Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

Saturday, November 9, 2019

You said, as a halfway point, treat the 3D world as “not only” our environment.

Re-read yesterday’s before we begin, to get it fresh in your mind. This will help the process.

Me only, or the reader as well?

You have no control over what anyone does but yourself. And you will benefit from the focus.

Yes, I can see that – having just done it – but even now it is hard to hold on to.

Which is why we need symbols, you will remember, and why religions (including science) need dogma, to provide capsule-summary-images to imply a lot in bite-sized bits.

Now you, experiencing yourselves in 3D as 3D, live differently depending upon your awareness of who you really are – and that awareness, remember, fluctuates.

• The 3D world of constraints may be seen as a stable platform maintained by joint effort of the various kingdoms: vegetable, animal, celestial, mineral.
• But do not think of this platform as static merely because it is stable. It is dynamic, rather.
• Do not think of it as uniform in texture. It contains within itself all possibilities and hence all possible conditions.
• “Magic” is the manipulation of the prevailing conditions by the will of the individual (bearing in mind that there can be no such thing as a 3D-only individual).
• “Superstition” is sometimes the deducing of rules governing the appearance of magic outside conscious willing.
• “Religion” may be, on one end, the extension of consciousness by the use of symbol and dogma, or at the other end a sort of substitute extension, living by rule, as superstition.
• Bear in mind, you move from one state of being to another as you live, aware of it or not. This is not a one-way progression, so much as a wandering.
• The 3D world, which you perceive as external, functions, as we said, as a sort of mirror of your state of being. Thus as Thoreau said, don’t curse your life, it isn’t as bad as you are.

And I guess don’t take credit for it either, when things are going well?

Let’s say, an attitude of trustful interest would be appropriate in either case. You didn’t cause your good fortune, you didn’t cause your ill-fortune, and anyway you can’t depend upon your judgment as to which is which.

Now, if you affect your environment, and your environment affects you, that is a very different state of affairs from that which you come to if you consider that it is only one way or the other. You are not “only” (nor always) magicians, setting the stage and directing the play. You are not only nor always victims or let’s say recipients, reacting to the latest blows of fate or kisses from the gods. Nor do you move from the one to the other. It only looks like that.

I think of Caesar as I write that.

Caesar, you know, was considered to be beloved by the gods, which assured his astonishing luck time and again when he needed it. Yet he was diligent, determined, far-sighted, of few illusions, sometimes ruthless and more often merciful, at a time when mercy was often mistaken for weakness. He is a good example of a conscious man operating in good connection with his non-3D component and interacting with what seems an exterior environment to entirely transform his society. Yet his goal and his methods were not primarily aimed at transforming his 3D environment even though he himself thought in those terms.

I wish I could speak to Caesar.

Only you don’t believe yourself worth of his attention.

Well, yes, I guess so, like when I contacted Joseph P. Kennedy expecting to be swatted for my presumption, and he said there isn’t anybody who is more nobody than a dead man.

The key as always is, what do you have in common? Where is the point of resonance between you? It won’t be culture or language or biographical detail necessarily, but there will be something, or you would not feel the draw. So ask yourself, or rather, feel, where the resonance is, and see if anything happens.

And this is not an interruption of your lesson-plan, I take it.

Very funny. Try the experiment. What doesn’t work today may work tomorrow. What does work today will necessarily carry the quality of the moment.

It’s funny, I woke up thinking of my academic friend who believed I was honest, but maintained that my contacts weren’t scientifically valid unless I could somehow prove that I was talking to whomever I thought (or they said) it was. I maintained just the opposite, that the experience precedes the proof, that it is the experience and not the data that must be looked at as of primary importance, for our attribution of source must always be speculative and probably at least partly erroneous.

Enough nervousness. Try.

Yes. Very well, what would be our point of contact, the reason for my fascination with the man Julius Caesar?

We transcend categories. It is that extending beyond bounds that is in common.

Clearly I am not socialite, soldier, statesman. So the transcendence you mean is not of career.

Why do you think Caesar transformed the world, more after his death than before?

You altered the categories for others.

After you have seen more clearly than others, their sight clears as well. This is not your doing as an individual; it is you as servant of the gods. But the gods love those who willingly do their bidding.

It can be hard to remember that you were others before and presumably after you were Caesar.

You will find it easier to see if you think of it not as Caesar but as Caesar’s traits. Many an individual has flowed with this or that bundle of Caesar’s categories, qualities. Napoleon chiefly, as you were given some time ago, but many a one unknown to history. Any life successfully lived adds to the possible patterns.

Think of yourselves as patterns interacting with the external world as also a pattern, but realize that you-as-pattern is itself a somewhat external thing, not you-as-essence.

So what is the over-arching thing you are trying to get across, here?

It is worthwhile to think of yourselves as separate from the 3D world and yet an integral part of the 3D world. Both, not one or the other, because “the 3D world” is itself more of two natures than appears.

As beings who are not of the 3D, you have leverage. As beings who are of the 3D, you have insight, or let’s say a sense of identity. You belong and yet you are more than. The 3D world is environment and yet it is an externalization of you (if only “in effect”).

And that will do for the moment.

Well, thank you for all this, as usual. A particularly unusual experience this morning.

No, a slight stretching of your categories, nothing more.

 

Friday, November 8, 2019

We are still wanting to relate your 3D life not so much to life in the greater reality as an abstraction, but to your life in the greater reality. Discussing abstractions can be practical, or it can be evasion. But discussing how you in the 3D really are, rather than how you think you are, is unmistakably practical, and then it is a question of whether you apply what you learn.

• Your lives in 3D are necessarily bounded by time and space and by the amount of things you can be aware of at any one time.
• However, your lives in 3D take place in a larger context that does not suffer the same constraints.
• Your awareness of the interaction between what we have been calling your 3D component and your non-3D component fluctuates, as of course all 3D consciousness fluctuates.
• Another way to say this is that sometimes you function in 3D as if you were on your own and sometimes as if temporarily connected to a larger being.
• It is that “as if” that determines the flavor of your lives.
• Different levels of consciousness effectively live in different worlds with different rules. This applies not only between lives but within

I understand that one, all right.

Yet you will find that you and in fact nearly everyone else commonly think and act as if you were constants rather than variables.

• You don’t live in the same world with the same rules when you change states of consciousness, until you stabilize them.
• In the absence of a stable platform, how reliable are your observations? How predictable are your reactions? How dependable are your interactions?
• Stability is not everything – growth may result from, or result in, temporary instability – but it is not nothing, either.
• And remember, what you experience as “the external world” is a (relatively) stable point of reference! That’s one reason it exists!

Explain that, a little?

You can’t measure one variable by another. Something has to be considered a fixed reference point. If you unpredictably change, and so do those around you (speaking of their internal selves), where is any point of stability but an “external” world?

But other people’s appearance is part of the world as we experience it.

It is, and your own appearance is part of the world as other people experience it. To that degree you act as landscape for one another, preserving a continuity of environment. But neither you nor they are as you appear. You (all) live as if your world was as it appears, when in fact you know full well it is not.

More carefully said, I think you mean when we know that in our own case it is not so.

That’s a doubtful qualifier. You know it of yourselves to the degree that you allow that your inner world is as real as the other. You might be surprised how few people do. And of those who do, some concede that others have a similarly invisible side to their lives, and some do not.

How can anyone not know that they live an internal life as well as an external one? I don’t see that it would be even possible.

Perhaps this is a matter of definition as well as of perception. Again, people’s definition of and perception of their internal life fluctuate in a great range, not only from moment to moment but from lifetime to lifetime. At any given moment, in any given lifetime, the variations in range are limited, but within those limits fluctuation is inevitable and therefore cannot be undesirable.

“Cannot be,” assuming that we assume that All Is Well.

You are perfectly free to assume that All Is Ill, or All Is Often Ill, or that you know better than reality, but how useful is any such arrogant assumption?

• “The world” provides a 3D frame of reference not obviously under your control, not apparently fluctuating as you fluctuate. Hence by implication your reaction to the world provides clues as to how you may have changed snice your last observation.

And as you open our eyes to things, we find “the world” changing?

Hard to give a true response to that statement, it is so packed with true and false implications.

• Greater command over life comes from greater command over your own variables, of course. What else do you have to work with?
• But as usual, “which you?”
• That is the reason for all this exploring, all this redefining, all this acquiring of experience and theory and data on life in non-3D.
  It isn’t like the universe needs another reporter (though each report adds another window on the world), but that you need a better handle on who you are if you are to be able to transcend your previous self-definitions.
• If you will begin to see the 3D world less as your natural environment and more as your independent sounding-board, you will find that your life seems, feels, and becomes entirely different and livelier.

But it is our environment.

It is and it is not. Let’s say, as a halfway point, treat it as not only.

 

Friday, March 9, 2018

In building up an image of our reality among a vast confluence of forces, we must not leave the impression of an enclosed reality isolated from the outside. We are not a flying saucer, an airplane, a submarine, separated by a skin from our surroundings. We are more like animals in the open, breathing the atmosphere that surrounds us, so that in a real sense it also permeates us, includes us not as a something-different but as part of its larger whole. You understand? We are affected by, we live among, these forces. We experience them as part of our lives, not thinking to separate ourselves from them. Before we began this discussion, it will not have occurred to you that any given emotions were not necessarily “your” emotions, nor perhaps that a given thought or idea might be not necessarily “yours” except in the way your body is yours; that is, as something that clothes you while you use it, but is not you.

That is, you live among these forces; you experience them as part of your everyday life. They aren’t something outside of life, nor are they something self-evidently alien. Only, they are more than what you experience; they signify more than you could ever comprehend, and have their own purposes. Still, they are a part of life.

The spirit that animates us but blows where it will.

At some point, perhaps we will discuss how people can know more than they can know. That is, how inspired experience can provide wisdom that could not be obtained through logic nor through associational thinking. The various scriptures have been inspired, and if people ascribe authorship to God or angels, well, that’s one way of seeing it, and who is to say it isn’t as correct as any other way? But that isn’t where we are at the moment. Let us agree that spirit has been described in various places and here is one more description.

All this series is intended to help individuals to work on themselves. But it isn’t exactly a do-it-yourself project, in the sense of learning a skill or in following instructions in order to produce a given result. It is, perhaps, a set of reminders, or of orienting nudges, so that a given 3D individual may be encouraged to listen to what another part of the same individual knows and would like it to hear as a whole. There is no other way of transferring an understanding, really: One can learn only what one is ready to learn, which in practice means what part of oneself already does know.

If we can only learn what a part of us already knows, it is important that various strands continuously intermingle as new individuals, so that those who did not know X now have a part of themselves that does, which opens the way for –

Oh, and this is what you meant in previous conversations by 3D individuals being, in effect, knots in the macramé. It isn’t just that different vibrational levels (whatever that means) be brought together in a way that would be impossible if there were no 3D experience to provide the crucible; it is also that each strand brings its own memories, its own experiences, its own connections, and hence its own specific and unreproducible access.

Yes. Continue.

Without the complexity caused by fragmentation and recombination, over and over and over again, the universe could at least theoretically fragment into mutually uncomprehending and antagonistic parts. Like proud families of nobles unwilling to marry outside of their own small circle, the blood would get thinner, the gene pool less diverse, the life-force more fragile and vitiated. Only, I think I have been getting carried away here by analogy and rhetoric.

There are better analogies available. However, the underlying understanding is serviceable. The continual recombinations enabled by 3D conditions produces All-D interrelationships that are very robust and productive. Intermarriage produces not only vigorous offspring but alliances among tendencies and – past productions, let’s say – that otherwise could not be.

One of the features of your time is a certain “weather” that you take for granted as “life,” perhaps not realizing that it is “life as it is at this moment.”  A creature that lived only one month would have a very different impression of what life is, if its life was in July rather than December, or September rather than March. In any of the four cases, it would generalize quite correctly in terms of its own experience and quite incompletely – so incompletely as to be entirely incorrect – when seen from the perspective of an entire year. Similarly, you.

Everyone’s life at the moment (whatever moment) will have certain definite if invisible limits to what it will be able to think, feel, experience, believe, imagine. To that degree, everyone lives in a separate world. Or, let’s put it this way: As an individual, you will have your own subset of the larger world. Geography, heredity, your own choices will all combine to define your effective boundaries.

Over and above that, your bounds will include some shared with others of your own time. The 19th century in a given place will have certain features that may appear to be caused only or primarily by world events but in fact will have been caused largely by 3D individuals in the overarching presence of “weather” – that is, of the vast impersonal forces as they manifest at that time. The same forces will express differently in different places and circumstances, but they will be the same forces, for that is what the weather is, an overarching influence.

Over and above that is the fact that each of you is not a solid welded individual but a community of many parts, each of them forged in different times, different lives. So you will react differently to identical external stimuli.

If we have a lot of Eskimo lives within us, we’ll do better in the winter and perhaps suffer more in the summer.

Not a bad analogy, provided you remember that you may also have many African lives, preferring heat to cold, and the Eskimo and the African do not have the luxury of living separately but must come to some modus vivendi, or be at each other’s throats.

And this is a good lead-in to the real point here, which is that not only does the “weather” of the vast impersonal forces affect whole generations at a time, but it affects everyone differently because today’s weather in effect also impacts 3D individuals living their lives in other times [that is, various strands], and mutually interacting continually. That’s a little complicated, but complications are productive.

Bear in mind that as we redefine things, what you have absorbed in one sense will be revealed in another sense, and some productive disorientation is to be expected. Welcome it, as a sign of continued growth in understanding. New eyes produce new material, in effect.

 

Friday, December 2, 2022

6:10 a.m. Gentlemen, I am reluctant to talk to you, reluctant to continue on the novel. Speed bump, or what?

You are asking us? Why not ask yourself? In a way, asking us is asking yourself, of course. You know that. But then, why feel reluctance to ask yourself?

Maybe I’m shrinking from the effort of doing an hour’s session.

Not that it need be that, nor that if it were, it need be transcribed.

Oh, I know all that. Still, if I gear up to do it, it seems a waste of effort not to do it right.

That could be every 3D person’s theme song.

Which part? Too much effort, or too bad to waste things?

Both, in different proportions according to temperament. The 3D conditions predispose you all to over-discriminate between yourself and others. That is, you aren’t nearly as different from each other as you think, it’s just that you’re seeing yourself from the inside and them from the outside.

Only – I hear – as usual, it isn’t that simple.

“Not that simple” really ought to be restated “only it could be analyzed more closely.” Turn the knob on the tele-micro-scope, and always a new relationship comes into focus

That has an interesting effect. As you say it, I realize that “not that simple” carries an aura of “you aren’t smart enough or careful enough to really see things straight,” and “could be analyzed more closely” does not.

You are all prone to underrate yourselves, your abilities, your central position in your personal universe. It’s good to remind you that any sense of insufficiency is an illusion.

I seem to remember my brother once telling me something similar. I think he said discouragement is the result of false expectations of oneself.

That is true enough, though of course not an absolute. False expectations are one source of discouragement.

In this case, I don’t think we’re dealing with discouragement – I feel pretty good, actually – but with disinclination to exert myself.

Though you have drifted right into a session.

Effortlessly; that’s the point. I’m not sure I could have geared up to do it, if it had been hard.

That is careless thinking. Actually, not “thinking” at all, but accepting random association of moods. At least, it could be looked at that way.

“Random association of moods.” I don’t remember your using that terms before. Meaning?

It isn’t a very precise term yet. We’ll work on it together – here – and see if clarity emerges. What we refer to is a certain passivity of mood – a little different from receptivity – that accepts as real what is presented by preprogrammed scripts, by what you sometimes call robots, by what seem self-evident truths that – looked at more energetically – reveal themselves to be shadows, or half-truths, or passing conditions.

I’m groping toward it. I have about a half-idea what you’re meaning.

Wing it, perhaps using bullet-points, and we’ll insert as we can and will observe as we cannot. That is, we will participate in nudging you whenever it’s possible.

Oh, I can hear my conspiratorially minded friends jumping on that. They’ll say, “Aha, they just admitted to being the puppet-masters,” etc.

You will not be able to explore new ground by obsession over what others may make of the trail you blaze.

All right, true enough.

• The penumbra of our consciousness probably is fill of automatisms, lacking the full energy that consciousness gives, but structured. (From past moments of consciousness, perhaps?)
• Such formed but inactive structures may wander into our conscious awareness, seeming real?
• Or maybe – taking your old definition of emotion as the boundary layer between consciousness and what we are unconscious of – a “mood” is a momentary appearance seeming real.

This isn’t gong very well.

Let us do it, then, and we’ll see if we progress:

• Your mental life contains many kinds of what you might call structures: ideas, thoughts, emotional patterns, biases, openness in some directions and relative closed-ness in others.
• You as center of your world are not replicable. Too many factors, 3D and non-3D, each individual, go into each person. There is no way that any two – even identical twins – could be the same.
• Your life is lived one 3D moment at a time and is lived in the permanent perpetual now. Which one you become aware of determines the flavor of your life, and of course awareness fluctuates, and is meant to.
• Each present 3D moment interacts with you. (That is as valid a way to put it as to say you interact with it.) It elicits response in your total being, most of which is invisible to you. Hence you are often surprised..
• Your life is structured by your past decisions. That is the “predetermined” part of life. And it proceeds according to your present decisions, the free-will aspect. The present moment is what presents you with (in effect) an outside agent offering you a certain range of freedom. It is a limited range, but a range. That energy flows through you via your structures. There is no other way for you to experience it. But it also permeates the areas beyond the structures, call it. Hence, sometimes, conflict.

That’s too vague for me.

Every present moment affects your 3D and non-3D. The 3D is affected directly, the non-3D second-hand, in a way; that is, because of, or through your 3D-created structures. Clearer?

Not there yet.

The vast impersonal forces – spirit – animates the 3D world. Spirit flows through what it finds. It doesn’t shape, it animates. The spirit plays the pan-pipes that are the 3D world. (Remember, the 3D is a subset of the All-D, which by definition includes 3D and non-3D alike.) But spirit can only play the pipes as they exist. This goes for any individual, quite as much as for the whole, and for anything between the extremes. You have helped spirit express, because your decisions, like everyone’s, have helped shape the pipes spirit plays.

And the connection with the final bullet you offered?

You experience life in two ways: As sensory beings, you experience the 3D world as if it were entirely (rather than relatively) real. As more-than-sensory beings, you experience life as if your mental and emotional reality were primary and everything else secondary. Life is the process of riding two horses.

What you experience directly – intuitively – you experience unfiltered (though immediately your filters begin to process what you get). What you experience indirectly – through the senses – must come through the filters that are your psychic life. You are not tabula rasa, not ever could be. You are the product of loads of experience, over this and associated lifetimes. There is no possibility of you experiencing reality directly, through any sensory-mediated route.

Tiring. Can we pull this together?

When you get discouraged – or manic, for that matter; the substance doesn’t matter – remember that you have a choice as to how to react. If you don’t like the picture of reality being presented by one set of filters, choose another, if you can. Or, better, meditate or use whatever technique works for you, and tap into the view from the penthouse. Tap into the way life looks when experienced directly – intuitively – rather than through the complex of baffles and lab-rat passages that your 3D life has created.

I get it. And I see you have inveigled me into a full session, merely by engaging my interest. I feel so used! 😊 Today’s?

“Discouragement and choice”?

That would be accurate enough but a little depressing, isn’t it? At first glance, I mean.

What about “A choice of filters,” or “A choice of input.”

One of those should work. Very well, our thanks as always.

 

Life in 3D can get tiresome.

Yes, when one plods along, doing one’s best, but cannot feel meaning. All forms of mental suffering – including boredom, including a sense of meaninglessness, including especially that sense of plodding an endless treadmill – will be found to stem from a disconnection from a sense of meaning, not from any “external” circumstances.

Viktor Frankl again, for example.

Or, better, in this case, Arthur Koestler.

Yes, I remember that incident, from one of his two volumes of autobiography.* Koestler was a red, in Spain during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39, in jail waiting to be shot. He had been a convinced and dedicated Communist, stifling his growing doubts because faced with the menace of fascism. His life involved endless lying, as he was overtly a journalist and covertly a Communist. Besides, the death-in-life that was a life staking its meaning on an ideology was killing him.

(I think it was Koestler who told of a young woman meeting a comrade clandestinely in the woods, enjoying the day until the comrade showed up and immediately began talking in ideological terms, at which something went dead within her, and she cried out, or maybe only thought, “Oh, why do the birds stop their singing when we approach?”)

Anyway, Koestler found himself pondering some point of mathematics, and wound up engaging in quite a long flight of abstract thought. Then he realized there was something he ought to be remembering, a flaw in the beautiful pattern, so to speak, and came back to earth remembering that he was waiting to be shot. “Oh, that,” he said in effect, shrugging at its unimportance. And that experience changed him entirely, instantly, so that when his jailer asked him, “Aren’t you a red?” he responded, “I was, but not anymore.” That wasn’t a calculated response – it wouldn’t have saved him from anything. It recognized that he had come to his true self. I can’t remember why he didn’t get shot ultimately, but this night was the important event in his life, maybe.

You may as well finish his story.

With the act of kindness, you mean? At some point  – I forget how it came to be – he was literally starving to death in Palestine, and a stranger gave him 10 or 20 pounds, an immense amount of money when compared to zero. If not for this anonymous Englishman, Koestler might have died in the 1930s, without having written Darkness at Noon. It is said that France might have gone communist n the 1947 elections, if not for the consequences of people reading that wildly popular book. A lot of consequences from one man’s charitable impulse.

And from Koestler’s willingness to rip up his past life when an insight showed him he was on the wrong path. That night in Spanish prison was as responsible for Darkness at Noon as was the stranger’s kind charity.

Now, we had you bring up Koestler not as a form of taking sides between ideologies, obviously. Good people find themselves taking sides in larger struggles for all sorts of reasons, few of them as rational as they assume them to be. But his experience illustrates our point. It wasn’t mathematics that recalled Koestler to himself, it was the opening to his greater self that was facilitated by his love of mathematics. You see? There was an access to the feeling of the non-3D, and when he found himself there, he recognized the feel of reality. It is difficult to express, and can only be hinted at, to those who have not had the experience. But those who have had it, may not have recognized it, or may not have thought of it in this context. That’s a reason to spell it out.

Just as Robert Pirsig said quality cannot be defined, but you know it when you see it.

Exactly so. When you touch a live wire, it may kill or transform.

Kill?

Suppose your life is defined by the worship of some idol that postulates that nothing beyond the sensory world exists, and then you have an undeniable life-changing experience. You know of those who come back from an NDE transformed. What you don’t know of is those who are unable to make so great a readjustment.

You mean, who turn what might have been an NDE into an escape.

Yes. And by the way, it is no tragedy either way. Life is choice. We merely point out that sometimes the shock is too much, and some choose not to try to retrace a long wandering in the wilderness.

Now to finish with this aspect of things:

• Your 3D life has its own validity.
• Feelings don’t necessarily tickle, but they are
• A life lived in touch with reality will have its own self-regenerating property regardless of “circumstances.”
• But individual choice may lead or perhaps mis-lead you. You may get lost in one or more of the seven sins, and the real world will be replaced by a 3D-only subset.
• No one mistakes reality for unreality when confronted with the two side by side.

Does anyone ever choose unreality in such cases?

Of course they do. That is what sin is, you might say, the choosing of unreality over reality. And the distinction you were taught (or rather mis-taught) between venial sin and mortal sin is precisely the difference between “wandering off the path” and “choosing to take the wrong path.

And as soon as you say “wrong path” my old instinctive response rises up and says, “wrong according to whom?”

To which we respond, not according to whom, but wrong for whom. The roadside sign that warns of a steep drop off one shoulder doesn’t particularly care what you do, it merely hints at consequences. But whether your choose to steer one way or another is always up to you.

And perhaps one man’s pitfall is another’s legitimate path?

We merely remind you, we were talking about reality and unreality. Follow your feelings and they will keep you connected. Koestler experienced that, waiting to be shot.

— —

* Arrow in the Blue, and The Invisible Writing.

 

Wednesday, November 30, 2022

5:05 a.m. Well, my friends, we agreed yesterday that I would ask this question, though I’m pretty sure I know the answer. Do we affect others when we’re angry, say, even if they don’t know it?

It’s slightly more complicated than you are seeing it, but, of course you do.

I take it that

(a) we’re all connected,

(b) the ability to send healing implies the ability to send harming, and

(c) we don’t always know what we’re doing.

All true but not without compensatory factors. There is also the question of timing, of armoring, and of – shall we call it – agency. (Others might call it “past life agreements” or even “pre-life agreements,” but that is misleading.)

Let us begin with bullet points, so as to keep the main outline clear.

• “All is one.” Everything connects. There are no loose ends in reality.
• You don’t exactly “send” anything, but you, shall we say, intend for others, and it amounts to the same thing. You might think of it as aligning your energy to someone, and intending that they resonate to your state of being. This brings you blessings or curses, as you intend for others.
• The perpetually apt question, “Which you?” should remind you that you do many things without being consciously aware of them. Nonetheless, these things have their effect on you.
• The moment allows certain things, disallows others. Thus to a degree your ability to curse or bless – to send harming or healing – will fluctuate not only with your will but with what you might call the cosmic weather.
• It fluctuates, too, by the intended recipient’s state of being. A well-armored person may refuse to admit alteration, and so you cannot “send” healing energies or curses, because the intended recipient refuses. An open person may be very open to help or harm.
• And, finally for the moment, a person may be open in certain ways, and to certain people, that we would call agents. That is, there is someone you trust. You maintain yourself (unconsciously, effortlessly) in a state of openness to that person.

Interesting. You saw my three and raised me three.

And had you gone deeper, we could have accompanied you. In general, we meet you at your level of the moment. Why not? Less friction this way.

Our joint precis doesn’t seem very complicated, to me. Common sense, even though I wouldn’t have thought of the three caveats you added.

True doesn’t have to be complicated. It always is, in that any analysis can be pursued more profoundly, but it isn’t always worthwhile to lose sight of the simple skeleton of it, for it is the bullet points that you will remember in time of need.

In time of need?

“Fear is the mind killer,” remember. Frank Herbert knew what he was having his characters say. It is when you are afraid, that you need a few simple touchstones to protect you.

Protect us, I take it, from our fear.

Well – yes and no. The fear, if it can be overcome, then ceases to be a factor paralyzing your analytical and other abilities, so removing the fear is always helpful per se. But sometimes the fear is well-grounded, and you need protection against what is rightly feared. Either way (and, in practice, usually both ways at once) it will help to have a few simple touchstones to banish fear so that you may remember that you are a child of the universe with a right to be here.

Some Protestant sect teaches or taught its children to recite something at night, more or less

Four angels guard my bed,

Two at the foot, two at the head

And I forget the rest of it,* but I can see the advantage of giving the infant something easily remembered, designed to inspire trust and a sense of protection. And I remember Lanny Budd [hero of Upton Sinclair’s series of eleven novels] advising his future wife, in mortal danger from the Nazis, to say her prayers like a child, not as a rational adult.

Yes, good advice. It is the emotional safe place, not the mental inquiry, that would be needed.

I am reminded that when a businessman is considering whether to extend credit to customers, the first consideration is that extending credit guarantees that you will sustain losses, and it is up to you to decide if the gain is worth the loss. An equivalent, it seems to me, is that living unarmored involves the rick of being stabbed in the back, and every person has to decide (consciously or by default) whether the gain is worth the risk.

Seth said it is a safe universe, and we would certainly agree. But that doesn’t mean the movie has no villains, nobody wearing the black hats. It’s up to you, how you want to play your part.

Which is to say, “Protection isn’t everything”?

And to say, “Neither is openness, not any quality seen in isolation. You are not simple beings; your role in the continuing improv is not necessarily simple, though you can make it less simple or more simple. So don’t expect one rule to cover all situations.

Now let’s look at the half dozen points again.

• Everything connects. (No accidents.)
• Not sending, but matching energies.
• Many motivations, often unconscious.
• Restriction by cosmic weather.
• Restriction by recipient’s condition.
• Restriction by implied agreements.

You see, a coherent framework for what you experience anyway.

Then it seems to me there is another aspect of this that we haven’t addressed. In fact, it may be the point I set out to address initially. Not just, can we affect others without their knowing it, but do we affect others without our knowing it?

You don’t need an answer to that. It is scarcely even a question.

Yes, of course. We’re affecting people all around us, all the time.

You couldn’t not affect others. Even if you suddenly ceased to exist, your absence (as opposed to what would have been your presence) would have an effect.

We radiate what we are.

You don’t have anything else to radiate. And what else could be as effective, let alone more effective?

Our being, not merely our acting.

You are all born knowing this, though society often enough unlearns you of it.

Shall we call this “Radiating”?

You might. Or, perhaps, “Relating.”

You were asked, “What do they do over there,” and you said, “We relate.”

Can you say we were wrong? And what are you doing that’s so different? Given that “you” and “we” are as mingled as everything else,, isn’t it what you ought to expect?

“Relating,” as in processing unfinished business,” or in fact also “producing unfinished business”?

Better to stay with processing “potential energy accumulated by past action and inaction.” Less productive of cross-currents.

Okay. Our thanks as always. See you next month, presumably.

— —

*So I went looking, and of course can’t find it. It may have been from a Dion Fortune novel. But I did find this, said to be a traditional nursery rhyme:

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John,
Bless the bed that I lie on.
Four corners to my bed,
Four angels round my head;
One to watch and one to pray
And two to bear my soul away.

 

Tuesday, November 29, 2022

5:45 a.m. Guys, I find a request for comment that I don’t remember putting to you. It actually goes back to August 10, an email from Laura Francis to the Voyagers Mailing List. I was gong to summarize it, but I see you want me to quote it in full.

August 10, 2022, 10:07 a.m.

[Vml on behalf of Laura Francis]

Insanity? Or just ignorance?

Hello folks,

I’ve been thinking about something lately that I thought I would share.

I keep hearing the popular saying, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” I have trouble with this saying, because things are always changing. If you are doing the same thing over and over, each repetition would be happening in a (maybe only slightly) different environment – it’s a different time, certainly, but also many other changing factors align differently every time. At some point those factors could align to give you a different result, which is why, I think, people might do the same thing over and over again in an effort to produce a particular result.

One way this seems to manifest in my work is when project managers ask me for a deliverable. My process takes, let’s say, 8 steps, and step 8 is the deliverable. I can’t produce that deliverable until steps 1-7 are done. I know the due date of the deliverable and work backwards to plan my work accordingly. If the project manager asks for the deliverable when I’m on step 1 or 5 or 7, they won’t get it because I won’t have it until step 8. But they are looking at the project from a different perspective and they ask for the deliverable, over and over, and keep getting the same result: “Nope, it’s not ready yet”. But then one day they ask for it and they get it, because I’ve finished my process by then. It seems to me that their repeatedly asking me for something and not getting it is not insanity, but mostly just ignorance of my process (and yes, I do try to educate them about my process and provide progress reports along the way).

Wouldn’t that often be the case in anything? There could be underlying processes that we’re not aware of, the state of which could affect our results with the very same actions that repeatedly produced different results before. Or there may not. Maybe that action will never produce different results. But we don’t necessarily know.

Now, I’m all for learning at any opportunity, and the more we can understand those hidden underlying processes, the more we can tailor our actions (and our expectations) to produce appropriate results at the appropriate time. But ignorance of those underlying processes, and a habit of just trying again to see if we can get it to work this time, doesn’t equate to insanity, in my opinion.

Some of the same people who like to quote this saying also like to talk about perseverance and the story of the crew drilling for some precious commodity (I can’t remember if it was oil, gold, diamonds, or what) and finally gave up after expending a lot of time, money, and energy and finding nothing. Later it was found that where they stopped was just 3 feet from what they were seeking. This story is usually used to encourage continued or repeated effort and to me, completely contradicts the first saying. The desired result could be hidden and may require repeated tries or continued effort with no results in order to finally unearth it. Or it may not be there at all and your repeated efforts really are wasted. But even if your efforts ultimately don’t produce the desired result, it is not an example of insanity, just ignorance.

The hidden treasure or underlying process we are ignorant of may be occurring other than in 3D (in case you were wondering how this relates to VML), in which case I would not expect the majority of people to necessarily be aware of it. So, a perfectly natural ignorance, in my opinion, not insanity.

Maybe The Guys would have something to say about this?

Laura

[TGU] We had you quote it because this is an example of good thinking that may put together for people things they hadn’t thought to connect. Laura

• noted the saying (two sayings, in fact),
• thought about their application using her life experience as example,
• changed viewpoint as she considered the example (that is, she considered how it appeared to others, not only to herself), then
• generalized – applied the 3D example to circumstances not necessarily confined to 3D.

She is quite right: Circumstances alter cases, and everybody knows it in principle, but everybody tends to forget it, in practice.

We have often cited the saying that no one can step twice into the same river. This is for two reasons: The river is never the same, and nor is the person. That being so, the premise of the definition of insanity falls to the ground. There is no insanity involved in different people trying the same technique on a moving target. But of course no saying becomes a saying without encompassing a grain of truth, and your life experience will remind you that – in the sense the saying means – repetitive action may in fact be a form of futility, if not necessarily insanity.

Oh, I hear the implied difference. Doing the same thing consciously may or may not work out, and may or may not be reasonable (it may be just stubbornness, say), but doing the same thing again and again because you are unconscious is, in fact, close to insanity. It is to be functioning from a place other than the here/now, and it is to be unable to change anything because you are acting out of unconscious compulsion.

What you say is true enough, only be a little chary of throwing around that word “insanity.” It is a word often used merely to mean “Something I don’t understand that somehow frightens me a little.”

Yes, I see that.

This is enough for the moment. Laura Francis did your work and our work for us, you see!

😊 Very efficient of me to find that paper, I’d say, if it hadn’t been lost for three and a half months. But better late than never.

Do you suppose the timing today is – What do you call it? – accidental?

Very funny. “Insanity” as a theme?

Perhaps “Revisiting the river.”

I’ll see when I transcribe. Thanks for this.