Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

A drumming question from Wednesday’s Intuitive Linked Communication group. I asked, “What is ahead and/or how shall we deal with it? (What’s in it for us?)”

The response I got:

You are always in the eternal now; punctuation is not discontinuity. To deal with the future is no different than dealing with the present moment – literally – because the future only manifests as the present moment.

So be now what you want to be then. Calmly strive for continuity of intent and action. Your life takes care of itself because inner and outer are the same reality, perceived differently. [The “outer world” being reality perceived by the sense; the “inner world” being reality perceived directly, intuitively.] There can be no events not connected to who and what you are. If surprises come, you can use them as learning experiences centered not on them but on who you are in your unknown mental and spiritual makeup.

[Came across this while editing (for the final time, one hopes!) the forthcoming “Only Somewhat Real” manuscript.

Tuesday, November 7, 2017

All right, since I have to be up anyway, I suppose we should begin. I know that doesn’t sound particularly gracious; you know I love doing this, but I’d be just as happy to do it under fewer physical constraints.

It does not occur to you perhaps that this maximizes the use of those constraints. That otherwise you would have the constraints but nothing productive to do within them.

You think I don’t know that, after a lifetime of sitting up reading, rocking forward and back, painful breath by painful breath? I’m not going to go into it, but I’m damn well aware of the advantages of being able to use physical problems as a sort of platform to kick away from. And if uncomfortable nights were the price I had to pay to be able to do this, I’d be perfectly happy to make the bargain. Only, why should it be? It’s the same unexplainable contradiction I’ve always lived within: I know that I should be able to just – turn something, adjust something – and be well, only I can’t find it. And this isn’t just about me, obviously. Everybody wrestles with something; why can’t awareness overcome it?

You have been down this line of thought more than once. Worth looking again, as you are in a different place now than before.

Then let’s look, by all means.

If you could wish away your problems, so to speak – that is, if you had Aladdin’s lamp to grant you even one wish, let alone three – what good would it do you? In fact, look how much harder it would make your lives. It is much like you were told once, if you had an infallible source of knowledge of what is going to happen, wouldn’t you then be prone to Psychic’s Disease? As long as you function in 3D, you function under limitations, and if it isn’t one thing, it will be something else.

Well, my father always used to say, in exasperation, “It’s always something.”

Yes, we smile too, but of course it is always something. That’s life. And by that we mean, not just “That’s the way life goes,” but, more, “that is the essence and fabric and value of life.” And not just limitation, but conflict, problems, difficulty. The very things you may be prone to think of as drawbacks to life are, in fact, demonstrations that all is well, all is always well.

So much easier to see that in other people’s situation, but I do see it. If we are here to choose and to create ourselves (if only by choosing among versions, which one we prefer to live, moment by moment), then obviously there must be things to choose between, and for the choices to matter to us, one must be more attractive, one less attractive. Which implies problems.

That is taking things a little too much at a gallop. Let’s look at it slowly.

I know, I know. Concentrate: con-center-ate.

Centering

And you see the first thing that happens?

It seems my breathing improved, only it isn’t quite that, is it?

The overall feeling improved because although the wheezing continued, the circumambient tightening of the muscles relaxed, reducing the discomfort.

I had a definite sense that you wanted me to use “circumambient,” which ordinarily I wouldn’t. Why?

It is more precise, more descriptive, than merely saying “surrounding.”

And that is important, why?

Perhaps your habits of thought and expression are not so uniquely and entirely yours as you may think.

Okay. And I get that that is a real point, not just a comment. In other words, we’re all in this together; 3D and non-3D, individual and what we might call our mental or at least non-3D community.

You see, anything widens out, at least potentially, if you concentrate. Slower isn’t necessarily deeper, but it may be. It’s up to what you do with it. Faster may get you safely over thin ice; not necessarily, but maybe. It is, as we say, all a matter of how you live it.

So, to return to my statement that was made too much at a gallop?

No need for us to spell it out for you. Sink into it. That is the advantage of writing, after all; the words don’t move.

It isn’t quite a matter of setting up problems so we will have things to choose among.

No, not Shaw’s “moral gymnasium.” So then, what?

I am forgetting the universal in thinking of the individual.

That’s the right idea, but – slower.

Tides

Well, in thinking of the choices and problems we face in life, it is tempting, or maybe I should say it is habitual, for us to think of our situation in isolation, because that is of course how it will present itself. And I see the relevance of the allusion to speed. In our day-to-day situations, we are usually skating, just having enough to deal with, moment by moment, and perhaps little enough time – even if we have the inclination – to examine what comes more closely, slower. Because maybe any situation, any set of choices, offers insight into larger things, if we have the time and inclination to feel our way into it.

Your lives are never accidentally dropped into circumstances. Inner and outer are the same thing seen differently, remember, one through direct feed via intuition (or, non-3D link), the other through sensory apparatus and extensions. So where is the possibility for meaningless occurrence? Not every choice is momentous; that doesn’t mean that it and its context are meaningless.

Slowly, feeling my way into it, as you suggested. So, our lives are bound into the times we live; we know that about our outer circumstances. That means we are equally bound into the times we live internally. Have to be, since it is the same thing. Which means our thoughts and feelings and all are caught in a tide. Have to be. We are not independent, though we think we are; we are independent to a degree, and social to a degree.

This should be obvious to someone who has studied astrology and seen the tides running through the lives of everyone on Earth, not just any one given person. What the tides react on, or let’s say individually affect

Let me.

Go.

The cosmic tides, call them, are what they are, and they are that as a sort of background for us all. But that isn’t what we experience. We experience the result of the interaction between the tide and the individual we are, shaped at a particular moment of time and place. [That is, shaped at birth.] So, we all live in the same – circumambient, since you like that word – cosmic tide, but the individual is affected by that tide differently depending upon what that tide works on; that is, what it finds pre-formed [by previous decisions] at any given moment.

Didn’t we posit vast impersonal forces on the one hand, and individual complicated pipes for those winds to play through?

Yes, clear enough now, in this context.

So was it worth while to be rousted out of bed?

I may cease to answer rhetorical questions.

Yes, good. We smile too. But you see.

Well, I see further implications, too, accurate or not. It seems to imply that certain problems can only be worked with at certain times.

Again, just a little slower.

What I mean is, it’s just what astrology would tell us: At any given moment, certain things are easier for the given individual (depending upon his or her composition) and other things harder. Does this quite imply that whatever problem or opportunity surfaces at any given moment is the best thing to concentrate on?

Easiest, anyway. “Best” is a matter of value and judgment.

And there’s our hour. Well, it turned out to be pretty productive, I think. Not what I would have expected.

There is something to be said for taking what comes.

I do know that. At least, for my kind of person. Other types tend to shape things more, it seems to me.

Hammers make poor screwdrivers. Wrenches make poor drill-bits. Every implement to its own uses.

Thanks as always.

[And as a sort of PS, I had already closed the book when it occurred to me – with help? – that this entry is an example of taking what comes. They began where I was and continued as they were able to. Maybe from their point of view they’re always doing that.]

Nothing at all. Okay, thanks.

Wednesday, October 16, 2019

Shall we do more headlines, this morning?

We can try. You will find this easier, and harder, than our usual plodding. Let’s see how it goes.

When we speak of evil, remember that we refer not to appearance of evil, nor personal preferences rooted in one’s values, nor things that seem evil until seen in greater context. Beyond all these categories, there is real, objective, evil, the twin to real, objective, good.

We know that many people have argued that evil is only appearance but it is not so. In a binary universe, good is paired with evil, and the fact that many things that are not evil are called evil does not change the fact that some things are evil, and you know it in practical life, even when your philosophic position or your intellectual preference would argue it away.

Yes, this is ground many times gone over.

Well, it is important, for if all choice is a matter only of personal preference, then values hang in the air, anchored to nothing, and then life would be, in truth, the meaningless arbitrary game it sometimes appears to be.

• The basis of life in duality is good v. evil in tension.
• Like all 3D phenomena, these are realities of the larger All-D reality, manifesting in 3D’s special circumstances.
• It isn’t that you are born ignorant; you are born with tendencies and preferences and potential.
• Life is thus not a school but a chance (and a necessity) for you to choose what you will manifest. It is boot camp in that you are being forced by circumstance to develop and use certain skills. It is a gymnasium in that it provides you an environment in which to exercise them.
• Life in 3D is not isolated from life in the greater sense, no matter that it appears to be so.

Are we divided into armies or families that are good or evil, or all we all a mixture?

Both, at the same time.

Can we change sides with different incarnations? I seem to get, immediately, that as our mixture of elements varies by incarnation, the answer is, “It can be so.”

Again, look to your spiritual and religious traditions. You needn’t be bound by their rules nor pledge your allegiance to them as corporate bodies, but you would be foolish to ignore so large and well-examined a body of information.

I take that to say that we are mixtures of good and evil; that we often do evil almost against our own will; that we are sometimes tempted; that one on either path may be seduced from it into the other.

The left-hand and right-hand path aren’t quite the same as evil v. good; closer to selfish v. all-encompassing. But close enough. In practice, you will find temptation enough on all sides, and even the lure of being all good may be a temptation from the proper path of wholeness. Any one of you is a mixture of prior individuals who were mixtures of qualities.

If our mixture in this life were merely mixtures of qualities per se, life wouldn’t be nearly as rich as it is. I, having 10 other “past” lives, say, have 10 definitely-formed rocks in the bag. If I had only the sum of the qualities they encompass, it would be a bag of sand.

Less structured, correct, and not a bad analogy. Your lives are more structured internally than you sometimes realize. More headlines:

• “Past” lives and psychological complexes are often the same reality differently described.
• “Past” lives, remember, are not finished, completed, polished, portraits or statutes. They, and you, interact.
• That interaction takes place seemingly in 3D, actually in All-D, and the difference is significant.
• The 3D is for choice in constricted circumstances; it is for shaping, or let’s say for self-shaping. You are the spindle and 3D is the lathe, only in some respects the spindle operates the lathe it is being shaped by.
• But 3D is not an end in itself. It is a means toward an end, not “3D life for 3D life’s sake.”

It is not a meaningless show, nor an illusion without substance, though this does not mean that you can see it clearly. Perhaps we might call it reality veiled by illusion.

So give us some more headlines about good and evil.

That might mislead, because larger subjects easily tend to float in midair, slipping away from practical concerns and becoming just mind-play. Nothing wrong with that, but it is not what we are after.

So then how do you anchor the subject?

In human conduct, always; in human experience inner and outer.

So, for instance?

• Anything you are ashamed to admit may or may not be evil (it may be merely social conditioning), but it is the first place to look.
• Things that you know are evil but that you feel within you do not convict you of evil; they convict you of being human. No one can live in duality without incorporating some of the evil in the world. But: Do you express it? Do you consent to it? Do you identify with it?
• If you say to yourself, “Evil per se does not really exist,” into what category do you place torturing animals, children, other innocents, even the guilty?
• Some of life is a choice of values, but other aspects are a choice between real evil and real good, or at least between real evil and neutrality.

We’re going to meet resistance on this point. I can’t quite see why; The same people who deny the existence of evil usually (in my experience) would never dream of committing it.

And there is your clue. It is in the imagination of evil that you can see the potential in real life, just as with any other manifestation.

I think you just said, it is important somehow that we form an active picture of the existence of evil.

In its absence you cannot form an accurate idea of life. The Transcendentalists tended to wave it away – but then the question of slavery hung in the air to remind them that life trumps theory.

Tuesday, October 15, 2019

A chief source of confusion for people is how the “external” world can be really only an expression of unknown parts of themselves; and can be existent in and of and for itself. If this is once understood, many things clarify, because who and what you are clarifies. As long as you can’t see yourselves as both individual and not-individual, you are going to have to choose between what seems to be a divide. When you see one thing as if it were two things, obviously you won’t be able to see it whole.

We trust that by this time our description of reality as without absolute boundaries has been absorbed.

I get that you want to recap many things like reality being projected rather than existing as “real” in the way it appears to us. You may be able to trot all that out again, though I couldn’t, but how are you going to spend the hour recapitulating and then have any time for anything new?

We understand the frustration. Do you have a better idea?

What about just putting out the headlines, and let people use their own search-engines?

Interesting idea. Bold idea, even. But can you transcribe the headlines?

I don’t know. Let’s try, and we will or we won’t get something.

All right. Headlines:

• “Life is but a dream.”
• “All is one”;
• “As above, so below.”
• “As a man thinks in his heart, so he is.”
• “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life, and you will call it fate.
• ”Beyond this mortal realm, there is another, not mortal; yet the two are one.
• You are not primarily 3D beings and yet you are. Which way you define yourself (con-fine yourself) determines who you appear, how reality appears.
• The only permanent thing is eternal unceasing change, and yet eternal change is itself a form of changelessness.

And you see the problem as well as the possibility: Too concise a statement emerges as paradox or cryptic allusion. Our habitual slow process of exposition avoids that pitfall.

Maybe worth alternating. I get tired of plodding exposition, continually half-repeating previously established views so as not to let them fall into oblivion.

Well, then, another headline or two, and then we will pause.

• You are the entire world, yet you are only the tiniest part of it, rather like a hologram.
• As a “divine spark,” that is, stemming as you do from something that is not of the 3D level of reality, your nature cannot be satisfied with 3D reality alone.
• Earth is not a school; it is closer to a gymnasium, or basic training.
• You are neither ignorant nor isolated nor limited, and yet your 3D experience continually tempts you to see yourselves that way. Why do you suppose that is?
• Life is vastly greater than the 3D version of life that you are living in one part of yourself.

Saturday, October 12, 2019

Evil is part of us, and yet that doesn’t excuse anything. Really, this is nothing new to religious thought, and it is ridiculous that contemporary society should need to have it explained yet again.

Contemporary society is in the process of redefining its understandings, bringing them to a new level of sophistication, and the process unavoidably involves losing ground. You recall that we explained that a new civilization’s assumptions are going to include some that the prior civilization took as fact and some that it took as fancy or superstition. Well, that is twice as true for religious thought. No new civilization accepts the prior civilization’s way of seeing things, and no new one receives the older one’s religion or religions unchanged. It may not intend to change it, or replace it; it may not realize that it has done so; it may even disapprove of the fact. Nonetheless, new wineskins and old wine. It is a reciprocal process: A new culture produces new individuals; new individuals change the culture. New individuals in a new framework are not going to fit into previous schemes of understanding the world and interacting with the older world’s gods.

To state it in crude outline, the Roman Empire was not the Roman Republic. The older Roman religion, excellent as it was for the older Roman civilization, died out in new circumstances, all the more definitely because it was not by anyone’s design. A Roman Emperor himself could not stem the tide, let alone reverse it, for neither he nor anyone else knew why the new Christian tide came flowing in. The Christian religion in turn changed its nature as the Roman Empire fell in the West and was replaced by the primitive but vigorous creators of its successors. In the East, where the Roman Empire clung to existence for another thousand years, the Christianity that lived in the civilization became almost unrecognizably different from the Christianity existing in the West. Both sides saw the difference, and each accounted for it by ascribing it to evil or stupid theological distinctions and/or by politically motivated corruption.

Similarly, in the West, when the Protestant revolution split the apparently whole fabric of Western Christianity. “Apparently” because a religion that is given only lip service by most of the population most of the time has already at least greatly changed, if it has not withered and died on the vine. But notice that Protestantism could not arise until certain societal conditions had changed things to prepare a congenial surrounding for it.

And, finally, Protestant Christianity flourished for 500 years, in turn lost its vigor and its societal support by further changes in the social world around it, and, certainly by World War I and its chaotic and catastrophic results, had actually died and was left standing, like dead trees.

This is not about religion. It is about interactions between society and the individual and the enveloping technological and scientific convictions that result in a certain way of seeing; that is, a certain way of being. Any given individual may be a communing member of a religion and live it quite sincerely and productively. But that is not the same thing as saying that that individual’s religion is (or isn’t) appropriate for the times.

We in our time of huge global change have outgrown our skins, and are in the in-between phase.

True enough but we would say more. What science is, what religion is, what art is, is changing, has changed, must continue to change, as older partial civilizations come under the continued bombardment of living among other partial civilizations that are themselves enduring the same process. A new global civilization will not universally adopt Christianity, nor Islam, nor scientific materialism. It may express itself in English as a language, in Buddhism as a philosophy, in this or that stance regarding human relations to the 3D world, but it will not adopt the prior scheme of things. How could it? It being different, how could the old ways fit it?

But do not take this to be confined to the conditions under which humans will agree to be governed or organized. We refer to the way you will see the world. And, change that, everything changes. Not just a religion, or even all religions, but religion per se. What science is seen to be; how science is to be practiced and experienced. Not “art for art’s sake” or, say, “socialist realism,” but a new conception of what art is, and therefore how it is to be pursued and experienced.

Every single manifestation of change will be, in itself, trivial. Every single problem that seems to flow from this or that policy decision will be seen, eventually, as symptomatic rather than causal. If you are in the middle of an earthquake, probably the falling crockery cannot be justly ascribed to your neighbor stamping his feet.

Thursday, October 10, 2019

The energy aspect of the world – the definite but non-material-appearing reality that is as vital to maintaining the world as is the mineral or vegetable or animal kingdom – is, as we said, of two natures.

I think you mean, its nature stretches to two extremes, one more mechanical, the other more conscious.

That is a good way to put it. On the mechanical end, the “nervous system” of reality. On the other end, the “population” of the celestial kingdom. But remember to connect all this of the 3D with the non-3D to which it extends.

Every kingdom shades off in two directions. The mineral kingdom shades off into non-material energy at one end (radiation, atomic radiation, what one might call semi-non-3D interactions) and the vegetable at the other. The vegetable kingdom extends from manifestations scarcely more sentient than mineral, to manifestations practically animal (think, say, of the Venus fly trap). The animal kingdom extends from quasi-vegetative organisms through human beings into quasi-divine beings. There are no hard and fast divisions, no closed frontiers, no absolutely differentiated stepping stones.

Divisions are constructs, quite as much as perceived realities. You may think of our scheme for sorting out reality as one of an unbroken but differentiated spectrum, like the rainbow. Just as, in a rainbow, colors shade smoothly into one another yet still show their own individual specialized nature, so the things of the world in general. The celestial kingdom is the end of the rainbow-spectrum that is closest to intelligence-not-bound-by-form, while the other end of the spectrum, the mineral kingdom, may be considered form-least-bound-to-active-intelligence. However, do not become captive to an analogy. It may illustrate, it may spark, but it cannot exactly represent reality, or it would be reality rather than metaphor.

So, to funnel down to the celestial kingdom again, now bearing in mind that it shades from quasi-animal to quasi-non-3D – well, you may end up staring at the page. Merely label this as speculative, even though to do that cuts against your (and others’) assumption that “the other side knows everything.”

Yes, that’s the source of anxiety, isn’t it. How to bring forth information not “that can’t be proved,” for all of it comes under that label, but also “that I don’t feel sure of,” which is a different thing entirely.

And, bearing in mind that our communications with you are quite as much about illustrating the process as about conveying a view, you can see that venturing out into deeper waters together is itself worthwhile.

I don’t see how any of this can be speculative on your part.

No, nor do you see lies, nor fictions, nor self-aggrandizing fables, nor commands, nor any of the unreliable-to-pathological phenomena that have been reported over the years.

Joe Fisher’s hungry ghosts, for instance.

Certainly. Poltergeists. Malicious or stupid or playful spirits encountered via light-headed experimentation with Ouija boards, say. Evil spirits. Malicious ex-humans determined to exert the dominance they exerted in 3D life. All the nightmares any alcoholic ever experienced in his worst seizures, or a drug addict’s. The world is not good without evil. (If it were, how could you have the concepts?) Why would you expect every phenomenon not to extend between the two, similarly?

And it all shades off into the vast impersonal forces that populate the non-3D.

Greater clarity on any subject may be obtained by proceeding in either direction: more detail, or greater extension. Better than either, though, is both. But it is not a quick and easy process.