Sunday, August 29, 2021
3:25 a.m. Gentlemen? You have a new approach you wish to try? I was getting a vague sense of it last night, around ten or so, but I didn’t try to push, figuring it would be better to let it flow. You’re on.
We said maybe, you realize. Most things are maybe, because that’s what free will is all about. In fact, a word on that: Does it occur to you that free will expresses in non-3D as well as 3D, and this because of 3D?
I hadn’t given it any thought, but as you say that, I realize that to some extent I have been prisoner to my unexamined assumptions. Of course non-3D expresses the conditions necessary for free will, because our thinking and feeling is done in non-3D. The 3D concentrates and constricts our experience, but you might say that concentration, that constriction, amounts to the 3D being the focusing lens. If one looks at something through a magnifying glass, or a telescope, or a microscope, the thing begin examined comes clearer, but you can’t say that the lens sees; the lens is the factor that enables the person using it to see.
That’s right. The 3D is the set of conditions that focus your mind, but your mind, as we have often reminded you, is not itself in 3D, nor is it subject to 3D laws. Its expression comes through the brain, which follows 3D rules, but the changes themselves take place by non-3D rules (or, let’s say, lack of 3D rules), which is why so much of your mental processes and occurrences is so mysterious-seeming.
Of course it makes sense that the real work takes place in non-3D, that being the main event here.
Allow us to remind you of your focusing devices: your visualized slide-switches.
Maximum focus, clarity, receptivity. All right.
You feel the difference? You were already alert and attentive, so what changed?
Maye mostly your calling attention to the need to focus.
Make the analogy between your 3D and non-3D awareness.
Hmm. It is that extra degree of extension, isn’t it, in a way. I’m still functioning as I was, but in doing so more self-consciously, I remember that I am focusing not only in one arena but in more than one. Or, not two arenas, but on two levels, let’s say.
You are right to shy away from a sense of bifurcation. It isn’t “this and that” but “a wider this.”
I see that.
It is life more abundantly, as we keep saying in different contexts.
That’s my title, isn’t it?
It could be, yes. As a title, it may mislead, but as your own working title, yes. That is one way to center on our on-going message.
And so, are you going to do the painstaking construction with me, as I had a hunch last night you were ready to do?
We have begun. What is the shaping of anything, but a focusing? So, not so much a table of contents, but a list of things to be included:
- Life more abundantly as central theme. The why of these explorations.
- The various aspects of life affected and affecting: consciousness, health, intent, process.
- Consciousness: Of what? What is your mental world and what can it be? No one can focus on everything: What is the specialization that is you?
- Health: What is the meaning of health beyond the obvious idea of a functioning mind-body? We have said the ideal is not perfect health but perfect adjustment. Why, and what does that entail? How can you use your existing state of health as evidence and as a hint as to the way forward?
- Intent: What does your life want? This isn’t quite the same as saying, “What do you want out of life?” It is closer to saying, “What does your life want of you?”
- Process: Given your circumstances, what will work best for you as habits? Circumstances include karma,
You got stuck there. Because we need to explain what you mean by karma?
Perhaps. Let’s see if explaining unjams the logs. By karma here we mean the unfinished business that each of your strands, and all of your strands together considered as one (that is, as you), bring to the table. You didn’t come in tabula rasa: This unfinished business is what makes you what you are as you enter.
I know that you don’t mean leftover situations from other lives: a yearning for revenge, say, or a continuing unrequited passion.
Well –. Focus a little more, and stay here rather than hurrying toward the rest of our bullet, or future bullets.
I smile. You know my mental habits so well. But then, you should.
Let’s stay with karma for a moment. In a way, it is “leftover situations from other lives.” Remember, those passions are being lived in the eternal living present moment; they are not archives or memorials. They are alive within you because they are alive within those strands (which are alive within you). Your life may help resolve them, as you become in effect a reconciling force, but remember their lives may help you resolve things, as they become in effect reconciling forces.
What will reduce confusion is for you to remember the distinction we drew between first-, second-, and third-tier experience. First-tier experience happens only in the moment within any given life, and does not reverberate further. But second-tier experience – what you decide to do about (how you decide to react to) first-tier experience – can reverberate, and third-tier experience – how you change as a result of the decisions you made – definitely reverberates, and in fact is a major determinant of where you begin in life.
Thus – we have said this before – karma is not punishment nor reward except in the sense of the saying that “virtue is its own reward.” It is the starting conditions for your 3D life, and is a sort of continuing unseen or half-felt boundary that limits your reactions to things. But it is not unchangeable nor even particularly recalcitrant. Like most things, it is quite pliable when approached in the proper manner.
So process, as one of the four overlapping areas of life, includes karma as one of its elements. You don’t escape what you (that is, your constituent stands) have been, and what would be the point if you could? But you begin there.
Another element of process is the external environment you live your life in: your “times,” the events around you (as karma might be said to be the events within you). The shared subjectivity, in other words, as it throws up this or that in any given moment.
And mostly, your dealing with the interaction between the individual subjectivity (karma) and the shared subjectivity (3D events). The “dealing with” is what you are here to do, and is all that you can do, or need to do, or are competent to do.
We should resume with process, or perhaps better, another bullet, involving what your options are. Spelling out the conditions is one thing. Sketching how to function given those conditions is another.
Well, this came out well, I think. A title for it?
Can there be any question?
Life more abundantly.
Let’s say, “Life more abundantly: Beginning an outline.”
Okay. Our thanks as always.