Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

Your 3D consciousness considered by itself has room to grow. What you are aware of can expand, depending upon willingness and circumstance.

Doesn’t it amount to saying, we can become aware of more of the content of our entire mind, rather than only the 3D-specific parts of it that we always have?

In a sense, yes. But there is more to it than that: willingness, circumstance. Willingness means you have to be able to deal with it, and you have to be able to do the dealing. Circumstance means, not all times are equally propitious. Carpe diem. Those who are willing to expand their everyday-life consciousness will find the propitious circumstances. Your greater mind, your All-D mind, call it, will always bring you what you need when you are able to make use of it. But not every opportunity is taken. You can lead a 3D mind to water, but you can’t make it drink. Nothing tragic about that, it’s just the way things are in 3D.

However, the counterbalancing factor is propitious times. Sometimes you have to wait. That’s a reason to use your opportunities when they become obvious to you, lest you miss the opportune moment and are forced by circumstance to wait. Again, it isn’t a tragedy, but it can be inconvenient. The world will bring you what you want, and you can choose the reality you want to experience, but the 3D reality of the lives you are all living at the moment ought to tell you that it isn’t that simple.

As always, you can’t get anything from the material (or from anything, really) if you merely accept it but don’t relate it to what you know by living it. So don’t just say, “Oh, yeah, create your own reality, I know all that, I don’t have any problem with this” – apply it! Ask yourselves, if it is true, why does my life contain what I don’t want as well as what I do? If it is true, how can what I live be true as well? And don’t settle for an evasion, an easy answer that answers only by explaining things away, but wrestle with it.

If you find it easy, you aren’t wrestling with it. That’s a pretty flat statement, but we’ll stand by it at least for now. You have to really look, to really see what it is you believe, and if you find that you believe two things that seem to contradict each other, you need to see if you can work out a sense in which they do not. The more sincere effort you expend, naturally the better the prospects for a worthwhile outcome.

—

This is an edited excerpt from “Only Somewhat Real,” not yet published.

 

[Epilogue to “Only Somewhat Real”]

Nathaniel – or whatever his name is – and I have worked hard to present a different way of seeing the world. I think it’s coherent, it explains a lot, and it is endlessly hopeful in its implications. But is it true?

Can it be true that this 3D life that seems so real to us is only somewhat real?

Is it a fair description of our lives, to say we’re always doing improv?

It may ring true, that we are creators by nature. Does it also ring true that our real work is to create ourselves?

Vast impersonal forces flow through us, animate us, and are deflected or are redirected to some degree by our decisions. Does this ring true to you?

We are all interconnected; thus in a sense we are all part of one thing. True? False? Debatable?

We are called to create ourself through our choices. Thus it may be said that we are the center of the world. Everyone else is called, equally, to create themselves by their choices. Thus it may be said that none of us is the center of the world. Nathaniel holds that both statements are true, that it’s all in how you look at it.

Free will is a given. (Choice without free will would be a pretense, a farce.) Predestination is a given. (Wherever we find ourselves, we are at the end of a long chain of cause and effect that could have led nowhere else.) Nathaniel says both are true, not just one. Do you know any way to reconcile the two other than Nathaniel’s?

These are big questions, big statements. The book is full of big questions, big statements. Is it safe, is it wise, either to reject them out of hand or to accept them without examination?

In short: What are you doing to do now?

Everything in this book may be true – I hope it is – but you won’t know until you test it for yourself. Knowing can’t be passed on through words or even by example. It must be lived. Until you live it, it is only hearsay to you.

It is true, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, but that step begins with the decision to take the step. Until you decide to take that step, you aren’t on a journey, you’re toying with the idea of taking a journey. Similarly, sometimes you have begun a journey and you decide to pause. Nothing wrong with that. Choice is what it’s all about, after all.

But when you’re ready to start, or ready to resume, the things Nathaniel has given us in this book are things you might wish to test, so see if they will bear your weight.

Whether you are just beginning, or beginning again after a pause, or reading this while already traveling,  I wish you a productive journey. After all, I have a vested interest: Your success is mine, as mine is yours. It is very true, we’re all in this together.

—

From “Only Somewhat Real,” not yet published.

 

Look at it this way. Daniel Boone may have been a respected member of his community in North Carolina, but what could his townsmen have told him about Kentucky? His role was to pursue the rumors of the Kentucky wilderness and bring them back to the Yadkin valley. Pioneers don’t use maps; they don’t even necessarily make maps. They cause them to be drawn.

I take it all the Daniel Boone stuff is out of my memory, not yours.

The process is not different, it is the character of the relationship.

I see, So you are going to give us rumors of Kentucky.

In a sense, yes. Only, the fewer your expectations, even in analogy, the easier the task.

Keep firmly in mind the larger theme: Why is 3D life only “somewhat” real? But bear in mind that this is going to bring you a long way seemingly afield, and will involve what seem to be extraneous matters, and contradictions, before we can bring in enough context to allow you to see things sufficiently differently. Even more so than in your work with Rita in which she sketched the variables around death and rebirth, we need to associate many things in your mind that you have never consciously or coherently associated. Much of what you need to know you do know, only you don’t know you know it, or you know it only in a seemingly unrelated context, or you know it distorted by other people’s reports.

While writing that, I had the thought, “You’re finding it easier to speak,” and then I had a flash of “You’ve connected to Rita somehow and learned how to do it,” though I don’t think that’s quite right. But, something has changed.

There are others in the mental world, call it, besides Rita, you know. But your intuition was mostly correct.

You are somehow communicating through Joseph, or someone!

That’s right. This still involves distortions, but using personalities even closer to you than someone you worked with and were on affectionate terms with and shared a vocabulary and a set of external situations with – Rita, that is – provides the link with language and assumptions, but with fewer confusions.

Can you go into why?

The shortest way to say it is that in dealing with you through Joseph Smallwood, say, we are thus dealing essence to essence on your end. That is – well, here, you state it.

It is a little more complicated than a sentence conveys. All right. This kind of communication is always essence to essence in one sense, in that it bypasses the personas that are our guardians at the gate, our pre-established interfaces with “the other.” So it is mind to mind, not mind to verbiage to reception to mind, as it would be in 3D (overlooking, for the moment, the fact that mind to mind also functions in our 3D life). But mind-to-mind between X and Joseph, say, is different from mind-to-mind between X and me, or X and Bertram. It is as if each of us is a different mood of our over-arching being.

Yes, and that is enough for the moment. This isn’t the time for further speculation, although another time may be. The point is that whoever we contact, bias will have been thereby introduced. The process cannot be helped, it must be allowed for.

I get the feeling that if we pursued this correctly, we’d learn something about why spiritualists used to think they needed a conductor to bring them to the one they wanted to speak to.

Don’t forget, those were early days. Their ground rules never applied as universals, however helpful they were to their times.

Which is why it is a mistake to be bound by other people’s rules.

Which is why it may be a mistake to be bound by them. It is usually worth your while to try them on for size, though.

So, are we good?

Ready to stop, then? We can stop for the moment. Yes, we have a way to proceed. As we say, it will have its disadvantages, but we will work around them, as people always need to do.

I take it that who you connect with may differ depending on where we go.

Depending on many things, many of them unsuspected on your end. And remember,

Oh, is that a correction I just sensed, of something I got from the guys when Rita and I were first contacting them?

It is a sort of correction, yes. A slight readjustment of your understanding.

I had been thinking the guys had said that they took turns speaking to us – that sometimes even in the middle of a sentence, one phased out and another phased in, usually unnoticed by us. It strikes me now, what they may have been saying is that the intent remained constant, but that the minds that they were silently connected with as intermediaries might fluctuate. Small difference, but significant. Did I get that right?

Remember always, in this work: Many, even most, of your misunderstandings and misstatements will go unchallenged. In the course of time, contradictions and errors will emerge to be corrected, but if we were to be correcting every misstatement, it would involve so much tedious restatement and spelling-out of context as to make any coherence impossible. When you get something wrong and it is going to make a big difference, we have to correct the statement, and the correction itself is part of the learning. But if it is minor and has no great consequences, we let it go, in the way that you, say, might not correct every slip of someone’s grammar for fear of inhibiting them from saying anything at all.

—

This is an edited excerpt from “Only Somewhat Real,” not yet published.

The theme is that the forces in the world that we call the virtues and sins make up our 3D environment.

That isn’t quite right, but it will lead you in the right direction. The question is, how does 3D life express forces that are realer than 3D life itself.

Yes, Woke up to hear “love makes the world go round,” not as an annoying refrain, just as a one-time statement. So I take it that is our theme, this morning? Love as an example of the forces that animate our lives?

This collaboration may be a little bit complicated. It is as if there is systematic interference between what we want to express and what you understand us to say, or mean, or intend.

Yes, it’s a form of static on the line, coming from the differences between your experiences and our assumptions, maybe.

Whatever the reason, it causes difficulties.

Why not continue to use Rita as intermediary, or anybody whose human experience will enable them to make allowances and understand how to compensate for differences in assumptions?

That has been done, for millennia. The advantages of the proceeding are obvious. But there are disadvantages. The very earth-shaped characteristics of the human or ex-human mind that aid transmission of the familiar impede transmission of the unfamiliar. The disadvantages are the unwanted associations of ideas, of the sounds of the words, of logically unrelated but emotionally connected incidents or thoughts, mostly unnoticed, almost always incompletely traced.

This is even on the non-3D end?

What else are we talking about? The obstacles on your end are constant, it is the obstacles on the other end that are variable.

Oh, I get it, I think – the vagaries of the temporary joint mind.

We cannot add unwanted assumptions if they are not there to be added.

That’s an interesting complication that had not occurred to me.

Yes, the love that makes the world go round provides a strong bond that lasts beyond physical death, so, all to the good. But sometimes you need to learn from a more neutral force, if you wish to expand your territory.

—

This is an edited excerpt from “Only Somewhat Real,” not yet published.

 

Wednesday, September 20, 2017

The initial insight was that our lives are only “somewhat” real because this level of reality we experience is not in any way an ultimate level. Since it isn’t, we aren’t. We are, in a way, characters in an on-running drama, created for the purpose of being conduits of forces greater than us, realer than us somehow, preceding us and, I gather, destined to outlive us. They may be eternal, whatever eternal means.

Compound beings. Humans. Constructs that live in an abbreviated version of reality, knowing only what can be known while constricted to a present moment that is a moving pinpoint. Yet, eternal beings no less.

We were given a definition of the larger being (of which we 3D beings are a part) that was arbitrarily called Sam to avoid an implication of gender, as Sam could stand for Samuel or Samantha. Our part-of-Sam nature is as eternal as Sam, and we assume that Sams are eternal at least for the purpose of the exploration. Relative to any one earth life, certainly a Sam is eternal, immortal. We, sharing that essence, are equally so. not much different from religion saying we share the essence of God (whatever God may be), but the rest of the analogy is close enough to continue with.

But if we are made of the undying essence of a Sam, the combinations we form are not unchanging or necessarily eternal. Joseph, Bertram, Frank, etc., all have a limited existence in 3D. Do they necessarily have an unlimited existence beyond 3D?

Need to go slow.

I remember author C.S. Forester saying somewhere that what ruins plots is forcing them rather than letting them grow in their own time. This sounds like a similar process, maybe the same process. All right then.

Essence and personality

Our essence is Sam’s essence. Our personality is the 3D expression of certain combinations of traits, etc. But we haven’t noted the difference in relative reality. Funny phrase, “relative reality.” But that’s the way to put it, I think.

Essence is real and unchangeable. Personality is more like a mask or a costume or a role in a drama, and is real only in its own terms, as Han Solo is real only in the Star Wars movie context, while Harrison Ford is real beyond the movie, in 3D life. But Harrison Ford is real only in the 3D context. The actor who is playing Harrison Ford himself is real beyond the 3D context, in real (realer?) life.

That’s the difference between spirit and soul, come to think of it. If I have it right, spirit is unchanging, unchangeable, unconstrained. “The spirit goes where it wants to,” to put it into modern language. Thus, the actor playing Harrison Ford. The soul, born into 3D, experiencing all the emotions of life, affected by what happens to it, is Harrison Ford as played in 3D Theater.

Actor and character

Hmm, so the point being pressed is that we are both actor and character, and that is a source of great confusion and great opportunity for growth. Religions see us as both divine and human, do they not? That is how they describe Jesus – but he is reported to have said that anything he had done, his followers would do and would do more, or greater. I often wondered if his calling himself “son of man” meant that he was what we could become.

In any case, if we are both actor and character, it is as if Han Solo, in character, during the movie, became aware of being the creature of Harrison Ford, and began speaking and reacting as Harrison Ford rather than as himself, not knowing the link between them, and perhaps not sensing the confusion as actually a breakthrough. It might play hell with the movie being shot, unless the movie was about Han Solo discovering he was a creation of (part of) Harrison Ford.

But we aren’t in a movie, I have been told more than once, but are doing improv. That’s exactly how it feels. And it comes to me, maybe one reason for the improv is for the actors to see through the drama (knowing there is no plot) so as to realize fully that they are actors (i.e. only relatively real in that their roles are added on to their essence, not intrinsic to it) and that the purpose of their acting is not to fill the time but to give expression to the forces that they feel flow through them. The cardinal virtues, the deadly sins: real forces, expressing in 3D. Why? As a sort of safety valve? A puppet show? Why?

The cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude. (And some add faith, hope, and charity.)

The seven deadly sins, whose initials I years ago made into an acronym so I could remember them: LEG CAPS. Lust, envy, gluttony, covetousness, anger, pride, and sloth (or ennui). Of the seven deadly sins, pride is traditionally considered first in importance.

All human life may be considered as a playing-out of those forces among varied circumstances.

But the forces pre-exist human life.

They are realer than human life, as you are realer than your human roles.

Hard to see how they could manifest outside of 3D conditions. Gluttony? Lust?

That is how they manifest in 3D conditions. But the underlying forces exist or they could not manifest.

—

This is an edited excerpt from “Only Somewhat Real,” not yet published.

 

All my reading of novels, of history and biography, and my frequent viewings and re-viewings of films may be seen in a different way, in light of the hint thrown out the other day by whatever force I was talking to. Behind all those stories of individuals are stories of conflicts of forces, of ebbs and flows of the power that flows through people for its own purposes.

This will strike some people as fanciful, as inappropriately concrete metaphor, so they will think either it is playing with words or it is being seduced by words into cloud-cuckoo-land. I can feel how inadequate language is. Trying to render what I just got there, the best I could do missed most of it.

Your practice has been to develop your skill. In practice that has meant, to bend your habits in certain directions in order to compensate for tendencies that would interfere.

Okay, we’re going to have to work differently, aren’t we?

We are. Express it.

Let me try to say what I just got.

A long process of development

My initial attempts at automatic writing imitated what I thought I understood from what I had read. This changed into communicating with The Boss, then Evangeline (first attempts to personify the forces I was experiencing), then The Guys Upstairs, then individuals such as David Poynter and Joseph Smallwood, then historically recognized figures like Lincoln and Jung and others, then – interspersed more as exceptions than as part of a progression – people I had known like my old friend David Schlachter and finally Rita. That long process, extending from about 1989, led me along, with gradually accumulating experience repeatedly modifying not only what I thought I knew, but the practice. The sequence aimed to change how I went about things, correcting mistaken ideas and, perhaps more fundamentally, habitual traits that tended to interfere.

My perceptions changed, my ability to work with those perceptions changed, and so did my part in these discussions. It has been a good long time since I was only a scribe writing down pearls from the other side. Dictation became conversation. Conversation clarified into part instruction, part how-to. From the beginning, the process was never what I expected on the basis of what I had read. Instead, it was peculiar to me. It was quite disconcerting to Rita in 2001, I remember. She was not used to a process where the person communicating was right there, passing along humor from “them.” But I don’t see how we could have done our work then, let alone our work subsequently, if we had tried to make what came to us fit into some preconceived box in format or content. And now, I think we’re changing gears once again.

It’s like we’re edging toward Bob Monroe’s “rotes,” where non-verbal transmission of information has to be unpacked into words, which can only be done by someone familiar with 3D restrictions of thought and experience. So, all these words have been in response to “Express it.” Earlier it was, “One level does not understand another,” and it was with that sentence that I realized that our manner of proceeding was going to have to change. I am not complaining. I think it is a good thing. But it is different, and should be seen as a new departure.

I got that we all speak at our own level of understanding. Some are incapable of seeing any level but the one they are used to. Some move in their lifetimes from one to another, leaving behind not only the habit but even the memory of the former level. Some – I’m one – move from level to level, partly inadvertently or unconsciously, partly upon demand as they learn to discern different levels. I don’t think there is any implied “better” or “worse” about it, but it is a difference in the three states. Either (1) stable and relatively unchanging, or (2) stable, then transformed, then stable again, or (3) a stability consisting of fluidity.

I think those of us who are able to move among levels are here as translators, stitching together different levels of understanding. And as I was writing that, I was reminded that the Indians called Joseph Smallwood the commuter, the man who alternated from one world to the other. That referred to him going back and forth between Indians and white worlds, but that same habit of mind that could translate different ways of seeing things might persist, I suppose.

Or might be an effect of prior training.

Hmm. Such as Joseph the Egyptian, you mean?

[Pause]

Dramas as doorways

Well, the point I’m taking such a long time getting to is that what is obvious reality to one level is fantasy to another. We see it in our 3D lives and it is also “as above, so below.” It just depends upon how far you care to extend it.

So, an example. If I say that our 3D lives are only somewhat real because we are the embodiment of forces beyond the 3D level, some people intuitively get it. In fact, it is more like I am agreeing with something they already know than like they are hearing anything new. But others have to wrestle with it, at first having to take on faith that I am not speaking nonsense, then seeing what they can make of it. And others not only can’t make anything out of it, but you might say won’t. It is self-evidently nonsense, and they aren’t going to waste their time. The different levels don’t translate.

And this brings us back to the thought that came to me as I sat down to do this: Dramas in whatever form are stories, and stories are, shall we say, peepholes, or entry-points, or doorways into other levels of meaning. But doorways function as doorways only if you walk through them, and those who are not ready to go through the doorways never even see them as such.

And I think that rounds out what we are going to get from these two cryptic expressions. This is a very interesting development. I will say, pro forma, to the energy system that is communicating to us, thank you. But my sense is that he is far beyond such human interaction.

—

This is an excerpt from “Only Somewhat Real,” not yet published.

 

Whoever you are, you are not so much accustomed to words, are you? Yet, you are coming through my mind; why does that not command the language I know?

[A long pause. At least, it seemed long. Less than a minute, I suppose.]

That was quite an experience. The response I got was a deepening of communication, in a few waves of difference, as if my mind settled, bit by bit, into a deeper, calmer place. And this wasn’t during the reaction, or because of the reaction. It was the reaction. Whoever I am in communication with is well beyond words, and needs my access to words if it is going to communicate at all.

That is much better. Can you see how your assumption that you were talking to a human mind – or an ex-human mind, as you like to say – absolutely interfered with the communication process? Absolutely interfered, and, carried farther, might have absolutely prevented.

You are nearing a fundamental transformation of your understanding of the process, if you are open to it and do not prefer to halt at the relatively stable place you have come to.

No, actually, I look forward to it.

Only somewhat real

Very well. So, from a mind that has never been human, you cannot expect a human slant on things, even though the words and concepts have to come through yours. Remember, always, that you are in the process. Any communication to humans must have a human intermediary, obviously. This affords opportunities for mistranslation of concepts, but without it, there is no medium of transmission. And of course in speaking to humans, the recipients themselves are equally sources of misunderstanding, mishearing, even deliberate refusal to understand or to hear.

Yes, that’s clear enough.

It is clear, but it is almost immediately forgotten as soon as heard. So, try to bear it in mind.

I’m not writing scripture, I get that.

Oh, but you are! What is scripture but human attempts to convey messages? Any serious and relatively successful attempt to communicate is of the same nature as scripture. However, don’t take that to be elevating you in stature; take it to be reminding you and your readers not to elevate scripture to a level it cannot sustain.

“You do the best you can,” Bob Monroe said. I think he was trying to say something of what you’re implying here, that all communication involves distortion because it is a translation from one set of conditions to another.

Almost from one reality to another. Not quite, but almost. And it requires great patience, practice, sincerity and even a form of recklessness. All of which you have been practicing for as long as John Tettemer was a monk.

I take it that is encouragement for any who are impelled to take the same road.

They don’t necessarily require encouragement, but some may find it there.

Now listen, for time is short in the remainder of this session. You have been told that your life as experienced is only somewhat real. This is because your life as you are experiencing it is deeper, with stronger cross-currents, than a mere conflict of compound-beings. You got the idea: Try to express it.

We see history as it affects us, so it becomes a matter of individuals, such as MacArthur and Wilson and Roosevelt and Hemingway and John F. Kennedy and Churchill and Robert Henri, and W.B. Yeats and so on. And to us, this is reality. It combines the external world we experience, even at second-hand, and the inner world we construct or experience as we cooperate in shaping our ideas of what is going on. But a deeper level of reality involves the same events, the same individuals, but experiences them as forces, as – I don’t know how to put it. As manifestations, I suppose.

Try not to stop there, but continue, for when you return you will not be in the same place.

In a real sense, our 3D lives may be seen at different levels of reality, and our accustomed way of seeing them is relatively superficial. All the deadly forces that run through us, as well as the living forces too, could be said to live their own lives through us. No, that doesn’t get it.

Try!

If you were a playwright, you might try to express certain ideas. You would have to clothe the ideas in characters, and express them in conflict and interaction of the characters. There would be no other way to do it.

Perhaps not “no other way,” but continue.

It would be the interplay of forces that concerned you, and the interplay of the characters you had invented would be secondary.

Well, not exactly. You acquire a stake in the characters as you animate them. You should know that, as you think of those you have brought to life and then have seen having that life, with its own bounds and possibilities.

—

This is an excerpt from “Only Somewhat Real,” not yet published.