Month: November 2020

Sunday, October 22, 2017

Work and input

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

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

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

So enter your notes from yesterday.

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

[No two people do it the same way. Rob and Jane worked together; Rob researched, cross-referenced, annotated. Jane pursued other lines of research and thought. [Jane Roberts connected and allowed Seth to come through her and her husband Rob Butts transcribed the sessions and did much necessary editorial work to produce the manuscripts that became books.] Very different even from Cayce, who also had someone transcribing his voice, but did no research nor cross-referencing. Different from me, certainly, typing up my own material, putting it out for question and comment, but – at least since Rita passed over – not analyzing or cross-referencing. Pretty good results so far, though.

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

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

Comment?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Virtual reality

[Watched “Terminator 3,” found in alphabetizing my DVDs and tapes. Thinking about the story. The visuals show how much people hate our civilization, and want to see it smashed – trucks, cars, buildings, people, cities. I don’t even know if the movie makers know they are expressing that. Maybe they think people just like “action.” (Even that would show how boring and unsatisfying people’s lives are.) But there is a deeper theme, for me: sitting on the sidelines watching the inevitable catastrophe. That’s what I have been doing my whole life, with the exception of a half-hearted attempt to enter political life. If it is inevitable, you waste your life trying to stop it – even if you know what to do. But how do you know it is inevitable? Well, I guess the answer to that is simple: You know. I can’t help wondering what form the catastrophe will take, and how much it will leave us alone. I don’t mean Skynet, I mean the progressive destruction of the republic. No way to know. Work while I have time, and hope that something survives.]

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

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

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

Choice

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

“It isn’t real.”

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

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

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

 

Saturday, October 21, 2017

1. Reshaping

Assistance

I have no idea where we’re going, and we left no bread crumbs.

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

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

No, but that’s our job.

Isn’t that what I just said?

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

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

Only that.

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

Rhetorical questions, but you see our point.

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

Well? Can you with your experience deny it?

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

Maybe we’re making you up.

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

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

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

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

That’s what I’m afraid of!

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

Expand on that, maybe?

Pointers not landmarks

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

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

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

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

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

And you as a publisher had a problem with that?

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

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

And that’s the function of poetry!

Of course it is. And of scripture.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Personal and impersonal forces

Thursday, October 19, 2017

Let us continue describing your lives in the context of forces beyond the – well, let us say beyond the obvious, or beyond the transient and apparent.

Deeper than what is seemingly common sense.

That’s right. Hard offhand to find a way to describe the difference. If in 3D you see a murder, or even a screaming argument, or even an icy silent confrontation, there is always an immediate cause to it. It can always be ascribed to circumstances, from “He made me do it” to “It was inevitable, given the circumstances.” But there is a deeper causation that may be discerned and described, and this is among the things we have been working up to.

You are, if you are anything like an instrument, a pipe with various stops, that may be played. The winds that blow through are modulated by your interaction with them. If you play a flute, your fingers determine the notes emitted, depending on which holes they cover and which they don’t, and in what combinations and in what order. The structure of the pipe does not change, but the effective passage of the wind through the pipe does change.

It is your free will in 3D circumstances that is the point of your existence, after all. Merely being the passive spectator of impersonal forces has nothing to do with free will. Further, it is not what happens to you in your life, but how you are changed by what happens to you, that is the importance of the events of a life. If your ability to react and choose were not there, what would your life be?

Choosing beliefs

But we would like to poke a little deeper than that. Let us say, what you are as you find yourselves in 3D existence is not adequately explained by your circumstances, by your 3D heredity or even by what may be called your non-3D heredity – your strands, past lives, extensive connections.

What you are is explained by circumstances beyond the 3D world. Just as your present-day self is not explanation enough for itself, but must be seen in context of its past, so your physical being cannot be explanation for itself, but must be seen in context of the larger being from which it springs – only, observation of that level of being is not possible.

Not even by intuitive inference? I mean, cannot our non-3D communications provide us the data, just as you are doing?

But remember, we – your non-3D components, and their friends and relations, so to speak – are at your level. We remind you, the 3D and non-3D aspects of yourself – the All-D creatures – are not separate. So in a sense, higher levels are as much a mystery to us as to you.

Plenty of people talk about them, though.

Yes. They do.

But don’t know what they’re talking about?

Let’s say, our information and theirs are not the same.

So say clearly what you mean, here.

If you ask someone for a description of a far country where he has been and you have not, how do you judge the accuracy of the description you receive? You weigh the known biases of the traveler, for one, and if possible you compare his “traveler’s tale” to those of others. But various stories are not always comparable, as they may not be describing the same things. A description of the Sahara desert and another of Cairo and a third of Naples and a fourth of – oh, anywhere – would not necessarily resemble each other, and not because any or all were inaccurate, but because they were describing different aspects of the same world. What is the difference between a traveler’s tale and hearsay, in the absence of any way to verify them? The difference is not in the reports, nor in the reporter, but in your own decision about them. That is, you decide what is reliable and what isn’t, but your decision isn’t necessarily accurate either; it’s just that you have to make it. You can keep that decision tentative. You can suspend judgment. But at some point you will have to make it, if only by default.

And we never have sufficient data to base a decision on.

You don’t have sufficient evidence; you don’t have sufficient evidence for a logical fact-driven conclusion. What do you have?

Psychic’s Disease? Uncaused certainty?

Feelings and judgment

Not necessarily. What you do have is a feeling, one way or another, a sort of centering in. This may be Psychic’s Disease, depending upon how reckless you are at coming to certainties, but it needn’t be. It is a perfectly legitimate method of judging things you cannot decide on evidence.

My old friend Ed Carter once told me that at the highest levels of management, all decisions are made on intuition, because if they could be made on logic they would have been made at lower levels of management.

This is merely to remind you that there are areas in which we know, and others in which we don’t, just like your own lives. Nobody knows everything, and nobody’s range is precisely the same as anybody else’s.

So, our take-away here, besides the reminder of fallibility?

It is more than a reminder of fallibility. It is a reminder of levels of being. If you were to ask a cell in your stomach muscles of its opinion of an afterlife, even if it could convey the opinion (or even have one), how likely is it that its reality and yours would overlap sufficiently to provide you with guidance? It is as immortal as you, in the sense that its non-3D existence is not threatened by the termination of span of its 3D existence, but that doesn’t mean your reality and its are any more translatable one to the other. And as above, so below.

I am more than ordinarily in the dark about this morning’s talk, and so I am not sure I’m really on the beam, here.

Perhaps we made too big a leap. Sometimes connections that are obvious to us are not so to you, just as sometimes you intuit a lot from us that needs spelling-out for those who were not there at that moment when the spark jumped.

Vivid analogy.

Personal v. impersonal

Remember our larger theme, your souls as conduits of vast impersonal forces that are experienced as personal drives.

You hadn’t added that last phrase before.

We would have thought it went without saying. Perhaps that is part of the gap in communications. It is because you necessarily experience, but less necessarily conceptualize, impersonal forces as personal, that much confusion arises.

Why?

Why does it cause confusion?

Yes.

But – here imagine sputtering noises. We can hardly imagine why it isn’t obvious. If you think a penguin is an albatross, won’t it cause confusion? They’re both birds, and they both like cold water, and that is about all they have in common.

Well, spell it out for us.

[Pause]

It is a difference in responsibility, let’s put it that way. If you think the impersonal is personal, you are likely to assume responsibility for things that are in fact well beyond your control. Thus you may blame yourself for an eclipse of the sun. Alternatively, you may blame the Gulf Stream for your own hasty decision. You see?

It muddles things.

It has to. It is true that sometimes – maybe even many times – the confusion makes no difference, isn’t even evident. But sometimes it matters.

All divination systems have as their basis the connection between inner and outer worlds. Some recognize that the connection is in fact identity, some don’t, but all see at least a connection, and they serve to act as indicators. Astrology, tarot, I Ching, to name but three, all translate the impersonal forces of the world for the individual querent. In short, “How will I likely be experiencing (as personal forces flowing through me) the winds flowing through the world (the impersonal forces)?”

Yes, I see that.

That is a sorting-out, you see, only it is implicit rather than explicit, at least in practice. The person using the system is interested in the factors impacting his, or her, life, not in the factors as an abstract description of the world’s weather. Nonetheless, it is indeed a weather report, and the wise querent is the one who explicitly recognizes that there isn’t anything personal about whether it’s raining, and yet at the same time it is very personal, but in an entirely different sense.

Now, since it helps you to know where we will resume: When we resume, let’s continue with the distinction between your ideas of personal and impersonal. Obviously that doesn’t mean Frank’s ideas except as representative of a 3D individual’s ideas.

All right. I can’t say I’m less at sea about today’s session than I was. Perhaps it will become clearer in retrospect, as I type it in.

That is an advantage to being your own secretary, just as Hemingway saw advantage to typing up what he had first handwritten.

In his case, though, it was to revise as he went.

Which could be paraphrased to say, in his case, it was to get another look at the material, to see it as a whole – which sometimes led to revision.

I see. Interesting. Okay, till next time.

 

Wednesday. October 18, 2017

It is a continuing feature of these communications that I never know – rarely know, anyway – what’s next. I can’t feel a logical flow from one to the next unless you leave bread crumbs at the end of the previous session and say, “start here.” But I see that we do get on, somehow. So, your move.

I think you will find that in exploring, it may be useful to have a general idea of where you are going, but it is less useful to think you know how to get there. That is, you may be headed north, but you aren’t likely to know what lies in the path, and for all you know, to get to your destination you may have to travel sometimes west, sometimes east, sometimes south, even. Ultimately what seem like detours – even what may be detours – still help fill in the map.

That’s all right, as long as I have my Indian guide. It’s when you aren’t sure you still have him, or that he really knows the ground, that you get nervous.

Of course. And you would be reassured if he could show you that he does know what he’s doing.

In any case, I am in your hands. I’m willing to be occasionally “confused for three days, once,” like Daniel Boone, if it happens. I must say, your track record so far is good. “Your” meaning you, Rita, TGU, etc. – all our guides.

It is the quest for an impossible certainty that would trip you up. Otherwise, errors of perception or interpretation will average out

So, today?

Let’s talk about motivation and emotion.

I know where this is going. I had a thought while making coffee. I take it you sometimes put out teasers, like theatrical trailers.

Think of it as an aligning nudge, to smooth communication.

Or like a left jab, to position me for a punch?

Motivation and emotion

We’re smiling too. All right. You look around you, sometimes, and you wonder, how it is that people want things so badly? How can so many things be so important to them? How can they believe so thoroughly and passionately? Why are they so driven?

Very true. And you don’t need to tell me that others would say that somebody who fills dozens of notebooks with early morning dialogues is driven in his own way. It doesn’t feel like it, to me, it feels natural, but I can imagine that that’s how it looks. So I don’t exactly think I’m the only exception to what I’m nevertheless puzzled over.

That’s a good point, that one person’s obsession is another’s natural way of being. But it is the underlying question of motivation that we are interested in, at the moment. Not specific situational motivation, but motivation in general.

Yes. What makes Sammy run, to use the old show title. What is it with us?

What is it with you is that what you used to call 3D Theater is for the playing-out of – well, we are going to say of conflicts, only that needs explaining.

More like confluences, I think. Or just interactions.

That is true once the context is understood, but it requires some spelling-out first, mostly to eliminate potential misreadings.

Life in 3D – which, we remind you, amounts to saying “consciousness restricted in its awareness to 3D conditions of perceived separation, delayed consequences, and constricted experience of time as an invariant succession of present-moments” – life in 3D allows the play of forces to be experienced from within, as it were. It makes it real at an entirely different level than one of somewhat chilly abstraction, which is All-D life as you would perceive it. (In saying that, we are not accusing ourselves of being cold. We are showing you the difference between 3D consciousness and the larger All-D consciousness as it would appear to you.)

If you will remind yourselves that in a very real, if hard to visualize, way, you are all part of one thing, it will be easier to understand. 3D life is the experience of many small parts of all-that-is experiencing themselves as separate. This is not (we keep reminding you) poor design, nor Original Sin in the sense of a culpable act or an error of judgment. It is the result of the eating of the fruit of the Tree of the Perception of Things as Good and Evil – that is, it is the result of the voluntary descent into perception of duality – but it is not punishment nor even an escape from justified punishment. It is the sine qua non of the experience. Without more than one actor, more than one stream of thought, more than one set of motivations, there isn’t much elucidation going on. Monologues and soliloquies only take you so far.

You are implying that our drama is somewhat artificial.

Well, let’s go carefully. Let’s say – we have used the analogy repeatedly, because it is expressive – let’s call you a repertory company doing improvisational drama. You are assigned roles (in 3D’s case, by being born into a certain time, place, heredity), and given baggage (what you sometimes call past lives, other times see as inherited traits, which in a way amounts to the same thing) but are then free to – and required to – make it up as you go along. This is because the theater management, and for that matter the audience, is less concerned with plot than with character revelation and character development. It is the playing-out, less than the play, that is of interest.

No Big Script, no Ultimate Resolution, no Armageddon.

Not except in the sense of the entire working-out process being the script, no. But people like to tack on the idea of a final resolution, for fear of meaninglessness.

Yes, that is a haunting fear many of us come to, after waking up from, or being born free of , belief in the surface appearance of things.

Desire and fear

It is harder, or perhaps we should say it requires greater consciousness and therefore involves more self-consciousness, when you are doing improv knowing it, than when you just follow your impulses less consciously, “doing what comes naturally.”

Living life instinctively, I take it. “Doing what comes naturally” leads to thoughts of the birds and bees, and I can’t think of much that is more instinctive or stronger than the sexual instinct.

Sex, survival, flourishing, all aspects of life as divided beings, yes. Powerful motivators, desire and fear.

I take it that is different from the Course in Miracles polarity of love and fear as the two forces motivating humans.

Yes. That one refers to attraction and repulsion. We are referring to a slightly different way to see 3D life, one in which, within the perception of multiplicity, desire and fear are two motivating forces.

I feel the distinction, but we haven’t put words around it yet.

Love versus fear – or vis a vis fear, we should say – refers to forces leading you [either] from, or further into, a sense of multiplicity. Desire vis a vis fear refers to forces within the sense of multiplicity. Neither one tends to lead you out of it, they manifest it within you (or, you might as well say, they manifest you).

Desire and fear make drama. Drama makes for enactment and, in a sense, awareness of, resolution of, the forces themselves, through manipulation of the agencies though which the forces manifest.

Better let me put that into English. You just said, the forces themselves can be felt but not represented except either by abstractions or by characters feeling them.

We didn’t quite say that, but that is the sense of what we meant, yes. What cannot be directly represented can be personified, observed, experienced vicariously, emotionally understood. This transforms the observer and we go on to whatever follows, to be transformed further.

So even when we live our lives feeling them pointless, even intolerably so, we are performing improv and there is a reason for it.

Well, “a reason for it.” We know what you mean, but to assent would be to mislead. Life is. It doesn’t need a “reason for it.” What you mean is, it isn’t ever meaningless, and this is true. However, a sense of it being meaningless is well within the range of emotions being expressed by this or that actor in the troupe.

Does that imply a need to have every possible mood expressed, so that, we might say, “somebody has to do it”?

That isn’t quite wrong, not quite right. Let’s say, the forces are there. the situations are there. the players with their baggage are there. It’s pretty likely that sooner or later everything inherent in the structure will be acted out by somebody.

 

Tuesday, October 17, 2017

Difference in observation

It’s interesting to see the difference between what I experience and what people read into that experience, even people who know me very well. Yesterday’s exchange, for instance. I experienced it, as always, as smooth, even flow. Statement, response. Question, response. One thing leading to the next, no emotion involved. The closest I have ever come to an emotion in any of these conversations, as far as I can recall, is humor. We’ll exchange jokes, or we will be amused by the other’s attitude or assumption or reaction. But that isn’t what people read. They read into the record, anger, chastisement, even, yesterday, cantankerousness. And it isn’t so much any particular individual’s misreading, but a general atmosphere that establishes itself around the conversations. And, since I can occasionally detect suspicious fingerprints when they are smudgy enough, I suspect that you encouraged me to mention this for reasons of your own. Your move.

Take that same difference between communication as you experience it essence to essence, and the record it leaves, the effect it produces, when people read it via 3D clues (written words, inferred attitudes, analogies to what would be if it were a conventional person-to-person interaction), and you get a sense of the difference between All-D and 3D perspectives on 3D life.

I almost get it, but not quite.

That’s all right, because there is quite a lot to say. Let’s make it easy to follow, by coding it. So, in our interactions, you, the 3D-plus-non-3D intelligence, we’ll call A. We, the non-physical intelligence you communicate with, we’ll call B. Your readers, separately or together, we’ll call C.

So, physical – A. Non-physical – B. Observer – C. Over-simplified, but it will do. These have their counterpart beyond the 3D world, and the part that may be confusing is that A and C extend into the non-3D and know they do, yet continually forget they do. So let’s call your non-3D component A2 and your readers’, C2.

A interacts with B, and C observes. But really, A and A2 interact with B, and C and C2 observe. As you have noted, interactions tend to be experienced this way: A2 and B, and experienced by C as if A and B.

Well, why should that be? Why (since C and C2 are the same) should it not be experienced by C as A2 and B?

It depends on how we observe, doesn’t it? If we observe using sensory cues, it appears to be A and B. Only if we observe giving intuition primacy over sensory do we perceive it as A2 and B.

Close enough for the moment. All right, draw and extend the analogy. Look at the world around you.

Yes, I see it. If we look at it and read only the sensory clues – or, I guess, if we only read the evidence using our sensory apparatus and its reporting, its logic, its deductions – the world looks one way. If we read the same thing in an intuitive way, it reads differently.

Again, not quite. But you’re on the trail. The point remains that the world you experience is only somewhat real, even in its own terms. It is more real, seen through C2 lenses.

It’s a difficult concept to really grasp. We can get it abstractly, easily enough, but when we come to apply it, it can seem like explaining things away.

Infinite mysteries

We understand. That’s what we are trying to do right now, give you an intellectual connecting principle – a hook, you say – to tie in what you experience within yourselves and what you experience outside of yourselves, because it is so hard for you to perceive (as opposed to knowing abstractly) that inner and outer are the same reality experienced through two different filters.

The world hurts! You, observing the world, hurt, because you take it as real. But – it is and it isn’t. What C experiences is qualitatively different from what C2 experiences, and the difference inheres in C, not in the world.

In a way, that’s saying what Hemingway said? That we’re making a mistake in thinking that others react to their situation in the way that we would react if we were in it?

You’ve seen it yourself, and I dare say everybody who reads this, present or future, has seen it too. One’s “personal experience” can never be translated accurately. You can’t express it and the other person can’t absorb it, just the way it is, because there are too many unnamable variables within each 3D individual to make translation possible. Because you extend into non-3D, because you experience partly intuitively, something of the emotional reality and the inexpressible experience can jump, can arc over, but only some. The actual flavor of everyone else’s life can only be approximated, can only be guessed at. Who understands how asthma has flavored your life? Who, understanding this, understands the effects – each combined with the others – of asthma and reading and hero-worship and early Catholicism and a thousand emotional incentives and motivators and what we might call anti-incentives and anti-motivators? Who can add in ambitions and disinclinations, insights and prejudices, penetration and blindness, etc., etc.? Nobody, nor could you do the equivalent for anybody else.

Empathy and levels of reality

This may not seem a very valuable insight, but when it clicks in, it may. You are all infinite mysteries to each other, you know that. Even when the other is known to the point of predictability, of boredom even, the core will remain a mystery to others and even to yourself. It’s one thing to say “know thyself,” but it is another thing entirely to know how to go about it.

Yet, observing the world, it is that very mistake that you do make, and most naturally. You assume you know what the napalmed child feels. We choose a horrible example purposely; there’s no point in using only easy cases.

It doesn’t take any great insight or empathy to know that the child hurts!

Of course not, and the ability to empathize is part of being human. A very valuable part. However –

All right, let’s extend our analogy. C is the observer, C2 is the observer plus its non-3D component. Another way of putting it, loosely, would be that C is the observer using only sensory input, C2 is the observer observing with intuition as well as sensory data. But what is the outside view of C’s observation-point? What is the view that watches C’s progress through 3D life with interest and involvement, but does not interfere, because to interfere would actually impede? Call that observer C3.

You may need to talk a little more about C3 (bearing in mind that in our world, C4 is a powerful explosive.

Yes, a joke, but you find C and C2 explosive enough, in everyday reality.

What we called B is really B3 as observed by A and C. We, here, do not exist as 3D-only, obviously, and we cannot even be said to be B2, which would imply that we were 3D using intuitive means.

I see that.

Well, from the C3 level, life looks, feels, is, different. It is the difference between watching an execution or a gunfight or a car accident in person (or on a news program), and watching them in a story, characters portrayed by actors. Anyone with empathy is going to be stirred even by drama – that’s the purpose of drama, after all, to stir emotions – but no sane person confuses drama with reality. Matt Damon doesn’t get shot just because Jason Bourne does. Tom Hank doesn’t die in Normandy just because the schoolteacher does.

Well, I don’t know, drama can carry a powerful kick, and some of us can confuse it with reality. I can well remember being heart-sick as a little kid at the ending of Tarzan of the Apes, and I can remember being rapt with tension at some TV show and my father laughing and telling me, “it’s just a story,” and my complicated reaction to that – regretting being taken out of it, and becoming aware of where I had been, and retaining the consciousness of that awakening. And I still get thoroughly involved with characters in some novels [and videos], especially in a continuing series. Hornblower, Castle, Inspector Grant.

And you make our point for us. Remember, these are created beings, like yourselves but at another level removed. Real but not as real. Embodying characteristics made plain by their adventures. To the degree that you care about them – and you can come to identify, in a way, even with characters who embody characteristics opposite to your own, in fact that can be the strongest identification – you enter into their reality. The surroundings and the plots don’t need to be realistic, because it isn’t as if you were identifying with their external experiences. You identify with their reactions. You feel their reactions as if they were yours. They enliven an existing but slow-flowing current within you. Hence the popularity of mysteries and romance novels. As art, they usually come to not much. But as doorways to your own interiors, well, that’s why they appeal.

So we are a TV series to the next highest level of reality?

Let’s say you are actors who are pretty intense, and often get lost in your roles. It is the surfacing to breathe, remembering that you are an actor with, perhaps, a mortgage or a favorite car, that reminds you that life is realer than the drama you are (legitimately) engaged in, immersed in. And that’s enough for now.

 

Monday, October 16, 2017

Relative descent into duality

You said, descent into duality is only a relative thing. What did you mean by that?

Remember always, there are no hard and fast divisions in the universe. It isn’t like there is here with one set of rules and there with another. Relatively, yes. In a manner of speaking, yes. But not absolutely. Just as it isn’t 3D here, non-3D there, so it isn’t duality here, non-duality there – except relatively.

Well, we are willing to be instructed, but that isn’t immediately obvious.

If the theme is, it’s all one reality, here is another case of that. Duality isn’t a physical or mental ghetto, a low-rent district. It is a state of mind, in a way, a state of acceptance.

Of acceptance. You mean, only the result of seeing things a certain way?

That sounds like your own thought at the moment, I realize, but yes, the result of seeing things a certain way – of Perceiving Things As Good and Evil.

And does that imply that escaping duality is a matter of decision? We decide to see things as one, and there we are?

If it were that simple, wouldn’t you have done it as soon as you first heard the idea, or at least when you first began to believe it?

Easier to fall in than to climb out? Is that it?

In a sense. But you are ignoring the second half of our statement, that there is a good reason for it.

I hesitated between “is a good reason for it” and “was a good reason for it,” and finally chose “is,” but I don’t know why.

The “why” is because duality wasn’t a one-time error or even a one-time experiment. It is on-going, and the reason for it is on-going, and you know why.

No, I don’t. I know it is about prisms, but I don’t know why that is necessary or desirable.

Why don’t you explain, and as usual you will find insight flowing in as you put your mind in the current.

I get that partial views rather than one all-encompassing view is the difference between many colors and one all-encompassing white light. We’ve had that analogy before. Our very flaws and difficulties act as filters, so that the light of spirit shining through us does not come out clear white (though I gather it remains clear white), but in whatever color results when you shine lights through us. So I can imagine that if it is useful to have colors, we are – duality is – a way to produce them.

That is a description that makes it all seem pretty futile.

You don’t need to tell me!

There are other ways to see it. It could be looked at artistically, for instance: You are (duality is) being used to produce light shows, visual displays, ever-changing patterns. Or, scientifically: It analyzes reality by dissecting it, saying “white contains blue and green and deep red and very delicate violet, et cetera,” showing the innate complexity of existence. Or dramatically: Duality demonstrates tension and resolution, continually flowing. Or religiously or philosophically, so to speak: Inherent in the nature of things are these possibilities.

You will forgive me saying that still seems pretty futile. In a way, why bother?

That is world-weariness speaking. Ennui, one of the seven deadly sins. Sins, you will remember, are defined as errors, as “missing the mark.” They do not lead toward truth and understanding, but away from them.

Well, I’ve said we’re willing to be instructed. But what you have said so far today is not appealing, at least not to me. It makes me feel like a gladiator in a pit, fighting for the amusement of others.

Even if you are at the same time one of those “others”?

Even if.

Then let’s see if we can do something about that. I don’t suppose it does any good to remind you that anybody in duality is there of their own free will, volunteers.

I don’t know that it does. Even taking your word for it, that leaves us in the position of a Marine in boot camp, partway through the course, with a long stretch still ahead of him. He may have volunteered once, but that seems like a long time ago, and it doesn’t make his current reality any easier.

Not a bad analogy, and of course you remember it is one you have been given, and have used, more than once before.

The fruits of duality

I can’t imagine why the world beyond duality needs veterans of duality boot camp.

No, you can’t, and that is perilously near theory as opposed to something you can use. But, recognizing that it is a real obstacle, let us say just this. The product of a spell in duality is a being that:

• Combines otherwise disparate elements
• Understands unity in a new and more sophisticated way
• Is, in a sense, denser, tougher, more concentrated.

In short, an ex-civilian who is now a Marine, and once a Marine always a Marine.

It is only an analogy, but not a bad one.

We use Marines for difficult combat. Are you implying combat goes on beyond duality?

That isn’t a question that can be answered yes or no without serious distortion. Let us say that life of any kind, in duality or not, always potentially involves contention, relative readjustments. But this does not imply warfare. Don’t carry the analogy too far. And let’s drop mere theory for the moment – anything that doesn’t affect your lives may be said to be mere theory in effect – and refocus on what you are living, hence what you can do.

Still avoiding Emerson’s siege of a hencoop.

It is a continuing temptation whenever one gets too theoretical; the hencoop is at least tangible. People instinctively recoil from the merely abstract. Either that, or they are tempted to immerse themselves in it.

So where are we?

Where we began today, really. All we have accomplished so far is to remind you that duality exists among non-duality, and that the world doesn’t have a damaged section, a war zone, a ghetto.

Creation within duality

And you have said that duality serves a purpose.

We’ve done more than that, implicitly. By reminding you that there is a purpose, we implicitly tell you that there is not only meaning but creation within it, and creation being a part of your nature, therefore there is joy. Remember Hemingway and the fireworks.

Hemingway and his wife Martha were in China in 1941, and she was revolted and distressed by the conditions of Chinese life. At one point he said that just because it affected her that way, didn’t mean it affected them that way, or they wouldn’t keep having babies and shooting off fireworks for enjoyment. I take it you are saying, don’t be distracted by the misery of the world, everything is fine.

Minus the sarcasm, more or less. Hemingway’s insight was deeper than her emotional reaction. Again, remember – and keep bringing yourself back to the fact – 3D existence is only relatively real. It isn’t the whole story. Remember too that you don’t, can’t, know anyone else’s inner reality. You don’t know their response to their own private experience of boot camp. You don’t know what it satisfies, what it develops and matures. Blind, shrill compassion is not compassion at all, but a rejection of the universe, the same old “I know better.”

And where does that leave reform? What good is it to see what’s wrong, and sometimes why it is wrong, if the end is to be “you don’t know better than the universe does”?

Notice what this short pause does.

I feel something within me settle, a little. Okay, the question still deserves an answer.

There is a difference between understanding and condemnation. In fact, they rarely run together.

Understanding slavery doesn’t make me any less inclined to condemn it.

Bear in mind, always: Understanding something involves neither condoning nor condemning. Either of those attitudes is to a degree a falling-off from understanding. To understand something is neither to become a partisan nor to become a condemner, a partisan on the other side.

Understanding liberates, condemnation isolates, Jung said.

Rightly.

We are out of time, but I don’t know that we have gotten very far.

You rarely do. [I took this to mean, we rarely know, not we rarely get very far.] Have faith, and persevere.

That’s the motto of the firm, I guess. Very well, see you next time.

 

Sunday, October 15, 2017

Feelings

Don’t be offended that we remind you that you tend to reach for more than can be grasped before further preparation. No harm in it, provided that you compensate for the tendency once it has been pointed out.

Your lives are not lived as reasonable beings. You like to think of yourselves that way, but even the most placid and self-contained among you are driven by emotion, and even, one may say, when it is being driven by the absence of emotion. And, yes, we realize we shall have to explain all that this short statement means.

Think of any story you have ever heard or read. Think of any event from your past that sticks with you. Think of any long-running trait or interest or characteristic of yours that arose, flourished, and died down. Think of the transient things in your life, and the enduring ones. What do that all have in common?

That’s an interesting thought. Is it true?

Perhaps you haven’t grasped it all yet, only in part.

Perhaps not. Well, I was going to say that you were proposing that what we have in common – what the things you listed have in common – is that none of them are determined by thought or decision.

You aren’t far wrong, but it needs, and will repay, a more careful statement. You are not, fundamentally, reasonable beings, living as Sherlock Holmes tried to live, a life embodying logic and order. Look at the life he is painted as living, and you find that he got bored, that he used cocaine to change his mental state when boredom got unbearable, that he had prejudices, blind spots, and animadversions. The man he was (as painted) was radically different from the man he thought he was, or rather, the man he would rather have been. Now, it is true that Holmes is only an invented character, but it is an illustration, as creatures resemble their creators. The important things in your life are always associated with feelings (even though sometimes strong feelings are disguised as lack of feelings).

Emotions

Your lives – there is so much to say on this subject! – your lives are not yours to mold in the sense that you start with a blank slate and may go anywhere, do anything, change in any way, that you like. You just don’t have that much freedom. If life were the way you sometimes unconsciously assume it is, wouldn’t you all be living quiet reasonable lives, even if you were skydiving or trapeze-flying? That is, regardless whether you wanted a physically quiet or a risky life, you wouldn’t be thrown about emotionally the way you are. You would do things for reasons, and not because you had to. You would do what you wanted to do, not what something else within you forced you to do. Or, to put it slightly differently, you wouldn’t always be struggling within yourselves, suppressing this, encouraging that, outliving this, regretting that.

I get your point. Our lives are battlegrounds.

Fields of contention, anyway. You want this one moment, that, another moment. Or you want two or more incompatible things at the same time. Or you want this action but that result that cannot follow. You pursue an interest with diligence and even obsession – and then the interest is gone as if it had never been. Or, one or more interests seize you at an early age and last you your entire life, and the same, each possible variation, for personal relationships, emotional habits, categories of thought, even forms of physical environment, and forms of circumstance.

The latter two are a little vague.

“Forms of physical environment” means merely you may tend to live in the same kind of physical or energetic surroundings. “Forms of circumstance” means you may tend to create and re-create (or “find yourself in”) similar relationships or habits of life. And, as we said, these may manifest in various ways: sudden changes, or continuity through life, or any variation between the two extremes.

You may ask, Why is this? Why do sudden gusts of anger run through your lives, or fits of unreasonable and undeniable yearning, or steady unquestionable and immovable certainties? Why are you prone to the seven deadly sins and the Eighth Deadly Sin (or the one preceding and causing or anyway enabling the other seven) of Not Knowing What You Are, Or Why You Do and Feel and Think As You Do?

Not a very catchy title.

Call it Unconsciousness of Self, then. The point is the same.

Jung quoted a Gnostic gospel as saying that if we bring forth what is within us, it will save us, but if we don’t, that same content will destroy us.

That’s a little off-point, but applicable enough. The point at the moment is, why is your day-to-day existence not the thing of reason and calm that perhaps you imagine it ought to be? And the short answer is that you are not as you imagine yourselves to be.

Not who we think we are

Which of you knows yourself as your acquaintances close or not close know you? Yes, you know things they cannot, but they know things about you that you cannot, or cannot anyway know in their way. And none of you, separately or together, can have a complete picture. The wellsprings of your 3D existence are mostly hidden.

You live as conduits of vast impersonal forces rendered as personal; that is, the animating forces illuminate and enliven the shape of your lives.

I hear you saying, the forces of spirit may be impersonal and even neutral themselves, but the structures they blow through are the result of so many past entanglements. I can see that. But it kind of begs the question of where these entanglements come from in the first place, doesn’t it? Are humans malfunctioning, as some believe? Was there some equivalent of Original Sin that warped the pattern, setting in motion conflicts that keep building, generation after generation, as each new soul is born embodying past karma?

You could look at it as progressive complexification, yes. But to assume that this is a large malfunctioning is to overlook the fundamental question of where these tangles came from before Adam and Eve ate the apple. And – remember the original sin was to eat of the tree of Perception of Things As Good and Evil.

Which, someone pointed out, was an obvious set-up. Tell a child it can do anything except one thing, and the psychological pressure to do the forbidden thing becomes enormous and eventually irresistible.

Yes. Pretty efficient myth, wouldn’t you say? It encapsulates psychological insight into easily memorable form, as myths do.

So, remembering that descent into duality is only a relative thing, and assuming that there may be a very good reason for it –

But it has been an hour, and so we’ll resume another time. Am I right?

You’re the one holding the pen. But yes, this is a good time to pause.