Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

Sunday, December 11, 2022

6 a.m. Louisa has a question I am not sure I understand.

[Find this {“Karma and free will”} right on target for some messages I have again received about becoming more in control of the unconscious forces pushing and pulling in my life. While meditation has been a great tool in this process I wonder if the guys have any other tools beside dreams they can suggest to gain the ability of self mastery especially in areas where in spite of our conscious efforts we meet a wall that is a block?]

Tools besides dreams to gain the ability of self-mastery, particularly when there are blocks. I will assume this means more to you than it does to me. Any advice? And, am I sufficiently focused for this?

You may be, if you become one-pointed. Otherwise, better to defer the question until a better time.

Meaning I am sort of out of tune?

Meaning you are sort of misaligned with the moment, and can either wait for the energies around you to change, or can adjust your tuning to better align with what it finds. And – oddly enough! – this is an answer to the question, as well.

And as you well knew, that was enough to actively engage my interest, so now I am fully here.

Fully here, now, yes.

Proceed, then.

Think of yourselves as machines functioning within an invisible but all-encompassing environment. Or, better, think of yourselves as organisms in an ecology. You are neither, really, in that you are partly non-3D beings functioning in what appears to be a 3D environment. As you begin to feel, this is a complicated answer, and may cause us more trouble to set out than you expected.

Yes, well, as you proceeded, I was getting a sense of a vast sea of interrelated ideas that would need to be brought together somehow.

As so often, the final thought will be simple, but explaining why the final thought follows will be anything but simple.

Bullets?

Perhaps. Do you realized (we sometimes wonder) how unique a form our interaction takes? It is very much a two-way working together, a long way from you taking dictation or we having to pretend to know everything. In helping us set out this model of cooperative exploration and exposition, that may be your achievement.

If anybody follows up on it. Very well, thanks for the acknowledgement or whatever. So, the elements of the simple answer to a simple question, obtained through a complicated process?

To put it in a nutshell, you can do very little if you think of yourselves as individuals divorced from others and from the world and from the times and from your non-3D source and ramifications. Trying to go it alone is often valiant, but rarely effective. The very things that defeat you are there (one might say) to remind you that you are not a unit, not self-sufficient, not isolated from the human race, not orphaned.

I’m getting an echo of Alcoholics Anonymous, with its directive to rely on a higher power.

Its directive is to realize that your addiction itself shows you that there is more to it than a matter of will, that you can’t do it by your own isolated strength and determination, and that this knowledge leads toward the way out of the dilemma. In other words, the fix you are in is the Exit sign, if you can but recognize it and use it.

We recognize that Louisa’s question is not about addiction, but we need to turn your heads to consider this in a different context. Addictions and psychological problems and external conditions and chronic illnesses and fixed patterns of any type have in common an implied division between “you” and “other.”

Again, we will set out the forces always in play:

1. “You.”
2. “The world.”
3. “The times.”
4. The non-3D as source.

1. Remember, you are a community, not a unit. There never was and never could be a community of unanimity. Your community may be relatively harmonious or otherwise, relatively cooperative or otherwise, but it is a community, which means different aspects have different priorities, values, abilities, freezing points, boiling points, etc. It is always a sort of slurring over differences, when you consider yourself as if you were one thing, even one thing with recalcitrant components. If you will remember that different parts of you have legitimate needs and perhaps grievances and potential, you will meet greater cooperation. We do not say this is a panacea. It isn’t. But it is an essential element of the attitude that will gain you control over intractable patterns.

2. Remember, “the world” as you experience it is always and only a seemingly external demonstration of your own unacknowledged or unrecognized or as-yet-unlived potential. How you experience the world can never be divorced from who and what you are beyond your conscious awareness. In effect, “the world” is the larger unknown part of you, calling for your attention, perhaps your willing integration.

3. “The times” refers to the nature of the invisible filters that allow certain energies and energy patterns and disallow others. Every moment has its own potential and no other. You need to recognize this as an inherent limitation to 3D life – and remember as well that only limitation produces form. Why waste time complaining about what makes your life possible? But if the limits are uncomfortable or undesirable, you need to learn how to change them; you will never eliminate limits, this side of death.

4. The non-3D as source is the most easily overlooked factor, in an age that has abandoned its old religions and has not yet fashioned its new and appropriate religion. Having outgrown past ideas, God on his throne, avenging angels, etc., it is tempting to think the old forms were symbolizing nothing, but of course that isn’t true, it was an earlier age’s best attempt to put pictures around an inchoate mute knowing.

Your non-3D component has a present-tense aspect (guidance) and a not-present-tense aspect (your origin and destiny). To attempt to contact guidance and to overlook your longer-term guidance, call it, is to cripple your ability to safely and sanely pilot your ship.

So now perhaps the simple answer is obvious.

It is perhaps me that is simple, but I got, merely, same as usual, be here now while addressing problems. Attempt to corral the entire community as best we can; attempt to do it in the present moment, without distraction or division (as we do in my talking to you here, for instance); attempt to treat the problem as a legitimate protest set forth by the outside world to get our attention; and attempt to live in patience if the times seem to prohibit immediate resolution.

Not so simple-minded. That’s a good precis. To restate it:

• Bring all of you to the problem.
• Deal with it in the present.
• See it not as “wrong” but as the result of a problem seen or unseen.
• Live the problem as best you can, with patience toward yourself.

This answer may seem to be no answer, because it is not a prescription for a specific doing, but a description of the proper attitude that will unlock the puzzle.

A word more. Just as in matters of health, do not confuse “perfect resolution” with whatever you happen to prefer. The goal is not to achieve an outcome you desire; it is to achieve an outcome suitable to the entire situation, much of which will be invisible to your 3D self but may come into view by way of your non-3D component if you allow it to.

A word to Louisa specifically: Thank you for this question which will of course open windows for others who may not have been able to ask it.

Our thanks as always.

 

In going through old conversations (putting together what I hope will be another book, perhaps to be called Life More Abundantly) I was struck by this disquisition on karma delivered as a response to a question by Louisa Calio.

Sunday, September 5, 2021

Louisa’s question:

[I am particularly interested in karma and this idea of pliable when approached in the Proper Manner- Would love to know more regarding the manner that can make what seems so stuck pliable.]

This referenced this quotation:

Thus – we have said this before – karma is not punishment nor reward except in the sense of the saying that “virtue is its own reward.” It is the starting conditions for your 3D life, and is a sort of continuing unseen or half-felt boundary that limits your reactions to things. But it is not unchangeable nor even particularly recalcitrant. Like most things, it is quite pliable when approached in the proper manner.

People’s ideas about the word “karma” may be accurate or wildly inaccurate or anywhere between – the usual range of conditions. But even if accurate, that will be an accurate idea of a term in another system, and thus may carry an unsuspected load of freight: unconscious associations that may warp the understanding by making the person hear “X plus Y” when we have said only “X.”

And yet presumably you find advantage in using the word, or you’d find another.

Well, the same process that may cause problems may also provide benefits. If we can show karma in a different light – and we think we can do it, pretty easily – we may free some people from limitations caused by unconscious assumptions. As always, the fact that one is unconscious of something renders that something impossible to change, but, once conscious, it becomes quite malleable. Only, it must be worked. It must be mixed with one’s intent.

Karma has become connected in many people’s minds with helplessness. They say, “It’s my karma,” as others say, “It’s something I’m stuck with.” And this is true even of people who are free of the idea that karma is some kind of punishment, which it certainly is not.

We say again: Life is a combination of predestination and free will. But these terms as we use them may not mean to others what they mean to us – so we’ll spell them out once more, in a sentence. Predestination is your starting-place at any given life, not a force condemning you pretend to choose while actually controlling you. You are not puppets, nor actors performing a script rather than improv.

And what is true of your starting place in life is true of every moment of that life. At any moment, you are in a place, you are subject to forces, and you cannot change that starting-place. To that extent every moment is a net you are caught in. You can exercise your free will, or refuse to exercise it (which is also an exercise of free will, if a negative one), only from within that moment. Your freely willed decision may result in your moving invisibly to another timeline, so that in effect you alter your past, but even then, you will have done so from the moment you were exercising it from.

I know at least a part of where you’re going, and it ought to be able to be said almost offhand.

We did say it offhand. “It is not unchangeable or even particularly recalcitrant. It is quite pliable when approached in the proper manner.” Very well:

• Any dilemma one faces, is of course faced in the present moment. But the present moment has two aspects, call them living and dead.
• The living present moment is experienced when you are here, You are focused, intent, aware. You are not running scripts, replaying past melodramas. You are awake.
• The dead present is how things feel when you are not here, now. Things seem solid; life seems dead, determined, without savor or possibilities.
• The good news is that you may at any time, and for no particular reason, re-enter the living present moment. There are no preconditions, no boxes to tick, no ticket to be punched.
• The bad news is that to return to the living present moment requires that you wake up. How do you remember to wake up, if you think you already are awake?
• Leaving aside the difficulty, the fact remains: The “external” world is inert if you are in the dead present and is malleable and cooperative when you are in the living present.
• Now, as to remaining awake, or regaining consciousness once asleep, several considerations apply:
  1. Habits, reminders, companions, sustained intent. All these tend to offer the possibilities of reminders that may jog you awake.
  2. Your own non-3D self has a vested interest in you being conscious. (You are in 3D for a reason.) So the better you communicate with it on a daily natural basis, the easier it will find it to provide you with reminders.
  3. The “external” world itself will provide you with opportunities. Obviously this amounts to saying your parts of which you are unconscious, often experienced as separate and external and independent and indifferent, if not hostile, to your wishes.

Look at your 3D life as unending opportunity – which it is.

And look at it as preparation for a continued longer life beyond 3D – which it is.

And look at it as only one part of a larger, correctly functioning organism – which it is.

Can you see that the three elements of your existence that we numbered are three complementary ways of assisting the 3D mind to transcend itself? To wake up? To choose in its own best interest?

• If you are asleep, you cannot choose anything. While it is true that sleep is necessary sometimes, yet it is true that nothing is accomplished during sleep to help you become what you choose to become, because in sleep you cannot choose. At best, sleep allows you to renew your connection with parts of you that you may deny or ignore when conscious.
• To prod you to wake up is not to determine what you will do or refuse to do when awake: That is up to you to choose. But it is to restore to you the chance to choose.

Now, having laid out all this, we come to the simple thing we might have said straight off, had we thought it would be understood.

What you experience as karma is largely the inertia of the past, manifested in 3D form as an “external” problem or situation or even opportunity. While you are asleep, you can do nothing to change it, because change comes only after an exercise of will, and will can be exercised only when you are awake. Therefore – your freedom inheres in your being awake. Every external situation that affects your life, be it health problems or relationship problems, or matters of availability of resources or opportunities – every situation that is “sticky” – may be seen as a manifestation of the third of the three manifestations numbered above.

Therefore – again – karma becomes quite pliable, as we said, when approached in the proper manner – that is, consciously. Louisa asked you how to make what is stuck malleable, and the answer is, make it conscious. That is, wake up and stay awake and, if you fall asleep, wake up again.

Nothing can be done in sleep. If you want life more abundantly, the prerequisite is that you live more in the living present moment and less in scripts and daydreams, frozen emotions, frozen attitudes. Every “external” problem can be used as reminder, and if approached in that way will change its nature to be less conspicuous. But removing the physical cause or manifestation is not the goal but the desired side-effect of pursuing the goal. The only goal that makes sense, given your situation in the 3D, is to wake up so that you may live in the present living moment.

 

Monday, April 15, 2019

Gentlemen, yesterday you said a phrase that struck me: “freeing his will from his karma (so to speak.”)

You don’t want to put that conversation out for everyone to see, but there isn’t any reason why you can’t quote a part of it.

[But there’s a point to be made here: Biography makes history. Personal interactions with oneself and with others spill over into what you might be tempted to think of as the “external” world. The better you deal with your own demons – or say problems, if that less dramatic phrasing suits you better – the greater the effect you may have on society.

[You can’t be saying that only the more balanced and mature and self-aware rise to the top! We have a lot of evidence to the contrary!

[No, it isn’t a matter of social position, but of effectiveness. Herman Hesse made no attempt at a political career – why on earth should he have done? – but had a much greater effect upon world thought and culture after he went into analysis with Jung than before. In freeing his will from his karma (so to speak) he vastly increased his effectiveness as a writer, which was only a side-effect of increased effectiveness as a man.]

Although I think I know what you mean by “freeing his will from his karma,” I get the feeling there’s more to be seen.

Here is a simple way to put it. (We’ll say “you” rather than “one,” as it will sound less formal, but we mean, anybody, everybody, not any one person.)

One way to see any individual is as a present-day personality comprising many previous individuals. Your living your life is them getting to know each other more intimately. They are cohabiting a new structure (you) rather than being the new structure, as when they were containers themselves.

I understand you to say that each of our strands is, in another time, a 3D individual in the driver’s seat; the ring holding together its own group of strands. So, when I die, that’s it for me being the holder of the ring; when (if) I return to 3D life, it will be as a strand in some new 3D individual.

Although that description contains a few distortions, it is close enough to be serviceable.

Now, you all know from personal experience that you are born with certain contradictions within yourself. A horoscope describes the angles and cross-purposes and reinforcements and oppositions within you. We don’t intend to hare off into a discussion of astrology. We use it merely to show external evidence of the fact that no one is born an empty slate. Everyone is born with patterns of inner behavior built into the structure.

I think that would be better phrased, we are born with certain automatic reaction-patterns, and what we are born with obviously can’t have been caused by events and our reaction to events (our choices) that haven’t yet occurred. The pattern we bring into life is brought forth by the intermingling of whatever traits comprise us. If they all fit together harmoniously, we will have one kind of temperament. If they don’t, we’ll have a different temperament.

So in a way you could say that an individual’s karma is formed of the unfinished business of its strands, plus the interaction of its strands. This forms patterns of automatic behaviors, which interacts with events.

You are a personality, interacting with a world that you experience “around you” as “external.” Nothing wrong with that; that’s the design, only there isn’t any harm in seeing more deeply. That personality that expresses you is not exactly you. It is more like a ratio between you and your life in the world. It is a necessity, but it should not be mistaken for what it is not. (One use of meditation is that it helps some people to realize for the first time that they are not the personality they have always assumed themselves to be, but are distinct from it and prior to it.)

Your personality expresses your internal tendencies in various circumstances. This is one reason to choose your circumstances, including your associates, your media-driven mental environment, your aspirations. If you wish to be conscious, the way to do so is to choose rather than drift. And choosing is done within limits. (One goal of your choice may be to widen the limits!) Those limits are, initially, the baggage you bring into your life by who your strands were.

That initial pattern may be called your karma. It is your inventory as you enter into a 3D life. It is at the same time a valuable resource and a source of difficulties, depending on what is happening. But you are not helpless, here, if you choose not to be.

Which takes us back to my initial request for clarification.

It is obvious now, surely? Herman Hesse was being driven by his inherited (call it) tendencies, conflicts, passions, contradictions, etc. In analysis, he learned how to make conscious (and hence malleable) what had been unconscious (and hence out of his control). In learning who he was, he gained the freedom to choose rather than be buffeted by the winds. And haven’t we been stressing the duty and value of choosing, from the beginning?

The more you gain control of unconscious forces within you, the wider your areas of choice; the freer you are to choose to be this rather than that. We have talked about this in terms of values, but it is at least equally true in terms of personal evolution. And your own personal evolution cannot be separated from any larger abstraction like “humanity as a whole,” or “the greater good,” or whatever. Your personal task is always conducted within the context of everything you are connected to, which, if you look at it widely enough, is everything.

 

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’s simple enough. Analogies always have not only limitations but unnoticed tendencies to distortion. Spatially-oriented analogies leave the unnoticed impression of being more solid, more permanent, less volatile, than the reality is. Thinking of yourselves as charged fields will lead you to other associations, more dynamic, more transient, 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 that may change quickly, rather than the straight-line movement other analogies suggest.

I get that the field you suggest 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,” with Paul Newman and James Garner and Susan Sarandon. And that reminds me of something else. Recently in an email exchange with a friend, I noticed myself saying to him (which alerted me to the fact that I believed) that our detours are as meaningful as our pursuits of an idea or an argument. Thus, when you have someone very mentally active, probably any little thing is likely to tempt him to go off in another direction. No, let me say that more carefully.

No, let us say it more carefully. It is our interruption, after all. (We’re smiling.) The interruption we caused by using the word “twilight” served to illustrate a natural process of the mind, as we intended. But (this is aimed at your friends, Frank, as you will understand directly what we mean) be slow to decide the implications of this. Give us time to explain without pre-judging, which might 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 objects of attention. 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 mental state that had received the object will alter. That is, the mind will then go on to the next “thing.” If an uncontrolled process (that is, if your mind is functioning as “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.

In such case, the 3D consciousness experiences the monkey mind in the same way it experiences the “external” world, as something that just happens, for reasons unknown, for purposes unknown, by mechanisms unknown. The monkey mind, like the external world, is not the 3D-consciousness’s doing, as far as the 3D consciousness can see. At best, the 3D person may seem to be a consumer; at worst, a prisoner. And, between the two, not all that much difference.

Objects and mind interact with each other. If it were possible to replay a day’s consciousness repeatedly, your chain of associations might begin in the same place but then would diverge, 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 if you train yourself to think low thoughts, the paths you choose in terms of relatively free association are going to be quite different!

So it isn’t really a matter of “our” affecting “your” mental processes. We don’t and usually can’t force a card on you. We may say, in effect, “Choose this thought; the resulting chain is better for you.” But who can choose for you? Nobody. That is what you are in 3D to do: to choose. Now perhaps you can see that your choosing is not choosing among paths of action, usually, but 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.

That’s a good way to put it.

If we choose different paths of mental association, the “external” world we magnetize to will be different, just as Thoreau said in Walden.

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

[The passage, which I have cited before: “I learned this, at least, by my experiment: 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.”]

 

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, 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 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 of the volume-control, or of 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.

A little less certain and sure than the statement would suggest, but yes, that is the idea.

Hence meditation is not a goal but a halfway house.

Yes indeed. 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.

 

Thursday, December 8, 2022

5:10 a.m. I’m out of touch with you, guys, which is strange, given that I’m spending much of each day editing past entries from 2021. It’s a subtle difference, but I can feel it, and it even conceals, or spotlights, an important psychological process, I think. Care to expound upon it?

Yes, we do. It will turn out to be a simple distinction, but getting to the simplicity of it may require some work.

We’ve seen that, often enough.

It is the difference between being something (doing something, it will often seem like), and thinking about, or even imagining being or doing that something.

I already have the sense of it, but I couldn’t phrase it yet.

Suppose you spent all your time daydreaming about being an electrician, or a military man, or an artist of some sort. That is, suppose the idea of being one of these things was at the center of your intellectual or emotional or imaginal life. That isn’t quite the same thing as spending your day actually being an electrician, or a military man, or an artist of some sort. For one thing, one’s imaginings never exactly capture a reality, but even if they could and did, imagining is not the same as living. (Put an asterisk here, but leave it for the moment lest we distract ourselves.) For another, even if one imagined – or remembered, say – to an exactness, still one would be doing one thing, but considering oneself to be doing something different. Imagining or remembering may come with a flavor so similar to the original as to mislead.

We’re going to need a solid example.

Suppose a young priest: pious, sincere, overwhelmed perhaps by his new priesthood. He became a priest for the purest reasons of wanting to serve God. Careerism, material advantage, prestige, etc. did not enter into his calculations. Indeed, he did not calculate, he followed the calling that said to him, “This is the life you were created to live.”

All right. I have known two. [One, a fellow schoolboy, the other, a native Irishman who came to this country as a young priest, whom I met in my 30s.]

That young priest is living a communion with God that is not miraculous in the way people commonly think of miracles, as exceptions to the natural order. Instead, his everyday reality is miraculous in its interpenetration of mundane and sacred interior space.

He is living his priesthood.

Yes. Not his ministry, his priesthood. There is a distinction to be drawn here.

Priesthood – at least as you are using it, I don’t know if this is how anybody else would define it – meaning his being an intermediary between sacred and temporal. Ministry meaning, what he as priest does. Priesthood is who he is, ministry is what he does.

Yes, and don’t worry if our definition matches that of anyone else in the world. The distinction is to help clear up the point at issue. That young priest is living his priesthood in a pure willing servanthood that few older men would find possible. Older men may become wiser, or corrupt, or intellectual, or lax, or tired, or disillusioned – all manner of attitudes may accompany the attrition of years, either paring one down to greater purity of being or scattering one’s intensity, or allowing the flame to be smothered by mundane cares or lusts or distractions. In no case will 3D leave one unaffected, for, after all, the priest’s life will be a life of choosing, just as anyone else’s. But we are looking at the initial intense flame of a young man’s devotion, the equivalent to other young men’s first love.

Such intensity cannot be maintained at an even flame, like a gas range. Life assures that one’s emotions, one’s intensity, one’s focus, fluctuates. Consciousness – we have said many times – fluctuates by nature, by design.

Well, if you come to think that a moment of intensity is (or ever could be) an unwavering state of being, at some point you are going to realize that this is not what you are experiencing. Perhaps you think you have fallen; perhaps you think, “A lapse; I must do better”; perhaps (forewarned by your training in seminary) you say to yourself, “Can’t be helped and it doesn’t mean it is the end of anything, but the honeymoon is over.” No matter how you respond, you are living in one state, remembering (perhaps longing to return to) another.

The situation may be uncomfortable, but as long as you are conscious of the distinction between what you are experiencing and what you did experience but are not currently experiencing, all is well. It is only when you lose the distinction that you run the risk of living by going through the motions.

Ah, I get it, and I get the specific application to me. I sensed it, but it wasn’t exactly clear.

State it, then, for possible amendment.

If I spend the day rereading past conversations, editing them toward a more polished form (“Life More Abundantly,” my current fantasy), but do not actually stay in conscious touch with you, I am doing one thing, thinking I am doing something quite different.

And nothing necessarily wrong with that state of affairs, with one big proviso, as you know.

Yes. Be conscious of what I’m doing.

This is one simple example of what Jesus said in Thomas: If you know what you do, you can do anything safely. If you don’t, it can destroy you.

I recognize that you deliberately retranslated that to make it unfamiliar, to help us actually hear it.

That is exactly what we did, and do often. Familiarity may or may not breed contempt, but it often lulls one’s intellect to sleep.

Now, there is a wider application to this simple distinction that may not immediately come to mind. Any occupation, any preoccupation, any way of being or doing or thinking or even of aspiring, may become like a desert river that finally runs into the sands and disappears.

Any source of inspiration may run dry, you mean?

Yes, but not quite only that. You know how some people feel that their life has failed them? Not, exactly, that they have failed, but that what they had invested their faith in had turned out to be an illusion, or, at any rate, had failed to be the support they had assumed it would remain?

We call it giving up on life, I suppose.

It comes from putting your faith in things that cannot possibly give you what you want, because you mistake their nature. Money, fame, love, achievement, dedication, whatever – nothing wrong with any of them (and, as we often say, a good deal right with them). But they cannot deliver what is not in their nature.

Thoreau said even carrying messages from heaven incurs the curse of trade.

His elliptical, allusive style was suited to the necessities of his time and audience, and proceeded from his classical education. Your time calls for plainer, if less elegant, statements.

But it comes to the same thing. There’s no use expecting a purity that cannot survive contact with ever changing 3D conditions. (This, regardless if that is what Thoreau consciously meant!)

When your source of inspiration runs dry, you may be sure that this is a sign that you have attached your hope to a symbol rather than to the thing is symbolizes. Life never disappoints.

“Always there is life, which, rightly lived, implies a divine satisfaction.”

Do you think it means anything that you were taken by the sentence at age 24 and remembered it periodically all your life?

Coincidence, no doubt. Have you said what you need to say, or is there a final summing-up?

Remember, amid whatever doing, what you intend to live, being.

Our thanks as always. Theme?

“Living consciously,” surely.

 

[Email from Dmitry Kornilov, in Moscow, Russia.

… So I’m reading Rita’s World Part I, and what an amazing material it is!!!… But anyway…The reason I’m writing to you is to find out whether I can propose a question for the discussion with the TGU.

I was wondering if you could ask their opinion on magic – “black” and “white” one? Personally I never bothered about this issue, until last year when the circumstances of my life were such that I happened to work in an environment where few people were practicing witchcraft. And they put spells on me which had very tangible physical effects, so that I had to ask for the help of a specialized master to remove those negative influences. Apparently they were trying to affect my energy system…or, perhaps aura… One of the methods those dark magicians used was NLP – neuro-linguistic programming…

So, such was my practical experience of this. I was fond of tarot cards readings at the time, and was told that all those negative influences were part of my family line karma – I was paying some ancestors’ debt…

Later I found out that the topic was very popular here in Moscow – in a negative sense, because I’ve got an impression that every second person was into magic trying to influence other people or to push forward their own selfish interests. Moreover, I’ve noticed that the contents of esoteric shelves in book stores radically changed from channeled stuff, yoga, Eastern teachings, Buddhism, Eckhart Tolle and so on, to books on runes and magic. Now all the shelves are stuffed with books titled something like “how to become a successful witch”, or “practical guidelines on magic”, and so forth… Terrible!

I don’t know whether these issues were previously raised with the TGU, but I would be really interested to hear their (or, perhaps Rita’s?) standpoint on that matter. If needed, we can modify the question, and shape it in a better way.

Go ahead.

[TGU]: The essential difference between white and black magic is not so much what people usually assume it is – unselfish v. selfish ends, nor even evil v. good. Obviously the subject may be approached from within those polarities, but we think it will be more useful to look at the subject neutrally, as we usually prefer to do.

Magic, ritual magic particularly, may be described as the attempt to alter the world to conform to one’s wishes. In that context, certainly you could see that some people’s intent was relatively unselfish, even altruistic, and that of others was quite bounded within ego. So it becomes easy to fall into judgment as good or evil. Perceiving things as good or bad does not lead to an easy life. So in considering magic, let us stay away from that particular snare, and see what it looks like when we remember that “the world” is not “other,” nor is it material, but is part of self, and is the visible aspect of the shared subjectivity. You could look at the essence of magic – as of any other power or ability or inclination in life – as opportunity. Opportunity to do what?

To live in that present moment, experiencing the interaction between the self we know and the self we don’t know.

Correct. So let us demythologize magic as a subject; let us take it off its pedestal, so to speak. Things cannot be carefully examined until they are off their pedestals.

• Magic works! There is no use denying it for the sake of a pretended ease of mind.
• Like any tool, it may be used to do good or bad, may be used well or badly, wisely or foolishly, idealistically or destructively.
• It is not something divorced from everyday life. It is an often-unnoticed, automatic part of 3D life moment by moment.
• “Luck,” intuitions, “accidents,” “coincidences” etc. may all be seen as manifestations of magic from beyond 3D awareness.
• Ritual magic may be seen as the practice of bringing non-3D energies into conformance with 3D desire.
• But always remember what is going on: It is the 3D conscious self interacting with the aspects of the shared subjectivity to which it has resonance (anything else being, in effect, invisible to it, untouchable).
• Discernment of good or evil is not the same as condemnation (or approval). It is seeing what is. But the addition of a label as good or evil is not so much discernment as it is adjustment to one’s values of what has been perceived.

So now, to your friend Dmitry, we say this directly.

Do not concern yourself worrying about the use or misuse of magic around you in society. It will have unanticipated side-effects, as everything does. Things that appear benign bring undesired consequences. Things that appear evil bring unsuspected blessings. The universe knows what it is doing, and can be trusted. People may enter into the study and practice of magic for all the wrong reasons, but perhaps their larger being is using that to turn their attention to the existence of non-3D forces, and ultimately to the existence of higher potential.

For yourself, protect yourself from such influences to the degree that you feel necessary, and open yourself up to whatever higher energies you can learn to employ in life. We have been sketching the indicated attitudes: openness, trust, intent to know your greater self to the extent you are able at any given moment. All will be well. Thank you for the question.

And I presume he is welcome to submit follow-ups?

Of course.

 

Clarifications

Wednesday, July 21, 2021

Let’s begin with questions Mr. Kornilov asked after seeing your statements of Monday. His email shows good understanding in general, I think.

[Received 7-20-2021, 6:33 a.m.

• .. I was overwhelmed with emotions when I read the piece, so it took time to settle… I understand that, perhaps, that was my ego’s reaction, which felt kind of glorified by being involved in communication with the TGU. But still, on a deeper level I was moved… We all have that theoretical knowledge that we are all one, but to me this message is an example of how it practically works, and a call to try accessing the Guys on my own.
• And, of course, their explanation and the advice helped me to look at the problem from a completely different angle. The general understanding I got from reading the text is that I should accept magic as an ordinary though often unnoticed part of our everyday life, and treat it like all other things, be it positive or negative. And that is what the TGU meant by “removing it off its pedestal” – it shouldn’t be seen as a bigger trouble compared to other daily troubles.
• However, I struggle a bit with the part where you and they say that this was an experience of an interaction between my 3-D conscious self with the non-3D rejected (?) parts of the self. Does that mean that magic was part of my other 3-D lifetimes and is being brought to my awareness in this current lifetime because it resonates to a certain sector of collective consciousness (or subjectivity)? And is shared subjectivity the same as collective subjectivity, collective consciousness, or am I confusing the terms?
• Once again, thank you for posing my question to the Guys, though I’m a bit curious: it seems that they themselves chose the appropriate moment to elaborate on the topic. Does that mean they had already been aware of the question by the time I e-mailed it to you?

Your response?

We begin with the paragraph you have numbered as four, because simply dealt with. Yes, we chose the moment. But that may not mean quite what he may think it means. We’d put it this way: We became aware of the email when you did; we suggested responding to it when the general discussion and his specific questions formed an easy link. “The times” made it appropriate to segue from one topic to another, you might say. Nothing extraordinary about it, and nothing particularly noteworthy. We do it all the time, and so do each of you. There are reasons why thoughts and associations well up within you: “The times” and your personal consciousness produce moments of convergence.

But there’ no reason to assume that you knew of his question before I did.

That could happen; sometimes does. But it is hardly necessary, in that these conversations are a cooperative effort. We prefer to work with you on things you are consciously aware of; it’s far easier and allows discussion in greater depth.

Paragraph three is a misinterpretation. It is more correct to describe the interaction as between the self one is conscious of, and the parts of self one is not (yet) conscious of. The parts not recognized may have been rejected, but they equally may have been unnoticed, or not yet encountered. In this we are again reminding you that 3D life is not what it seems. It is a continuing interaction of the inner world you identify with and the “external” world (that may seem entirely alien to you) that we are calling the shared subjectivity, to remind you that the “external” world is not “things in space” but is mind-stuff like you, only collective and not merely individual. What you experience of the “external” world is what you connect to via your own known or unknown extensions beyond the familiar individual mental world you live.

Thus, what we said does not predict whether you did or didn’t have connections with magic in other lifetimes. All we know is that the subject is alive to you in this 3D lifetime for some reason, and therefore manifests “external” things that catch your attention. You can probably attain greater clarity on the subject by careful meditation on the question of why and in what way magic affects your present life.

We trust that you now see that shared subjectivity = external 3D and non-3D world. Collective consciousness is closer to a description of the shared mental world rather than the shared mental and physical world, but perhaps this is only adding to confusion to address it.

Your understanding expressed in paragraph two is generally correct. In general, removing something from its pedestal means merely, see it as it is, don’t see it through a mist of awe, nor of detestation nor fear.

And finally, your first paragraph is exactly right. We are pleased that you see that it amounts to our saying, you have access to your own sources, specifically tailored for your use. Use them.

Again, productive questions that should be helpful to many.

 

Yesterday, thinking about “the gods love those who willingly do their bidding,” I wrote, “Let’s hope the gods don’t go to war.” In response, I got, “Oh, but they do! Why do you think humans go to war?” and was told this could be the theme of our next session.

Pray expand upon your statement.

We have arrived at the junction of

• 3D lives,
• vast impersonal forces,
• vast personal forces,
• the “exterior” world as something in and of itself, and
• much more that follows from this understanding of one more way in which the 3D and non-3D worlds tie together.

The 3D and non-3D, considered separately, will make sense to a degree in that context. But, not really.

• 3D life existing in and of itself to a degree, makes sense. Seen absolutely, it must always seem tragic, pointless, confusing, tedious.
• Non-3D, looked at as absolutely (rather than relatively) separate, also must appear pointless, chaotic, or else disconnected from real life, fairy-tale-like.

A good instance is the gods at war. The Greeks and Romans saw the non-3D as the origin of human conflict, and the 3D as the level where conflicts are played out, or where human conflict engages the gods to take sides. Read The Iliad and The Odyssey for a peek into that worldview.

In medieval times, God and the Devil are seen as battling for human souls, more than as playing politics and warfare. However, “more than” is not “rather than.”

By the 19th century, the sense of divine interest in human external affairs was fragmented. Some believed in divine providence, in “fighting for the lord,” and some did not.

World War I began in Victorian-Era piety and ended in despair and cynicism and moral exhaustion. Only the threat posed by Hitler brought forth a last gasp of real psychological reliance upon God’s help, in the West. But in the postwar era even this emotionally based sense of dependence did not last.

It isn’t that non-3D intervention wavers or disappears and reappears throughout history; it is that it is seen, experienced, and interpreted differently. Caesar was considered beloved of the gods. Joan of Arc was an unlettered farm girl whose career was initiated and punctuated either by miracles or by very improbable meaningless coincidences. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain fought four years in the American Civil War and saw God’s intervention repeatedly and in detail.

One difficulty is that 3D events must be seen in two ways:

• in and of and for themselves, and
• as part of the larger whole.

Seen the first way, it shades off into irrelevance and meaninglessness. Seen the other, it shades off into superstition and a different form of irrelevance. However, pathological manifestations do not discredit; they merely show what happens when a given tendency is carried too far.

I appreciate your effort to bring many things into one consideration, but can we approach more closely?

We are swimming against the tide of your times, you know, so it takes a bit of explaining. We’ll say a few things that maybe will themselves need explaining.

• “The gods at war” is one way to see vast forces contending. There is not a right and wrong about up and down, or inside and out, but they lead in contrary directions, and each has its inherent right to expression.
• Any 3D manifestation is going to be incomplete, inadequately balanced.
• Imbalance over time in a social environment will call forth its nemesis.
• Hence, adjustment via war, or via ebbs and flows of social movements, religions, worldviews, etc. There is no reason to expect reaction to be reasonable.
• Washington’s life, Lincoln’s, Lee’s, Marshall’s, all show lives whose strictly personal aspect fitted in with a social necessity.
• Authors, inventors, reformers, entertainers, “all walks of life,” live lives that have direct reference to the individual’s larger being and also have their societal effect. Harriett Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain.

The gods are to be found on all sides, not just one. In your day you are likely to think of it as a battle of ideals. We would see that as merely a watered-down version of the battle of gods. The older civilizations personified traits and forces; yours depersonalizes them. Neither view is absolute; it is more a matter of taste. But either way, 3D and non-3D are not and cannot be independent, one from the other. You could as well separate the fates of heads and tails, fore and aft. Distinction between them there is; disconnection there is not and cannot be.

Is lightning mere electricity, or a bolt of Thor? An omen of this or that? An effect of physical and/or mental and/or force of character? Edgar Cayce’s sources said that force expresses either in human affairs (war, say) or as natural phenomena (earthquakes, say, or volcanoes). The Romans followed omens; so did the ancient Chinese, and the American Indians, and Shakespeare’s characters, etc. Were they all stupid? Ignorant? Merely superstitious? Magicians and priests alike seek to bend non-human power to further human ends. A mistake, all of it?

• Non-3D forces manifesting in 3D are not perceived as they are, because 3D provides inadequate perceptual grounds. They are perceived in relation to existing categories. So don’t be so sure what is possible and what is not.
• Remember, you are the divine, only you are not all that the divine is. How you interpret what you experience depends upon what you are beforehand. More, what you experience, itself, depends upon what you are beforehand. You are the divine, but you are only a subset of the divine. It cannot be any other way, in the nature of things.

Given that we extend beyond the 3D, we perceive with non-3D eyes as well.

You do when your filters allow it, yes.

• “The gods at war” is the same thing as “natural forces interacting,” but each view has been strained through a different filter.
• “Animate” v. “inanimate” is a division that seems to be common-sense observation. Your desk is not given to dancing. Yet this is only a filter operating to make sense of the world.
• Filters might be grouped by those which make the world static and predictable and those which make it dynamic and even chaotic. The world is neither one nor the other. It is, as it ever was, beyond definition.
• You must realize that life cannot be determined by logic. Logic analyzes, but it does not provide what is to be analyzed. Your filters do that.
• Your life in 3D must always be a subset of your life. That you do not recognize your larger life does not mean it does not exist. If your filters block it, it does not exist for you, and your logic will thus infallibly exclude it, barring miracles.
• Necessarily then, your 3D life is repeatedly, if not continuously, being shaped and affected by forces beyond your cognition or logic. As you are more than you can perceive, so is your life.

And as for us as individuals, necessarily for a culture or civilization.

Yes, only a culture has a greater mass, a greater inertia, a greater stability (three ways to say the same thing) than the individual. Hence change comes from the individual in 3D; stability comes from the context in 3D. It is a balance.

• 3D life is a construct, remember. It appears to be solid, but its essence is evanescent.
• Can a soap-bubble be said to be independent of internal forces (surface tension) or of external forces (wind, or a solid object)?
• The gods at war, or the gods at peace, exist in their own terms, but their existence necessarily has consequences for the 3D world that experiences their shadows.