lives were the answers to their questions.

That is a way to see the meaning of your lives – but it requires that you hold firmly in mind that you and we are not different entities. We keep reiterating it; you all keep losing sight of it. If you think there is a “we” and a “they” you are going to continually misapprehend the situation – and yet language continually works to reinforce that false impression.

We are more like different parts of a dissociated consciousness.

Minus the pathological connotations, yes. There is only one reality, and everybody in it exists in all parts of it. We keep repeating that, too. 3D individuals nonetheless exist in All-D. Non-3D individuals nonetheless exist in 3D. It is much more a matter of where your consciousness centers, than any other single difference. Every religious or philosophical teaching that works from the assumption of a division in the universe goes wrong precisely because of that assumption.

Now remember that at the moment we are looking at your 3D life as an experiencer of the interaction of soul and spirit. That is, soul, the shaped collection of traits, and spirit, the free-ranging animating force.

I get that I should sleep on this a bit.

It’s easier. Come back to it when you know it is time.

5:20 a.m. That seems to have helped. Very well –

You may find it easiest to begin with negative manifestations. Let us start with hatred.

Which, I presume, begins with fear.

That’s a “yes but no.” But explaining why it is a “yes but no” may take some doing. It isn’t simple. If it were only yes, or only no, it would be.

Is it a matter of “circumstances alter cases”? But even as I ask that, I can tell that it isn’t that simple. Let me go deeper.

[A pause, as I do.]

Start by saying that 3D life, lived as it must be in 3D conditions, imparts its own peculiar spin on perception, hence on

I can’t find the word. Try again?

Let’s go about it this way. Your ideas about things are based on a combination of things: input and prior ideas, mostly.

Input is determined, or let’s say skewed, by perception, and your sensory perceptions are by themselves obviously limited to a tiny percentage of the physically existent spectrum. Even the electromagnetic spectrum that is recognized by science – which is to say, by sensory data extended by instrumentation and inference – is mostly far beyond your ability to experience directly by sight, sound, smell, taste, touch. That limited input is mixed – interpreted – by ideas of how things are, ideas formed from prior first-hand and second-hand experience, all of it also subject to those same limitations.

If this were the whole story, your possibilities would be very much more limited than they are, for how could you break out of the self-contained idea-system and experience-system, call it, delivered and limited by sensory data? You can get an idea of what your world would be like by looking at the mental constructs of people who do believe that sensory data is all there is. Of course, these people themselves do not live in the world they deduce; no one could. But they ignore and deny experience to the contrary, so you can get an idea of that mental reality by overhearing their mental reinforcement of their ideas, so to speak, as they ty to persuade others.

The compensating factor in your lives is, of course, what you would call direct feed. Call it intuition, divine guidance, extra-sensory knowing, instinctive wisdom, inexplicable useful connection – however you think of it, it is the other part of your being that greatly assists your limited 3D existence – that makes it possible, in fact. No one and nothing could exist on its own, without an unbroken connection to its larger self centered beyond the 3D construct. The birds that build nests may not be able to say non-3D, but they rely on it, as all animals and vegetables do, to enable them to make sense of incoming sensory data and, particularly, to make sense of it in advance. You call it instinct, in animals, in babies, in yourselves sometimes, but that’s what it really is, connection. And remember, that isn’t connection to a something else; it is connection to another part of yourself.

Aha! And the two forms of perception are sometimes at war with one another.

Not the forms, but the results of having contradictory ideas about the meaning of the data from two different kinds of sources.

Okay. But – war.

It can be; it certainly doesn’t have to be. Some people respond to contradiction by attempting to define one half of the contradiction out of existence, and this can lead to conflict in one or another form. But others respond by seeing any contradiction as an implicit invitation to see more clearly, deeper, to resolve it, and only if they are unable to find resolution do they proceed to ignore one half, or go to war on it. And still others, fewer, respond to an irreconcilable contradiction by leaving it in suspension, waiting for further developments to clarity things. But yes, there is the potential within you of warfare, one element against another, and of course it is easier to direct those forces outward – projecting the conflict on to others – than to deal with it within your own psyche.

Now, you could argue that in the case of self-division turned outward, the hatred is the unacknowledged result of fear (fear of one’s own contradictions, illogical, inexplicable, and perhaps therefore terrifying), and that isn’t wrong. But it isn’t the whole story either, you see.

This particular genesis of hatred is not the only one. But it is the most common by far.

Does that imply that if we could overcome the resistance of the 3D personality to realizing that it extends beyond the 3D, the world would be a more peaceful place?

It should scarcely need stating. Instinctive societies anywhere are inherently peaceful; it is the separation from one’s roots beyond the 3D world that leads to a society’s madness. And we are not quite saying, indigenous societies are sane and the technological post-Christian Western world is crazy, or, say, crazed. But we would say that if you will look around you, you will see some societies that take instinct and folk-wisdom for granted – Italy, say; Poland; country-folk pretty nearly anywhere before they are disillusioned and mentally overthrown by the assumption of superiority by city culture. These are not societies roiling in hatred, and they aren’t very easily roused to hatred based on abstract ideas and plans to reshape the world.

Unlike technological, materialistic America. Our rulers, I mean, not necessarily those of us who happen to live here.

Well –

I know, don’t give ourselves a pass as if we were living here by coincidence. We must bear some responsibility for what is done in our name.

That isn’t quite the nature of our reservation. It is more to the nature of your attitude than to the substance of the comment.

Okay, I get it. You don’t like me making blanket condemnations.

It isn’t so much what we don’t like, as what is good for you. To issue a blanket condemnation is to show that you don’t understand, or rather than you are suspending your understanding. To understand everything, someone said, would be to forgive everything. In your life you mostly know this. And, in fact, a teaching opportunity: Consider your reactions as opposed to what you would prefer your reaction to be, what your reaction often is. Where does the difference come from?

I think you’re going to say it is the difference between a reaction from my 3D-only personality and my larger personality which presumably knows better.

Well, knows better but also isn’t hurting in the same way. First-tier experience hurts, we said. Well, anger often proceeds from injury.

Interesting.

And this is one reason for bringing to political and social questions the knowings you have developed in your “higher” moments – that is, your moments of meditation, or of communion with your larger self. The closer your connection with your self beyond 3D limitations, the more accurate and effective your reactions within 3D, you see. It is in effect a fountain of wisdom that cannot be matched by any amount of 3D experience.

And let us pause here. With your earlier couple of pages [meaning, from 12:40], you will have quite enough to type up, and this is a convenient place to pause.

Thanks very much, as always. I can’t decide whether we got very far or not. I suspect, farther than it seems to me while still in the joint mind. Very well, 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.]

[Christmas, 2005. 8:30 a.m. I have to laugh. For days I’ve had “Marching Through Georgia” running through my head pretty continuously. This morning I realize it’s Rudolph the Reindeer! It makes a change, anyway. But it’s ridiculous.]

Joseph, am I scaring you away – so to speak – by my own being scared about all this?

No. And you don’t have to be scared, just do it and have fun with it and when it turns out I’m not really here, tell yourself it was just having fun writing fiction.

Writers of fiction do research.

Sure, that’s so they don’t get caught making things up that the reader can check. That’s your public right now.

I know that. But maybe I’m making up this dialogue too!

And maybe you don’t really know one thing about the way things are, would that be so hard to imagine? So if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can’t even find out where to do your research – so just go with it, as you say.

[10:30 a.m.) I did a little research on the web looking for Joseph Smallwood in an Iowa Cavalry regiment – of which it looks like there were seven volunteer regiments. And a lot more infantry! No sign. I can give up looking, but what does it imply, that I can’t decide or find any trace?

The odd thing is that I saw a hand write Smallwood on a slate, years ago, when I was trying to get his name right. Wood? Atwood? And I saw it write Smallwood. So why should I have trouble finding him when I know the surname? It doesn’t make sense unless he was using another name – and I don’t see any reason why he would – or he doesn’t really exist. And what I’m doing is removing ambiguities so that it will pin it down one way or the other. I like the idea of being connected to other lives very much. I’m attached to the idea. It would be hard by this time to give it up. But maybe I’d have to?

Well, let’s do a little thinking about this – it’ll fit in the book [on guidance] too. If the past life information I’ve gotten has been wrong, doesn’t that make the guys’ information wrong? At least suspect? But if that is wrong – that is, if the guidance from the other side were non-existent or delusory – what would I have left? For I have felt these things. I have given wise counsel from a place beyond myself. I have known what I could not know by senses or logic alone, and I have –

[Lost the thread – went wandering and came back to an unfinished sentence that cannot be finished.]

I suppose it is time to return to you, friend Joseph, and see what you have to say – even while wondering if you really existed and exist, and, if so, why I find no trace. I find myself cleaning up the transcript – adding subheads, mostly – and I wonder where it will end. But I do know I want to hear more!

[11:30 a.m.] You forget, too, experiences you have that are not the writing or reading of words. You experienced me experiencing you shaving; for a split-second, until your mind caught up to what was happening, you experienced looking down at a basin from my eyes, shaving. You drove down the road and heard (though not with your ears) “pappy” and knew what it meant. [It was what his men called Smallwood behind his back.] You heard Harkins and suspected what it meant (though you weren’t and aren’t sure). You painted a blue-jacket with a long beard and two stars on his shoulder, years ago, and didn’t and don’t know why you put the stars on the shoulder-straps (didn’t seem to make sense) but followed your feeling. You are more in tune and you know it; it is only in this area of verification that you go backwards; excessive reliance on external confirmation, I’d call it.

Well, I don’t know what to do about it. A little confirmation from outside would do wonders for me.

Maybe this will help all the people who have to work without the possibility of outside confirmation.

Yeah, maybe.

You can only do as much as you can do.

All right. This doesn’t sound like Joseph so much as David.

TGU at your service!

Very funny. But let’s resume; I’m writing.

All right – and don’t think I don’t know how hard this is for you. We all do, and some of us – not me particularly but some of us – have been through it ourselves. So it ain’t like you’re having to fight us.

You heard it right yesterday, though you half forgot it since. They sent us down to Missouri to try to hold things together. Lyons was down there but he got killed pretty quick, and we were pretty close and maybe they figured they needed boys who were as much like them Jayhawkers as possible. Now – you notice you took down Jayhawker without trouble even though you wasn’t quite sure that was Missouri? And that you took down Lyons before you could remember if he was Union or Confederate? Just keep doing that – acting on faith, as you call it – and you’ll get through it.

Well, you already heard but can’t figure out how it can be that I wound up an officer in infantry instead of cavalry and you’re wondering if that meant you changed the story behind your own back when you looked in the Iowa cavalry units and didn’t find me. But that ain’t what happened. You remember how you sort of fought with the story when we were training the men first off? You had it in your mind that I was cavalry so you had it be cavalry I was drilling and you had it be while we was waiting for horses! And I could fight you on it or give you the story as best I could.

So now we go back and fill in, correcting mistakes just like I said. I did enlist in the cavalry but it didn’t take long for them to move me to infantry. Maybe they figured I could keep up better on a horse with men marching than I could with men riding, even though I would be on a horse [too].

Let’s put it this way: When they figured me for an officer, even though I didn’t know army any more than anybody else, that meant I was going to be on a horse, and that meant I could keep up better. I don’t know if you get that or not.

Anyway, they moved me to the infantry before I was half used to the idea of cavalry, and there I was, like I said, private, sergeant, lieutenant and now I was in charge of turning these clod-busters into a unit. We trained just like I said, no equipment, no anything, but the boys learned, and the stuff gradually came in, and we all marched down into Missouri. The march was done for the sake of the march as much as for the sake of getting anywhere, for they could have just dropped us down the river with a couple of steamboats. But marching somewhere gave the boys the idea of “sojering” like nothing else. They felt like they wasn’t practicing or pretending any more, they was doing it. And they were. We took our first casualties on the road down to southwest Missouri. Bush-whackers. That’s where the term came from.

[December 25, 2005] Joseph – ?

Remember this lesson, later. It is a good lesson for those who will come after you, learning to do the same things. A bit of time spent pondering – really thinking – will result in valuable insights.

That didn’t sound like Joseph.

Remember, too that you went 15 years with only the vaguest concepts of who or what The Gentlemen Upstairs could be. That didn’t stop you talking to us, questioning us, profiting from our advice and insults and opinions. It is not necessary, tell your readers, to know ahead of time what you are doing, much less how it works. What is necessary is that you do it.

All right. But at some point, one wants and needs verification! How long do I have to go shooting in the dark?

In which version of reality?

I will rephrase it. What do I need to do to find the version of reality that gives me verification?

Go to Karen Storsteen or another psychic who can give you arms-length views. They won’t be crippled by doubt and self-division.

Of course! And I don’t know why I didn’t think of that myself! Thank you.

Tuesday, October 3, 2017

10:30 a.m. Seems to me you have a good opportunity for teaching us how “all is well” coexists with all not being well, in the latest terrorist incident, in Nevada.

Yes, it will serve.

My way is that once I know that something like that happened, I avoid anything more than the bare fact itself. I don’t immerse myself in the detail and the analysis that is sure to follow. I suppose that is somewhat ostrich-like, but it seems to work best for me.

Not your reaction to the JFK murder, however. Could your subsequent reaction to tragedies have been molded in reaction to your reaction to that event?

Interesting thought. I didn’t even want to know anything about various theories as to who really killed him. I accepted the official story, and my mourning was too deep to allow me to touch the questions, for decades, literally. It must have been 25 years before I emerged from that shell-shocked condition.

And you weren’t about to allow yourself to be equally traumatized again.

No. I walled it off. I remember that. I felt Bobby Kennedy’s murder deeply, but I stayed away from reading about it after the first week.

Now consider the situation. In the 3D world, there was your suffering and there was the resultant habits to deal with the possibility of similar shocks. What about in the All-D, where your 3D reactions were only a part of the reality?

I don’t know, you tell me.

Outside of time and space – which in context means in the world beyond the constrictions of 3D-ever-moving-present-moment life – what was real? Your day to day movements of your body? Your moment-by-moment words, thoughts, emotions, reactions? It probably seems like it, but no. Outside of the present moment, what is real is –

Well, we’re going to have to backfill for a moment. It is true that in one way every moment of your lives is real and enduring and vividly alive. That is what the Akashic Record is, really, each moment held like a fly in amber, except living. But it is equally true that this could be considered your soul’s record, while your spirit’s record is in what you sometimes call the completed self.

I think you mean, the spirit’s record could be thought of as the end-of-the-story record, rather than the moment-by-moment record. It is how the spirit was changed by the events and by my reactions to the events, from the point of view of “that life is over and done with; here’s the net result.”

Yes, that is the sense of it.

Which as usual begs the question of how there can be a net effect when every possible path in my life is taken, including any paths in which JFK wasn’t killed in Dallas. As usual, the question is, why wouldn’t they all cancel out.

And as usual the answer is, they don’t cancel, they add. The result is not a result of attrition but of addition. The very plethora of results is the answer.

I keep forgetting that. My tendency is to think that a life will produce a result that will be built upon, and I keep getting reminded that a life produces a huge range of results, all of which considered together, and only all of them considered together, is the result.

It makes a difference. Many a conundrum in logic disappears when you realize that common sense is misleading you by over-simplifying the situation.

So, to consider our response to your question. What is real in your life, as seen from the non-obstructed All-D perspective, is the result in you of going through such experiences either directly or vicariously. Yes, your moment-by-moment reaction is as real as the 3D world, but in a way, it isn’t any realer, even though it continues to exist in a way the moving-present 3D world does not.

To put it in a hierarchy of reality:

1) The 3D experience itself, including bodily impact, anything sensory.

2) The psychic portion of the 3D experience; what enters the Akashic Record.

3) The net effect on this version of your life of having gone through the experience.

The first tier hurts; the second tier has meaning; the third tier contains the potential from that life forward.

Well, what about the time I healed Joseph Smallwood’s injured back? Didn’t one life move to at least the Akashic Record version of another life and alter it, thus opening a new path for the entire life, at least that version of his life?

And perhaps you might have been able to – still could – cause him to move his body [during the battle] to avoid the crippling blow. That would be at the first-tier level of reality. Wouldn’t that be a good thing?

I’m sensing a trap. I don’t know if I would still be me if he didn’t have his altered-state experience of an angel healing him. If that is a true risk, I don’t suppose I would change things even to spare him. But, is it a true risk?

Remember, you are considering one given time-line. It isn’t like it would remove all other possibilities or even one of them.

Ah, but in effect I would be creating a new possible time line, and I would be somehow tied to it.

Haven’t you spent years wondering why you couldn’t life in a timeline in which Kennedy did not get killed?

For the first time, I’m beginning to understand. Not all timelines lead to the same place, of course. From your third tier of reality, where we come out is more important than what we go through to get there.

That’s the idea.

Can’t avoid the speed bumps if we want to traverse the road.

That’s a little too simple, but close enough. Now, enough for a while.

All right. Thanks for all this.

 

Monday, October 2, 2017

6:50 p.m. Trying again, in case I don’t feel like it tomorrow. Physical train wrecks and psychological debris and vast impersonal forces flowing through us.

This will go better, the more each reader brings to mind specifics as we discuss the general principles. That is, you all know how these forces sweep through your lives; you see it first hand, you see it in dramas and histories and twice-told talks. Passion and conflict is at the heart of story, after all. No conflict, no story. But is conflict as simple a thing as self-interest colliding with self-interest? You could make a reasonable argument that that is all it is, but we would say that argument would amount to “nothing buttery,” and would clarify nothing.

Lust manifests! Anger, envy, swollen pride manifest! You see them on all sides. Conversely, anybody could tell first- or second-hand stories of noble actions, of self-sacrifice, of quiet unnoticed heroism. Scratch any story and you will find people acting out of motivations, and scratch the motivations and you will find desirable or undesirable passions, maybe quiet, even placid, but passions. An old woman may be invisibly passionate over her flower garden, or her pets, or – anything, really. The key here is not “woman” but “invisibly.” Although passion is at the heart of all drama, not all passion expresses itself in a dramatic fashion.

The point is that these forces make up your life. The man who sacrifices his life day by day at a meaningless job, that his children may live and hopefully may live better than he, is acting from conviction, and what is conviction rooted in, if not some passion?

We will not continue to pile up examples. Look at other aspects of your life, the events around you and those you only hear of. Wars, cooperation, disasters and disaster relief, millions of private enterprises commercial and otherwise, and millions of pointlessly destructive activities like vandalism. Music, art, poetry, technology, finance, scholarship – all the forms of human activity you can think of. At some place they connect to passion.

So where does it come from? In trying to answer that, realize that plugging in a word like “instinct” is not an answer (because not a process, not a linking-together of things, but a word implying “nothing but”); it is a decision not to inquire. So – inquire. Where does this force come into your life from?

You may think, “I was born with it,” and that is certainly true, but it doesn’t actually answer anything. All it says is that you have never lived without it. (Nor could you.) But we knew this: Soul without Spirit is not living in the 3D world; it is closer to being a ghost of itself.

All right, but that sort of answers the question, doesn’t it? These forces are the forces of Spirit.

Fine. And what are the forces of Spirit?

I take it the answer is not as simple as “the electricity that runs through the wires,” or “the light that shines through the fiber optics.”

That would be merely to restate in other words what was said.

Okay – so?

Resist the temptation to consider the Soul as in 3D and the Spirit as coming from the non-3D somehow. Try to see both inhabiting the All-D, so that, although they coexist in the same space, Spirit is mostly not comprehended by Soul. You could say, pretty accurately, that Soul is bound to its 3D limitations in which it was founded, while Spirit inhabits all of reality, not only the 3D portion of it, hence is invisible to greater or lesser extend depending upon how conscious the Soul is or becomes. Spirit is always here, always functioning, but is it not always perceived, and rarely is perceived in the same way at different times by different Souls.

That certainly makes sense to me.

The next step is to realize that since Spirit interpenetrates your being, its vagaries are going to affect you, often directly.

I didn’t realize that Spirit has vagaries. I think of Spirit as – well, as a vast impersonal force, the way you have been describing it.

You are thinking of Soul and Spirit as two different kinds of things that happen to intersect in human enterprises. But Spirit created Soul. It animates Soul. It shares its essence with Soul.

I thought we were saying that a Sam creates a soul of its own essence.

Do you think a Sam’s essence (even in so far as it is personal) is somehow different from Spirit? That we have Spirit on the one hand and Sam on the other?

I guess I don’t know what I thought. I never thought about that as a problem at all.

Well, let us give the kaleidoscope a shake and see if anything emerges more clearly. Look at it this way. Sam = Spirit creating and incorporating and developing and fostering Souls. In being so engaged, it loses some of its freedom of action (somewhat as a parent does to a dependent child) and becomes part of a compound being. So the difference between what we call Sam for convenience and what we continue to call Spirit is whether one is or is not part of a compound being.

So I take it that Spirit too can be subdivided into more or less individuals, some of whom make one choice, others other choices?

“As above, so below.” What is individual seen one way is community seen another way.

Huh! Well this is a startling development.

Think about it and we’ll come back to it.

 

 

Bob Friedman informs me that the kindle edition of Awakening from the 3D World is now live. So, those of you who prefer electrons to cellulose, here’s your chance.

For Kindle:  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0763FBL3S/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1506967331&sr=8-1&keywords=Awakening+from+the+3D+World

For the paperback:  Awakening from the 3D World: How We Enter the Next Life

 

 

Monday, October 2, 2017

5:30 a.m. To continue, then: How can all be well when all is not well, at the same time?

And you heard the answer even as you wrote.

Well, I heard the analogy: How can we be individuals and communities at the same time?

Mostly it is a question of focus. “What you see is what you get” is an expression you use sometimes. Perhaps this is true in a sense not intended by those who invented it.

No, In computer terms, WYSIWYG [said “wissywig”] means transparency: Literally, whatever you are looking at is the result. It means there won’t be translation errors, you might say. But you are using it to mean, depending on how we choose to see things, that’s how they are.

Well – not quite.

Smiling. I get that a lot.

Better than “Dead wrong,” probably, or “Don’t be ridiculous.”

Better. Still smiling. So –

Depending on how you choose to see things, that’s the aspect of them that seems to you to be real. That often seems like the only aspect that is real. In this case, closer to “choose your own reality” than “create your own reality.” It isn’t that you are shaping reality by how you choose to see it, but that you might say you are shaping you, shaping your reality (which after all is the only reality you can know, your reality; you can’t know the ultimate reality any more than we can. Our perception of reality is always going to be less than whatever reality really is in essence).

So, then, accepting that, how does it tie in to the vast impersonal forces you keep mentioning?

First, are you clear that life is how it appears to you, more than how it really is?

I’d never get away with a sentence like that, but I know what you mean. Life is always our personal subset of reality; it is never what –. Or, rather, we never see the entire picture, only our subset which we often take to be the entire picture.

We’ll accept the correction. That’s the sense of it. But – you’re clear on it?

Can’t speak for our readers, but I am, yes. Even the fact that each of us has uncounted versions living different timelines tells me that reality has to be bigger than anything anyone or any one timeline can apprehend. By definition, really.

All right. So then it shouldn’t surprise you – though we suspect that it will – to hear that the shape the world is in is no more fixed than anything else, except in any given timeline.

That makes perfect sense, and you’re right, it never occurred to me. Not sure why. Or, actually I suppose it has been obvious all along, but in a different context that I didn’t happen to associate with this one.

Most of learning is less the acquisition of new facts than the associating of what you already know in different contexts.

And I’m starting to get your drift.

Well, it shouldn’t really surprise anybody that the world they see around them is integrally connected to the version of themselves that is walking that particular timeline. I mean, how else could it be? You and your world can’t be connected only arbitrarily. External events are only seemingly external and unconnected, as Rita was at some pains to point out in the context of the newly dead soul realizing that its 3D life had all been internal after all. It is in the confusing of external and internal that so many people’s anguish takes place. And perhaps you can spell that our in our place.

You seem to be saying, if we didn’t take “external” events to be more real than the internal life we know first-hand, we wouldn’t be so upset at how badly things go. Can that be what you really mean? I know, “not quite.”

It’s hard to find an equally useful phrase, you will admit. No, this requires some careful spelling-out.

Up to you, I think. It’s just a jumble to me so far. [More or less immediately:] I hear you: Slow down and center. So I will.

You will notice a pattern. Once we point it out you will, anyway. When there is a lot to be said, you sometimes start to race your editorial motors, and it doesn’t improve reception.

True enough. So –

If you take external events to be self-evidently real, if only because they seem to be perceived and accepted by everybody around you, you are going to wind up giving them primacy of reality. I mean, they will seem realer to you than the many thoughts, feelings, emotions that make up your life. It is crazy but natural: What is remote from your experience will seem more real than what is immediately at hand.

And don’t think this means only events you may see on the news. The things that happen to you – the innumerable things not necessarily of any importance that make up the external interface with the world also may seem more real, because more undeniable and more unmalleable, then the internal events. So, tying your shoe, eating your breakfast, driving your car, reading your mail, talking on the telephone – that kind of thing – is all going to seem realer to you than your own thoughts! It’s crazy, seen from our viewpoint, except that we do understand the underlying dynamics.

So do I, now that you come to explore them: We are used to crediting our senses more than our intuitions. Sensory data seems objective, intuition or call it non-sensory data seems at least debatable.

Does this seems like a stretch, then? To say that 3D life is a life that systemically inverts the order of importance of things?

I can see it. But seeing it doesn’t overrule the reality I experience. My lungs still function correctly or they don’t, and my part in that seems secondary to environmental forces.

Well, we aren’t trying to say that people in 3D conditions ought to be able to overcome them; just the contrary, in fact. 3D life was designed to work, not to be superseded or outmaneuvered. Our point here is that this systematic distortion in how you understand the world, rooted in how you experience the world, helps explain how “all is well” and “all is not well” can coexist, both being true depending upon viewing point.

It still comes perilously close to saying, “It’s all a show; those mangled bodies don’t mean anything.”

No, that is not the idea. What we are really getting to is that the reality is the energy flowing through those lives, it is not the external incidents that you can see, that result from energy flows, and redirect energy flows.

I’m starting to get what you’re driving at. They are real forces, real consequences. But the reality is in the real part of us, and not in the merely physical part of us.

You’ve gotten it by a spark leaping mind to mind, but your readers may not get it from the words they’ve read so far. Some may, some may not.

Well, how to put it any clearer? Our emotions, and that includes all the emotions of anybody in any news event, are real, and they are the point of the experience. They – and whatever changes they result in, within ourselves – are what we will take with us (so to speak) in the realer All-D world. Nobody carries a burned building or an exploded bomb or a deadly virus from 3D into All-D. They are all, you might say, local phenomena. In that sense, it hardly matters what happens externally on earth (i.e. in 3D). What matters is what happens internally to each of us, because that is what is real and that is what will persist. In that sense, all is well no matter the train wreck.

Although, it does leave the fairly large question of what about the psychological debris caused by the physical train wrecks.

That has everything to do with those same forces we keep promising to discuss. And of course, your time being up –

Next time. Okay, thanks.