Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

Wednesday, May 9, 2018

We have arrived at the interface between personal and impersonal, or between any one specific consciousness in 3D and all the rest of 3D and non-3D reality that that consciousness interacts with. Your job in 3D is to widen your comprehension of yourself and of “the other.” Naturally you can’t do all of it at once, nor necessarily at the same time, nor necessarily in equal proportions. Every 3D experience is different. But the ultimate goal – not any proximate or immediate goal – is necessarily the same for all.

But it won’t seem that way.

How could it? Everyone’s position is too different. Everyone has different deficits to make up, and different past accomplishments to build on.

This interface is the reason we kept building up the concept of vast impersonal forces, because once one begins to see that one’s ability to shape reality is vastly greater than one had thought, there is a temptation to over-do it, and think one can do everything. But the world is always greater than the individual, even if the individual is greater than s/he had previously experienced itself.

Saying that reality has plasticity does not amount to saying that it has infinite plasticity, for that would amount to saying, “It’s all about you,” for everyone. There is a sense in which that is true, but only a sense. Life is always bigger than any one living thing or any collection of living things.

We got that the first time.

Maybe. And maybe as soon as we change context you lose it again. For instance, Jesus asks rhetorically, “What does it profit somebody to gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” Doesn’t that speak to the infinite value of your own soul to you, when weighed in the balance against the rest of reality?  So, doesn’t that say that it is all about you?

Of course it does. But it equally says the rest of reality exists; it isn’t a figment of our imaginations and it isn’t merely an extension of our own personalities.

True enough. Our point here is that changing contexts always presents the risk of one losing newly acquired perspective, and must be guarded against.

We have been at some pains to reinforce your sense of identity with the world around you and to reinforce your sense that nothing is as it seems. Only, be careful how you digest this. That things are not as they seem stems not from someone attempting to deceive you, but from the unavoidable inadequacies of anyone’s ability to perceive and comprehend.

I got that a while ago. We’ll never get to a “the truth,” only to the highest truth we are able to comprehend at a given time.

Well, having painted your personal dimensions as All-D creatures experiencing yourselves initially as isolated 3D individuals, now we proceed to paint the world

• as if it mattered, rather than you;
• as if it were primary, rather than you;
• as if it was real, rather than you.

And of course, this is how most people do see things, only they don’t see the world any more clearly than they see themselves, and for the same reason.

The reason being – ?

What you pay attention to, you get to know. But if the filters between perceiver and whatever is perceives are strong enough, no image gets admitted that contradicts the filter. A confirmed materialist cannot (usually) see spiritual influences. A Christian Scientist cannot (usually) see physical rather than spiritual obstacles to perfect health. Bear in mind, in citing these examples of filters, we are not taking sides. Each is a legitimate point of view. What they have in common is the limitation in admitted input that the filters enforce.

We have sketched repeatedly how larger parts of yourselves interact with (you might almost say interfere with) your strictly 3D experience. The hard-headed materialist’s convictions may be undermined by contrary knowledge flowing out of the non-3D component. You should be familiar with all that. But now continue with the idea of the world at large as resistance, as obstacle, as contradicter. Once you get to realizing your own internal contradictions, you may begin to downplay those of the reality around you. Nothing wrong with that as a stage in your development, but like every overreach, it needs correcting.

The world is going to influence your 3D experience at least as much as your own internal struggles.

Common sense tells you that the world actually exists, in the way that you do. It isn’t what it appears to be, but it isn’t nothing, either, nor an arbitrary creation of your own mind. It ought to be unnecessary to say something that is so obvious, only once one sets sail on the intuitive seas, it is a temptation to forget about the sensory shores.

Interesting metaphor.

Yes, provided it isn’t taken too literally. It isn’t as if there were one area of life that is intuitive and another that is sensory. It is rather a matter of qualities.

You will remember that we spoke of the present moment (any present moment) as a sort of trance. By that, we mean not that strictly material causes lead to strictly material results. But it is a sort of cumulative total of all forces at that given time. Clearly, times differ from each other if only in that.

You mean, I think, that every present moment is shaped by the cumulative force of everything in that moment, hence has a solidity and massiveness relative to any one of us.

Of course. That is your experience every day. Only it isn’t that simple, and the discovery of the ways in which it is not simple lead you to see that you are more than you thought you were, and that reality is more than you thought it was. At the moment we are going to concentrate on the solidity and force and mass of the external, rather than concentrating (as we do at other times) on its plasticity and impressionability and its phantom nature compared to the inner reality of any 3D being. Both ways of looking at it are true, so we move now to the underreported aspect.

And do we have time to begin?

Try this. You exist in 2018, at the moment. You and everyone in the world are affected by the 2016 presidential elections. It doesn’t matter if you don’t read the news or listen to the radio or discuss it with your friends and neighbors. Even if you didn’t even know about it, you couldn’t help be affected, because of all those around you who care. Can anyone in his right mind maintain that 2018 can be the same as 2014, say?

But to say this is not to say that things are as they appear from any given viewpoint. It is to say, merely – but a big merely – that any present moment has its own “objective” reality that affects one’s subjective reality because of its effect on so many other 3D minds, let alone its expression in 3D external reality.

The 1848 elections changed the country. So did discovery of gold in California. So did whatever was invented in that year, or put into execution. So did Emerson’s visit to Europe, and the revolution in France. So did The Year of Hope in general. And we could look at the world of painting, sculpture, scholarship, technology, whatever, and we would see the changes in that context. The Fox sisters, in New York, or Joseph Smith. I see that what we concentrate on affects how we experience it, and I see that it exists regardless how any of us experience it.

That’s right. The world is there, and is not to be talked away. The fact that it is deeper than it appears does not mean it doesn’t exist. Quite the contrary, in fact. But that is enough for today.

 

Friday, April 27, 2018

We are encouraging you to think of reality in a different way, a more comprehensive way, than is usually adopted. Rather than concentrating on human life as it is experienced in the physical world, we brought in the non-physical world which, for a long time, you considered separately. Then we helped you to integrate your thinking, so that your new normal “default” position was of human life as being lived in All-D, as All-D beings. No “normal” versus “psychic” life, but life, all one thing.

In fact, 3D-plus-Non-3D is not your larger being. 3D-plus-Non-3D is your accustomed being, what you might call your lower selves, not your higher selves. Reintegrating your non-3D components into your self-definition was an important advance, but the All-D self is still your accustomed self, not your higher self. You might say it is you as you live on earth, only with all your senses functioning.

Your higher self is the part of you that is not confined to your 3D existence, but is prior to it.

Spirit, as opposed to soul.

Yes, but it is well to remind your readers that those terms are not interchangeable.

• Soul may be considered to be spirit as it is bound in one specific 3D life situation. It is the Frankness of Frank, the mind of Frank.
• Spirit is the essence that is expressing this time as Frank, another time as Bertram, or Joseph, etc. Of course when we say “time” in this context, we mean “general situation.”

Yes, I get that. Spirit cannot be changed by the events of physical life (as far as I know), whereas the whole point of physical life from our perspective is to change the soul.

To allow the soul to determine changes, yes.

Now, in identifying “spirit” with “higher self,” we will be stitching together two concepts that many people have held in not-interconnecting mental boxes. For others, still recoiling from anything smacking of religion, the very word “spirit” may be suspect, or may be rejected out of hand. But this stitching-together is necessary if we are to sketch a broader view of what you are, and what you are doing here, and what it’s all about.

So, let us say your Sam – the origin and interconnection of so many past or other lives – is in effect your higher self. This will serve as effective scaffolding. Seen this way, you will see a couple of things.

• Sam as we define it is not God, not in any sense the ultimate creator, not in any sense the connector of all beings, the common field of being. Your Sam is the common denominator of Frank and Joseph and Bertram and so on, not the common field of everyone else’s lives. There are fewer Sams than human lives “past,” “present,” and “future,” but that still leaves room for plenty of Sams!
• A Sam, then, though not the ultimate creator or the ultimate source of life or form, is nonetheless a being at an entirely different level of existence than an All-D human.

It is our greater mind, to which we sometimes have access when we are particularly connected.

It is to you as you are to your kidneys, or your lungs. It is a higher order of intelligence and awareness, primarily concerned with other things.

How far can we push “As above, so below” in this instance?

Pretty far, actually. Consider your everyday mind in relation to your lungs.

• Your lungs do not read books or watch films. The things you think about or experience directly or vicariously are invisible to them, and would be meaningless to a lung if it could somehow perceive them.
• Yet, the state of your lungs affects your life. You depend upon their functioning, and if they malfunction, you are affected.
• Conversely, the lungs are sensitive to your condition. The effects of emotion may affect the lungs, but of course they cannot know what caused the change in their condition. Not only do they not know what changed the chemical balance, they cannot even appreciate that there is a balance to be considered.
• So, you, in connection to the higher self, the Sam. It is an indissoluble link, but it is also alien to your accustomed world.

I get that you said that just as we and our physical organs have different levels of perception and intelligence, and so in effect live in different worlds, so we in All-D are similarly separated from the next higher level up, which we are calling a Sam. We are intimately tied together, but we are of different levels of consciousness, hence live in different world, among different concerns.

Good enough. Now, can you imagine that your liver cares about your politics or your economic situation or the films and novels you ingest? Conversely, can you imagine even comprehending, let alone being fascinated by, the day-to-day mental life (call it) of your liver? They are two different worlds, and rightly so, and the fact that they can be seen as parts of one thing (as they are) does not change the fact of their difference.

Similarly, can you imagine that your Sam cares about your politics or your economic condition, etc.? Because it is a higher order of consciousness, your Sam can comprehend these things. It can be aware of your struggles and amusements and progress and regress, in the same way that you as an All-D creature can become aware of the vicissitudes a lung experiences. A higher level comprehends – includes, incorporates – a lower level, but not vice-versa.

As you say that, I am reminded of E. F. Schumacher in A Guide for the Perplexed discussing the medieval concept of adequatio.

That was in a slightly different context, but the concept is worth exploring, and can be found, presumably, by a search on the computer.

In short, it says you can’t comprehend something if your level of being is inadequate to hold it.

Our point here has been to caution you that it is a mistake to think that your higher self is merely you with a telescope, or you with fewer obstacles to your understanding. What you are describing in such cases is not your higher self but your All-D self when seen more completely.

Your higher self is qualitatively different from your All-D self, and the sooner you realize it, the sooner your vision will clear.

Again, we do not say these things merely so you may skim over them and nod approvingly. To benefit from new ideas – to even fully realize the newness in them – you must mull them, must ponder, must knead the dough to leaven the lump.

[Found this: https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/08/22/schumacher-adaequatio-understanding/]

Thursday, April 26, 2018

It is a mistake to think, “There is reality, separate from me, outside of me, and I am a latecomer to the program.” You as 3D individual came late to the show, but to say that is to ignore your connection to all the rest of you that co-exists with the reality of the 3D universe since its beginnings. This is not metaphor, not poetic license. It is fact, but requires explanation.

I assumed you meant that we in our individual lives are souls, but in our connection to our Sam are spirit, and not spirits plural but spirit singular.

Sometimes you surprise us with your leaps.

How can I surprise you? Don’t you know what I know? And before I do, myself, sometimes?

No, it isn’t that predictable. Your life in 3D is like peering out in a rainstorm. Much of the time, your vision is clouded by internal and external factors, and you can see only so far. Then there will be a sudden clearing – lightning, say – and for an instant you will get glimpses of things far away and usually hidden. That is what happened just now, or so it seems to us.

Interesting. Okay, so –?

So the part of you that is undifferentiated spirit knows things that you-as-fragment cannot, even in connection with your non-3D resources (when considered strictly in connection with your individual soul, rather than with your Sam).

I keep forgetting that we have to adjust our ideas about our non-3D component, ceasing to think that “non-3D = spiritual,” any more than “non-3D = infinite knowledge.”

It is a major readjustment, but it clarifies how you think about many things.

Now, what does it mean for you, in practice rather than theory, that you are in intimate connection with the one undivided eternal spirit? Does it not entirely change your world?

• How can the indefinable, eternal, undivided spirit, coexistent with the founding of the 3D world itself be threatened by contemporary (or past, or future) events?
• How can it cease to exist?
• How can it be harmed or even impeded?
• How can it be even opposed, given that it is part of the whole and – in a way – is the whole?

You as 3D mind see reality from the soul’s point of view. You identify with the body’s limitations, and to the extent that you learn to perceive your non-3D components, it is you incorporating a larger field of activity into the already existing, already defined, 3D personality. (There’s nothing wrong with this. It is an inevitable first step. We are not criticizing but analyzing.)

You as spirit existing mostly in the background of 3D mind is a thing to be considered separately. You as spirit know better than to think that life is merely 3D life, or that your soul is all you are. You as spirit identify not with any one character in the play, nor even with the playwright, nor even with the theater director, but with everything.

Well, how easily do you suppose that a point of view that identifies with everything can make itself clear to a point of view that identifies around one body and soul? You as spirit can hardly even be called a point of view; more like, a field of view. There isn’t the distortion of perspective caused by a single viewing-point.

So, I gather than the point is that if we learn to express, or experience, the undivided-spirit field of view, our way of experiencing the world, our lives, changes too.

What you said isn’t wrong, but it is far from the whole story. It isn’t so much about your potential to live a satisfying, less fear-filled life – though this is an obvious side-effect – as it is your potential to help all of you manifest rather than any of you.

I have been thinking of it as, “Growing to see things this way is important in our self-development.” I think you are saying, “Yes, that’s all well and good, but it isn’t about you as individual souls, really, but about the one undivided spirit.” Only, it’s difficult to apply that in practice.

But not so difficult in concept.

• In concept you can see that what benefits the whole may or may not immediately benefit the part.
• In fact, the immediate effect for some parts may be harmful, at least in its 3D manifestations.
• So, from your soul perspective, you will count the cost to your 3D persona.
• From your undivided spirit perspective, you will not only be willing that the cost be paid, you may not count it as a cost at all.

This is the psychology of religious martyrs, isn’t it?

That’s too broad a generalization, but that is a part of it, yes. Opinion, stubbornness, opposition, circumstance may all enter into it, but the martyrs who went cheerfully to their death obviously were identifying not with their one, 3D, contingent, liable-to-destruction selves but with the eternal sureness underneath, the eternal untouchable part of themselves. How they thought about it didn’t really affect what was going on, except that it gave them courage and sureness. But the identification did not depend on the definitions they put around it.

 

Wednesday, April 25, 2018

I left myself a note: “The objective reality of the weather we live among. The world not primarily in relation to us.” And even my own note seems cryptic this morning.

However, “cryptic” is not “meaningless,” nor “impenetrable.” So let us begin there. To examine the world as it exists, rather than as it exists in relation to you, or to us, is more difficult than you might think. That is what science thinks it is doing, examining everything from nebulae to geologic strata to subatomic particles. But the danger has been the temptation to divide reality between living and dead, just as it divides the living between conscious and not, and then between self-aware and not. One can do quite a lot of useful work of analysis that way, only, the basis being wrong, a systemic bias will run through every conclusion, every investigation, every division of reality into comprehensible parts.

You mean, I think, science will thus accumulate facts but not truth.

Well – not the truth, certainly. Knowing the limits of the possible is the beginning of the process of broadening the area included within those limits. There is always deeper truth that will invalidate any way of thinking (including this one) if carried far enough.

So let’s look at the world in its own terms, remembering that

• we are intrinsic to the world,
• yet it is also not all about us (non-3D, as well as 3D).

How do we do that?

How does religion do it? How does mythology do it? Take those two approaches and blend in how science does it, and you get is an approach that examines oneself as part of a greater whole, without pulling the center of attention back to oneself.

• If the world was created by God and man was placed in the garden and the adversary to God stirred up dissention – that is a story that accounts for the world without making it “all about us” and without making it “all about everything but”
• Or if the existence of the world is taken for granted and the various forces in the world are personified in the inhabitants of Mount Olympus, again we see an account that describes the familiar passions, discords and difficulties of our lives, and ascribes them not to an individual’s failings or marred nature but to the effect of our living among the gods and the consequences of the actions of the gods. Eris, the goddess of discord, doesn’t even think about humans, but humans are plenty familiar with dissention.

These are two ways of describing more of the world than the scenery, so to speak.

Science describes the setting, while religion or mythology describes our inner life in that setting?

No, A scientist, or for that matter, many religious or philosophical thinkers, might think that, but it is a product of the initial wrong division of the world into “this” or “that” rather than “this” and “that.” Carl Jung would not make such a mistake.

Should we invite him in to make his own statement?

Called or not called, Jung, too, will be here. [A play on Jung’s inscription on a stone that said, in Latin, “Called or not called, God will be here.”]

Very funny. Okay, Dr. Jung, would you like to comment?

Societies with an active religious awareness need no science of psychology. It was the poverty of the Western imagination in the 19th century that led us to begin to carve a way out of the dead-end in which Western civilization found itself. Freud and his pioneering work almost had to come from a non-Christian source – it led out of difference from the taken-for-granted mythos of Christianity, you see, even if what passed for Christian thought had lost its vitality in our time.

For me, a non-Jew, to join that movement enthusiastically was somewhat daring, looked at conventionally. This may explain to you why Freud adopted me so whole-heartedly, and why when our basic fundamental differences forced us apart, he regarded it as personal betrayal. Freud’s cultural background was Jewish, though he was not observant. Mine was Christian, though I was not observant. For a time our mutual pursuit of the unknown truths we were glimpsing held us together, but then our backgrounds limited the relationship, and this is not understood even in your time.

In your time, to speak of Jewish or Christian is considered bad manners, or bigotry, or primitive thinking. Therefore there are things you cannot see, because the unnoticed screen in front of your vision allows you only limited slots through which to peer. But you may turn that to advantage if you once set aside the screen. Resolve to exhibit bad manners, or display bigotry or ignorance, if that is how people will take it, and see what is.

It is not anti-Semitism to see that Jewish culture is not Christian culture, as neither is Islamic culture. To pretend that different things are not different is to lose the ability to deal with them. At the same time, it is not helpful to oversimplify in the other direction. A Jew in 19th century Austria is not the same as a Jew in 20th century America, nor in 21st century America! You are (as everyone always is) mixtures of cultures within you. Ethnically, you are one thing (or many things, depending upon how mixed your physical heredity). On a soul level you are other things, depending upon who and what you have been before this life. And on a social level, you are something else.

I got the sense of that as, my ancestry is Italian, with whatever unsuspected strands that may include, and my other lives include sojourns in England and India and Egypt, etc. When that mixed body-soul heredity is placed in mid-20th century America, the result is not going to be very typical of any of the three elements considered separately.

Yes. You are not stereotypes, and neither are you tabula rasa. Life is more complex than it is sometimes thought to be. And this is what I have to say on this topic. Consider three strands of influence – your body, spirit and soul contributions to the being that is you now – and from there look at the world you try to understand.

“Soul” in this case meaning, I take it, our life as placed.

Yes.

• Your physical heritage is one thing, a matter of genetics.
• Your spiritual heritage is another, a matter of your original composition as modified by past decisions (or, one might less accurately say, by past experiences).
• Your soul is less a heritage than an ongoing contemporary experience: It is the thing that is you, as it expresses here and now.

Did we go off on a tangent, discussing ethnicity, etc.? Was that leftover business for you, given the accusations of anti-Semitism made against you?

What would a tangent be? The straight line may be the shortest, but it is not the most comprehensive. To see various aspects of things, tangents may be very helpful. Use your background, don’t apologize for it, or ignore it, or think it irrelevant. (How could any aspect of your life be irrelevant?) And therefore use the same process of analysis on whatever you examine. Freud was more than a European Jew in a secularized tradition in middle Europe – but he was those things, and how can you understand him if you do not take into account his background? I was the son of a Protestant minister who had silently lost his Christian faith. If you don’t know about my father, if you don’t know I was a Swiss peasant as well as a European scholar – how can you know who I am?

I realize, this still seems to you to be digression. But it is not. It is, rather, preliminary clearing of the ground. Careful study of new material will do you little good if you insist that it fit into your accustomed framework, most particularly if that insistence is unconscious, hence not under your control.

 

Wednesday, April 18, 2018

All right, friends, we said the 3D and non-3D and its application to all this – leaving “all this” undefined. I assume this means something more specific to you than it does to me.

Of course. It serves as a place marker, because our problems of orientation are the – reciprocal? opposite? complement? – to yours. You wonder where we’re going, we wonder which bit to offer at which time. So, any place gets us started. The function of a “topic for next time” is mostly to alleviate your anxiety.

So, yesterday we set out the idea that

• all moments of time-space (as opposed to “all moments of time” which isn’t as accurate) are equally alive, equally active, and
• the difference between this moving present-moment you experience in 3D and every other moment – the “past,” the “future” – lies in the physical movement of the earth, locating your 3D body here rather than there.

This is a vastly important subject that will lead you far, but there are so many subjects to link it to! That is, the context for this new way of seeing your lives is so extensive, it may take a while to sketch.

So we will pick up this or that aspect of things, as we are so moved, and you see it won’t matter very much in which order we do so. If there are 26 letters to be discussed and today we pick H when we haven’t picked G beforehand, it will make a difference, but ultimately it won’t hinder anything.

However, this is going to require a tremendous amount of work, and the less work you do, the less readjustment you can expect. We don’t want you memorizing nor accepting on blind faith nor rejecting out of hand nor limiting yourselves to what may be logically derived from the material as we happen to present it. Rather, we want you to pay attention to us and pay equal attention – at least equal attention – to your own intuitive promptings, which are likely to catch sparks we throw off. You can fan those sparks into flame, if you pay proper attention, and thus you can learn more than we can teach. In fact, that is the only way you can learn (as opposed to parrot or believe). We can’t be saying that every time, but it isn’t like we can say it once for all, because you all forget.

Given that your lives are spent traversing a living conscious universe moment by moment, bear in mind that so does your non-3D component. Only, it isn’t that simple.

When is it ever? But I’m with you. On the one hand our non-3D must be here with our 3D, as we’re all one thing. On the other hand, our non-3D component is not confined to this present moment any more than to this present place, which means, neither are we. At least, that’s the inference I draw.

In other words, your self-definitions are inadequate. Correct. So let’s look at it.

• This 3D experience is limiting, but it is not punishment, nor ignorance, nor detour, no matter what religions or philosophies argue.
• It may be seen as any of these, because of course it shares the characteristics of any of those situations, but that is not all it is, nor even is it all of them together.
• And it is precisely to help you see these things in a new light that Bob Monroe and Seth and so many people in and out of 3D came to say.
• 3D life is a more interesting, more hopeful situation than may sometimes appear. If people sell it short, that is usually because they are in pain, are feeling isolated, are feeling disoriented, or for some reason are identifying strongly with a sense of inherent meaninglessness or of separation and the logical and emotional effects of separation.

Working from the assumption that anyone in 3D is in fact in All-D (of necessity, because everyone in any of the dimensions must be in all of them, perceiving them or not), you come to the realization that your non-3D components necessarily share your 3D limitations to some degree. We need a good visual analogy.

A deep-sea diver tethered to his life-support on the surface? We in 3D being the divers, our non-3D being our life-support?

It is an attractive metaphor, in several ways. We’ll try it out and lean on it until it breaks under the weight we place on it. If your non-3D is tightly coupled to its 3D components, as it is, then necessarily its awareness is going to be tethered to the awareness of its 3D, as well.

I think you mean, if I’m in January, 1953 in Mexico City, so is my non-3D.

Well – let’s say that your non-3D is temporarily centering itself there.

And I’m only in 1953 because the sun has pulled the Earth over a particular place in the time matrix which is the 1953 place, and as it pulls us beyond it, obviously I – and everyone else on earth – am pulled with it, willy-nilly.

Yes, but just as in your present moment your non-3D is centered in but not confined to the moment the 3D body is, so always.

I get the sense of a solid point – us in 3D – and a gaseous envelope tied to the point but not limited to it, that floats somewhat free of it.

That may do for the moment. The point to be gathered is that the 3D experience is fully shared by the non-3D aspects of the entire (All-D) being.

Which is why you aren’t all-knowing in the way we start out expecting.

• And why you are more than your physical bodies,
• and why you know more, can do more, and are of more importance, than you sometimes think.
• And why it is so important to break down this putting us on a pedestal, or defining us out of existence, or thinking we are “spiritual” (or even “mental”) while you are physical.

All those alternative errors serve to distance yourselves from a large part of your potential. Fortunately, in practice you often disregard the walls you construct, but you can do better now, and it is time to do so.

We aren’t on our own, and never have been.

That’s right. Living as if you were on your own has had its advantages in exercising independence and in stretching your capacities to function without conscious connection with the larger part of you. After all, that is only a slight extension of what’s going on in the 3D experience anyway. But so much more is possible once you reunify the alienated parts of the whole.

Alienated?

Your 3D component often acts as if the rest of it did not exist, or was irrelevant. We want you to try to envisage living not only in continuous conscious connection (you are already in non-conscious connection, of course) but in active cooperative connection, which is another thing.

And this is something that cannot be described but might be “imagined” – that is, you may be able to catch something of the sense of it by fanning that spark; you will not get it by further logical exposition. How would your life look if your 3D were in continuous active cooperative connection with your non-3D? What would this make possible, even inevitable? How would your lives feel?

 

Tuesday, April 17, 2018

I made a note to myself last night to suggest that we begin with “present moment everywhere,” unless you have some other path you’d care to tread.

Nothing wrong with starting there. By those words – which now seem pretty cryptic, do they not? – you meant to suggest that we expand a little upon our suggestion (made many times over the years, but not really followed up to any extent) that every passing present moment is alive and interactive.

Not my idea entirely, to begin with “present moment everywhere,” I take it.

Not quite. It may be difficult to put into words, so be prepared with objections, questions, qualifiers.

Anyone reading this, no matter when, and no matter how often at different times you may read it again, are here, now, as Ram Das tried hard to get you to realize. It is always “here,” it is always “now.” Not so hard to understand, right? But then, add to it – not substitute, but add – the fact that that ever-moving present moment does not cease to exist.

Do you want me to hold off until you say a little more before trying for clarifications?

As we go along is fine. State what you got that is implicit in what we just said.

You are meaning, I think, that each given moment exists forever. As you first told us years ago, the past does not cease to exist – when seen from outside 3D space-time – merely because the moving present moment has moved on. So Jan. 10, 1850 is as alive as today, and always will be. We got that, but I’m hearing now that the “moving present moment-ness” also remains there, remains everywhere. And this I had not gotten, and will be interested to see you reconcile.

We may have to do a little surgery on your epicycles as we go. Very well, take the time you intervened in Joseph Smallwood’s life (and disregard the fact that you are increasingly sure that that wasn’t his name. That isn’t important in this context).You, Frank, in the 1990s – on July 4, 1994, intervened in the life of a man in 1863, the same day. You, in what was your present-moment (for when else could you have acted) intervened in his present-moment (for when else could he have reacted).

How can that be?

Similarly, Bob Monroe and various Monroe Lifeline participants intervene from their present-moments to assist people who were in their own present moments, although not confined to 3D.

They needed retrieval because they weren’t aware that they were no longer constrained by 3D.

That’s right. Well, look at those conditions carefully. Can you see that your accepted explanations are a little too much founded in everyday assumptions rather than in your deeper knowings?

I hadn’t, but I’m getting there pretty quickly now. Our own present moment isn’t any more real and distinctive than theirs, it is?

That’s just a little too fast, but you’re on the right track. What happens if we jettison the concept of a moving present-moment, and replace it with a better understanding?

Okay with me, though I can’t quite see what you’re going to replace it with.

If you could see it, why wouldn’t you have done it yourself?

Point. So?

You have been proceeding upon the idea that the present moment is the point of application, the point of power to act. But implicit in this concept (which is correct as far as it goes) is another assumption which is not correct – that all other moments of time are somehow frozen in place, perhaps more like monuments than like living moments. You modified this idea to say that such other moments could be brought to life, so to speak, when in contact with the living present moment – that is, whenever an actor chose in his or her present-moment to interact with that previously-frozen moment. We don’t say you ever quite consciously thought this, but it is implied in what you did think, combined with what you unconsciously assumed.

It looks a lot less reasonable as you restate it.

That concept was your epicycle, that enabled you to move from the conventionally accepted idea of the past and future not existing, and the fleeting present existing for a split-second before also ceasing to exist and being replaced by another transient present. Your epicycle enabled you to move from an unreasonable counter-factual idea to a less unreasonable idea. That’s the nature of epicycles. A politer word is scaffolding, intended to be discarded after they have assisted you to do the job.

So now we say, look at life this way.

• Not, nonexistent past or future with a fleeting moment in the middle, such as your dominant culture still clings to.
• But not, either, a living ever-moving present moment and all possible past and future moments equally in perpetual existence but without the ability to choose that is the outstanding characteristic of moments in the living present.
• Instead, every moment is alive with potential. It isn’t the moment sliding by, but you sliding by, so that wherever you are is what seems to be the uniquely alive present moment.

I’m getting that what I got so many years ago was true; it wasn’t just me making it up.

It was you picking it up. Something you read threw a spark and it ignited something. But spell it out.

The sense I got was that all time exists laid out in space, and that where we are in space – where the planet has carried us – determines where the present moment is.

No, you didn’t think in those terms then. No need to tell what you did think. Tell what you think now. Absorb it and then express it, letting go your previous ideas.

Here’s what I think I see. Let’s imagine outer space as a sheet of paper, and the sun proceeding across the page, dragging the planets with it. As we follow along, our long curving path drags us along the paper, and each place we are dragged to is experienced as the unique moment in time we call the present moment. But we never go back to where we have been; thus we never go back in time. We never proceed in a straight line; thus (I suspect) our lives have patterns associated with cycles rather than with straight lines. Astrology has the idea, only it seems to be concerned primarily with angles formed by various planets, rather than earth’s progression across the paper.

Now, mentally.

Well, as I said, we can’t go back in time, physically. Mentally, we can and do, but we do so while remaining coupled to the body, so we can’t experience any other moment in the same whole-hearted way we do naturally wherever we are dragged to.

And it’s a good thing the hour is up, because I can sense that we’re going to get dragged into deeper waters, here, and I wouldn’t have the energy for the additional hour or more that it will take.

Nevertheless, a good start. A couple of reminders. Your scaffolding served you well. Others may have different scaffolding. It is always well to be gentle in your approach to “helping” others see “the truth.” Kicking down their scaffolding because you can see its provisional nature helps nobody. Merely providing alternative scaffolding is enough. Those who can’t use it won’t, but won’t be harmed by its existence.

 

Wednesday, March 28, 2018

So, my friends, if I have the idea right, you are tying together personal self-development (dealing with our individual issues) and development as a group. But I find, writing this, I am still a bit vague as to the latter.

Instead of thinking of yourselves as individuals only, we are encouraging you to see yourselves as individuals and as communities; similarly we are encouraging you now on a larger scale to see yourselves as individuals and as part of a larger community which is itself also an individual.

Odd. It feels like you’ve said all that, only now it is new ground all over again.

There is a momentary blurring of focus, nothing important. Remember “as above, so below,” and you will see that the blurring comes chiefly from limitations of language that tempt you (and therefore us) to use the same words for different things, and sometimes different words to not recognize the same things. In this case, it is a matter of scale which is being obscured.

Here is the gist of what we mean.

• The 3D human is one level, a collection of strands living together in the 3D crucible, and ultimately either fusing and attaining permanence, or not.
• The All-D human of which the 3D-human is a part is itself both individual and part of a larger being. That is, it is both individual in its own right and it is a strand in a larger being.
• That larger being is itself also part of something still larger, but it passes from our range of vision. We are concerning ourselves with structure as you may experience it practically.

You are sticking to the levels we may directly affect, and that may be directly affected by us.

That’s right. It is important that whether you choose to occupy yourself with effort or with flights of fancy, you know which one you are dealing with. We hate to see you spinning your wheels thinking you are going somewhere. Spinning your wheels may be fun sometimes, or unavoidable in certain conditions, but it is well for you to know whether you are really working out your salvation or are merely running in place, enjoying a daydream (or suffering a nightmare).

So, again: The 3D human, individual yet comprising a community of strands. At another turn of the microscope dial, individual, yet, as an individual, only one strand in something larger.

Why don’t we invent a simple way to distinguish between whether we’re talking about us in one way or in the other?

The disadvantage to doing so is that as soon as we invent names, people will begin to see the distinctions as more absolute than they are. It is a tendency of left-brain sequential processing to exaggerate the individuality and forget the underlying unity. We have been going to some pains to counter that tendency.

Either way, there’s a tradeoff.

However, even your being aware of the constraint aids understanding, so the discussion every so often is not a waste of time. So, to return.

We are currently tying together your lives

• as individuals-in-the-making (that is, experiencing the living-together of the strands that comprise you)
• as pieces-of-the-moment: that is, as part of the 3D world as it is affected by the vast impersonal forces, (most of which you will never experience directly nor even suspect) that are the world).

We encourage you to reread that slowly, encouraging your deepest intuitions to surface, not overruling them with logic or with previous assumptions. What if what we just said is true? How does the statement feel to you? It needs to be weighed as a unit, and not as separate pieces, and some of you will find it very hard to do that. If you find it hard, persist, as long as necessary (that is, repeatedly when you remember to), and the very effort will bring its reward.

The first half, you see, is more or less Rita’s discourses to you, concentrating on the less obvious facets of the 3D experience in its All-D context. The second half is Nathaniel’s, concentrating on the day-to-day struggles of human life and their meaning for you. These are not separate agendas or separate fields of study, but one agenda, one field of study, necessarily considered separately at first and now rewoven.

It is all well and good to study your lives as they appear once you remove some of the epicycles, so to speak. Equally, it is all well and good to study your lives as the battlegrounds among forces and impulses that you experience. But it is far more enlightening to do both at once after the ground has been cleared. Just as the sun rather than the earth is the center of the solar system, the compound being you are continually shaping is and should be the effective center. This is not contradiction; it is expression of the fact that life is both.

I think of Yeats, in this context: “Why does the struggle to attain truth take away our pity, and the struggle to overcome our passions restore it again?”

He was seeing the unity of the two subjects, you see. He wanted to see as profoundly as possible; he also wanted to overcome himself, so to speak. The two tasks sometimes seem contradictory; they may be better seen as reciprocating.

And that is why we have been able to broaden the scope of inquiry, finally. You were given the necessary ideas. You have been living your lives, which is itself instructive, assuming you pay attention. So now we begin to show you how theology sheds light on psychology, and inner work turns out to be outer work as well, and politics and ideology are seen to be not irrelevancies nor “external” (whatever that would be) but illustrations writ large of whatever work is yet undone in each person’s individual case.

Which is enough for the moment.

It felt, as we are going along, as if we were only re-treading familiar ground, yet I see that perhaps we did make relationships a little clearer.

You will find that novelty is not as useful nor as much a sign of progress as one might tend to think. There is value in consolidating what one may think of as familiar territory. After all, you will not be the same person as you do so. you won’t be stepping back into the same river, because that can’t be done.