Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

Friday, August 30, 2019

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

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

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

Do you think so?

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

Oh, but it is, if you will examine the statement carefully, not in the meaning computer terms give it, but literally.

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

More to get. Isn’t that what you – we – said in Imagine Yourself Well? Your depth of connection determines the rules of the world you live in. Change the depth of connection, change the rules in effect for you.

It seems to me I realized sometime that our health could also be read as an indicator of where we are.

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

It’s more like a barometer.

Not a bad analogy, in that everyone lives at a different altitude so to speak. (Be careful of the analogy.)

• For some, physical health is a given.
• For some, it is an impossible dream.
• For some, a position anywhere between the extremes, for, remember, this is one

In the way that health varies wildly among people, so do other factors. Intelligence. Emotional stability. External good fortune. Luck, so called. Vitality. Not all life’s prizes nor pains are given to any one person. The fluctuations of your own barometer, no one else’s, can serve as indicators for you.

It is simple-minded to assume that the good and the bad that happen to us are reward or punishment, but I don’t think they happen at random either.

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

It’s just life.

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

Somebody must be calling the tune.

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

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

We should have to think how to answer that question, it has so many unconscious assumptions, some of which are right.

I withdraw the question, if it is going to interfere. Go on as you wish.

We are a long way even from making a fair start on the relations between 3D lives and the greater world they are usually only vaguely aware of. It requires thinking out.

Where’s Seth when you need him?

He was where he needed to be and where you needed him to be. But Seth once is empowerment. How could Seth twice be anything but enfeeblement?

Which I take to be you saying that we would come to be dependent upon him.

ILC keeps you as part of the process, not as a consumer of enlightenment. Seth’s role was to provide a massive source of new ways of understanding, thus changing the potential for any with ears to hear. ILC’s role is to provide a model and a guide for the individual 3D soul to take charge of its own perceptions and possibilities of creation. You have to do the work, because it is the doing that is the learning, not the reading about doing.

Sort of Hemingway’s prose as opposed to prose that lays it out for you to see.

Another good analogy. If one cannot understand a story without having read between the lines, the effort of reading between the lines is the reason to bother reading it. A story that is self-evident is qualitatively different.

Maurice Walsh wrote lovely stories quite unlike Hemingway’s, but Hemingway said Walsh was his favorite author.

Walsh painted portraits of a time and a place and complications of male-female relationships. Not every story need hint at deeper things, and excellence is to be measured by what is attempted, no less than by what might have been attempted. Similarly, life. Some people are in 3D to write Hemingway subtext, others, to write Walsh description. Is one or the other (or any possible combination of the two) “right”? “Wrong”? If 3D life is anything, it is a richness of diversity.

Have we wandered out of sight of the question of health and weather?

Let’s say we broadened the discussion. Everything touches upon everything; it’s a question of where you wander conversationally, or in thought.

 

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

And, you might add, the time you fainted in church and came back – just before you would have lost consciousness completely – when the ushers got you to the front door, thus allowing you to remember the event if with no sense of its meaning.

Three events, then.

And there could be others added. Anyone’s life is fuller and stranger than is realized from inside or from outside – that is, by self or others.

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

No. The message, received, reshaped its importance. It reconfigured your second- and third-tier reactions to life, you might say. So this version that you live is more magical and open than the ones in which the message was not received and the encouragement was not taken to heart. By the way, notice that the message and the response were below the threshold of your consciousness. It nearly always is; that allows the essence to bypass the personality. However, the fact that it is done by stealth is not the point here.

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

I get the sense of our lives being repeatedly tweaked.

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

 

Monday, February 4, 2019

Hans Oskar Porr asks if someone who is murdered chose to be murdered. “Is it part of a life-plan, probabilities, test, an exit strategy, etc.?” He asks, “If it is a choice, is it always a choice or are there also freak accidents?” I am inclined to think this (that he quoted in his email) contains the answer: A change of angle of viewing will show entirely different relationships that are no less and no more true. In other words, there is no one way of seeing things; there is only every way, and this of course no one in 3D can ever stretch to encompass.” But – is that right? Would you comment, please, to a sincere question?

Not only does a different viewpoint reveal a different aspect of a given situation – it alters what is possible, what is true. When you see life as fluid rather than static – as a dream rather than a collection of objects to be moved around – the ground-rules not only seem to change, but in fact they do change. What you believe is directly connected to what is true (and possible) for you. Many know this from experience, but not all who have experienced it realize what they have experienced.

Your beliefs bound your experiences; your experiences expand or limit your beliefs. As usual, a reciprocating process. Someone who will not  be convinced is impregnable in his unbelief, and thus

• from one viewpoint, is firmly rooted in fact,
• from another viewpoint, is trapped in his own limiting beliefs.

This is not an either/or – it is a both/and, as well as a neither/nor.

Choose your beliefs, change your life.

Yes, except that life is not as simple as a 3D mind making its decisions rationally and fairly.

Unless that is our ideal, I suppose.

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

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

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

All right. Alex Bee: citing the case of Canadian investigator Joe Fischer, asks

• if Fischer killed himself or was murdered, and
• (2), how to protect against malevolent beings. He asks specifically if saying or thinking Robert Monroe’s affirmation asking for the help of beings on the same or higher level of wisdom and development is protection enough.

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

Again, what we believe is what is true for us.

With an implied caveat, always, that no one in 3D knows fully who or what he is, and so never fully knows his own mainsprings.

If you believe you need a ritual of protection, you will. If you don’t, you won’t. However this is not as simple as deciding to decide. Again, what you are in various aspects of the community that is you will determine your range of choice. You may consciously think “I am not afraid” and unconsciously cower. Or vice versa, for that matter. But – subject to that very important reservation – it is true that life will serve up what you expect.

Surely “what you expect” isn’t right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So in practical terms?

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

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

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

 

Saturday, December 5, 2020

Taking off from input from others:

[Bill Ebeltoft, responding to the question of how we change emotions, said, “we don’t change them; we each interpret them through our own set of filters. We then react to them. How we react is our choice, we choose to react in a specific manner. By choosing, we can change the filter through which we perceive them, thus how we may react subsequently. My question to my guys: Is this a reasonable or possible correct interpretation?”]

It is an interesting starting-point, the question whether in your 3D lives you change the emotions you experience, or interpret and react and, by your reaction, change your end of the interface.

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

Same thing. Let’s rephrase the whole situation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[From Dirk: “In engineering, laminar and turbulent flows are commonly encountered. At times it is desirable to change these conditions. There are many ways to do this. One way is to change the boundary, …  We can even do things like adding or removing vibrations at one or many frequencies, introduce patterns in the surface, …. Might we consider that energetically we have a near infinite multitude of ways to metaphorically make similar changes the (our) emotional interface?]

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

[Pause]

That’s it?

You need more?

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

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

Anent that, since we have some time, part two of Bob Washburne’s email of Nov. 16:

[Also, I purchased the full Gateway Experience CDs several years ago … I have used them may times, but I don’t seem to be getting anywhere. I can readily attain the different levels at will without the CDs, but I don’t seem to be able to do anything with them…. So is there a self-help group for slow psychics?]

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

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

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

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

I sort of hoped against hope.

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

Very true. But listing obstacles, and listing suggested ways to overcome them, does not amount to a magic formula.,

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

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

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

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

The operative word is “seeming.” But life can require patience and faith, because often what you are really working on is not what you think you are working on. It’s an inevitable effect of your 3D consciousness being less than your larger consciousness. So you may strive earnestly and diligently and seem to get nowhere. But the striving itself is “getting somewhere,” if you can realize it.

So our life is less Sisyphus, everlastingly pushing a rock uphill, only to see it fall to the bottom, then George Washington, a life presenting endless possibilities to work on character?

Don’t carry it too far, but yes. Success in what you want is not necessarily the same as (nor worth as much as) success in what your intent and actions make yourselves.

 

Monday, October 12, 2020

I think you made your case for feelings being primary in our experience of life. But this may be because I experienced your ideas directly rather than second-hand through words.

Bear in mind, what we said does not prejudge whether people prefer to process their input via feeling or thinking. That’s a different question.

Care to go into it?

It is a preference, not an either-or. One may gravitate toward feeling and learn to think, or vice-versa. Ideally one does whichever is appropriate in given circumstances. Each mode of processing has advantages.

Jung’s scheme, as I understand it, is that we prefer to perceive either intuitively or sensorially,; we prefer to process what we perceive either through thinking or feeling. Hence the psychological type theory he put out. One is intuitive or sensory (N or S), a thinking type or a feeling type (T or F), and in addition is introverted or extroverted (I or E). Others later added Perceptive or Judging (P or J) to denote one’s preference for open-ended or closed decisions.

You will note that Jung said flexibility was to be preferred, so that one met a given circumstance with the appropriate tools.

Now, consider this in context of what we have been sketching. If feelings are a sort of ionized layer between small-you and you-as-part-of-the-“external”-world, how does that square with Jung’s scheme, based on decades of professional observation?

Well, that’s an interesting line of thought. Let’s see. We as 3D souls experience life as coming at us moment by moment. Jung would say, I guess, that we experience it through our sensory or our non-sensory mode of apprehension: We weigh things either by how they feel or how they seem to make sense. But I’m missing something here, aren’t I?

Your only way of experiencing the “external” world directly is through feelings first, below the threshold of consciousness. Then, what your filters allow you to process, you process intuitively or sensorially. “Intuitively” implies that you go around those filters, you extend behind them. That is, you know things you shouldn’t be able to know, because you are receiving not only what your filters allow you to have but also what you receive via other channels.

As we are doing here.

Correct. Your non-3D component is quite capable of feeding you sparks that contradict or supplement (or reinforce, for that matter) what your filters allow in.

But doesn’t this contradict what you just said – and underlined – about us experiencing the external world only through feelings?

Well, we can see that it seems to. Let us rephrase it. The 3D-you experiences the “external” directly only through its filters, meaning, only through what pre-rational feelings allow. But 3D-you also experiences the “external” indirectly, via input from its non-3D component. (“knowing” rather than “experiencing.”)

I’m not sure if Jung’s categories take this into account or not. I suppose non-3D input may be what “intuition” means. In that case, Jung’s long observations would be congruent even if his theory wasn’t quite the same.

Remember that even famous scientists and physicians have to make their way in the world, preserving their respectability. Jung undoubtedly knew more than he chose to say in public, and suspected more than that. It is not safe to assume what he knew.

We could ask him, I suppose, only it has been a while since I felt able to do that. Dr. Jung? Do you care to comment?

[CGJ:] You are quite correct that I knew more than was safe to say. To get too far ahead of one’s contemporaries is to risk becoming irrelevant. But more than that, one often knows more than one can express, and certainly more than one can explain to others.

Beyond that, different schemes explaining life and the world are not necessarily to be ranked in hierarchies of importance or utility. My scheme, your scheme, another’s scheme may each have desirable and undesirable aspects, may each serve some purpose better than others. It isn’t so that one way of seeing things will be right, even if others may be wrong. Many schemes may be somewhat correct; nothing can be entirely correct. Life is always more complicated than our simplifications.

You haven’t quite asked me to pass upon your scheme, but I shall do so. It serves. It clarifies certain relationships and, particularly, brings into relationship factors usually seen only in isolation or separately.

Specifically, you are considering humans as partly 3D and partly non-3D beings, which is accurate. You are concentrating upon your experience of life as an interaction between you and non-you, and this is of course how 3D life is experienced. And most interestingly, you are defining emotion as the affect thrown off by the moment-to-moment experience of the “external” world as it comes at you with the next moment.

This is all worth pursuing, and you should do so without looking over your shoulder to see if it squares with anything and everything a Swiss physician expressed 100 years ago!

Well, that’s reassuring and helpful. I wish you would write for us what you knew by the time your life was over, and, more, what you know now. But that would require an amenuensis schooled in the things you knew, and where would you find one who was willing to risk his or her professional respectability?

In any case, carry on with your investigation, remembering that getting something wrong does not mean the investigation is useless, merely that the investigator is human.

Have we gotten things wrong?

Here you may imagine a dry Swiss chuckle. Pray continue, I wish you and your enterprise well.

I guess that leaves me smiling too.

Is it worthwhile to continue today, or do we close a little early?

No need to bow out just yet. Bear in mind, you just got an endorsement for our scheme and an absolution in advance for possible errors. What more can you ask?

 

Monday, October 5, 2020

I understand you to be concentrating on how the layer of feelings/perceptions colors how we experience the world. It occurred to me, an example of a factor that would be neither emotion nor thought would be a continual awareness of physical illness or debility.

Many similar influences might be cited. This will serve as example, one that you and Dirk should be able to relate to, particularly.

• A chronic illness pulls your mental default position away from that common to the mainstream.
• Its fostered habit of continual or periodic monitoring of health factors itself alters one’s mental default position.
• Additionally, what that monitoring reveals, and what it mandates, will move one from a sort of mainstream unconsciousness, in that it is a commonly taken-for-granted factor that cannot be taken for granted.
• During flare-ups, the condition will entirely redirect one’s attention. In intervals between flare-ups, it will not be entirely absent from consideration.

Now, what we want to stress here is not any difficulty that such condition may cause. Difficulty is part of life. Instead, we want to emphasize, as example, that such condition shapes one’s expectations, perceptions, and conclusions about life – not merely consciously, but far beyond the layer of 3D consciousness. This awareness cannot properly be said to be thinking, though thinking will sooner or later be involved, nor emotion or feeling, though they too will come into play. Primarily it will be in perceptions. It will be a part of the data out of which one constructs one’s model of the world.

Again, this is one example. Bearing in mind that it is example, and is only one of many, some things need to be said:

• Your own body in such circumstances is certainly going to be part of the “other” you experience. Your body does not automatically respond in the way it does when, say, you intend to move your arm and it moves. Therefore you experience the body as other than “you” in a way you probably would not do otherwise.
• At the same time, your body is going to be obviously part of “you.” It isn’t like you can lay it down and move off from it, however rebellious it might be.
• Therefore, an anomalous situation. Your body is both “you” and “other,” blurring what otherwise might seem a logical division of reality.
• Cam you call your awareness of this anomaly mental? Emotional? It is neither. It is basic to your experience of the world, like your awareness that you have a body, that you even exist in a world.
• It is not the condition, but the result of the condition, we draw your attention to. Your physical debility per se is only a first-tier experience. You won’t be dragging it (or perhaps we should say, it won’t be dragging you) into your post-3D existence. But the awareness it shaped, and what you did with that awareness, are second- and third-tier, respectively, and they will accompany you. Really, they become part of you.
• Can you possibly think that someone with such a chronic condition will experience the world in the same way as those without it? This is not to say that any two people will necessarily react in the same way to the same illness; it is to say, rather, that any two people with such a condition shaping their lives will live in a different world from those who do not.
• Only, don’t over-emphasize the importance of this one example. It is only one example. Lives lived in poverty or affluence, or under the influence of prejudice, or lived in emotional warmth or sterility, or in a supportive or challenging environment will all differ in their experience of what the world is and of what they are and of what they are in context of the “otherness,” the outside world. Only, these examples are more ambiguous, in that thought and feeling more clearly enter into the equation.

Your point is that our interface with the “external” world is neither intellectual nor emotional, primarily.

Our point is more that 3D life is not as it appears to be. Your subjective and objective worlds are not separate as they appear to be, nor is the distinction between sensory and intuitive, nor is the difference between thought and feeling. Life is one thing, and if we can once get that across in a meaningful way, everything else will fall into place.

Life is one thing, experienced as dualities. Dualities are always only relatively true, only relatively real. In actual fact, they are polar positions within a unity, and only relatively polar at that.

We are trying to provide you with the material to bridge seemingly irreconcilable opposites, and show that they are merely different emphases of the one unified reality that is all there is. In showing you how pre-conscious apprehension shapes the idea of the world that you can hold, we are showing you – if you can see it – how what looks like two, or like many, is always only one.

If there is any clearer way of saying it, I don’t know what it would be. Still, I get the sense that we haven’t conveyed it except to those who receive the spark.

It isn’t ever any different. Sparks fly from one to another, or they do not. But there is no other way to convey a knowing. Words, pictures, examples, illustrations, fables – whatever one uses, it is only effective when it happens to strike a spark in just the right way at just the right time. And the right way and right time cannot be mandated.

Can the would-be recipient improve his or her chances?

At attitude of open receptiveness is always helpful, in that it is the opposite of closing one’s mind. But beyond that, you tell us: How successful have you been, all these decades, learning to come to new understandings by force of will, so to speak?

True enough. But righteous persistence did and does bring reward.

Indeed it does – but in its own time, in its own way.

You don’t need to tell me that. Me, nor anyone who has spent years in diligent or even in recurrent or occasional searching for greater truth.

Yes, but realize that what we said may be taken as encouragement. The fact that progress comes in its own time, in its own way, means you aren’t liable to screw up the process. You can’t take one wrong turn and lose the results of so many years of striving. Third-tier experience will bring you new first-tier experiences.

I get that. To paraphrase: Our resolute continuation on whatever path we find will bring us new opportunities.

That is what we said, yes. And obviously, you don’t need to be perfect in your application, only resolute in your intent. That should make you realize, you can hardly fail except by deliberately turning away, choosing failure. And even if you do that, it isn’t the end of the story, and there is always the ability to repent and turn around.

 

Saturday, March 21, 2020

Guys, anything for us by way of advice on how to deal with this current hiatus in our normal lives?

Treat it just like that: as a hiatus. It isn’t the end of the world, but it is the end of a previous page. So take advantage of the pause. Be aware, and use that awareness. When you were under the infra-red lamp, it occurred to you to spend the few minutes not reading or day-dreaming but actively visualizing and aligning your chakras. A time of lessened duties and a lighter schedule allows anyone to take time for a progress report, and for routine maintenance, and for sight-seeing.

Interesting way to look at it. So we can experience greater mindfulness and can channel that mindfulness toward whatever in our lives tends to get neglected, so as to balance it.

That is one way to put it, yes. It can be a time of rebalancing.

Consider: How much responsibility do you personally bear for your society’s various intricate systems? Economics, politics, infrastructure in its various forms – how much do you as an individual contribute?

Won’t that answer depend on the person?

Of course it would, but it wasn’t poised as a question to be answered for anyone else: The point is to consider, individually, your situation. Then, balance.

Not yet sure what you are driving at.

That which you customarily neglect may now be given attention.

Now, look at that statement and reinterpret it several ways, each of which (not merely any one of which) is true.

1.      You as one member of society.

2.      You as yourself a community.

3.      You as a representative of the greater you that is necessarily unseen.

As a member of society.

You, Frank, are by nature solitary, and you have no responsibilities comparable to a letter carrier, or an employee, an executive of a company. So your contribution will not have been in those terms. Instead, like Jefferson and Adams at the continental congress, “you think for us all,” as their friend said. If you think, if you feel, if you meditate, if you visualize, all this has an effect on your shared subjectivity; that is, on the world around you. Some people’s contribution is physical, putting their physical presence on the line in an active role. Others contribute silently and no less effectively by what they are. Remember this.

I remember on Sept. 11, 2001, Rita asked the guys what she could do, and they said two things: hold your stability so that others could anchor to you, and be a beacon, radiating your values.

Yes, that is exactly the sense of it. Invisible contributions, not at all negligible contributions. If a phone call steadies someone and stops them from succumbing to fear, or if one’s personal example does the same thing, that is a real but invisible contribution.

The British people under the bombs in the Battle of Britain.

Yes. Calm resolute endurance, a pride in not panicking. If anything, a resort to understatement and humor as bolsters to self-defense. Every man, woman, or child who put up a stiff upper lip did add that bit of resistance to panic. The cumulative effect was immense.

A Marine friend of Hemingway’s told him he would have made a good Marine because the one thing a Marine was most afraid of was showing fear.

Can anyone deny that Marines are a formidable fighting force?

As yourself a community.

You have your own neglected constituent parts to consider here: physical, mental, emotional, and connective or spiritual. That which you customarily neglect, pay attention to it.

If you have kepi in good physical shape, now is the time to look at the other three aspects of your life and shore up whatever is weakest.

If you are customarily a brain-worker, give time to nurture your emotions and your connections to your non-3D self. See what they need. Consider (feel) how giving them due attention can benefit you.

If you relate to the world primarily through your feelings, consider whether you need to think more, or exercise more, or identify more with less obvious parts of yourself.

And if your primary link in this life is to the non-3D, come back to a closer attention to mundane 3D responsibilities. In all cases, balance.

As 3D aspect of a larger being.

Remember that your personal invulnerability is shared by one and all, whether or not they know it, or believe it, or whether their biographical circumstances seem to support it. As Seth said, you live in a safe universe. Only, remember this when you drown in a shipwreck. Regardless what happens to your body (or even, in a way, to the habit-system that is your 3D mind), you are safe because it is impossible for you ever to be not safe.

Die?

Become crippled in some way?

Become destitute?

Suffer something incurable?

In terms of your 3D life, yes of course it matters, and yes of course it cannot be merely talked out of existence. If life were as simple as maintaining perspective and an even keep, it wouldn’t be very challenging. Nonetheless, in the larger sense, what happens to you in 3D doesn’t matter. What does matter is how you decide to react to what happens to you.

So there is our advice to you on how to approach the current situation. And we will add – be joyous, not merely determined. It takes many a broken egg to make an omelet. Identify with the omelet and you will grieve less for the broken eggs.

Meaning, I think, this is one more example of the unsustainable old systems breaking down so that new ones may have space to emerge.

The ancient Romans were probably little inclined to welcome the Vandals and Goths and Visigoths that finished destroying what was dead-and-alive but had not the strength to die. Nonetheless you can see, those eggs had to be thoroughly broken if they were not to rot.

Culinary examples to the side, thanks for all this.

Your customary signoff may have different resonance in the circumstances, but it is certainly appropriate: “Be well.”

 

Thursday, March 19, 2020

Gentlemen, I am asked [on Facebook] to ask you two questions about the corona virus.

Forrest A: Was this viral incident intentional and if so, details of the goals involved and should we prepare for similar incidents in the near future.

Suzanne G: Yes, and a follow up, was this designed as an opportunity for growth, or is it just the consequence of our poor choices as a species?

[TGU]: As is often our way, we choose to answer these questions in a way that may be helpful, rather than in a way that would reinforce incorrect assumptions built into the questions. Let us begin by answering Suzanne’s questions first, because easiest disposed of. Suzanne’s question builds in so many assumptions: “designed,” “poor choices,” and, most of all, the assumption that this is an either/or rather than two ways of looking at the same things.

Every situation is an opportunity for growth; that doesn’t mean “we” designed it, except in the largest sense of the word “we.” But those who have not followed the definition of “objective” as “shared subjectivity” may not easily follow this point. It isn’t that “we” here do something to “you” there. For one thing, we/you is a false separation; for another, so is here/there. For yet another, there isn’t really any separation in the universe; everything is connected in multiple ways, visibly and invisibly.

Is this an opportunity for growth? Certainly it is, but so was living with the results of the A-bomb at Hiroshima, or the Cold War, or polio epidemics. Every social and familial and individual situation is an opportunity for growth, and this is not merely playing with words. We’re saying something important here. Your current situation is the result, of course, of all your past poor choices and good choices alike. It always is. A wide enough view would leave you in some doubt as to how to be sure a given decision was good or poor. So much depends upon context, and upon the values being served and expressed.

I’m not sure that is going to be as clear to everyone as to those who have been following our journey.

Do you expect to be able to summarize 20 years’ worth of periodic instruction in a paragraph? And yet, it is not necessary to retrace the path. For some, it will be enough to hear the point of view and open the heart to recognize its accuracy. So, to put it into a nutshell:

• The interior world and the exterior world are the same thing, one experienced through intuition, the other through the senses.
• What seems to you to be “external, objective” circumstances are actually the living, continually refreshing internal subjectivity, in which all living beings share.
• Therefore – this may be intuited directly by those not closed off from it – there can be no coincidences, no accidents, no injustice or neglect or malign intent in the design of the world, regardless of how it appears.
• And therefore, everything is an opportunity, in that everything is rooted in what you are and what you have done and what forces are alive within you, individually and as part of levels of humanity.

“Levels of humanity” meaning, I take it, the various rings we are part of: family, neighborhoods, societies, nations, etc.

Yes and not in a hierarchical sense, but a more inclusive sense. You form a part of many different subsets of humanity; to some degree you experience reality buffered by each of these subsets. However, this is a little theoretical for the moment. For the moment, the point is, you are all individuals, you are all part of collectives. Both, not one or the other. In so far as you emphasize one over the other, you will experience differently. This isn’t anyone “doing something” to you; it is you choosing, even if not consciously.

So, to answer Suzanne’s question, if you regard your situation as the result of poor choices, that may clarify your values. Your individual question becomes: How do I vote to decide differently? (We do not, of course, use “vote” in this case to refer to political elections.) You cannot vote for your whole species; you can only vote by your own life. If you do not express in your life what you would have society do, any words you may speak or any emotions you may feel are beside the point.

You see? You are not victim, you are not powerless, because you are responsible for you, yet “you” extends to all mankind. Exhorting others is well and good – what else are we doing here? – but what counts is what you make yourselves, day by day, by your decisions. As you see, this refers to far more than one virus or any one crisis or problem.

Thank you, that is concisely said. And Forrest’s question?

This is actually two questions, and not quite the questions he or she thinks s/he is asking.

“Should we prepare for similar incidents in the future” does not depend upon a yes, no, or maybe to the first part. A moment’s thought should show you that yes, you should expect such incidents as continuing possibilities. If man-made once, they can be man-made again; if not man-made this time, they can be man-made another time; if never man-made past present or future, the fact that they exist demonstrates that they can occur, therefore might occur. If man-made by accident (that is, inadvertent side-effects), still, what happened once may happen again. So, in all cases, yes, you may expect the condition to recur.

And how do you prepare for them? On one level, rearranging your lives to reduce risk. But is that very productive, really, ultimately?

Ultimately, I’d say it is a reminder that we’re all in this together, only some people’s lives are more insulated from it than others.

Have you ever thought that one reason you haven’t had a nuclear war is because riches could not buy safety? If that were true of hunger, or deprivation of any kind, we assure you, they would not long exist. This is not saying, Blame the rich. It is saying, it is always easier to relate to one’s own circle than to those beyond it; easier to see one’s particular needs than to realize that one’s needs extend invisibly to the rest of humanity in which they live and move and have their being.

Now, as to the first part of the question, we pose a counter-question. What good would it do you, as one individual, to decide that this situation was or was not intentionally designed? How would having an opinion on it help you to give your best response, to be your best self in response?

Finger-pointing.

We cannot see what possibly good it could do. In the first place, why should anyone believe us? If they didn’t resonate to what we said, they world, at best, say “Frank’s attention wavered there”; at worse, “Frank is part of the cover-up” or, alternatively, “Frank is getting paranoid.” They couldn’t rationally blame us, you see, because if we are lying about one thing, why not about everything?

“Falso in uno, falso in omnibus.”

Exactly. But the real point is, what good would it do for you to decide that “Someone did this deliberately”?  Would it help you to prepare? Would it help you to remember that you are all part of one shared humanity? Would it encourage you to work on yourselves? And we remind you, working on yourselves is the only real work there is. That doesn’t mean, be selfish. It means, your life in the world is not the disconnected contingent thing you sometimes think it. Your life has meaning. Find it, deepen it, express it. and remember if you can, despite appearances, all is always well.