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Friday, April 25, 2025

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

We have not yet finished our particular approach.

Welcome, Dr. Jung.

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

Okay. [Did.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, I think you just did that.

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, I do.

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

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

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

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

But does the world depend upon how you see it?

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

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

How would we know?

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

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

Yes, but does it tell you something about consciousness?

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

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

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

Certainly.

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

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

Realer than this level.

You experienced it yourself.

For about five seconds. Yes.

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

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

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

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

Call this, “A dream dreaming us.”

All right. Till next time, then.

 

Tuesday, April 22, 2025

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

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

I’ll center. … Better?

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

Yes, I got it.

Let’s talk about everyday life and lifetime aspirations.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not sure even that will do it.

You try, then.

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

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

I don’t know, but people do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Becoming clearer about the difference between captain and helmsman?

More like this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Saturday, April 19, 2025

5:50 a.m. A couple days of reading instead of conversation. I suppose it’s necessary to break the pattern every so often. So, Jon, what do we talk about? More on healing?

More on intent, perhaps.

Take it away.

A word on the process of Intuitive Linked Communication. You know that the underlying skill is remaining receptive but not passive, remaining actively engaged without moving into trying to direct things. People do it all the time but usually in a different context.

Living a 3D life, accepting whatever comes next and then reacting to it.

Not previewing, not trying to anticipate, not trying to control what comes, yes. And at the same time, being there. Athletes, for example. Skilled pilots, careful scholars, directors of processes (industrial chemists, for example). Soldiers in battle. EMTs in dangerous situations. You could make quite a list of ways people employ this active receptivity, and, if you’re not quite sure of the concept, making a list will be instructive, for you will have to use your judgment continually to decide if this or that example belongs.

And what we are doing here is merely an extension of that skill.

Let’s say, it is a widening of the field of interaction to include the non-3D. but that will be misleading without some further comment, so our diversion may take over.

No harm in that.

No. Well, to say the field widens to include the non-3D is sort of right as a thumbnail summary, but bear in mind that the 3D shades into non-3D, so it isn’t like flipping an on/off switch. It is much closer to turning a rheostat. You become more aware of areas you are already functioning in. Let’s say, you pay more attention to intuition, and imagination (in a certain sense of the word), and undefined possibility. You see? It isn’t a new way of functioning, it’s more of a closer look at what you’ve already been doing all your life.

I would say, it’s doing what you’ve always done, but framing it differently.

Yes, that, but not only that. There is an element of the familiar and an element of strangeness, both.

I have been telling people for years, “anybody can do this,” but very few seem to believe me.

That’s why I mention it in this new context. The way people experienced you doing it emphasized to them the unfamiliar aspect of it, and they didn’t have this conceptual bridge to help them see the familiar aspect.

I don’t know what I could have done differently to help people see that.

It isn’t a question of what you did or how you did it, because any procedure will show some people and not others. All I’m doing here is suggesting another way for people to think of things so that some of them may take the next step.

Okay. How did you happen to jump to this, when you started to talk about intent?

This is discussing intent, in a way.

It’s a stretch.

To return: We discussed intent as an element of health.

We did?

Implicitly. But consider, everybody is different. Everybody’s constitution leads to different values, different abilities to pursue those values. There shouldn’t be any need to say this; it’s obvious is you look around you. But it is surprising how people, when they start trying to make generalizations about life, tend to make them about some one type of person, forgetting that “it takes all kinds” to make up a world.

In practice, this means that somebody following his goals, expressing his values, may run directly counter to your goals, your values. Usually it isn’t direct opposition, usually the angle will be oblique, but the point is the same. Two people pursuing their best values may express very differently, expressing and supporting very different, perhaps contradictory, things. And there’s nothing wrong with this. As your guys – your other guys, I suppose I should say now – often told you, it isn’t a design flaw.

All this conflict isn’t waste product like heat from an engine, and it isn’t Armageddon. It is just the various elements of an ecosystem.

If you look closely enough at your own mental and emotional life, you will see that it depends on conflict as a motivating force. In this context, I don’t mean “conflict” to be warfare, but, let’s say, jostling.

I read somewhere that somebody said humans always move from discomfort toward comfort. Is that what you mean?

I wouldn’t put it exactly that way, but more or less.  A bunch of independent factors operating at the same time and place will soon turn into an ecosystem, as each part finds a comfort zone. It’s a big continuing process of accommodation.

I have an illustrative image just out of range, something like things in a frying pan, naturally settling into the most efficient use of space, or molecules of gas, doing the same thing. The jostling is part of the process. It is less warfare than elbowing.

That’s close enough. Now if you look at your life  – your mental and emotional life particularly – can you see that this goes on all the time? Well, just as it goes on within you, it goes on outside of you – that is, among others.

And internally, I suppose, down to the molecular level and below.

And to the macrocosmic level, yes.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that life as such is cacophony.

Remember AA [in Bob Monroe’s book Far Journeys]. That parable may be considered as illustrating the appeal of 3D to non-3D.

We could use a little less conflict!

So you think. But what you really mean, in your sanest moments, is that you could use more of certain kinds of conflict and less of other kinds.

Aha! And thus, intent.

You should never forget that you are a part of a system, not a random collection of elements, because over time even a random collection will become a system. You are not lost, you are not embattled, you are not a helpless observer, no matter how it sometimes feels. You are part of a system and so am I and so is everybody and everything else, and if you think you are wiser than the universe, more moral than God, well, that kind of attitude is part of the system like any other attitude.

And our function as relative individuals is to form and live our values.

You may have heard that before.

Regardless of who or what would tend to say, “You’re wrong.”

That attitude is also part of the system – but so is resistance to that attitude.

Freedom, as the guys always said.

Freedom and the opposite of freedom. Hope and the opposite of hope. Benevolence, malice, acceptance, resistance, tranquility, turmoil – it’s all part of the game, and it is up to you to choose.

But you aren’t saying it doesn’t matter what we choose.

I’m saying now that what you are is your list of possibilities. Being what you are, certain choices won’t really be possible for you: They would be out of character. But within these pretty broad limits, it’s up to you. And some people’s choices will appall you, but that’s their business on their end (expressing their values) and yours on your end (reacting to this input from the “external” world).

Call this “Conflict and intent”?

As good a title as any. It may force people to think about the connection between the first words on process and the following words.

If you say so. Okay, thanks as always, Jon. I look forward to more, whenever.

 

Making the unconscious conscious is the key to achieving liberation from old patterns, because as long as something is beneath the level of consciousness, we are at its mercy. Once make it conscious and we can reprogram it closer to heart’s desire.

Our ILC group yesterday did a drumming on the question,  “How can we make the unconscious conscious?” Here’s what i got:

Intend. It is just that simple a first step.

Then, notice. Your life will tell you what is up at bat because something external will be a problem or an opportunity.

Then, dare. If it’s scary, take that as a sign that it’s important. Trust that you won’t be led into deeper waters than you can navigate.

Finally, integrate. Work the new insights; enjoy (or even suffer) the new realizations as they manifest as greater freedom of action.

Intend, notice, dare, integrate. Rinse, repeat until you need to glide for a while, and don’t think you are on a schedule. Nothing wrong with resting once in a while.

Wednesday, April 16, 2025

3:45 a.m. Jon, if you have an agenda, let’s proceed. Otherwise, perhaps we can address the questions posed by Jim Austin in a comment on my blog.

Let’s address his questions, which are good ones. But we will address them from an angle he may not have been considering.

Nothing new there! Seems like we’re always addressing things from an unsuspected angle. In fact, you could say it’s the motto of the firm. Here is Jim’s comment.

[Comment by Jim Austin on Illness as Indicator, 4-14-25

[“Perhaps Jon would discuss his views on the changes that come with ‘advancing years’ … what they might be indicating. Or if those (considered inevitable) deterioration, aches and pains, and weaknesses even fit into this present discussion.

[‘From the post today it seems that as we age, we resonate with different parts of ourselves (as indicated by changing health, vitality, and wellbeing). To:

• remind us that physical life is ending, so tie up as many loose ends as possible?
• push us to ‘get it together’ for existence in non-3D?
• look deeper into life (on both ‘sides’) to see/feel the Oneness and the distinctions?

[“Guidance and I work on this, so other viewpoints would be appreciated and helpful.”]

[Jon:] The simplest approach would be to remember what you got in yesterday’s drumming: Every challenge is also a gift. Put that text in here, too.

[“Stick to the idea of a gift and a challenge being the same thing, different aspects. This is the key to many things.  Be a little careful about banishing things because you think they are “bad” or inconvenient or challenging. Spend time drawing connections between seemingly external problems and hidden internal problems. And the same, by the way, with gifts. If something external favors you, ask what it connects to within you. resonance, after all, is resonance.

[“Remember that your goal is not perfect health in the sense of no challenges. It is, more, perfect health for you, bearing in mind that sometimes physical challenges prevent or substitute for emotional or other challenges that might be harder to deal with.”]

It helps if you keep your eye on the ball. What is 3D life all about? Endless prolongation? Achievement of some kind of bodily perfection? For that matter, is it even about achieving anything? Or is it about striving, rather than achieving?

That almost seems to say that by definition, we are going to remain unsatisfied.

No, whether you are satisfied with your life is a matter of your willed choice. You can be satisfied or dissatisfied less according to circumstances than according to temperament. But you will never be perfectly fulfilled (regardless of whether you are satisfied) because, by design, life has more possibilities than can be manifested.

Yes, I think we’ve got that: All that extra potential leaves us free to change directions.

So, then, consider your situation, a more-than-3D creature in a 3D span of years. What are you there to do?

To create ourselves, if I understand it right; to choose among possibilities.

And can there be an end of possibilities?

Theoretically, you mean?

No, practically. Could anybody ever use up all their possibilities?

I suppose we could run out of possibilities that we had a chance to manifest.

You suppose wrong. A helpless cripple on his or her deathbed still has possibilities, and you know what they are.

A choice of attitude toward whatever manifests. Frankl again.

Well, he may have lived to become a cranky old man, but as the saying goes, when you’re right, you’re right.

But I get the sense that when Seth told Jane Roberts she could choose to live, he was talking about more than a choice of how to accept the physical condition that was killing her.

He was pointing out that there was a reason why it was killing her, and that she cold change – could decide, you could say – so that the illness no longer matched the reality she was enduring. But this doesn’t mean quite what it may sound like. He wasn’t saying, magically move to an alternate reality, or parallel timeline, or however you want to think of it. He was saying, she was providing the basis for the resonance between her life and the illness, and if she changed – which was within her power, if she knew how to do it – the resonance would be broken and the necessary consequences would no longer apply.

If she could find the key – just as I was thinking as a kid – if I could just find (or remember) the key.

Now, do you see how this connects to Jim Austin’s question?

Not clearly. I see that it has to do with the conditions being also gifts, or anyway opportunities.

Health challenges, like other types of challenge, present opportunities for greater clarity, if addressed properly. Do you want to learn what’s still hidden from you in your unconscious mechanisms and procedures? A challenge in the 3D world – seemingly external – will do that. Whether you can and do use the opportunities is of course up to you.

There is a tricky aspect to this. Health challenges are external in that they manifest seemingly independent of us, but they’re not external, in that it is our own body, under our own control (theoretically).

Everything in 3D seems external and is also a part of you. That is the whole point of the 3D world as signpost to your unknown inner reality. And if you keep this not-so-obvious fact in mind, Jim’s questions answer themselves.

They do?

Try this:

• As you age, different problems arise. The pattern differs among people, but it is safe to say that everybody faces something, and usually more than one something.
• Each of these “somethings” can lead you to greater specific insights, and often enough can lead you to things you can still do something about. It isn’t about reaping what you have sown (though it can be that too), but about life continuing to serve up opportunities.
• It isn’t so much tying up loose ends as reviewing what else remains possible to take into account. “Loose ends” is one way to think of it, but less with the idea of tidying up than with the idea of seizing the day.
• It is true, you could look at it as preparing for your next phase of life, only don’t stress the future over the present. It is still necessary to be here, now, while there is life and breath.
• As to looking at “both sides now” and seeing the underlying oneness: That is a possible side-effect, but not the main purpose. The main purpose is for you to continue to do what you can, as much as you chose it. Realization of the oneness of internal and external doesn’t necessarily follow. For some it will, for some it won’t.

Now, bear in mind, health challenges are not the only thing in life. Some people live healthy lives right up to the end, and then their 3D self dies. That doesn’t mean they haven’t met plenty of other kinds of challenges.

I can see that.

And remember always, it doesn’t matter what you think you know of someone else’s life. You’ll never have the real flavor of it, any more than others will know the flavor of yours. In that sense, all lives are private. This isn’t about secrecy, it’s about the impossibility of seeing all aspects, and particularly the difficulty caused by the fact that 3D always imposes point-of-view limitations – perspective. Fortunately, you don’t need to know everything about anybody (even yourself!) to know enough to get a feel for them as a fellow soul on a journey like your own.

I can’t tell if we have given Jim what he needs.

He’ll know, and he or others can always ask further questions.

True. Okay, well, thanks again, and till next time.