Month: March 2022

Thursday, March 31, 2022

6:30 a.m. And just like that, we have burned through a quarter of the year 2022. It’s always surprising. And when we were kids, the time between October and Christmas was about ten years, every year. More like ten minutes, now.

I don’t intend for us to discuss Christmas today, but mentioning that long wait reminds me how we used to pore over the Sears Christmas catalog, a thick glossy dream-book of things we knew we’d never have but like to imagine having.

Which reminds me of the elaborate model train layouts I would draw – intricate loops ad complications of imaginary train tracks. Used to draw them everywhere. I don’t suppose trains have any allure for kids today, and they can hardly draw routes of imaginary airlines. I wonder what they do draw.

Now, I woke up thinking of Messenger and our reactions to things, sparked by yesterday’s discussion in our Intuitive Linked Communication group. I don’t know where we’re going to go with it (do I ever?) but I got the sense that that is the topic du jour. You’re on, gentlemen.

You noticed that you never explicitly set your switches yesterday and it didn’t make any difference. We remind you, this is about mindfulness, not rote, so there’s no need to make a superstition of a helpful habit.

No, I understand that. After a while, the habit of concentrating in a given place at a given time of day in a given circumstance will carry us. And I also know the other half of the equation, that it never hurts to remind ourselves.

So to the topic, Who is responsible for what happens to you? You have already come the first step.

That it’s a meaningless question, yes. Whether something is “our fault” or the fault of the universe, or fate, or other people, whatever, is strictly speaking only a matter of opinion. It is to say, “From this viewpoint, things look this way.” Other viewpoints result in other judgments. Who is to say that one is right and another wrong?

Who indeed? And sometimes “right” and “wrong” shade into “good” and “evil,” and you recognize that you are right back in the results of eating that apple.

Well, every child knows that things are his parents’ fault, if only in the sense that they might have done things differently, resulting in a different outcome, so I think we should just sit around and blame Adam and Eve and that dammed snake. That relieves us of responsibility.

Follow the stray thought.

Well, writing that, it did occur to me to wonder what the tellers (and then the writers) of the story in Genesis meant by saying that the snake lost its legs and from then on had to crawl. (Or am I misremembering the story?) Surely there is a meaning there, and I doubt it amounts to, “So there, you little bastard, take that!”

Go re-read the story sometime and it will be easier for us to comment.

All right. Was that “stray thought” planted, in fact? Oh never mind, that too is a useless question.

We smile.

Yeah, I know: “You’re learning.”

Now as to the storyline this morning. Yes, one lesson is that assigning blame is useless in itself, and is anyway a matter of viewpoint. But it is also a useful indicator, or, let’s say, can be used as such. It is worthwhile for each of you to recognize your own tendency (which would otherwise be invisible to you, being pre-conscious) to ascribe responsibility either to yourself, or to the universe, or to malign forces, or to the accidents of life, or to other people. Any of these attributions will have its advantages and disadvantages, and the way to maximize the former and minimize the latter is to remember that any judgment is necessarily provisional and partial: That is, it necessarily is true only so far, and only from one way of seeing things. Remembering that, will save you a lot of grief and anxiety and anger.

It seems to me that if we carry that to its logical conclusion, nothing can be blamed on anybody.

Certainly true.

Is it? But what of individual responsibility?

Paraphrased, you are asking, But what about guilt? What about scapegoats? What about victims and villains?

Well, that’s striking. I see your point. But then what are we left with?

“Pay attention, Arjuna. You don’t want to participate in this war because you don’t believe in it, but it is part of the pattern of the moment, and you are part of the pattern of this moment. You have to participate in life, and according to your station.”

I suppose I’ll have to re-read the Mahabharata. [The Bhagavad-Gita, specifically.] I never really understood that point. It seemed to me that Arjuna was right.

Do, and we can discuss that too. One could almost make a generalization to the effect that true scriptures are never understood until after they have had their effect.

In leading us to a new viewpoint, you mean? I wish I still had that book I had once that compared the scriptures of seven religions. If I knew the title, I’d try to buy it second-hand.

Now, consider everyone’s attention on the Russian-Ukrainian skirmish presently being fought. What use are people’s opinions of causes and effects, when so many causes are obscure or illusory or deliberately deceptive, and so many players are off-stage, and so many seemingly uninvolved players are using the conflict for their own purposes, hoping to gain advantage?

But that’s always the case.

Yes, it is. Shouldn’t that make people slower to judge?

Well, let’s drop back 80 years, to 1940. Russia invaded Finland and took over the three Baltic republics that had broken away from the Russian empire at the time of the 1917 revolution. We know now that Hitler had agreed to it, and we knew even at the time that England and France had not opposed it, mainly because there was nothing they could have done, and of course because the Germans had just overrun France and defeated it in a matter of weeks. Stalin later defended his actions as dictated by military necessity, which was probably true as well, but basically was a lie overing his usual rapacity.

Point your question.

Even though the behind-the-scenes factors weren’t known, couldn’t the actions themselves be judged?

Certainly. Only – which judgment do you prefer? Every way you look at the situation, it will cast a different light. Was it Russian imperialism? Soviet imperialism? Recapture of territories lost only because of a momentary failure of state power? Proactive self-defense? Choose what you wish to identify with, and the right and wrongs of the situation will announce themselves, loud and clear and incontestable. Only, don’t try to persuade anyone of a different outlook.

Well, the rights and wrongs of the situation were probably clear enough to the Latvians, Lithuanians, and Estonians! Not to mention the Finns.

Whoever said otherwise? But just as every story has at least two sides, so everything in life looks different depending on the assumptions you bring to it.

So Arjuna, if he had been in the Russian army in 1940 – or today – would be advised to participate in good conscience because life had placed him there?

In good conscience or bad, it remains true that life would have placed him there. And it remains true that it is unsafe for the part to think it is wider, more moral, than the whole. Life knows what it’s doing. Can you say the same?

This is pretty confusing.

No, it isn’t confusing. What it is, is uncomfortable. You understand our point very well, you just don’t like it.

I’m holding on to confusing. It’s true, I don’t like your conclusion, but I also can’t quite see how it follows.

That isn’t what you mean.

No. I can see how it follows logically, but I can’t feel it as true. It seems to me it’s missing something.

Very good. So it is, and we an go into it next time if you wish. This will take us farther into the question of the vast impersonal forces and how they manifest within 3D,  and why.

So, today’s theme?

“Blame and viewpoint”?

Maye. I think I can find something better. We’ll see as I transcribe. Meanwhile, thanks for all this.

 

Wednesday, March 30, 2022

6 a.m. After I fed the cat, I was sitting in the recliner for a few moments before heading back upstairs, and in that brief time I had a realization, but it fleeted away. Can you remind me? It had to do with a systems approach to how we transduce energies, though it did not come in those terms.

You were realizing that the various social and behavioral sciences have done a lot of work, gained a lot of insight, and all of that would be valuable once it was seen through more accurate filters. That is, once the world view that is their context changed to recognize realities presently not understood or accounted for. All that work is not lost effort, all the knowledge is not so many wrong directions, it only needs to be reoriented.

The music needs to change, so that the iron filings on the drumhead will rearrange into new patterns.

That’s what it amounts to. And of course while anyone may contribute to this work of reorientation, no one and no collection of people will do any more than a small part of the work. This is how it should be: You are shipmates on a long cruise, not paying passengers to be pampered and tended to in idleness.

Nice analogy.

Well, you know, people forget conceptually (though they usually remember, in practice), that work is a great blessing and amusement and gymnasium. Meaningful work has nothing in common with drudgery performed not for its own sake but for the sake of keeping body and soul together, as they say.

I used to say that if every job paid the same and had the same prestige, there would instantly be such a huge reshuffling, as people ceased to do what they felt they had to do, and instead began to do what they really wanted to do. Lawyers becoming railroad engineers, for instance, or shopkeepers becoming artists, or vice versa.

The argument extends well beyond things people do for a living. Your day’s work includes what you do, what you think and feel, how you create and re-create yourself moment by moment. Just as a lifetime of meaningless leisure may sound enticing to the overworked, but in practice would sate and then cloy, so a life in which one’s needs were met in one realm but not in another would remain unsatisfactory because unsatisfied.

You mean, I think, because until all parts of us are satisfied, we’re going to experience a hunger.

Yes, only that need not be a bad thing. Dissatisfaction leads to a desire to change. Hunger is a guide toward what is lacking. There is no reason to expect your life to be complete before it has been completed! That is, life is movement, and movement stems from a desire to get somewhere else, or a desire to not stay where one is. Positive and negative, you see.

Sometimes it is a desire to stay where we are, when things are changing around us.

Yes, same effect. All we are saying is, there’s nothing wrong with it. Many of people’s criticisms of life are unwarranted because they come from a pretense to be able to judge the whole by the standards of a vey small part.

I can understand that. Now, while we were writing this – about two paragraphs back – another thing flitted by that I didn’t interrupt us to mention, and of course promptly forgot. It isn’t the first time I have had this thought, either. What was it?

Look back and reread where you were when it connected. That is not a failsafe procedure, but it does work sometimes.

Well, it doesn’t work at the moment. Why not just give it to me?

Can you always remember what you want to remember?

Obviously not, but I’d think you could.

Isn’t time and your mind the common denominator here?

You mean, the limitations in 3D of us connecting to a given thought in non-3D.

It’s a little more complicated than you might think. We have to go back 20 years or so to when we told you about your mind as switching system.

I haven’t thought about that in years. I remember Rita Warren and Skip Atwater quizzing you on it in a black-box session in 2004 sometime. It had to do with how our mind maintains continuity with a body that is continually moving from time-slice to time-slice.

That’s right. You will remember that we said  that for us in non-3D to find you in any moment of 3D could be a bit of a problem.

You compared us to worms, if I remember right. You said any segment of the worm corresponded to a moment of 3D, and we extended from the moment of birth to the moment of death, but our mind was in a different place at each moment.

Well, not exactly. “Place” isn’t right. But your mind as a whole has a different locus, seen at any given time. You will remember, we were explicating the difference between your contacting another life at a given moment in that life, as opposed to the different life as a whole.

Yes. In-process lives as opposed to completed lives, I think you called them.

Bertram in 1242, April 8^th, is not exactly Bertram in 1223, April 8^th. Abraham Lincoln in 1832 or 1842 or 1852 or 1862 is the same man, and is not the same man, depending upon how you look at him. And Abraham Lincoln 1809-1865 is and is not the same as any of the time-slices of his life that you might contact. Frank is not the same person in 2005 as in 1985 or 1965. And after all, isn’t that the point? Isn’t life about each moment and also about the third-tier result? Not one or the other, but both.

Nothing is lost.

Neither is it embedded in amber. Life is much more dynamic – more alive – than schemes of understanding tend to see it.

So to hark back to my question of why you can’t remember things that I can’t remember.

Obviously, sometimes we can. We just showed you that. And sometimes we can’t. We showed you that, too. The difference is not in us but in the interface between us and you.

I don’t understand that. It sounds like you are describing static in the transmission between us, but I don’t think that’s what you mean.

No, it isn’t an interruption in the link between us, it is more an attenuation of our connection to the material you are trying unsuccessfully to remember. You are the focusing device. All the music suffuses the universal awareness; only the tuner can decide what we will distinguish among it all.

But you are not implying that without 3D consciousnesses – tuners – you exist in a chaos of competing symphonies? Awkward metaphor, but let’s use it until a better one suggests itself.

You forget – or underrate the importance of the fact – that we in non-3D by virtue of our very connection to a 3D individual are in effect limited. You might say, we focus on you, and therefore your focus becomes our focus, and to some degree your limitations constrict us as well.

It’s hard to remember. I still tend to think that non-3D beings know everything and can access anything.

True and not true, because it is not really possible for you to intuit our condition here. Even the word “here” is to some extent a misnomer; yet in another sense not. We are not in 3D, yet our connection is to a time-slice in which you are contacting us. So are we “in” 3D or not? We would argue yes, and no.

So then – hard to hold this argument – something in the nature of time itself gets in the way of memories?

Not time itself, but your relation to time. This is a long subject in itself, but you, internally, have to maintain diplomatic relations (so to speak) with all the other time-slices you exist in. Here’s something for you to chew on: What makes you think it is any different, “remembering” yourself at age 10, than communicating with Bertram, or Joseph, or anybody else you connect to? “You” in a different moment of time are no longer in 3D from your present perspective, and yet “you” in the present are continually changing as you move to the next time-slice. You see? You are not a stationary platform, and you don’t stand on a stationary platform. Should it be a surprise that there is slippage?

You’re right about that being a new thought! I have had inklings, but never so clear as now.

At some point we hope to obtain your sympathy for the difficulty we experience in translating the simplest realities, against so many incorrect assumptions.

You’re joking, but I do see it. You are trying to explain the movement of planets to people whose astronomy still assumes that the Earth is the unmoving center of the universe.

Yes, good analogy. And not an entirely wrong astronomy, at that, for in important ways not only the earth but each of you is the center of the universe, only, so is everyone else, each to himself, or herself.

I had had this thought before, but this puts another light on it: Some theologian says God is a circle whose center is everywhere and nowhere. Something like that. And I take it that we, as divine beings in human form, are also the center and not the center, as you just said.

Another time, we’ll look at the effects of slippage as you move from time-slice to time-slice.

Today’s theme?

You might call it, “Continuity.” Or “Continuity among times.”

I’ll think about it. Okay, thanks. I notice I’m getting more words per hour recently. Is that a sign that our connection is smoother? That I’m more confident? That the information flows easier?

Think about it, and if you wish, we can discuss it. Only, don’t come back today.

No. Again, thanks.

 

Tuesday, March 29, 2022

5:15 a.m. An awful lot – a richness – of associations go on beneath our surface consciousness. I awaken to a fully formed paragraph that could go into a science-fiction/spy story I will never write, and that, for all I know, someone else is writing, or has written,. Then a long chain of memory and association starting with an image of Tom Selleck as Eisenhower and going through the D-Day movie (“Ike: Countdown to D-Day”), and trying to remember, and finally remembering, the name of the general our Air Force accidentally killed at St. Lo, and remembering that they call the West Point Class of 1915 “The year the stars fell on” [because so many of that class became generals]. And on and on. A great richness of interest, sometimes of entertainment, sometimes of anguish even. It all goes on, behind the scenes, and are we to believe that this has no point but to interfere with our efforts at one-pointed mindfulness? I don’t think so. Like most things, it is a question of who’s going to be in charge, us or it.

So, guys, anything on your minds this morning, or do we take a day off?

We always have something on our minds; you can always take a day off.

Well, I have my coffee, and I have a cat crowding me out of my desk space, only grudgingly leaving me enough room to write, and my back started off hurting and rapidly eased as I went downstairs and back upstairs to feed Lila, and I have a slight headache – more or less an echo of a headache, nothing much – and as I write this long sentence my ears have begun ringing, ever louder, so I guess that all adds up to, “We’re up; we might as well do something.” And it’s nearly 5:30. So, over to you. (And to seal the deal, the cat just took herself off to somewhere more interesting, so I have the blotter back.)

All this may serve to remind you that life has more layers, all intricately interconnected – braided, almost – than is usually realized. If you were to try to record – or even to notice – all the layers operative at any one moment, you would discover that it can’t be done. Closer examination would reveal more subtle connections, and even closer examination would continue to reveal wheels within wheels. How could you know what layers were “important” and which were not? Your judgment would be affected by your preoccupations of the moment; you stand on a moving platform. Besides, even what you judge from a definite perspective (which is the same as saying, within a definite context), you don’t necessarily judge accurately.

It is unsafe to presume that anything in life is unimportant. You think life comes with spare parts, or with tret?

Tret?

Look it up. [I did. Tret has a couple of definitions, but basically it is an allowance to purchasers of certain commodities to compensate for waste or deterioration during transit. Wise guys.] The point is that everyone judges life by what they think is important, and that is always an arbitrary measure.

I got – well, you’d better spell it out.

You got that people’s values are always arbitrary compared to a theoretical whole, but are never arbitrary in the context of their own lives, and that is a correct modification of our thought.

How is it that I can correct you? Particularly, given that it is your thought.

You are more correcting our expression of our thought in sequential exposition, that is, words. You’re doing it all the time as you choose words, even when you don’t realize you are doing the choosing.

Meaning, I think, that even when I am writing without knowing ahead of time what comes next, it is still flowing through unconscious processes that turn any thought into words.

Yes. It is the process of expressing non-3D clusters of realization, doing so in 3D – hence sequential – strings of words. It is a process of interpretation. A visual artist – a Dali, a van Gough, a Picasso – will perform the same translation from non-3D into 3D by attempting to avoid the simultaneous-into-sequential process. Sometimes it works well, and conveys the feeling. Sometimes it can’t do it, because the translation requires specific signposts such as words.

So, to resume? I had to look back to see what you had been driving at.

There too, you see, you are more of the process than you sometimes think. This participation is one reason why people think they can’t do this.

Yes, it’s a version of, “I’m probably just making this up, but –“

In the age you have entered – the beginning of the very little understood Age of Aquarius – you will not “keep yourself out of it,” so to speak, but will realize that the human input is very much part of the equation. Aquarius is a human emphasis, you see: Not the water, but the bearer of the water. And not the mundane human but the divine human which includes the mundane but is not limited to it. The Age of Pisces centered on the transformative power of love (which inevitably included lessons of hate), and centered on the direct connection between the human and the divine as in parental form. The Lord’s Prayer was revolutionary in addressing the divine not as an imperial Jupiter or Jehovah, a la Thomas Hardy, but as “our father,” meaning, a creator of the same substance as yourselves.

Hardy’s quote is more or less, “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods: They kill us for their sport.” He was quoting a Greek, I think. A net search will tell me, and I will insert it here.

[Not Greek at all, as it turns out. The quote is from “King Lear.”]

But you see, what a revolution in emotional understanding, and in philosophical position, to see the divine not as something impossibly far elevated and of a different nature form humans, but as of the same substance, and integrally related to, and concerned for, its human children. Now it is no longer “They kill us for their sport,” but our father who cares for his children.

You had forgotten a “stray thought” about sin. Can you recapture it?

Probably, but why not just give it to me?

What you work for, you get more from. What is given you, not so much.

I think it was that the seven sins, that we were told are ways of missing the mark, look different if we use them as trail-signs rather than as reproaches. It didn’t come in those words, though.

Paraphrase. Paraphrasing is always working the material, for it is a way to put something into your, definite and specific, context.

It was in the context of the vast impersonal forces. Oh! In fact, this is more than I had gotten.

That’s what we said; you get more when you work it. So –?

Let’s see if we can get this into words. The vast impersonal forces flow through our lives as allowed by the filters that are our times. We have yet to explore that; I don’t really understand the filtering process, but taking that as given, these forces flow into life, and they flow through humans; we are step-down transformers. Or it may be closer to call us transducers, transforming one from of energy into another. Anyway, those energies interact with what we are when they come into contact with us. We, experiencing them, decide whether to express them freely, or to resist them, or to use one form of input to produce a different form of output of our choosing. And the result that we can observe is our actions, our thoughts, our impulses, our self-transformation. And we judge all that (judge, in this case, meaning “discern,” not “condemn”) by what we observe the result to be.

See?

I do. It’s a more sophisticated understanding of something taught usually in terms of good and evil, of trial and error, of aspiration and guilt.

Exactly. Whereas you can look at the sins as your report card saying “Here you are,” and the virtues as the habits that you intend to use to correct your past errors in self-creation. It is social and it is individual: It is of concern to the entire human race in its 3D and non-3D manifestations, and it is of concern to each fragment of humanity with its own tasks and opportunities.

And I get, fleetingly, that the vast impersonal forces flow into life not only among humans, but among everything.

Yes indeed, but that’s another story, and we’d rather not dilute the impact of this realization. Manifesting the sins is feedback, not a tribunal’s condemnation. Take it for granted (or test it, if you prefer), that these are the major ways of missing the mark. And the mark is –?

Life more abundantly, I take it.

That is it from the 3D individual’s viewpoint, yes. And from the system as a whole?

That’s above my pay grade, I’m afraid.

We’ll get there. What do you think we should call today’s session?

I don’t know. “A wealth of input”?

Try, “Transducing.”

I may. Thanks for this very interesting material.

 

Monday, March 28, 2022

6:05 a.m. I awaken to sorrow and indignation that Messenger, which should be an acknowledged classic by now, was let to die unknown because nobody would fight for it – not me, particularly.

[Messenger won an award upon publication, and a German company wanted to make it into a TV film. But when a firm of agents challenged my right to use James Hilton’s characters in a novel, we didn’t fight, but caved in, and forfeited the right to reprint the book. We should have fought it.]

The splinter ran so deep, and it blighted all the rest of my life. What ought to have been a beginning became one more dead-end. Perhaps it is time to ask “why” not in the sense of what did I do or not do wrong, but in the sense of, “What purpose does it serve, that I live in obscurity rather than a justly deserved fame?”

You mean, what if it wasn’t an accident?

I never thought it was an accident. But it seems a malevolent twist of fate.

Or maybe a dramatization to you of the effect of traits, just like anything else in life.

I can’t deny that it had that effect. I suppose if the shaping of my soul is more important than the shaping of my life, I should count it a good thing.

There’s “good” and “bad” again. Or do you mean fortunate, useful? In any case, a lesson is useful only if it is learned, not if it is disregarded. But even then, it may be useful eventually, if it eventually sinks in.

I have “The Spy” [a Netflix series] running in another part of my mind. I neglected to focus.

Multiple mental channels may be of use, if you recognize them for what they are.

A barometer?

A barometer. They show you, indirectly, the things that have come to the surface in a given moment. They are part of an internal weather report. A given moment will prompt these memories, dreams, reflections, associations, rather than those, and what is chosen will give you a glimpse of the energies working.

Ah, which is the basis of the I Ching.

And of Tarot, yes. Where astrology maps the pattern mathematically, I Ching and Tarot, among other systems, dowse the moment for the qualities it conceals and reveals. The one is predictive, the others are more analytical of the moment one is in.

I always suspected that the things we were being taught in New Age workshops weren’t quite what should have been meant.

If that sentence were ours, you would be severely critical of its opacity.

It’s true, I would. Let me say it more clearly. We were taught mindfulness, as if it meant, no stray thoughts, no chains of association. The teachers of yoga or meditation seemed to assume that such things were bad, were distraction, were the norm only because people were asleep.

Nor were they wrong.

Not were they entirely right.

It depends upon the mind you bring to the subject. You didn’t know what they meant, only what you picked up.

Well, that’s true.

A major thread running through your life is inability or unwillingness to express yourself – except explosively – to defend your own interests (Messenger, case in point) or to present your own point of view not as confrontation but as an attempt to clarify your or another’s ideas.

Yes, it has taken all these years, but now that it is too late, I have been seeing it.

Too late for what?

For my writing career, for Hampton Roads.

Maybe. But not for you as eternal part of the eternal human mind as it exists in non-3D.

Well, I wonder about that. What good does it do for the universe to know that if you put these qualities into this situation, one result can be such and such?

What good is anything?

That too.

No, ours was a rhetorical question meaning, How can the fragment understand the whole? We do not agree with the impulse that says, “Nothing is of any use.”

I suppose it amounts to having blind faith that “All is Well.”

Even faith is going to waver, form time to time. “Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.”

So I guess it is as Michael Langevin said a few years ago. I’m doubting the past, rather than having faith in it.

Aren’t you?

As I said. So the lesson going forward would seem to be, change. But what if I can’t, or don’t, make that effort?

If you change or don’t change, you have your life, don’t you? It isn’t as if a “wrong” choice will blight it. “There is a tide in the affairs of men” may be true in terms of the individual subjectivity’s relation the shared subjectivity – that is, of the person’s relation to his society – but it does not apply to his own internal development. A choice will determine a course, but it will not result in blighting his possibilities. Every choice always leads to new choices. Is where you landed so bad? Do you know that alternatives would have been equally satisfactory?

Point taken.

But do you feel better?

I do, I think. I could wish for more analysis and perception going forward.

“Wishing won’t do it, saving will.”

PSFS. [A long-time advertising slogan of the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society when I was growing up.] Good advice that may have been disastrous for some who took it.

Good thing the world isn’t random.

Yes. We do have all these unreconciled or unconnected places within us, don’t we?

It’s natural. You were not created all of a piece. Why should you not expect to have dissenting voices among your crew, and some who didn’t get the word.

Memories of John F. Kennedy. [“There’s always one guy who didn’t get the word,” he said, harking back to his years in the Navy.]

Take his life as an example. Should he have turned right instead of left, done this instead of that? Anyone’s life can be different, but different isn’t necessarily better, or worse, just different. The road not taken is always going to seem brighter with promise. The drawbacks and calamities will always seem lesser, perhaps nonexistent. But nothing is good or bad entirely; it just is.

One more private session that can go out into the world?

There’s nothing shameful in it, or anything that needs to be private. Why not? Don’t you think everybody’s life has regrets and unhealed places? Call this “The road not taken,” maybe.

Thank you Robert Frost. Except, that was “The Road Less Traveled.”

You took that, too, did you not?

I did, and as he said, it made all the different. Till next time, then.

 

Sunday, March 27, 2022

6:25 a.m. Remarkable. Just remarkable. I had thought we’d probably skip today, as we haven’t taken a day in a while, and I get that you think I ought to take off one day a week, but in the light of what I got, maybe not.

Yesterday after our session, I set my switches for continued receptivity and presence. Is that why I got the realization at midnight?

In any case, describe the experiences first, and then we will look at what you got.

Yes, I knew you would want me to talk about process as well as result, and certainly I see the value in doing so. Let’s see (looking back a few pages) what I noted.

• Moving pictures.
• The quote from “The Nigger of the Narcissus.”
• The crossword puzzle clue whose answer was Lachesis
• The epiphany at midnight.
• The decision to remain receptive and present, and a troubled night.

[Putting this into Roman because Ronan is easier to read in lengthy passages than is italic.]

No need – no ability, either, probably – to describe it at length. Here is a precis. Bear in mind, reader, that most of my inner life goes unrecorded. Just like yours.

So at 7:40 a.m. yesterday I made his note: “I just had an extraordinary experience of seeing moving pictures as I lay in bed, but they stopped and I couldn’t regain them.” As usual, I had gone back to bed after I transcribed and sent yesterday’s conversation. Sometimes it is only for a few minutes, sometimes I go back to sleep. This time, I was lying there quietly and instead of the usual chain of associations, or daydreams, or descents into and gentle awakenings from unconsciousness, I was seeing startlingly vivid visuals – someone’s head, first, I think; not someone I know – that moved. That is, I was watching something in the way we do with our 3D eyes. The experience stopped when I changed positions, u it was vivid, alive, while it was going on.

Later in the day I copied this extensive quote in which Conrad was clearly describing a type he had experienced often enough in his career as sailor. (For those who are tempted to get on their high horse by his use of the word “nigger,” bear in mind that the word didn’t always mean, in the early part of the 20^th century. In the English merchant marine, what it would mean if used today. Nor does the following description refer to the black man, James Wait, but rather to a piece of white trash – I don’t know how better to describe him – from the slums of an English city.)

“They all knew him! He was the man that cannot steer, that cannot splice, that dodges the work on dark nights; that, aloft, holds on frantically with both arms and legs, and swears at the wind, the sleet, the darkness; the man who curses the sea while others work. The man who is the last out and the first in when all hands are called. The man who can’t do most things and won’t do the rest. The pet of philanthropists and self-seeking landlubbers. The sympathetic and deserving creature that knows all about his rights, but knows nothing of courage, of endurance, and of the unexpressed faith, of the unselfish loyalty that knits together a ship’s company. The independent offspring of the ignoble freedom of the slums full of disdain and hate for the austere servitude of the sea.”

That led to many chains of thought, some well-trodden by now. The complexity of 3D life with all its types living together; the ease of making social policy on abstract principles and total inexperience; the individual, working out his individual problem (i.e. who and what he is to become) in so many different ways. Nothing too profound, but as usual with me, trying to tie together different orders of data.

I was doing a crossword puzzle, and had a hard time remembering Lachesis. After I did, I looked it up on the web, to refresh my memory of her relationship to her sisters. It struck me, specifically, how the three sisters make a coherent metaphor for our lives, and, more generally, how we could profit by studying mythology, no less than theology, to regain past understandings of the way life is. Not every way of knowing responds to mathematics.

Fate was represented by three sisters: Clotho, who shapes the circumstances into which we are born; Lachesis, who guides our life; Atropos, who chooses the time and manner of our death. Is this not a reasonable way to suggest the non-3D influences that mold and influence us?

Then came a sudden convergence of ideas that got me up a midnight to jot them down so I would not lose them, and after that, a disturbed night in which sleep was more semi-conscious than usual. A good thing? A bad thing? To be decided. I may have to give the experiment aa little more time, before I draw conclusions.

Now, to what I got at midnight. It suddenly seemed clear to me – and it still seems clear this morning – that 3D life in general is a neural network, just as we as individuals are neural networks. (I forgot to mention listening to an interview on neural networks last night; probably that contributed to spark the mental rearrangement.) Here is what I wrote”

“12:10 a.m.

• The [vast impersonal] forces are like backed-up energy
• The times allow certain kinds of energy to enter
• The energies flow into us, motivate us, sometimes take us over
• We act on each other and within ourselves.

“It is a neural network, analog and not digital, hence our part of the process is that how we have changed out internal balance by our decisions helps determine what we can withstand, what we can transmute. Our lives re not ours alone, nor our actions, nor out thoughts. We are not merely as individual as we think, nor as conscious. Not autonomous, nor meant to be. If this is still clear later perhaps we can flesh it out.”

So, gentlemen, can we flesh it out?

Do you see the connections among the items you were moved to list?

I got the sense that you wanted me to be more explicit about my process, and these seemed important, if only because they were important enough for me to make a note here. But what they have in common? Mostly, I suppose, they are examples of how everyday life is always furnishing us with grist for the mill.

Others might say they are examples of how your mill ceaselessly grinds what comes to hand, or rather, comes to mind.

Doesn’t everybody do the same thing?

You think any two people experience life the same way?

Well, in a similar way, anyway.

What you provided is an example of one ordinary day’s extraordinary realizations as a result of what you have made yourself as a grinder of grain. That is, this is a glimpse for others of your everyday process, but you weren’t born living that process; it developed as a matter of the result of successive choices. Nor is your process effective only when it is expressed. Most of what goes son within most people is unexpressed (except through their lives) and need not be expressed. For you,  for anyone, life is not about what you accomplish externally or even internally; it is about living, and in living, in shaping a specialized tool for seeing life.

So even Donkin [the worthless sailor described in Conrad’s story] has his purpose.

Consider what you are saying, in light of these few things you cited. Isn’t Donkin expressing some of the energies that flow into 3D? You don’t like him; you don’t approve of him, but so what?

Yes, this is the answer to cruelty, too, isn’t it? The energy will express somehow, and it will express through humans.

Somebody has to wear the black hat. You all do, to some extent, some more than others. It is when you go to judge God’s creation as “good” or “bad” that dilemmas arise.

Well, it provides employment for theologians and philosophers, anyway.

Call this “Some experiences,” perhaps.

Is that adequate? What about “An epiphany”?

How many people use that word, these days?

Well, I’ll think of something. I don’t think “Some experiences” will do it. Our thanks as always.

–  – –

[Wikipedia says: Lachesis (/ˈlækəsəs/; Greek: Λάχεσις, Lakhesis, “disposer of lots”, from λαγχάνω, lanchano, “to obtain by lot, by fate, or by the will of the gods”), in ancient Greek religion, was the second of the Three Fates, or Moirai; the others were her sisters, Clotho and Atropos. Normally seen clothed in white, Lachesis is the measurer of the thread spun on Clotho’s spindle, and in some texts, determines Destiny, or thread of life.^[1] Her Roman equivalent was Decima. Lachesis was the apportioner, deciding how much time for life was to be allowed for each person or being.^[2] She measured the thread of life with her rod. She is also said to choose a person’s destiny after a thread was measured. In mythology, it is said that she appears with her sisters within three days of a baby’s birth to decide the baby’s fate.

Saturday, March 26, 2022

4:45 a.m. Setting switches. Yesterday at some point after our session I set them for maximum receptivity and presence, and just sat, staying in the moment. It reminded me that the moment itself is magical, when we do not shallow it out by our daydreams and fantasies and stray thoughts and – in particular – lack of presence in the living moment. I must remember to do this regularly; it is an equivalent to meditation as I understand it.

Very well, gentlemen, let’s proceed. Yesterday, as so often, I got the sense that we were so close; that if I could just hang on, if we could just continue, the things that we had just connected would connect further, and it would all come clear. But, as usual, the tide receded. Where is King Knute when you need him to regulate the tide for you?

Although you are forced to proceed without the satisfying “Aha!” that makes sense of everything once and for all, there is a more enduring progress being made, in that little by little you are seeing the dawning of day. Little bits of understanding, separately grasped, then lived, then added to, provide a firmer foundation than a fireworks display that dazzles, and then perhaps leaves the darkness seeming all the darker in its absence.

Well, I know that. You see me showing up day by day, don’t you?

We do, and we appreciate it, as you appreciate our being here when you do call.

By implication, are you saying that the answer to the question in Shakespeare is that when anybody calls spirits from the vasty deep, someone will come?

[“I can call spirits from the vasty deep.”

“Why, so can I, or so can any man. But will they come when you do call them?”]

No one will be inclined to call who is unable to receive a response. That is, if in your nature you can’t deal with it, it won’t occur to you to try. If it does occur to you, that is a good indicator that it is within the range of possibilities for you. Only, you may not succeed right away; you may not know how to call, or you may not recognize an answer when it comes, or you may have to wait patiently (or impatiently) until the time allows the spirits to respond or allows you to hear the response. But yes, if you knock, the door will open.

We keep coming back to Jesus’ words [“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you”] in a context that makes them not only relevant but almost obvious, when prior contexts left them seeming only theoretical or even fanciful, and usually enigmatic.

His life was not about being fanciful or theoretical. He came to show the way to life more abundantly, as he plainly stated, and more than once. Really, that is all that any prophet tries to do. The Buddha said he wasn’t a god or a this or a that, he was awake.

And, subject to various limitations, any and all of us can awaken, or can at least struggle to throw off sleep.

Of course. That isn’t the only goal one’s life may aim at, but it is one, anyway.

Implying that sleep has its part in life too.

Can it be otherwise? You think the whole human race is malfunctioning?

Well, it does look that way sometimes. And what else are we discussing when we discuss why evil is endemic in the world?

You see?

Well – vaguely. It is sort of in the corner of my mind as I wrote that.

To discuss the question of evil while holding the assumption that humans are malfunctioning is to beg the question. It is to assume the answer. It is to say, “Evil exists because humans are malfunctioning.” But what if evil exists and humans are not malfunctioning?

It seems to me that that was my question originally. If we were malfunctioning as a species, it wouldn’t be a puzzle that monsters of cruelty would emerge and manifest from time to time. Indeed, they would be the norm.

But you see, your conscious assumptions and your unconscious assumptions are at variance with one another. One might as well say, they are at war with one another. Naturally this clouds your thinking, because as the balance shifts with any new thought or emotion, the weights move from one side of the scales to the other.

Thus, one part of your mind has accepted that good and evil are not as they seem; that matter and spirit are both mind-stuff; that the present moment is the only reality from a given point of view, and connects along invisible threads to other lives; that

Lost it, dammit.

No matter. The point is, reality is deeper than appearances, and a part of your mind knows it. But other parts of your mind were shaped by other influences, and believe – and perceive – otherwise. When beliefs and perceptions clash, confusion results. This confusion can be made productive (in that it allows the prepared mind to see things new) or it can be mere confusion. Instruction and inspiration and intent will make the difference.

I had thought that we would be continuing our discussion of the roots of cruelty. We digressed into questions of perception.

What makes you see it as digression? Giving you the ability to perceive more clearly as you desire is one of the major gifts we bring. It would not be particularly helpful to give you a description of reality on a “take it or leave it” basis. No matter how good the description, it is going to be second-hand to you; it is going to be mere rumor, mere hearsay, until you live it. Much better to ground it in “digressions” about how to live so as to be able to live it. That is, you need to invest in order to profit. Until you live what we are outlining, it is mere daydreaming for you. Yes, it is true that later on something may click that hadn’t – “the penny may drop,” as you say – and what you heard previously may suddenly change your life. But it is always better to be awake now, rather than only in some theoretical future.

All right, I hear all that.

We do not imply that you – anyone reading this – are not living it; we merely remind you that one man’s digression is another man’s gist.

Now, to show that we haven’t abandoned substance for process, let’s say this about evil and malfunctioning. Next time – after you take a break, perhaps – we can go into it deeper, but for now we will say this.

Consider humans as step-down transformers. The vast impersonal forces, running through your lives, become in effect vast personal forces. They manifest through you, because what else is there to manifest than you?

That isn’t clear. I mean, I understand the words, but what do they tie to?

Reality is greater than 3D reality. The larger beings in non-3D are greater than the human 3D beings that express them in this format. Conflicts of forces express one way in non-3D, another way in 3D, by the nature of things.

You may take it as a general rule that unity devolves not into duality but into trinity. That is, a unit will be seen to consist really of a positive and a negative force, but these two will necessarily be joined and related by a third, reconciling, force. Thus your world of duality that proceeds from the process of manifesting in a slowed-down environment that allows greater discernment. No world of duality could exist without reconciliation of forces, or call it interrelation among forces.

I read something of this in John Anthony West’s book Serpent in the Sky, but it seemed so abstract, I had a hard time relating it to real life. I believed him, but I couldn’t feel what I believed.

In all these things, first a seed is planted, then it germinates unseen, then it manifests. The time-lapse may be short or long, perceptible or not, but that’s the process. (It is one more reason why it is a waste of energy to allow yourself to become impatient.)

Call this session “Tides and fireworks,” perhaps. Next time we will deal with you as step-down transformers of energies. We will, that is, unless the moment presents other more alluring opportunities.

Very well. Maybe “Incremental comprehension,” instead.

It is always your choice.

Till next time, then, and thanks as always.

 

Friday, March 25, 2022

7:15 a.m. Setting switches, hoping for a continuation of the theme we are pursuing, ultimately an exploration of why there is evil in the world.

You are not quite focused regardless. It will help if you repeat our summary, omitting the “instead of” part.

Yes, I think it may. Very well, you said (looking back), that it is closer to the truth to see our lives this way:

• Individual subjectivity and shared subjectivity and timing as the means of discerning.
• Continual self-creation through choice and intent in time and space.
• We as individual subjectivity interacting with the shared subjectivity of which we are still part.
• A system allowing the individual to experience unknown parts of itself, and allowing the whole to experience individual viewpoints.

You’re right, stating it in few words does aid clarity.

Very well. Now re-set your switches, particularly for receptivity, as the action of reading and summarizing has activated other qualities. You understand? That’s why the qualities are experienced variably: Different tasks require different orientations.

Okay. F, R, C, P, again, all yours.

So where do the vast impersonal forces come in? What are they, how are they, when and why are they in everyday life?

You have cited all the reporter’s questions except Who and Where, and added How.

Hold in mind the description of 3D life that we sketched, and remember that life beyond 3D affects you no less. It isn’t so much that different rules apply outside 3D, as that, outside 3D, the same rules apply in different circumstances.

Which – I take it – amounts to saying, life when not artificially slowed and separated is the same, but appears different.

We would take issue with the word “artificially,” though we take your meaning.

Why? I thought the 3D was a creation, in a way.

Well, seen one way, a creation, yes. But that’s much like saying ripples in a stream, or a whirlpool, or rapids, are a creation. They are just as likely to be a side-effect of the stream in its course, reacting to (and thus ___) its environment as it meets it.

So 3D wasn’t created for the sake of producing certain effects?

As we say, it could be seen as deliberate creation, but that isn’t the only way to imagine it. In any case, the important point here is that we first had to reorient your understanding of the 3D part of the life you lead, because that is the nearest and most obvious thing. Having done that, now we can extend certain generalizations so you can intuit analogies that cannot be derived from sensory evidence.

As we have said several times over these sessions, emotions and feelings in 3D are not peculiar to 3D, nor do they originate there. Or rather –

Yes, I thought that didn’t come out just right. You meant, I think, more like “the source of” emotions and feelings?

It’s neither, and both. To put it as we did would imply no difference; to put it as you suggest would imply too much difference.

In 3D, emotions may be described as the interface between what you are aware of in yourself and what you aren’t aware of. You will remember our analogy of the smaller sphere contained within the larger one.

I do.

Beyond 3D – or, let’s say, disregarding 3D – there is no boundary such as that which is created by separation by time and space. Instead, there is separation, if you want to call it that, by essence, by quality. Everything that exists in 3D also exists outside of 3D conditions, however differently it may manifest. But it will manifest.

And all contradictions are a part of the whole, therefore every plus has a minus.

Let’s approach this carefully. Remember to compensate for the effects of the apple. We are not discussing “good” and “bad” in non-3D. If we say positive and negative, it is closer to the meaning when such terms describe electrical properties. That is, two different kinds of forces, or tendencies (think of it as you will), both of which are necessary for the system to flow. What kind of electrical system could proceed with only anode and no cathode because you approved of anodes and not of cathodes? It is the perception of things as good and evil that causes difficulty in 3D, as the Biblical tradition probably meant to convey originally, only as perceptions darkened, meanings were unconsciously rearrange to “make sense of” passages that now were seemingly distorted.

But even understanding that intellectually, we can’t help seeing certain things as wrong. Torturing children? Destroying the environment? Institutionalizing greed, cruelty, etc.

That’s as we said. Having eaten the apple, you can’t un-eat it. You can compensate for that way of seeing things, but you can’t help seeing them that way.

It seems to me a colonial Sampler I saw somewhere said,

“In Adam’s fall

We sinned all.”

This is the first time that makes any sense to me. It certainly never made sense that a creator would curse the descendants of someone for something that happened before they were born. Not that it made any sense that a creator would curse what it had created, in the first place.

As we say, understandings change as perception and experience change, until the thing people think scriptures were saying is unrecognizably different from what the speakers (and the writers) of these scriptures intended. It is only as you regain that higher, more direct perspective that you see the scriptures with new eyes. One facet of the emerging world culture will be that all the world’s scriptures will be available, and will be examined from a viewpoint closer to the originals, hence will be seen to be describing the same reality. What was closed, was closed only because you could not rise to the necessary level of being; what opens, opens not as reward but as consequence of greater discernment.

So are we mistaken, to think cruelty wrong? Are the occasional monsters of cruelty we experience merely a natural phenomenon like lightning striking a tree and destroying it? So should we merely shrug and say, “It happens”?

We are saying that gratuitous cruelty, like anything else you could name, is not as simple as it appears. Ask any cop on the beat, who sees more examples of cruelty than you dream of, if cruelty is likely to disappear any time soon. Look to your own heart in moments of high passion, and ask if cruelty is a thing separate from you, something you could never be able to express regardless of circumstances inner and outer.

So the seven deadly sins are cathodes? Unpleasant but necessary?

The Transcendentalists were neither quite wrong nor quite right in defining evil as merely the absence of good. But it’s a long subject. Let’s say merely, qualities balance out, and an extreme imbalance here must be balanced in some way there, or perhaps then.

In non-3D as in 3D?

In non-3D, the illusion of separation is not the same. Slowing down of reactions is not the same. Different terrain, different effects.

We’re out of time again, but I feel like we sort of said something important, and sort of said “We’ll get to it.” As usual.

It is the “as usual” that ought to reassure you, because after all, over time we have gotten somewhere, have we not?

No argument here. Very well, till next time, and, as always, we thank you for all this.