Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

Thursday, September 5, 2019

Nobody can kick you into working if you don’t want to. It’s in what you want.

I know. Although, that always reverts to Which you?

For you, it does. For another, maybe not, for there might be no conflict. For yet another, paralysis because the conflict might be beyond resolution. Here is a nuance that perhaps we have not made clear. For some people, it is a matter of one established “I” nevertheless needing to impose its will. You accept what comes. But do you mandate that something come?

You know I don’t.

Then you must accept a certain amount of frustration. How does anyone both accept and direct?

• Some people are naturally what is called weak-willed.
• Some are relentless bulldozers.
• Some are relentless in one direction and malleable (because indifferent) in others.
• Some are mild-mannered but persistent in a low-key way.
• Some are subject to fits of suborn assertiveness alternated with long stretches of apathy or acceptance or indifference.

If we spell out these different stances, it is only to bring them actively to mind, for of course you all see these differences every day; it’s just that you may not have thought of them this way. It has been noted that quite primitive personalities may meet external success because they are entirely undivided in their intent. They set a goal and move without internal friction to accomplish it, and the results may be remarkable.

Douglas MacArthur at West Point.

Yes, that is a good example. You don’t average 98 out of 100 and graduate without a demerit if you are busy trying to overcome internal conflict.

Yet his later record was littered with official reprimands of various kinds.

His later career was not as clear-cut in its requirements as was West Point. That embodied individual will functions extremely well in situations where the rules are definite and inflexible, and expectations can be met precisely and by intent. Most of life is not like that, of course, so such a person must either impose his will upon inchoate circumstances or suffer frustrations. Or, alternatively, both.

MacArthur was superb in dangerous situations, unruly in routine ones. In World War I he was apparently unruffled in the most violent battles, appearing quite heedless of the possibility of injury or death, just like Hemingway in 1944 when he was overtaken by his renewed conviction of invulnerability.

Both, too, were men who imposed their will upon the course of their lives. MacArthur willed his way to military pre-eminence. Hemingway worked and worried his way through the somewhat formless competition and chaotic requirements of the world of commercial publishing to achieve his own preeminence. In neither case was the position at the top of the heap achieved by accepting what came. They did their best to determine what came. Hemingway spent more time and energy organizing upcoming fun with his friends than some expend on a career. That energy overflowed in him.

However, we don’t wish to give the wrong impression. Hemingway was very self-divided – to the point of internal civil war – in everything in life except his purity of devotion to the act of creation. He wanted to succeed; he worked hard to get Scribner’s to promote his books, but what was non-negotiable for him was the process itself. He came to his writing desk as a priest to the altar. For Hemingway, writing was his sacred vocation, the thing to which he was always true. To Fitzgerald, writing was a talent and skill that he parlayed into fame and wealth. It isn’t that Fitzgerald betrayed his talent (as Hemingway sometimes thought he did) but that the two men thought of writing in two complementary but different ways.

MacArthur was something between the two. He was Army to his boot tips, but he was MacArthur to those same boot tips. He did not face (if he even recognized) conflicts between the role and the profession, or between either and himself.

Have we wandered off any conceivable point, here? It feels like we have.

Perhaps we have, a little. So find us our examples. You know what we want.

In the Army, how about Bradley or Eisenhower? Both highly professional, both at the pinnacle of professional success, neither one an egomaniac. And in writing, I don’t know, Dos Passos?

Bradley and Eisenhower were modest men who were team players; they didn’t have to be the star; they concentrated on doing their job as best they could. Their will, you see, was not focused solely on their own careers and preeminence. They were not weak-willed – that isn’t how one advances up a pyramid – but their will wasn’t one-pointed. In a sense, one could say MacArthur was always at an extreme of tension; Bradley and Eisenhower were not. They were balanced in a way MacArthur was not, not that MacArthur was unbalanced, but that he was centered entirely upon one thing, in a way they were not.

Dos Passos, too, was centered differently than Hemingway. His life centered upon other things than writing as a sacred profession. He was skilled, he was serious, he was professional, but he was not a priest in the way Hemingway was. This did not make him less of a man, and perhaps nothing could have brought his prose to the level of Hemingway’s, but the difference was there. Sometimes what appears to be a matter of will (or lack of will) is actually something else. Bulldozers don’t maneuver well. Sometimes a bicycle goes places bulldozers can’t go.

A little more explicitly, please.

Everyone chooses. Life is choice, and the result of choice, and the preparation for choice. But the criteria and the goals selected make life a very different thing for different kinds of people. Some are single-pointed and are quite successful in achieving what they can conceptualize – and may be quite blind to anything else, and may be quite disoriented, even helpless, when confronted with situations outside their accustomed areas of operation. Some are diffuse, achieving no single-pointed success but enjoying a well-roundedness unimaginable (because most of the facets are invisible to them) to the one-pointed person. And some are not focused at all, or are focused by default, being shaped by the currents they find themselves in. There is room for all these in life, else life wouldn’t allow them. And so if you wish to be frustrated, there’s nothing to it: Merely measure your life by the wrong yardstick

Wednesday, September 4, 2019

As you experience your community nature, you may find it invigorating and liberating, or scary and in fact terrifying.

So let’s spell it out once more, for the benefit of those who came in halfway through the movie.

The key to everything is “As above, so below,” for reality is made up of repeating fractal patterns, most particularly the 3D part of it. “Man is the measure of all things” means, not “Mankind is the only thing that’s important,” but, “Everything at every level may be understood in relation to the human scale, hence in understanding who and what you are, you can understand the shape and pattern and dynamics of all things, by extrapolation and analogy,” – only, the longer sentence is not a very snappy slogan, while the shorter one is easily remembered.

Thus, humans are communities, seen one way, and individual constituent parts of communities, seen the other. Like everything else in reality, it is a matter of scale. Atoms form molecules, molecules form elements, elements form compounds, compounds form larger shapes and units. Or, structures are composed of parts, each of which is composed of units, of elements, of molecules, of atoms, ultimately of bound energy. The thing you see depends upon the glass you see it through.

A human personality, far from being a simple unit, is a community of units functioning as one. The cells in your body may be considered either as communities of cells or as constituent parts of whatever unit they belong to. They are what they are, but what that is depends upon how you define it at the moment. You can’t say that a cell in your liver is “only” a cell rather than part of your liver; you can’t say that it is “only” part of the liver and not a cell. It is both, and cannot be only either. So with personalities. You are communities of other lives; you are individual elements in other lives. Both, not one or the other. Reality has no absolute divisions.

I see how strange and incomprehensible it will seem to any who have not gone through our long run-up to a different understanding. Can it possibly be made clear or even plausible?

Fortunately, that isn’t up to you. Each person’s inner self will guide them to what they need.

I sure hope so! I don’t see how we could bridge the gap otherwise.

Remember, we bridged the gap. No one needs to nor could follow your particular path. Everybody gets their own, makes their own. Serving as nudge, as reminder, as encouragement, is quite enough. Your understanding, like your experience, like your assumed self-definition, is going to wander. So what? Nothing lost and potentially something gained, for anything that gives you a more accurate experience of what you really are is potentially useful. There is always more to be learned, and how much you learn depends partly upon “circumstances” (the “externals” that represent your hidden springs and condition), but partly upon your interest and industry. Ask, and you shall receive. Knock, and it shall be opened.”

 

Tuesday, September 3, 2019

Some forms of society take our connectedness for granted, though each society may conceptualize differently. Others assume it is not possible. If a church encourages its members to expect to receive messages from spirit (no matter how they define spirit or define messages), those members will be more open to the experience and will be more open to sharing the experience, which in turn will open the way for others. It is a virtuous rather than vicious cycle.

The bump in the road may be that the terms in which the experience is described may be unfamiliar, and so may be suspect. The usual confusion of tongues.

That’s where we are today, isn’t it?

Not exclusively “today,” but yes. In the change from one era to another, much is lost in translation. However, realize that losing things in translation also allows for – encourages, almost enables – things to be found in translation.

I suppose it is an advantage of ILC that it comes with little cultural baggage.

Such baggage as it carries is of course transparent to you, but the less of the past one has to drag around, the more nimble one may be. However, if one disconnects from one’s past entirely, the result is not so much freedom as ungroundedness.

And the happy medium?

You being grounded, your expression of what you experience will be grounded, provided you intend it to be. You are personally well grounded in the history you know and feel. Others may be well grounded in the contemporary society they know and feel.

St. Columba on Iona, the Apostles in their wandering, any hermit or monk or nun or cloistered being; any mystic, any person devoted to an art or to living may feel this, and be sustained by it, and it does not in the slightest degree depend upon their idea of what – or who – they are experiencing. This is the reality behind any religious or artistic or scientific or philosophic conceptions.

I believe you just said – and I fully agree – that this sense of communion with a non-3D reality may be clothed in many belief-systems, but is the same enabling force.

It may lead to fanaticism, or to self-righteous certainty; it may even encourage someone in disastrously misguided directions. It isn’t a panacea.

No, it is the Age of Aquarius.

Very good. It is that.

The Age of Pisces had its own characteristics, and so will the Age of Aquarius, but there is no excuse for thinking that this new age will manifest only positively, any more than the old one did. That isn’t how duality works.

Yes. Very good. Very good.

 

Monday, September 2, 2019

I don’t know that I have ever fully realized till now how closely the rise of fascism is connected to the inadequacy of liberalism, which stems from the secularist materialist fallacy. There being no center for society to hang from, the structures of unreason try to provide one. Communists, fascists, liberals, conservatives, all try, all fail. Yet we can’t go backwards – as Jung said, the gods never reinhabit the temples they abandon. So what is to provide a center?

Guys? Do you do politics and society, or just individuals?

We try to do practical, and working on the individual is usually more practical than pretending to solve social problems, because that usually winds up advocating this or that panacea. We can talk politics and society if you wish, but we will do it in our context, not in the play-pretend context you are used to seeing. Our context includes humans as

• 3D and non-3D being (subject to internal forces and forces that manifest as external);
• individuals who are in reality communities (living minds past present and future, and therefore passions past present and future).

How can representations of man as homo economicus or homo faber or any other specialized, truncated, parodies of the human experience serve as adequate guides to social thought? Yet many ideologies of your time are still based hopes of social control or social liberation; in division among factions rather than in inclusion as part of a polity.

The New Soviet Man and the Thousand-year Reich of Aryan superman didn’t turn out too well.

No, and neither did any other model that was supposed to reshape society to employ forces not understood or even suspected. The basis of any social movement must necessarily be incomplete, and to some degree self-defeating and at best a poor make-do. If you can’t understand the situation, you can’t prescribe remedies, and if you can only act according to how strongly you feel certain, than as times continue to deteriorate, the proposed remedies will become ever more simplistic and fanatical.

It’s all pretty dismal, at the moment. Pro- and anti-Trump forces are making absolutely fanatically exaggerated claims and denunciations. Each is looking to the imminent downfall of the other, and blaming it for everything wrong, and conceding nothing in the way of self-criticism. They are, as far as I can tell, more ignorant than ever, because listening to only what they already agree with, and leaving no part of their minds open to the small still voice that says, “well, maybe.”

And you do see why?

Because we have little idea what the actual facts are. We have been lied to for so long, and are being lied to from so many directions, that there are “facts” enough to support any half-assed theory you care to name. People are ignorant of history,, and even what they know, they may misinterpret because of the poisoning of the sources of facts. If they hear something they would rather not be true, it is instantly “fake news” and that’s the end of it. And the problem is, we are inundated by fake news, too, only miraculously it comes only from the sources people already disbelieve, never from those they have decided to believe.

But there are deeper reasons than these. We repeat, no one can understand what is going on if they look at it through inadequate filters. You detect a signal more by filtering out noise than by your reception of anything and everything. Without a filter, it’s all noise. And the more unconscious the filter, the more the person mistakes the signal received for truth rather than construct. This is why some of the most closed-minded people are convinced that they are open-minded and open to correction. They never see any need to be corrected, since no contrary evidence ever gets through the filter.

True reform comes only through individual work on oneself. No matter what else you do or try to do or want to do or wish you could do, your level of being will determine your effect on the world. A social moment made of people with a cartoon image of the forces involved may amount to very little, in fact, will often serve chiefly to rouse the forces of opposition. Individuals quietly working on themselves, whether with others socially or not, may actually accomplish more constructive reform. Remember, the world is one thing, invisibly connected by millions of threads. This is true whether or not you believe it or are aware of it.

So, pro- or anti- gun-control legislation won’t bring utopia?

You are welcome to try. And so with any other measure that is advanced to be an item of faith, or a panacea. You can’t produce true meaningful reform by pounding water with a hammer, no matter how vigorously you pound.

 

Sunday, September 1, 2019

All right, my friends, ready if you are. What can we know that helps us live our lives?

Going to a psychiatrist and carefully concealing anything you think discreditable may save your face, but it doesn’t get you the real assistance that an impartial and helpful point of view would offer.

Hmm. Trying to look better than I am?

Perhaps trying to be better than you are. It can be a fine line, and worth talking about, for life is a long series of decisions about which impulses to encourage and which to yield to and which to fight. In a sense, that could be looked at as a process of trying to be better than you are.

And it’s a good thing, surely.

It is, but it has pitfalls, worth exploring a little. So, here you have been insulted by an old friend. Abstractly you know why; that is, you know what is driving him. But personally, you, as the one on the receiving end, resent the insult. Perfectly natural. You are conflicted as to how to respond within yourself. You won’t lash out in return – at least, you hope you won’t, you resist the impulse, you disapprove in principle. But – internally?

Internally I have logical responses that I would like to deliver, and I have the impulse to never communicate with him again. There is a mixture of emotions fighting it out: anger, hurt feelings, resolution to be better than these impulses – a potful of contending forces. All I know to do is to ride it out without expressing anything negative. But can’t we do harm merely by what we feel, even if less than by what we do?

Some careful thought will show you that sometimes unexpressed anger may be more devastating than expressed, particularly if not under the control of consciousness. You know that healing may be facilitated from one person to another non-corporeally. So may cursing. Your only hope of control is consciousness. Otherwise you radiate energies at a level inaccessible to you, and therefore unmodulated. This is why people ruled by primitive emotions may be effective in the world, while people of mild goodwill are not. But it is also why those who are in control of themselves, who are good by choice, let’s say, have the enhanced ability to do good. Un-conscious goodwill is less effective than unconscious ill will. But conscious good will – focused, intensified, intended good will – far outweighs ill will conscious or unconscious. Life has a bias toward love. Love is like gravity, a force tending to hold the world together. Its opposite is not hatred but fear, that is, concentration upon separation and difference. Given this bias, any conscious work working with the bias is paddling downstream. Working against the bias paddles upstream.

But when we work unconsciously, or consciously choose fear and hatred?

Then you still paddle upstream, but your paddling is more vigorous.

So, paddling in love will be inherently more effective than the same intensity of paddling against it?

Yes, only of course life is never a simple binary choice, always a combination of binaries. All your lives are cross-currents. There wouldn’t be much choosing to be done, otherwise. That said, even one who is being carried downstream under terrific force may still have some ability to steer, even if within severely constricted limits.

 

Saturday, August 31, 2019

Could anyone ever really describe his or her life? Detail every bump, so to speak? List every book read, every mental connection made, any coinciding event inner and outer? Obviously not, and if it could be done, who would want to read it? The equivalent would be to have a map on a one-to-one scale. As your professor said, so many decades ago, if you had one, where would you store it? The same goes for maps of moments. However, consider expression to be a process of successive compression.

Interesting way to put it. Selective editing, is what I might have said.

Successive compression gives the sense of it a little better.

• First is the living of it, then
• the rough recording of it in memory, then perhaps
• the jotting down of notes as in journal entries, then perhaps
• the transcribing of some of those notes, then perhaps
• the compilation of such notes as articles or books.

At each stage it is a process of selection and arrangement (even if only by chronology or by topic). The process swells and contracts, for at every stage in the process, notes may need to be more fully expressed, and items discarded as irrelevant. Selection produces clarity. A literal transcript of everything would be useless until condensed according to the need of the user. And this is an exact description of the process, the nature, and the use of ILC.

I remember how hard it was at first, sensing various possible phrases and meanings, and not knowing which was more accurate. I often could not tell which of two words or phrases or even, sometimes, directions, was what “the other side” wanted to convey. I learned to go ahead without so much angst, and eventually I realized that intent is more important than exactness, provided I was intending to do my best, the message would come through.

Eventually you came to see that any of the alternatives would go where we wanted to go – which is what you just said, but we thought it was worth the rephrasing and repetition. Now speak of Jones Very, and you will make our point.

Jones Very was an intuitive, a poet, who came to Emerson with transcriptions (so to speak) which Emerson recognized as genuinely inspired. However, Very would not allow a word to be altered, because, as he said, it was the word of spirit. Emerson is said to have drily remarked that it was clear that spirit didn’t always know how to spell.

Yes. You see, Jones Very was in touch; he received. But he placed too much reverence on the word as he received it, not realizing that he was necessarily part of the process. (Thus, we warned you repeatedly not to treat our words as scripture, but you still aren’t comfortable rephrasing or paraphrasing what you get this way.) Intent is the determining characteristic. All else is technique and detail. To those who read your reports: Lighten up, free yourselves to receive by realizing that you will always be part of the process; confide that mistakes are always corrected in process, provided sincere unflagging intent to be in genuine and helpful connection.

Take this encouragement and go forward.

Friday, August 30, 2019

A reasonable night’s sleep, courtesy of the nebulizer and a good deal of foresight. But what’s this all about really, guys? Is it really just weather all the time?.

You live in 3D, you can’t expect to be unaffected by 3D.

And I am also a creature of non-3D, and ought to have some immunity from 3D.

Do you think so?

I do. I can’t imagine that our 3D limitations are absolute in the way they seem to be. I guess that’s way I always believed in psychic abilities: I sensed that what we see is not what we get.

Oh, but it is, if you will examine the statement carefully.

Yes, I get it. What we see is what we get. As we see more, there is more to see.

More to get.

Okay.

Your depth of connection determines the rules of the world you live in. Change the depth of connection, and you change the rules in effect for you.

As Thoreau said in Walden. It seems to me you told me that our health could also be read as an indicator of where we are, like a barometer.

We said that if good behavior guaranteed good health, the 3D would be much better behaved. But, within limits, there is truth to the statement. Only, measure within yourself, not against others.

For some, physical health is a given; for some, an impossible dream; for some, a position between the extremes. (Just as health varies among people, so do other factors. Intelligence. Emotional stability. External good fortune. Luck, so called. Vitality. Not all pf life’s prizes, nor pains, are given to any one person.) The fluctuations of your barometer that can serve as indicators for you, no one else’s.

I have assumed that good and bad that happen to us don’t happen at random.

In the first place, how do you know the good from the bad? Is it “good” that lighting strikes, or rain falls, or the sun shines, or that temperature rises or falls? Is it “bad”?

It’s just life.

Yes – but what is life? Life is non-3D beings, experiencing 3D constrictions to focus perceptions and shape choices in the process of self-creation, and doing so in the presence of other non-3D beings undergoing the same process.

Somebody must be calling the tune.

Or maybe the tune is being simultaneously and competitively created as you go along. Just because we call them vast impersonal forces doesn’t mean they are vast autonomous forces, but they are impersonal relative to any given 3D individual or the larger non-3D being of which it is a part.

And do those non-3D beings together determine our weather here?

We should have to think how to answer that question, it has so many unconscious assumptions, some of which are right. We are a long way even from making a fair start on the relations between 3D lives and the greater world they are usually only vaguely aware of.

 Tell me more about what changed when I was ten, and again at twelve when I didn’t quite drown.

And, you might add, the time you fainted in church and came back – just before you would have lost consciousness completely – when the ushers got you to the front door, thus allowing you to remember the event if with no sense of its meaning. Three events. And there could be others added. Anyone’s life is fuller and stranger than is realized from inside or from outside – that is, by self or others.

The incident at ten influenced my whole life and I always knew it, but I didn’t really conceptualize it until much later. Yet now we work on the assumption that a message from my future shaped it.

The message reshaped its importance. It reconfigured your second- and third-tier reactions to life, you might say. So this version that you live is more magical and open than the ones in which the message was not received and the encouragement was not taken to heart. Notice that the message and the response were below the threshold of your consciousness. It nearly always is; that allows essence to bypass personality.

The incident at age 12, like the fainting-spell in church, allowed a brief bridging of worlds with conscious observation. Because you did not quite lose consciousness, but came so close, in circumstances that had your attention, you got a glimpse of the existence of more than the sensory world. It came without conceptualization, so could not be rationalized away, even if you had so wished. You passed on to other things and didn’t obsess over what had happened.

I get the sense of our lives being repeatedly tweaked.

Remember that what you experience as external events are in reality dramatizations of what you are and where you are trending at the moment. No two people experience the same event or series of events or background conditions identically.