Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

[I am re-reading Colin Wilson’s autobiography, Dreaming to Some Purpose and it came to me that he and I were connected in some way that wasn’t obvious.  So I thought I would ask the guys, in a private session, and as usual things took their own course.]

Friday, January 12, 2024

8:10 a.m. I look forward to learning how Colin and I are really connected. Clearly, somehow we are. Shared thread? I read of his life and I see my life in – what shall I call it? – not in a distorted mirror, not in a sort of opposition, but sort of a “transpose the same qualities into a different time/place starting point, and change a few other things.”

I have just gotten to where he has become an overnight sensation at 24, and his reaction to it.

Now, I find I cannot say – really cannot think – just what I’m groping for. A little help, my friends? Only, not for publication.

Unless you change your mind. The same ground rules as always.

Yes.

Colin and you, Colin and Robert Clarke and you, Colin and Chris Nelson and you – variations on a theme, with the added nuance of taking care of one another. Colin came first and established a position. Robert came next and worked in obscurity all his life. You came next and were sort of between the two, and Chris Nelson will be seen to be between Colin and you, and of course the chain doesn’t end.

If you were to write your life-memoir – for that is what it would amount to, certainly not a conventional autobiography –

Lost it.

Your story would be written as the cooperation (and interference) of strands, not as a unitary being which none of you are. That in itself would be a different take on things. But also, your concentration on your inner life and your relative helplessness in steering your outer life would be very different. You think of yourself as a failure externally and perhaps a tentative success internally, but this is just lazy thinking. How can one side of the duct tape be in different sync [I would have said “out of sync”] with the other? External is internal, as you know.

Perhaps making that clear would be achievement enough.

It can’t be proved. It can be intuited or not. Or rather, let’s say that to the extent it can be proved, it will be done by a new science scarcely nascent yet, combining physics and psychology, seeing gravity and love as equivalents, but demonstrating it mathematically, as that is the only language some people can believe in. (They don’t have to be able to follow the mathematics, only be able to believe in it. This is true of most science, of course, even among scientists outside their own subspecialty.)

I’m going to send that graf to Dirk.

By all means. It is more his tasks than yours, and more his task than more conventional explorations taking physical and non-physical to be separate things.

But to return to Colin and me.

Were you not sustained – shaped, almost – by his presence for a full 25 years before you met? Do you still think that was merely external?

Hmm.

So now reconfigure it and see you and him – and Robert and Chris and others – as branches of the same plant, connected at the stem if branching at the top. He nourished you all, you all nourished him, and you all nourished and nourish each other even now by a form of invisible support, just by living in the world – concentrating your essence in one moment – and retaining the unknown link. It is a powerful organizing force that is not widely realized, but universally experienced.

Another way in which we are less individual than we think.

Let’s say, another aspect of your lives that is not obvious. And this is worth a few words:

1. You as an individual tip of the plant, inhabiting one body, forming one surface-mind.
2. You as an extension of the plant, one more organ of perception for the non-3D larger being.
3. Between the two, you as one of a cluster of beings sharing certain characteristic and (usually) values.

You see our point, here? All of these, not just one, or two. You all function in just this triplicate way, whether or not you are aware of it.

So, Colin and Robert and Frank and Chris – and many others, known to you or not – share a cluster and instinctively, intuitively, naturally, recognize that you belong together. You function smoothly together – and most of your joint functioning is not visible to yourselves, let alone to others. Your lives do not need explaining, though for comfort and out of curiosity you would like the explanation. All you ever need is to follow the deepest impulses and you will do all right.

Our individual foibles don’t really matter, in this context.

Remember, everyone is functioning in three roles. Number one has all the quirks and surface eccentricities. Number two has all the deepest purpose and sureness. And number three (that Carl Jung did not iterate when he talked of his awareness of a number one and number two personality) has the sureness of common goals and opportunities and needs. You all play all these roles all the time. How could you not? It would be like opting out of one dimension.

Well, as usual this has grown beyond my personal question.

That’s the trip you signed up for.

Agreed. What of people with whom we share an affinity but don’t quite mesh? I’m thinking of John Nelson, here.

You and he worked together just enough to do a couple of things. You got him into the publishing mainstream; he got Hampton Roads into the same mainstream. But you and he needed room from each other even though the personal chemistry was good.

So our somewhat wistful distance – wistful distance on my end, anyway – is appropriate.

What can happen in one’s life that is not appropriate? What you expect, or desire, or even fear, is one thing: What is appropriate may or may not be any or all of these.

In short, “all is well.”

Do you have any reason to doubt it?

Often enough we are inclined to say, “It could be better.”

Certainly. So could you yourselves.

This is a bit of a sidetrack, but how should I answer people who point to all the pain and suffering and injustice in the world?

Do you expect to convince them?

No, but it seems to me we ought to have a better answer than, “It just is.”

This is like assuming that sickness or injury is “bad” because you don’t want them. It is Lucy in “Peanuts” saying she doesn’t want life’s ups and downs, she just wants up and up and up.

It is a form of fixed vision, isn’t it? I mean, one can get to see only the bad and forget that it is balanced by the good.

Assuming you wish to continue seeing things as bad or good, yes. No picture can be all light and no dark. Even a very light picture has areas that are relatively darker. Even a dark picture has areas relatively lighter. If all the world looks dark to you because it has dark patches, adjust your vision or rather, adjust your expectations, so that your vision can readjust. The world is not getting worse all the time. People are not sinking deeper and deeper into poverty. Violence and injustice are not increasing all the time. Pain and suffering are not as bad as – let alone worse than – 100 years ago, let alone 200. But you have to be able to admit the data. If you concentrate on darkness, what should you expect to see but confirmation of your bias?

I suppose it is a form of extremism: “If everything isn’t the way I want it, nothing is right with the world.”

And of course the opposite (if similar) extremism would say something like, “If all is well, there is nothing that could be better, or that needs fixing.” You all know that real life is between the extremes. It is mostly words, and the ideas stemming from words, that lead to extremism of either sort.

Well, the exposition of our three roles was helpful, and I’ll find a way of sending it out while preserving people’s privacy. Thanks as always.

 

Saturday, January 6, 2024, 3 p.m. Well, my friends, I hear you knocking at the door. Have heard you since this morning. What’s on your mind?

Consistency. Constancy. Reliability. Inertia in the productive sense of the word. Purpose. Filling of the time in the way best for you – with the usual caveat, “Which you?”

I’m listening.

What does one do with life in the absence of external constraints and external prodding? This is an important question that will shed light on how to employ constraints and proddings to best effect.

“No rest for the weary?” Or is it, “for the wicked?”

Rust is not rest. If you are idle and are content to be idle, where is the problem? But if you are idle and you feel it as waste, that’s another story.

Or if, like Rita in her eighties, you are still here but don’t know why, living without any great urge to do something, but somewhat bored.

Exactly so. UVA’s Alderman Library is about to reopen and you are feeling the urge to read everything in there, and at the same time you are feeling the discontent that goes with lack of direction.

Not just me. Charles, the same thing. He’s even tired of reading. But (although he isn’t shy about proposing projects for me to do!), one can’t just pluck a meaningful project off a bush, plus I have a strong feeling that perhaps the nature of the projects ought to change. It isn’t like I have to keep writing books or even blog posts, or even conversations with you. But a new direction is not obvious. Of course this involves getting back up to speed. I had hoped I was going to be out of this long lifetime by now, and here I am in 2024, for God knows how much longer.

We recognize that this isn’t quite a complaint.

No, but, like Rita, there is a certain amount of puzzlement. Plus, do I really want to start something new I cannot necessarily finish?

That may be said by anyone at any age.

Oh I know. But it’s perhaps more appropriate at 77 than at, say, 47, or 27, much less 17.

We return to the questions: Which you? The 3D ego self is at its best responding to the moment. It is not necessarily the best judge of direction or motion or velocity. You choose, but you don’t foresee the results of your choices (and there’s nothing wrong with that); another level of you keeps you on course, if you let it do so.

Well, I don’t know anything to do beyond being receptive to what comes. Lord knows, I don’t steer the ship.

You do steer the ship, moment by moment. You mean to say, you don’t set the course.

All right, I see that.

So if a wider, longer, older, wiser part of you sets the course, and you faithfully steer, where is the problem?

Slowing way down, I get that there isn’t a problem, so long as we steer faithfully and continuously choose according to our values (even if these values change as we go). We will move smoothly.

You will imperceptibly align yourselves moment by moment, which reduces friction and smooths progress.

In short, don’t sweat over the question of where we’re headed or how to get there.

Let’s say, live in confidence that doing your best moment by moment is the very thing needed.

No grand Five Year Plans.

Make your five-year plan if you wish. Make a 50-year plan, if you wish. You are free to choose what you prefer. Only, remember, you live moment by moment, and there’s nothing wrong with being unable to see very far ahead.

As [Joshua Lawrence] Chamberlain said, we don’t see far ahead, so it’s best to form habits that will carry us in future unpredicted situations.

This is just common sense, surely.

So if I’m hearing you right, you are saying that consistently living our values is, in a sense, all the planning we need to do.

It is all the execution you need to do. Live your life one moment at a time – as if you have any alternate way you can live! – and you don’t have anything worth worrying about.

Thanks as usual. A short session, but better than nothing, I suppose.

 

Friday, January 5, 2024

7:15 a.m. I got the feeling you wanted to do a session, and I connected it to a thought I had just had, reading Kenneth Whyte’s Hoover. (“It occurs to me, reading Hoover, that I read history and biography as drama, as the most intricate and varied and character-filled drama there is or ever could be. Seems so obvious now, I don’t know why it wasn’t until just this moment.”) You wanted to tell us something. By all means, proceed.

First you should remember the question, as it will help point the conversation.

That seems a little backwards, to me. It was your impulse, as far as I can tell, why do I need to remember it? Why isn’t receptivity enough?

Receptivity is fine, and of course is essential. But if you are to do something more than the minimum, you need to work more skillfully, using what you have learned in practice.

I think you mean, the more we use our experience and our deduced rules of the road, the better the answers.

Not exactly “the better the answers.” More, “the farther you can travel; the better you will see detail and context both.”

Okay.

Each of you is a specialist – in your own life. In your being. In your point of view. In the result of a lifetime’s choosings. You understand? In that sense, the more consciously you have lived – and, note, the more consciously you are living at the moment – the more specialized and valuable an observer and interpreter you will be. Consider yourselves (among other roles) reporters to your higher selves, and to the non-3D in general (to the Akashic Record, in a sense) from one particular window in 3D life. Now, bear in mind, such reports, such interpretations of life, are being filed continuously by everybody. So at one and the same time, you are uniquely valuable, and so is everyone else, as we have always said. It doesn’t matter whether you appreciate each other, you are all individual, you are all part of the overall oneness.

Like members of the cast and chorus of a Broadway production or a film: individual yet meaningful within that context only as part of the entire production.

And we are aware we have said this before, and more than once. However, now consider: Anything that interests you has been built up through people.

No, I didn’t get it and still don’t quite have it. I know, I know: Slow down, recalibrate. Give me a moment.

Okay. Try again?

All history is drama. All biography, all anything, is drama, in the sense of a vast potential narrative packed with interesting and diverse characters in every attitude of cooperation, conflict, mutual indifference, ignorance of each other’s existence, and of reverence or detestation of those who have acted on stage beforehand. But this is equally true of the sciences, little though you might think it. Geology, ichthyology, you name it, the facts being studied were discovered and arrayed and interpreted by human 3D individuals, and interwoven with the specific drams of their everyday lives.

I don’t think you mean that to understand the study of fishes we need to understand the scientists’ lives who study them. Are you saying that we can get at a deeper understanding of those sciences by coming at them through our connection with the scientists themselves?

Does talking directly to Lincoln or Jung provide you greater insight into whatever you discuss? How should it be different in any line of research or investigation?

I’m still groping for the spine of your argument. Are you implying that we can best understand reality by moving through the minds of others who have done so? That makes a superficial sense, but why isn’t a live dog better than a dead lion, as I think Thoreau said.

The point is simple: You approach reality – no matter what it is you are studying – through the human experience. Obvious, yes, and yet perhaps so obvious as to be forgotten from time to time. You cannot see reality except from a 3D human viewpoint. Your senses, even your intuitions, assume and stem from that base. Yes, this is a limitation, but a productive one, which is why the limitation exists. You are specialists in being human.

“But.”

Oh yes. But, how you self-define has consequences. How you self-limit has consequences. Same statement made twice.

So as we learn to accept continuous communication with our non-3D selves, we remain human, but what “human” means changes, in effect. Grows.

Certainly. Only, continuous communication is not the only productive mode. Occasional, even sporadic communication is valuable as training wheels. Isolation followed by (or following) communication may be equally instructive – or, let’s say, transformative.

Sure. So the point here is what?

Whatever you do, be it woodworking or art or scholarship or drudgery or anything, do with whatever consciousness you can bring to it, and your life will be richer and more interesting even if not one external thing changes. (As if there could be anything truly external, but you know what we mean.)

And this is a sort of decision, isn’t it?

Yes! Yes. Yes. It is exactly that, a decision. That’s why you are not [illegible] or victims or spectators or useless extras. It is a decision, and once you decide and execute the decision, you are living in another, deeper, richer, less disconnected, world.

This will not be obvious to everyone.

So what? It can’t be logically convincing because those resistant to the idea can and will always come up with ten good reasons why it’s impossible. So what? Anybody who actually makes the experiment will know, and what difference will contrary opinions make then?

I think I can offer a homely example. (At your prompting?) How we deal with suffering alters our experience. When I went to the hospital a couple of years ago and calmly observed what was happening, instead of getting emotionally involved, everything went smoothly, but really the point is, I had a very different experience.

Yes, and of course suffering comes in many forms, and no one’s life is immune to it (nor would you want it to be, if you could see it as we do). As we have mentioned, even the word “suffering” is too dramatic, but we use it to avoid the accusation that we are concerned only with trivial matters. A schoolboy receiving a reprimand can’t really be said to be suffering, and yet it is on the same scale.

No, you mean, and yet it is the same kind of thing in that it is something unwanted and outside of his control.

Yes. Just as health issues, or accidents, or financial reverses, or the death or disability of loved ones. Just as war and earthquake and any kind of civil disaster. Just as anything – even ageing’s problems, even boredom, even loneliness – is similarly something unwished-for but not, nevertheless, tragic except in a limited context.

I know from experience that many people think that’s taking too blithe a view of human life.

To be sure – from the 3D person’s viewpoint. But we have not been engaged in this long conversation for the sake of supporting the 3D person’s viewpoint, but of undermining it.

There’s something else. I can feel it but can’t quite get it.

Your approach to your life – which means to each moment of your life, of course – determines the holiness of life that you will experience. Everything is holy, including nuclear waste and politicians’ speeches, as we have sometimes reminded you. The holiness inheres in reality, not in specifics. But you have to have eyes to see. As you clear your mind of emotions, of complexes, of unwanted free-associating, you see more clearly. As you slow down, as you expect to see more deeply, more clearly, so you do.

I get that this is it for the moment. Thanks as always.

 

[This conversation took place a week after I returned from two weeks in Egypt.]

Monday, March 11, 2019

So then, friends. Talk to me.

We’re always talking back and forth. Mostly it doesn’t involve words.

“People are always praying, and their prayers are always answered.” The hired man Tarbox said that to Emerson.

In a way, we outside 3D are always praying, and you in 3D are answering or denying what we would have you (us) do.

I suppose that is one way to look at the result of the vast impersonal forces, and the vast personal forces, contending.

Contending by what we are, not necessarily by what we wish.

We in 3D are always at the center of things, and yet are nearly insignificant in the larger scheme of things.

Isn’t that true of your lives in general? “God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”

That’s the first time I’ve understood that saying in that sense.

As you change, everything you know changes aspect. It is just natural.

I feel like this is our first reset after Egypt, after a sort of forgetting.

You didn’t forget, you were unable to maintain. There’s a difference. The spirit may be willing and the flesh weak. That isn’t the same as the spirit deciding, “It’s too much trouble,” or “This other bauble is more alluring.” When you returned to your home and what had been your life, you had a day of functioning in unified fashion before you got sick. You deliberately and calmly went through necessary chores as they occurred to you and as you prioritized them. You felt as you are feeling now.

That’s so. I hadn’t quite realized I was feeling it again now till you mentioned it.

Which is why we mentioned it. Describe it, for others and for your own later purpose of comparison.

Everything quiet inside. Almost a need to balance, physically. The body quiet but not lethargic, energy-filled but not buzzing in the way one is when trying to sleep through jet lag, say. Awake and alert, the line open but no static nor competing programming. A nice state to be in.

This was your state, and you got sick. Being sick, you did not forget your intent to remain connected, but you were unable to bring the energy to physical endeavors. Your physical illness did not lead you to forget the connection, you see. You knew what you wanted to do, and, more important, wanted to continue to be.

It might not have worked out so well if I had been unable to breathe.

Here you are selling yourself short. It isn’t like there has been no permanent acquisition.

That’s very good to know.

But you know, it is like the sexual analogy you drew: The woman is always able but not always willing; the man is always willing but not always able. Like any broad statement, it could do with some qualifying, but it is true enough. And like most analogies, it may be applied in more than one way. You in 3D may be always willing but not always able. More commonly, you are always able but not always willing.

Relative to doing the will of the larger being rather than insisting on doing the will only of the localized 3D consciousness as if it had no larger context.

That’s a decent way to understand it. and now you are more likely – hence, more able – to continue to serve Ra.

Yes, that’s what came to me in Egypt, and not for the first time there. Something within said, “I still serve Ra,” and I understood that to mean, not that 21st-century-me served an ideal formulated thousands of years earlier, nor that I am divided among various beings each of whom serves gods of their own, nor that it is strictly a metaphor for willingness to serve the part of ourself larger than the 3D self. It is a little of each of those things, but it amounts to something more.

It amounts to a 3D-shaped consciousness aware of itself not as a unity but as a community, and now proceeding to a sense of itself as an integral part of something that transcends itself and yet depends upon that 3D awareness. Both, not one or the other.

For some reason I think of Prince Gautama, naming his newborn son Fetter and walking away from his life as a prince.

Balancing the obligations of one’s life in society against those of one’s duty to one’s own soul, which would you choose? There is no wrong answer. It’s all in what you are willing to sacrifice, for what purposes.
A life spent “serving Ra,” “doing God’s will,” “remaining connected” to the guys or the higher self or call it what you will, amounts to living a life you will find most satisfying, and the way you think about it mostly will be tacked on after the fact, as usual. Only, don’t be afraid of words, or of other people’s misunderstandings. Lead the life you are called to lead, knowing it will be mostly incommunicable anyway. Your life is what you are, not so much what you do. What you do is a pale wavering misleading shadow of the life you really lead. How else could it be?

[For several months, a group of us who wish to work on ourselves have been meeting on Wednesdays via Zoom. Our continuing agenda includes functioning as a temporary group mind, and strengthening our perceptions of our everyday connection to the non-3D. Our routine has come to include a five-minute session in which Dave, our resident shaman, provides drumming while we each go out on an individual journey centered on some topic.]

Thursday, May 27, 2021

6 a.m. Yesterday’s drumming question at the ILC meeting was: How do we live in continuous integration?

When we as a group returned from our state of individual receptivity, we went around and each one reported, as usual. Before we even began, Bill summarized what he got as “Pay attention.” The various messages were so congruent and mutually reinforcing, I said someone should listen to the recording and make notes on what was said. “But,” I said, “It ain’t gonna be me.” Famous last words. So here are my notes.

Dirk: It’s not about doing, but about remembering. We are all connected with everything. No reaching; we are connected. It’s remembering.

Martha: Miranda McPherson says “Do nothing, be nothing, rest in God.” End our projections. Focus on undoing our perception of separations by saying, of everything we see, “I am that.”

Paul: Surround yourself with reminders – art, flowers, music – whatever works for you that reminds you that you are in touch. Our secular world’s influences distract us from this. Cultivate habits that will remind us. The original purpose of religious traditions was to provide constant reminders of the connections we have.

Christine: “I don’t know if I want to live in continuous integration. I am here to experience and choose.” Periodic integration. Like Dr. Who: having extra-ordinary experiences. Don’t discount where we are. We are right where we should be, having extraordinary experiences.

Bill: Pay closer attention to what is going on. Easy to get so involved in your 3D experience that you miss the non-3D aspect. Several times a day, check in with your non-3D self. Can’t be not connected. Assume you are, and pay attention. The result will be different for each. One size does not fit all.

Louisa: Attune to your inner creator, and that will take you to the flow. Your inner peace, power. Let the rest go. Trust the river. Let go of habits, old thoughts, remember the time you had connection, and what supported it.

Dave: It’s a control-panel setting. Each situation should be individually adjusted, as in driving, creating art, etc. We’re in control.

Frank: It has to be important to you: (intent and reminders). Community assistance, such as these Zoom meetings. Call each other on our belief systems, as they surface in conversation. Love the non-3D as well as the 3D. Make integration your aspiration. Use everything for the sake of your intent.

Sue, who came in after we were in the middle of the drumming and thus didn’t know what the question was, got: “All is one,” which, as Dirk pointed out, nailed it.

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

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

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

“How can we explore limits, productivity?”

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