Author: Frank DeMarco

Friday, September 20, 2019

In trying to make sense of the world, each of you will inevitably make your own road map, and a map is always an abstraction, a simplification. In making your maps, don’t ignore all the map-making that has gone before, just because those maps were incomplete and were partially erroneous. Specifically, we refer to religious, philosophical, metaphysical maps. Discard them, or even remain in ignorance of them, at your peril. You aren’t the first people to concern yourselves with these things, and if you know things others did not know, so they also knew things you do not know. You are always going to choose, which implies rejection as well as acceptance, but what is rejected may be rejected well or badly. In this case, attitude is all, because “exterior” does not exist in an absolute sense. What does exist, for each of you, is your own mental world, your own world of choice shaping your continued being.

We waste a tremendous amount of time and energy, don’t we?

Well, you expend a tremendous amount of time and energy; we aren’t sure you should think of it as wasted. But let’s spell out, a little, what you spend on.

Well, we’re always concentrating on things that have only ephemeral existence.

As opposed to?

Huh. Well, that’s a thought.

Sure. The temptation is to say, life (reality) consists of essential and inessential, significant and meaningless, permanent and ephemeral. But, does it, really? And if it did, could you distinguish one from the other?

Provisionally, we do just that, every day. I don’t see that we have any choice in the matter.

We’d say, day by day you choose among limited options. What those options are, what those limits are, varies according to your past and present and future choices, including interactions physical and non-physical. But you do not have the luxury of deferring choice until you know. You are always choosing according to instinct, because you never have the knowledge that would be necessary to informed choice. And this is by benevolent design, for the “luxury” of deferred choice until you know would actually be paralysis. Thus everything you do stems from your values, which stem from what you are. Those values tend to constrict your effective choices among experience.

We only admit into consideration data that matches what we already think. We don’t easily believe things that contradict what we already believe, because if we did, we’d be starting over every day. But we don’t get to live our lives believing only what we already believe, because the world – the “external” world – keeps presenting us with contrary or overlapping and partly contrary data.

Reality is all one thing. You are part of the world, which means, the world is part of you. Nobody lives alone. You can absorb only that for which you have receptors. But that means, nothing external can come to you “out of left field” except in the sense of being unexpected to your 3D awareness. World War II entirely transformed the lives of hundreds of millions who never had any direct part in it; it transformed nobody “by chance” or “accidentally” except in appearance. In fact, everybody in the world at that time had in common – that they were in the world at that time!

The concept stretches us a little farther than is quite comfortable. Usually when people say, “We’re all one thing,” they aren’t including their political foes, and politics in the Philippine Islands, and conditions in Chinese factories, and – oh, any of the millions of things that go on in the practical physical world.

Your limited sample may not be taking account of millions of Christian and Muslim and Hindu and Buddhist and Jewish mystics and monks. Their view of the world may be quite unillusioned next to those few people you have met. It’s an important point, the same point we began with. You all create the world you live in by what you select to become aware of. What you select is enabled both by what you consciously choose and by what you unconsciously are, which is the result of past choices. Therefore the world to you looks like internal and external, choice and constraint.

I feel like we never quite say it, never quite nail it down.

We can only point to the moon. You like to quote Kerouac, “What can’t be said, can’t be said, and it can’t be whistled, either.” But it can be hinted at, can be seen behind the screens, can be brought to mind by comparisons and allusions.

Wednesday, September 18, 2019

Now that we have agreed upon the desirability of recognizing that you are whole rather than good, we have to consider what that means.

It occurs to me, writing that, that Jesus somewhere said don’t call me good, there isn’t anybody good but the father. If I’m remembering that rightly, this would shed light on what he meant; no 3D person can be made up of good only. It occurs to me, too, that pretty nearly everybody ought to have non-3D connections with various kinds of Christians by now. It may be that this is how the thoughts and even the presence of Jesus are to spread to every part of the world, not in mere geographic evangelization, as the Victorians believed.

Let it occur to you, then, as well, that spreading influence by resonance in the non-3D is the only way to avoid all the inevitable distortion and politics that would accompany expansion through physical contact and persuasion and conversion and, often enough, coercion.

A sort of subterranean process continuing through history while the surface currents concern themselves with other things.

Yes, only don’t assume that the non-3D has as its purpose to make everyone Christian. That doesn’t mean that religions were failures or detours or conspiracies. But neither can they or any of them be a panacea, and this is of course the temptation for the religious. In paying attention to the words and the underlying attitude of Jesus, you are doing what you did when you read that book, so many decades ago.

Yes, I loved that book. It compared the world’s higher religions not by analysis or argument but by citing their scriptures.

Seek the truth where you can find it, and the truth will not inhere in rules and regulations, nor in prohibitions. It will inhere in certain statements that your inner self will recognize as truth. And how do you suppose your inner self does that?

The answer is logically contradictory, not that that matters.

That’s why we love working with you!

You’re welcome. But it is. The non-3D part of us recognizes truth when it sees it – and it ought to, given that it steered us to it in the first place.

Precisely. But let’s look at that just a bit more analytically. What you just said amounts to this:

1. Your non-3D component knows vastly more than you can know consciously.
2. It would be self-defeating for your non-3D to coerce your 3D mind, given that the whole point of 3D existence is conscious willing choice.
3. Nonetheless some paths are more productive, more desirable than others from our point of view. Yet, we cannot constrain.
4. Given cooperation from the 3D self, we can gently steer you toward truth, toward growth, toward fulfillment. We can’t force you to accept the gifts, but we can show you where they are. But if the 3D personality we are dealing with is rigid, how much can we do? If it is frivolous, how can we put its attention to subtle opportunities?
5. What we can do is point you to whatever opportunity best harmonizes with your nature, so that you will be most likely to see and appreciate the opportunity.
6. Once the 3D consciousness seizes the good (that is, focuses attention on it) then it is a matter of the 3D personality choosing to accept or reject, but at least the opportunity has been presented.

And one of the lures you use is our resonance to past-life (so-called) personalities.

Of course: 3D calls to 3D in a very specific way, as you learned while doing retrievals at TMI.

Tuesday, September 17, 2019

Perhaps it has not yet become evident that this is a conflict of perception, not of essence. It isn’t better for a person to be whole than to be good, it is better for that person to conceive of, to picture, himself, herself, as whole rather than as good. If it were possible to be entirely good, who could argue against it? But it is destructive, or let’s say obstructive, to be one thing and think oneself another.

This, then, is a conflict of ideals, rather than of states of being.

Yes, but that will take some spelling-out.

I don’t see why. It’s simple enough. If our ideal is to be good, we will suppress awareness of every part of ourselves that is not good. But this will force that part of ourselves into the unconscious, where it will be beyond our control. If our ideal is wholeness, though, we will welcome awareness of what we are, without manifesting it deliberately but without disowning it when it does manifest, hence keeping it more in our consciousness, hence more under our conscious control.

Occasionally you surprise us.

It suddenly clicked, and became clear. As I said, I don’t see why you couldn’t say this a good while ago.

Perhaps we could have; there’s no knowing, even after the fact. At any rate, here we are.

It never ceases to amaze me, how things can be murky one minute, clear the next.

After a flash of insight comes the work of assuring that the new insight remains in context, so that it does not become like the cryptic scribbles that are left from a dream in the night. This insight is a very practical insight. It tells you what to do, how to live. It does not shade off into the question of why evil exists or even how it manifests in the 3D world. But practical is worth more than theoretical, if you have a choice. It’s just that sometimes you need to re-examine the theoretical in order to provide new practical awareness.

So we’re bailing out of the larger question?

We are anchoring an important insight before proceeding to that or any other matter.

Everyone lives according to an ideal, or to multiple, often conflicting, ideals. If you were the units you think yourselves to be, you could have one ideal, perhaps. As it is, each of your constituent selves (call them sub-selves, it that helps) has its own ideal. How are they all to be harmonized so that you are not working against yourselves? One way is to have one over-arching ideal that all can agree upon. This will not be possible at all for some self-divided people. It will be possible to some extent for others, and possible to a great extent for a relatively few others. Someone fused into one thing, such as Jesus, can have – will have – cannot not have – one ideal.

We keep coming back to Gurdjieff and his multiple “I”s that take turns running us.

It is a key insight, and as you apply it to different situations and conditions, it sheds light on them.

So, one over-arching ideal. What can serve so well as wholeness?

I see. Every possible attitude, value, or combination is contained within wholeness.

Yes, and what other ideal can contain everything? Goodness, by comparison, is continually choosing, discarding, rejecting, criticizing. You can measure up to an ideal of wholeness, for after all, what is it but acceptance of what you are and how you have been created and faith that you are as you are for a reason. But how can you measure up to an ideal of goodness?

To have as your ideal to be good is to invite repression of all in you that is evil, and to set yourself an impossible task, because one man’s evil is another man’s good. This refers not to other 3D beings around you; it refers to the multitude of strands within you.

It almost sounds like the proper ideal is tolerance.

If tolerance did not shade so soon and so easily into indifference, that would be so. Wholeness is a belter ideal. Tolerance will come in its wake, but it will be a judicious tolerance. There is no great advantage in learning to be tolerant of mass-murder, or torture, or any of the manifestations of individual or social insanity that are liable to pop up.

Monday, September 16, 2019

On so many subjects, you must remember that context is everything. Look at something while forgetting what you have learned, and you cannot possibly see with greater perception. But bring these new (seemingly unrelated) perceptions to the subject, and the maze may become penetrable.

So, here. The problem of evil. Every religion is at least in part an attempt to see why evil exists in the world, and is an attempt at strategies to overcome it. Every serious philosophy must grapple with this question. Manicheans see the world as battleground between equally extra-human forces of roughly equal strength. Some philosophies say evil does not exist per se, but is merely the absence of good. And all other attempts to see the structure of reality, fall somewhere between these two poles. Partly it is a question of appearances. How do conditions seem, as opposed to how are they really? Partly it is a question of meaning. How should we see this or that in connection with what else we know?

And partly it is a question of values? What we wish to uphold or stave off?

We can see how you would think that this is what we ourselves have said in the past. But, no, not really. Your values are chosen partly by what you were, partly by what you are, partly by what you wish to be. It is so reiterative a process, it may seem to be circular, but it is not. A cycle looks like a circle sometimes, but it involves an additional dimension.

It is a question of depth.

Yes. And that is also the question in a larger sense. Depth or lack of depth will affect your perception of how things are.

So far this is pretty abstract.

Still, that’s where we must begin, with context. It is always good to provide clarity.

Now, we said appearance and meaning. This too is part of an iterative process. How things appear depends upon the inner resources one can bring to the perceiving. What things mean depends upon the connections one can make. Changes in the observer lead to changes in what can be observed, and thus both appearance and its meaning seem to change, leading to further changes in the observer. There are two reasons, not just one, why you can never step into the same river twice. Yes, the river’s flow makes it impossible. But so does what we might call your flow. You are not the same, even between two attempts to step in the river.

“But” (we hear you object) “there must be some ultimate view of reality. There must be some way things really are.” To this we can say only, “Perhaps; perhaps not.” At most you will get to an explanation that satisfies you, now. Don’t expect to get one that will satisfy everybody, nor anybody forever.

It is easier for me to understand that we might not be able to see beyond all illusions than that there might not be an ultimate view. Something must describe it all, whether or not we here can become able to see it.

Do you think so? That is because you have an unconscious assumption that reality doesn’t change. What basis do you have for assuming that?

Are you saying that reality continues to change?

No. Neither are we definitely saying it does not. Either way, how would you know? How would we know? We or you or anyone could and can (and, often enough, do) decide, “This is the way it is,” but that is mostly a decision to stop looking.

Finding a place that is comfortable enough to be a staging-camp for a possible later further ascent.

Correct. Obviously as you change, you discern more (or, if you are losing ground, less). The reality you can perceive (which is all you ever have) changes, and you learn to deal with this changed reality. When you think “all is one,” it is a different world to you from when you think all is chance and accident. When you realize that there is no external unconnected to who and what you are (because you can only perceive that which is related to you), it is a different world from one in which unconnected forces exist. But even as perceptions change, your assigned meaning changes, and not mechanically. You may choose to see things as meaning one thing, or as a different thing, and the choice you make will help determine the next thing that happens to your perceptions

It’s almost a fun-house, set up to distort perceptions.

No! It can look like that. You can interpret it as that. And that’s a good example, right there, of how the process of assigning meaning to perception may result in conclusions of great definiteness that may have little relevance to anything but one’s momentary state of being.

It may appear that we haven’t advanced an inch on our task of examining evil in 3D life; may appear, in fact, that we have lost ground. But the motto of the firm is “flexibility.” The more flexible you are, the better your chances of being able to see what is not directly within line of sight. There’s no such thing as an unalterable decision, nor is there any reason there should be.

So let’s talk about wholeness rather than goodness.

Yes, we’re smiling too. But surely you can see that the discussion that now follows will be different from what it would have been if your mind had not been turned by this bit of brush-clearing.

Saturday, September 14, 2019

When I watch shows with particularly evil or arrogant villains, my response to them is (as the writers have intended) “Kill them; they have no place in the world.” It would be useless, of course: New villains spring up all the time. Worse than useless, because you become like the worst in those you fight. The only practical plan I have ever read was Anselmo’s in For Whom the Bell Tolls: Make the miscreants work until they come to realize the error of their ways. This might or might not reform the villains, but at least it would not destroy those who confronted them.

The key here, as you well know, is that your emotional reaction to a thing may be as powerful as anything you do or say. It is your second- and third-tier reaction that counts, and this is one reason people of ill will do such damage: They rouse righteous indignation that outdoes them in turn.

By the end of a war, people are enthusiastically doing things that they would have been horrified to consider at the beginning. Saturation bombing, atomic bombs – concepts that make no distinction between combatant and civilian, concepts that would have been rightly considered to be war crimes before the war. By war’s end they are accepted as defensible and even reasonable.

One-eyed pursuit of a good tends to lead to means identical to those being countered.

Fight fire with fire, is the saying.

Yes. That works out better in forestry than in human relations, where it is merely arson, and at that, arson that incinerates friend and foe and self alike.

And why does it have to be this way? I don’t pretend that there was ever a paradise on Earth, but does it always have to be this stew of hatreds and fears and self-righteous seeking of vengeance? I understand that life in duality must include both ends of every stick. Somehow, though, that isn’t terribly comforting.

It will be less disturbing if you remember that 3D is a part of a greater life, and that every life has purpose. Evil is good balanced. We know you don’t like it, but it may become more understandable if you look at it as a question of extremes. The center is where a stick will balance, nowhere else.

You are saying too much goodness creates or constellates too much badness.

Well – almost. A black-and-white negative may be muted or vivid. It may consist of highly contrasted lights and darks, or tones that are much more in the center scale. It’s only an analogy, remember.

But this lifetime does not seem to have an excess of goodness. I see chiefly excess of violence.

Yes, that’s what you see. That’s what is pictured. There is no entertainment value in portraying goodness, except occasionally as a change of pace. You know how it is.

People want to feel alive, and if their ordinary lives offer too little, you will find young men running to get into a war, as in 1914, for the sake of smashing things – they having no idea why they feel that way, having no idea how intolerable their lives were that they are fleeing.

So why the impulse in the first place? And why are we led by sociopaths?

You aren’t led by sociopaths, you are led astray by them. Most of your leaders are themselves bewildered, short-sighted, inconstant, often well-meaning but without vision and under continuous pressure to go along.

But the question remains: Why? Why is 3D life made into such an endurance test? Couldn’t we modulate the evil that has to manifest?

You could, but it involves wholeness, in place of goodness, as you have been told. It involves bearing your own share of the world’s evil., and thereby helping to corral it, to curb it from wild manifestation.

Jesus said it is inevitable that evil comes into the world, but woe unto him by whom it comes.

Yes, but that refers to ushering it into the world, not holding a piece of it that already exists and has manifested.

Friday, September 13, 2019

I have been reading, watching Netflix, and of course thinking of things I’ve read over the years.

And it all makes you feel, as you do so often, that you are living in a lunatic asylum.

I feel like I am living in a world structured on behalf of fools, psychopaths, sociopaths. I recognize that this is only a partial view, and that the good and the quietly strong and sane receive little ink in the world, but still, it’s a lot to live with.

The dissonance you and others are experiencing could be seen as the thinning of internal walls between non-coherent belief systems. You become aware of the contradictions you embody and live with. The result is an improvement in vision, but the process is uncomfortable.

I get that in this we are somehow participating in the group mind of our civilization, going through the same process.

Well, let’s take it a little slowly. Let’s take you as an example. You were born into postwar America, immersed yourself in American history, gradually broadened out your acquaintance to other countries, other times. That was the inner world you concentrated on, not really paying attention to the world you were actually living in.

Everybody constructs road-maps of the world. Not one road-map, but many, each tied to specific kinds of purpose, each tied to different clusters of experience. Thus people have one set of beliefs in one circumstance, another in a second, yet another in a third, and often enough the various road-maps are kept unconnected to the others. You can function this way – you mostly have functioned this way – changing in changing circumstances, not noticing the changes in you, of you.

The multiple “I”s taking turns steering, that Gurdjieff described.

Yes, but in your age, the maps are being superseded by GPS. Now they interact, and contradictions are glaringly obvious, like it or not. Now it is less possible to live with unnoticed internal contradictions. The result may often seem chaotic, but it may be the process of rendering chaos into ordered patterns.

“It hurts but it’s good for you,” so to speak.

It doesn’t even hurt necessarily. Uncomfortable, yes, but sleeping out in the open on a camping trip may be uncomfortable. You do it for the sake of the trip, and you don’t begrudge the discomfort, for the sake of the experience it enables.

I can see 3D life as a camping trip. It isn’t an analogy that had occurred to me before.

Your joke has been that you realized you were in an insane asylum but only became uncomfortable when you realized you weren’t one of the ones carrying keys. In other words, that maybe you belonged there. But there’s truth in the joke, except for the inference that you are as crazy as anybody else. It’s closer to say, the others aren’t any crazier than you are. It is their actions, their manifestations, like yours, that may be incomprehensible to others, which makes them unpredictable, uninterpretable, and therefore menacing.

Are you saying nobody is crazy?

Let’s say crazy is as crazy does. Crazy, like evil, is a part of the 3D condition. The same mind in non-3D manifests differently. It isn’t like you are then surrounded by dangerous criminals and lunatics. Nor, of course, that you appear like that to others. For one thing, the concept of “others” looks very different in surroundings where the concept of “external” is clearly illusory.

Wednesday, September 11, 2019

Guys? Anything today, or do we take a day off?

You can always take a day off merely by not showing up, and sometimes that’s appropriate.

And you, on your end? What are the variables?

On our end nothing, because we are not constricted by time-slices. If we cannot work “now,” we can work “later,” and you won’t see the difference.

Except sometimes in mid-process you have asked for time to think.

Yes. Perplexing you extremely, if we recall!

Well, it did. I half-remember you saying the obstacle was actually on my end anyway.

Perhaps a more careful way to say it is that what is available to you depends upon where you are mentally. Some things that are a stretch in one “mood” or at one phase of your life are not a stretch at another. This is not a variable from this end, but of course it may look like it.

So in terms of your recent description of the mental field as an interaction between 3D and non-3D –

Surely you can see that a field that continually fluctuates, fluctuates in what it is in resonance with. Someone who habitually thinks high thoughts is going to resonate to different fields than those of one who habitually thinks low ones, or who alternates between the two.

This is the same thing you’ve been saying all along: We shape who we become through our choices.

That’s correct. And this is a way of explaining the process via a different analogy, and a vivid image.

Yes, true. And our choices affect others to some extent.

Isn’t this what religions have always said? Isn’t it common sense, once you see that everything (hence every one) is interconnected? But the electrical field analogy may make it intuitively more obvious.

I was going to ask, how do people deal with conflicting voices, and the answer is, Test the spirits.

It requires rashness to accept anything on faith alone. Sometimes that is appropriate, sometimes not. But why take the chance? If everyone told the truth, if everyone’s intentions were pure, if people could be accepted at face value, it would be merely a matter of openness. But life in 3D is not that simple. Why would you expect it to be in non-3D?

I have been accepting you and your information for a quarter of a century and more.

But – have you? Uncritically? Without doubt and questioning and demand for evidence, and without qualifying further questions? We would hardly say you accepted everything on faith – nor would we have wanted you to.

I have always regretted that my ability to talk to you was not accompanied by Rita’s gift of analysis and cross-examination. But you and I seem to be on the same page, on the question of the utility of doubt.

We have never been on different pages, except in appearance. You stressed your doubts and we counter-balanced the boat by giving you reason to have faith. When you have gone too far in the opposite direction, semi-deifying us or the message, we would counter-balance, reminding you that no communication may safely be assumed to be pure and undistorted. What we both want is a clearly flowing stream that is not accepted as gospel nor discarded as fantasy, but is considered, examined, held up to one’s inner truth-detector. And we’d say we’ve both done pretty well at that.

Only now it gets more complicated.

Well, it is complicated, in that we need people to see how to be accepting and critical at the same time. Some will know how to do it instinctively; some can learn how and some will never be able to balance, but will land on one side or the other.

And we are now bringing into consideration the vast impersonal forces.

Think of those forces as if they were gravitational fields, or electrical fields, or, better, magnetic fields. (These are not scientific analogies, because that is not your playground, but they provide images, which will help people to leap the gap.) Think of it as the mental weather, generated by the magnetic currents of the day interacting with the magnetic fields that exist regardless of a specific day.

You are small boats on a great ocean. You don’t cause the tides or the waves or the atmospheric conditions, all you can do is adapt to them. Or, you are airplanes in a vast sky whose barometric pressure, jet streams, humidity, thunderstorms, etc. you must cope with but cannot control. Or, a third analogy, you are a localized electro-magnetic field interacting not only with a larger field from which you have been thrown off, but with huge external fields independent of your control.

We mean to convey:

• You are small; the universe is not.
• You are isolated in effect, no matter how connected you are in fact.
• You are in unbreakable connection with the field that is the present moment, but “present moment” is not evanescent nor fragile nor perishable, and neither are you.
• You are part of a system, not an accident but, have been thrown up in the course of events. Is there such a thing as a meaningless event?

The bottom line here is that you are not isolated nor meaningless to the rest of reality. How could you be? But you may need to function as if you were. Well, if so, so what? There are millions of roles to be played, and the roles are always filled.