(Q) [Jim Austin's questions: "A. She seems to define compound beings as anything created in 3D by sexual reproduction uniting different strains. Does she mean the standard biological joining of gametes from two or more 3D beings ... or are there more 'complex' forms of sexual reproduction? Does this imply that compound beings are always created through sexual reproduction? This would seem reasonable, as the physical process starts with joining material 'pieces' from different 3D beings.
(A) In this instance, sexual reproduction means merely what it seems to mean - the creation of a new unique physical heredity by means of taking half from one individual, and another half from another individual. It is the continual mixing and matching going on in the gene pool that makes different opportunities for new individuals being inserted at any given time.
This is not to say that such new opportunities are the only reason for sexual congress, nor that bloodlines determine fate. I am answering the question as posed. New mixtures define the opportunities among which the individual chooses. If you are born human, you can decide among options limited to whales, say, or trees.
Part B of the question should have been answered by now (though after the question was posed, I recognize). Given that the non-3D world is a part of the 3D world (and vice-versa), it should be clear that it exists within duality, even though duality manifests differently outside the specialized conditions of 3D. Therefore, all polarities are experienced in non-3D no less. So yes, there is the tension of opposites, but stopping at that leads people in misleading directions, so that they think of war rather than recognizing that war is onecondition but never the only one. When a scale contains war, it also contains reconciliation, just as a scale containing competition also includes cooperation. These are not either/or so much as either/or/both/neither.
(Q) In short, it isn't as simple as good vs. evil, which is where we tend to go in thinking about dualistic forces.
(A) No, but the reasons whyit is not that simple are so complex, so intertwined with seemingly unrelated matters, it is hard to get a handle on the subject, and harder to keep it once you get one.
(Q) Which is why questions help?
(A) It is why they canhelp. Whether they do or not depends largely upon the choice of question, and the order in which they are pursued. It is a matter of preserving and extending a line of inquiry.
(Q) I actually got a sense of your being overwhelmed by the size of the subject matter.
(A) Not the size of it, exactly, but the complexity. To understand A, in this case, you must understand not just B but a whole alphabet, and the same for each of those letters.
(A) Nothing is hopeless, but it is necessarily not as straightforward as you might expect, because we have to continually go back and explain apparent contradictions, or sketch out essential but not obvious connections, or redefine material that was slurred over previously in order to continue on a previous line of inquiry.
(Q) So how do you want to go about it?
(A) The only ways I know are either a prepared statement, or a close response to questions, or a loose response, using a question as a springboard, or, in practice, alternation among the methods. You will have to be prepared for a good deal of restatement, often seemingly redundant, because the process of explanation involves not merely the presentation of material but the presentation of that material in different contexts. To say it once and leave it is to leave it undigested, or at least oversimplified.
(Q) I seem to remember the guys often going back over previously covered ground using that background in new contexts.
(A) Yes. We may have thought them somewhat plodding at times, somewhat dogged. I recognized what they were doing, but still sometimes it felt slow. And I was nowhere near as fast as you were! So, the pace was not nearly as far from mine as from yours. Plus, I was by temperament and training more methodical and careful, and that also made it easier. The years since have perhaps made you more able to participate in this process in the way I did then. Let's hope so, because you will need to.
Even this explanation is an example of the process, and of the difference in you. You are not champing at the bit, saying, "get on with it! What about the question?" Instead you are patiently waiting for it to be revealed. That patience, whether you know it or not, is rooted in a faith that the process will produce results. This allows you to go along for the ride without suspecting that you are merely travelling in circles and without wondering if I am merely evading a short answer for whatever reason.
(Q) In other words, description of the process - illustration of the process - is an important part of the explanation, and not a diversion.
(A) That's right. The process is the often-taken-for-granted illustration that will help you glimpse the situation behind the larger questions, regardless whether it illumines any particular detailed question.
(Q) It has been only half an hour but I am tired already. Is this because of the need to concentrate on this? Or some other reason? Or just one of those things?
(A) Prolonged concentration on one detailed subject can produce fatigue, more so than concentration on first one thing, then another. And concentration on a message whose purport and intention is not clear may be more fatiguing than when you have a sense of where it is going. These are two different processes, and the difference is similar to the difference in effort required by thinking as opposed to associating.
(Q) So, I am doing a different kind of work when I bring in unfamiliar material than when I bring in easier stuff?
(A) It may look that way. It would be closer to say, different when you are bringing in material that is not clear to you over a long span, as opposed to material each bite of which is clear and makes sense and builds on (as well as towards) something easily comprehensible.
(Q) It is the working suspended in air that brings extra fatigue?
(A) You could put it that way. But this small digression on process has restored your attention for the question, you will notice.
(Q) I thought it was the coffee. But, proceed.
(A) When you consider good and evil, you tend to do so either as abstract concepts or as specific examples. Neither alternative is wrong, but neither is sufficient in itself. Every time you go looking into the nature of reality, context is all. Context determines how a thing looks. If you examine it always from the same viewpoint, in the same context, it will seem to you immutable and unquestionable. Indeed, this is a trap the true believers fall into; they mistake preferences for objective reality.
We will need to look at the subject of good and evil again (and, probably, again and again), each time reminding people to change contexts and see how it looks now. Those who will not or cannot examine a thing as it actually presents itself in a different context will be unable to follow, and will drop away. Nothing wrong with that, everybody has a different path. But for those who can, greater understanding can emerge.
Look at it this way. The situation - especially you while in 3D - may be described as in the Bible, a war of good versus evil that spills over between non-3D and 3D, as is only to be expected. You or anyone could easily produce an overwhelming case for the truth of this by looking to history, or to the news of the day, or to one's own experience. That is true, but not the whole truth, and so [while] being true, it also contains implied falsehood, not from intent to deceive but from inability to express non-sequential reality in sequential terms without distortion.
(Q) I remember working hard to make sense of things as you elicited explanations in 2001-2002. You were not receiving the answers you expected, I seem to remember, and I was not equipped with concepts to explain the logic behind what we were being told.
(A) You may consider this a rematch. Now, beginning with the Biblical view of good and evil, which as I say is accurate but inadequate, as a mythos must always be, consider in context the fact that compound beings are, by nature, compound! That is, we are not representatives of only one set of virtues; we are mixtures. Then add the fact that what deed is evil in one circumstance may be good in another. Add that the same is true for tendencies, like them or not, approve of them or not. Add that a physical situation is always more complicated than it appears and hence cannot really be accurately judged even by the most intuitive. Add that given "individuals" change moment by moment (in that different parts of the community that they really are may take charge for the moment, then be superseded, then may return, etc.). Where is the stable platform from which you can say, "This is good, that is evil"? And yet, in any given situation, that is not only what you do, it is what you shoulddo, even mustdo - only, do it provisionally, because you can never have the data for a final, absolute judgment, even on an individual, even on yourself, let alone a complex situation.
"There is great traffic flow in a city: A body knows how to leap out of the way in a moment's time from an approaching car. In the interior physical environment there is far greater traffic flow. There are decisions made in periods of time so brief you cannot imagine them – reactions that are almost over before they begin, reactions so fast you cannot perceive them as the body responds to its inner reality, and to all the stimuli from the exterior environment. The body is an open system. As solid as it seems to you, there are constant chemical reactions between it and the world, electromagnetic adjustments, alterations of balance, changes of relationships – alterations that occur between the body and its relationship with every other physical event, from the position of the planets and moon and the sun, to the position of the smallest grain of sand, to the tiniest microbe in anyone's intestine.
(A) That should lead to some clarification without requiring a good deal of explanation. Remember that this model stresses the unity of 3D and non-3D, rather than stressing differences. So, it is an invitation to you (plural) to redefine your ideas of life, stressing that you extend into the non-3D (because the non-3D consists of additional dimensions usually unperceived or misperceived by those minds focused on 3D) and, therefore, the non-3D world may be said to extend into you. It is merely a matter of definition.
Well, if you are (whether or not known to yourselves) non-3D beings as well as3D beings, should it surprise you that the affairs of "one side of the veil" and of the other side should not merely overlap but be an extension of each other? It is in the misrepresentation of life beyond the 3D that so much angst and disorientation originates. Once you remember that you have an understandable part in the nature of things - that you are not an accident, not contingent, not a meaningless specator of incomprehensible activities - then you begin again to live without disorientation and anxiety.
To focus specifically on the first part of the question: It is true that physical and spiritual are intricately and necessarily linked, but the process is easily explained yet easily misunderstood.
The sexual reproduction of physical beings is a means of continually producing new mixtures of physical characteristics, so that a new soul may have a new home with new possibilities.
(Q) Probably as well to remind people that you are using 'soul' to mean the specific mind created in any given incarnation, as opposed to 'spirit', which is the underlying unchanging breath of life that animates the soul.
(A) Yes, although the second half of that statement is not quite that simple. But yes, "soul" means a specific incarnation, regardless of the antecedents or afterlife of that soul. The mating of different physical heredities produces continually new combinations of physical heredities for the incarnating spirit, the soul.
Perhaps an analogy will help you to understand the relationship between spiritual heritage and physical heritage. Consider each of these to be one parent.
(Q) Not so new an analogy. The spirit is masculine, matter is feminine. Father God and Mother Earth.
(A) But if older ways of expressing things spoke to modern humans, there wouldn't be any need for new translations, would there? Once the relative polarities became entangled with physical gender, not only did the analogy become confused, but sexual politics entered in and caused needless additional confusion because of all the side issues raised by implication, as if analogy were anatomy.
In any case, consider that the physical confluence of different genetic inheritances is one factor in the new soul's environment. The other factor is what you may call the spiritual heritage but - as I try to express what to me seems very clear and obvious - I see is fraught with more potential misunderstanding than I had realized. The new soul is a new vessel, but what fills it is not created out of nothing, any more than the new body's material substance is created out of nothing. How could it be? It is just that the reassembly of cells into a new organization may look likeit sprang from nothing if the observer concentrates only on the emerging organism forgetting the energy stream that enters and is incorporated.
(Q) The body begins as sperm and egg, then zygote, then continually dividing and multiplying cells, and as the cells continually multiply, they begin to assume their specialized form and function according to the underlying pattern of their blueprint. If you don't realize that the cells do not come out of nowhere, but are the result of the mother's nutrition and continual feed of new material into the developing fetus, it will look like magic - something out of nothing. (And indeed, the reality is magical enough!) But, once you do remember that the new being has its genesis and maintenance in an already existing being, from which, at the proper point in its development, it separates to begin a separate existence, the magic is in the overall arrangement, not in any hocus-pocus.
(A) Yes, and although the new being's limits and characteristics are not determined by the genetics of its parents, the limits of choice are. That is, you may choose among a vast array of possibilities, but "vast" is not "unlimited".
(A) Now, the second part of the question could be answered, simply but probably misleadingly, by reminding you that 3D and non-3D are part of the same thing. Although local weather conditions may vary, they are each part of the same climate, or say, the same ecosystem.
Yes, the non-3D forces battle within 3D. Yes, 3D battles both represent and affect non-3D. If they [that is, 3D and non-3D] are the same thing, how could they not? Just because compound beings may exist without noticeable extension into 3D, that does not mean anything you can feel in 3D exists as well in non-3D, except that the expression of the underlying forces may be different because of terrain. That is, in 3D you may experience isolation and the - desperation, let's call it - of struggle moment by moment to have your values prevail. Outside of 3D, we cannot feel either of those things, for our environment - the relative freedom in non-3D of 3D constraints - prevents us from seeing life in that blinkered focused fashion. Nonetheless, we compound beings have our values, and we do not cease to maintain and represent them. If you are kind in 3D, you will not cease to value kindness beyond the body. If you are iron, you will not soften. And if you are cruel or vindictive, you will not cease to be so. You arewhat you are. You represent and extend what you are made of. The major difference is that within 3D you have greater freedom of choice as to what you will become, and outside of 3D you have greater awareness of your own place in the greater scheme of things.
John Wolf's question does not express the relationship between battles and reconciliation in the way that I would like to express it. Put it this way: every new compound being is a new opportunity for the expression of the potential contained within the larger being. (For the moment, I am concentrating on creation out of any one larger being, but it is not that simple, or you would be back to creation from God, end of story. But, one thing at a time.) The nature of each compound being is a bag of possibilities that each 3D life sorts and chooses among and brings together into an enduring pattern. Thus, by your work at reconciling opposing or anyway diverging forces, you help create new possibilities for reconciliation on the non-3D side as well. By your expression and choice of one or another set of values, you create an exponent of those values on the other side, in the non-3D, among the enduring archetypes, however you wish to say it.
Thus, the forces of heaven are at war and Earth is the battleground. Or, the world is a place of creation in which 3D beings created from non-3D elements create in their turn, thus returning, to the non-3D part of the world, elements of which they were formed, transformed. Or, values precede form as blueprints precede construction, and in the incarnation and interplay of the 3D representation of these values - particularly in that the 3D representatives are inherently mixturesof values, never pure representatives - is the continuous redevelopment and re-creation of logical development of tendencies.
(A) I want to second the motion about your taking care of your health as we do this. Your correspondent issued a warning that this could take an emotional toll as you proceed. Well, it doesn't needto, but it could. A little preventive maintenance would be just as well.
(Q) For others, I take it, not just for me.
(Q) And such maintenance would be?
(A) Nothing you haven't been told in the past, but that isn't to say that you have paid much attention. You needn't establish protective rituals unless ritual itself appeals to you, but you should remain aware that your mind belongs to you; that you in the physical have the right to make decisions and no one else does (for yourself, that is, of course); that you will need to remember to keep a middle course, opening to the unknown but not losing touch with mundane reality.
In short, establish your intentfirmly; you wish to explore, you wish to be of service, you wish to grow in a healthy direction, you wish to preserve your autonomy without either retreating into isolation or losing your protective boundaries. Those who prefer ritual should invent a ritual expressing this. Those who do not prefer ritual should still find a way not to forget that these are the boundaries within which your explorations proceed. Now we may start on questions.
(Q) [Chey's question: "At other times the Guys and Rita have talked about the completed being after we drop the body. I believe the Guys said that the completed being is a compilation of our 3D life as 'experienced' by the 3D individual AND the experiences of the same being having lived all those other possible paths. In other words, while we were in the body, we could choose among all possible paths, and only choose one to consciously shine our little 5% (or whatever) flashlight on, but all paths are actually taken. Is the combination of all those possible paths taken compile [sic] the completed being? Or is it something different? I assume that if this or something like it is accurate, that completed being would also have memories of all those other paths.
[If so, we are actually so very much more than we could ever even begin to dream!
(A) Initially, you will remember, the Guys groped for a way to explain to us the reason you (or anyone, of course) might reach another life in its state of awareness at that moment (the life in process, they called it) or might reach it after the storm of everyday life has passed and it had a vantage-point over the entire life as lived, the completed being. This was a necessary but insufficient step toward continuing to redefine our ideas so that we could become able to learn more.
(Q) To understand A, etc.
(A) Exactly. Had you and I begun from a different place, the explanations that would have led forward would necessarily have been different. That's why different explorers bring home different maps of the same territory. What you see depends partly upon what you are capableof seeing, and that depends partly upon where you were when you set out. Thus, it is good not to try to judge different schemes of things in terms of "which is more correct", and better to judge them in terms of "where did the mapmaker start from, to produce these differences between this map and mine?" It does no good to abandon the maps you have made yourself in favor of another's maps merely because that other has prestige in some form or another. The only reason to change is that you have found something that feels more correct than what you already had come to.
So, to return more closely to the question - today I would express it this way. The consciousness you are living at any given moment is aware of onepath, even if that awareness is aware of multiple paths within the path, if that is not too confusing. In other words, no matter how complicated or rich your path is, awareness of multiple versions coexisting, etc., still you will experience your life as onepath, not as several differentpaths even if that awareness shifts on you either slowly or rapidly. To be aware of - or, let's put it this way, you are aware of just as much complexity as you can handle, and anything more is only theoretical [to you].
So, any given life experience, no matter how complicated, is one path chosen among the many that might have been chosen. Looking at it from the path chosen, the completed-life-awareness sees only what itlived. It sees the results of itschoices in that lifetime. It, itself, is the stable result of the experiment that that life was.
But looking at it from the point of view of the larger being from which the individual was formed, each completed-life-awareness is only oneiteration, no more valuable, no less; no realer, no less, than all the others. So really, we might refine our model from two to three. We still have (from the point of view of contact from 3D, which is all you have) the in-process awareness - Joseph on July 4, 1863. We have the completed-life-representation - Joseph looking back on his life in the nineteenth century. But we also have - if we can get to it, which mostly depends on the level of awareness of the 3D questioner - another layer that I suppose we might call the larger being's experience of Joseph in all iterations.
We should say that the larger beinghas memories of all the paths any one consciousness created, or trod, whichever way you want to look at it. And you have access to the larger being by way of your direct connection, of course - your own non-3D component. Or, you can access any one iteration in detail; it depends on what you want, which depends partly on what you are.
Yes, you are more than you think. And you can learn to perceive more of what you are; it's up to you.
As to the final part of the question - yes, everything you connect to affects your lives to greater or lesser extent, dependent upon many variables. The rule of thumb I would propose is, you will experience more connection or less connection depending mostly upon your willingness to do so and also upon the appropriateness of such understanding to the path you are on, which are two categories that largely overlap but not always, and not necessarily. If you follow what feelsright for you, you aren't likely to go too far wrong.
(A) Yes. You will notice that this proceeds nicely from the previous question, though Charles presumably did not line them up that way, given that he did not know how my answer would proceed.
(Q) Well, the two do have a relationship. He may have figured they were a logical progression.
[Cat's Paw question: "I'm curious about one's relationship to one's strands in non-3D. Do you interact 'externally' with some or all of the strands that compose you as individual beings in their own right? Do you mostly know them as a part of your own being?
So, yes, the image of family is a good one in that it suggests an ongoing unbreakable relationship. Perhaps a better image would be the bees in a hive, all living as individuals, all living as individual cells in a larger being that is less physical than metaphysical almost, a "hive". The hive - meaning, the sum total of the bees operating as part of one units - is as real as the individual bees, yet could not exist without them. The bees are as individual as any 3D body that maintains itself, but, without the organizing principle that we are calling the hive, could not long exist and in any case, would have no meaningful existence.
"There are all kinds of biological reactions between bodies that go unnoticed, and they are all basically of a social nature, dealing with biological communications. In a fashion, viruses again, are a way of dealing with or controlling the environment. These are natural interactions, and since you live in a world where, overall, people are healthy enough to contribute through labor, energy, and ideas, health is the dominating ingredient – but there are biological interactions between all physical bodies that are the basis for that health, and the mechanisms include the interactions of viruses, and even the periods of indisposition, that are not understood.
(A) Here is the hope and the intent that I have. It is one thing to communicate more fully. It is another to release the results of such communication to close friends. A third, to release it to the winds, so to speak - to the world. A fourth to encourage others to do the same, and it is yet another step to encourage them to practice together - which is what this could become. Such practice would have its difficulties and its opportunities and would be the difference between a controlled laboratory experiment and uncontrolled everyday practice, which could become everyday behavior.
Supoose you and - well, I would name them, but I feel your resistance and I have to respect it - suppose you and your three close friends, one of them veryclose - all began to talk to me, first in private, then sharing the results among you (as you have already done), then - next - putting such communication on the public record. You all met me, and only one in-the-flesh meeting is required to set up an extremely powerful link if the link already exists in non-3D.
(Q) You mean, I take it, that a physical meeting helps us to recognize a link that already exists but might not otherwise be recognized.
(A) That's right. So, even though you know one another and know me, the act of bringing forth information supposedly from the same non-3D source is going to have its tensions. Fear lest you are fooling yourself, of course. Fear that the material will be distorted by your expectations. Fear that what you bring in will not jibe with what another is getting - or, far worse, with what more than one otheris getting. All these, over and above the usual concern lest you mislead others inadvertently (since you know you won't do so deliberately).
But the overcoming of these obstacles is precisely what is going to make a further step possible.
In fact, you could almost make that a law of 3D life - it is the overcoming of obstacles that makes for change. Then it is up to you to determine the nature of the change, which you do by your chosen attitude as you address the challenge, the obstacle.
Such a controlled small-group experiment will illustrate the obstacles that will present themselves to a world of people routinely communicating with the non-3D in one way or another - and will, in its working-out, point toward helpful practices and attitudes that will arise from recognition of the obstacles.
(A) There will be a tremendous temptation to oneself and to others to settle upon one or another person as "the authority on (in this case) Rita". That is as natural as breathing and couldn't be less helpful to the process. Because, if Frank, say, is the authority on communications with Rita (or with Hemingway, or anyone else Frank develops a non-3D relationship with), then what of everybody else, very much including people who knew Rita (or Hemingway, or whomever) much better than Frank did?
You see? Who is to say who has a better connection at any one time?
Who is to say whose internal mechanism is unconsciously distorting which part of which message?
Who is to say that theirconnection, theiroverall sense of the person, theirmessages, are right, and others' are wrong?
And - following from this and actually more important, but not always as obvious - who is to say that one's own message is wrong, one's own ability or authority is less valid, one's own contribution is unneeded or unwanted or "only" one talking to oneself?
It is in the friction of multiple messages from (and to) the same source that you will find a new freedom, the freedom that comes with true sharing in an attitude of one among equals, where the only judgment is - because it is what you have to come to - "does it resonate?"
Do you see what I am saying? In common 3D interaction, you may accept another person as an authority on this or that, but you accept no one as an authority over everything. (Or, if you do, you are in for a real disappointment at some point.) You should be grateful that this is so, or you would be perpetually in a subordinate role, the student to others' teaching. But what true teacher wants his or her students to remain students all their lives? Far better for them to move out on their own, hopefully to surpass the teacher.
Another issue will be consistency of information. Weigh consistency to some extent. Indeed, you will scarcely be able to avoid doing so. But recognize that not consistency but resonance is the touchstone. If you wish to set up a religion, then yes, consistency will be, or will anyway seemto be, the most important thing, as any deviation from the words of the master, as recorded in scripture, will be an assault on the fabric. But if instead of preserving a monument to the truth as found previously, you wish to continue to progress toward an ever-greater truth, consistency will serve only as a rough guide. You don't abandon your compass, your GPS - that is, your inner certainly expressed as resonance with a given message - in order to remain faithful to a map someone else drew. To do so would amount to an implicit declaration that someone else's connection, experience, and descriptive ability is automatically better than your own. And even if that were objectively true, where would living by that idea leave you? It wouldn't help you pioneer new territory, that's for sure. New territory (new to you, that is) may be marked on the map; it isn't known to you until you traverse it.
Yet another issue will be the silent jockeying among individuals for recognition or precedence or status. The more you are aware of this as a potentialproblem, the less of an actualproblem this will be. But it is complicated by the fact that valid information may come by means of an ego-driven individual. In other words, you will find yourselves separating the message from the messenger - and this is as it should be, indeed must be.
"… viruses that you consider communicable do indeed in one way or another represent communications on a biological level. They are biological statements, literally social communications, biologically made, and they can be of many kinds.
"When a skunk is frightened, it throws off a foul odor indeed, and when people are frightened they react in somewhat the same fashion at times, biologically reacting to stimuli in the environment that they consider alarming. They throw off a barrage of "foul viruses" – that is, they actually collect and mobilize from within their own bodies viruses that are potentially harmful, biologically trigger these, or activate them, and send them out into the environment in self-protection, to ward off the enemy.
(A) Charles has the first part, which is more difficult for many people than you might suspect. Not only do people criticize what others (and they themselves) do, they often criticize what others (and they themselves) are. Perhaps they do not think of it that way, but that's the effect. When you say, "I love x" - whether friend, lover, or only someone you have read about or seen - "but I only wish he or she weren't so [whatever]" - you are, in effect, saying "that person is imperfect as is".
Well, there ae two ways of saying the same thing. Either everybody is imperfect, because everybody has the defect of their qualities, or everybody is perfect, because they are as they were created and they are living that problem as best they can. This isn't even two statements, both true, but onestatement.
As I say, Charles has that part, or seems to, by this question. Now let us look at the second part of this, thinking as we do.
A right choice? There are so many ways to examine this. Right absolutely? Right for the individual? And, if the latter, what does that mean? Right as in, best expressing the person's qualities at the moment? Or, as offering the most productive path forward (however that would be defined, and whoever would be the ones to define it)?
Given that, one way or another, all choices are taken from the view of the absolute, it still remains true that on any one pathway, only one choice is made. You don't come to a crossroads and take very fork in the road. You take one, regardless what happens in other versions of reality. And often enough the various options are, shall we say, ethically neutral. That is, taking one path or another won't affect, or won't much affect, your ongoing process of living your values. Whether you go east or west may make no difference ethically though it may make a huge difference (or may not, but may) in the future choices you will be faced with. But whether you can call a given choice "right" or not depends on where you stand relative to the person choosing.
You see? My point was that a person isas he or she was created; they doas they are moved to do, and the results of their choices can be argued, but the nature of the community that is functioning as an individual cannot.
(A) When I say pole star, here, I mean the constant unvarying orientation that any 3D life cannot avoid having, consciously or (usually) not. What you areis hugely determinative of what you believe, what you value, what you choose. That's all.
"The body maintains its vitality not only through the physical motions and agility that you perceive, but by microscopic agility, and actions within microseconds, that you do not perceive. There is as much motion, stimulation, and reaction in the interior bodily environment as the body meets through its encounters with the exterior environment. The body must now and then "flush its systems out", run through its repertoire, raise its temperature, activate its hormonal actions more strongly. In such ways it keeps its system of immunities clear. That system operates always. To some extent, it is a way that the body distinguishes between self and nonself.
(A) Without getting into ideology, and certainly not into politics, let me say that of course everything looks different from here. How could it not? Context is all, or nearly all. Our 3D lives are a long effort to express what is within us, which requires and presupposes a decision - a continuing decision, you might say - as to what we wantto express, what we want to be. You may have contradictory values included in your 3D soul - well, your task is to judge which ones you wish to express and encourage, and which you wish to repress and discourage. And, of course, there are productive and destructive ways of going about all this, but if you don't realize that we are by naturecompound beings, the task is going to be misunderstood.
To answer the question succinctly, let me say this. Hawking is correct and also not.
Hawking is right that aggression as a trait threatens destruction, although I would now judge that the danger is substantially less in 2015 than it was fifty years before. But he is making an unnoticed error in attributing it to humannature. It would be closer to the truth to say that humans are living withaggression (as with all values and the behaviors arising from them) that are brought forth from the non-3D and are expressed more clearly in 3D circumstances. Life is a conflict of values, both in 3D and in non-3D. Behavior is a little different in different terrain, but the originating forces are, of course, the same.
Hawking says the human failinghe would like to correct. Is it specifically human, though? Is it a failing? And even if either or both, is it meaningful to talk of correctingit?
Well, even this many is enough not to invalidate the statement but to illuminate the tacit assumptions it incorporates. The additional rephrasing dealt with the assumption of individuals acting in mutual isolation, but you have enough to see my point here.
I would argue that it is not aggressionbut selfishnessthat threatens life as you are living it. That is, most people are not malign or even hostile, particularly; but a civilization that fosters a sense of isolation, of lack of mutual interdependence, is not only profoundly inhuman, it is also profoundly unscientific, because interdependence is perhaps the first law of nature, recognized or not. What is the much-quoted "survival of the fittest" but a statement that the most successful species is the one that best fits into the existing order of things? It is not who is the most ruthless. Anything that overreaches risks pulling the temple down around his ears.
Here is my point. Aggression flows from a sense of isolation, which may result in fear, in ruthlessness, in a sense that it is dog-eat-dog, sauve' qui peut. But, without that sense of isolation - in non-3D, in other words - the values still exist, and still have their vigorous proponents. It is just that we in non-3D do not experience the world as you do, so of course, everything expresses differently. So, I'd say it isn't aggressionthat threatens you; it is the belief that you each exist in isolation - in isolation from non-3D, from each other, from your pasts and futures. But that is not what Hawking is saying, because he is concentrating on effects and not causes. This is not to criticize his work, only to clarify. Now, I suggest that we move on to something else until questions and comments proceed from this, for we have not begun to exhaust the subject.
(Q) If I hear you right, you're saying, again, let this marinate for a while.
(A) Too big a chunk of unfamiliar material may prove indigestible, for two reasons. One, the temptation will be to embrace it but then move on, leaving it as a cyst rather than incorporating it. Two, the implications of new material only reveal themselves in connection with various facets of reality. Look at life through new lenses and each day illumines different things, as happened to us in 2001 and 2002 when we lived with the material the guys provided us week by week.
(Q) Yes, I well remember, and it's true, the continuing nature of the tutorial, combined with the somewhat random barrage of questions from the Voyagers mailing list and others, did result in our being presented new aspects of what might have been glossed over otherwise.
(A) Glossed over, encapsulated, and in essence disregarded. Okay, next question.
Viruses have been likened to nature's emails - messages to our DNA that are essential to the evolution of the human species. It would seem that, due largely to our acidic diet and high levels of artificial stress, we've lost much of our ability to process these fundamental communications with nature - hence things like flu season and epidemics that seem commonplace today.
"Viruses as part of the body's overall health system, and viruses as biological statements.
(A) I was merely noting that life outside 3D is not unvarying bliss the way some people imagine it. True, we don't get colds and our limbs and joints don't ache, but still there are stresses, and the results of stresses.
(Q) I take it you don't mean physical stresses left over from 3D life - that is, the non-3D equivalent of phantom-limb pains.
(A) An interesting analogy, that, actually. Let me think if I should pursue it.
Let me say it straight, and then we'll see if I want to pursue the analogy. What I intended to make note of is that we are still compound beings, even after we have dropped the body. As a matter of fact, the tensions between various components may sometimes be stronger, more evident without the body's buffering intervention.
(Q) Is that what Yeats meant when he wrote of being thankful for "the body and its stupidity"?
(A) I can't answer for Mr. Yeats, but it may have been at least a glimmer of the truth that spirits contend, both in the body and no less outside the body. Don't think of eternity as a place of eternal rest, necessarily! That is as much failure of imagination as anything. Hence, harps and clouds and all that, that discredits the idea of a non-physical world among the nonreligious.
An angel - a unitary being of any sort - is incapable of being self-divided, for the very good reason that there is no diversity of internal content to form sides.
But compound beings - and by that I mean anything created in 3D by sexual reproduction uniting different strains, incorporating in one body different strands each of which may itself have been a life lived as an individual by what had been a community - compound beings are not only capable ofbeing self-divided; they can scarcely escape it. And this is a function we have not yet touched on. Compound beings, by their nature, are both battle-ground and reconciling force for opposing forces. They live a battle (and perhaps a reconciling) and they become a potential way forward. In short, they not only complicate the non-3D world be presenting new possibilities, they also hep hold it together by sometimes reconciling the polar opposites they may learn to live.
(Q) I sometimes wonder if this or that that we get in these sessions is merely me echoing something I've read - but not in this case! I don't know that I've heard anybody describe us or our function in the larger scheme of things in just that way.
(A) Remember, "3D", "the world" - even "people", many times - does not mean only Earth. You may tend to think that humans on Earth are radically different from beings also in 3D who live elsewhere, but perhaps you tend to exaggerate the differences and underrate the commonalities. The same non-3D being may very easily incorporate elements from various parts of 3D, just as humans may have ancestors from different genetic strands, or different ethnic groups, or different races. Depending on the extent of difference, the internal diversity - and perhaps the internal stress - will be that much the greater. But this is a side trail.
The central point here is that 3D life is integrally connected with non-3D life, and if you can keep that in mind as you examine anything, it will gradually reorient your thinking in new and productive directions. Trust your guidance as you consider ideas. Entertain fanciful connections as they arise, and consider that they may be arising not at random, as they appear to be, but in some sequence not apparent to you, but aimed at assisting you to new integrations.
(Q) So, when I said "be well" as a sort of generalized sign-off gesture, and you in effect said, "not necessarily", it was to provide an entry-point for you to point out that on the other side not all is beer and skittles - and as soon as I wrote "the other side", I went, "oops!"
(A) It is hard to reorient your thinking all at once, and I recognize that three months is still pretty much "all at once". But you caught it, that's the point. And, you see, perhaps, why I began with that point that it is onereality, not two. There is a casual utility in thinking of "this side" and "the other side", but it too easily tempts you into disregarding all the unbreakable links that are more obvious when you remember that you are observing onebeing functioning partly in, partly out of, the 3D environment.
(A) "Spirits" as you often think of them, have passions no less than "physical beings" do. How could they not? They have self-divisions, values, motives. No, they don't commute to work or mow the lawn or clerk at a store, but they share human life in its essentials, and what is essential about human life is not the externals but the internals. However, naturally these things express differently in different surroundings.
(Q) Meaning, I take it, in surroundings where consciousness is not led to exaggerate the always-moving present moment.
(A) That, and the continual sense of separation, and the ability to go for long periods of time not recognizing the results of a given thought or attitude.
But valuesremain; passionsremain; one should say, I suppose, liferemains. The guys told us we would find them emotionally chilly next to us in 3D. True, but not the whole story. We "here" are seeminglymore chilly because of not riding that exaggerated present moment. But, in essence, we are morepassionate, actually, because we are not distracted by the innumerable crosscurrents of human existence.
(Q) I'm getting more than has been said so far.
(A) Go ahead, if you want to try. You know the limitations of language and the starting-point of visualization.
(A) Yes, but there is a difference between the larger being and any individual's non-3D components; that's the point.
(Q) I see it clearly now, but I think I was hazy on it till now. So, our non-3D component is our representation in non-3D of what we in 3D are, including whatever moves us.
(A) Yes, but it is a two-way street, and the 3D world represents the non-3D in a way and to an intense degree that I did not suspect while still in the body.
(Q) That's because you weren't raised Catholic.
(A) Well, maybe so. I can see there is far more in Christianity than I was willing to concede. And I admit to suspecting that you were still in the thrall of that early training.
(A) Everyone who reads, everyone who thinks about, everyone who contributes questions to or objections to the material, contributes. I hope you will all realize, there is no way for you to know whether a given question is "only you" or is being prompted by another part of yourself. It is, in fact, nearly a meaningless distinction. So don't underrate your participation.