Month: March 2022

Thursday, March 24, 2022

12:35 a.m. Since I can’t sleep at the moment, let’s try for more. Setting switches for maximum focus, receptivity, clarity, presence. Guys, can we continue your exposition on the factors leading to the existence in 3D of such things as deliberate cruelty?

It may be that you cannot sleep at the moment, but that doesn’t mean you have enough energy to do this. Let the wells refill for a few more hours. We aren’t going anywhere, and the times are not about to close the doorway on access to the information.

All right. Later, then.

5:35 a.m. So. Now?

Re-read yesterday’s, to smooth the way.

Yes. As so often, I am left with the sense of so much potentially illuminating connection, just outside my awareness.

That is always so; one’s awareness of it varies.

Now, we are inviting you to see the interaction among forces usually considered in isolation from one another. The better you understand the necessary interrelation, the wider your mental horizons will become, and you will truly have new wine and new wineskins. But if you consider old issues only in the contexts in which they have previously been examined, how likely are you to come to more sophisticated understandings?

Thus,

• The individual 3D life, considered as if separate, which it is, in a way, and to a limited degree.
• “The world” considered as if separate, perhaps as if inanimate, usually as a collection of unconnected items.
• Time, considered either as an unvarying factor, a given, like height or length or breadth, or as an element variably experienced according to one’s psychological position at the moment, but in any case a sliding transience.

Look at them separately, you have a jumble, you have three factors that make sense each within its own frame of reference, but not together. See them as firmly and inevitably interconnected, because part of one system, and suddenly life makes sense. And this doesn’t even consider the many interrelations we have drawn within each part of the system.

So,

• Considered either as “missing the mark” – as a mistake on the journey to self-perfection – or as a deliberate offense against rules established by God
• Virtue, both as reminders of the way toward your goal and as outward signs of inner qualities.
• Habits, and intent, as means to an end.
• Above all, continuous choosing, as navigation among possibilities, with or without a compass, with or without a known external goal (a port) or a known internal goal (a quality of being, while one is a sailor).

These are usually considered either separately or within one or another system of thought and values.

Thus,

• Emotion, feeling; one’s response to stimuli known or unknown, a response often experienced as external to oneself.
• Concepts, thought; the things one thinks one is living, usually only partly congruent to reality.
• (Harder to name this one.) One’s variable state of being; one’s altered states, be they high or low, controlled or otherwise, pleasant or unpleasant.

Moods.

Yes, moods. That’s a good way to see them.

Finally (for now):

• “The news” – external reports.
• One’s inner preoccupations, that repeatedly surface internally or eternally or, usually, both, connected but not quite seamless.
• Jolts, mild perturbations, earthquakes, inner and/or outer.

Now put this all together in the new way we have been suggesting, and see how simply they fit. When you get closer to the truth of anything, facts converge.

So now,

• Instead of individuals in a world that is external to them, driven by a moving moment that proceeds without reference to them, continually destroying the past and creating the future, it itself being “the present moment” only for a split-second, if that, you have you as 3D individual living amid “the world” as part of you, you being part of it, the individual subjectivity and the shared subjectivity functioning to play off each other, with time being not the great destroyer but the great separator, the great means of divining differences.
• Instead of a (deadly serious) game of reward and punishment, of continual striving to follow the rules lest you pay the ultimate penalty after you “die,” you have a sense of continual self-creation through choice, made possible (and even necessary) by the time and space 3D provides. Sin, virtue, judgment, are not done away with, exactly, but are seen in different light. The power of intent is seen in its orienting ability as you self-create.
• Instead of thought and emotion and seemingly externally caused moods jangling among one anther, pretty meaninglessly, you have the sense of what happens when your more immediate awareness (3D you) meets the wider awareness (your greater self, containing so much of which you are unaware). And you, remember, are still part of the shared subjectivity. Don’t lose sight of this connection; it holds together many things that will otherwise seem unconnected.
• Finally, instead of external v. internal, periodically affected by “events” physical or mental, you have one system, in which the 3D individual experiences the rest of itself, you might say, or, equally, in which the whole experiences aspects of itself.

Is this not a more coherent portrait of your lives as you live them?

Well, it is to me. Perhaps others will find things to object to, or things they cannot quite accept or make sense of.

So – we can all but hear you cry – what about monsters of cruelty among you?

Well, yes. What about them?

Examining the question of evil as it must manifest is going to be very different if we do it against the backdrop we just painted than if we were to do it in accordance with your society’s accepted (if inchoate) views.

To be sure. But are you ever going to actually do it?

That’s what we are doing. Or would you prefer to tread the same old ground so long trampled by those who see the world as a chaos, or as a battlefield?

I notice that in your summary, you didn’t mention the vast impersonal forces.

This is where we have arrived now. They can only be understood when seen in the proper context. To try to talk about them while thinking of the world as a chaos, or as a battlefield, would be to see them entirely differently. You will notice we didn’t refer to the apple of the tree of Seeing Things as Good and Evil, either. In considering these things, try to remember (as we have reminded you more than once) that, try as you will, you cannot escape the effects of that apple. By an effort of concentration you can overcome that bias toward seeing things in terms of good and evil, but as soon as you relax your vigilance, it comes back in from the wings.

So now, with luck, we will be able to discuss cruelty (among other attributes) in light of the vast impersonal forces as they manifest in the 3D world. But it is important that you try to keep in mind the world we’re painting, as opposed to the one painted for you, all your lives, by your society and by your 3D sensory evidence. Once you really change your viewpoint, your vantage point, suddenly all the world, inner and outer, transforms.

Very well. A lot of summation today. Looking forward to next time. Our thanks as always.

 

Wednesday, March 23, 2022

8 a.m. I think I’m going to take off today, and spare myself an hour of transcription. Though, come to think of it, I could do a session now and transcribe later. But, maybe not. When I do, though, I should remember my graf on “Heart of Darkness” from last night.

[Tuesday 9:10 p.m. So, I am re-reading “Heart of Darkness” for the sheer pleasure of reading Conrad, and I stop short when I realize that of course the story bears directly on our conversation about evil. I will mention it tomorrow morning, see what they say. Merely esthetically, Conrad’s prose and Mueller’s woodcuts – what a combination! But while “Youth” was as enjoyable as ever, “Heart of Darkness” was never one of my favorites. Reading it this time was reading it for the first time, in several ways. What a metaphor for the impact and nature of Western Civilization, which served its purpose, finally, but certainly had its ugly features, and not mere individuals but intrinsic to the process.]

11:15 a.m. I’m a little lost as to where to begin, so I hope you’re prepared. Setting switches, inviting my total self to run the show.

Rather than imply a straight line of development, we proceed as the moment suggests. That is, each moment is optimized for certain things and not others, so why not go with the flow, rather than trying to tack into the wind? One can do either, of course; it is a matter of choice.

Individual and shared subjectivity, and timing. When the three are considered in reference to one another, a slightly more sophisticated understanding can emerge. Add in the vast impersonal forces as input to the system, and you will see even farther. But let us begin with the first three.

You as 3D being naturally experience the shared subjectivity in relation to your own inner and outer life: that is, to your personal subjectivity. As has been pointed out, your world revolves around you, in a way. This is not egotism, nor autism. It is the way the system functions, in the nature of things. You might as well expect to live beyond the limits of the horizons around you, as expect to experience the world from any point of view other than you at the center. (Yes, you can imagine doing it, but you can’t really do it, and you certainly wouldn’t be able to live that way.)

The shared subjectivity might be seen as a vast pool into which innumerable individuals are continually dipping. Or you might say it is an unlimited stream filling the canals that lead to all those individual fields. It is its own center, of course, and all the 3D beings dependent upon it are the periphery. Of course, bear in mind that the shared subjectivity might equally well be seen as a vast well, into which individuals contribute their bucketsful of water. Three analogies, all of them illustrative, no one of them exclusive.

We are pointing out that although it is convenient, even necessary for our purposes, to consider individual and shared subjectivity as different things, in fact they are two ends of one polarity. To examine either as if it were not also part of the other would be to distort a vital connection.

And then there is timing. Some wit said that time is what keeps everything from happening all at once. This is true, and is more profound than may appear. Consider the physical relationship over time as an elaborate filtering mechanism. Some times are propitious for this, some for that, some for a third thing. The changes in the filter are not arbitrary, nor chaotic, not dependent upon 3D action or inaction. You may choose to think of it as a great machine, or else as a great organism, with its own procedures and sequences. The 3D world is shaped by thee rhythms, it does not shape them. Your life responds to opportunities and deprivals, it does not create them. The passage of time with its distinctive features for each moment is not just reflected by planetary motion, it is that.

If you’re saying what came to me many decades ago, that last didn’t quite say it.

We are. You might visualize all reality, all time, as one impossible map. The suns and planets are continuously pulling earth – hence, you – into new places, each of which has its own characteristics.

I used that as the final paragraph in Messenger, as long ago as 1979, though I didn’t spell it out. I’ll quote it when I transcribe.

[From my novel Messenger:

[Tomorrow night the moon will be full again, and my eyes will automatically seek it out. It will be there regardless what happens to me or to America or to the human race or to the world. As it always has, it waxes and wanes and waxes again, following its cycle as do the planets and the seasons and life itself. And, like life, it never sails through the same space twice, any more than the earth does, for the earth pulls the moon along as it circles the sun, and the sun pulls the earth, and the rotation of the galaxy pulls the sun, and on and on. All that cyclical motion: No wonder we can’t ever return to where we were.]

But you see, understanding this, ties together several anomalies

• Movement through time and space
• Astrological predictive ability
• Cyclical motion
• Interaction between inner and outer – between personal and shared subjectivity – not as a sometime thing, but, by nature.

This may give you an intuition about why certain energies can express only at certain times, or – same thing seen differently – certain energies cannot express except at certain times.

That’s how karma builds up, I suppose.

Nice deduction. Yes, that’s one way. If something needs to be balanced out, but the energies of the time don’t allow it, it goes into the “pending” file, perhaps. It isn’t quite as cut and dried as that, because life is amazingly flexible, but conceptually, yes.

So to discuss monsters of cruelty among us –

We haven’t forgotten. It is critical that you not approach the subject as if the individual and “the times” were separate and did not affect each other. And of course by the nature of things, the individual is going to be affected by the collective far more (in frequency and in intensity) than the collective will be affected by any one individual.

Common sense, of course.

Yes, but it may be forgotten, so we remind you.

Our free will is exercised within more stringent limits than we usually think, isn’t it?

Yes. And no.

Yes, in that you live within a sea of influences, most of them unperceived or seen only in fragmentary form. You may think yourself a rational being, unswayed by emotion, capable of calculating the forces around you. Captain of your ship, master of your fate. It is only somewhat true. You can’t add a cubit to your statures, the scriptures remind you.

No, in that the shared subjectivity is always mirroring your essence, most notably what you need most to know, because you are not conscious of it. The same situation that bounds your choices also assures that such choices as do arise will be relevant and potentially transformative..

In other words, we have no reason to complain about the way things are.

Correct. But it would be a mistake to see things only one way. You might see yourself as living only one 3D life (which would be true) or living many lives in that you extend to others (which also would be true).  You may look at the shared subjectivity as your own well of unfinished business, which it is – but what are the boundaries of “you”?

I’m starting to get what you’re driving at. If there is individual karma which we each incur, and various group karmas in which we may participate, (and more than one, it seems), then how can we think to be immune to anything?

There’s much more. If the timing allows (“allows” can look like “forces”) certain feelings and traits to manifest, can the individual be immune to it? Maybe yes, maybe no, for any given input – but it is  a certainty that no one escapes expressing everything. A part of your struggle in 3D is whether to express this or that or the other or none at all.

I suppose that’s the nature of temptation.

Yes, that’s one way it appears. You feel compelled to express certain things at certain times, and perhaps you don’t even approve of them. So, do you express them, or don’t you? Sometimes it is more like “Can you avoid it or can’t you?”

Which is not to excuse the people who decide to express the cruelty, say.

Well, here you have a genuine dilemma, something that can’t be resolved in those terms. Jesus said woe to the man through whom evil comes into the world – but nonetheless it is inevitable that evils do come, only woe to him who lets himself become their conduit.

I could probably find that passage without much trouble. If I do, I’ll cite it.

[Richmond Lattimore’s translation of Luke says: “And he said to his disciples: It is impossible that there should come no causes to make a man go astray; but woe to him through whom they come. It is better for him to have a millstone hung around his neck  and to be thrown into the sea than to cause one of these little ones to go astray. Watch yourselves.]

So you’re saying, the shared subjectivity is going to express, subject to timing, and it is going to express through us.

What other channel is there to express through?

Edgar Cayce’s earth changes?

That’s a longer discussion. Let s pause here. That doesn’t mean we will necessarily resume on this point.

All right. This is “Actions and consequences (5),” I take it.

Yes.

Our thanks as always.

 

Tuesday, March 22, 2022

5:15 a.m. “Actions and consequences (4),” presumably. Focus, receptivity, clarity, presence.

As usual, you experience difficulty in trusting that a given line of development proceeds smoothly.

I know that if it depended upon me for continuity, we would likely fail. So I look back, try to get the sense of it in my mind – and still it feels like I am flying blind.

Perhaps that is how a passenger often feels, being driven in the dark, with no access to the controls, unable to judge if the pilot really has the feel of the machine amid the specific weather conditions. What can that passenger do but trust, and try not to dilute the pilot’s attention?

That’s about the feel of it sometimes.

We will remind you that the Mind Mirror patterns for extending consciousness into altered states stresses the importance of the alpha bridge. In a way, that is the function of writing, and even more, of actively questioning: It keeps open the alpha bridge. You don’t “click out,” in Monroe terms, or slide off into sleep, or emerge into ordinary consciousness.

Meaning, I take it in context, that I pretty much ought to feel like I’m flying blind. Daniel Boone in the woods, not lost, but “confused for three days, once.”

Don’t worry if it seems to you that each segment is somewhat disconnected from previous segments. We’ve done all right so far, haven’t we? And if strict logic becomes important to you, you know how it is to be constructed: Use daylight mind: Outline. That isn’t what we are doing here. But enough of process. To return to our exposition.

The individual in 3D is responsible for his or her own development and welfare. We said a while ago, the more external freedom, the more responsibilities. You have to learn to maintain a body, to live among others, to be your own self, to decide who and what you uphold. The greater your resources, the greater your responsibility.

But at the same time, you don’t do it alone. Or, let’s put it this way, you aren’t bounded in quite the ways you think you are. You have learned long since that you are more than your physical body. You learned that your mind, too, is greater and more complex than you realized. We have spent several months accustoming you to the idea that the “external” world is not external in the sense of discontinuity, or of connection between unlike things. Using the term “shared subjectivity” and “personal subjectivity” was designed to remind you, amid discussion centered on other aspects of life, that the oh-so-solid 3D world is mind-stuff, and is all part of one thing, not many different things. It is true that “All is one”; it is equally true that you as a 3D human being are a piece of it that functions as if it were more or less separate. You know this in everyday life. It is important not to forget it when you go looking for The Nature and Meaning of Life.

You are in the position of acting as if on your own, when in fact you depend heavily upon others, constantly and unavoidably.

Ayn Rand to the contrary.

She overdrew her portrait of the individual v. society, but perhaps she was a necessary counter-force to those who saw only the collective. And, you will remember, for a while that emphasis on the individual was attractive to you.

Yes, but like measles or other childhood diseases, its ability to affect me waned.

It was a useful counter-irritant nevertheless. You learn by absorbing various extreme views, and letting them contend within you, until the ones most suitable to you emerge triumphant. Naturally, no two people will come out with identical sets of beliefs. It is probably impossible and certainly is not desirable. Two people may agree entirely on six things and diverge on a seventh. It is normal and, as we say, it is desirable.

So now consider some things together.

• That is, what the times allow or don’t, encourage or discourage. Timing, the basis of astrology, which as a scientific art was never the delusion or hoax that it appeared to be once people decided that the world was a collision of random elements.
• The personal subjectivity. You, as responsible for your microscopic part of all-that-is. A constructed organized bit of the whole, functioning as if separate, by design.
• The shared subjectivity, with its attributes we mentioned last time. You might think of it as 3D-all-that-is (as opposed to “all that is” that obviously would include so much more). This is an important concept. The shared subjectivity is the 3D world in general, in all its seeming objective existence. Rocks, trees, animals, people: all the kingdoms, and their invisible “Spiritual” components, mind-stuff appearing solid and outer, but actually expressing the real content of the 3D/non-3D world., and thus in its existence providing the continuity you experience as “the world.”

We could add more factors, and at a later time we may, but this will do for the moment. The picture we are painting is conceptually simple, but, being far from people’s ordinary ideas, may require careful exploration.

At the creation of the world, everything that ever could be is mapped into existence in potential. We have compared it to the parameters of a computer game, that includes all possible moves and situations in its own structure. But which ones emerge depends upon the moves made. Every move manifests some, suppresses others, leave still other unsuspected, because behind too many unopened doors. (They are there; they are not necessarily perceived.)

At the creation of the 3D individual, the game is already in play. The moves of previous players have shaped what you find as you enter. Your moves help shape what others find as they enter. You can easily see this in physical terms. Europe after Napoleon was quite a bit different from Europe before Napoleon.

You can see it easily enough in intellectual terms. The discovery of the concept of zero; the codification of data that resulted in discovering the laws of genetics; analyzing data and deducing the fact of physical evolution of species, etc. in all these cases, the mental world available to newcomers differed from what had been available previously. It works the same way with lost knowledge, too. When you can no longer use lost connections, you perforce make your own, or do without.

It is true, as well, emotionally. The actions of prior players affects the possibilities you find. Do you suppose that every age is equally open to the same set of virtues and sins? This difference appears to be cultural, but it is cultural only as a secondary effect. In reality, it is one culture’s response to previous choices as they play out. Thus one speaks of “Spanish cruelty,” or “Italian subtlety,” or “Irish irresponsibility,” or whatever. To some degree these are merely casual over-generalizations, but usually they contain a nub of truth. And what made them true? That cultural history; the things that happened to them; prior decisions and reactions.

You see, in all three realms – physical, intellectual, emotional – the 3D player lives in a game that has been shaped by previous play, among other things. What does this amount to, but saying that the individual is an indivisible part of the whole? Obvious, really. But not the whole story, by far, for this deals only with the conditions one faces vis a vis the shared subjectivity. It doesn’t yet address the timing of events, or the moment-by-moment interaction of the two forms of subjectivity.

Are we still on the track of the source of monsters of cruelty among us?

We are. Trust us. As we said, you won’t come to new insights without associating previously separated ideas and realms.

Well, I do, but there’s another hour gone, and we don’t seem any closer.

Hold in mind that timing is as important to this discussion as are the individual and shared subjectivities.

All right. Well, see you next time. Thanks for the continuing effort.

 

Monday, March 21, 2022

6:20 a.m. How easy it is to start a chain of associations! I was tempted (why?) to start this by saying, “Good Morning, Vietnam!” Which of course would lead to Robin Williams and then who knows where. Instead of following that sand pattern, I could look at the pattern formed around the question of why I should be prompted (tempted?) to use that tag line from an old movie. Or I could veer off – as I am doing now, but not for any longer – with the question of how originating impulses arise. All this could be seen as opportunity, and it goes on all the time, mostly unnoticed, I expect.

However, to work. Setting switches. I trust that my friends who read this set theirs when they are reminded by reading of me setting mine. Gentlemen? “Actions and consequences (3)”? The shared subjectivity as cause and effect?

You will bear in mind that in our examination of the subject we aim to connect fields of inquiry usually kept separate. So, people wanting to understand cruelty – your specific example – tend to examine nature or nurture; or they may examine the two together, nature v. nurture, and come up with a somewhat broader understanding. Well, the inquiry can be expanded farther, to greater profit. There is the 3D soul and there is “the world” it lives in. That is, there is the personal subjectivity that the individual shapes and experiences and identifies with, and there is the shared subjectivity, that the individual shapes only indirectly, and only to a small degree, and experiences as “out there” rather than identifying with it.

Obviously this is nothing you don’t know, because you live it. But knowing a thing in a certain context is different from knowing it in a different context, or in isolation. That’s why we mention it specifically now. The shared subjectivity has a life of its own, in that it is, you might say, everybody taken as a group, and particularly

Getting confused.

Bullets will help, probably. The shared subjectivity:

• Is everybody. It is shared. It is “humanity,” say. It is more than that, but we will stick to its human attributes for this discussion.
• It is everybody’s unfinished business; individually and as groups and as groups of groups.

That could be a disquisition in itself.

In due time, as things come together.

I take it to mean, you could see the shared subjectivity as containing individual karma from other 3D lives; and group karma as a sort of process of addition of various souls’ qualities; and various groups, perhaps overlapping, depending upon what is triggered.

That will do as an interim understanding.

The shared subjectivity is thus, in a way, a running tally.

We tend to think of it as debt to be paid.

That isn’t wrong, but it is far from complete.

• It precedes you; it follows you. Like the rocks that hold the world’s energy in form, or the plants that hold its energy in emotional form, or the animals that hold its energy in a more individual, mobile form, or the celestial beings that hold its energy in careful balance – and like the humans that hold the balance of how the world’s energies will express – the shared subjectivity is a sort of buffer, or shock absorber.

I get that that isn’t the right analogy. Closer to battery, isn’t it?

Battery is closer, yes, but that won’t do, either. You have the sense of is; reach for it.

Continuity. I can’t think of an image, but the function is continuity. The shared subjectivity maintains things on an even keel somehow.

Yes, that will do. That’s the idea.

• It is the reservoir from which you all draw, and into which you all contribute. this will take some spelling out.

Remember to keep your common sense operating as you grapple with this. What may be an unfamiliar way of thinking about a thing will be more productive if associated in your mind with life as you experience it.

• It is, indirectly, the result of and also the source of interactions between the 3D world in general and the vast impersonal forces that are like the sun’s rays, not particular to any one person, but a part of the common human condition. (And, like the sun, affecting everything, not only humans. We merely mention these truths to spark thoughts among some.)
• It is, you might say, the sieve through which the forces are strained, or is a prism through which they are diffused, or is the sorting-mechanism through which the vast becomes closer to human scale.

Step-down transformers, in effect.

Yes. Now look at the bullets we just gave you. List them, please.

The shared subjectivity:

• Is all of us.
• It is our unfinished business.
• It provides continuity.
• It is a reservoir of something.
• It is the interface with the vast impersonal forces
• It is the step-down transformer that brings them to a human scale.

You may or may not think about your relations to this all-encompassing field of activity, but nonetheless that is a part of your life. Perhaps you can see how your personal subjectivity differs from the shared subjectivity, and also how it depends on it.

So let us look at your own actions. There isn’t much point in examining the motivations of an assumed model – the steely-eyed killer, the monster of cruelty – without referring that model to you yourself. It isn’t hard to kick straw men, and people have been doing it forever. What good is that? But relate it to yourself, and suddenly you’re in a different place, much more real and perhaps tender, because nobody is as good as they’d like to think themselves. The up-side: Others aren’t as bad as you’d tend to think them.

I have been saying for years, our judgment is warped because we judge others by their actions, and ourselves by our motivations.

That is true insofar as one does; however, that is a bad habit that can be corrected.

Now, there is carelessness and its outcome; there is action performed without understanding why; there is the deliberate preference for one or another action as a way of satisfying a deeply felt urge (understood or not); and there is action performed consciously for reasons understood that relate to others and not only to one’s own motivations. You understand where we are going with all this?

I do, and maybe I should put them in bullets when I transcribe.

Very well, do.

• Carelessness and its outcome
• Action performed without understanding why
• Deliberate preference for an action as a way of satisfying a deeply felt urge
• Action performed consciously, for reasons understood that relate to others.

But where are we going?

I think this is the beginning of looking into how our actions result from factors that may or may not have much to do with our own intent.

Not quite. It would be closer to say, we will investigate how the actions of an individual tend to be the result of interaction between the personal and the shared subjectivity. The patterns within yourself are less individual and isolated than you may commonly think. That is a source of such confusion, and it bears directly on the question of why you live among monsters of cruelty. You also live among paragons of kindness and empathy, and we don’t hear you complaining about that!

More later.

Our thanks as always. A good thing we’re stopping: My handwriting is getting closer to runes than letters, and if I didn’t transcribe pretty soon I probably would be able to remember what I meant to write.

 

Sunday, March 20, 2022

5 a.m. Setting switches. F, R, C, P. “Actions and consequences (2)”?

We don’t need to do it in order. If you prefer to discuss your realizations since yesterday’s conversation, it won’t interfere.

Briefly, anyway. I got that I ought to note down associations as they come to me, and I did snag a few:

• Hamas. Irish. Our different reactions to similar phenomena.
• Cats play with their trapped victims. Cruelty is not an exclusively human trait.
• Cruelty can stem from more than one motivation; hence, observed effects may be more similar than unperceived causes. Specifically,
  • Inattention or lack of care (indifference) as opposed to
  • Deliberate cruelty as compensation for cruelty suffered. “Getting even” with a specific person or with the world.

Good sparks, all. Continued observation of stray thoughts, recorded, will lead to more. Which ties into your second set of realizations, and then we can proceed from yesterday’s start.

Well, I recognized in a couple of ways the difference between clusters of associations and chains. For instance, I realized that I should have written my novels, and should certainly write my final novel, if I write another, by letting ideas clump, rather than by working them together logically. I knew this abstractly (from Forester’s Long Before Forty if from nothing else), but knowing is one thing, living it is another. And this morning, as I was waking up, I was noticing the process behind the dream. I could sort of feel the dream casting about for where to go and what to use. I never saw behind the scenes like that before. Ordinarily a dream comes as a story, no matter what it comprises or what the emotional point. But this was closer to watching a movie being made, and watching the movie as it resulted. The observation of the dreaming and the realization about the creative process centered on the change in metaphor, and tie in to a third realization, which is that our second-tier consequences of our choices change our center of gravity (so to speak) and therefore change the probabilities within the choices life presents. Our sand-patterns on the drumhead change, because our second-tier consequences have changed something.

Noting these realizations and associations can enrich your daily life. We encourage sustained attention.

I see the value of it. I’ve always done that, sort of haphazardly, and my journal-books are littered with such observations, mostly left untended. That is why I have often felt a certain frustration at the wastefulness of leaving so much material unharvested. But at the same time, I see that it doesn’t matter. So, to work?

As if this hasn’t been productive? Very well, part two. Yesterday we began with the 3D/non-3D being – the personal subjectivity. Now let’s look briefly at the shared subjectivity in which you live and move and have your being. What is the relationship of “the world” to the individual expressing cruelty? That is, choosing to express cruelty. Limiting the scope of the inquiry helps clarity. Cruelty that results from indifference or from carelessness or from ignorance is a different order of cause and effect.

Yes, I see that. And you are exactly on what I wanted us to explore. Why do we live among monsters?

The shared subjectivity pre-exists you and remains in being after you as 3D person are gone. That is, it is not confined in time. Absorb that.

Well, I get that it is an important statement, but I don’t know where to go with it.

You in 3D are confined in time. Any lifetime you could mention is. You are all alive now in your own times, and are  alive in only a different way in terms of any other time. Joe Indian is alive in the 1800s and can be contacted, as you saw. But he is not in any way alive in the 1900s or 2000s.

Not even in me?

But he isn’t in you! Are you in him? This is an important point, and one commonly slurred over. You connect. You share a thread. You are both part of one thing. But that is all in the invisible realm, seen from 3D. Within 3D, when you’re dead, you’re dead. When you haven’t yet been born, you don’t yet exist. It’s obvious, but it needs to be thought through, and it rarely is.

I get that you could see us as fragments, each confined to one span of time (and space), bounded by our birth and death dates.

And the shared subjectivity is not bounded in that way, yes. That’s a real difference, and you still haven’t seen why or how. You think of your non-3D component as being essentially tied to your 3D self, but is it bounded by your dates? Alternatively, is it immortal (unbounded) in the same way as the shared subjectivity?

It seems to be a little of each, or let’s say somewhere in between.

Well, you see, that’s why you experience yourselves as half human, half divine. You are anchored in one particular time-space, but you range beyond it to others. However, that doesn’t mean you extend everywhere, everywhen. It means merely that your boundaries are wider than you commonly suppose, and that you always have more territory available for exploration than you have time to explore in.

All right, but have we wandered from the question of why we have monsters of cruelty among us?

We haven’t wandered at all. We have broadened the search patterns. At least, that’s our intent. You won’t come to new conclusions on a very old subject if you confine yourself to previously explored territory. It is in the putting-together of previously separated concepts that new understandings are to be forged.

All right, it seems that what you have added today is the different time-span of any individual life as opposed to the unlimited (maybe?) time-span occupied by the shared subjectivity. Is that any different from reminding us that the world is a lot bigger than any of us?

It is reminding you, in this context, of just that fact. That is why the world sems indifferent to cruelty (even, dependent upon cruelty, sometimes). It is why your lives may seem dwarfed to insignificance. Mostly, it is one facet of why you can’t ever judge life thinking you know enough to judge it. God created the world and found it good; later in Genesis you see people choosing to see the world as good and evil. Once you’ve eaten the apple, you can’t un-see that way of seeing things. You can overcome that way of seeing by force of will, or let’s say force of intellect, force of character, but you can’t change your instinctive response, you can only override it, or overwrite it, or refuse to see it.

But would it be an improvement to be unable to see cruelty as wrong? Would there be an advantage to being a cat playing with a cornered mouse?

What do you think a monster of cruelty is, but a person who doesn’t see cruelty as wrong for him?

As I say: Is that an advantage?

Here we return to the concept of the vast impersonal forces that will be expressed in your lives, as they blow through time and space.

Meaning that cruelty has to be expressed by someone or other?

Well – let’s say, if the force is not expressed as cruelty, it must be expressed as something else.

Cayce said energy builds up and is expressed by humans or by the world. I have assumed that’s why all his predictions of earthquakes and mass destruction were wrong, because those same energies were expressed through World War II.

It’s a long subject, and we’ll get to it if you remain interested.

But I don’t get that you have said what you wanted to say about the shared subjectivity as cause and effect.

No, not yet, but making clearer the distinction between human and trans-human scale was worth doing, and will contribute. More next time.

Our thanks as always.

 

Saturday, March 19, 2022

6:45 a.m. Rita died March 19, 2008.

As I was sitting on the bed waiting for the coffee to brew, thoughts were going through my mind spurred by who knows what, but using as central excuse the NCIS episode I watched last night. Can we talk about the subject of evil in a little more depth than merely saying that some things look good or bad to us only because we see them that way?

That is not quite your question.

No, it isn’t. Suppose you take a monster of cruelty: someone who spends a lifetime inflicting pain because he likes to. Can he really get a “Well done” on leaving the 3D?

This is a highly charged subject, so it offers the potential for you and others to learn something, only you must be willing to stay open to instruction, or, let’s say, to inspiration. It will do you no good to read anything if you do so only on the implied precondition that you not let it affect your judgment. That would amount to saying, “I’ll listen, but I won’t listen.” Not interrupting is not the same as listening.

This must really be highly charged.

It is, and it is also complex, interrelating aspects of 3D and non-3D life you may not have associated in your mind previously. As usual, we do not attempt to persuade: That is, to pile on evidence until you have no room to object. Instead, we will try to spark a re-evaluation on the basis of new associations.

Understood. I get the feeling you are in danger of forgetting much of what you want to associate.

Believe it or not, we have our problems expositing. Meanwhile, it will help if you will remember to

Set switches, yes, for maximum focus, receptivity, clarity, presence.

Repeating the formula will help it sink in, for you, for others. For today only, you might add non-resistance, although that is implied in receptivity. You will benefit by maximizing your willingness to consider a new way of seeing things.

To truly see the subject, we must hold in mind several realms:

• In the 3D world, the soul as shaped by third-tier decisions.
• In the non-3D world, the same. After all, it is the same person, but we will be looking at him in a different way, somewhat divorced.
• The shared subjectivity the person expressed.
• The shared subjectivity he affected.

That’s enough to begin with. You see, we want to look at the soul two ways and the soul’s context two ways. Need we say even at the outset that these will only scratch the surface? Yet, at the same time, it will afford an entry for those so inclined to go deeper.

Other factors being?

Well, if we pursue the subject beyond the immediate context, there is the question of your level of experience (that is, the world as a 3D human experiences it, 3D and non-3D both).

I lost that. Try again?

We are to look at the world as you all experience it, but there is the larger question of the larger being’s affairs, and your place in it. But that would be pretty speculative, in a way, and you like things kept on a practical level.

It may not always seem like it, but yes, I do.

So let us look at the problem. State it for us both, please. The requisite centering, focusing, will help put it front and center.

Does the world really need monsters? If not, why do we see them? If so, why do we need them? And what happens to them after they die to 3D? I realize that various religions have answers to these questions, but given that the answers don’t seem to agree, I gather there’s more to be said on it.

You see the tendency to diffuse as you go along? Again, blunter.

Let’s start with one manifestation: deliberate sadistic cruelty. What happens to one practicing it?

You see the difficulty in holding the question steady. Emotion and association tend to broaden it, reduce the focus. So, re-read the four points we made. The question leads from one – the individual and his acts and motivations – to two – the individual in his larger definition, with all his threads and resonances – to three and four – the individual in each sense, considered in two contexts, or let’s say two aspects of one wider context. To examine the subject from any one point of view is to come to firm conclusions that may not have much relation to real life.

Thus:

• The soul in 3D. Whatever circumstances shaped him, be they genetic or environmental, he is what he is. His life is for him to shape. He gets choices, and they are always real Nobody has to do evil (or good); it is always a choice. Let us say that more carefully: Nobody is forced to choose one or choose another. Obviously, if he is forced, it is not a choice. Many factors may push him in one or another direction, but within the limits of choice, it is his to choose.

I think this means, his area of choice may be constricted by whatever circumstances, but he always has an area of choice.

Of course. That’s what he is in 3D to do, to shape his life by his second-tier and ultimately third-tier choices. But – and we may not have put sufficient emphasis on this before now – that isn’t all he is there to do. He is, always, in 3D to shape his future self. But his life is bigger than himself.

• The soul in non-3D. His physical actions are one thing, but their inner meaning to him may be something different. An expression of cruelty in 3D may look different to him in non-3D, or rather, may be experienced differently.

I think you’re meaning, his motivations and limitations may shape his world so that he as an individual doesn’t see himself or the world or his actions in the way others do.

Well, sort of. That’s true as far as it goes, but we mean something a bit different. His 3D actions (which include thoughts and emotions, though you might not at first think so) stem from his world. They arise out of his makeup, his genetic and environmental preparation. They are unique, always. How could any two people have identical backgrounds or compositions?

Identical twins?

Different subject. We can go into it another time, if you wish. For today let’s leave it at this: Everybody acts out of a background unique to them. Therefore, obviously – we assume obviously – no two people see the same action or even motivation the same way. One man’s cruelty is another man’s strength, a third man’s insensitivity, a fourth man’s response to necessity. Views vary.

Now, that would lead you to think, “Then, anything goes, and there is no right or wrong, only preference.” But you know better. So how can what we said be reconciled to what you know but can’t demonstrate?

Can’t, and don’t need to. We may be unsure about any particular act of cruelty – there may be extenuating circumstances or whatever – but we know that, in general, cruelty is wrong.

This leads us to the individual and the shared subjectivity, in two aspects: as cause and as effect.

Do we have time to go into it?

Not today, but next time. We didn’t do too badly today; we stayed on point. You may not think we made much progress, but we did.

So, the theme?

Call it “Actions and Consequences (1).”

Does that really express it?

It will.

Okay. Till next time, then, and thanks as always.

 

Friday, March 18, 2022

5:35 a.m. Leaving it to you to choose the theme, as usual. Setting switches. Go ahead.

You woke up with a chain of association of thoughts. You can always examine such associations, whenever they arrive, because they arrive for a reason at that particular time. Don’t let yourself think that anything can be random. It isn’t determined; you don’t have to do this or that. But it isn’t meaningless, either. It arose out of what has recently happened on the inner or outer plane, either to you particularly as one 3D creature, or to someone to whom you are closely linked. You truly are one with the world; separation is at most relative and is in any case more appearance than reality.

But is it always worthwhile to spend time and attention figuring things out?

That depends. If you think it is, yes. If you’d rather do other things, then no. We merely point out that it is there for the examining. So is etymology or palmistry or bridge strategy.

“The world is so full of a number of things,

I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.” [Stevenson]

Do you doubt it?

Not at this point in my life. There were years upon years when I did.

We can make this a short session, if you wish. Or none at all, of course. The 3D soul usually holds the on/off switch; free will is what 3D is all about, as we keep reminding you.

“Usually”?

Consider people in mental institutions who can’t stop the voices in their head. In a way, you could say the 3D person doesn’t have the on/off switch in its hands.

I would have assumed that it was the – oh!

Yes. We can discuss that, if you wish.

I do. It could go in interesting directions. Who was it, who said that Western psychology had hold of things from the wrong end? Dion Fortune, somewhere.

Well, you see here an example. But it will take some spelling-out, even thogh it is a simple point.

Too much for one session?

Maybe not. Let’s see.

The point at issue is, “Who is in change of your life when it is not under your conscious control?” At least, that’s how the question first appears. But really it is a question of definitions and of arbitrarily seeing things as divided that are in fact part of one thing. You might repeat our bullet points from the other day.

I’ll have to look back and find them. Lord, it was only yesterday! At your prompting, I imagine, I shortened them, or will when I transcribe, anyway. What we really are is:

• A 3D being: the intelligence of the cells and organs and systems.
• A 3D being that extends into the non-3D.
• A 3D and non-3D being that perforce extends far beyond a specific time and place.
• A 3D and non-3D being that, as a unit, also relates to other beings as units.
• A 3D and non-3D being that is a part of the larger being of which it was created.
• A being that participates in that larger being’s life, in ways beyond your ability to imagine.

As we said, these are layers, not discrete entities. They are abstractions more than separate reality. Still, they should help analysis. Do they look as simple as the concept consciousness, unconscious mind, etc. used by psychology? Is even Jung’s greater scheme of abstract understanding equal to the reality he experienced and tried to map?

Of course not. How can the map be the territory?

Well, take this set of bullets and merge it conceptually with the thought that the entire exterior world is a shared subjectivity in which you participate but do not dominate. Does this not better reflect the reality you live than do models that take the outside world as something separate that mysteriously exists on its own but keeps impinging on your life?

This was triggered by the question of who holds the on/off switch.

It isn’t a question simply of you v. your unconscious mind, nor of you v. your “higher self” (defining that as more than merely your conscious and unconscious mind as centered in your 3D existence).

Yes, that’s what I sort of got, only it came as a tangle of half-seen connections.

Life is not simple, but people will persist in trying to simplify it in order to understand it. If they would keep reminding themselves that simplicity is necessary for analysis but is at the same time a guarantee that the analysis will be incomplete, they’d make fewer excursions into swamps of mistaken certainty.

Your life is continually motivated by things seen and unseen. It affects things it doesn’t even suspect the existence of, and is affected similarly. These connections are unseen not because of some divine decree, nor by their indescribable nature. What is invisible is so usually because your mental categories render it so. If you know that transmutation is impossible, it is, for you.

Richard Bach said, “Argue for your limitations and they are yours.”

Yes, and this doesn’t mean only limitations to your abilities; it also means, assumptions about the limiting nature of the world you experience.

So I think I’ll insert my comment to myself before I began this.

[5:30 a.m. “The Law and Jake Wade,” a silly story, a Western, bought for the sake of seeing De Forrest Kelly in an early role. Not much of a glimpse, at that. Thinking about it was part of a long chain of associations this morning, including “Just say no” and “You don’t win the war on drugs by surrendering” that show vividly how an emotional saying will trump a merely logical one.]

It fits in.

Amazing, isn’t it? You’d think life had patterns.

Very funny. I have forgotten most of the associations, but the place they left me was that we are indeed emotional beings before we are thinking ones.

As we said. But expand your thought. What prompted you to buy those old movies? What prompted the postal service to deliver them yesterday? Why did you not look at that one until evening? (Yes there are circumstantial reasons, but as you know, our question is more “What did it serve?” than “How did it happen?”) How did it happen that you have chains of mental associations into which these particulars fitted, rather than other chains? And so on and so forth.

There was another major link in the chain, about drugs and the idea of marijuana being a gateway drug, and the pro and con of depending on a physical substance for a mind-altering ability, etc. [And, transcribing this, I remember other links.]

No chain of associations is limited to one line of development. The whole metaphor of a “chain” is misleading, in that way.  A better analogy, though flawed in a different way, would be grains of sand on a drumhead, rearranging themselves into patterns as sound waves impinge upon their reality.

Yes, no implication of one invariant order.

The truth is somewhere between analogies, as usual. Now, you wanted a shorter session, so here it is.

Did I?

“Which you?”

I see. Today’s theme?

“The on/off switch”?

Does that really capture the nub of this?

Sparks, remember, not definitions. But if not that, then maybe, “A chain of associations,” or perhaps “Associations and consciousness.”

Yes, that may do it. Thanks as always.