Author: Frank DeMarco

Tuesday, September 10, 2019

Shall we continue?

Maybe. You understand, the subject is complicated. Not only is the viewpoint unfamiliar to you, there are many unsuspected and half-suspected ideas in what they call your subconscious or unconscious mind that will tend to interfere with reception.

My jumping to conclusions, you mean?

In a way. That’s how and why one jumps to conclusions: the inner preconceived ideas rush to finish a sentence in a comfortable manner.

That makes the ideas seem like they have a life of their own.

That’s almost so. It would be a way of looking at things that isn’t all that untenable. You might think of ideas as whirlpools: fixed patterns that are themselves continually in motion, but motion whose structure is held within limits by its own internal dynamics.

So that we as patterns interact with ideas as patterns.

As an electrical analogy, yes.

First you[-all] must cease to define yourselves as primarily creatures of reason. You aren’t. You are primarily creatures of emotion, of feelings. Thought comes a long way second, if at all. Many a person lives without thought; nobody lives without feelings. But just because this is so, doesn’t mean it is recognized as being so.

Somebody – Cayce? – said feelings are the language of the soul.

Let’s put it in unfamiliar ways, so as to give you the shock of unrecognition if possible. What you experience as feelings could be seen as resonances of a smaller field with a larger. What you experience as thought is either the association of various fields as it presents itself spontaneously, or the rationalization of the meaning of resonances experienced. We are constrained by the limitations of the analogy and the limitations of your associations to the analogy. This is why when we can we prefer to stick to images. Images, like dreams or daydreams, connect things by emotional logic that mechanical logic would never connect.

By mechanical logic, I take it you mean what we call thinking.

More like the limits to your thinking.

What our previously accepted ideas allow us to entertain.

That’s right. Your mind is, among other things, a huge fragile malleable open-ended structure of associations. This is what any new input has to interact with, either meshing or clashing or being unable to secure entrance. It is your stability, only it is a dynamic stability, changing as the field changes, responsive to alterations in the surrounding fields that affect it.

Your original query was as to the connections between illness and health and time, and circumstance, and mental position or attitude. This is what we are working to explain, but there is a lot of conceptual deadwood to be cleared.

Consider your body. You experience it as a solid complicated organism that has continuity in 3D and leads an existence somewhat independent of you. It breathes, it processes sugars, it maintains complicated physiological systems that interact to create ongoing homeostasis. In effect, the body is a ready-made chariot, but it rides largely where you want it to ride, and how you want it to ride. It isn’t independent of you, but it does have its own existence. Remember, not only mentally but physically, you are not only an individual, you are also a community. Communities get along well or badly.

An ill-assorted community may show as a physically ill individual?

That’s jumping a little too far, but you are in the right direction.

Your horoscope defines the community that constellated at that moment. (Not that the moment determined the constellation; more like the constellation may have had to wait for the proper time.) But, the horoscope will tell you many things if you will use it not to predict which door you will go through, but what is the internal relationship pattern and how will it manifest as conditions proceed.

A horoscope with oppositions indicates a community somewhat at cross-purposes, etc.

It delignates accurately the energetic pattern your life begins with. How you modify those patterns is up to you, but they are your starting point.

And that’s the link between health and its fluctuations. What we are at birth leaves us prey to, or immune to, fluctuations in the external environment, independent of our own emotional world within.

A little slower. You say independent of your emotional world within; we need to be sure that people understand that this assumes (correctly) that internal and external influences are equally internal. There is no such thing really as “external” because the walls between you and the world are not walls at all. At most they are shock waves between systems, or, better, interface patterns. So, external events like sunrise or sunset may impact you directly without any emotional input on your part.

Like Seasonal Affective Disorder. People are sensitive to lack of sunlight, and it has nothing to do with their being resolutely cheerful or not.

Someone with SAD may in fact counteract it to a degree by a consciously-induced counter-irritant. Similarly, you can and often do counter asthmatic conditions by a willed lowering of internal tension. You aren’t helpless in bodies, but you do need to keep in mind the fact that you have them.

Monday, September 9, 2019

Paul Brunton sensed and deduced that experience of the world (that is, of reality) can only come via the mind, hence the mind is the ultimate. He was careful not to dismiss the world as only an illusion, and not to take its independent existence for granted. He balanced. Well, now look at the “mental” as a field interacting with 3D and non-3D. Is it an individual field, when it interacts as well with every other mental field? Is it a collective field, when it uniquely interacts with at least one field that is unique (the 3D), and perhaps both? (The non-3D, remember, though not divided is not uniform.)

It is both and neither, depending upon what we stress.

Of course. And what happens to that field when the 3D pole ceases to exist (dies)?

I see it! In terms of time, the mental field ceases to exist, for there is no second pole to hold it in being. But wherever it was, it remains. The mind – the mental field – that was suspended between George Washington’s 3D existence and the non-3D remains in that context. That’s why we can still talk to past lives, why we can interact with living beings and not merely statues or recordings.

So now you can see several interacting awarenesses, if only potentially.

I won’t be able to follow up on them, but others will, once it has been called to their attention, and that’s what you are using me for.

Correct, except it is “we” using you – that is, you and us together. But that is one function of the ILC process, and one reason to spread the usage, to provide more people willing and able to strike sparks.

So let’s make it practical for those experiencing chronic health challenges. Rather than consider illnesses as 3D-caused (only), or as “spiritually” caused (as if it is one’s fault for hosting illness), what is the story seen when we consider our mental world to be a field generated by and suspended from the interaction between 3D and non-3D fields?

First, recognize that customarily you all experience yourselves as primarily mental, no matter how attached to physical sensations you may be. Even the person who is most sensually oriented does not identify with the body as a collection of cells and organs, but as the horse it (the person) rides. Anyone concentrating on primarily physical activities still experiences himself or herself as the person who. They don’t identify with the muscles; they identify with having the muscles. It is easier to see in those who experience the world primarily emotionally or intellectually, but it is the case always. You have bodies; you tend bodies; you may even think that you think of yourselves as bodies, but when you look more closely you see that it comes down to you using (living in) bodies. That is a small but important difference.

So now when something perturbs the body, does it really feel like it is perturbing you, or like it is perturbing something you are integrally bound to?

That’s why some of us are not afraid of death but welcome it as an end to interference.

Yes. The interference has made clearer to you that you really are mind. Then it is only a matter of whether you consider the mind to be an attribute of the body, which it is, in a way, or an entity not wholly dependent an independent entity upon the body, which it is in a way.

And the definition we choose determines how much we can or cannot affect things like health.

Like many things. But then let us penetrate a bit farther. The way in which one conceptualizes the mind as somewhat independent of the body also helps determine what is or is not possible.

It occurred to me that, as so often, the distance analogy has snuck into the illustration. We tend to think of 3D and non-3D as separated by something, rather than occupying identical or overlapping spaces. If we could visualize every moment of time/space separately and simultaneously, it would be easier to see it as it is, maybe.

Saturday, September 7, 2019

Yesterday’s wonderful conversation demonstrates what you said so many years ago, how we in 3D live our life in time-slices. After I gradually changed, I forgot how I had been, so entirely that I was puzzled how people could be the way I myself had been!

As we said then, the 3D world is designed to let you live in a pressure-chamber of now. This is what gives you the possibility of choice and change, far more so than the non-3D condition alone could provide.

I hear the words “hyperbaric chamber.”

A reasonable analogy. Such a chamber employs high pressure in an external atmosphere to force life-giving oxygen into tissues that need it.

I don’t know, though. Doesn’t 3D also force negative energies into us as well?

It may look that way, but that is mostly because 3D conditions produce the sensation of “external” forces, rather than forces that are part of you but are experienced as external.

 

Friday, September 6, 2019

Reading about Hemingway’s (and the Spanish people’s) attitude toward life and death again makes me wonder, it seems so out of proportion. You live, you die, so what? Why is something which is universal treated as if it were something to be dreaded, or ignored, or enshrined? It doesn’t make sense to me. Why is life a tragedy because it ends? Why is it unendurable unless one shuts out of awareness the fact that it is going to end? Both attitudes are so strange. It is as if you were to say that the meaning of life is only Friday, say, or 3 p.m., or the color orange, or the smell of citron, or the taste of ashes. It is like looking at a train ride without reference to the place left or the place arrived at.

Guys, you care to help me explain this? (Not that I don’t feel you prodding me anyway.)

What was called Western Civilization began with the Greeks and Romans and their gods and their understandings of the way things are. Christianity supplanted that with a new sense of meaning. As things do, it grew, flourished, produced fruit, and declined. The civilization that could produce the Gothic cathedral is not related to your civilization except as ancestry. The Renaissance was a searching for a more permanent footing, a realer reality, than what the European civilization had declined to. The Renaissance was naturally followed by the Reformation, and a century of intense warfare centered on the question of the human relationship to the divine.

The Catholic theology and organization had become too one-sided. The various Protestant revolutions were counter-balancing that one-sidedness, and by their nature could not come to any pretense of universality. Understand, we are not talking about politics or even theology. We are centered on a civilization’s understanding of the meaning of life and death.

After the religious wars subsided into an uneasy grumbling stalemate, the natural result of the warfare plus the Renaissance was the gradual destruction of faith in the Christian scheme itself. Indeed, you could argue that the religious wars were a matter of “protesting too much” – and we don’t mean that as a play on words, we mean the fanaticism on all sides was partly refusal to see that they themselves didn’t quite believe in the way that, say, medieval man had believed. Hence, an age of skepticism. But people can’t really live without belief, so when they cannot believe one thing, they grasp at something else. Thus came the ages of science, of economics, of social-engineering, of endless tinkering, of what is called science but is more like science-in-the-service-of-unbridled-technological-experimentation.

Capitalism, socialism, communism, fascism, scientific materialism, and on and on – what do they have in common but this? They all try to make sense of life by considering only what shows. The coming of psychology came as an awful shock; so did the coming of scientific theories based on new but not-to-be-ignored data showing that time, space, causality, material, energy – name it – are not what they had appeared to be.

So here you are. Religion is again having a last semi-hysterical upwelling, rooted in fear and even panic, but it is not rooted in the deepest reality. “Science,” so called, is more runaway than ever, and more enslaved to utility and less open to actual free inquiry than ever in its history. Politics, economic theory, ideology are wilder and more frantic than ever, and inspire ever less widespread conviction. Philosophy has become a university major and a profession disputing fine points in learned journals, and is taken seriously nowhere but in its own closed circle.

Can you see that this is all one phenomenon? What is fueling it all is your need for a more profound and satisfying sense of the meaning of life and death. Meaning cannot be imposed by political force. It can only be recognized.

There was a time when you lived appalled at the meaninglessness of a life that would be blotted out by death, destroying anything but whatever you might leave as artifact.

I wouldn’t have thought to put it together, but it’s obvious at the moment. This is why I am immune to political or ideological panaceas, or religious certainties, or any of the things people grab onto. I do not have the need to fill an empty center.

Yes. Exactly that. The unfilled emptiness drives people to find something to fill it, and it is no laughing matter to people who are desperately in need. Rather than provide examples of inadequate solutions, let us say this about the adequate solution (which, of course, will not be adequate forever): It will take account of life and death as parts of one reality. It will not concentrate on the things of life and consign “the afterlife” to the realm of the unimportant or the unfathomable. Neither will it pretend to know that there is no such thing. Neither will it say that “the afterlife” is all that matters, and 3D life is a dream or nightmare. It will deal with everything as if everything matters!

When you live in the knowledge that All is well, that Man is the measure of all things, that to understand it all, you need to remember As above, so below, that All are one, many things sundered will be seen in their interconnection, and you will be able to live without having to fight a continual background sense of despair. You cannot expect to live without problems; life is problems. But you need not live as if there were no underlying sense and meaning.

Thursday, September 5, 2019

Nobody can kick you into working if you don’t want to. It’s in what you want.

I know. Although, that always reverts to Which you?

For you, it does. For another, maybe not, for there might be no conflict. For yet another, paralysis because the conflict might be beyond resolution. Here is a nuance that perhaps we have not made clear. For some people, it is a matter of one established “I” nevertheless needing to impose its will. You accept what comes. But do you mandate that something come?

You know I don’t.

Then you must accept a certain amount of frustration. How does anyone both accept and direct?

• Some people are naturally what is called weak-willed.
• Some are relentless bulldozers.
• Some are relentless in one direction and malleable (because indifferent) in others.
• Some are mild-mannered but persistent in a low-key way.
• Some are subject to fits of suborn assertiveness alternated with long stretches of apathy or acceptance or indifference.

If we spell out these different stances, it is only to bring them actively to mind, for of course you all see these differences every day; it’s just that you may not have thought of them this way. It has been noted that quite primitive personalities may meet external success because they are entirely undivided in their intent. They set a goal and move without internal friction to accomplish it, and the results may be remarkable.

Douglas MacArthur at West Point.

Yes, that is a good example. You don’t average 98 out of 100 and graduate without a demerit if you are busy trying to overcome internal conflict.

Yet his later record was littered with official reprimands of various kinds.

His later career was not as clear-cut in its requirements as was West Point. That embodied individual will functions extremely well in situations where the rules are definite and inflexible, and expectations can be met precisely and by intent. Most of life is not like that, of course, so such a person must either impose his will upon inchoate circumstances or suffer frustrations. Or, alternatively, both.

MacArthur was superb in dangerous situations, unruly in routine ones. In World War I he was apparently unruffled in the most violent battles, appearing quite heedless of the possibility of injury or death, just like Hemingway in 1944 when he was overtaken by his renewed conviction of invulnerability.

Both, too, were men who imposed their will upon the course of their lives. MacArthur willed his way to military pre-eminence. Hemingway worked and worried his way through the somewhat formless competition and chaotic requirements of the world of commercial publishing to achieve his own preeminence. In neither case was the position at the top of the heap achieved by accepting what came. They did their best to determine what came. Hemingway spent more time and energy organizing upcoming fun with his friends than some expend on a career. That energy overflowed in him.

However, we don’t wish to give the wrong impression. Hemingway was very self-divided – to the point of internal civil war – in everything in life except his purity of devotion to the act of creation. He wanted to succeed; he worked hard to get Scribner’s to promote his books, but what was non-negotiable for him was the process itself. He came to his writing desk as a priest to the altar. For Hemingway, writing was his sacred vocation, the thing to which he was always true. To Fitzgerald, writing was a talent and skill that he parlayed into fame and wealth. It isn’t that Fitzgerald betrayed his talent (as Hemingway sometimes thought he did) but that the two men thought of writing in two complementary but different ways.

MacArthur was something between the two. He was Army to his boot tips, but he was MacArthur to those same boot tips. He did not face (if he even recognized) conflicts between the role and the profession, or between either and himself.

Have we wandered off any conceivable point, here? It feels like we have.

Perhaps we have, a little. So find us our examples. You know what we want.

In the Army, how about Bradley or Eisenhower? Both highly professional, both at the pinnacle of professional success, neither one an egomaniac. And in writing, I don’t know, Dos Passos?

Bradley and Eisenhower were modest men who were team players; they didn’t have to be the star; they concentrated on doing their job as best they could. Their will, you see, was not focused solely on their own careers and preeminence. They were not weak-willed – that isn’t how one advances up a pyramid – but their will wasn’t one-pointed. In a sense, one could say MacArthur was always at an extreme of tension; Bradley and Eisenhower were not. They were balanced in a way MacArthur was not, not that MacArthur was unbalanced, but that he was centered entirely upon one thing, in a way they were not.

Dos Passos, too, was centered differently than Hemingway. His life centered upon other things than writing as a sacred profession. He was skilled, he was serious, he was professional, but he was not a priest in the way Hemingway was. This did not make him less of a man, and perhaps nothing could have brought his prose to the level of Hemingway’s, but the difference was there. Sometimes what appears to be a matter of will (or lack of will) is actually something else. Bulldozers don’t maneuver well. Sometimes a bicycle goes places bulldozers can’t go.

A little more explicitly, please.

Everyone chooses. Life is choice, and the result of choice, and the preparation for choice. But the criteria and the goals selected make life a very different thing for different kinds of people. Some are single-pointed and are quite successful in achieving what they can conceptualize – and may be quite blind to anything else, and may be quite disoriented, even helpless, when confronted with situations outside their accustomed areas of operation. Some are diffuse, achieving no single-pointed success but enjoying a well-roundedness unimaginable (because most of the facets are invisible to them) to the one-pointed person. And some are not focused at all, or are focused by default, being shaped by the currents they find themselves in. There is room for all these in life, else life wouldn’t allow them. And so if you wish to be frustrated, there’s nothing to it: Merely measure your life by the wrong yardstick

Wednesday, September 4, 2019

As you experience your community nature, you may find it invigorating and liberating, or scary and in fact terrifying.

So let’s spell it out once more, for the benefit of those who came in halfway through the movie.

The key to everything is “As above, so below,” for reality is made up of repeating fractal patterns, most particularly the 3D part of it. “Man is the measure of all things” means, not “Mankind is the only thing that’s important,” but, “Everything at every level may be understood in relation to the human scale, hence in understanding who and what you are, you can understand the shape and pattern and dynamics of all things, by extrapolation and analogy,” – only, the longer sentence is not a very snappy slogan, while the shorter one is easily remembered.

Thus, humans are communities, seen one way, and individual constituent parts of communities, seen the other. Like everything else in reality, it is a matter of scale. Atoms form molecules, molecules form elements, elements form compounds, compounds form larger shapes and units. Or, structures are composed of parts, each of which is composed of units, of elements, of molecules, of atoms, ultimately of bound energy. The thing you see depends upon the glass you see it through.

A human personality, far from being a simple unit, is a community of units functioning as one. The cells in your body may be considered either as communities of cells or as constituent parts of whatever unit they belong to. They are what they are, but what that is depends upon how you define it at the moment. You can’t say that a cell in your liver is “only” a cell rather than part of your liver; you can’t say that it is “only” part of the liver and not a cell. It is both, and cannot be only either. So with personalities. You are communities of other lives; you are individual elements in other lives. Both, not one or the other. Reality has no absolute divisions.

I see how strange and incomprehensible it will seem to any who have not gone through our long run-up to a different understanding. Can it possibly be made clear or even plausible?

Fortunately, that isn’t up to you. Each person’s inner self will guide them to what they need.

I sure hope so! I don’t see how we could bridge the gap otherwise.

Remember, we bridged the gap. No one needs to nor could follow your particular path. Everybody gets their own, makes their own. Serving as nudge, as reminder, as encouragement, is quite enough. Your understanding, like your experience, like your assumed self-definition, is going to wander. So what? Nothing lost and potentially something gained, for anything that gives you a more accurate experience of what you really are is potentially useful. There is always more to be learned, and how much you learn depends partly upon “circumstances” (the “externals” that represent your hidden springs and condition), but partly upon your interest and industry. Ask, and you shall receive. Knock, and it shall be opened.”

 

Tuesday, September 3, 2019

Some forms of society take our connectedness for granted, though each society may conceptualize differently. Others assume it is not possible. If a church encourages its members to expect to receive messages from spirit (no matter how they define spirit or define messages), those members will be more open to the experience and will be more open to sharing the experience, which in turn will open the way for others. It is a virtuous rather than vicious cycle.

The bump in the road may be that the terms in which the experience is described may be unfamiliar, and so may be suspect. The usual confusion of tongues.

That’s where we are today, isn’t it?

Not exclusively “today,” but yes. In the change from one era to another, much is lost in translation. However, realize that losing things in translation also allows for – encourages, almost enables – things to be found in translation.

I suppose it is an advantage of ILC that it comes with little cultural baggage.

Such baggage as it carries is of course transparent to you, but the less of the past one has to drag around, the more nimble one may be. However, if one disconnects from one’s past entirely, the result is not so much freedom as ungroundedness.

And the happy medium?

You being grounded, your expression of what you experience will be grounded, provided you intend it to be. You are personally well grounded in the history you know and feel. Others may be well grounded in the contemporary society they know and feel.

St. Columba on Iona, the Apostles in their wandering, any hermit or monk or nun or cloistered being; any mystic, any person devoted to an art or to living may feel this, and be sustained by it, and it does not in the slightest degree depend upon their idea of what – or who – they are experiencing. This is the reality behind any religious or artistic or scientific or philosophic conceptions.

I believe you just said – and I fully agree – that this sense of communion with a non-3D reality may be clothed in many belief-systems, but is the same enabling force.

It may lead to fanaticism, or to self-righteous certainty; it may even encourage someone in disastrously misguided directions. It isn’t a panacea.

No, it is the Age of Aquarius.

Very good. It is that.

The Age of Pisces had its own characteristics, and so will the Age of Aquarius, but there is no excuse for thinking that this new age will manifest only positively, any more than the old one did. That isn’t how duality works.

Yes. Very good. Very good.