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Saturday, January 21, 2023

7:20 a.m. All right, guys, a little help?

Your thought – “your” thought! – that you are thinking to explain too much, is valid. Much of it has been explained in other books, and you don’t need to be saying it all again. This time, concentrate on life more abundantly: that is, the promise and the problem and the way forward. You are expressing a point of view, it doesn’t have to be perfect.

My point of view?

Let’s say, ours. We have poured out, as best we could. You have absorbed, as best you could. Now you need to translate, as best you can. How could such a three-part process not be personal? To make a comparison that may illumine by its very audacity, would Islam be the same if it had come rom someone other than Muhammad? Would Jungian or Freudian or Adlerian psychology have come into the world in some abstract way, unconnected from the humans who translated?

This is precisely the inflated view that I have feared and resisted from the beginning.

It is not. To illustrate anything, we use historical examples, because that is your alphabet, your dictionary. As Newton might have understood via mathematics, or Upton Sinclair via observation, or the Webbs via statistics, so you see through the lens of story. But that means that we must use examples that are known to history. We cannot use your friend Louis, for example, because the example would need as much explanation to others as what we were using it to explain.

We are not comparing you to Muhammad, nor your task to creating or revealing the elements of Islam. But we are comparing the process through which non-3D understanding must enter 3D terms. It always comes through an individual, and grows from that one small seed. Therefore, no new way of seeing things could ever be free from viewpoint, from personal bias. This is a part of the reason why ideas become contended over: Equally serious people see the truth of it and the individual peculiarity of it, and of course different people slice it in different ways.

So, the Catholic position of group understanding of revelation, and the Protestant position of individual discernment.

Both, yes. And of course both Catholic and Protestant organizations contain both positions, to varying degrees at various times.

Only, we aren’t trying to start a religion.

Oh, it could be seen that way. Every new understanding is the underpinning of a new religion. But in the sense you mean, yes, of course we aren’t. What we hope to do is to instill a little specific yeast into the dough of the worldview that is emerging in your nascent global culture. And, lest that worry you, we remind you that millions of other injections of yeast are taking place all the time. It isn’t like it’s all that important that any one specific vision “succeed,” whatever that would mean. It is merely that some versions of the truth are more accessible to certain groups than are others. A phrasing that is appropriate to 21^st century America is not necessarily equally relevant to 21^st century Peru, say, or Ghana, or Italy, or China. Every place, every culture, every time, will have its own expression of truth available to it, just as Emerson said.

[Emerson, February, 1855: Munroe seriously asked what I believed of Jesus and prophets. I said, as so often, that it seemed to me an impiety to be listening to one and another, when the pure Heaven was pouring itself into each of us, on the simple condition of obedience. To listen to any second-hand gospel is perdition of the First Gospel. Jesus was Jesus because he refused to listen to another, and listened at home.]

We repeat: our point of view, yours and ours. Every thing within you, every active Strand, every emotional response to conflict, every story absorbed, fiction or non-fiction, every mental construction – it all made you you, as it all makes anyone. That’s what we have to work with; that’s what you have to offer.

I recognize, but want to make clear, that in saying “have to work with, have to offer,” you aren’t saying “must” but are saying “what is available.”

Correct. And of course what is true for you is true for everyone, only not everyone writes.

We don’t all write, but we can’t help living.

Precisely. It is in living that you write on the Akashic record, put it that way. Your input into the development of the shared subjectivity comes not primarily from what you do but from what you choose to uphold. Actions are the manifestation in 3D of decisions arrived at (consciously and subconsciously and unconsciously) by a non-3D intelligence functioning within 3D constraints. Actions are not negligible, but they are secondary to the mind itself. The 3D world, remember, is not things in space; it is an expression of mind. Which is more important, Caesar’s day to day life, or his legacy? Which is more important, his specific actions or the trend of his vision? This will not be clear to one and all, but for those to whom it is clear, it will perhaps open the way.

So, to speak specifically to your task.

• You want to keep it practical. Therefore, bring in “the way things are” only as need be. Don’t go explaining everything just because you have a clear view of it. Leave some work for others who have a slightly different center of gravity.
• Keep it focused on human life as experienced here and now. The ancient Egyptians spoke to their own time. Use them as illustration if appropriate, but not otherwise.

I’m hearing, make more flat statements as background, rather than trying to explain, justify, convince.

People will absorb that for which they have receptors, nothing else, regardless how it is packaged. Take this as a relief.

Well, it will be, if I can do it. But I have always had a hard time with people’s flat statements.

You can only do your best, and trust.

• Sketch the human situation and leave it for people to weigh it. Concentrate on revisioning things people are overlooking.

Envision a great weary sigh. We are writing a religious book, when you come down to it.

Should you have ever doubted it? If religion is not about life and the meaning of life and how to live, what is it about? Certainly not rules.

People would say it is exactly about rules!

That is because they would confuse the essence with the manifestation of it. Or, to put it more plainly, they confuse truth with attempts to organize truth in society. The latter is no more a possibility for you than it is a desire. You really can’t create anything useful if you worry how it may later be misused. People misuse fire! They misuse water! They’d misuse the very dirt under their feet if they could do so. That doesn’t mean those things shouldn’t exist. It means merely that they too may be used to help people grow up by living their 3D experiences, choosing.

So here is one way you would structure it:

• A sketch of the condition you find yourselves in, interpreted by what you have learned over the years: the constriction into one time/space, etc.
• Possibilities arising from this way of seeing life. Old obstacles dissolving, new bridges appearing.
• Methods of deepening awareness, including
  • Removing obstacles
  • Developing abilities
  • Clarifying vision

That is one way, not (by far) the only way, and not necessarily the way best suited to you. The point remains: Keep it practical, focused, limited, hopeful.

I have been thinking this would go out to the blog. Now I am not so sure.

Your choice, always.

Thanks for all of it. Till next time.

Friday, January 20, 2023

8:05 a.m. Working on indexing July, 2021, I got that if I can get the internal logic of it better – by continually reexamining and refining categories – I could write it as a series of essays, themed. Thus, communication, etc., which, I see, is the same idea I wrote down less than an hour ago, only redirected toward the book, not the blog.

In the end, it will boil down to a few central ideas that have been there right along

• The 3D and non-3D aspects of one world
• The world as dream rather than things in space
• Humans as communities choosing what they are to be
• The nature of our awareness, our potential, and our problems.
• Helpful things to do, to achieve life more abundantly

Really, it is all contained herein. And – is this a back-door structuring for me? (For when I began that paragraph, I was thinking it was me and only gradually realized it was also them.)

It is a suggestion, responding to your desire, put it that way.

I think I’ll ask my friends what they think, see if anybody makes specific suggestions for additions or changes.

A very good idea, for only your readers can give you “external” feedback, and of course each of them can give you things we cannot.

Because I wouldn’t notice yours?

Let’s say, because the forces that would produce an impulse in someone to contribute an idea would be the product of their own long development, no less than of the times. It is a way of triangulating.

I hadn’t thought I’d post today, but this will be worth doing. Thanks.

 

Thursday, January 19, 2023

4:15 a.m. Well, guys, a command performance, huh? I gather that our small group of four engineers was told that I should talk to you about how to move to the next level, in terms of connecting to guidance. I didn’t get any particulars, but I figured you’d go where you wanted us to go. So, you’re on.

You no longer invoke presence, clarity, receptivity explicitly, so it is as well to remind people that they should make some such habit implicit if not explicit. The first need in communicating is to be present, and that is more complicated sometimes than it may appear to be. You are communities in many respects, cooperating entities functioning “as if.” It is as well to remind yourself at the beginning that you wish everybody present. That means all here, now, attending to the same effort at outreach, or, let’s say, all looking and listening in the same direction.

It is one thing to do that as an individual who is also a community. How do you do it as a community of individuals – which means, obviously, a community of communities, each of which is itself a community? Our point here is that the process is vastly more complex than it may appear if you think of yourselves as each units cooperating with one another.

So, first, as individuals and then as what we might call temporary individuals (which is one way a temporary joint mind may be seen), concenter yourselves, within yourself and among yourselves. A simple ritual usually suffices: All you’re doing is ringing the dinner bell, getting everyone’s attention.

A desire for, an expectation of achieving, clarity helps reduce unconscious worry that the task might be beyond your expectations. It isn’t. You won’t be called to do something beyond your strength and ability, though you often will be called to do things that stretch those abilities, heighten those strengths. These exercise periods may feel like failures. They aren’t. Remember that nothing happens in disconnected fashion. A failure would imply a disconnect. We say no more about this than that you should think about this statement. Insights will present themselves, but you need to be quiet enough to hear them and to work out the chains of thought that suggest themselves to you as you do.

That of course segues into receptivity. Intending to be receptive is slightly different from a request for clarity. It is a promise of cooperation, more than an act of faith, if you see what we mean.

We know this doesn’t seem to be what is requested, but, it’s all there. If more had been needed for you as an individual, Frank, we would have provided it. Why should this be different? The answer to “why?” is of course because it is the same kind of seemingly uncharted territory that you thought was uncharted when you entered it, so many years ago. Whenever one looks back, one sees that the way ahead was always clearly set out by the experience of others, only they could not change your own unrealized expectations. Communicating with us is mostly a matter of releasing the ideas that make it seem impossible or difficult or even unusual. So why set out rules that will seem to be helpful but in fact will silently reinforce false expectations of difficulty?

Presence. Bring all parts of yourself to the same moment of time – the eternal present manifesting in 3D.

Receptivity. Direct them all to be open to instruction in whatever form it may take: words, images, feelings, promptings. Reassure recalcitrant parts of yourself that receptivity need not be gullibility. Receive first, then discern later, but receive, or there will be nothing to discern.

Clarity. Expect – program – that what you receive will not be beyond the logic of the time and place. You will have asked: Expect to receive, and expect to be able to work out what it is that you did receive.

This implies traits such as integrity, benevolence, openness – you know the drill. If a given group wishes, it may make up a short ritual to be said, in the way Bob Monroe wrote his affirmation. It isn’t necessary, but it may be helpful. It may be helpful, but it may tempt some into idolizing the form rather than the intent, so beware of the possibility. You aren’t creating a church, nor a superstition, so be careful of the rituals you embrace, however helpful.

As I was finishing writing that, I got something – part of something – about Edgar Cayce and the Lord’s Prayer. Did he use it as part of his ritual?

Not explicitly, nor is that exactly the thought you perceived. It was built into him, you might say, because this was a man who read the entire bible every year of his life. But – fortunately – he never thought to make it or any prayer “essential” to his work. Instead, he tried to live the attitude the Lord’s Prayer sets out:

• Our father (that is, the non-3D being sustaining the world, of the same essence as the 3D beings invoking him)
• Who is in heaven (existing in non-3D but, implicitly, accessible to those in 3D, or why pray to him?)
• Your name be blessed. (We love and reverence you.)
• May your kingdom arrive (may we get past our sense of being separated from the divine)
• May we do your will
• In 3D as in non-3D.
• Give us our daily requirements (that is, we trust you to do so)
• And remove obstacles between ourselves and you, as we remove them among ourselves.
• Don’t lead us astray.
• Deliver us from evil.

Not so sure, any more, about that last part, “deliver us from evil.”

You could put it, save us from the consequences of the apple from the tree of Perceiving Things as Good and Evil.

Ah. Well, that does make more sense.

And, good ex-Catholic that you are, we spare you the final sentence added by Protestants, but remember it too is true.

So here’s the point of this. If you (anyone) had to have a ritual, one grounded thousands of years ago, across cultures, might serve well because it originated so long ago and far away. There would be less temptation to idolize it. But of course, ex-Christians would have emotional resistances, so it might balance out in difficulty. There really aren’t any rules that apply everywhen and everywhere, beyond our admonitions to presence, receptivity, and clarity.

I am surprised to see it has been nearly an hour. It flowed smoothly and easily.

You’d think you had invoked presence, receptivity and clarity.

Very funny. But our thanks for this. In a way, thanks mostly for not complicating it.

You put your finger on the most important thing we set out to accomplish. More ambitious undertakings do not require ore complicated instructions. If anything, just the opposite, and you may take that for a general rule. Follow your intent with integrity and simplicity (“like a little child”) and you have all you need.

Very well, our thanks as always.

 

Wednesday, November 20, 2019

All right, gentlemen. You said you had a larger topic queued up. Still have it?

You might consider it fairly major. But you need to relax about it. The key question for many, sometimes assumed, sometimes assumed to be unanswerable, is: Does your life matter and if so, how?

Sure. You’ve been talking about that right along.

We have, for that is the question we set out to answer, long before you consciously posed it. It will have looked like we were conducting a tour d’ horizon: human life; things you can’t know first-hand; the meaning of things you do know when seen from another perspective, etc. But this has been in the service of showing you (not telling you) how your lives matter, and to whom.

And I hear, now we have cleared away the shrubbery, we can get to the heart of the matter.

More like, now we have told you the things you were likely to find easiest to accept, we come to the things you have real resistance to. Here you cease being spectators or students, and choose to become participants or practitioners.

You can choose. In fact, in 3D you cannot help choosing; that’s what 3D is. But you may choose at random, or by default, or inconsistently. Better to fasten on to an ideal and choose in accordance with that ideal. Not every impulse is beneficial, not every habit leads toward your goal. (This of course presupposes a goal, or, as we put it, an ideal.)

You have long reminded us that an ideal can only be lived toward, it cannot be encompassed.

It is your pole star, keeping you oriented. You need to know where North is. Maybe you don’t intend to go anywhere near North, but North tells you not so much where you are, but which direction you are facing. And that is the important part! You could know exactly where you are, but head off in the wrong direction. You could be mistaken as to where you are, but if you know which direction is where, you can find your way eventually. Tendency matters far more than any place you happen to find yourself.

Like Dante waking up and finding himself lost.

Precisely. The trick is finding Virgil to orient you. [As in “The Divine Comedy.”]

And the bitter medicine you are preparing to administer?

It isn’t bitter medicine nor non-bitter medicine. But it requires mental and – shall we call it moral? – effort. It isn’t anything we haven’t been asking of you right along, but it is in an area more sensitive.

The familiar part is the effort to readjust our mental categories to incorporate a new viewpoint which includes some elements previously excluded.

Yes. As we have said, a new view will include things excluded by the previous view: Not all of them, but some, and it will require an effort, like Carl Jung forcing himself to study alchemy and eventually finding the solid productive generative core that had been buried.

The unfamiliar part is that you are exhorting us to take religion seriously.

That’s a shorthand way to put it, but really we don’t care what you think of religion in general or in terms of any given religion. What we do care about is your openness or otherwise to the things religion concerns itself with! And here we know we will encounter massive resistance precisely from those who are potentially most able to receive what we have to say and to benefit from it.

When your conscious mind has one firmly settled idea or group of ideas, and an unconscious part of your mind has opposing ideas, it creates a tension. The greater the internal (unacknowledged) tension, the more intolerant the expression. People half-convinced of a political argument are among those denouncing it most hysterically. Believers in “reason” may become screechingly irrational at external opposition that happens to reinforce their own unacknowledged doubts.

So. Look within. You want to come to the root of things. You want to discover who you truly are, what your limits and possibilities truly are. You want to grow. Well, we guarantee you, there are counter-forces within you that want the exact opposite, or a slightly or greatly diverging goal. The first step in dealing with them is to become aware that they exist. And how do you do that?

Simple. You observe what pushes your buttons.

That isn’t the whole story, but it certainly is a strong first step. Only, because your buttons are pushed, it becomes hard to remain present enough to observe it.

Which is what our non-3D is for.

It is if you don’t ignore it, yes.

And some of these button-pushing words are God, Jesus, Allah.

Sin, duty, surrender, sacrifice, sure. To permit ourselves a vast generalization, we would say that anything people label “religious” rather than “spiritual” offers the opportunity for growth because it presents button-pushing structures and allows them to be examined. Saying you are “spiritual but not religious” is one thing when you mean you take the spiritual world seriously but you can’t be, or won’t be, bound by any religion’s rules and dogmas. It is another thing, and not a helpful one, when it morphs (unconsciously, usually) to become “I take the spiritual world seriously, so long as I don’t need to learn anything of how it interacts with us and don’t have to limit my actions.”

That may not be quite a fair summary. For many people it is a fear of drifting into a situation where they find themselves bound by the rules and dogmas.

The reality is this. Truth comes with a duty toward the truth. Once you know the truth, you have a responsibility to live it. You will never get to “the” truth, but you always have “the truth as you know it.” You can’t go beyond that, but you can get closer to deeper truth, higher truth, if you put in the effort. But you can only attain more truth by living the truth that you have already come to.

Is that perhaps what Jesus meant by saying that the only sin that can’t be forgiven is a sin against the holy spirit?

If you rephrase it, it will become obvious: You can’t move North by moving South. You can’t benefit from wisdom by ignoring it, or by contravening it. Or, to put it another way, nobody is going to turn you around. You have to do that, and the preceding step is to decide to do it, or, let’s say, to decide to cease to resist doing it.

 

Wednesday, August 28, 2019

[I was working on my novel about Hemingway when I got a sense to talk to the guys.]

Has it occurred to you that the specific kind of illness that terrified him centered in the lungs?

It hadn’t, actually. He was thinking of the flu, but I take your point. He feared his lungs filled with fluid.

More. He feared. You haven’t really connected with his fears of death and of “external” hazards such as illness. A mistake to allow him to continue to hide from it. It doesn’t help him and it distorts your portrait.

Help him?

It isn’t too late. Didn’t you help Joseph [Smallwood], and Bertram?

My lord, I never thought about it in that context. If we all connect –

There is vastly more you can do. Obviously, not only you, but everybody.

We are carriers of the vast impersonal forces you began talking about last year.

The same forces could be regarded as impersonal or personal. It’s a matter of viewpoint. Humanity is one thing, and is part of something greater. There are no absolute divisions in the world. Even the division between  3D and non-3D is only relative rather than absolute, as you know.

Since non-3D is an integral part of 3D:

• time is not the absolute barrier that it appears to be when considered in 3D terms. So
• relating across space and across time is not only not impossible, it is in fact unavoidable, and
• the only question is to what degree such relations will be conscious rather than unconscious.
• And that depends upon individual decisions.

If you keep in mind both aspects of reality – all is one, everything is differentiated – you get a clearer picture. You all have the ability to help heal the world, or to help curse it. None of you – fortunately! – has the ability to do so single-handed (so you needn’t fear doom and you mustn’t rest on your oars), but none of you is powerless to do good or evil in terms of who and what you are in essence; not dependent upon what you do externally.

Remember, the external is secondary to the internal. You are 3D/non-3D beings, hence are not pinned to one time and place, although you must experience life that way. But you can know better; you can see beyond appearances, and it is time that you wake up fully to your part in the vast cosmic drama that is human life within a continuing background of non-human forces manifesting within human life.

Do you choose to curse the enemies of what you hold dear, or bless them? This is not as simple and self-answering a question as it may appear. What results is your addition to the total of a human cursing or a human blessing. Which do you suppose is more therapeutic, seen in all?

I have always been impressed that Robert E. Lee prayed every night for his enemies as well as for his friends. It accounts for that vaguely saintly aura that he shares with Lincoln.

Yes. Neither man slackened in his efforts to have his side prevail, but neither ever chose hatred over love. Lincoln did not slacken his efforts to vanquish Lee and his cause, but he found no need to add to the hatred that had been disfiguring his country for so many decades. And nor did Lee.

To bring it back to Hemingway, and to remind others of their possibilities, remember that from your point of view at any time, the external present manifests as the eternal now, the point of power, the place of application. But just as you may bless Lincoln or Hemingway or whomever, so they (in their continuing point of power in the eternal now) may bless you. You continually act as conscious or unconscious conduits of blessings or curses. Choose wisely.

 

Thursday, August 29, 2019

Do you care to say more about how other people in other times may bless or curse us?

Remember the TMI program where you were given an exercise to send a message to your younger self? [Timeline, in 2003.] You sent a message of encouragement: “Don’t give up. It will work out. Don’t give up.” Well, now that you are neither in 2003 nor in 1956 –

Consider how it was from the 1956 end, to receive a message and an encouragement from elsewhen.

That 10-year-old could not realize that he was being contacted from the future.

I see it now. Don’t remember being contacted at all, of course.

No. You don’t remember experiencing the contact. You well remember July 26, 1956, however.

But this now has the flavor of the science-fiction stories about time travel that I find so irritating, where people are influenced by a future self that comes into existence only because of decisions or actions they take that are the result of that future.

Reorient your ideas, remembering that:

• you are multidimensional beings,
• all possibilities exist, and
• any one version connects to all other specific versions by way of the self.

It isn’t one person contacting a different person at another time. It’s more like one neuron connecting to other neurons in the same brain. There isn’t the absolute division between components that ordinary 3D life suggests. A puzzling incident in your past may be a clue that more was involved than you know. So, look at July 26, 1956 again.

This is one of those extraordinary events that I cannot be making up after the fact, for I have always remembered that morning. Is that the day I was contacted by my future self?

Relive it first. A bare-bones explanation will help you connect.

On July 26, 1956, the day before my tenth birthday, in a certain sense my childhood ceased, and a very different life began. All week, I had been looking forward to the one-hour TV special that would tell how the Lone Ranger became the Lone Ranger. I don’t remember how much that boy knew the difference between fact and fiction. I’m sure he at least partly and maybe entirely believed the story.

Anyway, the slot was pre-empted. In the night, the ocean liner Andrea Doria had collided with the Stockholm in Long Island Sound, and had sunk after a few hours. Live news coverage showed the survivors arriving in New York City, and somehow the sight of that huddled misery changed me, in one instant, putting the weight of the world on my shoulders. From that moment, I was (pick one) intellectually precocious and emotionally retarded, or empathically enabled beyond my years, so that I felt but did not understand. Of course that reaction would look ridiculous and totally disproportionate and ungrounded, but still, something had happened, and now you are suggesting that my future self sent me a message. So tell me what happened.

You will need to go slowly, staying with us. You may look at it as a portal opening up for you. One moment you were a normal ten-year-old boy and the next you were a ten-year-old still with only a ten-year-old’s slight knowledge of the world and of life but suddenly, in addition, with a glimpse of the human condition seen as from outside that ten-year-old’s frame of reference.

Emotionally, it was a lead-lined blanket dropped over that child, and it was all he could do to stand up under the weight, no one understanding what had happened, least of all him.

Yet it was necessary if your life was to take its peculiar course. What followed could have gone many ways, but the bias had been introduced.

I get that my belief in psychic abilities is one consequence, even though the subject didn’t really come to mind (as I remember things, anyway) until my brother gave me Edger Cayce: The Sleeping Prophet.

You were overwhelmed. You were put into a situation in which you had no covering on your nerves, hypersensitive emotionally and not well developed mentally. You were incapacitated from leading any kind of normal life, which wasn’t in itself a bad thing. Only anything can be carried too far, and it is sometimes hard to judge from non-3D how much is too much.

I should think that you’d be able to tell from looking at future events.

What do you suppose we just said?

It doesn’t seem at all equivalent to me.

We, like you, are continually readjusting. Your decisions determine what you become. Each decision requires an adjustment from our side. You enable and disable potential all the time, as you go.

I think you’re saying, as we live, at some points you may adjust the trim, and depending upon how we react, the original intended-to-be-helpful input may have undesirable effects, so that in effect you have to change your minds and perhaps undo your own previous efforts.

That isn’t wrong as one way to look at it, bearing in mind that you are looking at things as if you – 3D you – were in the center of your life. Seems obvious, but of course it is wrong. No one 3D moment could provide a continuing platform.

Our non-3D self is necessarily our true center, in that each moment of 3D time in effect passes away. So, the intervention from 2003?

In effect, you sent a message to your past. That past changed: not external events, but what you were. You found yourself, unnoticeably, on a new and more productive timeline. You didn’t magically change your health, or your relationships, or your understanding of others, or your pattern of action. What changed was an internal assumption of support, and you will have seen by now how this assumption is relatively rare among others. And now you know why you have it when others may not. Also we have now told them how they may have it, if they value it.

It depends upon what messages in a bottle we send ourselves.

It does.

 

Sunday, October 11, 2020

Perhaps we have inadequately made the point that people see the world through filters that precede thought, and then they alter what they see and what they think by their values and decisions. If you once see that, you have seen the most important thing about emotions and feelings.

Do you think so?

We do. It is only in devaluing feelings, in deafness to emotion, and in what we can only call an idolatry of thought per se (at the expense of feeling) that deadness is enshrined in life.

“Feelings are the language of the soul.”

They are. And if you become deaf to feelings, you no longer have any evidence that the soul even exists, let alone that a soul is what you are. In being deaf to feeling, you make yourself an orphan in the universe; at sea, rudderless, in entire isolation, hence desperate.

That sounds like our world, all right.

More so the Age of Reason, that wound up unleashing horrors upon the world out of the disregarded unconscious mind and minds of men.

I know that you are not advocating that we abandon reason for emotion. But I am a little bit at sea as to what it comes to, in practice, one by one.

What it means in terms of how each of you should live, you mean.

Yes, how you would conceptualize the implications.

Quote the indicated excerpt from Dirk’s email of October 2.

[“First and foremost though it once again highlighted to me that my experience of the world is not usual. It is not how most people do experience the world. And it isn’t even a way that most people can ever experience the world. And so – even though I can describe it to you and others; for most people that explanation either rings entirely false, or utterly alien. It is simply not within the range of available experience to contemplate.

[“As an imperfect analogy, it is like I hear in a different range, which only partially overlaps with how others hear. My default in this analogy is to hear in a part of my range not heard by others, and hence completely outside their ability to relate to.”]

Notice what he says here. It is as if he hears in a different range, beyond the common limits. To some degree this is true of any outlier; whether it is cause or effect, we leave to you to think about. After all, hearing a common range is one aspect that goes into the commonality that is a herd.

Are you saying we are all herd animals, we are all outliers, depending upon who we live among?

Is this not your experience?

You refer to my finding the Monroe community as what I call “my tribe,” after decades of being entirely surrounded by what seemed like herd members living lives alien to me. Yes, it is so.

Each of those herd members is more individual than appear to you. From each person’s center, the world is part herd, part outlier.

I think you mean, we can each identify with some and not others, hence we could each be considered to be a part of a herd, only the composition of the herd would differ.

Again, is this saying anything you haven’t always lived? Depending upon how you slice your life, you are part of a different herd and are separate from others you live among. There are no absolute divisions in life. We keep reminding you of that. Concomitantly, life is replete with approximate divisions, relative boundaries.

In Dirk’s case, for instance, he is distinctly an outlier in some ways, but he is definitely firmly within different herds: managerial, scientific, theoretical (i.e. abstract) thinkers. In none of these three categories is he an exact fit, but perhaps none of you is an exact fit anywhere. And in fact we will draw you an approximate rule of thumb: The more conscious you become, the more of an outlier you realize yourself to be, until you reach a point where your understanding makes a sudden turn, so to speak, and greater consciousness shows you your “herd-ness” in ways you had lost sight of.

Thus – now listen, here, and think about this – how you perceive yourself and the world may be seen as a mood, quite as accurately as it may be seen as a conclusion. That is, the same data seen differently may lead to different conclusions in different mental circumstances, so in what way can it be said to be a logical conclusion rather than a chosen attitude?

That turns things on their head, doesn’t it?

If your rational conclusions actually rest upon a (usually) invisible foundation of feelings, can you be said to be primarily rational beings, or feeling beings? And if, being feeling beings, you reason yourselves into thinking you are primarily rational beings, can it be any surprise that you find life confusing, disorienting, contradictory, nonsensical?

Now extend the argument. If what you consider to be your objective view of the world, of life, is in fact the result of a way of seeing the world, seeing life, and that way of seeing is based in feelings prior to thought (because based in pre-conscious perception), how rational can your view of life be? It is a rational construct, yes. It is not, and can never be, strictly rational reporting of what is.

Thus, your opening thought: People’s view of the world is obviously personal, eccentric, conditional. You can see that by observing anybody else. Your own views, of course, are rational, indisputable – at least, they are until you change them for a new set of rational indisputable views. It is by looking at the effects on others of their prejudices and special ways of seeing the world, that you get a sense of your own.

Now, relate this to what we have been sketching. Other people’s make-up is part of the “other”; part of the shared subjectivity that you participate in but do not define nor control. As such, it is not “you,” yet it casts light on “you.” Or, it can if you allow it to. It is in this sense that the “external” world is said to mirror the internal.

Since you can see that no one else sees life unfiltered, you can see that you don’t either. And that knowledge can be immensely valuable.

And that will have to do for now.

Well, all very enlightening Thanks as always.