Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

Monday, June 27, 2022

I am always surprised how few people seem able to actually get inside another point of view. I figured lawyers would have to be able to do it, if only to anticipate challenges. Chess players have to do it, in terms anyway of their opponent’s strategy. Poker players must be able to figure out something of what their opponents are feeling, if not thinking. But is it really so rare for us to be able to place ourselves sympathetically inside another’s viewpoint? And if so, why? Don’t we contact one another on a non-3D level?

We understand, but we smile at, a question that asks why people can’t usually get inside one another’s viewpoint. The question itself is an example of the phenomenon, you understand.

Yes, I suppose it is. But perhaps that only reinforces it. I have become acutely aware of how little of people’s motivations and thought-processes I understand.

Still, you do pride yourself on your ability to think through to the other side of an issue.

I begin to see. This is a little bit more layered, more complex, than I was thinking it. The ability to see more deeply is connected with the amount of psychic energy one can bring to the examination.

Yes, that’s part of it. Carl Jung as an analyst brought to the table immense learning, continually greater experience, great natural gifts of empathy, great mental horsepower, tremendous ego-strength used constructively – but what good would that combination of gifts have been, if he had had to express it through an underpowered or ailing body? A Nietzsche, even if identical to Jung mentally, could not have done what Jung did, because his body was not adequate to support the task.

And I suppose as Jung’s body faltered with age, his own ability to do such active relating must have declined as well, channeling his energy more into isolated scholarship and less into the general practice of medicine.

Age brings limitation, and limitation is, itself, as useful as anything else for 3D beings. The total energy a person can bring to life – psychic force in the sense of mental force, not in the sense of ESP – will be a factor in how much empathy a person can bring to bear on a regular basis. But it is one factor, only one. Another is one’s pattern of assumptions. Clearly, someone who believes the world is chance and the collision of various forces is not going to find it easy to assume that anyone else’s impact on his or her life is part of a pattern. Much easier to believe that things are random. To believe in a close connection between inner and outer will seem to be superstition.

The relevance of this isn’t yet clear.

Well, if you are considering another person’s reactions, and you are considering your own reactions to their reactions as if they were unrelated phenomena, you will take no responsibility for your part of the equation. You will say, in effect, “My reaction is perfectly natural! Any reasonable being would react this way.” And that silently excommunicates as “unreasonable” anyone whose reaction is not the same as yours.

And that means, by extension, “People who hold these views are unreasonable or stupid or malicious.”

Don’t you see it around you on all sides, particularly on the personally anonymous internet, where people can quarrel while safely immune from a punch in the nose?

I fell prey to that mindset myself, in younger days. When you’ve put time and thought and intensity into forming a view of life, and something challenges it, the natural response is not to say, “Maybe I’m wrong, I ought to think about this,” but to say, “You jerk! Go evolve, will you?”

And there is another part of your answer. First, the amount of energy required to investigate one’s own views; second, one’s investment in one’s constructed mental world – which, after all, includes one’s values, chosen repeatedly over a lifetime.

A third factor is sheer imaginative ability, or lack of it. You have to be able to “think inside of somebody else’s head,” as Hemingway has his character put it. If you can’t do that, then to some extent (usually a pretty big extent!) your other person is going to remain a mystery to you, and you are going to flail around trying to ascribe motives for behavior you don’t understand. But people don’t do things for no reason. We’ve been telling you that for years.

Yes, and I have gotten the message – except, I realize now, less so in actual person-to-person contact.

Yes, and you know why? It isn’t as simple as that your emotions got involved. It is that person-to-person contact comes at you like life itself: immediately, without cessation, without your having time to think before the next moment is upon you. To understand takes time. To react, doesn’t. That is why it is so important how you choose, on an on-going basis. It constructs the source of your reactions for times when you don’t have time enough to understand.

And that is another variable: one’s speed of perception and analysis. The slower one reacts, the more overwhelming the stimulus. So, the better prepared one is (due to prior choosing establishing good habit systems) and the more one pays attention, and the better attuned one’s sensory and intuitive abilities are, the better one can respond.

We have come a long way in a direction I didn’t anticipate. Does all this really address the question of why it is so hard to see our adversaries/opponents/opposite numbers as they see themselves?

Bear in mind, being able to understand others is not a universal desire. Many people have no interest in understanding; they are content with choosing a stance and condemning those who don’t shared it. You may not like it, but they’re part of reality, too. If everybody in 3D were alike, there would be a whole lot less choosing going on.

Every attitude plays its part, I suppose.

And everybody has more sides to them than is consistent. A very tolerant person may be quite intolerant of intolerance. A very rigid person hay stand up for principles of tolerance for viewpoints he finds personally repugnant. Life is always more diverse than one’s thinking about it – conceptualizing it – would tend to make it.

 

Sunday, October 6, 2019

Re-reading your final paragraph from yesterday, I see that it may be misread in a way I hadn’t considered.

[“The essential difference  {between human and animal}– and we will have to resume on this point – is that humans are in 3D to shape themselves by their choices in a deliberately restricted environment, and nothing else in that environment is there for that same purpose, but [is there] to help provide the ecology of the process. Whitman was right that animals do not weep for their sins, but not perhaps for the reason he assumed. Start thinking that the 3D is provided for humans, and that it is not provided for its own sake but for the sake of non-3D purposes, and you will begin to come out of the woods without reverting either to scientific or religious dogma.”]

Clarification of ambiguities is your game – go to it.

What you said and meant to say is that only humans are in 3D to use it to reshape themselves; everything and everyone else is there in a supportive role to enable that process to take place. It was only the structure of the sentence that might lead people to misread it.

Thank you for providing them the clarification, and we shall use the opportunity to provide another, though a slippery and hard-to-describe one. And that is: Different actors play different roles at different times.

We have seen that as it applies to the human drama, but you are meaning it in a larger context.

Indeed we are. But, as we said, it is slippery. Rather than you “taking dictation,” as you say, this time we would like you to sit with the feeling, the not-thought-but-sort-of-a-logical-but-non-verbal-perception, so that you may get the overall sense of it. Then express it and we’ll see where we get to and how we do.

Okay. Interesting idea. Not sure we’ve ever done this in just this way. 6:43.

6:45. I made note of the times merely to see how long I’d take. Two minutes doesn’t sound like much of a gap, but, like when in the black box, it can seem long. So here is as much as I get. I think it is the thin edge of the wedge, but we’ll start here and see. And I’ll put it in Roman rather than in itals, for easier reading.

Let’s look at it this way. As so often, it’s all in the angle you view things from. We are accustomed to identifying with the human body, the human personality, the human identity, call it, including ancestry, affiliations, associations, resonances of character and interests, etc. This is natural and all but unavoidable. It’s what we are, after all. But it isn’t only what we are, and we tend to forget that. Beneath the compound spirit that has become human is the more universal spirit that does not change with our 3D experiences, that is not shaped by repeated pairings of physical heredities. We are the unchanged thing as much as we are the shaped, created, self-modifying thing we know ourselves to be.

Well, in the same way, the 3D drama may be considered two ways, both as story and as actors playing roles in that story. Only in this case, the “actors” include not only human actors but all the kingdoms, especially including the animal kingdom. (This shades off into other statements I am not so sure of, so I’ll stick to the point that is central at the moment.)

So, to hold to the analogy, at any given performance of the play, the cast may include certain energies playing humans, but at other performances, different energies may be playing the humans. It isn’t as if the universe is divided into humans on one hand and second-class citizens on the other. It is divided into the human experience and all other experience, but that is not the same thing as saying that only one class of actor gets to play human. It means, only one group at any given time.

I’m not sure I made that spectacularly clear, but it’s a start. Your critique?

As you say, it’s a start.

Laughing. All right, where do we go from here?

But we did not mean it satirically. It’s a start. From our point of view, that may be said of anything and everything we have ever succeeded in conveying.

Here is our paraphrase of your interpretation of what you intuited of our intended message. (And if you will re-read that sentence, you will have an enhanced understanding of the difficulties always inherent in translation.) Or rather, here is our continuation, hoping to shed side-lights that may say what cannot be said directly.

Some people, looking at a scheme that positions humans in the center of the 3D world, will object that this is nothing but what we might call collective human egotism. Despite the fact that we have gone to some trouble to show that this is not leftover thought from other times, the suspicion remains, because of a strong emotional vested interest in not being drawn into sympathy with any such view.  So, to demonstrate our point, let us turn the focus from humans to, say, the bee.

The 3D world from a bee’s perspective has been developed and maintained specifically to provide a nurturing environment for bees to exist, including a means of nutrition that also accomplishes their purpose in the larger scheme of things. Does a bee need to be aware of the place in the scheme of things occupied by whales, tigers, termites, jellyfish, oak trees, rain clouds, metallic ores? It does not. We need not posit nor deny that bees might become aware of such things to state confidently that such knowledge is not essential to it maintaining its bee-ness. Similarly, humans. You can see human “purpose” (though each of you may have a different piece of the puzzle, and some of the pieces may be being held backwards), but you cannot see the world from a non-human point of view.

Isn’t that precisely what we’re trying to do here?

No. Here we are trying to convey it as an abstract idea, just as you might grasp the conditions inside the atmosphere of the planet Jupiter, but you can no more actually see the one than the other.

I think you mean, we can’t experience the reality, as opposed to an abstraction.

Yes, better. All right, so the bee isn’t wrong (and neither is the human) in seeing itself and its species as the center of its world and as a vital link in the scheme of things. But that isn’t the whole story, by a long chalk. It is equally true that (a) the bee is a role as much as an essence, and (b) bees as a species are a role, are a function, quite as much as they are an independent existence; they are part of an ecology, after all. Neither bees nor humans (nor everything else) can live in isolation.

When an individual bee dies, does it go to bee-heaven? Alternatively, does the spark that animated the flying creature disappear rather than changing existence? Does the bee reincarnate in an attempt to become a better bee?

Aha, the light dawns! But I’d prefer you continue.

As with the bee, continue the analogy where you please. To trees, daffodils, pond slime, bacteria – and, much more interesting (at least, to us, given where it will take us), to the animating principle behind power spots, to the intelligence that governs subassemblies such as your muscle-groups or your nervous systems or your specialized organs like the liver. And we can generalize much farther than that: the intelligences that form and are embodied (so to speak) in created machinery or even in dwellings. In short, the living animating souls, call them, behind and within even what you think of as “inanimate” material. This, not to mention particular animals such as pets that form close symbiotic bonds with humans and across species, such as, for instance, cats and dogs in the same household, or canaries, or whatever.

I gather that this boils down (at least for the moment) to the fact that while the human role is unique, the spirit that plays the human role is not.

At any given time it is, but yes, otherwise, not. The world is not divided into officers and other ranks.

 

Tuesday, November 15, 2022

6:15 a.m. So, guys, shall we talk about “life more abundantly”?

We can.

Am I correct – oh hell, I know I am correct in assuming that my dream reflected on the situation.

[The dream:

[I was being made to sign a book that I owned, that had been given to me and had two signatures already, one at the top of the page and one at the bottom. I was signing it under duress, but didn’t particularly care what they had in mind – some trick or bit of planted evidence, I imagined. Nothing I could do about it. Oh, maybe it applies to my feeling that people are using TGU’s implied authority as support for anything they want to say. In that case, I see the point: Not my doing, nothing I can do to prevent it, might as well shrug. Thanks, that was a fast clarification.

[Yes, the point was that they were going to pretend that my signature had been there right along. For all I knew, they were framing somebody – maybe me, even – but since there was nothing I could do, no point in stressing over it. I could, though, sign very prominently, in huge letters taking up most of the page, to try to make whatever they had in mind unworkable. Maye that’s part of the message, too. Be sure it is seen as my work.]

So what do you think, should we publicly discuss the situation? Or merely the meaning of life more abundantly? Or the productive and unproductive ways to go onward? Or my personal quirks and foibles? Or what?

You are experiencing conflict between parts of yourself – but it seems to you that it is conflict between you and “other.” That’s generally how such internal conflicts do express: as if with something external.

Well, that was an unexpected response. Say on.

One part of you takes pride in the work you have done, beginning with conventionally accepted ideas about how to proceed, how to develop certain abilities, how to express both the certainties and the uncertainties, the faith and the doubt, the confidence and the lack of confidence. It has been a sustained intent over many years, and it has produced tangible and intangible results.

But another part of you feels defeated, almost anxious, wondering how what you have learned will ever get out into the world on a significant scale.

A third part of you is tempted to claim ownership, to say, I know what this is all about, what it is leading to: In short, what it means.

Another part of you says, I am but an instrument of providence, and glad to be a part of whatever it is.

Another part says, “How about give me some credit, here?” And it is coexisting with a part that says, “This is way beyond questions of credit. Individual contributions can’t really be seen, so shouldn’t enter into it.”

I see it. They all coexist, and I am more or less aware of them, but I don’t identify with any of them. So they fight it out as part of the “external” world.

That’s the way it works. People who want a peaceful world might first work on themselves, to be sure they aren’t feeding the fires by what they are, as it constellates into what seems external to them.

Well, can we begin with one specific? I realize that many people may not be understanding the phrase “life more abundantly.” It seems to me you have spelled it out more than once, but it isn’t getting through.

And what did you just realize, writing that?

It’s part of my pattern, isn’t it? Knowing something and therefore thinking that I had clearly expressed it.

You will remember your observation of your father, thinking that if he knew something, others around him should know it too.

And Bob Friedman, the same way. It is only recently that I have realized that I do it too.

Anything that irritates you in others is a good hint that it is an unsuspected trait of your own. That’s a pretty general rule.

Well, I wish you’d gotten that through to me, decades ago.

How were we to do that? That’s the point – one point, anyway – of 3D interactions: The world mirrors to you your own unsuspected features so as to give you an opportunity to become aware of them. But you have to have eyes to see. That is, you have to be able to and willing to see it. “Able to” is a matter sometimes of acquiring experience and reflecting on it. “Willing to” is usually a matter of character. Neither one can be (nor should be) forced from the non-3D.

So now, life more abundantly.

For one thing, you consistently overestimate people’s familiarity with the gospels, hence with the sayings of Jesus. You will note, we don’t usually quote from the Old Testament, nor form the epistles. All we quote from – and all you ever really used to read – is about Jesus, and less about Jesus than what he was recorded as having said.

Therefore, when you quote Jesus without naming him, you tend to expect that people will recognize the silent attribution.

But aren’t we talking about your statements?

That’s a disputed question. Yes it is our thought, yes the flow comes through you as it is doing now, but are we speaking Swahili? Apache? German, even? We are speaking what you know. How could we express anything you didn’t know – even if one or another of your Strands did know – except through a trance medium? And you and we agree that this would not be desirable in your case. So, yes, our statements, but your language, assumptions, implied meanings, etc. This is a joint production, and, indeed, making clear that such things always are joint productions is part of what you have accomplished.

All right. Your clearest statement, then, of what you have been meaning all this time when you refer to life more abundantly. And – I hear it, you want me to state and you to correct the statement if necessary. Why that way?

Because less strain on you to put it in your own words, so you don’t have to imagine people saying, “He put that in their mouths but it’s really him.” That’s just one of your insecurities, so we’re working around it.

Okay. Well, I have been hearing from the beginning – seems to me maybe when we were examining the Gospel of Thomas, but maybe earlier – that you were explicating what Jesus meant when he said that he came that we might have life more abundantly. Whenever it was, it was a clear and direct attribution.

True enough. And?

I seem to remember you making it clear (though I would have thought it clear already) that he was not talking about some future reward, some hypothetical afterlife door prize, but meant right here, right now.

We did.

And it always seemed clear to me that life more abundantly meant a richer, fuller, less obstructed, less fearful, less diminished life.

It did.

This has nothing to do with possessions or fame or any kind of satisfaction – except as side-effect of the real attainment.

All true.

So I don’t see where the ambiguity comes in.

No, it’s clear to you as you said it. Can you see that someone from another background would interpret things differently?

What I seem to see is people clinging to their assumptions and trying to hammer this in somewhere, rather than really thinking about it.

Don’t you suppose Jesus had the same problem? Do you think any teaching ever met a universally open response? You may have expected that our stuff would get that kind of response; we didn’t. So we are not disappointed. Just as you are slowly learning the futility of trying to persuade anyone of anything, so you can remember that people take what they can use. Not only does everyone do it, there isn’t anything wrong with it, if you think of these things as sparks rather than as dogma.

Yes, I see that that is what I do when I read something; I pick and choose. I can even see that although this may look like perverting the meaning of what I’ve read, from another point of view it is using what I have read to help make new connections. But. And it is a big “however”: not every interpretation is equally correct.

No, of course not, but the important thing is not how closely someone follows the argument, but how much it does or doesn’t help them hear their own internal voice.

Ah. That puts a different light on it. And of course that isn’t something that anyone else can be held responsible for.

Only do your best, and leave the universe to function. It has been doing this a good while.

Smiling. Thanks, this actually did clarify things. I think I’ll include my dream, too. What shall we call this?

“Interpretations.”

Okay. Our thanks as always.

 

[As it happened, we didn’t continue this conversation, but what is here seems worthwhile.]

Wednesday, April 7, 2021

6:15 a.m. If I learned anything from the first two parts of the Burns / Novick series on Hemingway, I don’t know what it would be. I have been more aware of what it had to leave out, than of what it said that I hadn’t known. But I am struck by how much he feared being alone. A writer, afraid of being alone, when his very writing life depends upon being alone? But of course, that’s an example of words misleading.

Papa?

Fear of being alone, fear of death, fear of the dark: three fears you do not understand.

It’s true. Do you, now? And did you, during 3D life?

It depends what you mean by the word “understand.” If you mean understand abstractly, that’s one thing. But if you mean, understand viscerally, that’s another. Intellectually, abstractly, I understood why I was afraid of the dark and afraid of death: I had been killed, in 1918, in the dark, out of nowhere, when that Austrian shell full of scrap metal blew me out of my body. So my body associated darkness with danger out of nowhere, ever since. But rational knowledge only goes so far. You don’t get rid of a fear like that just because you become aware of it and become aware of where it came from.

No, because that only gets you to the “how” of it rather than to the “why” of it. The fear came as a result of specific events, but the same events on a different person might have, maybe even must have, produced different results.

The cause-and-effect was so plain, I never got to the “why” of it. Why did that cause produce that effect? I stopped at realizing what had happened, not at why it had produced one effect rather than another.

So, now? Can we take them one by one?

No, your initial instinct, to group the three, is better. They reinforced each other.

Okay then, go about it your own way.

You will notice, you began with wondering about my fear of being alone. I went immediately to link fear of death and fear of the dark.

Meaning, you’ve figured it out.

Well, you know, I’ve had enough time! And I’ve chewed it over not only in non-3D, but by interacting with a good number of people in 3D, many of them thinking they were only thinking about me.

So many people loved you. I thought of Morley Callaghan, after he heard that you had killed yourself, thinking about you, remembering you day and night until his wife pointed it out to him and he sat down to write his memoir of your relationship.

Here’s what you people usually don’t realize.

“You people”?

Yeah, I heard that as soon as I said it. I don’t mean it as a slam. I mean, people in 3D who think about the connection between 3D and non-3D and sort of scheme it out in their minds.

People like your mother.

No, people who think about these things, not just feel about them, or accept the opinion of others. You try to understand – and that’s good, of course; what else did I ever try to do, but understand and then express? But in thinking about death and connection, you tend to make separations where there aren’t any separations. I don’t mean to imply that I was any different. If anything, my thinking about the subject was more fragmentary and more self-isolated.

Like the thinking you did about the soul, writing in the African night in the early 1950s.

You pointed out, I didn’t have  a lot of the concepts that would have made things clearer to me. But there was always my mother in the way of it, you know. I wasn’t going to become like her. [Hemingway’s mother was mystically inclined in a way that he rejected.]

A friend got me her question to Edgar Cayce and Cayce’s answer. But I imagine you and she will have come to terms by now. I mean, she has been dead since 1951, and you since 1961, and the passage of time in the non-3D isn’t the same as it is in 3D, but it isn’t nothing, either.

But that’s what I’m trying to say. “You people” in 3D underestimate the extent to which we in non-3D rely on you, because you can still change, you can still remember us, think about us, interact with us, and it gives us a point of departure.

I think you mean, some place to use as springboard.

You can’t jump if you don’t have anything to jump from. Your remembering us is more a form of interacting with us, though you don’t realize it. It lets us see ourselves from other points of view – points of view that didn’t exist when we did our immediate “past life review.” In other words, it is a continuing process, and helps us.

Kind of a big thought.

Live with it, examine it, see where it takes you. It may rearrange your mental furniture in surprising ways. Almost all of you will never interact with the culture the way Ken Burns and his team are doing; most of the work will be done anonymously. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a real contribution. And like everything, the more consciously you do it, the more useful it is for you.

This would be a diversion (from a diversion) but I am put in mind of prayers for the dead. I wonder if this is the original thought behind that idea, that degenerated into praying to God for mercy upon sinners. But, the thought is a diversion. You were saying that you have linked your three fears, and understand them now.

What is fear of death, when you look at it closely, but a specific form of fear of being alone? If it were only fear of ceasing to exist, well, maybe some people feel that,  but obviously any suicide had come to the point of seeing anything – even oblivion, if that’s what had to follow – as preferable to continuing as they were. I think for most people, fear of death is mostly fear that they are going to go through some unknown process and they’re going to have to go through it alone.

Not fear of judgment, and then heaven or hell?

Sure, but they’re afraid of facing that judgment alone.

I’ll have to think about that. Anyway, so –?

In one moment, that 18-year-old boy learned a hell of a lot about life and death. Now, I’m not saying that everything I “learned” in 1918 was true, but it was true for me. It shaped the life I let from there.

Okay, I can see that. And those lessons were that life is fragile and precious, first of all.

I already knew it was precious. I enjoyed life from the time I was born. What I learned, though, was that I wasn’t invulnerable in the way I had assumed. So in a way, it taught me that death is always about a heartbeat away from life (for anything could happen) and at the same time, that micro-second moment of death-and-life was almost even more precious than life itself. It was a glimpse of immortality as a fact of life. Now, bear in mind, I couldn’t have told you this then, nor in 1961. As I said, I’ve had lots of conversations with lots of people, and the seeing myself reflected in so many people’s minds has given me new understandings.

I get it. People have puzzled as to why your fascination with the dealing and receiving of death. I personally was puzzled that somebody who had died and returned could be afraid to die again. But if you were fascinated by something about it that you could feel but not understand, naturally you would do puzzling things, think in ways others would find puzzling.

Puzzling to me, too, when I wasn’t taking it for granted because the feel of it was so general.

I think you mean, because you were taking the mood for granted, because it was your mood; you were inside it.

Writing isn’t any easier when you have to dictate across the static.

I’m smiling. Okay, so – somehow we have written through almost an hour – can you give us your three fears in a nutshell? If not, we can do this again, of course.

It isn’t hard. If you live mostly in your head, but what you live is centered in the world around you, that’s a terrific dependence, you see? Yes, I could go out into the wilderness or onto the sea and concentrate on the physical world around me, but I’m still in the center of this processing machine, this thinking, pondering, analyzing, feeling, absorbing machine. I read all the time, and put together elaborate trips with friends. I studied things, and studied people and studied myself. It was all me interacting with not-me. Not that I would ever have thought about it in these terms, but that’s what it  amounted to. Can’t you see that always being in the center like that left me feeling alone, made me want human warmth around me?

You remind me so much of what I have read of the young John F. Kennedy (one of your big fans, as you know), who needed people around him, who devoured the world with his curiosity, although he didn’t seem to be afraid of death, having lived with it as a continuous probability from an early age.

As you know (you would say, “as you suspect,” but in fact you know), he and I share strong bonds, and we felt them in life, although he, young enough to have been my son, naturally felt them stronger than I did. I influenced his youth; he could not have influenced mine.

I guess maybe we will continue this next time? I don’t know if my side-trails prevented us from doing it all at once, but in any case it is always good to connect with you. and it is very satisfying to think that our connecting with our heroes or role models or whatever may help them as well. Not to mention the family we belong to biologically. Thanks, papa. Next time.

 

Wednesday, February 3, 2021

What shall we talk about?

What are you reading?

Gary Lachman on Colin Wilson. Markus Wolf on his life as East Germany’s spymaster. Finished the journals of Wilhelm Reich 1940-1947.

Why?

Why? I don’t know. I go to my bookcases of biographies and pick something. Or do the same for my bookcases of novels. Or something sparks me and I go hunting for something like Reich’s work in a single volume. If there’s a logic to it, it’s subterranean.

Follow the thought.

Being put up to this, am I? Very well, writing “subterranean” instead of “subconscious,’ which I could easily have used, reminded me of Jack Kerouac’s novel The Subterraneans, which of course led to The Dharma Bums. I suppose your point is that I function that way, one association leading to another.

Let’s pursue this a little farther. Can you see that a similar subterranean process may guide your mental movements throughout the day? This is how you can be led without being hammered.

Led? Or seduced? Or, almost, brainwashed?

It can look like that, sure. But can someone seduce himself? Brainwash herself? The source of the confusion is the unspoken assumption that there is both a “we” and a “they” involved, rather than a 3D-I and a Non-3D-I.

• 3D-I. The “you” you are familiar with. Your focused consciousness, your daydreaming self, the consciousness that holds together your various elements. The “you” that dreams, that schemes, that enjoys and suffers 3D life, that sometimes longs to go, sometimes longs to stay forever. It is not as simple as physical you: It is you as you experience yourself as body/mind/spirit living in time and space for a limited experience.
• Non-3D-I. The larger you. the “you” that you may sometimes call your higher self, or your spiritual self, or your soul. “The guys upstairs,” other than resonances. Your guardian angels. The “you” that is intimately tied to 3D-you but is never bound by 3D perspective.

That’s very clear.

You think so because you share the inner logic, the essence-to-essence understanding. But it may or may not have been conveyed to others by words, because it has to penetrate layers of misunderstanding in some cases.

It seems clear to me, you are saying what you have said many times, that we are not only “more than our physical bodies,” but are two spheres, one inside the other. The smaller sphere is 3D-I, in your terms, and the larger sphere, Non-3D-I. It isn’t a matter of physical v. spiritual, nor even, exactly, of local v. remote. It is a matter of smaller and larger, and even that is not fixed but variable.

That’s right. Any 3D-ego can grow to absorb and incorporate more of the non-3D-self of which it is a part.

We can expand our consciousness.

You can have life more abundantly.

Now, when you fully actively realize that Non-3D-I is part of you, that in fact you are a part of Non-3D-I, the 3D-I question of manipulation, using, seduction, brainwashing, can be seen to be a misunderstanding.

So what you were mentioning earlier was an example of how Non-3D-I may feed possibilities into a 3D-I’s consciousness?

Something moves you to pick a certain book or movie at a certain time; it starts a chain of mental associations that go this way instead of that way. What something? Chance? Coincidence? Predestination?

No, I see it. And someone confining the field of vision to 3D-I-only (presumably not suspecting the existence of Non-3D-I) will call it the subconscious or even the unconscious, not really thinking too much about it.

Many things simplify if you look at them as the product of binocular rather than monocular vision. Your 3D-I tells you X and such, because that’s what it knows. But your Non-3D-I may tell you something overlapping or contradictory or seemingly unrelated, because of what it sees. It is in a way right brain v. left brain writ large, gestalt working in sync with detail.

And this makes nonsense of the question of “whose” idea something was.

It does. There is no ownership of ideas, only tenancy.

So, you see, “what are you reading?” An innocuous question, but it leads on, with minimal steering on our part and minimal conscious response on yours. A smooth cooperative interaction, because no emotional landmines involved. But suppose we were to ask, “How is your sex life?” The potential for landmines and hot buttons goes way up – which is why we suggested to your group that you take advantage of the fact. In the consequent explosions or awkwardnesses or perceived evasions, many things formerly hidden may come to light.

We suggest that you all not waste time looking over your shoulders trying to find evidence of manipulation, but keep your eye on the ball, widening your field of consciousness, removing unnecessary internal barriers, redefining yourselves (and, consequently, your lives) with the goal of achieving life more abundantly. In so doing – it occurs to us we may never have said explicitly – you assist Non-3D no less than 3D. It should be obvious, all being one, but in case it wasn’t.

 

I have been going back through this year’s conversations, editing as I go. In this particular entry, the guys make some points about our thinking process, and bias, and judgment.

Context in the process of learning

Monday, June 20, 2022

We can go into the process of learning, if you wish.

Go ahead, then, and we’ll see.

What is learning but associating? And what is associating but ordering things? In so doing, you create, no less than assort.

I think you mean, the act of finding patterns and relationships is more creative than passive.

Let’s say, it is receptive first, then active, then again receptive in the face of the new aspect of things that your previous selection and sorting has revealed, and on and on. The deeper you look, the more you see. Thus you have superficial books and thorough ones and penetrating ones, and philosophical ones, and even metaphysical ones, all on the same subject, all integrally connected to how much time, attention, thought, sorting, looking again, more research, etc., etc., goes into it.

I think of my friend Jim’s researching casualty rates among bomber crews in World War II. I was astonished to learn that in important ways, the casualty rates weren’t ever collected, digested, and published.

And your own life experience – which was neither military nor particularly executive – tells you why.

Certainly. No important constituency ever demanded to know, and several important constituencies probably demanded that we not know. I can’t imagine Bomber Harris or Curt LeMay welcoming a real understanding of the costs.

So that is an immediate superficial reaction. (We do not say it is right or wrong. We intend to illustrate a process.) Look at it again, changing points of view, sticking to what you know, second-hand, from your years of reading histories, memoirs, and biographies.

I don’t know if there is consensus even yet over the effectiveness of the air war in Europe. You’d have to divide it into strategic and tactical.

Do so.

There can’t be much argument that the tactical effects were not devastatingly effective. It seems clear that air attacks, along with widespread sabotage on the ground, destroyed the German ability to deliver a counter-attack after D-Day. Eisenhower ordered the systematic destruction of rail stations throughout northern France, and that sill seems clearly warranted and clearly effective. Similarly, when the skies cleared in December, 1944, the Battle of the Bulge was lost by the Germans at least in large part because they couldn’t win on the ground against Allied control of the air. Merely two examples of the critical effectiveness of air power against troops, ships, and infrastructure.

But.

But Harris and LeMay set out to destroy German cities to win the war from the air, imagining that ground troops would mostly be needed for occupation, not conquest. They had some pipe-dream of an idea that the German people would rise up against their government, once misery reached a certain level. You know, nothing much, just overthrow the Nazis one household at a time.

But.

But Albert Speer’s memoirs, written after he finished his imprisonment in Spandau after the war, pointed out that at one point our bombardment nearly crippled ball-bearing production, which might have brought industrial movement to a standstill.

But.

But there are ways and there are ways. Nobody started off the war inflicting massive random destruction on enemy cities.

No, think that through.

You’re right. Hitler did, deliberately. He destroyed Rotterdam quite cold-bloodedly, to paralyze the Dutch. (Air destruction in Poland, earlier, may have been the same thing, I just don’t know one way or the other.) Still, the West wouldn’t have deliberately set out to flatten entire cities, not in 1939, not in 1940. But after the Blitz tried to do just that to London, attitudes hardened. One thing led to another, and ultimately you had Hamburg, and Dresden, and, in the Pacific, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

So was the bombing campaign unnecessary?

There are other elements involved. With the Germans in control of the whole continent for four years, air power was about all the Allies could apply directly. Until the Allies were ready to reinvade Europe, their ground and naval forces could be used only peripherally: North Africa, Sicily, Italy. For all that time, only the air offered promise of hurting them, and besides, it was crucial that the Allies have air superiority at least over France if they were to invade. Continuous air warfare was designed to provide that superiority and keep it.

But.

But as Jim points out, the campaign of bombing was very expensive in air crews and airframes. Even so many decades later, it is not widely understood how expensive. And in the absence of the facts and of the context for the facts, how can anybody make informed judgments?

This is different from armchair quarterbacking, how?

I’d say it is mostly a difference in intent. The armchair quarterback says, “Here’s what they should have done.” The researcher says, “Here’s what the facts are.” The two can overlap, but there is a difference.

So you could look at the same facts and draw quite different conclusions, depending upon the context you saw them in – a context largely invisible to you.

That’s very interesting.

Well, are you likely to be aware of all the associations you make beneath the level of consciousness? One person’s view of the war (for example) will be very different from another’s, partly because each will have his own personal associations that amount to a bias. (We don’t use the word “bias” in a pejorative sense, merely as a fact of life. The way you see the world is not objective, because it cannot be. It is always subjective, with you in the center of the web.)

Surely some viewpoints are more informed than others.

Certainly, but informed in one area may mean ignorant in another area, so the net effect is less predictable than you might suppose. Otherwise Harris and LeMay would have had unexceptional judgment, for they surely were well-informed.

I hadn’t thought of it that way, but that is one hazard of expertise, isn’t it?

Nobody knows everything. Nobody is wise about everything. Nobody is the last word on anything. But after all, that’s a hopeful thing, is it not? Leaves room for the rest of you.

Saturday, May 7, 2022

[The guys had used the expression “mind-stuff,” and it turned out that some people thought they meant “mind over matter,” or “it’s all in your mind.” Yet for quite a while, the guys had been using “mind-stuff” to express the fact that matter, the material world, that looks so tangible, is all made of mind, just as is what we recognize as mind.]

Is anybody really relating new material to old? I can’t see how people who have been following the material as you have been giving it can have not understood “mind-stuff” to mean “Reality is all one thing; there is no absolute distinction between physical matter and the rest of reality” But if one or two did, then chances are many did, and did not say so.

We picked up on your distress, of course. Set aside any emotional reactions on your part, and we’ll talk about it. Do not identify with the work, nor with the success or failure (in your eyes) of the work.

You are experiencing the condition we work in, which is a natural effect of working in time-slices. A thing comprehended in one moment may be disremembered at another, and most likely will be only incompletely associated with something else comprehended at another time. You can’t hover over 3D reality, living without living the limitations. Tuesday is not Friday, and nothing you can do can make it so. This is why we tell you that you will only make the material yours by wrestling with it. Working the material enables you to associate things picked up at different times, so that now they are part of a thing forged in this time.

Am I fantasizing, to get that what you just said is also a description of 3D life?

No, you aren’t fantasizing, you’re listening. The analogy is close. A 3D mind consists of all those threads having the same experiences together. What is that but saying that in effect you – here, now – are working the material inherent in all those threads? You won’t be activating everything in every thread at any one time, but over the course of your life you will probably activate a lot of them. Everything you do in your life is a shared experience among your threads, binding them together. That’s how you create a new habit-pattern, or crystal.

Ah, and the more reflective we are, the better we associate the threads.

Yes, although conscious reflection is not the only way, nor even the strongest way, necessarily. Prolonged suffering can do it. Any intensity of experience deepens the internal bonds. (“Bonds” not in the sense of constriction, of course, but meaning ties, as in “bonds of affection.”)

Listen, if we say we want you to have life more abundantly, and we advise you what helps the process and what doesn’t and what impairs it, that is a key that can be used to see the material. It isn’t the only key. Work with the material we give you, but work your life’s material in general. It is the same process, pursued for the same goal of greater internal freedom, hence greater “space” for understanding more, and living more, and becoming more. No two people will be affected in the same way, because no two people have identical vectors. The process of facilitation is roughly the same for all. But the goal is not to produce an army of ants, but to facilitate the self-production of individual minds that will enhance the quality of the overall being.

Emerson said he didn’t seek to call an army of young men to him (“What could I have done with them?”) but to themselves.

Is there any better goal?

You left off yesterday intending to resume on the subject of why pain and suffering is not good or bad. I, like you, could imagine people saying, “That’s easy for you to say.” But this morning’s start leads right into it, doesn’t it.

It does. In fact, we already answered it, in passing.

Yes, I thought so.

What makes all the difference is what goal you discern when you look at your life. If you imagine that a 3D life is for the purpose of enjoyment, you will measure its “success” or “failure” in terms of enjoyment. If achievement, or love, or amassing of riches or of experience or of knowledge or of wisdom, same thing.

But it is short-sighted to see a 3D life as if that’s all it is.

Of course. Your conscious intent is not necessarily your whole-person goal, if we may put it that way. Every life you connect with along your constituent threads may have its own idea of what’s important. The times you live in – the unfinished business, as we’re calling it – may impose its own imperatives.

Thoreau and Emerson were vigorously anti-slavery, but they didn’t want a civil war about it.

Exactly. Their idea of their ideal life did not include a civil war, but they were part of their times.

Millions upon millions of people died in Nazi and Communist prison camps. That’ a lot of suffering. Do you suppose it was all wasted? Certainly it blighted the lives of the prisoners. Was it wasted? Was it a sign that the universe, or God, was (is) heatless? Insensitive? Unaware? How could an over-arching, connecting, consciousness be unaware? But it could easily see things differently. Or do you think God also ate of the fruit of the Tree of Seeing Things as Good and Evil?

JFK famously said, “Life is unfair,” stating it (in typical Gemini style) as merely a fact of life to be considered, not as something to get outraged over. He was born rich and lived his life rich. He was also born sickly and lived his life as a continuing series of life-threatening illnesses and spending (his brother estimated) about half his days on Earth in acute physical pain. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to him to blame God or nature; he just accepted the situation as what is.

And suffering had one side-effect for him that it often does: It deepened him.

Suppose for the moment that the over-arching intent of whatever put you together by associating various strands in one time-place is that you attain intensity of consciousness. For some, that will involve a path of physical suffering. The suffering won’t have a side-effect of producing enhanced concentration, say but a prime effect. It is useful, you see, just as we have always said.

But there are other paths to enhanced consciousness.

Of course there are. For every person a different path, potentially. Our point is merely that “Life is unfair” is true only when seen only within the realm of what is obvious to 3D senses and feelings and conclusions. Take that same experience and put it through another filter, and you may get meaning. We ask you (anyone reading this): Are you in love with your suffering? Are you wedded to the idea of yourself as victim? Are you using “Life is unfair” to persuade yourself that you are more moral than God, more clear-sighted than nature?

You’re going to make a lot of friends with that.

We aren’t in the business of making friends; we’re in the business of helping people to have life more abundantly. And this, not merely for their individual sakes, but as part of something vastly bigger.