Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

Monday, March 17, 2025

5 a.m. This endless struggle with weight. I see, looking back, that I actually topped 230 one day. I struggle, regain ground by inches, but every time I do, the base camp is higher. I don’t remember when, but I remember that I was within sight of being less than 200 once, and lost the battle. Maybe there is a reason for it. Maybe the extra flesh serves a purpose. Women channelers are notoriously though of course not unanimously heavy.

I spent some time yesterday with the Mind Mirror report from the program I did in 2018, but I need to coordinate it now and it is in that intermediate stage of being a mess.

Guys? A word?

You know that continuity is your besetting problem. You have, from time to time, looked for some way to provide yourself a workbook or a chart or some physical device to remind you of what you want to do, and it has rarely worked because you nonetheless “changed channel,” forgot, went on to other things or other non-things.

Guilty as charged, or perhaps I should say, unfortunate as charged, because God knows I don’t like my predicament. Just like trying to lose weight, come to think of it. I hare off elsewhere. And ironically, I remember, we have discussed this before, in the context of Gurdjieff’s idea of multiple “I”s taking over the helm.

So what can be done?

A very good question indeed. And the answer is?

Clearly it can only involve consciousness. Even if you (or we) could invent a way to keep autonomisms conscious, what would be the point? The trick is to widen and lengthen as well as deepen, your consciousness.

And we do this how?

Haven’t we been working with you on this for years? What do you think Life More Abundantly is? Why do we seek to help you make your robots serve a consistent conscious will, rather than serving obsolete or intermittent versions of past conscious or unconscious moments? Why have we been talking about sins (missing the mark) and virtues? Why giving examples like John Tettemer and Carl Jung and Bronson Alcott? Why nudging you toward essentials rather than distractions?

It seems that to you all this is part of some overarching pattern. I almost get it, but not quite. It seems like it needs one last key element to make it gel.

Your own discontent with your life is the most powerful solvent, if used right. If only fruitless regrets or memories of past emotions, what good can that do you? But if you use the data as data points should be used – as raw material for the perception of patterns – then what a wealth of information you – anyone – accumulate in the course of a lifetime!

And our Upstairs component is the data cruncher.

Can be. Depends on the strength of your connection.

Okay, I think it’s coming a little clearer. Let me try. Our hope of greater consciousness (which includes greater continuity, not less than greater breadth of field and depth of insight) depends upon our having (1) a good connection Upstairs (to provide us with insights) and (2) a relatively clear field for analysis, unobstructed by defenses, prejudices, obsolete robots, bad habits, and what I might call unwholesome preferences.

All true.

And of course that means we have to keep working on ourselves.

Working on yourself is the only work there is. Out of that work may come great good for other individuals and for “the world” in general.  Think of the eventual influence of Thoreau or Emerson, for instance, if only in sparking and encouraging others. Their influence on the world followed their work on themselves – in this life and in prior life – and if it became a reciprocating process, still the intent had to come first. Who ever did good before deciding to be good? Who helped, not intending to help?

Seems you’re getting on shaky ground with those last couple of statements.

Leave them, then. The rest should be plain enough. But you see, you do understand what we are saying.

This is Thoreau’s “divine discontent,” isn’t it?

In part. But none of you needs to model yourself on famous others except in so far as it helps you recruit your own powers. Your uniqueness will mean that you automatically fail to be anyone else! And the person you wish you were like may have wished s/he was like you! You can only be yourself, but within that limitation, you will find scope enough for choice, because there’s many a different you that can develop, depending upon your choices.

Not that we haven’t been saying all this, year in and year out. We don’t mean, “You haven’t been listening.” You have. But still it bears repeating.

You are also saying, between the lines, as you long have said, Cherish our individuality, because change isn’t necessarily progress or regress, just new opportunities for expression.

Also true.

Of course, this still doesn’t give me access to greater continuity of intent.

No, you have continuity of intent. What you lack is continuity of execution, or let’s say continuity of consciousness.

Which you can’t help me with.

Not in the sense of magic formulas. We have given you plenty of concepts and hints and proposed habits, over the years.

Which I continually forget.

Stay as close to your unconscious as possible, but at the same time live in the 3D world: Put your attention there. That’s all you can do, all you need do.

If you say so. Well, this has given me a blog post, anyway.

You’re welcome.

Our thanks as always. What should we call this?

“Continuity,” surely.

Done.

 

[A few years ago, when I picked up my author’s copies of Awakening from the 3D World, I had a thought perhaps worth preserving. and then i had a welcome visitor, and one thing led to another. Thinking about the book, I said to myself:]

Look at it one way, I did it all myself. Look at it another way, by myself I couldn’t have done it at all.

Both true. Probably both a model of our lives here.

It is up to us to decide what to do, moment by moment, and then do it; but we live in a vast invisible web of support that we may disregard (“I’m a self-made man”) or recognize (“Thank God for my friends”). Equally true, which means, in both cases, only true in relation to one another, not true as absolutes.

[A familiar “voice,” not the one I expected!] You are feeling pride in our accomplishment. Nothing wrong with basking.

Hi, Rita. I guess that’s why I browsed the introduction [of Awakening from the 3D World] and re-read the conclusion, huh? And now I see why I was moved to think back on all the work we’ve done. The primary person I didn’t mention – not the only one, but the primary one – was you, of course. But I doubt you are here for the purpose of getting your film credits.

No, but our case is an example of how little we know our life’s shape ahead of time. We didn’t meet until I was already 80 years old and bored with life. Who knew what lay ahead?

We did those sessions, and more in 2004, and they didn’t seem to come to anything in terms of the outside world beyond the Voyagers Mailing List and our own friends. And then because you did the initial work, the path was open for us to work together in this new way over the past three years, and it continues to stretch ahead as a possibility. But the intellectual work could not have been accomplished without the other work which was not work but a natural joy, and how shall we describe it?

In a way you could say we were taking care of each other. You were mothering me, I was the dutiful affectionate son you never had.

That emotional trust and intellectual and spiritual companionship laid the basis for what we did, because as you know, these things proceed not from intellect alone (where they may easily turn rancid) but from the heart.

Where there is trust, there is no room for fear, for one thing.

Yes, but more, where there is trust, there is assurance, there is a sense of being guided. Almost the same as what you just said, but not quite.

Remember, at least as important as any information you bring through is your encouragement of others to do their own equivalent thing. So the more glimpses behind the scenes they get, the more they realize, you are just another guy, just as you say but they don’t always hear. Of course, you are but you aren’t. What distinguishes you is that you do the work; you follow where it leads; you are willing to serve. But that should encourage, too, for that is a decision open to anybody to take. It’s up to them.

Everybody’s circumstances surround them, obviously, and since their own unimportant boring surroundings, the flat and unprofitable details of their lives, cannot match anybody’s they read about, the temptation is to say “I’m nobody and I can’t expect to really do anything.” And of course that is wrong.

The fallacy of insignificance, somebody called it.

Your own life always looks relatively flat and humdrum in a way, even when it also feels exciting and even dramatic, because you yourself are at the center of it, and so where is the room for the drama of the unfamiliar? But drama is not a sign of significance any more than heartburn would be. Your own judgment of your life is unlikely to be an accurate one, because you cannot usually get any perspective on it. But if you are doing your best, and are living your truest impulses, and are following where it leads, how can you be wasting your time even if it feels like putting in time is all you are doing? The mother raising her children may feel like the days are going by without anything in it for her; that doesn’t mean that is the judgment she will come to when she looks back on her life as a whole.

If our readers don’t realize that that paragraph was aimed directly at them, well – I’m pointing it out.

There is an aspect to pioneering that perhaps they have never considered, and that is that your own true path is never obviously important, never obviously the path to significant achievement internal or external. It usually looks like “mere everyday stuff.” When you come to know that “mere everyday stuff” – speaking primarily internally – is the gold, your appreciation of your life will change. Everybody has a unique gift to offer. No two gifts are identical, any more than any two gift-givers are identical, so while you may use models for your conduct, use them as models of character, not as models of circumstance.

Nobody’s life is identical to anybody else’s, and nobody’s is redundant or insignificant. You know what Bob [Monroe] said.

“You do the best you can.”

I don’t know what more anybody could do.

While working on getting the Bronson Alcott book ready for publication, I came across this journal entry, which amounts to a message in a bottle.

Wednesday, May 26, 2021

5:20 a.m. The smallest disruption of routine can send you off the rails. I am still waiting for my printer’s cartridge to arrive through the mail, and in the absence of being able to print out work materials, I’m sort of stalled on the task of revising Alcott’s first 50 sayings. Perhaps I’d better keep going on the second 50, since I already have them printed up. Yet – something said don’t do it that way, but pause between the two sections.

You gentlemen have anything you’d care for us to do while  we wait for the ink? Or, should I revise on the machine and treat it as a tentative exercise until I can put it onto paper?

You could do that if you wished. It wouldn’t really waste any time, in the end. Or we could talk here, but of course you are somewhat under the same constraints.

No, not so much. Here I would transcribe and send out, and I could print for my own record later. It isn’t a matter of revising on the machine.

Do you hear the humorous echo of your childhood?

I do, in fact. It’s funny how things sneak in, isn’t it? The nuns used to refer to cars as our “machines.” That’s what they called them, and here am I, going on three–quarters of a century later, and I call a computer “the machine,” in much the same way. I wonder what that is about, if anything. Or do you intend to tell us, using that as an example of something?

We could; we don’t need to, but it’s like that  Hemingway short story title.

“I guess everything reminds you of something.” Are you accusing yourselves of plagiarism?

If we didn’t, no doubt you’d be willing do. We smile.

Me too. Well, what, then?

Not everything needs to be a big deal, you realize. Sometimes things you notice are relatively trivial, but even trivial things can prove to be quite illustrative.

Well, I notice that my friend Louis is finding that nearly every Hemingway story he reads sends him back to a very clear memory of something earlier in his life, often something he hadn’t thought of, literally, in decades.

Receptivity is everything. And perhaps that’s our theme du jour, as you like to say: receptivity. It is proverbial that as you age, short-term memories fade in importance, and longer-term memories resurface, often in great detail. Can something that is so universal as to be proverbial be accident? Can it, for that matter, be unmeaningful?

Rhetorical question, I take it.

It is. Not too hard to figure out, given that nothing in life is accidental. All great art contains everything needed, and no more. You think life isn’t art? So if the latter part of your life reminds you of specific and general incidents and themes from earlier in your life, it is superficial for you (anyone) to shrug off the process as “just getting old.” It is far more meaningful to say, “It is part of getting old: What purpose does it serve?”

The second half of life isn’t just a long coasting downhill, putting in time waiting for the curtain. Yes, it often feels that way, we realize.

It’s a long downhill coast if you don’t know how to take it, maybe.

Even there, your non-3D component hasn’t lost the script. Or do you think that this part of you is bored, too? Your life has purpose, from the first minute to the last. It is  increasingly a matter of choice, though it may appear to be the other way around.

Let me clarify that, because you didn’t actually say what I feel you mean. I think you mean, we tend to think our life is one of first greater choices, as life opens up, then of fewer choices, as life closes in. And I know you are talking about our internal life rather than our external life.

That isn’t quite right, but close enough. Your internal and external life, we remind you. are two ways of experiencing the same thing. So in reality they do not diverge. However, in appearance they may, and in function they definitely do, and for good reason.

• Your physical life (barring “accident” or termination prior to the normal lifespan) is a process of expansion, maturity, contraction.
• Your mental life is usually experienced as absorption, homeostasis, and either stagnation or generalizing.
• Your – we’ll call it “spiritual” – life is one of certainty followed by confusion, then proceeding either to new confidence or the assumption that no certainty is available.

These three processes may seem to diverge. They may seem to proceed independently. But, as we say, how could they? Only, each manifests according to its nature, and the manifestations may seem to have nothing to do with one another.

If you will look at your lives as meaningful, undefeated, always in process, and never completed by the completion of a given physical life – we know that may seem paradoxical – you will see your lives in better perspective.

Unlike Yeats, who thought of life as a long preparation for something that never happens.

He wouldn’t have been wrong to say that, provided that he added, “so far as external observers can see, and so far as one expects 3D death to be the end.” And the difficulty here is that it is the end, and isn’t.

Yes. I have the sense of that.

But not everybody does. It is a matter of faith, more than anything, and faith cannot be purchased or stolen or even earned; it is a gift, given or withheld.

By whom, and according to what criteria?

Some other time, perhaps. For the moment, let’s stick to the point.

Life as a given individual does end with 3D death, in that that particular mixture of elements will not return to another 3D life. If it returns, it is as a strand, not as the entire bundle. But it does not end in 3D dearth, in that living is forever, as your old friend [Ed Carter] wrote. The “you” you forge in life is a real achievement; it does not go away. It functions as it always has functioned.

Do you have any reason to feel that your being as it exists at this moment is perfect and needs no further work? To put it another way, do you think there is nothing more you could do, could become, “if only”? Well, it is always that way, up to your last 3D moment, and beyond. But there is a difference between what may be doable in 3D and what may be doable in a larger sphere of action.

This will strike some people as merely words. I have heard someone say you engage in double-talk – which I take to mean, some of your words went dead on her – but still there is the possibility to be guarded against.

The reason your old memories return in or out of context is so you may return to other points in your life. Your added days provide you with added perspective, with added wisdom. If hindsight is 20-20, why not use it?

Use it – I take it – as part of our continuing process of self-refinement, self-creation.

That’s all there is, of course. You will find your “declining years” to be far more satisfying, far more interesting, if you keep in mind that retrospection and rumination is a valid and therefore appropriate activity for this part of your life. The frantic striving to keep your head above water is past; the tangible 3D goals and aspirations are mostly or entirely past. What is now appropriate is the summing-up and the further preparation – for life doesn’t end with 3D death, any more than the 3D world ends with evening.

 

Yesterday may turn out to have been a big day. I’m thinking that my session with psychic / healer Jane Mullen is continuing to show results. That was October 30, and it seems to me it was a turning point. Certainly, a lot has happened, mostly but not entirely internal, in the two weeks since then. And, as we know, “internal” is probably a meaningless distinction from “external.”

And you, my friends, seem to have been an integral part of the process of change, or development, and I am grateful.

The theme at the moment is the practical application of so much investigation. Naturally, practice is going to result in change, or did you do so much work over so much time with the idea of manifesting no more than you already were?

We both know better than that. John Nelson pointed out in one of his novels that so many people want to “change without changing.” I know better than that. I feel better than that, let’s say. But of course change always involves moving into the unknown.

It does and it doesn’t. Let’s talk for a moment about the “doesn’t,” for in a time when sweeping comprehensive change is all about you (“you” plural, you understand), it is well that people be reassured that they are not being swept away by a tornado of unbound and unbounded forces. To change metaphor, they are not wandering, lost in the desert, or adrift on the sea. They are, and they aren’t, depending entirely upon their connection to their larger self which they experience.

It strikes me, that is what this whole long story is about, in a way. Muddy Tracks, first draft written in 1997-98, had as its theme my own stumbling efforts to conceptualize life as connection to what I was calling the larger being. Everything in the time since is variations on a theme. Connection, expansion, reorientation, exploration, consolidation – it has been going on a good long time now.

And finally you are at another culmination point. You as an individual, Frank, and you as a part of a small open-but-closed society, and you as a part of a civilization spanning the globe. These are times of gathering and manifestation. They aren’t the end; there is never a “the end,” but they are a pause for

I can’t find the right word. Not “consolidation,” not “reorientation.”

Call it rolling readjustment, maybe. Not the end of the line, not the end of movement. Not a pause, even. More a moment of recognition, a reorienting.

And, I know, not just me. I do know that.

So. for those who are ready to make such preoccupation practical, we have been providing the specific tools. For those who are not yet ready (including those who will never be ready in this lifetime), nothing wasted; no one can know what seed will germinate at what time, in what circumstance. And it takes many iterations, sometimes, for a given statement to suddenly (or gradually) penetrate layers of dullness or misinterpretation or resistance. But for those who are ready when they read this, or re-read it, or think about it later, our theme-song has been, “You are not alone, you are not lost, you are not damned, or forsaken, or stymied.” You have not foreclosed your future by your past action or inaction.

Some scripture says “though your sins be as scarlet,” you can be lifted above them not so much by divine grace (in the sense of an external agency that offers you a lift) as by your divine nature (in the sense of an innate part of yourself that you can at any time choose to identify with).

[To my surprise I find, it is from Isaiah 1:18: “Though your sins be like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red as crimson, they shall be like wool.” I would have bet it was from the Upanishads. If I properly understand the sense of the chapter, Isaiah, who was a prophet, not a lawgiver, was saying, in effect, that God told him that God wasn’t interested in sacrifices or externals, but in repentance – that is, in voluntary individual reform.]

—

This is an edited excerpt from “Only Somewhat Real,” not yet published.

 

Louisa Calio posts a query on my blog that amounts to, Can you give us an interpretation of 3D events that will make sense of the stupidity we live among, or, really, some way of seeing it that will make us feel better about it.

Answering your rough paraphrase rather than her original, we probably should say, “No, we can’t.” But we can give you a few clues, to help you arrive there yourselves. We can suggest interpretations; how you react is always an individual reaction, a merging of new data with old patterns and assumed relationships.

Sure, we can see that. But, subject to that proviso—

Your ways of making sense of things often put the cart before the horse. But explaining how you are doing that isn’t always so easy, given that it involves looking at the same thing from a different point of view, rather than altering or adding to the thing being observed. So you will perhaps be tempted to say, “That’s just talking around it” when we show you how it looks from another perspective.

We’ll try not to do that.

Louisa says – quote it –

“…the nature and purpose of some of these extreme conflicts within the individual…”

It isn’t so much that the conflicts have a purpose as that they express a result.

I know that seems helpful to you, but to us, not so much. A little more explaining?

You come into 3D embodying conflicts, precipitating conflicts around you by what you have within you. That’s one thing that 3D is, an arena, a place and time in which conflicts – and harmony, but we’re talking about conflicts at the moment – come front and center to be transformed. You wouldn’t expect a football game to be tranquil and harmonious; you wouldn’t expect a piano concert to be cacophonous. You expect each event to express in its own way. The thing that makes it hard for you to see, sometimes, is that your football game and piano concert are taking place at the same time, along with drag racing, aerial acrobatic exhibitions, family feuds, three different melodramas being filmed, prolonged mattress testing, and half a million other events including the depths of non-social interactions with yourselves such as monasticism, intense study, illnesses, and other preoccupations. It can get a bit crowded.

Makes me tired just thinking about it.

Yes, but it’s intriguing. Remember how Bob Monroe said AA dived in, because he was fascinated by the raw energy of it all?

I do now that you remind me. Far Journeys, the best of his books.

Well, with all that going on, what could you say is “the point” of it?

Meaning, it won’t have just one point?

Meaning, too, that the purpose of a football game or a concert isn’t just for producing the cheers of the fans or the ovations of the audience.

Aha. Meaning, Loosh may be produced but that doesn’t mean it is more than a by-product.

At this point we advise people to re-read Far Journeys to refresh their memory of what Bob actually said. The Loosh analogy was not, by far, the end of the story, but the beginning of Bob’s deeper exploration.

—

This is an edited excerpt from “Only Somewhat Real,” not yet published.

 

My friend Jim is convinced that we in 3D are – what? Victims? Laboratory animals? He sees human suffering as being designed by non-physical powers to cause suffering so as to produce what Bob Monroe called Loosh, which can be used by these higher beings (call them that) for their own purposes. Everything you have said that I take as evidence of our interaction he seems to take as evidence of our being manipulated for the benefit of others. I think this is a fair summary of his position.

And your part in it?

I’d like to show him that that isn’t how I experience it, but words are so clumsy that we all attach our own meanings to what we read. Plus, I have come to see that there isn’t really any persuading anybody about anything. As you have pointed out, words are sparks, not law.

So, where is the problem?

Yeah, I know. He has a different view of things and so what? But I can’t help thinking if I can’t say anything helpful, still maybe you can.

But why would we want to do that? If his life has led him to his own conclusions, presumably there is a reason for it.

[!]

There ought to be a way to show the this-then-this-then-this process that happens somehow. We need some kind of super exclamation point, to show when we experience a fast concatenation of realizations.

Lacking that, center, slow down, and trace them out, not trying to reproduce the sequence, only to sketch where you came to.

Well, when you said that I connected several insights, each of which led instantly – faster than memory could record – to new ones. It was nearly instant, didn’t take more than a flash, but reoriented several previously unconnected ideas.

• We don’t come to our ideas without a reason.
• Our ideas express our own psychic realities; they are not really data-driven.
• They are necessary to our overall development; they cannot be accidental or irrelevant.
• Our lives are not meant as expressions of some ultimate or abstract truth, but as expressions of who and what we are. As part of that, we entertain only the ideas we can and (one might almost say) should, ought to, entertain.

Now why do you suppose a simple question would realign all that?

Because I was ready, I suppose, and your question sparked it.

And that is all you can do, need ever do, should ever do. Your ideas, your ways of seeing the world, your prejudices, your hunches, your unreasoning or seemingly baseless certainties, are all part of you, and you embody them for a reason. No ideas are better than any other ideas for a given person.

I think you mean that for any given person, some ideas are going to seem right and others wrong. So there’s no judging another person’s ideas without in effect judging the person – and we have been told for years that we never have the data to judge anyone else, or even ourselves. We are here to express what we are, and of course our ideas are part of that expression.

Correct so far.

Whether our ideas are more accurate or less is something we also can’t guess, because we don’t have that data either. A heliocentric view of the solar system is right in terms of physics and a geocentric one is right in terms of psychology, say. (I’m not sure I actually agree with this example, but let’s go with it.)

I think you will find, when you look at it, that most of your social and ideological and political problems stem from the idea that there is a right and a wrong, a correct and an incorrect, and everybody and his position should be judged by how closely their position agrees with somebody’s idea of what is right. Since everybody’s ideas are different, anything other than “live and let live” – which is itself an idea – leads to chaos, which is what you are experiencing. (This ignores, for simplicity of statement, complicating factors such as greed, manipulation, etc., but they too stem from what people are, both individually and in packs.)

I can sort of see it. This assumption that there is one truth leads to the assumption that (of course) wherever we are is nearer the truth than anybody else, or we would move. And, it invalidates other ideas, hence invalidates other people themselves who hold these ideas.

Well, isn’t that what you see all around you?

It is, for sure, particularly in the poor excuse for a country that used to be America. Liberals and conservatives are tearing it to pieces in the name of fighting to preserve it. I have been saying for months that they’re all crazy, acting identically only around different ideas. But I hadn’t thought, until now, to see that it is fueled by each side feeling that the other side is invalidating them as what they are. Obvious, once I see it, but it wasn’t obvious before.

—

This is an edited excerpt from “Only Somewhat Real,” not yet published.

 

Friday, October 27, 2017

We have a few questions queueing up, but I’m anxious to hear you on predestination and free will.

Very well, it’s very simple – or very complicated, depending upon which end of the stick you pick up.

It doesn’t seem so to us. To us it looks like it ought to be an either/ or.

But, remember what you noticed repeatedly whenever Rita would find a contradiction. The universe contains all contradictions, but does not contradict itself.

Free will means, in essence, that in a given set of circumstances – at a given moment in the ever-flowing river of time carrying you along in your 3D life – you seize choices. That is, you have the real, not theoretical, ability to go this way or that way, like the lassie in the old song. You have a real, not a theoretical, choice. You really can choose heads or tails, A or B. You and Rita were told, first thing, that free will is the point of 3D existence, so that you will develop as you will, not as puppets, not as chips floating in rapids.

Predestination means, it’s all well and good to say you have freedom to choose, but your whole history leads you to choose one way rather than another. Not only your past but your future pulls you in a certain direction – or, one might say, holds you as a piece of iron might be held in an overwhelmingly strong magnetic current. That piece of iron won’t even be able to tumble end over end, though it might perhaps rotate on its forward-aft axis. To say that you have choice is to consider yourself as if you were in isolation; to say you are predestined is to see yourself as one tiny element in an overwhelmingly powerful, continuing organizing system; a rapids; a hurricane; a magnetic field. (Organizing systems aren’t necessarily calm or even apparently stable, but they channel immense forces.)

Swedenborg said humans were artificially suspended between equalized forces in order that they might have real, effective, free will. I think that is a fairly accurate summary of what he said.

Let’s set that way of seeing things to one side for the moment. Swedenborg was a great seer; so was Cayce; so were uncounted individuals known to the world and unknown. But nobody else’s experience and thought and conclusions can ever prove anything for anybody else. What they may do is spark a recognition, and of course that is what we are trying to do here, say things that some will recognize and profit by.

Thoreau said something similar once, that nothing was ever true to him because somebody else said it, but only because it whispered itself in his ear.

And that thought in itself appealed to you, you see. It sparked a recognition. That’s why people find favorite authors; their minds run in parallel.

Now, bear in mind, free will and predestination – seeming opposites – both depend upon one way of seeing things, namely that there is one time-stream, one consciousness, one individual will, for each person. When you change those assumptions, everything changes; consequences differ as circumstances differ.

In a reality in which the physical world was what it seems to “common sense” people, there would be only one time-stream. The physical world would be solid, substantial (as it appears) and obviously could not be multiplied millions of times every day as all those people made all those decisions. One reality-stream; real and irrevocable consequences.

In such a one-timestream reality, the free will/predestination argument would naturally arise as people seized on this set or that set of unarguable facts that cannot be reconciled, for in such a system, there could be no reconciling them. It would have to be an either/or, and yet the evidence would be too great on either side for the contrary assertion to be sanctioned. Deadlock, you see.

So the clue is that the world is projected thought.

Projected consciousness; formed not so much into thought as into awareness. There is life without thought; there is no life without awareness.

Okay. The world is projected consciousness, and all possible paths exist; all are waiting for us to walk them, and somehow we do walk them all, choosing heads and tails, time after time, with our awareness restricted somehow to only one path, the others remaining only theoretical to us. It often seems only a fanciful idea, even after nearly 20 years.

That is because you have the wrong idea of who “you” are. You are identifying with the Pac-man eating obstacles, rather than with the player playing the game. Or if you don’t like that example, another analogy would be that you are identifying with the character and not the actor, or the movie-goer viewing the final film rather than with the film editor choosing among possible scenes.

We get the idea. Pretty hard not to identify with what we experience every moment, though.

You also experience the other level, when you don’t filter out the evidence as impossible or fantasy or hallucination or merely inexplicable.

Yes, I have a few friends who experience alternate realities poking in, every so often.

A more accurate statement would be that you have friends who are occasionally conscious of it, for you all experience it; only they do not always screen out what they experience but may have no framework for.

In any case, when you realize – or even, for the moment, theorize, pretend, envision – yourselves to be the one, single, undivided you that takes all paths, rather than the fragment-you that you customarily experiences as taking one path only (whether or not free to choose), you see that there is no real contradiction at that level. Of course you are free, but not free to take only one path: free to identify with this or that part of yourself. Of course it is all predestined: the paths existed from the moment the world was created; all you could do was fill them, or as it seems to you, walk them.

And all this has ramifications.

Because all paths exist, it is easy to see and even visit the future. (And how could anyone see the future if it was not already pre-formed?) Because you change timelines – reality-streams, if you will – it is easy to cease to have one future and have another. (How else could real seers nevertheless predict futures that “don’t happen,” like Cayce predicting so many physical catastrophes that did not occur, instead of World War II, that did?)

We keep coming back to the same simple (but not necessarily easy) statement: You are not what you think you are; the world you exist in is not what it appears to be.

We do know that. Our questions mostly amount to, “But who are we, then, and what is the world?” And we’re glad for your assistance in orienting us.

Bear in mind, it is a continuing enterprise, because you – and we – may come to a resting-place, a comfortable way of making sense of things, and that’s all well and good, but ultimately there is always more to learn, always a deeper way of seeing things.

So we’ll never be bored, I know.

That isn’t the purpose, but it is the effect, yes.

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This is an edited excerpt from “Only Somewhat Real,” not yet published.