From: Jasper
Date: 5/8/03
Time: 6:46:12 PM
Remote User:
Rose,
You know that your personality is not constant because you are honest with yourself to a degree that most people aren’t. People tell themselves that they believe things that they only want to believe to feel more comfortable about something else they want. What they really believe is that bad things will happen to them if they step out of their comfort zone. What we’re talking about here is not choosing to believe but choosing to lie to avoid distress..
Is personality a constant with anyone? Or is it just a word we use for averaging out our many personalities from hour to hour and day to day? That’s why I used the word “character” the way I did. Character is far more stable. It takes years to develop and years – perhaps lifetimes or visits to other worlds – to change.
I shy away from the word “spirit” because it suggests an eternal essence that never changes. Can you think of anything in the universe that doesn’t change? I can’t.
Tapping into the universe is something I do often and often connect with people like my fellow Smartfellows here doing the same thing. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve thought about something we weren't discussing and then gone to the site and seen that someone has started a thread about it. For some reason it’s usually Kari but it has happened with you, Lollie, Jean and almost everyone else. Pat did it regularly when we were posting on the Court TV board (she was there first and did it so much better than I BELIEVED I could that it took me weeks to work up the nerve to post my first message).
Perhaps there is a mundane explanation for things like this. Often there is.
You can’t say that about the possum, though. It absolutely HAS TO have come from a source beyond any human being’s power to control. My first thought was that Dick finally saw what I did in the way O.J.’s Bronco was parked. But my second thought was that I was reading into it what I wanted to believe, not something that was necessarily true.
The desire to believe is another thing that makes it hard to tell sometimes whether we truly believe or not. The stronger the desire, the greater the temptation to accept it as the belief. The stronger the belief, the greater the temptation to accept it as the truth.
I believe that “truth” is another word for God and the close we come it the close we come to God. I believe that getting there is a process that begins with the desire to do so and evolves into a belief that it is possible. That’s why I think we sometimes get confused and why I think that you are right about belief opening the doors to possibilities that otherwise would not exist. But I am certain that it can work only if the belief matches the truth.
Thank you for responding to my post. You can probably see where it helped me to clarify some issues that I’ve been struggling with. I had the feelings; you had the words. –Jasper