Part II. Multiple Choice
16. E All of the above
Infinity is. Start here. The rest is derivative. And always remember: What we don't know is infinitely greater than what we can know. In 2017 ignorance of the world we live in is stupid, irresponsible, & immoral, but ignorance of Infinity must be acknowledged & embraced for what it is, a fact of existence simply. No human, however big & powerful can withstand Infinity alone. It takes collaboration on many levels by thousands, nay billions of unseen souls to move us through the dangers of Infinity, both immediate & inevitable. Human souls survive and indeed thrive in Infinity by entering a karass, where these millions reduce to one's most intimate circle. All our best teaching is heart-to-heart. I introduce the karass in these lessons as a "fellowship," but these soul connections form our closest bonds. Somehow out of our union something much greater arises. We retain & direct our individuality & free will, but willingly as part of something much greater. And recognize, that to "survive" Infinity necessarily implies having a goal or purpose: For us, it is to serve the Jewel, where the Jewel, like all eternal centers, serves the Good.
17. D Ascending 81 small steps is not direct anything.
Of course, see Lesson 3. Flight is many things, and it happens in every possible human endeavor (including both horrific & mundane adventures). What would I like to remind you of here? That flight is not merely better than good. It is not a mere extension of prior practice or personal readiness. It is discontinuity, a realignment of the default history ahead, a rewritten script now linked, at least for a moment, to an eternal target. It is direct connection. So a flyer doesn't need 81 incremental steps to get to the top. Scribe & I were blessed with our difficult steps precisely because we did not fly. All souls fly, but few are full flyers in life.
18. D & E Eternity is not immortality.
As I define these terms, immortality extends one's life or current state of being indefinitely into the future. Physical immortality is, of course, impossible (zombies & vampires notwithstanding). Even the universe ends. But afterlife immortality is equally silly. Most people seem to imagine Heaven as a steady-state place of ease & rest. That's not Heaven; that's Hell, or rather Charybdis, as the Greeks described. If you're not progressing, which means growing beyond yourself into another being—someone who nonetheless is you—then you've lost eternity. This does not mean, however, that there can be no backtracking or reassessing or even rejecting of faces & voices along the way. But there is no stagnant immortality. I will highlight here that I think our internal connection to eternity is vital.
Answer E is technical, and I highlight the distinction: Souls are eternal by definition, while not all persons are. Souls choose eternity in life, and many persons don’t.
19. B & D Free will marks the original source of flame; also, it is all we are
both in & out of time.
Let’s tackle these answers individually starting with D: We are how we choose. We might say casually “we are what we choose,” but that’s only because we have to think & say & choose something. We are in actuality the process of our choosing. That said, Answer A is tempting because life is illusory, and our free will plays out in life. Sages & saints appear not to have options in life (they do what’s right), while prisoners & paralytics also have lost most options. But our free will is independent of our circumstance. We choose our circumstance outside of time, and we choose within life how we learn from it. At the end of a card game, for instance, you might hold but a single lousy card; but you still choose to play it in your turn.
Regarding Answer C, the actions of our teachers set our circumstances in life, the places or given rules within each chosen moment; but good teachers take care not to affect our free will. Since “all we are” (D) are choosers, teachers avoid carefully to alter who we are, our unique individuality, which approaches the Good by becoming itself, ourself. Most importantly, we are ourselves our own best eternal teachers. Therefore, E is patently false. While buddhas in life may not have many options, they know life is just a play. They see that eternity is full of options. Being crucified, for instance, might be a last choice. Often we save our best card for last.
Finally, B is not so much an eternal truth, but rather a simple fact about this world. Many worlds do not include flame; but because this beautiful world Gaia is on fire, I & others choose this place & time to sound the alarm. Flame is an historical fact on Earth, represented in the Bible as the Fall of Man, but told in many other mythologies as well. It was not necessary to existence, not desirable. Our Guide informed us clearly in Session 15 that flame, which is not good, arises from the Good. The Good does not choose this result, but the Good respects individual free will to such a degree that it must allow infants—as well as master sorcerers—to make their own mistakes, where some mistakes are truly terrible.
20. D (not) the opposite of evil.
Answers A, B, & E are intended to be obvious restatements of foundational truths, while Answers C & D are mutually contradictory (because polar opposites nonetheless belong to the same continuum). And no, the Good is not "the opposite of evil." "Evil" is a word my teachers never use. They say instead flame, and they know the difference. The flame, we are told, did arise from the Good, but not by necessity. It shouldn't have happened, and eternity would be better off without it. The Good, despite its cosmic distance from us—I believe without overt confirmation—must still lie within us, growing as we ascend our kites, or else we'd never know where to aim ourselves. There'd be no compass needle to line up, no way to sense directly right from wrong. For example, despite my identification with, & over-dependence on, my rational self, my moral decisions always are felt first as a gut check. My reason chirps sharply enough to rationalize any side of a close argument effectively, and thus is suspect & fallible. So before I think, I look to know already what is good & what is right. My mind follows my gut.
21. B (not) Once you untie your knots, you become a flyer.
To exist is to tie your soul down to a specific existence; thus, we need some knots. And since every existence comes with unique challenges, persons in time find themselves knotted in life with given burdens & challenges. These knots then gather other knots. (Tribalism is a form of knotting.) Most non-flyers are so knotted they can’t think to move. Flyers, however, are able to move directly from one point to another, one mind to another, so their knots don’t tie them down completely; but flyers still have knots, which ideally they have chosen and know how to untie. Sadly, it is all-too common for people to tie knots onto others (parents on children especially), which can constitute soul harm, while it is also possible in the rarest moments through aliah to untie knots in others.
Btw, anyone who actually does untie all their knots simply has removed the soul from its origin, the life from its soul—after the body dies, leaving nothing. It happens all the time…
22. B & D Flame is not calculated, has no purpose; also, it arises from the
Good.
Flame is not evil, but an emanation of evil. (I quote what I myself don’t quite understand.) Flame is not linear, not purposeful, & therefore not the ill effects of ego only; but rather a tearing in the fabric of spacetime. It makes no sense even to itself. Trump strikes me as an historical archetype, conspicuously mistimed amidst our covid pandemic. Trump did, in fact, arise from democracy, a good ideal terribly misused. So too did the flame arise from Good. It wasn’t necessary, and we’d be better off had it never happened.
However, once the locked door has been opened, the Good stranger may yet step through.
23. C Different colours = distinct voices, though all are parts of the same soul
The nine inches of knots = our lives in time
The entire 33'5" = the eternal soul, including its knots
Much as the definition of a “gram” must be connected to a literal metal weight on Earth (housed in Paris), kite refers to my own giant rainbow kite, a board-anointed artifact & private metaphor I can’t improve on here. The kite’s knotted tail represents the tiny portion of the total soul tied up in life; the rest of the kite is eternal, rising in discrete, larger colours, where each represents a distinct higher voice. The overseer then—Albion, in my case—is the lowest eternal colour on the tail, the one just above the knots. Our overseer is our most immediate liaison to the full kite soul, the voice we most interact with, the easiest to comprehend. Importantly, the eternal soul, whether the voice of the overseer or the kite's very head, is not a future self. Eternity is not an extension of life.
24. B Creating freely, etc.…
I can think of no better description. Thus, here's something strange: When flying, one enters a paradox. In the moment of flying one seems to have at one's disposal many options (e.g., several different words that might fit a particular spot in a poem, let's say, where each rhymes well and adds meaning), and one feels like one can play with each and try out different combinations. That is, one generally feels great freedom & flexibility in the moment of creation. On the other hand, the finished product (a poem in this case) usually appears upon inspection to have arrived fully-formed. One can't conceive after-the-fact how it could be different or otherwise. It's the birth of Athena, arriving out of Zeus's headache full-grown & in full armor. Or consider Michelangelo's description of chiseling away the marble to reveal a David preexisting within. Discovery often seems to be the opposite of creating.
Answer E might be flight, if it's initiated by the self, but Answers A, C, & D are examples of direct information that our teachers spoonfeed us. That's not flight, which requires active participation and intent.
25. B (not) to survive eternity unchanged. (—which would be hell)
Souls, being eternal, belong to a karass. Each karass is structured around an eternal center, a focus common to its members; and each serves the Good. We see our lives in time. We see physical stages—infancy, puberty, menopause—which describe normal phases of development, but which are not necessary to being alive. That is, some souls die before ever reaching puberty. But all souls enter a karass. The Human Condition is to enter one, to affirm that place in the eternal structure that already has your nameplate on the door. There you are already, in fact, seated at your desk. While I have personally "experienced" eternity many times and have felt the warmth of its loving bonds, I have no inkling of the karass structure itself (and feel reasonably certain my 3-D brain can't process it).
Part III Critical Thinking explanations can be found in Chapter 4.2, No Justice in Heaven
Hail aliah
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albionspeak: a draught of language (4.7)
Home Midterm Answer Key & Explanations
Quick Keys
Part I: Matching
1-I 2-N 3-L 4-K 5-A 6-C 7-M 8-F 9-B 10-H 11-J 12-D 13-O 14-G 15-E
Part II: Multiple Choice
16-E 17-D 18-D & E 19-B & D 20-A, B, C, E (not D)
21-not B 22-B & D 23-C 24-B 25-B
Full Explanations
Part I: Matching
1. I albion - a watcher of the skies, which is a role in the Jewel Net. Albions see the big picture from our overview peak. Since the Jewel first came to Earth, there has been exactly one albion from our net alive at any given time (with at least one exception). Some, like me, work apart from the Jewel, maybe never to see it.
2. N aliah - magic moved by pure Good. Magic, to be clear, can be twisted by a twisted person. By definition, such magic is then no longer aliah, for aliah is not static; it exists and is defined by its use. While aliah is good, it's not so good that it's beyond our reach. We, too, are capable of pure good, often when we least expect it. It is important to note that while, in modern times, we naturally gravitate to ideas of aliah as "energy" or even "work," aliah includes consciousness, intelligence, telos, and love as well. Is it the Holy Spirit? Or is it love pure & simple?
3. L caring - memory of who you might become. Before we come to who we are, our eternal futures still call us in clues & affirmations & a zillion winking exclamation points. We remember from the past what we care about today, and we care/ache for a future that we soon will remember.
4. K contact -the easiest soul in eternity to locate. Scribe & I learned of our contacts (Anand & Jane respectively) as the first person in each of our Nine Men “sequences,” which took us step-by-step to flight. But the born flyers among us also have contacts. Karasses are hierarchical, though not as a top-to-bottom pyramid, more like an onion, as layers. Nearly every soul has one person, a unique soul, to whom they are anchored and on whom they might call. I note, however, that Anand had no contact, as he alone could see the Jewel directly.
5. A eternity - all that exists (in any dimension). This is a fluid set. Things pop in & out of existence, which is why eternity is infinite, even though it's finite & countable at any given moment. But eternity ends with what actually exists, not the potential, not what might exist. That's Infinity.
6. C flight - direct seeing & direct travel. See Lesson 3. But more, flight is what mature human souls do (firefishes), just as adult birds fly, while chicks (auroras) can't. Most flyers, one assumes, are eternal souls, but they still can fall or fail to fly away from Charybdis for lack of direction or interest. They still must choose in time. Flight is an ability only, and most of the planet's living souls are, like me, non-flyers. Being a flyer offers a means only, a vehicle. Note: Flight is not enlightenment, not arrival.
7. M flyer- one who calls on inspiration routinely. Both Scribe & I knew intuition & inspiration from childhood. I regarded such moments, which included whole soccer games as well as abstract insights, as the most treasured of my life. That is, I knew they were qualitatively different from my normal life. Most people, I fear, know little of such moments and likely discount them when they do happen. A flyer is someone who can achieve this state regularly, by choice. It is not a constant state, as we are discontinuous minds; and, indeed, it takes preparation to fly and energy to fly far. Born flyers while rare include many of our world’s most famous successful people; yet they especially often don’t know how they manage it and, more importantly, often can’t fathom why everyone can’t fly. They still have challenges in life, knots to untie; and they can easily lose their souls if they fail to find a worthy telos (the Good). Many born flyers in history have lost themselves to drugs or hubris or dilettantism. I add with emphasis here: Non-flyers can & often do find & attain eternity, though it’s work. No one has it easy.
8. F the Good- where we aim to find ourselves. Absolute Good exists, and it is absolutely beyond any human understanding, even in eternity. We aim ourselves toward it, and as we approach, we become ourselves. We are beings in motion, moving along the thread that leads us to the Good and ourselves. Importantly, the Good has no form. Even as a representation it is better to imagine it as sunlight, rather than as a sun. As far away as it is, we humans in life are still capable in life of doing pure good, though it would be pure hubris to presume to know it. It is not derivative, not linear; it shines.
9. B immersion- a descent into infinitesimals. Immersion is a mode of perception that sees “the trees, rather than the whole forest.” Overview is its complementary counterpart, and both perceptions are ultimately needed in a mature soul. In the Jewel Net scribes & fakirs (among others) are natural immersers, while albions own overview. Practically speaking, immersion allows one to enter worlds of detail and wander among them, receiving effortlessly—which is wonderful, naturally, but can lead to addiction & losing oneself among reveries of details.
10. H the Jewel- the modern name of our wampeter. Here I bait Scribe a bit, who hates Kurt Vonnegut's silly word. But Vonnegut deserves lasting credit, for not only coming up with a karass as a kind of cat’s cradle of souls, but for putting an eternal center at its focus. Also, vitally, Vonnegut saw that there are always two images of this center, one waxing, one waning. On this subject our Net is very clear: Never one image, for fear of making the Jewel into an idol. This, in fact, marked the first vow Scribe & I formally took, not to make idols. It sounds very Biblical, of course, but our Net is much older than the Bible. As to what the Jewel itself is, aside from the center of a great net, it serves the Good, as do all eternal centers. What makes the Jewel different from other centers concerns how it's used. I do not even know what "use" means in this context, but for us the Jewel is a lens to focus energies and attention—small, not big. And no, the Jewel is not a literal gemstone.
11. J karass- an eternal union of unlike souls. Karasses, central to Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, are formed around "eternal centers," ours being the Jewel. Our Guide, Advisor's guide (in Circle Sword), and also William Blake's younger brother Robert all belong to the Sphere, a karass vastly larger than our Jewel Net. These are the only karasses I've heard of, though many others, we've been told, are represented on Earth at this time. Of course, there exist also many false karasses—or granfalloons in Vonnegut’s fun vocabulary—“imagined communities” empty of value (Hoosiers, Republicans, nation states). Ultimately each soul must enter a karass, for without such a structure no soul can survive eternity. Essentially, all souls enter their karasses while alive in time, even though this choice is made outside of time, and we have no memory of the event. Josef told me I entered the Jewel Net at age 11, after three years of his showing me dreams. (I remember one well.) Josef then told Scribe he entered "much earlier.” Josef asked him yes or no. Scribe said yes.
12. D knots - the threads that tie us to our projections. There are worlds beneath & behind the visible projected world we call reality, layers of reality. Knots, I believe, are quite “real” and easily visible to my teachers when they look in on our existence, more as one might read machine code (as in the movie The Matrix). The physical world can be perceived as lines & threads—or, more precisely, filaments & fibers. Members of the Jewel Net, in fact, train (on certain trees) to read such threads, though we vow never to look into people directly—it's fraught with psychic violation. Knots are how we tie ourselves to the substance of our lives. Many knots are what we might call “baggage,” dependencies dragging us down. But we need some knots just as a boat must tie down to a dock or risk floating away. The trick is knowing how to untie them, how to tie good knots (a bowline, for example) that can easily come undone at one’s choosing.
13. O the loom- vertiginous Infinity, unassailable. The key to this image is that it's infinite wherever one looks, lines branching everywhere. It pulls one apart in every direction at once. Scylla face to face. No human can withstand it. Scribe was sent a vision of the loom during one of our sessions, which shook him deeply. Vilansit as a child dreamt of the loom regularly and was deeply frightened by it. I myself once had a great dream, not of the loom itself, but of a skeleton man, “Johnny Death,” whose bones radiated like trees & branches & blooming flowers in every direction. I tried in vain to stop him (and found it all wild & funny).
14. G mandala- our first family in eternity. Mandala in Sanskrit just means circle. For us it means both my drawn colorful image, as well as our “learning circle” in & out of spacetime—the definition here. I think it likely we belong to many circles in our karass, but the learning mandala focuses on the infant soul; and every member belongs to such a mandala.
15. E scribe- immerses in a grain of sand. From Blake's famous line, which my Scribe confirms wholeheartedly. Scribes enter a world—through dreams, through books or music or any door available—and they immerse themselves in it. Albions are expected to immerse as well, once we learn a skill that is not natural to us. But Scribes are built for this. It is their means to fulfilling their missions in life, which is to describe their worlds. Scribes move easily from world to world.
4d Midterm Answer Key
Images & Attributions (in order of appearance)
1. Banner: Rhiannon C. 2016
a) Albion Glyph: William Blake, "Glad Day" or "The Dance of Albion," c.1794
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/47/ William_Blake__Albion_Rose__from_A_Large_Book_ of_Designs_1793-6.jpg