Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

Friday, December 30, 2022

7 a.m. That dream. One of many, but the one I remember. How to describe it, look at it? I was sitting on the left side of JFK, in council of state, apparently. Robert McNamara was at the 3 o’clock position, if JFK and I were at 6 o’clock, and RM was attacking JFK’s position. For some reason, nobody around the table could see Kennedy’s way of gathering information, and I was trying to show them, I think. But let’s see if I can remember the technique I used one time. A little help, guys.  

One image.

Yes. Me looking over at McNamara, struck by the disloyalty and disregard and inability to see.

But you could see, could understand what the president was doing and why he was doing it.

Yet for some reason he was unable to act or speak for himself, or if he did, I don’t remember it.

You already know the analogy.

I do. My speaking wisdom – and seeking wisdom – across a community of responsible adults. Speaking for you because you seem unable to speak except through me. So I guess I’ll get to it:

Dave Garland asked for more on my statement that group minds that clustered around opinions, occupations, concerns, etc. channel the vast impersonal forces into the 3D. When I wrote the email he was responding to, it was clear enough to me that I did not try to think it out. Now it is vague in my mind. So – a little help, please.

You might as well include what you just wrote. It isn’t like your dream I unconnected to the subject.

It’ll make for an awkward lead-in, but okay.

Remember always, if you can, life does not really come in disconnected segments. Your minds naturally process reality into logically connected segments, but in a way, that amounts to cutting salami and sorting the slices according to some criteria that may or may not be relevant. Some bits may be rounder, some different shades of color, some this or that, but it’s all salami. Similarly, life. Your mind cuts it into categories: dreams, stray thoughts, fantasies, interruptions, inconveniences, memories, whatever, sorting as the input continues to stream. Each of you sorts by your own criteria, and each of you experiences differently according to the ratio of sensory and intuitive input. To that extent, you each experience a different world, and you each create (by choice and arrangement) a different world. It’s a wonder you can even talk to each other, and if you did not extend into non-3D, how much could you even be aware of each other except as “things” – often, as obstacles, if not threats.

So, you have a dream. If something inside you suggests you examine it, maybe you should listen. It doesn’t suggest that about every dream, you know.

You have a thought, or an encounter, or anything in the course of your day or night: If something says pay attention, pay attention. It’s all part of helping you re-member your reality instead of seeing it piecemeal.

Now, to the immediate point. What you are, not primarily what you think or do, forms interest groups in non-3D. Actions, fantasies, thought chains, any manifestation in 3D is secondary; what is primary is what you have made yourself. And of course, “what you have made yourself” is apt to change with time. That’s the point of living.

I could feel you grasping for a vivid analogy, an image, and it felt like you had almost received it, but it slipped away.

Find it with us. This process is all about collaboration, remember.

I know something of what you wanted. It was an image of us as active processors, not as passive consumers.

The vast impersonal forces – spirit, we have called them in some contexts – pour through reality, animating you and everything around you. But, like light shining into prisms, how that unchanged and unchanging light expresses depends upon the prisms it shines through. Prisms, filters, semi-transparent lenses, opaque surfaces – the light is the same source, always, but the manifestations are infinitely varied.

So, in the non-3D, on an on-going basis as you live your lives – that is, as the living present moment rolls forward in its path – what you are at that given moment helps reflect or refract or transmit the light. None of you is solo, but neither is any of you omitted. You are all part of the whole. You all affect the result.

Do you see? Is more needed, do you think?

Well, it’s again clear to me. I suppose it will be clear to others as well. I guess we’ll see. Our thanks as always – unless you have something more to add?

We smile. Our sessions don’t have to extend to an hour just because that has been our long-time practice. Short and sweet works too.

Till next time, then.

 

Thursday, December 29, 2022

5 a.m. I don’t know where to begin, so I will copy the two quotes from Emerson that I copied on the 13^th and 14^th of the month.

From “Aristocracy”: The great Indian sages had a lesson for the Brahmin, which every day returns to mind, “All that depends on another gives pain; all that depends on himself gives pleasure; in these few words is the definition of pleasure and pain.

From “Perpetual Forces”: The power of a man increases steadily by continuance in one direction. He becomes acquainted with the resistances, and with his own tools; increases his skill and strength and learns the favorable moments and favorable accidents. He is his own apprentice, and more time gives a great addition of power, just as a falling body acquires momentum with every foot of the fall. How we prize a good continuer!

Then I guess my question will be, how do we continue, day in and day out, when our varying moods paint the world so differently at different times? Some days seem bright with promise. Others seems self-evidently a waste of time and space. We may know one way, but we feel another way. It makes it hard to continue.

Maybe continue from when I broke off on Christmas morning? I said I was tired of living, you quoted “Be strong and of good courage,” and I knew how to finish the quotation, and said you don’t see me contemplating suicide, and you said, “No, but merely face each day with active curiosity.” But I was too stirred up to continue, and then I was off to my daughter’s and three days among others.

So – ?

You “just so happened” to find two quotations in your reading that are entirely on point. That fact alone ought to show you that your smallest action is performed in connection with subterranean – or should we say super-terranean – parts of your own mind, and this responds to your question, not quite phrased here (though earlier), of how one continues to do shadow work all the time, as indicated in the drumming last Wednesday. You might as well quote it in its entirety. It’s worth repeating for the studio audience.

The drumming: “What shadow stuff is most important for me to bring to consciousness?”

Depending upon your ongoing choices, different opportunities arise. So, a better question might be, how an I remember to do the shadow work on a continuing basis all year long. Not a grim prospect, more a continuing resolution – a habit. This living alert to possibilities will automatically deal with shadow aspects as possibilities arise.

You see? You don’t need to be able to map the road ahead. You don’t need, really, to have a goal or a desired result (which is not the same thing as saying you don’t need to choose, and to embody your values). Life itself brings you what you need: challenges, requisite resources, temptations, everything. The only thing to remember, if you can, is that No Work Can Be Done In Sleep. In other words, keep waking yourself up, and persevere. This is what is meant by “Work out your salvation with diligence.”

And of course it is the reason why there is never anything to fear, including the fear of meaninglessness, of futility, of emptiness.

All fears are absolutely meaningless, but relatively real. The trick is to take a fear seriously, as indicating something to consider and understand, but to take it seriously only as “somewhat real,” like the rest of 3D life, unable to really affect you without your concurrence and permission and – one might say – your complicity. Everyone’s life has 3D problems, for mental or emotional problems are themselves 3D in nature, remember. (Just because they are not material does not mean they are not 3D in nature. It is the very nature of emotion – as the laminal layer between your known and unknown self, between “you” and “the world,” or between “you” and “the Self” – that it is focused in 3D conditions of compressed awareness.)

Thus, deal with my emotions as they arise, but treat them with a certain skepticism, say.

A certain detachment, say. They are real enough; they have their rights, you might say. Certainly they have treasure they are guarding. But like your entire 3D existence, they are only somewhat real, as we keep saying. All human pain is exacerbated by confusing what is somewhat real for something that would be absolutely real.

And this is enough for today. The quotations will lengthen this, and you don’t want to overwhelm people.

Our thanks as always, then. Mine particularly.

 

Nathaniel on life among outcomes

Friday, December 15, 2017

The underlying question – 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, what she would like, “to have everything my own way.” It was so funny. 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 (though in a way, it is), so how could it center only on you?

Beyond all that, you are not engaged in playing a game, or constructing something, or competing (whatever the metaphor) 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 game. Intense, deadly-fast, intoxicatingly intricate, exciting.

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

Now, we know that here many of you will be saying, “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 many-worlds way of looking at things was a transitional concept. It isn’t that the world is duplicated by each decision. 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.

What I’m getting is 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 that all possibilities always existed, so all timelines existed, only one seeming real at any one time in any one place. And now 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, always on, always changing.

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 them as sparks, catalysts, not as in themselves the mechanism of construction. You can express something very sloppily and still strike sparks; you can express very precisely, 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.

I know you don’t mean, “Look out for number one,” as in, do whatever you want to others.

Even that, in a way. If you are responsible in your relationships, you express who you are. In other words, 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. Just because you disapprove of these possible ways of being does not mean they aren’t part of the range of human reaction.

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, 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 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. 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.

And that’s enough for the moment.

 

Thursday, May 17, 2018

Let’s talk a little more about the contents of any present moment. The thing people tend to forget is that it is a means of expression, a sum-total of existence. Everything expresses, not only those things you approve of. Cowardice, hatred, envy, anything you may think to name, is going to be there, just as much as courage, love, fellow-feeling, etc. Life is not only pretty¸ or reasonable, or smooth and orderly. It is those things as well as being their opposite qualities, but it is not any of those things by themselves. Life does not express only part of itself in any present moment; regardless of what is apparent, everything participates. Really, how else could it be?

Sometimes you’ll say something like that and I will realize, “Well that’s just common sense,” while realizing that I have been unconsciously thinking something quite different.

Which is true of everyone, now and again, you realize. It isn’t like the world is divided into realistic and unrealistic people, any more than into good and bad, or any other polarity. The dividing line – as always – runs within people, not between them. Any one person will be realistic in some aspects of life and unrealistic in others. Nobody gets it all right, and therefore nobody gets it all wrong. Someone who sees through one set of illusions probably does so courtesy of a different set of illusions. The person who is a hard-headed materialist who cannot be taken in by fake mediums or by New Age fantasies probably cannot be taken in by real mediums, nor by New Age insights that happen to be accurate. The hard-headed religious zealot, political extremist, a cynic of whatever complexion, the same.

And people like me, looking with a disillusioned eye at so many things –

You find, eventually, that you never run short of illusions. Even the illusion that life is nothing but illusion is an itself illusion, of course. And those things you do cherish and believe in are not going to be absolute truths, either. Your perceptions and values are partial – which amounts to saying, “You are living in 3D conditions.”

But if you are here to live your values – which in a way amounts to upholding them against contrary values – so is everybody else. An Eisenhower embodied virtues and defects quite different from a Patton, or a Bradley, or, later, a Roosevelt or a Churchill, or, later, a Khrushchev or a Dulles or a Rayburn or a Nixon or a John F. Kennedy. You see the point, but expound upon it a bit.

This is using my recent viewing (again) last night of “Ike: Countdown to D-Day,” an excellent dramatization.

It is using the area of life you are comfortable with and somewhat familiar with at the level of abstraction. For someone else it might be the molecular structure of silica-based molecules as opposed to carbon-based. So, elaborate just a bit on what we said.

Well, you are using Eisenhower  as an example of a complex man whose complexity is easiest seen by comparison to those he worked with and worked against, as opposed to examining his life by the events that shaped it and were shaped by it. I see you are silently warning us against over-simplifying the point. Do you really want me to discuss them all?

Start, anyway.

Well, look at the comparison with his friends and fellow soldiers George Patton and Omar Bradley. He shared their intense professionalism; all three were deeply immersed in their trade. Patton was a genius of a leader of men in his way and an advanced thinker when it came to mechanized cavalry. Bradley was an equally inspired leader of men in a very different way, and if he was not brilliant he was thorough and reliable and could be counted on to play on the team and not try to hog the ball. Patton was intolerant, pig-headed, self-righteous, devious, hard-driving. Bradley was kindly, flexible, approachable, scholarly, straight-forward, and not so much hard-driving as hard leading. Whenever I talked with men who had been in the war, I never met one who liked Patton or did not like Bradley. The sense was that Patton would use them ruthlessly to get whatever he wanted, and Bradley would protect them as best he could against the hazards that were put in front of them.

And Ike was friends with both, you see. Patton and he worked closely in the 1920s and Bradley and he worked closely in the intricate planning for D-Day. Ike changed as he grew, and the part of him that he had in common with each man made him his own unique combination of expression, as happens with everybody. It isn’t so much a matter of his choosing to take up these strands and lay others down; it was more like, moment by moment he chose to express this way and not that way, and a lifetime’s choosing produces the soul you contribute to the All-D.

Now, you may be more drawn to the slashing, profane, hard-driving Patton or the careful, scholarly, mild-mannered Bradley, but your preferences don’t matter: Each is a valid example of choices. And as you know, in terms of externals, each had his uses for the world. Certainly Patton’s life came to fruition in August and September, 1944. But we are making a somewhat different point here, and it is a slippery one. Some will find it natural, no step at all, and others may find it too big a step. That is mostly a measure of the distance between their beginning assumptions – many of them unconscious ones – and what we lead them toward. It is not, mostly, a difference in internal capacity to understand.

I started to say, you want to consider the mixture of all these contrasting individuals in any present moment, but I leaped ahead to see that all of us may be considered as sort of active expressions of the underlying qualities.

Yes, but keep going. The proper image here will help a lot as we proceed.

We think of ourselves as units – despite knowing better in theory. Can’t help it; that is how we experience ourselves in 3D. but we could see ourselves a different way. Probably every bubble on top of a cup of coffee regards itself as a bubble, and isn’t wrong to do so as long as the bubble lasts, but more fundamentally it is coffee, it is a liquid in a temporary mixture with air. It assumes a structure – its bubble-ness – but its essence is coffee and air. Patton, Bradley, Eisenhower were very distinct bubbles, but they were by the nature of things bubbles expressing the same mixture of coffee and air. I don’t know that this is the clarifying image you hoped for, though.

No. Dig a little deeper if you can.

The thing you’re getting at is that we in bodies are temporary combinations of qualities and those qualities will express one way or the other.

No, not quite. Slow way down.

You are after the active-ness of any given present moment. It’s more like actively boiling liquid than merely hot (or cold, for that matter) liquid interacting with the air above it.

The present moment is always a moment’s boiling activity; only, in 3D you see it in split-second slices, so the very transient structure seems to you to be more solid and lasting and hard to move.

I see that. A boiling moment’s cross-section.

It is going to look different to the roiling waters than to the observer outside of time.

And the location and fate of any given bubble won’t really matter at all.

Not to the coffee. Not to the fire. Not to the air, or the observer. But it will matter to the part of all of that that forms a bubble. And although from the point of view of everything else, the bubble itself seems transient and unimportant, that does not mean that on its own scale it is transient, or unimportant. It means merely that different turns of the knob focus the microscope on what seem to be very different qualities.

 

 

[This entry, from nearly four years ago, remembered an event now nearly twelve years distant. Some things become clearer, the farther away they are in time. Yeats said, “Things reveal themselves passing away.”]

 

Years ago, in January, 2011, my friend Charles Sides and I drove down to Marathon, in the Florida Keys, and spent two weeks at a home borrowed from my friends Linda and Neal Rogers. During that time we went twice to Key West, where Hemingway had lived for a dozen productive years, and I bought a lot of books as usual and mostly we enjoyed the sun and the warmth and didn’t feel the need to do much more than sit around and rest.

I was pretty unsettled. I had just written The Cosmic Internet, I was actively considering moving to Charlottesville after 13 years living in Nelson County near The Monroe Institute, and, not least, I was sick. A few days after I returned home, I had a conversation with Hemingway that made some things clear, and taught me a technique that I think others may find useful.

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Continue with the exercise to see your life to this point and see what it has led you to, so that you can begin to express what you have never felt able to express. This lack of ability to understand your life (partly because you can’t express what you know, which would make you more able to understand more) is a very common problem. As people see somebody working it out in public, they will get their own ideas on how to do their own sums.

Is this a particularly appropriate time for the exercise?

Can’t you feel it?

I do, actually. The vacation in Florida, which already seems a good while ago, marked a sort of intermission, a time away from normal, and was dominated by thoughts of moving, and by a strange sickness that wasn’t asthma, and a sort of gathering of forces, maybe.

That last statement doesn’t really say anything. Say it, or give up hope of understanding what you mean and what you’re only half perceiving.

I begin to see what you are doing. You are showing me how you worked and why you did what you did.

But do the work.

All right. Gathering of forces. What did I mean? I had a sense that both Charles and I were preparing somehow for a new phase in our lives. There was a sense of anticipation of change, and a readiness for change, in fact an impatience with a continuation of the old.

How? How did you feel that?

It’s beyond any “how.” I just felt it.

If you’re going to communicate, you’re going to have to hand the reader something definite. The by-product will be that you will hand it to yourself, at a deeper level of understanding than you have ever known. How did the sense of anticipation of change manifest? Remember specifics.

I would sit on the deck looking out at the water. I had books about Hemingway. I had just been to Key West (the first full day in the Keys). I had other books I had brought, that I had no interest in reading at the moment. I had this journal, though I don’t remember using it much.

Having said that, I just looked back, and I see that in fact Hemingway and I had some substantial conversations. I transcribed them, but I didn’t send them to my Papa list because of technical difficulties. Posted them to my blog, maybe.

But anyway, it looks like my time went to reading, talking to you, planning to move, and talking with Charles. And being sick, and a little sightseeing, not much.

How did the sense of anticipation manifest itself?

I don’t know!

Yes, you do. Or, you will, when you do the work.

I am put in mind of sitting in the chair on the deck. That’s what keeps coming up. Not sitting at the breakfast bar or lying in bed or driving around, but sitting on the chair there. Charles and I both did a lot of that. It wasn’t when I was reading, or even writing, but when I was just sitting.

You’re getting there. And?

Well, I don’t know “and” what. My sleep was disturbed once I got sick. I slept practically all the way back to Charles’s house, two days in the car. I slept a lot while down there. But what can I say about what happened when I slept?

Pursue the thread. This is the work I did in silence, that never showed. This is the iceberg-beneath-water.

But in regard to different subject matter.

Do you think so? Different externals, yes. But a man’s internal experience of life can be experienced with superficial understanding or can be deeply understood, and mine was as deep an understanding as I could achieve. Yours to now has not been.

I can see that. Partly it was not knowing how.

And mostly?

Yes. Mostly it was that so many memories hurt, or were embarrassing, and that didn’t encourage the process of examination any.

And?

And, as I say, I didn’t know how to go about dredging. I can easily help others dredge, but I am more or less terra incognita to myself.

Or that is your cover story. Just be willing to see. What happened when you were just sitting?

Things were going through my mind, probably. Stuff about your life, all kinds of thoughts, but I don’t remember what.

So remember the water and the island and the sky at night or in early morning or in midday or evening. It all changed continually.

Yes, of course it did, and often it was a little chilly. Particularly after I got sick, it wasn’t always entirely comfortable, but usually more comfortable than being inside. I don’t see how to get to whatever you’re trying to get me to, here.

You tell others about state-specific memories. Doesn’t it apply to you?

Oh sure, it isn’t an intellectual thing, it’s a matter of getting back to the emotion that will connect up to the memory of where I was when I felt that emotion.

Isn’t that what I said when I advised people to remember what specific detail had caused an emotion in them? The water jumping off a tightened fishing line, for instance?

I didn’t understand it. I could see that it was giving you something, but I couldn’t see what.

So now that you know, apply it. Do you remember what you were looking at?

I remember the wading birds. Charles thought they were always waiting for dinner. I figured much of their day involved other things that birds might understand but we don’t. But for all I know they do think about food all day long.

Did you look?

I sure did. My eyes aren’t very good for distance anymore — I often saw only a blur where Charles would see birds — but I’d see the ones close —

You know, thinking about it, that inability to see detail or even clear outline was on my mind that trip. I’ve come to accept it but it was getting in my way. I could see color changes, but even color is off when you can’t see in focus.

So your life was out of focus?

You could put it that way. So — how out of focus? In what way? Telling, I guess, that I can always read, with or without glasses, even if I can’t read road signs or see birds or trees or anything else clearly.

Yes, in fact, my life was feeling somewhat out of focus. I’d just finished the Cosmic Internet book, and I was feeling pretty good about that. But I was feeling impatient about the time I waste. I was feeling, obscurely, that I was on the verge of stagnating. Can’t say why I was feeling that.

Oh? Can’t you?

Can’t if I don’t know why.

State-specific memory. Don’t remember individual thoughts, get back into the emotional place where you connected to those thoughts. Watching the blurred but pleasant scenery, enjoying the day or night. Waking up, that time, to the intense star shine that you’d never experienced before. Why were you feeling you were stagnating?

For some reason the idea of living in town was growing on me, and had been for a little while. Somehow it seemed that the townhouse I was thinking of at the time (which didn’t materialize) was going to encourage and force me to consolidate, to concentrate. I would center more on myself and less on my surroundings — which is ridiculous, as I center on myself continually, practically to a pathological degree.

Follow, don’t judge. Judgment automatically cuts off access; it is not a mode of perception.

There was this feeling that I wanted to concentrate on expressing what I know, and somehow to continue to live on the New Land as I had for more than a dozen years, would not aid but hinder that process. I had a strong sense of “more lives to lead,” like Henry leaving Walden. It was time to put some things into the past so as to see them more clearly.

Oh?

Yeah, I heard that. To see more clearly. But I think I’m pretty much done for the moment.

Maybe you learned a skill here, though.

Maybe I did. We’ll see. Thank you, Papa, I do appreciate it.

 

 

Saturday, June 20, 2020

I felt, just now, something of what happens as I integrate new understandings of what happened at a moment in history. (In this case, Herbert Hoover talking to the bankers in 1931). Insight, please.

You are asking what goes on. You ought to be asking, as well, why and how it goes on.

The way you read history is the way anyone studies a subject. You acquire data, intuit a sketchy map of the territory, get more data, alter or fill in or scrap the initial map. But a series of distant collisions also ensues, as recent data leads to reconsideration of past judgments and changes the cast of players and the narrative. A map is always tentative, porous, translucent, provisional. Even what is well known may look quite different when unexpected connections are made.

Model-making usually amends previous maps. Even a revolution has something it overturns. Your lives do not provide an unlimited supply of new subjects for you to consider. And by the way, the more subjects you consider, the more relatively shallow your comprehension has to be in light of the vital relationships. Comprehensiveness is the opposite of detail in depth, as you might suppose. The wider is the enemy of the deeper. Both have their proper place. But you can’t do it all; there are always unplumbed depths, always more lateral connections to be made.

That gives me a fleeting image of a lacework tracing, extending to connect many things. And an uncounted number of such tracings, each different.

That is a reasonable image not only of minds in 3D but also of our minds in non-3D, connectors, ourselves the lacework at the same time that we are the spinners of the lacework.

Like spiders spinning our web out of our own substance.

Good analogy.

Now, there is a moment of recognition when many tentatives resolve themselves into a greater abstraction. That’s what you just felt. There is a little “clunk” as the final piece reveals a structure. Only of course it is never “final,” and it isn’t so much a structure as a dream.

I didn’t expect “dream.”

Well, your very life may be seen as a dream. Call a dream a temporary structure bridging impressions or emotions or understandings or imperatives. Isn’t that your life? Like your life, your maps are only somewhat real. Real, looked at a certain way, so take them for at least as real as you are!

Remember that you are creator-gods by nature. That being so, creation is your most satisfying occupation.

Creation is not at all limited to 3D material. Creation is primarily mental:

• Not “3D-brain processing information and coming up with new patterns,” though it may be that.
• Not “Ideas, as opposed to execution of ideas into material form.”
• Rather, “Shaping one’s reality by the placement of attention.”
• Thus, science, art, magic, religion, scholarship, handiwork, industrial planning, political and ideological movements and activities, teaching, anything.

If you look at it as we do, you see that the “external life” you take as a given is a sort of shared subjectivity of which you are a miniscule but not negligible part. Your being includes your habits, thoughts, fantasies, ideals, understandings, emotional and intellectual and personal connections: It all contributes, and it does so in the form of continual creation.

When you get a poem right, or you finish a sculpture or a painting or anything crafted with care and attention (that is, with love), you notice. Or (smiling) let’s say you notice, if you happen to notice yourself noticing. That’s what happened to you this morning. Something you read connected with other things you know and made a satisfying connection.

This despite the fact that I’d have to re-read what I stopped in the middle of, if I wanted to remember what I’d gotten. And (speaking from experience) probably I couldn’t get it even then.

Conscious awareness of a new dream-image is not required. The real effect is at a different level, mostly inaccessible to limited 3D-minds. But 3D consciousness is only the foam at the top of the wave. Don’t worry (ever) about what you don’t consciously remember. Pay attention instead, to the on-going work you do. Pay attention to your lives as they pass. The summing-up will come in due time and in any case may be of less interest to you than the scenery you passed among, along the way.

You were going to try to tell us why and how something happens when we make a connection.

Haven’t we done so?

If I don’t get it, I’d say no, you haven’t.

A “tink” at a moment of achievement may be regarded as a hint, an encouragement, a sign that you did well. That’s the “why” of the feeling. The “how” could be described simply as that moment of recognition that Pirsig talked about in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance when you see Quality. As he said, you can’t define quality, but you know it when you see it. We don’t mind nudging you in the ribs occasionally to be sure you noticed.

Well, I’ll pass it around. Anything else you’d like to add?

A word of cheer for those who are blooming unseen. This kind of creation can’t be hidden where it counts, and none of it is wasted. Besides, that is where you find your satisfaction: Whatever reason could lead you to abandon it merely because it was not obvious in the vast shared subjectivity, as seen by 3D eyes?

Which is to say, All is well.

It’s always the case, so why not say it?

 

Thursday, September 19, 2019

I don’t know where we’re going, but I keep in mind the question of vast impersonal forces, good and evil, 3D/non-3D beings, person-groups, and the scalar nature of reality, and God knows what other concepts it would be well to remember. Over to you.

The more concepts you associate in your mind, the larger the picture you can get, if only by indirection. It is a difficulty of 3D minds channeling and then interpreting, that they may tend to reconstruct on too small a scale, or may paint with such broad strokes as to remove the human connection altogether. The hardest thing is to keep a subject both expanded and grounded.

Seth did it.

Indeed he did – but Jane Roberts did not, at least initially. She had to remove her 3D personality from the equation before she could receive Seth’s far-ranging but grounded messages.

You are almost saying that Rob Butts was as important to the process as Jane was, not merely because he recorded what otherwise would have been ephemeral communication but because his mind was in effect Jane’s temporary left brain.

Very good. Very good. What you just said is implicit in what we just said, but only implicit. Yes, Seth communicated to Rob through Jane, quite as much as he could be said to have communicated to Jane through her own non-3D conscious mind. You see the implications for yourself and for anyone practicing ILC.

This allows us to be our own Jane, our own Rob.

Yes, and let’s look at that a bit. Here is your process as we see it.

• Your non-3D awareness consents, and usually encourages. Sometimes (often or rarely, but sometimes) it would rather not, but it is almost always the 3D personality’s choice.
• Your 3D awareness (your conscious mind) is receptive and alert, in a state of expectation. It may not have a specific topic in mind; the key is the willingness to be in communication.
• The “times” are right. That is, “external” factors do not inhibit. On the 3D side, external interference is at a minimum, and the 3D personality has a sense of safety. On the non-3D side, certain alignments make it not-impossible to communicate.

(“Not-impossible”?

(A little more definite than merely saying “possible,” which you would probably let slide by, unnoticed. We mean, sometimes conditions are not aligned so as to allow this kind of communication, and when they aren’t, it does not occur. But mostly they are.

• A smooth transition of information between minds is established which is actually an emotional resonance, though it may seem to have nothing “emotional” about it. This is the equivalent of being in loving relationship, such as may happen in a family or among any two or more people who find themselves also in another. This emotional resonance is essential for trust.

(Yes, I have been hearing that word “trust” the whole paragraph.

(Trust reduces friction because it allows the 3D mind to receive without caution.)

• A reciprocating process of reception and analysis results in greater clarity than reception alone, as we have often said. Your being in a state of alertness, having a conversation rather than taking dictation, allows for more to be conveyed because it builds into context as it goes.

I think that means, because as we think about what we’re receiving, the very process of thinking about it grounds it, connects it with the rest of our being.

Prevents it from remaining merely theoretical, yes. If you and Rita had either of you been working separately, you could not have gotten the altered point of view that carried you both far. Now, you are able to dispense with the necessity of having another member of a closely matched team, and how often can that happen?

How often can life arrange for two closely aligned people to work together, you mean? I wouldn’t think that would be all that hard.

Whether hard or not is not the question; it is the removal of a variable.

I see. ILC means any of us may proceed without waiting for our Rita.

It means you are not dependent. And that is huge.

Hence your long persistent listing of cautions for those doing it, the pitfalls of ego, etc.

What did you used to tell your children about tools?

I taught them that if tools couldn’t hurt us, they couldn’t do us any good either. In other words, tools need to be used respectfully, but, used that way, were not to be feared.

Our point exactly. Now if you will go back and re-read the points of the process we described – skimming over our dialogues within the list – you will see that it gives you a fixed point of reference from which to measure the experience as you in 3D experience it. It gives you another way of understanding it, and hence of experiencing it, and hence of refining it.

• Non-3D awareness
• 3D awareness is in a state of expectation.
• The “times” are right. “External” factors do not inhibit.
• Emotional resonance is established.
• We engage in reception and analysis.

Okay. Valuable, I’m sure.

Spreading the use of the technique is more valuable than any given bit of information brought through. What is one man’s work compared to what it opens for others?

Got it. Well, you always said you didn’t care if I wrote or not.

Yes we did. What we did and do care about is that you set an example of transparency and persistence. You know you are not transparent about every aspect of your life, and we respect that. But about this learning and practice of ILC, you have been transparent, and that has been of much greater value than any theoretical claim to omniscience or even of particular skill would have been.

I think you just said, nobody’s going to make of their life an open book, but they can learn to deal transparently with this 3D/non-3D transfer of information and concepts.

Is that how you see the process? As a transfer of information and concepts? It is that, of course, but is that its primary importance to you?

Now that you call my attention to it, no. It is the companionship.

Of course. And as it is for you, so it is for others, only it would be as well for them to realize it. Bringing in information is good work. Transforming yourselves by progressive alterations, sparked by new insights, is good work. But in a sense these are productive side-effects of the real thing that is going on, which is the freeing of the 3D self from the oppressive sense of isolation and futility that otherwise might overwhelm it.

Is that really the center of it?

You still tend to forget, externals are secondary. Helping others, reshaping society, opening new ways to advance, all that – it’s all well and good, but your job (everyone’s job) is reshaping yourself toward your ideals, whatever they may be. Our job is to help any given 3D personality with that task, the only real task anyone has.

I do forget, sometimes. It turns everything upside-down. We are taught that concentration on self is selfishness, and concentrating on helping others is beneficial and laudable.

And so it is, but your primary task remains yourself. If you wish to make yourself a conduit of blessings for others, we entirely approve, but your work is the shaping of yourself to be such a conduit, or a better conduit. The effect has more to do with others than with yourself.

Except there is no “other.”

No, there isn’t, except relatively. But relatively is where you live and are deigned to live.