Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

Thursday, January 19, 2023

4:15 a.m. Well, guys, a command performance, huh? I gather that our small group of four engineers was told that I should talk to you about how to move to the next level, in terms of connecting to guidance. I didn’t get any particulars, but I figured you’d go where you wanted us to go. So, you’re on.

You no longer invoke presence, clarity, receptivity explicitly, so it is as well to remind people that they should make some such habit implicit if not explicit. The first need in communicating is to be present, and that is more complicated sometimes than it may appear to be. You are communities in many respects, cooperating entities functioning “as if.” It is as well to remind yourself at the beginning that you wish everybody present. That means all here, now, attending to the same effort at outreach, or, let’s say, all looking and listening in the same direction.

It is one thing to do that as an individual who is also a community. How do you do it as a community of individuals – which means, obviously, a community of communities, each of which is itself a community? Our point here is that the process is vastly more complex than it may appear if you think of yourselves as each units cooperating with one another.

So, first, as individuals and then as what we might call temporary individuals (which is one way a temporary joint mind may be seen), concenter yourselves, within yourself and among yourselves. A simple ritual usually suffices: All you’re doing is ringing the dinner bell, getting everyone’s attention.

A desire for, an expectation of achieving, clarity helps reduce unconscious worry that the task might be beyond your expectations. It isn’t. You won’t be called to do something beyond your strength and ability, though you often will be called to do things that stretch those abilities, heighten those strengths. These exercise periods may feel like failures. They aren’t. Remember that nothing happens in disconnected fashion. A failure would imply a disconnect. We say no more about this than that you should think about this statement. Insights will present themselves, but you need to be quiet enough to hear them and to work out the chains of thought that suggest themselves to you as you do.

That of course segues into receptivity. Intending to be receptive is slightly different from a request for clarity. It is a promise of cooperation, more than an act of faith, if you see what we mean.

We know this doesn’t seem to be what is requested, but, it’s all there. If more had been needed for you as an individual, Frank, we would have provided it. Why should this be different? The answer to “why?” is of course because it is the same kind of seemingly uncharted territory that you thought was uncharted when you entered it, so many years ago. Whenever one looks back, one sees that the way ahead was always clearly set out by the experience of others, only they could not change your own unrealized expectations. Communicating with us is mostly a matter of releasing the ideas that make it seem impossible or difficult or even unusual. So why set out rules that will seem to be helpful but in fact will silently reinforce false expectations of difficulty?

Presence. Bring all parts of yourself to the same moment of time – the eternal present manifesting in 3D.

Receptivity. Direct them all to be open to instruction in whatever form it may take: words, images, feelings, promptings. Reassure recalcitrant parts of yourself that receptivity need not be gullibility. Receive first, then discern later, but receive, or there will be nothing to discern.

Clarity. Expect – program – that what you receive will not be beyond the logic of the time and place. You will have asked: Expect to receive, and expect to be able to work out what it is that you did receive.

This implies traits such as integrity, benevolence, openness – you know the drill. If a given group wishes, it may make up a short ritual to be said, in the way Bob Monroe wrote his affirmation. It isn’t necessary, but it may be helpful. It may be helpful, but it may tempt some into idolizing the form rather than the intent, so beware of the possibility. You aren’t creating a church, nor a superstition, so be careful of the rituals you embrace, however helpful.

As I was finishing writing that, I got something – part of something – about Edgar Cayce and the Lord’s Prayer. Did he use it as part of his ritual?

Not explicitly, nor is that exactly the thought you perceived. It was built into him, you might say, because this was a man who read the entire bible every year of his life. But – fortunately – he never thought to make it or any prayer “essential” to his work. Instead, he tried to live the attitude the Lord’s Prayer sets out:

• Our father (that is, the non-3D being sustaining the world, of the same essence as the 3D beings invoking him)
• Who is in heaven (existing in non-3D but, implicitly, accessible to those in 3D, or why pray to him?)
• Your name be blessed. (We love and reverence you.)
• May your kingdom arrive (may we get past our sense of being separated from the divine)
• May we do your will
• In 3D as in non-3D.
• Give us our daily requirements (that is, we trust you to do so)
• And remove obstacles between ourselves and you, as we remove them among ourselves.
• Don’t lead us astray.
• Deliver us from evil.

Not so sure, any more, about that last part, “deliver us from evil.”

You could put it, save us from the consequences of the apple from the tree of Perceiving Things as Good and Evil.

Ah. Well, that does make more sense.

And, good ex-Catholic that you are, we spare you the final sentence added by Protestants, but remember it too is true.

So here’s the point of this. If you (anyone) had to have a ritual, one grounded thousands of years ago, across cultures, might serve well because it originated so long ago and far away. There would be less temptation to idolize it. But of course, ex-Christians would have emotional resistances, so it might balance out in difficulty. There really aren’t any rules that apply everywhen and everywhere, beyond our admonitions to presence, receptivity, and clarity.

I am surprised to see it has been nearly an hour. It flowed smoothly and easily.

You’d think you had invoked presence, receptivity and clarity.

Very funny. But our thanks for this. In a way, thanks mostly for not complicating it.

You put your finger on the most important thing we set out to accomplish. More ambitious undertakings do not require ore complicated instructions. If anything, just the opposite, and you may take that for a general rule. Follow your intent with integrity and simplicity (“like a little child”) and you have all you need.

Very well, our thanks as always.

 

Wednesday, November 20, 2019

All right, gentlemen. You said you had a larger topic queued up. Still have it?

You might consider it fairly major. But you need to relax about it. The key question for many, sometimes assumed, sometimes assumed to be unanswerable, is: Does your life matter and if so, how?

Sure. You’ve been talking about that right along.

We have, for that is the question we set out to answer, long before you consciously posed it. It will have looked like we were conducting a tour d’ horizon: human life; things you can’t know first-hand; the meaning of things you do know when seen from another perspective, etc. But this has been in the service of showing you (not telling you) how your lives matter, and to whom.

And I hear, now we have cleared away the shrubbery, we can get to the heart of the matter.

More like, now we have told you the things you were likely to find easiest to accept, we come to the things you have real resistance to. Here you cease being spectators or students, and choose to become participants or practitioners.

You can choose. In fact, in 3D you cannot help choosing; that’s what 3D is. But you may choose at random, or by default, or inconsistently. Better to fasten on to an ideal and choose in accordance with that ideal. Not every impulse is beneficial, not every habit leads toward your goal. (This of course presupposes a goal, or, as we put it, an ideal.)

You have long reminded us that an ideal can only be lived toward, it cannot be encompassed.

It is your pole star, keeping you oriented. You need to know where North is. Maybe you don’t intend to go anywhere near North, but North tells you not so much where you are, but which direction you are facing. And that is the important part! You could know exactly where you are, but head off in the wrong direction. You could be mistaken as to where you are, but if you know which direction is where, you can find your way eventually. Tendency matters far more than any place you happen to find yourself.

Like Dante waking up and finding himself lost.

Precisely. The trick is finding Virgil to orient you. [As in “The Divine Comedy.”]

And the bitter medicine you are preparing to administer?

It isn’t bitter medicine nor non-bitter medicine. But it requires mental and – shall we call it moral? – effort. It isn’t anything we haven’t been asking of you right along, but it is in an area more sensitive.

The familiar part is the effort to readjust our mental categories to incorporate a new viewpoint which includes some elements previously excluded.

Yes. As we have said, a new view will include things excluded by the previous view: Not all of them, but some, and it will require an effort, like Carl Jung forcing himself to study alchemy and eventually finding the solid productive generative core that had been buried.

The unfamiliar part is that you are exhorting us to take religion seriously.

That’s a shorthand way to put it, but really we don’t care what you think of religion in general or in terms of any given religion. What we do care about is your openness or otherwise to the things religion concerns itself with! And here we know we will encounter massive resistance precisely from those who are potentially most able to receive what we have to say and to benefit from it.

When your conscious mind has one firmly settled idea or group of ideas, and an unconscious part of your mind has opposing ideas, it creates a tension. The greater the internal (unacknowledged) tension, the more intolerant the expression. People half-convinced of a political argument are among those denouncing it most hysterically. Believers in “reason” may become screechingly irrational at external opposition that happens to reinforce their own unacknowledged doubts.

So. Look within. You want to come to the root of things. You want to discover who you truly are, what your limits and possibilities truly are. You want to grow. Well, we guarantee you, there are counter-forces within you that want the exact opposite, or a slightly or greatly diverging goal. The first step in dealing with them is to become aware that they exist. And how do you do that?

Simple. You observe what pushes your buttons.

That isn’t the whole story, but it certainly is a strong first step. Only, because your buttons are pushed, it becomes hard to remain present enough to observe it.

Which is what our non-3D is for.

It is if you don’t ignore it, yes.

And some of these button-pushing words are God, Jesus, Allah.

Sin, duty, surrender, sacrifice, sure. To permit ourselves a vast generalization, we would say that anything people label “religious” rather than “spiritual” offers the opportunity for growth because it presents button-pushing structures and allows them to be examined. Saying you are “spiritual but not religious” is one thing when you mean you take the spiritual world seriously but you can’t be, or won’t be, bound by any religion’s rules and dogmas. It is another thing, and not a helpful one, when it morphs (unconsciously, usually) to become “I take the spiritual world seriously, so long as I don’t need to learn anything of how it interacts with us and don’t have to limit my actions.”

That may not be quite a fair summary. For many people it is a fear of drifting into a situation where they find themselves bound by the rules and dogmas.

The reality is this. Truth comes with a duty toward the truth. Once you know the truth, you have a responsibility to live it. You will never get to “the” truth, but you always have “the truth as you know it.” You can’t go beyond that, but you can get closer to deeper truth, higher truth, if you put in the effort. But you can only attain more truth by living the truth that you have already come to.

Is that perhaps what Jesus meant by saying that the only sin that can’t be forgiven is a sin against the holy spirit?

If you rephrase it, it will become obvious: You can’t move North by moving South. You can’t benefit from wisdom by ignoring it, or by contravening it. Or, to put it another way, nobody is going to turn you around. You have to do that, and the preceding step is to decide to do it, or, let’s say, to decide to cease to resist doing it.

 

Wednesday, August 28, 2019

[I was working on my novel about Hemingway when I got a sense to talk to the guys.]

Has it occurred to you that the specific kind of illness that terrified him centered in the lungs?

It hadn’t, actually. He was thinking of the flu, but I take your point. He feared his lungs filled with fluid.

More. He feared. You haven’t really connected with his fears of death and of “external” hazards such as illness. A mistake to allow him to continue to hide from it. It doesn’t help him and it distorts your portrait.

Help him?

It isn’t too late. Didn’t you help Joseph [Smallwood], and Bertram?

My lord, I never thought about it in that context. If we all connect –

There is vastly more you can do. Obviously, not only you, but everybody.

We are carriers of the vast impersonal forces you began talking about last year.

The same forces could be regarded as impersonal or personal. It’s a matter of viewpoint. Humanity is one thing, and is part of something greater. There are no absolute divisions in the world. Even the division between  3D and non-3D is only relative rather than absolute, as you know.

Since non-3D is an integral part of 3D:

• time is not the absolute barrier that it appears to be when considered in 3D terms. So
• relating across space and across time is not only not impossible, it is in fact unavoidable, and
• the only question is to what degree such relations will be conscious rather than unconscious.
• And that depends upon individual decisions.

If you keep in mind both aspects of reality – all is one, everything is differentiated – you get a clearer picture. You all have the ability to help heal the world, or to help curse it. None of you – fortunately! – has the ability to do so single-handed (so you needn’t fear doom and you mustn’t rest on your oars), but none of you is powerless to do good or evil in terms of who and what you are in essence; not dependent upon what you do externally.

Remember, the external is secondary to the internal. You are 3D/non-3D beings, hence are not pinned to one time and place, although you must experience life that way. But you can know better; you can see beyond appearances, and it is time that you wake up fully to your part in the vast cosmic drama that is human life within a continuing background of non-human forces manifesting within human life.

Do you choose to curse the enemies of what you hold dear, or bless them? This is not as simple and self-answering a question as it may appear. What results is your addition to the total of a human cursing or a human blessing. Which do you suppose is more therapeutic, seen in all?

I have always been impressed that Robert E. Lee prayed every night for his enemies as well as for his friends. It accounts for that vaguely saintly aura that he shares with Lincoln.

Yes. Neither man slackened in his efforts to have his side prevail, but neither ever chose hatred over love. Lincoln did not slacken his efforts to vanquish Lee and his cause, but he found no need to add to the hatred that had been disfiguring his country for so many decades. And nor did Lee.

To bring it back to Hemingway, and to remind others of their possibilities, remember that from your point of view at any time, the external present manifests as the eternal now, the point of power, the place of application. But just as you may bless Lincoln or Hemingway or whomever, so they (in their continuing point of power in the eternal now) may bless you. You continually act as conscious or unconscious conduits of blessings or curses. Choose wisely.

 

Thursday, August 29, 2019

Do you care to say more about how other people in other times may bless or curse us?

Remember the TMI program where you were given an exercise to send a message to your younger self? [Timeline, in 2003.] You sent a message of encouragement: “Don’t give up. It will work out. Don’t give up.” Well, now that you are neither in 2003 nor in 1956 –

Consider how it was from the 1956 end, to receive a message and an encouragement from elsewhen.

That 10-year-old could not realize that he was being contacted from the future.

I see it now. Don’t remember being contacted at all, of course.

No. You don’t remember experiencing the contact. You well remember July 26, 1956, however.

But this now has the flavor of the science-fiction stories about time travel that I find so irritating, where people are influenced by a future self that comes into existence only because of decisions or actions they take that are the result of that future.

Reorient your ideas, remembering that:

• you are multidimensional beings,
• all possibilities exist, and
• any one version connects to all other specific versions by way of the self.

It isn’t one person contacting a different person at another time. It’s more like one neuron connecting to other neurons in the same brain. There isn’t the absolute division between components that ordinary 3D life suggests. A puzzling incident in your past may be a clue that more was involved than you know. So, look at July 26, 1956 again.

This is one of those extraordinary events that I cannot be making up after the fact, for I have always remembered that morning. Is that the day I was contacted by my future self?

Relive it first. A bare-bones explanation will help you connect.

On July 26, 1956, the day before my tenth birthday, in a certain sense my childhood ceased, and a very different life began. All week, I had been looking forward to the one-hour TV special that would tell how the Lone Ranger became the Lone Ranger. I don’t remember how much that boy knew the difference between fact and fiction. I’m sure he at least partly and maybe entirely believed the story.

Anyway, the slot was pre-empted. In the night, the ocean liner Andrea Doria had collided with the Stockholm in Long Island Sound, and had sunk after a few hours. Live news coverage showed the survivors arriving in New York City, and somehow the sight of that huddled misery changed me, in one instant, putting the weight of the world on my shoulders. From that moment, I was (pick one) intellectually precocious and emotionally retarded, or empathically enabled beyond my years, so that I felt but did not understand. Of course that reaction would look ridiculous and totally disproportionate and ungrounded, but still, something had happened, and now you are suggesting that my future self sent me a message. So tell me what happened.

You will need to go slowly, staying with us. You may look at it as a portal opening up for you. One moment you were a normal ten-year-old boy and the next you were a ten-year-old still with only a ten-year-old’s slight knowledge of the world and of life but suddenly, in addition, with a glimpse of the human condition seen as from outside that ten-year-old’s frame of reference.

Emotionally, it was a lead-lined blanket dropped over that child, and it was all he could do to stand up under the weight, no one understanding what had happened, least of all him.

Yet it was necessary if your life was to take its peculiar course. What followed could have gone many ways, but the bias had been introduced.

I get that my belief in psychic abilities is one consequence, even though the subject didn’t really come to mind (as I remember things, anyway) until my brother gave me Edger Cayce: The Sleeping Prophet.

You were overwhelmed. You were put into a situation in which you had no covering on your nerves, hypersensitive emotionally and not well developed mentally. You were incapacitated from leading any kind of normal life, which wasn’t in itself a bad thing. Only anything can be carried too far, and it is sometimes hard to judge from non-3D how much is too much.

I should think that you’d be able to tell from looking at future events.

What do you suppose we just said?

It doesn’t seem at all equivalent to me.

We, like you, are continually readjusting. Your decisions determine what you become. Each decision requires an adjustment from our side. You enable and disable potential all the time, as you go.

I think you’re saying, as we live, at some points you may adjust the trim, and depending upon how we react, the original intended-to-be-helpful input may have undesirable effects, so that in effect you have to change your minds and perhaps undo your own previous efforts.

That isn’t wrong as one way to look at it, bearing in mind that you are looking at things as if you – 3D you – were in the center of your life. Seems obvious, but of course it is wrong. No one 3D moment could provide a continuing platform.

Our non-3D self is necessarily our true center, in that each moment of 3D time in effect passes away. So, the intervention from 2003?

In effect, you sent a message to your past. That past changed: not external events, but what you were. You found yourself, unnoticeably, on a new and more productive timeline. You didn’t magically change your health, or your relationships, or your understanding of others, or your pattern of action. What changed was an internal assumption of support, and you will have seen by now how this assumption is relatively rare among others. And now you know why you have it when others may not. Also we have now told them how they may have it, if they value it.

It depends upon what messages in a bottle we send ourselves.

It does.

 

Sunday, October 11, 2020

Perhaps we have inadequately made the point that people see the world through filters that precede thought, and then they alter what they see and what they think by their values and decisions. If you once see that, you have seen the most important thing about emotions and feelings.

Do you think so?

We do. It is only in devaluing feelings, in deafness to emotion, and in what we can only call an idolatry of thought per se (at the expense of feeling) that deadness is enshrined in life.

“Feelings are the language of the soul.”

They are. And if you become deaf to feelings, you no longer have any evidence that the soul even exists, let alone that a soul is what you are. In being deaf to feeling, you make yourself an orphan in the universe; at sea, rudderless, in entire isolation, hence desperate.

That sounds like our world, all right.

More so the Age of Reason, that wound up unleashing horrors upon the world out of the disregarded unconscious mind and minds of men.

I know that you are not advocating that we abandon reason for emotion. But I am a little bit at sea as to what it comes to, in practice, one by one.

What it means in terms of how each of you should live, you mean.

Yes, how you would conceptualize the implications.

Quote the indicated excerpt from Dirk’s email of October 2.

[“First and foremost though it once again highlighted to me that my experience of the world is not usual. It is not how most people do experience the world. And it isn’t even a way that most people can ever experience the world. And so – even though I can describe it to you and others; for most people that explanation either rings entirely false, or utterly alien. It is simply not within the range of available experience to contemplate.

[“As an imperfect analogy, it is like I hear in a different range, which only partially overlaps with how others hear. My default in this analogy is to hear in a part of my range not heard by others, and hence completely outside their ability to relate to.”]

Notice what he says here. It is as if he hears in a different range, beyond the common limits. To some degree this is true of any outlier; whether it is cause or effect, we leave to you to think about. After all, hearing a common range is one aspect that goes into the commonality that is a herd.

Are you saying we are all herd animals, we are all outliers, depending upon who we live among?

Is this not your experience?

You refer to my finding the Monroe community as what I call “my tribe,” after decades of being entirely surrounded by what seemed like herd members living lives alien to me. Yes, it is so.

Each of those herd members is more individual than appear to you. From each person’s center, the world is part herd, part outlier.

I think you mean, we can each identify with some and not others, hence we could each be considered to be a part of a herd, only the composition of the herd would differ.

Again, is this saying anything you haven’t always lived? Depending upon how you slice your life, you are part of a different herd and are separate from others you live among. There are no absolute divisions in life. We keep reminding you of that. Concomitantly, life is replete with approximate divisions, relative boundaries.

In Dirk’s case, for instance, he is distinctly an outlier in some ways, but he is definitely firmly within different herds: managerial, scientific, theoretical (i.e. abstract) thinkers. In none of these three categories is he an exact fit, but perhaps none of you is an exact fit anywhere. And in fact we will draw you an approximate rule of thumb: The more conscious you become, the more of an outlier you realize yourself to be, until you reach a point where your understanding makes a sudden turn, so to speak, and greater consciousness shows you your “herd-ness” in ways you had lost sight of.

Thus – now listen, here, and think about this – how you perceive yourself and the world may be seen as a mood, quite as accurately as it may be seen as a conclusion. That is, the same data seen differently may lead to different conclusions in different mental circumstances, so in what way can it be said to be a logical conclusion rather than a chosen attitude?

That turns things on their head, doesn’t it?

If your rational conclusions actually rest upon a (usually) invisible foundation of feelings, can you be said to be primarily rational beings, or feeling beings? And if, being feeling beings, you reason yourselves into thinking you are primarily rational beings, can it be any surprise that you find life confusing, disorienting, contradictory, nonsensical?

Now extend the argument. If what you consider to be your objective view of the world, of life, is in fact the result of a way of seeing the world, seeing life, and that way of seeing is based in feelings prior to thought (because based in pre-conscious perception), how rational can your view of life be? It is a rational construct, yes. It is not, and can never be, strictly rational reporting of what is.

Thus, your opening thought: People’s view of the world is obviously personal, eccentric, conditional. You can see that by observing anybody else. Your own views, of course, are rational, indisputable – at least, they are until you change them for a new set of rational indisputable views. It is by looking at the effects on others of their prejudices and special ways of seeing the world, that you get a sense of your own.

Now, relate this to what we have been sketching. Other people’s make-up is part of the “other”; part of the shared subjectivity that you participate in but do not define nor control. As such, it is not “you,” yet it casts light on “you.” Or, it can if you allow it to. It is in this sense that the “external” world is said to mirror the internal.

Since you can see that no one else sees life unfiltered, you can see that you don’t either. And that knowledge can be immensely valuable.

And that will have to do for now.

Well, all very enlightening Thanks as always.

 

Thursday, January 12, 2023

5:15 a.m. I suppose you’d like to discuss yesterday’s drumming question at our ILC meeting.

We would, and we should like to recognize and encourage your willingness to open up a little more. It was the kind of question it would have been easy to hide from.

[The five-minute shamanic drumming question: “What is an unconscious bias that I can let go of?”

[Can? Or should? There is a difference. Or, could be willing to?

[You still have a bias that sees your life separate from the world, as if you can do as you please and not affect things. That is a common bias but leads to feelings of futility and ennui and disconnection. Consciously remember that you are part of everything inner and outer, and the same thoughts, emotions, actions, acquire new significance and offer greater promise.

[You believe that everything is connected; you don’t necessarily live it. Intend to live more profoundly.]

I wouldn’t say it was any new perception.

It is an important thing when a known idea penetrates to deeper levels. The more thoroughly one admits a thing, the more profound a third-tier decision it becomes.

Or represents?

Or represents. It is a continuing process.

Beyond a certain point, it is more an act of faith than of knowledge, to think that our most private thoughts are yet in the pool of common human experience.

That is an accurate insight said only vaguely. Should you choose to, you can bring a much sharper awareness to bear.

In other words, recalibrate. True. Very well, explicitly rather than tacitly: greater presence, receptivity, clarity. Let me be more fully here, now.

Established habits become default postures, and so need not be continually spelled out, but every so often one may need to refocus by using one’s little rituals.

Understood. So, what I was meaning is that I have been changed profoundly by the moment-by-moment effects – and still more by the cumulative effects – of so many years of coaching and of sincere conversation. I remember well how quickly Rita’s and my life began to change from our very first few sessions in 2001. And I can see that nonetheless, there is probably never a stopping-place except an arbitrary one. Until we say “Stop, I have had enough changes for this lifetime,” everything we know is liable to be reinterpreted, time after time, we doing the reinterpreting and we being reinterpreted as well, so to speak.

And – to come to the nub of your prior statement –

And, as I said, it still requires faith sometimes to believe what is not necessarily evident. We – I – may fully believe that all our mind is one thing, that life is more a shared dream than a shared and also individual experience, but our sensory evidence persists in saying, “Not only are you alone in this, but there’s no getting out of the closet or out of the locked room around the closet, nor out of the house around the closet,” and on and on. What seems to us so private may not be shameful or even embarrassing. Indeed, it may be something we cherish and protect from possible profanation by the world’s eyes. Still, it may be impossible to believe that it is nonetheless common human property in the non-3D world.

We shall play devil’s advocate, for the moment. What difference does it make whether one’s inmost being is truly hedged around by silence or is spotlighted? What does it matter if common knowledge is in non-3D, if you live your lives in 3D, where barriers are available on every side?

Doesn’t the difference between our self-knowledge and our appearance tend to undermine us?

You should spell out the difference between persona and essence, perhaps.

We cannot help wearing what Yeats called the mask, what Jung called the persona. Since all aspects of us cannot be presented simultaneously (in the way that no one can see all sides of a sphere from any one point of view), in any situation some, and only some, aspects are present and some are hidden, either consciously or unconsciously. Who we are in essence remains unmanifest, necessarily. With the best will in the world, we could  not present ourselves in our entirety even if we could know ourselves in our entirety, which I imagine is not possible.

And therefore you are always in a position of your self-knowledge and your appearance being different. So why (or rather more important, how) should it undermine you sometimes?

I’m going to hand over to you. I sense that it does, but I don’t know that I could say how it does.

You could, it you could summon the energy to do the work, for thinking as opposed to receptivity is work. It is hard work.

Which I should do more of?

Which you are wanting to do more of, as you well know. But perhaps most people would be the better for doing more thinking and more receiving. Whichever they do less of, they should think to balance by doing more of the other. The ideal is not a continuing state of balance between the two, but an enhanced ability to employ either and both.

Well, how it undermines us. Let me try to think it out.

Use bullets. This relieves you of the perceived need to connect various points by logical chains.

Yes. Well, how.

• Sometimes we may feel like a fraud.
• Sometimes, a sense of futility, as the impossibility of translation and expression overwhelms us.
• It spotlights the usual problem: “Which you?”
• It “irks and repents us” as Thoreau or Emerson said. The sheer recalcitrance of life.
• The gulf of incomprehension between people exacerbated by the distortion and insufficiency of words.
• The exceptional shared intuitive moments, by contrast.

That is as far as I can get at this moment.

Yes, that is reception. Now think about what you received.

I see those are various aspects of the trap that 3D life sometimes seems to be. We feel isolated from others, unable to communicate our deepest nature, unsure if we would even meet acceptance if people could see us entire. More than that, we can’t see ourselves entire. So many Strands, so many cross-purposes and half-suspected motives and habit-patterns. It’s Plato’s man in a cave, for sure.

But –

But there is the other side of the picture, the fact that despite these obstacles we do connect with others; they do inspire us, and us them. They do forgive and indeed accept us, and we them. We are somehow important to one another even when experienced only peripherally. All this, I take it, is because on a non-3D level we know each other as all one thing.

Let’s say you recognize the fractal pattern you share. You are never identical, yet you are never unrelated. You each march to your own music, but the music has more in common than you sometimes think.

Perhaps you’d spell out the opportunity and pitfall here.

Sketch the dragon and the treasure it guards, you mean? Yes, we can do that. As usual, they are the same thing in its twin aspects.

Individuality as experienced in 3D is a lonely thing. Connection as experienced in 3D is a promise and a gleam and a sometime thing. Does that mean it is different essentially in non-3D? Try to remember this fact in everything you think about! : 3D and non-3D are ends of a polarity rather than different things. So how different is it going to be in non-3D. It is different, but think, how is it different?

It has to be the difference between perceiving something via the senses and perceiving it intuitively.

Correct. And so?

I don’t know if this is right, but I get that in a way, it is up to us how we experience things. We can concentrate on the 3D (sensory) experience, or the non-3D (intuitive) experience, and while either approach will have its own flavor, either one will contain the other as well.

How you experience life is up to you, in that sense. Viktor Frankl did not put it in these terms, nor did Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, but while they were in prison they learned to see life more intuitively than they had been doing, and this changed the meaning of the hard life they were experiencing. Few of you are in their hard circumstances, but if you were reading this in jail, you would find that it still applied. Your private life is private; it is also in common. And this has nothing to do with how much or how little effort you make to communicate it or even share it by actions.

Think about your life in terms of the dragon guarding the treasure – and dragon and treasure being the same thing – and be reassured.

Well, thanks for this exercise in receptivity and thought.

And that would be a good title for it.

Perhaps it would. Very well, our thanks as always.

 

Thursday, November 18, 2021

Gentlemen, you’re up. More about crossing thresholds?

Your reminder to your friends yesterday, that significant change is not necessarily accompanied by dramatic trappings, was well to say. It is the anticipation of bells and whistles, as you say, that leads many to devalue natural processes that flow smoothly. By the same token, that expectation sometimes leads people to overvalue what may be merely flash and little substance. Do not take this to be criticism of what you are or of what tendencies you may be subject to: It is merely a noticing of difficulties inherent in 3D existence.

I feel well supported by the universe. Once I learned to stop taking setbacks or problems personally, it became much easier to take what comes, as it comes, in faith that it makes sense in context whether or not I understand it. And you reassured us long ago that life sends us no more than we can handle, no matter how bad it may look.

And that is a very helpful attitude, as you see.

I do. Repining against fate, or feeling sorry for myself, or being angry with the gods, or feeling cheated: any or all of these temptations would have the effect of piling on unnecessary emotional miseries, and what good would that do? Much easier to take what comes, living in quiet faith that all is well. I might have saved myself and others a world of grief, if I had learned that earlier.

Life lived alone is a very different thing than life lived among others. Let’s consider it in terms of how the shared subjectivity and the personal subjectivity interact.

That’s a very interesting thought. I have danced around it, but I get a glimpse of what you intend to explore here.

Husband your energy, because although you are on your way to being entirely well again, still you are dragging the results of your year’s physical difficulties. That is, guard your energy level, keeping in mind that your stamina may be less than you are accustomed to.

I get your point. You may fire when you are ready, Gridley.

It may be as well to begin as bullet points, to stress inter-relationships, before going into more extensive discussion.

• Hold in mind the model of emotions as the interface between the conscious and the parts of your mind of which you are unconscious, (for they are all conscious in themselves).
• You experience life as “you” interfacing with “other.” Thus, you v. the world; you v. others; your consciousness v. life that seems to be not your consciousness.
• The personal subjectivity – the “you” you identify with, the part of your mind and being of which you are conscious – seems to you to be a unit.
• The shared subjectivity – the collective energies that make up the world as it is created and maintained out of mind-stuff – seems to you to be objectively “out there,” separate, different from you.
• Your personal subjectivity interacts with various aspects of the shared subjectivity continuously, in countless ways, and your tendency is to experience it as “things happening to me,” rarely as “things happening because I and they coincide and manifest.”
• If there were no shared subjectivity, you would not be aware that you are alive.
• You may experience this in miniature by comparing your mental and emotional existence (1) when you are living in conditions less impacted by others and by the world and (2) when you are actively relating to others or to seemingly objective external conditions.

Aha! That’s one reason for the worldwide pause in our incessant busy-ness, isn’t it? That’s one reason the virus was made to disrupt business as usual? To remind us of life as opposed to trance-living in routines and preoccupations?

Without going into “why,” we can say that one effect has indeed been that many people have been able to raise their heads and say, “Why am I wasting my life and substance pursuing trivial things?” But notice your automatic assumption that the virus and its conditions and effects are “other”; that they are things that happened to you. Indeed they are; and indeed that doesn’t mean what at first it seems to you to mean.

No, I get it. It is the shared subjectivity interacting with our individual subjectivity – presumably to somewhat different effect for each of us – but there is timing involved, and that timing cannot depend on anyone’s personal subjectivity; it must emanate from the shared subjectivity or from something behind it all.

As denoted by the signs in the heavens, as we have said. The nature of the times and the sequence of the changes in the times are marked by (not caused by) the positions of planets, stars, etc., systematized as astrological symbolism. But now if you will carry this one small step farther, you will see that astrology and what it marks can only be part of the shared subjectivity, which means cannot be separate from human existence. (Non-human existence as well, of course; that is what the seasons are. But that’s another subject.) This is why astrology “works,” because it is not and cannot be separate from the human mind – because that human mind is part of the same overall mind. How could the shared subjectivity and the personal subjectivity go separate ways? Does the “tails” side of a coin go separate ways from the “heads” side? Could it ever? Are the two sides, in fact, two? Aren’t they each an aspect of one undivided thing?

Now, to return to our central point at the moment: Anyone may live in such a way as to minimize your interaction with other people and even with the world in general. Your monk living in a cave, what is he doing if not that? But is that a desired end? Did God or the gods or the world or however you wish to think of purpose intend for individual subjectivity to live divorced from collective subjectivity? If so, why not bring everyone into the world deaf, blind, and mute? Why not render all the world autistic? Why – in fact – bring people into 3D at all? No, living divorced from the shared subjectivity is not the desired end-result. But it may be a desired interval, a resting-up, a time for taking stock.

It is a great mistake, to think that practices and circumstances that may be transiently helpful would be desirable in and of themselves for one and all, or from now forever. Yet this mistake is made by many: by the weary, and the sick at heart, and the directionless. So, knowing that it is a snare and a misreading, don’t fall for it.

“Don’t criticize your life,” Thoreau said somewhere. “It isn’t as bad as you are.” Today’s theme?

“Life never ‘just happens,” perhaps. Something on that order.

Two views of life

Monday, January 9, 2023

7:35 a.m. Gentlemen, some people think you didn’t answer my question the other day. I though thought you redirected me, pointing out to me that it wasn’t the right question. Perhaps we might continue by looking at free will v. “the nanny non-3D state.” My coinage and my way of seeing the issue, but it only clarified after our talk.

Why don’t you spell out your thinking and we will comment if it seems called for?

Okay. I think we see two ways of looking at life, here. One centers on the 3D world as if it were important in and of itself. The other centers on the individual human soul as if it were important in and of itself.

Other ways of stating the same dichotomy:

• One centers on result (the actual facts on the ground), the other on process (the ongoing formation of character by repeated choice).
• One values result as if life were the one-time thing it appears; the other values the lessons learned, the changes resolved upon, in the context of continual revision.

Your habit of parallelism is getting in the way of a clear statement.

Over to you, then.

A way of seeing the situation that has not occurred to you: holding both ends of a polarity in mind, v. clinging only to either end. Life is pain and suffering and is real in tis own terms, yet it is a dream, and so only somewhat real.

You as 3D beings function as if separate from non-3D, yet you also are of non-3D and function in non-3D, hence are self-divided in effect.

You are in 3D to function, yet it is important to be in it but not of it. This is a tug-of-war that can’t be merely talked away. It is lived, and therefore presents conundrums for you to learn to comprehend.

Lastly (though of course the list could be extended), you are communities of communities, and so you are largely mysteries to yourselves. Your motivations, perceptions, intuitions, biases, inherited karma (that is, ongoing unresolved results of prior decisions) – it all influences you day by day, whether you do or do not realize it.

Should it be a surprise that you all see the world differently?

And – you’re going to say – nothing wrong with it, and every new viewpoint adds.

Do you dispute it?

Not any more.

So there is your response:

• There is no need for (no possibility of) unanimity of opinion.
• Any partial viewpoint may be productive, and somebody will experience it as truth.
• But it would be silly to insist on a “the” truth. That would be saying, “There is only one valid viewpoint and (surprise!) I happen to have it.”

Nevertheless, we predict that is exactly what will happen. When it does, smile and go your own way, unconvinced that you need to give up your point of view just because someone else is sure.

Yet this doesn’t quite serve. One of those competing viewpoints sees us as victims of non-3D interference, perhaps malign.

You provide a teaching moment, for although you agree with us, you do not act as you believe. Or, let’s say, you don’t see things the way you think you do. Or (a third way to describe the same situation), some of your Strands see it one way and others see it other ways, and you do not have a permanent deck officer in charge of navigation.

I can see what you’re driving at, but I don’t quite see the way out of the dilemma.

It is one thing to recognize a point of view, a very different thing to agree with it. Understanding is vital to your growth, but agreement with everything you understand is a recipe for futility and confusion; to identify with all values would be to be unable to live one set of values.

I might argue, what if my value is to understand them all?

Does that become a value saying sympathize with them all? Exemplify them all? You understand cruelty and prejudice and intolerance: Do you wish to live them?

I see your point.

It is an important point. The proper polarity is not between ecumenical understanding and fanaticism, but between such understanding and an inability or unwillingness to understand. But what you act, what you live, is what you make yourself as you go.

And we can’t make ourselves everything.

You couldn’t if you wanted to, and in fact you can’t even want to. It seems like it, perhaps, in theory, but when you get down to it, in practice it means doing exactly what you hate, and just as thoroughly as doing what you love. Why would you want to do that?

All the actors in the improv represent a point of view, and they don’t go swapping roles.

They do if they want to – but how can they be everything at once?

They can’t. all right, I’d say you answered me. We’ll see what our friends say.

You did not state explicitly the difference you saw.

Didn’t I? Perhaps not. It was that if we are here in 3D to choose, we have to be allowed to make blunders and to commit crimes – with whatever ugly results. That means that the world without war or cruelty or suffering could come only if we all grow up, or if the non-3D were to continually restrict our freedom to choose. The freedom has ugly 3D results, but the non-3D nanny-state would leave us perpetually children. That, I think, is “Why God lets these things happen.”

And you may call this theme “A question of focus,” perhaps.

Perhaps. Our thanks as always.