Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

A sense of place
[This is an experiment to see if we can foster conversations on this blog. Jane Coleman proposed a topic and Jane Peranteau, Christine Sampson and I each promised to give it a paragraph or two, and then I would put it together and post it. It is our hope that others will feel inclined to add comments via Reply or, if that doesn’t work, by emailing me so that I can post on their behalf.
[Hint: Write your remarks in a word program first, and save them. Then if they get lost in the process of trying to post them, you only have to pull up the saved file and copy it to me to do for you.]

From Jane Coleman:
I was thinking about the year I went to Yosemite National Park and went hiking for several days. I noticed that my memory had a certain feeling about it, something unique. It had its own signature and resonance and mood. I could call it a signature, and yet it encompasses all these things.
As I considered that event, I also recognized that all the places I’ve ever been have a certain signature about them. They each feel a certain way. The memories have colored them. I would equate that to the way I recognize my friends. Each has a unique feeling about them, their unique signature, some something that I would recognize no matter where.
Your thoughts?

From Christine Sampson:
Ok. Here’s what I got.
Carnival! The joy! The excitement ! The things to do, to observe, to participate in, to ignore, to discover! My life in retrospect. The faces, the places, the actions, the inactions, the dismissing, the accepting, the relishing. Each individual act, moment, created and placed by forces beyond the conscious mind, to allow exploration and growth and knowing and wonder.
I sit in the warm sunshine feeling very feline. Thankful. In gratitude.
A cacophony of all visible and invisible, to be sussed out and savored in a flash or at leisure.

From Jane Peranteau:
After sitting with it:
Our response to experience leaves emotional trace elements, like snail trails, in the mind. Pathways that create scaffoldings of self-knowing.
Are these the same as filters?
Yes. Because pathways change what we allow in and what we don’t. They change us in terms of our choices. You can have a pathways series that builds a filter or serves an openness.
The feeling you have for a person or a place determines an openness to them or a caution or a closed-ness. Succeeding experiences can change that–e.g., as we forgive or are forgiven, receive insights and revelations, or continue to be enhanced by further experience.
Feeling is always informed by everything we know, which is everything we are. It is not experienced separate from reason or science (e.g., science can track feeling’s movement through the body and mind) or knowledge.
Would it be fair to say that the signature each of those places and people have is your love for them? The uniqueness of signature recognizes how love is not a blind blanket emotion but fits the characteristics and traits of who is loving and what is loved.
[Good question, Jane C. A big question. It incited a trail of sudden awarenesses that led to insights along the way, each having the potential to be its own pathway. Frank, I see what we’re doing as another extension of what intending ILC makes possible.]

From Frank DeMarco:
It has always struck me how different places have a different “feel” that is more than mere aesthetics. When I was a boy, the fields of my father’s farm were quite different from city streets, say, or someone’s lawn. The woods that were behind our house and across the street had a special feel that I loved. My life had trees well before it had books! And places devoted to a consistent endeavor seem to me to acquire their own signature, as well:
• Churches, or any place where many people have prayed over many years
• Libraries, suffused with the auras of readers and, it seems, writer
• The grounds at The Monroe Institute, specifically, where for more than 40 years people have come to explore their unknown potential.
And these are just “ordinary” places! We haven’t even touched on what are called sacred sites.

Wednesday May 18, 2022 ILC virtual meeting
Our weekly Zoom gathering features a five-minute drumming session in which all participants ask for information around a given question. I see that about a year and a half ago, we explored the question of whether there is a dark side to guidance. The answers we got were summarized here from Dirk’s notes, and mine, and notes I made on watching the recording

Drumming Question:
“Is there a dark side to guidance? If so, tell us about it. If not, tell us what we are misinterpreting.”

Jon:
Multiple levels involved. Lower levels may be less skillful, and when they put together a doing, it can have dark consequences. Acknowledge it and try to have one’s frequencies go with the lighter, higher side. Discernment.

Louisa:
What is darkness? Unknown, not completely seen. Interpretation carries the possibility of misunderstanding. Guidance is representative of our totality.

Paul:
Darkness comes from its misuse, misinterpretation by ego. Anything can be used badly. Purity of intention is key.

Nancy:
(Told the story of her engagement with energies that started telling her what to do, at which time she disengaged. Realized later that they had not given her a straight answer when she had asked if they were of the light.)

Dave:
The question assumes a Manichean world view. Everyone is on a spectrum between good and evil, and it is the same in non-3D. Test the spirits.

Jane:
If people hear a voice within, are they mentally ill? What if what they heard was really there? Did they misinterpret?

Martha:
What she got was like Jon, Dave, and Nancy, so she passed.

Dirk: [From the notes he put on the computer.]
No. To the extent that you see a dark side you either see aspects of your 3D selves and threads that are discordant or dishonored, or you see conflicts with belief systems and structures. These can be internal disagreements. They can as easily be conflicts between your threads or beliefs with the external world.

That in turn is most often with other people and their threads and beliefs. Or also often disagreements between your threads or beliefs, desires and wants and physical matter reality. Quite often the major confusion arises from conflicts between beliefs, wants and desires, and the information you receive from guidance. This in turn has many forms and levels.

Christine:
You don’t go through crime-ridden areas, but avoid them. Same here. It’s all experience. Choosing. The dark side must be pursued to experience it. [I take that to mean, it won’t happen by accident.]

Frank: [From my notes]
It is relative to your self-image, your consciousness of yourself. If you experience darkness outside, you experience darkness inside. Darkness has its rights and function, as does light.
However, think carefully about what you mean by darkness. Do you mean ignorance? Evil? Malice? Do you mean potential? Do you mean nurturing darkness? What you mean makes a difference.

Good to remember that just as 3D is not all love and light, but also fear and darkness, so in non-3D. The next question to ask is, What is my most productive relationship to darkness?

A couple years old, but scarcely outdated.

Friday, October 8, 2021

5:55 a.m. I thought we might look at what I got during our drumming session on Wednesday.

“What is our path to greatest joy?”

Openness, because openness is the opposite of shrinking from life. Joy is the path. Follow your bliss and it increases. First, do no harm. A clear conscience leads to happiness. Again, no need for shrinking (from memories). Live in great confidence.

In other words, openness, which includes openness to joy, innocence as best you can achieve it, and faith. Not so complicated a formula.

Some might say, “Yes, but how do we attain it?”

You don’t attain a formula, you live it. And let’s say, as an aside, that “try” and “intend” may sound like the same thing, but they are not. When you intend, that is following a course, watching your compass to be sure you are going where you want to go. When you try, that is saying you are not succeeding, with the implication not only that you have not yet succeeded, but also that you cannot yet succeed. “Try” is an implicit declaration of inability, you see.

So as a practical matter, how do we assure that we are following a course (however discouraged we may be at any given moment) and not silently saying “But I can’t do this, at least not yet.”

You set your teeth, with or without dramatics, according to taste, and you follow your compass. That’s what intend is, it is being pulled by your chosen future, you could say. It isn’t difficult conceptually; there are no techniques to learn (though each person may find it worthwhile to invent or adopt specific rituals to serve as encouragement and reminder). It is really a setting one person in charge, rather than allowing various people to take the helm depending upon any little change in the weather. You all want to crystallize a permanent being. Take this as a practical exercise. Teach your crew to follow one captain, rather than rotating the conn. And there’s no use saying, “I am the captain.” You are more like the shipowner, selecting and then maintaining the captain. (And if you will not do it, who will?) Choose who you want to be captain; that is another way of saying, Choose who and what you want to be, want to express.

So let’s look briefly at what you got when you asked “What is our path to greatest joy?”

“Openness, because openness if the opposite of shrinking from life.” You should understand this very well. Older people often say the sins they most regret are the ones they didn’t commit. Or, more neutrally, what they regret is far more often the things they didn’t do, not the things they did do. Why is this, do you suppose?

It seems clear enough. The reason we don’t do something we want to do often boils down to fear of some sort. Yes, there may be other constraints, but often enough, we’re afraid, like Mr. Prufrock.

And the two forces in life?

Yes, that’s my point. Love, which is expansion and inclusion – and fear, which is constriction and exclusion. And I don’t know how we can be expanding if we are contracting.

Ergo, a default position of openness is a default position of willingness to love what comes. That may not be obvious, and in some moods may seem to be impossible, but it is true. Now, “to love what comes” does not necessarily mean to greet it with cries of joy, like George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life”: (“Yes, I’m going to jail, isn’t it wonderful?”) But it does mean, “This comes next, let’s see what it brings.” You are going to the hospital, to the unemployment office, to jail, to bankruptcy court, whatever. Scarcely grounds for rejoicing, but it will be a new experience, and you could choose a relatively calm curiosity about it, a trusting that nothing happens by chance. And there’s no use saying of this advice, “That’s easy for you to say.” Whether it’s easy to say is not the question. The question is, are we right? If it’s good advice, it doesn’t have to be hard to say.

As Sam Spade said, “What do you want me to do, learn to stutter?”

Exactly. Easy or not to say, practice is what is important.

“Follow your bliss, and joy increases.” Surely this is self-evident? Should you expect that the way to increase your joy is in seeking out the things you don’t want to do? It is true that everyone’s life includes things they would just as soon skip, but if you follow where your feelings lead you, it will work out, and probably better than you hope. Just as advocating openness says, “Avoid shrinking from life,” so “Follow your bliss” says, “Not only don’t shrink from it, embrace it, trust it.”

Again, I don’t know why this wouldn’t be transparently evident.

You are forgetting your past in which you did not pursue what would be “too good to be true,” and you are not recognizing the present in which you are still doing it.

Ouch.

Still, you’re right: It ought to be evident. However, like most things in life, it won’t do itself. It can be hard enough to find your bliss, if you look with the wrong tools. (Hint: You want to be paying attention to feelings, not to logic and especially not to “practicalities.”) But once you find it, you still need to follow it, and that often requires a decision of some sort.

“First, do no harm.” You can’t live without doing harm; that is an impossible ideal. But you can intend to do no harm. You can make your life about not doing harm. You can, in short, do as little harm as possible, and certainly you can live by refusing to do harm either consciously or, to the extent possible, by inadvertence. It isn’t complicated, it is merely a matter of having your captain include it in the standing orders.

“Live in great confidence.” We should scarcely need to add anything to this point. Everything we have been telling you, all these years, is to this effect. What Jane Roberts brought through, and Cayce, same message. It is a safe universe, it was made for you (in effect).

A drumming question from Wednesday’s Intuitive Linked Communication group. I asked, “What is ahead and/or how shall we deal with it? (What’s in it for us?)”

The response I got:

You are always in the eternal now; punctuation is not discontinuity. To deal with the future is no different than dealing with the present moment – literally – because the future only manifests as the present moment.

So be now what you want to be then. Calmly strive for continuity of intent and action. Your life takes care of itself because inner and outer are the same reality, perceived differently. [The “outer world” being reality perceived by the sense; the “inner world” being reality perceived directly, intuitively.] There can be no events not connected to who and what you are. If surprises come, you can use them as learning experiences centered not on them but on who you are in your unknown mental and spiritual makeup.

[Came across this while editing (for the final time, one hopes!) the forthcoming “Only Somewhat Real” manuscript.

Tuesday, November 7, 2017

All right, since I have to be up anyway, I suppose we should begin. I know that doesn’t sound particularly gracious; you know I love doing this, but I’d be just as happy to do it under fewer physical constraints.

It does not occur to you perhaps that this maximizes the use of those constraints. That otherwise you would have the constraints but nothing productive to do within them.

You think I don’t know that, after a lifetime of sitting up reading, rocking forward and back, painful breath by painful breath? I’m not going to go into it, but I’m damn well aware of the advantages of being able to use physical problems as a sort of platform to kick away from. And if uncomfortable nights were the price I had to pay to be able to do this, I’d be perfectly happy to make the bargain. Only, why should it be? It’s the same unexplainable contradiction I’ve always lived within: I know that I should be able to just – turn something, adjust something – and be well, only I can’t find it. And this isn’t just about me, obviously. Everybody wrestles with something; why can’t awareness overcome it?

You have been down this line of thought more than once. Worth looking again, as you are in a different place now than before.

Then let’s look, by all means.

If you could wish away your problems, so to speak – that is, if you had Aladdin’s lamp to grant you even one wish, let alone three – what good would it do you? In fact, look how much harder it would make your lives. It is much like you were told once, if you had an infallible source of knowledge of what is going to happen, wouldn’t you then be prone to Psychic’s Disease? As long as you function in 3D, you function under limitations, and if it isn’t one thing, it will be something else.

Well, my father always used to say, in exasperation, “It’s always something.”

Yes, we smile too, but of course it is always something. That’s life. And by that we mean, not just “That’s the way life goes,” but, more, “that is the essence and fabric and value of life.” And not just limitation, but conflict, problems, difficulty. The very things you may be prone to think of as drawbacks to life are, in fact, demonstrations that all is well, all is always well.

So much easier to see that in other people’s situation, but I do see it. If we are here to choose and to create ourselves (if only by choosing among versions, which one we prefer to live, moment by moment), then obviously there must be things to choose between, and for the choices to matter to us, one must be more attractive, one less attractive. Which implies problems.

That is taking things a little too much at a gallop. Let’s look at it slowly.

I know, I know. Concentrate: con-center-ate.

Centering

And you see the first thing that happens?

It seems my breathing improved, only it isn’t quite that, is it?

The overall feeling improved because although the wheezing continued, the circumambient tightening of the muscles relaxed, reducing the discomfort.

I had a definite sense that you wanted me to use “circumambient,” which ordinarily I wouldn’t. Why?

It is more precise, more descriptive, than merely saying “surrounding.”

And that is important, why?

Perhaps your habits of thought and expression are not so uniquely and entirely yours as you may think.

Okay. And I get that that is a real point, not just a comment. In other words, we’re all in this together; 3D and non-3D, individual and what we might call our mental or at least non-3D community.

You see, anything widens out, at least potentially, if you concentrate. Slower isn’t necessarily deeper, but it may be. It’s up to what you do with it. Faster may get you safely over thin ice; not necessarily, but maybe. It is, as we say, all a matter of how you live it.

So, to return to my statement that was made too much at a gallop?

No need for us to spell it out for you. Sink into it. That is the advantage of writing, after all; the words don’t move.

It isn’t quite a matter of setting up problems so we will have things to choose among.

No, not Shaw’s “moral gymnasium.” So then, what?

I am forgetting the universal in thinking of the individual.

That’s the right idea, but – slower.

Tides

Well, in thinking of the choices and problems we face in life, it is tempting, or maybe I should say it is habitual, for us to think of our situation in isolation, because that is of course how it will present itself. And I see the relevance of the allusion to speed. In our day-to-day situations, we are usually skating, just having enough to deal with, moment by moment, and perhaps little enough time – even if we have the inclination – to examine what comes more closely, slower. Because maybe any situation, any set of choices, offers insight into larger things, if we have the time and inclination to feel our way into it.

Your lives are never accidentally dropped into circumstances. Inner and outer are the same thing seen differently, remember, one through direct feed via intuition (or, non-3D link), the other through sensory apparatus and extensions. So where is the possibility for meaningless occurrence? Not every choice is momentous; that doesn’t mean that it and its context are meaningless.

Slowly, feeling my way into it, as you suggested. So, our lives are bound into the times we live; we know that about our outer circumstances. That means we are equally bound into the times we live internally. Have to be, since it is the same thing. Which means our thoughts and feelings and all are caught in a tide. Have to be. We are not independent, though we think we are; we are independent to a degree, and social to a degree.

This should be obvious to someone who has studied astrology and seen the tides running through the lives of everyone on Earth, not just any one given person. What the tides react on, or let’s say individually affect

Let me.

Go.

The cosmic tides, call them, are what they are, and they are that as a sort of background for us all. But that isn’t what we experience. We experience the result of the interaction between the tide and the individual we are, shaped at a particular moment of time and place. [That is, shaped at birth.] So, we all live in the same – circumambient, since you like that word – cosmic tide, but the individual is affected by that tide differently depending upon what that tide works on; that is, what it finds pre-formed [by previous decisions] at any given moment.

Didn’t we posit vast impersonal forces on the one hand, and individual complicated pipes for those winds to play through?

Yes, clear enough now, in this context.

So was it worth while to be rousted out of bed?

I may cease to answer rhetorical questions.

Yes, good. We smile too. But you see.

Well, I see further implications, too, accurate or not. It seems to imply that certain problems can only be worked with at certain times.

Again, just a little slower.

What I mean is, it’s just what astrology would tell us: At any given moment, certain things are easier for the given individual (depending upon his or her composition) and other things harder. Does this quite imply that whatever problem or opportunity surfaces at any given moment is the best thing to concentrate on?

Easiest, anyway. “Best” is a matter of value and judgment.

And there’s our hour. Well, it turned out to be pretty productive, I think. Not what I would have expected.

There is something to be said for taking what comes.

I do know that. At least, for my kind of person. Other types tend to shape things more, it seems to me.

Hammers make poor screwdrivers. Wrenches make poor drill-bits. Every implement to its own uses.

Thanks as always.

[And as a sort of PS, I had already closed the book when it occurred to me – with help? – that this entry is an example of taking what comes. They began where I was and continued as they were able to. Maybe from their point of view they’re always doing that.]

Nothing at all. Okay, thanks.

Wednesday, October 16, 2019

Shall we do more headlines, this morning?

We can try. You will find this easier, and harder, than our usual plodding. Let’s see how it goes.

When we speak of evil, remember that we refer not to appearance of evil, nor personal preferences rooted in one’s values, nor things that seem evil until seen in greater context. Beyond all these categories, there is real, objective, evil, the twin to real, objective, good.

We know that many people have argued that evil is only appearance but it is not so. In a binary universe, good is paired with evil, and the fact that many things that are not evil are called evil does not change the fact that some things are evil, and you know it in practical life, even when your philosophic position or your intellectual preference would argue it away.

Yes, this is ground many times gone over.

Well, it is important, for if all choice is a matter only of personal preference, then values hang in the air, anchored to nothing, and then life would be, in truth, the meaningless arbitrary game it sometimes appears to be.

• The basis of life in duality is good v. evil in tension.
• Like all 3D phenomena, these are realities of the larger All-D reality, manifesting in 3D’s special circumstances.
• It isn’t that you are born ignorant; you are born with tendencies and preferences and potential.
• Life is thus not a school but a chance (and a necessity) for you to choose what you will manifest. It is boot camp in that you are being forced by circumstance to develop and use certain skills. It is a gymnasium in that it provides you an environment in which to exercise them.
• Life in 3D is not isolated from life in the greater sense, no matter that it appears to be so.

Are we divided into armies or families that are good or evil, or all we all a mixture?

Both, at the same time.

Can we change sides with different incarnations? I seem to get, immediately, that as our mixture of elements varies by incarnation, the answer is, “It can be so.”

Again, look to your spiritual and religious traditions. You needn’t be bound by their rules nor pledge your allegiance to them as corporate bodies, but you would be foolish to ignore so large and well-examined a body of information.

I take that to say that we are mixtures of good and evil; that we often do evil almost against our own will; that we are sometimes tempted; that one on either path may be seduced from it into the other.

The left-hand and right-hand path aren’t quite the same as evil v. good; closer to selfish v. all-encompassing. But close enough. In practice, you will find temptation enough on all sides, and even the lure of being all good may be a temptation from the proper path of wholeness. Any one of you is a mixture of prior individuals who were mixtures of qualities.

If our mixture in this life were merely mixtures of qualities per se, life wouldn’t be nearly as rich as it is. I, having 10 other “past” lives, say, have 10 definitely-formed rocks in the bag. If I had only the sum of the qualities they encompass, it would be a bag of sand.

Less structured, correct, and not a bad analogy. Your lives are more structured internally than you sometimes realize. More headlines:

• “Past” lives and psychological complexes are often the same reality differently described.
• “Past” lives, remember, are not finished, completed, polished, portraits or statutes. They, and you, interact.
• That interaction takes place seemingly in 3D, actually in All-D, and the difference is significant.
• The 3D is for choice in constricted circumstances; it is for shaping, or let’s say for self-shaping. You are the spindle and 3D is the lathe, only in some respects the spindle operates the lathe it is being shaped by.
• But 3D is not an end in itself. It is a means toward an end, not “3D life for 3D life’s sake.”

It is not a meaningless show, nor an illusion without substance, though this does not mean that you can see it clearly. Perhaps we might call it reality veiled by illusion.

So give us some more headlines about good and evil.

That might mislead, because larger subjects easily tend to float in midair, slipping away from practical concerns and becoming just mind-play. Nothing wrong with that, but it is not what we are after.

So then how do you anchor the subject?

In human conduct, always; in human experience inner and outer.

So, for instance?

• Anything you are ashamed to admit may or may not be evil (it may be merely social conditioning), but it is the first place to look.
• Things that you know are evil but that you feel within you do not convict you of evil; they convict you of being human. No one can live in duality without incorporating some of the evil in the world. But: Do you express it? Do you consent to it? Do you identify with it?
• If you say to yourself, “Evil per se does not really exist,” into what category do you place torturing animals, children, other innocents, even the guilty?
• Some of life is a choice of values, but other aspects are a choice between real evil and real good, or at least between real evil and neutrality.

We’re going to meet resistance on this point. I can’t quite see why; The same people who deny the existence of evil usually (in my experience) would never dream of committing it.

And there is your clue. It is in the imagination of evil that you can see the potential in real life, just as with any other manifestation.

I think you just said, it is important somehow that we form an active picture of the existence of evil.

In its absence you cannot form an accurate idea of life. The Transcendentalists tended to wave it away – but then the question of slavery hung in the air to remind them that life trumps theory.