Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

[A session that came in sort of sideways, and then went on far longer than usual.]

Sunday, March 11, 2018

A dream. He is at his desk. His superior comes by. He realizes he can’t do his job any more, at least he’s afraid that’s true, and is pretty sure it is. He tells her he is getting things ready in his mind, because he doesn’t want to jump in prematurely, as he used to do when younger. She accepts that – at least apparently, but maybe really, too – and leaves him alone. But he is in white-hot panic.

Preview of coming attractions? Flashback to earlier days? Analogy to Hemingway’s last years? All of the above?

I never had the confidence I would have needed, to accomplish what I was nonetheless impelled to attempt. And then I not only didn’t have the confidence, but was discouraged by the feedback as well, and did not have the confidence I would have needed to press on regardless. I needed brashness, or calmly implacable purpose, and instead I had – what? A perpetual feeling for what might be the way?

[Unexpectedly, for basically I had been writing to myself:] Don’t be so hard on yourself.

And within I had a traitor as well, someone always saying, “You can’t, you shouldn’t, you shouldn’t have, you don’t deserve it, you aren’t worthy.”

Maybe everyone has such angels, and maybe everyone has to decide whether to listen to them.

Maybe so. It didn’t make my life any easier, nor any more productive, to not know what to do.

Maybe nobody knows.

That isn’t how it looks.

Look at how some people look at your life. To them it appears a miracle of good fortune, natural gifts, luck possibly unmerited. Just as you have thought of the lives of others.

So – what? It’s just a trick of perspective, how I’m feeling?

It is a feeling, one that may be overcome by doing the work you can do, while you can do it, rather than being overwhelmed with sorrow that you did not do what maybe you could have done and maybe you could not have done. Which leaves you happier, doing what you can, or lamenting what you cannot?

Am I supposed to put this out in public, as well?

Everybody has his own path, or non-path, and breaks trail in his own way, shaping his life in the process. But it’s more about breaking the trail than about getting to the destination, for there is no destination, ultimately, only traveling.

I’ll think about it. Meanwhile, shall we continue?

That is just what we have been doing here. If we are going to produce something of use to people, it can only be something that marries all the high-flying speculation to the slogging through the mud. Conflicts, emotional overwhelms, depression, despair, hatred – all the expression within a life of forces beyond control: It is real, is it not? It is to be explained. It is to be placed into context. You don’t want – we don’t want! – one more representation of human life as if you were calculating machines (homo economicus) or reasoning beings, or ideologically determined ones, or pawns in the hands of God or the devil. Neither descriptive extreme is helpful. Only both extremes of any range, all extremes of all ranges, if it could be done, will help anybody face and transmute his own private despair.

Is everyone in despair, then?

It is not a question of everyone, nor of all the time. It is a question of helping those who can be helped, when they need the help.

I read years ago that greatness consists of touching both extremes at once.

Isn’t that what your heroes have in common? Hemingway particularly?

I have had many heroes over the years, and I notice that they have changed. That is, the qualities I value most – as embodied in individual lives – have changed within me, so that the heroes of one time become merely estimable men.

Hero-worship is a useful and a limiting tool, both. Examination of one’s own life may be done at any of several levels, and the more levels, and the more in relation one to another, the more productive the insights. Only, no one can understand one’s own life without feeling it.

And as it said in the movie “Ordinary People,” feelings don’t always tickle.

No indeed. But feelings alone, examination of events and motivations alone, treating your life as if it were lived in isolation – as one usually does – produces a curious weightless distortion, leaving the picture floating in air.

I’d better go start the coffee. I get the sense that although we’ve been going more than half an hour, the most important part is about to begin.

Observe how your mood lightened as you had the prospect of productive work. It is meaninglessness and drift that make people’s lives torment, and isn’t that precisely what we have been trying to help you dispel in others? And by the way it is very important that you not let them put you on a pedestal (thus creating a very convenient gap which they can use to excuse themselves from making their own efforts) if only by omission.

Not everything is anyone else’s business, let alone everyone’s.

No, but the fact that dirty laundry exists is all that’s needed. Everybody will have their own secrets, their own shortcomings, regrets, shames, embarrassments to conceal. They’ll understand very well, and, you’re right, the specific contents of anyone else’s skeletons in the closet is nobody else’s business.

And we are 45 minutes in, but on the other hand the coffee is at hand. So, we may proceed for some time if you need to.

Again, notice.

I do. I don’t know why I don’t spend all my time creating, either this way or another.

But you no longer have the energy you did when you were young. It is an inevitable process, so it becomes a matter of using what you have, in the light of your experiences, to do so more efficiently. The results may be more or less the same, for quite a while.

“Old age and treachery can defeat youth and skill,” they say in tennis.

A better analogy would not involve competition with others, nor even with oneself, but would express how the compensating knowledge and wisdom of age may keep up with, and often outdo, the sheer energy and impetus of youth.

As we were saying, your lives may be examined as if in a vacuum, and often are. Or they may be examined in the light of the times they were lived in: a “life and times of” book of someone famous. Or, they may be examined from inside (autobiography) or from outside (biography) or, very rarely, from a spiritual perspective. Even the words “spiritual perspective” scarcely mean anything to your time.

No, it sounds like The Lives of the Saints.

Now, this is a slight digression, but a relevant one, perhaps. Tell of Adomnan’s Life of Columba.

I bought it when I was on Iona, 15 years ago, and I like it very much, but it struck me how different it is to the way any biography would be written today, or even, almost could be written today. The things that scholars value so much as facts don’t interest Adomnan at all. When Columba was born, where, the name of his dentist (so to speak), the family tree, the record of his life chronology – none of that interests Adomnan. What does interest him is to show why Columba was held in such high regard; what qualities he possessed and how they manifested. The physical facts that enter the narrative are wholly subsumed in that purpose. And what we are left with, I recognized very well. It was a straight recounting of what might, I see, be called “the spiritual facts,” if the phrase be properly understood.

You should say a little more.

My own experiences, and those of my friends, especially those centering around our Monroe Institute experiences, if only because those combine community with specific group and individual endeavors understood within a common context. What specifically happens is often less important than what it indicates, what it illustrates or hints at or provides feedback to or encouragement for. And I think that’s what I find so simpatico in the viewpoint I read into the life Adomnan wrote. He sees the way I do, although his is firmly Christian in a seventh-century way that is not available 14 centuries later.

All right. Now, take a moment to gather your strength, and center, and we’ll see how far we got.

Okay. We have over ten pages – and our 65 minutes – already. But I take it that you have something specific in mind. [Pause.]

Proceed.

To examine what is called the spiritual heritage of mankind is not without its value, and may be done in any of various moods and methods. In-depth examination of any one religion’s scripts and traditions will lead in one direction. Comparative reading and study among many will lead in a different direction. Skimming or deep immersion, in either case, will, similarly, lead in different directions. Learning in any of these ways, and then actively relating them to one or more philosophies or disciplines, similarly, will lead in various directions. Will Durant leads one way, Carl Jung another, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and Emerson each in his own direction.

Of course, nothing worth doing is ever done in the spirit of imitation. Of emulation, yes, but not of imitation. You see the distinction?

Yes. Imitation tries to be someone else. Emulation tries to live up to the best in someone else.

Well expressed.

Yes, I’m a little surprised myself. I didn’t know that until I said it.

Probably you’re just making it up.

Clearly. So –

So in the days to come that you will not live long to see, new ways of seeing will produce a new type of history, a new biography, a new spiritual memoir, that will not have existed because they could not have been created out of the conscious vision of the world that is passing away. We are not here talking about a project for you nor your friends; we are talking about how you may reshape the boundaries and possibilities of your lives by absorbing this material and transmuting it into whatever it is that you, yourself, living where and when and how you do, produce when you incorporate your own being into it.

That will sound a little backwards, inserting ourselves into the understanding.

Seem, perhaps, but not be. It is said correctly, and the work needed to rearrange your minds to absorb it is work that will make it yours.

Now. There is a problem. Over 25 years, you have been led from the more commonly accepted view of things (your view may have been unusual, but it was well within the common stream) into something actually new even though seemingly an echo of things that have been said. It is too much to expect others to retrace that path, set out in how many books?

 I don’t know. Muddy Tracks, Chasing Smallwood, Sphere and Hologram, Rita’s World, A Place to Stand, Awakening from the 3D World – six or seven, anyway.

Nobody is going to go about living your life again, so it would be as well to produce another precis.

And that can’t be done this way? Is that what I get?

We’ve been telling you right along. But here is what we’re adding now: To write a book is to fix your understanding in time, and so the objective becomes to render each previous book out of date; otherwise you only imitate yourself. The previous books remain as stepping stones, but perhaps ultimately they will be of little importance except (big “except,” however!) to show others a way that the pathless path may be walked, in hope of encouraging them to do their own journeying in their own manner.

So now that you are aware that we intend to weave your lives-stories into the larger story of life lived among the vast impersonal forces of the universe, you see two things perhaps.

• One, you must be willing to give up an unpredictable part of what you believe and understand and think you know;
• two, you must live your lives as bridges from what you were to what you are becoming, even while realizing that you are what you are; you express what you express, which is a very different thing.

And after an hour and a half, that is enough for the moment.

 

Friday, March 24, 2023

6:35 a.m. Finished re-reading Jefferson in Power, skipping somewhat, and am moved to ask a question – not rhetorically – that has often puzzled me. (In fact, I suspect prodding, here.) What do I get out of so much immersion in history, given that I also see life as only a dream in a world made of mind-stuff? It’s all important somehow, I can feel that, but – Why? How?

Gentlemen? How has a lifetime of reading and daydreaming history served me? What is it for? Why is it important? Counting from about age 11 or 12 (Daniel Boone and the Opening of the Wilderness) and certainly from my introduction to Abraham Lincoln by age 13, I have spent what, 65 years, immersed in history, and then in alternative history and pre-history. In other words, all studies that take the 3D world seriously. Yet something within me knew there was more than meets the eye, and gradually I came to see that what meets the eye isn’t at all what really is.

I don’t want to point the question, and thus curtail the answer. So, I’ll leave it at this. That’s the background. Commentary and clarification, please.

Within the context of a dram, all is meaningful, is it not? Why would you expect that it would be different in the case of the larger dream that is 3D life?

Let’s put it this way: It is in geology that you will find the stabilizers of the dream, and in your individual and collective choosings that you will find the plot and characters of the dream narrative.

I get that you are going to try something different here. Verse?

Not quite. But your brother pointed out that your recent publications of your journey-notes were like poetry and evoked responses. Let’s see how that goes.

[After the fact, I added bullets]

• Life is but a dream; hence, more than 3D, or rather,
• 3D is more than appears.
• External is internal, objectified; hence, drama plays out at an observable distance.
• Every kingdom plays its part in the dream: mineral, vegetable, animal, human, celestial. Nothing omitted, nothing extra.
  • Mineral conveys stability
  • Vegetable provides expression of life, of living, of growth and decay
  • Animal shows and enables the individual element separating from, cooperating with, the overarching whole.
  • Human adds consciousness of self to the rest, and sees in the 3D something of the context as well as the manifest.
  • Celestial maintains the 3D in the matrix of non-3D realities.
• No one individual, no one group, can know everything, specialize in everything, stretch itself to encompass everything. Hence, all views are partial views, not comprehensive.
• Yet, all together are part of one thing, of course non-3D as much as (if not more so than) 3D. One might say that any one individual or group serves as one reporter, scanning its own chosen field and forwarding the information (as well as receiving reactions to the forwardings).
• Therefore, any one individual or group may concern itself with what it will, and how can the result be irrelevant? If you are called to do something, to focus your attention on this rather than that, how can the call be an irrelevance, or a whim?

So much for why a thing may concern you: It is enough to know that it concerns you; perhaps the why cannot be explained, or at any rate will not be explained. But beyond the question of why this or that is important to any one person or group, how is it important at all? The answer should be obvious.

It sort of feels obvious, though I couldn’t yet state it plainly. I’d say the 3D world is how the world-soul, the all-that-is, battles things out.

Why not think of it as where the all-that-is thinks things out, envisages, daydreams, blue-skys, what-ifs?

That’s an interesting way to look at it.

Life is but a dream. Does a dream feature real battles, or dramas? Is it intended to engage you physically, or emotionally? Think on this.

3D life feels plenty real.

How could it not? It is real within its own terms, and within its own terms is where you live – only, you also bridge to the celestial kingdom, so you somewhat see through things to the larger, realer, reality underlying and underpinning them.

What you say makes sense. I’m not sure it addresses why studying history has been so vital to me.

It could have been biology or geology or anything. It could have been the experience of the moving body; sports, for instance. It could have been the practical manipulation of circumstances: politics, salesmanship, propaganda, mechanics. Many things. But whatever occupies you in 3D life, something will occupy you.

Even if you’re a junkie? Or a sex fiend?

“Nothing human to me is alien.” Do you suppose unsavory activities have their place in life as the result of some mistake in the celestial architecture? What is, is necessary, or it wouldn’t be. If you wish to be rid of it, remove the necessity it fills. But failing that, yes, any human activity fills the individual’s needs, or the individual would do something else.

And nobody ever said every part of a dream is uplifting.

You could say “Life is but a nightmare,” if you wished, and some weaker or jaded individuals have adopted just that attitude. But we do not see the advantage in it. Why assume the worst when you can as easily assume the best?

As you said, we never say a thing is “too bad to be true.”

You don’t, but perhaps you should begin to do so. Your world of possibilities would enlarge.

In effect, life more abundantly does not follow from an assumption that life is wrong.

How could it possibly? An attitude of trust is an attitude of openness. One doesn’t receive gifts with a closed fist, but with an open hand, a receptive palm.

Have we said what you wanted said?

More or less. Remembering that

in a sense life is but a dream, and that nothing is by chance, and that the external is the internal made manifest,

Remembering that 3D drama has a purpose, is not a mistake, and is not as final and stark as it appears,

Remembering that you have a right and a duty to live what you are, choosing as seems best to you,

Remembering that the world’s “unfinished business” is your business but also everyone else’s business, no two people being quite the same,

Where does this leave you, but to live your life unafraid, following your deepest intuitions, not thinking you need to make things come out right, yet retaining the right and duty to have preferences?

So, if you want to spend your life – or, we might almost say, if you feel compelled to spend your life – in this or that pursuit, how can it possibly be a mistake to do so? Even if it leads to results disastrous in 3D terms, sincere integrity will assure that all will be well for you, for “you,” remember, is not an entity confined only to 3D.

And that’s enough.

All right, thanks for all this.

 

[This entry progressed rapidly. First I was talking to myself; then I thought I’d talk to Hemingway if he was available; then I was talking to – someone. Who it was, hardly matters. Attributing a specific source is unnecessary, which is just as well, given that it can never be proved.]

Tuesday, February 27, 2018

I got a real sense this morning of how Martha Gellhorn was a major bad influence on Papa’s career. If they hadn’t met, he wouldn’t have been tempted farther to the left than his center of gravity naturally was; wouldn’t have found the Finca; wouldn’t have left Pauline, maybe; wouldn’t have been so trapped at the end of his life in a life too comfortable to leave, to constricted to be really good for him. I don’t know where he would have wound up – not Key West anyway, maybe, given how the causeway had changed the island – but maybe the right version of To Have and Have Not, and no For Whom the Bell Tolls, true, but maybe something even better.

Not living in Cuba, maybe no Q-Boat operations, certainly no Crime Shop. If no Spanish Civil War involvement, perhaps he might have been accepted in US Army Intelligence in World War II. No China tour in 1941, but maybe other things, better things. Maybe a second safari before the war broke out, though maybe not. Maybe he would have ended his days in Africa or, like his son Pat, lived there some years.

I do wonder, Papa, what those possibilities would have been.

Okay, here is a lesson in how things are, if you want it.

Certainly.

When you go to thinking about how things might have gone, it is always vague and fuzzy, never crystal clear and never even as precise as your current version of your own life seems to be. (I say seems to be, because it’s a lot hazier than you ever realize while you’re in it, but that’s another discussion.) Why is that, do you suppose? It is because you are trying to take a precise picture of what is actually not an object at all, but a cloud.

A probability cloud.

Yes, but that isn’t the end of the discussion but the beginning.

Where you are at any given moment seems a fixed point. You came from a past, chose among a cloud of probabilities and even possibilities and made one choice or combination of choices your reality. In so doing, you established the launching-point for your own next choices – that is, for your future possibilities. Choices foreclose some paths and open others.

That’s how it seems. But it’s more productive to factor in what Seth said: When you decide to change timelines you pull in a different past as well as different futures. There is no way to make sense of that – if you really think it through – and still reconcile it with the way things seem to be. Your sensory reports tell you that you are in a fixed point emerging from a series of fixed points, with the possibilities ahead of you waiting to be chosen and fixed in turn. That’s the only common-sense way to see your lives.

So how can the two be reconciled, the appearance and the reality Seth tries to explain to you? The answer is, you have to (or get to; it depends upon your attitude whether you see this as a constriction or a freedom) give up the idea that you are on a fixed point or ever were; that you are a point of definiteness among a cloud of probable other-realities; that you exist in order to choose not who you wish to experience being, but who you are going to be, absolutely.

Instead?

Instead recognize that a cloud is a cloud and doesn’t become a pinpoint. But what you perceive, may.

Our vision funnels down from the cloud that exists to one path?

Think of your life – we’re going to go back to an image you were given some years ago now – think of your life as a laser beam focused through a crystal. The angle at which the beam is aimed determines what is illuminated. Change the angle of vision, the crystal remains what it always was, but the illuminated appearance differs, perhaps radically.

Did changing the angle of vision change the crystal even temporarily, let alone permanently? It did not. It changed what you saw, it changed what you experienced. But all the other ways to see it remain, because the only thing that changed is your energy focus, slicing into your sum of possibilities, lighting up one possible path.

You are so accustomed to thinking of your lives as fixed points, it can be hard to understand that the sum  of the possibilities of a life is fixed; the individual appearances, depending upon how the beam is focused and directed, are essentially countless. Thus, a cloud, thus a fixed reality. As so often, it is all in how you look at it.

So, you see, the limits of what can be perceived are not so much in any external, but in the habits of the person trying to perceive. If you can’t think of your present moment as other than the only way things can be, given past decisions, you can’t go any farther in understanding.

What you assume about reality limits what you can experience. This isn’t a tragedy or even an unfortunate fact of life. It is just life, for life is limitation, else it is shapeless. The question is, which limitations do you allow to shape your lives?

If you think the present moment is a fixed point, the product of past fixed points, you will feel that either you are the child of predestination or, at best, that your choices will create a series of future fixed points. This lays great stress either on predestination or on free will, or on some combination of the two – usually a very uneasy combination.

If you see that what Seth said means that your past changes with your present decisions, you may be drawn to think of life as a plethora of alternate time-lines, sort of parallel, that may be chosen – jumped to – in the process creating a zigzag path that is a given version of a life. It still has a tinge of predestination in it, in that it is a form of choosing among pre-existing futures. It has the very real disadvantage of seeming theoretical rather than actual.

Yes, I’ve experienced that. This is more or less the view I have been holding.

And it isn’t a bad halfway-house. But the image of the laser shining through the crystal is a more serviceable one, only it requires that you give up certain ideas that for a while seem essential.

The idea of making progress through making choices, for one thing.

No, the idea that a given 3D first-tier experience is real, while your second- or third-tier reactions are not, which is precisely wrong way to. The change in you as a result of your decisions is the reality; the scenarios in which you chose are the stage-setting. We know it doesn’t feel that way; it isn’t supposed to in 3D, after all. Think of reality as the exploration in simulation of all possible permutations. That being so, how can choice be momentous, life-changing, apocalyptic – except in the context of that particular laser-beam illumination of

Yeah, I hear the problem, finding that word. If we say “possibilities” it sounds like we mean, it isn’t real. If we say “reality” it implies that other angles of vision will show things that aren’t equally real. If we say “timeline” we’re back to that disconnect.

In any way of seeing things – put it that way – things may occur that are life-shattering and seemingly cosmically important. What you need to put your minds to, if you can, is that, at the same level of reality, all other angles of vision, with their consequent crises and challenges, equally exist. Thus all contradictions exist and don’t even interfere within one another. The crystal that is all of your life-possibilities doesn’t move, doesn’t change. What changes is your angle of vision, which seems to change everything. And the changes in that angle of vision must come from a different level than the angle itself, obviously.

You say obviously, but it wasn’t obvious to me until you said it. But yes, obvious now.

And that’s why you are well advised to connect to your non-3D component. That’s why your All-D you is well advised to connect to the next higher level it connects to. Freedom cannot be attained at the same level it is sought from. Freedom comes from above, so to speak. If you wish to become aware of the fishbowl and transcend its limitations, your consciousness has to transcend that of the part of you that is the fish. It’s only common sense, after all.

 

Wednesday, February 7, 2018

I haven’t had enough experience of long-term responsibility to be able to say confidently that what I want at any given moment is the best thing, for me, for anything larger than myself. A lack of external rules means leaning on nothing.

Still, it is an option. Any way of living is an option, and it is for you to judge how it suits you. Things like delineating seven prime errors are designed to help you avoid pitfalls that living has made obvious to your predecessors. They can save you from traveling many a wrong road, like street signs saying this road leads to here, not there.

Which is all well and good if you trust the authority that put up the signs, and if anybody ever takes the time to explain to you why this road brings you here and that one, there. Instead we get, “Don’t go down that road, because it’s wrong. And it’s wrong because we (or some others) say so.” It becomes a matter of feeling pushed around, especially when a part of us very much wants to see what’s down that road. Maybe feels a need to go down that road.

Understand that here you are talking about yourself in particular, because not everybody is puzzled or at sea until the “why” of things is explained to them. But, that said, neither are you the only one.

I take it, then, that some personalities or psychological structures benefit from, prefer, hard and fast rules on an understood (i.e. taken for granted) absolute authority. And of course, writing that, I see I do know. My own fundamentalist son gives me the example.

What suits some is hell for others. But rules tend to be made by those who require that rules exist to guide them.

I have long known that churches may be founded by mystics, but are carried on by organizers. It’s the same process that may be seen in business, I suppose: The traits that lead to initiating a thing are not those required to maintain it.

Well, you see, that is one of the things we are doing here, building bridges of understanding between two ways of seeing. Your mystics (though that isn’t really the right word here) want to know “why” before they follow rules. Your organizers want to know “on whose authority.” At first this is not a sharp conflict, because at the onset of any new understanding, the non-3D source of the understanding will be felt rather than only heard about. It is only later that it may become a matter of experience or submission to authority, which quickly becomes submission to authorities – that is, to human representatives of an institution organized around those original experiences and understandings that are no longer universally shared by those who are nevertheless willing to believe.

Inspiration translated into social action seems to have a limited shelf-life.

That is saying, “My way of apprehending reality is the only solid way,” which it certainly is not. What would you do with the great mass of people who would find it impossible to grasp these understandings? You can give them rules of thumb, knowing that their natures will lead them to codify and calcify them, or you can give them nothing, knowing that others with different measures and visions will provide what you will not. It really isn’t as simple as saying, “My way is right and theirs is wrong,” and it never is. Your way will be right for you – best case! And it will be no way at all, or will be a dangerous or even harmful way, for others.

Don’t they have their own non-3D guidance to lead them?

What do you think is leading them to be so certain they must follow rules?

You are saying, those of a certain nature will be so because their guidance leads them to be that way, not despite their own guidance.

Why should you expect it to be any different? People tend to downplay or even fear the tendencies opposite their own, but it is only prejudice, or, to be charitable, it is only preference. You who walk in places without paths may scorn those who stay carefully to whatever path they find, and vice-versa. You’re both acting naturally and you’re neither acting your best selves, in your scorn. It isn’t necessary, in order to follow your own bent, to condemn those whose bent lies in another, even a contradictory, direction. It is a great perpetual temptation.

All right, I see all that. The difficulty, though, is that believers in rigid rules always want the rest of us to adhere to them, and would enforce our consciences if they could, for our own good.

And there you have the Protestant position as it evolved five centuries ago. You in your loyalty to your Catholic heritage under assault from mistaken directions have tended to underestimate the degree to which right was on the side of those who rebelled in the name of freedom of conscience.

I suppose that’s so. Most of the Protestant criticisms of the Catholic church that I have seen in my time  –. Oh, that’s interesting! Of course! They aren’t well aimed because they are aimed against a church that relies on temporal power to enforce its views – and that view of the church is centuries out of date.

But when it was not out of date, it was not inaccurate, and if you in your present configuration had been involved in religious struggles then, you would have been firmly on the side of individual guidance –conscience – and hence would have been either a Protestant.

Very interesting! Of course I would have been. And the reason I am not, today, is because the flaws in the argument are so obvious to me. The need for an institution to avoid the wild excesses caused by individual eccentricity is evident to me, as is the need for individual freedom from such institutions. It’s a balance – an impossible tension of opposites – and I don’t like fanatics who take only one side and refuse to see the merits and necessities of the other.

So maybe you have learned something.

Maybe so. Though, I knew all this. I hadn’t put it together in just this way.

Remember, you are a long way from living in a civilization with a common, coherent, accommodative point of view. You will never see it. Your job – all of you alive now and for some time to come – is to explore possibilities, to find truths and not “the truth.”

I got the strongest impression – very nearly a visual image – of someone in ecclesiastical robes, and thought of Bishop Sheen, who used to teach on network television in the 1950s. What’s that about?

Although he was teaching doctrine, was he not attempting to explain, to set out, to reach individual minds that he could never meet, let alone have any authority over? That is the proper procedure for this period of history, only with the emphasis on the provisional nature of knowledge (even of conscience) rather than emphasis on the reliable nature of the source. It is always going to be a tension of opposites – the message as its own authority, the message as endorsed by someone or some body of persons conferring that authority.

Your own psychological makeup may all but force you to choose one or the other, but best if you can preserve knowing that both halves of any duality have legitimacy. You’ll be less of a fanatic, less unbalanced, the more you remember that.

Well, I’ve always said that the reason The Monroe Institute suited me was that you didn’t have to profess even a tentative belief to get in the door and proceed to have experience. Clearly the trainers knew things, but there was no attempted indoctrination. In fact, there was an on-going resistance to people generalizing from their experience to form rules. It suited my disposition.

Yes, very Protestant of you.

All right, I’m smiling too. Well, we never got to faith hope and charity, but very interesting as usual. Till next time.

 

Guidance and conscience (from February, 2018)

Wednesday, February 7, 2018

I haven’t had enough experience of long-term responsibility to be able to say confidently that what I want at any given moment is the best thing, for me, for anything larger than myself. A lack of external rules means leaning on nothing.

Still, it is an option. Any way of living is an option, and it is for you to judge how it suits you. Things like delineating seven prime errors are designed to help you avoid pitfalls that living has made obvious to your predecessors. They can save you from traveling many a wrong road, like street signs saying this road leads to here, not there.

Which is all well and good if you trust the authority that put up the signs, and if anybody ever takes the time to explain to you why this road brings you here and that one, there. Instead we get, “Don’t go down that road, because it’s wrong. And it’s wrong because we (or some others) say so.” It becomes a matter of feeling pushed around, especially when a part of us very much wants to see what’s down that road. Maybe feels a need to go down that road.

Understand that here you are talking about yourself in particular, because not everybody is puzzled or at sea until the “why” of things is explained to them. But, that said, neither are you the only one.

I take it, then, that some personalities or psychological structures benefit from, prefer, hard and fast rules on an understood (i.e. taken for granted) absolute authority. And of course, writing that, I see I do know. My own fundamentalist son gives me the example.

What suits some is hell for others. But rules tend to be made by those who require that rules exist to guide them.

I have long known that churches may be founded by mystics, but are carried on by organizers. It’s the same process that may be seen in business, I suppose: The traits that lead to initiating a thing are not those required to maintain it.

Well, you see, that is one of the things we are doing here, building bridges of understanding between two ways of seeing. Your mystics (though that isn’t really the right word here) want to know “why” before they follow rules. Your organizers want to know “on whose authority.” At first this is not a sharp conflict, because at the onset of any new understanding, the non-3D source of the understanding will be felt rather than only heard about. It is only later that it may become a matter of experience or submission to authority, which quickly becomes submission to authorities – that is, to human representatives of an institution organized around those original experiences and understandings that are no longer universally shared by those who are nevertheless willing to believe.

Inspiration translated into social action seems to have a limited shelf-life.

That is saying, “My way of apprehending reality is the only solid way,” which it certainly is not. What would you do with the great mass of people who would find it impossible to grasp these understandings? You can give them rules of thumb, knowing that their natures will lead them to codify and calcify them, or you can give them nothing, knowing that others with different measures and visions will provide what you will not. It really isn’t as simple as saying, “My way is right and theirs is wrong,” and it never is. Your way will be right for you – best case! And it will be no way at all, or will be a dangerous or even harmful way, for others.

Don’t they have their own non-3D guidance to lead them?

What do you think is leading them to be so certain they must follow rules?

You are saying, those of a certain nature will be so because their guidance leads them to be that way, not despite their own guidance.

Why should you expect it to be any different? People tend to downplay or even fear the tendencies opposite their own, but it is only prejudice, or, to be charitable, it is only preference. You who walk in places without paths may scorn those who stay carefully to whatever path they find, and vice-versa. You’re both acting naturally and you’re neither acting your best selves, in your scorn. It isn’t necessary, in order to follow your own bent, to condemn those whose bent lies in another, even a contradictory, direction. It is a great perpetual temptation.

All right, I see all that. The difficulty, though, is that believers in rigid rules always want the rest of us to adhere to them, and would enforce our consciences if they could, for our own good.

And there you have the Protestant position as it evolved five centuries ago. You in your loyalty to your Catholic heritage under assault from mistaken directions have tended to underestimate the degree to which right was on the side of those who rebelled in the name of freedom of conscience.

I suppose that’s so. Most of the Protestant criticisms of the Catholic church that I have seen in my time  –. Oh, that’s interesting! Of course! They aren’t well aimed because they are aimed against a church that relies on temporal power to enforce its views – and that view of the church is centuries out of date.

But when it was not out of date, it was not inaccurate, and if you in your present configuration had been involved in religious struggles then, you would have been firmly on the side of individual guidance –conscience – and hence would have been either a Protestant.

Very interesting! Of course I would have been. And the reason I am not, today, is because the flaws in the argument are so obvious to me. The need for an institution to avoid the wild excesses caused by individual eccentricity is evident to me, as is the need for individual freedom from such institutions. It’s a balance – an impossible tension of opposites – and I don’t like fanatics who take only one side and refuse to see the merits and necessities of the other.

So maybe you have learned something.

Maybe so. Though, I knew all this. I hadn’t put it together in just this way.

Remember, you are a long way from living in a civilization with a common, coherent, accommodative point of view. You will never see it. Your job – all of you alive now and for some time to come – is to explore possibilities, to find truths and not “the truth.”

I got the strongest impression – very nearly a visual image – of someone in ecclesiastical robes, and thought of Bishop Sheen, who used to teach on network television in the 1950s. What’s that about?

Although he was teaching doctrine, was he not attempting to explain, to set out, to reach individual minds that he could never meet, let alone have any authority over? That is the proper procedure for this period of history, only with the emphasis on the provisional nature of knowledge (even of conscience) rather than emphasis on the reliable nature of the source. It is always going to be a tension of opposites – the message as its own authority, the message as endorsed by someone or some body of persons conferring that authority.

Your own psychological makeup may all but force you to choose one or the other, but best if you can preserve knowing that both halves of any duality have legitimacy. You’ll be less of a fanatic, less unbalanced, the more you remember that.

Well, I’ve always said that the reason The Monroe Institute suited me was that you didn’t have to profess even a tentative belief to get in the door and proceed to have experience. Clearly the trainers knew things, but there was no attempted indoctrination. In fact, there was an on-going resistance to people generalizing from their experience to form rules. It suited my disposition.

Yes, very Protestant of you.

All right, I’m smiling too. Well, we never got to faith hope and charity, but very interesting as usual. Till next time.

 

Very different understandings (from January 2018)

Monday, January 29, 2018

Given the context of what you are, and who you are, relative to the rest of reality, given that your non-3D component has its hopes and wishes just as the 3D component does, and that sometimes they clash, and given that what happens in 3D affects the rest of the All-D creature – that is, affects your non-3D components no less than your selves – perhaps you can see a bit more clearly this entire idea of sin.

• Sin as missing the mark;
• sin as obstacle to your fulfilling your natures;
• sin as choice of response to the winds that blow through the structures that you are.

It is true that you are in 3D to choose as you will. It is not true that all choices are equally desirable, or that there is no absolute standard. But it is true that there is no way to codify that standard more specifically than in terms of your goal of fulfilling your nature and clarifying your solution.

I hesitated over that final word, because I knew you meant clarifying in the sense of removing the sediment from a liquid, but I didn’t think the meaning would necessarily be clear.

Presumably it is now. So let us talk about lust. What is it, what is it not? How can it be considered to be one of only seven major channels of error? And isn’t it, after all, only what may be expected of creatures in bodies?

Your rhetorical questions; your responsibility to answer them. But I get the sense that it is going to be more difficult for you this time than it would have been if not for our digressions. Why is that?

Not more difficult, but we had to break stride, and now it is a matter of syncing up with you again.

Weren’t we in sync in the digressing?

We were, but where we are and where you are when we begin a discussion makes a difference in possibility. So we have to re-align ourselves. This is true of anyone dealing with their own guidance, of course, and it is a process that usually goes on automatically, but not always.

Would it be easier if we changed to discuss a different sin, or one of the virtues?

No. It would be easier if you could have slept longer so that you could be at a different place.

It’s too early to make coffee.

Yes it is, but perhaps you should read or do something routine until you can fall asleep for a while.

Things will realign while I sleep?

More like, your energy wells will refill. This requires a greater level of alertness than you realize, which is one reason why it is fatiguing.

 

To resume –

You might think lust a matter of sexual attraction between – or even among – bodies, and nothing more. Not so. In fact, not even that much. Look at it while remembering that sin is a natural quality that, when mixed with the wrong kind of pride in the wrong kind of way, leads you astray from where you want to go.

And, I imagine, “Which you?”

Of course, which you. We hesitate among alternate ways to proceed, each of which will present to view different nuances, and hence will seem to present slightly or even significantly different results.

Let us begin with the aspect of how you in 3D see yourselves. There more variance than perhaps you realize.

• Animals in a material world with no non-3D dimensions and therefore no hereafter, no purpose. “A useless passion,” to quote Sartre.
• Animals in a material world with a spirit that somewhat mysteriously continues into another realm after physical death, there to meet either judgment, and hence heaven or hell, or, shall we call it self-judgment or judgment by impersonal standards, and hence reincarnation on earth for another try.
• Animal manifestations of spirit, in a world that is material but is not the be-all-and-end-all that the previously named views assume. A testing ground, a shaping force, for unspecified future endeavors.
• Spirit manifesting as creatures in a world equally spiritual in nature, equally manifesting in physical creation.

You can see that each view of things comes with its own set of implied limitations, which, being mostly beneath the level that would come to consciousness, will be very resistant to being changed by mental persuasion or physical (so to speak) experience. The very existence of the interplay of mental structures and vast impersonal forces will be unsuspected in some views, or greatly misunderstood. Each set of limitations will have its own set of effective or ineffective restraints, guidelines, encouragements, reinforcements, dangers, opportunities. You see?

The world at any given time is occupied by people at all these levels of being, each of which has its own appropriate conditions, many of which contradict each other as one moves from one to another.

Not “moves from” in the sense of one’s personal journey, but “moves from” in the sense of traveling in foreign parts.

Yes, that’s what I meant, and I see that wouldn’t have been clear.

Let this context serve as a reminder that any new insights we are able to provide will be helpful, will make sense, will offer new possibilities, only to those who begin at a certain place. To the others it must appear to be nonsense, possibly as satanic misdirection.

More importantly, it is vital that you and those who read this realize that more sophisticated understandings do not obviate the need for less sophisticated, even outmoded, ones. Yes, for you they will no longer do, but what about those who are unable to reach the starting-point from which you proceeded? Should we leave them with nothing? If we offer views understandable only to a relative few, the many must be lost or must cling to what conceptualizations will serve. And, lest you be tempted to think yourselves special (Pride, again), consider how many levels of understanding are still well beyond yours, and people quietly living them. The goal is never uniformity, but individual experience.

We always live in the world among others who perceive and judge it very differently; thousands or millions of different world-views, quietly or silently held, motivating behavior in very different ways, toward often very different ends.

Life in 3D – and in non-3D, necessarily, you see – is always a matter of disparate forces intermingled and interacting. Do not expect to come up with any one code suitable to one and all. Hence, the existence of organized religion and of shall we say organized philosophies; hence, too, the fact that they are always to some degree compromises, for they are riding many horses at the same time. By the same token, do not expect either personally or collectively to come to a natural stopping-point, beyond which no one will proceed. There is always more.

Now, you will recall that the question was, “Which you,” and you will perhaps see now that this meant not only, which of your centers of gravity (3D or non-3D) should take the helm, but also meant the same in rather an impersonal way. Each of you is your society – your time – in miniature. In a holographic universe (a metaphor, but a useful one), all your times and incarnated fellows reside within each of you, experienced mostly as qualities, and occasionally as inclinations or even impulses.

I see. Fairly radical thought, that.

Is it? It is the same thought you have been able to hold about our lives in the non-3D world. If true in non-3D, necessarily true of you in 3D, for you extend into non-3D and non-3D into 3D, as we seem to need to occasionally remind you.

• You are all members one of another.
• You are all holographic representatives of All That Is.
• You are all communities as well as individuals.

Only now, we shall begin to move beyond the understandings of these facts that you have come to. We shall continue to do so until you find yourself unable to continue for one or another reason.

Lay on, Macduff, and cursed be he who first cries, “Hold, enough!”

So you say. And, we concede, so you have acted, at least to this point.

Very well, you are all part of one thing, in ways you may not have considered until this point. That connection, scarcely comprehended, often mis-apprehended, manifests in various ways throughout your lives. Your 3D existence is continually affected by your own imperfectly experienced non-3D experience. And sin consists of the deliberate sabotaging of the interrelationship. That sabotage, that interference, may be seen as an incorrect perception leading to harmful results, manifesting in one of seven ways, as has long been outlined.

Lust, envy, gluttony, covetousness, anger, pride, sloth (or ennui). LEG CAPS, or LEG CAPE, as I encapsulated them, for easier recall.

It is not that these are forbidden as unseemly, nor that they are wrong because forbidden, nor, in fact, that they are forbidden at all, but that they are warned against, as in navigation one sites markers to warn against shoal waters. The water may look no different from deeper, safer waters, but the rocks below will be unforgiving of the hull that encounters them.

 

Wednesday, January 24, 2018

1. You can learn more sometimes from books that don’t quite make it than from more successful ones. An Old Captivity [by Nevil Shute] is interesting enough in that it details all the things that go into a long flight. It doesn’t quite have enough emotional conflict or development in it to carry it. The conflict doesn’t rise to meet the necessary plodding. It is Babe’s description of Gateway without the description of what happens to people in Gateway. [Refers to my novel Babe in the Woods, now republished as That Phenomenal Background.] I’ll keep it in mind.

But here I am at 71 still thinking of writing stories about life, when I haven’t lived and never shall.

You say “never lived” as if that were a possibility.

You know what I mean.

We do, and you might as well mourn for never having played professional basketball. There’s many a kind of life. Did Daniel Boone consider that he hadn’t lived because he never saw the ocean? Did Helen Keller, because she never saw the world around her, no matter how near?

It’s an interesting disconnect. Intellectually I know that everybody’s life is a unique lens on existence, valued by life for just that uniqueness. But emotionally I can’t help noticing that the most of life has passed by, unnoticed.

It is always that way, for everybody. Arctic explorers don’t live the life of suburban commuters, nor either one of them the life of a soldier, or scientist, or professional actor, or farmer, or homeless person, or professional student, or anything. It is as impossible for any two lives to be identical as it is for any two souls to be, and for just that reason. When one gets discouraged about one’s life and how one has lived it, it is because one is looking at life as if the word “external” meant anything, in that context. Your – anyone’s – life is you, writ large. Your difficulties and smooth stretches, your inclinations as they interface with your opportunities – it all amounts to you looking in the mirror and acting from there.

You mean, we live our lives sort of awkwardly sometimes because we are moving in reference to the mirror, rather than from within. Something like trying to cut your own hair and finding that the scissors move in the wrong direction when you try to move them the way the mirror makes it look like you should.

That’s what we meant, yes. Life can get awkward when you judge it – still more when you try to control it – second-hand, so to speak. Athletes don’t think their movements; they couldn’t possibly. All that practice is to enable them to move automatically. Their thinking is about strategy, not how to make the movements that will execute the strategy.

Clear enough – although, some people do seem to live from sensory rather than intuitive promptings.

No, that is beginning to muddle things.

I’m sure we would all appreciate your un-muddling them.

Everyone’s life operates from a combination of sensory and intuitive intelligence. Psychics still need to remember how to feed themselves. Hard-headed materialists still function from their own center, aware of it or not. Your lives express your souls; your external circumstances are precipitated by what you are: None of this is dependent upon what your opinions of it may be.

The specific texture of your life – what you pay attention to, what you dismiss, what you scarcely notice, what you never dream exists – is a different mixture for each of you, and if you didn’t have communication at the non-3D level, perhaps you would never be able to get any two people to cooperate to do anything.

So, for each of us, the text is something like, “Don’t go thinking yourself so unusual”

Much less, so weird, so unsuccessful, so indolent, so hyper-active, whatever.

Well, you have consistently said, we don’t have the data with which to judge ourselves.

You have enough rough data to take fixes on your position, but as to what it amounts to, no, you never do.

“All be the same in a hundred years,” Shute has Turner say, habitually.

Yes, and The Chequerboard is a good parable of the intricacy of ordinary life, how every life is ordinary and extraordinary.

 

2. It was suggested I ask, “Who are you to me?” I can tell a planted question by now. So?

You know already; it is the putting it into words that causes confusion.

I know. I have done what I could to say that in my opinion the people we interact with are those we resonate to, and that the difference between being them and resonating with them (if it even exists) isn’t very big. But people seem to want to make the non-3D as divided as the 3D. So, can you address that?

It will clarify for people if we can come up with the right metaphor, the right non-verbal image. Everything needful has been said, but saying it divides it, because the image is chopped up into words that are then strung together, which isn’t ever very satisfactory.

You came up with ice cubes and water, once. [I.e. we in 3D are like ice cubes, the non-3D like water; same substance, but different appearance and different qualities.]

Yes, but if that doesn’t do it, we’ll have to try something else. Do you have any ideas?

That’s an odd question. I always get the impression that the bright ideas I come up with are from you.

Given that we and you are part of the same thing, wouldn’t that be a bit circular?

I suppose so. But then where do they come from?

Your receptivity is a crucial part of the process of snagging ideas and relationships (which is saying the same thing twice). The 3D positioning makes it possible to bring forth this idea now, another idea then. And of course difference among receivers means different possibilities. So in effect, three variables: time, space, receiver. Together they produce the potential to receive ideas. What you (anyone) do with the potential depends on you, of course.

I see. And that’s one reason why civilizations and ages differ in quality – different kinds of orienting ideas are available in one, unavailable or unpersuasive in other.

That’s right. So, your image of the relationship between us and you?

Well, fishing for it. I get that I’m somebody holding a bunch of balloons on strings. Strange sort of image. Is that what we want?

It’s a beginning. Keep trying.

I think of radio, but that imposes the idea of distance.

Keep trying.

Really, I come back to my Cosmic Internet idea. I, here/now, can connect with anything if I have the right URL for it, or the right search engine, or, say, the right keywords. I don’t know that we’re going to get any better than that.

Oddly, you gave one to us. How about – your own brain, as analogy?

That’s very interesting. I as one brain cell and you-all as others.

A much more intimate analogy, is it not?

Yes it is, and immediately persuasive, too.

You see the difficulties it hurdles.

Oh yes. One doesn’t feel compelled to name or personify other brain cells, and at the same time the question of identity or non-identity is overleaped. I can arbitrarily name you Nathaniel or TGU or George, but that doesn’t signify any more than a name change to an IP address does to the computer, though it does of course to the user.

So for the purposes you put it to, we could say you and we are all cells in the same brain, you centered in 3D orientation, we not. It’s still only analogy, but the analogy may enable you – may encourage you – to think in different ways.

It’s only a slight extension of what I’ve come to long ago. You and we are part of the same thing.

That’s right, only we’re again reducing the distance.