Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

Tuesday, September 3, 2024

5 a.m. Jon, I’d like to try to continue what you began yesterday. I know our chances of really clearing it up are slim.

Slim but not negligible. The times, they are a-changing, and what couldn’t be easily grasped before are more easily grasped now. But of course it won’t be easy.

How about it we look at the points you made in order. First was, Life really is different; it isn’t what it seems to be. I take it this is because our 3D environment warps our perceptions.

But you see, even there – that sentence takes for granted the existence of a 3D environment; it makes the world seem real, solid, in a way that it isn’t, and unless people can get beyond that idea – and stay beyond it while thinking this through – they can’t really get the changed perception that will make sense of this. If they can’t eventually see that difference, it will remain all words, all theory, that they may assent to, but that will not change their lives. And of course, I say “they” but I mean “you,” too, and I would have meant, “me.” It isn’t a matter of brainpower; it is openness to an insight.

This first point is the entryway to everything that follows. Although you are holding a pen, writing in a book supported by a desk, etc., etc., all that is real only in its own terms, the way a stage-set in a movie is real in appearance though it is only a wall and some paint. Within the context of the movie, the set is real, and allows its interaction to proceed. But it is a background artificially created to support something that cannot be understood as a movie if you remain within the context of the movie.

But this is all words, and unless you get an insight into the reality they are pointing to, they’re just words. Memorizing them won’t help, and in fact may make things worse (in that the memorization concretizes the finger rather than the idea the finger is pointing to).

Try to let it come real to you, whoever reads this: Real life is garbed in 3D, but is deeper and realer than 3D. and that doesn’t mean that only non-3D is real. Within this context, non-3D is inextricably connected to the concept of 3D: They’re at the same level of reality that we need to penetrate beyond.

I have been quietly awed for years by our audacity here. Either we are damned fools or we are something else – pioneers, I guess – but either way we are saying our whole civilization is wrong: its philistines, its sophisticates, its conventionally pious, its mystics, philosophers, you name it. And common sense says, How can that be? I’ve been over this before, many times: How can it be that everybody is out of step but my Johnny? How much vastly more likely that we are just fooling ourselves, or anyway making some basic error.

And you know the answer to that doubt: New times provide new opportunities, new ways to penetrate deeper into life. Besides, it’s mostly a matter of mistranslation. People have gotten here before, but,

a) They didn’t have all the help available now,

b) They have been misunderstood, and what we know of as their teachings are their teachings as interpreted by those who misunderstood them.

By (a) I mean a couple of things. First, physical metaphors like computers and animation didn’t exist to change their sensory habits, so it was a longer stretch for them to make than it would be today. Second, everybody stands on the backs of what has been said, thought, understood, previously. It is an advantage, in some ways, to see how many people went down so many blind alleys. It potentially increases your sophistication and analysis.

But surely they had teachers we don’t know of, traditions and understandings we don’t.

Oh yes, I’m not saying we have progressed without also regressing. But it is helpful – can be helpful – to recognize at a glance errors that enticed others.

Aha, I just got something that ought to have been obvious before. The guys have said that in forming a new worldview, we will find ourselves incorporating some things that our present worldview regards as superstition, because we will understand its true nature. That applies to religious and metaphysical insights too, I see. In fact, the older and more esoteric they are, the more valuable they may prove to be.

As inspiration, yes. Not as something to be adopted blindly or wholeheartedly. You will find many things in the Vedas that you will understand from your new view that your present civilization had dismissed; but you will not be able to merely accept the Vedas as they were understood in their heyday. That would be an archaism, not a new appreciation.

We are really going to have to hammer on this one point, because if you don’t get this, you don’t get any of it: Life is different from what it is going to seem to be. If you think you can just add this on to your ordinary perception of life, fine, but you won’t change your life, you will blow beautiful soap-bubbles and admire their momentary beauty.

Matter/energy is an appearance, not an ultimate reality. Difference in time (past, present, future) is an appearance (a way of experiencing 3D), not an ultimate reality. Therefore you don’t know where or what you are. No one does. You have relatively firm ideas about your place in the movie, but as long as you believe the movie is “real life,” you aren’t getting beyond appearances to reality.

Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Most people go through 3D life believing in it. After all, it wouldn’t be must of a movie if you couldn’t lose yourself in it. But if you want to go deeper – if something within you says you have to go deeper – the first real step has to be to recognize what is movie-set and what is beyond movie-set.

We have to start by recognizing that we don’t know anything.

Easy to say, but not quite right. It isn’t that you don’t know anything. It is closer to say, you can’t trust anything your senses tell you, and therefore you can’t trust the towers of logic you (and mostly others) have built on what the senses say. If you are going to go deeper, you have to recognize that you are still a beginner, not an expert, and “beginner’s mind” means openness to the new, if it means anything. Yet this “openness to the new” is the very hardest thing to maintain. It feels like, “I’ve wasted my time up to now,” or it feels like “This is just know-it-all preaching.” True critical thinking based in true openness to the new is rare, and essential. Even in those who can do it, it comes and goes.

And in its absence, all this exploration is just flapping our jaws.

It isn’t quite that grim. Integrity, perseverance, intent.

I’m not sure if this clarified anything, but I’d say next time we ought to proceed to your second item.

Little by little gets it done.

Thanks again, and till next time.

 

Monday, September 2, 2024

4:25 a.m. Okay, Jon, ready if you are. Looking back, I see on Friday we left off with the question of who is holding the scales, and for what. Referring to our lives as conduits of vast impersonal forces. What is it all about in its own terms?

Always keep in mind, we are talking in circles here. We go over the same thing time after time, but every time is just a little bit different, and the differences add up.

Was that you, or me?

Maybe you haven’t quite made the link. Nothing harmed. Try again.

Okay. I do “hear” your voice though, not just the words or the meanings.

That should give you confidence. The thing we’re always looking at is, what is the meaning of life, and what is the meaning of one’s own life, and what is the extent and range of the life. That is, is life an in-and-out or is it reincarnation, etc.

Now, the strings metaphor served us well to get us out of the conventional reincarnation model of one life moving to the next. But now let’s go beyond it, remembering that this world is all mind-stuff. By the way, that means the non-3D as well as the 3D. That ought to be obvious, since we have agreed that they interpenetrate, and therefore are more poles to a magnet than different things. Not that they’re “things” in any case.

Since everything is mind-stuff, with the 3D being a more concrete form of dream, it may be more productive to see it as an eternal swirling than as units. And this means that each life is a swirl, an energy-pattern, almost you might say an abstraction, rather than a “thing” even if you define “thing” as energy, or soul, or avatar or whatever.

And that means, even the idea of past lives still being alive in their own present is a metaphor. It isn’t really that way because reality isn’t that way; it is what reality can look like when you retain certain incorrect assumptions in the back of your mind.

This is one reason why you can’t really reconcile a present moment that is separated from all other present moments, all of them alive. This concept contains hidden assumptions that mislead.

And it’s nearly impossible to express.

Well, you’re feeling it, intuiting it, because we are linked. That is probably the best anybody can do, is intuit, because the words deaden and mislead and separate.

But we can try.

That’s what we are doing, but I’m saying, we can’t really succeed at it. The best we can do is turn people’s minds to where maybe they can intuit.

I get that it’s a matter of clearing away wrong concepts.

Yes, except you could very nearly say they’re all wrong concepts. Not just the ones we’re talking about, but everything. That’s why the Tao is described in terms of what it isn’t. The master knew it couldn’t be described; the best he could do is name some mistaken ideas and say, “Nope, not that either.”

I get that the root of the difficulty is that we can’t really get out of our own way. We try to imagine different terrain but we’re always relating it to what our senses tell us, or what we think we know, or what we have been told that great teachers said.

Well, chew on this, see how far you get:

1. There is no matter, no energy, no past or future.
2. Consciousness is not what it seems to be; almost the opposite.
3. Nothing has weight or substance. There is nothing solid nor fluid nor gaseous nor plasmic in life except conceptually.
4. History is real and also non-existent. I don’t mean recorded history, I mean what actually happened, recorded or remembered or not.
5. There is no place to stand and no need for one.
6. There is no plural, not really, only provisionally. Therefore, no judge, no jury, no defendant, no prosecutor. Also no rewards or penalties.
7. And yet, in effect, there are.

That should be enough to start with.

Shall we go through them in order?

We pretty much have to, but bear in mind, all it will do is add to confusion – until, for some, a sudden leap to new assumptions that may straighten it out.

I am aware that the entire process proceeds as if we were plural, etc. I get that the best we can do is follow your ideas without arguing, until they suddenly make sense or never do.

Argument may be how some people bring themselves to the point where intuition kicks in. You can’t tell. In any case, they’ll have their own non-3D nature prompting them.

So, I’ve numbered them, replacing the bullets.

1. Life, reality, is really different from what it appears to be. We aren’t just playing with words. No matter, no energy. (E=mc², remember; they are the same thing.) No past, no future, only “now.” But “now” does not imply a time and a place, it means closer to a being suspended in mid-air.
2. Consciousness proceeds by isolating you from almost all input. It is why you feel yourself separate from “others.” It is why you feel the “material world” as external to you, and the “spiritual world” as separate from the rest of life. Higher, greater, consciousness is by way of opening the valves that produced consciousness in the first place by closing off the overwhelming input that would make it not possible to function as 3D humans.
3. There just isn’t anything substantial. “Life is but a dream,” and if it is sometimes a nightmare, it is because you have to take it seriously.
4. What happened led to where you are, but it wasn’t any more substantial than you are. How could it be? So it is real, it is tangible, is a filament to the web; but it is not any more real than the rocks and clouds and ideas and passions around you and within you.
5. Again, the word is “suspended.” If you look at life as if it were as it seems, you will see “here” and “there”; “now” and “then”; “I” and “other.” Very persuasive and entirely untrue except in appearance.
6. “All is one.” That’s what it means. In the absence of plurality, all the relationships between items, between qualities, between individuals, may be seen as what they are: provisional at best, and mostly illusion.
7. And yet, in effect, the world is as you experience it, which is one reason why it is so hard to get beyond the illusion.

That’s quite a lot, packed tight.

It has to be packed as tight as possible, because it is hard for people to keep long strings in mind at the same time. But a master would put all this in many fewer words. The disadvantage of that is that it makes it harder for people to climb aboard the train.

Bronson Alcott’s Orphic Sayings. They turned out to have quite a bit of meaning, but they were so compressed – took so much for granted, or anyway were so elliptical – that I can see why they didn’t have the impact they should have had.

He did the best he could. That’s all anybody can do.

Well, thanks for all this. It’ll take some chewing.

 

Friday, August 30, 2024

5:40 a.m. Jon, let’s talk. We were in the middle of something and now I don’t remember what it was, but perhaps you do. I suppose we could talk about how our unrequited desires and aspirations are part of our lives.

That’s a good topic, but it isn’t quite that they are part of your lives, nor even why they are part of your lives. It is more like how they are part of your lives. And here as well.

Always interesting to get a sort of overviewing sense of an answer, just by the way you reframe the question.

Asking the right question in the right way is itself the answer, because the asking wasn’t the beginning but the end of the process. It doesn’t look that way when you are functioning in the body because you can only process sequential logic –

That isn’t right, but I don’t know how to fix it.

It’s easy enough, we just try again. The way to say it is that in 3D, conscious reasoning is more obvious to you than the unconscious factors that are frequently – you might almost say usually – more important. If your thinking is being fashioned from within a given mood, for instance, the mood may or may not be obvious to you as a factor in your thinking, but either way, it will be there. So many factors go into your moment-by-moment perceptions and thought that you are always working the data while it is changing around you. You don’t have the luxury of working from a stable platform.

The result is that your mental and emotional life is chaotic (seen from outside the 3D condition) and if you didn’t have guidance from your non-3D anchor, you would never be able to navigate. You would scarcely be able to swim!

I get the sense that you are connecting “mental and emotional” in a way that the language isn’t quite expressing.

As you told your friends, language follows experience before it can be reshaped so as to be able to express the experience. Yes, current ideas of “mental” and “emotional” are radically insufficient and therefore misleading. But until someone invents a way to describe the swirling sea of interacting influences that is your moment-by-moment reality, it will be difficult to help you keep in mind that at no time are we describing a steady platform.

If we were able to create the necessary verbal shortcuts to do that, you could more easily see that the interaction within you of 3D and non-3D functioning both confuses and often resolves issues. So, by the time you get the question right, you are ready to hear the answer. This may not be clear to everybody, but it will be to some, anyway.

But to get to your question: Your unfulfilled and even your  unfulfillable aspirations, longings, painful deprivations, and so forth, are all a part of your mental makeup when you die, and so remain with you. We were calling it “unfinished business” and that was right in a way, wrong in a way.

It is a simple readjustment, but some will find it impossible to accept: Your frustrations and achievements etc. are as much a part of you as your aspirations and values. Can you see that they are the same thing? It may help if you remember that language always freezes separations, making them seem more real than they are. Just as your mental life isn’t as stable as you think, your categories of thought aren’t as real or defined as you think they are. This is not because you aren’t thinking right, it is because you are functioning in 3D conditions, and that is a skill that some master better than others do.

I once asked the guys about when somebody would realize something (he having passed over, I think; I can’t remember the specifics, only the resolution) and they said, “How soon after you die do you suppose you will approve of slavery?” I took that to mean that what we think and feel are part of us, and it isn’t a matter of learning that we were wrong (or right) after we die.

The important part of that is the realizing that who you are, what you believe, how you feel, what you struggle with, how you have failed in your own eyes – all of it – is part of your experience and therefore by definition can’t be wrong.

A Hitler or a Stalin or a hatchet-murderer is not wrong?

This is going to take some careful considering. Look at it this way, if you came into 3D and became a hatchet-murderer, there are many ways it could happen. Some of these ways are 3D-you following the currents you swim in. in law they might defend your actions as being of “diminished responsibility.” Other ways might involve a conscious choice of evil. Others might be a momentary loss of control, in the way somebody might shoot someone they loved merely because they had a gun handy at a moment of overmastering passion. We aren’t concerned here with the sociology of it, nor the legal or civil aspects. We are looking at how you cannot judge someone else’s actions accurately if you don’t know the swirl of motivations and temptations and confusions that resulted in the action.

The guys have always said, “You never have the data.”

You couldn’t. there’s too much of it and its too evanescent.

Somebody said, “To understand everything would be to forgive everything.”

He had the right idea, as long as you remember that he could know that but probably couldn’t live it, except maybe in fortunate moments.

To return to your specific question, there isn’t anything wrong with dying with your life aspirations unfulfilled. What is real is the aspiration, not the 3D result. Do you see that?

I think you are saying, we turn ourselves into conduits of the vast impersonal forces by our decisions including which aspirations to hold, and this is our achievement.

Let’s say it is your lasting influence. Nothing is forever except life itself, but while your influence lasts, you will have put your tiny weight on one side or another of various scales.

I get the idea, but – what scales? Who is holding them? For what?

Another time.

Thanks again.

 

Saturday, August 24, 2024

8:20 a.m. All right, Jon. It is as if I needed a couple of days off before I could face resuming. True?

It can take some time to absorb new information or new ways of seeing things. I wouldn’t worry about it – and I would ask myself, why do I feel I have to be doing more, sooner, all the time.

That has always been my life – together with not doing it.

That’s not true. You alternate, and you know you alternate. So why pretend you don’t remember?

Hmm. It is always hard for me to come up with a credible judgment on what I do or why or how. It never seems very obvious.

Let’s look at the reasons why. That is what we’re always doing here, by the way, looking at the reasons why. It is true that sometimes you may not know what happened, usually because you aren’t taking enough things into context, but usually it isn’t what you did, or didn’t do, but why. That’s where the insights are.

But isn’t there a danger of – and I hear your answer. To put it down: The danger is in falling for false reasons, and the answer is, that’s what your therapist is there for, to stop you from getting away with it.

Correct. To some extent. We lie to ourselves, but even more, we are lied to, you could say. Our take on our own history seems to tell us one story, and it is plausible enough that maybe we don’t go looking deeper.

So the therapist says, “Don’t you believe it. It isn’t that simple.”

Perhaps a little more gently than that. So why do you feel you should be doing more, better, sooner, longer?

I feel like I’m the guy who buried his one talent rather than putting it to use. [From the parable Jesus told.]

That feeling is more like a symptom than a cause. Why do you feel that way?

I’m saying, the evidence is there. I had so much I could have done, and I did so little, and that so poorly.

You have a high opinion of your talents.

I do. And so did you.

But you aren’t looking at the whole picture, or rather, you aren’t looking at it all at once. Yes, many talents, but at the same time, severe inhibitions and a strongly negative self-image. You can’t get a fair picture by looking at only one side of the scales.

That’s very true. So when I look at one side I say, “What wasted opportunities.” And when I look at the other, I say, “What I could have been, could have done, if not for the severe crippling I received.”

Only, you don’t believe in accidents, or chance.

No. So the inhibitions were part of the package. Well, I guess I have known that, from time to time. I have conceived of myself as a Mustang. Potential Mustang, anyway.

Just for clarity when others see this, if they do, you might explain that.

Officer-potential recruits were sometimes retained in the ranks so that when they were finally made officers, they would know first-hand life in the other ranks.

Remember your political experience.

I’m beginning to sense the deeper currents that have flowed within me, often stymying me.

Externally. Not internally. Politics:

I had just enough of it to see what a powerful drug it can be. You put yourself above the mass, and the mass takes you at your evaluation. Arrogance, ignorance, then self-interest, and a short move to corruption of one kind or another. I had only a taste, but I’m pretty good at deducing from limited experience.

And you think that’s an accident?

No, of course not. Everything I ever did was a peephole into another kind of life that some others lived.

Could there be a connection between the fact that you got fast glimpses that were all you needed and the fact that you repeatedly quit and went on to something else?

For the first time, I associate that with my father’s career, though there is a difference. Dad kept having entrée into different worlds and either passing them by or staying for a while and then quitting. So, in a way he could be said to have bene tasting, too. Only, he knew who he was.

And you didn’t?

Let me say it more carefully. Dad fit into an image: farm boy, small town, Italian, all that, plus of course public school education, radio, TV culture, magazines, books. What I mean is, he had many sides (I suppose most people do), but he fit. He could fit his differences into a model he knew.

I on the other hand didn’t fit. Never did, anywhere. Even in businesses I helped create, even doing things I do very well, even among people with similar preoccupations. My role seems to be to not fit, to be an outlier.

And in some moods, you’re proud of it and in other moods you are wistful, or lonely.

True enough.

So if you come into 3D to be an outlier in 20^th– and 21^st-century America, how have you failed to do that?

I don’t know that I’ve ever said I failed to do it. I have mostly failed to record it.

In print.

Well, in print, yes, but any way you want to cut it. Because a life of being an outsider doesn’t amount to much externally. And the difference hurts.

That’s the most honest thing you’ve said so far.

Yes. I felt that.

Now – did you in fact bury your one talent while the others were investing theirs and multiplying them? Or did you pour your life into experiencing and learning and sometimes teaching by example rather than any more direct method? Most people leave little or no trace on the world around them. You have already left more than most. But who ever fails to live the life their talents provided? It can’t be judged externally. You know that. The guys told you that, years ago and you accepted it. What you aren’t taking into account is that your own assessment of your own life is still judging by externals. Even though you are taking motivation and internal constraints into account, it is still external in that it says, “What external signs that I have lived have I left strewn around?” The proper answer, in a way, is, “Who cares?” Even your influence over others, good or bad, is still mostly external. It does not deal with the only thing you came to do, which is to create yourself further.

But there is a circularity to this argument. If I strongly feel that I should have done more, should still do more, isn’t that feeling a part of who I am? Isn’t it as legitimate a part of me as anything else?

This leads to a longer story, and we can go into it when you are fresh, if you want to. The long and the short of it is that, yes, the unfulfilled things in your life are a legitimate part of the total, but that shouldn’t be taken to mean, “Everything ought to work out even. You should die with no regrets and nothing left on your To-Do list.” A longer subject, and we ought to go into it, whenever you feel like it.

Well, all I can say is, even if I have to keep giving this a breathing spell, it is very stimulating, and helpful. Till next time.

 

Thursday, August 22, 2024

5:40 a.m. Jon?

It is a good thing to start getting counsel from others. You don’t replace your reliance on intuition, but you do supplement it. It’s more balanced.

Well, I’m using you that way, as long as you’re willing.

Yes, I understand. As usual, look at what you’re working with. What emotions are going into your general feeling about [a certain issue]?

[Discussion shows that I have a different attitude consciously and unconsciously.]

Now here you see an example of the shadow. Consciously, the last thing you want is [X]. But beyond the reach of your awareness, another part of you does want just that.

And I can honestly say I don’t, because that’s all I recognize, the conscious attitude.

Yes, exactly. There it is. And once you really experience it, then you know, and your view of yourself and of everybody else changes.

Is that the purpose of the analysis that prospective psychiatrists have to undergo?

You don’t want the blind leading the blind. And, you need that firsthand experience of your own resistance to learning the truth, if you are going to understand the resistances your clients will show.

It’s amazing anybody can communicate with anybody.

It doesn’t happen vey well, or very deeply. What else?

[More, leading to a topic that at first seemed unrelated.]

I would miss it, too, like everything else in my life I kicked away.

You might look at that. What is the pattern, what is behind it?

For some reason, the pattern is, there’s the glittering possibility that is probably beyond me; then, the reaching for it and attaining it; then, the worms in the apple and a forgetting what I have; then a freeing myself from what has become a constriction; then, exile, a little regret, a feeling of lostness, a temptation to return to the womb I just kicked my way out of. That’s more clarity than I have ever had. It has to be thanks to this conversation.

Now you see the pattern, things will be easier. And there is the credentials thing.

And I suppose I could go into that too, if I weren’t so tired. I disregard credentials as artificial (they are external; they don’t show what I can or cannot do) and then suffer from lack of credentials that might have opened some doors.

But it doesn’t matter, because you would have become dissatisfied anyway.

Yes, I see the pattern.

Go get some more rest. We can pick this up at any time.

Jon, thanks, this is really helpful.

 

10:55 a.m. I haven’t mentioned – maybe to anyone, ever – how my life has been shaped by a contradiction. Everybody has a private life and a public life, which amounts to, an interior life and a social role. I never bought into the social roles, the status. It seemed to me “all men are created equal,” even though everything I saw denied it.

That isn’t saying it in a way that will lead you to greater insight.

You phrase it, then.

Just as you chose intuition over sensory input – to an exaggerated degree – so you chose the soul over the persona. But of course you can’t live that way, nobody would let you. The policeman demands respect. The doctor, the teacher, everybody in your life is a function to you, and may or may not be a person behind the function.

In short, I was one-sided in this as in other things.

You were, shall we say, focused on one idea and were forgetting or preferring not to know contradictory or interfering ideas. But you had to live in the world, one way or another. So there was conflict.

It seems to me I see so much more clearly than others do, but I can’t really act very skillfully.

You see the world in a certain way, an unusual way. Because it is unusual, it is valuable, and it makes you a great deal of trouble.

And it makes it hard for me to understand where other people are coming from.

Not exactly. It makes it hard for you to understand the results of their compromises and strategies to deal with various parts of themselves.

I think I lost part of what I was getting when I wrote the first part of that.

Linda and Dave would bring strangers to see you at Rita’s house because they couldn’t get enough of seeing how you would penetrate their reserve instantly and get them to open up.

That’s true. I’d say, “How are you,” and whoever it was would say, “Fine,” of course, and I’d say, “No, I mean really,” and they would open up. I have assumed it was because they sensed I was really interested and was not making small talk.

They also saw you as intelligent, and open, and without harm. They took your bona fides from your friendship with Linda and Dave, but your manner reinforced it. They didn’t decide to trust you, they instinctively trusted you: by instinct, not by reflection or calculation.

And what is this connected to?

You relate to individuals better than you realize, but what part of the individuals?

Ah, I see. Not the social roles part but the who-am-I-really part that they are probably exploring at the program.

And few enough people find someone interested in their essence rather than in their role. Why do people learn what each other do for a living when they meet, rather than compare longings?

Not so easy to talk about deeper things, not so easy even to know, let alone to know what to say.

Leave this now and come back to it at another time.

Okay.

 

Yesterday’s drumming

Our small group did a five-minute journey on the question, “How can we learn to use our emotions to serve us better?” What I got follows:

“You are all on the same track, and it is the right track: Observe. Even when you find that you have gotten caught up again, go back to observing. The remembering, that you are 3D and non-3D both, will help you see how the “outside world,” so called, is useful in challenging you. These challenges are vital. They give point to your lives. They provide the opportunity for great growth. And remember, positive emotions are just as strong, just as useful, as negative. A parent dealing with his or her cherished newborn is a beautiful thing to see. Is that not emotion? Does that not offer clues toward growing to be more what one wants to be, and less what one regrets being?

“In learning distance from drama (not distance from emotion) you learn advanced control and it extends to other parts of your life. The objective is not this or that state of being (calm or tumultuous, for example) but greater control – less forgetting who and what you are. Life more abundantly.”

 

Wednesday, August 21, 2024

7:50 a.m. Suppose we make an attempt?

Prudence and providence. Let’s look at that Freudian slip [from the 20^th]. You were thinking of your undetermined future, and how to live in faith without being foolish about it. You heard “providence,” knew it wasn’t right, then heard “prudence.” But as I pointed out, there is a place for both.

It can be hard to find the line.

It is a matter of attitude, more than action. If you approach your everyday life in confidence, you can approach the unseen the same way. If you feel you need to protect yourself in one, you will feel it in the other. Confusion comes when you are confident by day and cautions or fearful by night.

Like the African natives Carl Jung observed.

Exactly. So it resolves into the same old problem of consciousness. If you are conscious, these contradictions won’t sneak up on you. Or, if they do, you can leverage them for more consciousness.