Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

Madoff and me

Saturday, January 7, 2023

So tell me, what is the bottom line for a society in which a fraud of the magnitude of Madoff’s can go unpunished, uninvestigated, unprosecuted, for decades as it continues to build? It seems too enormous to have been the result of lack of oversight. It is “too big to fail” in another arena.

Tell me, guys, what is the real story? Am I right, for instance, to assume that people at the top of the regulatory agencies must have been being paid off, or bought off, or implicated somehow? Could they really have acted so idiotically as to have not investigated things that would have been so easy to investigate? The fact for instance that there was no record of counterpart trades? What would it have taken, a phone call? A written request? They knew the independent agency that exists for just the purpose of recording such trades. One phone call requesting verification. Never made. It could have bene done pro forma, perfunctorily, even while totally disbelieving the allegations, and it would instantly have blown up the whole Potemkin Village. Can there be any innocent explanation why such a call was never made?

This excites you emotionally, why?

Because it reeks of conspiracy that cuts off a scapegoat to prevent investigation higher up. Madoff is assumed to be the head of the scheme. He is assumed to be acting alone as he claimed, with only relatively minor assistance from the 17^th floor. Frank DiPasquale, yes, the two computer programmers who each got two and a half years, yes, a couple of secretaries, more or less. But nobody among the regulators, nobody among the banks. Is there any reason to assume that they were innocent? Case in point, every bank transaction over $10,000 is supposedly looked at. Madoff shuttled not millions but billions overseas in both directions, continually. Never looked at. Why not?

We repeat, why do you care?

Okay, I see your point. Why this particular smoking gun when society is rife with them? Maybe just because I put my attention to it via the Netflix documentary, and am educated enough in history to put it into context. Richard Whitney, for instance. [Whitney was president of the New York Stock Exchange, 1930 to 1935, later convicted of embezzlement and imprisoned.]

No, why does it disturb you?

Perhaps I’m not understanding your question.

You began your life naïve about people and trusting in institutions, but you learned better, long ago. What is essentially different between Madoff and, say, the people behind the oil depletion allowance?

You’re saying, I think, our society is rotten top to bottom institutionally, so why is this any different. Maybe merely because I got my nose shoved into it.

Here insert a tired sigh. Look, you are spending your days going back through four years’ worth of material between us, centering on the question of how to have “life more abundantly.” What does that have to do with whatever rottenness can be found in your contemporary society?

Good and evil? I’m seeing things through the filter provided from eating the fruit of the Tree of Perceiving Things as Good and Evil? Is that it?

You tell us. You’re the one who is upset.

I don’t think that answers it.

Nor do we. So, dig.

Partly, I suppose, I always want to know, and I can see we’re never going to get the truth. Maybe in 50 years, if then. Certainly not in time to discommode the guilty.

And?

There is indignation. I hate seeing crookedness succeed, and at such a scale, and at such an unpunishable altitude in society.

And?

And why should it be so obvious to me and not to the people at the top? Either I’m wrong or they are stupid or – far more likely – complicity is so extensive, so overarching, that even a crook of Madoff’s magnitude is relatively a minor player. I can’t remember the proper name of the bank, nor what they did, but there was this major institution some years ago that was so complicit in so many crimes that they said its initials stood for the Bank of Crooks and Criminals. [Luxembourg-based Bank of Credit and Commerce International.] That’s what I’m smelling here.

We aren’t disputing any of this. What does it have to do with one’s pursuing life more abundantly? Did Jesus advise setting up an investigative agency within the Roman Empire? Did Gautama say that individual enlightenment would be facilitated by a just society? Did anyone ever find himself unable to follow the Noble Eightfold Path because he was surrounded by corruption?

I concede all that. I didn’t intend to abandon my work merely because I watched a Netflix series, any more than if I were to subscribe to a newspaper. But I don’t see that I need to ignore –. Ah, here’s an example. I am rereading Alice Turlock’s biography of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. I have always immersed myself in history, and I have no sense that any of it was wasted effort. How is this different?

You are perhaps misinterpreting our question. We ask, how does this affect you, and you take it as a rhetorical question. But it is a straightforward query. How? Why? Do a little digging, find a buried treasure.

Hmm, I see your point. It is easy to get involved in valid questions that are nevertheless tangential to your proper work.

Isn’t that one of the points you intend to make in your final novel, if you ever write it?

Is it? I hadn’t thought of it that way, but I suppose so. Not the main point.

Consider your friends who immerse themselves in politics, or international affairs, or “the new” in general. What is your habitual response?

Mostly I silently wonder why they bother. Or, no, not that, because after all I have been there at different times in my so-called career. More like, “Don’t get caught up in one viewpoint.” And I guess you’re saying that’s why I’m doing here.

We didn’t say it. Do you say it?

Well, I don’t know. I don’t see what’s different conceptually between studying (again!) Civil War history now more than 150 years old, and looking at a situation still historical, even if only over the past few decades. I don’t see why either study should be necessarily a distraction from the main event. I’ve never lost sight of the fact that, though our 3D life is not quite what it appears to be, still it is what we are living, it is what we are immersed in.

It is not the subject of study that is at issue; it is, do you lose yourself in it, and if so, positively or negatively?

I think you mean, positively as in “the thing that causes you to lose t rack of time,” Joseph Campbell’s measure of following your bliss, negatively as in “forgetting to hold your center,” letting a different “I” captain the ship, unnoticed.

Yes. And the answer is?

I’d say absorption in the Madoff affair could lead in either direction. One could theoretically go down the rabbit hole, chasing clues to a conspiracy so huge that no individual could ever unearth it. Or, one could use it to remind oneself that it is as Hornblower said to his wife: “Very few things re right, my dear.”

Your choice, always. And, after all, it is a valid choice. Nobody says there is no place in the world for Don Quixote’s quests. Somebody has to tilt against windmills, or the idea wouldn’t be in the mind of mankind. But that doesn’t mean it is your job. Only you can decide that.

I’m a little at sea as to the meaning of this little conversation.

Doesn’t it bridge your own experience and that of your news-obsessed friends?

Ah, I see your point. We all do it, only on different topics, at different times.

If there’s one thing at the heart of all our conversations with you, it is be aware of what you do and why you do it. That amounts to learning who and what you are.

Well, you have our thanks, as always. What shall we call this?

“Life more abundantly v. the news,” perhaps.

Very funny. Maybe, “Remembering our center”?

That might do. You’ll think of something as you transcribe.

Till next time, then.

 

Thursday, December 3, 2020

Louise Calio emailed me a while ago, asking if Jane Parenteau’s question had ever been addressed. Jane had asked if we in 3D affected the vast impersonal forces in any way beyond how we expressed them in our lives. “In other words, you could say they hone us. Do we hone them? Or is it just about honing us?” I might as well start by saying, “Beats me. If we do, I don’t know how. If we don’t, I don’t know why not.” So what say you, friends?

Welcome back. And don’t go feeling guilty or even puzzled by the hiatus. [Since I had communicated with them last.] Not everything that expresses in 3D life results from 3D decisions or lack of decision, from 3D action or inaction. And this is part of our response to the question you are finally able to ask us to address. You will remember,

• All is one;
• As above, so below; and
• Each of you in 3D is a unique window serving as conduit of Spirit which exists ell above 3D influence or manipulation.

Holding in mind these givens, look again at the question. What’s the answer?

I don’t know. Is it “Which you?”

That’s part of it, yes. Can you express it a little more fully?

I guess in this context the question is almost meaningless, in that it assumes one definition and forgets the other. The question sort of asks if we in our 3D lives affect the vast impersonal forces. If we were separate from the non-3D, and the larger beings from whom we are created as quasi-separate beings, and all the rest of us via the network of interrelations in 3D and non-3D, the answer would probably be, “No, of course we don’t.” But we are not separate. Our 3D decisions help shape our larger being, because they shape us (who are a part of that larger being) via third-tier consequences. I don’t know if that changes the answer to a yes, but clearly it affects the question.

Yes it does. Here’s an analogy to consider. If a life-experience of some kind changes someone, does it change that persona’s children by how it changes the person? Dos it change its friends, associates, enemies, neighbors, parents even?

I don’t see that the question can be answered yes or no. It’s a maybe.

Of course it is. Being changed, someone may or may not change those around it. If so, then yes. If no, then no. If sometimes, or potentially, or slightly or greatly, then that. But you can’t say “yes” or “no” per se.

But it seems to me that in saying maybe, we are implicitly saying “Yes” to at least one sense of Jane’s question. That is, potentially we can affect the vast impersonal forces.

No, that isn’t a valid understanding. We have yet to make it clear. Not even indirectly will you affect those forces. You may affect how they are experienced – that is, how they manifest. But this is not what you are thinking.

I’m not really thinking anything very clearly. But I was thinking we had gotten somewhere for a moment.

We did, only you went a step too far, too soon. Recalibrate.

Okay.

Let’s return to “you can’t say yes or no per se,” drawing a different set of conclusions. Rather than thinking this demonstrates something directly, let’s look at the nature of things. Does your life change the world? Does it change reality? Does it weigh in the scales in any meaningful way?

Surely you can see that the answer is, “It depends upon the scale you examine the subject in.”

• Day to day among your family and friends.
• Long-term among them.
• Day to day in your world at large, and
• long-term among them.

This is four states right there, at only the most superficial examination of the situation. It doesn’t even begin to address your inner world and its consequences. It doesn’t consider you as part of a network of lives any of which may be affected.

It’s the old “focusing the microscope/telescope” analogy. What you see depends on what your focal length allows you to see. There isn’t any one answer to all situations, only a “one answer” to a specific way of looking at things.

You’re saying (I think) that our question is ether too broad or too narrow to answer.

We’re saying this is the answer: that it depends on your meaning, which as usual depends on a lot of unconscious or semi-conscious assumptions.

I get that it answers part of Jane’s question. It says, it depends on which “you” we’re thinking of. But doesn’t that still support the conclusion I jumped to earlier, that potentially we can affect the forces?

Our qualification was not that you could or couldn’t sometimes affect the world around you even at a higher level: It was that you cannot affect the motivating forces themselves. It’s strictly a matter of disproportion. An atom of seawater, no matter what it does or what happens to it, cannot expect to affect the tides.

Ah! Got it. We don’t affect Spirit, any more than the atom affects the tides. The drop of seawater is part of the sea; it is affected by the tides and cannot not be, but its resistance or compliance (assuming it were capable of such) cannot affect the tide nor the moon that draws it..

Exactly. And if this is not clear, or spurs additional questions, you know where to find us.

 

Precognition (from October, 2020)

Dirk says there are at least three kinds of precognitive effects, the first of which you addressed, and the third of which he meant you to address:

1. seemingly (but not truly) precognitive, “an artifact of our complex brain and body.” He describes it as anticipation, and says he agrees with your description, although his description and yours seem to me to refer to very different processes.
2. immediately precognitive, which he describes as someone knowing that a thing is about to happen about 2.2 seconds before it occurs, and speculates that the transfer of sensory information could somehow be involved.
3. But he was asking about something very different, true precognitive, preceding an event by minutes, hours or days. In his words, “I have frequently seen people respond emotionally or in feelings to events that will not happen for tens of minutes, hours, or even a day or two in the future. In some cases they seemed to be acting in unison…. In other cases [the event] was a true surprise to all involved. And in many cases I have noticed people changing emotional states and feelings well before the event happened.”

Okay, guys, what do you say?

This could open an interesting discussion of the meaning of “precognitive,” but perhaps that isn’t the overall direction the conversation aims to cover. Keeping our eyes on the question of feelings and their place in your lives results in a somewhat different inquiry.

For anyone interested in the question of intuitive/sensory interaction, we recommend looking closely at the supposed mechanics of perception. The 1/30th-second delay in what senses can register; the somewhat longer delay in what they report; the interaction between one’s 3D reporting and one’s non-3D reporting; the process of correlating the two data streams to produce a consistent sequential view of life – it all flows together to broaden one’s view of life, because it integrates 3D and non-3D perceptions, thus rendering a mechanistic 3D-only perspective obviously erroneous.

That’s quite a sentence.

And it would be quite an exploration, but it is not one well suited to your talents. It requires careful meticulous observation and reporting rather than broad-strokes overview. A scientific mind will find it simpatico; leave it to such.

Oh, I didn’t have any intention of pursuing it scientifically. I don’t have the inclination nor the skills nor the talents. So let’s move to Dirk’s third description, and look at true precognition.

Bear in mind, the focus is not on precognition as such, but on the role of feelings in precognition. That is a slightly different study.

The first fact that ought to be clear is that thought and precognition have nothing to do with each other. You don’t think your way into a precognitive experience; it comes to you on its own. Thinking is always too slow.

At least for this moment, that seems very clear. Thought is sequential. But can we say that we feel our way into a precognitive experience?

No, you can’t quite say that either. You neither think nor feel your way into a precognitive experience. You experience it, you don’t precipitate it. You receive, not cause. Can you see why it must be so?

• The default position of your 3D consciousness is linear and time-space oriented.
• Information that comes to you, comes in pre-cognitive form. In this case “pre-cognitive” means “prior to thought.”
• Once something has made its way through or around your unconscious filters, it may be processed; not before.
• Neither thought nor feeling can deal with what has not been apprehended. Data processors do not function in the absence of data. This does not mean they don’t function in the absence of understanding of what they have perceived, however hazily. It means, until they perceive, they have nothing to work on.
• What you can do is systematically (or even accidentally, to some extent) prepare yourself to receive. Shamanic journeys are attempts to do just that.

Okay, I get it. A true precognitive experience is pre-cognitive. By definition, we receive before processing. In fact, I can’t quite see why it wasn’t obvious all along.

And yet we are discussing how people can react to what they have not yet experienced, and can do so either individually or in unison.

It’s funny how we can lose sight of the argument. Yes, I see the contradiction.

It isn’t so much a contradiction as a careful setting forth of the framework. What is impossible in a given frame of reference is proof that the frame of reference is at least partly and perhaps entirely erroneous. So, it is well to examine frameworks carefully.

The framework that precognition explodes takes 3D life for granted as an isolated phenomenon. It assumes that life can be explained without taking into account non-sequential reality. But if true precognition can exist, any explanation of life that rests upon sequential unity is obviously in error. Reality never breaks rules. If it seems to, it is because the rules are incomplete, or badly understood, or just plain wrong.

All discussion so far has proceeded as if reality is an ever-moving time-stream in which past moments disappear and future moments have not yet been created, and the oh-so-momentary “present” moment is all that is, only you keep jumping from present-moment iceberg to the next present-moment iceberg just as the previous one disappears and the next one forms. We exploded that model years ago, but “common sense” tends to bring it in again behind your back.

Your counter-conceptualization was one in which every moment of space-time exists (and always has existed, I take it) although we are carried from one to another physically. You pointed out that the iceberg-hopping model was not necessary once you realized that from a position outside of time and space, all such moments exist equally.

And given that your 3D-mind connects to all such moments by way of the non-3D mind  you are never disconnected from (however inaccessible you may find it normally), you may at any time find yourself knowing what you could not know if life were what you assume it to be.

It seems so simple as long as I remember that framework.

And to those who do not share it, what seems simple – self-evident – is that true precognitive experience does not exist because it cannot exist.

Yes, theory conflicts with facts and so they cling to theory.

You needn’t say “they.” You all do it, most of the time. It isn’t even necessarily a harmful trait. You wouldn’t want to be discarding your understanding of life every time you saw something that appeared to contradict it. You’d want to be sure, or at least confident, that it was more than illusion you had experienced. However, there is such a thing as clinging too long to a model that ceases to explain.

 

Tuesday, November 12, 2019

I got the sense that the gods at war (or at peace) channel through us, and we decide whether the small amount of force that channels through us will be used constructively or destructively.

Another way to say it would be whether your decisions will turn that energy to good or evil purpose. Freud got a sense of how the source of the sexual energy could be diverted – sublimated – or could express in so many, many ways. Only his reading of the libido and its place in human life was colored by his starting place in a sexually repressed and culturally ingrown Europe, so he never got a fair and unprejudiced look at the subject, but regarded it as pathological more than natural. This is still being corrected in your time.

Plus he was Jewish, and so outside the Protestant mainstream of northern Europe or the Catholic mainstream of southern Europe.

And he was in silent rejection of his own religious heritage, which cut him off from an antidote to materialist skepticism, and was a city-dweller, which cut him off from a peasant’s matter of fact view of life. He was also a medical man rather than a scientist or naturalist or literary scholar, which inclined him to see the play of these energies as pathological. Jung served as counterweight to all these biases.

Still, Jung says he was a great man.

We are not saying different. We are showing the bias that led his rediscoveries to make less of a positive impact upon Western culture than they theoretically might have done. Had Freud understood differently the forces he began to see, he might have encouraged Western intellectual man into more productive patterns. However, what he did accomplish amounted to a massive dynamiting of the roadblock that had made Western thought into a dead-end. Possibly no one could have done more than he did.

Here were his neglected vistas:

• The gods – trans-human intelligences with their own agenda – influenced human life directly and indirectly.
• These gods may equally validly be regarded as personal or impersonal, lives or energies, persons or forces.
• The gods, whatever they really are, are experienced by humans as energy flowing through themselves.
• “Energy” as in urges, “instincts,” tides of impersonally originating emotion, the fuel of all activity, be it mental or physical.
• Trans-personal energy, flowing through humans, is directed through (that is, expresses as) human individual desires, actions, and – let’s call it orientation.
• Human activity (internal or external makes little difference) is itself an input into the economy of the universe. It doesn’t stop with 3D expression. It has further consequences. It is a further cause.
• Thus, human decisions matter. To themselves, in that decisions help shape one’s further destiny, but also to the world, as, say, the outline of the Battle of Britain shaped the outcome of the war and hence of the operative possibilities after that.

This is a much broader canvas than is painted on by materialists, by those who think death is the end, by those who cannot see human activity as meaningful because taking place on “a 3rd class planet circling a 4th class star,” etc.

We must keep reminding you (-all) that 3D life is not an end in itself. To try to live as though it were is to live a pointless unsatisfying life – if only because you have to die! But even if you could live in one body forever, life would be pointless and unsatisfying. What is inherently unsatisfying in and of itself cannot satisfy. It is tautological.

But, like any tautology, it depends upon definitions.

Yes. But our definition is not arbitrary, nor a matter of taste. People may, over long periods of time, concentrate so hard on the game as to invest it in meaning – but let their self-hypnosis waver even slightly, and the spell is gone. They who look outwardly, dream. It is only in reaching for what is important in life that one achieves satisfaction. But this statement is far from self-explanatory.

It needs breaking down into components:

• Using a specific skill in life leads to satisfaction. So does pursuing and achieving a life path – a career, say, or a general pattern of life.
• These things end. It is in the nature of life in 3D, things end.
• The process of adjustment to loss varies considerably. The worst loss is one that cannot be compensated for. It may be a mate, or a path, or one’s physical or mental abilities.
• It may be what is called zest for life.

Is there any aspect of life that can be guaranteed not to run out of road?

Nothing I can think of.

Nor we. Philosophic calm, religious zeal or enthusiasm, the love of learning for its own sake, virtuous and satisfying courses of action such as philanthropy or just charity – you name it, it may or may not be attractive to a given person, may or may not provide meaning for that person, but nothing in life is the universal meaning. It may be made to serve in place of one, but it will not bear the weight on its own.

Some paths are more satisfying than others, however.

For a given person, yes. Not one for all.

But then, what of our life in connection with our larger life beyond. Won’t this serve?

How do you embody it?

Isn’t knowing about it enough?

Ask us when you are depressed.

So, then –?

Our point here is simply that 3D life does not satisfy in its own terms. It offers many satisfactions, and of course some lives are happier than others, but in and of itself, it is not enough. “And yet it is,” you say, and that isn’t wrong, but it needs looking at.

I think I just got it. Life is not the same as a definition of life, or a philosophy of life. People may live in connection with the non-3D component of their life without ever thinking about it, just taking it for granted.

Correct. And these lead blessed lives. Not easy lives, necessarily. Certainly not necessarily prosperous or famous or any attribute commonly given to success, but blessed. It is as the peasant said at Tolstoy’s funeral, “with too much reading one often loses the way.” Simplicity is a gift and is not bestowed on request.

You are talking about a sure instinct.

That is a good way to say it. and that instinct has nothing to do with learning or lack of learning.

However, I get that the eightfold path applies here.

[The Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path:

Right understanding.

Right thought.

Right speech.

Right action.

Right livelihood.

Right effort.

Right mindfulness.

Right concentration.]

That’s why it was codified, after all. Right livelihood assures that you don’t’ throw your shovelful of dirt into the air and have it land right back down in the hole you’re digging.

Odd image.

Not a bad one, though. More to the point than a ditch or anything that implies forward progress. You’re always in the hole you dig,  at least until you stop digging.

 

Nathaniel on life among outcomes

Friday, December 15, 2017

The question of how is it that you find yourselves on this rather than that timeline amounts to asking, why can’t you have everything your own way.

I remember my very little daughter saying one time, with a great sigh, that that’s what she would like, to have everything her own way. It was so funny, because I thought, yeah, wouldn’t we all.

Same old question, though – which you? And beyond that, what’s the fun in playing a game in which you win every time? And beyond that, how can you construct anything without resistance to be overcome? And beyond that – it isn’t only about you (although, in a way, it is), so how could it center only on you?

Beyond all that, you are not playing a game, or constructing something, or engaging in a competition – whatever metaphor you care to use – once and for all. Instead, you are engaged in what we might call permanent impermanence. Perpetual readjustment. Continual reaction and reaction and reaction, not in a passive way that leaves you only the acted-upon, but in a creative way that leaves you perpetually stimulated by what has been, and then contributing by your reaction – your chosen and unchosen reaction – to what has been.

I got a great visual of an intense handball or jai alai game. Intense, deadly-fast, intoxicatingly intricate, exciting.

Yep, that’s your lives. Even the boring parts are, let’s say, the background moments to a continuing movement.

Now, we know that the natural thing here for many of you will be to say, “But what’s the point of all this?” Wrong question, for the moment. A better question is, “How can this be true? It doesn’t feel that way.”

No, it can’t very well feel that way in any one given timeline, can it?

That is a very 3D way to look at it. We’d say it a little differently. That was a transitional concept, that many-worlds way of looking at things. It isn’t that the world is split by each decision – not in a physical-reality way. It’s that it is possible (inevitable, in fact) to split in a different way, non-sequentially.

I’m getting the idea, but non-sequentially isn’t the right word.

It is in a way, but it requires explaining. Try, and we will correct.

I’m getting that within conventional 3D thinking, it is an endless series of Y structures. One splits to become two, each of which splits in turn. The guys told us it doesn’t happen as a result of decisions, but that all possibilities always existed, so all timelines existed, only one seeming real at any one time in any one place. And you are saying, I think, that we don’t traverse all those timelines in parallel – all the timelines don’t exist simultaneously in the way we’ve been thinking – but we don’t traverse them sequentially either. It’s more like reality flickers continually, like a fluorescent light in a way, always on, always changing, always more or less continual.

It is in the continual readjustment of the perpetual present moment that all timelines are traversed.

I’m almost ready to give up on words. I can’t explain what I’m sensing.

You know how people sometimes describe reality as ineffable? That’s what they are running up against. But it isn’t an absolute barrier. Experience plus intuition can convey what theory and mere words cannot. That is why there is no substitute for experience and a personal teacher. Fortunately, “when the student is ready, the teacher will appear.”

Not necessarily in physical form, I take it.

Well in physical form is how you respond easiest while dependent upon sensory input. It doesn’t have to be a person. It may be a set of circumstances.

A book falling off a shelf, leading an intuitive person to buy the book.

Certainly. A chance conversation. An overheard remark. A connection drawn because you happen to be reading two very different books at the same time. There are millions of ways. It isn’t the circumstances themselves, it is the recognition of resonance. But sometimes it’s a person. And the odd thing is that that teacher may function for you as teacher without either of you suspecting it. Your influence on each other’s lives is greater than you commonly suspect, and it occurs in ways you often are unaware of.

In any case, no need to give up on words. Remember, think of words as sparks, catalysts, not themselves the mechanism of construction. You can express something very sloppily and still strike sparks; you can express very distinctly, with fine modulation of meaning, and not strike sparks. And in either case, you’ll mostly never know on a 3D level. Nor need you. It isn’t your effect on others that is the point of your lives, but your effect on you. On you. You are your responsibility.

To clarify, I know you don’t mean, do whatever you want to others.

Even that, in a way. If you are responsible in your relationships, you express who you are. You live your values. To be good to others may be who you are. To be indifferent to them, to view them with hostility and suspicion, to be actively malevolent – all these possible ways of being are part of the range of human reaction, and just because you disapprove of them does not mean they aren’t.

I get it: If you disapprove of evil, fight it by expressing your values, but the emphasis is not on the social outcome but on your own character development through choices.

Your own life is what you contribute to social outcome. This is not metaphor but fact. A John F. Kennedy, a Gandhi, a Hitler, will have a vast impact upon present and future society. That impact is an integral part of their lives. Nonetheless the lives were about their choices as individuals, as much as about their reactions to the influences around them. At the opposite end of the scale, someone nobody will ever hear of – a monk in his community, and we don’t mean Thomas Merton or the Dalai Lama or John Tettemer (or Mother Teresa; it isn’t a gender thing), but a truly anonymous monk – is still engaged in living his or her values. The invisible but very real influence of any of those individuals – who are connected to others by innumerable strands, remember – will have an effect, but they exert that influence, they have that effect, as a by-product, you might say, of living their values.

So you can say, perhaps, that “resist not evil” has as one of its meanings the importance of keeping your eye on the ball and not confusing your actions externally as being reality and your actions internally as not important or even not real. One of its meanings.

Bear in mind, there can be no “final” result while the world continues to exist. It isn’t past à present  à future. It is one perpetually interacting present moment, playing out all possible scenarios. At any one time – Now listen to this! – at any one time, you are who you are, you exist in the existing web of relationships, you choose (actively or by default) your reaction to that moment. There can be no final victory or defeat, because there is no “final.” So, can’t you see, the stakes aren’t nearly as high as people sometimes think? If you come to the happy ending, only to find that the story continues (as it always does), or if you lose everything and all is in ruins, only to find that the story continues (as it always does), how much emphasis should you put on winning?

But that seems to imply that our creation and expression of character is equally evanescent.

In a sense, it is. That is no tragedy, and it is not pointless. Everything gets expressed, developed, extended. Then other qualities get expressed, developed, extended, and maybe they to some extent contradict or reinforce or complement the previous ones. Which is real? Which is important? Which is the point of your life?

All of them.

Correct. All of them, any one of them at any given moment. You don’t need to understand your present-day life, nor see the point to it, nor bemoan the things you “should” have done, nor those you wish you hadn’t done. It is always now; you are always tasked with choosing who and what you want to be now, this moment. And no “external “developments can ever relive you of that responsibility nor (what amounts to the same thing) rob you of your inheritance and legacy.

 

In going through past conversations, excerpting for possible inclusion in Life More Abundantly, I came to this extraordinary experience. Perhaps all our lives are stranger and more magical than we commonly think them.

Thursday, August 29, 2019

Do you care to say more about how other people in other times may bless or curse us? What the variables are? What the potential is?

You might look at it like this: What we were calling the vast impersonal forces may be considered to be channeled among you through personalities, and so in effect this is the potential (the current, so to speak) between lives. Remember the TMI program where you were given an exercise to send a message to your younger self? You sent a message of encouragement. “Don’t give up. It will work out. Don’t give up.” Well, instead of thinking of that interaction strictly from the perspective of 2003, consider – now that you are neither in 2003 nor in 1956 –

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

Had that 10-year-old had the concept and the knowledge, he would have realized that he was being contacted from the future. You don’t remember experiencing the contact and realizing it. 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 only comes into existence because of decisions or actions they take that are the result of that (at that time) nonexistent future.

Reorient your ideas, remembering that

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

It isn’t one person contacting a different person in a different time/space. 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, or perhaps than you could know. So, look at July 26, 1956 again.

This is an extraordinary event that I cannot be making up, for I have always remembered that morning. Seems too much to describe yet again.

No, take the time. It will be worthwhile, for you do not understand it yet. Relive it. A bare-bones explanation will help you connect.

July 26, 1956, the day before my tenth birthday, is the day that my childhood in a certain sense ceased, and a very different life began, though of course I had no insight into it. (One could hardly expect it of a ten-year-old.) Oddly, it came about because of the Lone Ranger, a half-hour Western that aired every Saturday morning.

Okay, something weird is going on. I have never had a need to check if the 26th was a Saturday, but I just did. My Perpetucal says it was a Friday! Wikipedia has the 26th on Thursday! This could easily be an error, but now I have three days of the week for a date I clearly remember as being a Saturday! This is disorienting, plus I am needing to use the nebulizer as I write this, which is distracting. And I seem to be getting sicker rather than better as I write this, which is the reverse of the usual process as I talk to the guys. A telltale that I have allowed myself to fall out of connection, perhaps. So – recalibrate.

Recalibrating and nebulizing. Sounds like a TV show, or maybe a movie.

 So regardless what day of the week it was, I was settled down in front of the TV set because I had been looking forward for a week to the one-hour special that would tell how the Lone Ranger became the Lone Ranger. I don’t remember now how much that nearly-ten-year-old boy knew the difference between fact and fiction. I’m sure I at least partly and maybe entirely believed the story.

Anyway, I didn’t get to see it. The slot was pre-empted for live news coverage of the survivors of the sinking of the Italian luxury liner Andrea Doria arriving in New York City. All my life, I have thought and sometimes said that the net emotional effect of the sight of that huddled misery changed me in one instant. From that time I was either intellectually precocious and emotionally retarded, or, it occurs to me now, empathically enabled beyond my years, so that I felt but did not understand.

Later in my childhood my parents would joke that I had the world on my shoulders. I did. Of course it would look ridiculous and totally disproportionate and ungrounded, but I was always all those things. Still, something had happened, and now you are suggesting that my future self sent me a message.

Not quite. Note that your breathing is clear and easy now.

Yes. I needed to remember how to be in contact. So tell me what happened.

You will need to go slowly, staying with us.

Yes. Easier with things calm again.

On that morning, 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 with only a ten-year-old’s slight knowledge of the world and of life but, suddenly in addition, a glimpse of the human condition seen as from outside, certainly from outside that ten-year-old’s frame of reference. You were given not a glimpse but, shall we say, a doorway was deliberately left ajar. Many things followed from that moment, some of which you know, but it was overwhelming.

Emotionally, it certainly was. 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.

As I write that for you, I get that things like 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 Paul gave me Edger Cayce: The Sleeping Prophet.

You had a bias toward certain non-mainstream views that came not as a result of intellectual processes but by what you were (what your strictly genetic heritage made you), plus what part of yourself bled through the 3D barrier, aided by our leaving the door ajar.

So where does the message from 2003 come in?

You were overwhelmed. It didn’t – to put it mildly! – assist you in dealing with the world. You were put into a situation in which you had no covering on your nerves – to speak metaphorically. You were hypersensitive emotionally and not well developed mentally except in your innate understanding of non-3D realities rather than, and in fact in contradiction to, 3D realities.

You were too incapacitated to lead 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 a corresponding adjustment from our side in what we can do and what we can see as possibilities and constrictions. You enable and disable potential all the time, as you go.

I think you’re saying, we live and at some point you may adjust the trim, but 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, or how does July 26, 1956 rule your life or be ruled by 2003 you?

You mean, I think, our non-3D self is necessarily our true center, in that each moment of 3D time in effect passes away.

Well, let’s say no one 3D moment could provide a continuing platform.

So, the 2003 intervention?

The timeline you have been on since 2003 is radically and beneficially different from the one(s) you were on before. In effect, you sent a message to your past. That past changed. (Not physical external superficial events but what you were.) You then found yourself, unnoticeably, on a new and more productive timeline relative to what you concentrated on. You don’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. Oddly, 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 we send in a bottle.

It does.

 

Thursday, April 11, 2019

You said something that I should like to pursue. “At different times, your mind forms a differently charged field, attracting different potential and thus effectively living in a different world.” I feel like I almost understand this statement as it stands, only, not really. It is as if it were aimed at one of my technically oriented friends, instead.

Perhaps you are as technically oriented as we need, or could employ in this particular task. We are not writing science textbooks, after all. Remember Abraham Lincoln’s advice to his partner – phrase your arguments so that the simplest people can understand them, because the more educated will understand them too, and thus you will reach everyone. Perhaps if you were better educated in the accepted science of your day, you would be less able to entertain what you would see as heresies.

So, given that scientifically I am a simpleton, can you expand upon your previous statement?

We’re smiling. It’s simple enough. Spatially-oriented analogies leave the unnoticed impression of being more solid, more permanent, less volatile, than the reality. Analogies always have not only their limitations but their unnoticed tendencies to distortion, and every once in a while it is well to have them corrected or at least mentioned.

Thinking of yourselves as charged fields will lead you to other associations, more dynamic, more transient, but not less effective and transformative than thinking in terms of physical movement. The idea of a polarizing or attracting electrical field will tend to have you thinking of attraction from various directions, directions that may change often and rapidly, rather than the somewhat straight-line movement other analogies suggest.

I get that the field changes, and as it changes attracts different kinds of things, not merely different samples of the same kind of thing. And the very vagueness of my description here ought to show that I don’t really have a handle on any of it, just an inkling.

But you were moved to ask about it, so you aren’t exactly in the dark. More like in the twilight.

Leading me to think of the movie “Twilight,” and the fact that it did reminds me that our detours are as meaningful as our pursuits of an idea or an argument.

The interruption caused by using the word “twilight” served to illustrate a natural process of the mind. But, be slow to decide the implications of this. Give us time to explain without your pre-judging. Pre-judgment will result in your needing to revise your judgment or – much more seriously – will result in your being unable to receive what does not fit in with what you will have decided. (This is what prejudice does, after all; it defends against revision.) If you think of things one way, certain conclusions will suggest themselves so strongly as to be seemingly self-evident. Think of them another way, or a third, and what is self-evident may be entirely different. So it is important not to create unnecessary obstacles for yourselves.

First, here is our statement. Try to receive it neutrally.

As you process life moment by moment, your mind functions as a charged field, attracting certain types of – well, call them objects of attention. We can’t call them thoughts or ideas or emotions without introducing distortion. The mind attracts certain kinds of thing, and the kind, as well as the specific content, can vary from moment to moment. Through interaction, the thing received and the mental state that had received it will alter. The mind will go on to the next “thing.” If an uncontrolled process (“monkey mind”), it will be one long chain of associations without any direction or purpose. The person living in monkey mind may have a very active mental life – and likely a very active physical life – but the mind’s contributions to the life would be mere chatter, sometimes entertaining, sometimes annoying, sometimes maddening, sometimes neutral, but in no case directed by the 3D consciousness.” The 3D consciousness experiences the monkey mind as it experiences the “external” world, as something that just happens, for reasons and purposes unknown, by mechanisms unknown. At best, the 3D person may seem  to be a consumer; at worst, a prisoner. And, between the two, not all that much difference.

The Freudians’ free-association technique followed the chain of associations, trying to understand the hidden dynamics between the objects of association and the mind that was associating them.

It is true that objects and mind interact with each other. If it were possible to replay a day’s consciousness, you would see a chain that begins in the same place but diverges, perhaps slowly, perhaps immediately, because your part in the process is that you choose among the bright shiny objects that present themselves as possibilities. Thus if you train yourself to think high thoughts, or to think low thoughts, the paths you choose in terms of relatively free association are going to be quite different!

It isn’t really a matter of “our” affecting “your” mental processes. We don’t and usually can’t force any card on you. But often we say, in effect, “Choose this thought; the resulting chain is better for you.” But nobody who can choose for you. That is what you are in 3D to do. Only now perhaps you can see that your choosing is not among paths of action, but (usually) among paths of thought, paths of association of ideas. It is about what you want to attract to yourself.

And thus is it about us interacting in advance with our external environment. If we choose different paths of mental association, the “external” world we magnetize to will be different. Just as Thoreau said in Walden. [“I learned … that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him … and he will live with the license of a higher order of being.”]

Yes, only now you have a way to see why it should be so.

A word about “monkey mind.” There is nothing wrong with the mind functioning as an association-machine. That is how it is supposed to function. That is how you get ideas, how you get inspiration, how you move into new territory. The “wrong” is in using a hammer as a screwdriver, or in letting a high-powered car drive itself. You are there to drive it. Do so.

Which means, I take it, choose what the association-machine chews on.

Well, in practice, isn’t that what you do, directly or indirectly? If you choose a movie or a book, or if you meditate or do a Monroe tape, if you go for a walk in soothing circumstances or surround yourself with raucous music, are you not providing alternate beginning-points for chains of association? Only, it may be done more consciously or less, and it is to your advantage to make it “more.”

And anything that gives us more control of the starting-point, or the volume-control, or the on-off switch, indirectly gives us more control of how we experience the external world, because the external world and our magnetized inner world are the same thing. Hence meditation is not a goal but a halfway house.

Clearing the mind is one thing. Trying to live with it empty would be another. Similarly, learning to recognize the association-machine is one thing. Trying to function without it would be another.