Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

Saturday, November 20, 2021

I had a thought for a session, overnight. What can you say to help people who may have gone through the threshold of a new way of being, but have done so (in so far as they realize it) only in intent, and have not yet realized any change? That is a clumsy way to put it, but perhaps it will get us started.

In the interest of a clearer statement, we will answer a slightly different question, for really the concern of one and all is less, “How will I know when I have entered in,” than, “How do I enter in?” The first question would merely want encouragement (no bad thing in itself); the second wants guidance and assistance.

We say, “This is the time, things are changing, and you are part of the change,” and some people’s hearts leap within them, for we are only telling them what they already know, even if it is something they haven’t quite dared believe. But when we say, “If you intend to live an entirely changed existence; if you maintain that intent year by year – if you live toward your ideal, in short – you will not be left in the wilderness,” this may be a breath of renewed hope, even an echo of a longing, but it is unlikely to stir that inner leap of conviction. It will feel like a hoping against hope; it will feel perhaps as if we are saying, “Don’t worry what it looks like, things really are well.”

Which is just what you have been saying for 20 years – All is always well.

Yes, but you see the difference in emotional effect. The one statement brings a leap of joy, perhaps tears of gratitude for the reassurance after so much vigilant care. The other brings perhaps a gnawing doubt, as in, “Too good to be true,” or even, “This is just more of the same, and is not helpful.”

So now, here is a problem. We in non-3D, just like many of you in 3D, intend to be helpful; we offer whatever gifts we have in our grab-bag. But willingness, even eagerness, to help, is not the same as ability to give each one what s/he needs, instantly and in full, or there would be no woe or unrequired longing in the world. It takes one to give, one to receive, and, though intangible, it takes a flow between the two to enable the transfer.

Sometimes we have to wait for the times to be right, as you said earlier?

That is true too, but in this case we refer not to impersonal timing, as marked by the orbs in the heavens, but the vicissitudes of the human soul. These changes are not random, not accidental, but they do not follow “external” direction either. They result from the interaction of a person’s smaller and larger sphere, and thus are somewhat under the direction of conscious intent. This is important, and of course will require some spelling-out.

I’ll say! This is going off in a direction I haven’t gotten even a glimpse of, till now. This is why our intent matters. This is why our free will affects who we are, what happens to us, what we become, over and above and almost despite the constraints usually called environment or heredity or even predestination.

Later when you look at this you may be impressed by the leap you just made – or perhaps it will still seem logical and natural. In any case, that’s where we are going. Now let’s see how to get there.

What a fortunate man I am, to be allowed to bring in these things!

You were born potentially able; your sustained intent brought potential into practicality. We say this not only for you, Frank, of course. It is true of everyone. Anyone who is interested in what we have to say has it in them to express (to embody, to live) greater things, or they would not be attracted by them. But it is a fine line – and a crucial one – between merely wishing and intending. Intending sometimes involves “acting as if.” It is a safe way, perhaps the only safe way, of bridging the gap from how you experience yourself to how you long to experience yourself. It is an act of faith, and will bring the results you wish, though quite likely in a way and a form you didn’t suspect. But you will not be disappointed. You will say to yourself, as you just did, Frank, “How lucky I am!” It is not luck, it is cosmic justice, assuring that no good thing comes without effort, but no effort is ever wasted.

On behalf of my friends, thank you for these words of encouragement, which so many need in these turbulent and hopeful times. You’ve been encouraging us right along; this is just acknowledgement and renewed thanks.

We receive our thanks as you change your lives, and come out of your hard protective shells, and cease to cower in fear. (We don’t mean to be harsh; it’s a fair description for how your life appears to you sometimes, if you really look at it.) Your “life more abundantly” is of course also ours, for we remind you, we’re all in this together. Can you wonder that we rejoice when we see you make headway against 3D turbulence and confusion? And this is why we love you, because not only is your struggle valiant and admirable (no matter how it may look to you), it is also our struggle. So, you always have our blessings and our love. Rely on it.

So now, let’s look at how your intent can influence flow without reference to external timing, which means not constrained by any “external” necessity. Which – in short – means, “It’s up to you.” You’ll never hear a more hopeful statement than that: “It’s up to you.” If it’s up to you, how could it be possible for you to lack anything you need? How could it be possible for you to have to wait “until the times are right”? This is why it is always possible now. Let’s see if we can lay out a few bread crumbs to lead you by logic where logic strictly per se could not take you.

• You come into 3D with innumerable links to non-3D which you may see as past lives, or as threads, or as characteristic traits; three ways to grasp the same connection. Those links define your possibilities and, in a way, your constraints.
• You begin life with certain innate tendencies, and vectors, known to you or, mostly, unknown. But these help shape “what happens to you” as you engage with the world.
• Always in the background as you live and grow and discover yourself in comparison with “other” – with “the world,” with “external reality” – the non-3D connections influence you. You may or may not realize it, and you may think of those influences in various ways, but they will You are never the orphan you sometimes feel yourself to be. Those influences, like the good angel on your shoulder, continually suggest that you’d be better off turning right than left, going this way than that – and then of course it is up to you whether you listen, but the promptings are always there. As we said, you never were an orphan, never were alone in the wilderness. You have been a little deaf sometimes, that’s all.
• Everything that you are and do not know that you are – every aspect of yourself of which you are unconscious – is part of that larger sphere in which your smaller sphere of consciousness exists. “The world” is you, objectified, dramatized, made available for you to discover by your interaction with it.
• Such interactions may be positive or negative, not only in themselves (that is, pleasant or unpleasant, safe or dangerous, life-enhancing or discouraging) but, more, in how you react to them. If you come to the events in your life assuming injustice, meaningless collision, likelihood of injury to you (or, at least, the need to extreme caution to avoid such injury), your interactions will have a very different flavor and result from the same interactions approached with the assumption that there is always something to be learned, something to be gained.
• This different in intent is under your control. And you can decide to change, can change, at any time, and no one and no event and no circumstance or lack of circumstance can stand in your way. At any time, you may change your life by your intent. This change of intent is not only a real change, it is the only real change there is or can be.

But that doesn’t mean it comes accompanied with bells and whistles.

You could almost say it is very likely not to be accompanied with bells and whistles. Coming into your own is not drama, so much as fruition. Do natural processes come with bells and whistles, usually? Does the corn that grows in the night require a brass band, or even a flute?

Today’s theme?

Surely something on the order of, “It requires nothing more than intent.” That isn’t it, but close enough to give you the idea when you come to transcribe.

Again, heartfelt thanks, from me and from all who read this. Till next time.

 

Tuesday, April 2, 2019

4:50 a.m. I seem to be sleeping better, these days. Not up every hour or two, two or three times, before I can get several hours’ sleep in a row. Anything we should talk about, before we think some more about the book? [The guys are helping me plot another novel.]

You are expecting a “no,” but maybe it would be worthwhile to recall that your larger vision – your real goal – is increased and continual awareness of who and what you really are, as a model for others to use in shaping and recalling their own awareness. It isn’t primarily about writing books, of course.

I think I do know that. Am I on the edge of getting carried away with the fun of writing it?

No, and this is neither course-correction nor chastisement. It is merely a foghorn lest you unnecessarily hit rocks while navigating in obscure circumstances.

My life afterwards, I take it.

Your life now, whenever now is. It is always today, and losing consciousness is always a possibility. Not a catastrophe, necessarily; not even an interruption, necessarily, but always a possibility. Just as your physical life is an alternation of waking and sleeping, so your life in a larger context, only now you want to be paying more attention to the process of re-awakening as a regular part of life.

Me in particular, or us in general?

Both, actually. At your time of life, there is a reason why people sleep less – that is, why the need for sleep is less.

I have often speculated about that. I sometimes think infants are almost desperate for reassurance and re-grounding in their accustomed [non-3D] world, while learning this one, and children are equally needing a safe haven, but even as I write this, I see that my ideas on it are fuzzier than I realized. So, please enlighten us. What is it with sleep and us?

Leaving aside physiological reasons such as repair and maintenance of the brain, and of tissues, there is another function of sleep, which is a safe haven while you return.

Isn’t that more or less what I was thinking? The body is secured – even paralyzed, during dreams – for its safety so that the active intelligence may withdraw most of its attention from the 3D world for a time.

Even as you write that out, you feel its insufficiency.

I do. It seemed more substantial until I put it into words.

At that, it isn’t wrong, only incomplete. It isn’t your non-3D component that requires refreshment and reorientation, of course, but your 3D component, and that means something not too often considered (though it is hard to see why it isn’t), which is that your mind in effect operates two overlapping but distinct modes, 3D and non-3D. A distant echo of this distinction may be found in right-brain/left-brain distinctions, or conscious/subconscious, but usually the distinction is not very clear in people’s minds.

For some reason, Wordsworth’s lines come to mind, though I can’t quote them exactly. I’ll look it up and quote it correctly if I post this.

From Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood:“Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home”

He had an inkling, you see. He couldn’t phrase it very exactly, but he knew that the newborn infant was anything but tabula rasa, which one of the scientific fairy tales of your day asserts. Not a blank slate but a power – perhaps impaired by lack of memory, but – a power. Not an orphan.

We live as orphans, though, when we live without regard to that continuing connection.

Sleep maintains the connection. Deprive a person of sleep long enough, and you deprive him or her of reason.

I’m floundering a little, here. I can see that we are in effect two consciousnesses, cohabiting one lifetime. One primarily deals with the 3D world’s everyday contingencies and opportunities, the other maintains a less hands-on attitude and reminds the steersman of the course, so to speak.

That is one aspect of the divided attention, yes. So, you can see, perhaps, that periodic resynchronization is required, so that the 3D-oriented mind can relax its vigilance for the moment and regain its equilibrium.

Not clear to me.

Think of your lives in 3D as an unending balancing act, moving in effect from one moment of time to the next. (We said, in effect. We don’t wish to pursue that particular side trail at the moment; too long a diversion.) That balancing act requires more than merely responding to (or pro-actively affecting) the “external” world. It also involves balancing with the rest of your unseen life.

Now you are moving into new waters, I can feel it.

That’s why we don’t want to divert to other questions. Your life is in one reality, one version of the total of possibilities. But that does not mean that you are not integrally connected to all those other versions! How could you be connected and yet severed? Only, you couldn’t function very well if your 3D awareness were simultaneously aware of more than one. Where would you find firm ground?

I’m getting it. It makes your head spin.

It makes your head spin, you mean. But yes, it can be a pretty mind-boggling concept, at first.

I continue to be amazed at the huge gaps in my net – the huge gaps in how I understand the world conceptually or even how I understand the world as I experience it. You’ll point one out and I’ll be there with my jaw dropping, going “How is it that that never once occurred to me?” And this is one of those moments. It’s so obvious, suddenly, that in all the reorientation over 25 years, it never occurred to me that the different versions of our lives were still part of one life, that they must be connected in consciousness – at least potentially – as much as, say, our present life is with “past” lives. And I guess you are saying that sleep – well, no, what are you saying about this connectedness and sleep?

The word “sleep” as used may mean any of several things, not all congruent. One meaning is contrasted with awareness, so that sleep is considered negative, a lapse in awareness. Another is contrasted, as we said, with vigilance, so that sleep is seen as a necessary and beneficial relaxation. You can see that an unnoticed change in definition is going to confuse thought.

And often does.

Oh yes. But now look at things this way. Sleep is the re-syncing of various versions of your life, necessary if your 3D-limited mind is to keep its orientation relative to the total self rather than relative to the 3D world it experiences as one reality. In such case, sleep is defined as the opposite not of awareness or of 3D-world-vigilance, but of disorienting lack of awareness of its own position relative to all the other versions of this life which, necessarily, seldom or never come into 3D consciousness.

Accepting that, if only for the moment, how does it result in our needing less sleep as we go along? I should think we would need more, as the possible selves would be so much more numerous. And even as I write out that sentence, I see.

Yes. Those other pathways always existed. Those other versions always existed, from the creation of the world. It isn’t that decisions created them so that they increased decision by decision (as your linear-time quantum theorists would have it).

So the potential chaos is actually greater at birth and diminishes as we age.

Well, it can look that way. We would prefer to say, there is a terrific amount of syncing to do early on, much of it to do with the newly formed soul learning the ropes of the 3D equipment – hence, wiring the brain as it goes along, hence requiring substantial “downtime” as it goes while maintaining this unsuspected connection to other versions. It’s a lot to do. But after you have learned the ropes, things settle in for a while, then puberty comes along with its requirement of a whole new set of ropes to learn, then things settle in – but you know the stages of life, no need to spell it out here. But by the time you are old, not only are there few or even no momentous choices to be lived, but you are very settled in with the other versions. There is much less need to sync devices, so to speak.

Unless there is a positive or negative event that changes us.

Well, yes, but not quite the way you are thinking. Let’s not blur the point. Send this out, and there’s always another day.

Until there isn’t. Okay, our thanks as always.

 

Friday, November 25, 2022

3:25 a.m. Perhaps time to pause working on the novel and resume my conversation about continuity from the other day (Tuesday). Let’s center on the internal and external (the body as both self and other) as I am experiencing it, with a nod toward the memory process again.

Starting with the least significant event, I was lying down a few hours ago, remembering the end of The Old Man and the Sea, where a young Spanish-speaking boy tries to tell two English-speaking adults what happened to the huge fish Santiago had caught, of which only the spine remained. I knew he used the Spanish word for shark, said then “eshark,” and they misunderstood him to mean that they were looking at a shark skeleton. But I couldn’t remember the word for shark. It has something to do with San Francisco Bay or thereabouts.

I remembered to release the clutch (so to speak), trusting that the word would associate, and within seconds – not as many as five seconds, I’d say – I remembered. “Tiburon. Eshark,” the boy had said. And I remembered that the little town of Tiburon had been named that because its coastline seen from the bay had reminded somebody of a shark.

Watching the association-machine function smoothly, immediately, after watching it jam up, is fascinating and encouraging. It tells me that for whatever reason the jam-up occurs, the answer is to ease off, holding one’s attention loosely on it (or even letting it go entirely) and, in short, getting out of the way.

But the body as intermediary is a larger subject. Gentlemen?

Gee, do you suppose that could be one reason why 3D existence comes equipped with residence within a body?

Did I pretend it might be an accident?

No, but it’s easy, and common, for people to want the advantages and not the disadvantages of a situation.

“Good and evil”?

Well – let’s say desired and undesired. Wanting up and not down, easy and not hard, comfortable and not the reverse.

Impossible, of course.

It is mostly a matter of a conflict between perception and preference. No law says you have to like the way things are, even if “the way things are” are that way for good and necessary reason. Flight involves lift and drag, both. You may or may not like it, but that’s the way it is. Learn to live with it, and you can fly. Otherwise, you can spend your time complaining about what you don’t understand.

Well, I’m experiencing a pointed example of how the body is external even as I still believe it is internal.

And that is an error of judgment. It is neither one, but sort of a bridge between the two. Take, as a close example, your brain. Your brain is a close link to your mind, and therefore to what you think of as you. But it is also physical matter, subject to incident, disease, trauma, whatever. It is you; it is not you; it is how there can be a you. But to think of it as internal or external, you or not-you, 3D or non-3D, is to truncate the reality.

So, to change focus with a more urgent example: Your surgery leaves your body with swollen tissues and a line of stitches. A week after the doctor cut into the tissues, they have not recovered their equilibrium, you could say. You talk to the cells, encourage them to shed the edema and overcome the trauma that was deliberately inflicted to serve a greater purpose. It doesn’t immediately work, even though when you requested of the same tissues (or of the intelligence inherent in them) that they not send pain signals to alert you to what you already knew was happening, they did what you asked. Why should it work one time and not another?

Yes. Why?

You might think of it as stages of mastery.

I can imagine that. We learn to do so much and not (yet) more. Then later perhaps we learn to do more.

One is always in the learning stage, until one ceases to be interested in learning. So, there is always a challenge one hasn’t yet learned to overcome. Later perhaps it is easy.

I don’t get a sense that this has to do with value, or decisions. [Poorly phrased, but they knew what I meant.]

Rewards for good behavior? No. you aren’t born knowing how to play like Paganini. And if you are, you take it for granted and set your sights on other things, other challenging unattainable goals.

Well, you showed us how to get out of our own way, remembering. Can you show us things we do that may impair the healing process?

What’s the common denominator?

Yes, I hear that. Impatience.

As we said, a discrepancy between perception and preference. You want to be well immediately, but the possibilities aren’t necessarily there. Maybe it will take longer, maybe it can’t be done. Since you never know, ahead of time, which it is, there is always the potential for you to start pushing, unbeknownst to yourself. In healing as in memory retrieval, relax and allow.

That doesn’t mean you can’t do things that will help or hinder; it means, it isn’t exactly in your power to direct events to that extent – nor would it necessarily be in your best interests if it were.

So, a list of bad practices, or of best practices, when we are dealing with physical body problems?

Yes, we can do that. But only a few. Too many would start to seem like a recipe to be followed, which is not the case.

Best practices for health, for healing, for maintenance, are the same as for 3D life in general, only pointed toward this specific aim:

• Cheerful acceptance.
• Mild (constructive) impatience.
• Curiosity as to how the specific relates to the general.

Bad practices:

• Sullen refusal.
• Embracing fear.

Short and sweet.

As we said, we want to encourage a way of experiencing whatever comes. It will serve you well, regardless of the nature of the challenge. So, only a few talking-points, and very little explanation around them. Your own guidance will amplify anything you need help with, you know that. Except, of course, if you are afraid to trust guidance, or if you are convinced that you have no access to guidance, you sort of isolate yourself. [It occurs to me, transcribing this, in such case one could always resolve to act “as if” one were convinced.] But failing that, these few points ought to help.

Our thanks as always. A little short, this morning, but I think I’ll go back to bed for a while. Theme?

“Perception and preference,” perhaps?

Rather than “Tips on memory and health”?

Your choice, always.

Till next time, then.

 

Tuesday, November 22, 2022

4:20 a.m. Let’s see how much I can bring back. Sinking though a web of associations, returning up the same web if something calls me back. Experiencing, truly, but all mental construction, equally truly. And what we are helps determine how we drift and what we associate. “Real life” isn’t actually much different than “mental life.” And how do good and evil enter into pursuing webs of association? All they can do is inhibit exploration, inhibit experience.

Will I be able to expound upon this? How dreaming, remembering, fantasizing, all are sort of the same thing?

It started by my recognizing (what has become clearer and clearer in recent months) that I was spending the nights (and parts of the days, if I was lying down napping or even spacing out), moving in and out of states of more focused and less focused consciousness.

So I was coming “awake” after a prolonged dream-like period, and I was aware of myself becoming more conscious – more concentrated, you might say – even as it happened. And I was aware that waking and sleeping and dreaming are not three separate states, but more like three phases of one state. Sometimes the movement from one phase to another was abrupt and firm, but sometimes it was gentle and approximate, and in no case did it mean only one thing, though it could easily appear to be only one thing.

Gradually I realized that one way to see what happened is to think of myself floating in a sea of logical and other associations, all chained by whatever connectors. (This wasn’t pursued then, but as I write this, I can think of it as one vast data base, with various keys, some mental, some logical, some perhaps physical memories, some emotional connections, some biographical, some fictional, some a little of each, some all sorts of things. The thing about a date base, as opposed to a flat file, is that the data is not linked in one inflexible way, but is all available and all connected according to the keys one constructs – or discovers – to explore it.)

So, as sleep or relaxation releases the controls that a relative concentration imposes on exploration, in our sleep or reverie we may drift along, following chains of association downward deeper into the ocean, one thing leading to another. In sleep this will appear real to us sometimes, and at other times will be obviously constructed even as we follow it. In reverie or I suppose in some drug-assisted journeys, it may appear to be entirely imaginary, regardless of how it is constructed. (Let alone by whom!) In waking pursuit – to the degree that we can allow ourselves to be guided by the logic of the data rather than by the categories our ego-selves impose – it may appear to be genuine discovery, or conscious functioning, or the illustration of usually hidden mental laws and processes.

This is coming out very abstract. Perhaps people will find it dry and obvious. Guys, a little help here?

You’re doing fine; just, as you work, stay in that drifting emotional/mental/imaginal space and let it come through there, you shaping as little as possible, or, let’s say, only as necessary.

I had a real sense of moving up and down the web of relationships of data, a real sense of how it is that we move between waking and sleep and other states of being.

Say more.

It has interested me, how we changes states like that all the time. How, and why. “Why” in two senses of the word: to what purpose, and following what laws. And in recent months – it has been quite a while now, I suppose at least since I wound up in the e.r. on New Year’s Eve 2020 – sleep and waking have interwoven often enough, smoothly enough, that the movement between them has become at least as obvious as the difference in states.

That is, you began looking differently at the most common experience of life, how you experience 3D life as alternation.

Yes, I suppose so.

When you sleep all in one long increment – six or seven or eight hours at a time, followed by the rest of the 24 or 25 hour cycle “awake” – it can easily seem like you are moving between two states that have little in common and are, in fact, as puzzling when considered together as either one is considered in opposition to the other. When your sleep is broken into two or three bits, interrupted by what you think of as sleeplessness, still it seems that the two states alternate, rather than inform each other (let alone participate together). But your experience has dissolved that illusion of separation, and you have seen first-hand how your mind moves to de-center and re-center.

That’s a good way to put it. That is just what I have been experiencing. It is something like daydreaming, too.

Your normal mental processes, observed closely, are not nearly as much you dictating as you riding and steering.

That’s an interesting way to put it! That’s it exactly. When I start to write a sentence, I usually or anyway very frequently have only an imprecise idea where it’s going to wind up. I sometimes can feel myself hovering in indecision as to how to conclude, as for instance in adding that “too” in the previous graf. And of course it is that very habit of steering rather than dictating that made possible this form of conversation with you. It has my conscious input, but it is not limited to, or by, my conscious decision or teleology.

And – as I get up to refill my coffee mug – the light goes on, and I remember that while I was experiencing all this consciously, I realized I was experiencing – that is, consciously experiencing – what our 3D life is. It is a mistake to think of internal and external as separate, not merely because they reflect each other (though that is true as well) but because it is a false distinction to begin with. That data base is everything: experience, fact, thought, emotion, ponderings, desires, etc.

It could be called your unfinished business or it could be called the boundless well of creativity drawn upon by every kind of person there is. There scientists find their facts. So do biographers and historians. So do novelists and psychologists. And artists and artisans, daydreamers and wastrels, “good” and “bad” people of all kinds.

Which is why we probably ought to stop calling it “unfinished business,” in that that sets up expectations of an ultimate empty Inbox.

Any phrasing, any conceptualization, will have problems. That can’t be helped. Even a perfect concept or phrase, if it were possible for there to be one, would be misleading or repugnant to somebody, because of that person’s state of being at the moment. But we’re perfectly happy to use a different phrase, if you care to suggest one.

We’re coming up on an hour. What have I not mentioned that I ought to note before we close?

Not that you failed to mention it, right off, but it bears emphasis that “good and evil” inhibits understanding of the way things really are. We have said this, now, many times, in different contexts.

It is becoming ever more obvious. The first time you hear it, it sounds like “Anything goes, and damn the torpedoes.” And slowly you begin to understand that man who said that when you realize that it is better to be whole than good, you enter into a stricter life, compared to which your previous rectitude was flowery license. That’s a pretty close quotation, though I can’t remember whose words they are.

However, though an important insight, the crippling effects of “good and evil” are not the critical theme here.

No indeed. But I don’t know which is more central, the continuity of our consciousness whether waking or dreaming or in between, or the continuity of experience when seen from an image of ourselves floating along data chains of “real” and “imagined” and – what? Half-real? – input.

Perhaps defer further analysis to another time. What was retained and expressed is worthwhile in itself.

Today’s theme, then? Continuity?

That would do as well as anything.

My thanks in particular, and as usual the thanks of all of us, for your participation in this exploration.

The thanks is fully reciprocated, as you know by now.

Till next time, then.

 

Internal and external (from Jan 21 and 22, 2020)

Tuesday, January 21, 2020

Dealing with the “external” world as if it were disconnected to your own internally experienced world is a very common error. We thought it would be as well to provide the point of view that would allow people to correct it for themselves.

The external world has a very seductive solidity; it appears to be firmly there.

Yes, the myth of objectivity that bedevils science, journalism, and every discipline besides.

But there can be no objectivity, if there can be no disconnection.

No, of course not.

Well, you know, I didn’t need any persuading!

Part of you did not. Remember, o individual, there is no such thing as a unity, short of All-That-Is.

We are communities, meaning that different components have different beliefs.

Which means, they have different experiences because they have different beliefs, and means they have different experiences that cause different beliefs. It isn’t circular, but it is recursive and self-reinforcing.

So I have some laggards who still believe in disconnection, eh? I guess that makes sense. In matters of health, particularly, I sense an intermittent battle.

Oh, much more than in matters of health. But that is for us to discuss privately, if you wish. For others, a hint applicable to themselves will have to do. Now, notice that even this seems to take for granted a divide between self and others. In practice, as opposed to in theory, that’s how it is.

You could consider your 3D component as private and your non-3D component as public. Or you could substitute “Conscious mind” for 3D component and “unconscious mind” for non-3D component. A third phrasing would be subjectivity and objectivity.

That is, we’re all separate; we’re all connected, and which aspect appears foremost depends upon – our preference, or our belief-systems, or I don’t know what.

Let’s say it depends upon how you see it at any given moment. So what is the useful take-away?

We aren’t victims and there is no definable limit to what we can do or become, but practical limits do exist, whatever they are. And we should add, I think, that those limits change, or can change.

They change primarily in congruence with your structure of beliefs, and the experiences that flow from those beliefs. Now, this is nothing we haven’t said before, only apply it actively to politics and economics and social control and visible and invisible structures.

That is, reconnect two areas of life that we commonly keep in different compartments. But we find it hard to see how the political-economic structure we are born into can vary by the individual.

It doesn’t. The experience of it does.

That is embarrassingly obvious, as soon as you say it. The unemployed and uninsured live in a different society than do those who have economic security. As I say, obvious once said.

Yes, but go a little slower. What you just said is true enough, but still superficial. It assumes that your position determines your experience. What determines your position? Where is the scope for anything external, if there is no external?

And yet this feels like you are playing with words and avoiding the reality.

We are aware of what it feels like. But if you will give us the benefit of the doubt and look at what we say as if we meant it, where does it bring you?

Well –

• All is one, meaning everything is connected, meaning ultimately there can’t be any “exterior” in the sense of “objective.” Relatively, yes. Ultimately, no.
• But we experience life in duality. There must be some advantage in this. Maybe it is to clarify our vision.
• Greater consciousness allows for greater control over circumstances. Beliefs determine abilities.
• We are each the center of our world; yet the world exists. Important not to forget either half of the statement.
• I think you said somewhere, how we experience the world depends on us, in that we will or won’t have Velcro for any given thing.
• That means, it is awfully important what we pay our attention to.

So now consider how to live in a cruel and unjust world without feeling trapped and guilty and complicit; and how to live in a kind and nurturing world without forgetting that others are experiencing something quite different.  Doesn’t it amount to saying, “The world is as you experience it, but how you experience it follows from what you are”? And this would be a simple, self-evident statement if not for the fact that in 3D most connections are invisible or, at least, not obvious.

It is hard, seeing injustice all around us, not to revolt against it in our feelings, despite the fact that there is little or nothing we can do about it.

Yes, and it is this feeling that we intend to address.

Only, you can feel us ready to accuse you of being unfeeling, of advocating submission.

That’s a mild example of the rhetoric that encourages you to feel good about how righteous you feel, and does nothing to assist you in doing the only thing that can assist anybody, which is, increasing your own consciousness and therefore your own effective level of being.

To be clear, you aren’t saying there isn’t anything else we can do to assist others? No way to attack social problems? No way to counter the forces of injustice, selfishness, cruelty, etc.?

This is still mostly rhetoric. Who is stopping you from helping anybody you meet who needs help? Who is stopping you – or ever could stop you – from feeling and expressing love? Those are real things. But for you to bring about world peace, or end world hunger, or redistribute the wealth created by many and appropriated by few – fine, go ahead, as soon as you build a freeway by yourself, or construct a rocket ship or even a motorcar without assistance of any kind.

It isn’t news to hear that fixing social problems requires a coordinated effort.

But perhaps it is news, to some at least, that wishing for a better world is not the same thing as doing anything to bring it about.

Seems to me that’s just the accusation that will be made against you.

Why? Because we advise people to not waste time on what is ineffective, and instead do what is effective?

• What you can change is
• How you change is by putting down some threads and picking up others.
• Just as you cannot convince others, so you cannot convert others, save by your example.
• What is as powerful as personal example? Powerful for good or for evil, because in effect it is a magnetizing of strands within people, a providing of a rallying-point.
• You know the jingle, “One convinced against his will, Is of the same opinion still.” What, then, of political movements?

You are saying here, I think, that persuasion is a different type of thing than mobilization.

Political movements are a rallying of those of similar opinion. They are not out to convince; but to overawe.

Again, to be clear: You aren’t saying political movements have no place.

No, but it is well for you to know what that place is. Don’t use a screwdriver as a hammer.

• Reform movements aim at changing social behavior. But this has dangers.

“Cowards who run away and enlist,” in Thoreau’s words.

Yes. Don’t think that conscience drives people only to good causes.

• You live in the world as you find it, and then you decide what your attitude toward it will be. Only, your judgment is always going to be partial and perhaps myopic.

I suddenly think of Hemingway telling Martha Gellhorn that her problem was that she assumed that people reacted to the conditions they saw in the same way she reacted. She would have remade the world to her formulas, and so she spent her life in perpetual indignation. Hemingway chose to see what was, rather than to only see what ought to be. His sympathies were with those who tried to make a better world, but he didn’t overrate his ability to help them, nor even his ability to know which to help.

That is, it is easier to extract the splinter from your neighbor’s eye after you have removed the beam from your own.

Touché.

But that is also our point. Self-examination, self-reform, self-regeneration is always within your ability to work on. It may or may not be done while you concentrate on nearly any external task. We return to the Eightfold Path, one part of which is Right Livelihood. It can be done, only it doesn’t happen automatically. Unflagging vigilance is required, if you are not to leave the strait and narrow path of working on yourself for the broad and alluring path of working on others.

So the question becomes, how can we work to c—

Freudian slip, eh?

I’ll say! I meant to write, “correct the world’s injustice,” and started to write, “create the world’s injustice.

And that is the snag. Every social problem began as someone’s solution to something else.

So, be careful what we work for.

Look, we would never say, “Don’t try to make things better.” Everyone’s path is different in some way from everyone else’s, because no two people are identical. Some are meant to be reformers, some revolutionaries, some reactionaries, etc. Our point, for those who want to see things as they are rather than as they appear, is that the “external” world is and is not separate from you. It is, in that it preceded your entrance into 3D and will still be here after you leave. It is not, in that what you extract from it will always have specific reference to what you are.

The world is a vast swirling chaos of contending forces. That is the freedom of it.

 

Tuesday, November 16, 2021

Gentlemen, you said yesterday that no religion is the final word, and I got that this is partly because nobody ever gets it entirely right and partly because things don’t stand still, so that what is new ground one day is old-fashioned another day.

It isn’t so much about “old fashioned” – clinging to the past, yearning toward the future, it’s a matter of taste – but of keeping up with new understandings. Once you realize that old ways of understanding things were not exactly correct – or have become incorrect as things changed – you see that there can be no final revelation. The world moves on; so must your understandings, or there comes into being a gap, and a widening gap.

Specifically, suppose a people believe that the material world is what it appears to be. Perhaps they think that life is a matter only of birth, living in the world, then death and it’s over. A religious insight that comes into being and tells them that life extends beyond death will be a real advance. It offers people a way to transcend past limitations. Surely a good thing? But of course that new insight will still incorporate past misunderstandings.

Yes, I see that. You don’t go in one bound from a bunch of errors to suddenly everything right and in right proportions, no matter how inspired the prophet. We are as grounded by our errors as by our truths, and we can only move so many things at a time without becoming totally disoriented, ungrounded.

That’s right. So after the insight that life continues beyond the grave, a new civilization establishes itself, based on this new way of seeing things. (We ignore the frictions, the wars, the self-contradictions, that accompany such major changes. Yes, they occur. They could hardly not occur. But we merely note that fact, because we are concentrating on something else.)

Then maybe this civilization discovers, after a while, that time is not what it thought it was; that material is not what it thought it was. Maybe it learns that what had seemed obvious cause and effect cannot have been so, because the laws governing the world are other than what had been thought. Sooner or later this is going to change the society’s beliefs and its knowns and its values. It cannot help but do so, regardless whether those changes seem to emanate from science or religion or philosophy or whatever.

And then they discover that the human mind is more, and more mysterious, than had been thought. The unconscious mind is discovered and explored, deepening the mystery. Extrasensory perception, action at a distance, inter-influencing of minds, all previously presumed to be impossible, now are documented. A society’s understanding of things – its practical theology – has to be updated.

And with these successive updatings of ideas as to what the world is, what humans are, comes the need to update what the gods are. It won’t do, to say “It was all superstition and error, we don’t need that anymore; we’re grown-up now.” That may sound sophisticated and progressive, but in fact it relegates a society’s theology to the unconscious mind. It is done behind your own back, so to speak.

So now we come along, explaining the ways in which “All is one” describes reality, and you can see that you are going to have to ask yourselves, “What does this imply about reality?” Not merely, “How do we adjust our ideas about physical mechanisms and limitations and possibilities,” but, “What is a more accurate description of our relation to divine forces?” This is a real question, a vital question, and as we said, if you shirk it, it will be answered in the worst possible way, haphazardly, unconsciously, by default. You can see that it is not a simple question. How could it be?

• Who are “we” in 3D and non-3D?
• What larger forces determine the laws that govern reality?
• How far do we extend? How far are we subject to forces beyond our reach?
• How stable is our understanding at any given time? Since our understandings change what they understand, where is our place to stand?
• How many things in past civilizations have been discarded as superstition that now ought to be reevaluated? How many accepted truths need to be reevaluated, too?

But if our grasp of truth is always incomplete, and truth itself changes, we are always playing catch-up. Tell us, how is it that truth can change? If it is true today, must it not have been true yesterday, and will it not be true tomorrow? Not – do we recognize it as true, but – truth, in and of itself.

Is it true that the population of the United States is fewer than ten million people of European descent, almost entirely clustered on the Atlantic seaboard? It was true once. Is it true today?

That seems to be a different order of truth. That is fact, but it isn’t – oh, I don’t know how to say it: It isn’t laws, it isn’t generalities of nature. Gravity today is what it was then, for instance. That is the kind of truth that doesn’t change. Aren’t we talking about different things, using the same words?

What if gravity does change? What if what you think of as the immutable laws of reality are in fact variable, regardless of your knowing?

Even so, the truth of it wouldn’t change just because we didn’t get it right.

But that is where you are mistaken. The very rules of nature may change. The facts of life in the 3D world may change. Where is it written that, no matter how the mind (of which the human mind is part) may change, the world that is made of mind-stuff will not change? Where is it written that rules, relationships, essences, are immutable in the face of continual growth, which means change? Thus, as soon as you comprehend the world (assuming it could be comprehended in full, and with accuracy), the very comprehending would change it, for now a new fact (your comprehension) would be in play.

It is something of a feedback mechanism, I guess. It may start quite simply, but each access of understanding becomes a new factor changing the situation. As the lab rats learn, the maze gets more complicated. As the researchers learn, their own contribution to the situation helps raise it beyond their previous limits.

Yet, to extend your analogy, as the maze itself gains experience, it (not just the lab rats and the researchers) gains in complexity. It is difficult to pursue this particular analogy without severe distortion, though, so we should pick another. The 3D world is not a laboratory experiment, nor is the 3D individual a lab rat. Think instead of a self-learning artificial intelligence. It complexifies; what it perceives complexifies accordingly. Ever more sophisticated understandings call forth ever more complex interactions because now they need to accommodate the new understandings. You see? The new understandings are, themselves, new factors in “what is.”

Now, send this out so that those who are interested may chew upon it, and we will resume another time.

All right. Well, our thanks as always.