Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

Thursday, November 23, 2017

All day in the company of Tom Cutter, yesterday. How many times now have I re-read Nevil Shute’s Around the Bend, and it is still as fresh as ever.

Several people have asked, is this to be a book, and I have said I presume so but don’t know. Do you have a theme to set out, book length or so, and then perhaps another, or should I regard this as a continuing series that may be chopped into convenient segments, or what?

You are torn between the goal of delivering books and that of providing day-by-day guidance, or entertainment, or company, however you wish to see it.

True. And the answer to that dilemma is?

You might look at this as a bite-size precis of life on earth. You can shape your experiences into convenient units around a theme or you can regard your life as an unbroken whole, which has its own meaning. There is no “right” answer; it is a matter of choice. You have been doing a little of each.

Awakening from the 3D World certainly had a theme. Rita’s World did, and yet not so focused a theme. Well, actually – looking down the list – every one had a theme; every one was also an installment in the on-going saga of waking up. Even Imagine Yourself Well and The Cosmic Internet, very separate and themed books, were also part of a developing theme. I suppose you could say it is all one book, continuing as I continue. Maybe more than anybody cares to read.

Times change. A book is no longer the letter from author to reader that it once was. The coming of the internet’s continual interaction has meant that any given book may be dribbled out moment by moment – and, same thing, may be created in continuous interaction with those who participate as it develops. You are moving into a future with your assumptions shaped by a past, as necessarily happens. In this instance, your idea is to bind your experience first into words, then into collections of statements. That is, first transcription, then collation as physical books, a more permanent form than evanescent electronics. It is the two-sided reality that results in your two-sided efforts.

It’s true. To reach people instantly is good for them and good for me, but in itself results only in a few people printing out the sessions and (presumably) three-hole punching the pages and holding them in binders that are not a particularly attractive way to re-read them. Those who don’t print them out see them once, perhaps twice if they re-read, and then not again. Nothing seen in little daily increments can be grasped as a whole. Its only impact can be cumulative, which means it has one chance to be effective; it relies on the reader paying attention day by day, changing in response, and then, changed, experiencing the next. That’s too much to ask. If there is a book, it will sit there on the shelf waiting for whomever to pick it up and receive several months’ worth of effort in as little time as the reader cares to compress in reading it. Only, books need to be created, sold, and read. As you imply, there’s something to be said for both phases of the information-dissemination process, but I prefer to wrap it up into books.

There is another factor.

Yes, I got that. The day-to-day interactions may need pruning. Not every golden glowing word needs to be immortalized.

Like you, we’re smiling; like you, we agree on the problem. How do you know what is meat and what is fluff? How do you know what little detail, or misunderstanding straightened out, or casual aside, or any seeming irrelevancy may be safely omitted? Yet at the same time you know that saying a thing in the fewest words possible greatly increases the effect. However, it is very frequently the case that people edit out what seems to them redundancy or prolixity, and in the process haul up the only ladder that would have allowed some people access to the ship.

That is pretty direct and unambiguous guidance. All that is missing is the “how.”

Now we have passed beyond smiling, into chuckling.

Meaning, “that’s all the guidance you’re going to get, buddy”?

Meaning, it is as we said. It’s like life. No clear unambiguous path for you; your choice.

This morning I woke up thinking, more than ever, that I can’t write my – spiritual autobiography, call it, my interpretation of my internal life as it has manifested externally – if I keep doing this. Not that I don’t

[!]

New idea, eh?

Well, yes it is. Stopped me cold. An interesting idea, for sure. Write it in the same way we’re writing this, working with you in the same way, putting it out on the blog day by day in the same way. Autobiography on the fly. The drawbacks probably won’t be any greater.

Only, give yourself greater latitude. Revise freely. Consider your morning sessions to be your first draft. One would never publish a first draft; neither should you. But you could consider the readers of your blog as your editorial committee, your readers pre-publication (in the editorial sense). And thus you could accomplish all your goals in the only way that takes advantage of the instant-access of the internet and the later more permanent published form of books.

It hasn’t been clear to you, but a part of your problem has been your wish to preserve our words intact. In other words, you didn’t feel justified in editing the process except in the sort of minor correction that amounts to scratching out typos and inserting the intended word. That is no longer necessary, and perhaps not even appropriate or desirable.

In that –?

In that you have demonstrated what you set out to demonstrate. Anyone wanting help in doing this work can read what you have produced. It’s there. But you don’t need to keep repeating the demonstration. Those who come to your work later in the process will be able to follow the line of books backward, as you followed Colin Wilson’s when you found him.

So if I’m hearing you correctly, you may go underground, so to speak. If I concentrate on a theme, working with you as I go, there is no reason why it has to come out in this dialogue format, or, if it does, why it need remain that way.

As we say, just like the rest of life. And if on this day of thanksgiving you choose to consider this your final entry in the book of Nathaniel, that’s fine with us. We have said what we wanted to say; anything more would be repetition, which has its uses but quickly loses savor.

You know, it is an appealing idea. I may do it. Thanks for all your help, and I look forward to whatever new form of collaboration may follow.

Just like life in general. Very well, maybe take a day or two to do other things, and to prepare, and – as people say – we’ll see you on the other side. In this case meaning, on the other side of your decision.

That’s less drastic than saying “when you die”! Again, our thanks.

 

Wednesday, November 22, 2017

Definitely feeling better. A pretty good night’s sleep. Gentlemen?

What about your reaction to “Beat the Devil”?

I can’t say I much cared for it, though it had some funny lines. Basically a waste of time.

And – why?

I guess spoofs and take-offs bore me. It’s so easy to take potshots at other people’s creations, or even at entire genres. There’s something snide and vaguely destructive about it. I don’t like it, even if I like the actors involved, like Bogart here.

It isn’t serious enough for you.

Well, I’m not sure that’s it, exactly. I love laughing, and some of my favorite movies are funny or have funny moments in them. “Galaxy Quest,” for instance, is ridiculous, and it is a spoof of the entire Star Trek series, but I saw it many times, and loved it.

Then, the difference? Is it between films, or is it between different states of you, depending upon different circumstances?

I’m not sure what you mean.

It isn’t news to anybody that none of you are consistent. What may be news to some is that consistency isn’t always helpful or even appropriate. Consistency can harden into unadventurous rigidity, unable to cope very well with new circumstances. One of the circumstances that produces inconsistency is

I turned that sentence around somehow, didn’t I?

No harm done, we merely proceed, noting the momentary hesitation (that’s what it amounts to) that was that slight wrong turning. The easiest way to proceed is sometimes to restate where we were when it went wrong; an equally appropriate response, sometimes, is to go off on another tack, so as to avoid the distractions. Sometimes the one, sometimes the other. Use what works, and don’t fight it. It is an extension of the obvious fact that you are never exactly the same from one moment to the next. We need a good metaphor here.

It would be a steady-state that nevertheless varied continuously. What about a carrier wave?

Perhaps.

This is probably not accurate physically, but, basing my analogy on what I think is so, may serve. I gather that a carrier wave is a steady signal sent out that is itself modified, the modifications being the things that carry meaning, the carrier wave itself providing continuity. So, our day-to-day consciousness while in 3D would be the carrier wave, and the fluctuations would be the information.

Let’s say the fluctuations would result from, would indicate, would embody, the information. Not a bad analogy. For one thing, it dramatizes why you can’t necessarily meaningfully distinguish between “your” input and “input from others.” You are having to judge the theoretical ownership from the information itself, thereby inferring (guessing) ownership. You can see that in the circumstances, rigidity beyond a certain point is not going to be a helpful trait. On the other hand, you will need a certain amount of rigidity (expressed as consistency) if you are to keep your bearings at all. As in all polarities, you will have your range, and it will be different from perhaps anybody else on earth, and so what? Or, it may be quite close to some, and you will regard each other as kindred souls even though in many respects you may have little or nothing in common.

So, employing your metaphor, you can see that you will always have a core of consistency – the carrier wave itself – and you will always fluctuate – the input, the processing, the output, always going on. This is normal, desirable (what advantage in being unresponsive?). Only, recognize it.

Don’t think ourselves more consistent than we are.

Don’t think consistency an absolute virtue, for one thing. Recognize that you are meant to fluctuate. The very characteristics in yourself that you may deplore are part of your being, your voyage in 3D. Don’t allow yourselves to think you know better, and could have done a better job in construction, than those who made you.

Stop beating ourselves up for not being something other than what we are.

Yearning to be better, to grow, to develop, may seem to be the same thing as continual self-criticism, but it is not. The appearances may be the same; the reality is as different as could be. Aspiration seeks to grow, expects to grow, encourages growth. Self-criticism shrinks, fears to know, expects nothing better.

It is the difference between love and fear, in a new context. Expansion v. contraction.

Also faith v. lack of faith. Not, faith v. doubt, because doubt and belief are two sides of the same coin, seen from different angles. Belief /doubt within reason is always going to be a part of an on-going process. But lack of faith – often enough, what might be called anti-faith – has nothing positive or constructive about it. It leads nowhere. You might say despair is one of the deadly sins.

And I am led back to the question of why I don’t like certain kinds of movies even if they are technically well made. Some don’t lead on; they discourage.

No, you can do better than that easy generalization.

I sensed the insufficiency as I was writing it. Well, let’s say, some movies exude a negative atmosphere.

Not it yet, or do you want to cling to movies with a happy ending?

Nothing wrong with a happy ending, as long as it is not obviously contrived or tacked on in a dishonest way. But a movie doesn’t have to end happily to end in a satisfactory way. “The Bitter Tea of General Yen,” for instance.

Still, press on a little more.

I suppose it isn’t as static a situation as I usually think it. The same movie seen at different times encounters a different me, so the equation is different.

That’s closer. And a given movie will be closer to your more habitual position, and so will satisfy more often. Another may match only a less usual, or perhaps a quite un-usual position, and so will be one of those exceptional or even once-in-a-lifetime experiences that change you, or seem to. And of course what is said of movies goes for other things in your lives. Books, people, anything. They don’t meet an invariant carrier wave (which would indicate no signal), hence the interaction varies.

 

Tuesday, November 21, 2017

I have no idea where we go from here and can’t remember the theme.

No need. That is our job. We’re making things practical, remember. This is less a matter of presenting new material than of presenting various familiar concepts in a new light by presenting them as they relate to each other. You already have all the material you need; it is all around you, but it is like the scientist’s equipment.

They say that the equipment in a laboratory is designed for only one thing, to turn the scientist’s head around.

It is another way of saying that words are sparks. That’s what we’re doing, and it is all you need, sparks. That is one reason why questions and objections serve as catalysts.

I have received a few, but I don’t have them handy. I haven’t printed them out. Meanwhile –?

Meanwhile, we’ll give you a very practical how-to. We’ll try, anyway. Start with anything that is on your mind, particularly if you don’t exactly know what you feel about it, or don’t know why it is on your mind.

That’s easy. I learned last night that my old friend Frank Callaham died two years ago, and I didn’t know.

First, look at what you do know about your reaction.

Well, I was sorry that we had been in so little touch that he could have gone and I not known, nor that I would not be fresh enough in his family’s mind for them to remember to notify me. So many years since I’d seen him last. I could have called.

So, that is one: regrets. And?

I see, writing this, that my reaction to Frank’s death generalizes, and reminds me how little touch I am in even with people I like very much. That is, it reminds me that I don’t touch their lives, nor they mine, in a meaningful way on a day-to-day basis – or even, often enough, year-to-year. That’s another regret, more general but not less true.

And does it lead to resolutions?

Not really. Somebody told me a few years ago, people don’t really keep resolutions. If they change behaviors, it is because of a change that occurs, not because of a determination that they ought to change.

Let’s pause right here. (We didn’t have to go very far at all with this. In fact, it almost spoils the example. But let’s pursue it.) Can you see that the right question raises awareness within you? Now, such awareness can be shunted off into guilt, or steely-eyed negation, or indifference, and none of these (or other) automatic reactions will do you a bit of good. Automatic reactions in themselves never lead to greater self-awareness, although observing them can. This is a way to observe them, then create the possibility of actively modifying them. You see the distinction?

Making a resolution, by itself, doesn’t change anything, because it doesn’t touch the underlying dynamic. The same automatic mechanisms will continue to operate in the same old way. But making those mechanisms conscious creates the ability to modify their instructions, so to speak, and get them working for you instead of (inadvertently) against you. I wrote about this years ago, in Imagine Yourself Well.

Yes, but this application of that technique didn’t occur to you. It amounts to bringing into active awareness whatever is vaguely in your mind, seeing what is involved, and deciding about continuing or changing or discontinuing whatever habitual reaction-pattern you discover. It needn’t involve trauma, or guilt, or any of the negative emotions. It may be as simple as realizing that you enjoy doing X and maybe ought to do more of it. The common denominator here isn’t “fixing things,” but “consciously deciding.”

So, in this initial example you became aware that you wish you had kept in physical contact with someone you cared about, then allowed the specific to generalize to a description of your relations with people (not to say the entire outside world!). Had you left matters there, it would have amounted to a vague regret, even a pointed regret, and nothing changed. But as we held your attention there, we tacitly pointed out that you were assuming an inability to change your pattern. Like all assumptions, it was automatic, unconscious, hence not within your control. Like all such uncontrolled mechanisms, once made conscious it became under your control. So once you looked at it, you saw that of course there is no need to assume you can’t change; only, neither grim determination nor blind optimism will do it. You need to know what, you need to know how. It isn’t hard, but you need to use the right tool for the job. Hammers don’t turn nuts, and neither do good resolutions. Wrenches do; possibly you can even turn it by hand; but you don’t get torque by hammering.

I get it.

So next you look at the roots of the unconscious assumptions.

• What made you think you couldn’t change pattern? Then,
• how did the old patterns serve you? Then,
• how have your needs and possibilities changed? Then,
• how could you reprogram that particular robot or habit-system or Helpful Henry so as to give you what you want right now?

And it is always what you now want. You may change your mind later, but consciousness is now, not then. You may be conscious of other times, but you are still conscious – if you are conscious – only now, whenever now may be.

I remember struggling to understand what Ram Dass was talking about in Be Here Now. It seems so obvious.

Times move, and you move with them. Every external age has its unique pattern of what is easier or harder. This is an aspect of “external” that so far we have ignored. But, not today. For today, yes, Be Here Now. That is the key, because no work can be done in sleep, as you know Gurdjieff said.

Suppose I hadn’t given you a place to pause around the issue of choice. What might have come next?

It might have gone in any of several directions. (And it still may, of course. It’s up to you, and certainly doesn’t need to be done in public.)

• One might be, what did (do) you get out of leading so unnecessarily solitary a life.
• Another, what led you there?
• Another, what are the trade-offs involved, and are your first assumptions about tradeoffs accurate.

It could go in many directions peculiar to you the individual involved. But the generalized pointer we are providing is simply: Pay attention to the things that seem to be floating around in your semi-conscious moment-to-moment mind; these things will provide you with a menu of things available to be more fully understood and, if desired, changed or eliminated. The rest is merely technique, and a pretty simple one, at that, as described.

And there’s your hour.

Interesting. Shorter than usual, but filled with meat. Our thanks, as always.

 

 

Monday, November 20, 2017

For the first time in weeks, I find my lungs more or less at rest even while I am lying down, sleeping or half-sleeping. Now why is that? I instinctively relate it to my change of state, noticed yesterday and Saturday. But I still required the inhaler Saturday night, and I needed the nebulizer, though only to a small degree, last night. Yet it feels like I’ve really changed – like somebody inside got the message. Any light you fine citizens care to shed on the subject?

Think of it as a reason for thanks giving.

Nice pun. And –?

Why does there have to be an “and”?

Because usually, there is one.

You’re a little late, learning that.

I’m a little late learning most things. So what’s going on?

Why would you think that what you already know needs to be confirmed by a process that you half-suspect (half-correctly) is you talking to yourself?

I do love your straight answers.

I thought you told people the process never gets contentious.

Maybe it should, sometimes. But I take it that as usual we’re playing Socratic games?

Our rhetorical question was equally a straight question: How would confirmation from a source that may well be only a part of your own mind be confirmation? Of anything?

You, and others, have pointed out many times that sometimes we need to hear input from outside ourselves in order to give it the weight it deserves. I realize that by some definitions this does not count as input from “outside” myself, but I don’t know what that would mean anymore anyway. Even if this is a willed semi-disassociation, that may not be a meaningful distinction. If we are all one thing, our entire lives are, or could be described as, a willed (or sometimes unconscious) semi-dissociation from the rest of ourselves. And that is probably the only way 3D can function, maintaining the illusion of separation.

That is the way 3D does function, but it is not the only way it does, and is certainly not the only way it could function. You were told years before that the next step will be for people in 3D to walk around as now, only do so knowing they are connected. Well, that will amount to their experiencing themselves being connected to each other as well, even if (conceptually) at one remove.

At which time we will realize more fully that in speaking to “others” we are always speaking to an extended part of ourselves. It is true that at the moment we can at most accept that idea only theoretically. It doesn’t yet feel as true as we can accept it to be.

Realizations come incrementally. First perhaps one cannot imagine not being a closed unit. Then perhaps one’s system shifts to allow for the possibility of non-physical communication. Later, that communication may become more closely defined, so as to envisage or recognize (take your pick) specific individuals. Then perhaps the system shifts again and you realize – or imagine – that those other personalities are either dramatizations of part of yourself or are extensions of yourself that you have merely begun to recognize. And so on. Definitions are structures, and may function as scaffolding or as prison cells, perhaps alternately.

And I’m comfortable with proceeding in the absence of any decision as to what is “the truth.” So, back to the substance of my question. Let me rephrase. I feel intuitively that the

[!]

You see? A chunk of awareness hits – interrelated bits of information, thoughts, memories associate themselves and suddenly relate to your larger pre-existing mental structure – and you stop in your tracks and say “aha!”

Yes, it’s interesting. I haven’t yet tried to describe the experience. The pause and the implied aha seem necessary to seat it in, though of course I don’t know. It happens more usually when I am writing out what is coming through.

Subtext.

Subtext, yes. The words are saying one thing and the context tells me something else, either confirmation or expansion or settling-into-context or mental leap. Always satisfying when it happens. So, I was starting to say that I intuitively felt this latest change connects somehow to – well, I don’t remember what I was going to relate it to from yesterday, but I realized that, as I had suspected, this goes back directly to my session with Jane Mullen three weeks ago. For just a moment, I saw connections more clearly. Let me pause, sink in, and see if I can retrieve that awareness.

[Pause]

I went away somewhere. Don’t know that I came back with what I went dredging for, though.

Oh sure you did.

I did?

Start to express it and it will manifest.

You know, I know you’re right, but logically that sounds backwards.

It’s called priming the pump, and you used to be very familiar with the process.

Not in this context, though.

No, not specifically as a means of recalling information you already know you have but cannot place. But the process is the same. Open the pipe, expect it to flow. How can that work less effectively than sitting by the closed pipe, wishing for water?

Smiling. Okay, let’s see.

It is a feature of a temperament like mine that on the one hand I am open to miracles, and on the other hand I tend to expect them. That is, I underrate the importance of process, and rely upon quantum leaps. So when I have a transformative experience, I fall into the trap of expressing results in binary: on/off, yes/no, whereas they may well come like turning up a rheostat. Rheostats may be turned smoothly or in increments, but in no case do they more than superficially resemble an on/off switch. So, I can’t remember exactly what Jane and I discussed, nor even if it was absolutely a discovery but more a placement into new context. I could look it up (I wrote it out, I think), but it isn’t necessary. The work loosened the knot. Something over the weekend loosened it more.

Yes. Seeing asthma less as a disconnected physical problem and more as an indicator of an internal situation that can be triggered by external circumstances allows you control.

I think I’ll have to spell that out for people, and perhaps for myself as well, lest I forget the connection that at the moment seems so obvious.

Asthma exists. It is a systemic weakness. Environment affects it. There isn’t any talking it away as only this or only that. Mary Baker Eddy [founder of Christian Science] might have a difficult time removing it by concentrating on proper thought. And yet she isn’t exactly wrong either. It is a matter of context.

We all have weak points, circuit-breakers, the things that are going to go first, given sufficient stress. Asthma has always been mine. Well, you can look at asthma, and at specific asthma attacks, in one of two ways. The one would be, “Something specific (Fall, dust, mold, whatever) caused it and the only thing to do is to find the counter-agents that will control it – pills, inhalers, nebulizers, whatever.” The other would concede all this, but say, “Why is it the weak point in the first place? If we correct the weakness, the same causes will no longer trigger it, as it will not exist in that vulnerable form.”

But perhaps the most productive approach would be to recognize weaknesses as indicators, and correct the imbalance they are warning against, so that they don’t even need to be disabled (“cured”) but may continue to operate as sentinels, without necessary triggering.

We can wrap it up on that note – you’ve been at it an hour – but let’s add this one thing. “Perfect health” is a misnomer for “absence of symptoms.” It stems from assuming that an absence of indicators of distress is in and of itself an absolute good. Certainly it is more comfortable; it is not necessarily as informative, or as trans-formative.

I know you aren’t saying illness is necessarily good for us.

No, but it isn’t necessarily bad for you. Or, let’s say it differently, it isn’t necessarily as helpful to have no flashing indicators as it would be to have a more delicately calibrated mechanism that would sound the alarms more frequently. But that wouldn’t serve everybody. Some want growth more than comfort, some don’t.

Again I get that you are aiming that particular statement beyond me.

Think of yourself as a telegraph wire, sometimes.

Humming with electricity. Okay, till next time.

 

Sunday, November 19, 2017

[On Saturday, I drove down to Chesapeake, spent a few hours with my long-time friend John Nelson, then drove to the Virginia Beach waterfront for the night. After a short time on the beach, and then supper, I went to bed, expecting and hoping to be able to do a session after a while. In the middle of the night, I was up with pen in hand.]

Very well, gentlemen, I took yesterday off, and here I am. A sus ordenes. And, a pause. Nothing to say this morning? Want me to try again later? What?

Look out at the ocean. You can’t see it because it is middle night, and the streetlights (boardwalk lights) light not the sea but the boardwalk. Yet you know the sea is there, and if you were to open the door you would hear it. Open the door, just for the moment, not long enough to get cold.

Yes, lovely sound – and I can see the white of the breakers rolling gently in.

You retitled your novel about Angelo’s awakening That Phenomenal Background, because he looked out at the stars that in his normal city-bound existence he rarely saw, and he thought,

• the stars were always there even if in normal life humans were unaware of them; even if they never saw them, and
• the same thing applied to the hidden realities about life that he had begun to see.

The world is a deeper and more magical place than at first it may appear.

It certainly is – and it need not be unexperienced (if that is a word) merely because one’s surroundings are not particularly conducive to seeing it. Once see the magic and the beauty and the power of your lives, and you have all you need. It is merely a matter of remembering.

Big “merely.”

Yes it is. But not as big as the word impossible.

No argument here.

Fiction is a way to suggest truths that cannot be said straight out, a way to remind you of the unsuspected background.

Okay. I take it you have a point, here?

Your lives are always going to be about something; they are also always going to have an unsuspected phenomenal background. Maybe for any given person there is not going to be any reason to be aware of the background, maybe there will be. Either way, it is there, and anyone who denies its existence is either unaware of it or is perverse. So – and this is aimed specifically at certain of your readers present and future who will recognize themselves – on the one hand, no need to proselytize; on the other hand, no need to apologize. In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man need not expect to be understood. But he doesn’t need to pretend to be blind, either.

All right.

Doesn’t sound like much of a message, to you. But there are those to whom it will come as a revelation.

Really?

Oh yes. Remember, your differences from your environment may lead you to assume that you and it cannot both be right, and that it is more reasonable that you are wrong than that everyone around you is.

Shaw said that all progress depends upon the unreasonable man, who will not adapt to his environment.

On the other hand, that iron-willed determination produces a Lenin, or a Mao, or fanatics of any political stripe. The trick is to set one’s reforming instincts to reforming oneself, which is already a recalcitrant enough potential victim (or subject, to put it more kindly).

Always much easier to see what is wrong with someone else.

Yes, only in this case we are calling you to see what is right with yourselves. Like Whitman, we see no advantage to your weeping for your sins. If you have progressed far enough to forgive others, no reason not to start forgiving yourselves! And after all, what is forgiveness but sympathetic understanding of the circumstances behind the action or attitude in question?

Forgiveness is a sort of freeing-up, isn’t it?

That is exactly what it is. No progress can be made while you are glued to the floor unable to move because you are busy regretting what cannot be changed – by which we mean not so much something you may have done as something you may have been.

“That’s the kind of thing that happens in 3D,” I say now. I take it that something pretty much like it is our attitude once we have crossed over. At least, I hope we have a better perspective on it then.

It is a function of the purgatories and hells that people construct for themselves (by the belief-systems they adopt in life) to get one beyond such limitations. But it is easier, faster, done while in 3D, plus it frees you for further adventures in this life rather than in some future life.

And that’s enough for now.

Sort of slow, this morning. A little more than five pages in 45 minutes.

Not every session needs to be Moby-Dick, or War and Peace.

Till next time, then, and thanks as always.

 

Friday, November 17, 2017

All right, my friends, what is on the agenda for this morning?

Talk a little about the incessant reading you are doing.

Re-reading the six Dion Fortune novels, Moon Magic being the last. Reading Henry Adams on the U.S. during Madison’s administrations, currently reading about the War of 1812. Dion Fortune’s The Magical Battle of Britain, again, though hardly begun. Still on The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events. Still on Awakening from the 3D World. Never finished Holy Ice, a book about crystals. Set aside Parkman for the moment. Read one short story in Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life, which arrived yesterday.

And what does all this amount to?

Avoidance? Habit? I don’t know.

Talk about your lungs.

I haven’t been really well since asthma started up again, as usual, in the Fall. September wasn’t bad, but it got going pretty well last month and was tenacious enough that I realized, I was just holding my own, between nebulizer and inhaler. But then yesterday I sort of had it out with it. Or, no, it was as if I were saying goodbye to it, as a long-time companion. I remember thinking I’d miss it, in a way. Immediately I thought that, it changed. It didn’t exactly disappear, but the intensity lessened, and I do suspect it will be going. Not entirely sure what this is about.

Talk about the alligator.

If I must. When I was working with Jane Mullen on the 30th, at one point she saw what she apologetically described as an alligator within me, very tough hide, great snapping teeth. We both took it to be a defense-mechanism instilled or installed or developed at an early age. I could see that it had been needed. I could see that it was needed no more and in fact had caused me a lot of trouble, I not being aware of it. So I talked to it and we encouraged it to leave, which it did without struggle. I felt the difference immediately.

And finally, talk about your ambitions and your steps not taken to achieve them.

The things I’d like to tidy up by writing them, as I did Dark Fire, rather than leaving them in limbo.

That, and the ones not yet begun.

Lots of work to be done, but instead other than these conversations and their accompanying labor of transcriptions, I don’t do the work, I read. I watch movies sometimes. I do email. But mostly I read. I take it you have a reason for having me trot this out? I’m not very discreet, but this seems unnecessary.

Few people would describe their lives in a way that would agree with the way others see them.

Natural enough, I’d think. The view from inside is always going to differ from the view from outside looking in.

Indeed it will. But the view from inside may be as different from “the truth” – meaning, a closer description of cause and effect – as the difference you sometimes cite between intent and effect.

Yes. I point out sometimes, we judge ourselves by our intent, and judge others by their actions (and, often enough, by the effect of their actions). So?

So here is our view, neither internal nor external, both internal and external. The middle two terms of four-place logic, you see. [Rather than either “identity” or “non-identity,” four-place logic includes “neither” and “both.”]

Maybe it isn’t anybody’s business.

And maybe it isn’t discreditable and you don’t need to worry about it.

And maybe it isn’t anybody’s business anyway.

And maybe it is.

Well, that stopped me. It is?

From our point of view, one’s intent means more than one’s execution. That doesn’t mean, “We forgive you for not doing X; your heart was in the right place.” It means, what you really do and what you appear (even to yourself) to be doing, are not the same thing. Not now, not ever. And of course none of this is special to Frank, it is one life being used as an illustration of Life.

You having to find somebody willing to be dissected in public.

We wouldn’t have put it quite that way. But, say it is so. It is a valuable contribution, that willingness.

Now, you don’t know which you’d rather hear less, praise or criticism. Of the two, you are better at dealing with the latter.

There is a saying I don’t understand that comes to mind: “Praise to the face is open disgrace.” As payment for services rendered, you might explain that one. It’s sort of how I feel, but I don’t know why.

Oh certainly you do, you just haven’t connected it. Think of your reaction to literary criticism. One praising (or criticizing, but let’s stick to praising) another, in a sense assumes the right to do so; that is, assumes that s/he knows enough to have the right to judge.

I don’t think that’s quite fair. Mostly, when people say they like this or that, they are describing how it affected them. What’s wrong with that?

As a description of how it affected them, nothing at all. As you have pointed out often enough, appreciation of one’s work by others is an artist’s reward, second only to the work itself. But if the praise or criticism pretends to be an objective judgment, then the would-be judge had better have some credentials, or it is a bit of unconscious or conscious arrogance, and an implied ranking of the artist by an authority.

I see the argument, but it seems a little far-fetched.

To your conscious mind, yes. We suggest it is familiar enough to other levels of yourself! And how much less is anybody willing to concede to another the ability to judge your life and your being?

People judge all the time, and are judged.

Yes, and what a world of good it does them!

I always smile when you get sarcastic, don’t know why. Anyway –

You have described your life as you see it, and although you don’t quite realize it, that was a description of doing, not of being. And we would venture to guess that anybody you would ask would similarly describe what they did, not how they were.

For one thing, doing is easier to get a handle on than being. You’re asking the fish to describe the taste of water, when he’s lucky if he can describe the fishbowl!

Aren’t we willing to describe the taste of water for you? That was our point. And, as always not so much for you as through you, as example for others, because everybody is naturally going to be concerned primarily with the life that is their responsibility, and only indirectly with the life of others. What they can see done for someone else they can extrapolate for themselves.

A pitfall for biographers, I always say, is thinking they have the right and the ability to judge, just because they have a lot of facts. The portrait they wind up painting is a portrait of how those facts affected the biographer. My life of JFK whom I never met would be very different from those of others, even those who knew him well, because I would see or think I saw different things.

So, to describe you, we would do the same thing, though you don’t quite see it. We would describe you as the interaction of your 3D and non-3D selves. That unseen element is what people guess at, be they biographers, family, friends, or spectators. And we, having a ringside seat, in describing you who are willing to drive the pen, can thereby help others see their own unknown territory.

Here is how we see you being, as opposed to doing. You live a receptive life,

Stopped dead. But, try again.

If people respond, you respond to them. If you read, you respond to what you read and to what it suggests. If you

Gritting my teeth, in a way, not because of anything you’re saying, but for some reason this is hard.

The process – particularly when it involves a description of yourself – requires you to maintain a difficult and uncomfortable position, neither passively conveying nor actively shaping, neither comfortably objective nor comfortably subjective. The content has less to do with the discomfort than the position itself.

It isn’t what you do on the 3D level that expresses your life, it is what that doing does to who and what you are – and that is an on-going process. The nurse who helps a succession of patients, the lawyer who treats a succession of clients, the theoretician who examines a succession of possibilities – the list could be added to endlessly – all of you do something that is easily and inaccurately defined, but that doing is not the whole story. What you want to be, what you work at becoming, what you hope against hope is a possibility, is your realer life, percolated through that maze of doing.

See, as an abstract statement it wasn’t hard. But the concrete example is what would let people anchor it.

Oh go ahead then. I’ll let it through if I can.

If you will hold in mind any aspirations you ever had, and look at them, you will see your life differently. You wanted to become a saint, as a boy. You wanted to be a statesman, a famous author. Three easy if not altogether compatible illustrations. But you wanted other things, in different parts of your mind. Soldier and war hero, for instance. Explorers, pioneer, adventurer, a la Daniel Boone. Cowboy, like so many boys of your time. Later you found other ideals. None of this shows you, now, but they illustrate the fact that what you yourself remember of the life that shaped you isn’t much more accurate (that is, doesn’t include so much) as what others see. And of course we are leaving out what you would cross out anyway.

You, day to day, moment by moment, are an ever-moving combination of various ideals and daydreams, various responses to 3D and non-3D stimuli – that is, the books, and the thoughts and reactions the books stimulate – and a thousand unconsidered but very real everyday reactions as you go about your life.

This has gone on for nearly an hour and a half.

We won’t embarrass your further, and as usual we suggest that you take tomorrow off.

I can see I’ll need to. Very well, till next time.

 

Thursday, November 16, 2017

Gathering and manifestation

Yesterday may turn out to have been a big day. I’m thinking that my session with psychic/healer Jane Mullen is continuing to show results. That was October 30, and it seems to me it was a turning point. Certainly, a lot has happened, mostly but not entirely internal, in the two weeks since then. And, as we know, “internal” is probably a meaningless distinction from “external.”

And you, my friends, seem to have been an integral part of the process of change, or development, and I am grateful.

The theme at the moment, you will recall, is the practical application of so much investigation. Naturally, practice is going to result in change, or did you do so much work over so much time with the idea of manifesting no more than you already were?

We both know better than that. John Nelson pointed out in one of his novels that so many people want to “change without changing.” I know better than that. I feel better than that, let’s say. But of course change always involves moving into the unknown.

It does and it doesn’t. Let’s talk for a moment about the “doesn’t,” for in a time when sweeping comprehensive change is all about you (“you” plural, you understand), it is well that people be reassured that they are not being swept away by a tornado of unbound and unbounded forces. To change metaphor, they are not wandering, lost in the desert, or adrift on the sea. They are, and they aren’t, depending entirely upon their connection to their larger self which they experience.

It strikes me, that is what this whole long story is about, in a way. Muddy Tracks, first draft written in 1997-98, had as its theme my own stumbling efforts to conceptualize life as connection to what I was calling the larger being. Everything in the time since – and before, of course, given that I wasn’t writing theory but trying to make sense of experience – is variations on a theme. Connection, expansion, reorientation, exploration, consolidation – it has been going on a good long time now.

And finally you are at another culmination point.

• You as an individual, Frank, and
• you as a part of a small open-but-closed society,
• and you as a part of a civilization spanning the globe.

These are times of gathering and manifestation. They aren’t the end; there is never a “the end,” but they are a pause for – call it rolling readjustment, maybe. Not the end of the line, not the end of movement. Not a pause, even. More a moment of recognition, a reorienting.

So. for those who are ready to make such preoccupation practical, we have been providing the specific tools. For those who are not yet ready (including those who will never be ready in this lifetime), nothing wasted; no one can know what seed will germinate at what time, in what circumstance. And it takes many iterations, sometimes, for a given statement to suddenly (or gradually) penetrate layers of dullness or misinterpretation or resistance. But for those who are ready when they read this, or re-read it, or think about it later, our theme-song has been, “You are not alone, you are not lost, you are not damned, or forsaken, or stymied.” You have not foreclosed your future by your past action or inaction.

Some scripture says “though your sins be as scarlet,” you can be lifted above them not so much by divine grace (an external agency that offers you a lift) as by your divine nature (an innate part of yourself that you can at any time choose to identify with). [To my surprise I find, it is neither Hindu nor Buddhist nor Sufi nor Christian: It is from Isaiah 1:18: “Though your sins be like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red as crimson, they shall be like wool.” I would have bet it was from the Upanishads. If I properly understand the sense of the chapter, Isaiah, who was a prophet, not a lawgiver, was saying, in effect, that God told him that God wasn’t interested in sacrifices or externals, but in repentance – that is, in voluntary individual reform.]

A difficulty of scripture is that it is words rather than someone’s presence; hence the words may be taken out of context; their meaning may be seen only one way; they may be used as law rather than as assistance. But remember, everyone who reads a book is directly connected to the author, hence to everyone else who ever reads it. This is as true of scripture as of any book else.

A two-edged sword, there, isn’t it? I can see why not only literalism but sheepitude are dangers there. The sense of being one of a huge number visible and invisible, living and departed, may convey a sense of certainty, and that sense (correct enough as far as it goes) may extend to a self-righteous exclusionary cult mentality.

You know full well that you cannot have a tool sharp enough to do your work without it being sharp enough to cut the unwary. Scripture is a very powerful tool, and therefore it gets misused and injures the unwary. Is that reason to discard it, or to post warnings for the unwary to have more care?

Not that they are likely to listen, being unwary.

(1) You never know.

(2) The point is that you don’t want to deprive yourselves and others of that powerful assistance because the unwary may misuse it. And yet that is exactly what has happened among seekers who are intelligent, and independent, and sincere – often enough, desperate – yet so afraid of becoming sheep that they dare not take the food that will feed their life.

Not a new idea to me. Hard to apply, sometimes. I see it in some of my friends (or seem to). If I mention God or cite scripture, it is as if I betray that I am childish or superstitious or, let’s say, had not overcome the difficulties of my childhood. I saw that reaction in Colin Wilson, for one.

The touchstone always is a person’s sincerity and perseverance, not his conclusions or his walled-off areas. You yourself are not particularly open to scientific arguments that might tend to “prove” a meaningless or contingent universe. And, why should you be? That isn’t the “you” that it is your job and joy to express.

Yes, I know that. Obviously I am well aware of the value of Colin’s work in opening a space for seekers who are of a certain background and disposition – as I myself was.

Wouldn’t it be a reproach to a teacher if his students never went beyond his limits to their limits?

That’s a good way to think of it. I like that.

We return to the point one last time (for now!). It is time to make all this dedication and inquiry and good intent and exploration and resolve practical. That is what we have been sketching out, not the way but anyway a way. This is not the time to leave your castles in the air.

Thoreau: “If you have built your castles in the air, your work need not be lost. Now put the foundations under them.”

Exactly. So, not two worlds but one world. Not spiritual or physical, but both human and divine. Not predestined or free, but both and neither. Not stuck and lost and hopeless, only thinking one is.

As a man thinks in his heart, so he is?

That’s one sense of it, surely.

And, like Daniel Boone, never been lost in the woods but once confused for three days?

Also true.

Very reinforcing and encouraging, as usual. Our thanks, also as usual.