Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

Thursday, September 10, 2015

5 a.m. Dr. Jung, I remembered, last night, a dream I had on my visit to the island of Iona, back in 2003. But when I went looking in my computer journals for an account of the dream, I found that I had remembered it wrongly. It wasn’t one dream but two, and they didn’t say quite what I thought I remembered them saying. At the moment, though, I am a little surprised that I could have forgotten them at all, or that they should come to mind now.

Fill in the dreams and we can discuss them. Tomorrow, if you don’t care to do so at the moment.

I could find them and print them out now, if you think dealing with the computer won’t put me in too exterior a mood.

“It” won’t put anybody into any kind of mood. “It” may lure you if you are conflicted, or may surprise you if you are unconscious. But if you are aware and intent, why should doing anything for any reason change your orientation?

But we aren’t very conscious usually, nor very intent.

Being aware of lack of awareness is the antidote.

We’ll see. I’ll be back in a few minutes. Let’s see how many: it is 5:08 now.

5:18. Well, that was interesting, to say the least. I go up to my office and I find the computer left on, the Iona file already on screen, where apparently I had left it last night. I never leave the computer on when I’m finished with it, but put it in sleep mode. Yet there it was. And, although the long narrative is shot through with accounts of dreams, I find what I want easily enough – and find more that would be worth looking at. But I managed to restrain myself and print out just the excerpts I intended to ask about. So I guess I was able to preserve my continuity for ten minutes, anyway.

So how do we proceed?

Copy, and re-read, the first dream. Omit the correlations with conscious life and we will look only at the dream.

 [Sunday, June 8

“I am in the church that [My Scottish friend] Michael Ross and I were in yesterday. There is a service going on, I think.

“Two women go up to the priest – he is in the aisle. They want his help, but I from behind one of them say, “I know what you need, my dear, and I can help you. But it can’t be right now. This is not to do with you, just I don’t have the time right now.” This is accepted by all concerned. From within the dream, I am concerned lest it be 8 a.m. when I’m going to awaken (alarm set) but am glad to realize that it is not yet that, but about 3:30 real time.

“As we were coming out of the church – but still inside, in the aisle, toward the door – there was something. The woman to my left didn’t figure directly in the dream – I’m not sure she said anything – but the dream concerned the four of us, among so many strangers I did not know.

“I note that the priest and the women accepted that I had the knowledge and ability to help the woman. It was not presumption, nor a vying with the priest. I could help her as he (the church, I think) could not, and all concerned knew it. But not just yet – I had something else to do first. I stressed, it wasn’t her fault that I couldn’t help right away, it was that I wasn’t yet free to get to it. But I would be.”

The church you had visited had been destroyed during the reformation, and had lain waste for centuries, and had been slowly and laboriously rebuilt in the 20th century. You approved of the rebuilding, but were repelled by the present-day church’s leaflets on the walls and by the sight of a flesh-and-blood priest walking by.

Yes, I remember that well. I approved, but I was not a part of it and didn’t want to be, or couldn’t. I couldn’t even bring myself to pick up one of the leaflets. That was at Pluscarden, the day before I traveled on alone to Iona.

You were one of four in the dream, of course. The two women, the priest, and you. Three laity and a priest as the fourth. You were with the other two, and yet not with them. They were together, you were behind them, but the three of you were facing the priest, though he too was in the aisle. He was not on the altar, you see, but in the aisle.

Not quite him as only another member of the laity, though.

No, but not performing his priestly function, either. He embodied that function but he was not in the act of intermediating between humans and the divine.

And although I knew I could help one of them, I wasn’t ready yet.

Let us say the time wasn’t ready yet. You had something else to do first and so couldn’t help at the moment, but all concerned knew that it was only a matter of time. And your consciousness was aware that in “real life” it wasn’t time either; you didn’t have to leave your dream for external obligations – which fitted smoothly into the dream. Note that you, and the two women – only one of whom needed the help you could give – and the priest were four “among so many strangers” you did not know.

I am very much aware that what I don’t know about the dream, you or any analyst would know, or should know.

But maybe it isn’t everybody’s business. We don’t analyze in public.

All right, but then the second dream?

“Again at 6:15 a.m. I am up to record a dream:

“An experience that was almost suffocating in its intensity. I went into a church and proceeded down, down, down stairs to lower and lower – older and older – levels. I could see I was below the level of our civilization, where the steel foundations for it, the support of the structure, were. Construction was going on and I was concerned that I not interfere or get hurt. At a passageway, a ladder in front of me, a wooden ladder, very tall, of the A-shaped kind. A worker was sitting high up on the wall to the left. The ladder was tilted away from him [tilted onto one set of legs, on the right, its left-hand side in the air] though it was not falling. I gently pulled it down to sit firmly, and walked under it. I came to a level still far above the depths, I thought, though far below our time. But they had a press operating there, though it was not printing, but before printing. They asked if I would lend a hand for a few minutes – and hours later I was happily still there.

“They were not signatures but single sheets 8 ½ by 11 or larger, and were first individually written and colored – in many colors, not just red on black – and the sheets were collated and bound. It was full color printing, before printing, each sheet being individually prepared. [Here I sketched a sheet with the left third of the page being design and the right two-thirds being lines of text.]

“The dream ended there for the moment.”

You related it in your mind to my dream of going farther and farther beneath the basement of my house and discovering archaic levels of my psyche. That is a valid association in so far as it concerns the descent into historical realms. Your dream was leading you to the foundations of the church. Steel, thus rigid, modern and strong, and then below the upper levels, construction was going on.

Yes, I noticed that vaguely, although naturally I allowed for the vagaries of a dream’s logic. In real life, you don’t construct from the bottom up, nor from the bottom down by further excavation. I mean, you don’t construct from under an existing construction.

You persist in contrasting dream reality to “real life” although a part of you knows better.

The dream was “almost suffocating in its intensity.” It was meaningful and you knew it was meaningful. This closely concerned your life. You had no doubt of that. You were not part of the construction work going on – you didn’t want to interfere but you didn’t want to get hurt either. In short, you knew to keep your distance.

But then there was the ladder.

Ahead of you, in the direction you wanted to go, was a man on a very tall wooden (not steel) ladder. [But – I notice upon typing this up – the dream said he was on the wall, and the ladder was tipping away from him. Yet “Jung” proceeded as though my inaccurate recall was correct.] Although a man was sitting on it (that is, although he was not falling), one half of the A-shaped ladder was in the air, an unstable position. You pulled it – gently – until it sat firmly on both sets of legs – and then walked under the ladder and there you found what at first seemed a moment’s useful amusement but which turned out to occupy quite a bit of your time, happily but unconsciously.

Do you customarily walk under ladders? Is that not supposed to be bad luck, as well as perhaps slightly dangerous?

I had no sense of danger, and I had no sense of incurring bad luck. I can’t remember if I even thought about walking under the ladder as a sign of bad luck, either in the dream or later, writing it up.

You remembered the sensation of working happily with the press and the printers, but you did not pay attention to the fact that you had walked under the ladder you had stabilized, to get there.

Does this imply that in fact working further with the printers was a bit of bad luck?

It implies that you lost consciousness.

And if I hadn’t walked under the ladder?

You would have been left with a very different feeling –  “suffocating in its intensity.”

Hmm. So I let myself get diverted.

You were told earlier, you couldn’t help the woman yet, that you were not yet free to do so. No one and nothing implied that you were not free because of external circumstances (as if that could really happen, but we are holding to the conscious understanding here).

I had things to live, first.

That’s one way to look at it. Now continue to the third dream, three days later.

Only that one, or the others of which it was part?

We cannot do everything at once. Your hour is already over, even allowing for the time spend retrieving the file.

“There was some kind of building work being done in the church. And there was a man working who was somewhat skillful. I was involved with it at a less skilled level. The man had to quit. He couldn’t do it any more, there was something wrong. The posture hurt his feet, or something. I offered to do the work, or was asked, I forget which. The woman in charge of the thing said I had great [force?] The idea was that I could do the job, and otherwise it couldn’t be done.”

And the point, as you well knew and know yet, is that otherwise, it couldn’t be done. It doesn’t matter how much more skillful others may be – if only you can do the job, only you can do the job. Do you imagine that I felt up to the task life set for me?

I am well aware that this does not refer only to me but to those who read this. I’m merely noting that I know it.

Yes – but don’t forget that for you as well as for others there is something only you can do, well or badly, so you do not have the luxury of assuming that it doesn’t matter if you do it, it will be done by somebody else, and perhaps better. Your work can never be done by any but you yourself. Your inner work, your outer work. If you do not do it, your un-done outer work may perhaps be compensated for by the work of another, but it will remain un-done. And who is going to compensate for the work that you, as leader of your particular soul, are responsible to do?

Now, a word or two more, and we will dismiss class for the day. What do you understand the point to be, of today’s exploration?

I get that it may be time for me to consider that Iona manuscript again.

Not in the form you left it, but in the form you will have to find for it. Yes, and?

I always knew that the church was essential but that I couldn’t really be a part of it. I guess this showed me that I could help it get more grounded on the psychic side.

They won’t necessarily recognize the assistance, or appreciate it, but yes, demonstrating the everyday-ness of the nonphysical world in its interaction with the physical is a potential reconnection of a social institution with the basis of belief for people. It is an old, old wooden ladder, and a tall one, and the human at the top is not in danger of falling off, nor was the ladder in danger of falling over, but it is better when firmly placed on either side.

And one more thing.

It isn’t primarily about me and a manuscript, or printing, or helping others or placing the church on firmer footing. It is about me orienting myself correctly.

I will be very glad to continue our conversation whenever you find it convenient.

My thanks, and I think those of others whose interest you arouse now, let alone so many you have helped out of the wilderness in life and in your books. Till next time, then. (6:28 a.m.)

In preparing this entry, I realize that my friend Robert Clarke had commented on this dream after my visit in 2003,  saying:

“Doing construction work in the church, where the woman of authority (of the unconscious) says you have great force. You must do it, or it can’t be done. Now we are coming to it. This says it all. Building the church is building the Higher Self. Solomon building God’s temple means exactly the same. This may mean a divine incarnation, though it all takes place in the unconscious. Remember me saying that David begins the temple but Solomon completes it? Moses begins the Promised Land task and Joshua completes it. John the Baptist begins, Christ completes. Earlier, Osiris begins and Horus completes. The man in your dream begins and you have the chance to complete.

“St Francis was told by God to build the church, which he first took to mean the ruin he was in at the time. Then he took it to mean the Church itself. But it really meant building the structure of the Higher Self and this, as said, can indeed lead to a respiritualisation in the outer world. I have little doubt that you could build the structure of the Self yourself, maybe even go all the way. You have the right temperament, the thirst for spirituality, the basic goodness of heart, and the intelligence. I constructed the Self myself for some time, but couldn’t sustain it. It takes superhuman powers, not to rise above and inflate, as Nietzsche mistakenly took it, but rather to deflate in humility and self-sacrifice, to empty oneself of the world. It depends how far one wants to go. But, as said above, it is a very heavy burden that few would take on if they knew the suffering it entails.”

 

[Not all my conversations were with non-3D individuals! And of course not all of them were published. I can’t recall if I ever published this short session with Rita (who at the time was still in 3D), but it seems to be of interest today.]

&&&

This is the 31st of March 2007.

Rita: Well, we haven’t done one of these sessions for awhile. But you have this communication channel always available, don’t you?

Frank: Well it’s a different quality when someone else is asking the question, because you inject different — you come out of left field rather than where I already am internally.

R: Although sometimes I notice when we are just talking, the energy’s picked up as a response to you.

F: No, you’d have to believe in telepathy for that. I want to see a double-blind survey. [😊]

R: Let’s just ask a question about that while we’re at it. When this activity is going on, how different is it from what we’re doing here?

F: Well in a way, it’s the difference between talking to yourself and talking to someone else, because if you’re talking to yourself, the answer comes out of the same stream that the question came out, but if you’re talking to someone else, sometimes it comes out of the same stream but sometimes the other person has had different rabbits start out of the bush from the same question and therefore intersect again with the other person from a different angle. It’s really the same process.

You have to bear in mind that both in spoken communication and in unspoken communication, all kinds of levels are involved in both persons, and between them at an upstairs level, so an interaction between individuals seems much more straightforward to you than it actually is. It seems like this and then that, but what it is, is this and then that on a downstairs level, both of you connected to the upstairs level and maybe the upstairs level the same thing, maybe it’s coordinating the two of you by feeding you lines and feeding you emotional reactions. It would be the equivalent of the difference between two actors talking onstage and the writer or writers having written their lines ahead of time to set up certain interactions.

R: And so this in itself means that there will be different responses depending on who Frank’s having a conversation with.

F:Tthat’s right. And they will evoke different parts of himself, as he is doing to them. An interaction between two people is always unique because either of those two people interacting with somebody else is different. It doesn’t look like it, usually, too much. Often you can’t see it.

R: So when you think about lecturing to a room full of people, all these multitude of interactions –

F: Yes but if you are only lecturing and they are not responding verbally, it’s sort of like you have a screen in front of you that is speaking to them, it’s your public persona. We don’t mean by that anything artificial or insincere. We don’t imply a lack of integrity. We’re saying necessarily when you’re speaking to more than one person, it’s a persona speaking rather than the intimate conversation you might have with one person at the right time in the right way. Now for the audience, they are communicating in an individual way, but with that persona rather than with the speaker. They may know the difference, but not necessarily.

R: Depending on whether they’ve had a history with this person or not.

F: Yes, exactly. Exactly. If they know the person as an individual, and then are in the audience while that individual is speaking, they will definitely see the difference. They may not however correctly attribute what the difference is. They may think it is — actually it’s the same thing — tailoring to the audience.

R: Both ways there’s an assumption of who the speaker is.

F: And in fact you’re all mysteries to each other.

R: I want to ask about what seems like to me this new burst of creativity — I don’t know if we’re talking about a burst of creativity or way for talking about an operational relation of a lot of material that now is getting put forth.

F: We would think of it more as a burst of expression. It’s in there, it’s been tailored, it’s been thought of. The creativity was in the living of it and the thinking about, and it has been built up, and now that conduit is available, the expression is bursting forth. We can see that it looks like creativity happening now, and to a degree it is, but really it’s the expression of what has already been created but has been dammed up.

&&&

The transcript ends here, somewhat abruptly, it seems to me. Because it was a spoken rather than a written interchange, I have no way to know if this was the end of the exchange, or merely the end of my transcription.

 

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

The thing that strikes me is that we are bombarded by so much information, so continually, that it is hard to keep track. __’s house provided good examples. Here would be a bunch of cognate materials all pertaining to something that had been of intense interest to him until it was superseded by another. It’s hard to stop that from happening. I have the same problem. Velikovsky had it — he had different desks for different projects, just to try to keep up. If there is a solution for it, I don’t know what it would be. I keep searching for some method of indexing.

Guys?

Discarding is as important as accumulating, and you have seen this with __ and with others. Easier to see with your brother John than with your own habits, but “easily seen” is at least a beginning.

Ruthless intelligent discarding is a form of indexing. It is a pre-sort. “Do I/will I need this?”

Everything you discard, focuses you. Everything you accumulate, to that extent, un-focuses you. Now, if you have patience for it, a little expansion, a little exposition, of our meaning.

What is intellectual activity but an alternating focusing and unfocusing?

You gather. Perhaps you gather and gather and gather. It doesn’t matter how much gathering you do; that is a matter of personal taste and perhaps of width of interest and perhaps of genius. At some point, continued gathering without any focusing will be sterile.

It is in focusing that you learn (or impose) the meaning on what you have gathered. We mean this both literally and metaphorically. You may spend months or years reading in a certain subject area, say, or in two — or in what seems to you a random assortment of subject areas — and you may have no idea why or even if there be a why. You do many things without knowing the reason, or if there is a reason. That’s just the process of living.

But whenever you come to make sense of things — to summarize, or to index, or to cull, whatever the circumstances and form of the making sense — when you come to do that, it is as though you are sorting all that material to find certain threads or connections or affiliations.

This is pretty abstract and we can feel you falling asleep, so to speak. So — point us.

Well, I’m interested in where you seemed to be going about ingestion and digestion.

Yes — and excretion! What you have used up, what you have had the benefit of, what has nourished you but is no longer of service because it has nourished you — must you not eliminate it, if you are to function as an ongoing system rather than as a static momentary picture?

You know the new cliché about the beginner’s mind, the empty mind, being the best way to learn something new. It doesn’t apply only to learning the new. It applies to re-understanding the previously understood, which of course is to see it anew.

So — when overwhelmed by material, whether files, papers, e-mails, projects you want to start, old records of past projects finished or unfinished —

When you are overwhelmed, too much information is as bad as no information. You need to balance assimilation with ingestion. Could you read everything on the Internet? Could you read every magazine or book or newspaper? And, if you could, could you hold them, balance them, make sense of them?

Well, you can’t do it with your piles of gathered materials, either. No one could.

Now, each person, going through the same stack of materials, would cull and sort differently. For that matter, no two people will have the same stack. No two people ever could.

You remember Buckminster Fuller’s realization from the 1920s — that no two people see the world from the same place, and therefore no two have the same unique viewpoint, and so anyone may have insights that are obvious to him or her, but not at all obvious to most others, or perhaps to any others. It was this insight as much as any other that fueled Fuller’s career, providing him with the self confidence in his own way of seeing that led him to change the world rather than to wonder why his own vision was askew.

Find what is central to you, and begin to discard all that is not, and seek to attract more that is. You will find that this has a remarkable self adjusting effect on your focus.

Hard to know what does or doesn’t apply, though.

Hard primarily to know if you want to extend so far — as of course ultimately anything could connect with anything else. But the question is practicality. Is a given piece of paper or file or whatever useful to you? Does it help you to center? Will it help you focus on what you want to focus on?

Fortunately, you’re not going about it blind. Your guidance will give you nudges. “Save this, hang onto that. Think about this other in new contexts.” Listen.

Well — speaking of focus — this session has felt extraordinarily diffuse, as if you, or I, were having trouble staying on the beam. Of course, I know who you’re likely to blame for that! 🙂 but I’ve been drinking coffee. I don’t know what else to do.

We did all right. The point here was a practical one: How can you get out from under the clutter of things that fill your life? And our answer was, consciously decide what you want to focus on, and discard the rest. A natural caveat is — be a little careful that a fit of ruthlessness doesn’t lead you to discard things that later you’ll regret tossing over the side — but on the whole, discarding too much is probably preferable to keeping too much.

As a case in point — you have multiple print outs of past sessions in the black box. What will you ever use them for? You have stacks of old e-mails, many stacks sorted roughly by subject matter. But how likely is it that these will ever be useful? You keep endless e-mails on your computer, often sorted. Printed out or not, how likely are they to help you?

There is information to be saved for its beauty or peculiar nature — photographs, e-mails from friends, say. There is information that sparked an idea in you. Other information provided evidence you think you may someday use. You can see that these are three different things.

We can’t — and wouldn’t if we could — provide rules for keeping and discarding. We say only, when you feel the need for greater focus, one step to it is — discard. Sort, cull, discard, make sense of what you have. New material will come to you with every breeze; you needn’t worry that you will run out of material. You will run out of time, though, and we see no particular benefit to anyone in dying with bulging file cabinets and hard drives.

What you assimilate, you bring with you to the other side; that isn’t our point and isn’t for you to worry about. But if you want to function more consciously, to feel yourself and your life less cluttered, the process we’ve outlined is the only way we know to begin.

 

[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?