Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

[Me:] We’re not there yet, in terms of putting this clearly, are we? Is that because I’m out of practice?

[Rita:} It is because you are out of your accustomed comfort zone, intellectually. This is always going to be a problem, for anybody except trance mediums. To move into new territory, you must somewhat suspend what you think you know, and, especially, what models you have found useful to that point. But you can’t (and therefore shouldn’t try to) discard everything, because that is what brought you to the new threshold. You have to hold it lightly, and the balance is going to be delicate. So your first new steps are usually, if not always, going to be halting and contradictory, and sometimes seemingly nonsensical and even meaningless, and all you can do is persevere and see if it winds up making sense.

Until you experience the reality of the color orange – if all you know is red and yellow – you may be unable to comprehend orange as a concept. How can a color be red and yet not red; yellow but also not-yellow? It won’t make sense, and your initial experience of orange may appear to be a distortion of red or yellow. You may chalk it off as distortion, bad perception, cloudiness. That’s why it is always important to give these things time to prove themselves one way or the other.

— From Awakening From the 3D World, available from publisher Rainbow Ridge Books (https://www.rainbowridgebooks.com) or from other booksellers.

[Rita:] One thing interruptions do is sever the day-to-day connection of thought. There is value and disadvantage, both, to continuity and to discontinuity, as to everything else in life. Between the lines, your own individual part of the enterprise tends to take over and say, “Okay, I’ve got this, I’ll drive, I know what I’m doing now.” And in some circumstances that is good, and helpful, and in some, not. It isn’t so good for changing direction unexpectedly or for exploring new terrain in new ways.

I suppose it’s the thing about beginner’s mind, being empty, as opposed to expert’s mind, being too full to easily change course.

You are on the right track. The division of labor between the two makes for flexibility and also for persistence. Imbalance tends to make things harder to accomplish. Of course at any given moment, one or the other tendency will predominate, but that is not imbalance, but alternation.

– From Awakening From the 3D World, available from publisher Rainbow Ridge Books (https://www.rainbowridgebooks.com) or from other booksellers.

 

 

 

Saturday, November 23, 2024

7:40 a.m. Reading Oliver Sachs, The River of Consciousness, I had ideas for a blog entry, probably gone now, but let’s see. Jon Holt, you were a psychiatrist, you were an explorer like us, what say you? For that matter, are you in direct contact with Sachs?

I can be. As you should know, anybody can be, if they have the sympathetic resonance. Just because he and I are both dead, so-called, doesn’t mean we are any closer or farther away than when we were in the body. The difference is in the distractions life throws up in the 3D world of separation.

Our language tempts us to think that once outside the body, our minds are less focused, less conscious, than they were.

Yes and no.

Heard that before!

Well, most things are a matter of how you look at them. In the 3D, you tend to get seduced by one way of seeing things, just as Sachs says in what you just read. Confirming evidence piles up; contradictory evidence tends to be forgotten or repressed. It requires a certain amount of awareness and determination to remember that one way of seeing things can never be the whole story. Nor two, for that matter. The closer you look, the more nuances you see, and so the more exceptions you find to your generalizations, until you have Swiss cheese and then maybe only crumbs without much connection.

So yes, the non-3D mind is less focused – until it is. And no; the non-3D mind is also less distracted once it is focused. both halves true, neither half the whole story.

So Oliver Sachs and I may coexist without consciously communicating in any way I could describe, and yet we wouldn’t be separated, we’d just be – well, coexisting. But then a friend contacts us and holds us in mind at the same time, and there is a connection. Did anything change? Well, yes and no. We are still what we were; our “vibes” aren’t any different, we haven’t been changed. But we have been brought to each other’s mind, you could say, and so although we aren’t changed, our shared awareness is a change. So, yes but no.

And I get that one of the functions of the 3D is to facilitate just that kind of non-3D to non-3D interactions. Hadn’t thought of that before.

You contact Lincoln and the mind you call Smallwood, and Carl Jung and Lincoln Steffens and Hemingway and various people you knew in the body. These are all the equivalent of neural pathways you have facilitated. Perhaps Lincoln and Jung and Hemingway would never have had any reason to work together, or (more likely, in fact) two or more of them would have “come together” from someone else’s 3D associations. It is a real construction of a non-3D link.

Probably for purposes we can’t grasp.

Purpose that isn’t any of your business, maybe. You do what you do for your own purposes, and yet everything you do has other effects, most of them unsuspected by you if only because of geographical or temporal distance. Everything ripples, and nobody knows all the patterns, nor needs to.

So let’s talk about my half-forgotten theme that came to me, reading Sachs.

You sure you want this in the open, on the record?

I wasn’t thinking it would be anything particularly sensitive.

It is all about what you see yourself doing.

Ah, I get it. Delusions of grandeur.

Accusations of delusions of grandeur. Within proper limits, what you have in mind is perfectly appropriate. And, you do keep it within limits. You are not deluded into thinking you are more important than you are. If anything, you are in the direction of the fallacy of insignificance.

In any case, I see the need.

Sachs was describing why certain ideas may come to nothing, or may come to nothing for 50 years or more, and he was showing how the scientific mind no less than the artistic mind is vulnerable to error for various reasons, not all conscious ones.

And I have been saying that our next civilization will be based on many things, some of which we have discarded as superstition.

[And I remember, typing this, that actually this was originally something we got from the guys. I have believed it long enough now that I am regarding it as my own idea, not that there is ownership of ideas.]

His point is that there are reasons why the truth in some things cannot be seen at a certain time or from certain intellectual standing points.

But the thinkers don’t usually recognize their own blind spots.

Considering the amount of psychic energy that goes into creating and maintaining those blind spots, that’s hardly surprising!

But I don’t have the background or the training or the time or the energy to do the shuffling though all the data that must be out there. No one does.

No, no one does, but civilizations aren’t built by any one person. Even an Einstein, a Newton, an Emerson, a Yeats, can make only a tiny contribution to changing how people see things – but nothing wrong with that, as your guys always say. A tiny bit of work carefully done, leads to future possibilities.

One thing there I see I would have disagreed with Sachs, he seems to have believed in luck, in chance.

That is one way to see things. It is only wrong if taken to be an absolute. Similarly, your way of seeing things is only wrong if taken as an absolute. By now you should know, nothing can be said that cannot be contradicted truly. Life contains all contradictions.

And does not contradict itself, I know. Sort of hard to see how a thing can be true and not true.

Instead of saying “be,” try saying “seem.”

Aha!

Yes. Most of what people know is actually how something seems from a point of view, not how it is absolutely, world without end amen.

And that’s why we need to be re-examining what we think we know.

If people could get into the habit of thinking, not, “This is how things are,” but “This is how things seem,” they’d find it less disruptive when they were forced to go with the flow. And your times – that were my times too, obviously – are plenty strong on flow.

Any concluding words? This doesn’t feel complete but I don’t know what if anything it is missing.

The reason you have been led toward uncovering your unconscious impulses, your habits and screens and scripts and all the unconscious filters that separate you from the here-and-now is so that you could be able to do just what we’re talking about:  to reexamine your mental and spiritual world in light of a wider, freer consciousness. Living in a freer spot amounts to living life more abundantly – and that more abundant life enables you to ask better questions, experience deeper meanings.

Clear, as soon as you say it. Okay, Jon, thanks. I trust that you will contact us if we can somehow help you, and in return we’ll keep an ear to hear you if you come prompting.

 

Friday, November 8, 2024

1:40 a.m. I don’t know that I ever saw so plainly how an event like an election provides a fleeting opportunity to learn something about our own obscure processes. Nancy woke up on Wednesday, heard that Trump had won, registered the fact sort of neutrally, and snapped the radio off again. I learned of it at 2 a.m. or so, when I was up and browsing. Similarly, I shrugged. Not surprised, but not dismayed either.

Others, though, are responding in great fear, or in prospective apprehension, or in reasoned and reasonable worry – or, if they are on the other side of the divide, they are in hope and even excitement.

I have tried to get people to see that their reaction tells them nothing about whether or not they are feeling the future, but it tells them a lot about who they are right now. Only, you have to look and be willing to see.

It puts me in mind of the election of 1828, when sitting president John Quincy Adams was defeated by iron-hard, intolerant, self-righteous Andrew Jackson. That was not merely a lost election but the end of a way of doing things, the end of caucus elections among a small number of representatives, away from the cultured, somewhat insulated world of an Eastern and Southern aristocracy. It was the irruption into political life of the raw West, of the common people, of the previously excluded. It was a true revolution, and to the educated of the day it seemed the crack of doom. Could Jackson even read? Would he become a dictator? Would he not sweep aside the rule of law and become a sort of king?

Not every criticism of Jackson was wrong; not every fear of Jackson’s rule was warranted, not every one that was warranted was borne out in fact. An old saying has it that no dish is ever served as hot as it is prepared. Nor of course do we ever have the facts as to what another person’s motivations and hidden inner springs may be, given that the person himself may not know!

But people’s fears and their hopes are very high, unbounded by any realism yet. The sky will fall – or the promised land will be attained – and life’s unavoidable contradictions will not be allowed to spoil it this time (or, on the other side of the fence, will not save us this time).

All the tea-leaf reading, all the certainties! And what is it but Psychic’s Disease? “I feel this so strongly, it must be true.”

Well, you know what you feel. Is it too much trouble to examine why you feel that way, what it says about who you are? Don’t put it on “the objective situation.” It isn’t that you feel the way you do because “any reasonable person would.” Step back from the “objective situation” and pay a little more attention – a lot more attention – to your, subjective, situation. If you are in fear, how are you in fear? What does it say of you, that your belief in the world, in life, does not uphold you? Does your fine philosophic understanding vanish in the face of “real life” events? And, if so, how much is your precious philosophy worth? If it vanishes in the mist when you face something you’d rather not see, is it real? Was it ever real?

But there’s not much use in saying all this, though I may as well, since it came pouring out. It is the strangest thing to me, but people can’t see that the objective thing is not what they think they fear, but that they fear. What you think may happen may or may not turn out to become fact, but either way the one fact that you can bank on is what you are feeling and what it is based on within your psyche.

It is so odd – and so accustomed a situation for me – I can see the hopes and fears of both sides, and to me the processes and flavor are pretty similar, if opposite sides of a coin, but to either side, the other side consists of fools and knaves. There are plenty of fools and knaves, all right, but they aren’t conveniently lumped in only one party. Yet people seem comfortable only when they can tell themselves that ii is that way: They are angels, their opponents are fools and knaves.

It’s like living among people who have been hypnotized, who think they are in normal consciousness. And the one thing they are likely to agree upon is that this way of seeing things is mistaken, or wrong-headed! Blessed be the peacemaker, for he shall be shot at from both sides.

You guys want to add anything?

You seem to be doing well enough on your own.

Am I going too far?

Not too far in expressing your opinion. That doesn’t mean your view is the only way to see things, of course.

What? What?! Okay, which are you, fool or knave?

Yes, very funny, but it is worth remembering that even the most accurate analysis of anything must fall short of comprehensivity (if that is a word) because there are always more ways to see things, each of which can provide further education. So, your stricture not to confuse one’s fears with analysis is well placed, but not the only thing that may be said, because of course people’s fears also have an objective component. Yes, their fears will show them who they are, if they will pay attention, but there isn’t any difference in this than in any analysis of a situation: One hopes and one fears, and sees what happens. The one side is afraid of the destruction of certain safeguards. The other side is afraid of subterranean manipulation subverting popular will. They are not unreasonable fears. The danger is – as always – when fear swamps cool judgment and persuades it that fear is the only rational response.

Certainly we can see the indirect evidence of people always wanting to divide people into camps, presumably so that the situation can be manipulated. It seems to me that both camps see some of the same worrying problems, but they are prevented from joining to attack them constructively because analysis of the problem gets short-circuited by demonizing the presumptive villains behind the scenes.

Remember the Maharishi Effect. Remember the unbreakable connection of your non-3D components. Remember that All Is One. It isn’t hard to keep the world together, if that is your intent. Just don’t expect to enlighten the world to its own nature by some peaceful process, all love and light and never Sturm und Drang. As long as souls will coexist in 3D to work out their destiny, there will be contention and cooperation, strife and peace, triumph and tragedy. If you don’t set your heart of what is impossible, you won’t get it broken when what can’t be, isn’t. But if you live in faith that life is good, that all is well, you reap the reward of at least relative tranquillity.

And you guarantee being called escapist.

So what?

Oh, I agree, but still, there it is. Pretending a siege of Babylon is always in fashion as hard-headed common-sense. Seeing what is, is rarely in fashion.

Let’s not get to feeling sorry for ourselves.

Smiling. No. No reason to. Well, this is one of those sessions where I’ve done all the lifting. Nothing special to add?

Patience. Have patience with those who can’t see things as you do. You do not know but that you may change your mind, or may see things you don’t see at the moment. We don’t say you will; we say always, you may, so it is well to leave yourself allowance for it.

Okay. I get the feeling you have more to say, another time, and if I hadn’t run on so long, you might have said it here. But there’s always another time, until there isn’t. Till then.

 

Thursday, November 7, 2024

6:15 a.m. I’m not sure I quite made the point, in yesterday’s ILC gathering, that our reaction to the election results is valuable chiefly not as an indicator of coming attractions but as an indicator of our idea of coming attractions. If we are filled with fear, or joy, or mixed feelings, or whatever – it is the feelings that are real, and that are valuable to us as illuminators of part of ourselves of which we may not be very conscious. If people are in fear, the things they fear may or may not be, or become, real – but what is real right now is the fear itself, and it is always worthwhile to know what we usually cannot know.

But I am seeing that what is obvious to me may not be coming out of my pen all that obviously. You guys want to take a crack at it?

The concept is not complicated, but the understanding of it may be impeded until people remember that they themselves are real; the 3D world and the events and their own body and life in 3D are only somewhat real. That is, the events are shadows; the feelings they reveal within you are substance.

Yes, that says it more clearly, thanks.

Some will think you are wishing the world away, or, let’s say, are defining it away. But until the distinction is made between 3D world as theater and your life in 3D as reality, shadow is always going to be taken for substance. It is only “common sense,” after all.

Than which there is nothing more misleading, sometimes.

Of course. Common sense reflects the accepted understanding, and has no way to get beneath that understanding. In face, common sense is the chief obstacle, often, to penetrating beneath the deceptive surface of things. It is adjusted to a certain way of seeing things. Why would it want to encourage “nonsense” or – at best – a problematic way of rearranging the mental formations?

Any advice today for people who are not happy with the elections? Or, for that matter, for whose who are?

We subscribe to your mother’s saying, “Don’t holler before you’re hurt.” And for those currently traveling hopefully, we remind you of the perils of counting your chickens before they hatch. Life in general usually provides less than it seems likely to deliver – but that is less of evil as well as less of good. Don’t take counsel of your fears, but don’t let yourself be discouraged if the onset of the millennium is delayed. A mental construct easily projects expected consequences in a simplified and exaggerated form, casting shadows on the walls: goblins or angels.

Naturally life is not going to measure up to either the fears or the promise. Life is full of cross-purposes, internal contradictions, compromises, evasions, constructive adaptation, a million things. You all know this, for the good and sufficient reason that this is you. You, not that “external” soap opera that seems so self-evidently real, are life. The elections of 1828 – how real are they now? Yet the souls who were shaped in those days persist, so which was realer, the event or the spectator? Not quite that simple, but almost.

Yet the event is not meaningless, either.

Of course it is not. But it doesn’t mean only what it may seem to mean. Vox populi  is the voice of God, you will remember.

Interestingly, in that little pause I suddenly remembered how Lincoln would have the confidence of the common people, and how they would sustain him.. Trump is no Lincoln, but I can imagine that what we are seeing is the people, stubbornly trying to get their government back.

And, you see, that is you getting caught up in the “external” drama and temporarily forgetting to keep yourself at the center of your life.

Is it?

Well, all right, it is and it isn’t. It is, in that you are looking at the social situation as it appears to be, rather than remembering that you are integrally connected to anything you can see. It isn’t, in that what you are seeing does exist on its own regardless of how it reflects yourself to yourself. Both.

So the point is not the situation or even my own personal situation as it may be reflected to me by my reaction to the situation. It is that I am in danger of forgetting my relation to life.

“Danger” is too strong a word, but temptation, yes. Any strong soap opera has the potential to suck you into the drama. In fact, that is what it is supposed to do. But this can be either productive or not, depending upon how you get sucked in.

If you lose yourself in a tale of victims and villains, and high drama, you lose an opportunity to remember to learn what it may teach you if you apply it to your own life, your own being. But if you lose yourself in the drama while being aware of your reactions to it, you may learn something.

Decades ago, I decided that good fiction does not leave us unchanged, but teaches us something about ourselves and the world, and if it doesn’t, it is the equivalent of chewing gum.

And so, life. If you follow the story line told by outside events and do not relate that story line to yourself, you are missing the point.

I can hear people thinking, “Escapism.”

Ironic, isn’t it? What could be more escapist than ignoring the deep currents of one’s own life because of the distracting allure of external events? There is no reason to follow or to not follow current events: That is a matter of taste and priorities. But what matters is being conscious of your life, being aware of your situation, being alert to your opportunities, and you can’t do that very well if your attention is elsewhere.

Well, thanks for all this.

You have perhaps forgotten that for years, you would say to yourself, “Life is good.” Could it be that the reason you have forgotten about repeating it is that the message sunk in?

Quite possibly. It seems self-evidently so, to me. Makes it harder to get into a blue funk, crying, “Woe is me,” or “The end is near!” One sighs for all that lost drama. 😊 Till next time.

 

Wednesday, November 6, 2024

5:40 a.m. I am suddenly struck with the idea of contacting Mr. Lincoln about what is going on, it has been so long. I was feeling my deep weariness and it put me in mind of him saying there was a core of tiredness in him, toward the end, that nothing could touch. And that reminded me of our conversations of nearly 20 years ago.

Mr. Lincoln, if this is appropriate, a few words on the deeper things going on in our country?

You will remember, they are all your countrymen. There isn’t one legitimate set of opinions and everything else error and wickedness.

Yes, I do know that. Learned it a while ago.

Some never do. But you are not wanting to counteract a feeling of despair, I know. You are wondering, where does this all lead?

I am. I take the politics of it to be only the surface phenomena. As usual, I’d want to know what is going on beneath the surface of things.

You know that already. Nothing has changed.

Since the last time we talked, you mean? I don’t remember how long ago it was, but a while.

Nothing has changed in the order of creation. The world still turns, and it turns despite us, and regardless of us – and yet it hinges on us. And that isn’t so easy for people to understand. They may see it one way, occasionally they are able to see it two ways, but in my experience, only few can see it from every side. It is like saying, God is personally interested in you, and God has other fish to fry, and God will grind you for your own good if need be. The three things seem to contradict each other, and people can’t make sense of it.

It’s all in how you look at things.

It is – but the other ways of looking at things are still valid. That’s the thing. Any way you look at a thing, there’s always another way you might look at it, and see it a little better, a little fuller.

Your specialty in life, seems to me.

If you can’t see the other fellow’s views the way he does, you can’t understand him. That doesn’t mean you’re going to agree with him, but at least you will know why you don’t agree, and how you don’t agree. If you don’t see things as he does, your opposition or even your support will have its flanks in the air, you won’t be rooted in anything, and you are likely to keep getting surprised.

So, all this polarization. My own metaphysics would say it reflects what we are as individuals, including a whole lot of unconsciousness.

Now if you will look at people’s reactions as individuals, you will see that no two people are reacting exactly the same. Some are outraged, some despondent, some scared, some indifferent. This isn’t because they do or do not understand the situation: It is a reflection of what they are. Are you all upset by the elections?

I can’t put much stock in any of it, for some reason. It doesn’t seem vital, the way it did for so much of my life. It feels all superficial and unknowable.

So you see, that is your reaction. That is what the election is to you. At other times in your life you would have been affected quite differently.

Oh yes. I wasted years of my life on politics, rooting for the team, believing that events followed the politicians rather than the other way around. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I can’t believe in it anymore.

And perhaps that is a stage that many go through, putting their eggs in a political basket and worrying over the basket. Have you thought of politics as a displacement activity?

Surely not a phrase you ever heard in 3D life.

I have had time to learn a few things eavesdropping, you know.

Smiling too. Well, displacement activity? Meaning, keeping people busy while other things happen?

Yes, but not what you may think. Not a magician’s trick to pull the wool over your eyes while he does some sleight of hand. A way of channeling energies that exist and must be dealt with but perhaps cannot be dealt with so easily on their own terms.

I’m getting that you mean energy generated by life that may be discordant and might even be dangerous if not led into safer channels.

When politics breaks down, you get wars sometimes. When wars get out of control, you get an end of civilizations, sometimes, as happened in 1914 and 1939 and even in 1861. None of those wars could ever have left the societies involved as they had been.

I sort of remember us discussing that, a long time ago.

It is better to hash things out in all their ugliness than to let them simmer beneath the surface until they break out uncontrolled.

So, the anger and the fear and contempt and all that are actually being vented by campaigns, so that it acts as a safety valve?

Is it not obvious? Your politicians ride the wave, whatever it may be, persuading themselves that this expresses their deep belief, but you will notice how conveniently the belief changes in the face of any demonstration of a new wave. But nobody creates the wave. They may ride it, may encourage it, may fight it – they don’t create it. This is something vastly larger than human scale.

Yes, I see that. The astrology of the moment determines the mixture of forces in play. The combined psychology of all living humans determines what is at issue. The contemporary manifestations of these energies (culture, media, popular feeling, etc.) determines roughly what the bounds of the arena will be. We as individuals are way smaller-scale than that. That is the playhouse we step into, to do our best.

You can find the same sense of things in my speeches, if you know how to read them. But of course they were my words to my contemporaries. What else did I have to offer them?

I suppose you might have mentioned displacement activity. (Smiling.) I’m sure The Times of London would have commented in a learned fashion.

Or The Times of New York. But seriously, it’s all in my state papers, between the lines. I said I never tried to steer events but to be guided by them. The one would have been beyond my strength, and the other was plenty. It seems to me the prudent course is to do your own proper work, to tackle each day as it comes, to remember to reflect, looking for larger meanings and subtle opportunities, and to trust in God. I was never a conventional Christian but I could tell that our affairs were somehow a working-out of something larger, and I didn’t and still don’t know any more appropriate way to say it than to call it God’s purpose here below. I know that grates on some people, but they are free to rephrase it however they like. It’s still the same reality: There’s something always being worked out, on a scale larger than human but somehow tied to human, and the individual- so tiny in the scales – yet is somehow important in the working-out.

Well, I feel it too, and couldn’t have put it that well. I suppose it is one more special case of All Is Well.

In my blackest days, I never knew a day when all was not well – but sometimes it required a copulate change of mood before I could see it. Obvious now.

I am always moved to say it just this way, don’t know why: God bless you, Mr. Lincoln. And thank you for this.