Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

Thursday, January 25, 2018

We substituted a new analogy – neurons in a great brain – as a way of bringing you to new understandings. The closer you conceptualize the relationship, the easier you will be able to reconfigure accepted ideas that stand in the way of realizing a closer relationship in effect, that is, de facto.

Why have we begun exploring the concept of sin and virtue, the interaction of vast impersonal forces and what we might call mental structures, but to help you see deeper? You don’t want a bloodless metaphysics; you don’t want an ethereal religion that doesn’t compel your belief and therefore your allegiance and support, by virtue of the truth it contains. You want truth, as much truth as you can comprehend, and perhaps a bit more. And you want it in order to live by it, no to admire it in a glass display case.

I have always wondered about the Bible verse “Buy the truth and sell it not.” Did it mean, “Once you have paid for it, keep it,” or did it mean, “Don’t buy it and don’t sell it”? One could wish the King James, though a masterpiece of stylistic prose, were a little less ambiguous sometimes.

Ambiguity has its uses. To get toward truth, toward truer,  one does need to pay something. It is also true that truth cannot be obtained nor retained by bargaining of any kind.

What does one pay? It depends upon what the “you” is that you bring to the exchange.

• A proud man may need to sacrifice his pride, and come in a spirt of humility.
• A willful man may have great difficulty in accepting implied rebukes innate in the unwelcome truth that comes to his reluctant eyes.
• A man wedded by habit and inclination to any of the seven cardinal errors may feel torn apart between the comfortable and familiar (even if also harmful and futile) and the allure of knowing, of being closer to his true course.

We need hardly add that for “he” you may freely substitute “she.” The point is the same.

And, I get, truth is more than a matter of explanations and fact.

Truth makes demands. It may comfort or it may afflict or it may do both at once or both alternately, but it will have its own imperative which will not be those of any human or all human wills together.

If that seems harsh to you, or strange, consider. How can truth be anything but universal? What is true, is true. it does not depend upon the agreement or even the comprehension of the observer. You may say, “Obviously: I never expected to hear something that would be true for me alone.” You don’t. But probably you do expect something that will be true for humans, say.

And what of rocks and trees and animals and ex-humans and unitary beings? The same truth exists for all, only of course different levels of being will respond to different aspects of the truth. The bacteria in your gut, the cells comprising the organs in your bodies, the atoms and molecules comprising your “inorganic” structures in the 3D world – these are all specific levels of consciousness, with consciousnesses appropriate to their particular position. The same truth must be true for all; and at the same time, it would not be possible for different levels of consciousness to apprehend or conceptualize things similarly. Or are trees now to read baseball scores, and angels to maintain crystalline structures?

Thus, necessarily a great part of the truth of things will always be beyond your comprehension even abstractly. You can’t expect to understand everything and you shouldn’t waste your time attempting to – except (important proviso!) insofar as you are inclined to. That is, you are free to try; that doesn’t mean any good will come of it. It may, who knows? But we confidently predict that anything that comes of it will be different from what you expect ahead of time.

That’s just common sense, after all. You don’t have maps before you do the exploring, so if you find only what you expect, maybe you haven’t been as venturesome as you’ve been thinking you are.

Well done; you’ve learned that lesson.

Truth isn’t just ideas, it is life, it is reality. But it isn’t obvious reality. It isn’t what your senses report, and what your senses report, even when the reports of your intuition are added.

You aren’t as much good to us – or to yourselves – if you are operating not from an instinct to truth but from an instinct for the comfortable, the attractive, the seemingly easy, the least common denominator, the broad downhill slope.

Oh. So this is the strait and narrow versus the broad pathway to hell, so to speak?

It is a truth that the right thing to do in any conflict is always the more difficult path.

Sure, I learned that from John D. MacDonald. It’s one of Meyer’s laws.

It is also accurate psychology. If the easy and agreeable thing to do is also the right thing to do, where is there any conflict? So the existence of a conflict ought to alert you and serve as a rule of thumb as to what you ought to do.

And you ask – what does this have to do with sin?

No, I see the relationship clearly enough. If sin is missing the mark, these habits or traits or decisions or whatever they are constitute obstructions in our living toward truth.

Of course they do. It has nothing to do with them being wrong because forbidden. They are wrong because they lead the wrong way.

Only maybe not everybody is going in the same direction, or wants to.

But, you see, that’s getting mixed up in words. If you wish to live toward truth, these are signposts saying “wrong way.” But signposts do not determine your destination, still less interfere with your right and ability to choose. They merely serve to tell you where you are. Those who want to go to hell (metaphorically speaking) will always find the way broad and unobstructed. They need only follow what is easiest in any conflict of inclinations. All the signposts in the world cannot deter anyone from doing anything. The best they can do is assure that what might have been unconscious is made conscious, where people can either fight the awareness (because it is uncomfortable), or can pull up with a shudder and say, “No, no, that isn’t what I intended to do with my life.”

It’s always up to the person.

 

[I have a large crystal on my desk, weighting several pounds. On Sunday March 19, 2023 I sat quietly and intended a journey into the crystal. Rather than a journey I emerged with a description. My notes:]

Into the crystal

Repository of thoughts, emotions, transactions

Holding the timeline fixed

Stability, endurance, continuity, connection.

The mineral kingdom, its function:

Holding relationships,

Preserving the structure of life events,

3D and non-3D.

Access.

The alternative polarity to formlessness,

Chaotic change

The Akashic record, as pertaining to 3D

Our minds, objectified.

Alive as everything is alive,

Fixed, in service,

Conscious but not self-conscious

Not merely a record of the shared subjectivity,

But the matrix for it, the basis of it,

The reliable structure preserving it.

It is all there. Nowhere to go,

Nowhen to go.

Ask, and it will be answered,

Only, do not beg or grovel,

Do not presume difficulty,

Do not make a special thing of it.

Just ask and listen

And consider what results.

Wednesday, November 13, 2019

Let’s look at the fact that 3D life in and of itself is not sufficient. This of course says it can be sufficient only in another context. You can see that 3D life is one stage in a process. It has inputs from one end, processes those inputs, resulting in those outputs at another end.

Like a logic circuit.

Or a manufacturing floor, or a written sentence in language, or many similar analogies, yes. A process may need to be examined as if it were a thing in itself, but finally it will be understood only as part of whatever larger process it serves. One way to see it would be, like an organ, which is part of a larger organism, and is itself a larger organism to those cells and processes it comprises.

Now, you may want to ask yourselves, whyever would we think that 3D life is separate from the rest of life? Where would that idea come from?

That doesn’t seem so hard. The evidence of our senses on the one hand, the hidden nature of the rest of reality on the other.

Well, pursue that. Why would you (speaking culturally, not individually) distinguish between sensory evidence and non-sensory evidence?

That is poisoned fruit from the Enlightenment, though the ancient Greeks were a little that way.

Closer examination will show you that everybody, is “a little that way.” It is a matter of temperament, and mood, and circumstance, as well as culture. A culture sufficiently relaxed to allow great freedom of belief is necessarily going to allow – great freedom of belief! That is, you can’t expect to have it both ways. Either your culture will be as binding and comforting as swaddling clothes, or it will not. If it is, there is little room for exploration, and little uncertainty. If it is not, there will be freedom to see things differently, a matter of choice, only do not expect freedom to coincide with unity of vision and experience, except occasionally.

And you have been gently pushing me, most of my life, to see the unity that may be found through complexity, rather than instead of complexity.

You will not live long enough to see the widespread immersion in a new more comprehensive unity that will follow the productive relative chaos of beliefs that is your time, but it will come. It generally does – and that newfound simplicity will become the platform from which new complications arise to be dealt with.

That vision of process is well understood. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis, and begin again.

Let us think about what is the context for 3D life.

My God, isn’t that what you have been doing all along?

Yes, but it is not necessarily so obvious to one and all. To be on the inside of a process is to take much for granted that is never said and scarcely thought.

• If 3D life is a process – and, we assure you, it may be seen that way accurately enough – what are the inputs and outputs?
• Nor is it one process, but several, overlapping, sometimes contradicting.
• And you must bear in mind that pastàpresentà future, though a necessary way to think and experience in 3D, is only somewhat Thus, misleading as well as illustrative.
• When are inputs actually outputs, and vice-versa? When the flow is opposite what you think it must be, and what you perceive it to be.
• But if you cannot reliably sort inputs from outputs, results from causes, how do you make sense of it?
• If you cannot depend upon your senses, nor your logic, not your ability to reason from cause to effect (which is not quite the same thing as logic), then where are you? And how did you get into such a fix?

Just lucky, I guess.

Yes, very funny. Or maybe truer than you know.

• Not everyone is so constituted as to need to know “how things are,” much less “why things are as they are.” But those who are so constituted find nothing in earth equally compelling. A clue, if you can see it as such.
• Some have an invincible determination (so positive as to be invisible to them as anything beyond a self-evident reality) to accept the 3D world exactly as it appears, nothing more, nothing less. Another clue.
• The interaction of these two types (and of course the bell-curve panoply between the two extremes) creates possibilities that otherwise could not exist. Final clue.

Thoreau said “Atheism itself  may be comparatively popular with God.”

Yes. The resultant thought may be less important than the process of arriving there – particularly given that the process is likely to be more enduring than any given result.

Enough for the moment.

A word on the process. It seems to me, some may not realize that it appears to me, often, as if I am merely thinking aloud. It is only when I look closely that I see that this amounts to peering into the darkness and seeing light in this or that direction, and moving where the light is at the moment. How is that kind of “thinking” distinguishable from being led by “inspiration,” or from “talking to the guys”? the distinguishing feature is mostly, maybe entirely, the way we think of it.

A valid insight. Ours? Yours? A gift from the universe? A haphazardly produced side-effect? Season to taste.

 

Thursday, October 24, 2019

The larger theme is:

• To coordinate descriptions of the 3D and non-3D worlds, so as to make sense of your lives.
• Within that, the existence and function and effect of vast impersonal forces on human lives.
• Within that, the nature and meaning of good and evil in the human experience.
• More immediately, the extension of life between 3D and non-3D, rather than the confinement of life as between birth and death.

I often feel that I am fumbling around, waiting to tune into the channel, and not really getting it.

There is something of that in the process. And there is always the same remedy: Focus, wait, remain receptive.

Yes. I know that, and I forget it. Very well.

[Pause]

Nothing, this morning?

Sometimes the process works, sometimes it doesn’t. You are always free to do something else. Read, go back to sleep, whatever. A hint: Sometimes, trying too hard is as ineffective as only half-trying. The sense of having to butt through a wall, or cast a line over a great distance, merely subconsciously affirms that “this can’t be done,” even while decades of experience demonstrates that it can be done, and done naturally and easily.

I know the nature of this particular roadblock is me, trying to consciously determine the theme for today.

Of course. In effect, you wind up trying to direct the effort, as in common thought, and at the same time receive automatically, as in trance channeling. These are contradictory processes that cut against each other, sometimes resulting in stress. It is the very nature of ILC, as we have been practicing it with you, to be between these extremes; an active conversation only half of which you direct.

It’s amazing how we can forget the simplest things. Okay, now perhaps we can really begin.

We are teaching technique for access, not providing dogma for memorization. So. The question might arise as to why such instruction should ever be necessary. Why is an inherent human ability not universally known and routinely practiced? And why should it re-emerge now?

I take it you aren’t interested in the history of our culture’s selective blindness.

No, not the “how” of it, but the “why” of it. And the “why” simply put is that life in 3D time distracts; it tends to concentrate

• more on the moment than on the long-run, and
• more on the sensory than on the non-sensory, and
• more on the immediately nearby than on the wider circle of consequences and influences.

How’s that again?

You find it hard to hold the bigger picture because

• you perceive it in time-slices, and (to differing extents)
• divided between the input through the senses and the input that comes through the intuition, directly.

Even those who are closely connected intellectually and emotionally to their non-3D component may find it hard to live what they know, because they find it hard to remember what they know. This is not good or bad; it is merely a result of living in 3D conditions of time and space. The conditions that lead you to forget are the same conditions that lead you to be able to concentrate. The reason you find it hard to absorb the big picture is the same reason you are able to concentrate on detail.

So, this discussion is at one and the same time describing process and information, thus:

• 3D limitation means you can’t understand everything.
• Non-3D extension means you can (while still in 3D, we mean, of course) grasp non-sensory connections and implications.
• Your experiences – this is important, and not nearly so obvious as you will be inclined to think it at first – your experiences are both 3D and non-3D experiences.
• Therefore, similarly your perceptions.

Now, it will repay you to reread those final two bullet points and ponder them, not just skip over them as obvious and/or unimportant.

You are redefining life, in a way.

Well, we’re certainly trying to do so. It is in wrong distinctions that many errors inhere. If you disconnect things that belong together, and connect things that don’t really belong together, you are going to see differently. Sometimes that’s what you want. Art does that deliberately sometimes. But sometimes you’re just getting in your own way.

• Experience is both 3D and non-3D.
• Perception is both 3D and non-3D.
• That doesn’t mean that either one is seen to be that.
• Nor does it mean that perception or experience may not be truncated by mental filters (usually below the level of conscious control).
• To see only a part of anything and think it complete is to never have seen it.

But of course by your own statement, not to mention our lifelong experience, we can never avoid seeing things as if they were wholes when in fact they are parts.

Yes, but there is all the difference in the world between something seen or done consciously and the same thing seen or done unconsciously.

I think you mean, even if circumstances force us to perceive things incompletely, we’re better off remembering that they are incomplete rather than letting ourselves think they are complete.

Think what irritates you more than any other single thing about New Age thought.

I have always been very impatient with people getting half an inch of truth and thinking they now can explain the world.  I never knew but that the half-inch might be more universal than I knew. In other words, maybe they were right, or righter than I was.

And therefore?

It is easier to be able to accept or reject something wholesale, but to have to maybe accept it in one context while rejecting it in another, or to accept part of it while rejecting another part (knowing that the person whose idea it is would reject any such division) is not so easy. I didn’t (and don’t) want to crystallize my beliefs in such a way as to be unable to consider new thoughts, yet I got tired of continually having to reconsider everything.

And it is just such suspension between provisional belief and provisional disbelief that is a necessary helpful part of the process of continually refining one’s understanding. However, as we have said and you have experienced, there’s no harm in camping at a staging-place, either, f or whatever length of time you need before resuming the climb.

Nor is everyone equipped to climb.

Nor is everyone interested in climbing, or designed for it, correct.

So there’s your hour, better spent than you may think at the moment. Remember these points:

• Experience is both 3D and non-3D.
• So is perception.

And, I gather you are going to add, “particularly given that they are the same thing seen differently.”

At any rate, we’ll continue at another time.

 

Tuesday, October 15, 2019

You said you were talking about the problem of evil in the coming civilization, and talking about individual self-development as it appears. Pray continue.

A chief source of confusion for people is how the “external” world can be really only an expression of unknown parts of themselves; and can be, equally real-ly, fully existent in and of and for itself. If this is once understood, many things clarify, because who and what you are clarifies. As long as you can’t see yourselves as both individual and not-individual, you are going to have to choose between what seems to be a divide. When you see a thing as if it were two things, obviously you won’t be able to see it whole.

I think I know what you mean, but the words don’t seem to me to be adequate to the task.

You try, then. We trust that by this time our description of reality as without absolute boundaries has been absorbed.

No, this is hopeless. I get that you want to recap so many things like reality being projected rather than existing as “real” in the way it appears to us. You may be able to trot all that out again, though I couldn’t, but how are you going to spend the hour recapitulating and then have any time for anything new?

We understand the frustration. Do you have a better idea?

What about just putting out the headlines, and let people use their own search-engines?

Interesting idea. Bold idea, even. But can you transcribe the headlines?

I don’t know. Let’s try, and we will or we won’t get something.

All right. Headlines:

• “Life is but a dream.”
• Also, “All is one”;
• “As above, so below.”
• “As a man thinks in his heart, so he is.”
• “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life, and you will call it fate.”

Okay. I see promise in this. Continue?

• Beyond this mortal realm, there is another, not mortal; yet the two are one.
• You are not primarily 3D beings and yet you are. Which way you define yourself (con-fine yourself) determines who you appear, how reality
• The only permanent thing is that all is in eternal unceasing change, and yet eternal change is itself a form of changelessness.

And you see the problem as well as the possibility: Too concise a statement emerges as paradox or cryptic allusion. Our habitual slow process of exposition avoids that pitfall.

Maybe worth alternating. I get tired of plodding exposition, continually half-repeating previously established views so as not to let them fall into oblivion.

Alternation may have its value.

I think of Bronson Alcott’s Orphic Sayings, which meant something to him but were entirely opaque to his contemporaries. He set forth, but he did not explain, hence did not communicate.

We have done plenty of explaining, these past years.

We have. If you wish to wax orphic now and again, I suppose we shouldn’t complain of opacity.

Well, then, another headline or two, and then we will pause.

• You are the entire world, yet you are only the tiniest part of it, rather like a hologram.
• As a “divine spark,” that is, stemming as you do from something that is not of the 3D level of reality, your nature cannot be satisfied with 3D reality alone.
• Earth is not a school; it is closer to a gymnasium, or basic training.
• You are neither ignorant nor isolated nor limited, and yet your 3D experience continually tempts you to see yourselves that way. Why do you suppose that is?
• Life is vastly greater than the 3D version of life that you are living in one part of yourself.

And enough for now.

 

Monday, September 9, 2019

I guess I’m up for the day. I got my night’s sleep in bits. Three installments, looks like. Things seem more or less normal. Only in the daytime (if then). Why? Actually, no reason to leave that as a rhetorical question. Why?

In sleep, or toward sleep when weariness is great enough, the equation changes.

Between mental and physical?

That is how we conceptualized it for you, years ago, but not really. It’s more like physical – which includes mental, though you didn’t know that then – and non-physical, which also includes mental, which you did not realize in quite this way.

So physical – mental – non-physical, with each of the extreme terms sharing space in the middle, so to speak.

Yes, but do not think to divide mental between the two. The point is that the two share the space you call mental. That’s what it is; that’s what creates it and its unique properties, that it is shared between them.

I tend to say interfaces between them, but even that isn’t quite right, is it?

It isn’t sufficient. Look at it this way. Suppose matter is actually a field. Thus you have two fields, rather than one of them being what you call matter. The intersection and interaction and interference of these two fields may be considered as an entity in itself. It isn’t, really: It is the result of the interaction. And that is what mind is. That’s why it is so volatile, so sensitive to perturbation, so creative of interpretation.

God, I can feel it, I’m so close to something that would make sense of so much, but I don’t have the scientific background to grasp it.

In this case, that background would hinder you, because enmeshed in too many firmly held misconceptions. This is why it requires amateurs, to be able to disrupt well-ordered and accepted ways of thinking.

But it isn’t like nobody else is getting this. I can sense that.

No, and isn’t that good? Redundancy is the best safeguard.

Proceed, then.

Paul Brunton sensed and deduced that your experience of the world (that is, of reality) can only come via the mind, hence the mind is the ultimate. He was careful not to think the world away – that is, dismiss it as only an illusion – and not to take its independent existence for granted. He balanced.

Yes, I found it very reasonable. It felt right.

Well, now look at that “mental” as a field always interacting with 3D and non-3D.

• Is it an individual field, when it interacts as well with every other mental field?
• Is it a collective field, when it uniquely interacts with at least one field (the 3D) that is unique, and perhaps both? (The non-3D, remember, though not divided, is not uniform. As above, so below.)

It is both and neither, depending upon what we stress.

Of course. And what happens to that field when the 3D pole dies?

I see it! In terms of time, the mental field ceases to exist, for there is no second pole to hold it in being. But wherever it was, it remains. The mental field that was suspended between George Washington’s 3D existence and the non-3D remains in that context. That’s why we can still talk to past lives, why we can interact with living beings and not merely statues or recordings.

You must damp down your excitement if we are to continue.

Yeah, I get that. I’d flare up like a flash bulb, and then out.

You are a reusable bulb, but there could be recharging time involved.

Okay.

So now you can see several interacting awarenesses, if only potentially.

I won’t be able to follow up on them, but others will, once it has been called to their attention, and that’s what you are using me for.

Correct, except it is “we” using you – that is, you and us together. But that is one function of the ILC process, and one reason to spread the usage, to provide more people willing and able to strike sparks.

So let’s make it practical for me, and for those of my friends experiencing chronic health challenges. Rather than consider illnesses as 3D-caused (only), or as “spiritually” caused (as if it is one’s fault for hosting illness because illness can be overcome), what is the story when we consider our mental world to be a field generated by and suspended from the interaction between 3D and non-3D fields?

You mean, what’s the panacea?

I’ve waited 70 years. Surely long enough?

We smile. Yes, long enough, and in one sense you never needed to wait at all, only it served you well.

I suppose it did, but it gets tiresome. For me, for others with their own problems. And kindly don’t say that life is problems, we all know that first-hand. But maybe we’d like to deal with some other problems instead.

As you wish, only remember that there’s a reason why some people choose the devil they know over the devil they don’t know.

Well, I admit, it does give me pause. However, if you’re in the mood to explain, I’m in the mood to listen, and everybody can make up his or her mind.

Fair enough. All right, first, recognize that customarily you all regard yourselves as primarily mental, no matter how attached to physical sensations you may be.

Do you mean “experience,” rather than “regard”?

A valid correction, and experiencing yourselves one way leads to regarding yourselves that way, of course.

I would have said (judging second-hand) that most people experience themselves as inhabitants of bodies.

That does not contradict what we said. The person who is most sensuously oriented still does not identify with the body as a collection of cells and organs, but as the horse the person rides. A beautiful girl may identify with her beauty and her appetites; still she identifies as the person who, you see. Similarly the athlete or the lover or anyone concentrating on primarily physical activities still experiences himself or herself as the person who. They don’t identify with the muscles; they identify with having the muscles.

It is easier to see in the case of those who experience the world primarily emotionally or intellectually, but it is the case always. You have bodies; you tend to and you use bodies; you may even think that you think of yourselves as bodies, but you see that it comes down to you using (living in) bodies. That is a small but important difference.

So now when something perturbs the body, does it really feel like it is perturbing you, or like it is perturbing something you are integrally bound to?

That’s why some of us are not afraid of death as an end but potentially welcome it as an end to interference.

The interference has made clearer to you who you really are, body or mind. Then it is only a matter of whether you consider the mind to be an attribute of the body, which it is, in a way, or an entity not wholly dependent  upon the body.

And the definition we choose (or which seems obvious to us) determines how much we can or cannot affect things like health.

Like many things. But then let us penetrate a bit farther. The way in which one conceptualizes the mind as somewhat independent of the body also helps determine what is or is not possible.

A tremendously powerful image, the mind as a suspended field. I wish one of my friends would follow up on it. Meanwhile, thank you.

[I was doing the dishes when it occurred to me that, as so often, the distance analogy has snuck into the illustration. We tend to think of 3D and non-3D as separated in space, or anyway separated by something, rather than occupying identical or even overlapping spaces. If we could visualize every moment of time/space separately and simultaneously, it would be easier to see it as it is, maybe.]

 

Sunday, September 8, 2019

All right, gentlemen, last night you said we might talk about “fiasco,” either in private or in public if I decided to let it be in public. Shall we?

If you wish us to, we can. If you can allow it, we can.

I can only do my best, but I want to allow it, let’s put it that way.

[This refers to a dream I had yesterday. My college friend Dennis and I and a woman – I’m pretty sure it was the woman who became my wife, whom Dennis also knew then – were walking from our car into a hotel, and I was telling him that he had a registration from one state, a driver’s license from another, and other discrepancies in his cover story. We were laughing, light-hearted about it. The woman was more serious, somewhat disapproving of our attitude, I think. She entered first, and was no longer there when Dennis and I got through the doors.

[We entered the big double doors of the entrance, and it wasn’t clear where to go from there. We walked a few steps forward, then there came a choice of ways, neither obvious. I chose to turn left, and there was a little counter, sort of hole-in-a-corner affair. I heard Dennis say quietly to himself, “Fiasco,” and realized that he meant that he and I never really stayed connected in our lives as we had been supposed to do. It made me sad, and the sadness woke me up.

[Later, being depressed because I was not working and was feeling unable to work, I generalized the word to encompass my entire life. At 9:15 p.m. I said, “So talk to me about “fiasco,” and got, “No. Tomorrow morning, if you wish.”]

TGU: It [the dream] amounts to your systematically disowning – or, being tempted to disown – your entire past and present. But in that case, who is disowning? What is left?

I don’t see it quite that way. It’s closer to my accepting a modification of a view of myself that is so sweeping as to leave little left

Say that’s so. What does it amount to but saying, “My life was a mistake”?

Exactly. What does it amount to but that? When I dream of my best friend from younger days muttering “fiasco” and I know he is referring to our lack of relationship in this life – only, then it widens out to thinking of it as a commentary on my whole life – what am I to think but that other parts of me – including you, I should think – hold that opinion? I do myself, sometimes.

And as I wrote that, I was also thinking, I turned left as we entered the hotel, rather than continuing straight. Was it my turning left that was a mistake?

You lost sight of Jean – she disappeared from the scene – and you found yourself in a hole-in-corner place rather than the open lobby you would have expected.

I did.

Now remember the dream of the scout troop and your cousin Tom and your hat.

[This dream, of some years ago, had me at the end of a Boy Scout patrol of eight, hiking through my hometown. My cousin was also a member of the patrol. A wind blew my hat off, and I had to chase it down. When I got it, I went looking for the patrol, but they were out of sight and I never saw them again. The meaning I took from it was that the eccentricity of my life was not of my choosing, but was the result of forces beyond my conscious control.

It wasn’t your choice, remember!

Well, no. That’s true. but it was my lack of awareness.

Was it? Let’s say, instead, your inability to see farther than you did.

All right. So maybe my course has had less to do with my conscious mind than with my – what, fate?

Consider this. Your life as it has been lived has brought you to this place. What you have said, what you have dreamed, what you have attempted, what you have done, and failed to do, and done badly, who you have helped and hindered, who you have loved and refused to love, the lives you might have lived but didn’t, and above all the life you did live because of the choices you made – it all brought you to a place where you are able to help some people, connect to some people, take heart from some people. Any path offers opportunities, particularly if it is less a beaten path than a seeming wandering across a field. Every possible life will have regrets. Every possible life, though, will remain a point of the present, with opportunities at the present moment – at every present moment – for you to move on from there with your own third-tier reactions to what has been.

If you concentrate on regretting the 3D record, you risk overlooking the All-D reality. The 3D passes away; externals are merely externals, and can in effect be modified. But you are above and beyond what your life-record is. The 3D record is what it is. Your record – your soul record, call it – is entirely different although forged in 3D in part.

So if my life is a fiasco —

No, it may be seen as a fiasco. It is a fiasco from a way of looking at it. But – is that all it is, or is it also a triumph of perseverance?

Very merciful of you.

No it isn’t; it is very realistic of us. No one’s life is only one thing. No summary of a life is more than what you would call a horseback approximation. To accept one view is to always leave yourself vulnerable to (or perhaps we should say open to) a sudden flip-flop of viewpoint that will tempt you to say, “I’ve been seeing it all wrong! It’s really this way!” Well, it isn’t “really” any one way. It’s always a matter of viewpoint. What has your life taught you more thoroughly than that? Only you don’t always apply it.

It would be easier if I could ever express this to anyone and have them comprehend it and not either see it as self-indulgence or rush in to assure me that I am wrong.

So what? If others can’t do for you, you’ll have to do for yourself. Is this different than the rest of life?

I guess I am even nearer to the end of my life than I sometimes assume. I see I have no real hope of getting my materials together and out there.

That can come later if – as we told you, and you did hear – you do the work no one else could do. Leave it prepared and let others worry about distributing it. It will get done or it won’t, but you will have done one level of preparation.

It occurs to me, maybe my literary executors could do enough merely by reposting my material on the net, rather than publishing in book form.

They will find their own options.

Then what of the dream saying “fiasco”?

What of it? It did bring to your attention your regret that your life was not richer, fuller in human relationships. But maybe you couldn’t have had so rich an inner life, if outer life had been richer.

Well, it still seems to me I wasted and am still wasting so much time and energy and attention.

But are you wasting it? What would “wasting it” mean?

Hmm. I see. “Wasting” implies a goal not being pursued.

Yes it does. And your friend Colin Wilson did not waste time and attention, but would you have wanted his life?

His achievement, yes.

And maybe it was as unsatisfying, even frustrating, to him as yours is to you. Maybe it usually is, to anyone. That is a matter of viewpoint as well, of course.

I joke that I am under house arrest, but next to the lives I see around me, there’s something in that.

No, not really. You mean, your life is centered in non-3D in that it is internal no matter what it is you think about, but that doesn’t mean anyone is arresting you (nor that anyone is holding you safe, which would be another interpretation). It means your circle of experience, your 3D mirror, is seemingly quite different from your brother’s, say. So it is. Again, would you live his life, and if so, why haven’t you?

Well, let’s look at it a little more carefully. There are many things about his life that I envy. I couldn’t live his life because I don’t have the attitudes needed.

And the same is true for everybody.

So, stop repining?

Stop worrying.

It’s always the same old story, isn’t it? Emerson’s “lowly faithful, banish fear.”

It is for you. For others, there are different regrets and wistfulnesses. Fortunately for all concerned, 3D is not designed by Procustes.

Very funny. More like by Tantalus, or Sisyphus.

That’s why those myths, to describe an attitude in an image, so that those who follow will know that it isn’t just them. And, don’t forget Prometheus.

I’ll have to think whether to share this or not. I can see that it would require less interpolation than I had thought – a little explanation of my two dreams, mostly. Well, I guess we’ll see. Thanks in any case. I’ll try to take it to heart.