Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

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.

Thursday, August 29, 2019

Do you care to say more about how other people in other times may bless or curse us? What the variables are? What the potential is?

You might look at it like this: What we were calling the vast impersonal forces may be considered to be channeled among you through personalities, and so in effect this is the potential (the current, so to speak) between lives. Remember the TMI program where you were given an exercise to send a message to your younger self? You sent a message of encouragement. “Don’t give up. It will work out. Don’t give up.” Well, instead of thinking of that interaction strictly from the perspective of 2003, consider – now that you are neither in 2003 nor in 1956 –

Yes, I see. Consider how it was from the 1956 end, to receive a message and an encouragement from elsewhen.

Had that 10-year-old had the concept and the knowledge, he would have realized that he was being contacted from the future. You don’t remember experiencing the contact and realizing it. You well remember July 26, 1956, however.

But this now has the flavor of the science-fiction stories about time travel that I find so irritating, where people are influenced by a future self that only comes into existence because of decisions or actions they take that are the result of that (at that time) nonexistent future.

Reorient your ideas, remembering that

• you are multidimensional beings,
• all possibilities exist,
• any one version potentially connects to all other versions by way of the central self.

It isn’t one person contacting a different person in a different time/space. It’s more like one neuron connecting to other neurons in the same brain. There isn’t the absolute division between components that ordinary 3D life suggests. A puzzling incident in your past may be a clue that more was involved than you know, or perhaps than you could know. So, look at July 26, 1956 again.

This is an extraordinary event that I cannot be making up, for I have always remembered that morning. Seems too much to describe yet again.

No, take the time. It will be worthwhile, for you do not understand it yet. Relive it. A bare-bones explanation will help you connect.

July 26, 1956, the day before my tenth birthday, is the day that my childhood in a certain sense ceased, and a very different life began, though of course I had no insight into it. (One could hardly expect it of a ten-year-old.) Oddly, it came about because of the Lone Ranger, a half-hour Western that aired every Saturday morning.

Okay, something weird is going on. I have never had a need to check if the 26th was a Saturday, but I just did. My Perpetucal says it was a Friday! Wikipedia has the 26th on Thursday! This could easily be an error, but now I have three days of the week for a date I clearly remember as being a Saturday!

Regardless what day of the week it was, I was settled down in front of the TV set because I had been looking forward for a week to the one-hour special that would tell how the Lone Ranger became the Lone Ranger. I don’t remember now how much that nearly-ten-year-old boy knew the difference between fact and fiction. I’m sure I at least partly and maybe entirely believed the story.

Anyway, I didn’t get to see it. The slot was pre-empted for live news coverage of the survivors of the sinking of the Italian luxury liner Andrea Doria arriving in New York City. All my life, I have thought and sometimes said that the net emotional effect of the sight of that huddled misery changed me in one instant. From that time I was either intellectually precocious and emotionally retarded, or, it occurs to me now, empathically enabled beyond my years, so that I felt but did not understand.

Later in my childhood my parents would joke that I had the world on my shoulders. I did. Of course it would look ridiculous and totally disproportionate and ungrounded, but I was always all those things. Still, something had happened, and now you are suggesting that my future self sent me a message.

You may look at that morning as a portal opening up for you. One moment you were a normal ten-year-old boy and the next you were a ten-year-old with only a ten-year-old’s slight knowledge of the world and of life but, suddenly in addition, a glimpse of the human condition seen as from outside, certainly from outside that ten-year-old’s frame of reference. You were given not a glimpse but, shall we say, a doorway was deliberately left ajar. Many things followed from that moment, some of which you know, but it was overwhelming.

Emotionally, it certainly was. It was a lead-lined blanket dropped over that child, and it was all he could do to stand up under the weight, no one understanding what had happened, least of all him.

Yet it was necessary if your life was to take its peculiar course. What followed could have gone many ways, but the bias had been introduced.

I get that things like my belief in psychic abilities is one consequence, even though the subject didn’t really come to mind (as I remember it) until my brother gave me Edger Cayce: The Sleeping Prophet.

You had a bias toward certain non-mainstream views that came not as a result of intellectual processes but by what your strictly genetic heritage made you, plus what part of yourself bled through the 3D barrier, aided by our leaving the door ajar.

So where does the message from 2003 come in?

You had been overwhelmed. It didn’t – to put it mildly! – assist you in dealing with the world. You were put into a situation in which you had no covering on your nerves – to speak metaphorically. You were hypersensitive emotionally and not well developed mentally except in your innate understanding of non-3D realities rather than, and in fact in contradiction to, 3D realities. You were too incapacitated to lead any kind of normal life, which wasn’t in itself a bad thing. Only anything can be carried too far, and it is sometimes hard to judge from non-3D how much is too much.

I should think that you’d be able to tell from looking at future events.

What do you suppose we just said?

It doesn’t seem at all equivalent to me.

We, like you, are continually readjusting. Your decisions determine what you become. Each decision requires a corresponding adjustment from our side in what we can do and what we can see as possibilities and constrictions. You enable and disable potential all the time, as you go.

I think you’re saying, we live and at some point you may adjust the trim, but depending upon how we react, the original intended-to-be-helpful input may have undesirable effects, so that in effect you have to change your minds and perhaps undo your own previous efforts.

That isn’t wrong as one way to look at it, bearing in mind that you are looking at things as if you – 3D you – were in the center of your life. Seems obvious, but of course it is wrong, or how does July 26, 1956 rule your life or be ruled by 2003-you?

You mean, I think, our non-3D self is our center, in that each moment of 3D time in effect passes away.

Well, let’s say no one 3D moment could provide a continuing platform.

So, the 2003 intervention?

The timeline you have been on since 2003 is radically and beneficially different from the one(s) you were on before. In effect, you sent a message to your past. That past changed. (Not physical external superficial events but what you were.) You then found yourself, unnoticeably, on a new and more productive timeline relative to what you concentrated on. You don’t magically change your health, or your relationships, or your understanding of others, or your pattern of action. What changed was an internal assumption of support. Oddly, you will have seen by now how this assumption is relatively rare among others. And now you know why you have it when others may not. Also we have now told them how they may have it, if they value it.

It depends upon what messages we send in a bottle.

It does.

Wednesday, August 28, 2019

We are carriers of the vast impersonal forces you began talking about last year.

Remember we said the same forces could be regarded as impersonal or personal. It’s more a matter of viewpoint than of an essential distinction, and it’s more a matter of what and how they manifest than viewpoint.

All humanity is one thing, and is part of something even greater. There are no absolute divisions in the world. Even the division between  3D and non-3D is only a relative rather than an absolute distinction. All is one and everything interrelates. Since non-3D is an integral part of 3D, time is not the absolute barrier that it appears to be when reality is considered only in 3D terms. Relating across space and across time is not only possible, it is unavoidable, and the only question is to what degree such relations will be conscious rather than unconscious. And that depends upon individual decisions.

All is one – and is also distinct and separate and individual, when you look down the opposite end of the telescope/microscope you put on life. No divisions are absolute, still they exist. If you keep in mind both aspects of reality – all is one, everything is differentiated – you get a clearer picture than if you concentrate on either and lose sight of the compensatory other aspect.

So. Healing. You all have the ability to help heal the world, or help curse it. None of you – fortunately! – has the ability to do so single-handed, but none of you is powerless to do good or evil considered strictly in terms of who and what you are in essence; not dependent upon what you do externally. Remember, the external is secondary to the internal. You are 3D/non-3D beings, hence are not pinned to one time and place. For the sake of understanding things you must experience life that way. But you can know better; you can see beyond appearances, and it is time that you wake up fully to your part in the vast cosmic drama that is human life within a continuing weather of non-human forces manifesting within human life.

Do you choose to curse the enemies of what you hold dear, or bless them? This is not as simple and self-answering a question as it may appear. Which you choose to do results in your addition to the total of a human cursing or a human blessing. Which do you suppose is more therapeutic, seen in all?

I have always been impressed that Robert E. Lee prayed every night for his enemies as well as for his friends. It accounts for that vaguely saintly aura that he shares with Lincoln.

Yes. Neither man slackened in his efforts to have his side prevail, but neither (despite whatever personal weaknesses) ever chose hatred over love.

So when we see politically divisive characters, we may regard them as opportunities to discover who we are, by our reaction to them.

That is one effect, yes. Lincoln did not approve of Lee’s actions;  he did not slacken his efforts to vanquish him and his cause. But he found no need to add hatred to the total of hatreds that had been disfiguring his country for so many decades, and were now playing out in killing 600,000 young men. And nor did Lee. Remember that the external present manifests as the eternal now, the point of power, the place of application. But just as you may bless Lincoln or Hemingway or whomever, so they (in their continuing point of power in the eternal now) may bless you. You – and in saying “you” we are of course saying “we” – continually act as conscious or unconscious conduits of blessings or curses. Choose wisely.

August 12, 2019

The past is raw material for the present, not something to be obsessed over or enshrined for its own sake. You live now, in the living present tense. Nobody lives then, nor in the times to come. It is quite possible and, in fact, common, for people to live obsessed by (frozen in) the past or future, but past and future do not exist as separate things, the way language tempts you to think of them. Every moment of past and future is a present-tense moment. Every moment lives and continues to live, as a stitch in a tapestry does not cease to exist when the needle is busy elsewhere, or has not yet laid down that stitch as seen from a given point of view.

You may spend your present-tense moment thinking about past or future, and the point is not what you are thinking or doing but whether you are present while doing or thinking, or whether you are in a sort of trance. Not that full attention can’t alternate with what might be called slackened attention, or sleep, but that full attention is the only space you can work from.

As Gurdjieff said.

Bear in mind, Gurdjieff lived long enough ago that the mental raw material he had to work with was radically different. The electronic age has its drawbacks, but it has already transformed average human consciousness. Yes, people’s attention-span is shorter. Yes, they are distracted by millions of thought-baubles (TV, internet, games, continual telephonic communications, etc.). Yes, they are ignorant of their ignorance. But they live in a different kind of world, with different sensory perceptions that now routinely extend to ideas and experiences that would have been mind-stretching in Gurdjieff’s day

What you were built who you are, as who you are builds who you can be (that is, lays out possibilities and forecloses certain paths).

Wednesday, May 8, 2019

You have seen us using words like soul and spirit that many people in your day shy away from.

Your time will transcend religious, and anti- and non-religious, thought. “Your time” does not mean the next ten minutes, nor ten years, but you are in process. As the inner lives of those in the 1000s in Europe are not the same quality as yours, so neither will that of your linear descendants be. But this does not mean that you will be going into entirely uncharted waters, nor that you will be moving in oscillation to the past. New, but familiar. Familiar, but not identical.

We will live in knowledge, rather than belief, that we are part of something greater than our 3D selves.

If you will begin to apply one insight, things will gradually begin to clarify for you, and that is this: Life, even specifically human life, does not center in 3D.

And, I take it, you propose to set out for us what that means in practice.

Obviously if it were clear upon our first stating it, it couldn’t be very new, nor so very important. So if human life does not center in 3D, where does it center? And, in what way can we say it does not center where you are, as it seems to?

And that is what religious thought centers on, isn’t it, when it is not setting out rules and splitting logical hairs.

It will be a prime mistake and an unproductive diversion, to give in to the temptation to criticize religion. Remove the beam from your own eyes first, as is said. However, you are not wrong to see that the central concern of churches (also of philosophies) is the question of where the center of human life is. It seems clearly bounded: birth, life in its stages, death. This is the life you seem to see all around you, this is the appearance you perceive, and it is tempting to conclude that if there’s one thing 3D life demonstrates, it is that physical life is limited.

I would have said, our lives show us that there is an inner life to match the outer. What that inner life amounts to is debated, but I don’t know of anybody who actually denies that we experience it.

The perceived limits to physical existence (your outer world) tempt people to conclude that the inner world is equally limited. Some think the inner is dependent on the outer, some don’t, but in any case people tend to work from the assumption that the 3D world is the center of life.

If the 3D life we lead is not primary – if the center is elsewhere – why are we so fixated on things of the flesh? Sex, for instance. As I write that I feel that it is prompted, so, explain please.

You experience inner life and outer. Some think they are unconnected, some think connected only somewhat, some think they are the same thing perceived one through essence (through direct feed), one through personality (through the senses). Say it’s so. Then what happens to the inner world when the outer world goes away? You think you have addressed this in Awakening from the 3D World, but you haven’t.

The 3D body dies. What further connection can you have to the 3D world? Yet, you do have such connections. What are ghosts, what are lost spirits who don’t realize they are dead, or spirits reluctant or unable to “move on” after the death of the 3D body, if not a person’s inner world maintaining a distorted connection with the outer world? Yet if it is possible for this to happen, clearly the inner world cannot depend upon the outer (else they would vanish) but neither is it self-directed in the way that seems obvious.

We established, years ago, that the inner world is created by elements from beyond the 3D. The larger being is clearly not centered in 3D, and we are each extensions of it.

Then act like it!

What do religions teach, if not that humans are created by, and part of, something antecedent to and greater than themselves? The fact that they then differ on different aspects of that larger reality does not change the fact that this is the nub of religious life. So let us take that seriously, and many things will change in the world that no longer recognizes religion as the proper way to go about maintaining the relationship.

Tuesday, May 7, 2019

When we think of the 3D  as a dream, we don’t usually think in terms of galaxies and nebulae and all that as being ephemeral. But they would have to be, of course. Given that you probably prompted the thoughts, you want to take off on it?

Yes. As a general rule it is important periodically to go back and connect ideas that have been kept in separate buckets. Some ideas won’t be reconciled, but it’s worthwhile to find your inconsistencies. Other ideas may shed light upon one another, and this is all to the good. Not everything even within one context will automatically sort itself out. You will need to do some work at it – but it is very productive work.

So reincarnation and quantum mechanics and evolution and coincidence theory and the concerns of everyday life, and consultations with the guys – it is all input, it is all data, it all provides clues. Or (same data, different way of looking at it) it is all sand in the gears, all confusion twice compounded. But even confusion twice compounded may be turned to account! There isn’t any such thing as bad luck or dead ends except in a context that expects or demands certain results that the universe declines to provide.

A factor that comes to the forefront is the disparity between the temporal limits of 3D life and the lack of such limits outside of 3D. Life in the world v. the afterlife; time v. eternity. And (so you won’t have to say it), Eternity is a word meaning not “a very long time,” but outside of time, superior to time, existing in a dimension beyond time.

This is a religious question. We have been bringing you along for years to get you to the point where you can consider religious questions as religious questions, without falling into reflexive dismissal or (most unlikely) retreat into sectarian dogma.

We would have you connect to religious thought as it has been expressed over the centuries. There is no use pretending that things that millions of people have believed over thousands of years are obviously ridiculous, or fatuous, or superstitious. Any given teaching may be any of these things, but that is true of any avenue of thought. If you will not mesh your own metaphysics with religious teachings through the ages, you cannot progress toward truth beyond a certain point. Judging how far a given teaching differs from where you begin, and condemning it proportionate to the extent of the difference, isn’t coordinating and it certainly isn’t learning. It is merely reinforcing one’s own prejudice. No one is as impartial as he thinks himself, it is merely that he defines his position as the rational, reasonable center. But to become aware of a defect is to begin to see how to overcome it.

No one is impartial, because that would require a lack of preference that is impossible in 3D conditions. But one may be partial without hating what one does not extend to. (One can love one’s country without hating or fearing foreigners. ) To move to another level of understanding, you must to some degree sacrifice your comfort with your religious (or anti-religious) preferences. The world is wider than your idea of it. When we advise you to begin to absorb religious tenets, we are easily misunderstood. Perhaps we should begin by detailing what we do not mean.

Religions are compounded of a view of reality, and prescribed rules of conduct. Not the same thing. Are we agreed?

Of course. The Catholic Church held certain views that did not have to result in all its rules. Some of them were (are?) arbitrary. If there is a God with certain attributes and expectations, it does not necessarily follow that one should not eat meat on Friday.

And does it necessarily follow that one need follow the ten commandments, even if one remembers them?

I expect you are about to tell me.

No, we are not. We’re making a different point entirely. Our point here is, Don’t go picking and choosing among a church’s rules and prohibitions. Some may be arbitrary, some may stem from a misinterpretation of reality, some may have become inappropriate through changes in human condition, some may have served validly to distinguish a sect from its neighbors but had no greater purpose.

Well, by that token, I can’t see that we can pick among their tenets, either. One religion will pick one aspect of divinity (whatever `divinity’ may mean) and another a different, perhaps contradictory, aspect. Islam centers on submission to fate. Christianity, on living in love. Judaism, on living up to a compact with God. Manicheism, on living in a dualistic world. And so on.

True enough, but as soon as a church springs up, it has to minister to people of many different levels of development, with different needs, different responses. Codes of law emerge, and direct experience with the divine (again, whatever that is) may become exceedingly rare, and may be actively discouraged. And, as with any human institution – as you have often pointed out – politics soon enters, and compromise. All these factors will affect any religion, even before one considers corruption, or hypocrisy, or any of the human failings that inevitably infect any human endeavor. Scientists in their organizations follow the same pattern. So do politicians, mathematicians, professionals, club members – anything. It is just human nature.

So, no picking and choosing among a given church’s prohibitions.

It is deeper than that. You yourself can’t exist in a church. You can’t regress to living by belief in the same way you did. While it is true that your knowledge will always be limited, thus leaving you living in faith de facto, the word “faith” needs looking at, to sort out confusion among meanings. Faith cannot be mandated. You cannot just say “I am going to believe” and that’s that. It can look like you can, but it is closer to abandoning resistance to faith. You see the point?

Sometimes life pushes you to a conclusion that you don’t want to come to. You fight it tooth and nail until you are too tired, and when you give in, you wonder why you weren’t able to do so long before. I take it that is what you mean by abandoning resistance.

Surely you can see that this is a very different psychological process from willing yourself to believe. Until recently, most people who could not live by faith wound up living what you might call “faith in nothingness” or “faith in absence of meaning.” They couldn’t have faith in God or their religion, but they couldn’t live without faith either, so they transferred it to other things – to chance, to Evolution, to Progress, to the coming revolution, whatever. It’s still living in faith, if you do or don’t know what you have faith in. Some believe that their faith is in Knowledge. But this is a dangerous pitfall. Beware of making idols of abstractions. Your task is to learn to live in a very different kind of faith. Perhaps we should say, living in trust. They sound similar but are very different.

I’d say it’s the difference between talking to someone in the non-3D only if you can call it a name and identify it as a person, or talking to TGU and instead of asking for bona fides, taking what comes and then trying to weigh it.

A very good analogy.

I am not in the same state of calm focused concentration I was in when I returned from Egypt. Time to return to that state. In general, I feel I have been sloppy and undisciplined. More than that, wasting my life, still without a clue. How can this be?

How do you expect to justify your life?

Is that the right question?

It is. What makes you cling to the idea that lives can be, should be, must be, justified? Your life is your experience, and it is whatever it turns out to be, without your needing to judge it. What you did not create, you cannot fully understand. What you cannot understand, you cannot fairly judge. How do you know – how should you know – what your score would be on the great cosmic scoreboard?

If you feel that you are wasting your life, shouldn’t that feeling count as evidence? If you get advice from your guys upstairs, and don’t follow it, shouldn’t that indicate that you might be doing better things than in fact you are doing?

Nobody dies content with what they have lived, perhaps. Their own opinion of the life they lived may not be the only way to see it, though.

We don’t seem to be talking about the same things. The pattern of my life is to want to do great things and not really try to do them, and feel dissatisfied that I do not, yet be unable to use that dissatisfaction I feel.

Maybe you aren’t doing what you think you are doing.

Look, I’m not talking about external achievement, here. I’m thinking more of my internal life.

And we are pointing out that internal and external are more matters of viewpoint than different realities. Caesar’s life was enormously significant for the world, but it was at least as significant for himself! Do you think Caesar had accomplished everything he wanted to accomplish?

You continue to revert to what seems to me to be a focus on external. The real question would be, was he satisfied with the choices he had made as to what to be?

Would you like to ask him?

I have no confidence that I could. What links can I have with him? Oh, my admiration for him, I suppose, as with Lincoln.

Plus, facilitation from the non-3D may be available at this moment that is not available at every moment.

Well, I guess we can try this entre nous. I don’t think I’ll be sending it out!

Why not? Do you not tell people to discern for themselves?

I guess we can try. If it wouldn’t sound flippant, I would say Hail Caesar. If that much-admired man is willing to speak, I am certainly willing to listen.

You labor under a mistake if you think the dead and yourselves speak as one island to another. There are endless chains of connections, link by link. How would Caesar move people still, if there were not? After you are no longer in 3D, you remain as a link to all those whom you valued. If they wish to reach Abraham Lincoln or John F. Kennedy or Ernest Hemingway or Caesar, your established habit-pattern would serve. And this is true for everyone, of course. Plato, for instance, Sophocles, Homer. Their influence has spread enormously over the years, because generation after generation has forged links of affection, admiration, identification with them and their works. After a time the external works are less important than their function as conduits.

Another aspect of the “All is one” and “Everything is alive” that I had not considered.

There are always more connections to be made, as older connections are better seated and absorbed.

I’m getting the suspicion, suddenly, that people like me who read widely in history and biography may serve as connectors. I hadn’t looked at it like that.

Someone suffused in the world of science or of sports or of any given pastime, trivial or otherwise, serves as a node. This is one of the invisible things people accomplish merely by living.

Caesar serves as an enormously wide node.

In Caesar’s sphere. No one embodies all the arts and sciences, and no one connects closely to everyone or everything. However, it is true that one’s significance may broaden after death, depending upon how others make use of the connection. Lincoln, for instance, would have been unrecognizable to the 3D Lincoln, yet the transformed legend is not untrue to the man as he was.

Let’s talk about Caesar, unless you prefer to talk about something else. When your consciousness connected with your larger being after you died, what can you tell us of where you were?

A sudden death is convenient, but it is also a shock, you understand. So what you ask may not be exactly what you want to know.

Tell us whatever is appropriate, then.

Inherent in the nature of the man Caesar was dissatisfaction. Omar Khayyam was not yet born, but his sentiment about wishing to remold the scheme of things entire expresses Caesar’s nature perfectly.

[From the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, quatrain 88:

“Ah Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire,
Would not we shatter it to bits – and then
Re-mold it nearer to the heart’s desire!”]

You were awake among so many stupid people!

You have said yourself, in the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is regarded as an hallucinated lunatic. The same may be said of a man half-awake.

From what I know of your life, you had enormous charisma, which I take to be the result of an integrated personality. But how did you appear to yourself?

Clear-sighted. I could see situations not only from my own vantage point but, you might say, as they were, in and of themselves. Few others could do that. Politics is the art of seeing events from the point of view of what can and cannot be done: at any given moment, and in the short term, and in the longer term. It repays the ability to see, to understand what you have seen, and to act upon that understanding.

But what is politics? At one level, a game played by the ambitious. At another, a struggle among interests, those interests being represented by the ambitious. At another level, but rarely very consciously, an attempt to reconcile forces so as to produce a desirable result. Therefore, political success may come either to the most ruthless, or the cleverest, or the clearest-sighted, or the person moving in the direction that events are trending. To put that last another way, the person whose personal ambition and vision enables him to see openings that others do not.

As in your conquest of Gaul followed by extending Roman citizenship to them, which resulted in extending the republic to the Atlantic without thereby incorporating a nation of embittered rebels.

Yes, a good example. It required thinking of citizenship in a different way. To Caesar’s opponents, it was an opportunistic perversion of an historical right. To Caesar, it was a practical measure.

You saw yourself as clear-sighted, commonsensical.

I did.

And would you say so now?

Why should I not? If I pursued visions others could not grasp, why would that make me other than methodical and commonsensical in my approach to them?

So when you died, what was your summing–up?

Here you may envision a shrug of the shoulders. I had succeeded in some things, I had failed in others. I had lived as fully as I could, had tasted pleasures and absorbed responsibilities and had amassed deeds I was proud of and deeds I was ashamed of. How it is different for anyone?

No sense of gnawing incompletion, such as the projected invasion of Parthia?

Do you expect to die with no unfinished business? But you will find that you see things differently when you are freed from so many constrictions in your viewpoint.

I sense that we have scarcely begun, whatever it is that we are beginning.

Only move with confidence. You don’t know the shape of your life, who ever does? You don’t even know the date of your death, which is the first thing people after you will know about you, and your view of your life is always prospective while that of others will be retrospective, so how can you expect to see it clearly? On the other hand, you can see, looking back, that your lives do make sense, so, your life makes sense. So, move confidently.