Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

Friday, April 11, 2025

6:10 a.m. Two things Jon said require treatment at length: (1) Aspiration and finding the key to health, and (2) How to ask for the key.

Perhaps we can pursue that?

I said, not belief or belief in any rote system. It was to these that I began to oppose aspiration as a route to pursue, and it is with these as foils that we should pursue the matter.

You mean, I think, that thinking of aspiration as a contrast to belief or to rote will make the point clearer.

It is hard to say, “Yes, that is what I just said,” without it sounding like impatience. It isn’t; it is saying, yes, you got the sense of it.

Any course of action may usually be divided into three. In fact, you might make a rule of thumb: Conditions of duality are usually resolved by turning two into three.

Gurdjieff’s positive and negative and reconciling principles.

You can see that two is a tug-of-war, and three is a reconciling into a system.

I do. What would be deadlock in two becomes synthesis in three. So aspiration is the reconciling principle between belief and rote?

I said it would take a while, but we’re already on our way, I see. Yes, you could look at it that way. But that’s a pretty bold leap, and I can guarantee that you’ve left a lot of people behind. Not everybody, but a lot.

Well, I’m willing to go slower. You drive the argument and I’ll drive the pen.

Belief in a set of rules, belief in miracles, belief in possibility. That’s one way to look at it. But let’s restate it in terms of attitudes, of preferences, or let’s say of inclinations by temperament.

Some people believe in rules. They follow cookbooks, and, in the absence of a cookbook, are inclined to disbelieve in the possibility of producing a result in any organized, predictable way. To this kind of temperament, if it cannot be reduced to rules, it is problematical at best, and certainly cannot be relied on.

Many people’s reaction to ESP, etc.

Exactly. If it gets established to the point of an understandable predictability, they will have no objection to recognizing it, but until then, it doesn’t exist as much more than a rumor, to them.

Now, there’s no use decrying such a mentality. Like everything else that exists, it has its place, or it wouldn’t exist. But you can see that in the current state of affairs, such people cannot obtain health through faith-healers, say.

But if they happen to, their belief-system crumbles.

Not exactly. If their temperament is such that they must have rules, they perhaps improvise rules that seem to fit the new facts to be accommodated. They don’t usually become a different type of person; rather, they adjust their inventory of known or probably facts.

By contrast, every religion has an underpinning of miraculous occurrences – healings not the least of them – and many people are convinced by miracles who could never put their faith in a set of rules.

Me, for one.

Well, you in a way. You are open to miracles from a certain direction, but not from others. And in fact that’s a good example of aspiration.

I don’t get it yet.

Let’s first finish with belief. Devotees of strong enough faith can move mountains, just as promised, only it would never occur to them to try to move mountains; moving their own lives and the center of their lives is enough.

Miracles happen. Those of a certain temperament are not only able and even anxious to believe in them, they thereby enable them. (That is, they make them possible by providing fertile ground.) Those of other temperaments not only do not experience miracles, they actively resist experiencing miracles.

PSYCOP.

Yes, that’s an example in a secular field. Strong anti-faith, that cares less that things be this way or that, but cares passionately that they not be one certain way.

You have to understand, miracles as a psychological phenomenon are based in a strong belief in a contrary mundane reality. If you casually believed that it is possible for the dead to come back to life, you wouldn’t be particularly startled if you saw it happen. But if you were firmly convinced that the dead never return to life, such a premature resurrection would be paradigm-shattering – yet would also confirm that the world is normally the way you were thinking of it.

I see that. The stronger the belief in what looks obvious, the more startling an exception is, and at the same time, that exception is placed firmly in the realm of the ordinary, only it is the exception that they say proves the rule.

And these two temperaments could be looked at as antagonists that could not be reconciled, but then there is aspiration.

The joker in the deck? Trickster?

If you must. Not a very scientific way to look at it, but then that in itself illustrates the point. There is a temperament that isn’t quite rule-based, and doesn’t quite have a firm enough belief in a set of governing concepts to be startled by miracles. It is, let’s say, fluid, ready to flow with the slightest tilt of the playing-field.

But only in certain directions.

More like, not in certain directions. It’s a fine distinction but an important one.

Oh, I see it, all right. The way I put it implies a more constricted flow than the way you put it.

You can do better than that.

To say, “only in certain directions” implies, most of the circle is off-limits but there are a few possibilities. To say, “not in certain directions” implies that most of the circle is available, with only a certain part ruled off-limits. A nuance, but, I see, an important one. We aren’t as much closed-off in general as we are closed-off to a few possibilities. I for instance would refuse to believe in any strictly mechanistic or deterministic interpretation of things. Somebody else might refuse to believe in any supernatural or superstitious interpretation.

That’s right.

Well, this hasn’t been particularly difficult or complicated, but I can see why you wanted to consider it separately rather than as an aside. And I guess we should save “How to look for the key” for another time, an essay of its own. Thanks, Jon.

Call this “aspiration” if you wish.

At this last minute I am getting a qualm that suggests we didn’t deal with this thoroughly enough.

What we said will serve, and if occasion calls for further explanation, it can come at its own time.

Okay.

 

Thursday, April 10, 2025

5:30 a.m. So, Jon, if you have a topic, I have the pen in hand.

Notice in print what you just noticed in thought.

I surprised myself, realizing that I had written more than a page here, not noticing that I do not have my glasses. This, despite the fact that my vision is getting worse. It suggests that our physical ailments aren’t quite what they seem, but are in some way a combination of psychology with the physiology. That’s putting it only vaguely. You were a doctor: How does it look to you now from your new perspective?

It is time for you and others to begin to put together various hints that you have stored in different compartments. Faith healing, miracle cures, psychosomatic illness, homeopathy, all the various kinds of “crank” cures, energy medicine, prayer, the quirks of genetics (that is, the inexplicable exceptions and immunities), plagues, what may be called generational illnesses – widespread maladies of one age that more or less disappear in another, and were more or less out of the blue to begin with. Put all these hints together with the thought that all is one, that you in 3D all resonate with one another and with the times. Remember that beneath all appearances is consciousness, or call it universal mind.

Mix well, particularly mix with some active thinking, some active interacting, and see what you get.

I in particular?

Everyone is “in particular,” and everyone’s answer is going to be as different from everyone else’s as each is different in soul, or call it in psychological essence. But yes, here you in particular. That’s all we have to work with. Other pens at other times can get what you miss and may miss what you can get. That’s always so.

Well, at any rate this is a promising start. Let’s see. Immediately I get what I have always believed. Hell, as a boy I knew it (and have never ceased to know it): if I only had the key, I could in effect reach out and adjust something and I wouldn’t have to deal with asthma anymore. But I could never find the thing to be adjusted, let alone the key to adjust it with.

Do you think so? Isn’t that your whole life’s pursuit?

I suppose. For one thing, I learned that sincerely desiring isn’t the same as acquiring, yet that it has its own rewards in its effect on your course. But this is too pat an answer. What are you getting at? You spent years dealing with kidney failure, and dialysis, and transplants, so you know.

Ah, but what is the main difference between you and me?

Attitudinally?

Don’t search, let it emerge.

You knew so much more about the physical mechanism of the body than I did or do. I think it reinforced a certain set of limitations in what you saw as possible, like Bruce Moen after his stroke, convinced that healing could come only in one way, which of course it then did.

It’s an important point – though not central today as a theme – that too much knowledge of specifics may have the side-effect of imprisoning you in that way of seeing things. Ideally you would learn as much detail as you could, but without losing the knowledge that the system you were studying was one way to see it, with its particular advantages and disadvantages, its unique opportunities for insight and its unique blindnesses. Ideally you could be a homeopath and an osteopath and an allopath and a faith healer and a voodoo witch doctor, all at the same time. And of course even such a broadly ranging combination would have its invisible limits on what it could do, limits imposed by what it allowed for.

I see that. In 3D we can never get a full view of anything, because we always have to have a viewpoint – hence, a perspective, hence a vanishing point, hence a systemic distortion.

And that’s why everybody looks at everybody else’s system and says, “That’s great, except for –“.

I remember years ago reading Buckminster Fuller saying he realized as a young man that everybody’s viewpoint was limited by their experience of life.

So to return to the main point here, nobody is fated by anything external. Everybody’s limitations and constraints and opportunities and advantages are sealed in. Your character is your fate, somebody said. [It was Emerson.] Well, your character is also your escape route, if you know how to use it.

That doesn’t mean we can get perfect health.

Who says?

A lifetime’s experience, for one.

Your interpretation of a lifetime’s experience, and, at that, a lifetime’s experience so far.

But if we spend a lifetime looking for what we don’t find, what does that prove but that perhaps it isn’t there to be found?

Since when do you doubt that kind of inner knowing that the boy had and that you still have? Particularly when it is inexplicable and contrary to common sense?

All right, I get that we usually pose the wrong question. We think, how can I get rid of this or that?

Yes, and what should you ask?

More like, How can I cease to be the person with this or that, and be something else?

Now, a recent example in your life, PTSD. It is clearly a psychosomatic illness, involving mind as well as body. (But then, what illness isn’t?) Any body worker can tell you how specific memories can be held in body tissue, only to release when that tissue is physically manipulated. Why should that be, if a psychosomatic illness were only in the mind? But maybe it isn’t as simple as it appears. Suppose all illness is psychosomatic, and is as much in the mind as in the body.

I’m thinking of the model I worked out years ago and put into Imagine Yourself Well. I said what you are saying.

Only, your bias is so much toward the mental – the psychic – that it undervalues the “merely” physical. You saw one-half the opportunity, you might say. You are plenty open to the possibility of miracles – but not if they require physical intervention as well!

Laughing. It sounds pretty ridiculous, when you put it that way.

Actually, not ridiculous, but certainly not balanced, not common-sensical. It is the hardest thing, to marry common sense and higher sense.

Particularly when we’re caught between – or maybe I should say when we’re balancing between – two belief systems.

Actually, in your case and in many others, you are living among atomized belief systems, a little of this, a little of that, because you are living in the time between ages: not yet the Age of Aquarius, not quite still the Age of Pisces. (These are analogies, but productive ones.)

So, practically –?

Practically, try to be aware of what you do – the way you live – that puts obstacles in the way of perfect health. This isn’t a matter of belief, or all of Mary Baker Eddy’s followers would enjoy perfect health. It isn’t a matter of specific diet or regimen, or everybody would know just what to do and could do it by rote, on automatic pilot. It isn’t a matter of aspiration, even or – well, that’s a different topic that in fact we might profitably pursue, but not as an afterthought.

Could you have overcome your kidney failures?

You don’t know what you are asking. It’s like saying could Jane Roberts have risen from her bed, as Seth assured her she could. If someone asked you, could you overcome asthma, what would you be obliged by truth to say?

I’d say, yes, I believe I should be able to, but I haven’t found the key.

And I would say, “Not that you spent much time looking.” And I would say it of myself, and of Jane Roberts, and probably of nearly everybody who ever reads this.

And if we don’t know how to look?

That’s another topic in itself, and this is enough for now. Are you satisfied to be back in action?

I am. And I get the sense that addressing you – or anyone else – specifically, increases my chances of connection..

Which is why mediums used to have to use “controls” – specific spirit guides – in denser times. But you have lived into lighter days; take advantage of the new opportunities.

Thanks, Jon. Today’s theme?

You might call it “Health and being.” The title will make more sense to you later.

Okay. Again, thanks.

 

Wednesday, April 9, 2025

5:35 a.m. Have ben reading Walden steadily, but almost through now. I have hoped for another session such as yesterday’s. but I don’t think I have energy enough.

Return to Brunton rather than Thoreau (much less [Earl] Diggers [creator of Charlie Chan]), and perhaps your wells will refill. Thoreau inspired you, but that was long ago, and perhaps you now find in him confirmation rather than new inspiration. When scarcely into manhood, you had your eyes opened by him, but by this time you read him – recognizing, it is true, but recognizing is not pioneering. One pioneers for oneself, quite as much as for one’s neighbors, and in fact whether neighbors follow you into Kentucky is mostly irrelevant to the question of where you are going.

That sounds a little like what Henry himself would have written.

It shouldn’t surprise you. Those closest to you will manifest in one resemblance or another. Can you see – we know you can – how vastly more sophisticated your ideas are now of relationships in time, next to where you began?

Of course. Who could go through so extensive a tutelage over 25 years and not be transformed by it? For which – I know you know – I am grateful. You did help rearrange my ideas until I felt the world making sense. Or, I suppose I should say, you helped me rearrange my sense of the world.

I am moved suddenly – listening? – to see if Jon [Holt] wants a word.

I do. You and I never talked about Thoreau, and he was not prominent in my thinking, but I find that he and I are more alike than I would have guessed.

Well, you certainly share an acerbic quality, come to think of it. You didn’t suffer fools gladly; hardly at all.

We shared a thread, you see; that’s my point. Henry, I, you. It made an instinctive sympathy among us.

I feel that, now that you say it.

Sympathy between people is less about ideas or even interests, than something more personal. Like natures

Lost it. “Like natures” was a wrong turn somehow.

That’s one example of how your attunement sharpened over the years. It was a sort of blurring of focus, but you picked it up right away. What I meant was that people who share a thread, a strand, will be linked at a level well below consciousness, and it will mark them the way two brothers may be marked so that even if they themselves see mainly the differences between them, outsiders will first sense the similarities.

Now of course, everybody is part of all one thing, ultimately, but that isn’t as helpful on an individual level, any more than it would be to say that Florida and California are all part of the earth, so they aren’t much different.

On a human scale, they are. And on a human scale, if you are going to make meaningful distinctions, you have to see distinctly! You have to say, a pumpkin and an eggplant are not the same thing, no matter what they may have in common.

Understood. So what is the point here? I know you have one, and I suspect it had to do with my reading Thoreau again.

It has to do with the thought you scarcely remember to have had – that I helped send your way, you might say – that it was our talks last December that discussed the sins and virtues in a way that might help you write the essay you have already half forgotten about.

It is more complicated than I have seen yet, isn’t it, this interacting?

Yes. You tend to think of things as more straightforward than they are, more straight-ahead. But things curl around, and retrace their steps, and flow  back and forth, and all at speed, so your conscious mind simplifies the result into an idea it can hold without getting dizzy.

It isn’t, you contact me, I contact Henery, Henry contacts Emerson, say. It isn’t even, you contact me or I you, and we banter back and forth like this appears to be. And it isn’t as simple as a two-way conversation, with one or more people butting in or joining in or taking over. And it also isn’t a free-for-all. Communication has structure, but it isn’t Roberts Rules of Order.

Go ahead.

Go back to your idea of a 3D mind being like iron in a magnetic field. Think of communications as being a dance of various pieces of iron in that kind of suspensory field. You can see that it  there would be laws of nature applying, but they wouldn’t necessarily be simple and certainly wouldn’t be unvarying in application. It would be complicated. But someone looking at the field from outside – and still more from inside – might not be able to follow every little fluctuation of influence. He would simplify it not so much in his mind as in his perceptions.

I get the idea of that. He would see it simplified because, say, the movements would be too quick and too complex for his eyes to see or his mind to discern.

And therefore this is all at an unconscious level, you see. You can’t be conscious of what you can’t perceive as input.

On a sensory level, not on an intuitive level.

Of course, but in this case the difference isn’t as important as you might think. The point is, as you very well know, if you aren’t conscious of it, you can’t have control of it, even to the point of thinking about it.

Not even abstract thought, sort of blue-sky “what if?”

That’s what I’m getting to. Where do you think such ideas some from , since they don’t come from deduction from sensory experience?

They don’t?

They don’t.

I guess, from our non-3D component, directly or indirectly.

Exactly, and talking to the guys, or my talking to you, or you working with Rita, is all the “indirectly” we’re talking about.

I’ve almost got it. We help each other, across lives, by suggesting things that are clear where we are (for whatever reason) but not so clear to others.

That’s the idea.

This builds on yesterday’s.

Spell it out.

Every life is individual in effect. We are all specialists in our time, our place. This means each of us is open to deeper insight from one particular insight than perhaps anybody else is or ever could be. But we can pass this insight around among ourselves, and it looks to us like they are free-floating ideas, or perhaps they merely feel to us like our own ideas. “Oh, what a bright body I am!”

So there’s the conversation you hoped to have and thought you probably wouldn’t be able to have.

Thanks, Jon. It is very good to be in touch again. I had wondered if we had drifted out of reach of each other.

Does your left arm drift out of reach of your right arm? Have you ever heard that “All is one”?

I did hear that somewhere, come to think of it.

Not every rule people make up is true, and even if true, not every rule is absolute. The world will give you what you need.

I sure couldn’t have gotten you to agree with that when you were in the body!

You get what you need, not necessarily what you want.

Like the song. Okay, Jon, thanks and let’s do this some more. I may call this “Extension, Part II.”

Try, “Productive complications.”

Or I may try that. Thanks.

 

Tuesday, April 8, 2025

5:30 a.m. Reading in A Search in Secret Egypt, remembering my own time in the King’s Chamber, but [unlike Paul Brunton in the 1930s] surrounded by the others of Ruth Shilling’s party, I having done no preparatory fasting, but wanting some form of contact or knowing, and not receiving it.

Did I waste that opportunity?

You made the opportunity; seized it, used it, were quietly transformed by it – and at the same time were apparently unaffected.

Two levels of consciousness.

Certainly. One level clasped hands with – reunified – other levels of “long ago.” The normal level of everyday 3D consciousness linked this “normal” experience with your normal life.

I think you mean, my physical presence in the chamber served to link my consciousness to another part of myself in other times.

That is a carelessly put approximation. By that we mean, not that you are careless in your description, but that it is entirely insufficient, because in the absence of context it must be so.

Say more?

Your 3D consciousness may be described as a magnetic field in the midst of the forces of the moment (This is why consciousness fluctuates so.) Your non-3D consciousness is immune to the pressures of the 3D moment, being outside that crucible – except insofar as it is connected to your 3D consciousness. You see? It is the eternal (that is, the outside-of-time) linked to the temporal. An inherently unstable stability, a paradoxical yoking of the eternally-still to the eternally-moving.

This is why human consciousness has the potential to touch the non-sensory eternal. Which end of the polarity do you connect to – identify with – at any given moment? If the fluctuating end, you experience “everyday life” as if it were the reality. If the eternal end, you experience the infinite as if it were the reality. But for compound beings, the reality can only be both, not one or the other, regardless of how one sees or conceptualizes it.

So with a certain amount of effort we may become conduits.

Yes – but it isn‘t as simple even as that, for the effort may come from one end or the other. It may be effort in your present-day life but it may also be, or may be instead, effort from the opposite end of the polarity – from the “you” that you were in other lives. And in fact it is still less simple yet. The effort may be being made – and perhaps also resisted – by more than one other, for it is not so simple as one present-day-you and one previous-you. It is more like a community of present-day you and other communities of you in other times.

A community on the 3D end experiencing interaction with perhaps many communities on the non-3D end.

Yes. “All is one.” You are each communities of strands, each of which is a community of strands, so that individuality is always somewhat illusion. It is real, but never absolute.

It is the kind of thought that is hard to hold in mind. I feel like I ought to be gasping with effort, yet it feels perfectly understandable – and totally beyond my real grasp, at the same time. I wish I had an image to hold it. Words are slippery.

Produce images and we will comment. As usual, what you produce through effort will stay with you, while what you might receive as a gift might not.

Well, let’s see.

[Waiting.]

“Tug-of-war” is the first image that arises.

A good image, including the element of opposition – of unity through the tension of opposition. Try again.

[Waiting.]

Alliances, cooperating on either end. But this isn’t very helpful.

Perhaps more so than you realize. Alliances are fragile, require continual effort, are aimed at a purpose. Again?

[Waiting.]

I get the sense of smoke signals and connect with Thoreau’s poem “Smoke” that I put on my blog for today. The poet as communicator. Our attempts to communicate from this end. No, our attempts to listen at this end, but I get a sense now that we ought to be more aware that we are also speaking from this end.

Should it be any different for any moment of time just because that is where you are experiencing it? Those other lives were – are – speaking from their time, you are speaking from yours. The 3D-moment tempts you always to think your present different from all other present moments, and of course it is different in context but the same in nature. Tuesday, April 8, 2025, is not essentially  different from all the rest of time, and how could it be? Why should it be? And so with every other moment.

So, tug-of-war, alliances, smoke signals. Again?

[Waiting.]

Smiling. The Internet.

No bad analogy, and one you have used before. Only, you see, using it in connection with the three previous images produces a somewhat fuller understanding.

I do see. And your preferred method of multiple alternate images works well as usual.

So now return to the night in the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid. That present-moment experience of the time is now more than six years in your past. It is as far from your present present-moment awareness as, say, Joe Indian, or the Egyptian Joseph. But no farther! There is always only the now. That “now” may be seen either from the 3D point of view, something always moving, or from the non-3D point of view, something forever existing.

As soon as the moment moves us along, the present-moment we just experienced becomes inaccessible to us sensorily and can be accessed only through memory or imagination.

Yes – and who just wrote that sentence?

It’s true. I had the feeling – am having it now – of watching my hand guide the pen, and, in a sense, watching my mind receive the words. It is a slight distance between the 3D moment and this not-quite-3D-only observer/participant. But – words! – while what I am saying is true, the very nature of words somewhat falsifies it by making it seem something other than what it is. Words put an aura around everything they try to describe, can’t be helped except to make note of it.

This was good work. Type it up and send it to the world – but don’t forget to read it and re-read it and hold it, don’t let this one sink out of your sight.

Profound thanks and appreciation. These days – as you know – communications at this level are rarer and their value is clearer than when they came every day I cared to make the effort.

Title this one, perhaps, “Extension.”

I wouldn’t have thought of that title. Good idea. Thanks.

 

Friday, April 4, 2025

Open for business, I guess. Things changing, but I don’t have a starting-point even for a question.

Your extensive examination yesterday of the morning’s dream was good work.

It helped to have Charles’ perspective on it. The one thing he picked up that I had missed proved quite illustrative and suggested the larger theme. But I don’t intend to share the dream on my blog.

No need to. We never asked you for transparency greater than you can bear. But notice how well the decoding worked, how helpful.

We did as well, at least, as I used to do with Fran Slocumb more than 30 years ago.

Yes and you know why.

I do now that you put it in mind. (At least, I assume that’s what just happened.) I am so much more unobstructed between 3D and non-3D than I was in those days, I can do more on my own, or with a little help from a friend, than I could do then with a trained Jungian analyst.

And that is one more benefit of openness, as we have said many times: life more abundantly.

Interesting. I get a realization that as we progress, our baseline shifts, we not necessarily noticing. Makes sense.

That is the story of anyone’s life: As they change, the baseline shifts forward or backward. They gain ground or they lose it. But no matter where they are – and no matter which way they have been moving lately – every present moment offers the freedom to move. You can strive upward, you can coast (or plummet) downward; it is up to you, always.

Your message of hope and promise has not varied in 30 years, and it is a great comfort.

You are welcome.

I get the sense I should do an essay on choice, on the virtues as decisions and the sins as sliding (I can’t find the word I want; it means a process of not applying ourselves, and losing ground by it).

Hear this: Any such essay on your part would have great value, as you are the only person who has received these messages first-hand, which means as gestalts rather than as words, even though they have often come as words in conversations with us. You will have access to all the unspoken nuances and faint breaths of meaning that surround the words and surround even the concepts. That doesn’t mean you are required to do the work – who could do the requiring? – but it does mean, if you do it, it will be worth doing.

I’ll bear it in mind.

You think, “I don’t have the energy, the concentration, these days,” but as always, the task will provide the energy.

That hasn’t been obvious.

It is sometimes a matter of overcoming an initial obstacle: Once you get into the flow, the means will be provided.

You could outline it for me, perhaps.

You don’t want much!

Is that so big a deal?

Bigger than you realize. You are asking us to perform a sequential task from a non-sequential base.

Oh come! What are you doing right now but performing a sequential task?

We – you and we together – are doing that.

So how would it be any different? I’d still have to write out your caputs.

Very well. Give us a moment.

Still after all these years surprising you need time to regroup sometimes.

“All these years” means something different to you than to us. It is the difference between two cities if you bicycle or take an airplane. We are the plane, so there isn’t much “time” difference between our departure and arrival. This can be a problem as well as an advantage.

Care to elaborate?

Do you remember when Rita, a few months into your collaboration, said to us that we had told her something “a long time ago,” and we laughed?

I understand. In the perspective of 24 years, it is clear that the lapse of a few months was just nothing.

But she had changed. You had changed. You had bicycled a laborious way that we had merely traversed in a step. The disparity in how you and we experience 3D time is not to be underrated as a potential obstacle. But of course it can be overcome; indeed, our history for 24 years demonstrates that it can be overcome. Still, it exists.

In any case –

An outline of an essay:

• Life as choice and creation.
• Navigating sequential 3D time as an organizing principle.
• Difficulties in perseverance.
• Too much input; too many “you”s.
• Sins as errors you fall into.
• Virtues as choices you may use to advantage.
• Brief specifics of the seven sins and why they impede.
• Brief specifics of the four or seven virtues and how they assist.
• Coda on why it is important.

There is your essay, if you will write it.

Yes, very good. And I get the sense that there is a reason you couldn’t actually write it, though you could – and just did – provide the general outline.

Do you wish to become a trance channel?

Emphatically not.                                                                 

Well?

Now I’m wondering if the right AI could write it.

The process of informing the AI would be more tedious than writing the essay – and how would you propose to give it all the intangibles we mentioned?

I see your point.

Title this “Baselines” if you wish.

Yes. Good title. Thanks.

 

Tuesday, April 1, 2025

My friend Frank Pasciuti, knowing that I have misplaced or lost my copy of Paul Brunton’s A Search in Secret Egypt, surprised me yesterday by giving me a copy he had just bought.

9:50 a.m. If I can read Brunton slowly enough, I’ll get more out of it than the first time. And if I sit quietly long enough, I will get something too. Surely I have waited long enough! But maybe waiting is mostly what I have been doing.

Not quite that flat and dire. You have learned as you went along, it wasn’t just waiting.

I think my record of whatever progress I made has been warped by my automatic assumption that things must be put into words, when some things can’t be put into words.

Travelers’ tales always have the same obstacles to overcome. How make words or even pictures convey the reality that is so much deeper, less tangible, less defined?

You do the best you can. But that isn’t necessarily very good.

How would you know how to mark your own paper?

The end-result of so many decades of endless searching  – no matter how often I was diverted to other things – ought to have amounted to more. I am resigned to dying ignorant, but I wish I could at least have come closer to my sense of what is possible.

You – and anyone still identified with 3D consciousness – are entirely incapable of judging.

I know, I know: We never have the data.

Well, you don’t. not because of lack of effort or ability but because of the circumstances. One could say 3D is not for understanding but for action.

Splendid. Action out of ignorance, always swinging in the dark.

That is how it may look if you pretend for the moment that your 3D component could be disconnected from your non-3D component. But how could that happen? Regardless what you are aware of, or are willing to listen to, the connection cannot be broken, because it isn’t really a connection at all, except conceptually. 3D and non-3D components are part of one thing, not two. They are a polarity, not a set of fraternal twins. How would you et out to fracture a unit along its polarizing line? You might imagine it, but it can’t really be done. So, you are never alone as a 3D-only creature, regardless how it may sometimes feel.

So, we’re swinging in the dark (no 3D clues) but are being guided by non-3D radar.

You could put it that way. Disorientation is not the same as being lost and alone.

Well, I’ll keep keeping on, hoping that what I feel is guidance and not robots or fantasy.

There is always that risk, but even if you stray from the beam, you can always find it again, and go back to following it. As you know, for most of an airplane’s journey it is off course, and it doesn’t matter. Little course corrections will get you there, and that is vastly more practical than trying desperately to stay on course every minute. Navigate by your pole-star, and relax a little.

 

A suggested technique for going deeper, and initial results (or non-results, if you want to look at it that way), for what they’re worth.

Saturday, March 29, 2025

[David Poynter was one of my “past lives,” the Welsh journalist and psychic investigator who I feel has been one of the most prominent influences in this life.]

8 a.m. I wonder, is David Poynter less prominent [within me] and one or more others more so? I still think in terms of writing and of psychic exploration, but that isn’t what I do. I talk to Charles, I read, I ponder my life.

David, are you still here guiding?

Observing, more. What makes you think you need guiding at your advanced age?

My advanced age, mostly! I can see what a mess I’ve made of the practical side of life.

But if I was your guide then –

Well anyway, what’s our current relationship?

You always have what you need, if not in one guise, then in another.

Meaning, I take it, that if we leave off pursuing one thing, other things are always in the stack.

It would be a poor life that could be fully expressed.

So what is my current program? Amateur psychotherapy?

Not so bad a way to put it – on yourself as much as on others. As you noted, the insights come in for you as your express them for others.

I wish I had access to my history. I‘d like to experience some of those “past lives.”

Sequential processing – reading – won’t do it.

Yes, I realized that yesterday. In fact, reading may be just exactly the wrong thing to cultivate. So am I driven finally to meditation?

Just as you didn’t do channeling the way others did it, so you don’t need to do meditation as others do it. Sit quietly at your desk, with eyes open and mind blank, and proceed from there, noting down what comes and when it runs dry, then going back to sitting empty.

Allowing the larger “me” to drive.

Yes, but you in the passenger seat with eyes open.

I will try it. I realized yesterday, reading interferes not by giving me plots and characters to run around in my mind. Presumably it is the sequential nature of the activity that is the problem.

That causes and exaggerates the problem, yes.

So now I’ll try your suggested method.

[A couple of images.]

Can’t write every thought.

You can get the important ones – only how do you know ahead of time which are important? You don’t need to spell out the connectors, that’s what would take too long.

[A few more entries.]

So far, not a very productive meditation.

Remember George Chiari [the protagonist of Messenger, who learned meditation in a chapter I called “The Monkey”], and keep at it.

Eyes open prevents fantasy. Provides the alpha bridge, too, I think.

[Further entries.]

So many examples of my not running intellectual and emotional lives in sync. Very clear now. Listening to the literal words, not getting the meaning. Suddenly seeing that others had that problem with me – and I didn’t suspect it. They heard the words and not the intent.

[Tried again a couple of times during the day, ending with this entry.]

8:30 p.m. I haven’t had much luck so far. Some input, please.

You need to think of your readers. You are leaving your readers with no new entries to read.

 I am. But I don’t feel like working.

Not the point. You are trying to get to another level. Think of your readers.

Work for their sake, you mean, which is ultimately for my sake?

Seek, and record your seeking, as usual.

Since I’m not receiving input – other than what you’re giving me right now – I suppose I could describe the process and the hope.

Have you ever done anything else?

I don’t know what it amounts to. Something, not nothing. But what, I don’t know.