Tuesday, August 31, 2021
2:25 a.m. I’ll be interested to see where we go from here. You’re on.
Yes, last night you were speculating. Would it refer to how you examine your own specialization? Some good insights to be obtained there. Or, what is the meaning of life, or of any one life? Or, something about the relation of your strands to yourself. All worthy topics. But remember, the idea is to continue more or less in a straight line, if possible.
Life more abundantly, as seen by examining consciousness, health, intent, options, process. There are two ways to proceed “in a straight line.” One, by examining each stem in turn. Two, by examining any given aspect of each, then returning to examine each in the context of the next aspect.
That is clearer to me than it is going to be to the reader. I get that you mean, either proceed down one stem entirely, then the next, then the next, or proceed by each aspect of life, examining it in light of each stem. The latter seems pretty artificial.
Either method has its disadvantages. But our intuition is that following either will be better than not following either.
Up to you, of course.
Yes, of course, but we are attempting to make it easier on all concerned.
And we have spent 15 minutes accomplishing nothing.
Trust in the track record. It gets done. It’s mostly a matter of perseverance.
So –
Let’s pursue aspects of consciousness, and see how we go.
If you are to have life more abundantly – or less abundantly, for that matter – it is going to depend upon the state of your consciousness. We would say, “Surely this is clear,” except that we know too well that for too many people, it is not clear. So let us begin by dismissing any other factor from consideration. It is not a matter of fate, nor of a God’s arbitrary degree, not of the constraints imposed by your own past deeds (your personal karma from “other lives”), nor of your following or not following some formula. It isn’t even a matter of attitude or of valuing or of choosing.
In theology this would boil down to the question of salvation through good work or salvation through membership in the elect. At least, that’s my understanding of the old controversy.
Yes, and your civilization used to take that controversy seriously. When it ceased to believe in an arbitrary God, or in salvation, or in sin and redemption, an unexpected side-effect is that the controversy over faith or good works became as irrelevant. It more or less morphed into the question of free will or determinism.
I take it that you aren’t leading us back to that theological context. We wouldn’t follow, in any case. As Jung said, the gods never reinhabit the temples they once abandon.
We trust that we are not being confounded with a Sunday School. But the most serious questions of life will surface again, in one or another guise. It is because the old theological way of viewing things has gone dead on your civilization that new conceptualizations have to be found.
Yes, I know that. And I wasn’t exactly twitting you, just clarifying.
And worthwhile as a reminder, if not overdone. At some point we have to trust that people are following the argument.
So, the state of your consciousness. We trust that by this time it is clear that you can be free only by being conscious, and you can be conscious only to the degree that you are present. Any deadness in your consciousness impedes you from fully participating in the endless “now.”
I can feel you hesitating as to how to itemize obstacles.
Not only how to, but whether to. Sometimes it is better to focus on obstacles; sometimes, on prospects.
- Lack of focus is one obstacle. To live in the moment requires application of energy, something like priming the pump. It is usually easier, in any given moment, to drift than to make the effort to seize the moment.
- Somewhat related, reliance on authority is another. Not that you will ever know everything; not that you are always right; not (therefore) that you can safely live by accepting whatever you feel or think as necessarily correct. But this weighing is active, is an aspect of applied consciousness. Accepting, is not.
- Prejudice, similarly, is a sort of reliance on your own past judgments as authority.
- Running scripts – what Colin Wilson would say was letting the robot drive – is another. So is drift in any sense.
It sounds like anything that comes easily is the opposite of what we want.
Not necessarily. It is less a question of ease than of intent. You don’t drift your way into clear centered consciousness.
So, intent.
That is why people go to Zen monasteries, or study any form of control of their inner drunken monkey. It requires focused intent to reshape your world, and what else is it you wish to do, than that? What you call higher consciousness, or perhaps listening to the small still voice, or reaching for direct contact with God, or any way you want to put it, that amounts to your clearing out the deadness within you, so that you may have life more abundantly.
You can have greater life, and you don’t have to earn it, but you do have to want it, to value it. And you must be able to recognize it, and be able to maintain it. Otherwise, even if you stumble into the conditions that allow for it, you are likely to stumble out of them again.
Nobody cares what routine you follow (including spontaneity as routine, if that seems natural to you). You don’t earn clarity and presence, at least not in any way recognizable from a 3D perspective. It may come as a gift, so that all you need to do is to be aware of it, and nurture it. Alternatively, you may need to claw your way to it against a thousand obstacles “internal” and “external.”
But if you can’t recognize it, you aren’t likely to know what to do to keep it. And if you don’t long for it, value it, you aren’t likely to be willing to do the things necessary to keep yourself aligned with it.
To those who don’t understand what you are doing, it will look like you are sacrificing. What they won’t see is that you are not sacrificing but shedding inessentials so that they will not impede your pursuit of, retention of, something infinitely more important.
This is Jesus and the parable of the man who found the “pearl of great price” and sold everything he owned so as to buy it. I always thought, “What is the advantage of selling what you have, in order to buy something presumably worth what you paid for it?” But of course I came to see that the sense of the parable is that all we own is not so much to pay, because the pearl is undervalued in the world’s eyes.
We keep telling you, that is what Jesus was trying to do, to show people the practical things they could do to have life more abundantly. It is not his fault that all the theology was tacked on to his message, often in direct contradiction to what he said.
Thoreau said once, “It would be a poor story to be prejudiced against the life of Christ because his book was edited by Christians.”
We smile too, but he had a point. Every religious teacher is potentially at the mercy of disciples. Fortunately, life is so arranged that the non-3D provides direct feed for those open to it. Otherwise, there would be no way out of the feedback loop. Indeed, that’s what Jesus was pointing out: Widen your access, to win your freedom.
So today’s should be titled – ?
“Clearer consciousness,” perhaps, or “Toward clearer consciousness.”
Our thanks as always, and see you next time.