Author: Frank DeMarco

On June 18, 2024, Jane Peranteau, Christine Sampson, Ruth Shilling, and I heard from the guys upstairs in the course of a small ILC group meeting. Their theme: How a few people working together, forming a temporary group mind, in effect create a new level of organization with its own peculiar possibilities, rather like what we are as individuals in bodies. Something to think about.

TGU (through Frank):

You as one individual in one body are a community that functions as a unit. But you [referring to the four of us functioning together at the moment] can form another layer of organization.

As above, so below – the same sense. What you’re accustomed calling a “group mind” is the equivalent of an individual made of communities. It’s temporary, but nonetheless, it’s an individual.

After all, you’re temporary, too, and if you don’t believe us, wait until you die, and then we’ll tell you.

Everything that could describe that larger sense, that larger group mind, could contradict itself if you looked at it from a different point of view – which is what’s happening. So you can look at it and say, “Well, it used to be four different units, now it’s one unit: That’s change.” Or you could say, “They’re the same strands, containing all of them, but now they’re working together: That’s continuity.” Both of those are true.

You could say, “There is conflict among them. There is cooperation among them. There is indifference among them. There is unity.” You see. Reality doesn’t contradict itself, but it contains all contradictions. So, all of those things can be equally true, and it depends upon your ability to either keep your definitions loose or change them.

If you can change your point of view from here to here to here, then you can sort of see it in the round. But the difficulty with one point of view is it gives you perspective, and makes that perspective look real or more definite, more factual, than it is. It’s only a way of seeing things. Okay.

You’re all doing your best, and you’re all working hard to get the communication. That’s why you’ve come as far as you have so far, But to expect to come to a common understanding of it… You can come to a common understanding if you keep it imprecise enough, if you keep it more of a gestalt than a definition. You’ll get a general idea of it.

But to go beyond that… Look, there’s nothing wrong with what you’re trying to do. We’re just saying some ways work easier than other ones.

We will also say, though, that sometimes dead ends are very productive. So we would never say, “That’s a dead end. Don’t do it.” We’ll just say, “Well, that’s a dead end. Do it, if you want to do it.” Because, you know, who knows? It may turn out to be very productive.

 

Friday, June 21, 2024

7 a.m. What is it that makes us respond emotionally to emotional stories? All of fiction, written, oral, visual, depends upon creating that response. How does it work? Why does it work?

Isn’t it obvious?

I can feel it beginning to be. Something about stories being closer than life.

Not quite, but that’s in the general direction. What happens to you, in 3D, affects you at second-hand, in a way. That is, you seem to interact with an external world, and the interaction has its effect on your mental and emotional life. So, the event happens, and it causes an effect.

You fall in love for the first time – or for the tenth. Your emotional world is transformed. The change is only indirectly affected by what happens next, except if it is punctuated or is truncated or is even reversed, and in any of these cases, a new emotional composition results. Maybe the results are permanent, but usually they are only temporarily permanent – that is, they are final in regard to the starting place, but they are only the initial stage of whatever follows.

I can’t tell if this is making sense of not. I have the feeling that what is clear as a feeling is not getting expressed coherently.

As usual, just persevere and it will come clear. Try restating, not worrying about accuracy in every point, but just getting the general drift.

Well, I think you were saying, our emotions are evoked by a situation, and a particularly charged situation can drastically affect our emotional default position, so that we see life differently. Then other events may reinforce or contradict or in some way modify that new default.

Good enough. And you see, the point is that the strong emotion results from events, and they don’t even need to be external physical events, though they usually are.

We have said that emotions are at the boundary between what you do and do not know about yourself: the line between known-you and unknown-you, in other words. That is why a sudden or extreme or permanent shift in what you know about yourself is likely to be accompanied by strong emotion, though you may mistake cause for effect.

But what causes that readjustment? Doesn’t it have to involve self-awareness?

We advise that you take some time during the day to consider that sentence. Weigh it, make sense of it, decide whether it squares with your experience of life.

Now, you watch an episode of NCIS that involves Gibbs revisiting his childhood home; interacting with his father; reliving childhood conflicts with others; finally, remembering meeting the love of his life when he was a raw marine. You don’t need to have experienced any of those situations to be affected by the story. In fact, if that were necessary, storytellers would be out of business. Instead, what is needed is that you project analogies. “This is like that, that happened to me. This is like that, that I felt as a result of similar circumstances. This is what I might have felt, if I had gone through that.” Et cetera. It is the drawing of analogies that produces empathy. (Or you could equally well say it is empathy that allows the drawing of analogies.) But is any of this a process of mental construction? Clearly not.

No, clearly not. A storyteller who leads you to consciously unpick his weaving, fails to that extent. It comes viscerally, or not at all.

That doesn’t mean that thought is never involved. Sometimes, as in reading Hemingway, you have to think hard to get inside the character’s head to figure out why he or she would do such a thing, think or feel such a thing. But the actual analogy will be not mentally drawn: It will be felt, emotionally, and immediately, and may also grow with your reflection about the story.

Yes. Take Island in the Stream, for instance. It is all about a father’s love for his children and his having to carry on living after they are dead. That wasn’t my experience, it wasn’t even Hemingway’s experience. But the true emotion did come across, because it wasn’t about the specifics but the emotion.

No symbolic statement can ever have the strength of a description of a tangible situation. That’s what drama does.

Now, notice. Drama, fiction, poetry, even fact-telling like biography or history, may convey the emotional truth mind-to-mind directly. That is, it serves in lieu of one’s own physical experiences. It is more direct, so may have more of an impact.

At the same time, your actual external life is usually far less dramatic, if only because it is always seen in a mundane context, and is usually a matter of slow-motion, rather than drama’s severe compression. Yet obviously your own 3D life experiences are in their way more real to you than drama. And of course if your life takes a dramatic turn – a tragedy, an ecstasy – it vastly overshadows anything drama can provide.

Feels like we haven’t quite come to the point here, but I can’t see what it would be.

Your mental life is far closer to real than your physical life. This is not a balanced statement, but close enough.

Which is more real? The physical life contained in instants of 3D time, or the mental life that is what it becomes, and never stops becoming, and is not confined to 3D instants?

They’re both real.

They’re both somewhat real, and the less tied to material circumstances, the realer. Naturally this will look inverted to 3D beings.

You are primarily energy patterns, and by “energy” we don’t mean electricity or anything physical. (Matter, we must remind you, is slowed-down energy. So to think that physical energy is less material than matter is to make a mistake.) The energy we refer to, some call spirit. It is the inflow into your lives that animates them. It is the local manifestation of the vast impersonal forces that are equally busy animating the universe. You are closer to being a local energy pattern – a flute being played by the divine breath – than you are to being a thinking feeling lump of animated matter.

Therefore, it is closer to contact you in spirit than in flesh. The contact comes in concentric rings:

• Most direct: unknown-other to unknown-you.
• Next, that same energy as it expresses in you as emotion, taking emotion to be the laminal layer between unknown-you and known-you.
• Least direct is this input filtered into your conscious categories and perceptions.

You see? Your conscious circle of awareness is the farthest away from the true life that exists beyond 3D. Your emotion registers the differences between conscious and unconscious content, the way an amplifier’s membrane reproduces sound by vibration. And beyond your emotion is this vastly larger part of yourself that functions most clearly, most intelligently, serving as your buffer, stepping down divine energies to the point that they won’t blow your circuits.

Given these truths, how surprising should it be to realize that drama – abstracted reality – should be a very effective way to convey messages from the realer you to the somewhat-real you?

And that’s enough for the moment.

This is very good. Thanks.

 

Tuesday, June 18, 2024

5:40 a.m. Several possible places to continue:

1. Judging by our intent rather than by our actions seems backwards.
2. “As you change your mind, you change your effective being.”
3. The mechanism for internal readjustment.

Your choice, guys.

All good questions. Shows you are paying attention, not merely transcribing.

1. Judging by intent rather than by actions seems backwards.  Yes, it is backwards from how you naturally judge things when you regard 3D as real and non-3D as theoretical at best. And the same point of view would see the moment as transitory and the effects as at least relatively permanent. But do you want to see your lives from outside, or not? If you do, you must at least temporarily lay down your accustomed judgments.

It is very true that the road to hell is paved with good intentions – if you look at life from 3D assumptions. The saying means, merely intending change sometime in the future is the same as clinging to what you already are, for the present.

It is – as so often – the difference in meaning concealed within the use of the same word for different things. “Good intentions” sounds like “sustained intent,” but of course they are very different things. Sustained intent has nothing vague about it, nothing of delay. And it is your sustained intent that leads you to the future you pull toward yourself, for the astrological moment cannot be modified; the only thing that can be modified is your attitude toward “what happens” around you, your sustained intent.

The difference is very clear as you spell it out. Thanks.

2. “As you change your mind, you change your effective being.” We have replaced our previous scaffolding of “laying down some strings, picking up others.” Now we would have you think of it as less material an analogy, less concrete. You are a complex balance of internal dynamics, affected not only by your initial “setting” (determined by your physical and non-physical heredity and the astrological moment and social environment), but also by your intent. In a sense, you decide how to intervene in your own life. You choose among your possibilities.

Yes, that is clear now too.

3. The mechanism for internal readjustment. The question is, how does this occur? How do you turn intent into change?

And I have no idea where you want to go with this one.

Actually, you didn’t have much idea of the two previous, either. You forget what you didn’t know, usually as soon as you now know it. You didn’t know, then you knew, then you disremember the earlier state of not knowing. It’s normal. But this third question is unexplored territory, which is why you feel blank, approaching it.

Some bullet points:

• You comprise all those strands, each of which is a complex energetic pattern, each of which – if acting by itself – would replicate in you the pattern it established in the life it leads elsewhen.
• But they don’t act by themselves. They inter-act, smoothly or otherwise. Your internal life, your impulses and compulsions and contradictions and confusions, all stem from the fact that you are living all those pattens simultaneously in every new moment.
• There is a hidden problem here. Each of those strands exists within you as it existed at a given moment, at death, which was the culmination of that life. That is the pattern. But nothing is frozen, so as that life changes, the pattern you are partly made of changes. How?
• The astrology of your life clearly can’t be the astrology of the various strands’ lives. They’ll all be different., from you and from each other. The living present moment that each is experiencing will have a quality different from any other. How can all this be reconciled?
• Only your intent can reconcile the various clashing or meshing energetic patterns. And the same is true for each of the strands. Is it astonishing that the 3D world is full of conflict? What ought to astonish is that it has as much harmony as it does have.
• Bear in mind, the result is not chaos meaning shapeless, meaningless disorder, but chaos meaning infinite potential expressing in all possible combinations.

And everything boils down to free will exercised within a given framework that itself changes and is changed by the free will of others.

Circumstances are often, perhaps always, produced by others. Your part is always to choose, and of course in choosing you are changing the circumstances for all you connect to in any way, 3D or non-3D.

It’s a little dizzying.

Some time spent pondering will bring you along. Merely the readjustment from physical or energetic analogies would be an advance, freeing up your understanding.

So what can you tell us about the Gates of Horn?

Nothing. Do the work, observe the results, and at some point it will be profitable to talk about it. At this point it would be front-loading.

At any point, it’s going to be front-loading for somebody.

Just mind yourself; that’s your true business. As usual, people will come to it at the proper time for them. Those who come to it before-time will not notice; it will make no impression on them. Perhaps three years later, at the proper moment, it will sink in.

I am feeling we have left too much unaddressed on this third question.

That is true, but it seems best. There’s time. And no harm in a slightly shorter session.

Very well. Next time?

It will have to emerge on the moment.

Thanks as always, then.