Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

Friday, April 28, 2023

4:40 a.m. All right, guys, let’s talk. I gather that you’re okay with my ceasing to post, ceasing to talk to you this way, ceasing to do anything at all. The major variable seems to be, does it satisfy me. And, I appreciate that. Nobody would like being whipped to work. But is this variation on retirement really what I want? I don’t think so. I think I would actually prefer the kind of advance i was hoping would follow taking the program earlier this month. That was the point of spending the $2k, after all.

And your question is — ?

I don’t know what my question is. I’m getting a feeling again of the vultures circling, not as a sense of being preyed on, but of them being an indicator of the end approaching. Financially I’m starting to feel pinched, in a way I haven’t for quite a while – a couple of decades now. Socially I am more aware than ever of my day to day isolation, and it doesn’t hurt but is tiresome, only in that I am not turning that isolation to effect in production of art or letters or careful teaching. I keep thinking of the woman who worked at Hemingway’s in Cuba, who killed herself leaving a note that said she was bored with life.

None of this really touches your complaint, though all of it is true. Really, you are asking, “Why can’t I work, happily and productively?”

I suppose I am, yes.

You have long had a sense of being self-divided, and even almost of being sabotaged.

It is as if there was some restraining mechanism at work. I’ve never understood it, and I’ve never found a way of disabling or removing it. When I’m not bound up by it, I work happily for hours and I produce another book, or whatever I am setting my mind to. But I can’t seem to govern the timing of when I am free of that binding cord.

It isn’t merely lack of willingness.

No, it seems environmental. But if the shared subjectivity – the external world – is a representation of our own internal world, can there really be “external” obstacles?

You are to some extent disregarding what you have absorbed in recent years about the intractability of external factors because you are not the center of the world. You are, and you aren’t, as we spelled out at some length.

Yes, I see. The shared subjectivity is maintained by everybody together, and not merely by everybody in 3D at any present moment, so of course we are each an inconsiderable dot in a huge picture. This, even though at the same time the entire “external” world is a mirror for us, and is, in a sense, background against which we do the only real work there is, work on ourselves.

So, should it surprise you that you cannot by sheer willpower overcome what you begin with and remold it to heart’s desire? That is one purpose of 3D, after all, to provide resistance against which you can exercise your muscles. Without the world as canvas, how could you paint? Without intractable limitation, how could you productively struggle?

So, grin and bear it, then.

Well, you always have alternative strategies, and some moments favor one, other moments others.

• Go along. Coast. Flow with the energy of the moment.
• Struggle. Determine to do what you want, not what the times make easy or even what the times make possible.
• Flow, steering. That is, move toward what you want, skillfully making use of even adverse currents or contrary winds.

Probably every possible attitude is a variant of these three approaches. Which you prefer will depend upon who you are and what the times are (as you experience them) at any given moment.

Well, how about some helpful hints about how to employ these strategies? Flow seems obvious, but Resist and Steering, less so.

Reflect upon your situation – which in context means, reflect upon your life. Look, for greater clarity, less upon what you might do, and more upon what you have done. The data is clearer. You have a track record.

You mean, what we have preferred, and how we have executed it? Sort of like a Myers-Briggs, showing our natural bent?

More or less.

• How often have you flowed with the stream, merely keeping off the rocks on either shore? When you have done so, what has your internal life looked like? Were you serene? Contented? Bored? Restless?
• When you have resisted, attempting to impose your will on your life circumstances, again, how did it feel? Was the struggle invigorating? Fascinating? Exhausting? Satisfying?
• When you have attempted to skillfully steer among the rapids, or in contrary winds, was it, again, a positive or a negative or a mixed experience? Was it a matter of avoiding the negative aspects of drift or struggle? Was it the quiet exhilaration that comes with exercising skill?

The helpful hint that I asked for is, I suppose, that by examining our feelings in past circumstances we can somewhat triangulate our inclinations now.

You can predict results psychologically, put it that way. You can get a better feel for the way that is right for you.

Only, don’t expect easy. Don’t expect satisfying, or productive, or anything at all. What you experience may be anything; there is no predicting (from 3D-you) what is most fitting nor most likely to occur.

When I heard the little orienting mantra, I thought, “May I be safe” is a given. “May I be happy” is a choice of attitude. “May I be healthy” is a sort of choice that follows from other choices, and “May I live with ease” also follows from what we have decided to live. Someone like my friend Joe, under a sentence of leukemia, has just as much choice of living with ease as someone in good health – depending upon his attitude, which ultimately is within his control.

Then why aren’t you living with ease?

Am I not?

We would say so. But, if you recognize that, what is it you are feeling?

Hmm. Thoreau’s “divine discontent”?

Is that part of you?

It is.

So, anything wrong with it?

Only if I let it discourage me, I suppose.

And if you were to get discouraged? Is that the end of the world?

Just “the kind of thing that happens in 3D,” I’d say.

So where is the problem? That is, is there a problem? Doesn’t it depend upon how you look at it?

Everything you’re saying strikes me as true, but it seems to leave something out. It doesn’t seem to factor in the something that makes life hard.

Your brother told you years ago that expectations could be a problem. One’s expectations of oneself, of the world –  in short, of life – could easily lead a person to conclude somewhat hastily that something is wrong, because the reality experienced is not living up to the reality expected. But is it reasonable to expect that life will conform to your expectations? What possible good could that do you? It is precisely to provide you with contrary or unexpected or undesired situations that 3D is designed to do. If there were nothing to constrain you, how could you create and grow and live in exultation?

That sounds almost like, “Stop whining.”

That would be good advice, if you were whining. Let’s say, instead, “Stop second-guessing yourself, stop second-guessing life.” Try living as if you knew what you were doing. Or, to put it more bluntly, “Try trusting yourself more, and life more.” Doubt, difficulty, pain, failure, illness, name it – they’re all part of life. Do you imagine that they somehow invalidate life? Just because you’d rather not have to experience something doesn’t mean it’s bad for you. Everything in your life can be used for your betterment. That’s why it’s there.

I can imagine contrary voices, offering objections rooted in their personal history or in history at large.

And there will be no persuading them of what they are determined not to believe. Still it remains true that happiness and health are a choice, not an accident.

Thanks for this, as always. Good to be in touch again.

Notice that you are now asking more personal questions. Don’t draw conclusions, but notice.

Okay. Till next time, if there is a next time.

 

Thursday, November 21, 2019

Let’s continue to explore the question of whether your life matters to anybody but you, because if you are designed to do something, that is where you will find your satisfaction, like a born artist, painting. And if you know what you are designed to do – which means, what you are designed to be – then you have the master key to the question of what you should and should not encourage in your life.

We will know the difference between an application and a virus.

You will be better able to weigh the effects of given tendencies, put it that way. You will see whether the fruit is rotten or not.

Which lands us smack in the middle of the question of religious prohibitions.

You will remember, we delved extensively into the various overlapping categories of “wrong” or “evil.” The scale extends from things that are evil in themselves all the way to things that are merely considered evil because they are disapproved or even merely because they have been forbidden.

“Dog trainers,” I thought as I wrote that graf. To some degree, arbitrary prohibitions (no meat on Fridays) may be put into place as a test of obedience.

Of course.

You say “of course,” but how many people ever think of it that way? Churches that set up arbitrary prohibitions merely add to the confusion between what is truly evil in itself, what leads to evil tendencies, and what is merely undesirable in itself, and what is merely prohibited by some authority, legitimately or not. Those are four very different characteristics.

As you say, four categories of things, all commonly lumped as one, to the confusion of the observer.

• Evil in itself. Deliberate cruelty, for instance.
• Leading to evil tendencies. Bad habits. The road to hell, so to speak.
• Undesirable. Or perhaps one might say, unedifying. Backbiting. Things that annoy people or lead to social friction.
• Merely prohibited. No meat on Fridays. Walking outside of crosswalks. Not using seatbelts.

Seemingly simple, this is nonetheless a powerful distinction, because once you see the situation clearly, you can see that there is no need to define evil out of existence merely for the sake of acquiring freedom from arbitrary or superstitious or tyrannical prohibitions.

Notice, the same action or tendency may fit into different categories in different circumstances. For convenience, let us label the four conditions E1, E2, E3, and E4. E for “evil,” you understand.

• E1 is pure evil, evil in itself, regardless of circumstance. What is called a “necessary evil” – killing in warfare, perhaps – is nonetheless recognized as evil. The circumstances may have everything to do with the guilt or lack of guilt of the killer; still the evil of the killing remains.
• E2 is something that leads toward evil, even though it per se may not be evil. An example might be hanging out with bad companions. Nothing wrong with the friendship in itself, but it may easily lead to evil, and thus is, in itself. dangerous.
• E3 is what is considered undesirable or unpalatable. Anti-social habits stemming from selfishness or carelessness, for instance. At one end, such habits tend toward E2, at the other, toward mere nuisance value. Office politics, selfishness, disruptive behavior, even littering, as an expression of lack of consideration for others. Certainly not serious, but illustrative.
• E4 Merely prohibited. Things no one would even notice if they weren’t prohibited so that violating the prohibition is itself considered an offence. Resisting arrest. Underage drinking. Driving on the wrong side of the road.

The way to light up the argument is to use a charged example, so let’s discuss sex in this context. Here is a basic human drive, expressing in various ways, some of which are clearly good (and we won’t look at that here) and some of which shade into evil. Now, pay attention: Sex will hold people’s attention, but anything and everything in your lives may serve to offer you the same choices. Anything may be innocent, or may be unfortunate, or may be what is called an occasion of sin, or may be a form in which evil expresses. If you cannot entertain this thought, you will not be able to follow where we want to lead.

Rather than listing the four levels and fitting sex into each, we will do the opposite, showing how the same act may fit into different categories, depending upon how it is contexted.

Two people connecting physically and emotionally via the sex act and all its ramifications. In itself certainly a good thing, indeed a blessing among so many lonely 3D lives. But you know how hedged around it has been, by prohibitions social and religious. It is not our purpose here to criticize any society or any religion, nor their rules around sex. Nor will you find it helpful, though you may find it comforting, to silently provide your own criticizing. There is always something to criticize, but we are not speaking as social or religious reformers: We are trying to bring clarity to the question of evil by using a charged example.

Suppose two people engage in sex, not religiously or socially sanctioned: that is, not wed either religiously or socially. Certainly this qualifies as E4, in that it contradicts prohibitions of sex outside marriage. (We recognize that the two may be in a society that does not have such prohibition, and may not be religious at all. We overlook this for the sake of the example.) Other than evil in the sense of E4, can they be said to be doing evil? That depends entirely upon whether the conditions justify judging them by the other three categories. Is their union undesirable? Does it lead to evil? Is it somehow evil in itself? No one can sensibly answer these questions with only the scant data we have given.

So now let’s say the lovers are underage teens. This may move beyond E4 into E3, undesirable, especially the younger they are. Social tastes differ, but most societies differentiate between adolescents and children, and have different values for each. So now is it E4 (“wrong” merely because arbitrarily forbidden), or E3, wrong because in itself undesirable? (And of course, who judges? But that is a practical question and this is a theoretical statement.)

So now, suppose the lovers are under-aged or, for that matter, of age, and somehow the allure of sex is leading them toward forms of behavior that are themselves dangerous. Let us say, behavior that leads them to undervalue themselves, to objectify each other rather than relate as persons. This at least reaches E2, leading toward evil. Again, we are not judging this or that sex practice nor this or that situation; we are setting out results and tendencies.

Finally, sex like anything else can express real evil. E1 sex would for instance objectify at least one of the partners, treat one or more as objects rather than as persons. Regardless of circumstances, you must feel that this is wrong. It may be mixed with many other psychological elements in any or all concerned, but in itself it is evil to treat a person as a thing.

And this will have to do for the moment.

 

Monday, February 4, 2019

Hanns Oskar Porr asks if people who are murdered choose to be murdered. “Is it part of any greater plan ( call it a life-plan, probabilities, test, an exit strategy, etc.)?  And here is the important one:  if it is a choice, is it always a choice or are there also freak accidents?”

I am inclined to think that the answer is in something he quoted in his email: “A change of angle of viewing will show entirely different relationships that are no less and no more true. in other words, there is no one way of seeing things; there is only every way, and this of course no one in 3D can ever stretch to encompass.” But – is that right? Would you comment, please, to a sincere question?

The quotation is apt beyond what you were thinking. It is more profoundly true. Not only does a different viewpoint reveal a different aspect of a given situation – it alters what is possible, what is true.

That is a truism, I think.

Only from a certain point of view! From another, it may appear to be fantasy, or debatable, or disinformation. When you see life as fluid rather than static – as a dream rather than a collection of objects to be moved around – the ground-rules not only seem to change, but in fact do change. What you believe is directly connected to what is true (and possible) for you. You know this from experience, many of you, but not all who have experienced it realize what they have experienced.

Your beliefs bound your experiences; your experiences expand or limit your beliefs. As usual, a reciprocating process. Someone who will not  be convinced is impregnable in his unbelief, and thus from one viewpoint, he is firmly rooted in fact, and from another viewpoint he is trapped in his own limiting beliefs. This is not an either/or – it is a both/and, as well as a neither/nor.

Choose your beliefs, change your life.

Yes, except that stating it that way implies a firm platform from which to choose. Your life is not as simple as a 3D mind making its decisions rationally and fairly.

Unless that is our ideal, I suppose.

Not exactly one’s ideal; more like, one’s firm idea of how things are. You understand, there isn’t really any point in thinking one or another person can set out the rules of life as they are. The best you can do is to set out the rules of life as they are for you. Again, looking at life more as a dream than as a staged event will bring you closer intuitively to the reality. Only – some will be unable to adopt that view!

I see it. So your definitive answer to Mr. Porr’s question is, “The rules of life depend upon how you see them, so there isn’t any way to answer this question, except arbitrarily.”

That isn’t wholly representative of our answer. But perhaps it is best to pause there and wait for reaction. On to your second question.

All right. Alex Bee, citing the case of Canadian investigator Joe Fischer, author of The Siren Call of Hungry Ghosts, asks if Fischer killed himself or was murdered by malevolent beings. More specifically, he asks how to protect against malevolent beings.

The two questioners are linked in more than the accident of chronology, you see. They illumine each other. Let us think for a moment about luck, and divine protection, and evil or malicious spirits, and intent.

Oh, I see that clearly enough. Again, what we believe is what is true for us.

With an implied caveat, always, that no one in 3D knows fully who or what he is, and so never fully knows his own mainsprings. If you believe you need a ritual of protection, you will. If you don’t, you won’t. However this is not as simple as deciding to decide. Again, what you are in various aspects of the community that is you will determine your range of choice. You may consciously think “I am not afraid” and unconsciously cower. Or vice versa, for that matter. But – subject to that very important reservation – it is true that life will serve up what you expect.

Surely “what you expect” isn’t right.

Well, it is, provided you remember that people do their expecting at various levels, not all known to one another.

I have never felt a need to ask for protection, but perhaps that is foolhardiness. So far, so good, anyway.

But in your external life you do the same, and again, so far so good.

Although I do hesitate to make recommendations to others, for fear I may be wrong, or may be pushing my luck, only to discover one day that it runs out.

But regardless, this is your experience, your (inner and outer) world in conformity to your expectations.

So I suppose the answer is, if you think you need protection, act as if you do, otherwise not.

Let’s say who and what you are determines the need or non-need for protection, because malevolent forces do exist, in a way, and don’t, in a way. That is, what is within your limits seems real to you, and other things do not, can not. But again, don’t confuse deciding that you believe something with actually believing.

So in practical terms?

It’s always the same prescription: Get into close touch with all levels of yourself. Stay in touch. Reconcile to the degree possible, while remembering that you while you are in the body have the opportunity and responsibility to choose. That’s what you are doing here, choosing.

Or at least, that is my/our take on things.

Yes, very good. Everyone lives in a different subset of the world tailored for them, of necessity. That is the opportunity; that is the predicament.

 

Tuesday, January 29, 2019

[A man named Hanns Oskar Porr sent an email asking if strands ever wrap around as in a hologram, each point containing all else and at the same time feeding into the others. He (noting the problem with using the words “higher” and “lower”) asked if a higher level might feed back around into a lower level. He had had an experience of cosmic unity which, by analogy was, “like being part of a ‘cosmic hologram,’ where the part contains the whole and the whole contains that part.” He added that “the idea of the hologram is incomplete, because the holograms we know here in our 3D always have an outside observer/viewpoint,” and in his experience he had been the cosmic hologram. ”So, you see, this is what I mean by ‘does it wrap  around?’”]

Here is what I think it means: Everything is all one thing not only in being all-connected, but in being non-hierarchical. If this is the meaning of his question, I’d say yes, although not intuitively obvious, that’s true. Reality isn’t divided into enlightened and unenlightened, king and pawn, superior and inferior, advanced and retarded – except in relation to any given point of view. Is this right and am I reading the question right?

Yes and yes. This is a clarification that may be important for some, and may be already obvious for others. The world (that is, reality, All That Is) isn’t divided into first class and cheap seats. It’s all one thing, as we keep saying. Reality is neither unorganized nor hierarchical. Instead, it is self-organizing and fluid; it is all one thing and at the same time it is segmented, or compartmentalized, or segregated, or – well, organized in many ways at once, so that different ways of seeing it result in perception of different structures.

You once gave us the analogy of the interior of a crystal, looking one way when a laser is shined through it from one direction, and different when shined through differently. That is, each angle of vision illumines different relationships that exist always but are not necessarily always evident.

You see the limitations of analogy. Words are more fluid than objects, but are nonetheless far more static and unresponsive than are the realities they try to capture. Images are somewhat more supple than words alone, but are also too static, too defined, to capture the quicksilver-like nature of the reality they attempt to reflect. Even the simultaneous overlapping of images cannot do it justice. If you were not intuitive beings, in touch with your non-3D natures, you would have no hope of grasping any of it.

In sum, think perhaps of the ongoing process that is represented by kneading dough. The outside becomes the inside. Neighboring particles become separated; unmixed portions become part of other previously separate pieces. Not the dough but the process of kneading is the analogy. Don’t fall for the idea that some people are first-class citizens and others hangers-on. A change of angle of viewing will show entirely different relationships that are no less and no more true. There is no one way of seeing things; there is only every way, and this of course no one in 3D can ever stretch to encompass.

And this, although very brief, is enough for the moment. Summarize the query before citing.

 

Friday, January 25, 2019

As I look back on my life, it seems to me I didn’t stay conscious enough. I rarely turned the inner spotlight on me, though in another sense that is all I ever concerned myself with. It’s hard to express: A self-centeredness that was not egotistical, or a self-awareness that was not introspective. I was there, doing (or usually reacting), but I wasn’t there thinking about what I was doing or reacting to. I couldn’t learn from experience, because I wasn’t altering my reactions from having thought about past reactions.

I’m not getting it expressed clearly, which suggests I may not be conceptualizing it very clearly. Guys?

You might consider yourself to be a society living by ad hoc adjustment. “How do I feel right now?” This isn’t necessarily a fault or a virtue, but it certainly is a condition and a predicament! It opens some doors and closes others.

I can see that. In the same way that openness to experience opens doors.

And closes them. Danial Boone’s life was as bounded as anybody’s, but everybody’s bounds are different in nature and extent. One travels extensively abroad; another, extensively inward. And beyond this difference, which is still internal regardless of the fact that it plays out in the outer world, there is a deference in what one does with what one lives.

So take Bob Friedman, quietly influential over a long lifetime. Not his external career but his internal career is all but invisible except to those with eyes to see, either from a close vantage point or an affinity of nature. In the same context, consider Colin Wilson.

The commonality being that they liked to think about psychic experience but didn’t particularly want to have it.

Not quite, though not wrong, either. They wanted to maintain.

Are you contrasting it with my wanting to transform?

Both Bob and Colin were thinkers in a way that you are not. They reflected. They pondered. They learned from experience considered. This doesn’t mean that what they learned necessarily was right; we are concerned here with the nature of their process. Someone considering something new in the light of past conclusions may end up merely adjusting new perception to not contradict older conclusions, or they may learn something.

Well, I think I get that. People who live their life by a rigid code can be an admirable result. George Marshall. George Washington. But, maybe George Patton!

It is the difference between rigidity and suppleness, only without an implied judgment that one is good and the other bad. Different ways of living produce different crucibles, each with the defects of its qualities, all within the 3D crucible.

So if Bob and Colin are intending to live their lives from a stable platform that will allow them clear observation (and of course this is not all they were doing, but it is one way of looking at their lives), you cannot expect them to want to jettison that stable platform just when things get interesting. Instead, by not moving, they get the effect they wanted: front-row seats. And from those front-row seats, they were able to describe the view to others (although this is only one aspect of what they were doing).

And I by contrast?

You by contrast are more like a raft on a lake, or sometimes a river, occasionally on the open seas. You are a moveable platform – or, not so much a platform as a set of water wings. What you know is an idea of yourself shaped by your reaction to your surroundings. You are aware of “external” changes, you think of yourself as changing and unchanging, and what you chiefly have to report is your own process, your own journeying. Only, can it be called journeying when it is more like being rafted along?

It is true as time has gone by, I have had a greater sense of my own journey being all I had to offer by way of instruction or commentary or even encouragement.

Well, triangulate, for greater clarity. You share with Colin the reporting of what you think and do – in other words, your experience. Bob did not do that.

To put it mildly!

Well, you share with him your own vivid intense inner life, poorly communicated, often misunderstood or unsuspected.

The three of you delighted in assisting others.

That’s true. Publicly and privately, Colin was very generous with his time for unknown writers and thinkers. Bob set many an author in print. And I am like them both, in that.

Of the three of you, Bob was perhaps the most self-aware, in that he did not live in a continual whirl of mental and physical activity like Colin, and did not lose his inner compass by throwing himself into new circumstances (inner or outer) like you. He was the quietest of the three of you.

And Colin the noisiest?

Certainly the one who made the greatest impact, by far, in the short term (meaning, in the span of one’s life).

James Joyce said history was a nightmare from which he was struggling to wake up. I sometimes think my life is a nightmare, or anyway a dream, from which I am struggling to wake up.

That isn’t quite what you mean. It is more like, your drift is the lack of direction from which you are struggling to become aware enough to overcome.

Is it?

Rita’s words about your lack of introspection were the beginning of a different understanding of your life, were they not?

I need to think of this.

But, you see, the very thought of thinking about it drives you to think of doing something else – Netflix, perhaps, or another novel.

Yes, I recognize that persistent drive to escape. It feels like self-sabotage.

Think of it as true north, and see where that brings you. What you are doing is not at all what you think of yourself as doing.

So, in practical terms, what can I (ought I) do?

If toward the end of your life you can live a summing-up, it will be well.

s

Saturday, December 5, 2020

In considering emotion and our lives, two inputs, one from Bill Ebeltoft, one from Dirk. How about it, guys? Compare and contrast? Or at least comment?

[Bill suggested that we don’t so much change our emotions, as interpret them through our own filters. How we choose to react can change the filter, and thus change our subsequent reactions. He reported his guys as calling this a reasonable interpretation, if a bit simplified. “But a good place to start.”]

It is an interesting starting-point, the question whether in your 3D lives you

• change the emotions you experience, or
• interpret and react and, in your reaction, you change your end of the interface.

May I rephrase? I think you mean, “or do we, by reacting, change what we are, which changes the equation.”

Same thing. Let’s rephrase the whole situation.

Emotions are the boundary between small 3D-you and either the “external” world or your larger 3D and non-3D you, whichever way you choose to see it. So emotion per se is beyond your control, in the way the weather is beyond your control. You can carve out a greater amount of control over how you react, but that isn’t the same thing.

In other words, the emotion you interface with may be regarded as a constant that you cannot affect) but your reaction to it, hence your degree of freedom, is a variable that is potentially under your control, in that you by your second-tier reactions can change the equation. The same input may express differently depending upon what it interfaces with.

George Washington controlling his temper by a lifetime’s rigid self-discipline.

Yes. To look at it merely externally for the moment, would an undisciplined Washington have experienced the soul-searing experience of the winter at Valley Forge in the same way that in fact he did? And would such a version of Washington have been able to command the respect and allegiance of his officers and men? Life in 3D is not primarily about externals (though it looks like it is), but here is one external that should illustrate the point.

So in response to Bill’s interpretation we would say it isn’t exactly the filter of perception that you change. Rather, it is the mechanism of reaction that changes.

Not so much that we perceive differently but that we choose to react differently.

Yes. By choosing how you will react to something, you choose what you will see subsequently. You change the world coming at you, hence you change the emotional layer interpreting and intervening in your life. The laminal level – the smooth or turbulent connection between inner and outer world (for this is how it appears to you) – changes automatically if one or the other end of the equation changes, or if both do. It is a boundary and a bridge, an energetic, dynamic, barrier and bridge, not something solid or static.

So, moving on to Dirk’s analogy to physical systems —

[Dirk said that when engineers want to change laminar and turbulent flows, they have choices in how to do so. He asked if similarly we might have many ways to change our emotional interface.]

One way would be to consider the habitual reactions you can build, the second-tier reactions we discussed. What is that but redesigning aspects of yourself so that the same input from the emotional layer will meet a different you, hence express differently.

[Pause]

That’s it?

You need more?

I don’t know, somehow I expected it would require a more in-depth discussion.

We don’t see the need, but if questions arise, you know where to find us, as we said earlier.

Anent that, since we have some time, Bob Washburne’s email of Nov. 16 said he had used TMI’s Gateway Experience CDs many times, but didn’t seem to be getting anywhere.  “That is, I can readily attain the different levels at will without the CDs, but I don’t seem to be able to do anything with them. For one thing, I never see anything but black.  No images, no sounds other than the ringing in my ears, no voices, no emotion downloads. Just black. Second, my awareness seems to be nailed right behind my eyeballs and nothing can shake it loose. So is there a self-help group for slow psychics?]

And as you know, many people experience excruciating difficulties in connecting.

Yes, they do, and being individual they respond in different ways. Some take it personally, some assume they are at fault, some travel hopefully, some despair.

And many of us move from point to point along that scale, until we succeed or we concede failure. I well remember the two or three years  before I did Gateway, using the tapes, trying, intending, hoping and not succeeding.

Your second-tier reaction to that long preparation served you well. You did not get angry, nor did you despair.

I sort of hoped against hope.

Righteous persistence did bring reward. But remember, what you learned at Gateway was that you had been expecting things to appear in the wrong guise. Your unconscious expectations added to your difficulties.

Very true, and after nearly 30 years of experience, I have learned to advise people of some of the usual pitfalls. But a listing of obstacles, and a listing of suggested ways to overcome them, does not amount to a magic formula.,

If there is a magic formula, it is “Persist, live in faith, live your life knowing that although it may not be what you wish it were, it is right for you.” Not so easy a formula to follow, yet not impossible.

You can understand that to us in 3D it sounds a little like “It isn’t under your control, so ride with it.”

And is that erroneous? Your life is not under your 3D control, and it is well that it isn’t, or your life would be a maze with no exit. What is under your control, we remind you, is how you react to what happens to you. Seen in a certain light, that is no different from George Washington continually molding his character.

So what of someone trying sincerely and seeming to get nowhere?

The operative word – as you knew when you wrote it – is “seeming.” But life can require a lot of patience and faith, because often what you are really working on is not what you think you are working on.

Yes, I’ve seen that often enough in my life.

It’s an inevitable effect of your 3D consciousness being less than your larger consciousness that has a better perspective. You may strive earnestly and diligently and seem to get nowhere. But the striving itself is “getting somewhere,” if you can realize it.

So our life is not so much Sisyphus, everlastingly pushing a rock uphill, only to see it fall to the bottom, making him continue an endless fruitless labor. It is more George Washington, a life presenting endless possibilities to work on character?

Don’t carry it too far, but yes. Success in what you want is not necessarily the same as (or worth as much as) success in what your intent and actions make yourselves.

 

Saturday,  December 30, 2017

6:55 a.m. I watched Michael Ventura’s full-length commentary on John Cassavetes’ movie “Love Stream” again last night, and I am reminded that metaphysical conversations have a tendency to glide lightly over the hard questions that serious filmmakers and writers come up against all the time. Sex, love, hatred, conflict, anguish, dead-end situations, white-hot impulses, years of drift and indecision and lostness – all the sharpest flavors of life, all the things that make life hardest and brightest. Somebody (a Hemingway, say) lives his life overshadowed by the awareness of unpredictably imminent death, feared and longed for. Or, he spends his life in productive but also destructive alliance with alcohol, or drugs – or coffee or bread, for that matter, anything that forms an unbreakable chain that is both anchor and fetter. He burns for sexual union, or for fetishes that for him replace sexual union. He burns for success, or money, or revenge, or whatever it is he burns for. He struggles against fate, against circumstance, against his own demons or weaknesses, against betrayal.

In short, his life is struggle, and it may be struggle against comfort, against boredom, against discordant parts of his own nature, against anything, but even the most tranquil life includes struggle, conflict, drama. Any system of metaphysics or psychology or religion that did not address this fundamental reality of life would not be real.

Guys, hasn’t the flesh and blood of life tended to escape the confines of these conversations?

Only if you define struggle too narrowly. Struggling to understand can be a real hunger too, a real ongoing drama. Struggling to create a coherent view of life that makes sense of life as you in your times experience it is little different from struggling to paint a masterpiece, or write one, or carve one, or direct and produce one, or to sit alone, building careful chains of thought and logic, to think something into existence. Or, to change fields, to struggle with material objects and an evolving comprehension of motivating forces, to invent an airplane, or a 3D printer, or a molecular rearranger, or whatever; or to create a garden, or any useful or decorative item.

Yes, life is struggle, but struggle is not solely mental, or emotional, or physical, and it is not solely negative or positive in nature. Just as they day drama is conflict, well, so is life. It is only in the conflict of forces of whatever kind that one lives a 3D life (which, let us remind you, is a deliberate constriction of consciousness into one moment of time and one locus of space). The ever-changing present moment is, above all things, a crucible. And if a given moment (even a moment stretching for years) seems to have nothing in particular happening, no conflict, no drama, no progress, no regression, still such moments are part of a larger rhythm of ebb and flow.

Yes, but how it is that we tend to –. Oh, of course. Our conversations tend to be relatively bloodless because I am on the 3D end. Someone else might bring in something more red-blooded and equally true.

Well –

What? What’s this long pause?

It’s difficult. You don’t want us spilling your discreditable secrets, but you don’t want us sanitizing either, and this is true for everybody. So how do we tell the truth without telling the whole truth? Yet this is always the case.

I remember Thoreau saying, in Walden, I think, that he could tell a sorry enough tale on himself if he chose to. After all, some struggles are private. I think Hemingway deserves way more credit than he usually receives for being as honest about himself as he was.

It is true on one hand that everyone is entitled to a private life; it is also true that everyone’s private life is to a degree a self-created prison (or, to be charitable, call it a cloister) beyond which he will not venture. Thus our repeated reference to the fact that the specifics in your lives are animated by the vast impersonal forces that run through them. Life is not a matter of cause and effect confined to material forces. You know that. Everybody knows that. And neither is it the result of the logical working-out of whatever a person contains.

Logical George Bernard Shaw to the contrary.

Yes. Life is more vital than bloodless theorizing, and at the same time not as rich as it appears when taken at face value. The only way this can be reconciled is to remember that 3D life is not a thing of itself, but is, so to speak, suspended between non-3D forces beneath and above it. Thus, “vast impersonal forces,” and any attempt to understand life without balancing its extremes of true drama and not-so-real reality is going to fail to some extent. Bloodless from one point of view is insightful from another; realistic from one point of view is deluded by appearances, from another.

This is a function of art, isn’t it? To include as much as possible while being unable to include everything.

Everybody specializes, and not merely “everybody in 3D.” (If you can remember that 3D and non-3D are part of the same reality, statements such as this will become superfluous.)

I am tempted to go into my usual generalizing. I’d say religion tends to concentrate on the 3D-suspended-among-other-forces end, and detective stories, say, concentrate on 3D drama seen as if fully real.

Many such dichotomies might be drawn, all somewhat accurate, none particularly enlightening. What is most helpful is whatever is most useful, meaning whatever is most able to be applied to a person’s daily challenges.

Surely that is different for everybody, and different at different times.

Of course – and neither you nor they can know what is going to be the bell-metal and what is going to be the “clunk,” at any given time. But your, and their, non-3D awareness is not restricted to one time-and-place locale, so it will get you, and them, to where you all need to be.

And that is enough for the moment. No need for a full session; this brief discussion contains enough food for thought.