Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

Wednesday, November 15, 2017

[Up again after maybe an hour and a half – not sleeping, exactly, but resting, anyway.]

Very unsatisfactory session today. because no coffee? Because no idea where it would go? But either and both these conditions have been true in the past. Stage-fright lest Bruce come in? This is the first time I am left with so unsatisfactory a feeling about it. It occurs to me, perhaps I am shirking.

Bruce, is it you, wanting to come through?

Of course.

Well, I don’t see that there’s any “of course” about it, necessarily. It has been years since we met or even talked.

Not that that makes any difference.

No, maybe not. So – how are you doing? Surely you haven’t adjusted so quickly?

Why not? I wasn’t taken by surprise, and I had a firm idea of what was to come. Any surprises would be incidental; mostly I knew.

That’s reassuring.

It is as you have been told. The closer you establish the link while you are alive, the easier it is to change your base of operations.

I don’t suppose you will have completed your past-life review.

Again, why not? It takes place in an instant – it only takes a long time to describe if you have to string words together in sequence.

I trust you are satisfied with what you saw.

Anything can be improved on – could have been improved on, I mean. But, it could have been worse, too.

You did make a difference, Bruce. You came a long way.

It is very gratifying, but the strongest gratification is in the people I loved and who loved me. You’ll find it the same. Anybody will. Expressing and experiencing PUL [pure unconditional love] is a solid achievement. Other things are well and good, but they’re more transient, more tied to the moment.

Well, you always said so. I remember you telling me of how as a boy you were walking down the road and pulled the ability to feel and threw it away, because it hurt so much. We who knew you only as an adult watched you recover and develop it. It was very interesting.

Sometimes you have to lose something and get it back, before you can appreciate it.

Many, many people benefitted from your work on yourself, Bruce, even though only at second-hand.

You’ll find it is always that way.

So now you are with Bob Monroe and Ed Wilson and Dave Wallis and Ed Carter, with Laurie Monroe and with Rita presumably. Old Home Week?

Well –

How well I remember that, Bruce! I’d ask you a question, and you would pause, take a drag on your cigarette, let the smoke out, look up and to your right, and start by saying, “Well –.”

See? Some things never change.

I don’t know, Edgar Cayce said once, “Where I am going, there are no cigarettes.”

Hasty conclusion. As to my friends, bear in mind that anybody may have mutual friends with somebody else, but the mutual friends are going to be only a small percentage of the number of friends and loved ones he has in all. Right at the moment, relatives I lost years ago are more front and center. But you know that is misleading. It isn’t quite that way, but that is one way to describe it. Anyway, the TMI portion of my life is one portion. There were many others, and what is important and productive and pleasurable and even urgent – we have urgent here too, although you might not think it – is going to change from moment to moment. Don’t forget, one realm, not two. We here and you there is a way of seeing things, but it isn’t really any more accurate than we here and you here, or we there and you there.

Any messages for your old friends?

Let’s say this is like having my manuscripts edited, all over again. I knew what I wanted to convey, and it came out in my words, but the editing process certainly changed the result.

I get that anybody you contact is going to in effect participate in editing your thoughts – if only by putting them into 3D sequential language – so we shouldn’t worry too much about consistency among various messages.

And you shouldn’t treat them as scripture, as you say. But there isn’t really any need for more at this point.

Give my regards to our friends as you encounter them, and congratulations on your new freedom.

I won’t go into it – ask your sources – but in the absence of 3D time, you are as “here” and as free as I am. But I know what you mean. Thanks.

See you another time, maybe. I’d say “Be well,” but I guess that is no longer a concern.

Finally.

I know what you mean! Okay, till another time.

Our deepest wish

[Later:] Okay, I finally got it. My reaction to being expected to post my conversation with Bruce is an example of the attitude I need to overcome.

Correct. Modesty, even humility, is a very good thing as opposed to egotism. But any good thing can be carried too far. As we said this morning, you have begun to express deeper levels of who you are. You want to, but your own self-contradiction is getting in your way. And here is the thing: No matter how much the world might want and even need a decision, no one has the right to overbear someone’s free will. In fact, it is more than a matter of right; it couldn’t be done anyway. How does one force another to make a free choice? And an unfree choice is no choice at all, so has no force.

I take it that, as usual, this is not just for my benefit.

No, not just; but it is for you to pay attention to. We most earnestly implore you to pay attention to your own soul’s longing.

Interesting. It is in this issue of appearances that I am affected by public opinion. I, who am always congratulating myself on not having to hide. Presumably if heads-me declines to take the indicated path, tails-me will, so what’s the difference?

In a way, free will is an attempt to have heads and tails both come out in the same place, which tips the balance, you see.

No, I don’t see, actually.

A long time ago down the chain of decisions that is your life, the path not taken by you – by the version you are tracing today – led to mastery. If we can encourage tails-you to take decisions that lead to the same result that that very old heads-you chose, the entire weight of your total being will be moved.

I still can’t say that I see. But I don’t need to understand it. I know what my deepest wish in this life has been, only it seemed impossible of attainment, without teacher, without school, without a discipline to lean on.

Don’t you know that people’s deepest wishes are apt to be granted? And, does it occur to you that your deepest wish is rooted in your deepest nature?

Meaning we already are what we long to be?

In a sense, yes, or why would you long for it? What would bring you to recognize it?

I get that I am depending upon the inner knowing that has always sleepwalked me when necessary.

You are not alone. You may have heard that.

I see. Well, all I know to do is what Emerson said, “Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime.”

That’s all anybody could ask, and all you or anybody could need.

And I suppose the next step is to transcribe and send all this, and stand naked.

No one could or would force you to do so. It’s up to you.

Yes. All right.

I suppose this is why you have had me reading Dion Fortune novels, which are all about people discovering their built-over selves. But this is no small thing you’re asking me to do. If I do this, I think surcease from asthma is not an unreasonable price to demand. But that isn’t the kind of payment in advance one can exact, I suppose.

[Later] If I type it up, I’m liable to send it. So – hesitating. No small thing, this; yet I suppose if I do not do it, it’s shallows and miseries for me. I just don’t know.

 

Wednesday, November 15, 2017

Bruce Moen died yesterday, apparently peacefully, after many months’ slow approach to his transition. I presume that he was as well prepared for it as anyone could be. My friends, any comment on that?

You are finding it more difficult, these conversations being neither private nor public, but a mixture of the two.

Indeed I am. I presume my difficulties are no greater than others may experience.

Each person’s experience will be slightly different from anyone else’s, as the individuals are slightly different. Each will be similar, as you all have many things in common. This is so in all aspects of life. And, you see: part private, part public.

I don’t see what is to be done about it.

Who said anything is to be done about it? Be aware of it, make the adjustments as the need for them indicates. What else could you (anyone) do?

Very well. So, today’s theme?

You must now learn to express a deeper part of yourself. This means letting it well up within you, thoroughly mixing with what it finds as it does so.

I get the image of something boiling up through a liquid, roiling and mixing as it rises, sort of tumbling things in waves.

It is a good image, conveying process, steadiness, disruption becoming transformation, injection of additional energy, plasticity of form.

I keep thinking “ice cream” but that doesn’t have any of those characteristics, a fermenting, slow-boiling process that is just out of reach.

Not everything that may be perceived or conceptualized need be named. The important point is that they be followed. Fingers pointing to the moon, not the moon itself, not even the finger itself.

Yes, I get that. Life precedes understanding.

Well, sometimes. It is a reciprocating process, sometimes one leading, sometimes the other. This is an example of the fact that the work can proceed in the absence of clear understanding or precise description.

Another image comes: river rapids. It’s all water, of the same salinity, chemical composition, etc. The difference is in what happens to any given part of the water as it is tumbled. Some gets aerated; gradually I suppose it all gets aerated.

Wild ride, sometimes; perhaps even wild for water.

If there is a theme here, I don’t see it. We have mentioned expressing a deeper part of ourselves, but the mention is all we’ve gotten to.

You are painting a self-portrait as we go along, all the better since it comes out in asides and unconscious allusions. It is well for anyone doing the work to remember it is okay to be a normal human being, in fact unavoidable. Only, normal doesn’t necessarily mean typical, and typical doesn’t necessarily mean anything at all except a vacuous abstraction.

Stirring is another image that comes to me. Stirring one element into another, producing a new homogenous liquid that is neither the one nor the other. I’d say it could be solids stirred, too, only there isn’t the sense of transformation that liquid has.

Stirring will do, so will boiling or churning. The general idea is more important than the specific clothing.

[Much later, I realized that the word I wanted was “Swirl.” That’s why the vague idea of ice cream, I think, a subconscious association of words.]

There is something I intended to ask or say, and it keeps almost appearing, then disappearing again. Presumably you know what it is.

We do because you do, on an equally non-3D level. But if you cannot receive it through your own internal channel, why would you expect to be able to receive it from an “external” channel still internally received? That may apply in cases where you have not been paying attention, but scarcely when you are.

That is a puzzling aspect of things, come to think of it. It applies to the whole process.

You must remember not to fall into the habit of thinking yourself in control of the process, merely because necessarily the material must come through your mind.

It is a temptation, that’s true. Sometimes it is obvious that I am interacting with a different intelligence; sometimes that it is me; and sometimes not clear at all. Despite that, there is the unconscious tendency to think it is or ought to be under my own control, when of course, that is the last thing I’d want, and the last thing any genuine interaction could be. But. We’re all interconnected. You and my mind are linked, or we couldn’t be having the conversation. So why wouldn’t you be able to tell me things like what it is I am forgetting?

The question expresses a certain lack of clarity, if we may say so.

Abstract reasoning is not my best thing. But I presume that you know how to bring more clarity to the question.

Not at the moment.  You’ve been at this 50 minutes and there isn’t really time for more. You do the best you can. Remember always, you don’t know, nor need to know, who will get what from any of it.

Tuesday, November 14, 2017

Last night I thought I would take a glass of wine to relax. To my great surprise, it made me dizzy when I tried to go to bed early. As dizzy as if I were drunk, dizzy as in, that whirling sickening feeling when my eyes were closed. It is sufficiently strange that I think to ask you, my friends, what is going on?

Good that you not only noticed – how could you not, though, in the circumstances – but remembered that things don’t just happen; they happen in a context.

Am I being told to stop drinking alcohol entirely? I’m not a very alcoholic person. It isn’t like I have a drink every day, or every week, or even every month.

Usually in your life (everyone’s, we mean) it is a more productive question to ask what something is in aid of, than why it happened. They may seem like two ways to say the same thing, but they aren’t.

The one is map-reading, the other is analysis of where we’ve been. Similar activities, but a different orientation.

You will remember Thoreau saying that he had discovered that one could over-do anything, even drinking water. He wasn’t blaming himself for having had too much water, obviously. He wasn’t gnashing his teeth, nor setting his teeth in grim resolution to reform. He was merely observing. He had done X; Y resulted. He would not do X again, as he didn’t want to de-tune himself.

He may have had a tendency to generalize rules for others from what was true for him.

Any observation one makes probably describes a tendency in yourself to be watched. That is, if you say it of others, look for it in yourself.

Biography as cautionary tales, eh?

Well –this could be a long discussion. Let’s at least take a step or two along the road. The fact of the matter is that mental experience is no less an education than social experience.

I take that to mean, we may learn from the story of other people’s lives in the same way we can learn from actual observation of people we interact with in the flesh.

After all, in the last analysis, all experience is mental; which means, all experience is you, reacting; which means, all internal and external events are more or less the same in their effects. Or, not quite that. More like, your real life is your choosing your attitude toward what comes at you. Therefore it follows that, to the degree you are more attuned to the inner life, the greater its influence. Not quite right, but you try, and we’ll correct if need be.

I think the nuance is, if one lives primarily “in one’s head,” like me, the majority of one’s important input will come from that world. If one is oriented primarily toward the objective, outside-world life, then that is where one will find the input. Interesting, this shouldn’t be hard to say; it is a simple concept, even an obvious one, but I am getting the sense that we still haven’t quite said it. Which tells me it isn’t as simple as I am inclined to think.

Well, the word “important,” for one thing. Is the air you breathe important? Yet it may not be noticeable. “Important” is not the same thing as “noticeable,” nor is episodic the same as habitual or even constant, but you may not know the relative importance of any of them. In fact, that is a major point in itself: As we have said in other contexts, you never have the data that would be required to judge your life. But observation need not be tied to judgment, and in fact is more likely to be accurate when it is not connected to an attempt (one-time or continuing) to judge.

Whitman said,[in Song of Myself]:

I think I could turn and live with animals,
they are so placid and self-contain’d,
I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

You see, the point that is half-eluding stating is that observation and rumination (speaking of cattle!) are key.

Are we back to Socrates, the unexamined life is not worth living?

Notice, he didn’t say, the unjudged life, the unrepented or un-rued life. Like Whitman, perhaps (though that may seem an odd pairing) he is saying, see your life as it passes; experience it. Analyze it, if that is to your taste, or don’t if it is not, but notice. But notice what your life is, not what others say it is, or what they – or you – think it ought to be.

I get it. Saying “experience your life” is not the same thing as “Go out and collect experiences.” This idea of a bucket list – a list of thing you want to have accomplished before you kick the bucket – is easily trivialized. What’s wrong with your bucket list containing only one item, if you prefer, which is, “Don’t make a bucket list”?

Probably your life will not have been wasted even if you never learn to ski, never experience life as one of the rich or one of high society or one of whatever elite impresses you. Probably you may live your life fully and successfully even if you don’t (or do) drink heavily, smoke, carouse, fast, devote yourself to acts of charity, spend your days reading or watching movies or taking long walks or playing cards with friends or strangers.

Why, to listen to you, you’d think we are here to be what we are and what we want to be.

Yes, imagine that. We, like you, are smiling. We, like you, are entirely serious. Your lives were given to you for you to express yourselves by continuous interaction between what you are and what comes to you.

I got what you meant: Our input may come from anywhere, objective or subjective; our task and our entertainment, our artistic task, is to react to it, to interact with it, to continue to work with ourselves as a sculptor works with clay, to mold it to the shape, or anyway toward the shape that pleases us.

And don’t worry too much about what you bring to yourself. A little worry, fine; not too much.

In other words, don’t over-steer.

You can second-guess yourselves right out of what you know is true and helpful.

It’s an odd feeling, this morning. I can seem to hear you saying some of these things specifically for people I don’t necessarily know who will be reading this.

That is always true, of every author and every reader, only there is no way (and no need) for those involved to be aware of it. Your 3D components are meant to relate to the world around you, which means the place and time you live in. That place and time includes records of the past and foreshadowings of the future, but it is still a definite orienting locus. So it is no surprise and no malfunction, that a writer or artist does not know who any particular work is to have special significance for, and it is equally unimportant that any particular recipient be aware of a particular connection. Nonetheless it is there, and in a very real sense.

I was told once that everyone who reads a book is directly connected to the author and thus to everyone else who ever reads it. I suppose that goes for musicians, composers, sculptors and painters, no less.

What about architects, builders, anyone who shapes the world in any way?

Meaning, the workers in factories? Farmers in their fields? Trash collectors, police, anyone?

Who do you suppose is unneeded in the world? Homo economicus [“economic man”] is only an abstraction, like homo ludens [“playing man,”] or any other abstraction. You are all there, you all interact in ways known and unknown. The man who founds a publishing company, or a distribution company, or a book store virtual or physical – do they not all impact the world around them? The people who grow fruit, or package it, or ship it, or display and sell it – are they unnecessary, supernumerary, merely because you can do without them without ceasing to live? None of these interactions need be obvious; that doesn’t make them any less important to the world. Important to the individual, important to those the individual affects.

Henry Adams certainly wasn’t thinking of me when he wrote his histories of the United States during Jefferson’s and Madison’s administrations, yet they are having their effect on me, 100 years later.

No one’s 3D component knows or can know the effect of his or her thoughts and actions 100 years hence. The fact that the interactions are invisible is not the same as saying they are non-existent.

Well, there’s our hour, but it seems a bit unshaped. Have we been merely rambling through the grass?

If the theme of “the importance of self-observation” be merely rambling though the grass, yes.

Smiling. Okay, till next time.

 

Sunday, November 12, 2017

You have been thinking about Bruce Moen.

Yes indeed. He is dying or, for all I know, may be dead already. Naturally the news brings back memories.

And, perhaps, reminds you that the difference between “being used” and “gladly participating” is mostly a matter of the attitude one takes to it?

Sure, but I gather that you’re wanting to say something on the subject, and we’re all willing to be instructed.

So much in your lives depends less upon what happens than upon what you make of it. The prime decision you make at any given moment, in fact, is usually, “How do I see this thing that just happened?” The “thing” in question may be a physical event, or a memory, or anything that presents a choice of attitude. Forgiving may be a decision, or forgiving oneself. Taking heart, or ceasing to struggle. Putting another or oneself or an abstract cause first, may be another. The permutations are endless, but remember if you can, decisions look like decisions to do or not do some action, even if the action is to harbor or reject a thought or an accustomed idea. But really, decisions are you rebalancing the ballast, adjusting course. Most such adjustments are going to be minor, of course, but not all. And some that appear minor will in fact be seen later to have led to major consequences.

Viktor Frankl again.

Yes, because his experience and his testimony (by his life, not merely by his words) has weight. Has gravitas, as you like to say. Only, don’t thereby conclude that this is necessarily a grim aspect of reality. It can be, but mostly not. Most people don’t have to spend most of their time defying fate. But even for the happiest, most tranquil life, still it remains true that every moment presents a choice of attitude. One may be miserable in a palace, or contented, or ecstatically happy, and it is the same palace.

I seem to remember that it was the emperor/philosopher Marcus Aurelius who wrote – citing the advantages of his position, all that he had been blessed with, etc. – that he had counted the number of happy days he had had in his life and they amounted to five, or seven, or some such single-digit number. His conclusion was, don’t look for happiness on this Earth.

Our conclusion would be, don’t count your felicity by tallying external circumstances, nor consider yourself a neutral observer of your life.

Do you mean “neutral,” or “helpless”?

Actually, closer to powerless-to-affect-matters, however you would phrase that. The point is, he in his philosophic attitude toward his life was deciding the nature and meaning of the ups and downs of it. He may have been thinking he was applying philosophy to make the best of a bad situation – life! – or he may, more likely, have been saying, “Don’t expect life to be smooth and easy,” without any nuance of complaint. In a way, he was saying the same thing we are, that your attitude is the thing that is realest in your life.

The specific application we wish to make of this general truth is that in choosing one’s attitude one really, not metaphorically, not theoretically, not in a  wishful-thinking way, determines what one’s life is going to be, to mean, to feel like, to – well, everything.

Poor structure there at the end, but your point comes through.

The specific illustration may be the way you and Bruce Moen met; what he had experienced before the fact; the agency of Ed Carter, etc., etc. When you look at that smooth blending of energies in a way that neither Bruce nor Ed nor you were aware of on a conscious 3D level, and when you trace backwards the events in all of your lives – and Bob Monroe’s life, and Ed Wilson’s – that were required in order to bring you together in that time and space, you can see the weaving of the web, and might easily conclude, “It was a set-up.” That is, you might draw the usual predestination argument, because you might say, “Given what you were, that’s what was going to happen.”

I’d be more inclined to say, “Given what we were, that’s what was enabled to happen if we played our parts right.”

And we would be inclined to say both, and also, more importantly, “That’s what was set up to happen, courtesy of your cooperation and the cooperation of so many others in your pasts, and it remained to be seen if you would all stay on script.” Only, improv doesn’t use scripts, it uses setups and sees what happens.

I get the strangest feeling, here. It’s that I sort of know what you’re driving at, and you are sort of saying it, but, in each case, not quite.

No, it’s slippery. Any time we attempt to bring in a fine nuance, it is actually harder than hitting you with your proverbial 2×4.

Harder because more slippery.

The recipient – you, and anyone who reads this – is likely to (mostly unconsciously) let the nuance slide into some already accustomed category. A radically new concept, you’ll have to accept or reject or at least ponder. A nuance may just keep sliding around.

So, trying again?

You choose how to receive what comes to you, easily seen when “what comes” seems to be external, less easily seen when it seems to be “merely” internal. You choose meaning. Some choose to see it as predestined, some as free-will, some as meaningless chance. Same event (physical or mental). We still haven’t quite succeeded in expressing it.

How about, “You choose viewpoint”?

Better. You have the idea now, you try to say it.

If we look back on our life, our present attitude toward it will incline us to see it in a certain light. If we change our attitude, the same look will present an entirely different profile, perhaps. More likely, many different profiles.

That’s it. It is a matter of changing perspectives by changing viewing-points. Same objective reality (so to speak) but many different scenes, different landscapes.

Parallax.

Well, a shift in viewpoint, anyway. No need to extend the metaphor. The operative point is that how you choose to see the workings of your life determines the possibilities you create for yourself. If you look at so much orchestration and consider yourself to be the acted-upon (rather than also the actor), it is easy to slip into victim mode. From victim mode, you will find evidence enough to persuade you that nothing you do will free you from the spider’s web, and that at best your meaning in your life is that you are food for the cosmic spider, so to speak. Or, if you look at it all and conclude that you are as integral a part in the play as anybody else, even if you don’t know your lines or don’t have any lines, you may easily feel included, and important (that is, not contingent or without meaning), and that attitude may lead you to either overestimate your role (inflation) or to treat your life with a little more seriousness, a little bit more self-respect.

So, Bruce and Ed Carter

• just happen to take the same program.
• They just happen to share the same two-person table at a meal.
• Ed just happens to have bought into Hampton Roads and gotten a few business cards.
• Bruce just happens to tell Ed something of what he has experienced, and
• just happens to mention that for no reason he could think of, he
• just happened to bring an article he had written about a retrieval he had done.
• Ed just happens to call me and suggest that I join them for breakfast Friday morning, as there is a potential author he’d like me to meet.

And so on and so forth, and none of us having any idea what we were helping to orchestrate.

And this could be sketched out for all of you – for anybody and everybody – for your entire lives. Life is always orchestration and the dance. That isn’t the meaning (pretending for the moment that there is a “the” meaning) of your lives. That is the improv, but what of your training and rehearsals, and your learning about your characters? What of the living-out of your life for yourself as well as for the improv in general? To weigh life fairly, you need keep all these factors in mind, if you can. It isn’t easy; it’s a lot of geese to juggle. That’s one reason why people often choose one or another position and disregard the rest.

 

Saturday, November 11, 2017

I know it’s Saturday and you like me to take a rest once a week, but maybe a short session? Answering Bob’s question shouldn’t be all that complicated, should it?

[Bob Friedman: I’ve been reading Rupert Sheldrake’s 2012 book Science Set Free, which is a fascinating study of the materialist versus what is called the “vitalist” philosophies. The vitalists believe in the separation of mind and matter, mind being non-3D. But the vitalists cannot explain how the non-3D mind can attach to the 3D body. The materialists cannot explain the origin, nature, and composition of consciousness either. I wonder if Nathaniel can address this apparent dilemma.]

Most things can be answered in a few words, but then explaining and hedging the words takes a little more, and perhaps the basis of the explanations needs more, and you go ever-deeper into the swamp. But we can begin, and we shall see. Maybe it won’t amount to much, as such explanations go.

The short explanation is that vitalism and materialism are two sides of the same mistaken coin, much as capitalism and communism were in the political/economic sphere. When you start off with a wrong premise – particularly an unnoticed one – many a logical antithesis amounts to pointing out the errors of the opposite position, not realizing that one’s own position is equally undermined, because not recognizing what the two have in common.

I am almost perplexed that people can’t instinctively understand that there isn’t any material world, in any absolute sense, so there isn’t the basis for any such contradiction. Of course I realize I lay myself open to charges of being a philosophical idealist, but, given the company that puts me in with – the Transcendentalists first of all – there is worse company to be placed among.

Well, that is the nub of it, of course. In a universe formed out of consciousness, in which every atom and molecule partakes of consciousness, where is there room for what people call dead matter? Where is there room, even, for unconscious matter? There isn’t. What there is, is a world entirely composed of elements all of which are conscious, each form of consciousness different, according to the physical form’s possibilities and constraints, but all conscious. The fact that human 3D consciousness cannot communicate with that of plants or rocks does not mean that there is nothing to be communicated with – particularly given the fact that in some circumstances, people do communicate in such ways. You have experienced it yourself, Frank. Many of your readers will have experienced it in what are called anomalous experiences, usually doubted because not resting firmly and comfortably in a theory.

Jeremy Narby took some hallucinogen – ayahuasca, maybe – and found himself communicating with DNA itself, if I remember correctly. I think it was he (and I think it was in response to that experience) who realized or anyway theorized that this is how indigenous peoples knew the pharmacological properties of plants: The plants told them.

The setting-aside of obstructive beliefs (no matter how “scientific” they are supposed to be) is sometimes enough in itself to allow one’s mind to realign things – seemingly spontaneously sometimes.

Ideas may divide reality into seemingly solid compartments, and once you see that the walls of the compartments are merely arbitrary and theoretical, new and more fundamental relationships become evident.

So, once realize that reality is not “mind” and “matter” – because there can be no matter divorced from mind, no matter not made out of consciousness – and you see that both vitalists and materialists are believers in the same mistake, only differing from each other in which pieces of data they wish to admit from the real world beyond their theories.

Short and sweet, as advertised.

And, as advertised, it could be expanded upon as one things leads to another.

“As we ramble into higher and higher grass,” as Thoreau put it.

It was undoubtedly a coincidence that led you to honeymoon in New England and visit Concord and Walden before you – as opposed to your bride – even knew who Thoreau was, other than knowing his name. Undoubtedly coincidence that your thesis supervisor suggested a topic that led you to Thoreau, and equally a coincidence that one moment’s acquaintance with his writings instantly and permanently captured you. Undoubtedly a coincidence that your wife – who was afraid of the kinds of mental exploration you would enter into – gave you as a gift the complete set of Thoreau’s journals in that same year of graduate school.

Yep, pretty coincidental life I lead.

It was only the co-inciding of the many strands of your life that led you where you are. And it was only your larger self’s guidance that repeatedly brought you into the orbit of this or that pole-star. Thoreau, Melville, Emerson, etc. No need to count them. The things you come to in “sinfully strolling from book to book,” as Emerson put it, are as much a part of your experience as anything that happens to your body. Where is there division between mind and matter, except in philosopher’s or scientist’s categories?

 

Friday, November 10, 2017

Louisa Calio posts a query on my blog that amounts to, Can you give us an interpretation of 3D events that will make sense of the stupidity we live among, or some way of seeing it that will make us feel better about it.

Answering your rough paraphrase rather than her original, we probably should say, “No, we can’t.” But we can give you a few clues, to help you arrive there yourselves. We can suggest interpretations; how you react is always an individual reaction, a merging of new data with old patterns and assumed relationships.

Sure, we can see that. But, subject to that proviso—

Your ways of making sense of things often put the cart before the horse. But explaining how you are doing that isn’t always so easy, given that it involves looking at the same thing from a different point of view, rather than altering or adding to the thing being observed. So you will perhaps be tempted to say, “That’s just talking around it,” when we show you how it looks from another perspective.

We’ll try not to do that.

Louisa says – quote it –

“…the nature and purpose of some of these extreme conflicts within the individual…”

It isn’t so much that the conflicts have a purpose as that they express a result. You come into 3D embodying conflicts, precipitating conflicts around you by what you have within you. That’s one thing that 3D is, an arena, a place and time in which conflicts (and harmony, but we’re talking about conflicts at the moment) come front and center to be transformed. You wouldn’t expect a football game to be tranquil and harmonious; you wouldn’t expect a piano concert to be cacophonous. You expect each event to express in its own way.

The thing that makes it hard for you to see, sometimes, is that your football game and piano concert are taking place at the same time, along with drag racing, aerial acrobatic exhibitions, family feuds, three different melodramas being filmed, prolonged mattress testing, and half a million other events including the depths of non-social interactions with yourselves such as monasticism, intense study, illnesses, and other preoccupations. It can get a bit crowded. With all that going on, what could you say is “the point” of it?

Meaning, it won’t have just one point?

Meaning, too, that the purpose of a football game or a concert isn’t just for producing the cheers of the fans or the ovations of the audience.

Aha. Meaning, Loosh may be produced but that doesn’t mean it is more than a by-product.

At this point we advise people to re-read Far Journeys to refresh their memory of what Bob actually said. The Loosh analogy was not, by far, the end of the story, but the beginning of Bob’s deeper exploration.

I won’t quote it, but if I can find the place easily, I’ll indicate the relevant chapters.

Not necessary. Tell them, as you told Colin Wilson, to begin at Chapter 12.

Okay, so –

Bearing in mind this great assortment of activity taking place around you, remember that it is also taking place within you. Selective attention is a powerful tool to overcome the effects of cacophony. You can tune yourselves to live more harmonious lives, and those who prefer to live more on the edge can tune to do that, instead.

It isn’t exactly a matter of ignoring larger parts of the world’s events, but of deciding which events are going to be allowed in to fill our RAM [the available workspace in our metaphorical computer] at any given moment.

Not so much that you must tune certain things out – that doesn’t work very well – but that you can tune other things in.

In a sense, that amounts to saying that the world’s miseries and problems mostly aren’t our concern and needn’t bother us.

Any true statement may be made to seem uninviting or shallow or even silly. Look at it a little more slowly. Most of the world’s problems, conflicts, tragedies, perplexities, generation-long tangles, etc. are not everybody’s business, in toto. Nobody can be concerned with more than a small fraction of what goes on in the world, any more than one can be a professional in all fields, or a master of all sciences. Your lives make you specialists; one time, one place, one heredity, even if that heredity is complicated. You can’t be really – as opposed to superficially – concerned with everything wrong in the world. Don’t count the cats in Zanzibar unless you happen to be called to do it, but even if you are, you may be sure that you can’t do that and tend to every other possible task in the world.

And if it isn’t up to you to do something you can’t do, why would it be up to you to suffer because you can’t do it? That suffering is not externally-mandated. It is, in a way, the product of a decision. You decide to suffer (and of course, as always the question arises: Which “you”?) or you decide not to. Or, easier than that, your own makeup prevents the conflict from arising in the first place.

Feeling for people, even feeling for the Earth: nothing wrong with it. But allowing yourself to feel guilty for not doing what was never within your power to do is a waste of energy and potential that could go elsewhere and produce something more satisfactory.

We realize that  this argument has centered on what you call “world affairs” or “social problems,” and Louisa specifically used as example a situation very close to home, concerning her own family. That is the complement of the “social problem.” It is the very personal conflict that does deserve and even demand your engagement. But we wanted to trace the social aspect first, so as to gain perspective from the contrast between the two.

So – in cases closer to home?

There is still the same dynamic: Plenty of things are going on, and only a few of them will fill your RAM, the others automatically being swapped out. So – what do you want, what do you concentrate on?

I know you don’t mean to imply that we can choose only smooth events, but I can’t get what you do mean.

If you come into 3D life embodying certain contradictions, it is for a reason, and those contradictions may express. They may not; you may choose to defer dealing with that particular karma (so to speak), but, they may. Anything that does express may be regarded as material presenting itself to be worked. Even if you can see no way to alter events, you still can choose your attitude toward them, like Viktor Frankl in the concentration camps.

You can always choose to see yourself as victim or can live in faith that it all makes sense, or you can alternate or even do both at the same time. But you will express an attitude toward the events of your life.

Now, a thought and we will end for now. Your external events in 3D won’t mean much to you once you have transcended those limits. Your internal events – the way you shaped yourself by how you reacted to external events – will remain with you, because they will be a part of you. Which do you think is going to be important, once you have dropped the 3D body?