Edgar Cayce’s dream tells me more about the material world than the spiritual world.
About nine years ago, one of my brothers announced a party for his wife’s 50th birthday, and invited us all to come. It turned out not to be her birthday, but rather a pretext for us all to get together while we still had Mom with us and were all well enough to travel. We all lived in different states. I went.
I came back and told my boss at the dollar store, “My brothers live in a world of beauty such as our customers cannot imagine. It’s simply beyond their ken.” Conversely, my brothers cannot possibly imagine the depravities that were commonplace in the ‘hood where I lived at the time.
Edgar Cayce’s dream similarly reports different realms. One is tantamount to “the outer darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Another is tantamount to a world of eternal light. Other realms exist intermediate between those extremes. My point: they correspond exactly to conditions in different places in the material world. For all practical purposes, this life is the next; heaven and hell are here and now, in whatever people create for themselves and one another.
Realms and vibes
Edgar Cayce saw himself rising upward within a shaft of light, through various realms. The lower realms are fully of darkness, chaos and despair. The higher realms are progressively full of light, harmony and joy.
An ascension from darkness into light, an upward motion, corresponds well to what we commonly experience and say about various emotional or spiritual states. The terms “elation” and “depression” themselves indicate upward and downward directions. One can be “on a mountaintop” or “in a valley” — or “a pit” — emotionally.
The popular literature about psychism likewise includes many references to “lower” and “higher” “vibrations” — that is, vibrations of one’s soul at lower or higher frequencies. Given dynamics of consonance, dissonance and interference; in the spiritual world, souls — or vibrations — automatically separate themselves so as to have contact almost solely with like-minded other souls — souls that are “in tune with” one another. As George Ritchie said, “Birds of a feather flock together.”
In the end, one’s place on this continuum is one’s own choice. How can this be?
Choosing vs. wanting
In prayer and in life — and prayer may be life, and life prayer —
you get what you choose whether you want it or not.
People often choose things they don’t want, and thus get things they don’t want.
Related: What you “see” is what you get
One single set of principles governs all events and processes in the cosmos, in the material world and the spiritual world also, as if there were no separation. We may refer to this as “God’s will” or “natural law.”
The laws of physics, for example, are special-case expressions of these principles as they apply to the world of matter. Every law in the material world has its corresponding analogue in the spiritual world.
All living things are both present and active in both the spiritual world and the material world, at all times.
The spiritual analogue of gravity is attention. Attention operates the same way in the spiritual world as gravity does in the material world.
Anything you pay attention to — that is, choose — will appear larger, closer, and more massive than other things. In effect, you are being drawn toward it, and drawing it toward you. Your attention makes it “matter” — to you.
It makes no difference whether you like or dislike the scenario you choose to attend to. Either way, your emotions feed energy and power into the attraction. The stronger the emotions, for good or ill, the more power one feeds into the attraction, for good or ill.
Consider, for example, a toothache. Attention to the pain magnifies it. Dislike of the pain magnifies it even more. Consider likewise racism, or white supremacy. Some fixate on it so much that, to them, little else matters in life. They have so empowered it, that it completely dominates their world.
The preferable alternative is to choose what you want — pay attention solely to scenarios that you do like, that you will like, that will bring you happiness and joy. Then when they come, you will have what you want, and happiness, and joy.
Some people prefer to live in a state of perpetual crisis. They conceive the cosmos as inevitably a place of need, where the only joy one can have in life, one must forcibly take away from others. They draw to themselves, and are drawn to, like-minded souls and people; they engage in like-minded conduct; and they ultimately incarnate into like circumstances.To paraphrase Allen Toussaint,The name of the place is, They like it like that.At least, it’s what they chose.
Others seek harmony. They conceive the cosmos as potentially a place of plenty, where people can strive together to create joy for themselves and one another. They draw to themselves, and are drawn to, like-minded souls and people; they engage in like-minded conduct; and they ultimately incarnate into like circumstances.To paraphrase Allen Toussaint,The name of the place is, They like it like that.At least, it’s what they chose.
Continued in tomorrow’s post, Part 2.
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