Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

Wednesday, April 30, 2025

6:30 a.m. Shall we resume?

Beginning with the idea of consciousness as being elimination of input quite as much as inclusion of input, let’s look at your lives. A baby needs protection not only because of physical weakness but because it does not yet know how to orient itself in the 3D world.. It doesn’t know where it is, you might say. It can’t predict, can’t very well understand, in short can’t cope. But what it can do, and do very well, is receive psychic input from all directions and build a picture of this new world it is experiencing. That doesn’t mean it builds an accurate picture, but build one it does. It has no choice.

Builds that picture from what elements? Some bullets:

1. Its 3D input through the senses.
2. Its 3D input through the intuitions.
3. Its non-3D input from various threads, in varying importance one to another.
4. Its non-3D input from non-3D sources as well as what flows from its own threads.

That is enough to be going along with. For convenience we could group them as 3D (1 and 2) and non-3D (3 and 4), or as internal (2 and 3) and external (1 and 4). But it is all input.

The ingredients do not change as you live your lives, but of course the proportional importance of each element changes, both moment-to-moment and over time according to preference and circumstance.

We will spell it out, at the risk of belaboring the obvious. Your polarities in life:

• Internal or external
• Sensory or intuitive
• Self or other
• Understanding or action

Obviously you will experience the entire range of the polarity, rather than merely one or the other side of a polarity. And, the four polarities overlap. We are less concerned with presenting a neat and tidy scheme than with offering you new glimpses into your reality.

So, internal or external. Which source of input do you pay the most attention to? (Again, remember this is a moment-to-moment choice as well as an overall-bias choice.) Is your inner world so brightly lit that you pay as little attention to external affairs as you can get away with? Alternatively, is the evident “realness” of the external world so blinding as to lead you to forget or be unable to perceive your own non-physical connection? These are extremes, but the polarity is real.

Sensory or intuitive. Which do you trust? Which is realer to you?

Self or other? Which is your proper orientation, and which is diversion? Not everybody is meant to concentrate on the state of their soul. Neither is everybody meant to concentrate on the state of the world in which they find themselves. Again, not an either/or. How could it be? But, a matter of proportions.

Finally, understanding or action. (As we say, the themes incorporates overlap.) Put it this way: Which seems like real work to you? Which seems worth doing and which not? Understanding puts together a map of the world – as we are doing right now. Action sets forth to make improvement on what exists – as we are doing right now. You couldn’t really do only one and not the other, but few people – and you are not one of them – can hold the two in balance. Nor is there any particular reward for doing so.

Now put it together:

1. You are 3D and non-3D
2. You receive input from both sources, and each input-strain is made of two elements, and expresses in two dimensions
3. Your mind – which is the only real expression of you, the realest part of your “somewhat-real” existence – forms an on-going system that we once called a habit-pattern. That is, it works in predictable ways that vary, but are nonetheless orderly and distinctive.
4. Nonetheless, whether you realize it or not, remember it or not, you as habit-system are only one node in a greater being that expresses partly as a network of threads. Therefore in reality you cannot exist in isolation.
5. The more you concentrate on the here-and-now, the sensorily obvious, the more prone you are to forget that vastly the larger part of life – even the 3D life you are fashioning – is non-3D, invisible, nearly imperceptible.
6. However, concentrating on the here and now is what you are in 3D to do! Sleepwalking through your life is not, in general, particularly productive. (That doesn’t mean never, but we are setting out generalizations here.)
7. So, there is a built-in contradiction. Should this surprise you? Look to your lives, and see if many of your perplexities do not stem from your disregarding or not realizing the fact that you are suspended between conflicting necessities.
8. Hence, consciousness!

I waited for more, but you seem to think that final bullet is self-evident and self-explanatory.

Is it not?

Not to me.

Consciousness is choice. Life is repeated choice. Choosing is what shapes the gift you give to life (that is, the life you create and hand back as a new habit-system). And what informs choice?

I think I get it. Choice may be well-founded or not, and how well it is founded depends on how well we process input and manage output. The more we get, the better we function, and the better the choices we make.

Jesus said that the more you have, the more you will be given, but if you bury your own talent, you will have wasted the opportunity, and your higher self will not be pleased.

Interesting take on a parable that many people think seems to approve arbitrary and unfair distribution of wealth.

We keep telling you —

Yeah, yeah. You don’t need to persuade me.

This isn’t only for you, though, is it? We say it again: Your spiritual heritage will give you valuable clues if you can once relate them to your present work. (And, by work we mean not any particular process you may be involved in, but the construction of your lives.)

I get that this is not quite finished.

No, one more thing. The nature of consciousness isn’t worth investigating in a vacuum. You will get results of considering it not as a thing but as a condition, as a relation of one thing to another.

That isn’t clear.

Let’s say, consciousness always relates to purpose. A cloud’s consciousness is real, definite, changing – but that may be said of you. What is a cloud’s purpose? It is the same as yours, to relate itself to the world, 3D and non-3D. (We know that sounds counter-intuitive, but if 3D and non-3D shade into each other, how could anything exist in only one and not also the other? And, existing there, how could it not have some form of awareness of that realm?)

I’ll defer consideration of the question until another time, but I want to note to ask, don’t large parts of the non-3D exist only in non-3D and not 3D?

This would be a diversion at this moment, so yes, let’s look at it another time. Our point here is that consciousness stretches between your self-awareness and some seemingly external object or event. But words tangle this up.

They certainly do. Self-awareness and consciousness sound like the same thing.

A baby is aware of itself, but has no concepts; hence it is aware but not conscious that it is aware. It has no basis for self-reflection.

Hmm, you tie consciousness to concepts.

Think of “clicking out” in the Monroe world. You perceive something for which you have no concept, no experience, no way to connect it to your accustomed world – and so you return from a real experience but you have no idea what happened. If later you experience the same thing again, or if for other reasons you are able to build a bridge to what happened, perhaps what had been clicked out becomes perceptible. You have extended your range of consciousness. You can “make sense” of something that previously you couldn’t even bring to mind.

I can see the confusion that language makes, given that we all use “awareness” and consciousness” and such terms loosely and interchangeably.

It is a problem, but not an insuperable one, provided that you are conscious of it! We smile.

A very interesting session. What shall we call it?

“More on consciousness” would do.

Our thanks as always.

 

Tuesday, April 29, 2025

3:40 a.m. We were talking about consciousness, but that was a couple of mornings ago, and I have since completed that journal book and don’t have it right here. I suppose you can remember where we were. Jon? Dr. Jung?

The central concept is that consciousness of the 3D world of time-slices is not additive but subtractive. To live in the world, you must concentrate on one time, one place. Centering, though, may be looked at equally rightly as blocking out the periphery. Let’s see if we can come up with an image or analogy that will provide a gestalt recognition, rather than attempting only a sequential – logical – understanding.

• All reality is emanated from a higher-order reality of which we know little.
• Everything in this reality (non-3D as well as 3D) shares the properties of the higher-order reality of which it was made.
• Let’s use the concept of densification in an unusual context, see if that clarifies our view. In this scheme, our level of reality proceeds from the least concentrated to the most concentrated.
• Hence: Undifferentiated aether (the essence of everything at this level) -> separation into 3D and non-3D -> 3D continuing the process: -> gas -> liquid -> solid.
• But remember, every physical (3D) substance includes a non-physical (non-3D) component, and thus we see a progression by kingdom, as in the old scheme, only, in effect, reversed for our purposes. That is, the mineral kingdom’s concentration is less than the plant kingdom’s, which is less than the animal’s, which is less than the human.
• The human level begins the return from the densest, most concentrated, upward toward the whole again; hence, the next step up from human concentrated consciousness is the angelic kingdom, which, like the human, is a mixture of elements.
• By this densification scheme you can see that increased concentration is – like most things – a two-edged sword. One gains and loses.
• Looking more closely, this shows that states of consciousness differ by kingdoms, as we have always said. The mineral kingdom’s consciousness is not individual but is not non-existent either, and as you go up or down the chain of being, you see progressions.
• Even within human consciousness, you see the same thing. Everyone, even babies who are unaware that they are in any way separated from their surroundings, enjoys a basic flow of energy. As one grows, the awareness of being one with the world decreases; awareness of being individual increases.
• Special states (autism, for one) provide special experiences of life, some readily communicable, many not. Deliberately achieved states of meditation or awareness of oneness also provide special experience, this time voluntarily. But even states of bliss are not unmixed blessings except in that they are seen as such, because desired. Every increase in concentration – even if it is concentration on awareness – is a step farther from the original universal (relatively unconscious) awareness.
• That seems paradoxical, but again, movement in any one direction is necessarily movement away from other directions.

You don’t think of yogis as striving to attain the same view of the world as mountains have, say, or oceans or clouds.

Nor is it the same. There is every difference between simplicity that has never changed and simplicity that has been achieved by incorporating and overcoming complexity.

I can’t understand how it can have taken us 50 minutes to go only this far. It has flowed smoothly.

Doesn’t matter. This is a beginning. Call it “densification,” perhaps. It is necessary that people begin to understand that “consciousness” and “altered states of consciousness” are not what they tend to think they are.

I have an impression of having gone over this many years ago, though not so clearly.

Reiteration is a valid technique. Every time you step into the river, it is a different you, a different river, although equally it is the same you, the same river. Retracing your steps is not lost motion.

All right, well, our thanks as always.

 

Sunday, April 27, 2025

3:50 a.m. Let’s try for a session. I got a brief thought, Friday, that what we call consciousness is the result of a process of subtraction, rather than of addition.

And you have glimpsed this truth before, but you have forgotten.

I almost remember, but not really.

Let us distance our thought from the word “consciousness,” which is so laden with contradictory implications. To grasp the basic concept here, we will need to use the simplest terms and make the simplest arguments.

Let us begin thus:

• All this level of reality – which is all we can know – is alive and is all one thing.
• What we experience as matter and spirit, as alive or dead, as substance or thought, is all one thing under the 3D conditions of time and space.
• Thus, before we exist, before the world as we experience it exists, there is a “something” whose qualities give rise to all the qualities we experience as part of life.
• That primitive substance that is the world prior to our perception is alive – because nothing can be constructed out of dead material, if there could be such a thing as dead material.
• Being alive, this substance must have within it all the qualities that it gives rise to in our experience. In development, something cannot come out of nothing, nor can lesser produce greater.
• However, the categories through which we view things may mislead us, and in the case of “consciousness,” the concept is backwards. We tend to think that what we call consciousness is a construction, a development, an increase, and it is none of these things.

The reality that emanates from a higher level begins as an undivided unity. As such, it is aware of itself in the way that any unity is aware of itself before it becomes aware of the existence (or even the concept) of “other.” If you did not know that others existed, how could you feel any need (or ability) to communicate?

So, becoming aware of the existence of other things is not an increase in consciousness?

It is a matter of viewpoint – and the very word “viewpoint” implies separation. If you are everywhere, how can you have a viewpoint? If you are everything, what can there be to see? If your awareness is universal and undifferentiated, how can you channel it into senses? So, yes, the conventional view of things is somewhat true – from one point of view – but the view of consciousness as being a state of subtraction (and its result) is at least equally true. And, as usual, considering a thing from more than one point of view adds understanding.

Now, the nature of 3D is separation in time, separation in space. You are here, now, in bodily placement and sensory awareness. But if 3D were all there is, life would be impossibly fragmented. How could there be continuity of awareness, continuity of effort? So, intrinsically connected to 3D conditions is the other end of the polarity, that you call non-3D. In non-3D you have the glue that holds together your lives. Time, space, being, becoming, all require non-3D to exist equally with 3D.

As has been said many times, non-3D is the home of mentality, 3D the home of the adaptation of mentality to physical conditions of separation.

I don’t think you ever put it quite that way.

Perhaps not, but we have said the equivalent. The mind is in non-3D, the brain is in 3D, and it is a matter of translation. To exist in 3D, then, one must also exist in non-3D, while the reciprocal is not so. Thus, non-3D is closer to the initial creation.

I’m not sure we could prove that, or even state it more convincingly.

There is not time enough to try to prove anything. We state it, and people can work it out for themselves, or, usually, can intuit their way to accepting or not accepting it. For the moment, accept the corollary: Non-3D is the superior state, 3D the subsidiary.

What you are accustomed to think of as progression up the scale is at least equally truly a descent. Not either/or, but both.

“What we gain in the swings, we lose on the roundabouts,” the English say.

The very distinction between yourself and “the English” (or anybody) is an example of the state of separation of concepts that you take for granted as life.

Now, try not to let yourself slip into categories of good and bad, or even better or worse. just follow our description of what is.

Yes, I get it.

Just for this discussion, we may need to make up some words, just to clarify. But we do not intend to create a jargon if we can avoid it.

Probably we can’t avoid it, and who cares? We’ve created enough clarifying distinctions over the past 25 years.

Yes, but simpler is better.

• The initial state of this level of reality when created. Prior to any form of separation, call it peaceful floating.

Call it the waters before God divided them.

Yes, very good. Undifferentiated creation from a higher order which our ancestors called God or the gods or whatever. So rather than unity, let’s call it “undivided creation.”

• Separation, the descent into polarities beginning with the separation by time and space. No longer a timeless universal unity, now a multiplicity of moments, a multiplicity of places. Does that first-order separation have consciousness?

We didn’t establish that the first-order condition had consciousness.

We did; we reminded you, nothing can proceed from less, only from more.

So you did. Well, I suppose you’d guess that whatever was separated might experience a lack where there had been whatever it was separated from. And it might experience that lack as the existence of other things, at the same time.

Yes, it is all in how you look at it. You might say that the primordial material lost its sense of completion and gained a sense of a more particular sense of itself as part of many. And on and on, as division followed division.

I may have to reread the first part of Genesis in this light. No point in going to other scriptures that I am less familiar with, but I’ll bet they will give the same kind of insights when reassessed this way. When I get to the computer, I’ll see if I can find a few verses worth looking at. Probably more than I will be able to add to this session, though.

We will do well to finish this initial thought. Consciousness looks higher if you examine the individual components, and looks lesser if you look at it comparing it to the initial unity. Thus:

Unity

Time and space

Land and water

Sentient and non-sentient

Rooted and mobile

Generalized species

Individuals

The Bible and other scriptures may not put it just this way, but perhaps you can see that his list represents a successive descent into particular from general, and ascent from unawareness to greater awareness.

Culminating in man being told to name the beasts.

Yes, and all this before the descent into better or worse, symbolized by eating from the tree of the perceiving things as good or evil. Before that, remember, God looked at all the polarities and said it was good.

That’s a pretty different way of reading it than we usually see.

Remember, we said the new civilization will have to consider scriptures among other things presently being neglected – but in considering them, it will see them differently and in turn they will help shape how it sees.

I get that. A place to pause?

Yes. Perhaps call this “Subtractive consciousness,” though that really may mislead.

How aout, “In the beginning….”?

Perhaps “The roots of consciousness.”

What happened to avoiding the word?

Well, you’ll think of something.

Our thanks for all this, as always.

& & &

Chapter 1 Genesis,  [Not the King James version, to make it easier to grasp anew, and verse numbers removed for the same reason. https://www.vatican.va/archive/bible/genesis/documents/bible_genesis_en.html]

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

And God said, “Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” So God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome. And it was so. God called the dome Sky. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day.

And God said, “Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.” And it was so. God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good. Then God said, “Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.” And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation: plants yielding seed of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the third day.
And God said, “Let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, and let them be lights in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth.” And it was so. God made the two great lights – the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night – and the stars. God set them in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth, to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day.

And God said, “Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the dome of the sky.” So God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, of every kind, with which the waters swarm, and every winged bird of every kind. And God saw that it was good. God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.” And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day.

And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind: cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth of every kind.” And it was so. God made the wild animals of the earth of every kind, and the cattle of every kind, and everything that creeps upon the ground of every kind. And God saw that it was good. Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”

God said, “See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so.  God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.

 

Friday, April 25, 2025

5:20 a.m. Yesterday’s insight asked how – if consciousness is universal – anything could appear to not share it. This, rather the opposite of the traditional question of how consciousness can come into being. I don’t know who to consult or what to ask, so I’ll leave both questions open and ask for whichever intelligence may be interested and able to communicate.

We have not yet finished our particular approach.

Welcome, Dr. Jung.

If you will reread our last conversation, it will align your mind for more.

Okay. [Did.]

We shall now begin again, with a different metaphor. Each change of metaphor or image assists in the process of realigning your mental habits, and although this may seem to slow down the process, in actuality it provides a firmer footing for a new understanding, by broadening the base it ultimately stands on.

I get that, and I am not impatient. I am all too aware of how little I am ready to understand the things I will need to learn.

Let us think of all of what you call All-D reality: the 3D world and its non-3D extension. (Or, of course, equally the non-3D world and its 3D extension. It will help if you remind yourselves that you are a viewpoint, not a universal view.)

The All-D as you have been thinking about it is all of one level of reality. You might say it is one state of mind within the vast cosmic mind. Just as one might define any given day or moment as one state out of the entirety of days or moments, so the reality in which we live (in body or not) is one specific. It is not everything, it is one thing. Even realizing that much, some people find impossible and most people find possible only sporadically. You can learn more about this reality; so can I: We cannot know everything about everything. If you cannot come to feel this fact, to accept it with due realistic humility, you will never be able to go beyond very elementary understandings, because your mental context will warp them to agree with your below-conscious strait jackets.

Yes, I understand that, even if I may not always keep the fact front and center.

Then, to our metaphor, not of cable cars and taxicabs, not of electricity and wiring, certainly not of objects and mechanisms. Let us see life as a dream from another level of reality, as one state of that larger reality’s mind.

I return to that native saying “There is a dream dreaming us,” and at different times I feel I understand it or don’t.

Think of it said this way: Something that we can experience only intuitively, and only in a vague and ethereal state, is responsible for our existence. Is that not what the man said?

When you put it that way, it is transparently clear, but I keep losing the sense of the reality of the perspective.

Sometimes we cannot hold our sense of a thing’s reality, but must cling to the memory of that time when we sensed it. If you can remember that you once understood it, you can prevent its slipping back beneath the level of your consciousness.

Now, that perception was very pointed, very much common sense from the native’s accustomed mental framework. Convey it as description of reality into yours.

Well, I think you just did that.

But, you do it, using your own words, because the nuances will be different when fashioned within 2025.

But you just did it: Isn’t that part of 2025?

Then let’s say, within a mind fashioned in 1946 instead of one fashioned in 1875. And we may come back to this, but, rephrase.

I guess I would say, the 3D/non-3D system we live in emanates from a deeper, higher, level of reality that we cannot fathom but can intuit. Maybe it is what some call God. Maybe it is like a laboratory and us an experiment. In any case, we are central to ourselves – our physical and mental reality is what we can know – but in a larger sense, we are only a product of a greater system of which we know little or nothing but some of its effects on us.

You see, as you turned it over in your mind, different aspects came to light.

Yes, I do.

So then, life as a dream. Always remembering that we explore by use of analogy, what kind of consciousness may fill dreams?

Is that the way to put it, or did I lose something at the end?

It would be better to say, “What is your experience of consciousness within dreams?” This subtly shifts the emphasis from some objectively existing “external” element in the dream and returns your mind to its central importance.

We come into life not conscious of the 3D world in any way we would recognize later. Someone – Ken Wilbur, I think – defined various kinds of consciousness. He discerned a hierarchy. It all centered on how an individual perceives the world. If he took into account changed in reality outside the individual, I don’t remember it.

But does the world depend upon how you see it?

It does as far as we are concerned. Our mental structures determine pretty much what we can experience.

That is not nearly as true as you think. But, accepting it for the moment, if you see it differently, for whatever reason, does it actually change?

How would we know?

Correct. How would we know? And this fact tells you what?

Tells me to be a little skeptical of people who think they know what the world is.

Yes, but does it tell you something about consciousness?

This isn’t a logical development, but I am getting the sense that what we experience as consciousness is shaped by our existence in a 3D-brain-influenced environment, and that even after death that influence persists.

And after all, this is one purpose of life, is it not, to shape an individual habit-system?

Hmm. So you are saying it isn’t only a disadvantage, being shaped by 3D forces, but also an advantage.

Certainly.

And, I guess, by extrapolation we’d have to say therefore the mind in that unknown greater reality isn’t like us, or there’d be no point in creating the conditions that shape us.

Or, equally, you could say it suggests that the unknown mind is like us, and in fact is probably the same substance at a different level of reality.

Realer than this level.

You experienced it yourself.

For about five seconds. Yes.

Still, five seconds is significantly more evidential than no seconds. Even though you forget about that brief experience from one year to the next, still it helped shape you. It is one reason you can do this work.

Have we even begun with your new metaphor of a dream dreaming us?

Painting the negative space is as important as working in the foreground. It will emerge.

Our thanks for your efforts on our behalf, both in 3D and since.

Call this, “A dream dreaming us.”

All right. Till next time, then.

 

Tuesday, April 22, 2025

5 a.m. Ready for a conversation, no idea as to topics. As long as you are able to function that way, I’m willing to drive the pen. Jon?

You can’t come to it with half a mind, though.

I’ll center. … Better?

Better. Not that it bothers me, you understand, but it’s driving with the brakes on, trying to do this and letting other things go on in the background. You’d still get stuff, but it would be easily distorted; contaminated, you could say.

Yes, I got it.

Let’s talk about everyday life and lifetime aspirations.

I didn’t feel that coming. Okay, let’s.

There is always a tension between the two, and biographies and histories and even fiction usually underrate the friction implied in the situation.

We tend to smooth out the speed bumps and wrong turns, and see the longer path.

That, or tend to not see the living path as a path at all, and instead see a life as nothing but speed bumps and wrong turns.

Well, I’ve said for a long time, I look at my life from one direction and it is a slow-motion train wreck, and from a different direction it is a miraculous series of guided or anyway assisted events.

No, you say from that other point of view it looks like a miracle, which is closer to the real meaning. But that’s right; this is one way the tension between daily events and lifetime pathway may be experienced.

I see I haven’t really written down what we’re talking about. It was clear to me from your first sentence, but only intuitively. I’m not sure anybody will have the data to understand it logically.

Then let’s spell it out a bit. On the one hand you have life as you experience it moment by moment, and on the other hand you have life as it aims itself, as it finds its path. On the one hand, innumerable incidents. On the other, a flight-path determined by a succession of choices.

Not sure even that will do it.

You try, then.

Biographies and fiction try to describe a life by moving from one significant event to the next, like a series of still photos. What they don’t show – never could show – is the millions of utterly normal, undramatic moments that make up life as we experience it. Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address, and every biography of Lincoln mentions that. Does any – could any – detail his waking up and washing his face and getting dressed and eating breakfast, and engaging in casual conversation, and doing all the tiny things that make up our lives? Do they – could they – show the unending swirl of thoughts, memories, dreams, reveries, fears, hopes, worries, that run through his mind as he does those little essential things? We experience our lives in excruciating detail, but no one could portray all that, and if someone did, nobody could read it.

And this is why it is easy to lose sight of your aspirations for how to be, as you live your life. Nobody could live life at a state of continual high tension. Peak moments, yes, but they are moments, not lifetimes. How many peak moments can even the most tumultuous life contain? Even Napoleon had to wake up and get himself ready for the day. He had to go to the bathroom and eat and rest and all manner of things as everyone does, and even that unbelievably industrious ambitious man could not live every moment as a peak moment. And on the other end of the scale are people who perhaps never have an unusual thought or do an unusual deed in their entire life. Everybody lives life minute by minute, and enough of it may be tedious, or painful. Amid all these humdrum moments, how do you hold on to your aspirations for yourself?

I don’t know, but people do.

Of course they do. So it is worth looking into what you call “the how of it.”

On a guess, I’d say our moment-by-moment living is done at the 3D level and our steering a course is done on a non-3D level. This, assuming that the non-3D component is less likely to be diverted by any one moment’s distractions.

That’s roughly true. Now let’s look more closely at the how of it. If you have two centers of attention, say –

Better might be, one directing the shop’s course and the other doing the actual steering.

Yes, that’s a good way to put it. So what we are doing here is looking at the interaction between the bridge and the helm. We want to look at the nature of that interaction.

We experience it, I guess, as life continually and guidance occasionally.

That’s one pattern. There are others. Plenty of people don’t experience – or rather, don’t realize that they experience – guidance at all. They feel totally at sea without a course or even a rudder. Others – relatively fewer, and not all admirable by your standards – may experience their life as all guidance, interrupted by mundane necessities. Many historical characters could be cited, including Hitler and de Gaulle, Napoleon, Napoleon III. Any “man of destiny” is likely to feel that he is a tool of a higher power, a higher cause. At the other extreme are saints, and reformers, and embodiments of benevolent intent. They may also experience the presence of guidance as over-mastering their ordinary life.

And I can see that some get ego-inflated like Nietzsche and others get more grounded, more humble in a way, like Jung.

Or Hitler versus Lincoln, or Mussolini versus George Washington, yes. But since most of our readers are not going to be world-historical individuals, what is the relevance to them?

Becoming clearer about the difference between captain and helmsman?

More like this:

• Everyone is both captain and helmsman. This is one more aspect of life as a compound being.
• People’s ability to discern guidance in their lives varies widely, not only between individuals but, within individuals, from one moment to the next.
• Jung carved on the stone [in his garden at Bollingen], “Asked or not asked, God will be there.” Who can live in 3D without an unbroken connection to non-3D? That doesn’t mean the connection is recognized.
• Life is choosing. But what bounds the area of choice? What sets the course, established the bias? What stops you (or allows you) as you wander from impulse to impulse?
• What does your life look like if you look at it this way: Non-3D = the source of your aspirations. 3D = everything else.

We often experience life as a tug of war between higher and lower. And I’m guessing where you are going with this is that once again the world’s theologies and scriptures and philosophies will give us valuable insights if we will allow them to, us reinterpreting them to see what light they shed on the things we are investigating, using a very different language.

If you’re exploring new trade routes, it’s probably better if you look at whatever old charts exist, even if they are in a foreign language or use a different grid system; even if they are charts put together by people you consider to be your enemies. Ignorance of the spiritual explorations of past generations is – ignorance. Worse if deliberate ignorance.

I get that in a way we have barely begun on this topic of life and aspiration.

We may or may not continue but certainly there is more to be said.

But my hour is up, and I can feel it. Thanks, Jon. Next time.

 

Saturday, April 19, 2025

5:50 a.m. A couple days of reading instead of conversation. I suppose it’s necessary to break the pattern every so often. So, Jon, what do we talk about? More on healing?

More on intent, perhaps.

Take it away.

A word on the process of Intuitive Linked Communication. You know that the underlying skill is remaining receptive but not passive, remaining actively engaged without moving into trying to direct things. People do it all the time but usually in a different context.

Living a 3D life, accepting whatever comes next and then reacting to it.

Not previewing, not trying to anticipate, not trying to control what comes, yes. And at the same time, being there. Athletes, for example. Skilled pilots, careful scholars, directors of processes (industrial chemists, for example). Soldiers in battle. EMTs in dangerous situations. You could make quite a list of ways people employ this active receptivity, and, if you’re not quite sure of the concept, making a list will be instructive, for you will have to use your judgment continually to decide if this or that example belongs.

And what we are doing here is merely an extension of that skill.

Let’s say, it is a widening of the field of interaction to include the non-3D. but that will be misleading without some further comment, so our diversion may take over.

No harm in that.

No. Well, to say the field widens to include the non-3D is sort of right as a thumbnail summary, but bear in mind that the 3D shades into non-3D, so it isn’t like flipping an on/off switch. It is much closer to turning a rheostat. You become more aware of areas you are already functioning in. Let’s say, you pay more attention to intuition, and imagination (in a certain sense of the word), and undefined possibility. You see? It isn’t a new way of functioning, it’s more of a closer look at what you’ve already been doing all your life.

I would say, it’s doing what you’ve always done, but framing it differently.

Yes, that, but not only that. There is an element of the familiar and an element of strangeness, both.

I have been telling people for years, “anybody can do this,” but very few seem to believe me.

That’s why I mention it in this new context. The way people experienced you doing it emphasized to them the unfamiliar aspect of it, and they didn’t have this conceptual bridge to help them see the familiar aspect.

I don’t know what I could have done differently to help people see that.

It isn’t a question of what you did or how you did it, because any procedure will show some people and not others. All I’m doing here is suggesting another way for people to think of things so that some of them may take the next step.

Okay. How did you happen to jump to this, when you started to talk about intent?

This is discussing intent, in a way.

It’s a stretch.

To return: We discussed intent as an element of health.

We did?

Implicitly. But consider, everybody is different. Everybody’s constitution leads to different values, different abilities to pursue those values. There shouldn’t be any need to say this; it’s obvious is you look around you. But it is surprising how people, when they start trying to make generalizations about life, tend to make them about some one type of person, forgetting that “it takes all kinds” to make up a world.

In practice, this means that somebody following his goals, expressing his values, may run directly counter to your goals, your values. Usually it isn’t direct opposition, usually the angle will be oblique, but the point is the same. Two people pursuing their best values may express very differently, expressing and supporting very different, perhaps contradictory, things. And there’s nothing wrong with this. As your guys – your other guys, I suppose I should say now – often told you, it isn’t a design flaw.

All this conflict isn’t waste product like heat from an engine, and it isn’t Armageddon. It is just the various elements of an ecosystem.

If you look closely enough at your own mental and emotional life, you will see that it depends on conflict as a motivating force. In this context, I don’t mean “conflict” to be warfare, but, let’s say, jostling.

I read somewhere that somebody said humans always move from discomfort toward comfort. Is that what you mean?

I wouldn’t put it exactly that way, but more or less.  A bunch of independent factors operating at the same time and place will soon turn into an ecosystem, as each part finds a comfort zone. It’s a big continuing process of accommodation.

I have an illustrative image just out of range, something like things in a frying pan, naturally settling into the most efficient use of space, or molecules of gas, doing the same thing. The jostling is part of the process. It is less warfare than elbowing.

That’s close enough. Now if you look at your life  – your mental and emotional life particularly – can you see that this goes on all the time? Well, just as it goes on within you, it goes on outside of you – that is, among others.

And internally, I suppose, down to the molecular level and below.

And to the macrocosmic level, yes.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that life as such is cacophony.

Remember AA [in Bob Monroe’s book Far Journeys]. That parable may be considered as illustrating the appeal of 3D to non-3D.

We could use a little less conflict!

So you think. But what you really mean, in your sanest moments, is that you could use more of certain kinds of conflict and less of other kinds.

Aha! And thus, intent.

You should never forget that you are a part of a system, not a random collection of elements, because over time even a random collection will become a system. You are not lost, you are not embattled, you are not a helpless observer, no matter how it sometimes feels. You are part of a system and so am I and so is everybody and everything else, and if you think you are wiser than the universe, more moral than God, well, that kind of attitude is part of the system like any other attitude.

And our function as relative individuals is to form and live our values.

You may have heard that before.

Regardless of who or what would tend to say, “You’re wrong.”

That attitude is also part of the system – but so is resistance to that attitude.

Freedom, as the guys always said.

Freedom and the opposite of freedom. Hope and the opposite of hope. Benevolence, malice, acceptance, resistance, tranquility, turmoil – it’s all part of the game, and it is up to you to choose.

But you aren’t saying it doesn’t matter what we choose.

I’m saying now that what you are is your list of possibilities. Being what you are, certain choices won’t really be possible for you: They would be out of character. But within these pretty broad limits, it’s up to you. And some people’s choices will appall you, but that’s their business on their end (expressing their values) and yours on your end (reacting to this input from the “external” world).

Call this “Conflict and intent”?

As good a title as any. It may force people to think about the connection between the first words on process and the following words.

If you say so. Okay, thanks as always, Jon. I look forward to more, whenever.