Author: Frank DeMarco

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.

 

Making the unconscious conscious is the key to achieving liberation from old patterns, because as long as something is beneath the level of consciousness, we are at its mercy. Once make it conscious and we can reprogram it closer to heart’s desire.

Our ILC group yesterday did a drumming on the question,  “How can we make the unconscious conscious?” Here’s what i got:

Intend. It is just that simple a first step.

Then, notice. Your life will tell you what is up at bat because something external will be a problem or an opportunity.

Then, dare. If it’s scary, take that as a sign that it’s important. Trust that you won’t be led into deeper waters than you can navigate.

Finally, integrate. Work the new insights; enjoy (or even suffer) the new realizations as they manifest as greater freedom of action.

Intend, notice, dare, integrate. Rinse, repeat until you need to glide for a while, and don’t think you are on a schedule. Nothing wrong with resting once in a while.

Wednesday, April 16, 2025

3:45 a.m. Jon, if you have an agenda, let’s proceed. Otherwise, perhaps we can address the questions posed by Jim Austin in a comment on my blog.

Let’s address his questions, which are good ones. But we will address them from an angle he may not have been considering.

Nothing new there! Seems like we’re always addressing things from an unsuspected angle. In fact, you could say it’s the motto of the firm. Here is Jim’s comment.

[Comment by Jim Austin on Illness as Indicator, 4-14-25

[“Perhaps Jon would discuss his views on the changes that come with ‘advancing years’ … what they might be indicating. Or if those (considered inevitable) deterioration, aches and pains, and weaknesses even fit into this present discussion.

[‘From the post today it seems that as we age, we resonate with different parts of ourselves (as indicated by changing health, vitality, and wellbeing). To:

• remind us that physical life is ending, so tie up as many loose ends as possible?
• push us to ‘get it together’ for existence in non-3D?
• look deeper into life (on both ‘sides’) to see/feel the Oneness and the distinctions?

[“Guidance and I work on this, so other viewpoints would be appreciated and helpful.”]

[Jon:] The simplest approach would be to remember what you got in yesterday’s drumming: Every challenge is also a gift. Put that text in here, too.

[“Stick to the idea of a gift and a challenge being the same thing, different aspects. This is the key to many things.  Be a little careful about banishing things because you think they are “bad” or inconvenient or challenging. Spend time drawing connections between seemingly external problems and hidden internal problems. And the same, by the way, with gifts. If something external favors you, ask what it connects to within you. resonance, after all, is resonance.

[“Remember that your goal is not perfect health in the sense of no challenges. It is, more, perfect health for you, bearing in mind that sometimes physical challenges prevent or substitute for emotional or other challenges that might be harder to deal with.”]

It helps if you keep your eye on the ball. What is 3D life all about? Endless prolongation? Achievement of some kind of bodily perfection? For that matter, is it even about achieving anything? Or is it about striving, rather than achieving?

That almost seems to say that by definition, we are going to remain unsatisfied.

No, whether you are satisfied with your life is a matter of your willed choice. You can be satisfied or dissatisfied less according to circumstances than according to temperament. But you will never be perfectly fulfilled (regardless of whether you are satisfied) because, by design, life has more possibilities than can be manifested.

Yes, I think we’ve got that: All that extra potential leaves us free to change directions.

So, then, consider your situation, a more-than-3D creature in a 3D span of years. What are you there to do?

To create ourselves, if I understand it right; to choose among possibilities.

And can there be an end of possibilities?

Theoretically, you mean?

No, practically. Could anybody ever use up all their possibilities?

I suppose we could run out of possibilities that we had a chance to manifest.

You suppose wrong. A helpless cripple on his or her deathbed still has possibilities, and you know what they are.

A choice of attitude toward whatever manifests. Frankl again.

Well, he may have lived to become a cranky old man, but as the saying goes, when you’re right, you’re right.

But I get the sense that when Seth told Jane Roberts she could choose to live, he was talking about more than a choice of how to accept the physical condition that was killing her.

He was pointing out that there was a reason why it was killing her, and that she cold change – could decide, you could say – so that the illness no longer matched the reality she was enduring. But this doesn’t mean quite what it may sound like. He wasn’t saying, magically move to an alternate reality, or parallel timeline, or however you want to think of it. He was saying, she was providing the basis for the resonance between her life and the illness, and if she changed – which was within her power, if she knew how to do it – the resonance would be broken and the necessary consequences would no longer apply.

If she could find the key – just as I was thinking as a kid – if I could just find (or remember) the key.

Now, do you see how this connects to Jim Austin’s question?

Not clearly. I see that it has to do with the conditions being also gifts, or anyway opportunities.

Health challenges, like other types of challenge, present opportunities for greater clarity, if addressed properly. Do you want to learn what’s still hidden from you in your unconscious mechanisms and procedures? A challenge in the 3D world – seemingly external – will do that. Whether you can and do use the opportunities is of course up to you.

There is a tricky aspect to this. Health challenges are external in that they manifest seemingly independent of us, but they’re not external, in that it is our own body, under our own control (theoretically).

Everything in 3D seems external and is also a part of you. That is the whole point of the 3D world as signpost to your unknown inner reality. And if you keep this not-so-obvious fact in mind, Jim’s questions answer themselves.

They do?

Try this:

• As you age, different problems arise. The pattern differs among people, but it is safe to say that everybody faces something, and usually more than one something.
• Each of these “somethings” can lead you to greater specific insights, and often enough can lead you to things you can still do something about. It isn’t about reaping what you have sown (though it can be that too), but about life continuing to serve up opportunities.
• It isn’t so much tying up loose ends as reviewing what else remains possible to take into account. “Loose ends” is one way to think of it, but less with the idea of tidying up than with the idea of seizing the day.
• It is true, you could look at it as preparing for your next phase of life, only don’t stress the future over the present. It is still necessary to be here, now, while there is life and breath.
• As to looking at “both sides now” and seeing the underlying oneness: That is a possible side-effect, but not the main purpose. The main purpose is for you to continue to do what you can, as much as you chose it. Realization of the oneness of internal and external doesn’t necessarily follow. For some it will, for some it won’t.

Now, bear in mind, health challenges are not the only thing in life. Some people live healthy lives right up to the end, and then their 3D self dies. That doesn’t mean they haven’t met plenty of other kinds of challenges.

I can see that.

And remember always, it doesn’t matter what you think you know of someone else’s life. You’ll never have the real flavor of it, any more than others will know the flavor of yours. In that sense, all lives are private. This isn’t about secrecy, it’s about the impossibility of seeing all aspects, and particularly the difficulty caused by the fact that 3D always imposes point-of-view limitations – perspective. Fortunately, you don’t need to know everything about anybody (even yourself!) to know enough to get a feel for them as a fellow soul on a journey like your own.

I can’t tell if we have given Jim what he needs.

He’ll know, and he or others can always ask further questions.

True. Okay, well, thanks again, and till next time.

 

Tuesday, April 15, 2025

12:40 a.m. Should we begin? We were going to discuss illness as facilitator.

Which is the same as discussing wellness as facilitator, or geography or heredity or proclivity as facilitator.

Just one more factor in bounding our possibilities, you mean?

Certainly. Not all factors are of equal strength within any given life – certainly not between or among other lives either – but they are factors. In discussing illness, it is important that we not accidentally give the impression that it is particularly determinative. It can be; it isn’t usually. But everyone will have a weak link in their armor of health. It may not be particularly weak, but in the nature of things, not every link will be the same strength. Under stress, one will be more likely than others to fail.

And in the absence of stress?

Many people live their entire lives without a physical or mental or emotional link snapping or even bending. Such cases are not particularly fortunate; this situation merely means that their challenges come in other forms: poverty, perhaps, or isolation, or being square pegs in round holes. Inability to conform to what is expected, lack of brain power; it could be anything. But for the moment we will confine ourselves to the question of health. How does health or a specific lack of health provide opportunity by its very restriction?

I can imagine it steering us away from things the illness renders impossible.

Or it may lead a person into those things for the sake of confronting and perhaps overcoming impossible adversity.

Living on the edge, for the sake of it.

Some people thrive on danger, some on adversity, some on security. It takes all kinds of people to make a world.

So let’s take Helen Keller as one example. Blind and deaf. How could she ever be expected to interact successfully with the world? Impossible, surely – only, she not only succeeded with the help of the remarkable woman [Anne Sullivan] who guided and nourished her; she attained a remarkable level of wisdom and benevolence.

Mark Twain was deeply impressed by her.

So, was her hardship a disadvantage or a spur?

Both, surely.

Of course. Every gift has two sides, and may be turned to account or may become a curse (in effect) by how the person uses it or refuses to use it, accepts and transforms it, or refuses to do so.

Christopher Reeve set up a foundation to promote research into spinal cord injury, and probably never would have done so if he hadn’t been injured.

Yes, but it is important here not to make the mistake of thinking that the effects you can see in 3D are the only effects, or even the most important effects, in terms of a person’s life. Most people in any situation are unknown or relatively unknown to a public. But who could be unaffected by living with such a condition? One more instance of, You never have the data to judge other people’s lives.

Have we wandered from the theme of illness as facilitator? Have we even begun on it?

Just as with illness as indicator, there is no need to spell it out by means of examples. A long table of relationships wouldn’t really add anything, and might deter thought about the relationships. Suffice it to say, health and illness, like every other part of life, ought to be kept in mind and ought not to be made an excuse or a scapegoat.

If we’re through with the subject, how about if we return to the four categories medieval man used? [That is, choleric, melancholic, sanguine or phlegmatic natures.]

I didn’t use them, and anyone wishing to learn about them will find plenty on the internet. What would be the practical application of such a discussion?

None, maybe. Very well, so what next?

Next get some more sleep, and when we resume, we’ll see.

Okay. Thanks for this much.

4:05 a.m. I was saying yesterday, you must feel much lighter without the drag of the body.

Lighter, yes, but of course it isn’t all profit. When you lose the 3D anchor, you lose a certain amount of concentration. You won’t find great writers composing outside the 3D crucible, at least not in the same way. Conditions matter.

Still, would you trade?

You wouldn’t think so – but as usual the question is more complicated than it seems. For one thing, 3D comes mixed with non-3D. It has more possibilities than I realized at the time. More than most people realize. And non-3D has, as you know, certain compensating disadvantages to go with its added freedom. On the other hand, if I had never been in 3D – if I wasn’t an ex-human compound being – maybe I wouldn’t know what I was missing.

Like AA and BB in Bob’s tale? [In Far Journeys]

That’s what I had in mind. AA was seduced by the sheer energy and wild potential of life in the physical, remember. Games within games, he said, feeding the score. It is intense, you have to give it that.

And we, caught inside it, can’t wait, sometimes, to achieve liberation.

Typical perversity of life, always wanting what we don’t have, rarely valuing what we do have.

My favorite analogy for that is – like breathing. If you’ve always been able to breathe freely, you don’t know how to value the fact, not really. Abstractly, maybe.

Or any other physical or mental or emotional condition people live within. They know what it would be worth not to have to deal with it, but they can’t really convey it to others, and they themselves are just as blind to the reality of the prices other people pay.

It occurs to me, possibly we haven’t sufficiently stressed the element of clarity in all this. You have heard that your task is to create enough internal space, by reclaiming the initiative from various robots, to achieve life more abundantly. But maybe another way to say that is, Achieve greater clarity.

Know thyself? Not exactly a new formula.

“New” doesn’t matter, any more than if something is easy or hard for someone to say. What matters is, is it true? Know thyself – which means know what you’re in 3D to do and what you ought to leave alone. And how do you know yourself? You have to be willing to look, and you have to be able to see, and you have to be able to understand, and make decisions and carry them out.

That sounds like bullets.

Yes it does.

• Willing to look. That takes courage sometimes, because everything about yourself that you disapprove of is probably shoved down into the unconscious. You don’t want to know, and you work pretty hard sometimes not to know. But if you aren’t willing to look, how can you get beyond superficial understanding? This is one reason why life often puts people in a bind, to force them to do what they need to do but are reluctant to do.
• Able to see. The light that puts out our eyes is darkness to us, Thoreau said. Being able to see involves more than willingness; It also involves capacity. That is why many people never do this work. they know at some deep level that it would destroy them. Ask any psychiatrist. It can be dangerous to the patient to learn too much too soon, or in the wrong way.
• Able to understand. People may be willing and able to see, yet still be incapable of understanding what they perceive. You should know by now, context is – well, it isn’t everything, but it is an awful lot. If you perceive but do not have the ability or the background or the inclination to put two and two together to make four rather than 44, you aren’t going to gain much clarity.
• Make decisions. Logic and reasoning are enhanced by the 3D experience, believe it or not. Having to deal with things partially and sequentially imparts a certain skill in analysis and prediction. But such a skill isn’t useful unless put into play. If you don’t choose, you drift. (It isn’t quite that simple, but more or less so.) Only decisions allow movement in a given direction. Often enough, decisions are made by default, but that is a poor procedure, pretty much guaranteed to be unsatisfactory.
• Carry them out. What good is it to decide what to do, if you can’t bring yourself to do it?

Call this split session “Facilitation and choice,” perhaps.

Or “Facilitation and discernment”?

Either, or something similar.

This split session worked well. Having a couple of sleep cycles between the two reduced the fatigue quite a bit. Thanks again;  I know we’re all enjoying this.

 

Monday, April 14, 2025

4:45 a.m. Illness as indicator, and illness as facilitator. Yes?

And how do you feel?

You know how I feel: crummy. (Crumby, for purists.) But I trust my state of health or non-health is not being used for display purposes.

Isn’t the theme illness as indicator? Why would your state of being not be relevant?

Okay, well, I have a mild headache and I’ve been up and down all night and I have a persistent wheezing and my back hurts. Other than that, things are peachy as usual.

Now look at the negative space.

The rest of the picture, you mean? Well, as far as I know there isn’t anything serious going on, and things have often been much worse.

Bring firmly to mind some of your difficult nights (and notice, it has been a good while since you have gone through one like that).

You have a point.

Describe one, just a little.

I feel like a kid: “Do I gotta?”

It will be instructive – only don’t wander into it, just describe it a little.

Very reluctant even to bring it to mind. All night long, gasping for breath, nothing holding it off, no rest because I can’t lie down or even relax in a chair. Chilly or sweaty or both alternately, wracking coughing, maybe sneezing, painful breathing, each breath an effort, hours of waiting for the time to pass because day is never as bad as night and sometimes the attack would cease the moment the sun came up, which was perplexing and irritating, if finally a relief. Getting through the next day on insufficient sleep, knowing that another night is coming –

You’re right, things are a lot better now.

Your friend Bob’s wife Karen suffered from spinal cord leakage that left her in continuous unbearable pain. Your experience wouldn’t necessarily have been easier for her, but you an see that she might have swapped if only for the variety, for the surcease of the torment she endured on an unending basis.

Sure. I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to swap with her. Mine was easier to bear, and besides, I was used to it.

Dirk’s ankylosing spondylitis – would you have swapped for that?

Hell no! And I see your point. It is the same point the good sisters used to make in Catholic school: Everybody’s burden fits them, nobody else’s would. They didn’t put it that way, but that’s what it amounted to.

Now, let’s tread lightly here, lest anybody think we’re making light of anyone’s situation.  Still, it must be said, nothing is random in the universe. If you are bearing a burden, (a) there’s a reason or it – that is, there is something in it for you, and (b) therefore, you can bear it. Even if you ultimately have to kill yourself to be free of it, that isn’t defeat and it isn’t meaningless. Nobody gets cheated in the full scheme of things, regardless of what appearances in 3D suggest.

I can hear people thinking, “That’s easy for you to say,” and I will respond on your behalf as I always do when someone says that: Whether it is easy or hard to say is not the point. The point is, it’s true.

So supposing someone has a severe life-threatening or let’s say life-crippling illness: Steven Hawking, say, or the actor who became a paraplegic after he fell from a horse.

Christopher Reeve.

Consciously, would either of them have chosen life in such a strait-jacket? Then why would they have chosen it at other levels? “Upstairs,” as you put it.

I don’t have a clue. I assume it isn’t random; I always assume that. But beyond that, no idea.

You were told from the beginning, 3D life is choosing. And you gradually worked out that it is always choosing within limits, and that the limits are never random, hence could be said to have been chosen at some level. But let’s look at that a little more; it may look different now.

I sort of have the idea. It isn’t that the limits were chosen before the life, or even within the life.. but I can’t quite get the next step in the chain of logic.

It isn’t logic, so much as data. I’m providing you with a new angle of vision to look at the facts you already know, and then adding a correlate.

And it centers around the nature of limits.

Yes! And what about the nature of limits?

We can only be in one place, one time, while we are in 3D. Our experiences here are concentrated, focused. And, I see it, by definition we are here and not there,  now and not other times, genetically shaped as we are and not otherwise, etc. We live within limits; that’s the precondition.

If you are placed in a certain moment of time, in a certain locale, does every bit of it have to refer to you? Does it have to reflect your preferences? Is it (in this sense) “all about you”?

We take what comes with the territory.

Let’s say, you take the territory, and what comes with it is a mixed bag, some of which affects you and some of which doesn’t affect you.

And the indicator is what we resonate with!

Almost there. And what determines what you resonate with?

Partly, our decisions as to what we value, what we want to be.

There. Now is it clear?

I’d say, adverse circumstances are as much “us” as favorable ones, and they always fit our conditions or else we couldn’t resonate with them.

You might say, better, it is the resonance that determines what you can or cannot experience, and, within that, how you will experience it.

Therefore, nothing at random, but not necessarily everything as we would prefer it.

And there is your “illness as indicator.” It isn’t exactly about your moral character, or even your beliefs and preferences. It is more, Here’s what you allow into your life by resonance with what you are, knowingly or (usually) unknowingly. Change, and the resonances change – and perhaps your external situation changes.

It feels like I have it at this moment but may lose it as time goes on today.

That’s why you write things down, and print them, and send them to the wind.

No, I meant, I’m not sure I will be able to hold the meaning that the words try to express.

I know what you meant. When you reread the words, cast yourself back to the moment. Intend to remember the inner meaning.

Okay.

And how do you feel?

Very funny. I have just the slightest of headaches – a wisp, no more – and my breathing has been better pretty much since we began. But I notice, whenever I am intensely absorbed in this work, my breathing rapidly becomes background. In effect, it smooths out to let me concentrate on other things.

Or vice-versa. Very well, so much for illness as indicator. You thought we might provide a table: This symptom indicates this cause. I trust this was better. Next time, perhaps, illness as facilitator.

Thanks, Jon. Very helpful. Till next time.

 

Sunday, April 13, 2025

5:30 a.m. Perhaps we could say more about how our health challenges provide indicators of our – what should we call them? – moral deficiencies?

First let’s define terms a bit. We don’t want to leave things so loose that people fit our discussion into their theologies or philosophies rather than hearing what we are actually saying.

“Oh, that’s nothing but ….”

Exactly. It isn’t new if you insist on seeing it as old. And it can’t do you any good if it doesn’t let you change the viewpoint from which you define things. Ask any psychiatrist, there isn’t anything harder than leading people to see themselves differently. It is easy to provide ideas and facts, even to lead people to draw connections between things they had considered unrelated – but to change an idea, a concept, is different from changing a basic orientation. As long as the change is just in their head, nothing has really changed. But when that change reaches the core of the self, then there is the chance of something new.

To put it into Monroe-speak, they connect the mental body and the emotional body. And the energetic body, too, I suppose.

And the physical body. Yes, in that idea-system, they align the four bodies around a new way of experiencing life, and everything changes.

Or, as I have been putting it, they synchronize their emotional and mental spreadsheets so that data and the meaning of the data and the experience of the data interrelate.

The conceptual framework isn’t very important. What counts is the person’s willingness to engage, of course.

Sure. They have to be present.

In all senses of the word, yes.

So on the one hand, you are saying defining terms is important, and on the other hand, it isn’t.

Let’s say, it is usually important as a prerequisite; it is never important as a solution. You have to know what you’re doing, but knowing isn’t enough: You have to do it.

Okay. So what terms?

Health, indicator, challenges, and the difference between moral and – let’s call it wholeness.

• For our purposes, we will call health the smooth and efficient functioning of the 3D body in its circumstances, but with reference to the often unknown, even unsuspected, needs and possibilities of the non-3D component.
• A gauge, a diel, a tell-tale. Not a judge passing sentence or a doctor or guide warning of disaster ahead, more like an automatic weighing of the situation to provide data.
• This could be either of two things, or – usually – both, considered as they impact each other.
  1. A physical situation that is less than optimal – from occasional nuisance through perpetual fact of life to the immediately life-threatening. Of course, in this context, “physical” includes emotional and mental.
  2. The difference between what is and what the individual wants, or thinks it needs. This could be anything from concern over appearance to life as a cripple.

In other words, sometimes we are challenged by the difference between what we want and what we have.

Regardless of what is good for you, or even what matters, yes.

Now the difference between morality and wholeness is well known to mental-health professionals, not so well known to the general public.

I used to quote somebody – can’t remember who (Walter Cooper?) – who said that when we realized that it was better to be whole than good, we held ourselves to a stricter standard.

He knew what he was talking about. But that doesn’t mean that everybody reading that will understand it.

I take it to mean that morality comes from our sense of right and wrong, and wholeness is more a case of accepting all of what we are, like it or not. Therefore – I assume – you could say morality defers to wholeness whenever we admit to our conscious selves more of what is in the depths.

So let us look at the situation from outside the usual 3D framework, to better understand the limits of your viewpoints and the range of your potential. You do not have unlimited room to grow, but you do have room, and you cannot know what those limits are.

I’m wavering, here – speaking of health challenges.

A headache does no harm; a drop in energy does no harm. Giving up unnecessarily would, in a sense, do harm. Let us use this as an example.

Your headache and weariness seem to you external to your will. You didn’t ask for either, and you can’t wish either away. The normal response is to consider yourself a victim of the circumstance. (I use “victim” without prejudice here – I am not implying that you are tempted to scapegoat or to throw up your hands. I mean merely you feel your inability to change things by will or intent.)

And that is a mistake somehow?

It is, let’s say, a sliding away from possibility. Remember what Skip [Atwater] said when you got a headache in the black box [at Monroe], long ago.

“Welcome the energy in and ask what you can be learning from it.”

Well?

A minute. [Doing so.] Hmm, I get that I was splitting my consciousness, part wanting to continue, part begging off, saying “I’m tired!” In a way, the headache was there to tell me to pay attention and either work or quit but not continue self-divided.

Yes, but in a way the headache was there not for the sake of telling you, but as a natural result of the slight additional strain. You see?

It arose, and it is up to me to think to ask what’s going on? If I do, I learn something and the headache goes away.

It went away not because you learned what was causing it, but because you ceased to be divided, which removed the cause.

Yes, I see that. My ears are ringing loudly now, instead. I will do the same thing, asking. [I do so.] When I stop and pay attention, it seems as if the ringing serves as a reminder that I am functioning (for the moment) as if I were separate from the outer 3D world. The ringing is like a wall reinforcing that isolation. It nearly ceased as I paid attention strictly to it, then increased a bit and is still here.

[And, typing this, it is back. I am trying to think if I have ever heard ears ringing while I was writing fiction, and I don’t think so, but of course I may merely not remember.]

So, two fast examples of symptoms as indicators, you see. The gas gauge doesn’t cause the tank to become empty, or full, or half-full; it merely reports on what the situation is.

And if we don’t want to go around with an empty gas gauge, we need to fill the tank. We aren’t operating on the gauge at all, but it will automatically reflect the new situation.

True in that respect. But the situation is a lot more complicated than that, or everybody would be in perfect health except the ones who aren’t paying attention.

I’ve paid plenty of attention to asthma over the years.

You have paid plenty of attention to the situation as you experienced it. How much attention have you paid to what it was indicating?

I know that many people claim to have a cookbook that says, this illness is a sign of this or that emotional situation, but I am not convinced. I remember Skip used to use one such scheme with great success, someone’s cookbook. Can’t remember whose.

Louise Hay.

That’s right. Or, I think so. Anyway, that approach worked for him, not for me. could you have made your kidneys work if you had changed your attitude?

If I had spent less time being pissed off, you mean? What do you think?

I think, can’t be that simple.

It isn’t that simple, but that isn’t wrong. There was a reason why physicians used to divide temperaments into choleric, melancholic, sanguine and phlegmatic.

[For those interested, use your search engine; you will find plenty on the net.]

Now, this is enough. You are at about your limit, and this is a natural place to pause anyway. We can resume with a closer look at illness as indicator. There’s lots to say, because our common ground is that we look at 3D and non-3D interaction, not look at 3D as if it were separate. And once we get beyond illness as indicator, there is illness as facilitator. But enough for the moment.

Thanks for this. Our theme today?

“Health and illness as indicator,” perhaps. And you might leave people a situation report.

Meaning, headache went away and so did most of the ringing in my ears.

Yes. Till next time, then.

That’s my line. Thanks again.

 

Saturday, April 12, 2025

4:45 a.m. Jon, I can’t help feeling we missed the point somehow about aspiration as one of the keys to health. I do feel like we left it undefined somehow. I’m going to reread it and ask you again.

Perhaps we did, but it seems obvious. If you have belief in rules on one side, and belief in miracles on the other side, what is in the middle but steering? navigating? intending?

Ah. So really in a way it is a duality, with both rules and miracles being a form of fatalism, and on the other side a belief in one’s own efforts.

You could put it that way. But that isn’t really any different from what we said. Faith is one word but it has many shades. On the one end is helplessness, on the other end, confidence.

Okay, I think I see it now. So let’s proceed to the second field awaiting explication, How to look for the key.

You realize, it can’t possibly be “One size fits all.” That slogan is always a lie.

Sure. Everybody is different.

So then, how can there be one key in any mechanistic fashion? But we can set out the rules of thumb.

Sort of like I did in Imagine Yourself Well? Different possibilities for people at different levels?

Yes. But your table was more a summary of possible ranges of possibility. Here we want to be more specific.

Well, I’m sure anybody with an illness or a debility or a chronic susceptibility to something would be interested.

Remember, though, that perfect health doesn’t mean everyone in the same condition. It means what is perfect for you, at the specific time, in your specific circumstances.

That sounds to me like redefining health to be whatever you already have.

Very good. In one sense, that is exactly what I’m saying – and that nobody is going to want to hear. And in another sense, it is the clearest message of hope anyone could want.

I sort of have it intuitively, mind to mind. But it is going to be awkward, maybe impossible, for me to put into words. Bullets perhaps, Jon?

Perhaps. Let’s find out.

• Health can only mean health of all of you, not just any one physical mechanism or system or organ.
• That means, body, soul, spirit, mind, emotions, habits, automatic mechanisms (robots) all in harmony.
• And that means you can’t have perfect health if one part is pulling in one direction, another in another direction, etc.
• That is, you must be one But what does that mean? A simpler organism? No, an integrated, smooth-running, cooperative society.
• Thus, if your aspirations are one way and your habits some contradictory way and your emotional life, some third contradictory way, and your associations and circumstances yet another way – well, that is the opposite of harmony.
• You could even extend this to consider the other lives you are part of – “past” lives, other versions, etc. but this, while true, is beyond consideration for most people. For most people, if they can get their own immediate house in order, they will be doing well.

But perhaps we should drop the bullet format and return to conversation; it will be more illustrative.

Meaning, I’m getting distracted by my reactions to the things you mention as you mention them.

Well, “distracted.” I’d say, “stimulated.” It’s productive. It does what conversation always does, broaden your context both by another viewpoint and by what it brings into your consciousness that was previously beneath your notice. So – react.

For one thing, the thought came through that we are born with physical conditions that reflect what we are at the beginning of our 3D life. It isn’t so much potential (dependent upon our actions) as it is the result of previous actions.

And if you look at it one way, that is people’s idea of karma: What you are is the result of what you were. That idea isn’t wrong, but it needs looking at.

I see it. Take the implied judgment out of it; see it more like a systems problem.

More than that. Nobody manifests every potential he is born with. You couldn’t. That’s part of our freedom within our limits.

I think you mean, what we manifest is going to determine what we get to work on during the lifetime.

Or the other way around: What you want to work on will determine what you manifest. Or – both. It’s always a mistake to oversimplify these things by assuming they work only in any one direction.

Doesn’t this come pretty close to saying, whatever we have to deal with, we’re stuck with it because it reflects what we are?

Yes. But that is the same thing as saying, Whatever you have to deal with is your indicator of what you need to deal with! It is the key. It is your path to perfection, to liberation, if you see it right.

Ah. Change your being, change your external manifestation.

That’s the only way to change it. Well, not quite: Let’s say, that is the only productive way to change it. You may outgrow it or it may develop into something else or you may find yourself “cured” without changing who you are – but in such cases it is closer to giving up on the indicated route and pursuing something else.

I think you mean, we may have a certain number of years in which that condition may be the way toward healing whatever is wrong underneath, and if we don’t use it successfully, it may go away without being the means to a cure it was intended to be.

Sometimes payment is deferred. Sometimes one goes on to deal with other things. There are always other life-problems that can be addressed.

The bottom line seems to be, what we regard as health may be looked at as absence of symptoms.

That’s one way to put it. Someone with low potential may have low conflict (hence what seems a smooth life) or high conflict (because the resources available are barely adequate to deal with the things being set up to prod him into action). You can never tell from the outside.

Well, this seems to me to be pretty close to saying, “Accept your life as an indicator of what you are, and use your challenges to change causes, not symptoms.

I wouldn’t have any quarrel with that definition.

That was your whole career as a psychiatrist, I suppose.

Of course. And of course the hardest thing in the world is “physician, heal thyself.” Not because the physician is unwilling or ignorant, but because working on yourself leaves you no independent place to stand – as you well know from experience.

Whatever our psychic reality is at any moment seems to us to be self-evidently true.

It is very difficult to not believe in the mood one happens to be caught in.

Hence the need for religious communities to provide external support, if you happen to be able to participate in one.

Or, if you are solitary, some kind of pole star that you follow particularly when you don’t want to, to keep you on track.

A lot to digest. I think I am going to ask Peter or someone to run this through an AI and see if it can be crystallized for better comprehension.

If you do that, string together Thursday’s and Friday’s with it. Have the AI address it as one unit, see what comes out.

Not starting at Tuesday?

Start there if you wish and if it does not overwhelm the program.

A very interesting idea. Okay, thanks and I hope to continue these talks. I know 3D consciousness offers focus for non-3D minds – or so I was told long ago – but in turn you give us such added breadth of field. It is very satisfying. So, see you next time, I hope.