Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

Saturday, March 16, 2024

9:10 a.m. I figure it’s time for a chat with the guys. Nice to have enough energy again. So, boys, what’s on your mind?

Let’s briefly discuss Memory Lane, its uses and possibilities.

Discuss away.

Your poking into your past memories via journals and – especially – fictionalized recounting set into print long ago – offers you a time machine. Not only do you get an automatic correction of dates and sequence, you get vivid reminders of what you felt then, and you get vivid comparisons between what you concluded whenever you wrote what you now read and what strikes you from this vantage point so many years – decades – later.

And what was that? This: You are not the same person. (We should hope it is clear that this must apply to any and all, but it never hurts to make it plain.) In that sense, it is not a time capsule alone; it is also a time capsule opened by a different person than originally sealed it. We know you know on some level that you are not –

Well, maybe we’ve never said this explicitly.

I don’t think you did, no, at least not what I’m hearing so far. Proceed.

Horizontally (so to speak) you now know that you are not one but many, or, if you have done the work, are one made from many, although the many retain their separate existence.

But look at yourself vertically – that is, as you proceed through time during your years of life. You will see that here too you are not one but many. And it can be harder to make one out of the many than it is to make one out of the many strands.

We need a better focus on this. Horizontally, strands. Vertically, –?

The naming will somewhat define your understanding, so we will proceed carefully. If we were to say one version of you for every moment of awareness (or rather, for every moment lived, regardless how aware your 3D self was or was not), you might see that as a clear statement, but when you came to try to use it, what could you do with it? Let us say you are different at 3:35 p.m. one day than you are at 3:36. How can you really imagine in any useful way a life made up of hundreds of thousands of slightly different versions of yourself? Not everything that is true is also useful.

So how make the distinctions still true but also useful, useable?

Simplify, simplify, simplify.

There is really no alternative. The saying is, “The map is not the territory.” Of course not, it is a simplified representation. It is in the simplification that its usefulness inheres. Simplifying relationships makes plainer their relative positions. If one over-simplifies, one distorts beyond the value of usefulness, but until that point, the simplifying process is a clarificatory one.

Not sur about “clarificatory,” but I get your gist. Only, everybody is going to have a different dividing point between useful and oversimplified.

Certainly, but that’s true of everything. Individual judgments always differ. That’s one of the advantages your non-3D component derives from having 3D representatives.

Parallax.

Essentially. Now, to return to what we may call vertical community. What would be an acceptable level of simplification?

I suppose, most grossly, childhood, youth, young adult, middle age, old age, something like that.

Yes that is one way one could begin to learn one’s vertical components. So, a conference table or campfire or whatever, populated by the child you were, the youth etc., and – personalizing these abstractions – see what you can be learning from one another. This is one way, and we may say a very basic way. Basic, as in, easy to do, but limited in possibility.

I get that maybe we could set up (find?) representatives of who we were before and after certain turning points. Not sure how practical that would be, though.

“Practical” implies “for a certain end.” What end would you foresee?

Oh, I don’t know. Self-awareness, I suppose, what else can we call it?

Consider what you did in posting your articles on “Dave.”

They haven’t appeared yet, but okay.

You are a long way beyond that 23-year-old whose life was so brutally punctuated. By rereading old words you in effect brought together the “you” in the immediate event, the “you” who later wrote about it, and the “you” who has had a long lifetime ‘s experiences beyond that.

Now, this is difficult to say because it has so many elements.

Bullets, maybe?

• The strands active at any of those times.
• Interaction among them, outside of time.
• Emotions, thoughts, physical sensations, unconscious resonance from each player involved, that is, from each moment of time.
• Judgments and their interactions. What a 25-year-old sees, feels, decides will not necessarily mesh with a 50- or 75-year-old.
• Ongoing conclusions, not quite the same thing as judgments. “What’s the lesson in this? Where do I go from here?”
• Pass-forwards and pass-backs: In effect, telepathy among different moments of time. Unexpected insights; emotional flashbacks; seemingly disconnected memories and themes.
• All of this, remember, also going on among all your strands, each of which has its own life.

All these elements in play, all the time, mostly (necessarily) beneath your level of consciousness, if only because of the sheer volume of input it would  represent. So when you revisit your past, you stir the pot.

Unless.

Oh, I hear it. And this is going to tie up a couple of loose ends, isn’t it?

Tie one, create two more. But yes. The “unless” is – unless in revisiting your past you insist on seeing it always the same way. You play the same tapes, you’d say. And this, as you immediately intuited, ties in with Life More Abundantly. Tell why in your understanding.

Life playing old tapes is in a rut. It is stuck. It clings to the sides of the sliding board, determined that, no matter what happens in the future, at least the past isn’t going to change. And good luck to that.

Life More Abundantly is all about increasing your room to maneuver, broadening the amount of your life that is under your control. Or, no, not “under your control,” that gives the wrong idea. Let ‘s say, it broadens the scope for you to shape your life, past, present and future.

It is so clear to me, though still mostly beyond words. We are meant to widen our scope, not in pursuit of self-aggrandizement, but to function well as part of the larger organism of which we are a part. When I read Colin’s Mind Parasites fable, it resonated because he was saying what I hadn’t known I knew: Our lives are not essentially trivial, accidental, meaningless. Our possibilities are real but not obvious. But even as I put this into writing, it loses its noumenal quality and becomes mere words. Doesn’t matter, it’s still true.

Vertical communities, as well as horizontal. Thanks, guys.

 

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

8:50 p.m. Okay, I hear you. Let’s talk more about life More Abundantly

You should note that it came to you in context of our suggestion that your engineers’ group consider how to balance between 3D and non-3D.

How to move our center of gravity, I believe you said. And yes, when I thought that I thought of Dave, who consistently focuses on Life More Abundantly more than anyone else.

Including you.

Really? Perhaps so.

It is a defining stream for him. Each of you has or may have such an identifying stream.

May have?

Let’s say, may recognize. For, by your individual makeup, one or another angle of approach will seem natural, productive, almost ordained for you.

All right, and Life More Abundantly is Dave’s?

We do not mean to imply that there can be only one such stream for any given person. But yes, certainly this is one for him – and, by extension, for his smaller group and the larger group.

So what did you want to be saying about it?

We reiterate, this has nothing to do with acquisition of goods or honors or even satisfactions, certainly not of honors or power or even influence upon kindred souls. It is not about prospering in 3D. Yet – because you are living in 3D, it is about your thriving in your life. Only, what is “thriving” in this context, and what is :life”?

I can feel what we have been unable to figure out how to say. I don’t know why it should be so slippery.

Subtle shifts can be harder to define than large course-corrections. You have often experienced this.

Oh yes. I get accused of pedantry when I am merely seeking greater precision of thought and expression. An odd problem for a wordsmith who is far more intuitive than sensory.

The problem inheres in perception. Those accustomed to broad sweeping terms and fields of vision may find it hard to control their impatience when asked to distinguish fine shades of color one from another. So, with that warning, that we could hardly make more explicit, let’s look to the subject of what we really mean by Life More Abundantly.

For some reason I am reminded of the quote attributed to Dzongsan Khyentse Rimpoche: “If we could not be bought by praise or defeated by criticism, we would have incredible strength. We would be extraordinarily free.”

That is directly on point, you see.

I sort of see.

Life is about you. You are your life. Your world centers on you, rightly. We have said this many times. It is true for each, which modifies the effect in practice, but for now consider only this half of the truth, because it is the key.

Is this what Gurdjieff meant when he said there are two forms of considering others, one of them illegitimate?

Let’s leave him out of it. Those interested in him will pursue it. Others will find it a distraction. But yes, that is what he meant. To consider the existence and interests and rights of others is certainly legitimate, lest you become an anti-social monster. But to consider the imperatives set up by social or even other individual expectations is to betray your own obligation to the life you are there to lead.

Damn it, I can feel it, but we haven’t yet clearly said it.

Patience. It is this. Following the still small voice means staying on the beam. It means not losing your soul and gaining the whole world. It means holding to the pearl of great price.

It means clinging to the real and letting the false go.

Yes, and means saving your life even if you must lose it. It means invulnerability to accident and crime and tragedy – regardless what happens. It means not only “all paths are good” but, more, “Anything you do, anything that happens to you, is good provided that you do not sell the good and buy the false.”

Be what we were created to be.

If your life contains illness or poverty or obscurity, if it reeks of futility, even of desperation, do you have reason to complain? Do you have reason to think there was a slip-up somewhere? Or does it not make more sense to think “This is exactly what I need, because life always gives me what I need”?

An attitude of gratitude

Creates a space for grace.

Well, it’s true. So think of Life More Abundantly as what happens as you cease to kick against the walls, and learn to not only trust fate but live in gratitude that face can be trusted.

The good sisters always insisted that faith was a gift, and I can see their point. If you don’t have it, you can only hope to get it. I don’t know any way

Oh certainly you do.

A way to come to it? Live “as if,” I suppose.

Certainly. Live in faith that faith is warranted, and see what happens. It sounds a little circular, but in practice it works out.

So to put it into words, we should live intending life more abundantly, living in faith that what we sincerely desire will be provided.

And that is all that is necessary. But many will find it all but impossible, do you see why?

They put their ego-level consciousness as judge of what they can and cannot trust, I suppose.

It requires a certain courage to go your own way in the face of public opinion. Think how much greater courage it requires to go your own way in the face of those strands within you who doubt, or deny, or mock. Yet this life is your life. It is for you to choose, and no one else.

Seems to me the more we go into it, the more I return to these or those words of Jesus. In this case, his saying what father, asked for bread, will give his child a stone? In other words, it is not only rational to have faith, it is sort of stupid to expect anything but benevolence.

For some, this will be axiomatic. Others will see everyday life contradicting it. And this brings us back to the nub of it. What you judge by will determine how you see the world, how you see your chances, how you see your life.

Thanks for this. I’m not sure we succeeded in saying what almost can’t be said, but we gave it a good try, anyway.

Words are sparks, remember. This is not a game of logic-chopping. If people leave this page with an image of the pure flame within them, that will be what they need. Nobody is or ever could be an orphan in the universe. Nor a scapegoat. Nor a sacrifice. Nor “unlucky.” Forget about judging by appearance. Your world centers on you, and what is your choice among paths is always available. Incidents do not matter in the sense of throwing you off the rails; they couldn’t. incidents may seem to derail a life; only the person within that life knows the reality, and that “person” is not to be defined as 3D ego-level self alone. Everyone is far greater than that.

Again, thanks.

 

Sunday, March 10, 2024

The only creative thing I have done lately in writing is retrieving and adapting pieces of “Graduation” for the blog. Charles finds it worthwhile; I’m not sure that I do, except in the freeing that comes from expressing things I have never said.

Guys, if you would, some clarity? On this or on anything I ought to be thinking about (or realizing)?

Everything has its season. It grows, it flourishes, it withers and departs. This, whether one talks about friendship, or ambition or the practice of a skill, or almost anything in life. The Buddhists say: Impermanence. You know this abstractly, intellectually, but it is true at the deepest emotional levels as well.

Well, I have thought a philosophy of taking what comes is based in a knowledge of impermanence.

Not exactly. It is based, more, on surrender. Not “surrender” in the sense of “I give up,” nor of any sense of powerlessness, but of surrendering the will of the less competent to the more competent.

Keeping my own hands off the wheel so as not to interfere with the grownups driving?

Not that either. It is a form of active cooperation, though usually not thought of that way. Your left hand works as a unit to allow you to write. But what does that mean? It means that in order for the hand to write, the various fingers and the thumb and the wrist and even the forearm have to work together. Some muscles or muscle-systems have to remain relatively quiescent if the hand is to be able to form letters. And of course you can extend the metaphor far beyond even the arm. If your right hand were to insist on “doing its own thing” while you were trying to write with your left, it would interfere. And on and on.

It becomes a problem of definition, doesn’t it?

Yes it does, though we would prefer “a matter of definition” to “a problem of definition.” It isn’t a problem, it is a decision.

Spell it out for us, if you would.

It should scarcely be necessary. If you define yourself as an individual in 3D that does not extend into non-3D, you are going to experience a different world than if you define yourself in a larger, more comprehensive way. If you see yourself as a 3D-plus-non-3D unit that is separate from the rest of creation, you will live in a different world than if you define yourself as a 3D-plus-non-3D being that includes strands from other lives. And so on.

What is meditation but an experiencing of yourself in an intuitive non-sequential way as opposed to the logical sequential way your experience yourself when entangled in words? Again, a matter of definition.

This seems a jump that you didn’t quite prepare us for.

Why? It is another example of the same thing. If you define yourself as a sequential being (what is loosely called left-brain), you will suppress all those things that would otherwise show you that you are also a non-sequential being living in the wordless now (roughly called right-brain). It is the same thing. What you call yourself, that you will experience yourself to be – unless and until an anomalous experience knocks you out of your comfort zone. And – parenthetically – where do you think those anomalous experiences come from, if not from unknown parts of yourself?

Now to answer your question more directly – the question you mean to ask, though not yet said – how does one surrender individual control and yet at the same time live life responsibly?

Yes, exactly. I find I can’t put it into words very well, but it is something like: How can I be receptive to the moment without surrendering my legitimate responsibilities? Or, looked at the other way, how can I do what I want (or let’s say what I ought to want, ignoring for the moment all the questions that “ought to” raises) without taking over more than I ought to? And there’s “ought” again.

You are asking a question for which there are as many correct answers as there are people. One man’s meat, another man’s poison.

All right, let’s talk about me specifically (or anybody else specific you wish to use, but one example): How does it work?

Let us limn a theoretical, then, not worrying about biographical accuracy. Let us suppose one’s priorities are effective action in the 3D and in the non-3D. Can you see why metaphysical wisdom says one leads either in non-3D or in 3D, but not both?

Did we say that as well as it needs to be said?

Perhaps not. Let’s restate: Wisdom maintains that one is at home in 3D or non-3D, though of course necessarily living in both. Can you see that one’s center of gravity cannot be in both?

No, I can’t, not yet. I don’t see why it can’t be one thing, spanning the division.

So you intend to span the unbridgeable difference between two realms?  One with laws designed to focus attention on one time-space and the other designed to allow free ranging among all possibilities. One a pressure cooker designed to enable and require choice; the other the freedom of formlessness. One, focused here, now, even if not mindfully. The other focused  within itself, not focused by externals. How do you propose to bridge that gap?

But aren’t we bridging it every minute, by living?

Well, yes. Let us restate it: How do you propose to concentrate in two ways, to aim in two opposing directions, to create rose and not-rose simultaneously?

I don’t know, I kind of thought that’s what we are doing, just by living. We’re in 3D, we have to express life in 3D, don’t we? And we extend into non-3D, we have to express life in non-3D too, don’t we? I’m very well aware that we aren’t necessarily aware of it, but still, don’t we have to be doing both, all the time?

You just put your finger on it, not noticing.

Awareness.

Certainly. Why do people need to learn to meditate, if not to become aware of something they live and always have lived? To live something is not to be aware of it until you become aware of it. A two-year-old breathes, speaks, feels, etc., but what it automatically lives is not necessarily lived consciously.

All right. Are you implying that we can shift our center of gravity by increasing our awareness?

We leave that to your engineers’ group to explore, as the exploration will be more valuable than an explanation.

Now, you are living in 3D and your goal or let’s say your desire is to surrender your little will to your larger will without falling into quietism or passivity.

I’d say, wanting to be as receptive as possible without ceasing to do the things one ought to do.

One word, and it is so simple (though not always easy) that you will be tempted to discount it: Intent.

I find it difficult enough to maintain intent over time.

As you would say, “Welcome to the club.” Who does not? Nevertheless, this is the key.

Intend without defining it.

In a way. You can (and do) know things, live things, that you can’t put into words. Looking at that in the context of this conversation, can you see why?

Sure. Words are always left-brain: They always chop up wholes into sequential logic, whether we want them to or not.

Yet words and sequence and a analysis are valuable tools, of course. It’s just a matter of maintaining a balance.

Well, it is consistent enough with what you’ve always said. Choose and choose and choose.

And if your choice changes, so what? There is no prize for consistency in goal or in procedure. Consistency in intent means constantly intending. It does not mean always intending the same thing.

Mindfulness, regardless of what mindfulness seizes on.

You could put it that way.

And it amounts to: Trust your inner guidance. It won’t steer you wrong, only you have to be sure not to forget the connection.

See? Why do you need us to clarify any of this?

Very funny.

Perhaps, but said seriously too. Remember not to fall into the unconscious habit of assuming separation where there is only relative separation.

To go back to the “center of gravity” thing.

Someone focused on 3D is likely to succeed – to be a player – in 3D. Focused in non-3D, the equivalent. Only of course remember that being a player, like “success” or other external measurements, is usually misleading. Nobody can judge another’s success or failure if they don’t know what the priorities and goals were.

Thanks for all this. Like old times.

 

Thursday, September 10, 2015

5 a.m. Dr. Jung, I remembered, last night, a dream I had on my visit to the island of Iona, back in 2003. But when I went looking in my computer journals for an account of the dream, I found that I had remembered it wrongly. It wasn’t one dream but two, and they didn’t say quite what I thought I remembered them saying. At the moment, though, I am a little surprised that I could have forgotten them at all, or that they should come to mind now.

Fill in the dreams and we can discuss them. Tomorrow, if you don’t care to do so at the moment.

I could find them and print them out now, if you think dealing with the computer won’t put me in too exterior a mood.

“It” won’t put anybody into any kind of mood. “It” may lure you if you are conflicted, or may surprise you if you are unconscious. But if you are aware and intent, why should doing anything for any reason change your orientation?

But we aren’t very conscious usually, nor very intent.

Being aware of lack of awareness is the antidote.

We’ll see. I’ll be back in a few minutes. Let’s see how many: it is 5:08 now.

5:18. Well, that was interesting, to say the least. I go up to my office and I find the computer left on, the Iona file already on screen, where apparently I had left it last night. I never leave the computer on when I’m finished with it, but put it in sleep mode. Yet there it was. And, although the long narrative is shot through with accounts of dreams, I find what I want easily enough – and find more that would be worth looking at. But I managed to restrain myself and print out just the excerpts I intended to ask about. So I guess I was able to preserve my continuity for ten minutes, anyway.

So how do we proceed?

Copy, and re-read, the first dream. Omit the correlations with conscious life and we will look only at the dream.

 [Sunday, June 8

“I am in the church that [My Scottish friend] Michael Ross and I were in yesterday. There is a service going on, I think.

“Two women go up to the priest – he is in the aisle. They want his help, but I from behind one of them say, “I know what you need, my dear, and I can help you. But it can’t be right now. This is not to do with you, just I don’t have the time right now.” This is accepted by all concerned. From within the dream, I am concerned lest it be 8 a.m. when I’m going to awaken (alarm set) but am glad to realize that it is not yet that, but about 3:30 real time.

“As we were coming out of the church – but still inside, in the aisle, toward the door – there was something. The woman to my left didn’t figure directly in the dream – I’m not sure she said anything – but the dream concerned the four of us, among so many strangers I did not know.

“I note that the priest and the women accepted that I had the knowledge and ability to help the woman. It was not presumption, nor a vying with the priest. I could help her as he (the church, I think) could not, and all concerned knew it. But not just yet – I had something else to do first. I stressed, it wasn’t her fault that I couldn’t help right away, it was that I wasn’t yet free to get to it. But I would be.”

The church you had visited had been destroyed during the reformation, and had lain waste for centuries, and had been slowly and laboriously rebuilt in the 20th century. You approved of the rebuilding, but were repelled by the present-day church’s leaflets on the walls and by the sight of a flesh-and-blood priest walking by.

Yes, I remember that well. I approved, but I was not a part of it and didn’t want to be, or couldn’t. I couldn’t even bring myself to pick up one of the leaflets. That was at Pluscarden, the day before I traveled on alone to Iona.

You were one of four in the dream, of course. The two women, the priest, and you. Three laity and a priest as the fourth. You were with the other two, and yet not with them. They were together, you were behind them, but the three of you were facing the priest, though he too was in the aisle. He was not on the altar, you see, but in the aisle.

Not quite him as only another member of the laity, though.

No, but not performing his priestly function, either. He embodied that function but he was not in the act of intermediating between humans and the divine.

And although I knew I could help one of them, I wasn’t ready yet.

Let us say the time wasn’t ready yet. You had something else to do first and so couldn’t help at the moment, but all concerned knew that it was only a matter of time. And your consciousness was aware that in “real life” it wasn’t time either; you didn’t have to leave your dream for external obligations – which fitted smoothly into the dream. Note that you, and the two women – only one of whom needed the help you could give – and the priest were four “among so many strangers” you did not know.

I am very much aware that what I don’t know about the dream, you or any analyst would know, or should know.

But maybe it isn’t everybody’s business. We don’t analyze in public.

All right, but then the second dream?

“Again at 6:15 a.m. I am up to record a dream:

“An experience that was almost suffocating in its intensity. I went into a church and proceeded down, down, down stairs to lower and lower – older and older – levels. I could see I was below the level of our civilization, where the steel foundations for it, the support of the structure, were. Construction was going on and I was concerned that I not interfere or get hurt. At a passageway, a ladder in front of me, a wooden ladder, very tall, of the A-shaped kind. A worker was sitting high up on the wall to the left. The ladder was tilted away from him [tilted onto one set of legs, on the right, its left-hand side in the air] though it was not falling. I gently pulled it down to sit firmly, and walked under it. I came to a level still far above the depths, I thought, though far below our time. But they had a press operating there, though it was not printing, but before printing. They asked if I would lend a hand for a few minutes – and hours later I was happily still there.

“They were not signatures but single sheets 8 ½ by 11 or larger, and were first individually written and colored – in many colors, not just red on black – and the sheets were collated and bound. It was full color printing, before printing, each sheet being individually prepared. [Here I sketched a sheet with the left third of the page being design and the right two-thirds being lines of text.]

“The dream ended there for the moment.”

You related it in your mind to my dream of going farther and farther beneath the basement of my house and discovering archaic levels of my psyche. That is a valid association in so far as it concerns the descent into historical realms. Your dream was leading you to the foundations of the church. Steel, thus rigid, modern and strong, and then below the upper levels, construction was going on.

Yes, I noticed that vaguely, although naturally I allowed for the vagaries of a dream’s logic. In real life, you don’t construct from the bottom up, nor from the bottom down by further excavation. I mean, you don’t construct from under an existing construction.

You persist in contrasting dream reality to “real life” although a part of you knows better.

The dream was “almost suffocating in its intensity.” It was meaningful and you knew it was meaningful. This closely concerned your life. You had no doubt of that. You were not part of the construction work going on – you didn’t want to interfere but you didn’t want to get hurt either. In short, you knew to keep your distance.

But then there was the ladder.

Ahead of you, in the direction you wanted to go, was a man on a very tall wooden (not steel) ladder. [But – I notice upon typing this up – the dream said he was on the wall, and the ladder was tipping away from him. Yet “Jung” proceeded as though my inaccurate recall was correct.] Although a man was sitting on it (that is, although he was not falling), one half of the A-shaped ladder was in the air, an unstable position. You pulled it – gently – until it sat firmly on both sets of legs – and then walked under the ladder and there you found what at first seemed a moment’s useful amusement but which turned out to occupy quite a bit of your time, happily but unconsciously.

Do you customarily walk under ladders? Is that not supposed to be bad luck, as well as perhaps slightly dangerous?

I had no sense of danger, and I had no sense of incurring bad luck. I can’t remember if I even thought about walking under the ladder as a sign of bad luck, either in the dream or later, writing it up.

You remembered the sensation of working happily with the press and the printers, but you did not pay attention to the fact that you had walked under the ladder you had stabilized, to get there.

Does this imply that in fact working further with the printers was a bit of bad luck?

It implies that you lost consciousness.

And if I hadn’t walked under the ladder?

You would have been left with a very different feeling –  “suffocating in its intensity.”

Hmm. So I let myself get diverted.

You were told earlier, you couldn’t help the woman yet, that you were not yet free to do so. No one and nothing implied that you were not free because of external circumstances (as if that could really happen, but we are holding to the conscious understanding here).

I had things to live, first.

That’s one way to look at it. Now continue to the third dream, three days later.

Only that one, or the others of which it was part?

We cannot do everything at once. Your hour is already over, even allowing for the time spend retrieving the file.

“There was some kind of building work being done in the church. And there was a man working who was somewhat skillful. I was involved with it at a less skilled level. The man had to quit. He couldn’t do it any more, there was something wrong. The posture hurt his feet, or something. I offered to do the work, or was asked, I forget which. The woman in charge of the thing said I had great [force?] The idea was that I could do the job, and otherwise it couldn’t be done.”

And the point, as you well knew and know yet, is that otherwise, it couldn’t be done. It doesn’t matter how much more skillful others may be – if only you can do the job, only you can do the job. Do you imagine that I felt up to the task life set for me?

I am well aware that this does not refer only to me but to those who read this. I’m merely noting that I know it.

Yes – but don’t forget that for you as well as for others there is something only you can do, well or badly, so you do not have the luxury of assuming that it doesn’t matter if you do it, it will be done by somebody else, and perhaps better. Your work can never be done by any but you yourself. Your inner work, your outer work. If you do not do it, your un-done outer work may perhaps be compensated for by the work of another, but it will remain un-done. And who is going to compensate for the work that you, as leader of your particular soul, are responsible to do?

Now, a word or two more, and we will dismiss class for the day. What do you understand the point to be, of today’s exploration?

I get that it may be time for me to consider that Iona manuscript again.

Not in the form you left it, but in the form you will have to find for it. Yes, and?

I always knew that the church was essential but that I couldn’t really be a part of it. I guess this showed me that I could help it get more grounded on the psychic side.

They won’t necessarily recognize the assistance, or appreciate it, but yes, demonstrating the everyday-ness of the nonphysical world in its interaction with the physical is a potential reconnection of a social institution with the basis of belief for people. It is an old, old wooden ladder, and a tall one, and the human at the top is not in danger of falling off, nor was the ladder in danger of falling over, but it is better when firmly placed on either side.

And one more thing.

It isn’t primarily about me and a manuscript, or printing, or helping others or placing the church on firmer footing. It is about me orienting myself correctly.

I will be very glad to continue our conversation whenever you find it convenient.

My thanks, and I think those of others whose interest you arouse now, let alone so many you have helped out of the wilderness in life and in your books. Till next time, then. (6:28 a.m.)

In preparing this entry, I realize that my friend Robert Clarke had commented on this dream after my visit in 2003,  saying:

“Doing construction work in the church, where the woman of authority (of the unconscious) says you have great force. You must do it, or it can’t be done. Now we are coming to it. This says it all. Building the church is building the Higher Self. Solomon building God’s temple means exactly the same. This may mean a divine incarnation, though it all takes place in the unconscious. Remember me saying that David begins the temple but Solomon completes it? Moses begins the Promised Land task and Joshua completes it. John the Baptist begins, Christ completes. Earlier, Osiris begins and Horus completes. The man in your dream begins and you have the chance to complete.

“St Francis was told by God to build the church, which he first took to mean the ruin he was in at the time. Then he took it to mean the Church itself. But it really meant building the structure of the Higher Self and this, as said, can indeed lead to a respiritualisation in the outer world. I have little doubt that you could build the structure of the Self yourself, maybe even go all the way. You have the right temperament, the thirst for spirituality, the basic goodness of heart, and the intelligence. I constructed the Self myself for some time, but couldn’t sustain it. It takes superhuman powers, not to rise above and inflate, as Nietzsche mistakenly took it, but rather to deflate in humility and self-sacrifice, to empty oneself of the world. It depends how far one wants to go. But, as said above, it is a very heavy burden that few would take on if they knew the suffering it entails.”

 

[Not all my conversations were with non-3D individuals! And of course not all of them were published. I can’t recall if I ever published this short session with Rita (who at the time was still in 3D), but it seems to be of interest today.]

&&&

This is the 31st of March 2007.

Rita: Well, we haven’t done one of these sessions for awhile. But you have this communication channel always available, don’t you?

Frank: Well it’s a different quality when someone else is asking the question, because you inject different — you come out of left field rather than where I already am internally.

R: Although sometimes I notice when we are just talking, the energy’s picked up as a response to you.

F: No, you’d have to believe in telepathy for that. I want to see a double-blind survey. [😊]

R: Let’s just ask a question about that while we’re at it. When this activity is going on, how different is it from what we’re doing here?

F: Well in a way, it’s the difference between talking to yourself and talking to someone else, because if you’re talking to yourself, the answer comes out of the same stream that the question came out, but if you’re talking to someone else, sometimes it comes out of the same stream but sometimes the other person has had different rabbits start out of the bush from the same question and therefore intersect again with the other person from a different angle. It’s really the same process.

You have to bear in mind that both in spoken communication and in unspoken communication, all kinds of levels are involved in both persons, and between them at an upstairs level, so an interaction between individuals seems much more straightforward to you than it actually is. It seems like this and then that, but what it is, is this and then that on a downstairs level, both of you connected to the upstairs level and maybe the upstairs level the same thing, maybe it’s coordinating the two of you by feeding you lines and feeding you emotional reactions. It would be the equivalent of the difference between two actors talking onstage and the writer or writers having written their lines ahead of time to set up certain interactions.

R: And so this in itself means that there will be different responses depending on who Frank’s having a conversation with.

F:Tthat’s right. And they will evoke different parts of himself, as he is doing to them. An interaction between two people is always unique because either of those two people interacting with somebody else is different. It doesn’t look like it, usually, too much. Often you can’t see it.

R: So when you think about lecturing to a room full of people, all these multitude of interactions –

F: Yes but if you are only lecturing and they are not responding verbally, it’s sort of like you have a screen in front of you that is speaking to them, it’s your public persona. We don’t mean by that anything artificial or insincere. We don’t imply a lack of integrity. We’re saying necessarily when you’re speaking to more than one person, it’s a persona speaking rather than the intimate conversation you might have with one person at the right time in the right way. Now for the audience, they are communicating in an individual way, but with that persona rather than with the speaker. They may know the difference, but not necessarily.

R: Depending on whether they’ve had a history with this person or not.

F: Yes, exactly. Exactly. If they know the person as an individual, and then are in the audience while that individual is speaking, they will definitely see the difference. They may not however correctly attribute what the difference is. They may think it is — actually it’s the same thing — tailoring to the audience.

R: Both ways there’s an assumption of who the speaker is.

F: And in fact you’re all mysteries to each other.

R: I want to ask about what seems like to me this new burst of creativity — I don’t know if we’re talking about a burst of creativity or way for talking about an operational relation of a lot of material that now is getting put forth.

F: We would think of it more as a burst of expression. It’s in there, it’s been tailored, it’s been thought of. The creativity was in the living of it and the thinking about, and it has been built up, and now that conduit is available, the expression is bursting forth. We can see that it looks like creativity happening now, and to a degree it is, but really it’s the expression of what has already been created but has been dammed up.

&&&

The transcript ends here, somewhat abruptly, it seems to me. Because it was a spoken rather than a written interchange, I have no way to know if this was the end of the exchange, or merely the end of my transcription.

 

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

The thing that strikes me is that we are bombarded by so much information, so continually, that it is hard to keep track. __’s house provided good examples. Here would be a bunch of cognate materials all pertaining to something that had been of intense interest to him until it was superseded by another. It’s hard to stop that from happening. I have the same problem. Velikovsky had it — he had different desks for different projects, just to try to keep up. If there is a solution for it, I don’t know what it would be. I keep searching for some method of indexing.

Guys?

Discarding is as important as accumulating, and you have seen this with __ and with others. Easier to see with your brother John than with your own habits, but “easily seen” is at least a beginning.

Ruthless intelligent discarding is a form of indexing. It is a pre-sort. “Do I/will I need this?”

Everything you discard, focuses you. Everything you accumulate, to that extent, un-focuses you. Now, if you have patience for it, a little expansion, a little exposition, of our meaning.

What is intellectual activity but an alternating focusing and unfocusing?

You gather. Perhaps you gather and gather and gather. It doesn’t matter how much gathering you do; that is a matter of personal taste and perhaps of width of interest and perhaps of genius. At some point, continued gathering without any focusing will be sterile.

It is in focusing that you learn (or impose) the meaning on what you have gathered. We mean this both literally and metaphorically. You may spend months or years reading in a certain subject area, say, or in two — or in what seems to you a random assortment of subject areas — and you may have no idea why or even if there be a why. You do many things without knowing the reason, or if there is a reason. That’s just the process of living.

But whenever you come to make sense of things — to summarize, or to index, or to cull, whatever the circumstances and form of the making sense — when you come to do that, it is as though you are sorting all that material to find certain threads or connections or affiliations.

This is pretty abstract and we can feel you falling asleep, so to speak. So — point us.

Well, I’m interested in where you seemed to be going about ingestion and digestion.

Yes — and excretion! What you have used up, what you have had the benefit of, what has nourished you but is no longer of service because it has nourished you — must you not eliminate it, if you are to function as an ongoing system rather than as a static momentary picture?

You know the new cliché about the beginner’s mind, the empty mind, being the best way to learn something new. It doesn’t apply only to learning the new. It applies to re-understanding the previously understood, which of course is to see it anew.

So — when overwhelmed by material, whether files, papers, e-mails, projects you want to start, old records of past projects finished or unfinished —

When you are overwhelmed, too much information is as bad as no information. You need to balance assimilation with ingestion. Could you read everything on the Internet? Could you read every magazine or book or newspaper? And, if you could, could you hold them, balance them, make sense of them?

Well, you can’t do it with your piles of gathered materials, either. No one could.

Now, each person, going through the same stack of materials, would cull and sort differently. For that matter, no two people will have the same stack. No two people ever could.

You remember Buckminster Fuller’s realization from the 1920s — that no two people see the world from the same place, and therefore no two have the same unique viewpoint, and so anyone may have insights that are obvious to him or her, but not at all obvious to most others, or perhaps to any others. It was this insight as much as any other that fueled Fuller’s career, providing him with the self confidence in his own way of seeing that led him to change the world rather than to wonder why his own vision was askew.

Find what is central to you, and begin to discard all that is not, and seek to attract more that is. You will find that this has a remarkable self adjusting effect on your focus.

Hard to know what does or doesn’t apply, though.

Hard primarily to know if you want to extend so far — as of course ultimately anything could connect with anything else. But the question is practicality. Is a given piece of paper or file or whatever useful to you? Does it help you to center? Will it help you focus on what you want to focus on?

Fortunately, you’re not going about it blind. Your guidance will give you nudges. “Save this, hang onto that. Think about this other in new contexts.” Listen.

Well — speaking of focus — this session has felt extraordinarily diffuse, as if you, or I, were having trouble staying on the beam. Of course, I know who you’re likely to blame for that! 🙂 but I’ve been drinking coffee. I don’t know what else to do.

We did all right. The point here was a practical one: How can you get out from under the clutter of things that fill your life? And our answer was, consciously decide what you want to focus on, and discard the rest. A natural caveat is — be a little careful that a fit of ruthlessness doesn’t lead you to discard things that later you’ll regret tossing over the side — but on the whole, discarding too much is probably preferable to keeping too much.

As a case in point — you have multiple print outs of past sessions in the black box. What will you ever use them for? You have stacks of old e-mails, many stacks sorted roughly by subject matter. But how likely is it that these will ever be useful? You keep endless e-mails on your computer, often sorted. Printed out or not, how likely are they to help you?

There is information to be saved for its beauty or peculiar nature — photographs, e-mails from friends, say. There is information that sparked an idea in you. Other information provided evidence you think you may someday use. You can see that these are three different things.

We can’t — and wouldn’t if we could — provide rules for keeping and discarding. We say only, when you feel the need for greater focus, one step to it is — discard. Sort, cull, discard, make sense of what you have. New material will come to you with every breeze; you needn’t worry that you will run out of material. You will run out of time, though, and we see no particular benefit to anyone in dying with bulging file cabinets and hard drives.

What you assimilate, you bring with you to the other side; that isn’t our point and isn’t for you to worry about. But if you want to function more consciously, to feel yourself and your life less cluttered, the process we’ve outlined is the only way we know to begin.

 

[I am re-reading Colin Wilson’s autobiography, Dreaming to Some Purpose and it came to me that he and I were connected in some way that wasn’t obvious.  So I thought I would ask the guys, in a private session, and as usual things took their own course.]

Friday, January 12, 2024

8:10 a.m. I look forward to learning how Colin and I are really connected. Clearly, somehow we are. Shared thread? I read of his life and I see my life in – what shall I call it? – not in a distorted mirror, not in a sort of opposition, but sort of a “transpose the same qualities into a different time/place starting point, and change a few other things.”

I have just gotten to where he has become an overnight sensation at 24, and his reaction to it.

Now, I find I cannot say – really cannot think – just what I’m groping for. A little help, my friends? Only, not for publication.

Unless you change your mind. The same ground rules as always.

Yes.

Colin and you, Colin and Robert Clarke and you, Colin and Chris Nelson and you – variations on a theme, with the added nuance of taking care of one another. Colin came first and established a position. Robert came next and worked in obscurity all his life. You came next and were sort of between the two, and Chris Nelson will be seen to be between Colin and you, and of course the chain doesn’t end.

If you were to write your life-memoir – for that is what it would amount to, certainly not a conventional autobiography –

Lost it.

Your story would be written as the cooperation (and interference) of strands, not as a unitary being which none of you are. That in itself would be a different take on things. But also, your concentration on your inner life and your relative helplessness in steering your outer life would be very different. You think of yourself as a failure externally and perhaps a tentative success internally, but this is just lazy thinking. How can one side of the duct tape be in different sync [I would have said “out of sync”] with the other? External is internal, as you know.

Perhaps making that clear would be achievement enough.

It can’t be proved. It can be intuited or not. Or rather, let’s say that to the extent it can be proved, it will be done by a new science scarcely nascent yet, combining physics and psychology, seeing gravity and love as equivalents, but demonstrating it mathematically, as that is the only language some people can believe in. (They don’t have to be able to follow the mathematics, only be able to believe in it. This is true of most science, of course, even among scientists outside their own subspecialty.)

I’m going to send that graf to Dirk.

By all means. It is more his tasks than yours, and more his task than more conventional explorations taking physical and non-physical to be separate things.

But to return to Colin and me.

Were you not sustained – shaped, almost – by his presence for a full 25 years before you met? Do you still think that was merely external?

Hmm.

So now reconfigure it and see you and him – and Robert and Chris and others – as branches of the same plant, connected at the stem if branching at the top. He nourished you all, you all nourished him, and you all nourished and nourish each other even now by a form of invisible support, just by living in the world – concentrating your essence in one moment – and retaining the unknown link. It is a powerful organizing force that is not widely realized, but universally experienced.

Another way in which we are less individual than we think.

Let’s say, another aspect of your lives that is not obvious. And this is worth a few words:

1. You as an individual tip of the plant, inhabiting one body, forming one surface-mind.
2. You as an extension of the plant, one more organ of perception for the non-3D larger being.
3. Between the two, you as one of a cluster of beings sharing certain characteristic and (usually) values.

You see our point, here? All of these, not just one, or two. You all function in just this triplicate way, whether or not you are aware of it.

So, Colin and Robert and Frank and Chris – and many others, known to you or not – share a cluster and instinctively, intuitively, naturally, recognize that you belong together. You function smoothly together – and most of your joint functioning is not visible to yourselves, let alone to others. Your lives do not need explaining, though for comfort and out of curiosity you would like the explanation. All you ever need is to follow the deepest impulses and you will do all right.

Our individual foibles don’t really matter, in this context.

Remember, everyone is functioning in three roles. Number one has all the quirks and surface eccentricities. Number two has all the deepest purpose and sureness. And number three (that Carl Jung did not iterate when he talked of his awareness of a number one and number two personality) has the sureness of common goals and opportunities and needs. You all play all these roles all the time. How could you not? It would be like opting out of one dimension.

Well, as usual this has grown beyond my personal question.

That’s the trip you signed up for.

Agreed. What of people with whom we share an affinity but don’t quite mesh? I’m thinking of John Nelson, here.

You and he worked together just enough to do a couple of things. You got him into the publishing mainstream; he got Hampton Roads into the same mainstream. But you and he needed room from each other even though the personal chemistry was good.

So our somewhat wistful distance – wistful distance on my end, anyway – is appropriate.

What can happen in one’s life that is not appropriate? What you expect, or desire, or even fear, is one thing: What is appropriate may or may not be any or all of these.

In short, “all is well.”

Do you have any reason to doubt it?

Often enough we are inclined to say, “It could be better.”

Certainly. So could you yourselves.

This is a bit of a sidetrack, but how should I answer people who point to all the pain and suffering and injustice in the world?

Do you expect to convince them?

No, but it seems to me we ought to have a better answer than, “It just is.”

This is like assuming that sickness or injury is “bad” because you don’t want them. It is Lucy in “Peanuts” saying she doesn’t want life’s ups and downs, she just wants up and up and up.

It is a form of fixed vision, isn’t it? I mean, one can get to see only the bad and forget that it is balanced by the good.

Assuming you wish to continue seeing things as bad or good, yes. No picture can be all light and no dark. Even a very light picture has areas that are relatively darker. Even a dark picture has areas relatively lighter. If all the world looks dark to you because it has dark patches, adjust your vision or rather, adjust your expectations, so that your vision can readjust. The world is not getting worse all the time. People are not sinking deeper and deeper into poverty. Violence and injustice are not increasing all the time. Pain and suffering are not as bad as – let alone worse than – 100 years ago, let alone 200. But you have to be able to admit the data. If you concentrate on darkness, what should you expect to see but confirmation of your bias?

I suppose it is a form of extremism: “If everything isn’t the way I want it, nothing is right with the world.”

And of course the opposite (if similar) extremism would say something like, “If all is well, there is nothing that could be better, or that needs fixing.” You all know that real life is between the extremes. It is mostly words, and the ideas stemming from words, that lead to extremism of either sort.

Well, the exposition of our three roles was helpful, and I’ll find a way of sending it out while preserving people’s privacy. Thanks as always.