Author: Frank DeMarco

Wednesday, November 13, 2019

Let’s look at the fact that 3D life in and of itself is not sufficient. This of course says it can be sufficient only in another context. You can see that 3D life is one stage in a process. It has inputs from one end, processes those inputs, resulting in those outputs at another end.

Like a logic circuit.

Or a manufacturing floor, or a written sentence in language, or many similar analogies, yes. A process may need to be examined as if it were a thing in itself, but finally it will be understood only as part of whatever larger process it serves. One way to see it would be, like an organ, which is part of a larger organism, and is itself a larger organism to those cells and processes it comprises.

Now, you may want to ask yourselves, whyever would we think that 3D life is separate from the rest of life? Where would that idea come from?

That doesn’t seem so hard. The evidence of our senses on the one hand, the hidden nature of the rest of reality on the other.

Well, pursue that. Why would you (speaking culturally, not individually) distinguish between sensory evidence and non-sensory evidence?

That is poisoned fruit from the Enlightenment, though the ancient Greeks were a little that way.

Closer examination will show you that everybody, is “a little that way.” It is a matter of temperament, and mood, and circumstance, as well as culture. A culture sufficiently relaxed to allow great freedom of belief is necessarily going to allow – great freedom of belief! That is, you can’t expect to have it both ways. Either your culture will be as binding and comforting as swaddling clothes, or it will not. If it is, there is little room for exploration, and little uncertainty. If it is not, there will be freedom to see things differently, a matter of choice, only do not expect freedom to coincide with unity of vision and experience, except occasionally.

And you have been gently pushing me, most of my life, to see the unity that may be found through complexity, rather than instead of complexity.

You will not live long enough to see the widespread immersion in a new more comprehensive unity that will follow the productive relative chaos of beliefs that is your time, but it will come. It generally does – and that newfound simplicity will become the platform from which new complications arise to be dealt with.

That vision of process is well understood. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis, and begin again.

Let us think about what is the context for 3D life.

My God, isn’t that what you have been doing all along?

Yes, but it is not necessarily so obvious to one and all. To be on the inside of a process is to take much for granted that is never said and scarcely thought.

• If 3D life is a process – and, we assure you, it may be seen that way accurately enough – what are the inputs and outputs?
• Nor is it one process, but several, overlapping, sometimes contradicting.
• And you must bear in mind that pastàpresentà future, though a necessary way to think and experience in 3D, is only somewhat Thus, misleading as well as illustrative.
• When are inputs actually outputs, and vice-versa? When the flow is opposite what you think it must be, and what you perceive it to be.
• But if you cannot reliably sort inputs from outputs, results from causes, how do you make sense of it?
• If you cannot depend upon your senses, nor your logic, not your ability to reason from cause to effect (which is not quite the same thing as logic), then where are you? And how did you get into such a fix?

Just lucky, I guess.

Yes, very funny. Or maybe truer than you know.

• Not everyone is so constituted as to need to know “how things are,” much less “why things are as they are.” But those who are so constituted find nothing in earth equally compelling. A clue, if you can see it as such.
• Some have an invincible determination (so positive as to be invisible to them as anything beyond a self-evident reality) to accept the 3D world exactly as it appears, nothing more, nothing less. Another clue.
• The interaction of these two types (and of course the bell-curve panoply between the two extremes) creates possibilities that otherwise could not exist. Final clue.

Thoreau said “Atheism itself  may be comparatively popular with God.”

Yes. The resultant thought may be less important than the process of arriving there – particularly given that the process is likely to be more enduring than any given result.

Enough for the moment.

A word on the process. It seems to me, some may not realize that it appears to me, often, as if I am merely thinking aloud. It is only when I look closely that I see that this amounts to peering into the darkness and seeing light in this or that direction, and moving where the light is at the moment. How is that kind of “thinking” distinguishable from being led by “inspiration,” or from “talking to the guys”? the distinguishing feature is mostly, maybe entirely, the way we think of it.

A valid insight. Ours? Yours? A gift from the universe? A haphazardly produced side-effect? Season to taste.

 

Thursday, October 24, 2019

The larger theme is:

• To coordinate descriptions of the 3D and non-3D worlds, so as to make sense of your lives.
• Within that, the existence and function and effect of vast impersonal forces on human lives.
• Within that, the nature and meaning of good and evil in the human experience.
• More immediately, the extension of life between 3D and non-3D, rather than the confinement of life as between birth and death.

I often feel that I am fumbling around, waiting to tune into the channel, and not really getting it.

There is something of that in the process. And there is always the same remedy: Focus, wait, remain receptive.

Yes. I know that, and I forget it. Very well.

[Pause]

Nothing, this morning?

Sometimes the process works, sometimes it doesn’t. You are always free to do something else. Read, go back to sleep, whatever. A hint: Sometimes, trying too hard is as ineffective as only half-trying. The sense of having to butt through a wall, or cast a line over a great distance, merely subconsciously affirms that “this can’t be done,” even while decades of experience demonstrates that it can be done, and done naturally and easily.

I know the nature of this particular roadblock is me, trying to consciously determine the theme for today.

Of course. In effect, you wind up trying to direct the effort, as in common thought, and at the same time receive automatically, as in trance channeling. These are contradictory processes that cut against each other, sometimes resulting in stress. It is the very nature of ILC, as we have been practicing it with you, to be between these extremes; an active conversation only half of which you direct.

It’s amazing how we can forget the simplest things. Okay, now perhaps we can really begin.

We are teaching technique for access, not providing dogma for memorization. So. The question might arise as to why such instruction should ever be necessary. Why is an inherent human ability not universally known and routinely practiced? And why should it re-emerge now?

I take it you aren’t interested in the history of our culture’s selective blindness.

No, not the “how” of it, but the “why” of it. And the “why” simply put is that life in 3D time distracts; it tends to concentrate

• more on the moment than on the long-run, and
• more on the sensory than on the non-sensory, and
• more on the immediately nearby than on the wider circle of consequences and influences.

How’s that again?

You find it hard to hold the bigger picture because

• you perceive it in time-slices, and (to differing extents)
• divided between the input through the senses and the input that comes through the intuition, directly.

Even those who are closely connected intellectually and emotionally to their non-3D component may find it hard to live what they know, because they find it hard to remember what they know. This is not good or bad; it is merely a result of living in 3D conditions of time and space. The conditions that lead you to forget are the same conditions that lead you to be able to concentrate. The reason you find it hard to absorb the big picture is the same reason you are able to concentrate on detail.

So, this discussion is at one and the same time describing process and information, thus:

• 3D limitation means you can’t understand everything.
• Non-3D extension means you can (while still in 3D, we mean, of course) grasp non-sensory connections and implications.
• Your experiences – this is important, and not nearly so obvious as you will be inclined to think it at first – your experiences are both 3D and non-3D experiences.
• Therefore, similarly your perceptions.

Now, it will repay you to reread those final two bullet points and ponder them, not just skip over them as obvious and/or unimportant.

You are redefining life, in a way.

Well, we’re certainly trying to do so. It is in wrong distinctions that many errors inhere. If you disconnect things that belong together, and connect things that don’t really belong together, you are going to see differently. Sometimes that’s what you want. Art does that deliberately sometimes. But sometimes you’re just getting in your own way.

• Experience is both 3D and non-3D.
• Perception is both 3D and non-3D.
• That doesn’t mean that either one is seen to be that.
• Nor does it mean that perception or experience may not be truncated by mental filters (usually below the level of conscious control).
• To see only a part of anything and think it complete is to never have seen it.

But of course by your own statement, not to mention our lifelong experience, we can never avoid seeing things as if they were wholes when in fact they are parts.

Yes, but there is all the difference in the world between something seen or done consciously and the same thing seen or done unconsciously.

I think you mean, even if circumstances force us to perceive things incompletely, we’re better off remembering that they are incomplete rather than letting ourselves think they are complete.

Think what irritates you more than any other single thing about New Age thought.

I have always been very impatient with people getting half an inch of truth and thinking they now can explain the world.  I never knew but that the half-inch might be more universal than I knew. In other words, maybe they were right, or righter than I was.

And therefore?

It is easier to be able to accept or reject something wholesale, but to have to maybe accept it in one context while rejecting it in another, or to accept part of it while rejecting another part (knowing that the person whose idea it is would reject any such division) is not so easy. I didn’t (and don’t) want to crystallize my beliefs in such a way as to be unable to consider new thoughts, yet I got tired of continually having to reconsider everything.

And it is just such suspension between provisional belief and provisional disbelief that is a necessary helpful part of the process of continually refining one’s understanding. However, as we have said and you have experienced, there’s no harm in camping at a staging-place, either, f or whatever length of time you need before resuming the climb.

Nor is everyone equipped to climb.

Nor is everyone interested in climbing, or designed for it, correct.

So there’s your hour, better spent than you may think at the moment. Remember these points:

• Experience is both 3D and non-3D.
• So is perception.

And, I gather you are going to add, “particularly given that they are the same thing seen differently.”

At any rate, we’ll continue at another time.

 

Tuesday, October 15, 2019

You said you were talking about the problem of evil in the coming civilization, and talking about individual self-development as it appears. Pray continue.

A chief source of confusion for people is how the “external” world can be really only an expression of unknown parts of themselves; and can be, equally real-ly, fully existent in and of and for itself. If this is once understood, many things clarify, because who and what you are clarifies. As long as you can’t see yourselves as both individual and not-individual, you are going to have to choose between what seems to be a divide. When you see a thing as if it were two things, obviously you won’t be able to see it whole.

I think I know what you mean, but the words don’t seem to me to be adequate to the task.

You try, then. We trust that by this time our description of reality as without absolute boundaries has been absorbed.

No, this is hopeless. I get that you want to recap so many things like reality being projected rather than existing as “real” in the way it appears to us. You may be able to trot all that out again, though I couldn’t, but how are you going to spend the hour recapitulating and then have any time for anything new?

We understand the frustration. Do you have a better idea?

What about just putting out the headlines, and let people use their own search-engines?

Interesting idea. Bold idea, even. But can you transcribe the headlines?

I don’t know. Let’s try, and we will or we won’t get something.

All right. Headlines:

• “Life is but a dream.”
• Also, “All is one”;
• “As above, so below.”
• “As a man thinks in his heart, so he is.”
• “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life, and you will call it fate.”

Okay. I see promise in this. Continue?

• Beyond this mortal realm, there is another, not mortal; yet the two are one.
• You are not primarily 3D beings and yet you are. Which way you define yourself (con-fine yourself) determines who you appear, how reality
• The only permanent thing is that all is in eternal unceasing change, and yet eternal change is itself a form of changelessness.

And you see the problem as well as the possibility: Too concise a statement emerges as paradox or cryptic allusion. Our habitual slow process of exposition avoids that pitfall.

Maybe worth alternating. I get tired of plodding exposition, continually half-repeating previously established views so as not to let them fall into oblivion.

Alternation may have its value.

I think of Bronson Alcott’s Orphic Sayings, which meant something to him but were entirely opaque to his contemporaries. He set forth, but he did not explain, hence did not communicate.

We have done plenty of explaining, these past years.

We have. If you wish to wax orphic now and again, I suppose we shouldn’t complain of opacity.

Well, then, another headline or two, and then we will pause.

• You are the entire world, yet you are only the tiniest part of it, rather like a hologram.
• As a “divine spark,” that is, stemming as you do from something that is not of the 3D level of reality, your nature cannot be satisfied with 3D reality alone.
• Earth is not a school; it is closer to a gymnasium, or basic training.
• You are neither ignorant nor isolated nor limited, and yet your 3D experience continually tempts you to see yourselves that way. Why do you suppose that is?
• Life is vastly greater than the 3D version of life that you are living in one part of yourself.

And enough for now.

 

Monday, September 9, 2019

I guess I’m up for the day. I got my night’s sleep in bits. Three installments, looks like. Things seem more or less normal. Only in the daytime (if then). Why? Actually, no reason to leave that as a rhetorical question. Why?

In sleep, or toward sleep when weariness is great enough, the equation changes.

Between mental and physical?

That is how we conceptualized it for you, years ago, but not really. It’s more like physical – which includes mental, though you didn’t know that then – and non-physical, which also includes mental, which you did not realize in quite this way.

So physical – mental – non-physical, with each of the extreme terms sharing space in the middle, so to speak.

Yes, but do not think to divide mental between the two. The point is that the two share the space you call mental. That’s what it is; that’s what creates it and its unique properties, that it is shared between them.

I tend to say interfaces between them, but even that isn’t quite right, is it?

It isn’t sufficient. Look at it this way. Suppose matter is actually a field. Thus you have two fields, rather than one of them being what you call matter. The intersection and interaction and interference of these two fields may be considered as an entity in itself. It isn’t, really: It is the result of the interaction. And that is what mind is. That’s why it is so volatile, so sensitive to perturbation, so creative of interpretation.

God, I can feel it, I’m so close to something that would make sense of so much, but I don’t have the scientific background to grasp it.

In this case, that background would hinder you, because enmeshed in too many firmly held misconceptions. This is why it requires amateurs, to be able to disrupt well-ordered and accepted ways of thinking.

But it isn’t like nobody else is getting this. I can sense that.

No, and isn’t that good? Redundancy is the best safeguard.

Proceed, then.

Paul Brunton sensed and deduced that your 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 think the world away – that is, dismiss it as only an illusion – and not to take its independent existence for granted. He balanced.

Yes, I found it very reasonable. It felt right.

Well, now look at that “mental” as a field always 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 (the 3D) that is unique, and perhaps both? (The non-3D, remember, though not divided, is not uniform. As above, so below.)

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

Of course. And what happens to that field when the 3D pole 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 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.

You must damp down your excitement if we are to continue.

Yeah, I get that. I’d flare up like a flash bulb, and then out.

You are a reusable bulb, but there could be recharging time involved.

Okay.

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 me, and for those of my friends 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 because illness can be overcome), what is the story when we consider our mental world to be a field generated by and suspended from the interaction between 3D and non-3D fields?

You mean, what’s the panacea?

I’ve waited 70 years. Surely long enough?

We smile. Yes, long enough, and in one sense you never needed to wait at all, only it served you well.

I suppose it did, but it gets tiresome. For me, for others with their own problems. And kindly don’t say that life is problems, we all know that first-hand. But maybe we’d like to deal with some other problems instead.

As you wish, only remember that there’s a reason why some people choose the devil they know over the devil they don’t know.

Well, I admit, it does give me pause. However, if you’re in the mood to explain, I’m in the mood to listen, and everybody can make up his or her mind.

Fair enough. All right, first, recognize that customarily you all regard yourselves as primarily mental, no matter how attached to physical sensations you may be.

Do you mean “experience,” rather than “regard”?

A valid correction, and experiencing yourselves one way leads to regarding yourselves that way, of course.

I would have said (judging second-hand) that most people experience themselves as inhabitants of bodies.

That does not contradict what we said. The person who is most sensuously oriented still does not identify with the body as a collection of cells and organs, but as the horse the person rides. A beautiful girl may identify with her beauty and her appetites; still she identifies as the person who, you see. Similarly the athlete or the lover or 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 the case of those who experience the world primarily emotionally or intellectually, but it is the case always. You have bodies; you tend to and you use bodies; you may even think that you think of yourselves as bodies, but 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 as an end but potentially welcome it as an end to interference.

The interference has made clearer to you who you really are, body or 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  upon the body.

And the definition we choose (or which seems obvious to us) 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.

A tremendously powerful image, the mind as a suspended field. I wish one of my friends would follow up on it. Meanwhile, thank you.

[I was doing the dishes when 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 in space, or anyway separated by something, rather than occupying identical or even 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.]

 

Sunday, September 8, 2019

All right, gentlemen, last night you said we might talk about “fiasco,” either in private or in public if I decided to let it be in public. Shall we?

If you wish us to, we can. If you can allow it, we can.

I can only do my best, but I want to allow it, let’s put it that way.

[This refers to a dream I had yesterday. My college friend Dennis and I and a woman – I’m pretty sure it was the woman who became my wife, whom Dennis also knew then – were walking from our car into a hotel, and I was telling him that he had a registration from one state, a driver’s license from another, and other discrepancies in his cover story. We were laughing, light-hearted about it. The woman was more serious, somewhat disapproving of our attitude, I think. She entered first, and was no longer there when Dennis and I got through the doors.

[We entered the big double doors of the entrance, and it wasn’t clear where to go from there. We walked a few steps forward, then there came a choice of ways, neither obvious. I chose to turn left, and there was a little counter, sort of hole-in-a-corner affair. I heard Dennis say quietly to himself, “Fiasco,” and realized that he meant that he and I never really stayed connected in our lives as we had been supposed to do. It made me sad, and the sadness woke me up.

[Later, being depressed because I was not working and was feeling unable to work, I generalized the word to encompass my entire life. At 9:15 p.m. I said, “So talk to me about “fiasco,” and got, “No. Tomorrow morning, if you wish.”]

TGU: It [the dream] amounts to your systematically disowning – or, being tempted to disown – your entire past and present. But in that case, who is disowning? What is left?

I don’t see it quite that way. It’s closer to my accepting a modification of a view of myself that is so sweeping as to leave little left

Say that’s so. What does it amount to but saying, “My life was a mistake”?

Exactly. What does it amount to but that? When I dream of my best friend from younger days muttering “fiasco” and I know he is referring to our lack of relationship in this life – only, then it widens out to thinking of it as a commentary on my whole life – what am I to think but that other parts of me – including you, I should think – hold that opinion? I do myself, sometimes.

And as I wrote that, I was also thinking, I turned left as we entered the hotel, rather than continuing straight. Was it my turning left that was a mistake?

You lost sight of Jean – she disappeared from the scene – and you found yourself in a hole-in-corner place rather than the open lobby you would have expected.

I did.

Now remember the dream of the scout troop and your cousin Tom and your hat.

[This dream, of some years ago, had me at the end of a Boy Scout patrol of eight, hiking through my hometown. My cousin was also a member of the patrol. A wind blew my hat off, and I had to chase it down. When I got it, I went looking for the patrol, but they were out of sight and I never saw them again. The meaning I took from it was that the eccentricity of my life was not of my choosing, but was the result of forces beyond my conscious control.

It wasn’t your choice, remember!

Well, no. That’s true. but it was my lack of awareness.

Was it? Let’s say, instead, your inability to see farther than you did.

All right. So maybe my course has had less to do with my conscious mind than with my – what, fate?

Consider this. Your life as it has been lived has brought you to this place. What you have said, what you have dreamed, what you have attempted, what you have done, and failed to do, and done badly, who you have helped and hindered, who you have loved and refused to love, the lives you might have lived but didn’t, and above all the life you did live because of the choices you made – it all brought you to a place where you are able to help some people, connect to some people, take heart from some people. Any path offers opportunities, particularly if it is less a beaten path than a seeming wandering across a field. Every possible life will have regrets. Every possible life, though, will remain a point of the present, with opportunities at the present moment – at every present moment – for you to move on from there with your own third-tier reactions to what has been.

If you concentrate on regretting the 3D record, you risk overlooking the All-D reality. The 3D passes away; externals are merely externals, and can in effect be modified. But you are above and beyond what your life-record is. The 3D record is what it is. Your record – your soul record, call it – is entirely different although forged in 3D in part.

So if my life is a fiasco —

No, it may be seen as a fiasco. It is a fiasco from a way of looking at it. But – is that all it is, or is it also a triumph of perseverance?

Very merciful of you.

No it isn’t; it is very realistic of us. No one’s life is only one thing. No summary of a life is more than what you would call a horseback approximation. To accept one view is to always leave yourself vulnerable to (or perhaps we should say open to) a sudden flip-flop of viewpoint that will tempt you to say, “I’ve been seeing it all wrong! It’s really this way!” Well, it isn’t “really” any one way. It’s always a matter of viewpoint. What has your life taught you more thoroughly than that? Only you don’t always apply it.

It would be easier if I could ever express this to anyone and have them comprehend it and not either see it as self-indulgence or rush in to assure me that I am wrong.

So what? If others can’t do for you, you’ll have to do for yourself. Is this different than the rest of life?

I guess I am even nearer to the end of my life than I sometimes assume. I see I have no real hope of getting my materials together and out there.

That can come later if – as we told you, and you did hear – you do the work no one else could do. Leave it prepared and let others worry about distributing it. It will get done or it won’t, but you will have done one level of preparation.

It occurs to me, maybe my literary executors could do enough merely by reposting my material on the net, rather than publishing in book form.

They will find their own options.

Then what of the dream saying “fiasco”?

What of it? It did bring to your attention your regret that your life was not richer, fuller in human relationships. But maybe you couldn’t have had so rich an inner life, if outer life had been richer.

Well, it still seems to me I wasted and am still wasting so much time and energy and attention.

But are you wasting it? What would “wasting it” mean?

Hmm. I see. “Wasting” implies a goal not being pursued.

Yes it does. And your friend Colin Wilson did not waste time and attention, but would you have wanted his life?

His achievement, yes.

And maybe it was as unsatisfying, even frustrating, to him as yours is to you. Maybe it usually is, to anyone. That is a matter of viewpoint as well, of course.

I joke that I am under house arrest, but next to the lives I see around me, there’s something in that.

No, not really. You mean, your life is centered in non-3D in that it is internal no matter what it is you think about, but that doesn’t mean anyone is arresting you (nor that anyone is holding you safe, which would be another interpretation). It means your circle of experience, your 3D mirror, is seemingly quite different from your brother’s, say. So it is. Again, would you live his life, and if so, why haven’t you?

Well, let’s look at it a little more carefully. There are many things about his life that I envy. I couldn’t live his life because I don’t have the attitudes needed.

And the same is true for everybody.

So, stop repining?

Stop worrying.

It’s always the same old story, isn’t it? Emerson’s “lowly faithful, banish fear.”

It is for you. For others, there are different regrets and wistfulnesses. Fortunately for all concerned, 3D is not designed by Procustes.

Very funny. More like by Tantalus, or Sisyphus.

That’s why those myths, to describe an attitude in an image, so that those who follow will know that it isn’t just them. And, don’t forget Prometheus.

I’ll have to think whether to share this or not. I can see that it would require less interpolation than I had thought – a little explanation of my two dreams, mostly. Well, I guess we’ll see. Thanks in any case. I’ll try to take it to heart.

 

Friday, August 30, 2019

A reasonable night’s sleep, courtesy of the nebulizer and a good deal of foresight. But what’s this all about really, guys? Is it really just weather all the time?

You live in 3D, you can’t expect to be unaffected by 3D.

And I am also a creature of non-3D, and ought to have some immunity from 3D.

Do you think so?

I do. I can’t imagine that our 3D limitations are absolute in the way they seem to be. I guess that’s way I always believed in psychic abilities: I sensed that what we see is not what we get.

Oh, but it is, if you will examine the statement carefully, not in the meaning computer terms give it, but literally.

Yes, I get it. What we see is what we get. As we see more, there is more to see.

More to get. Isn’t that what you – we – said in Imagine Yourself Well? Your depth of connection determines the rules of the world you live in. Change the depth of connection, change the rules in effect for you.

It seems to me I realized sometime that our health could also be read as an indicator of where we are.

We said at the time that if good behavior guaranteed good health, the 3D would be much better behaved. But, within limits, there is truth to the statement. Only, measure within yourself, not against others.

It’s more like a barometer.

Not a bad analogy, in that everyone lives at a different altitude so to speak. (Be careful of the analogy.)

• For some, physical health is a given.
• For some, it is an impossible dream.
• For some, a position anywhere between the extremes, for, remember, this is one

In the way that health varies wildly among people, so do other factors. Intelligence. Emotional stability. External good fortune. Luck, so called. Vitality. Not all life’s prizes nor pains are given to any one person. The fluctuations of your own barometer, no one else’s, can serve as indicators for you.

It is simple-minded to assume that the good and the bad that happen to us are reward or punishment, but I don’t think they happen at random either.

In the first place, how do you know the good from the bad? How do you know reward from punishment? Is it “good” that lighting strikes, or rain falls, or the sun shines, or that temperature rises or falls? Is it “bad”?

It’s just life.

Yes – but life is a non-3D being, experiencing 3D constrictions to focus its perceptions and shape its choices in the process of self-creation; and doing so in the presence of other non-3D beings undergoing the same process.

Somebody must be calling the tune.

Or maybe the tune is being simultaneously and competitively created as you go along. Just because we call them vast impersonal forces doesn’t mean they are vast autonomous forces, but they are impersonal relative to any given 3D individual or, in fact, the larger non-3D being of which it is a part.

And do those non-3D beings together determine our weather here?

We should have to think how to answer that question, it has so many unconscious assumptions, some of which are right.

I withdraw the question, if it is going to interfere. Go on as you wish.

We are a long way even from making a fair start on the relations between 3D lives and the greater world they are usually only vaguely aware of. It requires thinking out.

Where’s Seth when you need him?

He was where he needed to be and where you needed him to be. But Seth once is empowerment. How could Seth twice be anything but enfeeblement?

Which I take to be you saying that we would come to be dependent upon him.

ILC keeps you as part of the process, not as a consumer of enlightenment. Seth’s role was to provide a massive source of new ways of understanding, thus changing the potential for any with ears to hear. ILC’s role is to provide a model and a guide for the individual 3D soul to take charge of its own perceptions and possibilities of creation. You have to do the work, because it is the doing that is the learning, not the reading about doing.

Sort of Hemingway’s prose as opposed to prose that lays it out for you to see.

Another good analogy. If one cannot understand a story without having read between the lines, the effort of reading between the lines is the reason to bother reading it. A story that is self-evident is qualitatively different.

Maurice Walsh wrote lovely stories quite unlike Hemingway’s, but Hemingway said Walsh was his favorite author.

Walsh painted portraits of a time and a place and complications of male-female relationships. Not every story need hint at deeper things, and excellence is to be measured by what is attempted, no less than by what might have been attempted. Similarly, life. Some people are in 3D to write Hemingway subtext, others, to write Walsh description. Is one or the other (or any possible combination of the two) “right”? “Wrong”? If 3D life is anything, it is a richness of diversity.

Have we wandered out of sight of the question of health and weather?

Let’s say we broadened the discussion. Everything touches upon everything; it’s a question of where you wander conversationally, or in thought.

 

Tell me more about what changed when I was ten, and again at twelve when I didn’t quite drown.

And, you might add, the time you fainted in church and came back – just before you would have lost consciousness completely – when the ushers got you to the front door, thus allowing you to remember the event if with no sense of its meaning.

Three events, then.

And there could be others added. Anyone’s life is fuller and stranger than is realized from inside or from outside – that is, by self or others.

The incident at ten – that influenced my whole life and I always knew it, but I didn’t really conceptualize it until much later. Yet now we work on the assumption that a message from my future shaped it.

No. The message, received, reshaped its importance. It reconfigured your second- and third-tier reactions to life, you might say. So this version that you live is more magical and open than the ones in which the message was not received and the encouragement was not taken to heart. By the way, notice that the message and the response were below the threshold of your consciousness. It nearly always is; that allows the essence to bypass the personality. However, the fact that it is done by stealth is not the point here.

The near-drowning incident at 12, like the fainting-spell in church, allowed a brief bridging of worlds with conscious observation. Because you did not quite lose consciousness, but came so close, in circumstances that had your attention, you got a glimpse, so to speak, of the existence of more than the sensory world. It came without conceptualization, so could not be rationalized away, even if you had so wished. And because your attention was then on aftermath – post-fainting, post-near-downing – you passed on to other things and didn’t obsess over what had happened.

I get the sense of our lives being repeatedly tweaked.

Remember however that what you experience as external events are in reality dramatizations of what you are and where you are trending at the moment. No two people experience the same event or series of events or background conditions identically.

 

Monday, February 4, 2019

Hans Oskar Porr asks if someone who is murdered chose to be murdered. “Is it part of a life-plan, probabilities, test, an exit strategy, etc.?” He asks, “If it is a choice, is it always a choice or are there also freak accidents?” I am inclined to think this (that he quoted in his email) contains the answer: A change of angle of viewing will show entirely different relationships that are no less and no more true. In other words, there is no one way of seeing things; there is only every way, and this of course no one in 3D can ever stretch to encompass.” But – is that right? Would you comment, please, to a sincere question?

Not only does a different viewpoint reveal a different aspect of a given situation – it alters what is possible, what is true. When you see life as fluid rather than static – as a dream rather than a collection of objects to be moved around – the ground-rules not only seem to change, but in fact they do change. What you believe is directly connected to what is true (and possible) for you. Many know this from experience, but not all who have experienced it realize what they have experienced.

Your beliefs bound your experiences; your experiences expand or limit your beliefs. As usual, a reciprocating process. Someone who will not  be convinced is impregnable in his unbelief, and thus

• from one viewpoint, is firmly rooted in fact,
• from another viewpoint, is trapped in his own limiting beliefs.

This is not an either/or – it is a both/and, as well as a neither/nor.

Choose your beliefs, change your life.

Yes, except that life is not as simple as a 3D mind making its decisions rationally and fairly.

Unless that is our ideal, I suppose.

Not exactly one’s ideal; more like, one’s firm idea of how things are. You understand, there isn’t really any point in thinking one or another person can set out the rules of life as they are. The best you can do is to set out the rules of life as they are for you. Again, looking at life more as a dream than as a staged event will bring you closer intuitively to the reality. Only – some will be unable to adopt that view!

So your answer is, “The rules of life depend upon how you see them, so there isn’t any way to answer this question, except arbitrarily.”

That isn’t wholly representative of our answer, but perhaps it is best to pause there and wait for reaction. On to your second question.

All right. Alex Bee: citing the case of Canadian investigator Joe Fischer, asks

• if Fischer killed himself or was murdered, and
• (2), how to protect against malevolent beings. He asks specifically if saying or thinking Robert Monroe’s affirmation asking for the help of beings on the same or higher level of wisdom and development is protection enough.

The two questioners are linked, you see. They illumine each other. Let us think for a moment about luck, and divine protection, and evil or malicious spirits, and intent.

Again, what we believe is what is true for us.

With an implied caveat, always, that no one in 3D knows fully who or what he is, and so never fully knows his own mainsprings.

If you believe you need a ritual of protection, you will. If you don’t, you won’t. However this is not as simple as deciding to decide. Again, what you are in various aspects of the community that is you will determine your range of choice. You may consciously think “I am not afraid” and unconsciously cower. Or vice versa, for that matter. But – subject to that very important reservation – it is true that life will serve up what you expect.

Surely “what you expect” isn’t right.

Well, it is, provided you remember that people do their expecting at various levels, not all known to one another.

I have never felt a need to ask for protection, but perhaps that is foolhardiness. So far, so good, anyway.

But in your external life you do the same, and again, so far so good.

Although I do hesitate to make recommendations to others, for fear I may be wrong, or may be pushing my luck, only to discover one day that it runs out.

But regardless, this is your experience, your (inner and outer) world in conformity to your expectations.

So I suppose the answer is, if you think you need protection, act as if you do, otherwise not.

Let’s say who and what you are determines the need or non-need for protection, because malevolent forces do exist, in a way, and don’t, in a way. That is, what is within your limits seems real to you, and other things do not, can not. But again, don’t confuse deciding that you believe something with actually believing.

So in practical terms?

It’s always the same prescription: Get into close touch with all levels of yourself. Stay in touch. Reconcile to the degree possible, while remembering that you while you are in the body have the opportunity and responsibility to choose. That’s what you are doing here, choosing.

Or at least, that is my/our take on things.

Yes, very good. Everyone lives in a different subset of the world tailored for them, of necessity. That is the opportunity; that is the predicament.