Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

When I watch shows with particularly evil or arrogant villains, my response to them is – as the writers have intended it to be – “Kill them; they have no place in the world.” It would be useless, of course; new villains spring up all the time. Worse than useless, because you become like the worst in those you fight. The only practical plan I have ever read was Anselmo’s in For Whom the Bell Tolls: Make the miscreants work until they come to realize the error of their ways. This might or might not reform the villains, but at least it would not destroy those who confronted them.

The key here, as you well know, is that your emotional reaction to anything may be as powerful as anything you do or say. It is your second-tier and third-tier reaction that counts, and this is one reason people of ill will do such damage: They rouse the righteous indignation that outdoes them.

By the end of a war, people are enthusiastically doing things to others that they would have been horrified to consider at the beginning. Fight fire with fire, is the saying.

Yes. That works out better in forestry than in human relations. In human relations, it is merely arson, and arson that incinerates friend and foe and self alike.

And why does it have to be this way?

Your question is, why is human life prey to evil.

I hadn’t put it quite that way, but let’s look at it that way. I understand that life in duality must include both ends of every stick. Somehow, though, that isn’t terribly comforting.

Evil is good balanced. We know you don’t like it, but he longer the stick, or the shorter, still the center is where it will balance, nowhere else.

If I just heard you right, you are saying too much goodness constellates too much badness.

Well – almost. Another analogy would be intensity. A black-and-white negative may be muted or vivid. It may consist of highly contrasted lights and darks, or tones that are much more in the center scale.

But this life does not seem to have any excess of goodness. What I see chiefly is excess of violence.

Yes, that’s what you see. That’s what is pictured. There is no entertainment value in portraying goodness, except occasionally as a change of pace. You know how it is.

The news media used to have a saying, “If it bleeds, it leads.”

Precisely. Plus, people want to feel alive, and if their ordinary lives offer too little, you will find young men running to get into a war, as in 1914, for the sake of smashing things. They have no idea why they feel that way, having no idea how intolerable their lives were that they are fleeing. And of course long after the enthusiasts volunteer, men are unwillingly conscripted to continue what was begun and cannot now be allowed to fail.

Why? Why is 3D life made into such an endurance test?

It needn’t be. It could be a life lived more at the mercy of what are called natural forces. But one way or another, 3D life is going to express duality in full, not only the half you prefer.

Couldn’t we modulate the evil that has to manifest?

You could, but it involves wholeness in place of goodness, as you have been told.

I can’t remember who said it. More or less, “When a man realizes that it is better to be whole than to be good, he enters upon a harder life that makes his previous goodness seem like flowery license.”

It is true, and there’s a reason for it. It involves bearing your own share of the world’s evil., and thereby helping to corral it, to curb it from wild manifestation.

I don’t know. Jesus said it is inevitable that evil comes into the world, but woe unto him by whom it comes.

Yes, but that refers to ushering it into the world, not holding a piece of it that already exists and has manifested.

& & &

On so many subjects like this, you must remember that context is everything. Look at something while forgetting what you have learned about reality, and you cannot see with greater perception. But bring these new, seemingly unrelated, perceptions to the subject, and the maze may become penetrable. So, here.

Every religion is at least in part an attempt to see why evil exists in the world, and an attempt at strategies to overcome it. Every serious philosophy must grapple with this question. So far, none has found an answer that others find satisfactory. Manicheans see the world as battleground between extra-human forces. Some philosophies say that evil is merely the absence of good. And all other attempts fall somewhere between these two poles.

Partly it is a question of appearances. How do conditions seem, as opposed to how are they really? Partly it is a question of meaning. How should we see this or that in connection with what else we know?

And partly it is a question of values? Of what we wish to uphold or stave off?

We can see how you would think that this is so. But, not really. Your values are chosen partly by what you were, pertly by what you are, partly by what you wish to be. It is a cycle, a reiterative process. A cycle looks like a circle sometimes, but it involves an additional dimension.

It is a question of depth.

Yes. Depth or lack of depth will affect your perception of how things are.

Now, we said appearance and meaning. This too is part of an iterative process.

• How things appear depends upon the inner resources one can bring to the perceiving.
• What things mean depends upon the connections one can make.

In both cases, changes in the observer lead to changes in what can be observed, and thus both appearance and its meaning seem to change, leading to further changes in the observer. There are two reasons, not just one, why you can never step into the same river twice. Yes, the river’s flow makes it impossible. But so does your flow. You are not the same, even between two attempts.

“But” – we hear you object – “there must be some ultimate view of reality.” Perhaps; perhaps not. In neither case can you get to the bedrock of things. At most you will get to an explanation that satisfies you, now. Don’t expect to get one that will satisfy everybody, nor one that will satisfy anybody forever.

People like certainties. They find it hard to deal with uncertainty and with leaving open-ended questions open-ended. Thus so many “final” answers, mutually contradictory but similarly certain. We or you or anyone could and can (and, often enough, do) decide, “This is the way it is,” but that is mostly a decision to stop looking.

Obviously as you change, the reality you can perceive changes, and you learn to deal with it. When you think “All is one,” it is a different world to you from when you think all is chance and accident. When you realize that there is no “external” unconnected to who and what you are, it is a different world from one in which unconnected forces exist. But even as perceptions change, your assigned meaning changes, and not mechanically. You choose to see one meaning or another, and the choice helps determine the next thing that happens to your perceptions

It’s almost a fun-house, set up to distort perceptions.

No! And that’s a good example, right there, of how the process of assigning meaning to perception may result in conclusions of great definiteness that may have little relevance to anything but one’s momentary state of being.

Now, it may appear that we haven’t advanced an inch on our task of examining evil in 3D life. But surely you can see that the discussion that follows will be different from what it would have been if your mind had not been turned by this bit of brush-clearing.

& & &

Perhaps it has not yet become evident that this is a conflict of perception, not of essence. It isn’t better for a person to be whole than to be good, it is better for that person to picture himself, herself, as whole rather than as good. If it were possible to be entirely good, who could argue against it? But it is obstructive to be one thing and think oneself another.

Well, that puts it in a different light entirely. This, then, is a conflict of ideals, rather than of states of being.

Yes, but that will take some spelling-out.

I don’t see why. It’s simple enough. If our ideal is to be good, we will suppress awareness of, and manifestation of, every part of ourselves that is not good. But this will force that part of ourselves into the unconscious, where it will be beyond our control. If our ideal is wholeness, though, we will welcome awareness of what we are, without manifesting it deliberately but without disowning it when it does manifest, hence keeping it more in our consciousness, hence more under our conscious control.

Occasionally you surprise us.

It suddenly clicked, and became clear. It never ceases to amaze me, how things can be murky one minute, clear the next.

After a flash of insight comes the work of assuring that the new insight remains in context, so that it does not become like the cryptic scribbles that are left from a dream in the night.

Bear in mind, this insight is a very practical insight. It tells you what to do, how to live. It does not shade off into the question of why evil exists or how it manifests in the 3D world. Practical is worth more than theoretical, if you have a choice. It’s just that sometimes you need to re-examine the theoretical in order to provide new practical awareness.

So we’re bailing out of the larger question?

We are anchoring an important insight before proceeding to that or any other matter.

Everyone lives according to an ideal, or to multiple (often conflicting) ideals. If you were units, you could have one ideal, perhaps. As it is, each of your sub-selves has its own ideal. How are they all to be harmonized so that you are not working against yourselves? One way is to have one over-arching ideal that all can agree upon.

This will not be possible at all for some self-divided people. It will be possible to some extent for others, and possible to a great extent for a relatively few others. Someone fused into one thing, such as Jesus, can have, will have – cannot not have – one ideal.

One over-arching ideal. What can serve so well as wholeness? What other ideal can contain everything? Goodness, by comparison, is continually choosing, discarding, rejecting, criticizing. You can measure up to an ideal of wholeness, acceptance of what you are and how you have been created and faith that you are as you are for a reason. But how can you measure up to an ideal of goodness?

Hemingway is a case-study of a man whose impossible ideals tormented him, wracked him with guilt, led him to deny what he had done, filled him with remorse and despair and yet continued valiant attempts to reach the unreachable.

He certainly provides a valid example. He would provide insight into the faith-filled despairing lives of the saints in terms comprehensible to your age. To have as your ideal to be good is to invite repression of all in you that is evil, and to set yourself an impossible task, because one man’s evil is another man’s good. This refers not to other 3D beings around you; it refers to the multitude of strands within you.

It almost sounds like the proper ideal is tolerance.

If tolerance did not shade so soon and so easily into indifference, that would be so. Anyway, wholeness is a belter ideal. Tolerance will come in its wake, but it will be a judicious tolerance. There is no great advantage in learning to be tolerant of mass-murder, or torture, or any of the manifestations of individual or social insanity that are liable to pop up.

 

Went to Alderman yesterday, came out with six books on Hemingway and (what I went for primarily) The Owl of Minerva, the autobiography of Gustav Regler, published in 1959. Regler’s times seem so comparable to these. If some equivalent of Nazism isn’t brewing here, I miss my guess. Emotionally it certainly is similar to what Regler described. I will have a good sense now of the man he was. I am not surprised Hemingway liked him.

What a position Regler was born into. An honest man and the son of an honest man, a brave man (a decorated war hero whose own heroism he explained as a form of trance or insanity), he looked everywhere for a way to live as an honest man in dishonest times. He saw fascism for what it was, and tried to stay out of political work but was unable to force himself to ignore injustice. He became a communist, and couldn’t help seeing the reality behind the cant, and the degeneration in only a few years into the beginning of Stalinist tyranny.

He is a very convincing witness of what communism became. As he put it, they were still Dostoevsky’s people, but they had discarded God and retained only the devil, and saw any misfortune as the result of sabotage, nothing else ever. It was an infectious mind-set that their closed society was unable to resist, any more than Germany was able to resist the equally paranoid Nazi beliefs. By the end of Regler’s stay in Russia, in 1936, he saw it all. Why then did he hope for better from Spain?

I don’t know that I have ever fully realized till now how closely the rise of fascism is connected to the inadequacy of liberalism. And this in turn stems from the secularist materialist fallacy: There is no center for society to hang from, so the structures of unreason try to provide one. Communists, fascists, liberals, conservatives, all try, all fail. Yet, as Jung said, the gods never reinhabit the temples they abandon. So what is to provide a center?

This view must be overdrawn. Look at Europe. Until their recent Muslim invasion they seemed to be faring well enough, since 1945 and, in a wider geographic area, since 1991. The Scandinavians in particular seem to have developed a strong contented society. So what are they based in? It isn’t religion. Scandinavia, like much of Europe, has quietly abandoned Christianity. So what is the glue?

Guys? Do you do politics and society, or just individuals?

We try to do practical, and working on the individual is usually more practical than pretending to solve social problems, because that usually winds up advocating this or that panacea. We can talk politics and society if you wish, but we in our context, not in the play-pretend context you are used to seeing.

Our context includes:

• man as 3D and non-3D being, subject to internal forces and forces that manifest as external;
• individuals who are in reality communities, consisting of living minds past present and future, and therefore passions past present and future.

How can cardboard representations of man as homo economicus or homo faber or any other specialized, truncated, parodies of the human experience ever serve as adequate guides to social thought? Yet it is in economic theory that many ideologies of your time are still based; in social control or social liberation that people place their hopes; in division among factions rather than in inclusion as part of a polity that they base their analysis and their social prescriptions.

Well, the New Soviet Man and the Thousand-year Reich of Aryan superman didn’t turn out too well.

No, and neither did any other model that was supposed to reshape society to employ forces not understood or even not suspected. The basis of any social movement, seen in itself, must necessarily be incomplete, and to some degree self-defeating. If you can’t understand the situation, you can’t prescribe remedies, and if you can only act according to how strongly you feel, than as times continue to deteriorate, the proposed remedies will become ever more simplistic and fanatical.

I see you’ve been looking over my shoulder at Facebook.

We have also been at your shoulder as you read history.

It’s all pretty dismal. A at the moment, pro- and anti-Trump forces are making absolutely fanatically exaggerated claims and denunciations. Each is looking to the imminent downfall of the other, and blaming it for everything wrong, and conceding nothing in the way of self-criticism. They are, as far as I can tell, more ignorant than ever, because listening to only what they already agree with, and leaving no part of their minds open to the small still voice that says, “well, maybe.”

And you do see why?

To my mind, it is because we have little idea what the actual facts are. We have been lied to for so long, and are being lied to from so many directions, that there are “facts” enough to support any half-assed theory you care to name. People are ignorant of our history, and even what they know of, they may easily misinterpret because of the poisoning of the sources of facts. Today, if they hear something they would rather not be true, it is instantly “fake news” and that’s the end of it. And the problem is, we are inundated by fake news as well, only miraculously it all comes only from the sources we already disbelieve, never from those we have decided to believe.

But there are deeper reasons than these. We repeat, no one can understand what is going on if they look at it through inadequate filters.

Filters?

To be sure, filters. It is more by filtering out noise that you detect a signal than by your reception of anything and everything.

Open-mindedness, then?

After all, open-mindedness is itself the application of a filter to make sense of input. With no filter, it’s all noise. And the more unconscious the filter, the more the person mistakes the signal received for truth rather than construct. This is why some of the most closed-minded people are convinced that they are open-minded and open to correction, only they never see any need to be corrected, since no contrary evidence ever gets through the filter.

This is why true reform comes only through individual work on oneself. No matter what else you do, or try to do, or want to do, or wish you could do, it is your level of being that will determine your effect on the world. A social movement made of people with a cartoon image of the forces involved may amount to very little (in fact, will often serve chiefly to rouse the forces of opposition); individuals quietly working on themselves, whether with others socially or not, may actually accomplish more constructive reform. Remember, the world is one thing; you – we – are all invisibly connected by millions of threads. This is true whether or not you believe it or are aware of it. You can’t produce true meaningful reform by pounding water with a hammer, no matter how vigorously you pound.

 

Monday, October 31, 2022

4:40 a.m. Shall we proceed? I think you intended to resume by talking about the difference between what people think 3D life is about, and what it is really for. That is, the nature of life after 3D. Or the nature of the greater life. My very inability to phrase it shows that I don’t really know where you intend to go.

Well, focus, remembering your overnight experience, and we shall proceed in whatever direction the moment leads us.

Okay. Presence, receptivity, clarity. Last night I realized I was lying quietly between waking and sleep, and various scenes were playing, not of my conscious doing. I thought, “I could contact Joseph the Egyptian!” That is, I was in a state that sometimes we seek, and I had come to it naturally, merely by being mentally and physically quiet. It occurred to me, we can always extend to our Strands; it isn’t like we have to go anywhere to do so. I was unable to control the contact, but that may be (we’ll see) merely a matter of getting to Carnegie Hall: practice, practice, practice.

Yes, you see, you already know everything you will ever seek to learn. You already do anything you will ever seek to learn how to do. The problem is not learning in the sense of acquiring a new skill, but learning in the sense of reconnecting to something already well known. That may seem only theoretical, only an impractical abstract idea, but it is very real, very doable. It is less a matter of one growing into something than of removing the artificial barriers that prevent one from being, knowing, doing, living, what one really is.

This should be a very encouraging statement, if you can bring yourselves to believe it. You can’t be too stupid, or too ignorant, or too feckless, to attain the greater wholeness. You already connect to perfection, and that means perfect knowledge, perfect balance.

None of your problems, of whatever kind, exist by accident or ill-fortune or by the malice of the universe. They exist as opportunities to be overcome, and it is the overcoming (not the getting to the other side of the problem) that is the gift.

Now on the one hand you say, we don’t need to do anything; on the other hand, you say, obstacles exist for us as opportunities. Opportunities must be seized, must they not? Isn’t that a doing?

You will remember the scripture that says that though your sins be scarlet, you can fly over them? That is to say that life is decisions. You can decide to be other than what you experience yourself to be. (Yes, a decision is a “doing,” in a sense. But don’t let language prevent you from grasping the point.) Life need not be plodding. Neither need it be plodding interrupted by magic. It can be as easy as your experience of realizing that you are already in a mental state that, at other times, you have had to strive for.

I think this will strike some people as playing with words. Our experience is of struggle.

Your experience is of struggle mixed with ease, or call it luck, or good fortune. What you concentrate on will seem to you to be your reality. Change your idea of yourselves, and it will seem (and will be) as if your life magically changes accordingly, either instantly or slowly according to what you unconsciously deem possible.

It is true that my life began to appear magical after about 1987, but it took me a long time to believe fully in what at first I was almost pretending (to myself) to believe.

Well, you see that was you working out your destiny. That is, your life-pattern began you in one place, with certain tendencies, and led you along the logic of the problems/opportunities those characteristics manifested in interaction with the changing moment. Your decisions along the way helped determine which way you would go as you proceeded in your canoe down the river. They couldn’t move you to another river, but they could move you to this or that part of the river, this or that current or ripple, avoiding this or that rock or shallows. Perhaps not the best analogy, but perhaps it will serve.

Your life and everything in your life, which includes all the noise of your contemporaries, all the “news” (and the “olds”!) that illustrates and frames your life, may run smoothly or rough, may be consistent or wildly varying, may tempt you to despair or exultation or confusion. It doesn’t really matter. What force could make you other than you are? What could get between you and your non-3D community, or between All-D you and the higher larger being to which you are inextricably connected? What misfortune could damage your immortality? Many things could throw you off balance, could leave you feeling isolated or abandoned, could tempt you to think that you are at the mercy of events. In the truest sense, that is not true, because it could not be true.

That is the true meaning of the Book of Job: not that it is up to you to bear whatever affliction comes your way (though obviously that is true as well), but that things cannot happen by chance; you cannot be abandoned by your larger being, only, you sometimes need unwavering faith that life is good, despite the evidence, despite world news, despite personal tragedy or disappointment or persuasive feelings of ennui.

The Book of Job says this in the form of a story, which people can remember more easily than an abstract principle. It casts it in the form of a contest between God and Satan, as if man were a pawn between them – for life often enough does seem that way, as you all know. And, it tacks on a fairy-tale ending that actually not only obscures the point but contradicts it – but this was superstition being tacked on to a teaching story by those who thought they understood but did not.  We cite the story to remind you that we aren’t telling you anything no one ever realized; we are merely reinterpreting into contemporary language and concepts, as must be done every generation, and will need to be done again, forever. Still, you are here now. Hear it if you can. Life is good and you are not an orphan, not a disfavored child.

Having said all this, it ought to be unnecessary (but isn’t, we fully recognize) to add that the purpose of 3D life is other than what many people assume it is.

Can it be meant to be a life of universal happiness? Contentment? Mutual assistance? Love? Continual growth? Fulfillment? Life does contain all those things, but as you well know, it also contains their opposites. Does that mean that life itself is struggling? That this is a Manichean universe in which Satan fights God for dominion? Certainly it can look that way. When it does, are you looking profoundly enough?

When we see a world of suffering and cruelty, it is very tempting to see it just that way, as a battle of good and evil, with us in the middle.

Yes it can, but look at all life in the light of your own life. You yourself are not all “good” nor all “evil.” You are not all knowledge nor all ignorance. You experience your times, whether or not you follow world news. You are not isolated from your fellows, even if you are a hermit in the desert someplace. So look inside yourself and ask if the meaning of your life lies in 3D developments.

I don’t know if I am or am not typical, but I’d have to say no. I live among a climate of what we might call institutionalized fear, after Sept 11 and now the invisible virus, but although it affects my life, it does so from the outside, not from who I am.

This is more common than you think. People may fixate a certain kind of attention on “the news,” but their own life is curiously divorced from what is being reported. And even if they are in the midst of an epidemic or a water shortage or a war to the death, still it all is external to them though they have to deal with it. You can’t exactly say that World War II was an interruption to the lives of the people caught between the armies – yet, in one sense, it was not internal but external.

I get that, but you haven’t yet said it, quite. You mean, I think, that anything we live through is the shared subjectivity manifesting within ourselves, for us to process however we are able to do.

Yes, that is a very concise way to put it.

And that’s our hour. What was our theme?

You might call it “Life and events,” but that wouldn’t really express it.

Maybe, “Your life and times”?

Maybe, “Your life and why.”

I kind of like that. Very well, our thanks as always, and till next time.

 

Sunday, October 30, 2022

5:45 a.m. Well, guys, shall we return to ancient Egypt and its take on immortality?

We could. Or we could address the subject more directly. Or we could instead address other aspects of the same topic, namely the ancient forgotten civilization. Or we could address your present peril.

The chances that we are in the process of dying and perhaps even becoming a forgotten civilization ourselves.

Yes. And no matter which entry point we choose, our preference as usual will be that we address something that you, here, now, can do something with, if only mentally. There is no point in wasting time – whatever you look at – by leaving your own life unexamined.

I think you just said, study whatever we want, but relate it to ourselves.

Given that all things connect, whyever not?

Not always so easy to see the difference between idle occupation – reading for fun, or doing anything we like – and working on ourselves.

“Working on yourselves” sounds so grim and determined and humorless. Why should you not think of it as play, as recreation – that is, re-creation? Why shouldn’t you do anything you want, but do it consciously? If you have a paintbrush or chisel or potter’s tool or tennis racket or shovel in hand, or if you are sitting in silent satisfaction, or are addressing a knotty problem, or are doing anything at all – why should you not be aware of yourself doing whatever you are doing, and be in quiet joy?

That’s the kind of admonition that sounds not only advisable but even obvious. Not so easy to do, though. That’s one of the first things Gurdjieff told his students, if I remember rightly, that we mostly are not present but mostly insist that we are.

What is “life more abundantly” but life lived consciously? And Jesus, like any awakened soul, taught his friends and disciples how to live more consciously. In practice, his teachings amount to instructions on how to avoid common obstacles and how to maximize one’s chances of doing so. If you look at religious teachings outside of the framework of right and wrong, and instead look at them as instruction manuals to get to a goal perhaps not suspected at the beginning of the journey, perhaps you will find that they make more sense. Did we not spend time discussing the sins and virtues? Did we do so in terms of salvation and damnation? Did we promise heaven or hell? No. We said, Here is the reason behind the dogma.

But, you know, no one can live forever on his toes, forever keyed up, forever living on cigarettes and nerve endings. Relaxation of tension is as necessary to long-term endeavor as exhalation is to breathing. So, it would be undesirable – even if it were possible – to live a life of continuous struggle. Live a little! Play. Only, do so in a certain way and you will make progress. Do so in a different way, and it will be one step forward, two steps back. Try to avoid doing so at all, and it will be worse than that; you’ll forget what you were doing entirely, and it may be quite a while before you wake up again.

Where are we going, here?

Focus.

Ironic. Okay. Presence, receptivity, clarity. I thought I was awake. Was I not?

Consciousness is a rheostat, not an on/off switch.

Of course. Well, then – ?

You may consider every true civilization to be a common striving toward some ideal. The ideal may be implicit, and it may well wander over time, and it is likely to contain certain internal contradictions, but at the core of any common enterprise will be a shared ideal. When that ideal is abandoned or discredited or superseded for whatever reason, that civilization has changed and will change, more drastically and probably more quickly. It will be somewhat like an individual who has lost faith in whatever it believed. If it finds a new faith, well and good. If not, well, there are many possibilities.

None of them good.

Not necessarily. Sometimes losing one’s faith is a prerequisite to catching sight of a better ideal. Sometimes, in fact, it is the result of catching sight of a better ideal. Or, let’s say, catching the scent, living for the moment in faith that one’s instincts are not steering you wrongly.

But the process of abandoning one faith and adopting another can be pretty messy, particularly for a society.

There is such a thing as growing into a new faith. That is, one pursues one’s truth, one’s vision of the truth, and a way of seeing crystallizes around what is seen. That is, this is not blind faith. It is one’s best attempt to live what one knows, and what one feels, and what one more-than-suspects. You are doing it right now. You all do. Your grasp of life and the world within you and around you is always a work in progress, a sort of open-ended improvisation. That’s how it should be; the alternative is temporary fossilization.

But what can you know for sure? What can you know that is guaranteed not to be overthrown or at least seen quite differently, once some new fragment of truth has come floating by? And why – other than for purposes of catching your breath – would you want to pretend that you have come to “the” truth, and have come to the most consciousness you will ever achieve?

Now, your own civilization is a long way from the certainties and ideals it began with. You can see clearly that it is inadequate to deal with current realities, let alone with the onrushing future. Rather than looking at this as a tragedy, look at it as a life-cycle’s final stages. Only, let’s look at this more carefully, more slowly:

• No civilization has a beginning nor an ending point. Everything has predecessor and successor stages that are part of it and part “not-yet-it” or part “still-it.”
• Civilizations are less real than individuals. Be wary of thinking an abstraction to be realer than it can be.
• Still, it is not nothing. It is a pattern, or filter, affecting every individual subjectivity within it.
• Every ending is a beginning, and vice versa. Try not to be seduced by the idea that “progress” means improvement. It means change, and change implies loss, no less than gain.
• The coat that used to fit the boy won’t fit the man. Should it not be discarded? That doesn’t mean it was a failure; it means, its time of usefulness has passed.
• All of which is to say, what it is to be human is changing, again, and nothing that used to be seen as true, nothing that could be taken as a given, nothing that one may have identified oneself with, can be taken for granted.
• This is uncomfortable. Many will be reacting from fear, and thus it is a “dangerous” time. (For those who think life is chance, particularly so.) Thus the relative insanity you see playing out around you.
• On the other hand – and here is the nub of it – those who are able to live in calm faith will find themselves floated above the chaos. They will still be among chaos, but they will not be drawn into it like the victims of quicksand.
• But – avoiding quicksand is not the point of increasing your consciousness, of living life more abundantly. It is merely an accidental side-effect, so to speak. The apostles were mostly murdered, you will remember. Greater life is not – and is not meant to be, and is not pretended to be – an invisible shield against the slings and arrows. It is oriented in a way quite unconnected to the 3D world’s vision.

That last point. I get it, but you didn’t quite say it, I think. You mean, we’re set on something that isn’t anything the 3D world can see. What it can see of it looks, to it, like fantasy or delusion or mass hysteria or something.

Yes, and that is worth pursuing next time, your hour being up.

So what shall we call today’s theme?

“New wine, new wineskins,” perhaps.

I wouldn’t have thought of that, but yes, I guess so. Very well, our thanks for this, as always.

 

Saturday, October 29, 2022

5:45 a.m. Very well, friends: Things as portals. Focusing for maximum presence, receptivity, clarity.

Obviously here is no need for us or for you to trace a history of psychometry. Anyone interested can find the trail. But no two people’s experience will bring to the material the same mindset; therefore, no two people will experience reality in identical fashion. They never do, but usually the differences shade off from nearly-the-same to utterly contradictory. If subjective bias were not a factor, would not everyone have come to agreement long ago? Even liars would have no room to maneuver, if that were true, for the sheer discontinuity of their reports with everyone else’s would be impossible to miss. Similarly, for any who made honest mistakes.

But as we said, such is not the case, because bias is built in to the reality of individual piecing-together of the world, so your task is much more difficult than it would be if everyone could come to one truth. This has advantages, as well as disadvantages. It allows you freedom to create, by bringing to the table the sum total of what you are.

Creation is never finished, presented to us on a take-it-or-leave-it basis.

Let’s say, human perception of creation is never complete, never without the possibility of new human contributions. And this is what you might expect, life being a dream. (Or, to put it more neutrally, reality being projected from a higher reality, and therefore any given fact being only somewhat real. Same statement, really.)

It is because no one in 3D can see everything, comprehend everything, that you are free to create your own subsets of reality. Think of yourselves as artists, not accountants. Not that anything that may appeal to you is going to be true, but that your likes and dislikes, your instinctive certainties and connections, are themselves elements in your personal construction of your picture of reality, and that – from the larger being’s point of view – all such constructions are creative elements.

There is a creative element in our grappling with incomplete pictures of how things are?

Yes. The universe knows (in a way) what it is, what ultimate truth is. But (you might say) the universe is interested in all the creations of its parts acting as disconnected pieces rather than as all one thing.

Hard to see the value in that, but as you say it, it feels right. Are we ever going to get to talk about things as portals?

Do you think it would serve your purposes to allow you – even to unintentionally encourage you – to think that any of you will penetrate the veil of imperceptibility and come to ultimate truth?

Well, can’t we take for granted that whatever we come to, it will be only one way of seeing things?

Long experience suggests otherwise. The truer the insight, the more persuasive to you that now you have the truth, even if in another part of your mind you know all about bias and limited perspectives and the changeability of reality under conscious scrutiny.

Okay, okay. But you know we’re going to remember and forget, remember and forget. Let’s get on with it.

The process-oriented paragraphs  are never diversions, however impatient they may sometimes make you. (Any of you.) It is a way of keeping things grounded, we remind you.

Now, things as portals.

Any religious or philosophical position that amounts to “All things are holy” or “All things are numinous” implicitly recognizes that nothing is unconnected. The stone has no consciousness comparable to yours, any more than it has an everyday life experience comparable to yours, or a lifespan comparable to yours. But it is mind-stuff no less than you, with its own consciousness, its own nature, its own place in the scheme of things, its own connection to the sea of consciousness-creation that you swim in. This does not explain “things are portals”; it is a precondition to how they can be portals.

No thing in the 3D fails to extend into non-3D. How could it? No matter how many dimensions there were, you would all have to be in all of them. Everything does. (Therefore it is misleading, though unavoidable, to speak of 3D and non-3D. Everything is necessarily in All-D, all the time. But for the purposes of experience and analysis, it is convenient to concentrate on relative polarity and speak of 3D and non-3D.)

But you will remember that, as 3D is an experience of at least relative separation, non-3D is an experience of connection. Everything in 3D may be experienced as separate, but is connected. Really, that’s what you need to know about “things as portals.” Stone, plastic, radioactive waste, people, dead bodies – you name it, it is separate in one way, connected nonetheless. So what’s the variable?

Our consciousness. Just because the connection is there, doesn’t mean we can experience it.

There you are. What else do you need?

Conceptually, maybe nothing. But how about some clues as to how to extend into the knowing of connection?

You will pardon us if we snicker. What do you think you have been learning to do, in absorbing so many concepts? In practicing group mind? In learning to identify with your greater rather than only with your lesser self?

Still –

Really, as in most things, the biggest obstacle is an idea that you can’t do it, or even – in extreme cases – that it can’t be done. In such cases, every time you begin to glimpse it, you ascribe it to fantasy: “I’m probably just making this up.”

So, no special exercises, no helpful mindset, no tricks of the trade?

Only everything we have ever told you. You all know anything we could ever tell you. The only thing we do is unjam the gears now and again.

The light dawns, thinking of Thoreau. It’s a matter of seeing things the right way.

Thoreau, Hemingway, Thomas Merton, many others you know, and of course uncounted others that you don’t know, or whose heart you don’t know. An attitude of reverence for life (and we don’t mean by that mere antipathy to killing, nor even an attitude striving to keep people healthy and alive) is essential.

“I would worship the parings of my nails, if I could,” Thoreau said.

Yes. A saying easily misunderstood as pantheism or even panentheism, but in the sense he meant it, true and true north. Ordinary life, everyday things, undistinguished realty, is holy. Every moment, every inch. People talk of a “holy land,” or a “holy relic,” or a “holy man” or “holy woman,” and these terms are not meaningless. But in the larger sense they are not more holy, but more obviously holy. Life is sacred, and mundane, both, always.

And – I gather – if we bring that attitude to our explorations, we will be able to experience things as portals.

Your asthma inhaler is a portal. Your coffee cup. Your pen, your slippers. Your body.

It is easy to feel that as a concept, not so easy to make it real.

The key is emotional, not intellectual. We can give you the intellectual connector: We just did. The emotional connector must well up from within you. This is why some people can never (in this 3D life) get this, and why others come to it as naturally and inevitably as Thoreau and Alcott did, and why people such as you, between the extremes, struggle with it. But, knowing what you need, then it is only a matter of sincerity and integrity and righteous persistence, and the door will open, as promised.

One point: When you say emotional –

Not emotionalism, still less a sort of quiet hysteria. Closer to what puritans condemned as “enthusiasm,” but not quite that either. Perhaps the best way to put it is, you have an innate joy, a knowing that life is good and that you are a part of it. You may choose to dismiss or disregard or downgrade that innate joy, or you may warm your hands on it. Which attitude do you think will bring you farther?

Our thanks for all this, and for all that has come before. Next time?

TBA and don’t worry about it.

See you then.

 

Friday, October 28, 2022

4:20 a.m. So let’s look some more at Egypt. I glanced through my photos from 2019 yesterday – only a few of them, not all, by any means – and it did bring it back, a bit.

Looking back at Wednesday’s conversation, I am struck with the idea of things being portals. After discussion with others, we hared off into the question of whether the Egyptians were trying to prevent soul and spirit from disconnecting after death, and I know we will want to come back to that, but let’s look at things being portals. And don’t think I don’t feel the prompting, here. Presence, receptivity, clarity: Over to you.

It is the presumption that things are no more than the sum of qualities that can be measured that is the problem the West faces. And, ironically but inevitably, the West taught this fallacy to the rest of the world, and now sees it reflected to itself in daily life.

If I have the history right – and I realize, probably I have only a stripped-down version of it – it was Galileo who began the study of objects and forces as only the qualities that could be measured. If he was weighing an object, or observing its momentum or whatever, he did not consider its color or smell, for instance, as relevant.

You can make a much more careful statement than that, and it will aid the discussion.

All right. Galileo stripped away consideration of any qualities he considered metaphysical, let’s put it that way. He didn’t care what aspects the object may have been born under, nor what were the traditional affinities of iron, say, to various systems. It’s hard to put into specifics, because I don’t know the specifics, but medieval knowledge has all sorts of categories that made sense to them originally, and/or were legacies of hermetic studies, and/or were superstitions that has accreted over time. That is, it was a mess, and .Galileo showed his contemporaries how to cut clean through it. He opened the way for modern science, in that sense.

It was not a one-man show, but yes, that is the sense of it. The Renaissance thought it was stepping out of the rubble of medieval superstition and setting out to see what the world was really like.

Just like you and your friends, and equally justly. Only, every new start is flawed, because it necessarily discards as untrue some things that are true, and makes assumptions, conscious and unconscious, that seem obvious but are nonetheless misreadings.

Such missteps cannot be avoided, so should be regarded as just part of the process of discovery. If the fact leads explorers to retain a certain sense of humility in the face of the incomprehensibility of everything [that is, our inability to ever understand totality], so much the better.

You will remember, we said that every new approach will consist of:

• Discarding what now seems wrong
• Re-examining things the established view had discarded
• Fitting together anything that now seems to fit, some of which will seem scientific, some superstitious, some tentative (that is, provisionally believed because it seems to follow, with or without supporting evidence).

Ideally, you will cast your net widely, leaving systematization for a later time, perhaps for a later generation, because it is the insight that changes things. It is the new viewpoint that is the critical factor, not the specifics of what is viewed.

I think of Wade Davis, I’m pretty sure the name is, a scientist who in Brazil or somewhere experienced the spirit of plants communicating with him, after he used ayahuasca or some psychoactive substance with the natives. I have his book upstairs somewhere. If I find it easily, I will cite it when I transcribe this. The Serpent and the Rainbow? Something like that. I reviewed it for the newspaper in the 1980s.

[Didn’t find the book, but: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wade_Davis_(anthropologist)]

And he is an example of what is needed, a scientist with credentials who is willing to explore what his peers might dismiss in advance as obvious nonsense. We say, “what is needed”: This should make it obvious that this is what is being provided, all over the world, all over various disciplines. Life provides for itself what it needs.

Because the process of exploration and discovery proceeds in this non-inerrant manner – that is, by a combination of hits and errors – clues will be found everywhere, and the question becomes, how do you fit them together. You understand the gist of this?

I think so. You are saying ten people can look at the same pool of facts and each draw different conclusions as to what is relevant or irrelevant, and what is accurate or distorted or false, and therefore what sense is to be made of the pieces selected as real and relevant.

Yes. And, considering that each of you will begin from a biased position – necessarily – how likely is it that any ten people will come to agreement? Much more likely, they will agree on a certain amount and will agree to disagree on the rest. Nor will the agreed-upon area be necessarily the same for all. Some may agree on A to E, but not F, and then G to J, say, while others may agree on A to C, not D, then E to J, etc. Enough to work together, but never unanimity, which anyway would not be a good thing.

And right here, for instance, is one such belief to be challenged: the belief that there is a “the” truth. That was materialist science’s hope and its faith: Examine facts closely and you will be able to see what really is, and how it relates, and even how it may be expressed mathematically. The idea that there may be no truth other than viewpoint is the equivalent of that anarchist’s dream of throwing a bomb into pure mathematics.

So, things as portals –.

We haven’t wandered. What is psychometry, “scientifically” considered, but superstition. But – it works, and so is a fact, and so falls into the category of things to be investigated. But science cannot take psychometry seriously unless it postulates that matter can somehow store memories.

Not necessarily. It can provide access to memories.

From the point of view of materialist science, so much the worse! Now you have suggested that matter has properties that cannot be measured except in psychological effect. And this means that all the discarded lore about the psychological properties of various stones must be re-examined more sympathetically. And it’s worse than that, for them: It means they themselves are not the experts but the uninstructed, and they nee to humble themselves enough to accept as teachers those they had presumed were superstitious or were charlatans.

But there is another side to it. Take the natives who have used psychoactive plants all these centuries and have accepted a view of the situation. They, too, need to adjust their views. It isn’t that the truth has changed. (What “the” truth?)  It is that the new civilization will include their knowledge and beliefs, but will change it, too, just as it will accept materialist knowledge and beliefs, but will change that as well. It isn’t a matter of accepting any one, nor of rejecting everything and beginning anew. It is a matter of casting the net widely and re-examining what is caught in the mesh.

So, when you accept the possibility of psychometry, you look at the record: What has been recorded about it? When did the idea come up in modern times, who has studied it, with what results, etc. [For a jaundiced precis, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychometry_(paranormal).] But anyone else’s conclusions are your initiating queries. You aren’t out to imitate their mindset, but to look at these fishes among other fishes you (but not they) may have caught in other casts. Wade Davis did not draw the same conclusions from his psychoactive-substance-enabled contact with plant spirits that his fellow experiencers did, nor could he have done, nor should he have done. Your bias is your gift to the world. Don’t abandon it, refine it.

Things as portals will necessarily mean different things to you than they ever have to anyone who ever lived, because who ever embodied just your exact bias?

To be continued, I take it?

Yes. Call this one “Things as portals,” if you wish, but a better title might be, “Exploration and bias.”

Yes, I agree. Very well, our thanks as always.

 

Awestruck, and perhaps in connection

Wednesday, October 26, 2022

5:30 a.m. I am reluctant to ask a factual question, as always, being more comfortable with conceptual ones. But Jane Coleman and Jane Peranteau and I agreed to ask this question, so I will, and we’ll see if you-all can answer it.

Presence, receptivity, clarity. What was the purpose of the Egyptians placing reminders of 3D life in their burial places? What did they think it would accomplish? We’re taking for granted that it was not the act of superstitious ancients that our stupid civilization assumes it was. Gentlemen, can you shed some light on this for us?

We can – and loosen up. If you inadvertently misinform people, it isn’t the end of the world. Mistaken translations straighten out over time.

Okay.

You were getting intuitions even as you spoke of it. These were vivid representations of First Life, and they were not meant for other living eyes. Surely that is clear? Sealed from the outside world, hidden and even boobytrapped to prevent grave robbing, how could they have been intended to impress others?

Well, then, what? Were they really so simpleminded as to think that a picture of food would be able to be eaten? That a picture of a hunt would assure good hunting in the afterlife? That the presence of things they had used, the bodies of servants they had known, would be somehow available thereafter? The answer is yes, in a way, but not at all in the way that your contemporaries may imagine.

We draw your attention to something that may seem unrelated: the art of psychometry. Things are portals.

That’s very interesting.

You experienced it at Newspaper Rock.

I did. And I seem to have experienced it since. Crystals, especially, seem to be portals.

Ever hear of a crystal ball? The scryer isn’t actually looking at something, but is connecting to something. (We don’t say that the distinction is always obvious to the scryer.)

All right, well, — all those things in the Egyptian tombs. Do you see that a portal opens either way? A connection to the non-3D (seen from the 3D side) is of course a connection to the 3D side, as seen from the non-3D. Now why should the non-3D want to have portals back to 3D? Aren’t they finished with that life?

Not if the soul is continuing to live forever in its 3D time span, as you said.

Exactly so. Consider those portals to be connectors between spirit and soul. They are facilitators, you might say.

They are preventing the spirit from forgetting its soul connection?

You could put it just that way. The spirit’s weakest point is emotion and memory, the soul’s strongest point.

That’s why the non-3D needed to remember the 3D life, not for the sake of the memories per se, but for the sake of the connection.

Yes. As an analogy, it is the two halves of a brain, functioning together, as opposed to a split brain.

I keep going back to Peter Novak’s book that I published – two or three of them, but particularly The Division of Consciousness. I knew it was important.

It opened the way for you to consider things in a certain light.

Now, I have read somewhere that it is important to realize that the physical world is symbolic of the spiritual, quite as much as it is here for itself. That’s said clumsily. I mean, things are just what they appear to be, but they are also deeper, they extend into another dimension, so to speak. Our stupid civilization treats things as if they were merely rocks in space, rather than as all part of a symphony.

Well, there you are. The Egyptians knew better.

So if they – well, you spell it out for us.

Yes. We can, now, as we could not have, before, because of the work we have done together, building understandings in common.

The Egyptians described 3D life as First Life. They did not, by that, mean to imply that they would be reincarnated. You haven’t understood that until now. They meant, the 3D life was bounded in time, and now they moved to non-3D life which is not. But their non-3D life is based in what they had made themselves in First Life – that is, 3D life.

This is not to say that everyone in that civilization retained the understanding. Most people most of the time mostly follow their society’s mores. That’s what makes civilization even possible, mimesis. But if not everyone did, the ones who counted did, and that starts with the Pharaoh and the Pharaoh’s family, and the priesthoods male and female.

Realize this. If you have been king, you do not cease to be king when you die. Your non-3D self – provided it remembers! – continues to be linked to that kingly life and continues to feel and fulfill its responsibilities throughout the endless changes that occur as people’s decisions alter the dream.

If you are a miller in that life, or a forester, or a fisher, or soldier, or priest or teacher; if you are a mother or father or aunt or uncle, you do not cease to remember those feelings, skills, points of view – if you remember and do not forget.

Given this view of life, what could be a larger error than to not provide as much assistance as possible so that the newly freed spirit remembers – remains linked to – the soul that helped shape it?

So a Pharaoh’s tomb, or a high official’s, would feature painted scenes of all manner of people.

Helping keep it all in mind, you might say.

I imagine that at some point this degenerated into superstition.

Mimesis always does. You might consider it intellectual or spiritual entropy. Every good thing needs to be renewed – reborn – eventually.

Every bad thing, too?

That’s a different topic. The short answer is yes, as you might expect. Nothing is in the world without reason.

Now what about the elaborate and seemingly endless hieroglyphic inscriptions in the tombs – narratives, I took them to be. Surely the non-3D soul doesn’t need to reread the life.

As you intuited in your discussion, the hieroglyphics are themselves portals. But they are a different kind of portal, a portal to intangibles, you might say, or to abstractions.

So in a way they would be read?

Not in the way you read with your eyes. More like, the energetic signatures of the minds that carved or painted the symbols are there, and that’s what was to be read.

Was? Or is?

That is almost a meaningless distinction, dependent entirely upon where you are and how permeable or impermeable you experience time to be. Those souls then are as alive as ever, so, “is.” But you can’t reach them (usually), so, “was.”

A lot to absorb, here.

You could not have brought this across if you had not gone to Egypt. Again, psychometry.

Our thanks as always. I’ll call this one “Egyptian Tombs,” I guess.