Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

Return continually to Jesus’ helpful suggestions, all of which were meant to give you reliable ways to proceed. He preached integrity – that is, being the same thing inside and outside. Don’t do things behind your own back. Know your intent and hold to it.

When listening for the small still voice, or talking to the guys, or trying to know what the right thing to do is, the key is not to fool yourself. And how does one assure that he is not fooling himself? Not by judging the content, like the person who only accepts what is reasonable to his own previous definitions of what is possible. What you can judge is whether you proceeded honestly and consciously, as best you could. Good fruit grows from good stock: Good information proceeds from good intent and good execution.

In other words, we don’t need to worry as much about fooling ourselves as about wanting to fool ourselves, or being willing to fool ourselves.

That’s what it comes to. And you can always be aware of your own true intent if you are in the habit of being honest with yourself. If you were the units you appear to be, it would be relatively simple. But you are not units, but communities, and not even communities of units, but communities of communities. That’s a lot of cross-purposes!

Jesus’ saying about not putting new wine in old wineskins, nor old wine in new wineskins may not apply to our lives, our consciousness, our task of bringing our constituent parts into alignment during our life, but it seems like maybe it could.

Well, if you try to cram old perceptions into new circumstances, or new perceptions into old categories, you can see that it probably won’t work very well. Jesus need not have meant the analogy for it to be true nonetheless.

So how do we avoid being led astray by our internal contradictory elements? Some do it by adopting a rigid code, but for those who can’t or won’t?

A first step is to be clear about the distinction between you as present-tense keeper of the ring – the person who has the right and responsibility to decide – and you as arbitrator among so many constituent agents. Same you, different functions.

And how do we distinguish? Intent, I suppose.

Exactly. In your intent as to what you wish to be, you have your guide.

The way some people say What Would Jesus Do, for instance.

That’s an example. The fact that a technique may be misused, or may not fit you, does not mean it is mistaken or worthless. And after all, if Jesus is too exalted an example for you, the world is full of examples. Who do you admire? (We’re talking of character, not achievement or renown.)

And I see that we could take this trait from one, that from another. Lincoln for honest, clarity and humility, Washington for character and obedience to perceived duty. Jefferson for lucid intelligence and all-devouring curiosity, Teddy Roosevelt for sheer vigor and energy and determination, and so on. We could choose among any who were important models to us, regardless of their fame or obscurity, their field of activity, their nearness or remoteness to our actual lives.

Certainly. One’s grandfather or brother or cousin might serve, or a friend. There is no limit to who might serve as model, and, after all, the qualities one infers from observing may or may not be actually present in that other. That doesn’t matter. What matters is not the source of one’s ideal but the nature of the ideal. Choose what you want to be, and live toward it, retaining the sense that you will not attain the goal and shouldn’t (else the goal was not set high enough). If you do attain the goal, merely set another, higher.

In other words, no guilt or discouragement, but no self-satisfaction either.

Well, rules are misleading. Let’s leave it at this. In order to have a compass, you need to set an intent and live it. (Everyone has intent, if only accepted ready-made, as a social convention, or a religious creed. But for people like you, deliberate choice is the only practical path.) You may or may not know who you are, but it is essential to have some clear idea of who (and how) you want to be; who you want to become, who you hope to see in the mirror, looking back on your life. This isn’t for the sake of meeting an expected judgment, it is for the sake of keeping you oriented along the way.

As I look back on my life, it seems to me I didn’t stay conscious enough. I rarely turned the inner spotlight on me, except as a sort of non-introspective self-awareness. I was there, but not thinking about what I was doing or reacting to. I couldn’t learn from experience, because I wasn’t altering my reactions from having thought about past reactions.

You might consider yourself a society without regulation. Rather than by-laws, it’s always ad hoc adjustment. “How do I feel right now?” This isn’t necessarily a fault or a virtue, but it certainly opens some doors and closes others. Of course everyone’s bounds are different in nature and extent. One travels extensively abroad, another travels extensively inward. And beyond this difference, which is still an internal difference regardless of the fact that it plays out in the outer world, there is a difference in what one does with what one lives. So take Bob Friedman, quietly influential over a long lifetime and Colin Wilson.

The commonality being that they liked to think about psychic experience but didn’t particularly want to have it.

Not quite. They wanted to maintain. Both Bob and Colin were thinkers in a way that you are not. They reflected. They pondered. They learned from experience. This doesn’t mean that what they learned necessarily was right; we are concerned here with the nature of their process. Someone considering something new in the light of past conclusions may end up merely adjusting new perception to not contradict older conclusions. But on the other hand, they may learn something. Different ways of living produce different crucibles within the 3D crucible. So if Bob and Colin are intending to live their lives from a stable platform that will allow them clear observation (which is one way of looking at their lives), you cannot expect them to want to jettison that stable platform just when things get interesting. Instead, by not moving, they get front-row seats. And from those front-row seats, they were able to describe the view to others. You by contrast are more like a set of water wings on a lake, or sometimes a river, occasionally on the open seas. What you know is an idea of yourself shaped by your reaction to your surroundings. What you chiefly have to report is your own process, your own journeying.

As time has gone by, I have had a greater sense of my own journey being all I had to offer by way of instruction or commentary or even encouragement.

You share with Colin the reporting of what you think and do – in other words, your experience. Bob did not do that. You share with Bob your own vivid intense inner life, poorly communicated, often misunderstood or unsuspected. The three of you delighted in assisting others. Of the three of you, Bob was perhaps the most self-aware, in that he did not live in a continual whirl of mental and physical activity like Colin, and did not lose his inner compass by throwing himself into new circumstances (inner or outer) like you. He was the quietest of the three of you. And Colin was the one who made the greatest impact, by far, in the span of his life.

James Joyce said history was a nightmare from which he was struggling to wake up. I sometimes think my life is a nightmare, or anyway a dream, from which I am struggling to wake up.

That isn’t quite what you mean. It is more like, your drift is the lack of direction from which you are struggling to become aware enough to overcome. But, you see, the very thought of thinking about it drives you to think of doing something else.

Yes, I recognize that persistent drive to escape. It feels like self-sabotage.

Think of it as true north, and see where that brings you.

Huh! You mean, maybe what I’m seeking is the very thing I must not find?

No, what you are doing is not at all what you think of yourself as doing. That’s a very different thing.

So, in practical terms, what can I (ought I) do?

If toward the end of your life you can live a summing-up, it will be well.

Watching Peter Jackson’s 90-minute film “They Shall Not Grow Old,” comprising restored footage of British doughboys in World War I, I remembered an experience I had in 2001 or 2002. I was in London, walking near Trafalgar Square, trying to give David Poynter (experienced as a past life) a sense of modern London, knowing that he would recognize the buildings, which are essentially unchanged since his time. I walked down to the Embankment, the north shore of the Thames, reading the monuments, not particularly moved, but interested.

Then I came to one that said only “July 1, 1916,” and although I had no idea what it referred to, I was instantly filled with the most violent rush of emotion I have ever experienced: rage, grief, indignation, despair. I realized, this was David’s reaction I was experiencing, though I was pretty sure he himself had not been in the war. So after I saw the movie, I searched both “the Battle of the Somme” and “July 1, 1916.”

So, David, let’s talk about July 1, 1916. What was the nature and source of that upwelling of anguish that I experienced.

You felt correctly that I was not in the war. I was past the age of enlistment, and perhaps could not have stood the physical toll. But neither was I caught up in war fever. My sympathies were with the poor. The warfare that interested me was an uprising against the forces that were grinding the faces of the people. I don’t mean insurrection – that couldn’t happen – but organized resistance to the overwhelming combinations of force and law and opinion that held society in an unfailing grip.

You were a socialist, I remember thinking.

I was. But my socialism did not have its roots in a belief in materialism, so I was somewhat out of the socialist mainstream in the same way you have always found yourself out of the mainstream of political opinion – and for the same reasons. Any social movement necessarily presumes certain commonly accepted beliefs, and to the extent that you cannot share them, you find yourself having to go along unwillingly, or with mental reservations. This does not tend to make you an effective partisan.

When war broke out in August, 1914, there was a unanimity of emotion, an enthusiastic springing to arms. People didn’t realize it, but they were desperate to destroy the lives they were leading. They wanted to tear down the structure, but they thought they were tearing at something that threatened them from outside.

A socialist could see that, if he could keep his head against the group-think. Was I keen to fight for the King-Emperor and the social system I despised? Only it was not so simple. Is it ever? German autocracy as personified – almost as caricatured – by the Kaiser was clearly worse. Privately I deplored the war and did not believe in it – and yet, at the same time, I deplored Prussian autocracy even more, and certainly could not have rooted for a victory of Germany. I sat on the sideline. I observed, I remained conscious, but this only got more agonizing as time went on.

I got that you were an editor at the London Illustrated News.

We would call it a sub-editor. I was a selector of photographs and illustrations, a glorified caption-writer. It was not a glamorous nor an influential position, but it did keep me somewhat better informed than the average man in the street. I had been there for some three years, maybe four, by the time the war began, and I was there for a decade or so after the war concluded.

Surely you had to do some official drum-banging for the war.

Less than you might think. If I kept to describing specifics, there was no need to hint at the self-destructive futility of it, not that any such hints would have had any result beyond getting me fired. But the anguish cumulated as the months dragged on. You cannot envision the change from 1914, when the war would surely be over by Christmas, to 1915, 1916, 1917, 1918, when it clearly was going to go on forever. In 1914, even in 1915, it was possible to imagine that the end of the war would find us unchanged. By 1916, certainly by 1917, it was clear to those with eyes to see that nobody was going to win this war, and it was about who would lose it more thoroughly. The one date that marked that change more than any other was July 1, 1916.

I looked it up yesterday: 57,000 casualties in one day – 19,000 of them killed – the worst day for casualties in British history. The beginning of a 141-day battle that cost more than 400,000 British casualties and resulted in a six-mile advance over a 16-mile front. To my surprise, I saw that it was no longer considered to be useless butchery that accomplished nothing. Some think it led to the beginning of the end for the Germans, for reasons I won’t go into.

But you asked for the source of my reaction, which you felt that day, and my reactions had nothing to do with questions of strategy, nor even with the question of was it worthwhile even in its own military terms. Mine were rooted in something deeper.

I can feel a certain complication here, a reluctance to dip into it.

Yes, it is powerful, isn’t it, still? What you are calling first-tier and second-tier effects. And the third-tier effect went into the making of you, you understand.

In that you are a dominant strand comprising me.

Yes. You might be fascinated reading about military history (that was another strand’s influence, of course) but you could not enter whole-heartedly into such a career even if your health had allowed, because I knew better.

How do you think I felt, watching without being able to do anything, as a generation of young men was ground into the mud in France, and Gallipoli? Futility, official stupidity, dirty motives of politicians, economics behind it all, deliberate whipping-up of public hatred. It stank, and there was no way out except through it, by way of killing, killing, killing. Just as for many people Sept. 11, 2001, marks the end of one era and the beginning of another, so for me July 1, 1916, marks the end of a relatively innocent age. World War I destroyed Edwardian society.

So to focus in specifically on what I felt that day in London –

Imagine concentrating your emotional reaction to all the wrong-turnings you have witnessed in your life, and spraying them out in one burst, like a capacitor discharging. That’s what you were on the receiving end of. You are thinking of it as if I were sending you a message and you were receiving it. That’s the same idea people in my day had about what telepathy was. But, change metaphors and the nature of the event will become clearer. Think of something that equalizes with something else when brought into contact, the way water seeks its own level. Say you were in the Panama Canal and someone opened the gate between your lock and the adjacent one. The water might come in quickly or slowly overall, but it would come from the higher level to the lower as quickly as it could. The higher lock didn’t “send,” exactly, and the lower one didn’t “receive” in the way people think of telepathy as being sent and received. Instead, in the absence of a barrier, the water naturally sought its own level. A lightning bolt may be seen as the equalization of energy too, violently and suddenly.

So you are saying it wasn’t that you were trying to send a message, but that time and place created the spark?

As you intuited, place is an important part of this.

I have always wondered why ghosts haunt specific places, and why they mark anniversaries.

And now perhaps you see the answer. This is one world, not a physical and a separate non-physical world. Therefore place matters; time matters. Only, it is a matter of conceiving of things correctly. One might say the first of July, 1916 was in 3D on that date, and subsequently is in non-3D only. Yet it is not gone, as conventional thinking would have it. The non-3D version of events does not pass away, any more than other time-space combinations pass away when the living present moment passes on beyond them. But if you were to stand on the Marne battlefield today, it would be the same place (to all extents and purposes), which might facilitate your communication with that place-time that is otherwise difficult or impossible to reach.

When you reconceptualize the world to remove certain thought-barriers, sudden inflows of knowledge and being are enabled to occur. Such barriers include:

• I am only a 3D being
• Those in the non-3D are accessible only through effort and practice, and perhaps special talent.
• The past is beyond touching.
• The future is “the” future, and in any case does not yet exist.
• The world is physical and external, rather than mental and internal.
• We are each alone.
• “On the other side there is no time.”
• The 3D and non-3D worlds have little or nothing to do with each other.
• Mental, spiritual, and physical are three realities, rather than merely three words describing reality from different viewpoints.

 

I awoke from a dream in which I was Harold (from the TV show “Person of Interest”) on a bus listening to John helping a woman, promising her chocolate, something she longed for, against the life of taking abuse that she was enduring and would be going back to. Then I interacted, saying I was Harold, and she heard my laugh as Frank’s laugh and I realized we had been spotted. Forced open the bus doors, and John and I ran, of course in different directions. As I write this, I realize, it was near Sacred Heart High School, my Catholic high school before I went to public high school. I ran past a place offering air travel. I said, joking, I’d fly if I didn’t have to get into an airplane, and kept running.

Interpretation? Helpful hints, at least?

Harold is the introverted, bookish one. John is the man of action. Harold was observing John interacting, then he announced his own presence; then they had to flee as usual to avoid capture.

I was identifying with the man of action as well as the introvert?

Well, you were at least approving of him, and humorously announcing your allegiance.

John was being kind to her.

That is part of his job description, after all – the job description Harold gave him.

I have been thinking, lately, how unfitted I was to deal with the world.

Yet you did it. Well or badly, even by your own measurement, you did interact, perforce. And your Harold approved of your John, set him in motion, mandated kindness.

Yet John is a man of violence.

“Person of Interest” is a Western, set in futuristic terms. The lone cowboy, the marshal with his posse, the friends working together in the absence of law –

Harry Morgan. [Hemingway’s protagonist in To Have and Have Not]

And as you have pointed out, Harry Morgan is not a bad man, only a man in an unfavorable context, not well understood, a man on his own who learns that a man on his own can’t make it any more in a complicated society.

But John isn’t on his own. For one thing, he has Harold, and Harold’s resources.

That’s right, Harold.

And you in turn are my Harold, I suppose.

A good enough analogy, provided you don’t apply it to chasing crooks. But every man of action is backed up by an introverted, often unseen or even unsuspected link to greater resources, often invisible ones.

Defining “man of action” here, as individuals in 3D. So, running past SHHS?

That’s your past. You weren’t running to it, nor toward it, but by it. And your joke in passing – that you would fly if you didn’t have to get into an airplane – is representative. You want to fly, you can’t be cooped up in a defined space where you can be identified and detained. Think of the Harold and John analogy from time to time: It will illumine your situation.

You live at a remove from the physical world, mentally. Even when you spend your time reading of the world, understanding the world, conceptualizing the world, you aren’t really participating in it the way other people do.

Which is why I interact so badly with practical things, have such anxiety when faced with the prospect of looming events such as a trip or a meeting or even a social event.

You used to say, in a different context, that you were always playing “away” games. There’s something in that. It is difficult for you to do things in the way others do, for you can do things others can’t, and for the same reason. You live from a somewhat different standing-place. You are scarcely alone in that, but by nature you and others in that situation experience yourselves as alone in a world you share with others only by the narrowest of connections. It is difficult to state, because the words are not there to express it. The differences, not being widely experienced, have not come into common use in language. Start with Laurens van der Post’s analogy of the herd and the outliers.

He said that he had observed that herds would have one or more members who were not fully accepted but were not quite outcast. The outlying positions of these individuals made them hypervigilant, continually alert, and therefore provided the herd with an advantage.

Yes, because even though the entire herd experienced their lives as continually requiring alertness, the outlier sensed danger quicker than those who were to some degree lulled by the proximity of their fellows.

Only, van der Post’s analogy didn’t refer to danger specifically, but to increased sensitivity.

That’s right. The race’s sentinels don’t necessarily persuade anybody; they react, and their reactions alert the rest through a process of contagion. There are outliers in any society, and they serve a function, just as the relatively compact mass that forms a society’s center of gravity serve a function. That does not guarantee that either outlier or mass is comfortable. One’s 3D life is only a subset of All-D life, and the 3D portion of the world goes on within the larger All-D world. Difficult to express, even after so many months of exposition attempting to express the essential unity. But clearly, if your mental world is anchored in one place, it won’t be anchored in a different place. The way you see the world will necessarily be different from any other person’s way of seeing it, because you are all experiencing it as individuals. But beyond that, some experience it as outliers and others as part of the center of gravity. You won’t be living quite in the same world, nor quite in different worlds. You will be tenuously bound together.

We’ve said many times, everyone is, must be, in all dimensions. But that doesn’t mean you are all equally aware of the encompassing world we have been calling the non-3D. Everyone’s position on a scale of awareness of the non-3D in ordinary life facilitates their particular interim report.

All aspects of the world deserve and receive equal attention, which in effect means everything gets reported on, and these reports are collated and summarized and fed back to the participants, who go about their day in light of the developing situation. That ought to be an analogy that provides a flexible understanding without luring you to read it literally. You all feed situation reports to the larger beings of which you are a part. Those reports affect the non-3D being, and in turn affect our feedback to our 3D components. You understand, language is overemphasizing separation here and understating the degree of connection.

A friend said meditation often seems to him a waste of time, and I sense that you wish to comment.

Meditation isn’t the right tool if you aren’t using it on the right job. You can’t tighten screws with hammers, or pound nails with screwdrivers. At least, not very efficiently! But this hardly exhausts the subject.

Meditation is one tool, Intuitive Linked Communication is another. Applied logic is a third. Careful analysis is a fourth. Careful observation is a fifth. Different tools for different jobs, and different combinations of tools for different jobs.

Suppose you are living your life taking the 3D world as all there is, taking your varying moods as if they were a stable platform, placing all your attention on the external world and not even realizing that your internal world is primary. Meditation may help you stop the machinery long enough for you to realize that there is more going on than you realize. Silencing the noisy clanking and banging and whirring may let you hear the birds singing. It may be a revelation, a revolution.

Or suppose you are well aware of the inner world and are somewhat unaware of the outer world. Your internal trance, your daydreaming your way through life, may need a corrective. Mediation may be such a corrective, but maybe an experience of ILC, or a course of logic, or applied effort at acquiring a skill, say, may be more helpful. And so forth.

It creates confusion when people don’t differentiate between different starting points, which may include:

• Needing to clear your mind of chatter
• Having an endless calculating machine operating
• Ceaselessly collecting the data presented by life
• Needing to slow down an internal daydreaming trance

An analogy would be, taking psychotropic drugs. The effects of such pharmacology will vary not only by the circumstances in which it is used but – and primarily – by the person who comes to the experience! Compare the results obtained by Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzger on LSD, as opposed to Ken Kesey, say, or musicians on cocaine or marijuana. These are all creative people, but what they brought to the experience couldn’t help affect the experience they received. It’s only common sense, after all. So if meditation does nothing for you, or perhaps no longer does anything for you, why persist in it? However, that doesn’t mean, forget about internal exploration. It means, try a different kind of tool.

For years, people would ask me if I meditated, and were puzzled when I said I did not. It was only last year that I realized that I didn’t need anything to wake me up to the fact that I as observer was other than appearances. I needed a way to better interact with the world. I needed to develop logic, and needed to apply it to the world around me.

Everybody’s life may be looked at as a problem to be addressed, a puzzle to be engaged. You are always trying to accomplish a task some of which is invisible to you. The lapse of time makes it clearer what your life was about, but doesn’t not necessarily make clear what it is about.

In other words, where we have been is always clearer than where we are, let alone where we will be.

Isn’t that your experience? Moments of clarity alternating with moments of opacity? And of course the proportions of each vary, by the individual and perhaps also by the moment. Meditation is not going to be productive for everybody, nor is it necessarily going to be effective for any given person forever. There is no guaranteed path to heaven.

I get the image of a priest saying his breviary, the prayers he is required to say every day.

Yes. Such practice may concentrate a young man’s mind on the continual existence of the non-physical world, may serve to help him remain on a path of consciousness. But such practice can degenerate into mere rote, accomplishing nothing. Do you have any reason to think that meditation per se is any more universal, any more infallible?

Nor is ILC for everyone.

Nor psychotropic drugs, nor any conceivable path. Don’t put your trust in a method, any more than in any particular creed, to bring you infallibly home. Sincerity and persistence will always bring you through.

Your means of deepening your conscious connection to your non-3D self will vary; the connection itself does not vary. You need not fear becoming unanchored. It’s just a matter of allowing, not of forcing. So, doing what you are led to do (following the pattern of your life) will always result in your pursuing the right path for you. The thing to monitor is your intent. Intend, and your inner life aligns in turn, obviously.

I know that “obviously” refers to inner and outer being parts of one thing, hence never decoupled.

They may appear to be decoupled, because there is a lag in manifestation to the degree that there is a separation between intent and resolution. Intend consistently and alignment follows consistently. Waver, and what can you expect but a wavering result?

Intent that wavers brings irresolution in its wake.

Rather, it is irresolution. What it brings in its wake is the appearance of separation, to which the  conditions of 3D life renders you susceptible anyway.

 

Spending time accomplishing many little practical things is not a waste of time, is not “killing” time. Neither is doing nothing in particular. The idea that one must be continually doing something in order to be productive is a mistake rooted in the idea that one earns one’s place in the world. But you don’t earn a place; you are here by right, each of you. (Each of us, remember – for we remind you, the separation of 3D and non-3D worlds is only one of degree. The separation is no greater than the identity. That is, yes, separate, to a degree. Yes, identical, to a degree. One world, one people, so to speak.)

You do not earn your place in the world. It is a gift. You may treat that gift well or badly, but gifts do not have to be earned, and in fact can’t be earned. Strictly speaking, they can’t be deserved or undeserved. A gift is free, or it is no gift but a bargain. Therefore, do what pleases you. Do what is true to your own nature, and you will not go wrong. However, knowing what is true to your nature does not mean, “run riot,” nor “I am the only person who counts,” nor, “Follow any whim.” Just as we often ask, “Which you?” so should you ask of an impulse or a pattern, “From which ‘me’ and for what purpose?”

That will sound contradictory to many people.

Practical life will clarify it. In day to day life, there are abiding urges, purposes, and transitory ones, whims. They don’t necessarily pull in the same direction. They may cut against each other, or may represent an alternation of energies. You realize one day, you don’t feel like working on your book, nor reading. You’re feeling cooped up, and you are tempted into wandering for a couple of midday hours in the nearby woods. Is that a whim or a deeply rooted urge that is worth listening to? How can you know?

In practice, usually the rest of the pattern of our lives indicates.

What of a situation where the breaking of bounds is the best thing for you? Everything might (and, likely will) make it difficult for you to break these bounds: Does that mean that breaking them would be a good thing? A bad thing? Can you safely depend upon the world’s guidance in such things? Can you safely depend upon your own unexamined reactions?

I begin to see the point you are moving on, here. Don’t proceed in one direction only, but remember that the opposite direction has its own validity.

By all means follow your intuition, only don’t discard common sense. Wisdom lies in using both halves of your brain, logic and intuition.

How do you differentiate intuition and other non-rational impulses? How do you avoid reductionism without becoming a flake? We would like to say a word on the discernment process. A close connection to your non-3D component, with its sure access to knowledge from other mentalities, is certainly a resource to be developed. But what of the interaction within you of so many strands, be they “past lives” or tendencies? These may mesh smoothly or conflict bitterly, or anything between the two extremes. Surely you can see that this complicates the question of listening to guidance.

Sure. Carl Jung said that his anima tempted him to say that his drawing of mandalas was not science (analytical psychology) but art, and he had to insist that they were what he felt them to be. He said that if he had accepted the anima’s judgment, she might later have said, “Nonsense, they are nothing of the sort.” I take it that he was expressing something of what you are saying.

In the day he lived in, only so much could be said and conceptualized. He was doing his own bursting of bounds, personally and on behalf of his culture, and so had limits on what he could think or experience or express, as is always the case. This is why people are only as wise as their times allow them to be, and people who live in later times may surpass the insights of the giants who preceded them, even if they themselves are inherently less wise, less experienced, less learned. Too much reverence for past wisdom and accomplishment and insight may distance you from your own perhaps more germane understandings.

It is not always easy to know the difference between valid and invalid, appropriate and inappropriate, germane and irrelevant. The existence of different strands within you means you do not have a platform from which you can deliver objective judgments to yourself. You may “get carried away”; you may find yourself unable to transcend certain prejudices; you may become overcome by desires, whims, ideas that seem self-evidently true at the moment, and perhaps self-evidently false not so much later.

In short, we have no infallibility. That isn’t news.

Well, you have no infallible way to discern which impulses or biases stem from an infallible source and which do not. That’s why judgment – discernment – always comes into play. It isn’t safe to follow every whim; neither is it safe to follow every rule, internally or externally imposed. Life is more complex than that, by design. Therein lies your freedom.