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For what it’s worth. This started as a journal entry, and turned into a mini-exchange with the guys.

8 a.m. or so. I was reading in The Portable Jung his description of the differences between Eastern and Western thinking, wondering if the scheme I have from the guys isn’t applicable: the unconscious roughly corresponding to the non-3D and consciousness to the 3D.
But this is sloppy and I think you can give me a better handle on it. For instance, someone living his life on the 3D level only – scarcely to be thought of as conscious, really – you can’t really say he’s living in the non-3D.
Oh yes you can. And so are you and so is everyone. Remember, 3D and non-3D are coexistent. It’s one world, not two or more. Your mental lives are sometimes conscious, much more often day-dream-y, often enough not conscious at all. Where do these neat divisions disappear to, when you look carefully?
Jung saw that consciousness could be described as a sort of one-sidedness, a forgetting or disregarding of the unconscious material it cannot bring to light (if only for lack of mental energy). But it comes out of unconsciousness in the way a plant comes out of the soil it grows in. it depends upon the soil it is rooted in. it solidifies (for the moment) the sea it emerges from. It encapsulates a particular set of energies and their associations – complexes – for as long as it maintains itself.

These terse notes from our 2021-06-30 drumming session in our Zoom meeting of June 30, 2021, may be of interest.

“How can we explore limits, productivity?”

Be efficient conductors
Reduce barriers (conscious and unconscious)
Be open to unfamiliar energies
Trust the process – you will get what you need
“Parking carma” more widely applied. [This refers to the fact that people who live in expanded awareness often experience little helpful synchronicities in their lives, as for instance finding a parking space when they need one.]
Remember that “your” bright idea may not be “your idea” but may have wider applications. Be confident.

A sense of place
[This is an experiment to see if we can foster conversations on this blog. Jane Coleman proposed a topic and Jane Peranteau, Christine Sampson and I each promised to give it a paragraph or two, and then I would put it together and post it. It is our hope that others will feel inclined to add comments via Reply or, if that doesn’t work, by emailing me so that I can post on their behalf.
[Hint: Write your remarks in a word program first, and save them. Then if they get lost in the process of trying to post them, you only have to pull up the saved file and copy it to me to do for you.]

From Jane Coleman:
I was thinking about the year I went to Yosemite National Park and went hiking for several days. I noticed that my memory had a certain feeling about it, something unique. It had its own signature and resonance and mood. I could call it a signature, and yet it encompasses all these things.
As I considered that event, I also recognized that all the places I’ve ever been have a certain signature about them. They each feel a certain way. The memories have colored them. I would equate that to the way I recognize my friends. Each has a unique feeling about them, their unique signature, some something that I would recognize no matter where.
Your thoughts?

From Christine Sampson:
Ok. Here’s what I got.
Carnival! The joy! The excitement ! The things to do, to observe, to participate in, to ignore, to discover! My life in retrospect. The faces, the places, the actions, the inactions, the dismissing, the accepting, the relishing. Each individual act, moment, created and placed by forces beyond the conscious mind, to allow exploration and growth and knowing and wonder.
I sit in the warm sunshine feeling very feline. Thankful. In gratitude.
A cacophony of all visible and invisible, to be sussed out and savored in a flash or at leisure.

From Jane Peranteau:
After sitting with it:
Our response to experience leaves emotional trace elements, like snail trails, in the mind. Pathways that create scaffoldings of self-knowing.
Are these the same as filters?
Yes. Because pathways change what we allow in and what we don’t. They change us in terms of our choices. You can have a pathways series that builds a filter or serves an openness.
The feeling you have for a person or a place determines an openness to them or a caution or a closed-ness. Succeeding experiences can change that–e.g., as we forgive or are forgiven, receive insights and revelations, or continue to be enhanced by further experience.
Feeling is always informed by everything we know, which is everything we are. It is not experienced separate from reason or science (e.g., science can track feeling’s movement through the body and mind) or knowledge.
Would it be fair to say that the signature each of those places and people have is your love for them? The uniqueness of signature recognizes how love is not a blind blanket emotion but fits the characteristics and traits of who is loving and what is loved.
[Good question, Jane C. A big question. It incited a trail of sudden awarenesses that led to insights along the way, each having the potential to be its own pathway. Frank, I see what we’re doing as another extension of what intending ILC makes possible.]

From Frank DeMarco:
It has always struck me how different places have a different “feel” that is more than mere aesthetics. When I was a boy, the fields of my father’s farm were quite different from city streets, say, or someone’s lawn. The woods that were behind our house and across the street had a special feel that I loved. My life had trees well before it had books! And places devoted to a consistent endeavor seem to me to acquire their own signature, as well:
• Churches, or any place where many people have prayed over many years
• Libraries, suffused with the auras of readers and, it seems, writer
• The grounds at The Monroe Institute, specifically, where for more than 40 years people have come to explore their unknown potential.
And these are just “ordinary” places! We haven’t even touched on what are called sacred sites.

Wednesday May 18, 2022 ILC virtual meeting
Our weekly Zoom gathering features a five-minute drumming session in which all participants ask for information around a given question. I see that about a year and a half ago, we explored the question of whether there is a dark side to guidance. The answers we got were summarized here from Dirk’s notes, and mine, and notes I made on watching the recording

Drumming Question:
“Is there a dark side to guidance? If so, tell us about it. If not, tell us what we are misinterpreting.”

Jon:
Multiple levels involved. Lower levels may be less skillful, and when they put together a doing, it can have dark consequences. Acknowledge it and try to have one’s frequencies go with the lighter, higher side. Discernment.

Louisa:
What is darkness? Unknown, not completely seen. Interpretation carries the possibility of misunderstanding. Guidance is representative of our totality.

Paul:
Darkness comes from its misuse, misinterpretation by ego. Anything can be used badly. Purity of intention is key.

Nancy:
(Told the story of her engagement with energies that started telling her what to do, at which time she disengaged. Realized later that they had not given her a straight answer when she had asked if they were of the light.)

Dave:
The question assumes a Manichean world view. Everyone is on a spectrum between good and evil, and it is the same in non-3D. Test the spirits.

Jane:
If people hear a voice within, are they mentally ill? What if what they heard was really there? Did they misinterpret?

Martha:
What she got was like Jon, Dave, and Nancy, so she passed.

Dirk: [From the notes he put on the computer.]
No. To the extent that you see a dark side you either see aspects of your 3D selves and threads that are discordant or dishonored, or you see conflicts with belief systems and structures. These can be internal disagreements. They can as easily be conflicts between your threads or beliefs with the external world.

That in turn is most often with other people and their threads and beliefs. Or also often disagreements between your threads or beliefs, desires and wants and physical matter reality. Quite often the major confusion arises from conflicts between beliefs, wants and desires, and the information you receive from guidance. This in turn has many forms and levels.

Christine:
You don’t go through crime-ridden areas, but avoid them. Same here. It’s all experience. Choosing. The dark side must be pursued to experience it. [I take that to mean, it won’t happen by accident.]

Frank: [From my notes]
It is relative to your self-image, your consciousness of yourself. If you experience darkness outside, you experience darkness inside. Darkness has its rights and function, as does light.
However, think carefully about what you mean by darkness. Do you mean ignorance? Evil? Malice? Do you mean potential? Do you mean nurturing darkness? What you mean makes a difference.

Good to remember that just as 3D is not all love and light, but also fear and darkness, so in non-3D. The next question to ask is, What is my most productive relationship to darkness?

A couple years old, but scarcely outdated.

Friday, October 8, 2021

5:55 a.m. I thought we might look at what I got during our drumming session on Wednesday.

“What is our path to greatest joy?”

Openness, because openness is the opposite of shrinking from life. Joy is the path. Follow your bliss and it increases. First, do no harm. A clear conscience leads to happiness. Again, no need for shrinking (from memories). Live in great confidence.

In other words, openness, which includes openness to joy, innocence as best you can achieve it, and faith. Not so complicated a formula.

Some might say, “Yes, but how do we attain it?”

You don’t attain a formula, you live it. And let’s say, as an aside, that “try” and “intend” may sound like the same thing, but they are not. When you intend, that is following a course, watching your compass to be sure you are going where you want to go. When you try, that is saying you are not succeeding, with the implication not only that you have not yet succeeded, but also that you cannot yet succeed. “Try” is an implicit declaration of inability, you see.

So as a practical matter, how do we assure that we are following a course (however discouraged we may be at any given moment) and not silently saying “But I can’t do this, at least not yet.”

You set your teeth, with or without dramatics, according to taste, and you follow your compass. That’s what intend is, it is being pulled by your chosen future, you could say. It isn’t difficult conceptually; there are no techniques to learn (though each person may find it worthwhile to invent or adopt specific rituals to serve as encouragement and reminder). It is really a setting one person in charge, rather than allowing various people to take the helm depending upon any little change in the weather. You all want to crystallize a permanent being. Take this as a practical exercise. Teach your crew to follow one captain, rather than rotating the conn. And there’s no use saying, “I am the captain.” You are more like the shipowner, selecting and then maintaining the captain. (And if you will not do it, who will?) Choose who you want to be captain; that is another way of saying, Choose who and what you want to be, want to express.

So let’s look briefly at what you got when you asked “What is our path to greatest joy?”

“Openness, because openness if the opposite of shrinking from life.” You should understand this very well. Older people often say the sins they most regret are the ones they didn’t commit. Or, more neutrally, what they regret is far more often the things they didn’t do, not the things they did do. Why is this, do you suppose?

It seems clear enough. The reason we don’t do something we want to do often boils down to fear of some sort. Yes, there may be other constraints, but often enough, we’re afraid, like Mr. Prufrock.

And the two forces in life?

Yes, that’s my point. Love, which is expansion and inclusion – and fear, which is constriction and exclusion. And I don’t know how we can be expanding if we are contracting.

Ergo, a default position of openness is a default position of willingness to love what comes. That may not be obvious, and in some moods may seem to be impossible, but it is true. Now, “to love what comes” does not necessarily mean to greet it with cries of joy, like George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life”: (“Yes, I’m going to jail, isn’t it wonderful?”) But it does mean, “This comes next, let’s see what it brings.” You are going to the hospital, to the unemployment office, to jail, to bankruptcy court, whatever. Scarcely grounds for rejoicing, but it will be a new experience, and you could choose a relatively calm curiosity about it, a trusting that nothing happens by chance. And there’s no use saying of this advice, “That’s easy for you to say.” Whether it’s easy to say is not the question. The question is, are we right? If it’s good advice, it doesn’t have to be hard to say.

As Sam Spade said, “What do you want me to do, learn to stutter?”

Exactly. Easy or not to say, practice is what is important.

“Follow your bliss, and joy increases.” Surely this is self-evident? Should you expect that the way to increase your joy is in seeking out the things you don’t want to do? It is true that everyone’s life includes things they would just as soon skip, but if you follow where your feelings lead you, it will work out, and probably better than you hope. Just as advocating openness says, “Avoid shrinking from life,” so “Follow your bliss” says, “Not only don’t shrink from it, embrace it, trust it.”

Again, I don’t know why this wouldn’t be transparently evident.

You are forgetting your past in which you did not pursue what would be “too good to be true,” and you are not recognizing the present in which you are still doing it.

Ouch.

Still, you’re right: It ought to be evident. However, like most things in life, it won’t do itself. It can be hard enough to find your bliss, if you look with the wrong tools. (Hint: You want to be paying attention to feelings, not to logic and especially not to “practicalities.”) But once you find it, you still need to follow it, and that often requires a decision of some sort.

“First, do no harm.” You can’t live without doing harm; that is an impossible ideal. But you can intend to do no harm. You can make your life about not doing harm. You can, in short, do as little harm as possible, and certainly you can live by refusing to do harm either consciously or, to the extent possible, by inadvertence. It isn’t complicated, it is merely a matter of having your captain include it in the standing orders.

“Live in great confidence.” We should scarcely need to add anything to this point. Everything we have been telling you, all these years, is to this effect. What Jane Roberts brought through, and Cayce, same message. It is a safe universe, it was made for you (in effect).

A drumming question from Wednesday’s Intuitive Linked Communication group. I asked, “What is ahead and/or how shall we deal with it? (What’s in it for us?)”

The response I got:

You are always in the eternal now; punctuation is not discontinuity. To deal with the future is no different than dealing with the present moment – literally – because the future only manifests as the present moment.

So be now what you want to be then. Calmly strive for continuity of intent and action. Your life takes care of itself because inner and outer are the same reality, perceived differently. [The “outer world” being reality perceived by the sense; the “inner world” being reality perceived directly, intuitively.] There can be no events not connected to who and what you are. If surprises come, you can use them as learning experiences centered not on them but on who you are in your unknown mental and spiritual makeup.