A model of consciousness

Saturday, May 30, 2020

3:40 a.m. Time for concentration and conversation, I guess. Either that, or re-reading or trying for even more sleep. Gentlemen, anything for us today?

We might ask you the same.

As it is up to me to provide the agenda, eh? I don’t really have one. Should I go back to bed, then?

What would you wish were different in your life?

I was unable to bring myself to begin on the triple portraits I had sketched in some time ago – Jung, Hemingway, Lincoln as my guiding spirits.

You are trying to start at the top. Try something simpler, starting from scratch. You have the photo of Hemingway – begin there. Once you have learned how to see, how to draw, how to paint the face, you can return to the more complicated three-person sketch with confidence.

All right, I can see that.

So go back to bed meanwhile.

I think so, yes. Thanks.

7 a.m. People are speculating on how Dirk had unintentionally inhibited the growth around him of yeast and then, by consciously explaining to the world around him that this isn’t what he meant, reversed the inhibition. Someone – Bob Paddock? – speculated on the role of infra-red light. I didn’t even read the speculation, let alone absorb the idea, because for some reason my computer is quite picky as to what emails I get to read, but the very word “light” got my attention and then I thought, rather than my giving forth second-hand speculation, why not ask you for the speculation direct?

It isn’t quite that way. [Meaning, it isn’t that something gets my attention and I then am led to speculate about it.] the way it works is that you absorb information from many sources, and so different bits are available to you. (You know this is how you make sense of history; it hasn’t occurred to you that that one use of the process is just that: one use.) When you have a sea of bits of information available, it becomes possible to link seeming unconnected bits, and there is an insight (sometimes) seemingly out of nowhere. Because the link is not created by logic, it can seem whimsical, absurd, superstitious, whatever.  But true links may be verified by logic even though one didn’t connect them that way.

I got that. What we intuit we may laboriously test to see if it holds up.

Correct. And some things will and some will not. But oddly, whether a given link is real or only seeming is not the important point. The process is universal even among scientists, only contemporary mores lead people to hide the process behind a veil of respectable reasoning – so they conceal the actual process and put the spotlight on the revelation that came via the unacknowledged process.

I thought you were going to say something about light, but I see you intend to discuss process.

And that is your specialty, is it not? You don’t set up to be an expert on physics, but on how to learn to communicate.

All right.

Intuition, you see, is pattern-recognition, combined with openness to pay attention to those recognitions without having to vet their credibility beforehand.

Leonardo da Vinci used to get ideas by gazing at puddles, he said.

And it was not what he was gazing at, nor even how he was gazing, that brought him the ideas. It was that gazing unfocused his mind – occupied his surface mind, you would say – and allowed other parts of his mind to browse. The less he directed the browsing, the freer he was to think outside the box – but he could only browse among things he had noticed in one way or another. A moron staring at a mud puddle isn’t likely to match da Vinci’s insights.

Wilbur Wright was talking to a customer in his bicycle shop and was idly twisting the empty cardboard box he was holding, when he got the idea of controlling aircraft by warping the wings in opposite directions.

And that is an example of you consciously dipping into your personalized sea of information-bits. Or, was it conscious? You have used the anecdote before, so it is available, but how can you trace the process of selection? Why did that anecdote arise just then? The connection was a line of thought about intuition and ideas and the process of encouraging them. Da Vinci and Wilbur Wright were both inventors, both interested in the problem of flight, both men, but that’s about what they had in common. So another line of thought might never have arranged the two in relation to each other or to a neutral subject.

I can see that. Italian politics, painting, the Renaissance – none of these would lead to Wilbur Wright. And Ohio and bicycles wouldn’t lead to da Vinci. Flying would. Fascination with watching birds would. A tremendous analytical ability linked to a reliable mechanical ability would.

But if you did not know consciously that da Vinci had invented the helicopter, or that Wilbur Wright had spent a year watching the movement of birds via binoculars, you could not create (or recognize) that link, unless you knew it and didn’t know you knew it.

Deeper and deeper waters here. You’re going to look at subconscious v. conscious v. superconscious.

Doesn’t it follow? Your society’s ideas on the subject are not as helpful as they might be because, as Dion Fortune said, they had gotten hold of it from the wrong end, thinking 3D consciousness superior and more focused than non-3D consciousness. This is because they postulate each 3D being as the center of that consciousness, shading off to an ill-defined sea.

And this is why I need, or needed, to study many things, that I might have them more accessible even if forgotten.

Yes, and some people will not be able to follow the leap you just made.

Isn’t it obvious? Somehow whatever is, or apparently has been, conscious is more accessible to us than what has not been conscious. So the more things we exposed ourselves to, the wider the immediate sea of possibilities to dip from.

Let us propose a model, and you need not relate it to current psychological thinking, nor even to the model of consciousness we sketched out for you years ago, that you have mostly forgotten about.

• Take models as sparks! As ways to enable connections by removing logical barriers to associating various things. As an example, think how the very word “transmutation” froze scientists in just the way that the word “heresy” froze men of the Middle Ages. It wasn’t only concern for their own respectability (though it was that too) but more fundamentally it was a challenge to not only their worldview but to every logical connection and every logical division upon which they had built their lives! There was the abyss, and they were terrified to move a finger.

It looked like you were going to provide a list of bullets.

We began that way, but the initial point seemed worth emphasizing. Models make possible, but they indirectly make im-possible, too. Hold your models lightly, and do not hesitate to hold incompatible models simultaneously. What one will conceal, another may make obvious.

So, our model:

• One mind, one reality, no ultimate cracks or divisions.
• Yet, in effect, many minds (hence many realities), separated not in absolute but in practice, in the way that California may be distinguished from New York: Same continent, but different emphasis.
• Within each 3D individual, a local mind absorbing influences, choosing, recognizing links. To that extent, separate.
• Yet each 3D mind shades into its non-3D mind, and there is two-way interaction possible (and indeed inevitable, but not always recognized by the 3D side).

Can you see that the conscious/unconscious model is only a slipshod make-do?

I sure can. And I’m hoping that next time you will go into some of the variables of communication that we experience in employing Intuitive Linked Communication.

You haven’t absorbed all the lessons implied in the novel “you” wrote. Dark Fire’s premise was that telepathy is dangerous to vested interests. But it is also that telepathy cannot be separated (except logically) from psychic functioning.

Well, I thought I knew that, in writing the book. How have I not absorbed the lesson?

Next time.

Okay. Well, thanks for all this. .An unexpected treat, today.