Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

Saturday, October 1, 2022

5 a.m. I feel like something within me is waking up, just as Gurdjieff and Ouspensky and Colin Wilson would describe. Yesterday, it slept, and I could not gear up to do anything.

Once again I am at the stage of looking around and wanting to take inventory of what I can do, should do. “Alcott’s Orphic Sayings,” for instance. And as usual I am in mind of Mark Twain’s brother whose name I can never remember, who woke up every day with new aspirations in a totally futile life.

All right, gentlemen, if you have a topic in mind, fine. If not, perhaps we can discuss sleep.

Let’s discuss your dilemma in re information from books v. information from us.

That would be highly appropriate.

You were going to ask if what you have experienced since Tuesday is indeed a form of sleep of some higher part of yourself, and you wouldn’t be nervous about asking about it if it were not that Ouspensky and Gurdjieff and Wilson had expressed not mere opinions but flat judgments on the subject.

That’s true.

You have never claimed omniscience. That goes for us as brought forth by you. If we’re “wrong,” we’re wrong. But surely our recent clarification of the nature of right and wrong ought to help ease that particular knot.

It did. Seeing right and wrong (that is, truth and error) as relative to a point of view, rather than as fixed points on a scale, did reduce the authority for me of external sources. It is as Thoreau said, it’s all hearsay to me until experience confirms it.

Then the last piece of the problem is this: You are concerned about what a given thought or discussion will reveal about your judgment. But maybe this has less to do with your judgment than with your receptivity.

It still feels a little reckless, until I remember that nobody (I hope) takes my word for it. Sparks, not gospel. So, sleep?

Since you felt it, it should be clear to you. Probably would be clear to you, if you hadn’t read it long ago.

Ironic, but true.

Just as long as you realize it, you can free yourself from that reaction. Not yours alone, of course – not by a long chalk.

I suppose I should explain that Gurdjieff taught Ouspensky, and Colin Wilson picked it up too, and I picked it up from all three of them: Something within us sleeps and wakes and sleeps again, and when it sleeps, we can do no work on ourselves. (This has nothing to do with the busyness of our days.) “No work can be done in sleep.” And sometimes we can feel, we can experience, that something, waking up. So, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, I functioned on one level, but was not functioning on a higher level. Which makes me ask: Am I ever talking with you while I am asleep? Am I ever prolonging my internal wakefulness by remembering to stay in touch with you? Does that internal rhythm require periodic sleep in the same way our external rhythm does?

Interrelated questions. Do you begin to suspect that you are currently awake again?

Smiling. But how about some answers?

You could answer all this, without leaning on our presumed authority.

Perhaps, but it would be easier to write it as you formulate it, than to have to do both.

Your underlying question ties to one you have been asking yourself recently and half-forgetting between asking: “What was it I wanted to accomplish, so long ago?”

It’s true. I haven’t been able to remember what I wanted to do when I was in my twenties, burning. And now, yes, I remember. I wanted to live at a higher level, to live awake, to have higher goals and pursue them. But it is so hard to do that on your own, with no school to help you, no colleagues to help you wake up when you fall asleep, no road map, no hints even, as to how to tie an external 3D life to an internal 3D life. And as I write this now, I remember, and I wonder than I ever could have forgotten. But that is exactly the problem. The million details of 3D life confuse our aim; they distract us; they set out illusions – mirages – and we get lost, pursuing them.

Yet, your situation is not hopeless, nor desperate even. Provided that you maintain unbending intent, you will return to the quest every time you wake up again. But the problem is, how do you connect the dots? How do you remember the intent after you have been asleep?

Exactly.

Well, how did you?

I didn’t do it very consistently. And decades went by without my being able to connect inner and outer. In 3D life I was one thing, doing this or that, groping through darkness, or, heavy fog, anyway. In non-3D – no, I can’t put it that way, because we’re talking about my mental structure within my 3D life only. Let’s say, internally, I was yearning for some path I could not find.

You are going to want to slow way down, to get this.

Presence I have. Receptivity, clarity, I have.

Yes, just approach this calmly. You didn’t recognize that you were actually in a state of some agitation. That does not aid clarity.

I see it as you point it out. Okay. So your question was, how did I maintain intent, to the degree that I did.

The qualifier is yours, not ours. We have no complaints about your performance.

To say it clearly:

• My internal life – careers, family, relationships pleasant and unpleasant, productive and counterproductive – were one thing.
• My internal life was something else. It touched on the external life, but it sure wasn’t identical to it.
• No wonder I had such trouble formulating ambitions or carrying them out once formulated: They were all peripheral to what I really wanted. And, I think I knew that in many ways, external success would lead away from what I really wanted.
• Only, it was so hard to realize or remember what I really wanted. Even when I remembered it, where was there any pathway to it?
• I see now, I haven’t been seeing the significance of Gateway and Monroe in the right context. I have been thinking of Gateway (accurately enough) as the beginning of my conscious life. I have been thinking of the Monroe community – the participants, more than the organization – as a community I had never had. I have been forgetting that all this is peripheral.
• The real importance of Monroe’s tapes and the programs and the shared experiences with the friends I made is that it was my only connector of my external and internal life.

That could be better phrased.

It was a pathway, of sorts. It was a way to do something as well as want something. That’s still not a very good way to say it, but if you have a better way, please provide it.

It helped you stay awake, by giving you something your 3D mind could use to remain consciously connected to your non-3D mind.

This is going to involve a redefinition, isn’t it?

It is only a nuance. We have said all along that mental processes are non-3D in nature, as opposed to 3D limitations. But surely all your life experience teaches you that you have one mind focused on the 3D world around you – your ego mind, call it (with no intent to denigrate “ego” which is a useful and necessary part of your Self) – and another mind that primarily functions in another non-3D sphere.

You, in other words.

Let’s say, that mind is how you communicate with us. But your guys upstairs are not necessarily “yours” in the sense of exclusivity. That’s a side point. The main point, the important point here, is that you have three minds – and you know this, only you have not be relating what else you know to this subject.

As you mention it, I remember, Max Freedom Long, and Hank Wesselman, and the three levels of mind, yes. It’s true, I hadn’t associated them.

Well, your one mind deals with the body, your other mind deals with body-plus-soul, let’s say, and your third mind represents your footing outside of 3D. If that third mind sleeps, your second and first mind can’t really do anything about it but wait for it to wake up.

But we don’t think of higher mind sleeping.

Well, perhaps you should begin to consider it.

You learned to live a more connected life. You didn’t know how to do it, but your intent pulled you to it. That’s what intent does, if you let it.

We’re going to have to continue this another time, I guess.

We’re here when you’re here – only, consider: Does what we discussed today shed any light on why sometimes you can’t connect? Think about that and we’ll talk about it.

All right. Today’s theme, I guess, is mindfulness, only that doesn’t seem to get it.

Try “Waking and sleeping.”

That may do. Very well, thanks for this as always. And if it is to you that I owe such continuity as I have experienced, thanks for that too.

We can talk about it.

 

Monday, June 10, 2019

4:30 a.m. Saying 34:

Jesus said: If a blind person leads another blind person, both of them will fall into a ditch.

I suppose there is more to this than the obvious point, that we should choose our guides carefully. The previous saying, about not hiding our light under a bushel, says light is placed so that people can see it. But of course the blind cannot see, so there is no light for them, and they must be guided by one who can see. As I say, the point is obvious. So what is behind the obvious?

External and internal are the same thing, remember, and Jesus was not concentrating on the 3D world as an end but as means, nor on society except as in reference to the individual. Put all that together and this saying looks different, does it not? Remembering, too, that it is a talking point for active discussion, and not a finished product for itself?

Well, it implies relations within the community that is the individual. Do we guide ourselves, and are we guided by ourselves? Can one part of us depend upon another? That seems to be forcing it. unless – come to think of it –

Yes, and that is why some of these sayings were not for popular consumption: They cannot be understood unless the underlying assumptions are understood – and these are not easily conveyed. So tell what you just came to.

If we are communities of “past lives,” each in its own present time, we may be said to be guiding ourselves. A life being lived in the 1800s in Spain connects to one being lived in the 1400s in the Philippines and one living in the 1900s in Africa somewhere, and so on and so forth. Each is alive now, in its own circumstances. Each is in the point of power – the now – from its own frame of reference. Each has unconscious and sometimes conscious interconnection with the others, so that as one changes, potentially the others change.

And who is to guide them all?

Exactly. Without a guide external to the unit, it may merely spin its wheels, never finding traction. But – there’s that word “external.”

You might bear in mind that external is a relative term, but still it may be relatively external. That is, yes, “all is one,” but forks are still not napkins even if both are part of a place-setting.

So, our units are more of a oneness than other units are to them, even though ultimately there is no division. I suppose that means a hierarchy of being, in which x number of 3D souls are spun from a given non-3D higher self – what TGU used to call amoebas – and at this level of analysis the various amoebas are each separate, thus confining us to a smaller subset of the universe.

You may find that what is clear to you at this moment is less so later; you may wish to rephrase what you just said, to be clearer for you and for others.

Okay. I get that my life connects with x number of other lifes spun out of whatever my higher self is. All my lifes (not lives, in that I am using it as was given me a while ago by Nathaniel or perhaps Rita or TGU in general) are equally alive, each experiencing its life as alive in the eternal now; so we affect each other, intuitively and unconsciously always, but sometimes also deliberately and consciously. Interactions with lifes of another higher self, though, are perceived as external because they are, relatively, external to my higher self. At some level beyond that, there must be identity again, but that is beyond our discussion. The immediate point is that we cannot escape from a closed system, so if we are to obtain guidance beyond what we know, it must come from outside. That is, in spiritual matters as in material ones, there is an “external,” if only relatively.

Exactly so. The light is no light to the blind. The blind cannot be guided by it, so must rely upon one who is not blind. And if one’s 3D soul connects to other 3D souls each of whom is blind, where is the guidance to come from?

I would have thought – from the higher self.

So now we ask you, is it possible for a higher self to be relatively blind, as well?

I shouldn’t think so.

That is because you are not yet factoring in vast impersonal forces, not vast personal forces, blowing through your lives. Or, let’s say, you are thinking of them as if they blew only through 3D lives.

You are saying they also affect the parts of ourselves that are in non-3D?

Can you think of any way in which they could fail to? You in 3D are also in non-3D. If you burn your toe, is your finger unaffected? Is the total being that connects toe and finger unaffected, merely because the finger itself is not burned?

We’re still thinking of our 3D lives as if they were unaffected by the rest of reality, I see.

You tend to think of them as if the 3D was as separate as it appears to be, and is if any one part of 3D is unconnected to other parts of 3D, yes. And, once again, this is why so many truths cannot be easily told: Too much background must be understood before the explanation can explain anything. But yes, this is how the blind wind up leading the blind, and how the lamp’s light may avail them not, they being blind.

Enough for the moment. This will repay pondering, even more than others, because it recasts what will have been experienced as familiar.

It does that. Many thanks for this. It seems like it by itself could lead to a whole book’s worth of further explanation / exploration.

So it could, and perhaps many a one will undertake it.

But not necessarily me, eh? Well, I have enough to do.

A work that can be completed by any one person will not live in the way that an open-ended exploration can.

Okay. Again, thanks, and see you next time.

 

[For several weeks in 2019, we examined the Gospel of Thomas, saying by saying, and it produced remarkable insights. I am moved to shared this transcription today, don’t know why.]

Thursday, June 6, 2019

12:30 a.m. Gentlemen, shall we discuss Saying 24?

Saying 24. His disciples said to him: Show us the place you are, for it is essential for us to seek it. He responded: He who has ears let him hear. There is light within a man of light, and he lights up all of the world. If he is not alight, there is darkness.

They said show us the place you are, for it is essential that we seek it. Very perceptive of them, for the statement implies, rightly, that Jesus is not of a different nature than them – certainly not “the only begotten son of God” – but that nonetheless he has something they don’t; is something, lives something, they want to emulate.

The light within a man of light is the difference, and has the potential to light up the world.

Is there a hidden meaning to the light, or “a man of light”?

Only what is obvious, that it is not talking about physical light. That should speak for itself. It is the inner knowing, the inner awareness, that communicates itself to those around the “man of light,” which is what the disciples were becoming. Of course “men of light” includes women; it is not gender-specific except in terms of grammatical and stylistic usage.

Okay, Saying 25?

Saying 25. Jesus said: Love your brother as your own soul. Protect him as you protect the pupil of your eye.

Is there a particular significance to the comparison of one’s brother to the pupil of one’s eye? That is, does it imply that one’s brother is essential to one’s vision?

Yes.

And – ?

Remember, 3D and non-3D. The external world – particularly other people as external – reflects to one’s consciousness aspects of oneself, known and unknown. So, the respect one gives to others is, in a very real sense, the respect one gives one’s own nature, known or unsuspected, but either way essential to the 3D person.

So that what is an ethical advice is also an indirect description of reality.

Of course.

Saying 26, then?

Saying 26. Jesus said: You see the splinter in your brother’s eye, but you do not see the log that is in your own eye. Remove the log from your own eye, and then you can see clearly to remove the splinter from your brother’s eye.

In context of the previous saying, I see it differently than I had before. I had seen it as advice to stop projecting. But it is also advice on how to use the external world to gain information on our inner world.

Correct. And that’s enough for the moment. Three sayings will provide enough to mull, to chew on.

 

 

Tuesday, September 27, 2022

I have been re-reading our study of the Gospel of Thomas, beginning in May, 2019, and yesterday I was moved to say, “I’m finding it very interesting. In fact, it’s pretty impressive. Did all that come through my pen? I hope it is not all illusion and delusion.” But I also picked up Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous, re-reading of Gurdjieff telling Ouspensky how things are, and said, “I despair of actually accomplishing anything. Everything I have brought through may be wrong, and how would I know.”

At 3:15 a.m. I wrote:

Perhaps my inability to reach more extended ranges of consciousness ought to argue for doing the Discovery program again. Yet if there was no permanent gain before, why should I think to win something permanent now? And if nothing permanent, why bother?

By the same token, why bother with anything? To get through the day, I suppose.

I find myself in an attitude of prayer, and I realize, I’m in the same position as George Washington at Valley Forge, or Abraham Lincoln so often during his presidency, at a loss as to where help is going to come from, at a loss as to what to do or how to do it. Their struggle involved an entire country, mine only me, but it is the same struggle. They came through it, I can come through it, but I wish I had their strength of character.

So then, after I awoke again:

8:15 a.m. John Anthony West, is that you knocking at the door? I’m reading In Search of the Miraculous. And slowly, and a chain of associations – not a very long one – puts you in my mind. Is it true, or just a stray thought?

You remember my abrasiveness and assertiveness. You could do with a touch of them.

The connection between us was your obvious and incontrovertible contempt for modern so-called civilization, its clear decline.

It becomes blindingly obvious as you look at it, does it not?

Long ago already.

You could bring it out. I would have said “you need to,” but you changed it.

I did. Sorry. It can be slippery, this process.

Plus you don’t like people telling you that you “need to” do anything.

True.

You are agonizing over the possibility that everything you have been doing for 22 years and more is a mistake, is a misdirection, is leading you and those who follow you into a swamp. But you forget, it isn’t up to you. Consider: sparks, not persuasion. Interconnectedness. Higher selves, etc. What you might call divine protection, or anyway providence. You don’t necessarily know what you do, why you do it, what effect it has, or on whom. You do the best you can.

Well you certainly did. I loved your Serpent in the Sky. And I loved your attitude in general. It’s too bad that the only time I might have talked to you, I was so sick, in Ohio that time.

Nothing by chance, you know that.

I do.

That’s mostly what I dropped in for, a word of timely encouragement. Colin and others join in; we’re all in this together. And yes, you might contact Ouspensky or Gurdjieff directly, but would you and they be on the same wave-length?

Somehow, I doubt it.

Then stay at whatever level is most comfortable. After all, if you can hang out with Carl Jung, that’s not exactly at the beginner’s level, is it?

No, that’s true. And I wonder, would G or O have considered (did they consider) Jung to be less than they? On a dead-end path? Whatever?

Try to keep real in your mind that nothing is fixed, no matter how the 3D evidence points. They are as alive as I am, and I am as alive as you.

So I shouldn’t let myself become intimidated by what others – even great others – have left behind.

You came to do your work. What advantage is it to assume that it’s all a snare and a delusion? Maybe it is, and in that case you need to find something realer. But maybe it isn’t, and doubt is distraction.

I wish I could know.

You can’t ever know, but you can intend. Unbending intent cannot come to nothing. Whatever it do or do not achieve in the external world, it works its transformation in you, which is realer than the shared subjectivity.

I’d give something to know what Dr. Jung would have thought of all I have been given. Yes, I hear it: “Ask.” Nothing to lose, I guess. Dr. Jung, a word?

I told you first off, don’t be intimidated by the authority of others. I might have added, that authority is always in your mind; it is your acceptance or rejection of claims that you can never judge on any evidence but whether or not the results resonate within you. Kant, Schopenhauer, hundreds of philosophers you will have heard of and probably not read, and if read not studied, and if studied not necessarily understood: They all produced their truth, and each of those truths are true for some and are untrue for others.

Now, listen, here. I do not say, “seem” untrue to one or another; I say “are” untrue. Truth and untruth are not objects, but the result of ratios. On one side of the equation is the individual (you, in this case) and on the far side is the way of seeing things. The sign that completes the equation connecting the two may be positive or negative, and it may – very probably will – change over time, so that what was once seen as true is seen as false, and what was once clearly false is seen as true.

Or, to put that more carefully: Everything contains truth and error, but which is evident, which is predominant, depends upon the angle from which it is approached. Every individual exists at a certain point, stands at a certain place, one could say. From that place, only certain angles of vision are possible. One may see a narrow range or a wider one, but no one sees from all directions. Hence, only certain angles of vision are open to any given point, any given individual life.

But your life may change you; you may will it or it may change around you; either way, you find yourself at a different point. From there, things look different. What is true, what is error, may be unrecognizably different, or slightly different, but there will be some change. This is a different situation from what is commonly supposed. Therefore, what is true for Gurdjieff may not be true for you, or may be partly true, or may be false but provocative. Understand, no one’s truth should make you doubt your own.

I’m getting that this is stronger than your saying, “Don’t be discouraged by seeing things differently from people you feel know things.”

That would be a very mild version of what I have to say. More like, “It is your responsibility to develop your thought, your sight, your version of reality, and not just accede to someone else’s.” Only you can do that. If you do not, no one can. This is true of everyone, of course, but you are responsible for you, not them.

And if some or all of what I bring forth is wrong?

Did you hear me when I said right and wrong are operators, not terms of an equation? Even if everything you said was “wrong” – and how could that be, if you are operating from integrity? – how do you know what it will spark in someone else needing exactly that nudge? Do you suppose I had any idea who would make what out of what I spoke and wrote?

I wasn’t going to publish any of this, but I think I will.

Others have their struggles.

Yes. All right, I thank you – and John – for this. It does help.

 

I am not in the same state of calm focused concentration I was in when I returned from Egypt. Yesterday I got a nice section of my novel written, but in general, I feel I have been sloppy and undisciplined. More than that, wasting my life, still without a clue. How can this be?

Yes, if you are willing to chime in, I am willing to listen.

How do you expect to justify your life? What makes you cling to the idea that lives can be, should be, must be, justified? It is not that justification is there but may be invisible to others. It is that your life is your experience, whatever it turns out to be. What you did not create, you cannot fully understand. What you cannot understand, you cannot fairly judge. How do you know what your score would be on the great cosmic scoreboard?

But if you feel that you are wasting your life, shouldn’t that feeling count as evidence? If you get advice from your friendly neighborhood guys upstairs, and you don’t follow it, shouldn’t that indicate that you might be doing better than in fact you are doing?

Nobody dies content with what they have lived, perhaps. Their own opinion of the life they lived may not be the only way to see it, though.

We don’t seem to be talking about the same things. The pattern of my life is to want to do great things and then not really try to do them, and feel dissatisfied that I do not, yet be unable to use that dissatisfaction I feel.

Maybe you aren’t doing what you think you are doing.

Look, I’m not talking about external achievement, here.

A life conducted according to your own ideas of how it ought to be conducted may be regarded as an external achievement, surely.

I’m thinking more of my internal life.

And we are pointing out that internal and external are more directions of viewpoint than different realities. Caesar’s life was enormously significant for the world, but it was at least as significant for himself! Do you think Caesar had accomplished everything he wanted to accomplish?

You continue to revert to what seems to me to be a focus on external. The real question would be, was he in his character as he wanted to be? Was he satisfied with the choices he had made as to what to be?

Would you like to ask him?

I have no confidence that I could. What links can I have with him? Oh, my attitude of admiration, I suppose, as with Lincoln.

Plus, facilitation from the non-3D may be available at this moment that is not available at every moment.

Well, I guess we can try this entre nous. I don’t think I’ll be sending it out!

Why not? Do you not tell them to discern for themselves?

If it wouldn’t sound flippant, I would say Hail Caesar. If that much-admired man is willing to speak, I am certainly willing to listen.

You labor under a mistake if you think of the dead and yourselves as speaking as one island to another. There are endless chains of connections, link by link. How would Caesar move people still, if there were not? Someone connecting to you after you are no longer in 3D thereby connects to a link to all those whom you valued. This is true for everyone, of course. Plato, for instance, Sophocles, Homer. Their influence has spread enormously over the years, because generation after generation has forged links of affection, admiration, identification with them and their works. In your case, your established habit-pattern would serve as a way to reach Abraham Lincoln or John F. Kennedy or Ernest Hemingway or Caesar. After a time, external works are less important than their function as conduits.

An aspect of the “All is one” and “Everything is alive” that I had not considered. I’m getting the suspicion, suddenly, that people like me who read widely in history and biography may serve as connectors.

But don’t limit it to only what interests you. Someone suffused in the world of science or of sports or of any given pastime, trivial or otherwise, similarly serves as a node. This is one of the invisible things people accomplish merely by living.

Caesar serves as an enormously wide node.

In Caesar’s sphere, yes. No one embodies all the arts and sciences, and no one connects closely to everyone or everything. However, it is true that one’s significance may broaden after death, depending upon how others make use of the connection. Lincoln, for instance, would have been unrecognizable to the 3D Lincoln, yet the transformed legend is not untrue to the man he was.

Let’s talk about Caesar, unless you prefer to talk about something else. Did you die contented with what you had done? Or let’s put it this way, when your consciousness connected with your larger being after you died, what can you tell us of where you were?

A sudden death is convenient, but it is also a shock, you understand. So what you ask may not be exactly what you want to know.

Tell us whatever is appropriate, then.

Dissatisfaction was inherent in the nature of the man Caesar was. The man Omar Khayyam was not yet born, but his sentiment about wishing to remold the scheme of things entire expresses Caesar’s nature perfectly.

[From the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, quatrain 88:

“Ah Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire,
Would not we shatter it to bits – and then
Re-mold it nearer to the heart’s desire!”]

You were awake among so many stupid people!

You have said yourself, in the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is regarded as an hallucinated lunatic. The same may be said of a man half-awake.

From what I know of your life, you had enormous charisma, which I take to be the result of an integrated personality. But how did you appear to yourself?

Clear-sighted. I could see situations not only from my own vantage point but as they were, in and of themselves. Few others could do that. Politics is the art of seeing what can and cannot be done: at any given moment, and in the short term, and in the longer term. It repays the ability to see, to understand what you have seen, and to act upon that understanding. But what is politics? At one level, a game played by the ambitious. At another, a struggle among interests whose interests are represented by the ambitious. At another level – but rarely very consciously – it is an attempt to reconcile forces so as to produce a desirable result.

Therefore, political success may come to the most ruthless, or the cleverest, or the clearest-sighted, or the person moving in the direction that events are trending. To put that last another way, the person whose personal ambition and vision enables him to see openings that others do not.

As in your conquest of Gaul followed by extending Roman citizenship to them, which resulted in extending the republic to the Atlantic without thereby incorporating a nation of embittered rebels.

Yes, a good example. It required thinking of citizenship in a different way. To Caesar’s opponents, it was an opportunistic perversion of an historical right. To Caesar, it was a practical measure.

You saw yourself as clear-sighted, commonsensical.

I did. If I pursued visions others could not grasp, why would that make me other than methodical and commonsensical in my approach to them?

So when you died, what was your summing–up?

Here you may envision a shrug of the shoulders. I had succeeded in some things, I had failed in others. I had lived as fully as I could, had tasted pleasures and absorbed responsibilities and had amassed deeds I was proud of and deeds I was ashamed of. How it is different for anyone?

No sense of gnawing incompletion, such as the projected invasion of Parthia?

Do you expect to die with no unfinished business? But you will find that you see things differently when you are freed from so many constrictions in your viewpoint.

Only move with confidence. You don’t know the shape of your life: Who ever does? You don’t even know the date of your death, which is the first thing people after you will know about you. Your view of your life is always prospective, so how can you expect to see it clearly? On the other hand, you can see, looking back, that your lives do make sense, so, move confidently.

 

Aspects of communicating mind to mind across time

I get that we’re going to explore the question of transition between lives, and if so, that would be of great interest to me, and perhaps to others. I don’t feel we have ever had a fully coherent picture.

It was necessary deconstruct older, inadequate, models, before a closer approximation to reality could be apprehended.

This isn’t “Caesar,” I take it from the last sentence. Not that it matters who.

Don’t forget, Caesar thought in Greek and Latin, not in English which hadn’t even formed in his time. We always communicate person to person in  “thought,” not in whatever language we are perceived in. So if a sentence is wordy or pompous or has more syllables than you like, whose fault is that? (But this is a joke, which you also don’t expect.)

The point is that your own preconceptions and assumptions as receiver shape your communications to a greater extent than you realize. You aren’t a blank slate receiving language, any more than in receiving concepts. You are not limited in who or what you can connect with by any arbitrary limit, be it time, distance, ethnicity, gender, whatever. However, certain orientations will be closer to you than others, and these will be the easiest and most productive to approach. You may think of them less as individuals than as interests, or traits, or – well, orientations.

I get that this means the “feel” of a mind, the general outlook or, I suppose, any one aspect of a general outlook. Come to think of it, we’ve touched on this before. When I connect with Hemingway, I don’t necessarily connect with the hunter or fisherman or avid sportsman.

Yes, and it is always so. You see, if you change your model from unit to component, the possibilities and limitations change. [That is, change from thinking of ourselves as units to thinking of ourselves as bundles of strands, as cohabiting communities.]

And that’s what you were saying, it is more like communicating trait to trait, say, than Frank to whomever.

It is one more complication, or perhaps simplification, that comes when you change concepts. Frank as a unit talking to Caesar as a unit isn’t nearly so likely as Frank in his communication aspect talking to Caesar in his communication aspect.

Writer to writer, you mean.

Yes. With someone else it may be different aspects. But they will be aspects you embody, or else where is the connection.

 

Sunday, September 25, 2022

10:20 a.m. Reading about possession in Mary’s unpublished manuscript, I’m led to think, “How can that be? It takes disconnection for granted. Maybe it is a new dominant Strand taking over?

You see the difference an overall concept makes. Wat one concept leaves open as a possibility, another closes. More to the point, what one explains, another explains differently, and therein lies opportunity.

Say on.

If you are each separate, then yes, if “you: go away because you are drunk or are using drugs or are in a coma or any of several possible situations – “you” can be upstaged, dispossessed, by another individual.

Or, if you are all   connected so that every division is only a relative division, not an absolute, then there’s plenty of room for displacement by conflict among the many lives that coexist within you.

What if either conception is only a provisional, partial, sort-of-true explanation? What if you apply “As above, so below” to the question of who you are and what influences may affect you?

If we in 3D are communities made of communities, brought to a point by being fixed in a moment of time/space, well, let’s see:

• We certainly are surrounded by others, even if ultimately at another level we may be all the same.
• We each seem to embody certain values, certain ways of seeing things.
• Such difference may lead to instinctive enmity. “Born enemies,” so to speak. Also of course to instinctive alliances, “born friends,” or even “born soul-mates.”
• We seem to be here partly to act as part of the shared subjectivity for each other, so show the other (perhaps merely by being what we are, regardless of anything we do) something about him- or her-self.
• Some people are bullies; some are ignorant louts; some are nurturers, teachers, helping hands, inspirations, whatever. What we are, not merely what we do, varies greatly.

So do you colonize one another, in a way analogous to possession?

I don’t know if we do; I know that some people try to. They try to completely control another person, like a guard in a concentration camp.

Should you expect that anything that manifests in 3D does not exist in non-3D? May perhaps be said to originate in non-3D, to be worked out in 3D?

So what’s your model, here? That cases of possession are internal or external? One of our own Strands, or something extrinsic?

What protects people from possession? It can’t be as simple as consciousness,” or you’d all be vulnerable whenever you closed your eyes.

I imagine our continuity is preserved by our link to our non-3D self. And I don’t see how that link could be severed.

Then how does possession take place? How is it even possible?

I can’t see how it can be anything external, whatever “external” may mean. So that means that anything that manifests is part of our larger being’s inventory.

Your Larger Being, being of course different from other Larger Beings.

Well, that’s a thought. We’re right back to “All is one.”

It is. You won’t get around the fact. But if all is one, and as above so below, what of possession?

It is just as you said: How we see it depends on the model we fit it into.

Yep. There’s room in the universe for everything, and there’s no possibility of the universe holding less than everything.

Very interesting.

3:50 p.m. So let’s talk about “alternate realities,” sparked again by Mary’s manuscript. My present thought is that every possible permutation occurs not at the same time, exactly, but one after another depending upon which changes of mind produce which chain-reactions. So in one sense you could say every reality lasts the blink of an eye, if that; in another sense, you could say that each version of reality is as complete and as real as any other, because – it’s all projected. Its all mind-stuff, and mind-stuff requires no time to reset the scenery.

True enough. And that is one way of seeing things, not two. That is, it is one unified vision that says, “From the one point of view, this; from another point of view, that.” Far better than thinking that any one point of view could ever adequately encompass what is.

Naturally there would be bleed-through between lives. In fact, it’s surprising there isn’t more of it.

Your mind is a focusing-mechanism, designed to focus on one moment, one place, one composite reality. It doesn’t always eliminate bleed-through, and of course there are always some who seek it out, wanting to see around the corner (and nothing wrong with that), but mostly it functions as we describe: One world at a time, as Thoreau said on his deathbed.

 

[This seems appropriate in light of recent material.]

Saturday, July 7, 2018

5:40 a.m. A moment to describe what just happened, then back to the council room, I hope.

I lay down with sleep mask on and assumed the eagle, flew up to the council room in a tree, shifted to human – or to a point of awareness, I guess, really – and first had to try to get the Jessica Williams piano tune to stop playing in my mental background. When I did, I was back in the calm space I experienced at Discovery. Then I tried to talk to my council, and found it hard to stay there. The temptation to give in to sleep was strong, but I realize now what is happening in such moments, so I followed Judith’s advice to sensualize as best I could. By pressing my fingertips against the bed and envisioning myself as pressing them against the tabletop, I held on. But it was difficult rather than easy. I wanted something visualized to help me hold it. They questioned that, and I realized that this process, writing sitting up with eyes open, gave me the sensualization I need – as long experience demonstrates. So here I am at the desk again.

Now, gentlemen and ladies of the council, let me bring my awareness back among you. What is it I realized – and realized I would lose if I continued to try to do it the ordinary shamanic way?

You would lose the whole proceedings, for one thing. You were thinking of yourself as the executive officer of the ship, or alternatively as the most junior officer, invited to speak first so that his opinion would not be inhibited by prior expressed opinions from his superiors.

Yes, so I was. I don’t even know what should be on the agenda.

No, but you’re excellent at listening, despite what you and others sometimes think.

I’m willing to listen, anyway.

If you begin to visualize our sessions differently, they will of course change correspondingly.

Is that in our best interest?

We like the “our.” Yes, it is, because you are at a new stage, a point reinforced when you listened to tapes of yourself from more than a dozen years ago.

All right. Should I give over to you?

You can’t really do it, and it wouldn’t be good if you could do it. But you can be guided.

Well, that’s the name of the game, isn’t it, guidance?

It is if that is what you accept, if that is what you want. It could be other things.

Such as?

Pure information to assist you on a pre-determined course, for one. It isn’t for us to choose for you, though we may set out the choices.

In setting them out you may make my choices all but pre-determined.

You might think so, but free will is more to us than a buzzword or a sham. The goal is for you to choose. What you choose is not nearly so central.

Then let’s go about it in a different way. What is the most valuable thing you can offer me today? How do we proceed?

You don’t yet quite realize it, but this change in procedure is itself a new departure.

Immediately, I think, “I’ve got to share this with Dirk and Jim.”

That is part of your function, networking awarenesses and understandings.

So, today’s agenda?

Your long-held desire is closer contact with other parts of yourself. “Past lives,” at first.

Yes, and the difficulty has been (1) no visualization, but knowing, which makes verification impossible, and (2) no over-arching concept to help me get a sense of it.

No over-arching concept? What have we been doing, all these years?

Clearing ground in preparation, I would say.

Yes, true enough – but it is somewhat staggering to think that you really have no idea.

Why should that come as a surprise to you? You know my mind from the inside, presumably.

Well, yes and no. The effective points of contact aren’t the same as the sum total of theoretical points of contact.

You mean, it never came up. But even that surprises me. How could I be aware of it – as I have been for nearly two weeks – and you not? Am I getting bad information here, or making bad interpretations or something?

Let’s put it this way. Who you are is one thing. What you think is another, and what you feel is yet another.

Sort of like Bob Monroe envisioning the mental and emotional bodies separate from the physical and energy bodies.

It was a way to experience different aspects differently, yes. Well, your mental categories come to us in the context of where you are at any given moment.

It still doesn’t explain why you wouldn’t know where I was or am mentally.

Let’s drop the subject.

Really?

It can’t be productive. Let’s move instead to a useful structure for you to use as scaffolding, in place of previous scaffolding which, we see, has evaporated in the light of recent experience. You had flirted with this new awareness in Luigi and Thomas’ class, but it did not hit home until you sat down to work last month.

I have been thinking of 3D-me as part of All-D me, an emanation from an All-D Sam.

Good enough as far as it goes.

Yes, but when I came to consider past lives, etc., where do they and I fit together? Yes, I may be a ring comprising strands that are other lives, and I in toto may be a strand for other lives, but that now seems both too simple and too complicated.

The difficulty surfaced when you began to see yourself as a point of awareness.

Yes, so it did.

So who is this around the table?

Precisely.

All right. But you do realize? The difficulty you are experiencing is due to incongruities in an accepted framework, and will not go away, but will change, if we change framework. You are still you, think of yourself how you will.

Still, a new scaffolding ought to be useful.

We’ll see.

Anything to make my new acquisition more permanent (as opposed to retrogression, I mean) and more useful?

We can do that. Consider first, who is it around this non-3D table?

Various members of my guys upstairs, I presume.

Suppose you couldn’t presume that. Then whom?

Past lives, I assume. Any part of my total self that I am not consciously aware of.

You see – or rather, feel – the problem?

I am beginning to. If I do the defining, I cannot transcend my own conceptual limitations. So why don’t you do it for me? That’s more or less what I’m asking.

But this requires thought, and a fresh mind.

I’m still suspicious of how you can not know what I know. Your preliminary statement strikes me as doubletalk.

We are aware of it. Perhaps we can fold that explanation into the new scaffolding, whatever it turns out to be.

Turns out to be. Puzzling.

Remember, from the beginning we have turned out to be other than what you expected – which is the same as saying, than how you had conceptualized us.

Yeah, I hear your wisecrack: “Remarkable, given that we may not exist.”

Not entirely a wisecrack. Enough for now.

 

8 a.m.Let’s try playing “Potential” from Discovery, and see what happens.

Your move, guys. [Vague visuals and associations from the visuals. A round table, Camelot, the musical, reflections of the faces on the tabletop]

Mistake to think of them as individuals – more like representatives of qualities. So, Hemingway in his fifties, writing – the picture on my wall – is more certain aspects of him than him as a package. Not packages at the table, so much as personifications, qualities. By listening, we can absorb those qualities for the moment. The longer we listen, the longer we borrow the qualities. At some point they are also your own.

You are a point of awareness surrounded by influences and resonances. Not one individual and other individuals though that is how it seems. One focus of consciousness among all others. You personify what you are, and thus represent those qualities for others. They don’t exactly experience you as an individual but more, your qualities that resonate with them.

But – relatives and friends we connect with?

That’s different. You – we compound beings – are both. Both individual and yet representative of qualities.

We interact differently depending on if we seek out the individual (for conversation) or the qualities (for guidance).

That’s roughly correct.

So the mistake is in seeing ourselves and others as too individual.

As exclusively individual, and as too particularly individual. Frank and Margaret did not share lives in Spain, but they are connected to those who did. Drawing on the connection, they draw upon the lessons and wisdom of those lives; that doesn’t make them “past lives” in the way people think of past lives.

You’re going to have to make it clearer than that.

Give us a clearer conduit.

I would if I could.

 

All right, delta was flooding up, only now I know to fight it. Forcing myself back awake may do it.

You have new tools and can learn to employ them. But it may take time.

Still., it is a new tool, that knowledge. I’ll have to tell Judith I’m grateful for it.

So now when you envision yourself as a point of awareness, think not of self as a point in a vast cave or bag or total, but as the entire container whose

Geode!

Good image. Your awareness extends to the whole thing, but you are one concentrated part of it. You can extend without changing.

Still fighting waves of sleep. There is much more to get if I can learn to fight it off, isn’t there?

You don’t need an answer to that.

No, I don’t. But I need a way to remain here without struggle.

This can be part of your next novel, once you master it.

That doesn’t help me now, though.

Still you got what you need. You may have to work it a bit – and realize that an understanding that suits you won’t necessarily suit everybody.

I’m fighting these waves of sleep – I often have them, reading – and I think just pausing may do it. But it is a struggle.

What comes up?

The council room,, the delegates – just an approximation, an image, a visualization of what really is.

Do you need a visualization?

It would help, I think.

Will the geode help?

Colin talked of waves of sleep in The Outsider, I think, or in Religion and the Rebel.

Yes, it isn’t effort, it is transcending energies inflowing, that brings the delta.

I don’t think geode will quite work.

It could, if you remember the split geode Dave Garland brought you long ago, filled not with space but with crystals.

Maybe.

Now flirt with sleep – with hand in the air, maybe, to wake you up – and see if there is more.

A bit from Colombo – the diver’s car.

[Then as I held myself on the edge, my hands were filled with energy. I turned them toward each other, and they were buzzing, so to speak. I thought, healing hands. I used the energy experimentally, and I’m sure it’s what I need.

[At this point I had a headache, as I have had at other times at the edge of sleep. I wrote: “Need to release the energies, I think,” and just as I wrote that, the CD ended, and I stood up and walked around, awake, if a little spacy.]