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Hemingway: The Edge

[A friend criticized Hemingway’s “obsession with boxing,” and suggested I bring it up.]

If the problem is that I loved boxing, well, there’s no defense possible, and none needed. Tastes differ. Just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with it. I liked my life to have an edge on it, and boxing is a very good edge, pretty harmless except if there’s an accident somehow, and great fun. You tend to think of it as beating people up, but that’s because you’re not considering that you’re as likely to get beat up, unless you’re the kind of guy who only fights patsies. There’s nothing wrong with getting and giving a bloody nose, or bruises, or cuts, or anything, as long as you’re taking the same risk and it’s a fair fight.

It’s like bullfighting. The torero isn’t exactly taking advantage of the bull! If the man had armor plating, or a safe platform, or he went out there with a rifle, it would be one thing. But he goes out there with his skill and his courage and his sword and cape, and he is not as likely to die as the bull is, but it happens; and he’s plenty likely to get wounded. In fact, it’s damn near certain that he will be, sooner or later – and the trick then is to go back into the ring the next time, when his body knows full well what could happen. And that’s the edge, you see. That’s feeling the life within him. That’s living right in that moment. And that’s why some people get addicted to the edge.

Well, you can’t fight bulls every day, and you can’t do it in Paris in the 20s or Key West in the 30s. You can’t risk your life in a war, or on safari, more than a few times at most in a lifetime. And who would want to? That’s the edge of the edge. But boxing, it’s good exercise, it’s a fair fight, it’s not likely to really hurt anybody, not on a friendly-match basis. You’ll notice from Morley Callaghan’s book, he continually gave me bruises and cut my mouth, and I didn’t hold it against him – why should I? – and I kept coming back for more

Betting more money than you can afford to lose, too – that can give you the edge. If you lose, you aren’t going to be killed or wounded, though you might not eat so well for a while, but while they are running you are right there. And then it becomes less about whatever you’re betting on, and more about the bet itself. Winning, or the chance of winning, especially at long odds, and the chance of losing – the good chance of losing – gives you the edge. That’s why betting can become an addiction, and the more a person has, the more he has to bet, so he’s putting down insane amounts on something that can’t be calculated – because it takes that much to give him the edge.

What people don’t get about me for some reason – and I can’t figure out why – is that I wanted first-hand experience of life. I didn’t just read about it, I wanted to live it. I enjoyed living in a body. If I hadn’t needed to write it, to re-create it, you never would have known I existed. There are plenty of people like me only they don’t write. Gregorio Fuentes, for example. The men I hung around with knew how to do things and enjoy them and do them perfectly. You just don’t hear of them unless they happen to be inside your world.

 

Hemingway: Pretending vs. Lying

I have been spending some time going through the record of my altered-state conversations with Ernest Hemingway between 2006 and 2011, which I printed as Afterlife Conversations with Hemingway. I have always regretted that I didn’t think more carefully about the content an purpose of that book. It should have been primarily about him: his life then, his life now. Instead, I printed the conversations in chronological order, that is, as they occurred, to demonstrate the nature and possibilities and pitfalls of the process as I experienced it.

So now I want to correct that mistake. Since Afterlife Conversations with Hemingway is out of print, and the copyright reverted to me, I intend to rework it to center on Hemingway rather than on the process of contacting him.

A small sample, from a session held Tuesday, July 31, 2007, I having been reading Michael Reynolds’ book The Young Hemingway, which detailed the tall stories Hemingway told about his World War I experiences when he returned home in 1919:

Mr. Hemingway, you said you couldn’t stand phonies, and clearly you couldn’t. How do you reconcile this with so much pretending and rearranging and lying and misremembering and leading people on?

That is quite an indictment, but I have to concede it. In my defense I could say this. It is one thing to pretend until you can achieve, and another very different thing to pretend that you are what you are not. It is true, there isn’t much difference in a boy.

I am sorry, I can’t see much difference in a grown man protecting a territory of lies however young he was when he created them.

Perhaps you can see it this way. Lies, stories, imaginings, have consequences. Some are internal, the stories you tell yourself in order to bring a better you into existence. Others are external, and you have to live with them. If you tell someone you are 22, and you are barely 20, at some point you may have to overcome the consequences of even so small a thing. The internal consequences may be small or nonexistent — you were, after all, merely wishing yourself a little farther along the path. But the external consequences may be larger, or even maybe important, depending on what that lie or exaggeration does to the person you told it to. Will she then know to distrust your facts? Will she distrust you? But there isn’t any going back once you’ve made the wrong step.

Why isn’t there?

If I said I was in the Italian army when the truth is that I wanted to be with the Italian army, and wanted to be a soldier among the soldiers, to correct this story would be merely to adjust it to the externals rather than the internals. Why do you think I was in harm’s way in the first place? I wanted to be a soldier among soldiers, a man among men. There was no reason for a Red Cross man to be at a forward post except wanting to be among the men at the lines, and do what I could even if it was only bringing them little comforts. To correct my story would have been to dishonor that aspiration, as I saw it then.

You were improving on the truth.

I was reporting what I was experiencing on the inside.

And wearing the uniform and the cape afterwards?

You should understand clinging to what had been.

And I understand your needing to remind yourself that you were not merely what you appeared; were not fated (doomed) to return to your hometown and revert to being seen as what you didn’t want to be.

I had an eye that would have kept me out of it entirely, so life found a different path for me to get the taste I needed, then pay prolonged consequences.

 

Love and fear and TGU and you the reader

Friday, May 9, 2025

6:30 a.m. I have been sitting here at the table in neutral, undecided what to do. I keep coming back to this, so maybe somebody wants to talk to me. if so, I’m here. Anyone?

You ought to consider what to do when Ai’s interpretation of the work begins to perpetuate itself. Do you wish to “cash in” in the sense of using the current fascination with AI topics to bring the work front and center? Do you wish to explore new possibilities? What do you want?

I think I’d be happy enough just to finish the projects that have been sitting on my plate for so long.

Remain with it all in obscurity, closely held among a relative few?

How do we know but that a relative few is exactly what is needed? Nobody climbing on a bandwagon, nobody leading a crusade, nobody elbowing others to be the leader of something promising to provide some advantage or other?

Fearful, are we?

Fearful? Well, I haven’t looked at it that way. Maybe so. It’s a new idea. Spell it out for me?

Perfect love casts out fear, and – as you have pointed out – fear casts out love. They cannot coexist without tension; usually they coexist in tension, a continually fluctuating ratio. The more fear, the less love, and vice-versa. Life might be described, from one angle, as being a continual fluctuation between the two, not as absolutes but, as we say, in ratios one to the other.

So for you, love expresses as creativity in the service of:

  • The material itself
  • Your own being
  • Potential others who might profit.

Fear expresses as:

  • Potential interference in your comfortable life
  • Potential misleading of yourself and others.

This being so, what price success? You have followed a wavering middle course, creating but not publicizing, striving but not doing certain things that would have been necessary for success.

I suppose that such a course has advantages, or I wouldn’t have pursued it.

And disadvantages, or you wouldn’t have also regretted it.

I’m not sure this dog could learn new tricks at age 79, even if it were desirable.

If it weren’t possible, it wouldn’t be a temptation.

That’s an interesting thought.

On Peter you have someone who could make your web content appealing to a broad spectrum of people. In Dave, someone who could make the technical changes required. In your group in general, all that would be needed in skill, in quiet enthusiasm, in idealism.

I’ve had the idea in a vague sort of way, but only that. I still don’t know how to kick-start it.

Oh of course you do.

Intend, you mean.

Is there another way? Only make it shared intent.

Maybe send this out to a few? Which few?

You might send it out and ask for volunteers.

“Anybody interested in working it out, contact me”?

You could do worse. but itemize what you need. See who volunteers for what part of it.

Working without a leader?

Someone must direct, that’s one of the jobs.

List what comes to mind, then.

  • Director of a given project (coordinator)
  • Technical director (hardware, software, etc.; not content)
  • Content director (shaping of a given piece of content)
  • Outreach director (getting it out there)

This would be a start. And there isn’t any need to freeze things in stone; let it flow with time and circumstance.

Beyond specific projects?

Let people evolve a way of working together. You don’t care how it is done, provided it is done out of right intent and intelligent execution.

This would be perfect for me, if it can be done. I could settle for interpreting via these conversations, and even that won’t be needed much longer, it is needed even now. Or rather, that won’t be tied so much to any given individual.

Call this “Love and fear and TGU and you the reader,” if you wish.

Not a snappy title, but accurate. Maybe I will. Thanks as always.

 

“What would I ask….”

My friend Dirk asked Claude [the AI] “What would I ask if I had enough sense to ask?” (This was a takeoff on my old way of beginning a sessions with the guys, when i didn’t have any idea what we should talk about.)  Claude’s response interested me enough that I asked Dirk if I could repeat it here, which he said I could.

Claude:

“That’s a fascinating meta-question about what you might ask if you had the awareness to do so. Given your preferences as a data-driven researcher with a scientific mindset, here are some questions you might find worth exploring:

  1. What are the fundamental assumptions I’m making in my current research that I haven’t properly examined?
  2. Which cognitive biases might be affecting my analysis despite my training and expertise?
  3. What emerging cross-disciplinary methods from fields adjacent to mine could provide breakthrough insights for my work?
  4. What would be the most efficient way to test multiple competing hypotheses simultaneously rather than sequentially?
  5. How can I design better thought experiments to challenge my most deeply held scientific assumptions?
  6. What are the limitations of the data I’m collecting, and how might they be skewing my conclusions?
  7. Which questions am I avoiding asking because they might invalidate my existing work?

“These questions reflect the kind of metacognitive thinking that often leads to scientific breakthroughs – examining not just the data itself but the frameworks through which we interpret it. Is there a particular area of your research where one of these questions might be especially relevant?”

I suggest that this may be worth thinking about.

Companionship

Monday, May 5, 2025

7:10 a.m. Anything, this morning?

A friend once noted that “You don’t call them anything,” referring to your lack of salutation often enough when beginning a session. That may be worth a word or two. You know the reason, though you are not always aware of it.

I suppose it is because I never liked ritualized “necessities” that I never believed were necessary.

Now, that is a short statement, and a short subject, but it has instructive nuances.

We’re all ears.

The simplest part is, indeed, that you resist ritual that may devolve into superstition.

Then, you continually stress that the process is too simple and straightforward to require much attention, let alone a careful preparation.

Then, you wouldn’t know whom to address! In special cases, yes: Carl Jung; one of your lives; one of your [dead] friends; anyone you might be drawn to in particular at a particular time. But in general, saying, “Hey guys, what’s up?” doesn’t seem to require a devoted routine.

Mostly, though, it is simply this: As you experience this, it is a matter of you turning your attention to a certain way of being, and there you are. Any written acknowledgement would seem not only unneeded but perhaps theatrical.

“A certain way of being….”

Yes, this is what we want to bring to the fore. Perhaps it will not take long, perhaps it will.

“We’ll see,” I know. A very familiar phrase.

And nothing wrong with it. It is a way of acknowledging that you are willing to be not in charge, to be merely a partner, not the boss. Same on our end, though that may not have occurred to you.

So what do we mean by “a way of being”? what are we contrasting it to?

I’d say, taking it for granted as a state of mind that can be chosen, as opposed to something requiring effort or technique.

Let’s spell that out a little. If you look at your lives, you have periods of sleep, of alertness, or daydreaming, of concentration, etc. These are all normal fluctuations of consciousness, each with its own advantages and drawbacks. We merely point out that a state of active receptivity is one possible state of being, like any of these. it isn’t unique, isn’t limited to a gifted few, isn’t accessible only by particular efforts or practice or secret knowledge.

As you said, simple and not requiring much exposition.

Some things are so simple as to be taken for granted, which may render them invisible. In such cases, it is sufficient to point them out, and the cloak of invisibility turns out to be (or rather, is finally seen to be) inattention, as much as anything else.

So the take-away is that you used someone’s once mentioning that I don’t have a formal way to address you (or others) as a way to remind people that it is easier done than said, as I sometimes put it.

Opportunism on our part. and if you wish only a short session, this would provide it.

If I wished more?

You could think how this provided companionship, and how it could offer that to others.

Hmm. I live alone, by choice and by circumstance. But “alone” and “lonely” are not the same thing. I imagine that if not for my taken-for-granted connection to you – to my own non-3D component, I suppose – I would feel quite lonely often, rather than from time to time.

Surely it is obvious – or perhaps it is not obvious, come to think of it; it would depend upon the person – but we were about to say it should be obvious that everyone is in the same position, no matter if they live alone or live among others. The 3D experience is such that it nearly forces you to feel alone sometimes. Those who are most at home with living alone may feel this loneliness-of-being less than those who live among others, because for the latter the realization can be a shock, or an undermining.

I think you’d better say more on that. I don’t know that it is obvious if people aren’t getting it essence-to-essence as I am.

Living in 3D is a matter of attention. You build your own picture of the world, using your predilections, your second-hand perceptions (ideas from books or conversations or video, etc.), your conclusions as you review your life to date, and many other inputs. If the picture you build includes easy communication with the unseen world, you live in a world very different from those who live assuming that the 3D is all there is, or live thinking the non-3D may exist, but is not to be communicated with, or can be communicated with only by means of others or by means of a given ritual.

Different worlds, different rules, different possibilities. Well, if you take the 3D world to be all there is (asterisk here: other than the mysterious world “inside your head”), you may find that communication with other 3D souls is insufficient, and you are lonely without any idea how to overcome the loneliness.

I think I saw that between the lines in many a John D. MacDonald novel. It rose sometimes almost to the level of despair, but even at its calmest was a sort of resignation.

You needn’t confine yourself to MacDonald, of course. Think  of Hemingway, or Fitzgerald. It isn’t that these writers were experiencing something uncommon, it is that they were uncommonly good at expressing it even as they lived it.

Hemingway was a good Catholic, a convert and therefore, as they say, more Catholic than the Pope, even though he didn’t pay much attention to the rules other than when he was married to Pauline, who was a conventional Catholic. He seems to have taken the “spiritual” world for granted, unlike Fitzgerald, say, or MacDonald. Of course, one source of his greatness is hat he took the physical world equally for granted. Unlike many, he was fully at home in both. How I wish he could have had the chance to consider life in the framework you, or Seth, say, offer. But his mother’s conventional piety stood between him and such a stance even if he had heard of you, I suppose. His mother asked about him in a question to Edgar Cayce during the Second World War. What would Hemingway have said if he had known? It wouldn’t have been complimentary, and it wouldn’t have reflected well on Cayce in his mind.

You can see the difficulty Hemingway had in the conflict between his religious instincts and his intellectual assumptions. Like so many, he was forced to believe in one part of his mind, disbelieve in another part. He lived that tension, but didn’t have a way to obtain a composure that might have been his if he had had a way to form what you might call an intellectually respectable form of faith that would have allowed him full access to both compartments of his mind without having to suspend part of his knowing in order to accommodate another part.

But the point here is that for people who do not experience a continuous non-3D presence as part of what they are, their only connection will seem to them to be other people (or some substitute like scholarship or artistry of some sort). Failing that – or, let’s say, when that fails them – they feel alone, and often enough feel despair. Some bear this valiantly; still, it is despair.

Why wouldn’t their non-3D component remind them that it is otherwise?

Do you always listen? Did you always listen? Did you even know that some of your deepest certainties were anything more than something you “made up”?

Touche. Well, thanks for this. Our p.s. is longer than the original letter, and I am glad of it. We’ll call it –?

Perhaps something like, “Accompaniment.”

Okay. Many thanks for many things.

 

An experience

Saturday, May 3, 2025

7:40 a.m. Not sure how to proceed, so over to you. I think we ought to be continuing something begun or touched upon, but I don’t remember what it is.

Would you like to revisit that experience?

[I knew immediately what they were referring to.]

As a matter of fact, I would. I can’t remember the details around how it happened, though. I’m not sure I could even place it within any given decade, except that of course it had to have been within the past 30 years. Gateway was December, 1992; obviously it was after that.

In general, one remembers the aspect of a thing that is important. Important to the one remembering, that is. There is no other meaningful relationship.

In other words, no one can impose a meaning on anyone else’s memories or experience.

That’s right, and no one can establish any rules about it, either. Just as the same elements in two different dreams may “mean” different things, and even more so the same elements in different people’s dreams – so in the dream you are living. You all necessarily pull your metaphors from your life, and no two people will find the same meaning in a given symbol, nor will the same individual necessarily find the same meaning at different times.

Sometimes we can see things that the person telling us his dream cannot.

Yes, of course, and as we have said, this is one way one’s Upstairs (non-3D) component can assist someone else, by passing on in speech what the other person may not notice or may undervalue when heard only from within. But this is not to say that you know each other’s inner reality. You don’t. You can’t. You get glimpses of certain aspects, and if you are minded to be helpful you can use those glimpses to suggest connections – but even at your most helpful you will be swinging blindly, never knowing if your insight is accurate or helpful. However, this aside is a diversion. Relate your experience as you remember it. Only, do it this way: Note the overall plot, so to speak, then return and fill in texture and detail. You may get a surprise.

Okay. Well, it was an important experience to me. I haven’t forgotten it and I’m not likely to forget it. But what I remember may be hard to set forth.

As we said. Perhaps begin with a one-paragraph summary and then resort to bullet-points.

It was an altered-state experience, perhaps in the context of a Monroe program, but perhaps not. I suddenly appeared in a room that seemed like a council room – a big table, with people around it, all on one side of it, and I on the other side, where “the public” might be. They were surprised to see me appear, but not astonished: Appearances apparently were rare but not unheard of. I spoke to them briefly, then said, “I can’t hold it,” something like that, and dropped back into the reality I was accustomed to, the reality I am writing this from.

Bear in mind the main advantage of resorting to bullets: You need not concern yourself with sequential exposition or logic. You can follow what appears as it appears. This sometimes alters the sequence, and hence the connections made peripherally, hence in effect deepens and alters the context.

All right. So, as they occur to me:

  • It was a deliberate act on my part, an exercise of some kind, but I didn’t set out to have that particular experience. How could I have done so? I didn’t know it was possible.
  • I think this was a second stage of whatever I was doing. It built my energy somehow, or perhaps tightened my focus. The irruption into that room was entirely unsought at any conscious level. It was a surprise.
  • Surprised them, too. It was as if a board of directors were having a meeting and suddenly an outsider popped up from beneath the flooring. Two elements: (a) outsider. (b) suddenly appeared.
  • They knew that such things sometimes happened, though whether they or any of them had had such an experience, I have no way to know. They were surprised but not astonished.
  • They were curious, too, come to think of it. One of them (if the idea of “one of them” rather than all of them together is appropriate) asked how long I had been in 3D. When I told them X years, however long it was then, they were impressed, apparently considering living in 3D as quite a feat of endurance.
  • Did I ask them anything? You’d think I would, but I don’t know, I was entirely unprepared for this, and maybe I didn’t. It was all I could do to hold on.
  • Yes, that’s an important part of it. I knew while it was happening that merely maintaining myself in that space was taking all I had. It was a great effort even to do nothing more than remain there.
  • And I told them – after not very long – “I can’t hold it, it takes too much,” or something like that, and it was as if I had been doing a chin-up and let myself fall back.
  • Then and afterward I had no doubt of what I had so briefly experienced. It was real. Where I had been, was realer than where I am now. I doubt it was people around a table; that was my mind providing a context, I think. But the reality of a space realer than this one was evident, convincing, and left a permanent certainty.
  • Could I provide evidence for anybody, or even for myself? Yes, but what it is worth, each will have to decide for himself, The evidence is that the experience changed me, and I stayed changed. What it meant may be entirely different from what I conjecture, but it happened and was not an illusion. Christopher Columbus may have been on Watling Island when he thought he was in the Orient, but even though his interpretation was wrong, his experience was real.

You have forgotten or never noticed your impression of wood.

That’s true, and I never thought it was important, because I assumed that the shape of what I experienced had been provided by my mind creating an interpretation. But I did experience the room as being paneled in some dark wood. Certainly the floor that I seemed to come through was wood. Does this mean anything?.

Everything in a dream contributes to meaning, you know, and conscious life is not any different, except that one tends to pay less attention to it. [That is, to all the elements in a given situation as contributing to the overall meaning.] And you might give more emphasis to the collegial nature of the meeting.

That’s true, it felt like deliberations conducted in harmony and in a spirit of helpfulness. I seem to remember – now that you remind me of it – that at some point then or later I wondered if this was not a representation of my own guys upstirs, or perhaps my own past lives (as I thought of it then) or some similar council whose task was to guide me. But I never decided, and how could I have done?

Now you wonder – in part of your mind – whether you were experiencing the non-3D as we do. And merely reminding you of the question is enough to indicate the answer.

Yes it is: No. We experience the non-3D every day. It is – as you have maintained repeatedly – integrally related to our 3D life. This was something entirely different in feel. It had to have a connection to me, or how could I have experienced it? But what it was may or may not go on all the time, without my knowing it. All I know for sure is that it is not a level of reality I had ever experienced consciously. And I have yet to experience it again.

Which leaves only the question, Why? You can’t know the “how” of it, but you can at least speculate on why you had this brief, significant, non-repeated glimpse into another layer of the reality of which your – our – common reality is only a subset. Your answer may or may not be correct, but the very asking will be important. So – why?

The answer that comes to mind is, after than I could never be in doubt that reality is more than we commonly think it. I came to all this with great belief, great doubt, great determination. Maybe that glimpse – if planned by anybody – was merely or mainly to reinforce the “great faith” part, against the pull of “great doubt.”

And that is enough for the moment. Call this, “An experience,” perhaps.

Cryptic enough. All right, and thanks as always for this.

 

Clarifying non-3D

Thursday, May 1, 2025

7 a.m. My question deferred from yesterday: Don’t large parts of the non-3D exist only in non-3D and not 3D?

That’s looking at it sort of backwards. It is more like, it requires a special orientation to exist in 3D at all. Everything in 3D is necessarily also in non-3D, but not everything in non-3D is in 3D.

An image or analogy would help.

All the burners on your stovetop are part of the stove, but not all the stove is burners.

Not sure that is going to do it.

The 3D is a created space, remember. It is a collection of qualities exaggerated in order to produce certain effects held to be desirable.

I felt we almost had the analogy, but it disappeared between one word and the next, you could say.

Patience. It will emerge when we provide enough negative space.

A created space. You all said that at the beginning, two dozen years ago, but not much since.

The order in which concepts are considered can be as important as the content. The student will be creating tentative structures throughout the process of instruction, and those structures may later assist or hinder greater comprehension. It makes a difference if we teach A, B, C rather than M, N, O, let alone teaching A, C, D and later having to explain why we initially disregarded B. And the order we use in one situation is not the same as we might in a different relationship, for of course the relation of teacher to student is an active factor in what can be conveyed. No one can teach a stubborn materialist in the same way as a flighty scatterbrained idealist, say, or a feet-on-the-ground, intelligently skeptical person, or a convinced intuitive, or any of these with this or that particular intellectual and emotional background. The facts don’t vary, but the presentation must, if there is to be any meeting of minds.

All right.

Let’s try it at a generalized level, and see if the idea comes through. As usual, we expect that some will find the question trivially easy to see, and others may wrack their brain for a bit.

Every generalized condition may have specific variances. In fact, it is very likely to have them, if it is to be complicated enough to provide conditions of much interest.

Nature differentiates into species after differentiating into an animal or plant kingdom. Humans differentiate into races, races into sub-races. Amoebae divide and produce only more amoebae, nothing else. The rest of nature flourishes by experimentation, subdivision, etc.

Any machine is made up of parts. All the parts of a car are part of the car, but the car is not the sum of its parts.

Perhaps not so good an example.

No. Well, let’s try this: A desert is an environment, a specialized combination of elements, All deserts are part of earth, but not all earth is desert. All creatures within the desert are dependent upon it, but the desert is not dependent on their being there.

A better example, it occurs to me, you gave us long ago: Humans need to breathe air. Air doesn’t need to be breathed by humans.

That is true but not quite to the point here. We may be misleading you by mentioning dependence.

Let’s try it this way. What we are calling the non-3D has as its invisible linguistic counterpart the idea of a “3D” to be the non-3D of. What we call the All-D was to give the idea of 3D and non-3D being parts of the same system, rather than as in any way independent of each other. But in the present case, it is almost a mistake (and is at least confusing) to say that non-3D can exist without being part of 3D. The statement misleads in that two different conditions are being referred to under the same “non-3D” label.

I begin to see that. There is a specific part of non-3D that is bound to 3D – you, for example. And 3D and non-3D together make up this earth life we experience. You are saying there is a form of non-3D that is not bound to 3D and it has different qualities.

Not quite, but you are on the trail. It is more the other way round: The non-3D that is not bound to 3D is vastly larger than the specialized form that is bound to 3D. To return to our stovetop analogy, we could say that all non-3D is metal, but only that part of the non-3D that is integrally connected to 3D is a burner.

Is this worth coining a new term to reduce confusion?

Perhaps. Try.

Well, what if we continue using non-3D as we have been using it, to depict the part of reality that we in 3D can experience – via ILC, for instance, or remote viewing, or unaided intuition or whatever. Then we need invent a word only to mean the non-3D as it exists without this close connection to the 3D implosion.

Yes, that is the idea. And you would call it, what?

Cosmic non-3D?

There are difficulties with that.

Yes, I can feel it. Well – I don’t know, uncoupled non-3D?

Closer but still not yet suitable.

External? Unaffiliated? Natural? Uncompressed? Ah! Uncoupled?

Uncoupled may work, but it will be decipherable only to those who already know what we mean.

I suppose we could say “non-binary,” meaning, not coupled to the 3D condition.

Non-binary is not an improvement over uncoupled. Either may serve.

So then, let’s have your capsule summary using this clarifying phrase.

Most of non-3D is non-binary (uncoupled), in that it has no limitation on it by any close relationship to a 3D condition. However, specialized cases in which non-3D provides one pole and 3D the opposite pole do exist. Non-coupled non-3D is vastly more common than coupled non-3D – but how would you experience it?

That sounds close to a division in reality.

Our rhetorical question has an answer, if you will pause to ponder it.

Oh. Through our own non-3D connection, of course.

Exactly. As you say, there are no absolute divisions in reality. However, remember that there are steps. The higher reality you once briefly experienced is kin to yours, but is not identical to it, as artwork you create is kin to you but not identical to who and what you are.

There’s always more to learn.

Yes, isn’t it good? You never need to be bored, never need to sigh and say, “I’ve seen it all.”

I for one have no criticisms of reality. I did, and for a long time, “but that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.”

You like Abraham Lincoln’s quote and he was right, most people are about as happy as they are determined to be. It is a good world, a good life, and those who don’t know it now will know it at some point.

Our thanks for this, as always. What do we call it?

“Clarifying no-3D,” perhaps

Till next time, then.