"I of my own knowledge…"

Perception and Morality

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Alright I guess I am finally ready if you are. Perception versus story, part 2 — which aspect now?

Nervous in the service, for fear that we won’t know our lines? It would have been more instructive for you not to have reread the first installment so you wouldn’t know until you came to enter it into the computer whether we were repeating ourselves. The more faith you bring to this, the easier it goes — validation comes after you have something to validate, not before! (more…)

[Saturday, January 14, 2006]

Well, I’d like a companionable chat. Which of my friends shall I talk with today?

You call me Joseph.

[This is not Joseph Smallwood, but an ancient Egyptian, some kind of priest.] Yes. Welcome, friend. You know that one of my friends this life was startled that I was so respectful of you.

This is because he does not understand what he observes, in this case. Your reverence, I am well aware, is not for me as an individual – as your civilization always puts it – but for what my state of being represents for you. In reverencing me you are reverencing that part of yourself, and this is as it should be. I recognize this, of course, having the advantage of the inside position (if you will forgive a mild joke). Like Gordon, I would not approve of your giving reverence to an individual rather than to the qualities and to the achievement of embodying those qualities. Not all will understand these words, but some will. (more…)

Data vs. knowing

[April 13, 2007] All right friends, let’s talk a little about “story” versus perception as it comes to psychic exploration. I can see this as at least a post to the blog, as I think it is an important insight bearing on — that is to say, clearing up — many things that have plagued me about the process for years. This, unless you have something else in mind for us to discuss. But I rather suspect that this is you knocking on the door anyway.

True enough. You will notice that it was in rereading one of Joseph’s posts — knowing that some of it has to be wrong — that you felt the urging to get off the screen and back to this journal book.

Anything you know, you can know only relatively. There is no such thing as absolute knowledge, and beware of anyone promising it to you. Everything existing in context with everything else, there is no room for anything to stand alone, unaffected and unmodified by context. (more…)

My friend Richard and I met at a Monroe Institute program, Lifeline, a dozen years ago. Since then he has gone on to do several programs with shaman Hank Wesselman and his wife Jill. (Rich presently writes a blog that I have mentioned before, http://thesacredpath.wordpress.com/. Well worth a visit.) When Rich and I met, it was old friends meeting for the first time in this lifetime, and that hasn’t changed. As it happened, he and I were involved in a little private experiment that broadened the Lifeline experience for us. [This is adapted from my book Muddy Tracks.]

During a tape one morning, The Gentlemen Upstairs suggested to me that it would be productive to have several people talk to them together. They said, “Pick them carefully. Or rather, let them pick themselves.” So I took my tape recorder and sat in the lounge at midday. TGU had said they would self-select, and they did. First Rich came over, then, one at a time, five others, and we wound up recording nearly 90 minutes of tape. (more…)

Saturday, April 7, 2007

8 a.m. My friends, what have you to say about my blog, or self development by choice, or past lives, or your ongoing project working through me, or the price of eggs?

The more pointed the question, remember, the more pointed the answer. However, we take your question to be in effect “what is the thing you would most likely to know and perhaps to communicate today?”

Close enough. And the answer is?

We realize that it seems irresponsible even to you for you to be blogging without consideration of how that is to translate into income for you. But the operative word, as you like to say, is “seems.” (more…)

It’s a chicken and egg kind of question: How do you connect to guidance if you don’t have guidance to connect you to guidance? How can you know that you are not connecting to evil or mischievous spirits intending to lead you astray?

As usual, the guys upstairs had a couple words about this, that I hope you will find useful. (more…)

In January 2006, while I was in the middle of receiving lots of information from the other side, several things happened that once again shook my confidence — for in this whole process, I have never been certain that I was right or even that I knew what I was doing. Much closer to say the opposite. (If you cannot stand ambiguity or uncertainty and if you cannot stand the feeling of being lost, exploring probably is not for you.)

Not only was I unable to obtain verification of Joseph Smallwood’s story as I went along, but when a friend asked me to obtain information from the other side, and I did, it turned out that what I had brought back was smoke. It didn’t match the case at all. Yet the information that I was bringing back — and promptly posting to a Monroe Institute group — was proving helpful to people. How could I sometimes be receiving information that was helpful and at other times receive information that was wrong? It never made sense to me. A little discussion with the guys upstairs shed light on the question. (more…)

Taking stock of my experience of guidance over the years, I see that it has indeed been a long strange trip, as Michael Ventura says, quoting somebody.

First there were undoubted certainties that went unexamined. Why did the boy that I was “know” that he could fix his health through his mind alone? What gave him the irrational conviction — only half maintained, and that not by his conscious reasoning mind — that if he read the books in the right way the past would change? (more…)