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Tuesday, April 15, 2025

12:40 a.m. Should we begin? We were going to discuss illness as facilitator.

Which is the same as discussing wellness as facilitator, or geography or heredity or proclivity as facilitator.

Just one more factor in bounding our possibilities, you mean?

Certainly. Not all factors are of equal strength within any given life – certainly not between or among other lives either – but they are factors. In discussing illness, it is important that we not accidentally give the impression that it is particularly determinative. It can be; it isn’t usually. But everyone will have a weak link in their armor of health. It may not be particularly weak, but in the nature of things, not every link will be the same strength. Under stress, one will be more likely than others to fail.

And in the absence of stress?

Many people live their entire lives without a physical or mental or emotional link snapping or even bending. Such cases are not particularly fortunate; this situation merely means that their challenges come in other forms: poverty, perhaps, or isolation, or being square pegs in round holes. Inability to conform to what is expected, lack of brain power; it could be anything. But for the moment we will confine ourselves to the question of health. How does health or a specific lack of health provide opportunity by its very restriction?

I can imagine it steering us away from things the illness renders impossible.

Or it may lead a person into those things for the sake of confronting and perhaps overcoming impossible adversity.

Living on the edge, for the sake of it.

Some people thrive on danger, some on adversity, some on security. It takes all kinds of people to make a world.

So let’s take Helen Keller as one example. Blind and deaf. How could she ever be expected to interact successfully with the world? Impossible, surely – only, she not only succeeded with the help of the remarkable woman [Anne Sullivan] who guided and nourished her; she attained a remarkable level of wisdom and benevolence.

Mark Twain was deeply impressed by her.

So, was her hardship a disadvantage or a spur?

Both, surely.

Of course. Every gift has two sides, and may be turned to account or may become a curse (in effect) by how the person uses it or refuses to use it, accepts and transforms it, or refuses to do so.

Christopher Reeve set up a foundation to promote research into spinal cord injury, and probably never would have done so if he hadn’t been injured.

Yes, but it is important here not to make the mistake of thinking that the effects you can see in 3D are the only effects, or even the most important effects, in terms of a person’s life. Most people in any situation are unknown or relatively unknown to a public. But who could be unaffected by living with such a condition? One more instance of, You never have the data to judge other people’s lives.

Have we wandered from the theme of illness as facilitator? Have we even begun on it?

Just as with illness as indicator, there is no need to spell it out by means of examples. A long table of relationships wouldn’t really add anything, and might deter thought about the relationships. Suffice it to say, health and illness, like every other part of life, ought to be kept in mind and ought not to be made an excuse or a scapegoat.

If we’re through with the subject, how about if we return to the four categories medieval man used? [That is, choleric, melancholic, sanguine or phlegmatic natures.]

I didn’t use them, and anyone wishing to learn about them will find plenty on the internet. What would be the practical application of such a discussion?

None, maybe. Very well, so what next?

Next get some more sleep, and when we resume, we’ll see.

Okay. Thanks for this much.

4:05 a.m. I was saying yesterday, you must feel much lighter without the drag of the body.

Lighter, yes, but of course it isn’t all profit. When you lose the 3D anchor, you lose a certain amount of concentration. You won’t find great writers composing outside the 3D crucible, at least not in the same way. Conditions matter.

Still, would you trade?

You wouldn’t think so – but as usual the question is more complicated than it seems. For one thing, 3D comes mixed with non-3D. It has more possibilities than I realized at the time. More than most people realize. And non-3D has, as you know, certain compensating disadvantages to go with its added freedom. On the other hand, if I had never been in 3D – if I wasn’t an ex-human compound being – maybe I wouldn’t know what I was missing.

Like AA and BB in Bob’s tale? [In Far Journeys]

That’s what I had in mind. AA was seduced by the sheer energy and wild potential of life in the physical, remember. Games within games, he said, feeding the score. It is intense, you have to give it that.

And we, caught inside it, can’t wait, sometimes, to achieve liberation.

Typical perversity of life, always wanting what we don’t have, rarely valuing what we do have.

My favorite analogy for that is – like breathing. If you’ve always been able to breathe freely, you don’t know how to value the fact, not really. Abstractly, maybe.

Or any other physical or mental or emotional condition people live within. They know what it would be worth not to have to deal with it, but they can’t really convey it to others, and they themselves are just as blind to the reality of the prices other people pay.

It occurs to me, possibly we haven’t sufficiently stressed the element of clarity in all this. You have heard that your task is to create enough internal space, by reclaiming the initiative from various robots, to achieve life more abundantly. But maybe another way to say that is, Achieve greater clarity.

Know thyself? Not exactly a new formula.

“New” doesn’t matter, any more than if something is easy or hard for someone to say. What matters is, is it true? Know thyself – which means know what you’re in 3D to do and what you ought to leave alone. And how do you know yourself? You have to be willing to look, and you have to be able to see, and you have to be able to understand, and make decisions and carry them out.

That sounds like bullets.

Yes it does.

• Willing to look. That takes courage sometimes, because everything about yourself that you disapprove of is probably shoved down into the unconscious. You don’t want to know, and you work pretty hard sometimes not to know. But if you aren’t willing to look, how can you get beyond superficial understanding? This is one reason why life often puts people in a bind, to force them to do what they need to do but are reluctant to do.
• Able to see. The light that puts out our eyes is darkness to us, Thoreau said. Being able to see involves more than willingness; It also involves capacity. That is why many people never do this work. they know at some deep level that it would destroy them. Ask any psychiatrist. It can be dangerous to the patient to learn too much too soon, or in the wrong way.
• Able to understand. People may be willing and able to see, yet still be incapable of understanding what they perceive. You should know by now, context is – well, it isn’t everything, but it is an awful lot. If you perceive but do not have the ability or the background or the inclination to put two and two together to make four rather than 44, you aren’t going to gain much clarity.
• Make decisions. Logic and reasoning are enhanced by the 3D experience, believe it or not. Having to deal with things partially and sequentially imparts a certain skill in analysis and prediction. But such a skill isn’t useful unless put into play. If you don’t choose, you drift. (It isn’t quite that simple, but more or less so.) Only decisions allow movement in a given direction. Often enough, decisions are made by default, but that is a poor procedure, pretty much guaranteed to be unsatisfactory.
• Carry them out. What good is it to decide what to do, if you can’t bring yourself to do it?

Call this split session “Facilitation and choice,” perhaps.

Or “Facilitation and discernment”?

Either, or something similar.

This split session worked well. Having a couple of sleep cycles between the two reduced the fatigue quite a bit. Thanks again;  I know we’re all enjoying this.

 

Monday, April 14, 2025

4:45 a.m. Illness as indicator, and illness as facilitator. Yes?

And how do you feel?

You know how I feel: crummy. (Crumby, for purists.) But I trust my state of health or non-health is not being used for display purposes.

Isn’t the theme illness as indicator? Why would your state of being not be relevant?

Okay, well, I have a mild headache and I’ve been up and down all night and I have a persistent wheezing and my back hurts. Other than that, things are peachy as usual.

Now look at the negative space.

The rest of the picture, you mean? Well, as far as I know there isn’t anything serious going on, and things have often been much worse.

Bring firmly to mind some of your difficult nights (and notice, it has been a good while since you have gone through one like that).

You have a point.

Describe one, just a little.

I feel like a kid: “Do I gotta?”

It will be instructive – only don’t wander into it, just describe it a little.

Very reluctant even to bring it to mind. All night long, gasping for breath, nothing holding it off, no rest because I can’t lie down or even relax in a chair. Chilly or sweaty or both alternately, wracking coughing, maybe sneezing, painful breathing, each breath an effort, hours of waiting for the time to pass because day is never as bad as night and sometimes the attack would cease the moment the sun came up, which was perplexing and irritating, if finally a relief. Getting through the next day on insufficient sleep, knowing that another night is coming –

You’re right, things are a lot better now.

Your friend Bob’s wife Karen suffered from spinal cord leakage that left her in continuous unbearable pain. Your experience wouldn’t necessarily have been easier for her, but you an see that she might have swapped if only for the variety, for the surcease of the torment she endured on an unending basis.

Sure. I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to swap with her. Mine was easier to bear, and besides, I was used to it.

Dirk’s ankylosing spondylitis – would you have swapped for that?

Hell no! And I see your point. It is the same point the good sisters used to make in Catholic school: Everybody’s burden fits them, nobody else’s would. They didn’t put it that way, but that’s what it amounted to.

Now, let’s tread lightly here, lest anybody think we’re making light of anyone’s situation.  Still, it must be said, nothing is random in the universe. If you are bearing a burden, (a) there’s a reason or it – that is, there is something in it for you, and (b) therefore, you can bear it. Even if you ultimately have to kill yourself to be free of it, that isn’t defeat and it isn’t meaningless. Nobody gets cheated in the full scheme of things, regardless of what appearances in 3D suggest.

I can hear people thinking, “That’s easy for you to say,” and I will respond on your behalf as I always do when someone says that: Whether it is easy or hard to say is not the point. The point is, it’s true.

So supposing someone has a severe life-threatening or let’s say life-crippling illness: Steven Hawking, say, or the actor who became a paraplegic after he fell from a horse.

Christopher Reeve.

Consciously, would either of them have chosen life in such a strait-jacket? Then why would they have chosen it at other levels? “Upstairs,” as you put it.

I don’t have a clue. I assume it isn’t random; I always assume that. But beyond that, no idea.

You were told from the beginning, 3D life is choosing. And you gradually worked out that it is always choosing within limits, and that the limits are never random, hence could be said to have been chosen at some level. But let’s look at that a little more; it may look different now.

I sort of have the idea. It isn’t that the limits were chosen before the life, or even within the life.. but I can’t quite get the next step in the chain of logic.

It isn’t logic, so much as data. I’m providing you with a new angle of vision to look at the facts you already know, and then adding a correlate.

And it centers around the nature of limits.

Yes! And what about the nature of limits?

We can only be in one place, one time, while we are in 3D. Our experiences here are concentrated, focused. And, I see it, by definition we are here and not there,  now and not other times, genetically shaped as we are and not otherwise, etc. We live within limits; that’s the precondition.

If you are placed in a certain moment of time, in a certain locale, does every bit of it have to refer to you? Does it have to reflect your preferences? Is it (in this sense) “all about you”?

We take what comes with the territory.

Let’s say, you take the territory, and what comes with it is a mixed bag, some of which affects you and some of which doesn’t affect you.

And the indicator is what we resonate with!

Almost there. And what determines what you resonate with?

Partly, our decisions as to what we value, what we want to be.

There. Now is it clear?

I’d say, adverse circumstances are as much “us” as favorable ones, and they always fit our conditions or else we couldn’t resonate with them.

You might say, better, it is the resonance that determines what you can or cannot experience, and, within that, how you will experience it.

Therefore, nothing at random, but not necessarily everything as we would prefer it.

And there is your “illness as indicator.” It isn’t exactly about your moral character, or even your beliefs and preferences. It is more, Here’s what you allow into your life by resonance with what you are, knowingly or (usually) unknowingly. Change, and the resonances change – and perhaps your external situation changes.

It feels like I have it at this moment but may lose it as time goes on today.

That’s why you write things down, and print them, and send them to the wind.

No, I meant, I’m not sure I will be able to hold the meaning that the words try to express.

I know what you meant. When you reread the words, cast yourself back to the moment. Intend to remember the inner meaning.

Okay.

And how do you feel?

Very funny. I have just the slightest of headaches – a wisp, no more – and my breathing has been better pretty much since we began. But I notice, whenever I am intensely absorbed in this work, my breathing rapidly becomes background. In effect, it smooths out to let me concentrate on other things.

Or vice-versa. Very well, so much for illness as indicator. You thought we might provide a table: This symptom indicates this cause. I trust this was better. Next time, perhaps, illness as facilitator.

Thanks, Jon. Very helpful. Till next time.

 

Sunday, April 13, 2025

5:30 a.m. Perhaps we could say more about how our health challenges provide indicators of our – what should we call them? – moral deficiencies?

First let’s define terms a bit. We don’t want to leave things so loose that people fit our discussion into their theologies or philosophies rather than hearing what we are actually saying.

“Oh, that’s nothing but ….”

Exactly. It isn’t new if you insist on seeing it as old. And it can’t do you any good if it doesn’t let you change the viewpoint from which you define things. Ask any psychiatrist, there isn’t anything harder than leading people to see themselves differently. It is easy to provide ideas and facts, even to lead people to draw connections between things they had considered unrelated – but to change an idea, a concept, is different from changing a basic orientation. As long as the change is just in their head, nothing has really changed. But when that change reaches the core of the self, then there is the chance of something new.

To put it into Monroe-speak, they connect the mental body and the emotional body. And the energetic body, too, I suppose.

And the physical body. Yes, in that idea-system, they align the four bodies around a new way of experiencing life, and everything changes.

Or, as I have been putting it, they synchronize their emotional and mental spreadsheets so that data and the meaning of the data and the experience of the data interrelate.

The conceptual framework isn’t very important. What counts is the person’s willingness to engage, of course.

Sure. They have to be present.

In all senses of the word, yes.

So on the one hand, you are saying defining terms is important, and on the other hand, it isn’t.

Let’s say, it is usually important as a prerequisite; it is never important as a solution. You have to know what you’re doing, but knowing isn’t enough: You have to do it.

Okay. So what terms?

Health, indicator, challenges, and the difference between moral and – let’s call it wholeness.

• For our purposes, we will call health the smooth and efficient functioning of the 3D body in its circumstances, but with reference to the often unknown, even unsuspected, needs and possibilities of the non-3D component.
• A gauge, a diel, a tell-tale. Not a judge passing sentence or a doctor or guide warning of disaster ahead, more like an automatic weighing of the situation to provide data.
• This could be either of two things, or – usually – both, considered as they impact each other.
  1. A physical situation that is less than optimal – from occasional nuisance through perpetual fact of life to the immediately life-threatening. Of course, in this context, “physical” includes emotional and mental.
  2. The difference between what is and what the individual wants, or thinks it needs. This could be anything from concern over appearance to life as a cripple.

In other words, sometimes we are challenged by the difference between what we want and what we have.

Regardless of what is good for you, or even what matters, yes.

Now the difference between morality and wholeness is well known to mental-health professionals, not so well known to the general public.

I used to quote somebody – can’t remember who (Walter Cooper?) – who said that when we realized that it was better to be whole than good, we held ourselves to a stricter standard.

He knew what he was talking about. But that doesn’t mean that everybody reading that will understand it.

I take it to mean that morality comes from our sense of right and wrong, and wholeness is more a case of accepting all of what we are, like it or not. Therefore – I assume – you could say morality defers to wholeness whenever we admit to our conscious selves more of what is in the depths.

So let us look at the situation from outside the usual 3D framework, to better understand the limits of your viewpoints and the range of your potential. You do not have unlimited room to grow, but you do have room, and you cannot know what those limits are.

I’m wavering, here – speaking of health challenges.

A headache does no harm; a drop in energy does no harm. Giving up unnecessarily would, in a sense, do harm. Let us use this as an example.

Your headache and weariness seem to you external to your will. You didn’t ask for either, and you can’t wish either away. The normal response is to consider yourself a victim of the circumstance. (I use “victim” without prejudice here – I am not implying that you are tempted to scapegoat or to throw up your hands. I mean merely you feel your inability to change things by will or intent.)

And that is a mistake somehow?

It is, let’s say, a sliding away from possibility. Remember what Skip [Atwater] said when you got a headache in the black box [at Monroe], long ago.

“Welcome the energy in and ask what you can be learning from it.”

Well?

A minute. [Doing so.] Hmm, I get that I was splitting my consciousness, part wanting to continue, part begging off, saying “I’m tired!” In a way, the headache was there to tell me to pay attention and either work or quit but not continue self-divided.

Yes, but in a way the headache was there not for the sake of telling you, but as a natural result of the slight additional strain. You see?

It arose, and it is up to me to think to ask what’s going on? If I do, I learn something and the headache goes away.

It went away not because you learned what was causing it, but because you ceased to be divided, which removed the cause.

Yes, I see that. My ears are ringing loudly now, instead. I will do the same thing, asking. [I do so.] When I stop and pay attention, it seems as if the ringing serves as a reminder that I am functioning (for the moment) as if I were separate from the outer 3D world. The ringing is like a wall reinforcing that isolation. It nearly ceased as I paid attention strictly to it, then increased a bit and is still here.

[And, typing this, it is back. I am trying to think if I have ever heard ears ringing while I was writing fiction, and I don’t think so, but of course I may merely not remember.]

So, two fast examples of symptoms as indicators, you see. The gas gauge doesn’t cause the tank to become empty, or full, or half-full; it merely reports on what the situation is.

And if we don’t want to go around with an empty gas gauge, we need to fill the tank. We aren’t operating on the gauge at all, but it will automatically reflect the new situation.

True in that respect. But the situation is a lot more complicated than that, or everybody would be in perfect health except the ones who aren’t paying attention.

I’ve paid plenty of attention to asthma over the years.

You have paid plenty of attention to the situation as you experienced it. How much attention have you paid to what it was indicating?

I know that many people claim to have a cookbook that says, this illness is a sign of this or that emotional situation, but I am not convinced. I remember Skip used to use one such scheme with great success, someone’s cookbook. Can’t remember whose.

Louise Hay.

That’s right. Or, I think so. Anyway, that approach worked for him, not for me. could you have made your kidneys work if you had changed your attitude?

If I had spent less time being pissed off, you mean? What do you think?

I think, can’t be that simple.

It isn’t that simple, but that isn’t wrong. There was a reason why physicians used to divide temperaments into choleric, melancholic, sanguine and phlegmatic.

[For those interested, use your search engine; you will find plenty on the net.]

Now, this is enough. You are at about your limit, and this is a natural place to pause anyway. We can resume with a closer look at illness as indicator. There’s lots to say, because our common ground is that we look at 3D and non-3D interaction, not look at 3D as if it were separate. And once we get beyond illness as indicator, there is illness as facilitator. But enough for the moment.

Thanks for this. Our theme today?

“Health and illness as indicator,” perhaps. And you might leave people a situation report.

Meaning, headache went away and so did most of the ringing in my ears.

Yes. Till next time, then.

That’s my line. Thanks again.

 

Saturday, April 12, 2025

4:45 a.m. Jon, I can’t help feeling we missed the point somehow about aspiration as one of the keys to health. I do feel like we left it undefined somehow. I’m going to reread it and ask you again.

Perhaps we did, but it seems obvious. If you have belief in rules on one side, and belief in miracles on the other side, what is in the middle but steering? navigating? intending?

Ah. So really in a way it is a duality, with both rules and miracles being a form of fatalism, and on the other side a belief in one’s own efforts.

You could put it that way. But that isn’t really any different from what we said. Faith is one word but it has many shades. On the one end is helplessness, on the other end, confidence.

Okay, I think I see it now. So let’s proceed to the second field awaiting explication, How to look for the key.

You realize, it can’t possibly be “One size fits all.” That slogan is always a lie.

Sure. Everybody is different.

So then, how can there be one key in any mechanistic fashion? But we can set out the rules of thumb.

Sort of like I did in Imagine Yourself Well? Different possibilities for people at different levels?

Yes. But your table was more a summary of possible ranges of possibility. Here we want to be more specific.

Well, I’m sure anybody with an illness or a debility or a chronic susceptibility to something would be interested.

Remember, though, that perfect health doesn’t mean everyone in the same condition. It means what is perfect for you, at the specific time, in your specific circumstances.

That sounds to me like redefining health to be whatever you already have.

Very good. In one sense, that is exactly what I’m saying – and that nobody is going to want to hear. And in another sense, it is the clearest message of hope anyone could want.

I sort of have it intuitively, mind to mind. But it is going to be awkward, maybe impossible, for me to put into words. Bullets perhaps, Jon?

Perhaps. Let’s find out.

• Health can only mean health of all of you, not just any one physical mechanism or system or organ.
• That means, body, soul, spirit, mind, emotions, habits, automatic mechanisms (robots) all in harmony.
• And that means you can’t have perfect health if one part is pulling in one direction, another in another direction, etc.
• That is, you must be one But what does that mean? A simpler organism? No, an integrated, smooth-running, cooperative society.
• Thus, if your aspirations are one way and your habits some contradictory way and your emotional life, some third contradictory way, and your associations and circumstances yet another way – well, that is the opposite of harmony.
• You could even extend this to consider the other lives you are part of – “past” lives, other versions, etc. but this, while true, is beyond consideration for most people. For most people, if they can get their own immediate house in order, they will be doing well.

But perhaps we should drop the bullet format and return to conversation; it will be more illustrative.

Meaning, I’m getting distracted by my reactions to the things you mention as you mention them.

Well, “distracted.” I’d say, “stimulated.” It’s productive. It does what conversation always does, broaden your context both by another viewpoint and by what it brings into your consciousness that was previously beneath your notice. So – react.

For one thing, the thought came through that we are born with physical conditions that reflect what we are at the beginning of our 3D life. It isn’t so much potential (dependent upon our actions) as it is the result of previous actions.

And if you look at it one way, that is people’s idea of karma: What you are is the result of what you were. That idea isn’t wrong, but it needs looking at.

I see it. Take the implied judgment out of it; see it more like a systems problem.

More than that. Nobody manifests every potential he is born with. You couldn’t. That’s part of our freedom within our limits.

I think you mean, what we manifest is going to determine what we get to work on during the lifetime.

Or the other way around: What you want to work on will determine what you manifest. Or – both. It’s always a mistake to oversimplify these things by assuming they work only in any one direction.

Doesn’t this come pretty close to saying, whatever we have to deal with, we’re stuck with it because it reflects what we are?

Yes. But that is the same thing as saying, Whatever you have to deal with is your indicator of what you need to deal with! It is the key. It is your path to perfection, to liberation, if you see it right.

Ah. Change your being, change your external manifestation.

That’s the only way to change it. Well, not quite: Let’s say, that is the only productive way to change it. You may outgrow it or it may develop into something else or you may find yourself “cured” without changing who you are – but in such cases it is closer to giving up on the indicated route and pursuing something else.

I think you mean, we may have a certain number of years in which that condition may be the way toward healing whatever is wrong underneath, and if we don’t use it successfully, it may go away without being the means to a cure it was intended to be.

Sometimes payment is deferred. Sometimes one goes on to deal with other things. There are always other life-problems that can be addressed.

The bottom line seems to be, what we regard as health may be looked at as absence of symptoms.

That’s one way to put it. Someone with low potential may have low conflict (hence what seems a smooth life) or high conflict (because the resources available are barely adequate to deal with the things being set up to prod him into action). You can never tell from the outside.

Well, this seems to me to be pretty close to saying, “Accept your life as an indicator of what you are, and use your challenges to change causes, not symptoms.

I wouldn’t have any quarrel with that definition.

That was your whole career as a psychiatrist, I suppose.

Of course. And of course the hardest thing in the world is “physician, heal thyself.” Not because the physician is unwilling or ignorant, but because working on yourself leaves you no independent place to stand – as you well know from experience.

Whatever our psychic reality is at any moment seems to us to be self-evidently true.

It is very difficult to not believe in the mood one happens to be caught in.

Hence the need for religious communities to provide external support, if you happen to be able to participate in one.

Or, if you are solitary, some kind of pole star that you follow particularly when you don’t want to, to keep you on track.

A lot to digest. I think I am going to ask Peter or someone to run this through an AI and see if it can be crystallized for better comprehension.

If you do that, string together Thursday’s and Friday’s with it. Have the AI address it as one unit, see what comes out.

Not starting at Tuesday?

Start there if you wish and if it does not overwhelm the program.

A very interesting idea. Okay, thanks and I hope to continue these talks. I know 3D consciousness offers focus for non-3D minds – or so I was told long ago – but in turn you give us such added breadth of field. It is very satisfying. So, see you next time, I hope.

 

Friday, April 11, 2025

6:10 a.m. Two things Jon said require treatment at length: (1) Aspiration and finding the key to health, and (2) How to ask for the key.

Perhaps we can pursue that?

I said, not belief or belief in any rote system. It was to these that I began to oppose aspiration as a route to pursue, and it is with these as foils that we should pursue the matter.

You mean, I think, that thinking of aspiration as a contrast to belief or to rote will make the point clearer.

It is hard to say, “Yes, that is what I just said,” without it sounding like impatience. It isn’t; it is saying, yes, you got the sense of it.

Any course of action may usually be divided into three. In fact, you might make a rule of thumb: Conditions of duality are usually resolved by turning two into three.

Gurdjieff’s positive and negative and reconciling principles.

You can see that two is a tug-of-war, and three is a reconciling into a system.

I do. What would be deadlock in two becomes synthesis in three. So aspiration is the reconciling principle between belief and rote?

I said it would take a while, but we’re already on our way, I see. Yes, you could look at it that way. But that’s a pretty bold leap, and I can guarantee that you’ve left a lot of people behind. Not everybody, but a lot.

Well, I’m willing to go slower. You drive the argument and I’ll drive the pen.

Belief in a set of rules, belief in miracles, belief in possibility. That’s one way to look at it. But let’s restate it in terms of attitudes, of preferences, or let’s say of inclinations by temperament.

Some people believe in rules. They follow cookbooks, and, in the absence of a cookbook, are inclined to disbelieve in the possibility of producing a result in any organized, predictable way. To this kind of temperament, if it cannot be reduced to rules, it is problematical at best, and certainly cannot be relied on.

Many people’s reaction to ESP, etc.

Exactly. If it gets established to the point of an understandable predictability, they will have no objection to recognizing it, but until then, it doesn’t exist as much more than a rumor, to them.

Now, there’s no use decrying such a mentality. Like everything else that exists, it has its place, or it wouldn’t exist. But you can see that in the current state of affairs, such people cannot obtain health through faith-healers, say.

But if they happen to, their belief-system crumbles.

Not exactly. If their temperament is such that they must have rules, they perhaps improvise rules that seem to fit the new facts to be accommodated. They don’t usually become a different type of person; rather, they adjust their inventory of known or probably facts.

By contrast, every religion has an underpinning of miraculous occurrences – healings not the least of them – and many people are convinced by miracles who could never put their faith in a set of rules.

Me, for one.

Well, you in a way. You are open to miracles from a certain direction, but not from others. And in fact that’s a good example of aspiration.

I don’t get it yet.

Let’s first finish with belief. Devotees of strong enough faith can move mountains, just as promised, only it would never occur to them to try to move mountains; moving their own lives and the center of their lives is enough.

Miracles happen. Those of a certain temperament are not only able and even anxious to believe in them, they thereby enable them. (That is, they make them possible by providing fertile ground.) Those of other temperaments not only do not experience miracles, they actively resist experiencing miracles.

PSYCOP.

Yes, that’s an example in a secular field. Strong anti-faith, that cares less that things be this way or that, but cares passionately that they not be one certain way.

You have to understand, miracles as a psychological phenomenon are based in a strong belief in a contrary mundane reality. If you casually believed that it is possible for the dead to come back to life, you wouldn’t be particularly startled if you saw it happen. But if you were firmly convinced that the dead never return to life, such a premature resurrection would be paradigm-shattering – yet would also confirm that the world is normally the way you were thinking of it.

I see that. The stronger the belief in what looks obvious, the more startling an exception is, and at the same time, that exception is placed firmly in the realm of the ordinary, only it is the exception that they say proves the rule.

And these two temperaments could be looked at as antagonists that could not be reconciled, but then there is aspiration.

The joker in the deck? Trickster?

If you must. Not a very scientific way to look at it, but then that in itself illustrates the point. There is a temperament that isn’t quite rule-based, and doesn’t quite have a firm enough belief in a set of governing concepts to be startled by miracles. It is, let’s say, fluid, ready to flow with the slightest tilt of the playing-field.

But only in certain directions.

More like, not in certain directions. It’s a fine distinction but an important one.

Oh, I see it, all right. The way I put it implies a more constricted flow than the way you put it.

You can do better than that.

To say, “only in certain directions” implies, most of the circle is off-limits but there are a few possibilities. To say, “not in certain directions” implies that most of the circle is available, with only a certain part ruled off-limits. A nuance, but, I see, an important one. We aren’t as much closed-off in general as we are closed-off to a few possibilities. I for instance would refuse to believe in any strictly mechanistic or deterministic interpretation of things. Somebody else might refuse to believe in any supernatural or superstitious interpretation.

That’s right.

Well, this hasn’t been particularly difficult or complicated, but I can see why you wanted to consider it separately rather than as an aside. And I guess we should save “How to look for the key” for another time, an essay of its own. Thanks, Jon.

Call this “aspiration” if you wish.

At this last minute I am getting a qualm that suggests we didn’t deal with this thoroughly enough.

What we said will serve, and if occasion calls for further explanation, it can come at its own time.

Okay.

 

Thursday, April 10, 2025

5:30 a.m. So, Jon, if you have a topic, I have the pen in hand.

Notice in print what you just noticed in thought.

I surprised myself, realizing that I had written more than a page here, not noticing that I do not have my glasses. This, despite the fact that my vision is getting worse. It suggests that our physical ailments aren’t quite what they seem, but are in some way a combination of psychology with the physiology. That’s putting it only vaguely. You were a doctor: How does it look to you now from your new perspective?

It is time for you and others to begin to put together various hints that you have stored in different compartments. Faith healing, miracle cures, psychosomatic illness, homeopathy, all the various kinds of “crank” cures, energy medicine, prayer, the quirks of genetics (that is, the inexplicable exceptions and immunities), plagues, what may be called generational illnesses – widespread maladies of one age that more or less disappear in another, and were more or less out of the blue to begin with. Put all these hints together with the thought that all is one, that you in 3D all resonate with one another and with the times. Remember that beneath all appearances is consciousness, or call it universal mind.

Mix well, particularly mix with some active thinking, some active interacting, and see what you get.

I in particular?

Everyone is “in particular,” and everyone’s answer is going to be as different from everyone else’s as each is different in soul, or call it in psychological essence. But yes, here you in particular. That’s all we have to work with. Other pens at other times can get what you miss and may miss what you can get. That’s always so.

Well, at any rate this is a promising start. Let’s see. Immediately I get what I have always believed. Hell, as a boy I knew it (and have never ceased to know it): if I only had the key, I could in effect reach out and adjust something and I wouldn’t have to deal with asthma anymore. But I could never find the thing to be adjusted, let alone the key to adjust it with.

Do you think so? Isn’t that your whole life’s pursuit?

I suppose. For one thing, I learned that sincerely desiring isn’t the same as acquiring, yet that it has its own rewards in its effect on your course. But this is too pat an answer. What are you getting at? You spent years dealing with kidney failure, and dialysis, and transplants, so you know.

Ah, but what is the main difference between you and me?

Attitudinally?

Don’t search, let it emerge.

You knew so much more about the physical mechanism of the body than I did or do. I think it reinforced a certain set of limitations in what you saw as possible, like Bruce Moen after his stroke, convinced that healing could come only in one way, which of course it then did.

It’s an important point – though not central today as a theme – that too much knowledge of specifics may have the side-effect of imprisoning you in that way of seeing things. Ideally you would learn as much detail as you could, but without losing the knowledge that the system you were studying was one way to see it, with its particular advantages and disadvantages, its unique opportunities for insight and its unique blindnesses. Ideally you could be a homeopath and an osteopath and an allopath and a faith healer and a voodoo witch doctor, all at the same time. And of course even such a broadly ranging combination would have its invisible limits on what it could do, limits imposed by what it allowed for.

I see that. In 3D we can never get a full view of anything, because we always have to have a viewpoint – hence, a perspective, hence a vanishing point, hence a systemic distortion.

And that’s why everybody looks at everybody else’s system and says, “That’s great, except for –“.

I remember years ago reading Buckminster Fuller saying he realized as a young man that everybody’s viewpoint was limited by their experience of life.

So to return to the main point here, nobody is fated by anything external. Everybody’s limitations and constraints and opportunities and advantages are sealed in. Your character is your fate, somebody said. [It was Emerson.] Well, your character is also your escape route, if you know how to use it.

That doesn’t mean we can get perfect health.

Who says?

A lifetime’s experience, for one.

Your interpretation of a lifetime’s experience, and, at that, a lifetime’s experience so far.

But if we spend a lifetime looking for what we don’t find, what does that prove but that perhaps it isn’t there to be found?

Since when do you doubt that kind of inner knowing that the boy had and that you still have? Particularly when it is inexplicable and contrary to common sense?

All right, I get that we usually pose the wrong question. We think, how can I get rid of this or that?

Yes, and what should you ask?

More like, How can I cease to be the person with this or that, and be something else?

Now, a recent example in your life, PTSD. It is clearly a psychosomatic illness, involving mind as well as body. (But then, what illness isn’t?) Any body worker can tell you how specific memories can be held in body tissue, only to release when that tissue is physically manipulated. Why should that be, if a psychosomatic illness were only in the mind? But maybe it isn’t as simple as it appears. Suppose all illness is psychosomatic, and is as much in the mind as in the body.

I’m thinking of the model I worked out years ago and put into Imagine Yourself Well. I said what you are saying.

Only, your bias is so much toward the mental – the psychic – that it undervalues the “merely” physical. You saw one-half the opportunity, you might say. You are plenty open to the possibility of miracles – but not if they require physical intervention as well!

Laughing. It sounds pretty ridiculous, when you put it that way.

Actually, not ridiculous, but certainly not balanced, not common-sensical. It is the hardest thing, to marry common sense and higher sense.

Particularly when we’re caught between – or maybe I should say when we’re balancing between – two belief systems.

Actually, in your case and in many others, you are living among atomized belief systems, a little of this, a little of that, because you are living in the time between ages: not yet the Age of Aquarius, not quite still the Age of Pisces. (These are analogies, but productive ones.)

So, practically –?

Practically, try to be aware of what you do – the way you live – that puts obstacles in the way of perfect health. This isn’t a matter of belief, or all of Mary Baker Eddy’s followers would enjoy perfect health. It isn’t a matter of specific diet or regimen, or everybody would know just what to do and could do it by rote, on automatic pilot. It isn’t a matter of aspiration, even or – well, that’s a different topic that in fact we might profitably pursue, but not as an afterthought.

Could you have overcome your kidney failures?

You don’t know what you are asking. It’s like saying could Jane Roberts have risen from her bed, as Seth assured her she could. If someone asked you, could you overcome asthma, what would you be obliged by truth to say?

I’d say, yes, I believe I should be able to, but I haven’t found the key.

And I would say, “Not that you spent much time looking.” And I would say it of myself, and of Jane Roberts, and probably of nearly everybody who ever reads this.

And if we don’t know how to look?

That’s another topic in itself, and this is enough for now. Are you satisfied to be back in action?

I am. And I get the sense that addressing you – or anyone else – specifically, increases my chances of connection..

Which is why mediums used to have to use “controls” – specific spirit guides – in denser times. But you have lived into lighter days; take advantage of the new opportunities.

Thanks, Jon. Today’s theme?

You might call it “Health and being.” The title will make more sense to you later.

Okay. Again, thanks.