Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

Tuesday, October 25, 2022

6 a.m. All right, friends, I’m beginning to get the idea, I think. Should we proceed to part three of The Future of the Individual? As always, written or spoken or even only thought, I intend presence, receptivity, clarity.

Your equivalent of faith, hope, and charity.

Very funny. But can we continue?

We are continuing. Do you notice how you can feel the understanding gelling inside you?

I do, sort of. I read what we get, and I feel like I get glimpses of what you’re leading us to. I get an anticipation of concepts you haven’t yet laid out. In earlier years, this would have made me suspect that I was making it up behind my own back. Not “would have,” did. Now I’m seeing that sometimes we think we’re making it up when in fact it’s coming into view, the answer appearing before the question.

You will remember – something you have often told others – that often in Monroe programs you would hear someone say, “Probably I’m just making this up, but – ,” and you would know that a real experience was about to be related. Knowing they weren’t consciously inventing something, yet half-experiencing it slightly ahead of themselves, so to speak, they experienced it neither as their own nor quite other, so they were tempted to tag it the product of imagination – “imagination” being considered to be something somehow theirs and somehow not theirs.

It’s a problem due to our mental categories, then, isn’t it?

Most things are, if you can’t see them straight. Or, to say that better, whenever you cannot clearly categorize or experience, the fault is going to be not with the experience but the category. It is a case of round pegs and square holes.

Yes, clear as you say it. So, then –.

What we have been driving at, this long time, and what is finally emerging from the mists, you might say, is that half-human half-divine 3D individuals are journeying toward some goal that cannot be in the 3D, yet uses 3D to help get there. Your future as souls is not to become ever-better, ever-stronger, ever-more-fulfilled 3D souls, but to participate in the flowering of what you are into an entirely new order of being. The goal of a caterpillar is miraculously different from what any caterpillar might imagine on the evidence of its life to date. It is not living so that it may become a sort of super-caterpillar, but so that it may fulfill its perhaps unsuspected nature by leaving behind creeping on vines and eating leaves.

I have always wondered at Thoreau’s paragraph at the end of Walden about the bug that was – well, I’ll quote it when I transcribe this. It seemed uncharacteristically impractical, a little too high-flying, though of course very characteristically idealistic.

But now you see what he was getting at.

I do. Our future is to become an entirely new order of being that nonetheless fulfills our nature.

It seems divorced from reality, does it not? Every church, every spiritual and esoteric tradition, has faced and will face this same difficulty. If people cannot intuit their real nature, and cannot imagine any future but a 3D-bound slogging, followed by vague bliss, they cannot, as Thoreau put it, “understand much that I have to say.” Even you did not, until now it has finally hatched within you.

Bob Friedman was always asking me, “But what do they do over there.”

And when we were asked, we said, “We relate.” What should we have said? If we could have substituted a clear, understandable sentence or two – or even paragraph or page or chapter or book! – for so much successive building and removing of scaffolding, would we not have done so? It is so hard to communicate without being misunderstood. But, even harder, it is so hard to communicate without reinforcing existing misunderstandings. If the hearer is determined to hear A when we are saying something that is neither A nor B, or is A but also B – what are we to do?

Persist, I suppose. You do the best you can, and then you keep trying.

Which is why when we can find someone working in the way you do, we are grateful. That of course does not mean your virtues are the only ones that count, nor that what others bring to the table may not be equally valuable. (Nor do we think you think that.) But it is of great value to transcribe faithfully, to strive to understand without prematurely deciding meanings, to tolerate ambiguity, to accept open-ended outcomes. As we say, there are other virtues – but these are valuable, in trying to bring forth what can never be fully said.

As our perspective changes – as we get another inch up the mountain – we see new meanings in what other people have said. Bob Monroe, for instance. He said, in effect, that our larger being experiences completed larger beings winking out of existence in the plane they lived at. The implication was that uncompleted larger beings are caterpillars and the completed ones became butterflies. And he said, explicitly, that his words were a translation of a translation of a translation.

Yes. “You do the best you can.” In practice, this means that you speak your truth as best you can, even knowing that everyone will read what you write from where they are. Where else can they read from? That means, they are going to misinterpret, but it also means that – this is something you may not have thought of in quite this way – misinterpretation is scaffolding. Thus, it is not exactly labor lost. It is a bridge flung over a gap, even if neither bridge abutment is as solidly grounded as one may think.

We misunderstand our way toward the truth, in a way.

When you allow yourselves to be guided, you do, yes. Not when you insist that whatever new you learn be conformable to your existing patchwork of beliefs.

So can you give me that final bit of clue that will help cement this latest understanding?

Yes, only remember that our very best explanation will be patchwork, in that it must necessarily rest on wherever you happen to be. It isn’t quite building a house upon sand, but there are analogies.

So:

• You are body, soul, and spirit.
• Body is as “spiritual” as the rest of you, much of its intelligence and composition unsuspected by you, taken for granted, but its firm purpose is to act as temporary – that is, time-related – platform for the soul’s journey.
• In that sense, body is of course as holy and as matter-of-fact as soul and spirit. It is the taken-for-granted servant that allows the rest of the show to proceed.
• Soul is the solidification of various Strands within time, to provide an unceasing but continually changing platform for spirit. Soul is to spirit as body is to soul.
• Spirit is the purest essence of the higher being, participating in – making possible – the concretization that is body and soul. That is, spirit is not confined to any timespan or place, but is what makes such manifestations possible.
• You – body and its intelligence, soul and all its extensions along various Strands, all of its choices within a defined span of years, spirit as a part of the higher being – are in effect one cell of a larger being that is not primarily 3D (though it extends into 3D through you and all your fellow beings).
• Your destiny is as a cell and as a part of the whole. That is, in fulfilling your human nature, you are also fulfilling your divine nature.
• Be careful not to slide into confusing your higher being with God (whatever your definition of God may be). Your higher being is divine to you, but is not “divine” in the sense of being the creator of all things. Infants probably regard their parents as divine, too. With time, they learn better.

And there is your hour, and that is as much as we have to say about The Future of the Individual.

But of course you are open to questions.

Always. It is how we can tell how our expressed thought is clear or is subject to misinterpretation or is obscure. Do not neglect to quote from Walden.

Our thanks as always.

& & &

The final two paragraphs of Walden, published in 1854, when Thoreau was 37 years old, with fewer than six years more to live in 3D:

“Every one has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree wood, which had stood in a farmer’s kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut, and afterward in Massachusetts — from an egg deposited in the living tree many years earlier still, as appeared by counting the annual layers beyond it; which was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn. Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality strengthened by hearing of this? Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society, deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree, which has been gradually converted into the semblance of its well-seasoned tomb — heard perchance gnawing out now for years by the astonished family of man, as they sat round the festive board — may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society’s most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last!

“I do not say that John or Jonathan will realize all this; but such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can never make to dawn. The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.”

 

Monday, October 24, 2022

6 a.m. I have not worked here for a few days. Where were we? I had to look back in my binder, till I got to Tuesday, October 18 – less than a week ago, but a long time mentally – where I find “The Future of the Individual (1).” So, can we continue?

Focus, and we shall see.

I am aware that you said it would be well for me to have a little time to process the material in the background. I wonder, now, if my incessant reading, and watching Netflix, is not specifically to allow that to happen. Very well, presence, receptivity, clarity. Over to you.

A brief summary of your understanding of that session’s salient points.

You said that we  as individuals have a future, the world as such does not. Meaning, I took it, that whatever it is that we are grows, changes, moves on to other levels of complexity so that in some fundamental sense we are no longer what we were (that is, what we are now), but that the world continues to be the world.

That will serve. You see, the shared subjectivity is more of a function, a relationship, than a being. You, even as a community of communities, are a being, shaped and shaping, creation and creator. Functions do not evolve and grow and change natures and transform themselves (or be transformed, whichever way you choose to see it). They are a function; they perform a function.

I see it. Do we need an analogy for anyone who does not immediately see it?

A caterpillar becoming a butterfly is an individual transforming. But you can’t say that the process of transforming can evolve. You can’t say that the environmental requirements that allow the transformation to occur, themselves transform. That would be a meaningless playing with words. Similarly, you and the 3D world. You transform; the supporting environment does not.

The changes we see in the 3D world are more like the seasons than like transformation into something fundamentally new.

Even when the 3D world moves from one age to another, so that it no longer supports dinosaurs and now supports mammals, or no longer supports mammals and now supports something else, it is not evolving, it is continuing. Gas does not become imbued with higher consciousness. It may physically transform; it does not move into another sphere of existence.

This, despite the fact that everything is alive, is mind-stuff.

Yes. Your body is alive, but your kidney cells do not become something in another realm of being. It is true, in supporting you in 3D life they are assisting your process, but they do not accompany your consciousness to another realm.

This is more complicated than first appears too, isn’t it?

Most things are. But we don’t want to pursue that side-trail at the moment. It is true that your physical body and its components are inextricably part of your 3D soul’s consciousness, but that would only divert us from the understanding we would like to pursue now.

Our soul is tied to one timespan; our spirit is not.

Your spirit is tied to nothing whatsoever. It is what you make it by your decisions acting upon a soul’s conditions, but it per se is free of conditions.

The body cannot escape 3D limits.

The soul is the animation of the body in connection to every other soul – every other Strand, you see – by connections direct and indirect.

The spirit is the thing that is you beneath and prior to any 3D identities.

That is, spirit precedes soul.

Necessarily. You could not come into 3D existence, nor remain there, if spirit did not in-spire you. There is no life without spirit. There is no shaped life without soul. There is no continuity in any present moment without body.

Let us try to state this as simply as possible, ignoring for the moment necessary caveats and qualifiers:

• The “you” of you is spirit in one view, soul in another. Confusing the two leads to inability to understand.
• “You” as soul means, the everyday you that you are accustomed to identify with. It is your ancestry, your predilections, your skills, biases, complexes; it is your noblest and basest instincts; it is what you are by virtue of your connection along Strands. Everything that is 3D linked to non-3D is your experience of yourself, in relation to your 3D environment.
• “You” as spirit means, that in you that is deeper, prior, and not bound to any 3D lifetime. It is the “you” that precedes First Life (that is, it is alive before any specific 3D existence) and follows it, and transcends it. When in your 3D life you sometimes identify with your spirit rather than only your soul, you touch something literally inhuman, literally godlike. It is you and yet not-you, for it is beyond 3D constraints and possibilities.

I get that this is what Dion Fortune would say we connect to via magical rituals.

There are many ways to connect to it – or, more usually, for it to connect with you, in transformative miraculous moments.

So I get, soul does not move to another level of being, only spirit can do that.

That statement is true, mostly, but easily misunderstood. Re-focus and try again; if you bring it through, rather than we giving it to you, it will connect at a deeper level and will gradually make unexpected connections.

All right.

We as souls do our best here in constricted circumstances, deciding one moment at a time what we want to be, how we want to be. That somehow has its effect on Spirit, though I can’t see how.

Your decisions alter you, and alter everything you touch, and of course vice-versa. This makes every instant a thought-experiment. In effect, the world is re-created by every decision. More importantly, souls are re-created by each decision.

But I don’t get how transforming our soul affects spirit.

It isn’t spirit that transforms; it is the larger being comprising all its souls, of which any of you are one, but branching off. [That is, each of us connecting to others.]

Aha, and our decisions in 3D at some point allow the larger being to crystallize in some way, similar to how we crystallize as souls.

That’s pretty close. Pretty good, actually, as it will allow you to remember to apply the maxim, As above, so below.

Not quite an hour, but I’m losing focus and am inclined to close.

A good place to pause. Title this one “(2),” of course.

Our thanks as always. I do sense we’re getting somewhere.

 

 

“For a voice in my head, you ask good questions”! From today’s blog entry, from 2010.

Re-reading the conversation from 2010 that I posted on my blog today, I see that it was truer than I knew at the time. Then, I took it more or less on faith. Today, I can take it as the seed of what I did in fact experience. Everything is a split decision. Or, as the English say or used to say, What you gain on the swings, you lose on the roundabouts. If there is such a thing as an absolute good or an absolute evil, it may not translate in our 3D lives. Always there is a compensating opposite. But what we do get is about as much as we can handle.

Now, I wonder (a) what that graf meant, and (b) who was saying it? I thought I was thinking it, but by the end, I didn’t even quite know what it meant, let alone whether I believed it.

Guys?

As you said, split decision. Part of you said it, part of you agreed with it, part of you quarreled with it, part of you didn’t quite get the gist of it. This is not the result of lack of attention, nor of split personality (whatever that would be), nor of divided feelings. It may be seen, rather, as increased awareness of a complexity that is always there but not always seen, or felt.

You care to say more? I get that you mean that we, who are communities of selves experiencing ourselves as individuals, sometimes experience our “community-ness,” to coin a word.

That’s correct, and it is like Jung on Joyce and Joyce’s daughter.

Jung told someone that the difference between James Joyce, the author, and Joyce’s daughter, who was under Jung’s care as a schizophrenic, was that they were both in the sea of the unconscious, only Joyce was swimming and Lucia was drowning.

[Not quite, though close. Wikipedia says “Lucia was analyzed by Carl Jung at the time, who after reading Ulysses is said to have concluded that her father had schizophrenia. Jung said that she and her father were two people heading to the bottom of a river, except that Joyce was diving and Lucia was sinking.”]

Similarly, as you experience your community nature, you may find it invigorating and liberating, or scary and in fact terrifying.

Thus the value of our little public strip-tease? [That is, as encouraging example for others, that they are not alone.]

Of course, and, of course, not only yours but that of many others at the same time, unknown to you as you are unknown to them. It is a matter of giving people a sense of the order of things, that they not be disoriented and lost.

The same friend I found referenced in the post today, written 2-9-2010, swims vigorously. I would gladly name him, were it not for the fact that one never knows the unexpected blowback that may come from the most innocent of disclosures. For myself, I am not particularly discreet; for my friends, I am.

Care is always appropriate.

So let’s spell it out once more, for the benefit of those who have not had the benefit of a dozen books spelling it out as fast as you have given me the idea.

Still trying to sell books, we see. Well, no harm in it, but it isn’t necessary. As you have been told, the very expressing of an understanding is an achievement not to be lost, regardless if that expression then mounts to a higher level of achievement, of acceptance, of “success.”

At any rate –

As we spelled out at some length, the key to everything is “As above, so below,” for reality is made up of repeating fractal patterns, most particularly the 3D part of it. “Man is the measure of all things” meant, not “Mankind is the only thing that’s important,” but, “Everything at every level may be understood in relation to the human scale, hence in understanding who and what you are, you can understand the shape and pattern and dynamics of all things, by extrapolation and analogy,” – only the longer sentence is not a very snappy slogan, while the shorter one is easily remembered.

Thus, humans are communities, seen one way, and individual constituent parts of communities, seen the other. Like everything else in reality, it is a matter of scale.

Put it this way: Atoms form molecules, molecules form elements, elements form compounds, compounds form larger shapes and units. Or, structures are composed of parts, each of which is composed of units, of elements, of molecules, of atoms, ultimately of bound energy. Look one way, and it is an ever more intricate chain of being, look the other way, and it is an ever more intricate chain of being, but the thing you see depends upon the glass you see it through.

A human personality, far from being a simple thing, far from being a unit, is a community of units functioning as one. As an analogy, the cells in your body may be considered as communities of cells or as constituent parts of whatever unit they belong to. They are what they are, but what that is depends upon how you define it at the moment. You can’t say that a cell in your liber is “only” a cell rather than part of your liver; you can’t say that it is “only” part of the liver and not a cell. It is both, and cannot be only either. So with personalities, or call them individuals. You are communities of other lives; you are individual elements in other lives. Both, not one or the other. Reality has no absolute divisions.

Looking at this from a slight psychological distance, I see how strange and incomprehensible it will seem to any who have not gone through our long run-up to a different understanding. Can it possibly be made clear or even plausible?

Fortunately, that isn’t up to you, nor to anyone. Each person’s inner self will guide them to what they need.

I sure hope so! I don’t see how we could bridge the gap otherwise.

Remember, we bridged the gap. No one needs to (nor could) follow your particular path to understanding. Everybody gets their own, makes their own. Serving as nudge, as reminder, as encouragement, is quite enough.

To return to our starting-point today, my somewhat perplexed experience of writing and then wondering about it –

We never left the subject. Your understanding, like your experience, like your assumed self-definition, is going to wander. So what? Nothing lost and potentially something gained, for anything that gives you a more accurate experience of what you really are is potentially something that can be useful to you.

I read recently that Ram Dass is preparing to die, and is quoted as saying that he looks forward to it, but his body fears it. (I think that’s a fairly accurate paraphrase.)

And you wonder about your own manner of dying.

Of course. I envision dying like Thoreau, or Washington, calmly and without self-division, but of course how it will actually be is one thing I can never know until after the fact, which –

Hmm. I was about to say, “doesn’t do me any good now,” but then I thought, “Well, I could ask.”

Indeed you can. But if we say it “will be” this way or that way, what good does that do you?

Given that all possibilities exist and will play out. All right. Well, it is only a background wonderment anyway.

As to the question of who you are, bear in mind, there is always more to be learned, and how much you learn depends partly upon “circumstances,” that is, upon the “externals” that represent your hidden springs and condition, but partly too upon your interest and industry. Ask, and you shall receive. Knock, and it shall be opened.”

 

Saturday, October 22, 2022

6:55 a.m. Gentlemen, what can you tell me of the long dream? I feel like, to try to put it into words would distance myself from it. Maybe just go into it, remembering?

• The desk drawer filled with clutter – empty plastic bags, some useful, some not, litter, all kinds of things that together made the drawer unusable.
• Your opening the blinds on your colleagues’ windows, without asking them, which let you see across the street to the excitement happening there.
• A hook-and-ladder truck making its way carefully and laboriously up the curving driveway to the building across the street – a school, you know. Your deducing that somebody had gotten caught up in a high place. (It wasn’t a fire.)

Hmm, easier to remember this way than trying to narrate. Maybe I’ll try it this way more often. So, what do you make of it?

No, what do you make of it? Things that are obvious to others won’t hurt you [I’d have thought you meant to say “help” me, but, go ahead.] won’t help you as much as things you connect for yourself. The Freudian slip is           because in the case of new realizations, what helps can hurt.

Can’t find that missing word, which I think begins with “c” and means, right on point. May start with “con.” In any case –

The clutter refers to my mind, I guess, more than my life. To my environment somewhat, but mostly, I have a lot in my mind (rather than on my mind), and it would be worthwhile to sort it out. Discarding, I suppose, but perhaps expressing, quite as much.

As I wrote out opening the blinds, I got the sense that this is me – is us – opening windows on obscured knowledge, as we have been doing all these years.

I suppose watching the hook-and-ladder and not participating in the drama, and knowing there was no fire, is me not buying into the drama of our times, knowing it is less life-and-death than it seems.

So what would you like to know?

It’s surprising how much I got out of that, so easily.

Use that technique of sketching scenes without trying to write connecting passages, see if it doesn’t facilitate the interpretation of dreams for you. Doesn’t mean it would work for everybody, nor every time for you, but it did work very effectively this time.

Yes it did. Thank you. What is the word I couldn’t pin down? “Connate,” something like that? “Cognate”? No, it means directly to the point. All I can think of is apposite, or appropriate, and I have the sense of the sentence anyway, but I would like to know. It isn’t correct,” either, I think.

Condign.

I know there is such a word, but I don’t know what it means. I guess I’ll look it up. I don’t think that’s the one anyway.

“Condign: Deserved, adequate, worthy, suitable. Deserved, adequate, suitable to the fault or crime.”

Doesn’t sound like the meaning I got.

[8:30. Typing this, I get that the word was probably “cogent.”]

 

So many workers in the fields. So many people giving similar information. Surely there is someone and something for every sincere searcher.

https://charlessides.wordpress.com/2022/10/22/conclusion-our-unseen-guest-the-finleys-conversations-with-stephen-1920/

 

Rita [Warren], I am suddenly aware that this is an anniversary, you having left us eleven years ago. I trust that you are still happily engaged in doing whatever it is that you are doing.

And, oddly, I see I am experiencing a little stage fright, here! Too aware of a potential audience, I guess. But – how are you?

You know the answer to that is always, “I’m fine.” That’s how we are raised, and it isn’t a bad habit to have anyway, looking at the bright side of things.

Are you needing to do that?

Not particularly. I mean merely that “I’m fine” isn’t really any different from “All is well” that we used to hear.

Did you observe my trip to Egypt?

It is there to be seen, put it that way.

I guess that means, an opened mind offers anything it experienced, when contacted?

Well, let’s say that is closer to the truth than this idea that we’re looking over your shoulder as you go along.

It occurs to me, this is the first time we’ve talked since Bob [Friedman] went over. Have you been in communication? It was his persistent question, “What do they do over there?” that sparked a good deal of our dialogue.

Your question implies separations that are not real, and therefore reunions that are not what they would seem to be if the first definitions were correct.

I guess I can see that. Not sure where that leaves us, though.

Bob is fine.

But he doesn’t necessarily want to communicate!  Nothing new there!

[Bob:] Actually, if you’ll remember, we communicated most clearly in writing.

True enough. So, how are you?

I’m fine.

I’m smiling too. But, come on, give me something. God knows I worked hard enough to get you an answer to what you wanted to know.

It’s pretty much the way Rita described it in the last book I published. [Awakening from the 3D World] No major surprises. But she wasn’t able to tell you the whole scheme of things and neither can I. We can tell but you can’t hear.

Meaning not just me as an individual, I take it, but people in 3D in general.

A little of both. You have your own set of blinders. Everybody does, and everybody’s are just a little bit different. That’s how the truth gets in, sort of sideways.

So what can you tell me that Rita couldn’t or didn’t?

Connection. We are all more connected than it might appear if you read various accounts. By definition, Rita gave us her experience, centering on her. I’d do the same. So would you. What we couldn’t do very well is give our experience not centering on ourselves. By definition our own consciousness centers on the 3D life it led, or leads. You couldn’t expect it to center elsewhere. So when you ask for, or somebody volunteers, an account of that person’s experiences not centered in that 3D consciousness, what are you going to get? You’re going to get a second-hand account.

I’m not sure I follow that. If Rita’s higher self transmits through Rita as a familiar focus, aren’t I still getting its account first-hand?

That’s what I’m trying to explain. You are and you aren’t.

I suppose you mean, any explanation filters through Rita’s mind the way it filters through mine.

In effect, yes. That isn’t how it works really, but that’s what it looks like. Look, in a way it isn’t hard. If you talk to me now, you expect the Bob you knew and the rest-of-Bob that you didn’t know, and the not-Bob that not-you may have known in other lifetimes. What you won’t get is the Bob you knew, only, because that Bob didn’t actually exist. It was me as you experienced me, and if you will think back on your own experiences with others, which of them ever knew you? They knew a part of you that they experienced, and a sort of fill-in-the-blanks rest of you that they imagined but didn’t realize they were imagining. And that was only centering on you in this 3D life! Think what they would have had to do, to know you, when even you yourself don’t.

It isn’t any different now.

So I guess this amounts to saying, anything we get is part true, part fantasy, part fill-in-the-blanks-with-your-best-guess.

You could put it that way. Just as you phrase things in your own language, so that quoting us doesn’t seem just right, so you perceive in your own categories, and it takes a lot of careful work to untangle perception from interpretation. You know all this, but it bears repeating.

Well, it’s good to talk to you, at any rate. I had wondered if we would. Colin [Wilson] has been gone since the end of 2013 and I haven’t heard from him. Do say hi from me if you run across him.

Or Bob Monroe?

Or Bob, or anybody we both knew. I hesitate to offer to carry a message from you, for the same old reasons, but I will if you wish.

No, people will have to do their own discerning.

Now, that did and didn’t sound like you! You wouldn’t have put it that way, but it is very characteristic of the way I experienced you. Be well. Anything else at the moment?

Just wanted to say hi. Bu we can talk again if you want to.

I’ll have to think about whether to send this out, but I’ll certainly transcribe it. thanks, Bob, and Rita.

 

Wednesday, October 19, 2022

7 a.m. The Psychology of Totalitarianism (Mattias Desmet) arrived yesterday, and I pick it up and am electrified even by the few pages of the introduction, let alone by the first pages of this first chapter. He’s telling the truth, and he knows what the truth is.

Guys, I was thinking we would continue yesterday’s theme, but this is important. I came to Desmet via Amazon because I googled his name as one of many talking heads in some documentary I watched. (Was it the series about the Roman Empire?) but I sense your hands in my decision to buy this book, which came out only this year, after the series I watched, and in its arrival just now. The timing couldn’t be more perfect. I don’t know what his solution is – other than that it must involve a new social paradigm to replace the one currently failing around us – but I immediately recognized my own thought in his shorthand description of the cause of the problem.

“Problem” only if you would wish the current thinking to continue to shape your world.

Problem in the sense of an algebraic problem.

Focus first.

Yes. Presence, receptivity, clarity. I partly feel like I should be reading the book and partly feel that it is important for some reason to talk to you before I read more. I’m only on page 14, after all! Anyway, proceed.

Quote the one paragraph that electrified you, but not more. It would be easy for you to get carried away. Don’t.

It’s true. I’m tempted to quote the whole page. So which one do you want here, of the three linked grafs?

Start with, “Truth-telling is a way -.”

“Truth-telling is a way of speaking that breaks through an established, if implicit, social consensus. Whoever speaks the truth breaks open the solidified story in which the group seeks refuge, ease, and security. This makes speaking the truth a dangerous endeavor. It strikes fear in the group, and results in anger and aggression.” (p. 13)

Now quote the paragraph from the introduction, though your readers will not all like it.

“That’s how most people eventually become certain. Very certain. Yet of the most opposing things. Some people were convinced that we were dealing with a killer virus, others that it was nothing more than the seasonal flu, and still others believed that the virus did not even exist and that we were dealing with a worldwide conspiracy. And there were also a few who continued to tolerate uncertainty and kept asking themselves: How can we adequately understand what is going on in our society?” (p. 6)

That’s me, at the end. I have a very high tolerance for uncertainty, and I find it harder and harder to be sure of anything. When I was young, I regarded this as a handicap (and it certainly is, in terms of decisiveness), but now I see it as a means of preserving balance. (And after all, I do have Libra as my rising sign, with both Neptune and Jupiter in that sign.)

You all were born into the turning point, the end of one age and the beginning of another. Some people, in looking forward, see only the bright prospects ahead; some see only the darkness surrounding them and getting darker. Both are somewhat right, in that what they perceive does exist, and somewhat wrong, in that what they are filtering out is as important as what they are allowing in. The glass is always half-full and half-empty. It is always filling and emptying at the same time. Life never comes to an end-point. Every moment is a culmination and a beginning.

I sense that Desmet sees both. That’s what his TOC indicates, and that’s the sense I get from his introduction.

Well, how many years have you been telling people of your deep unease that almost no movies or novels are painting a utopian future, and almost all are painting a dystopian future or are pretending that the current moment is going to endure indefinitely?

A long time. Star Trek and its variations and spinoffs are almost the only examples I can find of a positive vision of the future. Most of the rest are like the old film “Bladerunner,” grimly dealing with a degraded world we wouldn’t want to live in.

And you think this is significant, why?

You know full well. A postwar analysis of Weimar Germany’s films showed that artists intuited what was coming.

You will find in Desmet’s book an incisive analysis of the situation. But that isn’t what you brought yourself to your journal to ask. So, what was it?

That’s true, I see, looking back: I didn’t have a question in mind, I just wanted to connect. Well, what’s my question? This, I suppose, though it sounds inflated: Is our work here potentially liberating to others? I hesitate to ask, our publishing track-record being so dismal. But still – is it?

You are being tempted to forget that what is important is not numbers but intensity. A different way to say that would be – well, think of Viktor Frankl in a concentration camp. Was it likely that his experience would have an effect on you (and, of course, on anyone who took his insight to heart)? Any one person, speaking truth, will have an incalculable effect on the 3D world, because the 3D world is only partly 3D, and is as much non-3D as 3D.

That is, as connected invisibly as it is separated visibly.

Well, what made you buy that book? Or any other fundamentally important book you have ever read?

I have concluded that it is very little different in effect to publish or merely to formulate.

Did Desmet’s book affect you while he was only thinking it, or after you had it in your hands?

I see your point.

What have we been doing, for a quarter of a century, but preparing you – by helping you to experience a truer sense of reality – to write it out?

But I don’t have the credentials nor the data. I have our conversations.

You will not persuade, no, but you may spark, which is what is necessary. Consider, Desmet wrote a book you have scarcely tasted, yet immediately you know it is true and is important and is part of the way forward.

Just as with Paul Brunton.

Just as with Colin Wilson, and Carl Jung, and every other recognition in your life. Did any of them prove anything to you?

Brunton did, I’d say.

But even there, he was able to persuade you only because you were ready to be persuaded. That is, only because you were not armored against his conclusions. Had you been so, his arguments would have left you cold, for you would have been psychologically unable to hear them, lest they shake your certainties.

One more book, like The Cosmic Internet?

It’s entirely up to you. What you leave behind is important in its way, and unimportant too. Don’t think Carl Jung is judged by how many books he wrote or interviews he gave, or even by how many patients he helped. That is all real and at the same time irrelevant, in a way. He judges himself by what he is, which manifests only partly by what he does.

I feel like there is a point to this session that I’m missing.

Desmet is a link between inner and outer that you have been seeking, as you will see as you read his book. It isn’t about society; it isn’t about psychology, even. Both, but something more, something harder to describe, as you will see.

I guess we’re just advertising somebody else’s book.

There are worse ways to spend your time. Once send this out, you can go back to reading.

The theme, then?

“A revolutionary book.”

Hmm. Maybe so. All right, our thanks as always.