Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

Saturday, October 8, 2022

5:30 a.m. All right, guys, let’s look some more at this question of illness (as an example of things we experience that we tend to label as negative, but probably ought to see as neutral) and the times and the relationship of any individual’s experiences to the experience of the life going on around them.

In the phrasing of the question is an indicator that you have moved quite a bit, over the years, toward a broader perspective, which is of course beneficial to you, and productive. You may wish to pay attention to your slide-switches.

Okay. Presence, receptivity, clarity. I was re-reading our past several sessions, trying to help us pursue whatever it is you are pursuing, if only by reducing the drag of my own unawareness.

Always good to strike a balance between receptivity and passivity. Too little mental participation would be as unhelpful as insensitivity to non-sensory input. Active receptivity is the desired balance here.

Let’s continue looking at your 3D lives from a systems viewpoint. It will show you things by indirection. Some things that can’t be said may however be hinted at, may be backlit, let’s say.

First begin by remembering that in trying to see life straight, you are having to overcome the effects of eating the apple. It is one thing to know that you shouldn’t judge things as good and bad; another thing entirely, to be able to avoid doing so. This is particularly the case in anything you have not consciously considered. In other words, once you put your attention to it, you see that this or that example is something you have reflexively judged. Until you put your attention to it, though, you don’t notice.

To state it as clearly as we can: The effects of eating the apple do not manifest so much in how you consciously decide to see things. They manifest in how you unconsciously see them; how you assume things to be. Those peoples who descend from cultures that didn’t eat the apple do not experience life in the ame way, even if the externals are identical, because they do not label.

I can see that, as you say it. And you guys are what I used to humorously describe myself as, you are the Apostles to the Christians.

Someone has to do missionary work, if the world-pot is to be stirred! But seriously, this work could be considered, in toto, as an Epistle to the Unaffiliated. And of course what we hope to convert people to is not an orientation but a way of approaching life; not dogma but the habit of seeing ever more deeply.

Life more abundantly.

That is always the goal.

So – this diversion aside – peoples who descend from those who did eat the apple tend to label things good and bad; they tend to do it indiscriminately, unconsciously, and (therefore) erroneously. But it may take some explaining to show how we’re seeing it.

I get the idea of a hurricane hitting, and people labelling it a bad thing because of the destruction it leaves in its wake.

Yes, that’s a good example, and we will add to it, contagions such as the 2019 virus you are still experiencing worldwide. Who is considering either of these phenomena neutrally? They are clearly “bad.”

I’m edging toward your distinction. Clearly they are destructive. I know you aren’t disputing that.

That merely backs up the argument one level. It becomes that destruction is “bad.”

I think I’m beginning to see.

“Fortunate or unfortunate” is not the same as “good or bad,” though at first glance you may think so. Nobody is likely to regard a hurricane or a viral plague as fortunate, but that doesn’t mean they must see them as “bad.” The good or bad is a tag you add on, unconsciously, reflexively, and quite unhelpfully.

Now, you might ask how such labelling can be unhelpful, but consider – how much analysis do you do, once you have begun by looking at something as bad? You may analyze the cause and effect, in the way that a social worker may look at juvenile delinquency, say. But that isn’t the same thing as understanding that accepts.

That may be misunderstood, I think, by any who come to it when not linked to your mind that originates it. I take it that this is in line with what Jung says, about condemnation always isolating, never helping to heal.

Yes, only it can be slippery. In saying that people judge hurricanes to be bad, we are not imagining that they really treat them as malign. Some animists may, but mostly when people talk about “nature’s fury,” it is a threadbare expression. Still they are seeing it as “a bad thing.”

Hard to see why they would see it as a good one.

But you see, that’s our point. As long as you continue along that good-bad continuum, you cannot escape the blinders. Why does a storm or a virus have to be good or bad? (Indeed, how could they be?) Fortunate or unfortunate, yes, but not good or bad. To insist on labelling things in that way is to cling to your blinders lest you have to waken to uncomfortably new ways of seeing.

In case we haven’t really absorbed your point, would you mind going into the difference, as you see it, between good-bad and fortunate-unfortunate?

This seems hardly necessary. Isn’t the difference obvious?

I don’t think it is, actually, especially for those of us who haven’t really rooted out the reflexes left over from generations of Strands shaped by that eating of the apple. If we have thousands of people on the various Strands we participate in – that’s a lot of  drag to overcome.

Yes, true enough. Very well, look at it this way. When you were a boy in the 1940s and 50s, it was common to expose young boys, particularly, to what were called childhood diseases, so that they would acquire immunity that would save them from danger after puberty.

Mumps, for one.

Yes. Measles, chicken pox, mumps. You were expected to contract them, you were expected to recover from them, and life went on. They were considered neither good nor bad; they were mostly inconvenient, but just something to be encountered in the ordinary course of life. That was a sound and healthy attitude. But polio, say, was another story.

Nobody would call polio good. And “unfortunate” doesn’t do it.

No indeed. So was the polio virus bad?

Ah, aren’t we teasing out a linguistic ambiguity here, such as we found in the word “judgment,” which can mean discernment or can mean condemnation, two very different things? “Bad” as in effect is not the same thing as “bad” as in intent; using the same word for each introduces (or anyway expresses) confusion.

Yes, and thank you for clarifying our point. That is indeed a part of what we’re trying to get across. Seeing polio as an unfortunate effect is different from imagining it as a malign effect. “God,” or “the universe,” or “blind fate” did not punish the person who contracted polio, or AIDS, or any socially prevalent infection. There was no malign intent; it was closer to being in the wrong place at the wrong time. (Only, don’t let that slip into a sense of “accident.”)

Now, it took an entire session, nearly an hour, to clarify this one point, but that is time well spent, because anyone who internalizes the logic will have acquired the key to gradually undoing layers of conditioning – and remember, what you do for yourself, you do for everyone. Working on yourself is never a matter of one person, though it usually looks that way.

Let’s pause here. Call this one “Redefinition,” perhaps.

We could use that label for practically any session we’ve ever had.

Well, you suggest.

“The apple and our unconscious assumptions,” perhaps?

Your choice, always.

Thanks as always.

 

Friday, October 7, 2022

6:50 a.m. Gentlemen, I realized yesterday, we’ve done this for thousands of hours, these past couple decades. Thousands of hours. Very satisfying. But if I had similarly pursued other things systematically over time, what might I have accomplished! I’d be fluent in several languages, for one thing. I regret not having done that. Colin once wrote something about how little use we make of our time.

In any case, can we continue from yesterday’s? Or, shall we discuss how the universe always presents the bill (as I put it), or always sweeps up after the party (as you put it)?

It is only two ways of looking at the simple fact that reality has no extra pieces, nor any missing ones. Whether you think of life as things bumping around in space, or see it as mind-stuff in the universal dream, after a while you learn to trust that reality knows what it is doing. It has been doing it longer than you have been watching it; it works in ways half-hidden to your senses five and even to your intuitive knowing. It isn’t “winging it”; it has done this before.

I agree with all that, but I don’t see how it demonstrates that life has no loose ends.

Oh, any particular level of focus will show loose ends and unresolved problems and inexplicable happenings, but readjust the focusing knob of the microscope/telescope, and an explanation appears, sooner or later, and does not – could not – contradict itself. A dream may contain many discordant elements, and may be beyond your ability to understand it, but even if it were nonsense, it would not be nonsense in its own frame of reference. That is, it wouldn’t have sprung out of partly-nothing. A thing does not cease to exist, merely because you have no conception of it. It does not manifest effects without itself existing.

That won’t be clear, but I think you mean, whether or not we know it or even can imagine it, everything is caused, and gives rise to other effects.

Let’s say, everything has its place, and how could something be half in its place and half outside of the scheme of things? And what is “uncaused,” if not “outside of the scheme of things”? And “uncaused” is what people are really getting at (if they only knew it) when they think things are random. Without real randomness, where is the room for something to exist without cause, even if it’s a thought we’re considering. What people experience as randomness is actually an experience of the multiplicity of possibilities.

That’s an interesting way to look at it. We may experience any of a dozen alternatives, and may have little or no ability to choose which will manifest, but each of them will itself have sprung from its causes, and our experiencing any of them is merely to continue a particular chain of cause and effect.

This is an example of the advantage of this form of interaction. (ILC, we mean.) You would not have phrased things our way, and we would not have phrased them your way – and the difference in the two phrasings may itself function as a spark for some, seeing the common understanding that ties the two ways of saying it.

I hadn’t looked at it that way, but (as I say so often), clear as you say it. Our end of the conversation is itself an active contribution, not merely a form of staying awake.

What you have to keep remembering, even when it is hard to retain the sense of it, that you are playing tennis on both sides of the net. (Is it a wonder that you tire, after an hour or so?) You define us – TGU – as non-3D beings, and yourself as a 3D being, but of course that isn’t an accurate nor a sufficient definition, because, for one thing, the 3D and non-3D are not really separate except conceptually. The 3D and non-3D interpenetrating each other, where is the room for division into beings that are all one and beings that are all the other? That difference is mostly a difference in perception.

You in 3D are also in non-3D, of course. You in your sensory world also participate in the intuitive world, inescapably. Indeed, the very calling them “sensory world” and “intuitive world” is a misnomer, though in this case useful to make our point. It is one world, sensory, intuitive, 1D, 2D, 3D, etc. You are all in all dimensions, regardless how you perceive at any given moment. So when you are communicating with your guys, or your higher self, or Guidance, or whatever, you are talking to yourself.

And also aren’t.

And also aren’t, depending upon your point of view, because of course what is inaccessible to your normal consciousness must seem “other” to you. But both halves are true; you are talking to yourself; you are talking to another, or rather to others. Given that “all is one,” and that reality experiences itself separately (indeed, that is how it experiences itself), how else could it be. So, you play tennis with us, and it is in a way you returning your own serves.

And, it comes to me (from where? From “you”? From “me,” whatever that means?) that this process is a way of waking up.

Not waking up, exactly. You couldn’t do this in your sleep. But you are on the right track. Pursue it a bit.

Well, if not waking up, it is a way of broadening our categories, of seeing things from more than one viewpoint, and the process itself accustoms us to move beyond our habitual boundaries.

Yes it is. [a way of broadening our categories]

It’s maybe more like a guy with a tennis racket, bouncing the ball against a wall and returning it as best he can.

Find an analogy now that does not depend upon serve and return (call and response).

Again from somewhere (where do things come from that suddenly move into consciousness?) I get an image, but in writing out the parenthetical clause, I lost it. A moment for it to resurface. Oh, yes, art. An artist produces something, lives with it, alters a line here, a color there,  lives with it, follows impulses or intuitions that say, “try this,” “maybe do that,” and sometimes those intuitions ruin the work and sometimes they perfect it, and sometimes they merely alter it.

But the artistic process is one of call and response with the material. Yes, good. That’s practicing intuitive linked communication. It helps keep you in practice as you work on the piece of art that is your life.

So what are you? The art critics?

Who are you, the lonely genius in the attic? Why limit either of us as to definitions?

You want to say more on that?

Definitions are necessary for you to live in the world. It is a way of setting boundaries to things, that you may make sense of the world. But definitions are always inadequate to a broader, higher, understanding. This shouldn’t be a discouraging fact of life, but an encouraging one. It means, as you grow, you acquire the possibility of changing your definitions, and as you change your definitions, you effectively change the world you live in.

Which is another way to say that outgrown definitions become constrictions.

For one thing, they cease to explain. At the very least, outgrown ways of seeing the world lead to discomfort, to disorientation, perhaps to momentary panic (or, perhaps, to momentary euphoria, perhaps to delusions of grandeur). But once you recognize such symptoms for what they are, again, they show themselves as hopeful signs. And that’s enough for the moment. Call this “tennis and artwork,” perhaps.

Perhaps. Our thanks as always.

 

Thursday, October 6, 2022

5:55 a.m. I’m hoping to continue the discussion – but I’m hoping you know where to go next, because I sure don’t. Concentrating for presence, receptivity, clarity. Over to you.

From the individual point of view, you take what comes and you react to it, and your reaction continues to shape who you are, either by reinforcing who you were already or by modifying it, slightly or sometimes radically.

From a systems view, such individual reactions are the whole, operating through its units. The sum of all those reactions shapes the potential and the limitations of the situation that results.

Either way you look at it, inputs were processed and resulted in altered outputs. Can the system care about – can it even notice – every element within it? Well, yes and no. A good deal depends upon your definition of “cares about.”

It is a continuing discussion, whether there can be a God who cares about each individual. This is one of those arguments that turn people into believers or atheists.

Only because it is a question badly posed. If it were asked, can a system exist which operates under laws (or, ultimately, within one law) and which consists of self-aware units and combinations that exist in several layers, and interconnect, and affect each other by what they themselves decide, and how they themselves alter – does that phrasing require you to decide if there is or is not  an overarching person that is aware of each atom and cares about it? The problem with discussions about (let alone attempted definitions of) “God” is that so little of the web of assumptions going into the argument is conscious.

Not to mention, so many of the definitions of people, of life, etc., are wrong.

That too. As you know, our preference is to stay close to what you can do, what you can know first-hand by personal experience. Then, any such inevitable distortions and misunderstandings work themselves out, provided only that you continue to approach such questions in integrity.

Now let’s work our way backward for a moment, posing some rhetorical questions.

• Can a system of inputs being processed and turned into output which thus becomes input be considered mindless, or accidental?
• Can it equally validly be considered mindful, or determined?
• Does it matter if one looks at it as if the material world is really rocks in space, or sees the material world as mind-stuff? (Yes, it matters in effect, but is there any way to prove it?)
• You experience your own consciousness, and nothing else, firsthand. Yet you experience “other” as somehow inseparable from you.
• You may be observed from another viewpoint as “other,” just as you experience everything else as “other.” Does this suggest that viewpoint is more important than evidence?
• If you – as well as others – are a continuing element in processing input, and if that input is the unfinished business of the shared subjectivity – which of course includes your personal subjectivity within it – are you not in a situation of taking in each other’s laundry? That is, isn’t the situation inextricably about you and not-you?
• You are connected to other by Strands, by situations, by unfinished (and, for that matter, also by finished) business. Is the distinction between “you” and “other” real, or is it merely conceptual?
• Disease, illness, maladjustment, war, constructive cooperation, activity, disaster – all the fluctuations in human 3D existence – can they accurately be described as purely personal? As purely impersonal? As “yours”? As “other”?

You see where this leads?

Not quite. “All is one,” for one thing. But that seems more like something you are taking for granted than like something you are leading to.

Isn’t the question on the table at the moment the question of how illness originates, how it is distributed, what purpose it serves, etc.?

Yes, that’s a way to put it.

Aren’t we looking at it – encouraging you to look at it – from a systems point of view and from a personal-experience point of view?

Yes. And so –?

So you should all stop taking things personally, and at the same time should take them as your personal responsibility, and you’ll not only be happier and more equanimous, you will be more efficient in serving your purpose. And that purpose is (1) to play your part in the system, and (2) equally, to develop yourself. The two purposes do not – could­ not – cut against each other. Once you see that, your way will be less encumbered by internal objections and drag.

We will, in changing our own experience, somewhat change those along the Strands we share.

And vice-versa, of course, which is why you fluctuate in your beliefs, in your experience, over your lifetime. The Strands you comprise are no more unvarying than you are.

Clear, as you say it.

So how do you stop taking difficulties personally, while recognizing them as part of your personal responsibility? Understand, you are neither victim nor culprit. You didn’t bring sin or corruption into the world, and you don’t “deserve” to suffer the consequences. Or should we say that it is “your fault” that the 3D is subject to gravity (as if, for the moment, gravity were a “bad” thing), or should say that it is your “misfortune” to be subject to gravity? No, gravity just is, it’s part of the package, and there isn’t anything wrong, so how could it be your fault or your unfair burden?

I think you’re saying, in effect, that illness, disease, misfortune of any kind, shouldn’t be looked at as some inexplicable interruption of life, some distortion of life, but should be accepted as a natural part of the process, like occasional hurricanes as part of the overall weather system.

Yes indeed.

And that system requirements are somehow magnetized to us as we can use them.

Well, a better way to look at it would be not to look at it by effect (you can “use” the illness or whatever) but by affinity. It is true that you can use whatever comes to you, but that isn’t why this rather than that comes to you. How could it be, if (as is true) you can use whatever comes? If comes to you because something in you aligns with it.

That’s sort of conceptually clear, but I can’t think of a way to exemplify it.

You do not enter into 3D life tabula rasa – that is, as a “blank slate.” The philosophers who thought that conclusion inevitable were quite unaware that their unconscious assumptions were blinding them to any evidence that would render such a conclusion – such an assumption, really – so evidently wrong as to be almost ludicrous. You always enter as a work in progress. You, like the rest of the reality, always are in the midst of unfinished business!

Except perhaps the Buddha, I suppose, or Jesus, or perhaps others we haven’t heard of.

Set that to the side for the moment. Even if there were occasional exceptions, the overwhelming, overwhelming majority of 3D beings enter with unfinished business, and in a way you could say such things are receptors for whatever will lead to the opportunity to process them. “Misfortune” may be quite as useful as “fortunate” situations. Do you think you will regret skinned knees, after you look back on your 3D life, or will you regret (if anything) what you became as a result of how you reacted to skinned knees?

You have a wonderful way of posing rhetorical questions that make things clear.

Thank you. Call this “Systems and individuals,” perhaps.

All right. Our thanks as always.

 

Wednesday, October 5, 2022

5:25 a.m. Shall we continue? We’re wandering, I think, though you did warn us it’s a broad subject.

Look back, then, and summarize.

We started with discussing why we in 3D wake and sleep. We discussed the way everything is connected, matter as well as mind, all being mind-stuff. We moved to the question of illness as a social statistic rather than an individual problem. You said illness is neutral, not necessarily good or bad. We found genetics as a metaphor for the question of how the factors in illness are distributed. This is rough, but more or less accurate.

Accurate enough to orient. Focus.

Yes. Presence, receptivity, clarity.

As an orienting principle, take the continual interaction of positive, negative, and reconciling principles, recognizing that in each specific instance, a given force may play any of the three roles. Two forces would produce stalemate or divergence or conflict. One force would produce stasis. Three forces allow for change and stability.

The three we use as framework are individual subjectivity, shared subjectivity, and the quality of the moment. This could be said, “”I, other, the times,” remembering that both “I” and “other” are approximations; they are labels on certain parts of an undivided whole, they are not separate things.

Yes. You have described the external world (including our bodies) as unrecognized parts of who we are.

Not exactly. The shared subjectivity reflects to you unrecognized aspects of who you are. It is the only way you have of obtaining an outside view of yourself – which in practice means, a view of the things you have not included in your consciousness.

And I begin to see where you’re going with this, maybe.

Yes. You heard the hint when we reminded you that your body ought to be counted with the shared subjectivity in some contexts, and with the individual subjectivity in other contexts. Your physical body is the bridge between inner and outer, between “I” and “External.” It expresses (and shapes) you; it also expresses and channels the external world.

Hence, illness.

Well, hence the opening for illness, and for health, and for the transmission and reception of disease.

I will be damned.

If you will, it is you who will have to do the damning.

You know what I mean. This simple rejiggering begins to explain a lot. You had shown us that the body was in a sense us, in a sense other, but I hadn’t put it in terms of public health – or of individual health, really.

Remember that from the individual point of view, anything life serves up will have its uses. It can be turned to account. It can be coped with, and it can be suffered, and it can be profited by, and it can leave scars, and it can cripple and it can cause one to do things one would rather not have done, or things one cannot bear to remember having done, or things one cannot believe one was capable of (good or bad). The difference in result is partly dependent on the ratio of stimulus to what it encounters, and partly a result of the intent, the will, of the one encountering it.

That’s awfully abstract. I think you just said, anything that happens to us is subject to how we meet it, but that nonetheless we don’t have the ability to have everything our own way.

Doesn’t that square with your experience of life?

It does, of course.

You always have free will. Free will is always a factor in how you meet events. But you are not Superman, nor a god: Things happened to you not as you will but as they happen.

We keep coming back to Viktor Frankl’s insight that we always have freedom to decide how to respond to what happens.

That is, you can always form your second-tier response, whether or not you were able to shape your first-tier response or were overwhelmed by the moment. It is life’s second-tier responses, ultimately, that shape who you become.

But that’s from the individual perspective. How does it look rom the perspective of the system at large? (Not that “the system at large” has a perspective, but how would it look if it did.)

The key here – one often overlooked – is not the individual nor the collective, but the times in which they manifest. Jung’s insight that every moment of time expresses different qualities is accurate, and will lead you to many things.

Consider the paradox. We say there is only one, eternal, “now.” Yet we say that all moments of time exist and do not cease to exist, and are active, not inert; alive, not museum pieces. How can both aspects of time be true? How can the living present moment continually slide you into uncharted waters, continually slide you away from familiar, perhaps cherished, surroundings?

I’m groping for it. Time is the reconciling principle somehow, stemming from our interaction with our surroundings.

That’s more literally true than you may think.

We experience happy times as fleeting, painful times as dragging.

You can do better than that somewhat sleepy generalization. Try.

Yes, all right. We know that our experience of time has a variable quality, which you have said is a function of our consciousness. The year after Gateway seemed to go on forever – not that I minded!

An artist, a scientist, a thinker, may experience a depth of time that ordinarily s/he would not. You call it “Losing track of time.” You might better call it, “Time losing its hold on you.” What changes? Clearly it can only be your depth of engagement with the material. Thus, the variable isn’t (can’t be) the environment nor the times, but your engagement. It isn’t quite that simple, for life has to present you with the opportunity to engage, but that itself [the opportunity] is a ratio involving an individual’s sensitivity. Jacob Boehme caught a glimpse of sunlight reflecting off a bowl. Krishnamurti saw white birds against a dark background. Many a poet experienced transport by stimuli others might have found quite mundane. One’s sensitivity to the environment makes a difference. Still, basically the variable to watch is your own sensitivity, your own response to life and the world at any given moment. And isn’t it a good thing?

In that otherwise we would be dependent on something outside our control.

Yes. Your reaction is under your control, depending upon how you have developed. But the stimulus isn’t. How could it be? Should you be required to devise each test, as well as respond to it? However, let us return to looking at this from the system’s point of view.

Every moment that you move into is shaped by

• What has occurred previously
• What “the stars” allow, so to speak

That is, the state of the shared subjectivity’s unfinished business, combined with the potential and limitations of the quality of the new moment, add up to what that new moment can and must bring. The astrology of it (that is, the unending systematic change in cosmic “weather”) assures that you don’t continually tread the same ground, and that the ground changes not arbitrarily but according to law. The hared subjectivity aspect of it  assures that nothing is forgotten, either on a personal or on a system level.

The universe always presents the bill.

Let’s say, the universe always sweeps up after the party. Equally true.

And we’re out of time, but I felt like we got somewhere this time. The theme?

“Three principles as they interact.”

Okay. Our thanks as always.

 

Tuesday, October 4, 2022

7:40 a.m. Next on the agenda was going to be a look at the nature of the gates of specific times, you said: what they let in and what they don’t. Yes?

All this is in the context of you all being connected in so many ways more than your senses suggest.

• You and everything and everybody are all mind-stuff; you are not some alive and some dead; some connected and some not; some conscious and some not.
• Of course, within the dream that is life, many relative separations exist, but they are relative, not absolute. A cat is not a hat rack, and neither of them is a cloud, nor are they you. But as you probe more carefully, you see that everything is of the same substance, and must stem from the same source.
• There is, and there is not, randomness and chance at play. Is, in that leaves don’t each fall in predetermined spots on the sidewalk. Is not, in that all processes are subject to law, and the role of chance is within

Pattern within chaos, chaos within pattern.

Yes.

• The one-ness of everything does not start nor stop at the human level. Everything from beneath sub-atomic to beyond galactic is part of the one everything. Each specialized part will have its own law, but that law will be part of the great overarching law. Reality is not a house divided.
• To keep our attention at a human scale, everything that happens, happens within law. Personal subjectivity and shared subjectivity interact by way of the times they are lived in. The qualities those times allow are no more “random” than any other factor in life. Neither is there – nor could there be – meaningless variation.

Now, to bring this specifically to disease and illness.

I get that you were saying yesterday that sometimes we can’t see things straight because we are instinctively labeling things good or bad.

Should it be any different when considering health than in considering any other aspect of life? Some people automatically consider death bad. Does that make it so? Does that help them understand or appreciate the cycle of life? Does it help them understand the process or direction or meaning of their own life? Similarly, with anything else.

Eating the apple had more devastating effects than giving us a racial bad conscience.

It did indeed. It stops you from understanding. Condemnation always does that. You may impartially judge something to be unworthy, or whatever, but when you condemn it, in the sense of saying, “This is alien to me,” you lose any chance of actually understanding it from various viewpoints, because you will be unable to see it from any viewpoint that does not coincide with your sense of it being alien to you.

Thus we should look at anyone’s actions from a sense of “There but for the grace of God go I”?

At least let us say you should do well to avoid saying or thinking, “I could never have done that, regardless of my background or provocation.”

Now, carry that caveat to the examination not of people’s actions but to natural processes such as illness or accident or death. You cannot understand the nature and necessity of anything you insist on looking at as if it were evil, or even unfortunate. You must look for the gift in the situation, as people used to say. To put it another way, metaphorically, whenever you see dragons, you ought to look to find the treasures they guard.

And I expect you’re going to show us how to do that.

You already know how to do it; we merely encourage you not to let yourselves forget what you know.

So now – what possible purpose can illness serve? Or widen it to anything that restricts a person’s life in any way.

Immediately, I get that restrictions channel energies. Someone thwarted in one direction may work with added force and effectiveness in the directions left open.

This is true but not quite on point. We are not concerned so much with work as with being. Your lives are not worthwhile in proportion to the work you accomplish, even if it is splendid work, like Beethoven’s, or Newton’s, or Joan of Arc’s. It is what you are (seen or unseen by others or even by yourself), not what you do, that weighs in the realer world. Your deeds are bound to the 3D; your being, isn’t.

So then, illness or injury may help us channel our energies in certain ways?

Yes, they may, but we are not concentrated here with their effects, so much as their nature. It wouldn’t advance your understanding of water much, to know that it may be used to clean your skin.

I see. Still, you said this would center on us in our 3D lives. And you said restriction in one place might channel energies elsewhere.

Yes, those are effects. But why must there be illness or – to broaden the focus slightly – maladjustment of any kind?

That word “maladjustment” seemed to illuminate things a little. I can’t quite put it into words, but the sense I get is that there is the total situation and there is our part of the situation, and we don’t always quite fit with it. I mean, there are ragged edges.

That’s rough, but not too bad. It is in the right direction. But we don’t have the illustrating metaphor.

Rocks in a tumbler?

The purpose of the tumbler is to smooth and polish the rocks. That may be one effect of illness; it is not its reason for being.

Not quite sure how this can apply, but I thought of sedimentary rock, how it’s formed.

That has the quality of things finding their place and thereby contributing to the shape of the result. But still not right.

A lightning strike, in a storm?

That’s closer, but what it strikes is more random seeming than we are looking for.

Well, sticking to “As above, so below,” something we see in everyday life?

Genetics may be an example that will serve. Compound beings can pick and choose only from the total genetic traits of the parents. The combinations chosen by the child cannot include something that was not there in the bloodline, and the only way to add a trait to a bloodline is to mate with one who includes it. But until it is there, it isn’t there. You can’t use what you don’t have.

Conversely, what is there, may or may not express. If it does express, it may or may not be dominant or may be relatively unimportant. If it does not express, you call it recessive. It is still available in the bloodline.

Obviously – we hope obviously – not everything in the two merged bloodlines is gong to be coherent, or smoothly interacting. Just as in your mental life, you may have strands of DNA that carried physical traits that fight each other.

But doesn’t the 3D individual have some say in what expresses, and how?

What do you think freewill is? But like everything else in life, it has its law and its limits and its possibilities. Depending upon your conception of those limits and possibilities, your say varies.

Our time is up and we haven’t gotten very far.

We told you, it’s a big subject. As always, slow and steady wins the race. Or, to put it another way, righteous persistence wins reward. You will benefit from these discussions – as you well know – only to the extent that you wrestle with them and make them part of you.

Whatever will we title this?

“Restrictions” might do. Or “Restrictions and possibilities,” something like that.

Well, we’ll see. Our thanks for all this, as always.

 

Monday, October 3, 2022

4:30 a.m. Presence, receptivity, clarity. Gentlemen, I hope you have more to say on our higher minds. If that is a misnomer, we’re certainly open to correction.

It’s a little broader subject than you are expecting. We are somewhat at a loss as to where to begin. Bullets, then:

• Your higher, middle, and lower minds, if you wish to call them that, for the moment, are not individual in the way you assume. Just as your consciousness extends beyond the limit of one body to other bodies, well –

I sense already how convoluted this may become.

Not convoluted ultimately, but difficult to explain when so many concepts have to be considered, some simultaneously. It is a good deal of redefinition.

• You know by now that you as individuals are actually communities of communities. In one direction, this is Strands connecting to Strands, ultimately leading to everyone being all one thing.
• This is true on a strictly physical level as well, where it most seems unlikely. You all breathe the same air, pass the same molecules of matter through your flesh, and employ the same materials, sequentially, to build and maintain that flesh. Every atom of every body was once elsewhere and will be again. This ties you together quite as much as shared consciousness does. Indeed, it is a form of shared consciousness.

You are saying, I think, that matter is mind-stuff no less than anything else is, only we don’t notice the fact.

Animists notice. Magicians do. Mystics do. There is no matter without consciousness. There is no matter disconnected from everything. How could there be? Do you dream in disconnected parts, or does everything in a dream connect, regardless if they seem to relate to one another? As above, so below.

• Thus, you may say that your body, at a level different from (not exactly “below”) the level of your ordinary consciousness, is both separate (individual) and part of a community, just like your ordinary (middle) consciousness. Your body and someone else’s body may interrelate without you and they even knowing of each other’s existence. What some call “mass consciousness” is not a matter merely of mind as you ordinarily think of it. Your bodies have minds as well.
• But this simple situation is so easily misunderstood, and is so difficult to express clearly. Higher mind is part of all that is at that level. Middle mind (call it; ordinary consciousness) is part of all that is, at its level. Lower mind (the body’s mind?) is part of all that is, at its level.
• You see? Life is structured; life is fractally organized, in that it has no absolute separations; life’s structures repeat, or at least echo, at each different level of attention.
• In one sense, nothing is as simple as casual observation would make it seem. In another sense, the overall situation is quite as simple as you can conceive it being.
• Therefore – this may not seem, at first, like a “therefore,” but search out the connectors – every conception of life is correct in its way. Materialists are right that there is not spiritual world separate from the sensory world you live in. Mystics are right that all matter, all life, is holy.
• Of course, to say that every conception is right in its way, is to say that each is wrong in its way. Materialists undervalue the non-3D aspects of the world. These aspects are not separate, true, but they are not non-existent, either. Mystics sometimes undervalue the 3D in its particular manifestations, undervaluing the time and the place as specific manifestations of the divine.

You could say that materialists and mystics share the error of seeing the 3D world as separate from the rest of reality (the materialists thinking there is no “rest of reality,” but not in the way we would).

The deeper you go into understanding that the world is mind-stuff from a higher level of reality, the clearer you see (eventually!) that few people see things as they are.

Now, if your body’s intelligence connects not only vertically (to you), but also horizontally (to the world around it), what does this mean in practice?

Does it have something to do with epidemics? With people’s susceptibility to infections, or to non-inherited physical illnesses?

Why limit it to “non-inherited”? indeed it does. Just as crowds may be seized by momentary joint-mind panics or manias, so bodies may pass around susceptibilities to specific illnesses.

You aren’t talking about germs, here, or viral infections.

We are not speaking of them as causes, though obviously they may be agents. There is a reason why one child in a crowd would contract polio and another would not. You commonly think of the factor that makes the difference as hereditary: “He got good genes; she unfortunately inherited a predisposition to, or at least a susceptibility to, polio.” Not that simple.

I am assuming it is not their state of mind that is the cause, either, nor their “level of being,” whatever that really means. To say that would be a form of blaming the victim.

That’s correct. The agent no one seems too interested in investigating is the contagion through the body intelligence. It is not strictly genetic; it is not strictly mental or even spiritual, certainly it is not “luck” or “chance.” Yet one is chosen and another is spared. Why? Or rather, How?

I am getting a hazy sense of our interconnection resulting in a certain proportion of us needing to bear certain physical illnesses or handicaps. It isn’t at all clear, though.

You are groping toward a sense of distribution. Statistically, say, X percent of a population will acquire this or that condition. The percentage need not be invariant. In fact, it is unlikely to remain constant over time. But at any given time, X percent will contract polio, or will express breathing disorders or muscular disfunction or whatever, or will contract illness so severe as to cause invalidism and death.

Why?

I’m getting that this has something to do with the energies of the times, that just as the moving moment allows in this and not that form of mental energy, so with physical energy.

That is a distinction without a difference, at the level of mind-stuff, you understand. Proceed. You are on the right track.

What we think of as deformity or invalidism or as tragic consequences may be looked at as – what? Side-effects? Collateral damage? The inevitable tret of 3D existence?

Only if you insist on seeing them as negatives, rather than as neutral facts that may be (will be) experienced either as negative or as positive.

Yes, I remember. Nothing by chance, so everything may be turned to account

Should you expect otherwise? You may look at gravity as a bad thing that prevents you from flying about without machines, or you may look at it as a good thing, an automatic stabilizing force. Does your opinion alter its nature? So with the ailments that have to be shared out among bodies.

Accepting – as I do – that life is not really unjust, despite appearance – what is the origin and the usefulness of these ailments? I am asking, now, in terms of a shared bodily consciousness, rather than in terms of an individual’s own dynamics.

You are becoming more elliptical in your questions than you realize. In any case, your hour is up.

A hint, anyway?

Let’s segue into a wider look at the nature of the gates of specific times, what they allow and what they don’t. Not a short discussion! Only remember, or you will get it all confused: It’s all – we’re all – mind-stuff.

Today’s theme, then?

“Unexpected horizontal connections”?

Can we do better than that?

“Body-consciousness and illness”?

Maybe. Part I?

If you wish.

Our thanks as always.

 

6:30 a.m. I realize, typing this up, my particular form of interaction with the guys is necessary for someone who works alone. How could I do it as trance work? Cayce had Gladys Turner. Jane Roberts had Rob. Thus they could set their 3D conscious minds aside (so to speak) and allow information through. How could I do that?

And therefore, the nature of what I can bring through is different from a trance channeler’s. To bring it through me, the guys sometimes have to deal with argument, or incomprehension, or, particularly, with misunderstanding. They can’t just dictate to a stenographer.

Maybe one part of this is to serve as example for others who also have to work alone.

 

Sunday, October 2, 2022

6 a.m. Can we return to the specific questions I began with yesterday, and continue perhaps to more general descriptions of how the larger something within us wakes and sleeps, and how it affects our lives?

Concentrate, then. That is, center.

Presence, receptivity, clarity, yes.

Rephrase your questions as they seem to you now, rather than merely copying them from yesterday.

I guess I’d ask:

1. Am I ever asleep while talking to you? That is, can I rely upon this process to be an indicator?
2. Whatever the process is that I’m trying to look at, is it something necessary (similar to our body’s need for periodic sleep) or is it a sign of lack of development?
3. In short, what does it mean, what does it accomplish, and should it be fought?

You see, your questions today are better. You take into consideration yesterday’s few points.

First question. Anything you ever do may be done consciously or by rote. Therefore, it is difficult to tell by external evidence alone whether you yourself are awake or not.

I suppose it would be too easy, otherwise.

You are being mildly sarcastic, but in a way, that isn’t so wrong. It is not in procedure per se but in struggle that opportunities for fundamental growth arise. Good thing, too, or else people’s externals would outweigh their internals, in terms of possibilities for growth.

If our activities don’t automatically show if we are asleep or not, is there a way to know?

You are really asking, is there a way, when you are asleep, to realize that you are asleep, so that you may wake up.

Yes, I suppose I am.

“As above, so below.” How is it in your everyday life? Can you move to lucid dreaming by will?

Not directly (as far as I know). We can set our intent before we go to sleep. But once we are asleep, I don’t see that we can exercise our will until we go lucid.

Then should you expect it to be different when you consider your higher mind? (And put an asterisk here, because we will need to define what we are talking about better than by calling it “higher mind,” but not now.)

So I guess the answer to my first question and follow-up is, no we can’t tell merely by what we’re doing, and no we can’t influence it if we are asleep.

What you can do is monitor your activities as a habit – as rote itself, you might say. Sometimes you will be awake enough to realize that you are proceeding by rote, and then you can sometimes bring yourself more awake by making an effort. It is the equivalent of shaking off sleep while slowly waking up.

Your second question is well phrased to demonstrate that you don’t really understand what’s going on.

Well, that’s familiar territory.

Again, “As below, so above.” In your life in 3D, different stages of development require different amounts, and different kinds, of sleep. Babies and teenagers require great amounts of sleep, greater than any other stages of life. But although both require a lot of sleep, the kind of sleep differs radically. For the baby, it is a form of prolonged womb-time, as it gradually moves into its new surroundings. For the teen, it is almost life life-support as the developed consciousness is escorted into its newer body and all that that transition implies. The child in the years between infant and teen sleeps hard and deep, but it is more in the nature of recharging than of managing any transition. The post-teen for quite a while sleeps routinely and uneventfully, more a drip-trickle recharge than a massive inflow of current. Then after a time, the older adult requires less and les sleep, in less and less of an ordered pattern, because the needs of the adjustment mechanism are different. You understand, these are all broad generalizations, subject to exception.

As we were writing, I thought, my experience of how asthma could interfere with normal sleep patterns is probably paralleled in many ways for different people.

Of course, but this is not centered on the stages of life and their variations. This is mostly an analogy, to show that your higher mind (as we are calling it for the moment) will have different needs at different stages of its growth.

I take it that your answer to my second question amounts to, Yes it is necessary, but the specific need varies according to the development of something we don’t understand (yet?), and so may look like lack of development, but this my be our ignorance.

A fair summary. Your third question may seem to have been answered by implication – as a part of a natural process, should it be fought? – but not so simple.

Which brings us, I guess, to the question about higher mind that you said put a star by.

Yes it does. Again, center, slow, engage, receive.

Go ahead.

You are well used to thinking of yourself as a community of Strands by now. This is good. But now take that conceptually flat model (that is, primarily seen as a horizontal array) and remember that all parts of it are three dimensional. Not only do we mean that they express in 3D, as of course they do, but also we mean that each of these minds is hierarchical, and although we don’t usually focus on that fact, it is always so.

Max Freedom Long, etc. again.

That is itself a shorthand for saying, the Hawaiian understanding of life. [Huna.] Three layers, not just one. Do you wonder that your life is so complicated? It is, horizontally, a federation of Strands, and vertically, a federation (sort of) of different kinds of mind. Each element in each mind in each Strand is itself three layers of mind.

It all interacts. It may be seen, remember, as one thing, subdivided, or as many things, working together. Either way, you are looking at any given consciousness as a junction of so many ways of experiencing the world. To the degree that you can absorb what we are pointing to, here, you will get the idea of how complex is the everyday situation you embody.

And it all changes, moment by moment.

Consisting of so many variables, all in play, could you expect anything else?

I looked for Long’s book The Secret Science Behind Miracles, yesterday, but couldn’t find it. I’m pretty sure I own it, but I don’t remember specifics.

Without definitions, leave it at this. Different layers of being require different means of coordination.

“Means” wasn’t right, but I couldn’t find the right word. Rephrase?

Let’s say the nature of different layers of self is going to be different, one by one. Just as your body consciousness knows how to process sugars but not how to read books, and just as you know how to read books but don’t know (expect perhaps academically) how to process sugars or how to read the Akashic record, so your third layer of mind knows how it relates to things you don’t even dream of, but is apt to be vague on the specifics of your politics or ideology or religious or other opinions.

Let alone processing sugars.

Let alone processing sugars – but if it weren’t keeping the whole show running, there wouldn’t be any sugars to process.

The answer the question you haven’t yet posed, “Waking and sleeping, three questions.”

Okay. More to come, I take it?

TBA.

Good enough for me. Our thanks as always.