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Tuesday, September 10, 2019

Shall we continue?

Maybe. You understand, the subject is complicated. Not only is the viewpoint unfamiliar to you, there are many unsuspected and half-suspected ideas in what they call your subconscious or unconscious mind that will tend to interfere with reception.

My jumping to conclusions, you mean?

In a way. That’s how and why one jumps to conclusions: the inner preconceived ideas rush to finish a sentence in a comfortable manner.

That makes the ideas seem like they have a life of their own.

That’s almost so. It would be a way of looking at things that isn’t all that untenable. You might think of  ideas as whirlpools: fixed patterns that are themselves continually in motion, but motion whose structure is held within limits by its own internal dynamics.

So that we as patterns interact with ideas as patterns.

As an electrical analogy, yes.

First you[-all] must cease to define yourselves as primarily creatures of reason. You aren’t. You are primarily creatures of emotion, of feelings. Thought comes a long way second, if at all. Many a person lives without thought; nobody lives without feelings. But just because this is so, doesn’t mean it is recognized as being so.

Somebody – Cayce? – said feelings are the language of the soul.

Let’s put it in unfamiliar ways, so as to give you the shock of unrecognition if possible. What you experience as feelings could be seen as resonances of a smaller field with a larger. What you experience as thought is either the association of various fields as it presents itself spontaneously, or the rationalization of the meaning of resonances experienced. We are constrained by the limitations of the analogy and the limitations of your associations to the analogy. This is why when we can we prefer to stick to images. Images, like dreams or daydreams, connect things by emotional logic that mechanical logic would never connect.

By mechanical logic, I take it you mean what we call thinking.

More like the limits to your thinking.

What our previously accepted ideas allow us to entertain.

That’s right. Your mind is, among other things, a huge fragile malleable open-ended structure of associations. This is what any new input has to interact with, either meshing or clashing or being unable to secure entrance. It is your stability, only it is a dynamic stability, changing as the field changes, responsive to alterations in the surrounding fields that affect it.

Your original query was as to the connections between illness and health and time, and circumstance, and mental position or attitude. This is what we are working to explain, but there is a lot of conceptual deadwood to be cleared.

Consider your body. You experience it as a solid complicated organism that has continuity in 3D and leads an existence somewhat independent of you. It breathes, it processes sugars, it maintains complicated physiological systems that interact to create ongoing homeostasis. In effect, the body is a ready-made chariot, but it rides largely where you want it to ride, and how you want it to ride. It isn’t independent of you, but it does have its own existence. Remember, not only mentally but physically, you are not only an individual, you are also a community. Communities get along well or badly.

An ill-assorted community may show as a physically ill individual?

That’s jumping a little too far, but you are in the right direction.

Your horoscope defines the community that constellated at that moment. (Not that the moment determined the constellation; more like the constellation may have had to wait for the proper time.) But, the horoscope will tell you many things if you will use it not to predict which door you will go through, but what is the internal relationship pattern and how will it manifest as conditions proceed.

A horoscope with oppositions indicates a community somewhat at cross-purposes, etc.

It delignates accurately the energetic pattern your life begins with. How you modify those patterns is up to you, but they are your starting point.

And that’s the link between health and its fluctuations. What we are at birth leaves us prey to, or immune to, fluctuations in the external environment, independent of our own emotional world within.

A little slower. You say independent of your emotional world within; we need to be sure that people understand that this assumes (correctly) that internal and external influences are equally internal. There is no such thing really as “external” because the walls between you and the world are not walls at all. At most they are shock waves between systems, or, better, interface patterns. So, external events like sunrise or sunset may impact you directly without any emotional input on your part.

Like Seasonal Affective Disorder. People are sensitive to lack of sunlight, and it has nothing to do with their being resolutely cheerful or not.

Someone with SAD may in fact counteract it to a degree by a consciously-induced counter-irritant. Similarly, you can and often do counter asthmatic conditions by a willed lowering of internal tension. You aren’t helpless in bodies, but you do need to keep in mind the fact that you have them.

 

Monday, September 9, 2019

Paul Brunton sensed and deduced that experience of the world (that is, of reality) can only come via the mind, hence the mind is the ultimate. He was careful not to dismiss the world as only an illusion, and not to take its independent existence for granted. He balanced. Well, now look at the “mental” as a field interacting with 3D and non-3D. Is it an individual field, when it interacts as well with every other mental field? Is it a collective field, when it uniquely interacts with at least one field that is unique(the 3D), and perhaps both? (The non-3D, remember, though not divided is not uniform.)

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

Of course. And what happens to that field when the 3D pole ceases to exist (dies)?

I see it! In terms of time, the mental field ceases to exist, for there is no second pole to hold it in being. But wherever it was, it remains. The mind – the mental field – that was suspended between George Washington’s 3D existence and the non-3D remains in that context. That’s why we can still talk to past lives, why we can interact with living beings and not merely statues or recordings.

So now you can see several interacting awarenesses, if only potentially.

I won’t be able to follow up on them, but others will once it has been called to their attention, and that’s what you are using me for.

Correct, except it is “we” using you – that is, you and us together. But that is one function of the ILC process, and one reason to spread the usage, to provide more people willing and able to strike sparks.

So let’s make it practical for those experiencing chronic health challenges. Rather than consider illnesses as 3D-caused (only), or as “spiritually” caused (as if it is one’s fault for hosting illness), what is the story seen when we consider our mental world to be a field generated by and suspended from the interaction between 3D and non-3D fields?

First, recognize that customarily you all experience yourselves as primarily mental, no matter how attached to physical sensations you may be. Even the person who is most sensually oriented does not identify with the body as a collection of cells and organs, but as the horse it (the person) rides. Anyone concentrating on primarily physical activities still experiences himself or herself as the person who. They don’t identify with the muscles; they identify with having the muscles. It is easier to see in those who experience the world primarily emotionally or intellectually, but it is the case always. You have bodies; you tend bodies; you may even think that you think of yourselves as bodies, but when you look more closely you see that it comes down to you using (living in) bodies. That is a small but important difference.

So now when something perturbs the body, does it really feel like it is perturbing you, or like it is perturbing something you are integrally bound to?

That’s why some of us are not afraid of death but welcome it as an end to interference.

Yes. The interference has made clearer to you that you really are mind. Then it is only a matter of whether you consider the mind to be an attribute of the body, which it is, in a way, or an entity not wholly dependent an independent entity upon the body, which it is in a way.

And the definition we choose determines how much we can or cannot affect things like health.

Like many things. But then let us penetrate a bit farther. The way in which one conceptualizes the mind as somewhat independent of the body also helps determine what is or is not possible.

It occurred to me that, as so often, the distance analogy has snuck into the illustration. We tend to think of 3D and non-3D as separated by something, rather than occupying identical or overlapping spaces. If we could visualize every moment of time/space separately and simultaneously, it would be easier to see it as it is, maybe.

Saturday, September 7, 2019

Yesterday’s wonderful conversation demonstrates what you said so many years ago, how we in 3D live our life in time-slices. After I gradually changed, I forgot how I had been, so entirely that I was puzzled how people could be the way I myself had been!

As we said then, the 3D world is designed to let you live in a pressure-chamber of now. This is what gives you the possibility of choice and change, far more so than the non-3D condition alone could provide.

I hear the words “hyperbaric chamber.”

A reasonable analogy. Such a chamber employs high pressure in an external atmosphere to force life-giving oxygen into tissues that need it.

I don’t know, though. Doesn’t 3D also force negative energies into us as well?

It may look that way, but that is mostly because 3D conditions produce the sensation of “external” forces, rather than forces that are part of you but are experienced as external.

Monday, September 16, 2019

On so many subjects, you must remember that context is everything. Look at something while forgetting what you have learned, and you cannot possibly see with greater perception. But bring these new (seemingly unrelated) perceptions to the subject, and maze may become penetrable.

So, here. The problem of evil. Every religion is at least in part an attempt to see why evil exists in the world, and is an attempt at strategies to overcome it. Every serious philosophy must grapple with this question. Manicheans see the world as battleground between equally extra-human forces of roughly equal strength. Some philosophies say evil does not exist per se, but is merely the absence of good. And all other attempts to see the structure of reality, fall somewhere between these two poles. Partly it is a question of appearances. How do conditions seem, as opposed to how are they really? Partly it is a question of meaning. How should we see this or that in connection with what else we know?

And partly it is a question of values? What we wish to uphold or stave off?

We can see how you would think that this is what we ourselves have said in the past. But, no, not really. Your values are chosen partly by what you were, partly by what you are, partly by what you wish to be. It is so reiterative a process, it may seem to be circular, but it is not. A cycle looks like a circle sometimes, but it involves an additional dimension.

It is a question of depth.

Yes. And that is also the question in a larger sense. Depth or lack of depth will affect your perception of how things are.

So far this is pretty abstract.

Still, that’s where we must begin, with context. It is always good to provide clarity.

Now, we said appearance and meaning. This too is part of an iterative process. How things appear depends upon the inner resources one can bring to the perceiving. What things mean depends upon the connections one can make. Changes in the observer lead to changes in what can be observed, and thus both appearance and its meaning seem to change, leading to further changes in the observer. There are two reasons, not just one, why you can never step into the same river twice. Yes, the river’s flow makes it impossible. But so does what we might call your flow. You are not the same, even between two attempts to step in the river.

“But” (we hear you object) “there must be some ultimate view of reality. There must be some way things really are.” To this we can say only, “Perhaps; perhaps not.” At most you will get to an explanation that satisfies you, now. Don’t expect to get one that will satisfy everybody, nor anybody forever.

It is easier for me to understand that we might not be able to see beyond all illusions than that there might not be an ultimate view. Something must describe it all, whether or not we here can become able to see it.

Do you think so? That is because you have an unconscious assumption that reality doesn’t change. What basis do you have for assuming that?

Are you saying that reality continues to change?

No. Neither are we definitely saying it does not. Either way, how would you know? How would we know? We or you or anyone could and can (and, often enough, do) decide, “This is the way it is,” but that is mostly a decision to stop looking.

Finding a place that is comfortable enough to be a staging-camp for a possible later further ascent.

Correct. Obviously as you change, you discern more (or, if you are losing ground, less). The reality you can perceive (which is all you ever have) changes, and you learn to deal with this changed reality. When you think “all is one,” it is a different world to you from when you think all is chance and accident. When you realize that there is no external unconnected to who and what you are (because you can only perceive that which is related to you), it is a different world from one in which unconnected forces exist. But even as perceptions change, your assigned meaning changes, and not mechanically. You may choose to see things as meaning one thing, or as a different thing, and the choice you make will help determine the next thing that happens to your perceptions

It’s almost a fun-house, set up to distort perceptions.

No! It can look like that. You can interpret it as that. And that’s a good example, right there, of how the process of assigning meaning to perception may result in conclusions of great definiteness that may have little relevance to anything but one’s momentary state of being.

It may appear that we haven’t advanced an inch on our task of examining evil in 3D life; may appear, in fact, that we have lost ground. But the motto of the firm is “flexibility.” The more flexible you are, the better your chances of being able to see what is not directly within line of sight. There’s no such thing as an unalterable decision, nor is there any reason there should be.

So let’s talk about wholeness rather than goodness.

Yes, we’re smiling too. But surely you can see that the discussion that now follows will be different from what it would have been if your mind had not been turned by this bit of brush-clearing.

Saturday, September 14, 2019

When I watch shows with particularly evil or arrogant villains, my response to them is (as the writers have intended) “Kill them; they have no place in the world.” It would be useless, of course: New villains spring up all the time. Worse than useless, because you become like the worst in those you fight. The only practical plan I have ever read was Anselmo’s in For Whom the Bell Tolls: Make the miscreants work until they come to realize the error of their ways. This might or might not reform the villains, but at least it would not destroy those who confronted them.

The key here, as you well know, is that your emotional reaction to a thing may be as powerful as anything you do or say. It is your second- and third-tier reaction that counts, and this is one reason people of ill will do such damage: They rouse righteous indignation that outdoes them in turn.

By the end of a war, people are enthusiastically doing things that they would have been horrified to consider at the beginning. Saturation bombing, atomic bombs – concepts that make no distinction between combatant and civilian, concepts that would have been rightly considered to be war crimes before the war. By war’s end they are accepted as defensible and even reasonable.

One-eyed pursuit of a good tends to lead to means identical to those being countered.

Fight fire with fire, is the saying.

Yes. That works out better in forestry than in human relations, where it is merely arson, and at that, arson that incinerates friend and foe and self alike.

And why does it have to be this way? I don’t pretend that there was ever a paradise on Earth, but does it always have to be this stew of hatreds and fears and self-righteous seeking of vengeance? I understand that life in duality must include both ends of every stick. Somehow, though, that isn’t terribly comforting.

It will be less disturbing if you remember that 3D is a part of a greater life, and that every life has purpose. Evil is good balanced. We know you don’t like it, but it may become more understandable if you look at it as a question of extremes. The center is where a stick will balance, nowhere else.

You are saying too much goodness creates or constellates too much badness.

Well – almost. A black-and-white negative may be muted or vivid. It may consist of highly contrasted lights and darks, or tones that are much more in the center scale. It’s only an analogy, remember.

But this lifetime does not seem to have an excess of goodness. I see chiefly excess of violence.

Yes, that’s what you see. That’s what is pictured. There is no entertainment value in portraying goodness, except occasionally as a change of pace. You know how it is.

People want to feel alive, and if their ordinary lives offer too little, you will find young men running to get into a war, as in 1914, for the sake of smashing things – they having no idea why they feel that way, having no idea how intolerable their lives were that they are fleeing.

So why the impulse in the first place? And why are we led by sociopaths?

You aren’t led by sociopaths, you are led astray by them. Most of your leaders are themselves bewildered, short-sighted, inconstant, often well-meaning but without vision and under continuous pressure to go along.

But the question remains: Why? Why is 3D life made into such an endurance test? Couldn’t we modulate the evil that has to manifest?

You could, but it involves wholeness, in place of goodness, as you have been told. It involves bearing your own share of the world’s evil., and thereby helping to corral it, to curb it from wild manifestation.

Jesus said it is inevitable that evil comes into the world, but woe unto him by whom it comes.

Yes, but that refers to ushering it into the world, not holding a piece of it that already exists and has manifested.

Friday, September 13, 2019

I have been reading, watching Netflix, and of course thinking of things I’ve read over the years.

And it all makes you feel, as you do so often, that you are living in a lunatic asylum.

I feel like I am living in a world structured on behalf of fools, psychopaths, sociopaths. I recognize that this is only a partial view, and that the good and the quietly strong and sane receive little ink in the world, but still, it’s a lot to live with.

The dissonance you and others are experiencing could be seen as the thinning of internal walls between non-coherent belief systems. You become aware of the contradictions you embody and live with. The result is an improvement in vision, but the process is uncomfortable.

I get that in this we are somehow participating in the group mind of our civilization, going through the same process.

Well, let’s take it a little slowly. Let’s take you as an example. You were born into postwar America, immersed yourself in American history, gradually broadened out your acquaintance to other countries, other times. That was the inner world you concentrated on, not really paying attention to the world you were actually living in.

Everybody constructs road-maps of the world. Not one road-map, but many, each tied to specific kinds of purpose, each tied to different clusters of experience. Thus people have one set of beliefs in one circumstance, another in a second, yet another in a third, and often enough the various road-maps are kept unconnected to the others. You can function this way – you mostly have functioned this way – changing in changing circumstances, not noticing the changes in you, of you.

The multiple “I”s taking turns steering, that Gurdjieff described.

Yes, but in your age, the maps are being superseded by GPS. Now they interact, and contradictions are glaringly obvious, like it or not. Now it is less possible to live with unnoticed internal contradictions. The result may often seem chaotic, but it may be the process of rendering chaos into ordered patterns.

“It hurts but it’s good for you,” so to speak.

It doesn’t even hurt necessarily. Uncomfortable, yes, but sleeping out in the open on a camping trip may be uncomfortable. You do it for the sake of the trip, and you don’t begrudge the discomfort, for the sake of the experience it enables.

I can see 3D life as a camping trip. It isn’t an analogy that had occurred to me before.

Your joke has been that you realized you were in an insane asylum but only became uncomfortable when you realized you weren’t one of the ones carrying keys. In other words, that maybe you belonged there. But there’s truth in the joke, except for the inference that you are as crazy as anybody else. It’s closer to say, the others aren’t any crazier than you are. It is their actions, their manifestations, like yours, that may be incomprehensible to others, which makes them unpredictable, uninterpretable, and therefore menacing.

Are you saying nobody is crazy?

Let’s say crazy is as crazy does. Crazy, like evil, is a part of the 3D condition. The same mind in non-3D manifests differently. It isn’t like you are then surrounded by dangerous criminals and lunatics. Nor, of course, that you appear like that to others. For one thing, the concept of “others” looks very different in surroundings where the concept of “external” is clearly illusory.

 

Wednesday, September 11, 2019

Guys? Anything today, or do we take a day off?

You can always take a day off merely by not showing up, and sometimes that’s appropriate.

And you, on your end? What are the variables?

On our end nothing, because we are not constricted by time-slices. If we cannot work “now,” we can work “later,” and you won’t see the difference.

Except sometimes in mid-process you have asked for time to think.

Yes. Perplexing you extremely, if we recall!

Well, it did. I half-remember you saying the obstacle was actually on my end anyway.

Perhaps a more careful way to say it is that what is available to you depends upon where you are mentally. Some things that are a stretch in one “mood” or at one phase of your life are not a stretch at another. This is not a variable from this end, but of course it may look like it.

So in terms of your recent description of the mental field as an interaction between 3D and non-3D –

Surely you can see that a field that continually fluctuates, fluctuates in what it is in resonance with. Someone who habitually thinks high thoughts is going to resonate to different fields than those of one who habitually thinks low ones, or who alternates between the two.

This is the same thing you’ve been saying all along: We shape who we become through our choices.

That’s correct. And this is a way of explaining the process via a different analogy, and a vivid image.

Yes, true. And our choices affect others to some extent.

Isn’t this what religions have always said? Isn’t it common sense, once you see that everything (hence every one) is interconnected? But the electrical field analogy may make it intuitively more obvious.

I was going to ask, how do people deal with conflicting voices, and the answer is, Test the spirits.

It requires rashness to accept anything on faith alone. Sometimes that is appropriate, sometimes not. But why take the chance? If everyone told the truth, if everyone’s intentions were pure, if people could be accepted at face value, it would be merely a matter of openness. But life in 3D is not that simple. Why would you expect it to be in non-3D?

I have been accepting you and your information for a quarter of a century and more.

But – have you? Uncritically? Without doubt and questioning and demand for evidence, and without qualifying further questions? We would hardly say you accepted everything on faith – nor would we have wanted you to.

I have always regretted that my ability to talk to you was not accompanied by Rita’s gift of analysis and cross-examination. But you and I seem to be on the same page, on the question of the utility of doubt.

We have never been on different pages, except in appearance. You stressed your doubts and we counter-balanced the boat by giving you reason to have faith. When you have gone too far in the opposite direction, semi-deifying us or the message, we would counter-balance, reminding you that no communication may safely be assumed to be pure and undistorted. What we both want is a clearly flowing stream that is not accepted as gospel nor discarded as fantasy, but is considered, examined, held up to one’s inner truth-detector. And we’d say we’ve both done pretty well at that.

Only now it gets more complicated.

Well, it is complicated, in that we need people to see how to be accepting and critical at the same time. Some will know how to do it instinctively; some can learn how and some will never be able to balance, but will land on one side or the other.

And we are now bringing into consideration the vast impersonal forces.

Think of those forces as if they were gravitational fields, or electrical fields, or, better, magnetic fields. (These are not scientific analogies, because that is not your playground, but they provide images, which will help people to leap the gap.) Think of it as the mental weather, generated by the magnetic currents of the day interacting with the magnetic fields that exist regardless of a specific day.

You are small boats on a great ocean. You don’t cause the tides or the waves or the atmospheric conditions, all you can do is adapt to them. Or, you are airplanes in a vast sky whose barometric pressure, jet streams, humidity, thunderstorms, etc. you must cope with but cannot control. Or, a third analogy, you are a localized electro-magnetic field interacting not only with a larger field from which you have been thrown off, but with huge external fields independent of your control.

We mean to convey:

• You are small; the universe is not.
• You are isolated in effect, no matter how connected you are in fact.
• You are in unbreakable connection with the field that is the present moment, but “present moment” is not evanescent nor fragile nor perishable, and neither are you.
• You are part of a system, not an accident but, have been thrown up in the course of events. Is there such a thing as a meaningless event?

The bottom line here is that you are not isolated nor meaningless to the rest of reality. How could you be? But you may need to function as if you were. Well, if so, so what? There are millions of roles to be played, and the roles are always filled.