Saturday, April 19, 2025
5:50 a.m. A couple days of reading instead of conversation. I suppose it’s necessary to break the pattern every so often. So, Jon, what do we talk about? More on healing?
More on intent, perhaps.
Take it away.
A word on the process of Intuitive Linked Communication. You know that the underlying skill is remaining receptive but not passive, remaining actively engaged without moving into trying to direct things. People do it all the time but usually in a different context.
Living a 3D life, accepting whatever comes next and then reacting to it.
Not previewing, not trying to anticipate, not trying to control what comes, yes. And at the same time, being there. Athletes, for example. Skilled pilots, careful scholars, directors of processes (industrial chemists, for example). Soldiers in battle. EMTs in dangerous situations. You could make quite a list of ways people employ this active receptivity, and, if you’re not quite sure of the concept, making a list will be instructive, for you will have to use your judgment continually to decide if this or that example belongs.
And what we are doing here is merely an extension of that skill.
Let’s say, it is a widening of the field of interaction to include the non-3D. but that will be misleading without some further comment, so our diversion may take over.
No harm in that.
No. Well, to say the field widens to include the non-3D is sort of right as a thumbnail summary, but bear in mind that the 3D shades into non-3D, so it isn’t like flipping an on/off switch. It is much closer to turning a rheostat. You become more aware of areas you are already functioning in. Let’s say, you pay more attention to intuition, and imagination (in a certain sense of the word), and undefined possibility. You see? It isn’t a new way of functioning, it’s more of a closer look at what you’ve already been doing all your life.
I would say, it’s doing what you’ve always done, but framing it differently.
Yes, that, but not only that. There is an element of the familiar and an element of strangeness, both.
I have been telling people for years, “anybody can do this,” but very few seem to believe me.
That’s why I mention it in this new context. The way people experienced you doing it emphasized to them the unfamiliar aspect of it, and they didn’t have this conceptual bridge to help them see the familiar aspect.
I don’t know what I could have done differently to help people see that.
It isn’t a question of what you did or how you did it, because any procedure will show some people and not others. All I’m doing here is suggesting another way for people to think of things so that some of them may take the next step.
Okay. How did you happen to jump to this, when you started to talk about intent?
This is discussing intent, in a way.
It’s a stretch.
To return: We discussed intent as an element of health.
We did?
Implicitly. But consider, everybody is different. Everybody’s constitution leads to different values, different abilities to pursue those values. There shouldn’t be any need to say this; it’s obvious is you look around you. But it is surprising how people, when they start trying to make generalizations about life, tend to make them about some one type of person, forgetting that “it takes all kinds” to make up a world.
In practice, this means that somebody following his goals, expressing his values, may run directly counter to your goals, your values. Usually it isn’t direct opposition, usually the angle will be oblique, but the point is the same. Two people pursuing their best values may express very differently, expressing and supporting very different, perhaps contradictory, things. And there’s nothing wrong with this. As your guys – your other guys, I suppose I should say now – often told you, it isn’t a design flaw.
All this conflict isn’t waste product like heat from an engine, and it isn’t Armageddon. It is just the various elements of an ecosystem.
If you look closely enough at your own mental and emotional life, you will see that it depends on conflict as a motivating force. In this context, I don’t mean “conflict” to be warfare, but, let’s say, jostling.
I read somewhere that somebody said humans always move from discomfort toward comfort. Is that what you mean?
I wouldn’t put it exactly that way, but more or less. A bunch of independent factors operating at the same time and place will soon turn into an ecosystem, as each part finds a comfort zone. It’s a big continuing process of accommodation.
I have an illustrative image just out of range, something like things in a frying pan, naturally settling into the most efficient use of space, or molecules of gas, doing the same thing. The jostling is part of the process. It is less warfare than elbowing.
That’s close enough. Now if you look at your life – your mental and emotional life particularly – can you see that this goes on all the time? Well, just as it goes on within you, it goes on outside of you – that is, among others.
And internally, I suppose, down to the molecular level and below.
And to the macrocosmic level, yes.
So it shouldn’t be surprising that life as such is cacophony.
Remember AA [in Bob Monroe’s book Far Journeys]. That parable may be considered as illustrating the appeal of 3D to non-3D.
We could use a little less conflict!
So you think. But what you really mean, in your sanest moments, is that you could use more of certain kinds of conflict and less of other kinds.
Aha! And thus, intent.
You should never forget that you are a part of a system, not a random collection of elements, because over time even a random collection will become a system. You are not lost, you are not embattled, you are not a helpless observer, no matter how it sometimes feels. You are part of a system and so am I and so is everybody and everything else, and if you think you are wiser than the universe, more moral than God, well, that kind of attitude is part of the system like any other attitude.
And our function as relative individuals is to form and live our values.
You may have heard that before.
Regardless of who or what would tend to say, “You’re wrong.”
That attitude is also part of the system – but so is resistance to that attitude.
Freedom, as the guys always said.
Freedom and the opposite of freedom. Hope and the opposite of hope. Benevolence, malice, acceptance, resistance, tranquility, turmoil – it’s all part of the game, and it is up to you to choose.
But you aren’t saying it doesn’t matter what we choose.
I’m saying now that what you are is your list of possibilities. Being what you are, certain choices won’t really be possible for you: They would be out of character. But within these pretty broad limits, it’s up to you. And some people’s choices will appall you, but that’s their business on their end (expressing their values) and yours on your end (reacting to this input from the “external” world).
Call this “Conflict and intent”?
As good a title as any. It may force people to think about the connection between the first words on process and the following words.
If you say so. Okay, thanks as always, Jon. I look forward to more, whenever.