Individual and separate – and…

Sunday, May 31, 2020

4:40 a.m. To resume -. Yesterday you said we should continue with the question of how I have not absorbed the lesson that telepathy cannot be separated from other forms of psychic functioning. This, in the context of the variations we experience in practicing ILC in particular, but in connecting in general.

A key – perhaps the key – is to remember that you are both a part of an undivided consciousness and, in effect, a local independent consciousness. You are both a 3D-oriented mind and a mind that straddles 3D and non-3D. Every variation you experience is connected to these two straddles.

Conceptual models that do not recognize this autonomy within unity cannot explain certain things and therefore they under-report them, leading people to not understand what they experience, and in fact to deny their own experience. A model that assumes separation cannot accommodate the fact of non-separation except as an exception, an anomaly, or a misperception. Certain things cannot be, because they are impossible. If nonetheless they are reported, the reports are erroneous or fraudulent or incompetently interpreted.

Yes, of course. I think we’re all familiar with this.

You are familiar with it from others. You may not be aware of portions of your own mind that react in just that same way, creating internal conflict.

I certainly am aware of it! How many years did I struggle with the question of whether I was making it up!

Examine your reactions closely whenever anyone reports a phenomenon a bit too outré for you to swallow easily. (As usual, “you” refers to anyone reading this.) There is always a limit beyond which you wonder if the reporting is accurate or if it has been exaggerated or misstated for whatever reason.

Unavoidable, I suppose, if we are not to give up discriminating and instead accept everything. What would that be but psychic’s disease?

But observe the form it takes. Why should one be more hesitant to accept every thought of another’s than of one’s self?

It implies a suspicion of motive, I guess, doesn’t it? We know whether we are deliberately choosing to fool ourselves; we don’t know that of others.

Yet you also know by now that there is no ownership of ideas. You may discover an idea; it may come to you; you may even have to work to develop it or deduce it. But for you to claim ownership would be as limited as your claiming ownership of a given bit of land or property. Legalities and practicalities aside, “ownership” amounts to the ability to use, not much more. The land is there and when you die or sell it, it remains there. The same for any tangible “possession.” Well, how is intangible possession even that definite?

Aren’t you mixing things here? If I have a storehouse of knowledge, isn’t that a possession? Some may think it dissolves when my body does, but regardless of whether that is true, how is it not mine? I accumulated it, I am the center of it, in the sense that the collection has me as its common denominator. Knowledge, memories, fantasies, anything of the mind seems to me essentially different from things of the 3D world.

And this is true and not true. Thank you for stating the theme so concisely.

I thought I was contradicting you.

New ground here, so go slowly.

All right. I’ll recalibrate.

The key here is the question of whether your minds – our minds too, remember – are individual or separate.

You mean individual or joint, I take it.

No, actually – we almost had to distract your mind for a second to get it written – we meant to distinguish between what seem to you two similar states. “Individual” need not mean “separate.”

As I pause I get the beginning of what you’re meaning.

State it and we will correct.

You have said that a maple tree, for instance, may be equally accurately described as a single tree, or as one expression of maple tree as a whole. 3D conditions incline us to see individual trees as separate but it is equally true to see them as local representatives of maple tree as a distinct category. And, I gather, the same may be said for anything we care to consider – rocks, plants, animals, humans. Considered from one direction we are separate; from the opposite direction, we are representative of a generalized being.

Good enough. Now consider that you as individual have your own thoughts, your own active mental and emotional life, without being separate. Does this not re-form your categories in terms of connectedness?

It is impossible for us to be separate, you are saying.

A little more than that: It is very possible for you to experience yourselves as separate, but it is equally possible to experience yourselves as connected individuals, and that is a very different set of assumptions. Both connected and individual, you see. Hence, a more complicated situation than sometimes appears.

Things are always bleeding through.

Let’s say, at any given moment things may bleed through. Your everyday experience is richer and more complex than it commonly appears to be, seen either from inside or outside.

Now, as so often, you are inclined to look back at the pages written and say, “But we haven’t really gotten anywhere.” In this case, to do so would be to overlook the importance of a model in limiting or expanding your field of perceived possibilities. Once you see why mental isolation is impossible as fact (not as perception, obviously), you see that what you are does not fit the models that assume separation. You are individual; you are also inherently connected. This is the field you play in. Absorb this fact all the way down, and your effective world changes.

We become more able to practice ILC, for one thing.

Not necessarily. After all, the concept you were working from in 1989 is a long way from where you are today, but it allowed you to begin, as it allowed Cayce and Jane Roberts and uncounted others famous or unknown to begin, and continue. You thought of yourself as being alone and that did not prevent you from discovering how to deepen your access.

So then, what does it enable?

You know, or almost know. What is the context of these sessions as they have evolved over the years?

I see.

Spell it out for the studio audience.

“The studio audience” is exactly the point. I began in isolation. TMI programs awoke certain abilities – encouraged me to consider myself in a different way. I shared it with Bob Friedman, thinking we were using access to TGU to make better business decisions, though in retrospect it looks like I was practicing, becoming accustomed. Enter the Voyager Mailing List in 1994 after Tony Sanders’ Castaneda-based mailing list. Years of continued practice, books of transcripts, leading me to an awareness of doing this in public with only a slight delay. Explorers and now the ILC group weekly chat.

Thus, a quiet, scarcely noticed progression from strictly private “within your own head” practice to a more or less public practice, the next step of which leads to joint endeavors.

And we will stop right here. It has been an hour anyway, but this is a good place to pause.

Very well. Our thanks as always.

You see? “Our” thanks. Once it was singular, not plural.