"I of my own knowledge…"

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

1:15 AM. Asthma again. Well, it is September, after all. Since I’m up, you guys care to continue where we left off?

The volatility and porous nature of consciousness, and how (as well as why) the individual may be looked on as a convenient fiction.

Volatility, because no two moments of time necessarily have the same components. Porousness, because you can’t necessarily know or control who is coming in, from what level. Convenient fiction, because the features that provide continuity within a given individual are often not as strong as the things that separate the component parts.

[I realize, reading this into Dragon, that "porousness" is not recognized as a word. The word is porosity. But since the guys, as well as I, like porousness better, I guess that's what we'll use.]

You — not you personally, but your time, including even the most advanced “New Age” thought — have some very ungrounded concepts coexisting uneasily, adding up to a very fuzzy picture. Thus, spirit guides, past lives, ET’s both physical and non-physical, saints, possession,

Sorry, the process of iteration threw me.

Leave that, for the moment, then. The point is simple. Many concepts that don’t seem to have anything to do with one another — or to contradict one another — require merely a certain orienting principle in order for their inherent inter-relation to become clear. Such an orienting principle usually — perhaps always — requires the destruction of a previous orienting principle that prevents a new way of seeing. In this case it is the unstated and usually unconscious assumption that people are individuals, and that individuality means separate mind and body, [and] continuity as that same personality, from life to life or — if reincarnation is not in the picture — a separate destiny, be it heaven or hell or some other idea.

When you realize how greatly the idea of you as individuals depends on one way of seeing things, one consistent set of rules as to what to notice and what to ignore, the arbitrary nature of the concept becomes inescapably obvious, as we have been pointing out.

If you as a person-group comprise many strands, each of which is a person-group, and if your person-group considered as a whole forms one strand of a higher-level person-group — and if, as we have said, these relationships continue up and down the chain of being so that everything is inextricably part of everything else (as only makes sense, from our viewpoint) — there is your porousness. Your momentary consciousness holds the ring and attempts to impose a consistency. Regardless whether it succeeds largely or little or not at all, the nature of its contents does not change. Multiplicity is multiplicity. And since the effective active composition varies moment to moment, there is your volatility.

It feels like you are having a harder time of it, my being sub-par.

That doesn’t help. Notice how many background tapes are playing as opposed to your usual focused awareness? This is largely because you’re coming to this on insufficient sleep, and your breathing isn’t deep enough.

I can correct the breathing, anyway. I notice you didn’t mention [my having had] no coffee!

You can’t really afford to do that in mid-night if you are to return to sleep.

A big “if” anyway.

Not necessarily. You’ve seen, this work helps.

Yes I have, though this is something of a first, trying to talk to you as an alternative to lying there, or sitting, working on breathing. But I’m always up for something new. You were saying?

It will repay effort — for you, for anybody who reads this — if you go back over your personal experience and see if it doesn’t look different in light of these concepts. Past lives, you’ve already seen, look different. So must the guys upstairs whether named or unnamed. So do elements of telepathy. But maybe we should start with what you call robots.

Robots are your term for what we would describe either as split-off bits of consciousness or as pieces of strand-mind.

I’m muddling this, aren’t I?

Just continue as you can, quit when you must. You don’t have to do this now, and you scarcely have the energy to do so. The alternative — trying to go back to sleep — won’t necessarily be as difficult as you think.

We’ll see. I’ll try, and I’ll be back hopefully on all cylinders.

6:30 AM. Well, that’s remarkable. I got several hours of sleep, not having to fight asthma at all. How did you do that — and why not 60 years ago?

We didn’t do it, you and we did it. As a large part of you knows. Have you ever been prevented from doing something you really wanted to do?

I don’t know. I would have assumed so.

Well, as so often, we will continue to talk about the topic, using as illustration something topical.

You know — because we, and your experience, and your thoughts about the experience, which somewhat means “we” again, taught you — that a person’s health is a relationship between mental and physical factors. If they change their mental body, they may experience quick, even instant, change, but it is unlikely to persist because mental states fluctuate by their nature. If they change their physical condition, it is likely to require effort and time, but any change is likely to persist, because the body structure may be said to have an inertia to it. But just as a person with multiple personalities may have different eye color for each personality, or be able to do different feats of skill or learning in different personalities,

Lost the thread.

These are clues that can be better understood when you realize that none of you is a unit, even physically, so much as a coalition. Naturally if your health depends upon your mental and physical states, and if those states are actually the prevailing compromise among a congeries of what might seem to be smaller-scale individuals, you’re going to be at the mercy of many temporarily prevailing conditions — and, on the bright side, you’re going to have many a resource behind you, once you learn how to use them.

Yes, it’s pulling together. And you were just about to talk about robots when we broke off a few hours ago.

And that is where we could have gone then perhaps, and will go now. You taught yourself — which means, you let yourself be guided by seemingly external forces and seemingly autonomous inner forces (us) and then thought about and applied what you had been shown — you taught yourself how to deal with the physical and emotional problems of others by envisioning the forces in play as doing what they thought was right for the individual, but doing it mindlessly, repetitively, and so at last inappropriately. You learned how to reprogram those robots, and learned, through the experience of your friends as you worked with them, that not only could reprogramming stop negative behavior, it could be redirected back to positive channels.

Yes, and I have actually been forgetting that I have engaged to teach the technique in a workshop at the end of the month.

You’ll pull it together at the last moment and in the moment, as usual, and it will be fine. But our point here is to redefine your robot analogy in light of fluctuating and porous consciousness.

I got a half-glimpse of a visual image just then. A painting to do, like the original spools-and-thread painting you had me do so that Rita could understand what had been given to me right-brain fashion?

Not quite yet. In a short while — or we should say after you have a bit more data — you will have the feel of the information, and maybe then a drawing or diagram will be appropriate and helpful. No need for a painting unless it would amuse you.

Well, when I got “porous” consciousness I could start to see it — but, it’s true, not quite.

The concept is that your consciousness is both porous and fluctuating. We don’t quite see how you are going to portray both without our providing the connections.

Okay. Proceed.

You must for the moment regard your consciousness not as a thing, not as solid in any way, not as permanent. Your consciousness is not the same thing as you, any more than the volatile and temporary contents of a computer’s RAM are the same thing as the computer, or as the computer’s software, for that matter.

There is nothing permanent about a state of consciousness, and this is because it is not designed to be permanent, and could not do what it does if it were permanent. As we said, one permanent state of consciousness would be the equivalent of a computer locking up. Consciousness fluctuates. It is supposed to. It was designed to. It is in those fluctuations that it expresses the fluctuation of the forces exerted upon it from various and changing agents including external circumstances, the nature of the given moment, the effective pressure of other consciousnesses, and the effective participation of its strands and group-mind, moment to moment. If we were [presumably they meant “weren’t”] pressed for time, we would repeat this, because it is important. Indeed, in stating it here, now, we do repeat, for we have said it before.

If instead of identifying with your momentary state of consciousness, you realize that it is an interim summing-up of your life at that moment (for so it may be seen) or as the result of your past choices (for it may be seen that way, too) or as the interplay of your known and unknown inner and outer components (a third way it may be seen), you will see both how at the mercy of other forces your daily life is and how vast an array of abilities you may command merely by realizing the fact.

There is a lot packed into that paragraph, and we advise that you re-read it more than once, and wrestle with it until (in connection with your ever-helpful guys upstairs, of course) you have anchored it to your practical everyday life. Ultimately it will ground and anchor many a free-floating concept, rendering the whole more coherent and usable.

As to porousness. Again, you must let go of the idea that you are the unit you think yourself, any more than that your emotional makeup is the same at age 8 and 15 and 28 and 60. It just isn’t so, and the attempt to see as consistent and unitary what is neither can only be made by slurring over all the detail and by resolutely forgetting vastly more than you remember. And this is what is customarily done, of course, but it does not serve you.

Remember that your consciousness at any given moment is the person-mind comprising many strand-minds and participating in a group-mind. This, remember, is over-simplification, but it is complicated enough until you have anchored the concept among your other mental orienting concepts; perhaps later we can then add nuance and exception and complication.

But what is true for your person-mind is also true for the group-mind of which you are a strand-mind, and equally true for the strand-minds that make up your person-mind. Again — always — as above, so below.

Therefore all is movement, and change, and interaction — and is this not your experience of life? This porousness is why and how you do not stagnate. At one and the same time, life is freedom and fate, and it does not depend upon viewpoint in this case. That is, we are not saying that life may be viewed as freedom or fate, depending upon the point of view. We are saying, instead, it is both, always, in the same way that there cannot be an up and no down, or an inner and no outer. The two — freedom to create; being created with — are inextricably linked because the same. If you pull on a string, the string also pulls you.

Yes, we can quit again for the moment. Although this morning session is shorter than usual, when added to the middle-of-the-night session it will give quite enough for your friends to chew on as they begin their day, or whenever they come to it.

I feel like you made some real progress today, with porousness and volatility.

It won’t be the last time we will need to remind you of the concepts as organizing principles, but yes, it feels expressed.

My thanks, not least for your assistance in getting a night’s sleep.

Quite all right. Given that you consciously lay there relaxing and not letting yourself tense up, as you learned, you may also thank yourself.

Till later, then.

Monday, September 6, 2010

4:40 AM. Today is an anniversary that grows in importance to me year by year. On September 6, 1966 — 44 years ago — I made my first journal entry. This present 6 x 9 spiral bound journal book is my 81st. I do believe that the simple habit of keeping a journal has done vastly more to give my life continuity than any other thing I ever did. Other than the mechanics of keeping body and soul together, what other habit has continued for 44 years? From time to time I have tried to stop; the way I was keeping it has petered out; what I was getting out of keeping it was a mystery to me — but I kept on doing it because in a way I had to keep on, not knowing why. It was never a diary after my college years. In my year of grad school in Iowa City I began keeping it as a repository for thoughts that came to me as I did my required reading — I found that I could jot the thoughts down in the journal and then be free to continue reading without distraction. Over the years it became something of an in-house psychiatrist, or anyway someone I could tell my troubles or perplexities too. And, beginning in 1989, it became my natural medium for conversations with The Boss — my first conception of The Guys Upstairs. Something in me knew a hell of a lot more than that 20-year-old boy why it was important to buy a blank book and start keeping a journal.

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Sunday, September 5, 2010

5:50 AM. Thinking, for some reason, of “The Search For Spock” and the TV episodes of Star Trek that I have been watching (the complete set of VCRs, the gift of a friend uncluttering so as to be able to accumulate new clutter, as do we all). Watching so many TV shows of the same program, essentially one after another, makes so clear how the formula runs, and shows the central flaw in it as drama. If, every time it’s time for a commercial, it looks like it’s curtains for Kirk or Spock or the Enterprise — in order to build enough suspense to force or entice the audience to sit through the commercials and not change channels — and then of course it turns out to be (big surprise) not curtains after all…

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Saturday, September 4, 2010

4:45 AM. You were going to conclude your list of the way our lives change by discussing how we express various aspects of ourselves.

And, as you knew immediately, this was a major topic far too important and too involved to be dealt with as an afterthought or even dealt with on the same basis as the others. Nor is our list necessarily complete; thought would suggest other ways in which lives in the three-dimensional world change. But it is complete enough for our purposes.

Now, in talking about change in various aspects of a given group, we come to the center of our explanation/argument. For, you will remember, we said that various “levels” of reality each changed within the level, and both did and did not affect other levels, an impossible paradox, surely. And we said that “levels” like “individuals” is a convenient fiction. And above all, we said, as above, so below, which says, investigate your own level closely enough and you can come to understand the repetitive pattern that constitutes the reality in which we live and will always live.

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Friday, September 3, 2010

4:50 AM. Still pursuing the statement that any given level does not depend upon or affect other levels — and yet does.

Clever of us to put it  just that way, apparently. It holds your interest and it holds continuity.

All right. And I have it in mind that you intend to illustrate your point by way of inner biography.

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Thursday, September 2, 2010

5:45 AM. Did some everyday-life chores yesterday, after our brief conversation about how to structure my workshop on robots. The day off really does help, even though I spend it entirely differently than I expect to.

The new Sphere And Hologram arrived yesterday afternoon, and the three Robert Clarke books. They now sit on my shelves saying, “when are you going to do the promotion and selling?” and I can’t quite answer them.

All right, to begin. And I might remark here that I realize now why it goes better when I have at least looked over the previous material, or made notes of my questions. It is the same old story: More focused questions get better answers, and they come only by my having a question in mind (except I notice that sometimes you continue like a house afire regardless).

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Monday, August 30, 2010

5:15 AM. I have just spent half an hour or so reviewing the material given since August 19, and I am a bit staggered by the amount of new information, new ways of seeing things, that you have provided, so smoothly and quietly, in that time. And equally impressive is how, once I absorbed it, it’s now so obvious-seeming.

In that, you see the benefits of sending this out in real time — day by day — and getting feedback from this or that person as you go along. The interchange, the suggested ideas, even the misunderstandings, are all productive.

Are they not!

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Tuesday, August 31, 2010

6:15 AM. About robots. I am going to do a workshop on reprogramming robots at the end of the month — next month, I mean — but my view of things is expanding and changing so quickly that I can’t imagine what my theoretical framework will be by that time. I don’t know how long ago it was, but it wasn’t all that long ago that I was thinking of robots as a problem. Then they became seen as more symptoms than the problem itself. Then I started to see them as easily self-correcting, then as an opportunity. Now I see them as not robotic at all, but aspects of consciousness functioning at a different level, with us ourselves perhaps being the robots that a higher level of consciousness has to deal with. Time to change the metaphor?

Time anyway to do more thinking about the subject — that is, to recalibrate consciousness, which in a way is what thinking is, or to reprogram yourself (as we shall explain) which is also what thinking is, except that this is a particular kind of thinking done in a particular way.

In all this, you’re going to have to realize that you are not reinventing the wheel. Are not, should not, and in any case could not. An attempt to do so would be futile and misleading and ultimately discouraging to anyone who tried to follow that new truth. We are saying, in short, you should

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Saturday, August 28, 2010

4:30 AM. Last night’s program had 22 people, and all but one seemed to me to experience the receiving of guidance in a two-person exercise. Very satisfying, particularly as I had done no special preparation, but had relied on notes from previous programs and the inspiration of the moment. So now the next program will be one on robots, and sometime between now and the end of September I have to figure out how to teach what I have discovered.

All right, my friends. It is all coming together nicely — which I suppose should be an indicator that it’s about to be pulled to pieces, or blown to bits.

Would we do that to you? We smile.

You mean, would you do that to us — again. But I’m certainly not complaining! I thought yesterday’s material was just wonderful and again I thank you for it and for this whole series. I joke with you — and about you — a lot, but you know how greatly privileged I feel to be in such a connection.

As well you should — to use your own joke. But — seriously meant, too. The connection is available to all; it’s just a matter of desire and application. But not everyone will or should live their lives as you live yours, and not anyone will or should experience just what you are experiencing, any more than you can live anyone else’s life, or would enjoy it if you could. So — it is always well to understand the particular ways in which your individual lives have been blessed, and to be grateful for it. Far better be grateful than to confuse blessings bestowed with rights earned! In other words, with thanks goes humility. And humility is always a productive state of mind, far more than any sense of entitlement or any sense of appropriation of credit for gifts.

That may not be clear. May I?

Certainly.

They’re saying, simply, that it is fitting for us to be grateful for our blessings — for what we are, for the gifts we have been given to express — and it is better to feel that way than to assume that we somehow deserve credit for the gifts we have been born with.

It seems to us that this is just what we said.

Perhaps it was. At any rate, you have the floor.

We are more or less at the point where you need to do the work of summarizing the past few sessions so as to hold it more in your mind. This sharpens your focus which makes it easier to sharpen our focus.

Care to expand upon that?

You might look out at this way. We have said, your limited RAM forces you to try to make efficient use of symbols if you are to be able to hold complex associations in mind long enough — simultaneously enough — for you to process them. Writing does that by substituting permanence — or, we should say, persistence — for momentary awareness. But as you absorb information, as you process it and make what was new into an accustomed part of your mental library, you — in effect — cease to need RAM to process that particular information, and can therefore associate it with new information. You understand?

You only absorb new material, beyond a certain point, by having previously absorbed and assimilated the material received previously.

That’s right. And material received in right-brain fashion particularly requires left-brain processing, for it will not have received it in the way information received in other ways would have been received. You know from your experience that information given out in this way does not go into short-term memory unless recalled via conversation or via re-hearing from a recorder or re-hearing from a written record. But — more than that — neither you nor anyone reading this will be able to absorb this material by reading it and then going on to other things. It is to be thought about — not remembered, certainly not memorized, but thought about — so as to incorporate it. We’ll say a couple of words about that.

Your mind, we have said, is in the non-physical, and your brain in the physical. While you are functioning in the body your access to information must be filtered to you in one of two ways (usually, in both, actually, but that would not assist the analysis, so we will proceed for the moment as if only one or the other). You may receive intuitively — that is, directly, without the interference or intermediation of thought processes — or you may receive sensorally, which for our purposes at the moment (not forever) we are going to define as employing the habits of cognition.

You mean, I take it, by association or deduction or induction. But why call that sensorally? I recognize, you want an opposite to intuitive, but is that the proper opposite term in this case?

We are open to suggestion, as you say.

Well why not simply oppose intuition to thought? “Thought” could include induction, deduction and association, surely.

We’ll accept that scheme, subject to later correction if necessary. It overlooks for the moment the part that your sensory apparatus plays in what seems to you a process of thought unconnected to the senses, but we can always discuss that at another time. Make a note.

So, then, intuitive and thought-filtered reception. If you come to a new place via thought processes, the procedure itself will assure that the new material associates with the old, at least in the context in which it occurred to you. You study a subject, you learn it by systematizing your knowledge in one way or another. If, though, instead of studying systematically, you receive a thought (for that is how it seems to us, reception rather than production, for you should not take the credit for that which you did not deliberately produce) that does not have any context but the one that produced it — if it is what you call a “stray thought” — you will probably lose it, perhaps forever, if you do not in some way associate it with other thoughts beyond the momentary context. This, after all, is a main function of a journal, to store such thoughts against a later time in which they will find another more permanent or more significant context.

Such stray thoughts are not what we mean by intuitive reception, however similar to it they may be. They share the quality of evanescence, but they are received via a quite different process. In fact, that word “process” well describes the difference.

You are, in your left-brains, word processors. You process sequentially, first this, then this, then this. It is the nature of the left-brain.

In your right-brain (typically; not of course universally or even strictly speaking, but as a useful generalization) you process non–verbal gestalts; entire irreducible relationships; things that can only be grasped whole if they are to be grasped at all. Landscapes, photographs, road maps (disregarding the processing that must follow the initial reception of the spatial relationships).

For the purposes of illustration, the right-brain material may be looked at as that which is more easily grasped than expressed, and, for that matter, more easily felt than grasped. There is nothing more fleeting than an unexpressed, on absorbed, feeling. Nothing but direct intuition.

The work you are doing in studying material that has been received intuitively is the associating of its component ideas into a coherent system for yourselves, so that it may be fitted into the rest of your lives. Else, what good to you could it be? It might serve as encouragement, true, but it could not do much beyond that. If it is to transform your life, it will do so by transforming your mental life. And this it can do only if you do the work of absorbing it and its implications.

What we are saying here is only common sense and common experience. You never own anything until it has become a part of you, and this never happens until you take it into yourself. Doing the work of sitting with new material, absorbing the “feel” of it, and thinking about it, and applying it, is the price you must pay if it is to be yours.

I heard, more or less between the lines, that everybody is going to hear something different in this material, that no two people are going to construct the same mental model.

No, and how could they? It is in the association with the rest of your life that this material is made yours. Given that by design everyone’s life is very different, how could or should the end-result be the same in any two instances? But — that is not a weakness but a strength. Just as variety in plants is safer than genetic motony, so variety in the application of insights is more reliable, more versatile, more enduring, then any lockstep memorized catechism could be. It is in the unvarying adoption of uniform expression of thought, that thought dies. What is as dead and deadening as petrified thought? Be, instead, living wood, growing, assimilating, connecting sky and earth and the deep underground.

Nice image.

We’ve done this before.

Seems like a place to stop, and it has been an hour and a quarter. Anything you’d like to say about last night’s program?

Only that, you see, this is the time. You and others spent many a long year yearning for the time to come round, and here it is. You are within it. Enjoy the time.

Sounds like a plan. Okay, till next time. Thanks as always.

Friday, August 27, 2010

7:15 AM. The theme continues to be, “as above, so below.” This is the key to many things, and it’s why people repeat it even not having the slightest idea why they do, they not knowing what it means.

You want to know why “as above, so below”? Because anything else implies separation.

Think about that. Anything else implies that on this side of the line, life is one way, but on that side, it is another way. A physical analogy might be — below ground versus above ground, or land versus ocean, or earth-atmosphere versus outer space. Your physical existence is full of boundaries, some realer or more definite than others, but always reinforcing the illusion of separation into units.

But the world — that is, reality — is not like that. In reality, not even the barrier between physical and non-physical is what it appears from your end.

Everything, from lowest to highest, is another iteration of the same scheme. Everything is suffused with life because there is nothing else. There is no “dead”ness to the universe, no “dead matter” into which “life” is inserting itself, contrary to Shaw’s fable. And there is no level of being that is in pieces that can be (or theoretically could be) detached.

Anything, looked at under a microscope, reveals itself to be not solid but porous. Anything, looked at through the largest telescope, reveals itself not to be chaotic and unrelated to the rest, but patterned and interrelated. The skies — that is, the heavens, the galaxies and universes and nebulae etc. — are as much a solid as the table you write on. The table is as much a wilderness of space connected in regular solid patterns as those same nebulae. And so you in the body as well. “Man is the measure of all things,” not only physically but non-physically, because that is the scale of measurement that is most convenient and appropriate to man.

We are not confining ourselves to physical appearance or structure — although those analogies do apply. For our purposes here, we are pointing out that you extend downward and upward equally; you are part of the microscopic world and the macroscopic world equally. (It ought to go without saying, but doesn’t, so we will say it for completeness, that the entire physical world has its underpinnings in the underlying world, the non-physical world; therefore all manifestation is at the same time an expression of the unmanifest.)

Try to understand, these are not just poetic images, not just philosophic words, but literal if allusive description. If you once receive into yourself the image and feeling of what we are saying here, you will hold it and it will change you. It is in order to do this that we have worked with the concept of the person-group and the social-group, to begin to accustom you to see how it can be that you are an expression of continuity with the microscopic and macroscopic worlds, literally, both physically and non-physically.

As we “guys upstairs” are part of you but are not confined within any arbitrary grouping, as the molecules of your body at any given time are part of you and then not part of you, seamlessly, as you breathe and cells die and are born and bits of air are breathed in and out, so you, considered as a sort of metaphorical unit, are neither really bounded nor defined. Your constituent organs are actually collections of person-groups at a lower level. You are actually part of person-groups at a higher level. And just as your constituent groups function — relative to you! — at a lower, more automatic level, so you function relative to the next higher level — and so correspondingly up and down the scale.

What we have just said is enough. It is the entire key, once understood. Everything we add to it is only because it will not be understood at any given time by any given person according to any predictable schedule.

Now we’ll try saying it again in different contexts, for context helps define what is being examined.

Let’s suppose that you are doing some robot-work. That is, you and another are attempting to discover and reprogram autonomous complexes so as to disable undesired automatic reactions and either enable different automatic reactions or create a space for conscious choice in the moment. To you, it appears that the intelligence operating (constituting) the robot is far less acute, far less conscious than you are. You are functioning in the moment. Hence, you are focused. It has not been functioning in the moment, in that sense of the term. That is, it has functioned moment to moment in terms of scanning the situation, alert for a match between the external situation and the situation it has been programmed to be activated by, but it has not functioned and does not function “in the moment” in the sense of actively thinking, perceiving, self-examining, except in so far as it decides whether or not it is being called to action.

When you, being in the moment, focus on it, it temporarily enjoys a higher consciousness, as your being-in-the-moment-ness creates a temporary joint consciousness. It experiences contact with a higher mind. It intuits purpose. It is reshaped.

Does any of this sound familiar?

Now, notice. The “it” that has been through this experience did not choose the experience. From its point of view, it was chosen. It was — shall we say — the grace of God that it experienced. It was an experience, it would feel, of Cosmic Consciousness. It was something that other person-groups, not having any consciousness of having experienced something similar, would dismiss, perhaps, as “woo-woo.”

Does it sound familiar?

The person-group that you reprogrammed has had its mission altered (for reasons beyond its ken) but since it cannot hold its larger more focused consciousness once you move on to other things, it may well forget. It may wall off its memory of the inexplicable experience and try to go back to normal. May indeed return to normal not quite noticing the course-change.

Or it may found a religion around the experience and its perception of the meaning of the experience. Or it may in its own way suffer from a neurosis of sorts, knowing that it has experienced what its beliefs insist could not have happened.

Or perhaps it will devote time and effort to attaining that moment of enhanced consciousness again — that is to say, either at will (hence, magic, control) or as a favor received (hence, ritual, devotion, willing surrender).

Can you see that from its point of view any of these reactions would be perfectly defensible, depending upon the psychological context? And yet, everything we have just sketched is inaccurate and misleading in so far as you identify with the person-group rather than any one strand of that group. For you could consider yourself a person-group looking downward, so to speak; looking upward, you could consider yourself but one strand of a larger person-group.

Yes, I do see that. And you’re about to tie this in to our work sideways, so to speak.

Exactly. “Know thyself” did not refer merely to knowing oneself as a unit. In fact, that is a trivial and misleading view of the saying. To truly know yourself — as you are learning — you must know that in all the world physical and non-physical there is no such thing as a unit, except provisionally, temporarily, and from a certain point of view.

So. Learn the other members of your person-group, bearing in mind that every strand has a right to be there, regardless whether you like it or not. This holds true for other members of your person-group in your body (as it seems to you) and equally true for other members of your person-group not seemingly sharing your body.

That isn’t going to be clear.

We know. You try.

We are not single or separate but inherently part of something larger, and also are made up of things smaller that cooperate to constitute us. This is true physically and non-physically. Thus we have to learn who else functions as part of the “I” we think we know, and we need to learn who else we as a composite form one part of.

You think that will be clearer to people?

Who knows? It tries to express what I am feeling you expressing.

All right. Class dismissed, and well done.

Glad we’re done for the moment. Only a bit more than an hour, but some intense concentration here. I suppose the bait in the trap is this continuing experience of higher consciousness?

Not exactly higher consciousness, but more intense focus, which is a necessary prerequisite perhaps.

You’ve provided a tremendous lot of food for thought, these past few days. We thank you.

You express your thanks — any and all of you — in so far as you do the work, and for that we thank you in turn.