Month: March 2022

Wednesday, March 9, 2022

5:30 a.m. Yesterday’s small Zoom meeting resulted in Jane Peranteau and Jane Coleman and I discussing two big topics with you – two that I can remember, anyway. One was love and gravity being the same thing. The other, before that, skipped my mind last night when I was trying to recall it, and returned before I fed the cat this morning. What was it? Was it about perceiving things as good and evil, or was that only this morning’s thought? Because, when I woke up but hadn’t quite mobilized myself to get up, I found myself dictating sentences – which of course I knew I would lose, which meant I was wasting my time. The first time I noticed this, some weeks ago now, I compared the process to Hemingway having stories come to him, and losing them if he couldn’t begin working then and there to get them into shape. This time it was merely recognition of the prospective waste of energy.

So, I set my switches, and we’ll see what happens. What was that other theme we discussed? F, R, C, P. Or, if for some reason you don’t want to remind me of the other main topic – which they were also unable to remember, interestingly enough – let’s talk about whatever you want to talk about. More about the body?

Your intent is too diffused, so far. You don’t realize it.

I did set my intent. So why is it not pointed?

The time and the place and your mental gears.

Isn’t that what setting our intent is supposed to overcome?

It is: to mesh. But you are worrying at the half-remembered topic, and the process of picking at it (“Why can’t they tell me? Why don’t I remember it?”) actively interferes with one-pointed concentration. Surely, that is obvious.

It is, once you mention it. So I’ll let go of it. What shall we discuss?

One final thing: Once you concentrate, it can be our topic or yours. Whose it is, doesn’t so much matter. That it is one thing and not two or more, is what matters.

All right, I can see that. I did have a thought the other day, as I matter of fact. I was thinking to ask you of something that plays out as mind but may really be body. And I hope you remember what it was, because that’s as much as I can recall.

We smile, because at least you are one-pointed about it. That is, you do know there was something, you do mention that there was something, but since you do not remember more, you don’t go looking for it, but stay where you are on solid ground.

Solid quicksand, you mean.

No, because it is only a metaphor. To change metaphor, you are single-minded about the little you remember, rather than letting your flashlight beam wander, looking for what is not in sight.

And we have managed to kill 20 minutes on this, going nowhere.

The description of mental processes, including malfunction or lack of focus or whatever, is in itself potentially helpful. It all adds up, for anyone paying attention. Or do you think others won’t recognize the same sate of affairs?

If you say so. So, you choose.

The point we were able to put across yesterday about love and gravity is worth putting on the record. Two points, really:

• Love and gravity are the same thing seen differently.
• That is the only force that has no opposite. It is the organizing principle.

Yes, we found it compelling. More like three points than two, though. The “organizing principle” is an explanation of why it has no opposite, I suppose, but it seems a separate characteristic, to me.

It hardly matters how you number it. The point is that it be recognized.

So, love has no opposite force, nor does gravity. Everything else in the 3D world (gravity) or the non-3D world (love) has a counterforce and a reconciling factor. That is how a stable but flexible system is maintained. But the organizing principle of that system must be uncontradicted, or it can not be a unitary system but, at best, a duality.

Let us say this carefully. Life within the system is structured in dualities; the system itself is not a duality but a seamless unity.

It is not a house divided against itself.

Precisely. As Jesus pointed out, a house divided against itself cannot stand. A system that contained its own contradiction is not a system but a sub-system. Those theologians and philosophers who persisted in seeing the world as “good or evil” naturally wound up thinking the world fundamentally a battleground, or a chaos, depending upon their other assumptions (mistaken by them for perceptions or for necessary postulates or conclusions).

While we were writing that out, I remembered that it was something to do with good and evil in the garden. Adam and Eve did not get a sudden accession of knowledge in the fable, as it usually assumed. They got a sudden change of view that saw nudity as bad, whereas before it had been just an accepted condition of life. Now, who knows what the originators of the fable meant by “saw that they were naked” – I imagine they meant more than “physically unclothed” – but the point is that they had begun to judge. God had created the world and found it good; now his creatures were finding parts of it evil. It isn’t even that their judgment differed from his, but that they had begun to judge.

And judge, necessarily, incompetently. What creature is able to fully comprehend the circumstances of its creation, and the nature of its surroundings?

Sometime yesterday it occurred to me, thinking about your saying that love has no opposite, that maybe that is a deeper meaning of the saying that “God is love.” I have always taken that to be a sort of sentimental generalization, but I see that in fact it may be sheer description. That is, what people perceive as God – the ultimate uncontradicted force that suffuses the created universe – might just as well be called love, which shares those characteristics.

You have been learning, throughout your long recuperation from the rigors of Catholic school, that things that were learned by rote and often taught only by rote were the skeleton of living realities. There was a point to centuries of earnest theological contention, you see. It wasn’t merely the clash of egos or the promotion of personal or dogmatic or even national self-interest. Human self-interested manipulation always enters into such things, but the root of them is that people take seriously certain questions, because their view of reality is important to them, and will be affected by whatever conclusions they feel the data and reasoning lead them to.

That came out awkwardly. I think you mean, people earnestly debated these things because the truth was important to them, and they were doing their best to come to it.

Ye. And parasitic considerations like politics and economics and corrupt self-interest are always to be encountered in any human endeavor, as the consequences of 3D separation leading to people thinking themselves separate. But the nub of the questions are always genuine.

And better to realize that these are real questions than to dismiss them as foolishness or smokescreens.

Ah, “Better.” How was the apple?

Oh, very funny. But you know full well that in practice we do judge things as better and worse. How can we not?

But you see, that is the very point of the Biblical story. Once you have fallen into seeing things as good or evil, can there be a going back to the naïve acceptance lived, for instance, by animals? You could say that the story of eating the apple is mere description of your situation.

Only, it sems to me you are all about our overcoming that fall into duality.

But it isn’t so easy. Has everything changed because for 50 years people have learned to say, “All is one,” even while engaged in protest marches, so to speak?

Touché. Still –

We aren’t taking back anything we have said. We merely point out that regaining perspective is the first step, not the final step.

And call this session – ?

“Love and gravity,” maybe.

Maybe. All right, our thanks as always.

6:45. Now I remember what else emerged in our Zoom session, it was that what we as individuals want may not be what we, as parts of the larger being we were created from, want.

 

Tuesday, March 8, 2022

3:35 a.m. Very well, my friends. Setting switches for maximum focus, receptivity, clarity, presence, as has become our habit. Shall we continue on the body as seen from your particular viewpoint? Embodiment (4), presumably?

Yes. And point four was, you remember?

Having its own needs and preferences; and point five was, integrating other aspects. Going back to Friday’s session, I see you were saying – what I had more or less forgotten – that we should think of the body as part of our mind that was performing several specialized functions, not as something operating for its own physical reasons.

Yes, trying to break down the idea that even in 3D, “soul” and “body” were two different things in any way. They may seem that way; it may be convenient, often, to think of them that way. But they are part of one thing.

Just as 3D itself is part of one thing that also includes non-3D.

That isn’t a wrong formulation, but even there, the idea of duality is sneaking in between the lines. It isn’t body and mind as two aspects of one larger unit, though, as we say, it can be useful to consider it that way. It is that body includes mind, everywhere. Mind suffuses body, everywhere. There is no part of body that does not include mind, nor any part of mind that is separate from body. To the degree that one separates the two for the purposes of analysis, that very separation may distort one’s understanding unless it is firmly remembered that it is an artificial, and in fact an impossible separation.

This is important, and is the difference between remembering, or not remembering, that everything material is in fact mind-stuff. So, when we say that the body has its own needs and preferences, you must remember that we are saying that the mind, expressing as body, has its own needs and preferences.

This is another of those simple points that are so difficult to express in a way that can’t be misinterpreted, isn’t it?

Yes it is. What’s worse, it is one of those points that to some will appear so obvious, such a trivial splitting of hairs, as to be not worth the time to read, let alone to write. But this is because they will have missed the profound – that is, deep, not-obvious – restructuring of thought that it is.

I can sense that, but I don’t have any helpful suggestions as to how to make it clear.

We can only blunder on, hoping to ignite sparks.

Here’s the thing. Looking at the body as a mechanism operating on its own to maintain itself in 3D is well and good; it is that. But it isn’t only that. It is also the densification, in 3D, of aspects of the non-3D totality that exist in non-3D.

Matter is mind-stuff, therefore has no independent existence. It is like the dilemma of Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice”: How do you get your pound of flesh without drawing a drop of blood, when they cannot exist in separation. (Yes, you can extract blood and store it in blood banks. Yes, you can drain meat of blood and store it, too. But neither one functions without the other. There never was nor every could be a living organism of flesh without its blood, nor of blood without its flesh.)

Well, if you remember that fact, you won’t accidentally revert to considering the body as only a mechanism. You will remember, we pointed out that your body seems to you sometimes part of you, sometimes part of the external world. That in itself ought to give you a clue. It ought to tell you that any hard and fast distinction you might draw is going to be an error.

So if, as we say, the body has its own needs and preferences, that is but a shorthand way of saying that the body is a definite – we would say concrete, if it wouldn’t lead to a series of bad jokes – expression of the mind’s needs and preferences.

It is a marker, in a way, a dynamic living marker.

That’s a good way to think of it. Just as an emotion, a mood, may be evanescent – here strongly in this moment, forgotten or in abeyance the next moment – so the body, contrariwise, represents more lasting conditions.

You said years ago that our health is a ratio between mental functions which are highly mobile and physical functions which are stable and harder to move.

Yes. The combination is more stable and flexible than either would be on its own. And you will recognize, even here we are pretty much forced to speak of the mind and the body as if they were two things. That’s why it can be hard to keep in mind their essential unity.

We have done our best to provide the spark that may carry understanding of this point. People will get it or they won’t. They’ll get it now or later or not at all. But we can only do what we can do.

There was one thing that flitted by, and I almost caught. Try that.

It was a rhetorical question, more or less asking: Why do you think it is, that changing your self-definition (making a second-tier decision) may result in your health spontaneously changing? It is because you can’t change only one half of an equation

I agree that we probably can’t go any farther with this one. Maybe someone will pose a question that would lead to a clarification. So, point five? Integrating other aspects?

You might quote our sentence from Friday.

“Continually acts to integrate, in the here and now, elements of you that you otherwise might experience only separately, only occasionally.”

And what do you make of that?

I take it to be restating point four in slightly different context. I hear it saying, the body acts as the stable center, the stabilizer, the equilibrium.

There’s a little more to it than that.

I never doubted it.

You could look at it this way: You came into 3D as a mixture of energies with their own separate and pooled potential. The body embodies that. It is the reservoir and the calendar and the appointment book and the inventory list. Yes, 3D is the realm of limitation, but do not forget that the very concept of limitation implies a store of things within the limits, not merely a “Do not enter” sign beyond the limits.

If I get you right, you are saying – well, I got distracted. What were you saying?

You have one kind of body type and not another. You have certain limitations and not others. These are not random and they were not determined by your genetic inheritance. (They were limited to the possibilities presented by your genetic inheritance, but that was a very large pool to choose from.) All of this, remember, is mind-stuff densifying in 3D. So your body is, among other things, the embodiment of your possibilities, which means also of your unfinished business. In other words, that’s why you experience it as both internal and external, depending upon context.

So now if you will go back and re-read the several sessions on the body, perhaps we will have made our point.

I hope so. Thanks as usual.

Monday, March 7, 2022

3 a.m. Setting switches, and I presume you will wish me to copy the five aspects of the body’s function that you listed yesterday.

1. Holding us in one time and place.
2. Interacting with the shared subjectivity.
3. Holding markers to, and interacting with, other threads.
4. Having its own needs and preferences.
5. Interpreting or rather, integrating, other aspects.

You said we would have more on point three, then presumably we will discuss four and five, if time allows.

And you may call this Embodiment (3) to continue the theme.

I see, looking back at yesterday’s, that you restate point three this way: “Holding your interaction points with others on your threads.”

Yes, and this may be one of the more difficult concepts to convey. We shall see. Remember, this is looking at the 3D body and its functions from a non-3D viewpoint, which is going to look quite different from a “common sense” 3D viewpoint. It is the difference between seeing light as “just light” or seeing it as either waves or particles, or seeing it as wavicles. The light’s nature doesn’t change. What changes is what one deduces from one’s mental vantage point.

So what do we mean in saying that the 3D mechanism has, among its functions, that of “holding your interaction points with others on your threads”? first, of course, what is an interaction point?

The closest I get to an idea is that the physical tissues somehow hold memories of trauma in this life, so perhaps in past lives too.

“Past lives” could use better definition, but at another time. For the moment we’ll let it ride. Tell of Bruce Moen’s experience.

With sarcoidosis, you mean. He had the lethal condition, and learned via an altered state that in some life he had been killed by a spear through the liver or whatever organ is involved in sarcoidosis. Becoming aware of the other-life trauma, healing it via altered-state intervention (I can’t remember detail; it’s all in his books), he healed the condition in this life, and went on to make a remarkable contribution to the field of exploration.

Can you see that his physical organ acted as marker, holding the place, so to speak, until such time as would be right for addressing the problem?

To consider it carefully would involve a good deal of careful thought, I’d imagine.

Or a couple of illuminating analogies, which is quicker and more effective. This is the kind of thing that is less susceptible to logical explanation than to sudden illumination.

You see, it is a mistake to think that the body is merely a vehicle for maintaining consciousness by maintaining life. It is far more than that. Again, changing viewpoint is essential, to get it.

Every body needs lungs, needs a liver, needs a heart, and an endocrine system, etc., etc. You can’t make the machine go without a full set of parts. But to say that, is not to say that one person’s organs are going to be the same as another’s. The differences between people are most evident in the case of malformation or chronic illness, but “most evident” is not necessarily the same thing as “most important.” In Bruce Moen’s case, his liver malfunctioned at the proper time in order to set him on his path. It was created to incorporate (literally) that possibility. In your case, Frank, your lungs were installed, shall we say, or designed, so as to provide at least the possibility of your developing asthma. Again, in order to set you upon your path. And these are but obvious examples. Everyone’s reality contains examples, many too subtle to be noticed, or considered as characteristic (that is, taken for granted and not considered at all.)

You take this for granted in terms of your minds. Some are clever, some have this or that natural talent, some have high IQs, some low. Even physically, some are kinesthetic, some are relatively ignorant of the needs and fluctuations of the physical mechanism. Some are athletes, some are strong, or extraordinarily well balanced, or have particularly good eye-hand coordination. You know all this; it is obvious. What is not obvious is the teleology.

Many people don’t believe in teleology.

That is their right, but it blinds them to causes and effects beyond the obvious. The fact is, you don’t come into the 3D to make it up as you go along, though it often feels that way. If you doubt that, the remedy is simply to look back on your life and see the patterns that emerged.

Yes, somebody said life doesn’t make sense looking forward (that is, toward the future), but it does make sense when you look backward. But even there, many people say that the patterns that emerged were the result of chance.

They were the result of choice. For them to be the result of chance would require that chance exist.

I didn’t say I think that way, only that many do.

Yes, we know. But it is worth repeating, that chance does not exist, because it seems so obvious that it does, that it must. That’s because if one trusts only what one sees, most of the connective tissue is going to be overlooked because invisible. We are saying here that you your body is a massive complex clue or series of clues to invisible extensions to what you call other times, other lives.

If we change our view to see all times and places as existing (rather than appearing, then ceasing to exist), this makes perfect sense.

And not otherwise, you see. It is an absolute sticking point, this question of the nature of time. As long as people persist in thinking of it as past, present, future, with only the microsecond of present-time being in existence, with past gone and future not yet created, it will remain impossible for them to see these threads. Once they realize that 3D isn’t what it seems, all these other concepts become not flights of fancy but logically defensible, and in fact quite useful.

So, your body-mind is created, in 3D and in Non-3D, and in its creation are implicit certain possibilities. Which ones manifest will depend upon your free will acting in connection with fate. Or, to put it another way, will depend upon your personal subjectivity interacting with the shared subjectivity. And that, in turn, always boils down to your continual decisions as to who and what you wish to be. It may often look like you are blown around by events, and it may even be said to be true from a certain way of seeing things. But ultimately it is your decision.

We haven’t actually said much about the body as containing interactive points.

You know that massage therapists may hit a spot that releases intense energies in the person being worked on, and those incorporated memories are not always from this life. What else do you need? You are not the person to describe the mechanism as it functions; let it suffice that we point out that it exists, because that is what people need, to change their view of their physical challenges and opportunities and gifts.

You are pointing out that we are powerful transceivers, and there isn’t any need to describe the programming.

Precisely.

It has been an hour, and we don’t seem to have gotten very far.

Many a little makes a much, is the old saying.

Very well. Till next time, then, and our thanks as always.

 

Sunday, March 6, 2022

7 a.m. I’ll set my switches for maximum focus, receptivity, clarity, presence. On Friday, you had some every interesting things to say about the body. Care to continue?

We provided five ways to see the body’s function that may not have occurred to people in the context of self-development, of forging a soul. Trying to overcome the idea of body as obstacle, you see. It isn’t an obstacle, it is an embodiment of the obstacles that exist by virtue of the 3D situation, which itself exists, we remind you, in order to perform a function necessary to the continued and continual development of all-that-is.

I thought at first that your use of the word “embodiment” was a play on words, then I realized that this is, in fact, literal description.

It is. And to bring you to that realization is a part of the point. So summarize the five aspects of your physical structure that we cited.

Looking back, they were:

1. Holding us in one time and place.
2. Interacting with the shared subjectivity.
3. Holding markers to, and interacting with, other threads (I take it).
4. Having its own needs and preferences.
5. Interpreting or rather, integrating, other aspects.

I see, summarizing this, that the latter three points are vague in my mind. What do they mean in practice?

That’s what we propose to discuss. On Friday, we discussed your initial reaction to the fifth point, but let us proceed from one to five systematically. As usual, we are attempting to help you use your own life as also an example of everyone’s life, illustrating for each person either by recognition of shared traits and experiences, or by examination of differences in traits and experiences.

Understood. And, by the way, it was somewhat humbling to see how badly written my account of the sailing trop was, 50 years ago, and I guess encouraging to see that in fact I have made progress since.

That’s most people’s experience, in most things, don’t you suppose?

So. Your body holds you in one time, one place. Bear in mind, that means it holds your non-3D component’s attention, in the same way. Although your non-3D aspects may range in time and space, the 3D component serves as locus. It is the center of gravity, so to speak.

I suppose that should have been obvious.

Consider it this way: Your non-3D components consist of portions of whatever they are connected to besides yourself. So, you see, point one connects to point three.

All right, I see that.

So your non-3D component (or components; it is a matter of how you wish to conceptualize it), reap the advantage of a 3D center of gravity, and of mutual interaction in non-3D. You thus blur the lines between singular and plural, and in the process you facilitate the creation of new combinations that can thereafter act as entities in themselves as well as continuing to function as part of the entities from which they were formed. Thus, a very important non-3D function performed in 3D, just as we said from the beginning.

What you should hold firmly in mind as we discuss this is that we are considering your 3D body (and of course your 3D soul) from the point of view of the non-3D reality it serves and stems from, not from the point of view that takes the 3D as existing in and of and for itself. If you lose sight of our orientation, you lose sight of our purpose, and there’s little you’ll get from this.

Sure. It will be restatements of the obvious, mixed with a few startling improbabilities.

We smile. Yes, more or less. But if you march with us in our state of mind, you may really learn something valuable. As usual, it is less the words than the pointers that instruct.

So, point two. Because you, as sojourner in time-space, experience yourself as confined and acted-upon,

Is that the best way to put it?

It is not, which is why we paused. To rephrase: The non-3D components acting in 3D experience 3D as exterior, as pre-existent, as “out there” rather than “in here.” Daily life is experienced as driving in traffic. That is, whatever your internal desires, predilections, priorities – which themselves are greatly affected by your mental, emotional, and physical environment – you live in an “external” environment that does not have you as its center. It entirely disregards you, in fact, or contradicts you, or resists you, or in some way or another makes your life difficult. Even pleasant moments may be lived in the shadow of past of future pain or disappointment or boredom, or whatever. Do you see what this really means, and why it is good rather than bad?

I do at the moment, anyway. You are saying, the external world that we have to live in is one more way in which the non-3D generalized intelligence has to focus and deal with one set of issues at a time, maybe once, maybe repeatedly, maybe continually.

That’s right, and since those issues are the result of an equation – you plus your unconsidered elements as manifested in the shared subjectivity – every day’s joys and problems are tailored for you personally.

“As if” tailored for us specifically?

Well, “as if” in that of course they have their own independent existence, but not “as if,” but flatly, in that you can only be affected by what you are bonded to by what you are.

Without the separation allowed and imposed by 3D conditions, how could you sort out the things you didn’t suspect were part of you?

All right, persuasive, at least to me.

This is why all is well always, because no one can experience anything that is not essential to themselves. Illness, cruelty, name your painful manifestation and we will show you people in whose world that particular problem does not exist (because they aren’t part of it), but you may be sure that they will have their own cross to bear. And there’s nothing wrong with it. This is 3D doing what 3D is supposed to do. It is only when you lose sight of purpose and goal that you are tempted to think life a madman’s dream, as Hamlet or Macbeth did. [Macbeth.] It is not “a tale told by an idiot.” If we were to take the classic definition of idiot as one incapable of communicating with the outside world, 3D life is closer to being “a tale told to an idiot.” The “separate” existence of the 3D world around you serves its purpose.

So, to look at point three – the body holding your interaction points with others on your threads.

That isn’t how you put it.

It is how we’re putting it now. You might think of the body as a 3D machine incorporating (literally) connections with larger aspects of yourself perhaps unsuspected by your 3D persona. If Frank is linked to Bertram, how does that manifest? On Bertram’s end, it is to a man yet uncreated, hence to a bundle not yet bound. That is, from his point of view, it is a link to something that is only potential, rather than existent or pre-existent. On Frank’s end, it is a link to a portrait finished and varnished and hung on the wall, not susceptible to alteration. Or so it would seem – must seem – by 3D logic.

You mean I think, by logic that presumes the reality of 3D separation by time and space.

Yes, and that brings up a point: The 3D separation is real, as well as being not real. Hence – as we said somewhat earlier – only somewhat real. Just as waves and particles could be said to be each only somewhat real, in that they could validly be seen to be something else, so with 3D conditions.

So we need an equivalent term to wavicle.

You need an equivalent mental attitude to the one that is capable of overcoming sensory appearances to come to a category of wavicles, yes. And of course what else have we been doing, this long time, but encouraging such an attitude?

Now, we need to continue with point three and go on to four and five, but your hour is up and your attention will flag.

Today’s theme?

Perhaps, “Embodiment.”

We’ll see. Okay, thanks for all this.

 

Friday, March 4, 2022

6 a.m. Looking for a poem on the computer and not finding it – which is disturbing – leads me to go though my three-ring binders of poetry, and leads to my spending a couple of hours putting into alphabetical order those that I haven’t already gathered into collections: The Marsh; An Unsuspected Life; Alien Terrain; Death and Resurrection. At some point I ought to see how to share them, as part of this new transparency thing.

Very well, gentlemen, keeping in mind that we want to let the total self drive, does that mean we want to move beyond you as non-3D extensions of this local reporter? Setting switches to maximize focus, receptivity, clarity, presence.

It is a balancing act, always. For you, for us, for what you are calling the larger being, for what we call a Sam, for layers of organized being at various levels, including – it may surprise you to realize – levels of organization lower than yourself. That is, the cells and organism of the body are part of your total self in a way similar to how they are part o your 3D-level mind.

Hard to imagine how that functions.

It’s the old Cather heresy within you, thinking the soul good and the body evil.

I wasn’t thinking of it like that.

No, of course not, but thinking that non-3D organizes upwards indefinitely and 3D does not is a different form of that same error, you see.

Well, I hadn’t seen. I’m not much up on old heresies, nor on theological interpretation of our human situation.

Al contrario, that’s exactly what you are into, whenever you look into the meaning of life and the world. You may wish to think of it as theology without its having been privatized by churches. It is the most basic of inquiries, and there would be great use in someone summarizing past inquiries for examination in a context that did not presume that only one way of seeing things is implied.

But could such inquiry ever come to a conclusion?

Of course it could; to many conclusions. But they would not be the kind of conclusions that said, or implied, “Believe anything other than this at your peril.” They would set out the way something was seen by this or that group, and why they came to see things that way. (We do not mean the “how” of it, the circumstances that led them to their conclusions, but the “why” of it, the elements of perception and logic that persuaded them.) Then, the objections to that view.

You are describing a scientific approach to theology, sort of.

We are saying that theology – or rather, the subjects theology concentrates on – can only be studied in the same way as other things are studied. To put it too high is to distort everything you look at, and ultimately it is to cause it to be discarded entirely.

As we were writing that, I was thinking of Guy Playfair’s book The Indefinite Boundary, that I am reading with a mixture of interest and impatience. That’s the approach he was taking to the subject of what was called the paranormal.

Well, as you know, investigation of anything beyond consensus models based on materialism was hampered by fears of inadvertently winding up in some form of theological morass. That’s what happens, when you try to make any line of inquire above criticism.

Hmm, and I hear, “science.” What do you mean?

In your time there is a widespread reverence for what is thought of as science, and a growing suspicion of the same complex of thought and inquiry and activity.

Because in effect “science” has become a religion, its theology subject to investigation only through mathematics? That is, because it is seen as a belief-system served by a specially trained priesthood?

You’ve said this yourself, many times, over many years.

Yes, but it is the kind of generalization that is only somewhat true.

Name us a generalization that isn’t only somewhat true.

“This too shall pass”?

Can it be more than only somewhat true, in a reality that is only somewhat real?  Generalizations serve to organize thought, as a sort of shorthand, only don’t let them become strait-jackets.

Which is what happened to theology, I guess. So – looking back – I see that I diverted us by wondering how it could be that our material components could be part of our total self. And I guess a part of my mind must have continued mulling this over, because now I see that yes, I was considering matter as if it were something other than mind-stuff. So of course I’d be surprised that it participated in my larger self, and of course that’s a silly error, obvious once I got to putting together two things I know from different contexts.

Not a “silly” error; there’s plenty of reason for it. But an error, yes.

And you want to talk about our 3D components as they affect our non-3D strivings toward greater awareness?

Yes. And once you remember that your body is sentient intelligence organized in various systems, isn’t it obvious that in disregarding it, you have been hitting on four cylinders out of eight, or three out of six, or whatever?

It is obvious, at any rate, that we aren’t talking to the Tappet Brothers. [I e., Tom and Ray – Click and Clack – from the radio show “Car Talk.”]

Whose analogies are we confined to, after all? Okay, a mutual smile at that. But you see our point.

I do. All this time, I have been regarding the body as something that operates as a drag on the enterprise, an obstacle to be overcome or circumvented or, say, bamboozled into staying out of the way.

Yes, you have. And how has that worked out for you?

Very funny. But it’s even more than not an obstacle, isn’t it? It is a complicated, sophisticated system of awareness that is also oriented in the same way.

Well, let’s say that it can be. It can also be – well, wait.

[Pause]

Consider the body as a part of your awareness performing several specialized functions and in no way operating “on its own,” or for its own reasons. That is, think of your body as the part of your mind that:

• Holds you in one time and place;
• Interacts most closely with the shared subjectivity in its “external” aspects;
• Holds in itself markers to other aspects of your extended self, and interacts with those aspects;
• Has its own needs and preferences, more oriented toward what you would think of as mundane requirements;
• Continually acts to integrate, in the here and now, elements of you that you otherwise might experience only separately, only occasionally.

I have read somewhere that the body may fear death even when the mind does not.

You are actually remembering an experience you had, sailing in a storm.

So I was. That was a long time ago, sometime between 1971 and 1973. It’s true, I commented later that I had seen a split within me. Mentally I didn’t care [if I lived through the experience or not]; physically something very much did care. At least, that’s how I interpreted it at the time.

If you will spell it out for others, it will clarify for yourself, as usual.

And this is worth our time?

Just please do it.

Bob Serina and I went out for a sail from Tampa down Hillsborough Bay and Tampa Bay down toward Sarasota, as I remember. Bob was an experienced sailor. My experience consisted of having read Hornblower novels. But, for a small boat, one experienced hand was enough, right? And, of course, it was his boat, a single-mast sailboat maybe 18 feet long. I’d have to look at my journal from that time, for details. We didn’t have an outboard, I remember.

I can’t remember at the moment how it came about that I wound up at the helm steering through a storm while Bob slept, but that’s what happened. It was nighttime, as I remember, and the only light was the little binnacle  light. I had to keep the sail  looking a certain way – I can’t remember now, but it had something to do with how the sail was, relative to the wind. The word “luff” comes to mind, but not yet connected to anything. Anyway, the storm came up suddenly – it was summertime – and it got wild, quickly. I had to do all these unfamiliar things, coordinating my actions with the elements as experienced, and I really didn’t have the background for that.

Over my mental horizon, I remember, there was a wild, unreasoning panic, and I had to firmly shut the door against that, or we would have been lost. I think (but I may easily be wrong) that was when I observed the split between my mind that was sort of interested in the problem and my body that was saying, “Get me OUT of here!”

You might find it interesting to reread that entry, if only to remember what you didn’t notice at the time, the emotional and other observations you didn’t pay attention to then, that were nonetheless noted and will surface if invited.

But that’s our hour, unless you think we should continue here.

No, this is enough for the moment, Mr. Hornblower. Call it, perhaps, “Bodily awareness.”

That doesn’t seem descriptive enough, nor for that matter allusive enough. How about “The body as part of our total self”?

That would work. It’s up to you.

Our thanks, then, and see you next time.

 

Thursday, March 3, 2022

6:25 a.m. Yesterday’s drumming session resulted in people getting different analogies to supplement the idea of threads. Frequencies, orchestras, various less-definite-seeming analogies. (I mean, less form, more energy.) I can see I need to set my switches for a little more clarity of expression, if nothing else!

[The drumming question was “Give us tips on how to move our consciousness closer to all that is,” and what I got was this: “See yourself differently. You aren’t exploring or traveling, you are reconceptualizing yourself according to the direction of your larger self, not your 3D self. Like Monroe. Then, pay attention and weigh what you get.”]

I have a slight headache. What’s that about? Welcoming the energy in, as Skip advised so many years ago, and asking what I might be learning from it.

Ah, a reminder, in effect, that I had wanted to practice letting the total self drive, a la Monroe. Very well, I’m willing if you’re willing.

As you all were also advised yesterday, it can’t be done in one leap, but can be done as a process. This kind of communication was (is) a part of that process, as it gives you experience of being in control and yet not in control. Perhaps you could think of it as a dual stick, for pilot training.

Yes. I like that analogy. When do we solo?

When the instructor feels you are ready, of course, which includes when the instructor feels that you feel that you are ready.

Skill plus confidence plus practice, practice, practice.

And, as you were also told – patience. Sometimes you have to wait for the time to come round, for 3D conditions (or, you could say, the shared subjectivity, with its requirements) to allow.

And of course it will be different for each one, yet I do get a sense that we help each other by our own efforts. The analogy that comes to mind is a reed raft – probably because I am reading so much Heyerdahl – in which each read buoys and is buoyed.

And is flexible, and durable. Yes.

We are bound to each other, and although this reduces our individual freedom of action, it makes possible things that we as individual reeds may never suspect or experience.

Yes, a flexible and serviceable analogy, as were the others. You see that your reserve, your skepticism, about various people’s certainties over the years did serve you well. A change of vantage-point shows the incompleteness of schemes derived from less complete experience, less extended perception.

I don’t like know-it-alls, even when it’s me.

As we said, a useful trait. Now, you will notice that yesterday Dirk had a new experience that you recognized as your habitual state here. Thus, he learned, you learned, and anyone else listening learned. Three ways to share experience, you see. Having the experience, recognizing the experience, hearing about the experience. You all move from one to another, and in no particular order, nor is it one time and done. It is a dance-step. You read about things for years, wondering, hoping, doubting, believing – whatever – and then maybe things happen to you, and the reality changes your understanding, and maybe you describe what you experienced to someone else, who recognizes something that had been experienced but never understood in that context.

“And the end of our exploring will be to return to where we were, and understand it for the first time.” Rough paraphrase.

Reiterative learning: It’s practically a definition of life in 3D. The separation by time allows you a certain freshness of experience. You might say, with a smile but nonetheless meaning it, that there’s a good deal to be said for forgetting things.

I’ve never happened to think of forgetting as an advantage of 3D, but in a weird way I can see that it is, and I can see, too, that it serves the purpose of scene-shifting in plays; it allows different action to interrupt the continuity of specifics while preserving the continuity of the story arc.

You will notice, your headache went away, unnoticed, when you opened up to the energy underlying it.

It did, and yet it is still potentially there. I can feel it beside my left eye as a quasi-presence. Weird feeling which reminds me to ask about what Dave Garland experienced, while drumming for us. That’s one of those related experiences that are familiar.

There is a word for it, you know the word but don’t waste time dredging for it. It is very like asthma in one respect: It is neither strictly physical nor strictly mental (not that that distinction is as real as it may seem to be). Because he was in a certain state of mind, at a certain time, in a certain place, among a certain set of similarly focused energies (your group in general), he experienced an energy that expressed as physical sensation, because the brain has to interpret it as something, and didn’t know what.

“The nearest possible thing,” that Bruce Moen used to talk about.

Yes. It was an energy formation (call it) without precedent, so his brain interpreted it as a physical sensation of inexplicable origin.

Am I being right, in getting that everything in our experience – pain, pleasure, whatever – could be examined as a clue?

If you wanted to go overboard, you could. Or if you were called to it. (Two ways of saying the same thing.) But a less extreme and more practical course might be to limit such examination to things that called attention to themselves, or things you were prompted to examine whether or not you had what seemed like good reason to do so.

So, I have a pain in the neck – literally. I move my center of attention to it, and it lessens, but I don’t get any practical insights into anything. Is it as simple as the body having its own needs, including a need for us to put our attention to a certain spot, or a certain function, say?

If you will remember Dirk’s story about his vision, and the unexpected side-effects of concentrating on peripheries, you will learn something.

Oh, I got it at the time, I think. Life forced him to pay attention to things in a different way, like Buckminster Fuller’s experience, come to think of it. Fuller’s extremely poor vision wasn’t suspected or corrected until he was four years old, so he developed a different way of seeing the world, that manifested once he had eyeglasses. Dirk’s vision was 20/300, but then his arthritis came to be so bad that he couldn’t move his neck, so developed the ability to see a far wider range of vision than most of us have.

Yes, somebody should really eat another apple and decide if his physical ailments were good or bad.

Laughing. I think Shakespeare answered that one. And here’s an interesting tidbit. I haven’t been trying to remember where that verse that I paraphrased came from, though I thought it was T.S. Eliot, but as I wrote “Laughing,” it came to me that it was from “Little Gidding.” When I come to transcribe this, we’ll see,* but what I find striking is that here is a parallel processing going on entirely outside of my awareness. I wasn’t concerned at all over the source of the quotation, but the inner archivist was earning his pay, trustworthy sort that he must be.

Now, notice what is different.

Well, this session seems to be a different mix than usual. I can’t remember us commenting on Zoom sessions before.

That’s what happens when you intend to let the total self drive: It isn’t that you go away, but that you go off in directions you wouldn’t have chosen, but directions very useful to you specifically. Bob Monroe went traveling astrally. That was his total self’s direction for that particular 3D manifestation. You suddenly rediscover the 3D human relationships. We smile, but it is sort of true, for anything seen in an new context is in effect rediscovered.

Yes, I see that.

So, call this one, perhaps, “Dual controls,” or “Flight instruction”; something like that.

All right. Our thanks as always. See you next time.

– – –

* “Little Gidding” is quite a long poem. The lines I half-remembered:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

 

Wednesday, March 2, 2022

4:40 a.m. David died fifty-two years ago today. I wonder, did he and Dennis reunite in some way, when Dennis died, or is that some sort of misunderstanding we have? [Dave Schlachter (1947-1970) and Dennis Crabb (1947-2022) were college friends of mine, as will appear.]

Is that what you want to talk about today?

Yes, I think it is. But I wouldn’t want to stray too far from your exposition of the past few days. Yesterday’s was already an interruption.

Again, to some extent the concept of interruption does not apply. If one is exploring an ocean, one’s direction does make a difference in what is seen immediately, but ultimately it is all the same.

Well, let’s talk about what happens between people after death. Rita may have discussed this specifically, but I don’t remember it, if so.

What you are asking about is not quite that, but closer to, What is the connection among souls in and out of the 3D.

Is it? Very well, shall we explore it? I take it that Dennis’ death [which was on Jan 29, but I learned of it only this Sunday]is being used to call this to my attention.

Omitting the cause-and-effect of it, you could put it that way. That is, your reaction can be used to explore certain things about you and your life both personally and as an example of human life in general, but to say that, is not the same as to say that he died, or you reacted, for the purpose of the examination!

Understood.

So there were the three of you, that could be examined as a unit. That is one aspect of each of your lives. Thus, for everybody:

• Oneself
• One’s friendships singly
• One’s friendships in small units (two or three or at most half a dozen, say)
• One’s membership in larger units, scaling upwards to, ultimately, membership in the human race. That is, groups scaling ever upward in number, many overlapping, each with something in common apart from other groups.

Thus, you see, this need not be seen as interruption of our theme, merely a choice of one particular direction. You are each part of America’s soul, after all, and that is something you have in common, considered consciously or not. Three young men, Americans, from very different backgrounds: one WASP, one Jewish, one Italian-American. Did you ever center your attention on your ethnic backgrounds?

I can speak for myself. I was more aware of other things, at that age. Mostly I saw that they both came from more money than I did, but that was true of almost everyone around me, for I was in an expensive school.

You had things in common, and if you will list them, you will release from within your unconscious mind associations you may not have realized.

All right. We were boys, Americans, college boys, fraternity brothers. Whatever the basis of friendship is, we had it. David and Dennis shared a midwestern background. David and I were equally serious and political. Dennis and I – well, I never really knew what it was that Dennis and I shared, only that the moment I met him I knew he was important to me, even though it was not reciprocated until we had enough experience of each other. Dennis and David had a good deal of disposable money, next to me, but they were not rich. Dennis and I worked during our college years, but, for instance, they both had cars. I don’t know, is this what you want? It seems pretty superficial to me.

That’s how dredging proceeds, usually, from the superficial into successively deeper strata. Nothing wrong with superficial as a beginning. We can start here.

So there are three of you, sharing things you haven’t yet considered. You were all undergraduates at the same school, for one thing. You were all liberal arts majors. You were all born in the same short span of time – 1946 for you, 1947 for them. You all followed political news and considered yourselves pretty well informed. You were all readers. You see? Still not profound comparisons, but illuminating a little more as you dig.

I suppose our courses may have overlapped, though I don’t remember being in the same class as either of them.

The general drift of your education would have overlapped, you perhaps taking it too much for granted to notice.

I see that. I majored in History, eventually, Dennis in International Affairs, David in – well, what did David major in? I know he wanted to be a lawyer, perhaps eventually a judge.

And law is something you seriously considered as a stepping stone to politics, and law is how Dennis eventually made his living. That attraction to the law as a profession is what you might call an invisible shared characteristic.

Okay, I see that. But is there a point to this?

Well, people examining past-life connections don’t always pay enough attention to present-life connections. Past, present, future are separate as long as you remain constricted by the 3D condition of experiencing the present moment as divided into time-slices, but once you set that aside, what is left of such differences?

I’m getting your thought, but it so delicate, so tentative, if we don’t get in onto paper I’m going to lose it.

The living present moment in 3D is (outside of, or we should say, beyond 3D) the way time really is. People say, “There is no time” but what they mean or should mean is that outside of 3D there is no passage of time, no division of time. It is all one thing, in the way that geography is all one thing, and there is no traction-engine pulling you in one direction at its own speed. Instead, you are free within the limits of your comprehension.

Almost changed that to “within the limits of your range,” but that seemed tautological.

The point – and it is an important point, though not necessarily at this moment – is that once you are free from 3D limitations, that doesn’t mean you are automatically co-extensive with the universe. You are and you aren’t.

We could be but we aren’t aware of it.

In a sense, yes. Let’s say that what you are – no matter how extensive the definition – can never be the same as everything. Everybody is limited; that’s what it means, to be creatures. That we are not bound by 3D does not mean that we are bound by nothing. We have our limits. Everything does, except for all-that-is, seen either as an abstraction or as a being. (Clearly, all-that-is couldn’t be a creature, a creation, or you have just backed up the argument one level more, ending in the same mystery.)

So you, David, Dennis, having been connected in 3D, are connected regardless whether you were, or considered yourselves, or consider yourself now in retrospect, to have been connected in “past” lives or “future” lives. You see our point here?

I’m not sure I see all of it. I get that you’re saying there is only one living present moment, so that in effect our 3D life cuts us off from awareness of most of it. All we experience is living in whatever present moment we are living. But the past and future are equally real (be they single or multiple). I imagine you intend for us to realize that we in 3D sometimes feel the reality even though it may be hidden at any given moment.

That’s the idea. Thinking in time-slices as you do (led there by all of your 3D experience), you naturally structure such awareness as “past-life,” or else as merely an inexplicable present-life attraction. But really, you are sensing connection and putting story around it.

I have gotten two bits of story, it is true. David as my instructor when I was learning to be a diviner in fire in the first century A.D.; Dennis and I as husband and wife, I think, in Switzerland at some undetermined time. But who knows? Plus, in those days I wasn’t thinking in terms of threads, but of reincarnation as units.

That way of looking at it is true as well, you should realize. We stressed threads at first because it had bene a neglected understanding, not because it was the only way to see things.

So if you want to see if David and Dennis had a reunion when Dennis dies, ask yourself first if any of you ever parted.

Bob Monroe envisioned our return to our full non-3D selves as a reunion overflowing with joy.

He did, and he also reminded you that his reports were a translation of a translation of a translation.

In other words, “you do the best you can,” but that doesn’t mean you’re writing Scripture.

Or another way to see it, it doesn’t mean Scripture is more than somebody’s best attempt to describe what can’t help getting distorted by the process of translation.

You might call this “Connection,” and we might pursue it next time.

All right. I’ll be interested to see how this looks to me after I transcribe it and re-read it. That will make three readings, as usual, and sometimes I see it differently, getting it all at once after getting it twice in detail. Till next time.