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Sunday, November 3, 2024

2:15 a.m. (Standard time again). I had the feeling earlier that you wanted to talk, and I put it off till later. The extra hour caused by changing back from DST means I have slept as much as I am going to for a while, so let’s go. What is on your mind?

What is on your mind, is the question. You are experiencing the ragged edges of an advance in consciousness, and you don’t know what to do with them.

A primer: Clear your mind of active thought, holding an intent to communicate. Remember to not press, but allow. Follow anything that then arises. If you have once cleared your mind, things that arise will not be chatter but will be the matters of the immediate moment. And it is this process that is what we want to talk about, either in passing or at length, depending upon how we go.

Again: Clearing. Receptivity. Development of what appears.

Clearing. As we indicated earlier, the goal of meditation is not to leave you with a mind devoid of thought; it is to give you control over the association-machine by making you aware of its presence and characteristics. You want, not to kill the drunken monkey, but to get it sober. Thought-association is of course a valid method of mental functioning; you wouldn’t want to lose the ability to construct (or even to follow) chains of associations of ideas and sensations and memories. But ideally you will want to be able to experience this on your own terms.

Once you realize that this mental behavior even exists, you are better off, because this allows you for the first time to realize that most of the time you are not really present-tense so much as daydreaming. That is, you are in the present moment (there being no other place one could be) but you are not actively functioning, neither receiving nor constructing, but are being carried down an unending river, tossed by its currents, at its pace. It may be an interesting ride, even a fascinating ride, but it is not participation so much as spectatordom.

As we say, there’s nothing inherently wrong with this, but it is far better to be aware of what you are doing. You paid for the ride – why not take it with eyes open?

Receptivity. Once you have learned to discern the difference between being carried automatically downstream and paddling, or at least steering, you see how new opportunities arise. Let’s look at why this is so.

I’d guess it is that stillness – an absence of the continuing torrent of thoughts-that-generate-thoughts – allows quieter, more profound associations, rooted in the moment, to assert themselves.

You are in the right direction, but it should be said more carefully, because this is not as obvious as it appears to you in this moment, and may become distressingly vague to you later if not tied in.

I get that you are right, but it does seem obvious at the moment.

To some it will be, to some not. Think of it in terms of momentum. (This is analogy, remember, and must not be pushed too far.) If you travel at great speed, your ability to even notice, let alone deal with, your passing surroundings is vastly less than when you drift by slowly, or are at rest. In effect, you have less time at your disposal to look at anything. It is a trade-off, and again, not in itself a disadvantage. Sometimes you want to be traveling at speed, associating things ordinarily far removed from one another. But when you slow down, you regain the ability to see at greater depth of connection, greater detail.

And we can hear fainter voices.

And you can hear fainter voices, yes. It is the difference between a cocktail party and a quiet tete-a-tete. Neither is an absolute, but they are very different, offering very different possibilities.

You cannot come to the third state, the ability to develop what you hear, unless you first can hear it! And you cannot recognize the difference between being carried in a stream of associations and consciously choosing which connections to make, until you have recognized by experience that there is a real difference between the two.

So, first comes clearing. Even if you have been communicating consciously for decades, you will want to clear. This requires no ritual, nothing special, merely the awareness that your intent at the moment is a sort of heightened receptivity to the things of the moment; that is, to the thoughts and feelings and perceptions that are particularly acute at that moment. This gives focus.

Receptivity follows clearing. (And there need be no perception of separation between the two; they are, after all, inherently part of the same state.) Once you learn the trick of being actively receptive, you regain your freedom of choice.

Then comes the question of what you do with the input you are now allowing.

Interesting, I just got an example of this. I had to pause  and as I did I realized, people that I respected (Ed Carter, for one) told me right along that I needed to slow down, but I was proceeding at the speed that was normal to me, and I was even proud of that speed. It wasn’t so much that I disregarded the advice; I had no idea how to put it into effect, and I suppose nobody ever realized that I didn’t know how to slow down. That’s why you had me put down our talks in penmanship rather than typing, I know; it slowed me down.

And gradually you had the conscious experience to traveling more slowly, and then could deliberately adopt that speed if you wished, without sacrificing the lightning-speed imparted by intuition whenever that was appropriate. But you had to experience the difference, not merely hear about it.

Yes, and this happened just now, when I was interrupted. I realized, less speed may allow greater depth. If I could write twice as fast, or if I were dictating into a machine, the quality of whatever I got would be different. I would lose some of the advantage of going slowly.

You see us use bullets sometimes: It is a way of using a sort of shorthand to preserve relationships among far-flung items that offers the possibility of later, slower, development.

Development. Anything may be developed farther, but not everything need be, nor even deserves to be. It is a matter of choices. But that is the point here, isn’t it? Your life is choice. Your greater ability to choose is one more aspect of the life more abundantly that we wish you to be able to claim and to live.

I see it. Thanks as always.

 

Friday, October 25, 2024

3:10 a.m. Jon – I assume it was you – last Friday you said a fascinating subject to investigate would be the interrelation between the merely 3D aspects and the non-3D aspects of being human. Can we address that?

You usually say your 3D or non-3D component, and that is one good way to describe separation within unity, or, let’s say, relative separation, relative polarity, within a structure.

The guys told me long ago that the main difference between us and them is the terrain we exist in.

That was suited to your ability to understand. With what came over time, honing your perceptions and clarifying your analogies, you came to see that no 3D being is a unity except when considered within 3D, and even then, only to superficial analysis.

Yes. Compound beings produced as the result of endless generations of physical gene-sharing cannot be all one thing. You are what your parents were, in a sense, only you are more like a compromise between mother’s heritage and father’s. and each of them was a compromise between a prior set of mated characteristic and so on back forever.

But of course that merely describes the physical heredity, which is the universe of possibilities you were given, your physical endowment.

As you should understand by now, “physical” includes mental, and any 3D life is a combination of 3D physical possibilities that define the arena the non-3D characteristics must match if there is to be a live birth.

I rake it you just said that the physical makeup we are given must match the characteristics allowed in by the “weather” – the astrological characteristics of the given birth day.

Sometimes fully mature embryos have to wait several days before they can be born into the world. Sometimes they must come in earlier than the normal nine months, as the changing situation allows.

What you should think of now – if only as a thought-experiment – is that just as you are a compromise between your mother’s and your father’s genetic possibilities, so you are a compromise between your physical and your non-physical heritages, each considered as a unit. In effect, you experience a tug of war between what you call body and spirit. It may express in many ways, but it is always there, a second form of duality.

And just as your physical heredity comes from so many bifurcated genetic strands, so your non-physical heredity comes from more than one strand.

This is why your lives are so complicated. (Well, this is one more reason why.)

I’m hearing, “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.”

You have all experienced that. It is the human condition to be self-divided, indecisive, at cross-purposes, just as it is to be single-minded, decisive, with unblurred focus.

And I see you are not defining emotions as part of us.

Emotions, as I have said before, and others before me, are the interface between the acknowledged, known “you” and the unacknowledged you that you experience as “other.” So in that sense they are not you, yet they are your inseparable companions.

I’m hearing a new way to look at ourselves. Our mind is part of us, our emotions are with us but not of us.

They can be difficult to control. When is your mind difficult to control?

I experience quite a lot of difficulty controlling my body. I have come to see it as quite distinct from “me.” But I don’t suppose I could fairly say that my body is with me but not of me.

You could if you chose to look at it that way. Listen, the big thing is how you (anyone, of course) experience your life. If your body doesn’t trouble you, you tend to identify it with you. If your emotions or your mind don’t trouble you, similarly you just assume they are “you” and not “other.” But when faced with illness or any condition you cannot wish away, you are very likely to see that you are not your body. It can be less obvious until noticed, but the same may be said of your mental processes. Only when they are somewhat out of your control for whatever reason may you realize, “That isn’t me, it is at least partly autonomous.” And emotions, as I say, aren’t really a part of you or anyone, but may be mistaken to be a part of you.

Now look at the resulting situation. You have:

• Avatar-level mind, that believes it more or less knows who and what it is.
• 3D body systems working cooperatively, usually working well with mind, leading to an unconscious assumption of identity.
• Emotions generated by the interplay between known and unknown, often seen as between “self” and “other.”
• A non-3D mental environment unhampered by continuous coordination between mind and body, and not susceptible to emotion (because there is nothing in non-3D conditions to generate the “self” v. “other” perceptions that generate the emotions).

Why should anybody expect these four elements to function smoothly and flawlessly? Or to say it more clearly: Why would anyone expect life to be all sweetness and light? That is a baby’s dream. You’ll need a lot more integration before you get them all working smoothly together, and there’s no use thinking it is somebody’s fault (even your own) that life is what it is and not what you imagine it ought to be.

Some damned fool of a philosopher defined man as “a bourgeois compromise.” I take that to be somebody complaining that the world isn’t what he wanted it to be, and neither are we.

That discontent is also part of the human condition and – as your guys are always saying – “and nothing wrong with it.” But there is discontent and discontent. The discontent that is aspiration and impatience is one thing. The discontent that thinks it is smarter than the universe, better than God, as you put it, is something else. The one is a spur, the other is discouragement.

Now, you might give some thought to the practical implications of seeing the human condition this way. It may lead you to see your dilemmas and problems and possibilities quite differently.

Enough for now.

Theme?

“Man as compromise,” maybe, or “Redefining again,” or even “Why humans are so divided.” Something on that order.

It’ll come to me, I’m sure. Our thanks for all this.

 

Friday October 18, 2024

5:20 a.m. I liked our little chat about the individual’s opportunities and constraints. I hope people find it valuable in clearing up ambiguities in our situation that – until then – had been unclear to me. But I expect you have more on the subject. In fact, I expect you will always have more on any subject.

There is always more on anything, yes, for anyone willing to listen and assimilate. You may take that as a promise, and a hopeful one.

I do. I started to make a joke about google searches and AI chats, and realized, hmm, there are analogies.

Yes. New opportunities arise in many parallel ways when the times begin to allow new ways of being to manifest. One group may develop ILC for direct contact, another AI or other technological means to provide the same kind of expansion of possibilities, others may concentrate on telepathy or remote viewing or simple improvements in communications skills. It all flows together to produce, in effect, a new type of person who lives in a new type of culture. You have seen it many times throughout history and of course before your recorded history. It is one way in which the non-3D’s windows into the 3D world alter and provide new types of data. It is a continuing process – sometimes fast, sometimes slow – of change of the individual and of the individual’s environment and of the group and group’s environment, and so on and so forth, as one climbs or descends the chain of being.

I almost gather that you mean that animals – and even plants and minerals? – change over time, not only humans.

To remain unchanged in a changed situation would be to change relatively. There is no way to remain unchanged in a fluid life that is (we remind you) only somewhat real in 3D terms.

So how do rocks change as the times do?

Wouldn’t it be easier to begin rather closer to home?

Fine. On one end, angels, on the other end, animals. How do they change?

You realize, the question as posed invites only general answers, and that is just as well, you being what you are. Someone more versed in theology (on one end) or in biology (on the other end) would be able to receive answers in some detail.

I’ll call that to people’s attention. Maybe someone will take up the challenge. But for your run-of-the-mill liberal arts types, what do you have to say?

Perhaps you can see, as soon as it is stated, that the divine is going to change in terms of its interaction with 3D humans, as you do. Again, the situation changes (because one end of the relationship changes) and so even if angels, as you are calling them, were to remain unchanged in themselves, they would change relative to the changed element they are now interacting with.

They can reveal new aspects of themselves?

You as avatars are now better able to see complexities you did not see previously.

That sounds reasonable. And animals?

Perhaps animals are better able to express characteristics that could not be expressed before. But this is a trickier subject than you realize, and requires much more thought than the malleability of angels (non-3D beings not compound) that you intuited pretty quickly.

• There is a mental environment for all species, suspected or not.
• This “soup” has limitations, that is, boundaries in what its nature allows its component creatures.
• The soup changes with the larger atmosphere it lives in. We are not referring, here, to gaseous envelopes, but to the overall conditions in which you live. An equivalent would be the heliosphere in which all Earth exists. No one can escape it, and why would you want to, other than sheer curiosity?
• That atmosphere changes over time. What we are calling astrological influences affect everything, not merely human or even biological life.
• Thus, it changes in response to regular processes. The universe isn’t winging it; the planets and stars don’t move erratically or by whim, as far as you are concerned. This gives life a certain predictability in its unceasing changes.
• A part of the invisible atmosphere in which everything lives is – everything else! This is a huge concept that should not be merely acknowledged and forgotten. It is the key to many things.

I get that this leads to: As we change, we affect animals and they change.

And it is a reciprocal process.

Hmm.

Well, did you expect to change others and not be changed? Consider your pets and how you interact with them. Cats, dogs, chickens, pigs, horses, birds, otters – whatever people have had for pets has led to interaction between human and animal mind. Can it have left either unaffected?

This may be disguised because the human may nor recognize changes in the animal mind, either as individual or as part of its species – and the human is certainly not prone to recognizing the animal’s reciprocal effect. (Instead, he likely attributes it to himself. “I really like horses and so they bring out certain emotions in me.,” rather than “We affect each other and change each other.”)

Over time, this mutual influencing can only cumulate, of course. Cats and dogs and certain birds are different because of their long relationship with humans. Do you think the humans are unchanged?

I have always thought that pets are essential for children, so that they can learn that love restrains tooth and claw.

That is true on the negative end of the scale of influencing. But how much more important is the nurturing of empathy and trust and stewardship. However, this is all more direct and observable than what we refer to.

Well, I see that. Continue, then.

The very mental air you breathe, so to speak, is a shared atmosphere. Whatever else lives among you affects you, know it or not, as you affect them, whether they or you know it. Remember, it’s all one thing. This is another example of the fact that everything is part of the whole, not merely in an ecological sense (though of course that is true), and not as an abstraction (though that is also true) but as a day-by-day reality.

Should you regard this as a limiting factor? Should you somehow fear it? Only if you fear life. The fact is, this is one more example of how much more magically interrelated life is, despite the materialist fairy tales that say all is separate and may be comprehended in isolation.

And, you’re saying, what is true of the celestial and animal kingdoms is true as well of the plant and mineral kingdoms.

Yes, and of course not just in relation to humans, but in relation to everything. It is easy to overlook that, given that you are naturally centering on the human reality. Minerals affect animals and plants and human – can they not affect the celestials?

Hard to see how, but I’ll take your word for it.

Nonsense. What are the peculiar aspects of crystals or other minerals, if not manifestations of minerals affecting the celestial realm.

In terms of us.

What else could you possibly perceive? Everything you examine, you see in connection with human existence. It’s only because being human means being half celestial that you see more than strictly material phenomena, but whatever you do see, you see from your 3D/non-3D platform.

So I see the possibility of quite an extensive investigation here, one that doesn’t require new data as much as new interpretation of existing data.

That is what we have been telling you. You will retain some of your existing ways of seeing things, and you will discard some, and you will take up things forgotten or discarded previously, and this is how the new civilization will form. It is how new civilizations always form.

Mineral, plant, animal, celestial influences on humans, and vice versa.

More than that. There is also the interrelation between the merely 3D aspects of being human and the non-3D. There’s a major subject right there.

Well, it’s all fascinating. I hope I’ll be able to get it all when I go over, and not have to wait for people to piece it all out here. Today’s theme?

“Interrelations”?

Maybe. Thanks for all this.

 

Thursday, October 17, 2024

12:50 a.m. So now you have had an experience with how quickly and easily a new technique will be adopted when people are ready for it.

Yes. I was surprised how well it was accepted in yesterday’s meeting. I was not surprised so much by success in the small group on Tuesday, but I thought there might be resistance or – oh, I don’t know, call it a lack of resonance – in the larger group. But there wasn’t.

You and others have noted the fact, but it may be worth repeating here: You couldn’t have done this if you hadn’t been working together for so long. Some things don’t required long lead-times, but some do. The gradual coming together of an accustomed group mind brought you to mutual trust, expectation of success, and experience of new ways of being.

It is a far cry from the gloom-and-doom about contemporary politics and society.

Actually, there is a linkage, though it is not obvious.

Pray tell.

The fall of Rome took a long, long time, and every day of that slow decline provided implicit encouragement for people to readjust their ideas about what was important, what was meaningful. Bad times often deepen people, individually and, sometimes, in large numbers, though to use the word “collectively” would be misleading.

In that. awakening is never a collective process.

That’s right. It may happen in large numbers sometimes, but it can only be an individual process. Except –

Yes, the same thought came to me. I guess that’s today’s theme, assuming I don’t run out of gas?

Well, it could be. It’s worth pursuing.

Oddly, as soon as I say “assuming I don’t run out of gas,” I feel tired. Perhaps the prospect of so much work – an hour’s connecting and thinking – daunts?

Quite possibly. No reason you can’t sketch the problem (so you won’t forget it later) and defer attacking it.

There is an interaction between “individual” and “collective” mental activity, rooted in the fact that we are only somewhat individual and only somewhat all one mind. It may be that the differences in manifestation are dependent upon the difference in conceptualizing what and who we are.

And I think I will defer making the effort to expound until later, as I can see I will need a certain amount of energy to actually think along with you.

Later is fine.

6:55 a.m. To resume. Awakening is always an individual thing, and yet, it isn’t immune from “outside” influences. There is a lot involved here. You take it? With bullets, perhaps?

Bullets are always a convenient way to pick off aspects one by one without needing to restate them logically. That can always be done later, though sometimes the mere process of enumerating will make relationships obvious.

• In any aspect of life, what we are calling astrological aspects are involved, because the nature of a given time bounds and limits the kind of energies that can manifest, and somewhat shapes how they can manifest. This is not determinant, but it does set limits to possibilities.
• This applies to physical manifestations such as earthquakes, but it also applies to other kinds of physical manifestations (not always thought of as physical) such as brainstorms, or prevalent manias, or widespread or individual ways of seeing things.
• You as individual increase your personal scope of action and manifestation chiefly by deciding which “you” you care to manifest at any given moment. Different aspects of “you” will mesh with different aspects of what seems to you “external” reality.
• In a sense, “You create your own reality.” This does not mean, you shape the world others will experience. It means, you choose indirectly what you will be able to experience.
• But clearly, this is not true in itself without modification by other things that are also true. Just as necessity and free will balance each other, so “you” and “not-you.”

I take that to mean, simply, we are not omnipotent any more than omniscient; we are the center of our world but not of other people’s world; we are part of the 3D world, not all of it. Obvious facts, all of them, but needing to be kept in mind.

Yes, but there are other equally central truths:

• It’s all one thing. 3D life is only somewhat real. It is always now. This has consequences:
  • There is no truly separate “you,” only a relatively separate you.
  • Life is not mechanistic and as determined by physical laws as it appears to be.
  • There is no dead (fixed) past any more than there is dead (fixed) matter, despite appearances.
• In short, in important ways, everything is always in flux, and you all (and for that matter, obviously, we all) continually interact at many levels.
• Therefore – can you see why “therefore”? – your possibilities for self-transcendence are continual, and are dependent upon your own intent, and yet find less or more favorable times to manifest. In short, some times are propitious for growth, other times, less so.
• Another therefore: You are each dependent upon no one for your growth, and yet you each may help others and may be helped.

And this is all you need, but it needs mulling over. It won’t all come clear in an instant, even though at first reading, many will think they got it. Some thought at different levels (what you would call conscious or unconscious) will reveal unexpected connections which will be different for each, because each is embedded in a different mental matrix.

Call it, “Individual and collective progress,” perhaps.

Thanks as ever.

 

 

Monday October 14, 2024

3 a.m. Okay, Jon, I think I’m finally ready to do another session. If I post this – that is, if we get something worth posting – I will throw in a little explanation of what Dave Garland and I did while he was here before his TMI program. But beyond that, what can we talk about?

Once again, you are worrying because you can’t set out a logical agenda. Even after all this time, there is the temptation to think it all depends on you.

I know. But, I’m here. So what do we talk about?

There isn’t any reason not to talk about specifically that little experiment that proved so beneficial. And of course you take for granted that it wasn’t so much “your” idea as your listening to a sudden idea that came from nowhere.

I take it for granted, by now, that there is no ownership of ideas. This is one of those realizations that started off as something told to me by the guys, and I think read somewhere (or intuited by a carom shot off something I read), and then over time becoming convinced as I observed my mental processes more closely. We call them “our” ideas, but they are ours only in that we paid attention. We didn’t generate them.

And that is easy enough to prove. Anybody trying to generate an idea will find they can’t do it. They have to wait for it, and the most they can do is prepare themselves to be receptive if it comes.

I think of Wilbur Wright, twisting that cardboard box absent-mindedly while talking to a customer. God knows he was immersed in the problem he was trying to solve, but he didn’t – couldn’t – reason his way toward the idea that worked. All he could do was keep the problem in mind, consciously and unconsciously. Then, when the analogy suggested itself, he was ready, and snagged it. But he couldn’t generate it at will.

It is a simple distinction, but an important one. And how different is your situation – anyone’s – when you sit down to have a conversation using intuitive linked communication? You may or may not have a topic, you may or may not know where you want to go with it. You may or may not be receptive enough and active enough to do it successfully – but in any case, you won’t know what you are going to get. As you often say, if you knew where you were going to go and what you would see when you got there, what kind of exploring is that? And I’m saying this for your audience, whoever it may turn out to be, because you never can tell when one more repetition may be enough to get the idea through.

So talk a little about what you and Dave discovered in a few minutes, and maybe we will talk about why it could be important and what it could lead to, for any who wish to employ the technique.

Dave and I are well accustomed to working together in short spurts, dating back to the days when he used to come to TMI for a program and spend time before or after, visiting  I was living in Rita’s house in those days, so I was right there. Dave is a shaman by nature and training, though I don’t know if he would be totally comfortable announcing himself that way. But that is how I experienced him. He is a very nice combination of openness, curiosity, creativity.

Like so many of your friends.

True. But everyone has his or her own specialty, and Dave’s centers on short journeys, usually involving drumming. Until he and I began working together, I had never known anyone to do drumming sessions shorter than half an hour at least. Dave gets in and gets out in five minutes, and it is highly effective. He has taught our ILC groups that habit by example, which is of course the best kind of teaching, the kind that says, “Here, it’s easy. Just do this and see what happens.”

Which itself is an idea that you pick up from “somewhere,” whether or not you think of it as your own idea.

Yes. Well, we were sitting around in my living room talking, and as usual looking at the things behind the obvious in our lives. “This happened and then that happened and it had this result. And what was the gift in the situation? Well, maybe this. Let’s look.” Etc.

Then we came to a health problem we both have, and I suggested we “go upstairs” and ask what we can do about it, and before we could begin, I said, let’s do it for each other. That is, rather than my going upstairs and asking for insight into my own situation – a process that often comes up with little or nothing – I would ask about Dave’s situation and he would ask about mine, and it worked like anything.

You bypassed the obstacles that present themselves when you seek to get greater insight into your own problems.

Exactly. It’s easy to get for someone else, because the impulse to help is a reaching out, an expansion. It isn’t always so simple when you are reaching for yourself.

And you both saw the implications for future work.

Sure. After all, this was a version of the first exercise they gave me in Guidelines, more than 30 years ago, paired intuitive questioning. One person holds the question, the other offers an answer out of whatever comes to him. Only in this case we both knew the question, and of course we were a long long way from the days when we didn’t know if the process could work.

And so you saw a possible way it could develop.

Sure did. One way would be for any two people who trusted each other to make a habit of teaming up to answer each other’s questions. If they could bear to hear honest answers, they could make huge strides against problems that otherwise might resist their own best efforts for years, maybe forever.

Before we look at the second idea, of pairs that change by situation or by subject, let’s look a bit at what happens. You might ask yourself not so much why the process worked, but how.

All yours. Go ahead.

The psyche constructs filters to protect its self-image, and those filters are very effective. Every analyst learns how well defended people are against change, even change they are paying good money to have happen, change they are desperately hoping for, but can’t bring about.

We’re talking about “Which you?” here?

That’s a way of looking at it. If you as a 3D/non-3D mixture are contending with an avatar-level mechanism that has been set in motion long before, it can seem like you are wrestling with another person. Call it a robot (and calling it that is an advance in that it recognizes that what seems like “you” is not simply you) or call it past-life influences, or the remnant of trauma, or whatever, the fact you are dealing with is that the process of getting information to flow is impeded.

Someone else may know the truth you cannot see (because of these effective filters), but even if they tell you, you won’t believe them, because they will be telling you of something of your shadow, so what they say won’t feel right. It may make you irritated, or even angry, or perhaps indifferent, but you will not respond with “Oh, now I see! Thanks.” You are far more likely to explain to them why they are wrong and are not seeing what they think they are seeing.

But if you are working intuitively – that is, if both of you are working intuitively – you have the chance to bypass the defense mechanisms and get a clear view.

This requires trust, and a certain facility with intuitive rather than merely logical processing, and openness not only with each other but, of course, with various levels of yourself. But given those conditions, you can do remarkable things, miraculous things.

Is this one of those things you said was a puzzle when you were here and is now so clear?

The bypassing of the defense systems is, yes. There’s lots to be said there, if I can find the right person to connect with.

One trained professionally, I take it.

Not that so much as a certain cast of mind, hard to describe. I’ll know it if I can find it.

You said there’s a second idea beyond pairing.

Not beyond pairing, beyond any specific pairing. There are advantages either way.

• The same pair continue working together. They can go deeper and deeper, also can range farther in subject matter – that is, beyond personal subjects – as their teamwork matures.
• Different people can form pairs for one session or more, continual or intermittent or repeated. The flavor of any twosome will be different, as will the possibilities and limitations.

Our theme?

Call it, “The next step,” if you wish, or “Bypassing the robot,” or maybe “Self-helping each other.” That last may intrigue.

Well, a good session, after a couple of days when I couldn’t get started. Thanks and till next time. 

 

Monday, October 7, 2024

5:45 a.m. It occurred to me last night, we could do a session on filters theoretical and practical, if you like.

Your idea of asking your friends to each contribute a list of every practical suggestion they can remember having been made is a good one. Many heads are better than one, in the same way that many hands make light work.

I’ll put out the call. Some, at least, may respond.

They could equally list the theoretical explanations we have played with about filters.

That would be more work than listing practical applications.

You can’t know that. For some, it may be easier. It is a matter of how their minds work.

Okay, well, we’ll see. Meanwhile –

It will serve you all well if you quietly change your idea of what you are into something at once more malleable and more persistent than you sometimes think yourselves. That is, it is easier than you sometimes think it is, to manifest differently. Yet at the same time, it is safer than it may sometimes appear, because your greater life center of gravity cannot be easily thrown off the rails. You can change how you relate, how you experience. You cannot accidentally lose yourselves, nor any part of you that is vital.

Is fear a part of this, then?

Fear is always a factor. Bob Monroe’s brilliance consisted in centering in removing the fear from the process of exploration. Just as life is impossible without the force of love, so life in 3D is impossible without the balancing force of fear. The defining question is always, what is the ratio of either and both that you allow into your decisions conscious and unconscious. It is fear that teaches you about hot stoves, but it is fear that populates your childhood nights with imagined monsters. It is a useful force that is to be kept within manageable limits. What those limits are, only you can decide. As you decide, so your life will be. Change your decisions (conscious and, mostly, not conscious) and your world changes. As we have said many times.

I think we get confused sometimes hearing – and believing – that love is all, that all is love, that “perfect love casts out fear.” It makes us think that experiencing fear in any form is a sort of failure.

This is a linguistic difficulty, not a logical one. All is love; that is like saying that everything is held in place by gravity. But what you feel and express is the balance – as we just said – composed of love and fear (expansion and contraction) in productive and protective interaction.

As example. You may have a fear of heights (which is really a fear that you will be unable to prevent yourself from casting yourself off your place of safety into the abyss before you). It need not affect your life badly, or it may. The difference is the control you exert. Can you see that one effect of such a fear might be that it serve as a continuing examination into how far you are controlling fear in that form? Like any limitation, it has its productive aspect, being there – as is everything in your life – to show you to yourself and to give you something solid to push against.

I see that. But I thought we were going to discuss filters.

Someday it will occur to you that everything connects. Our fault for never mentioning it, perhaps.

Very funny. So, connect.

Is the connection between fear and filters not evident, once you think about it?

In that fear can create filters? Or, in that filters can result in fear? Which?

Look a little deeper. That is, sit quietly and dredge, see what surfaces.

I can see clearly that some filters may create fears, whether or not we intend that.

We’d better take this explanation. We can see it would be hard for you to straighten out the connections.

Yes, why is that? I felt it too.

A new approach with several elements is more easily set out by means of stream-of-consciousness bullets. Otherwise it over-stresses your logic, forcing you to concatenate variables, leaving you gasping, so to speak.

Inarticulate, anyway. Very well, take it.

• Filters are by definition outside of the range of conscious awareness. By what they filter out, they shape that awareness, hence cannot be seen.
• And yet, in the right circumstances, and certainly when you exert intent, they can become clear to you. It is of course only when you become aware of them that they can be modified or at least compensated for.
• Dealing with anything that has been beyond your consciousness is always going to be a surprise, of course, and sometimes (not always) a very unpleasant one.
• The filter’s very existence can complicate efforts to modify or remove it. It helps define your reality, so, to modify it or attempt to remove it may well seem to you to be nonsense, a sort of wishing-away of something real.

Yes, I can see that as you say it. It may feel like playing pretend. I often see that reaction in others (easier there, of course, than in myself) when I suggest they do something that I know perfectly well, from experience, is practical and even sometimes easy (that is, requiring only a decision to see things a certain way) but that is not only outside their experience, but outside the experience that a given filter or set of filters allows them.

Quite right. That is what is happening. In such a case, might you not experience fear? Something is proposing to remove one of the props of your reality: How far can you trust them to know what they are doing?

I see this in an unexpected connection.

It was what you call “a long time ago.”

Well, 50 or 60 years isn’t just yesterday.

No, not experienced in time-slices. But, mention it. It will serve as a good example.

When I was first drawn to study the occult, as it was called, or New Age thought, or the perennial philosophy, call it what you will, I really struggled. Like Carl Jung studying alchemy, come to think of it. Something told me, “There’s truth here, there’s life here.” But what a pile of undigested and indigestible superstitions around it! Or – were they superstitions? Just because I couldn’t see why things should be connected the way this or that tradition insisted they were, didn’t mean they weren’t. But in the absence of a teacher, and I being unwilling to find and follow a school (especially one demanding a vow of silence over anything learned), what was I do to do?

In many ways, the connections taken for granted were the very connections and kinds of connections that science had severed centuries earlier. Was I smarter than science? On the other hand, was science necessarily smarter than the occult science it supplanted?

Yes, and now you see how it was resolved for you.

Well, not quite. I begin to, maybe. I’m thinking now that I had filters preventing me from believing the materialist view of the world. Implanted by my Catholicism, I suppose (or maybe, the Catholic surroundings were provided in order to support the filter. I hadn’t thought of it that way.) And other filters cut against this, leaving me fully in 20^th century materialist America at the same time, however logically impossible this was.

Now, can you see that complementary filters may act to support your freedom?

Yes, I do. They help keep us suspended, leaving us free – or, if you want to look at it another way, forcing us – to choose who and what we want to be.

So you see, by this process we come out at an unexpected fact.

Yes, that filters may be useful to growth, not only to maintenance.

Should that surprise you? Life is many things, often contradictory things, all of which have their place. Naturally every tool has more than one use, every plan has more than one Plan B.

Moral of the story being, be a little careful what you discard?

Moral being, keep your eyes on the ball as you proceed. If your intent is clear and your integrity is preserved, you won’t be disappointed. And if you are disappointed, there’s always next time, and we don’t mean “Next life,” we mean, next decision, next intent.

Do encourage your friends to send what ever occurs to them as examples of filters and practical steps to affect filters.

Till next time, then. Thanks.

 

Sunday, October 6, 2024

6:05 a.m. Blank, at the moment. Your move.

Talk a little about fame.

Yes, interesting how that bubbled up after I wrote about it. Sometime later that day I realized, as a boy I was obsessed with becoming famous. We used to play a board game – was it called Life? – that had you choose a formula, how much proportionately you wanted to acquire in life of Love, Fame, Money. The idea was, you’d shoot to achieve some ratio, say 30, 40, 30. I never cared about winning per se, but I would always set my goal impossibly unbalanced. I don’t know if I would try to achieve Fame 100, Love and Money 0 each, but something along those lines. I think it was my non-3D component trying to give me a clue as to what was important to my life plan, if it can be called a plan.

Not that I ever knew any practical path to fame. There were several potential paths, given my particular gifts, and many that could never have had a look in, given my particular deficits. But there was never the link I would have needed. It took a long time for that ambition to not only fade but be forgotten.

Only, look more closely. As a rule, you will find that things in a life that seem meaningless or disconnected, or that seem to have run into the sand, are nonetheless seamlessly connected to the rest of your life. How could they not be? Life often looks as if it proceeds by fits and starts, exploring this or that dead end, but when you look back you can see it is like sewing a seam (although less regular): The thread moves from top, in sight, to bottom, out of sight, but the thread is continuous and it is the up and down alternation that is its usefulness.

You’re saying sometimes we have to proceed behind our own back.

You don’t need us to tell you that. Your own lives will tell you, once you examine them for that characteristic. So, look more closely.

I’m beginning to get nudges. One I never thought of is that my incessant reading of history

But was it incessant?

No, I see that now. Would you like to tell it?

Your reading was much less directed than you remember it, and much less thought-about. Nothing surprising about either fact. You wouldn’t expect a boy to have the same preoccupations or even amusements as he would later. But, in fact, you were vitally part of a few pieces of American history for reasons it took you a very long time to discover.

Lincoln and the Civil War, yes. And World War II, which was only recently concluded, hence being written about.

But the boy was reading all kinds of work, forgotten by the man. Neither history nor biography had yet emerged from all the possible things that might attract his interest.

And I was even concerned with baseball, come to think of it, though I really knew nothing about  what I was watching except winning and losing. But I remember now, it seemed to matter. Mazeroski’s home run in the ninth inning of the seventh game of whatever World Series that was, for instance. And the hapless Phillies, with their not very exceptional roster. But is any of this to the point?

Your life moment by moment is not very much like your life seen as a whole from after the fact.

No, I see the same thing in biographies. Telling it can’t help falsify how it felt to the person whose life is being described. Moment by moment takes so long, has so many hours to fill, has so many random or random-seeming things happening. Biographies don’t detail people brushing their teeth or putting on their shoes and socks, and if they did, who could stand to read about it? But life as we live it doesn’t have the silent fast-forwards that biographies do, and memories do.

And self-made summaries do. So what is the point of looking back and making the effort to recapture the feel of it at various times?

A binocular view, I suppose. We know how the movie developed: It is useful to remember how it seemed at the time.

Now, go back to the boy’s reading of history.

I realize, I always read history as if it was something at my level. I mean, I expected to be a history-maker, it was just a matter of growing up.

Did you have any reason to think that would happen?

It wasn’t a matter of thinking. It was assumed. I guess I thought everybody read history that way.

Just as boys casually assumed they would become baseball stars, or president?

Or astronauts, yes. And I still imagine that most boys did just that. (I hadn’t any idea what girls daydreamed.)

Now, this is useful background, mostly to send you back to the feel of those years. Does it shed light on your later career?

By God, it does, and I would have thought there wasn’t much I could learn about it. I see now, all of a sudden, that is what was behind my irrational assumption that I would go to the war, come out a hero, and enter politics, as Churchill and Kennedy had done. I have always wondered why I couldn’t see that my life and theirs had little in common. But now I see that that cartoonish plan was a stepping stone, a path connecting my childhood assumption that I would live a life among such matters with a way to get there.

Your astonishment is at the expense of your customary clarity.

Yeah, yeah. It’s clear enough. I pieced together what I thought was a reasonable flight-plan. Then Kennedy was killed and a few months later the Navy turned me down because I had asthma. No wonder I was so disoriented, directionless, coming home on the bus from the AFEES center. What was to be a path wasn’t actually there.

But you improvised anyway.

Totally without planning, too. No wonder I took such hare-brained moves. I was still following a path that was fundamentally disconnected from reason and therefore from criticism. I got married, got jobs, marking time until I could run for Congress in 1974, the bit of the plan that still survived, unconnected. I went to school for four years, too, and that wasn’t part of my plan.

You lived at two levels. Consciously you did what seemed sensible things. Jobs, college, marriage, jobs again, school again, and you were marking time. When the time came around, you were carrying out the plan nonetheless without much preparation, without knowing what you were doing, without much of anything except your brother’s support and your non-rational certainty.

And the odd thing is, it all worked out.

Nothing odd about it. You didn’t get the job you weren’t qualified for, but in effect your campaign was an advertisement for certain qualities that were recognized and rewarded, and you were on your way.

And this is just the kind of distorted summary we mentioned.

Can’t be helped. Feel free to describe every time you brushed your teeth.

That isn’t what I mean. I mean, it doesn’t mention my being taken by Colin Wilson’s book nor my sudden overwhelming drug-fueled breakthrough into seeing the world differently, nor my other ambition to write popular novels and make a lot of money so I could be independent.

It doesn’t mention your marriage nor your house-buying nor your putting up wallpaper nor your becoming a father, either. Shall we list the cars you owned, the telephone numbers you had, the grocery stores you shopped at?

I’m just mentioning it. It is as we said, life moment by moment is filled with so many things, and has so many movements to fill –

We keep saying, your lives and your ideas about your lives are not nearly the same thing. This is one more reason why: Memory compresses events, trends, daydreams, obsessions, and tries to make it all seem reasonable. Nothing wrong with the process, only don’t let yourselves be fooled into thinking that any one way of seeing is accurate. It is, at best, a pretty accurate summary of the view from a certain viewpoint. Change viewpoints and some things disappear from sight and others appear, and even the things that remain in sight probably look different.

Seems to me our theme has wandered all over the place today. What was our theme? I thought it set out to be fame.

Perhaps it is more the fact that your lives are a sort of balancing act.

We often feel that. You are setting it out in a different way.

• There is avatar-self at any given time, and
• Avatar-self at other times, that occasionally interact for reasons that may be opaque or anyway cloudy to you, and
• Your larger self that includes all these avatar-self versions, and has its own view of your life, and
• There is what could be thought of as “the self in the times,” meaning a sort of inertia that serves as a ballast for your life. But this is more than can be spelled out so casually.

Let’s begin with that next time, then. So, the theme?

“Many lives in one”?

“Life v. daydream”?

Life as a form of braiding, but we have used “braiding” in another context.

“Many lives in one,” then, unless I think of something else when I sit down to the computer. Thanks as always.

[In the event, I chose “Unseen threading.”]