Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

Sunday, December 19, 2021

Life always goes easier in certain directions than in others. But just as in cutting lumber you may need sometimes to rip and other times to cross-cut, so in life you can’t generalize to say, “Only do what comes naturally,” or even, “If you are finding it hard, you’re going the wrong way.”

Same old story, new application: “One size never fits all.”

You will notice that in 20 years we have never told you anything in terms of rules of thumb for conduct in life that you couldn’t have heard in folk wisdom. The things we have offered that are not in common parlance all involve the invisible structure behind what is visible. We are trying to appease the hunger for knowledge and understanding of context that haunts certain natures. But nobody needs us to tell them how to live. At most, we can tell why one should live in a certain way. And you will notice that even there, we are somewhat chary of dictating or seeming to dictate. We started off saying you are here to choose, and we have never deviated from that: How could we?

I’m sure it is a good thing that we all can find the truth in so many places, in so many circumstances. Funny how often people believe just the opposite, though, that truth can be found only in one place.

That’s a matter of them clutching. They have found a truth, and anything that appears to contradict it threatens their certainty. People can lose out even by finding a truth, if they make that truth an idol.

Like the Calvinists Emerson impatiently described as always interposing “their silly book” between themselves and any non-conforming thought, however sincere. Or like Thoreau: “They don’t want any prophets in their family, damn them!”

But, as always, there is something to be said on the other side of the question. Sometimes people clinging to a truth are in the position of a survivor clinging to a piece of driftwood, and that’s the best they can do.

Don’t judge, I know.

There isn’t anything wrong with judging in the sense of discerning, particularly if you remember to keep the judgment tentative. It is condemnation, not discernment, that isolates.

Were you wanting to say more about finding truth in many places? Or about how sometimes we are ripping and sometimes cross-cutting, and neither is per se “right” or “wrong” in life?

The points made should be obvious.

A very short session, then?

Nothing wrong with a short session. Nothing wrong with skipping, from time to time. It’s mostly in your preserving the habit of it, so that habitual usage will keep the path smooth for you. It is like everything else in life: What you practice, improves.

Was it Pablo Casals? Someone, very much up in years, was asked why he still practiced at his age, and replied, in effect, “Because I think I’m starting to get it.”

“Genius is the infinite capacity for taking pains,” they say. Another way to put it might be, “Genius is the willingness to keep showing up.”

In fact, a word or two on the subject. Talent is one thing. Genius is a different thing. Aptitude is a third. We will throw out these distinctions for consideration. We do not mean them as strict definitions, but as sparks.

Understood.

In all three cases, many of the factors involved are invisible in 3D. One’s physical heredity may be somewhat guessed at by looking at the genealogical records, if they exist – but what chart is going to show you someone’s heredity from various threads of other lives? It may be deduced – again, guessed at – but obviously it is going to be mostly a mystery.

They say talent is often based in generations of similar traits, and genius often shows up when two different strands are crossed. Yeats, for instance, or Thoreau.

Yes, but you’d have to explain Emerson, the descendant of generations of ministers, with no exotics to be seen. Not that the generalization is not somewhat valid – Churchill, say – but, like most generalizations, only somewhat.

In any case, our point here is merely that most of the determinants of limits – the extent of the palette, so to speak – are factors not evident to the senses and not necessarily all that evident even to study or to intuition. Your lives are always going to be largely mysteries to you, and there’s nothing wrong with that, it leaves you freer of self-constructed prisons.

Why does that sentence – that final phrase, actually – remind me of the poem I was given in 1995, supposedly from Yeats? *

Beats us.

Very funny.

Well, what’s the use of a “why” question? Won’t the “why” appear in your treatment of whatever event caused the “why”?

Hmm.

In any case, this set of distinctions.

• Talent draws upon life’s inherited reserves. Something comes naturally to you. It may require a lifetime of practice, but still it is an expression of you, that is as naturally fulfilling as breathing.
• Genius is different in a way that isn’t so easy to define. It is as much dependent upon one’s 3D and non-3D heredity as talent, but it is not talent. It may manifest with or without talent, and perhaps that is the best way to glance at the undefinable difference between the two. A Beethoven, a Goethe, a Napoleon, a Lincoln, demonstrate genius allied to talent. Very different fields of endeavor, but that’s part of our point. Genius, like talent, manifests in all walks of life, recognized or not.

For examples of talent without genius, think of any competent practitioner in any field – musicians (including composers), writers, soldiers, statesmen, whatever. They are skilled, but they will never set the Thames on fire. For examples of genius without talent, think of anyone you know who is known primarily for eccentricity and who is not particularly successful in translating his or her native ingenuity into something with practical effect. These are the people who, if they do set the Thames on fire, do so with an air of having done so by accident. History is full of wild mean who clearly are not run of the mill, but equally clearly aren’t quite suited to their genius.

Jones Very? Bucky Fuller, in some respects? Stephen Douglas, maybe? Robespierre?

You will find it hard to find examples of genius truly without talent, for they will not have made their mark. But we give you the clue, anyway.

And aptitude?

• Aptitude is largely a matter of someone being in the right body at the right moment. The times are right, and so the result of genius or talent, or both, finds the way smoothed. Who does what the shared subjectivity is ready for, finds life easy, at least so far as that contribution is concerned.

Shall we call this one “Talent, genius, aptitude”?

It might be more to the point to call it “Ripping and cross-cutting.” But it’s up to you.

Our thanks as always.

* [From Muddy Tracks, how Yeats gave me a poem, if indeed it was Yeats.]

[On Saturday, August 12, I made several trips to 27, the most important of which involved finding Yeats. He talked, and he promised to give me a poem via automatic writing. Sitting in my cabin by a fire, I asked him, this intense middle-aged man of penetrating eyes and prominent cheekbones, if I could succeed in transcribing it. You can get it, he said, but whether you can understand it is another matter.

[I sat down at my journal and was nearly stifled by performance anxiety. I got so far as a title, then a first line—then I was quarreling with the next lines, trying to make something coherent and losing it, then the phone rang. I tried again, and got this:

Sentinel

There are those think the day a long weariness,
Life a long never-releasing swampland clinging.
Can they never in their ceaseless counting and reckoning
Look up to the bird on the wing, or the hour?

Cease telling your beads of worry and amassing.
Your prayers are in every breath you take,
will it or not. The grave’s no prison
to match that spun by blind men building.

We who know pass you this directive;
Live your limitations as a blessing bestowed;
Build your castles but omit the bars;
Pass through the glowing.

[After the poem came to me, I said: “Maybe it’s Yeats, though it certainly doesn’t sound like him. And I can’t make sense of that title and this content. Nor does it sound like great poetry to me—or even competent rhyme. Would Yeats write something unfinished and crude? Ask him, maybe. Can I do that here and in 27? Let’s see. Mr. Yeats—”

[“Different rules apply in new circumstances. What you value may seem child’s play or child’s distraction to us, sense and sound detracting from other attributes. Study the poem and see if it has anything to say to you and you may decide it’s not so bad after all.”]

 

Thursday, November 25, 2021

6:25 a.m. In The Demon Lover, as in her other novels, Dion Fortune gives so clear a description of realities the guys have given us, that the similarity or identity of the two sets of teachings is plain. Someone not having had the guys’ explanations might not find her statements so clear, but those who have had them can hardly miss the point, I should think. Case in point, page 150 :

“Was he indeed dead? Dead in the sense in which most people use that word? She knew quite well that he had discarded his physical body, that a man with an olive skin and an erect carriage would no longer walk toward her with the light springing step that was so characteristic of him; but she firmly believed that Lucas as a personality continued to exist – that the organized system of thoughts and feelings that made up his character was still held together by a centralized consciousness, was still activated by desires and controlled by a purposive will, and it was this organized consciousness that had been her companion, not the five foot nine of flesh and bone that now mouldered in the churchyard.”

Now, the guys have yet to talk to us of such magical procedures – I hope some day they will – but that description of what we are cannot be surpassed: an organized system of thoughts and feelings making up character, held together by a centralized consciousness, activated by desires and controlled by a purposive will. Isn’t that us?

 

Wednesday, November 17, 2021

You are at the threshold of greater things, and perhaps it would be as well to point out that sometimes greater things come to you whether you are willing or not, and in such case your own free will takes greater importance than even usual.

I think you are saying, in effect, the times come round, prior to which it was “You can’t really experience this yet, except perhaps by exceptional effort or by unusually propitious circumstances,” but once they do come round, it’s “Ready or not, here you go.”

That’s a very striking way to put it. Yes. At one age (denoted by, not caused by, astrological symbolism), a given achievement or attainment or even aspiration may be quite difficult for any given individual to obtain or pursue. In another age, Joe Schmoe will be able to do, naturally and easily, things the greatest adepts of earlier ages were unable to do, or could do only after long preparation and with great effort.

(Of course the changes that now make certain previously difficult things easier may also make previously easy things difficult. Everything has the defects of its qualities; specialization is always a narrowing as well as an extension. However, let us concentrate upon new possibilities rather than older doors closing.)

You could say that is what happened every time a new religion swept the field, I suppose.

Yes. Very good. Very good. That is the connecting theme here. The characteristics of an age manifest through individuals, of course. How else can they be seen? Those changed individuals are of concern to themselves, and their own development, but also of their times and of the newly flowering potential. When Christianity replaced paganism in the Roman world, it closed certain doors and opened certain doors. This was not a case of bad side-effects accompanying good effects, it was the principle we have alluded to in the past, that in order to manifest a rose, you must suppress manifesting what is not-rose.

Which is not to say that Christianity was necessarily as broad-minded as it might have been.

That is more a matter of “season to taste.” For some personality types, a new manifestation must appear narrow and tightly bounded, or it would be shapeless and uncertain and without effect. Other personality types cannot abide narrowness and find new material satisfying only when it incorporates previous understandings, rather than rejects and supplants them. But a religion, like any broad cultural movement, must simultaneously appeal to many psychological types. The better it fits some, the less well it will fit others. There is always going to be a tension there, it’s inevitable.

Still, when the time comes round, in effect the cosmos itself leans toward a certain new way of seeing and experiencing things, and so every individual’s judgment is weighted in a certain direction. At a certain time, even if over generations, it becomes impossible to bring oneself to believe what one’s ancestors had believed and experienced naturally and easily and accurately.

We are saying “religion” to make a point, but any new way of seeing – of living – is going to be subject to the same rules of life. Whatever you believe is you able to believe this rather than that. That tendency is likely to have more to do with the shared subjectivity expressing as “your times” than with any individual qualities you bring to the mix. There was a time when Voltairean skepticism was the latest liberation from a smothering orthodoxy. But later ages do not find in it what its own age did, simply because the times have continued to roll around.

This is not without specific application to you who read it. As we said at first, you are at the threshold of greater things, and it is not up to you whether or not the opportunity comes round. It is up to you how you respond to the opportunity.

Sure. You can’t sail on the ship till it comes to the harbor and is ready to go, but just because the ship is there doesn’t mean you’re going to ready and willing to set foot on it.

Yes, that is it exactly. The times have come round. What may have been long held aspirations that you mostly thought could never be realized, now await your decision. Rejoice.

Of course the ship being in port does not by itself guarantee that we know how to get a ticket.

Don’t fool yourselves. You were born with the right to a ticket. The question is not, will the opportunity arise. It is right here. The question is, do you wish to board, or to stay ashore, or to ponder what to do. We do not imply that there is a right or wrong answer. How could we decide for others? But we do point out, you’ve longed for the ship to arrive, and it’s here. Don’t make your decision by default, whether or not to board it. Deciding by default is rarely satisfactory.

I take it, by the fact that we were born with the right to a ticket, that we can count on our non-3D and on the shared subjectivity to not only not impede, but to facilitate.

Of course. The only joker in that deck is that your own unknown mind may have unsuspected cross-currents. That’s one more reason for you to know yourself. Openness is all.

In effect, do our past-life review while we’re still here, as best we can.

The more you face what you are reluctant to acknowledge, the freer you are, yes. Enough for the moment.

 

Wednesday August 17, 2016

Words don’t mean the same thing to different people – and I’m not talking about vocabulary or semantics, but meaning, communication.

That is an advantage as well as a disadvantage, as usual. Slippage is opportunity, not just inefficiency. Ambiguity is a door we can use to suggest things, and of course everybody needs different suggestions, because no two people begin from the same places. The argument that convinces one person of free will strikes another as proof of interference, and a third of overall purpose, and a fourth of general confusion.

And that merely reinforces my idea that logic and chains of thought are more matters of convenience than proofs of anything [I wrote “everything”] – and even as I write that, I can feel myself demonstrating your point.

If, in exploring these things, you bear in mind slippage as a fact of life, and internal course-correction as another, you’ll breathe easier. All you can do, and all anybody need do, is your best. That’ll be enough.

“You do the best you can.”

The important thing for you, Frank, in this instance, is to show what life looks like to you, through your window, via your communications and your conclusions and your speculations. Other people have other goals, other priorities, other possibilities. We doubt you’d do well in the Olympics, or in politics, or as a realtor. You do better at being you, doing your work (which doesn’t mean producing some product; we mean living) better than anybody else ever could. It’s true for everybody. The only sense in which “one size fits all” is that for each of you, the task and the opportunity is the same: Live your possibilities. It is in this sense that everybody is perfect – each of you is a perfectly crafted opportunity, or window on the world, or reflection of oneself as one facet of a jewel. You are perfect because you are what you should be, not because you are clones of each other or are exact copies of some divine pattern.

More, you are perfect because you are all part of the same over-all thing, “the only thing there is.” So it isn’t a matter of each part needing to be well-rounded or balanced. A machine, an organism, even a molecule, is not one undifferentiated symmetrical thing, still less a collection of undifferentiated symmetrical things. It is a combination of dissimilar, specialized things that function together as a whole. (Of course, bear in mind that analogies are only analogies.) But if you – and we – are part of one thing, non-physical as well as physical, living in conditions of duality and perceived separation in space and time, and if even unity is divisible into components and multiplicity is only one way of seeing unity–

Yes: What does it come to?

Or, more practically, what is the universe to you? What is life to you?

Isn’t that where we came in?

There really isn’t any other place to enter or exit. “What’s it all about, Alfie?” Everybody has the same question, nobody has the same answer, and meanwhile your life comes at you moment by moment.

It struck me yesterday, the incessant activity. Everybody is so concerned with planning, striving, competing, and not necessarily among each other but in general. It’s exhausting.

Life is nothing if not ceaseless activity. Even sitting zen is doing something. That’s part of the point of that ever-moving present moment: Nothing stands still.

Except at the still center. So let’s talk about that.

All right. I don’t have any idea where you’re going to go with this, except for the word “balance,” so – let’s see.

Stillness balances activity, as the hub of a wheel in its quiet rotation around its own center allows a much greater rotation at the rim.

Is that the best analogy available?

It was the first on the stack, and although it has its defects, it does give you the non-logical but nearly tangible sense of relation – stillness allowing for, controlling, motion. A very different but equally inadequate analogy might be the projector versus the film. A third, the seed-case and the plant-to-be.

Mutually contradictory analogies designed to reinforce one aspect, as usual.

It has proved useful enough in the past, has it not? The sphere, then the hologram? The point to be understood is that analogies are necessarily always partial, partly misleading if taken literally or applied too closely.

What does it mean, the still center?

I suppose it means that we are on the revolving rim where appearances are realer to us than underlying reality, or realities, and that at another level the reality is more evident, and the appearances less so.

That is one possible take on it. Another is that, at the rim, not just appearance but experienced reality is ever-changing, and at the sill center, the resolution of everything produces balance, as it stems from balance.

All manifest qualities proceed from one source of potential?

Be careful that words don’t go dead on you here, producing what seems to mean something but is really just sounds. It is a very common problem.

You live your lives and they are real to you, of course. They are the same thing, as “you” cannot be divided from the color of your hair or the state of your beliefs. In living your lives you are you, in 3D, and yet you are at the same time no less the “you” created from the much larger being; thus you are also in non-3D; you are also not the you you experience yourselves to be. Both, not one or the other.

But the larger being itself is a special case of a deeper level of reality which is the hub to it as the larger being is to you, and so on and so forth, all the way up, all the way down. The center is the center; the rim is the rim. At one extreme is the realest reality, at the other is the most apparent of appearances.

And yet – not instead of, but contradictorily also true – there is no geographical aspect to this realness/appearance scale. You won’t find real in one postal code and apparent in another. Neither will you find a smooth chain of increasing or decreasing realness. For as the theologians say, God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. That is, the realest real is everywhere, and so is the shadowiest of shadows. It can’t be sorted out into “this v. that” except in logic.

Including theo-logic.

True enough. Theology is the application of logical exposition to supersensory perception. It has the defects of its qualities. That doesn’t make it useless; doesn’t make it a panacea. It is one tool among many.

The point here is that you, where you are, whenever and however you come to read this, are in unbreakable connection to the center as well as to the rim. You can and may live in the stillness as well as in the activity. We are not talking about how you spend your time, whether meditating or selling papers. We mean, the door is always open.

Oddly, it doesn’t matter to the universe or even to yourself what you choose or how you choose to experience your life.  A life in intimate connection with the stillness is not more or less desirable intrinsically than one that is lived amid the drama of the rim of the wheel. It is just a matter of preference, and – we remind you – you were created to prefer!

Saturday, August 4, 2018

For the longest time, I have relied upon these conversations for a sense of purpose and of achievement. Absent them, nothing. That isn’t good.

An old pattern, an old problem. Doing as a way to validate being.

— Re-reading journal 114, I come to that dream of July 19 that had me so exultant, so exalted – only to bring me crushingly (the word I used) to earth when I realized I had been dreaming.

But – had you?

Well, that was the question, yes. Had I? Or was it a higher perception interpreted into a dream? It sure was a disappointment to realize that I was here, in 3D, rather than the dream’s reality being the reality I was in. Can I – should I – take it as encouragement that sort of backfired?

Instead of looking for the cause, look to the reality. You were so happy! You were free of so many hampering circumstances. Only, when you awoke, you tried to make 3D sense of it all, and of course could not, because symbolic reality does not translate into prosaic reality.

I lost something just then, a glimpse I got while still writing out your words.

Yes, just concentrate on it. “Symbolic” is the word, because it reminded you of John Anthony West writing on Symbolist Egypt.

Yes, it did, but that isn’t quite what I glimpsed and lost. It was a way to explain the relation—

Oh yes. First-tier, second-tier, third-tier experience.

That’s right. A dream may be considered to be a first-tier experience just as much as any 3D physical experience. And like any first-tier experience, it may have second-tier effects. That is, first there is what happens, but that is always of the moment and so (from the point of view of the ever-moving present moment ) is ephemeral. The effect that the first-tier event has, its second-tier effect upon your psyche, will always be what is important. A blow to the head may hurt; its second-tier effects (and we don’t mean any continuing physical trauma) will determine if it is important to you or not.

If I understand it rightly, this may be what Dion Fortune meant, in saying that modern phycology had gotten an idea of this reality, but was holding it from the wrong end of the stick. Psychology reads dreams as expressions of the psychic reality of an individual – as is undoubtedly true – but does not seem to suspect that the dream may be truer in a way than the 3D reality it illustrates.

No, slow down a little. Try again. You aren’t on the wrong track, but it needs more careful stating, and better for you to do it (and thus lock it into your understanding) than to be merely given it.

Well, this dream reassured me that my reality really exists, that I am not stuck here as it sometimes seems, that what I know can be experienced.

[The dream, as recorded Thursday, July 19, 2018, at 2:20 a.m.

[I was so exultant! But then –

[I slipped out of a church service; it was evening, I guess. I was aware of people watching me, or anyway they might be watching me, but I didn’t care. I set off for home. I was barefoot but that didn’t seem odd. I began walking, only I was slip-skipping, traveling a little above the trail, which led through the woods. I was so exultant: I was flying, and this time there could be no doubt about it. All the way home to what was Rita’s house, and I walked the last little way, up a small hill, carrying something in front of me (a chair?) that I had been carrying the whole time. When I entered the house, Matt and Sarah and the kids {i.e. my daughter and her family} were there, it was Christmas night and a couple of presents were still unopened.

[But then I realized that I was in the recliner on the first floor, in p.j.s and a robe.

[So crushingly disappointing. Yet still I suspect that it means something.]

But then one wakes up, and must decide, what does the dream mean? Is it only wish-fulfillment? Does it symbolize important non-3D realities? So I suppose it is a pioneering instinct. It is a reassurance from the future, and/or from a wider part of the present moment.

It is a first-tier fact, rather than, as it may appear to be, a reaction to 3D mental and/or physical events.

“Rather than”? Couldn’t it sometimes be, “in addition to”?

Perhaps. But the important point here is that a dream has its own reality and is not merely a symbol of something, just as an idea has its own reality and is not something you made up.

So when we react to our dreams –

You remember “When you wish upon a star.”

I do every so often. That was a magical event for me, for no particular 3D reason I ever saw.

It came because you would need it. Tell the story.

I was a boy, watching a Walt Disney TV show. I don’t remember what the show was about, but at the end, with little apparent connection, a man’s voice sang these magic words –

When you wish upon a star,

Makes no difference who you are.

When you wish upon a star

Your dreams come true.

When you wish upon a star,

Makes no difference who you are.

Anything your heart desires

Will come to you.

When you wish upon a star,

Makes no difference who you are,

When you wish upon a star

Your dreams – come – true.

It almost brings me to tears, so many years later, because I vividly remember how that song penetrated my core. I can’t remember if I felt exalted or reassured or what, but something in me clung to that message of desperately needed encouragement.

Disney as dream, you see. He organized and institutionalized a dream factory for just that reason. That was his function, to encourage, to cast out lifelines in a desperate time.

Well, God bless him. It certainly worked for me. And it reminds me of my friend Robert Clarke, saying how much cheerful optimistic American films helped in the depths of the English hard times of the 1930s and 1940s. This puts that in a different light.

So there is your “doing” for the morning.

Well, it helps, always. Thanks.

 

Sunday, July 15, 2018

So, guys – “wheezing”? I started to ask, “clarity?” but got diverted, probably by you yourselves.

Well, we did want to put in a word about wheezing and your life. Though it is now only a mild annoyance, once in your life it was a major annoyance, a disruption, even a threat.

I well remember.

But you were not remembering, that’s the point. Well and good to make progress, but much better to remember what you progressed from, and to. You are pleased with, but didn’t take much notice of, your healing working with ___’s husband, adapting your spiel instinctively to his comfort zone.

He noticed.

And he isn’t the only one, nor will he be. But what about you? Are you noticing?

Not taking it for granted, you mean?

Not noticing that you – and others – take it for granted.

I suppose this ties in to what I was thinking about when I got up, just now. I was feeling a certain amount of decent envy, as I often do, of what other people accomplish in their lives – in this case, Jim Lewis and Bob Holbrook, I think – and Jim pointed out how impressive he thought my work was. I said, more or less, “But to me it seems like such a narrow, limited area of achievement.” But he didn’t see it that way. I suppose anybody else’s life looks more successful, more fulfilling, than one’s own.

Don’t over-generalize that statement. That is your pattern; it doesn’t necessarily extend to others.

Still, that is my pattern. I look at my life as largely a waste of opportunities and abilities.

And how does it serve you to feed that particular robot?

You mean, I take it, that what I know about my life isn’t necessarily true.

It isn’t necessarily in perspective. For you to get here required many trade-offs, and you don’t have any idea what your life would have had to be, for you to be where you are in certain abilities and yet be other places in achievement.

Well, I’ll take some reframing, if you have it in the offing.

Then here it is. Your horoscope is a promise that you live, believing, on faith, that it will be fulfilled. It can’t possibly not be fulfilled. So, as your life is not chance and coincidence, and as you trust it, trust all of it. That includes trusting your own past sins of omission and commission.

That’s a somewhat different concept – trusting our sins.

Look at your failures and successes, your vices and virtues, your inabilities and abilities, your evil deeds and thoughts and your good deeds and thoughts, fairly. Don’t weight the scales one way or the other. Don’t heavily emphasize the “good” (the things you approve of) and discount the “bad” (what you disapprove), nor the opposite. Come to a fair reckoning.

It is hard enough to get a balanced view of your life without making it harder by being too hard or too easy on yourselves by deliberately miscounting.

You have always said we can’t judge our lives (let alone anyone else’s life) accurately because living in 3D time-slices prevents us from seeing things in perspective. But this is a little different, seems to me.

Not so much different as an extension into another realm of thought. Your view of your lives is distorted by more than one factor; time is not the only agent warping your perspective. To overcome the drag of the robot that says, “I’m not good enough, I’m not a satisfactory result of so much raw material,” the answer is: Trust your life. And we want to say a little more about that, as usual aiming our remarks not at you as a particular example (though you are that) and not even at certain of your friends as examples (though they too could be that) but at everybody living their lives moment by moment in 3D, struggling or swimming in a continuing movie that they may or may not be enjoying.

Let us say this as bluntly as we can, if only to get your full attention: It is stupid to distrust your life. It may also be self-indulgent. Certainly it is not productive for you, nor – you may not have thought of this – is it helpful to others.

Angst over missed opportunities is perfectly natural, as is angst over things you’ve done or omitted to do. But regrets are merely judgments in two senses of the word “judgment,” unhelpfully coupled. In the sense of discernment, sure; it is always good to be as aware as possible. But self-condemnation only freezes you in position. It is a form of being wedded to a description of your possibilities that you despise. What good can come of that?

Similarly, if you feel you have been held back by others – external 3D others or internal non-3D others – what are you doing but painting yourself as victim? “I deserved better. I wuz robbed.” But if you put your life in the scales against holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, where are you? Suppose you were robbed, so to speak. Can that have been an accident, in a world in which chance and accident do not exist?

You’re saying we have a tendency to feel sorry for ourselves, and should get over it.

Not quite. Many of you are quite valiant in bearing the burden that your life feels like to you. but we are saying: “Stop thinking you know better than life. Just because you have other preferences doesn’t mean you know what you are asking.”

Trust life.

Well, what is the advantage to dis-trusting life? What is the advantage to wishing things had turned out differently, that you had turned out differently?

I can imagine some people asking if we should thereby be perfectly delighted with our lives including the things we are ashamed of, or regret, or remember with pain.

You know your grandmother’s saying, “Everybody rides the mule.”

Everybody has something to bear, yes.

Everybody has valid reason to complain, and valid reason to rejoice, on an on-going basis. Which one you do, or what proportions you allot to doing each one, is up to you. it’s your choice – only, don’t think you are the victim of cosmic injustice, just because you don’t approve of what is. Maybe the world is larger than your comprehension of it.

When we started this, I thought it was going to be private, but I see that with a couple of discreet omissions, I can post it, and, I gather, you’d like me to.

It’s your choice, always, but it may help people.

May help me, for that matter. Okay, then, always pleasant talking with you. Our thanks for this, and we’ll talk to you another time.

 

The other day you referred to “we” humans. I take it that was you slipping in a further redefinition.

Drawing a connection that is not necessarily obvious, let’s say. There is still a tendency to think of non-3D elements as separate from 3D individuals. It may be time to remind people that sometimes what those in 3D think of as non-3D individuals are actually extensions of those 3D individuals into non-3D, then experienced as if separate. Some of the guidance that people experience is another part of themselves. Some is not, but some is. That is worth realizing and remembering.

Okay, so what occurred to me last night was – ?

You continue to read novels and see dramas, and of course they involve passions. What is a villain but a person in the grip of a hot or cold passion? Some are personifications of such drives – that is, their whole lives are driven by greed or hatred or by indifference or whatever. Others are a mixture of traits and characteristics and only occasionally – perhaps only on one fatal occasion – explode into action, or coldly execute some scheme. We emphasize hot or cold, you see, because this is not necessarily a matter of a lapse, nor of a thorough-going rottenness. It could be either; it could be any shade between. But no matter how it expresses, it is a passion motivating a personality.

I’m getting that you want to make a distinction in our thinking that often we don’t make.

Passion is not always emotional. There can be a cold passion, just as deadly, just as icily indifferent to suffering. The evil done by the Himmlers of the world is quite as deadly as that done in a rage by Goering, say, or by calculation (Goebbels, say), or by someone possessed by a demon, like Hitler. Nor, we hasten to add, is this a political statement, as if evil existed on the right and not also the left. But the personalities and consequences of the Nazis we cited are well known. Those of Stalin and Mao tse-tung are less so, and in any case we would hope that those who are following this line of exposition would be beyond capture by ideology by this point.

You are citing Himmler as a mild-mannered clerk, like Eichmann; Goering as an impulsive, passionate driving force; Goebbels as all intellect and no morality or even decency; Hitler as a man swallowed by his hatred and resentments and his all-consuming will to have his way, less out of egotism than out of delusions of grandeur.

That’s right. A metaphysical scheme that does not explain the existence of such men (and women, of course) is no good to you. But now let us connect some dots: the existence of forces that run through human lives, and the timing of the release of such forces.

Should I try to set it out more carefully, or do you want to continue?

Bullet-points, perhaps.

All right. It’s more than just “on the one hand on the other hand.” It is a correlating of things we don’t usually think of together.

• We as individuals are communities of threads, as has been explained.
• In a sense, our character is something like a ratio among these threads.
• Our decisions over a lifetime strengthen some elements and weaken others. That’s what recurrent free choice does; that’s what free will in 3D conditions is all about.
• But our actions are not taken in a vacuum. Our life situations are defined not only by our inner drives but by external situations. We respond to externals in our individual manner, but we do not shape those externals.
• The manifestation of such externals is not random, but is not under human 3D control. It may be compared to the weather, an external force to which we adapt.
• That weather has its timing, and as was said, it may be mapped by astrology. The psychic influences of any given moment are to be seen in the stars, for those who learn to read them.

Yes, good. And the interconnection between the individual (as shaped by its decisions), and the weather at any given moment, is the passions. At least, that is one way of saying it.

On the one hand, who we are; on the other hand, what we have to contend with at any given moment.

Close enough. You see – or apparently you do not yet quite see – this is the piece missing from many a model of human behavior. Humans are not of a piece; they are often self-contradictory; they change over time; they sometimes behave in unpredictable ways; sometimes they “aren’t themselves.” You have come to see that this is because they are communities acting as individuals. Well and good. But the next step is to ask yourself, how and why and even when do humans manifest various characteristics?

People are not puppets; they do have free will, and they exercise it to varying degrees in different circumstances and in different parts of their lives. Nonetheless humans as groups are quite predictable and are often quite easily manipulated. How are the two equally true statements to be reconciled?

I get that it is the interaction of our inner lives with the vast impersonal forces sweeping through our outer lives but it hasn’t yet clicked. Need the right image, I imagine.

Your statement is not quite correct. It isn’t flat wrong, but it is misleading as stated. The vast impersonal forces do not sweep through your outer lives, because there is no such division, and if there were it would be the inner and not the outer which is primary. The vast impersonal forces are of the same nature and quality as the vast personal forces, and that will take some explaining. As we have been at this an hour, let us pause here and continue from this point. Thus, there is your next starting place.

Wednesday, June 13, 2018

You said we would begin with the statement that the vast impersonal and personal forces share the same nature and quality.

This is an example of the same thing experienced differently. Thus it looks like two and not one. Or, it is two different things sharing the same characteristics. The two ways of looking at it make an ambiguous situation artificially clear, but only misleadingly so.

Like our thinking that you in non-3D are one being, subdivided, or many beings, intensely interconnected.

Yes, same thing. It is a characteristic of mind functioning under 3D conditions that things seem to be either/or, easier than both/and or neither/nor. Two-value logic corresponds to the overall condition of duality, while four-value logic blurs the distinctions and seems like fuzzy thinking until one’s level of perception and understanding rises to a level able to comprehend that the thing under examination at the moment (like all life in 3D) transcends dualistic logic.

We’ll keep it in mind as we go.

Actually, probably you won’t be able to keep it in mind except sporadically. The habits of 3D perception are very strong. But as long as you are able to periodically recoup your understanding, to recast what you have come to, and say, “Except, it isn’t only this way,” no harm done.

Ultimately, you and the forces we are to discuss are not separate. “All is one.” But everything is separate. Both sort of true, from a 3D perspective. Neither the whole story. It is just a condition of 3D existence, one that can be sensed only because you extend beyond 3D as well. To the degree that you remain within the 3D trance, life is either/or. To the degree that you transcend it, life is all one, either/or, both/and. It is the fact that you exist in All-D, not merely in 3D, that allows you fish to perceive water and the fishbowl.

So, within these limitations –

Describing the forces as the weather around you is a productive analogy, but it exaggerates the distinction between them and yourselves. We will employ it for the moment, remembering that it is a provisional aid to the understanding, and not a description set in stone as an absolute.

You as created beings – as knots in the fabric, to refer to a different analogy – represent complex structures with their own inertia.

No, that isn’t going to work very well, I don’t think. I get where you are going, but the analogy won’t work.

We recognize the difficulty, but let’s try simple inadequate models and work our way toward more complex suggestive ones. The process is a groping toward a common understanding between two beings in very different conditions. It is you and we each grasping a huge beach ball in the dark, attempting to walk with it while not stumbling over the uneven ground, not able to tell very well where the other’s grasp is, how firm, what the next step will do to the delicate balance – you get the idea. It isn’t a hazardous process, but it is somewhat unpredictable, haphazard, even.

If we think of you in 3D as sailing ships, each rigged differently and each with different origins and distinctions, you could see that the same winds and tides will hit each ship with different effect and will be used differently. But – as you already said – this is an inadequate metaphor. So let us seek a more complex one.

Suppose yourselves each an electronic chip. The same electric current running through each will produce very different effects, not because of a difference in the current, but because each chip consists of different units combined in a way that will produce a certain effect. Thus, the current is motivator, the chips are animated but not defined by it. This is a better analogy than ships and wind, but still far from adequate, so let’s build on the understanding.

We are searching now for an analogy that will show how the being is affected by – and also affects – the forces that move it. Not a ship being pushed by wind and tide. Not an electronic chip being animated by an electric current. We need something much more interactive, though still a matter of great disparity of forces. We need to bring will into it, you see, which implies perception and judgment.

Something less automatic than an electronic circuit no matter how variable its result. How about a prism?

That is an advance in one way, in that it demonstrates the acted-upon as being also the transformer, but it lacks the element of will. A prism will affect the light passing through it according to its own nature, but its nature does not change according to its decisions or circumstances. You do, and that is the point of 3D existence.

Well, what about decision-circuits employing light rather than electricity? Logic-gates shunt the light into this prism or that, and in effect the same input is continually changed as it shines through and the logic-gates vary their positions.

Yes, in some ways that is pretty good. You may wish to define logic-gates for people who do not deal with computer logic.

A logic-gate – it’s probably called something else, but that’s how I think of it – is a decision-point in the flow. Input will go right if the switch is set one way, left if set the other way. A simple binary choice, but put a million of them in sequence and you’ve got a complicated, seemingly infinite set of paths possible.

If you take your 3D life to be a run through this amazingly long sequence of logic-gates, you can get a sense of how your lives are continuous choice. But the analogy does not allow for any but choices pre-planned by the designer of the sequence, nor does it provide for a modification of the motivating force by decisions during the sequence. So, better to revert to the use of logic-gates to choose among prisms – remembering that the analogy is still necessarily inadequate.

Ideally, we will find an analogy or an image that will show the rats changing the maze even as they are running through it, but that may take some doing!