Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

Tuesday, October 18, 2022

9:30 a.m. You said yesterday that we as individuals were more important than the world in total. You didn’t put it that way, but that’s what it amounted to. Care to say more?

It will need to be said far more carefully. Focus, please.

Presence, receptivity, clarity. Go ahead.

So many terms to define carefully, and so many relationships to clarify. It is a case of having to do many things at the same time. Let’s see if bullet points will do it.

• You as individuals. In this discussion, “you” will mean you as a subdivision of your larger being. One given 3D life is only a part, even when one considers other lives, Strands, to be part of the one life.
• The world. This may be seen two ways, and it makes a difference. “The world” as an abstraction, merely the total of everything, could be disregarded. Real things (including souls, obviously) always outweigh abstractions. But “the world” as the sum total of souls is not an abstraction but a piece of verbal shorthand; in other words, it refers to real things, not some abstract concept.
• Individuals have a future, a life beyond 3D life. They have a purpose; they are a vector. This 3D life is a template and a finishing-ground (or, if you will, a nursery, a school, and a training-ground), not an end in itself.
• The world as total of souls – or, say, as the shared subjectivity in which individuals swim – does not have a future. It has no life toward which it is growing. It is now what it was and will be, an environment.

You need to modify your third bullet, don’t you? 3D life is not a training ground but an experience of a training ground.

That is correct. Good clarification.

This says, as the Egyptians seem to have been saying, that First Life is merely to be shaped, and the important business proceeds from there.

It doesn’t say that, you intuit it, but, close enough. Your experience of 3D life is important, it is never meaningless, but it aims you at something, it is not the end in itself.

I can see that you are having trouble making a destination clear, but I’m not sure what it is. (Come to think of it, that’s probably saying the same thing twice.)

The difference is between you at one level, and you at that level and another level. This is mostly what we’re hoping to sketch vie bullet-points: The former was only a beginning.

• You – as we described you in the first bullet – may be seen in two ways: (1), as a subset of a larger being, (2) as a being considered only in relation to 3D. To begin to consider you as in (1), we need to take for granted the definition in (2) that we have been describing, these many years.

I think I see that. If we were still thinking of ourselves as one-body-one-person, or even as one-body-one-reincarnational-history, it would be harder for us to understand the first of the two definitions.

You have thought you understood, as we have suggested relationships in the past, but no, you couldn’t have gotten it right.

I was thinking of us 3D beings as the children (so to speak) of the larger non-3D being, but I hadn’t gotten any farther than that.

Implied, you see, is a qualitative difference between 3D beings and their “parent” being.

Yes, that’s how I was thinking of it.

Now we want to refine your understanding of the situation.

• Remember, 3D and non-3D are not different, nor separated. They are polarities and they interpenetrate.
• Therefore, do not overdraw the distinction between consciousness currently immersed in 3D – you – and that which is “located” in non-3D. Same substance, different state, like water and ice.
• Therefore – and this will not have come clear until now, perhaps – consider all of it together as one thing: the larger being, all of its “children.” Part is in 3D, part isn’t, but it is all one thing as opposed to another.
• This separate being – this larger non-3D being and all its children who live in and also out of 3D – may be called –. Well, what should we call it? At some point names only confuse, as they imply more of a distinction than is warranted.

I get it, you’re reminding us that distinctions are always provisional; no absolute separation in reality, but not undifferentiated jello either.

Yes.

Will it help to say that we are going to treat as individuals things that we will later have to see as all part of one something?

You have been paying attention. Yes, that will help clarify what we are doing here. For initial exploration, we treat it as if it were a discrete unit, then later we may go over it again, stressing connections instead of distinctions.

But while we are stressing distinctions, we want to say this: Each such unit has a destiny, a future, a state it can grow into, which is not merely more of the same.

Bob Monroe talked of clusters “winking out” of existence when they reached a certain level of completion. I gathered he meant they were moving on to a new level of complexity.

Close enough. The point is, life never ends, it never stays still, and it changes nature, situation, possibilities, challenges, depending upon what it chooses. And in the case of this larger being we’re sketching, that means all these decisions made by 3D beings, that shape them, and in so doing help shape the larger being of which they are part.

And you still haven’t gotten it said. I get the sense of it, though. On the one hand, – no, it fled.

You got distracted. Let’s pause there, and resume another time. This is hard work, and taking it slowly helps give you time to process in the background.

Okay. Today’s theme?

“The future of the individual”?

Perhaps. Add “(1)”?

Perhaps.

Thanks as always.

 

(from September, 2020)

I’m thinking it is taking a long time to get from question to answer. We started off wanting to know the difference between feeling and emotion, and several sessions later we are as far as ever.

Not so. Redefinition precedes new clarity. A superficial definition would leave you with “Take it or leave it.” We’d rather offer an alternative way to see things that lets people work things out themselves. Dirk’s 11th question: “Some psychologists (Jung in particular) used ego, id, superego, and other terms. Are these related? Are they distinct ideas, or do they represent ‘concrete’ things? Do they map to the other terms?” 

Jung moved away from such terminology as his admitted and unadmitted experience grew with time. Freud tended to remain with not only the words but the initial concepts. Let’s look at the underlying idea these words represent. Rather than explain each one in its own terms (that is, rather than assume their viewpoint for long enough to replicate their terminology), let us sketch their starting-point as opposed to (contrasted with) ours. It should clarify quite a lot in relatively few words.

To the first modern psychologists, humans now appeared to be 3D creatures composed of a 3D consciousness (ego), a 3D subconscious self, irrational, unpredictable, disruptive, often dangerous – the uncivilized part of the 3D mind (id) – and, though well-argued among them – another layer that was perhaps the equivalent of the id from the opposite end. That is, the superego was as different from the 3D consciousness as the id was, but where the id was all irrational and subhuman force, the superego was perhaps equally irrational but arguably superhuman, as much better than the conscious self as the id was worse.

This summary is unfair to all schools, but it is good enough for our purposes, because look how different the human psyche looks when you begin by knowing that it is not 3D-only, and that the 3D is not even primary let alone singular, and that the 3D consciousness is arguably the lowest of the three states. As you will see, this moves us closer to Jung’s distinction between ego and self.

From our point of view, here is the human 3D psyche.

What Freud generalized as the “id” and generalized as the “ego” is really abstraction added to an erroneous understanding. Had he come from a different cultural tradition, his same medical experiences with his patients would have led him to different conclusions, as, indeed, is what happened with Jung.

We would say this. “Id,” “ego,” “superego” are terms, not realities. They are conceptual labels that bundle certain aspects of the human experience; they are not things. Therefore, it should be evident that they do not exist physically; they cannot be sited (hence, cannot be sighted!) in specific physical tissues. Yes they are ideas, but they are ideas that are not helpful anymore.

Instead, think in terms of process. Once you see the human 3D experience as integrated with the non-3D in various ways, you see that even relatively obvious distinctions can be only approximate, can be only more or less true.

Your life was created or assembled or chosen (however you choose to think of it) from outside 3D – that is, from the greater reality that encompasses but surpasses 3D. It commenced in one point in time and space and from that birth point, functioned both as separate and as continually connected. The vast impersonal forces that animate all life flow through your life and are transformed in effect into vast personal forces, the energy flowing through the wiring you continually maintain and alter as you live. Nothing happens to you that could be accurately described in 3D-only terms, no matter how long you live, no matter how deeply you think or feel, no matter what you admit into or exclude from your conscious awareness.

Within that view of your psychic reality, there is room for distinctions between the 3D consciousness, its subconscious penumbra, and the non-3D matrix in which it exists, but the underlying unity is more clearly seen, and the temptation to overstate divisions is perhaps reduced or countered.

Yes of course there is an “ego,” if you refer to your 3D awareness, limited (as it necessarily is) if only by time and available RAM. Of course there is an “id,” sort of, if you refer to the fact that much of your life is beyond your consciousness, and is hence beyond your conscious control. And of course there is a “superego” in the sense that you are integrally connected to a part of yourself that does not weigh or discern by 3D standards, but has its own values. But, you see, context alters everything. We see no particular benefit in using any of those terms in our exploration, because mostly they will drag their unwanted and often unsuspected baggage into the discussion, warping things.

So now we are ready to look at emotions and feelings, because now you have a model based more on flow than on a static idea of structure. If you see yourself as conduits of life-force rather than as units receiving inputs and producing outputs, it may seem to be only a slight change, but in fact it is profound. This model puts the forces as primary – as they should be seen to be – rather than looking at them as if they were breezes blowing through the room ruffling papers. And that changes everything.

It reconnects us to the universe.

It does that, or you might say, it reconnects the universe to you, from your 3D point of view. Instead of questions of “the afterlife” and such being matters of speculation, they are taken for granted as existing. Their exact nature and effects may be debated, but that they are an integral part of life can no longer be doubted, and therefore there can no longer be a temptation (or even an excuse) to suspect that “3D life is all there is.”

All right.

So, emotions and feelings, for example, cannot be what the old model conceived them to be. If the structure is incorrect, the ideas about forces within the structure cannot be accurate, even if they themselves, seen in isolation, save the phenomena.

I see that. “Saving the phenomena” refers to the fact that an incorrect theory may nonetheless produce accurate results, in the way that medieval astronomy was able to predict the movements of the planets even though the calculations assumed that Earth, not the sun, was the center of the system.

A little thought should make it obvious that any theory, no matter how erroneous in a larger context, is going to save a significant amount of the phenomena it examines, else it would never become an accepted theory. Usually such theories get overturned when enough new intransigent evidence demonstrates its insufficiency. And isn’t that what we have been doing with you for 20 years, bringing in and harmonizing intransigent facts and ideas?

Now, we don’t have time to really enter into the next phase of this discussion, but you should be able to see how, and why, we began where we did.

 

 

Monday, October 17, 2022

8:30 a.m. Gentlemen, it may have been you who put the idea in my head, or maybe I snagged it off a non-3D bush – there is no ownership of ideas, I realize – but what can you tell me about this thought? It occurred to me, it would explain a lot about alternate lives, karma, justice, free will, chaos within pattern and pattern within chaos – and other thing – if we look at all life as mind-stuff and any given circumstance as mind-stuff’s thought-experiment.

A serviceable metaphor, at least.

Yes, but – say something about it.

Most of the wrong turnings that philosophy takes, and science, and often enough religion and occult investigation, stem from consciously or unconsciously assuming that the 3D is real, rather than somewhat real. Often enough, 3D is taken as primary and non-3D attributes are taken as problematic or non-existent. Beyond that, many people treat energy as if it were (or ever could be) separate from matter, when they are, of course, the same thing in different manifestations, like water and ice, or water and steam. But when you realize that matter is mind-stuff, then necessarily anything else is mind-stuff.

In that matter is the densest, hence the farthest away from whatever mind-stuff comes from.

That could use some clarification, but not now. And you could – good, you focused even as we thought of it. Presence always makes it easier.

If you will look at life in various ways, concentrating on the enigmas and contradictions inherent in each explanations, you will see that most “common sense,” “down to earth” explanations are unreasonable.

Bullets?

Spelling out the various worldviews and objections to them is not needed here. Those who have the type of mind that responds to closely reasoned logic will find it all in Paul Brunton’s two books.

The Hidden Teaching Beyond Yoga and The Wisdom of the Overself.

They did for you; they will do for many others. However, we prefer striking sparks to laying bricks. Let us stick to your latest, accurate, insight.

If the world actually split with every decision anyone made, who is moving all the rock and water? Yes, we’re putting it whimsically, but there’s a reason for it: Behind the conscious mind, one tends to imagine the many-worlds theory manifesting as splitting physical matter into clones. But you can see that this would be impossible even if time were what it seems. How many quadrillion Niagara Falls in an infinity of alternate worlds? How many erupting volcanoes, drifting clouds, herds of antelope, clusters of housing? How many reproductions of specific animals and people?

I get the point. Got it quite a while ago, in fact. If the physical world were what it seems to be – including the ever-moving present moment – it couldn’t possibly work that way. Its one of those ideas that seem plausible until you really think about what they would entail.

But then why do quantum theorists postulate the many-worlds theory?

I think because the mathematics says X And Such must be so, and the theorists try to figure out what  X And Such would mean in real terms.

That is, they create epicycles.

Yep. And when I spot an epicycle, I always think that’s a strong hint that something is rotten in the state of quantum physics.

A strength of your recent insight is that it bypasses many an epicycle.

Yes, but if people can’t buy the idea that everything is mind-stuff projected as the reality we know – the somewhat real reality we live in 3D – they can’t follow any of it. They’ll have to dismiss it as fantasy.

People follow what they can follow. It isn’t a popularity contest.

I did turn the idea over in my mind, and it seems the clearest expression of our situation I have come to. But I realize, I’m trying to judge something I have no way of judging. Story of my life, in a way, but not less of a problem for all that.

You cannot judge it using 3D measurements, nor 3D logic, but fortunately, you have non-3D knowings and you have intuition. If you didn’t have these, you’d never be able to transcend appearances, any of you.

I can see that this is one more deleterious effect of eating the apple, too: Judging things as good or bad would pretty much make it impossible to look at alternate lives as thought-experiments. If everything has to be good or bad (which is a way of saying if it is essential that part of life be defined as evil), thought experiments would have to be labeled good or evil, rather than just life.

You have come a long way in all these years. You could not have written that, 30 years ago.

Well, it has been a long seduction, and a pretty successful one.

To round out your idea, you need to remember that all paths exist and are explored. All “alternate lives” are lived. All roads are taken, and no one road is realer or more important or even more probable except in reference to itself.

That is, the reality – the world – All-That-Is at this level – is created. Inherent in its creation is every possible variation and combination of variations, a mind-numbingly-high number, beyond anyone’s counting.  From the point of view of All That Is, these possibilities manifest not sequentially but immediately. The world winks out (so to speak); another set of possibilities manifests. The world winks out. Rinse, repeat. You may consider each iteration a thought-experiment.

But doesn’t that conflate two things?

It does.

• Each world that winks into existence and winks out again, as the Buddhists and Hindus know.
• Each variation within each of these worlds.

It should be obvious that we and the world-soul, so to speak, are not tremendously worried about elections in the United States or on Alpha Centauri. We don’t get too worried about everything going to hell with or without handbaskets. We don’t sit here tallying people’s sins, follies, crimes, madnesses.

And yet with all that you do care about us individually. It can be hard to square that circle intellectually.

Indeed it can. But that’s because you are measuring incompatibles, in doing that.

I’ll focus again. I didn’t quite get that.

If you look at reality from the point of view of the whole, it looks one way.

If you look at it from any one individual perspective, it looks another way.

If you remember that ultimately individuals are part of one inseparable thing, you get a third view.

But mostly, remember, it is your decisions that affect not only you and all who are connected to you, but, indirectly, the shared subjectivity as well. In other words, your individual decisions shape you and they shape the world around you. (In both cases, somewhat, not entirely, but that should be obvious.)

Then what difference does it make, what we do? If all paths are taken –

You asked this long ago, and we were unable to explain it in the absence of scaffolding. We can answer it now by saying, simply, it is your experience; it shapes the only version of you that you know. It makes a difference to you. And, you being different, it makes a difference to the world, but that is secondary. It is your development that is important.

That certainly turns things around. Says who?

All religions concentrate on the individual soul, however they express it, whatever they see its nature or duties or perils or opportunities. This is why. You are realer than the world, in the way that any object is realer than any abstraction.

From a certain point of view, maybe.

Of course. But that’s our point. Just as a Frenchman is realer than a “France,” if you look at a body v. an abstraction, so a soul is realer than the shared subjectivity – the world weighed in the same scale.

I trust you’ll say more about this, another time.

As it emerges. Call this one, “A thought experiment,” perhaps.

Yes, I think so. Our thanks as always.

 

(from September, 2020)

So we proceed to describe unconscious, subconscious and conscious states conceptually; that is, from the widest possible frame of reference. It is a long way from the focused question Dirk asked as his #10, but perhaps you can see that to try to answer that in its own terms (basically considering 3D only) would have been misleading. If you now hold in mind our discussion to date, we can proceed to tie it to his question more closely.

[Dirk’s question: “What exactly are the conscious, subconscious, and unconscious? Do these relate partly or mostly to structural parts of the brain, such as the left and right hemispheres and the primitive brain?”]

You can see, perhaps, that since these three states of consciousness transcend the brain, they cannot be explained in terms of the brain alone. However, how they express via the brain can be discussed and explained. It is not a matter of brain tissue producing states of consciousness; rather, they respond to states of consciousness.

It is that simple statement that we have been leading to. It could not be understood if we had confined the focus to the brain, and to the 3D mind alone.

Isn’t that painting with too broad a brush? Can’t physical changes affect consciousness? A blow to the head will knock you out. Excessive fatigue will produce changes. So will psychological problems, things that happen, etc. So how can you say that the tissues (and, I presume you mean, as well, the electrical-impulse circuitry and chemical baths) respond to, rather than produce consciousness?

That’s a valid point, but still misleading. Mostly it is a matter of semantics. Let’s clear up the language.

Unconsciousness. A boxer who has been kayoed, a person who has been knocked out by concussion, even someone forced into sleep from sheer fatigue, may be said to be unconscious, because they are “dead to the world.” But although the word is the same, the meaning is not. This common meaning of the word “unconscious” refers to the person’s inability to function in a state of awareness. Someone dreaming, someone in a coma, someone temporarily knocked out by a concussion, someone sheerly unable to maintain conscious activity for any reason is unconscious; they are not “the unconscious.”

Consciousness. A person actively functioning in the 3D world does so in a state of consciousness, but is not the state of consciousness, but is an example of it. The 3D trance continues throughout life, though its boundaries and characteristics may change. You don’t escape it in 3D life, and you aren’t intended to. It is not a trap or a predicament but, literally, a life-support system. You do not move beyond it when you sleep or use drugs or ritual or special exercises to transcend its boundaries. You glimpse beyond it, and that is a very different thing.

Subconscious. There is less linguistic confusion here, because people don’t so much think of themselves functioning in a state of “sub-consciousness.” So it should be clearer that this term represents a condition rather than a sort of choice. That is, the confusion of terms is less likely to happen here.

So now we can get closer to beginning to answer the question. From our point of view, the three experienced mental states are not of course produced by different parts of the brain, but express through them. This is a more fundamental distinction than it may seem to be.

Thus for instance let us discuss left and right hemispheres of the brain as commonly understood. We add the caveat “ as commonly understood” because as usual the actual situation is more complicated and nuanced than the common understanding. The common understanding provides a place to proceed from, but remember, what you and we express flatly are really approximations, generalizations.

Your brain may be described as a dual-track assembler of clues. What is commonly called left-brain function assembles the world sequentially, in detail. The right-brain assembles the same clues in a holistic gestalt. Neither way of seeing things is adequate without the compensating other. We won’t go into this; it is commonly understood.

Similarly, the brain may be seen divided vertically, from the medulla up to the latest additions to the human mental apparatus. Again, we ask you to look at these division of functions not as producers of given mental states, but as expressions of them. It makes a difference!

To make a particularly flat statement, for the sake of emphasis: What you experience as your 3D conscious experience is the momentary All-D consciousness, filtered through your own subconscious world and then your conscious apparatus. You do not produce consciousness; you receive it. Your brain does not originate mental states, it translates what it receives.

In this context, you could regard the existing conditions of the present moment as the vast impersonal forces influencing (running through) your consciousness, and being shaped by your mental structures. Different moments of time interflow with your state of being to produce what possibilities there are. Some times are just not propitious for certain kinds of endeavor. Conversely, what you are at any given moment limits or enables what you can do with that moment. You see?

If we have made ourselves something “spiritual,” or let’s say high-minded, we will have different possibilities in a given moment than if we have made ourselves something coarse.

Yes except overstated and too definite. But you have the idea. And on the other hand, no matter what you have made yourself (and even pretending for the moment that you are a unit rather than many people taking turns steering), different times will present different boundaries that will affect saint and sinner even though the make-up of the saint and the sinner will process the raw materials differently.

 

(from September, 2020)

Remembering that the various mental states of the 3D world are all, themselves, substates of a greater world, let’s re-examine how things really are, as opposed to how they appear when one carelessly assumes that the 3D is primary.

Within the 3D world, looking from within the individual subjective personality, what is called the “unconscious” mind is actually the widest, most coherent consciousness. It does not sleep. It does not get interrupted, nor deceived by appearances, nor confused by the contradictory appearances that are the 3D trance state. The word “unconscious” is a tremendous misnomer, except in the sense of “that part of the mind that is  inaccessible to the conscious mental apparatus.” In that sense, yes, unconscious. That is, you are not conscious of it. But the unconscious never sleeps, never gets interrupted, never gets bamboozled by appearances. Can your conscious mind say as much for itself?

Now, to say that the contents of the unconscious are inaccessible to the conscious mind is not to say they always must be, nor that all must be. “Talking to the guys” is itself a method of bringing unknown material from far places so you may look at it, and perhaps be changed by it. But, by and large, the unconscious is the unknown platform upon which your life rests.

And – this is important – it is not divided among individuals. It is more like atmosphere that is breathed by many in common and is not subdivided except temporarily while it is in someone’s lungs.

You should give this some thought. The implications are great and wide and important. If your ideas about the unconscious are wrong, the structures you try to build will have no adequate foundation.

Now, we have sketched a view of the unconscious level of 3D life, saying that it is normal 3D mentality that is not conscious of it, rather than that the unconscious is a larger mind that is unconscious of itself. If you have absorbed the implications of this fact, you should find them very encouraging. It is not as [Bernard] Shaw and [Colin] Wilson thought, that life is mind inserting itself into dead matter. Just the reverse. In fact, what they observed was mind reinserting itself in the 3D consciousness of your civilization. Had Shaw and Wilson ever considered the importance of animism as practiced throughout the world, they would have seen that many people already knew what they were struggling toward. This is not a criticism of Shaw or Wilson  as thinkers. It is a criticism of the materialist assumptions of the society they sprang from, that they were fighting their way free from.

The greater world, which the 3D present-moment consciousness is normally unaware of, is itself conscious, and of a higher order of consciousness. What you call the subconscious mind, we would describe as a step inward from the universal consciousness. It is more particular to you, the 3D mind. It is the immediate penumbra to your everyday reality. By definition it consists of what you don’t quite bring into consciousness ordinarily. It is the license plate you see but don’t notice, the colors around you, the smells, the noises faint or loud that do not register because you are focused on something else – or, to put it another way, because your active RAM, your 3D conscious mind’s buffer, is already filled with other things. (Indeed, the act of clearing your mind through meditation may be seen as an act of clearing some of the RAM so that you will have room to experience consciously some things that ordinarily life does not allow you to see merely because it is filled with other things, mostly matters of habit.)

There are other categories of things in the subconscious than what has not been noticed. There are the things one does not want to remember: painful things, embarrassing or shameful things. Parts of your experience that you deliberately or by default repress. It is these sorts of things, mostly, that disturb conscious life, causing what seems to be irrational behavior or tendencies; compulsions; distortions in the thinking process; overwhelming, uncontrollable, moods.

This penumbra of 3D life, this mental attic filled with unnoticed or repressed material, shades off in both directions, naturally. (There are no hard and fast boundaries in the universe.) On the one end, it shades into the conscious realm; on the other end, it shades into the realm of which the 3D mind is unconscious. Regard it, if you will, as a buffer between 3D conscious awareness and non-3D unsuspected awareness. As such it is of course 3D and non-3D.

The 3D conscious mind is primarily an experience of limitation, as we have said. It is not that 3D consciousness is a triumph of rationality, fearlessly pushing back the curtains of ignorance and separation, etc. It would be closer to describe it as a special case of the universal mind, functioning as if in isolation, functioning under a continuous pressure of lockstep movement (the ever-pressing living present moment) functioning under deliberately imposed limitation on connection, on making connection, on even maintaining itself in continuity.

This – as you may have noticed! – is hard. Life in 3D is not (and is not designed to be) easy. It is by nature and by design and for a purpose, difficult. Even those around you who may seem to you (from the outside) to live easy lives, don’t find life easy, any more than you do.

 

I wonder sometimes, what’s the use in messages from heaven (dreams), if they flee? Or if you hear them, think about them while in bed, then lose them when you get up. Was it a communication that did its job even if the conscious mind is not involved, or cannot hold it? I started this paragraph talking to myself, but it occurs to me, guys, what say you?

Your intuition is correct: Not all dreams require retention (much less interpretation) by the conscious mind. When you think about the fact that most people don’t recall most of their dreams, you surely conclude that it must be so. Why would nature provide a function that mostly didn’t function?

So if dreams aren’t intended primarily for the conscious mind, who are they intended for?

Think of them as lightning strikes. That is, they provide balance. Just as serious electrical imbalance creates the conditions needed for lightning in the skies, imbalance – lack of communication, call it – within the mind creates the need for dreams to rebalance.

Our conscious awareness of it not needed.

Not needed and usually not available.

So what extremes are being rebalanced?

This is a bigger subject than first appears, because it involves not so much the brain as the mind, a much wider subject.

We have encouraged you to invert your society’s conventional view of the mind, and see consciousness as surrounded by subconscious knowledge, and that in turn surrounded by the vast universe of which it is mostly unconscious. That is, your individual consciousness is a bubble of disconnection from the universal intelligence, not a bubble of superior focus rising out of a sea of ignorance or in fact non-consciousness.

Thinking that way, it will be easier for you to see that much more goes on around your consciousness than goes on within the small circumference it is aware of.

And dreams are a part of that whatever-it-is that goes on around us?

Sometimes a dream might be best considered to be leakage. That is, it isn’t primarily intended for your consciousness, but you become aware of it nonetheless. What you make of it varies according to your mental state at the moment.

Psychiatrists regard dreams as valuable messages from the unconscious mind that may need interpretation.

They don’t quite say that dreams are intended for the conscious mind, though, do they? And some would say they are little more than automatic processes, or are the aftereffects of conscious activity, or are, in effect, garbage through which one may profitably root, seeing pearls of wisdom. We don’t say this is how they would but it, but that is sometimes what their attitude would amount to.

Freudians and Jungians and Adlerians would define dreams and the mental environment quite differently.

Of course. And which school of psychiatry or psychology one is drawn to serves as a rough measure of one’s own mental state. But notice that our scheme differs from theirs – less so from Jung’s, but still from that too – in inverting the structure. Where they regard the individual conscious mind as primary, we are considering it as only a local phenomenon.

Understood.

Well, consider. Think how many layers of mind coexist, and consider (as you have never done) how necessary it is for them to be continually adjusting to each other, to be rebalancing, one might say. Dreams are a sort of lightning flash in the sky, an occasional glimpse of powerful forces continually functioning. There is:

• Your conscious mind, which includes what you think of, experience, and consciously react to.
• Your subconscious mind, comprising so much more that doesn’t come up to the threshold of consciousness, or that is repressed for whatever reason, or that is not conscious mostly because the conscious mind has no receptors (has no mental structures) capable of representing it.
• Then – but here’s where things get intricate, and interesting – there is all the communications between your present 3D life and other 3D lives of yours, each of which are no less complicated and self-focused.
• In addition, there is all the communication between your present 3D focus with its non-3D aspect.
• And each of your other 3D lives comes with similar links.
• All this even before considering mental links between your own 3D life and the 3D lives of others with whom you are in resonance.

Huh! That is somewhat more than we usually consider together.

Well, if it were not continually rebalancing, readjusting – communicating, in short – how could you live?

Say some more about that?

You (that is, 3D minds) tend to forget overhead. Maintenance. You forget that your life depends upon the functioning of so many things unsuspected by you. You are creatures of your environment, and if the environment were to fail, you could not live.

That you forget, or never think about it in the first place, is natural. You are created as the center of your mental world. That is how you function and how you are designed to function. Being responsible for one tiny part of the universe, you are meant to focus your efforts on your particular responsibility. At the same time, though, it is important that you learn that this is so for everyone, for the same reason, and therefore it cannot be true in any one sense, but only relatively.

You live your lives as if  the world was created for you, and centers on you, but ideally you remember that this is only one point of view, useful but contradicted from every other point of view.

Now, when your view of who you are expands sufficiently, you see that there is a sense in which it is no contradiction. You are the center of your world, and you are a spider whose web is far wider, grander, than you ever suspected. You interweave (so to speak) with all these other webs, until no one can see any one spider’s domain as central, yet each one is essential to the whole.

We may not appreciate being called spiders, but I imagine few will object to being told that their absence would leave a hole in the universe.

Well, the spider is analogy, but the hole in the universe is true.

So, dreams. Like most things in life, they have different attributes and uses, different advantages and disadvantages, depending upon how they are considered. They are not meant primarily as messages from the other layers of mind to your conscious mind. Nonetheless, they may function in that way, and your conscious intent may increase the probability of your receiving dreams that serve your purpose. Still, you will notice that you cannot command your dreams. Like the spirit, they go where they want, as they want.

Well, how about lucid dreams?

You will remember, we told you long ago (in a different context, amid a different model of psychic life) that dreams, lucid dreams, and out-of-body experiences were the same phenomenon, separable by the amount of mental energy you put into them.

In our current model we would say that lucid dreams are in effect your conscious mind’s extension into the surrounding subconscious mind and thereby retaining awareness while participating in processes that usually go on without such conscious awareness. And OBE’s may be looked at as your retaining conscious awareness while extending farther.

 

Disconnection is always a problem over time. It is a prime drawback to 3D living. At the same time, connection is a prime way to retain connection. That is, it is either a vicious or a virtuous cycle.

3D is continuously variable, by its nature. Non-3D is immune to the pressure of continuously-moving time in the way that 3D is subject to. So, each has its advantages and disadvantages. But if you maintain a foot in each world (so to speak), you maximize the advantages and minimize the disadvantages.

Sure. 3D offers concentration, intensity. Non-3D offers interconnection, continuity.

By the same token, 3D “offers” gaps in continuity (distraction), distorted perspective, and wild excursions in unpredictable directions including many a dead-end. Non-3D “offers” endless discursions, lack of single-mindedness, cloudiness of thinking. Each has the defects of its qualities.

Hence the value of remaining connected; our minds centered in non-3D, with all its connections, but operating via the brain in 3D, with its intensity.

Correct – but note Paul Brunton’s caveat about meditation as a means of maintaining connection.

I can’t quite remember what the reasoning was, but I know it reinforced what I have always thought, that meditation as a technique in and of itself could become merely a diversion and a very alluring distraction from real work.

You should know. That is what the state of mind produced by endless reading does. Feeling not of this world (because one’s attention is elsewhere) is not the same as being not of this world. That is, yes, the feeling of connection is desirable in and of itself, insofar as the only alternative is perception of 3D limitations as absolutes. But that feeling in itself can do nothing more than that. To become productive, one needs to couple a sense of connection with a physical goal.

“Physical” wasn’t right, I know. What’s the right word?

“Tangible,” perhaps. Defined; definite; practical (in the sense of bounded rather than merely fuzzy and vague).

When we think of practical goals, we think in terms of achievement and the symbols of achievement: money, fame, influence; our effect on the society we live in. At least, I do. And I gather that this isn’t what you are meaning.

That’s right. It isn’t. but what we have to say is out of favor.

Well, I’m used to that. Go ahead.

Living one’s life with integrity, affecting those around oneself – parents, spouse, children, neighbors, employers or employees, bus drivers, store clerks, office workers, bums. That is very much 3D, and one’s relations with one’s neighbors (in the largest sense) is every bit as inescapably part of one’s life’s purpose as any greater scheme or even reality of achievement. The fact that it isn’t noticed doesn’t make it less central.

The housewife and mother.

Exactly. The husband and breadwinner. No prizes for either, but look around you to see what happens to a society that no longer values them as the core of social health and happiness. As individuals, they don’t have to be brilliant or even particularly smart or well informed. They may be dumb intellectually, as they are dumb in the other sense of the word: voiceless. But they are the blood cells in society’s corpus. And, at another scale, they are individual eyes on the world from the non-3D.

Our point here is not political, though it has political ramifications. It is this: Every person on Earth is an ambassador from the non-3D, and files regular reports. That’s what they are supposed to be! That’s what they are supposed to do! It isn’t as if those who don’t become the more specialized tools are a waste of time. How could anyone be famous, if everyone were? How could anyone excel in any direction, good or bad, if everyone else were manifesting just the same qualities?

Looked at in that less distorted way, perhaps you can see that getting into touch with your eternal self, your spiritual essence, your non-3D extension, your divine guidance – call it what you will – is desirable but in and of itself, does nothing. And, in fact, may lead to serious errors of self-delusion, inflation, arrogance, etc. What’s the use of doing an hour of yoga and then snubbing the next person you deal with, or treating him or her as if you were put on Earth to be master, and they servant? What is the use of meditating every day and then being less able to deal with the everyday world around you?

Gandhi (for instance) loved meditation; it didn’t prevent him from freeing India from British rule. Not that any of you is necessarily called to do “great” things, but that you are called to express in your life what you feel in your meditation. Life is not one or two grand gestures or sublime achievements. It is an endless string of moments that offer opportunities to choose to express one’s best or not; one’s essence or not; one’s positive influence or not.

By all means read biographies of inspiring individuals if you wish. Watch movies that produce encouragement of certain virtues. Engage in yoga or meditation to remember your connection. But at the end of the day, the point is, how are you living? What are you feeling, and what are you doing with those feelings? It isn’t only a matter of how will others be affected by your time in the world, but of how will you be affected by your time in the world.

We’d recommend that you (all) give this question some serious thought, recursively, not merely a brief notice on a fast scan of the page. It is as important as anything we have said yet.