Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

Friday, September 23, 2022

6:10 a.m. So, my friends, I sampled the audio file Bill Ebeltoft sent the link to, and sure enough it reminds me of a state of mind I don’t get to easily otherwise. Not the realer reality I visited once, but, let’s say, one story up from my normal dwelling place. I’ll have to try using that as background while I do something, see how it plays out.

This ties in with my ongoing concern as to whether to do Discovery again.

You aren’t asking for a “Should” or a “Shouldn’t,” as you once might have done. This is good. You are asking, more, “What if?”

Exactly. The pros and cons, please?

In favor of doing another program

• Past experiences almost universally good.
• This specific program, very
• Your hope as always is that the right tool applied in the right way will open the closed door, or will find the lost key – however you want to think of it.

Negative:

• Could it be a diversion, or evasion of doing real work?
• Being with people full time for a week will have its difficulties.
• There is a question of health concerns, and we say no more.

I suppose any course of action, for anybody, at any time, has its upside and downside. These seem pretty minor. Not exactly crossing the Rubicon.

Not like Gateway, no.

I suppose it would be worthwhile to take even an off-chance, if there were the possibility of results as dramatic as Gateway produced.

Only they weren’t what you hoped for, let alone expected; they were an entirely different order of things.

Yes they were. How would I have known what to ask for?

How would you know now?

Looking at your list, the negatives seem theoretical and not too important, the positives mostly hope.

Your choice.

As always, yes.

Then the next question is one of my responsibility – or not – to write a summary of the way we now see the world, in the wake of 20 years of discontinuous but connected instruction by you and by life.

More specifically, why can’t you bring yourself to write the book?

Yes.

But maybe it isn’t another book the world needs.

That would be fine by me.

Can’t you follow where your feelings lead?

I can when it’s a clear direction. Not so easy when it’s blankness.

Now, you know better than that, in a way. That is, you have known better, and now it would be well for you to remember better.

And to do that?

Use what you know. Your ever-twisting acronym, for one thing.

Twisting is right. Latest iteration (and I’m not satisfied with it yet) is PERC: Presence, engagement, receptivity, clarity.

Regardless, center on that. Now, with your mental space clear and you in a state of quiet receptivity, sit with the question. Where would your feelings lead you?

I may have to list things as they come, sort them out later.

That’s a good use of bullets, just as valid as using them to list things you’re sure of.

• Most of the things that are associated with “success” I don’t like. Publicity – particularly reaching for publicity – especially.
• Too much physical activity is beyond me.
• Zoom etc. opens up possibilities I am not paying enough attention to.
• I like to teach, I like to encourage.
• I guess I no longer believe much in books, in my writing them I guess I mean. That’s a shocking statement, but it’s true.

Or is it that you feel defeated ahead of time at the idea of getting your books accepted by a publisher with the ability and will to get them out there?

That too.

Remain in the clear receptive state. Continue.

• I liked teaching those weekend courses. But I would have needed for TMI to promote them, which it did not do. Bob Holbrook was wiling to expand it to a weeklong program, but that was perhaps more than I could do.
• What I really would have liked would have been to have a continuing seminar with the same people, to help them as obstacles arose. At the same time, maybe the weekend was all that people needed. No point in fostering dependency.
• Actually, what I would have preferred would be to be part of an ongoing group, exploring. I don’t have to be the leader (speaking of the blind leading the blind), and I don’t have to be a follower; can’t do it for long even if I wanted to. A group of peers, perhaps alternating leadership according to specialized knowledge or aptitude.
• We’ve been meeting for two and a half years on Wednesdays, but I don’t know what we’re accomplishing. Something, I think, but I don’t know quite what, and perhaps nobody else does either. If this is the group of peers I just mentioned, the form of it hasn’t jelled. And maybe an hour a week isn’t enough to do anything beyond remind us.

Suppose you set out to create a group of just such self-selected explorers. What would you do different from what you sleepwalked into?

I’d have some sort of syllabus, I think. Some road map, however inadequate, keeping us oriented on what we want to accomplish.

You mean, like the road maps Daniel Boone used, in exploring Kentucky.

Very funny.

It’s a more instructive comparison than may appear at first. In exploring Kentucky, Daniel Boone made it possible for people to cross the mountains and create the first state there. [In 1792, eleven years prior to the admission of Ohio.] Did he intend to do that? Did he have any idea he was doing it? Would he perhaps even have had severe second thoughts if he had realized that he was changing his hunter’s paradise into a land of settlements? But knowing what he was doing had little or nothing to do with doing it. He was acting as what people used to call an agent of providence.

Authorized local representative of the universe, as I sometimes say.

Can you say that your life has no such implication? Can anyone? You are all living individual 3D lives centered on yourselves, and at the same time are living as part of a vastly larger pattern, some fringes of which you sometimes see, and other times don’t.

The drawback to seeing things that way – as I do, of course – is that it becomes harder and harder to know one’s own motivations. Am I following a whim resulting from some quirk in my composition? Am I on the beam, doing the will of God, so to speak? Am I wavering between whim and certainty? It’s all mixed together.

And so?

Well, it can be hard to know what to do, when you try to follow your feelings but don’t always know if the feelings are to be trusted.

So?

I know, “Which you?”

It’s always your choice, you don’t have to explore. You don’t have to coast. You don’t have to do anything: Who is going to force you? You don’t even need to decide.

No, if we don’t mind standing on one foot, teetering.

Follow your feelings, knowing that the better you let them clarify, the better satisfied you will be that you are doing the right thing. The “right thing,” remember, for you. That’s who you are responsible for.

This is a little personal, but I’m going to send it out. What shall we call it?

“Indecision”?

As good as anything, I guess. And next time TBA, I get that. Well, my thanks – our thanks – as always.

 

 

You live at a remove from the physical world, mentally. This won’t come as news to you. Even when you spend your time reading of, understanding, conceptualizing the world, you aren’t really participating in it the way other people do.

It is difficult for me, participating in the world around me.

Let’s say, it is difficult for you to do things in the way others do, for you can do things others can’t, and for the same reason. You live from a somewhat different standing-place. You are scarcely alone in that, of course, but by nature you and others in that situation experience yourselves as essentially alone. Start with Laurens van der Post’s analogy of the herd and the outliers.

Van der Post said that he had observed that herds would have one or more members who for whatever reason were neither fully accepted into the herd nor quite outcast. He said the outlying positions of these individuals made them hypervigilant, continually alert, even more so than the rest of the herd, and therefore provided the herd with an advantage of increased sensitivity.

That’s right. The race’s sentinels don’t necessarily persuade anybody; they react, and their reactions alert the rest through a process of contagion. Artists, scholars, prophets, eccentrics – we neither set such people upon pedestals nor smile at them as if they were to be pitied – there is a whole class of outliers in any society, and they serve a function, just as the relatively compact mass that forms a society’s center of gravity serve a function. That does not guarantee that either outlier or mass is comfortable.

Hold the herd-and-outlier analogy in mind. Now consider, the 3D portion of the world goes on within the larger All-D world. If your mental world is anchored in one place, it won’t be anchored in a different place. The way you see the world will necessarily be different from any other person’s way of seeing it, because you are all experiencing it as individuals. But beyond that, some of you will experience it as outliers and others as part of the center of gravity. That is, you won’t be living quite in the same world, nor quite in different worlds. You will be tenuously bound together.

Now, bear in mind, you are all experiencing the 3D world while being part of the greater all-encompassing world of which it is a part. (We’ve said many times, everyone is, must be, in all dimensions.) But that doesn’t mean you are all even roughly equally aware of the encompassing world we have been calling the non-3D. You all feed situation reports to the larger beings of which you are a part. Everyone’s particular position on a scale of awareness of the non-3D in ordinary life determines, or anyway facilitates, their particular report. Those reports affect the non-3D being, and in turn affect our feedback to our 3D components. You understand, language is overemphasizing separation here and understating the connection.

Let’s sum it up this way. All aspects of the world deserve and receive equal attention, which in effect means everything gets reported on, and these reports are collated and summarized and fed back into the morning briefings of the participants, who then go about their day in light of the developing situation. That ought to be an analogy that provides a flexible understanding without luring you to read it literally.

 

Wednesday, September 21, 2022

5:35 a.m. Gentlemen, two things came up yesterday while Jane Peranteau and Jane Coleman and I were talking, and I’m hoping you will explore with me. Setting for maximum presence, receptivity, clarity, contributing. First, can you clarify the nature and relationship of Strands and Guidance.

You straightened that out yourselves, in the course of conversation. However, it is well to remember that any one way of seeing things may be superseded by an entirely different way, without necessarily falsifying either. As usual, so much depends upon the angle of vision provided by where you stand relative to what you examine.

So, your present understanding is, as Jane Coleman pointed out, vertically oriented for Guidance, horizontally oriented for Strands. Spatial analogies, but that can’t be helped, and the idea comes across. Another way of saying it is, you regard Guidance as a higher power, Strands as peers. As a rough and ready standard, nothing wrong with it. But as you look closer, problems – or, let’s say, nuances – emerge.

I start to see that, as you say it. So much depends upon definitions.

Guidance is non-3D, surely. Yet we have pointed out that non-3D is inextricably part of 3D (and of course vice-versa) except for the purpose of analysis. Like opposite ends of a polarity, they are opposite relative to one another, like the positive and negative poles of a magnet. They are not two separate things; they are, at most, opposite ends of the same one thing.

This being so, how can your relationship – 3D-you to Guidance – be said to be vertical, with you slogging around in 3D and Guidance soaring above the fray? That’s a valid way to see things, but only one way to see them. It would be just as accurate to use a different spatial analogy and say Guidance is your far interior, your core, and 3D-you is your exterior, your surface. (Indeed, “superficial” means surface, and what could be less superficial than Guidance?)

Or, to look at the other comparison, your Strands are as non-3D as Guidance, relative to you. Living in their own living-present, unreachable by you corporeally but intimately connected spiritually – or, to put it in other terms, inaccessible by 3D and inseparable in non-3D – they are as matter-of-fact and as magical as are you yourselves.

And remember – have we mentioned this? – You’re all mind-stuff, living among mind-stuff. Where is the distinction to be drawn between your lives in 3D, ruled by the ever-moving present moment, always in connection (recognized or not) with non-3D, and with the life of any or all lives on any or all Strands that comprise you?

This is clear as you say it.

Separating into Guides and Strands is convenient, useful, true – and  equally awkward, obstructive, and illusory. It’s one way of seeing things. Use it while it serves you; discard it for different scaffolding if it no longer serves you.

Yes, I get, as I write that, the Church had (has, I guess) saints and guardian angels and I don’t know what else, all spiritual beings available to help those in life. A different way of seeing things, one we’re no longer comfortable with.

The Romans and Greeks had gods; Hindus have thousands of them. Animists see them in all aspects of life. Trying to decide which way of seeing things is “right” and which is “wrong” is – from our point of view – somewhere between tedious and futile. Use what works for you; stop wasting time judging what works for others.

Frank Sinatra was quoted as saying he was for whatever gets you through the night, be it booze or religion.

That isn’t quite the same point, but close enough. So, to sum up: Guidance is a non-3D influence on your present-moment life that may be called upon consciously or may be relied upon implicitly and even unconsciously. Substitute the word “Strand” for “Guidance” and the sentence remains true. It’s time, perhaps, to replace older scaffolding with a new image.

I agree. Such as?

Raisin bread? Chocolate chip cookies?

We in 3D being the raisins or chocolate chips, and the non-3D being the surrounding matrix we exist in?

Not a great analogy, in that it posits a difference in substance. Raisins, chips, are not dough. You are welcome to come up with something more helpful.

What comes to mind is a galaxy, a nebula. If you think of the stars as very compact portions of a field of energy, the aliveness of it all seems obvious, and it seems a lesser differences between the nodule and the matrix.

Better might be a brain.

Yes! And I guess the word “nodule” sparked you as it did me, even as I wrote it. If we look at reality as one great brain, it consists of all that material – Hercule Poirot’s “little grey cells” – and within it, part of it, those uncountable number of synapses, neurons, all that.

Probably an analogy – only an analogy, remember – more suited to your present understanding of things than what you have been using until now. Less of a sense of different things cooperating; more of a sense of one thing, looked at analytically, which means separated somewhat artificially for the purpose of enhanced understanding.

This being so, how can Guidance and Strands be seen as different in essence? What need remains to distinguish one from another? You may, if it interests you, just as some people enjoy exploring genealogy, but it is not necessary to dissect your experience of guidance and inspiration, in order to employ and profit from it.

Yes, I see. Very helpful. Unexpected, too. This is not where I thought you’d go with it, but I’m glad you did. So let’s see what kind of curve ball you can throw when I ask our second question, which is: I got the sense that any one other life (not to call it a past life) might directly connect more than one present life. The answer seems obvious as I write it out – Why should Strands not string together more than one concurrent life as easily as they do consecutive ones? – but I put you the question.

You can see that the brain analogy will make the question look different. It is more three-dimensional than linear, more dynamic than static. In that, it is a closer representation.

My mind strayed to a movie I watched last night. Now I am attuned to wonder: Distraction? Unnoticed connection? But neither way does it facilitate this communication.

Not immediately, but we encourage you all to pay as much attention to what goes on along the back channels, so to speak, as on the channel you are concentrating on. This may require you to develop a talent that may seem less mindful rather than more, but if successful you will open access to parallel processing that already takes place but may be mostly unnoticed.

Einstein apparently had five or six lines of thought going on at a time, until he got older, at which time he complained that he could only hold two or three.

Holding more than one line of processing is a human ability. The fact that even one person demonstrated it would be enough to prove that. But in fact it is more commonly experienced than reported.

We’re almost at the end of an hour. My second question, more directly?

If Strands and Guidance are merely abstractions for understanding relationships, do you have any reason for thinking Strands are limited in some way that Guidance is not? Specifically, if a Strand ran through Joseph Smallwood and runs through you, do you imagine that there’s some law that says it can’t also run through another person living while you do? It isn’t physical, after all; it is, you might say, a spiritual affinity. What is to stop it from manifesting in as many people as genetics and the times allow?

Seems clear enough. Very well, great session, fast hour. Our thanks as always. Oh. Today’s theme?

“Guides, Strands, and models”?

That should work. And tomorrow’s?

The day will bring what the day brings.

Again our thanks, and see you next time.

 

Monday, September 20, 2022

6:10 a.m. Anything on your minds for this morning, guys?

You don’t have to do this every day. You put in a good day yesterday, between this and cleaning up old files.

I’m just tired, this morning, I guess. Maybe later.

[A very few minutes later:]

– I was sitting here running the waters of life and health, and the thought came that the energy reaches each cell and as it passes, encourages them. It was a sense of an army, or any coordinated enterprise, any band of defenders. Hadn’t thought of things that way. I wonder, what is a cell’s experience of 3D life? What is it in non-3D? In fact, instead of wondering, why not ask? Guys?

You are asking, in effect, what is the experience, in the largest sense, of any portion of mind-stuff that is participating in 3D.

I guess I am, yes. I wouldn’t have put it that way.

Reframing the question is one way of facilitating a certain approach to an answer.

Sort of setting up the expectations behind our backs?

More like painting background, or context., that will flavor the show. A background is a sort of unnoticed influence.

We should like you to consider the cells in your body – which after all anyone would describe as alive – as a variant of the composition of stone, say, or anything you would describe as inanimate. Every thing, “living” or dead,” “sentient” or “inanimate,” is composed of matter, no exceptions. Molecules, atoms, sub-atomic particles, the works. In fact it is a problem for materialist science how “life” arises from “dead material,” and how “consciousness” arises from “unconsciousness.” It is the same problem, seen differently. They can’t figure it out, because they begin from the wrong end, thinking they know what matter is, what consciousness is, what life is. as opposed to – non-life, call it.

You are close to arguing away the question.

We are close to showing you that the question arises from a wrong understanding. To ask what a cell’s experience of 3D life is: – so many assumptions and definitions.

I get that you were ready to set out some bullet-points, but nothing came.

You remembered yourself (PRCC), which helps. The problem is that you aren’t confident there will be any bullets, because you don’t have any sense of what they will be.

That’s true, but I am holding myself in willingness.

Merely let go. If nothing happens, if garbage emerges, so what? You are not required to send out failed attempts.

True. Well, let’s see, then. Assumptions and definitions?

• Living or dead. When it’s all mind-stuff?
• Conscious or unconscious. In a way, same thing: It’s all mind-stuff.
• Organized, disorganized, organizing, disorganizing? Nothing is static, everything flows. How could there be a perpetual state of being, for anything?
• Within 3D terms (that is, in the realm of “somewhat real” that we have set out many times), structures are created, employed, dissolved. Life is impermanence, but it is not the impermanence of chaos, but of flow.
• Can you pinpoint the molecules of oxygen in the air you breathed yesterday? Where are they? Is someone else using them without your permission? Did they get involved in a fire and then get “destroyed”? Is it their hard fate to circle the earth forever, or get bonded as rust to some old iron girder, or get destroyed by some chemical recombination they had no say in?
• That is, does it make sense in any way (except provisionally for analysis, and practically, for usage), to treat anything as if it were a unit? Units are temporary formations, mind-stuff doing a do-si-do in 3D. Blast anything to its component atoms, blast the atoms to subatomic particles, go as far as you wish, and still whatever comprised it exists.
• Or, look at things the other way. The things these subatomic particles form when properly combined (for the moment) into atoms, molecules, substances, etc.: Can the thing have a quality it picks up from nowhere?
• Yet, if that quality inhered in its constituent parts, how can that be? How could anything new enter the world, anything more complex, anything the result of whatever had preceded it?

Now, wait. You’re saying, “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,” somehow.

No, we’re about to say something a little different.

• Every layer of organization of matter has a new feature that was not evident in previous layers. Einstein was made of the same elements that went into an amoeba or a chemical bath or a flower or a politician, but no one could say there was no difference in organization between him and other layers. They were all material; they were all made of the same somewhat-real elements in the somewhat-real 3D world – yet, each layer includes differences.

It ought to be evident that the differences in organization cannot be merely chemical. That is, a flower and a whale and a mountain and an Einstein are all made partly from matter and partly, surely, from – something else.

If you say “mind,” you’re saying mind added to what you already defined as mind-stuff.

Indeed we are. Good thinking, now settle in and see what comes next.

Well, the mind-body problem isn’t what it looks to be. We aren’t adding one thing to a different kind of something. We’re adding mind to mind.

Not quite.

We are adding organization of some kind, we’re adding complexification.

That’s a very reasonable way to look at it. It may be seen physically. Put enough of a given something in the same place and time, under the right conditions, and it will spontaneously (whatever that is supposed to mean) organize itself into a more complex structure with new possibilities.

How many politicians to make an Einstein?

How many honeybees to make a hive? How many wheels to make a wagon? It should be obvious that “spontaneous” really means, “suddenly able to conform to an advanced pattern, a possibility, that required that certain prerequisites be met.

Plato’s pre-existing patterns.

Yes. It wasn’t a flight of fancy on his part. But – keep looking more closely. Where to those patterns arise?

Is this a trick question? They arise in the non-3D.

Which interpenetrates the 3D and is not really a separate thing except in the language. So where do Platonic Ideas arise/ Or, we’ll settle for, Where do they live?

Any pattern implies an intelligence that laid down that pattern, even if the pattern then replicates itself. A hive of bees was designed somewhere as a pattern for future bees to conform to, and they’ve been doing it ever since.

So where does that creating intelligence abide?

On a higher level of organization than ours, I suppose, or it wouldn’t be invisible to us.

Very good. There’s your hour, and we can continue this another time.

Today’s theme?

That’s an interesting question. Any title we might give it will give you too definite an idea – that is, too partial a sense of it. You choose.

“Organization”?

That will do nicely.

Then, till next time, and thanks as always.

 

Monday, September 19, 2022

6 a.m. Reading, reading, reading. Did all the stuff I’m getting from the guys actually come by way of Richard Bach? So much of what I re-read seems to have it all there, at least in potential and often enough spelled out. Of course, truth converges, and there was a time when his ideas seemed foreign, at least some of them. But it’s striking to be re-reading Running from Safety, or Illusions, or even Nothing by Chance, and see it all laid out. Not the explanations of how things are, but certainly the “how it works in practice.” And  I’ve been reading Richard for quite a few years – as in, I suppose, fifty. Fifty years ago, I was 26 and he was 36. That’s a lot of steering, a lot of encouragement.

All right, friends, shall we take the side trail we passed yesterday? You were pointing out that each of us is an alliance of many Strands, which meant that each of them with its own unfinished business was participating in the same moment as we do. And doesn’t that tie together the events of one time with those of all the others?

It is all one present moment. This is another way why.

Another way why it’s all one moment, and therefore another way how it’s all one moment.

That’s right. You always have to be careful that focusing your microscope doesn’t give you an exaggerated idea of reality’s divisions at the expense of remembering reality’s unity. You may cut a town into town lots, or may cut a day into hours, or may cut a human being’s body and soul into logical parts, but life doesn’t inhere in division; it is in one-ness.

We’ll risk generalizing it this far: Any time that logical analysis makes it look like its two things (no matter what “it” we’re talking about), it’s still always one. Every time, if you look closer, analyze more carefully, factor in things you hastily discarded, you’ll see the same. There are no absolute divisions in reality.

So, now look at what it means, that humans are the tying together of many times and many places, all experiencing (second-hand, one might say) a given present moment. Lots of consequences.

It’s like kneading bread to get the yeast evenly distributed.

Yes it is. Time is not a sequence, not a flow from past to present to future. It is not, you might say, one-dimensional. It is closer to outer space, packed with black holes, gravitational distortions, interruptions of cookie-sheet smoothness everywhere. Nothing in outer space is as it seems to the eye – empty, seamless, uniform. It is more like the medieval pictured it, in a way: packed with energy, tumultuously full of events, suffused with causation and reactions. Sorry to be opaque here, we are constrained to rely on effects; you don’t know anything about modern astronomy nor medieval and classical astronomy nor Chinese nor Mayan astronomy, let alone Egyptian astronomy. Mostly what you think you know is you putting your assumptions on whatever shards of old belief systems happen to have survived the ages. Just because you can put a label on something doesn’t mean you have understood it – or even, perhaps, really recognized it.

So with time, too.

That was an interesting experience. It was like watching the pot of water on the stove suddenly boiling over, after years of seeing it gently simmering.

Yes, a little unexpected vehemence, eh? Perhaps this process of extended exposition creates its own tensions, the tension you feel when unexpressed things build up within you over time, and there is never occasion to set them out. Instead, you have to continue with half-understandings, or lose your teaching-learning link by proceeding too far too soon.

Several things set us to boiling over, actually, not because we are emotionally involved nor even because you may be ready to hear them, but because the times and the material given have finally released the spring. You might refocus, first.

Presence, receptivity, clarity, considering. Go ahead.

• Each of you helps hold time-space together. Or, to state the same thing from the other end of the lens, one of the things “the times” do is precipitate individual combinations.
• It isn’t just humans. Anything produced by sexual recombination is a compound being, including trees, animals, insects. You can’t feel or see or perhaps imagine how they participate, but that is just your limitation. Reality has broader views.
• Remember, always – don’t let yourself lose this connection, or none of it can be seen properly – it’s all mind-stuff. You are all mind-stuff; so are mountain ranges and oceans and clouds. But compound beings are a particular kind of mind-stuff with their own properties.
• The reason it is important to remember that the heaviest metal, the dullest day, is still just mind-stuff is that otherwise you start making divisions and you start creating logical obstacles that may appear real.
• A concomitant to “It’s all mind-stuff” is “Dreams don’t divide. They don’t

I’m setting the sense of it, but that isn’t getting it said.

No. But let’s continue, see where we go:

• “Life is but a dream” is truer than “Life is what it looks like, a lot of plodding or even dancing, through a whole bunch of events.” There is nothing solid about life, save thinking make it so.
• Space, time, the whole stage apparatus is one thing, not several. Everything interconnects, which is the same as saying, “There’s only one everything.” When you let this become more than just words, more than just a nice idea, your world opens up.
• Because 3D humans comprise many Strands, and because those Strands each involve themselves, and everything they connect to, to every person’s present moment, in effect there is only one present moment, and you are all experiencing it “now” as you “did then” and “will do in the future.” Again, when the reality of this sinks in and it ceases to be “just words,” your life changes.

Well, for the first time I have an idea how it can be that time is all one present moment, seen from each fragment of reality that 3D sequence allows us. I mean, how could Joseph be living in a living moment in 1863? I accepted that somehow he could, but only now can I see how it makes sense. It’s like everything being alive, regardless of appearances. Once we remember that its all mind-stuff, the logical problems disappear. Once we remember that there’s only the eternal now, braiding and looping and kneading itself automatically everywhere, again the logical problems disappear.

This has been quite a side-trail! More like a superhighway.

Even though we are only 50 minutes in, this is a logical place to pause. You will noticed that going slower does not in fact result in your gleaning less.

I do notice. What I get is richer, too. Today’s theme was?

“Kneading,” perhaps?

“Kneading time and space?”

If you prefer.

And I get that tomorrow’s (or whenever) is our old standby, TBA.

By this time, that shouldn’t cost you any anxiety.

Not noticeably. Thanks as always.

Sunday, September 18, 2022

4:35 a.m. Not sure where to resume. I think with this sentence that caught my eye as I looked back over Friday’s. “Our allegiance is to something deeper than that church; it is to what the church holds allegiance to….”

Set your intent.

The Puerto Rican Communications Commission, until I can remember PRCC as a unit. Presence, receptivity, clarity, considering. And, I know: As slowly as I can go.

It is always going to be a problem in 3D: How do you sift the grain from the chaff? Any organization may be alien to you, for any of a million reasons; still, what it believes in, and supports, may be more or less what you believe in and support. It isn’t the path for you, but you wish it well for the sake of those it helps.

I see it in my life. I was in Scotland, and a friend (Michael Ross) and I were touring this old Catholic church that had been destroyed by the Protestants centuries ago and was being restored. I was thoroughly in sympathy with the restoration movement, and was feeling (or was persuaded I was feeling) the energy of the place, as a sacred spot that had had a church built upon it – when I walked into a room that had the kind of literature churches have in their lobbies – innocuous pamphlets, single sheets, maybe even little booklets. Something within me froze: I went from active sympathy to a sense of alienation, instantly. And later I figured out why, but it was a shock, as when a priest passed and I had a similar sense of withdrawing.

This was Pluscarden Abbey; it took till now for the name to surface, as I was confident it would. [Photos at https://www.pluscardenabbey.org]

So, guys, would you like to help me separate the various things that were going on, to help make your point?

It isn’t difficult, though there were, it is true, several strands to the reaction.

We may need to agree upon a word to distinguish various meanings of the word “strands,” as we did for the word “judgment.” In this case we mean strands just as it is used in ordinary conversation, not to mark other-life influences within you.

Maybe capitalize the word when we’re using it our way, and otherwise use it uncapitalized, in the way that is common?

That may serve. We shall try it and see. The strands of your reaction:

• You were intellectually convinced of some things before you were emotionally convinced, and here was a demonstration of it.
• Seeing anything in the flesh is going to evoke different reactions than merely thinking about it – particularly if the 3D manifestation is the first since you have begun thinking of a thing differently.
• Never forget, every experience includes and constellates the question: Which you? The boy who rejected the church is not the same person as the man who saw the church abstractly as a very good thing.
• It is just such shocks that may serve to open diplomatic relations, as you like to say, between parts of yourself that may have been coexisting by ignoring each other, or let’s say by forgetting each other.
• But every experience has the potential to teach you new things, the more you return to it with questioning mind. Every new examination will attach new context, and this will reveal new sides to the situation.
• Implied in the previous point is this, which may not have occurred to you: There can be no ultimate, final, judgment. Everything you believe, everything you know, everything you are down-to-the-ground sure of, may look different later. Or it may not, but even if it never looks different to you, remember that all judgments are subject to later revision, — or do you want the 15-year-old that you were to decide your life for you? Doing its best at 15, fine, but are those judgments likely to hold up over a long lifetime?

More to the point at the moment: Your experience then shows you now the difficulty any alliance must face.

I see that. I wondered once at an aside in a John LeCarre novel where the character said he supposed that allies always hate each other. I eventually came to see that he meant that in an alliance, you necessarily often cannot get what you want, perhaps not even what you need from the other, but you are still tied to the other by need.

So you today – and any who are in a similar position, intellectually and emotionally – find yourself allied to organizations that are somewhat oriented in the same way you are, and somewhat in favor of the things you favor, and somewhat friendly and well-meaning to what you are, even while not being able to see or even suspect who you are beyond whatever shows.

Certainly true politically, but I see you mean, for instance, churches, and scientific and metaphysically oriented organizations.

Many things. The fact is, 3D life is a series of alliances, many of them running parallel in your life, not merely sequentially. You are the center of your world. Everyone else is the center of a world. You share certain aspects of life: You are in the same times, which means you are working on aspects of the shared subjectivity that the times allowed to manifest. But you are the heirs of your own composition, so to speak. You were formed of various Strands, each with a history, each with unfinished business.

And I heard a major side-trail open up there. But do we want to pursue it now? Every Strand is engaged with its own times, its own shared subjectivity – but in linking to other lives it is enmeshed also in those times.

Hold the thought. Let’s begin with it next time. An advantage of paying attention, you see. You didn’t miss the bird on the wing.

So if at best you are among allies rather than family, what does this imply?

About what?

Sit with the question.

I suppose, come to think of it, even our Stands could be considered as much allies as family. They are and they aren’t part of us. They do and they don’t necessarily share our values and goals.

It’s complicated, you see. But isn’t that your experience of life? Do you know many people who experience life as simple?

This is hooking up things I hadn’t connected before.

Slowly.

• People whose Strands clash experience the world in a different way from those whose Strands coexist in harmony.
• Yet that equation changes during life, or may change, anyway. Different circumstances may call forth different reactions – may awaken different Strands, so to speak, and in effect all alliances may have to be renegotiated.
• Or, if not renegotiated, let’s say they may manifest different priorities, suffer different strains.
• Different alliances, different ratios among Strands, will, in effect, show the world as correspondingly different.

Hence, as we said, judgments will alter in the light of new context. And this process is never-ending, unless you think that all Strands can finish all their unfinished business simultaneously, and hence cease agitating each other. Since every Strand extends in many directions beyond the link you share, in effect you would be requiring that the entire universe cease to revolve. Do you think that is likely to happen? Do you think it would be a good thing if it did?

It’s striking, how things are suddenly clear that weren’t, in all the time we’ve been thinking about things.

We promised Rita, and we promise you, you’ll never be bored unless you want to be.

I look forward to looking at that side-trail next time. Today’s theme?

“Allegiance and alliance,” perhaps.

Not bad. Till next time, then, and of course you have our thanks for all this, as always.

 

Friday, September 16, 2022

5 a.m. A new acronym to help me remember how to be: the Puerto Rican Communications Commission, the PRCC. That is, presence, receptivity, clarity, consideration – or, let’s say, considering. Not a very big change from focus, receptivity, clarity, presence, but, better. If I can actually learn to do things that way.

I was thinking, just now, of friends who know that I do this, but do not know of the material itself. If I were to try to explain to them the world-view the guys have given us, gradually, over the years, where would I begin? That’s the oral version of the problem of writing the summary book. Guys, what say you?

Are you in the persuasion game now?

Not persuasion, exactly. More like exposition. I can’t find a place to begin for those who have not invested time and energy over the years.

Now, start practicing that considering. You have the little plaster statue of Horus, just as a mind-focusing item. Let your mind take a stroll, while at the same time sitting there, remembering your own question. Don’t think we can’t help, but you can get to places we can’t bring you, if you provide your own sparks and let them lead you on.

Well, I think, how does anybody present a new view of anything? If I were trying to explain to somebody how the old Egyptians saw the world, how would I begin? I’m tempted to say, start with a catechism, a book of questions and succinct answers.

Perhaps you can see that religious instruction has always required such tools, and every religion could provide examples of how they instruct potential converts.

Including the children who are born into their belief-system. In fact, you could think of children as the major source of converts, in that they come into the world not having the belief-system. (Or at least, I don’t think they do. I suppose they may be fitted into a religion, no less than into ethnicity and nationality, by a combination of what the times allow in, and what their innate nature matches.)

But even those whose strands include other lives that were lived within a given belief-system require instruction too. They get it or they do not, and get it by observing their surrounding, at least as much as by anything they read or are taught. Think of your own lives. You observe  what people do, at least as much as what they say.

Many a young child learns to reject the faith they were born into, by observing the discrepancies between dogma and behavior.

Or between dogma and heir own sense of the world. Or even between dogma and their resistance to any dogma. And yet what one child rejects, another child, or an adult, may come to live their life in. That is, people convert, as people say, from one religion (or even non-religion) to another. Something tells them, “This is truer than that.” For the purposes of the argument, we ignore those who convert for social or political reasons.

Naturally I think of Hemingway. Born into a devout Protestant family, he found his spiritual home in the Catholic church, against all familial precedent. Yet he seems to have

Yes, now this is what we’re encouraging you to do. Take a stroll with the thought, and see where it leads.

Well, Hemingway accepted the Catholic church on one level, and apparently quite sincerely. When he lived with Pauline, he was apparently pretty careful to follow the forms.

Now, go as slowly as you can. Creep along, if you can. Try not to elide anything as it wells up. We recognize that it will seem endless and pointless and impossible. But how do you know if you don’t try?

He followed the forms – confession included, presumably, though of course he never mentions it directly. The Sun Also Rises has Jake trying to explain to Brett that she doesn’t understand about confession, and it seems clear to me that Hemingway does, even then, though it may be merely authorial illusion.

When the Spanish Civil War came, he felt unable to keep praying, in that he somehow felt the church to have  appropriated his access to God, and

No. Slower, if you can.

That’s true, he no longer felt he could pray for himself, but did pray for others. I’m not getting my point stated.

You may, if you can go slow enough. Plod. Annoy yourself, if need be. This is important. There are truths that cannot be said, but can be intuited. Some things can only be received in a flash, only the mind must be clear. For you specifically, and for some others, a clear mind results from freedom from chains of logical connections, combined with an attitude of receptivity to unstructured input. That freedom, that receptivity, in the untrained mind produces freewheeling associations. So, you had to learn to not give in to following all the side-trails that open up; now you need to practice following some of them. One way to choose is to move so slowly as to stand almost still, tasting the moment, sniffing your way toward the proper scent. To see takes time, as Georgia O’Keefe said. Give yourself the time.

Hemingway called himself “a very dumb Catholic.” He meant, I think, that he didn’t much know or care about dogma, but did consider the church as a sheltering tent.

As slowly as you can bear to proceed.

How can there be a religion without dogma? Dogma is codification of what that religion believes. It has to have dogma, even if that dogma were to be, “Don’t  be impressed by dogma.” If you are part of a religion but you don’t accept (or perhaps even know about) its dogma, how can you be said to be part of it?

Yet, there is a sense that this is so.

You should know.

Yes, I am feeling that. (You’re right, going slowly allows associations to present themselves.) In the sense we’re considering it to be, this being of it and not quite in it is true of me as well. Intellectually I am closer to being a Sufi than anything else. But I bridle at unwarranted attacks on Catholicism made by people who don’t know it from inside, and therefore attack what is not real, not knowing what really is open to attack.

Is this going slowly enough?

Intellectually you are a Sufi, say. That is not yet true.

No, I see it. If we look at it carefully, intellectually I assent to the core of many religions, each of which has a different splinter of the whole truth, each of which is an attitude, call it. But then I cannot assent to the structures built upon those splinters.

Yes, but slowly. Sink into it. Forget the clock.

Emotionally I fit into certain ways of experiencing the world, and not others. If social considerations did not intervene, maybe everybody would automatically find the way of seeing the world that they resonated to.

Meaning, people wouldn’t be sorted by having been born into a given way of seeing things.

I suppose. There would be fewer converts, or more; hard to say.

But the point is:

I don’t know, it’s hard to see the point of this whole discussion, except maybe as practice for me in working more slowly.

So, sink into the moment, holding an intent for things to clarify.

Something within me spontaneously said, sometime, “I still serve Ra.” I didn’t then and I don’t now know what that meant in any way except as emotional allegiance. But if I were to become educated in the detail of Egyptian religion, is there any reason to think it would fit with my life today? In the same way, I have a sort of tribal allegiance to Catholicism that has nothing to do with its command structure, or its rules and regulations, or even, I suppose, with its habitual way of seeing things. That is, the Catholic way would be a constricting collar for me; nevertheless there is a truth there that I can’t deny and have no interest in denying. And this is surely true of every religion, including the modern religions of materialism and scientism.

Now, the clarifying flash, for Hemingway’s situation and yours, and that of others.

A flash? Don’t know about that. What this comes to seems to be, We can sense (or can find) belief-systems that are particularly attuned to our structure, so that they express our truth more closely than anything else does. But that is not the same as requiring us to be soldiers in their army, or even necessarily sojourners in their camp, nor even family. It’s just, that’s where we live emotionally. Not in that church, but in the same ground that church camps on.

And therefore –?

Our allegiance is to something deeper than that church; it is to what the church holds allegiance to, or did, or sometimes does.

Can you see why this was clear to Hemingway and not clear?

Yes I can. It wasn’t clear to me, an hour ago, and I have wondered.

A church that takes sides politically, orphans those who have to choose between following their conscience or obeying the church’s commands. But what those orphans are hasn’t changed. What they instinctively adhere to hasn’t changed. All they have lost is a comfortable tent to shelter in.

I am surprised to see that we have gone 70 minutes and – let’s see – eleven pages. It did feel like very slow movement, going nowhere in particular, but I see that was misperception. What shall we call this morning’s conversation?

“An exercise in slowness,” perhaps.

“Belief-systems and dogmas”?

That would serve, as well.

I’ll decide when I transcribe. My thanks for this. It is curious how the counter-intuitive serves, sometimes. Till next time.