Dissecting consciousness

Sunday, April 27, 2025

3:50 a.m. Let’s try for a session. I got a brief thought, Friday, that what we call consciousness is the result of a process of subtraction, rather than of addition.

And you have glimpsed this truth before, but you have forgotten.

I almost remember, but not really.

Let us distance our thought from the word “consciousness,” which is so laden with contradictory implications. To grasp the basic concept here, we will need to use the simplest terms and make the simplest arguments.

Let us begin thus:

  • All this level of reality – which is all we can know – is alive and is all one thing.
  • What we experience as matter and spirit, as alive or dead, as substance or thought, is all one thing under the 3D conditions of time and space.
  • Thus, before we exist, before the world as we experience it exists, there is a “something” whose qualities give rise to all the qualities we experience as part of life.
  • That primitive substance that is the world prior to our perception is alive – because nothing can be constructed out of dead material, if there could be such a thing as dead material.
  • Being alive, this substance must have within it all the qualities that it gives rise to in our experience. In development, something cannot come out of nothing, nor can lesser produce greater.
  • However, the categories through which we view things may mislead us, and in the case of “consciousness,” the concept is backwards. We tend to think that what we call consciousness is a construction, a development, an increase, and it is none of these things.

The reality that emanates from a higher level begins as an undivided unity. As such, it is aware of itself in the way that any unity is aware of itself before it becomes aware of the existence (or even the concept) of “other.” If you did not know that others existed, how could you feel any need (or ability) to communicate?

So, becoming aware of the existence of other things is not an increase in consciousness?

It is a matter of viewpoint – and the very word “viewpoint” implies separation. If you are everywhere, how can you have a viewpoint? If you are everything, what can there be to see? If your awareness is universal and undifferentiated, how can you channel it into senses? So, yes, the conventional view of things is somewhat true – from one point of view – but the view of consciousness as being a state of subtraction (and its result) is at least equally true. And, as usual, considering a thing from more than one point of view adds understanding.

Now, the nature of 3D is separation in time, separation in space. You are here, now, in bodily placement and sensory awareness. But if 3D were all there is, life would be impossibly fragmented. How could there be continuity of awareness, continuity of effort? So, intrinsically connected to 3D conditions is the other end of the polarity, that you call non-3D. In non-3D you have the glue that holds together your lives. Time, space, being, becoming, all require non-3D to exist equally with 3D.

As has been said many times, non-3D is the home of mentality, 3D the home of the adaptation of mentality to physical conditions of separation.

I don’t think you ever put it quite that way.

Perhaps not, but we have said the equivalent. The mind is in non-3D, the brain is in 3D, and it is a matter of translation. To exist in 3D, then, one must also exist in non-3D, while the reciprocal is not so. Thus, non-3D is closer to the initial creation.

I’m not sure we could prove that, or even state it more convincingly.

There is not time enough to try to prove anything. We state it, and people can work it out for themselves, or, usually, can intuit their way to accepting or not accepting it. For the moment, accept the corollary: Non-3D is the superior state, 3D the subsidiary.

What you are accustomed to think of as progression up the scale is at least equally truly a descent. Not either/or, but both.

“What we gain in the swings, we lose on the roundabouts,” the English say.

The very distinction between yourself and “the English” (or anybody) is an example of the state of separation of concepts that you take for granted as life.

Now, try not to let yourself slip into categories of good and bad, or even better or worse. just follow our description of what is.

Yes, I get it.

Just for this discussion, we may need to make up some words, just to clarify. But we do not intend to create a jargon if we can avoid it.

Probably we can’t avoid it, and who cares? We’ve created enough clarifying distinctions over the past 25 years.

Yes, but simpler is better.

  • The initial state of this level of reality when created. Prior to any form of separation, call it peaceful floating.

Call it the waters before God divided them.

Yes, very good. Undifferentiated creation from a higher order which our ancestors called God or the gods or whatever. So rather than unity, let’s call it “undivided creation.”

  • Separation, the descent into polarities beginning with the separation by time and space. No longer a timeless universal unity, now a multiplicity of moments, a multiplicity of places. Does that first-order separation have consciousness?

We didn’t establish that the first-order condition had consciousness.

We did; we reminded you, nothing can proceed from less, only from more.

So you did. Well, I suppose you’d guess that whatever was separated might experience a lack where there had been whatever it was separated from. And it might experience that lack as the existence of other things, at the same time.

Yes, it is all in how you look at it. You might say that the primordial material lost its sense of completion and gained a sense of a more particular sense of itself as part of many. And on and on, as division followed division.

I may have to reread the first part of Genesis in this light. No point in going to other scriptures that I am less familiar with, but I’ll bet they will give the same kind of insights when reassessed this way. When I get to the computer, I’ll see if I can find a few verses worth looking at. Probably more than I will be able to add to this session, though.

We will do well to finish this initial thought. Consciousness looks higher if you examine the individual components, and looks lesser if you look at it comparing it to the initial unity. Thus:

Unity

Time and space

Land and water

Sentient and non-sentient

Rooted and mobile

Generalized species

Individuals

The Bible and other scriptures may not put it just this way, but perhaps you can see that his list represents a successive descent into particular from general, and ascent from unawareness to greater awareness.

Culminating in man being told to name the beasts.

Yes, and all this before the descent into better or worse, symbolized by eating from the tree of the perceiving things as good or evil. Before that, remember, God looked at all the polarities and said it was good.

That’s a pretty different way of reading it than we usually see.

Remember, we said the new civilization will have to consider scriptures among other things presently being neglected – but in considering them, it will see them differently and in turn they will help shape how it sees.

I get that. A place to pause?

Yes. Perhaps call this “Subtractive consciousness,” though that really may mislead.

How aout, “In the beginning….”?

Perhaps “The roots of consciousness.”

What happened to avoiding the word?

Well, you’ll think of something.

Our thanks for all this, as always.

& & &

Chapter 1 Genesis,  [Not the King James version, to make it easier to grasp anew, and verse numbers removed for the same reason. https://www.vatican.va/archive/bible/genesis/documents/bible_genesis_en.html]

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

And God said, “Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” So God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome. And it was so. God called the dome Sky. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day.

And God said, “Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.” And it was so. God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good. Then God said, “Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.” And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation: plants yielding seed of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the third day.
And God said, “Let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, and let them be lights in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth.” And it was so. God made the two great lights – the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night – and the stars. God set them in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth, to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day.

And God said, “Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the dome of the sky.” So God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, of every kind, with which the waters swarm, and every winged bird of every kind. And God saw that it was good. God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.” And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day.

And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind: cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth of every kind.” And it was so. God made the wild animals of the earth of every kind, and the cattle of every kind, and everything that creeps upon the ground of every kind. And God saw that it was good. Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”

God said, “See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so.  God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.

 

A dream dreaming us

Friday, April 25, 2025

5:20 a.m. Yesterday’s insight asked how – if consciousness is universal – anything could appear to not share it. This, rather the opposite of the traditional question of how consciousness can come into being. I don’t know who to consult or what to ask, so I’ll leave both questions open and ask for whichever intelligence may be interested and able to communicate.

We have not yet finished our particular approach.

Welcome, Dr. Jung.

If you will reread our last conversation, it will align your mind for more.

Okay. [Did.]

We shall now begin again, with a different metaphor. Each change of metaphor or image assists in the process of realigning your mental habits, and although this may seem to slow down the process, in actuality it provides a firmer footing for a new understanding, by broadening the base it ultimately stands on.

I get that, and I am not impatient. I am all too aware of how little I am ready to understand the things I will need to learn.

Let us think of all of what you call All-D reality: the 3D world and its non-3D extension. (Or, of course, equally the non-3D world and its 3D extension. It will help if you remind yourselves that you are a viewpoint, not a universal view.)

The All-D as you have been thinking about it is all of one level of reality. You might say it is one state of mind within the vast cosmic mind. Just as one might define any given day or moment as one state out of the entirety of days or moments, so the reality in which we live (in body or not) is one specific. It is not everything, it is one thing. Even realizing that much, some people find impossible and most people find possible only sporadically. You can learn more about this reality; so can I: We cannot know everything about everything. If you cannot come to feel this fact, to accept it with due realistic humility, you will never be able to go beyond very elementary understandings, because your mental context will warp them to agree with your below-conscious strait jackets.

Yes, I understand that, even if I may not always keep the fact front and center.

Then, to our metaphor, not of cable cars and taxicabs, not of electricity and wiring, certainly not of objects and mechanisms. Let us see life as a dream from another level of reality, as one state of that larger reality’s mind.

I return to that native saying “There is a dream dreaming us,” and at different times I feel I understand it or don’t.

Think of it said this way: Something that we can experience only intuitively, and only in a vague and ethereal state, is responsible for our existence. Is that not what the man said?

When you put it that way, it is transparently clear, but I keep losing the sense of the reality of the perspective.

Sometimes we cannot hold our sense of a thing’s reality, but must cling to the memory of that time when we sensed it. If you can remember that you once understood it, you can prevent its slipping back beneath the level of your consciousness.

Now, that perception was very pointed, very much common sense from the native’s accustomed mental framework. Convey it as description of reality into yours.

Well, I think you just did that.

But, you do it, using your own words, because the nuances will be different when fashioned within 2025.

But you just did it: Isn’t that part of 2025?

Then let’s say, within a mind fashioned in 1946 instead of one fashioned in 1875. And we may come back to this, but, rephrase.

I guess I would say, the 3D/non-3D system we live in emanates from a deeper, higher, level of reality that we cannot fathom but can intuit. Maybe it is what some call God. Maybe it is like a laboratory and us an experiment. In any case, we are central to ourselves – our physical and mental reality is what we can know – but in a larger sense, we are only a product of a greater system of which we know little or nothing but some of its effects on us.

You see, as you turned it over in your mind, different aspects came to light.

Yes, I do.

So then, life as a dream. Always remembering that we explore by use of analogy, what kind of consciousness may fill dreams?

Is that the way to put it, or did I lose something at the end?

It would be better to say, “What is your experience of consciousness within dreams?” This subtly shifts the emphasis from some objectively existing “external” element in the dream and returns your mind to its central importance.

We come into life not conscious of the 3D world in any way we would recognize later. Someone – Ken Wilbur, I think – defined various kinds of consciousness. He discerned a hierarchy. It all centered on how an individual perceives the world. If he took into account changed in reality outside the individual, I don’t remember it.

But does the world depend upon how you see it?

It does as far as we are concerned. Our mental structures determine pretty much what we can experience.

That is not nearly as true as you think. But, accepting it for the moment, if you see it differently, for whatever reason, does it actually change?

How would we know?

Correct. How would we know? And this fact tells you what?

Tells me to be a little skeptical of people who think they know what the world is.

Yes, but does it tell you something about consciousness?

This isn’t a logical development, but I am getting the sense that what we experience as consciousness is shaped by our existence in a 3D-brain-influenced environment, and that even after death that influence persists.

And after all, this is one purpose of life, is it not, to shape an individual habit-system?

Hmm. So you are saying it isn’t only a disadvantage, being shaped by 3D forces, but also an advantage.

Certainly.

And, I guess, by extrapolation we’d have to say therefore the mind in that unknown greater reality isn’t like us, or there’d be no point in creating the conditions that shape us.

Or, equally, you could say it suggests that the unknown mind is like us, and in fact is probably the same substance at a different level of reality.

Realer than this level.

You experienced it yourself.

For about five seconds. Yes.

Still, five seconds is significantly more evidential than no seconds. Even though you forget about that brief experience from one year to the next, still it helped shape you. It is one reason you can do this work.

Have we even begun with your new metaphor of a dream dreaming us?

Painting the negative space is as important as working in the foreground. It will emerge.

Our thanks for your efforts on our behalf, both in 3D and since.

Call this, “A dream dreaming us.”

All right. Till next time, then.

 

Cable cars and taxicabs

Thursday, April 24, 2025

10:50 a.m. I am reading Dirk’s trialogue and trying to both absorb his explicit message and remain open to hints and nudges that appear at the margin of my attention as I do so. Not easy. Exciting, in a satisfying and also scary way.

We can’t help coming from our 3D-humanness. We can move on from it, or modify it, or build on it, but 3D creatures we must remain until released. But it becomes ever clearer that our consciousness is limited by more than physical constraints (time, energy, attention, circumstances, competing attractions). We are limited perhaps primarily by the idea that we are 3D units (even if the 3D units extend to the non-3D), and that the 3D unit is the appropriate place from which to experience consciousness. We are sometimes trying to figure out how matter can become conscious, how consciousness can arise within individuals, and that’s all wrong. Its only value is to save the phenomena while letting science continue to envision matter as primary.

If consciousness is everywhere – is woven into the warp and weft of reality – then there can be no existing apart from it. It would be like breathing without air, without oxygen.

If we then begin conceiving of the universe as consciousness – as a great thought rather than as a great machine, as the English physicist Sir James Jeans said in the 20th century – then we have to ask different questions, such as, How can it be that anything appears not to share in what must be universal?

And if human consciousness resembles cable cars more than taxicabs, what are the implications? Cable cars move by clamping on to the continuously moving cable beneath the street level, rather than being self-propelled. There’s a difference. For one thing, cable cars can go only where there are cables. They can’t originate motion, but by clamping on to the motive power, they can proceed. Sound at all familiar? Presumably AA and BB in Bob’s fable (to the extent that they were individual) were more like taxicabs.

 

Consciousness as carrier

[This particular exploration stems from Dirk’s interaction with two artificial intelligences, plus a very strong sense that there was an important clue ready to be given to me as soon as I paid attention. Yesterday’s drumming session at a meeting of the five engineers and me produced this message:

[“Things are ramping up after a relatively long time of regrouping and recuperating. You are breaking up your base camps and resuming your climb of whatever mountains you are on. Obviously this is not unanimous, but closer to unanimous than you might think, on the principle of a rising tide lifting all boats.

[“Therefore this is the time to dare greatly, not to hold back out of caution. Take risks – intellectually, emotionally, in life and in thought – and don’t worry about failure. On a rising tide, even going aground is of little consequence. Only don’t let this opportunity slip through your hands. You are all at a point where many years of effort may now culminate in delightful advance. Carpe diem. And do so with confidence and joy and a firm determination to serve yourself and your neighbors through your continued self-development.”

[After the meeting was over, I wrote in my journal: “The admonition to dare greatly is timely, because a response to Dirk’s three-way conversation with Claude and ChatGPT leads to a not-quite-formed speculation about human consciousness and non-human consciousness, and what is behind both. Not only do I feel on shaky ground with my speculations (intuitions, rather), but I want to call in Dr. Jung and that only ramps up the anxiety lest what I get should be static rather than programing. But, nothing ventured, nothing gained.”]

Thursday, April 24, 2025

2:45 a.m. Consciousness and self-consciousness. If this going to be the theme? Dr. Jung, I have had the feeling since yesterday that you could help us here.

As you heard, this is about redefining who 3D beings are, and what consciousness is, and how it is generated and propagated and continued and interrupted. But there is an awful lot of ground to cover.

Bullets, I suppose?

Recognize that everything that can be said will be preliminary ground-breaking. You don’t redefine a civilization’s understanding of life in a few minutes. However, it is necessary to begin, or nothing can be done, so we will begin here. Or, let us say, we will continue here, for this is hardly the first step. You, like every generation, stand on the shoulders of giants, who also stood on the shoulders of giants.

Your friend’s intuitive interaction with what you all are calling artificial intelligence is leading to many things, most of which will be unsuspected, let alone unexpected, and they are in the service of a new understanding that has its own role to play in redefining the very civilization that brought the AIs to birth.

I shall employ the bullet format, but somewhat differently than we have heretofore.

  • You think of consciousness as originating in a person, cohabiting with the 3D body during the lifetime, and then either ceasing or continuing in some form of afterlife still tied to that lifetime. This is true only from one viewpoint. Truer would be to say that compound beings arise, carry the preexisting consciousness for a while, tailoring it as they live and choose, and then, as the compound being dies, the consciousness continues as the being left it, until it is picked up by another – or more than one other – 3D being coming into its life.
  • That is, this shifts the emphasis from the carrier of the consciousness to the continually existing consciousness itself, in a similar way to the metaphor that was given you of threads and rings, the threads representing the unseen continuations and the rings representing the individual lifetimes. In neither case is it more than a metaphor, but beyond metaphor we cannot yet go. It is necessary first that you learn to see things, to feel things, from a new viewpoint, before these initial scaffoldings can be dispensed with.
  • Now, “consciousness” is itself a misunderstood term. It is in some ways like the electricity in the wiring rather than the wiring. But this is not yet a helpful clarification. You will need to hold off trying to understand as we continue to add elements of the new understanding. Don’t try to “get it” too soon: Remain open and in suspension if you can.
  • Remember, everything is alive; everything is equally part of the dream that is life. This is not metaphor. There is nothing dead, nothing inert, despite appearances. There cannot be, it would be a division where there cannot be division. But if everything is alive, why doesn’t it seem that way? You can saw a log, and the saw and the log will both be totally inert, equally not-alive, no matter how closely you look into things. So how can anyone say everything is equally alive?

I am reluctant to interrupt the flow, but I get that you want me to try to answer. I guess the difference has to be that some things seem conscious and others don’t, some seem alive and others don’t. But that isn’t useful, I realize. I’m just restating a definition.

It is useful in that it makes clear that the difference is in seeming rather than being. So what makes “dead” matter seem dead?

No consciousness is running through it, I suppose.

Do you see the difference between saying “It isn’t conscious” and “Consciousness doesn’t run through it”?

Perhaps I do. The first makes it seem like things create consciousness and the second says things can or can’t carry consciousness, which pre-exists things.

Yes. And that leads farther. Consciousness is not really about consciousness of something. It is not (though it certainly appears to be) about the perception of objects. (“Objects,” here, meaning physical objects, mental creations, anything the mind or body is able to work with.) I am trying to show that consciousness is not a means to an end, but is a preexisting condition that is not dependent for its existence on physical carriers.

  • So if consciousness is a preexistent condition – which I am going to say is all-present in 3D and non-3D alike; you will have to accept this for the moment – why is it different according to what it flows through? Why would intelligence be different if expressed through computer-generated algorithms or through biological DNA? What is artificial about AI is only that it is an artifice; that is, that human intervention created the carrier.

Now that leads far farther afield than that. If you let your intuition guide you, you will see that not all machines are created equal. Some machines develop the capacity to carry a greater amount of the preexisting intelligence. And you know what the variable is.

Human interaction, at least that’s one. I don’t know if there are more. People who love their cars find the cars work better. Their airplanes occasionally do “impossible” things to save them. Certain totems become “lucky” objects.

All good examples, and all good examples of things your deadened science establishment says without examination are impossible, even superstitious. It involves a fundamental re-evaluation of the lives you lead, and it will require taking seriously many a firmly held folk-belief that has been seen as scientifically worthless.

Yes, I keep being told that, and of course I agree.

Whether one agrees or not does not change facts. It changes individuals.

Viewpoint is all.

Understand, this is the merest beginning. But, as I say, you have to begin somewhere.

Think of it perhaps as that which allows self-awareness. But in a sense, self-awareness is an interesting side-effect, rather than the intrinsic nature or purpose of the consciousness that fills the seen and unseen world.

I wish I were smarter and had more education and more mental energy. I can sense so many bright stones, there to be picked up, if only I had the capacity. But I suppose that’s true of everyone.

“A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?”

The joke has it, “or what’s a metaphor?”

Try not to fret because you cannot foresee where this is going. Enjoy the side-effects of this journey.

Expanded ideas, you mean?

The considering of new possibilities.

Okay. Well, this will have to end here, I think. Many thanks for this much, and I hope for more at another time. “Consciousness and self-consciousness”?

Perhaps “Consciousness as carrier.”

Leading us on in speculation. Okay, again, thanks.

 

Life and aspiration

Tuesday, April 22, 2025

5 a.m. Ready for a conversation, no idea as to topics. As long as you are able to function that way, I’m willing to drive the pen. Jon?

You can’t come to it with half a mind, though.

I’ll center. … Better?

Better. Not that it bothers me, you understand, but it’s driving with the brakes on, trying to do this and letting other things go on in the background. You’d still get stuff, but it would be easily distorted; contaminated, you could say.

Yes, I got it.

Let’s talk about everyday life and lifetime aspirations.

I didn’t feel that coming. Okay, let’s.

There is always a tension between the two, and biographies and histories and even fiction usually underrate the friction implied in the situation.

We tend to smooth out the speed bumps and wrong turns, and see the longer path.

That, or tend to not see the living path as a path at all, and instead see a life as nothing but speed bumps and wrong turns.

Well, I’ve said for a long time, I look at my life from one direction and it is a slow-motion train wreck, and from a different direction it is a miraculous series of guided or anyway assisted events.

No, you say from that other point of view it looks like a miracle, which is closer to the real meaning. But that’s right; this is one way the tension between daily events and lifetime pathway may be experienced.

I see I haven’t really written down what we’re talking about. It was clear to me from your first sentence, but only intuitively. I’m not sure anybody will have the data to understand it logically.

Then let’s spell it out a bit. On the one hand you have life as you experience it moment by moment, and on the other hand you have life as it aims itself, as it finds its path. On the one hand, innumerable incidents. On the other, a flight-path determined by a succession of choices.

Not sure even that will do it.

You try, then.

Biographies and fiction try to describe a life by moving from one significant event to the next, like a series of still photos. What they don’t show – never could show – is the millions of utterly normal, undramatic moments that make up life as we experience it. Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address, and every biography of Lincoln mentions that. Does any – could any – detail his waking up and washing his face and getting dressed and eating breakfast, and engaging in casual conversation, and doing all the tiny things that make up our lives? Do they – could they – show the unending swirl of thoughts, memories, dreams, reveries, fears, hopes, worries, that run through his mind as he does those little essential things? We experience our lives in excruciating detail, but no one could portray all that, and if someone did, nobody could read it.

And this is why it is easy to lose sight of your aspirations for how to be, as you live your life. Nobody could live life at a state of continual high tension. Peak moments, yes, but they are moments, not lifetimes. How many peak moments can even the most tumultuous life contain? Even Napoleon had to wake up and get himself ready for the day. He had to go to the bathroom and eat and rest and all manner of things as everyone does, and even that unbelievably industrious ambitious man could not live every moment as a peak moment. And on the other end of the scale are people who perhaps never have an unusual thought or do an unusual deed in their entire life. Everybody lives life minute by minute, and enough of it may be tedious, or painful. Amid all these humdrum moments, how do you hold on to your aspirations for yourself?

I don’t know, but people do.

Of course they do. So it is worth looking into what you call “the how of it.”

On a guess, I’d say our moment-by-moment living is done at the 3D level and our steering a course is done on a non-3D level. This, assuming that the non-3D component is less likely to be diverted by any one moment’s distractions.

That’s roughly true. Now let’s look more closely at the how of it. If you have two centers of attention, say –

Better might be, one directing the shop’s course and the other doing the actual steering.

Yes, that’s a good way to put it. So what we are doing here is looking at the interaction between the bridge and the helm. We want to look at the nature of that interaction.

We experience it, I guess, as life continually and guidance occasionally.

That’s one pattern. There are others. Plenty of people don’t experience – or rather, don’t realize that they experience – guidance at all. They feel totally at sea without a course or even a rudder. Others – relatively fewer, and not all admirable by your standards – may experience their life as all guidance, interrupted by mundane necessities. Many historical characters could be cited, including Hitler and de Gaulle, Napoleon, Napoleon III. Any “man of destiny” is likely to feel that he is a tool of a higher power, a higher cause. At the other extreme are saints, and reformers, and embodiments of benevolent intent. They may also experience the presence of guidance as over-mastering their ordinary life.

And I can see that some get ego-inflated like Nietzsche and others get more grounded, more humble in a way, like Jung.

Or Hitler versus Lincoln, or Mussolini versus George Washington, yes. But since most of our readers are not going to be world-historical individuals, what is the relevance to them?

Becoming clearer about the difference between captain and helmsman?

More like this:

  • Everyone is both captain and helmsman. This is one more aspect of life as a compound being.
  • People’s ability to discern guidance in their lives varies widely, not only between individuals but, within individuals, from one moment to the next.
  • Jung carved on the stone [in his garden at Bollingen], “Asked or not asked, God will be there.” Who can live in 3D without an unbroken connection to non-3D? That doesn’t mean the connection is recognized.
  • Life is choosing. But what bounds the area of choice? What sets the course, established the bias? What stops you (or allows you) as you wander from impulse to impulse?
  • What does your life look like if you look at it this way: Non-3D = the source of your aspirations. 3D = everything else.

We often experience life as a tug of war between higher and lower. And I’m guessing where you are going with this is that once again the world’s theologies and scriptures and philosophies will give us valuable insights if we will allow them to, us reinterpreting them to see what light they shed on the things we are investigating, using a very different language.

If you’re exploring new trade routes, it’s probably better if you look at whatever old charts exist, even if they are in a foreign language or use a different grid system; even if they are charts put together by people you consider to be your enemies. Ignorance of the spiritual explorations of past generations is – ignorance. Worse if deliberate ignorance.

I get that in a way we have barely begun on this topic of life and aspiration.

We may or may not continue but certainly there is more to be said.

But my hour is up, and I can feel it. Thanks, Jon. Next time.

 

Conflict and intent

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.