Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

Thursday, September 15, 2022

5 a.m. Very well, you said yesterday we would continue with more on the theme of endless revision. It is true, I don’t quite have your idea. It’s funny, I have the feel of it, but I could not explain it, even to myself, which is always a sign that I’m on the right wave-length but haven’t done the translation work necessary to bring it into left-brain terms.

Insight is a flash of lightning. Comprehension is an electric light, or at least a flame. The object to be seen may be the same, but the process is so radially different.

And translating it into 3D terms is the same as distorting it, I suppose.

In a way. Notice the process of brief meditation this morning: It is in a way the enabling of non-logical (not necessarily il-logical) connections.

Yes, I did notice. You had said spend a few moments meditating and yesterday I spent it meditating over pages in a book of full-page photos of Karnak. This morning I picked up a little white statue of Horus I bought in Egypt. An inexpensive thing, but I like it as much as anything I brought back. As I held it, all manner of associations came back. One could say, memories (very much this-life memories, nothing fancy) and what the memories led to. It isn’t the content but the connecting, I think.

It’s the getting out of the way of the connection, yes. Everybody knows everything, in potential. Certainly everybody knows everything needed in any practical sense. But having it, and having access to it, and knowing how to facilitate that access, are three different aspects of the same thing.

I get that this directly relates to what you want to discuss, but I don’t yet see how it does.

The process of continual revision might be thought of as the process of continual and continuing meditation over one’s life in all its aspects. Given that “all aspects” includes so many connections unsuspected during First Life (though, put an asterisk there), perhaps you can see that this ties in to what we told Rita long ago, “You will never be bored.” The process of revision, the process of meditation as a means of removing logical and habitual interference with connection, the extension of awareness into previously unexplored territory, would be enough in itself to provide continuing interest, even if one’s own, and others’, changes did not in themselves cause further revision.

So in the way you are using the word at the moment, “revision” means more reconsideration, or even afterthought, reflection, enhanced understanding, than correction of mistakes.

Given that you were in 3D to choose, how could a choice be a mistake? It could, strictly in the sense of one choosing a path that led to a destination one didn’t like, or even to a destination one didn’t prefer, but this is a matter of preference and experience and learning. Who cares if Daniel Boone turned north instead of south on any given day, or hunted in this area rather than that one?

So, the asterisk?

Merely, we do not want our statement to be misinterpreted to be, “First Life is relatively ignorant of extended connections.” Some are, some are not. The nature of the mixture of elements that goes into a given First Life varies all over the map, as you would expect. Some are born magicians; some are born denizens of an ordered, bounded, 3D existence, and of course most are somewhere between the two extremes.

Now, it is becoming obvious to you that your procedure needs to change, or let’s say, will profit by changing. Is profiting by changing.

Well, it’s interesting. Earlier I would have thought it was wool-gathering. It isn’t, quite, is it?

It can be, or it can be you participating in a dialogue in a calmer, deeper way.

To spell it out, I get that it is all right to pause while doing this, to allow my thought to range where it will on whatever was just said, and my mentioning the result will enhance the dialogue.

You may think of it as you being more thoughtful during the process. That is, being more of a mixture of receptivity and thought about what you receive. Until now you have emphasized receptivity and have thought very little about what we were telling you. Later you might think, but at the moment you concentrated on maintaining the link. This works, and nothing wrong with it, but now you can do a little more, if you choose to, and you will find the process and the result pleasant and rewarding. And, it will be an example of what we are trying to get across about endless revisions after 3D death.

The pitfall, I suppose, being a possible tendency to wander off into unrelated fields. Yes, I hear you: What would “unrelated” mean? But still, why isn’t that a potential pitfall now, when it was before?

Habit, practice, intent, experience, you name it. Do you think you could sit there at your desk, pen in hand, in the middle of a conversation, and forget what we were talking about because your inner magpie [I think they meant crow] found a bright, shiny object?

So I suppose it’s like learning to touch-type. Familiarity with the process tends to render the skill transparent to us, allowing enhanced flow from intent to result.

Of course. Effort always produces a result (not necessarily the result one expects, but result), and you might say results are always the effects of some prior effort, remembered or not, observed or not. It’s a very efficient universe.

I can see that, as we talk, connections arise in my mind that I do not follow, intending to not distract myself or you. Do we need to modify FRCP to take into account the desirability of allowing myself to pause and consider?

While you were up refilling your coffee, you got a sense of this. Express it.

If we continue to reconsider our lives – not in a fault-finding or breast-beating way, but just as we are doing here – that would amount to a localized consciousness participating in the generalized consciousness doing the same thing. That’s more what’s going on in the flashing-lights image you gave me as an analogy. It’s all of us rethinking our lives, or let’s say reexperiencing them, not in an endless treadmill kind of way, but on a continuing journey of discovery.

And perhaps a certain amount of satisfaction, don’t forget. You will see yourselves in a more favorable light, not less than also in a less favorable light. Your judgments will be continually more nuanced.

So should we add another letter to FRCP?

We’d hate to disrupt your mnemonic. Consideration, perhaps. Thought. Association.

Active contribution?

That would work. The sense of it is that in your receptivity and focus is also the background process of analysis and association.

Reasoning, in a way.

Let’s say thoughtfulness. Mulling.

So, focus, receptivity, analysis – though, “analysis” isn’t quite right.

No, you don’t want to be chopping logic, if only because it will get in the way of perception.

Daydreaming.

Yes, though not quite so undirected as that sounds.

Maybe focus, receptivity, mulling, clarity of expression, presence.

Only rearrange them, since you’re losing your acronym anyway. Presence comes first. If you are not present, nothing can follow. Presence, receptivity, transparency (that is, clear flow of ideas), clarity of expression, mulling. Make your acronym of this.

Let’s use C to mean both clarity of reception and clarity of expression, so PRCM. Instead of mulling, maybe consideration. PRCC doesn’t stand for anything I can think of, but it may do, if I can remember it. Puerto Rican Communications Commission, I suppose. 😊

Presence, receptivity, clarity, consideration. I can go with that. We’ll see if it works as we go along.

So today’s theme was what?

“Consideration and revision,” perhaps.

Perhaps. And next time?

Let us continue on this theme. There is much more to say.

Our thanks as always.

 

Wednesday, September 14, 2022

3 a.m. First Life and endless revision? That’s where you said we’d pick up.

But you are already tired.

I am, but lying on the bed isn’t going to help anything, and this may at least get us a little farther along.

You will need to be extremely present.

Let’s try, anyway.

You found yesterday’s point clarifying.

Extremely so. It was like the sun rising, suddenly showing spatial relationships among many things that had been experienced separately.

And the key was – ?

Maybe it was your clarification of the word “insubstantial,” but looking back, it was the whole discussion, really. I saw what is wrong with our lives and what is right with them. If we think of our lives in terms of sequential 3D development, we attach concepts like permanent, leaving, definite, single-version, past lives, all manner of things.

To clarify for yourself and for others, set out your understanding, not worrying over the fact that it cannot be a final report. (Not that there ever could be a final report!)

I’m seeing it this way.

• A group of elements is inserted into a moment of time-space to live a 3D life together. This may be what the Egyptians meant by First Life.
• All during that life, the individual that is also a community chooses and learns from its reaction to past choices. Its first-tier choices are fixed, its second-tier choices perhaps fluctuating.
• At the end of that life, you have a permanent mind that hadn’t existed before. This is from a 3D perspective, though.
• From a non-3D perspective, the same three elements look quite different, because nothing is set in stone in any way.

See if you can make that last point clearer.

What looks like sequence to 3D – birth, life, death – to the non-3D look like not so much sequence  as existence, as maintenance, as continuity. You can do this better, I think.

In 3D the sequence seems to proceed from past to present to future. From non-3D one sees that each of these moments does not cease to exist; therefore all parts are alive and (sort of a nonsense statement in non-3D terms, but) continue to be alive. Nothing replaces; it sets up next to the previous, as we mentioned many years ago, in passing.

And this means our ideas about life and death and afterlife are skewed by invisible links to 3D experiencing things as successions of replaced moments. We got that, in terms of past lives, but it was only yesterday that I got it in terms of everyday moments.

The Egyptians saw a distinction, you see. Succeeding civilizations mistook the Egyptian perception for obsession with death and the afterlife, and no doubt this was true as the centuries passed and superstition supplanted understanding, as it does over time. But what ended as superstition – that is, as repetition of actions after understanding of the meaning of the actions (the context) had been lost – did not begin as superstition, but as sophisticated understanding.

The Egyptians, like any hierarchy of knowledge – like we ourselves in this context – faced the usual difficulty of attempting to transmit non-3D understandings while using sequential 3D symbols in 3D time. It’s very difficult! Given the passage of enough time, distortion is guaranteed to enter in; superstition is guaranteed to replace understanding, usually a little bit at a time, but always in the direction of greater distortion.

I get that hieroglyphics had some kind of advantage over script, in that regard, and maybe that’s one reason they did so well over so long a period of time.

Yes, but in the larger scheme of things, one can only do so much to overcome the erosion of millions of seconds, billions of understandings, trillions of semi-comprehensions.

Odd the priesthoods, that work so hard to fight the encroachment of superstition, become blamed for the success of what they attempt to stem.

If you are charged with holding back the waters, there is rough justice in holding you responsible for floods, even though of course it was not you who brought the rainfall.

I suppose if they don’t have the active assistance of non-3D sources, they succumb pretty quickly, given that whatever they have learned, they still must maintain while living a 3D life that argues otherwise.

Why do you think priesthoods depend so heavily upon prayer and meditation? Until prayer becomes rote and meditation becomes stylized and in fact bounded, they help the priest maintain the link. And of course that is why other strictures upon them. But this is peripheral to today’s point.

The key for you yesterday – that you have forgotten, oddly, even in writing it down at the beginning – is that your 3D lives are never finished. There is never a final version. That isn’t what life is about. There is First Life, for each of you, and then the living of endless permutations of that life.

• Every decision anyone makes changes the person and reverberates along the threads to all who connect to it.
• Each other person, the same, and, you will remember, it is this endless interlinking that leads us to say that there is only one Individuals are relative and fractal, never absolute with solid boundaries.
• With everyone continually changing, there is no “final version” of anyone’s life. Those lives are – alive! They change, they grow, they express different characteristics, they affect each other, continuously.
• The better you did with your First Life, the better a platform you have. It isn’t exactly an “afterlife.” It is a revision process.

Revision, though, sounds like movement from less good to better. Is that what you mean?

How could it be? Who can get outside totality to judge better or worse? And what relevance has the apple in the garden, when you are considering all life?

• That’s another thing, by the way. This does not consider humans (or ex-humans) alone. The other kingdoms are mind-stuff too, and the more you take that into account, the better chance you will have of better understanding things. This is not a morality play; it is a light show.

Now, we aren’t able to translate Egypt’s understanding into your time’s mind-set. Even if we were able to do so, which version? No civilization persists for thousands of years without its understandings changing, for better and for worse. Think how America’s has changed, so many times, in only 500 years.

But you are using Egypt sort of as a shining example.

You won’t get there by scholarship, but you might, by meditation and open-concept feeling.

Say again?

We mean, take a fact or a photo or a remembered story and sit with it, not attempting to remember but to attune.

Is that what I was doing in Egypt in 2019?

You tell us. You held your hands near to – not touching – the carved stone walls, and felt the inaudible buzz, so to speak. You didn’t know why you did it; you longed to be able to read the hieroglyphs, indeed irrationally you felt you ought to be able to read them, and nothing you had ever read or heard suggested there could be benefit from attuning with the stone in the way you did. You were listening to an impulse that said to do so. You did not get much of what was said in each place, but we would hardly say you came away having wasted your time.

So today’s theme, “Egypt and us”?

More like, “Hints from the Egyptians.” It is only hints, at this point, but there’s a good deal of progress possible. Next time we will continue on the theme of endless revision, as we haven’t really spelled it out yet. And we remind you, you intended (where would you have gotten this idea?) to ask for questions and comments, as that will help us see what we have not get succeeded in sketching.

By now it’s a formula, but it is no less true for that: Our thanks for all this, as always.

 

Tuesday, September 13, 2022

3:30 a.m. Looking back to the 9^th and going forward:

• The realest things seem least real in 3D.
• It’s all mind-stuff.
• Can’t ignore religious or occult ideas of the past.
• Life looks different to everybody. We each live in a different world.
• The everyday world is timing, filter, culmination, and precondition.
• The 3D world is not separate and not primary.

And you said we would resume today with living a sacred and grounded life.

Yes. And we suggested the bullet summary and perhaps you can see that it may help keep the argument centered.

When you said sacred and grounded, I took that to mean – well, it is difficult to find words for the concept, though it feels clear enough.

After all, this entire conversation, stretching back 25 years or so, might be described as finding words for simple concepts. It is a feature of 3D that words – sequentially employed strings of specifics and abstracts – may affix what otherwise would be felt but not understood. It is the left-brain complementing the right-brain, you see.

I do.

We are suggesting what you might think of as everyday reverence for life. Not woo-woo and exalted; not materialist and uninspired. Rather, putting the 3D world in its proper perspective as a place for the specific working-out of problems in a way that would not be possible in other conditions.

Take your life seriously as a competent actor takes a given role seriously. Live your life respecting your life, let’s say. But the actor knows that there is a difference between a given role in a play and his life beyond the actor portion of that life. He may also have a mortgage, or an ulcer, or hobbies, or children. These other aspects of his life need not interfere with his acting, but they do not cease to exist merely because he is not concentrating on them while he is on stage.

But what would it mean, to live a life that is both sacred and grounded? In asking that question, we do not mean to imply that none of you know. Some of you live exactly that sort of life, instinctively from earliest childhood. Some learn to live it. Some are ready to live it but have lacked the idea of it. As usual, we are addressing ourselves not to any one person, yet, at the same time, to any one of a multitude of types of person.

That came out a little awkwardly, but I think it comes though.

It is an insight that cannot be proved. It can’t be argued into, let’s say. Suggestions and sparks may provide those who are ready with just what they need, but it will be as sparks jumping gaps, not as proofs overwhelming objections.

As usual.

Yes, but even more so than as usual.

Why more so?

Because this is another example of the realest things seeming least real. An attitude toward life doesn’t sound  very solid, does it? Doesn’t sound like an achievement, not a skill, nor even a trait. And yet this bit of smoke may prove solid enough to found a life upon, to shape a soul upon.

I see. Not unlike the gift of faith in life.

No, nor courage, nor, indeed, prudence, temperance, justice and fortitude as lodestones.

All of it seeming insubstantial, all of it being vital and invisible.

You say “insubstantial,” and in a way you did not mean, that is it entirely. Substance, being material, is less real than mind-stuff, per se.

But material is mind-stuff too.

Yes, but mind-stuff stepped down, so to speak. Matter is the long way round, and spirit is the direct line. Thus, in the way we mean it, you can see that “insubstantial” might be paraphrased, “not merely material and contingent, but spiritual and thus primary.”

[Transcribing this, I see that the “merely” may be misread as meaning “not only.” They intended it in the sense of material and contingent being less than spiritual.]

Until now you have been shying away from the word spiritual.

We are hoping that after all this time, your readers ought to be able to separate a concept from the prejudicial associations it may have had in their minds.

I guess we’ll see. Some will be able to, some won’t, I suppose.

For those who cannot, or for those who are unable to feel that the material “external” world is not a preexisting thing in itself, the things we have in mind to say will at best be seeds for their future, seeds that may bear new life, unpredictably, at some future time. There is no schedule about it, no wasted lives, no wrong turnings. But this is for those who came here because their non-3D component knew they were ready, or might be ready, or were almost ready, or might profit from this at some future time.

That’s lovely, actually. Comprehensive, helpful, non-directive.

You will find that guidance is always that way, with fluctuations according to the situation.

To return to our earlier point. The things that most powerfully affect the shaping and development of your souls are always, and necessarily, the things that seem least substantial to a materialist mindset. Even to call them “things” is a misnomer. They have no solidity, and are the stronger and more permanent for it.

You know the true saying that no one ever lay on his deathbed wishing he had spent more time at the office. Well, neither did anyone ever look back at his 3D life with satisfaction at –

Yes, it’s going to be misinterpreted unless you say it very carefully, or unless you spell it out after you say it. I know where you were going, but the obstacle to understanding is equally clear to me.

It is a problem with words, not with concepts. It is a simple concept that will mislead when put into words unless, as you say, we do it very carefully. We can only try, and you will clean up after us if need be.

No one looks back on their past 3D life and counts the number of Cadillacs they owned, nor the awards they were given, nor the fame or pleasures or even accomplishments they were in the center of. Not that there is anything wrong with any of these; not that what they did doesn’t matter; not that all these things are not in a way what that liberated soul is. (Say graduated, if you like that better: The sense is that the 3D life is completed as far as that soul is concerned.)

Our point is that what the ex-3D soul will weigh and value will be intangibles. Did it love? Did it live in a way it approves of, after the fact?

No, that isn’t quite what you mean. Not “approves of.”

No, you’re right. We mean, closer, did it live in a way that had results it finds helpful. Even this doesn’t quite get it, but it is closer. It isn’t exactly submitting the life to judgment – certainly not to potential condemnation – but it is a sort of summing-up, a position report. “As a result of that life, I am now X.”

So far.

Yes! So far, for of course a life isn’t over merely because it’s over, Yogi Berra to the contrary. But First Life is. You only get to do First Life once.

Which sounds like the cliff-hanger you often use to round off a conversation.

We did well today. Most of what we have to say here has been said between the lines, and, as Hemingway knew, that is a very powerful method of bringing evanescent things to the eye: They can’t quite be seen clearly, but they hold the attention. We will resume with the question of First Life and endless revision of the manuscript, perhaps.

Our thanks to you as always. Today’s theme?

“Sacred, real, and insubstantial,” perhaps.

Till next time, then.

 

Monday, September 12, 2022

4:50 a.m. Shall we proceed? You left it at, we should take the world more seriously, but in a different way.

Yes, and you are beginning to see, in a general way, the direction of our argument.

Well, considering the above with your statement that the realest aspects of 3D life appear the least real, and earlier admonitions to take seriously religious preoccupations, and your approval of astrology and other means of tying together the moment and its qualities, it does seem clear enough that you are saying the shared subjectivity – what seems to us external to ourselves – warrants more attention from us than it has had, but not as something existing external and existing without relation to us but as something equally important but not yet understood.

Your difficulty in groping your way to the end of that long sentence will surprise you, after a while. Once the point is made, the preliminary gropings seem so unnecessary, even inexplicable.

• Take the 3D world seriously. It exists. You swim in it. You pilot a body that manifests its qualities. Don’t wave it all away with a philosophic or metaphysical formula.
• However, do not make the mistake of seeing it as simpler than it is. Just as 3D extends into non-3D dimensions, so any other conceptual boundary you may imagine you see can be only somewhat real. There are no hard and fast boundaries in reality, as we keep reminding you.
• In taking the 3D world seriously, you must necessarily remember to take your own individual psychic world seriously, for the one is part of the other. There is no “the world” separate from you. If there were, how could you experience it?
• Of course this does not mean that the world is a dream that you as an individual are dreaming. But it is a dream that everybody (in 3D and not) is dreaming. A moment’s thought should show you that anything dependent on one person’s attention would be infinitely fragile, evanescent.
• Just as there is no “the world” separate from you, so can there be no “you” separate from “the world.” It is the same statement. You don’t go off after death and leave the things of earth behind, not in the way you usually think. First, you don’t “go off” at all. Second, you don’t shed all that part of yourself like a snake shedding its skin. Any moment of time you ever lived in, remains: Could it somehow remain without you?
• The shared subjectivity may be seen as the analogue to your various extensions to other lives. (This is an important point and needs mulling.)

This does seem to pull together things I have been considering in separation. Couldn’t we summarize it, crudely, by saying that the world and everything and everybody in it is holy?

You could indeed.

It means that “ordinary” is more magical than we give it credit for being.

It means that every one of you is more magical than you give yourselves credit for being.

People talk abut “the holy land,” or about sacred spots, or holy individuals, but at best this is an exaggeration of differences, and at worst, a misunderstanding.

Less a misunderstanding than a misperception. You may look at that view as an exaggeration of differences, an exaggeration of the reality of boundaries.

I see that it can be difficult to show how materialism is mistaken, because in a way it is right to put emphasis on the reality (at least, the relative reality) of the stone we kick. But it is blind to the extension of 3D into non-3D.

No! No. To think that is to slide back into the mindset that Colin Wilson and Bernard Shaw shared, a sense of the primacy of the 3D and its extension. We repeat, the material world has no life independent of the rest of life.

I can’t untwist that sentence, though I see where I was going wrong.

The 3D world exists, but it does not exist as something independent of what people call the spiritual life. There is no physical-only. There could never be a physical-only, because what you perceive as physical is a slowed-down version of reality that is itself projected from a higher reality, as we keep saying. This is why we renamed the seemingly self-existent external world the shared subjectivity, to get you thinking of it as mind-stuff like the rest of mind-stuff. If we now emphasize that this part of the mind-stuff is as numinous – as sacred – as any other part of it, this is not to say it has an independent existence in the way it appears to have.

So when you said materialism “is blind to the extension of 3D into non-3D,” we had to object, because although that is true in a sense, it is terribly misleading. It seems to put 3D first, and that is precisely the mistake we are correcting. The 3D does not, could not, come first.

Ah, I start to get it.

Spell out what you are getting?

If 3D came first, reality would be divided. If 3D is a result of a projected reality, there is no such division required.

This is accurate enough, but not everyone will be able to follow it. You yourself perhaps would not come to it in the absence of our direct link. But yes, that is so. Any scheme that supposes multiple pieces, multiple causes, cannot be true in an unfractured universe.

I see, though, that this won’t be convincing to everybody. I can envision contrary arguments.

We remind you that we are not in the persuasion business. We are, at most, unrollers of maps for your benefit. The proper use of our instruction is to weigh what we say – and what it suggests to you – and see what you come up with. People will come up with different things – even contrary things – and even if what they come up with demonstrates that they don’t really get what we’re saying – that is, if our sparks combine with their substance to produce something radically different from our meaning – still, trust the process. People no more come to conclusions at random than they do anything at random. Your thoughts, your emotions, your tendencies conscious and unconscious, proceed from what you are. How could they be wrong for you? And of course that says, how could they be universally applicable?

It is an odd form of teaching you do, continually laying out perspectives and then saying, take it or leave it, it’s all the same to us.

Perhaps that is an experience more common to teachers than you know. A true teacher educes, s/he calls forth what it there in the student to be called forth. How could s/he know ahead of time what there is in any given pupil? Set out the material as best you can, and see what happens. Whatever it is, it won’t be random, but will proceed from what the pupil is, and what the teacher is, and what the teaching is, and what the time allows.

Enough for the moment.

Okay, our thanks as always. And our next starting-place?

Living an everyday sacred and grounded life.

See you then. Today’s theme was?

“No separation,” perhaps.

Till next time then.

Sunday, September 11, 2022

4 a.m. Focus. Receptivity. Clarity. Presence. And I suspect I’m going to need them.

Repeat the sentence.

“The aspects of life that are realest are those that appear (to the 3D mindset) the least real.”

As we said, this is the key to what we have to say. The deeper you penetrate its significance, the greater insight you will obtain. It is because you are identifying with the 3D world that you find it difficult to feel the reality of the greater world of which 3D is only one part, one aspect.

Our sensory experience skews our perception, I take it.

It overbalances your judgment, let’s say. It leads you to give certain appearances the weight that they do not actually merit, and thus leads you to undervalue other aspects. But this is all general and thus not particularly helpful.

No. If you were to leave it at that, I would probably assent but it would not give me any way to change my perception of reality.

We will say again, the key here will be to recognize that in the ordinary way, you believe in the existence of the material world your senses report. You can hardly not believe in it. Your very body that sustains your locus in time/space tells you that you are a 3D creature, and that 3D very evidently is going on around you now, and was in the past, and will be in the future. None of that is false; none of it is true in the way it seems to be.

When you reverse the emphasis, what you experience does not somehow disappear, it merely looks entirely different.

Noce “merely.” But I know what you mean, by experience. The difficulty is less in coming to that realization than in living it.

Cayce and Steiner quotations.

Yes. Both the A.R.E. and a Steiner organization whose name I can’t recall offhand offer a daily quotation from the Cayce and Steiner material, respectively. I subscribed to both, and hence every day in my morning email I receive a quote, and on many more mornings than I ever mention, I am struck by how I now understand what they are saying. Not only understand what, but to some extent understand why. I could not do that – I could at best assent on faith, put it – until I had learned to see reality as emanating from a non-3D source. And all the things you have taught me, bless you, all these years, have sorted themselves gradually, until I see how they bear about one another.

At each point in your journey – in anyone’s journey – helpful examples of how a given insight plays out in practice.

Yes, I realize that is what you are doing. I get to a base camp, and that new base camp provides a settled understanding which then allows you to nudge it onward by showing that the understandings I have are not exactly right, but have been helpful compromises. And on we move. I don’t know if this way of proceeding would be everybody’s cup of tea, but it is mine, perfectly adjusted, I see, to my mentality and even my biases. I’m very grateful for the care you’ve taken.

Of course everyone has carefully tailored guidance available to them, and of course the flavor and style will be different for each, because tailored one for one.

So now consider that initial statement once again: For each of you, life will appear in different guise. You will find this rather than that to be self-evident. You will have to work to envision X as real rather than as fantasy, while someone else will accept X easily but will balk at Y which is self-evident to you. Therefore, to each person, the process of seeing beyond the surface of reality is a different specific task. Our generalization holds, but it will manifest in different specifics to different people.

This is just each of us representing a different point of view, as you said a while ago.

Yes. You are each different; you each live in a different world, and at the same time you are each a part of the one great thing that is reality. And this leads us to today’s point. Because you live in different worlds, it is the “external” events that hold you at all together. Because your individual subjectivities would dissever you from everyone else, it is the shared subjectivity that provides the common center around which you all orient yourselves. You will remember, we chose to begin this series by seizing upon the idea of “The Age of Elizabeth.” Superficially, what can a generalization mean to an individual soul working out its salvation, as the religions put it? Our answer: It means everything.

What we have been calling our unfinished business is quite a bit more than that.

It is, but it is that too. The individual and the collective are two aspects of one reality, as usually. So much depends upon how you look at a thing. One view shows one background and context. Turn around and you see a different background, a different context. Which is real?

Both.

Both, and many more, yes.

The everyday world is

It is illusion, but there is a reality behind the illusion. It is transient in a way, permanent in a way. It is very much material and 3D; it is equally the thing beyond material and 3D. But you can’t get the reality of this – the factual, non-metaphorical, practical trueness of this – if you allow yourself to half-believe that this material world is anything but a projection from a realer reality. Yes, you can kick the stone, like Dr. Johnson, but the kicker and kickee are projection, both. The fact that they have a stable relations one to the other does not affect the fact.

I understand. Assuming we at least suspend our disbelief in the concept (until a new orientation supplants the older one), this leaves us where?

The everyday world is timing, among other things. It is a common orientation point. Just as you all experience the pyramids as having been built and being “there” now, so you experience Queen Elizabeth as having reigned, lived a long life, and now died. You don’t live with one person experiencing Elizabeth alive and another experiencing her dead, and a third experiencing her never having ascended to the throne. Any given version of reality – any timeline, as you sometimes think of it – is consistent with itself. Anyone experiencing fluctuations experiences them within this common reality.

It is filter, as we said earlier. Every moment has certain qualities, and therefore every moment is hospitable to certain things and not to other things. The Age of Elizabeth – either Elizabeth – is not the Age of Victoria.

It is culmination. Everything that exists around you does so as the effect of innumerable causes, 3D and non-3D. This is only common sense, after all. And so is the fact that every moment is pre-condition, for every moment’s choices are opening a way into a particular future.

It will help me – and probably help us, in that it will replace any floundering around looking for a starting-place – if you can give me our key to the next session.

Well, you see, all this is preparatory to saying you all should take the world more seriously, but in a different way.

I don’t see, but that should do to get us started. Our thanks for this, as usual. Anything you care to add?

Try to remember as an on-going reality, not merely an idea, that everyone proceeds at his or her own pace, toward different destinations. So, what one gets from these discussions will be vary different from what another may get. Sparks, not bricks.

Got it. Till next time, then, and thanks again.

 

Saturday, September 10, 2022

3:50 a.m. I guess I’m ready if you are. I wish I had a better idea of how you want to proceed, and where.

Trust.

Oh, I know. F R C P.

We have pretty extensively described you as 3D individuals/communities. We have somewhat sketched the shared subjectivity that you experience as “the world beyond you,” both mental and physical, and we showed how the emotions you experience may be looked at as the interface between the you that you know and the you that you don’t know – or, between the personal subjectivity and the shared subjectivity. Within the model, the major thing we have not yet described is the nature of “the times” you live in.

It is easy to jump to the conclusion that “the times” refers to external events, but we hope that this is no longer so misleadingly self-evident, in that “external events” have been shown to be not external at all, but internal.

I had to go back to yesterday’s, to find the sentence that struck me. “The aspects of life that are realest are those that appear (to the 3D mind-set) the least real.”

That’s the one. That is, in a way, the key to what we’re to say. If you will remember that your so-solid reality is really mind-stuff, at some point you realize that mind-stuff is the strongest, realest, most vital building-block of reality, and everything else that it appears to be – energy, matter, especially “dead” or “inert” matter, the “things” you live among (including your body) – is just appearance, however convincing it may be.  When you once realize that, many things become seen in their proper relation. Until then, though, things will continue to be seen in the materialist distortion, even if that materialism is overlain by a religiosity that thinks it is at war with matter.

I’m with you so far. But then, I would be: This is the journey I’ve lived at least from the days beginning in 1970 when Colin Wilson showed me a way forward from the sort of blank rejection of religion I had fallen to. He – nor his intellectual hero Shaw – ever quite got beyond the idea of “life inserting itself into matter,” as far as I know. But it was that particular scaffolding that helped me for many years. But if we hadn’t done those black-bx sessions in 2000, leading to Rita’s and my sessions over several months of 2001 and 2002, I don’t know if I’d ever have gotten beyond the base camp where Colin and Shaw wound up. (As far as I know, they did, anyway.)

We remind you of the value of other people’s life-journeys – most especially, their mental and spiritual journeys – in providing base camps for those who follow. Paul Brunton, in your case, most recently.

Yes. It helped crystallize many things, reading his two books, The Hidden Teaching Beyond Yoga and The Wisdom of the Overself. Like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams “thinking for us all” at the convention that declared independence, Brunton’s distilling the intellectual arguments that underpinned his view of reality in effect thought for you; he provided you with the logical chains that explicated what you had come to know.

(Again I began a graf and you finished it. That would have been terribly disconcerting, once.)

Well, all this said, what is the next logical examination but the “how” of your 3D experiences?

I am seeing why you kept bringing in religion, and astrology too. To ignore them as facts would be to at least partially remain mired in the view that paints the physical world as primary, or, at least, as at war with (or anyway, in opposition to) the living.

We said it many times: You cannot afford to ignore or reject any belief that has been sincerely held by substantial numbers of people. It may be necessary to reject any given manifestation as you find your way, but anything you reject ultimately will result in a less-than-complete understanding.

Even materialism, say?

If you cannot sympathetically understand something, how can you weigh it fairly? This will take more than a word, probably, but it is necessary to be clear: There is every difference between choosing fairly and rejecting arbitrarily.

That ought to be self-evident, I should think. The one is discernment, the other is prejudice.

Yes, very good. Still, we will spell it out a bit.

• If one is a materialist, one may be that in different ways, ranging anywhere from rabid rejection of anything that cannot be measured to milder forms of “common sense” that cannot believe that appearances lie to the extent of disguising the nature of the world.
• Religious belief varies at least equally widely, form the tightest, most bigoted set of beliefs to the broadest, least structured set.
• Most people are something of a mixture of incompatible beliefs, due in part to the coexistence within themselves of so many conflicting strands. You are churches, in effect, comprising believers whose beliefs differ extravagantly.
• Given that no one can see the entire reality no matter how talented their “guys upstairs,” equally sincere, equally intelligent people will come to conclusions about reality that may have very many points in conflict. Which one is “right”? Which one is “wrong”? We would say there are many different right approaches to learning greater truths, but one wrong one.

Contempt.

You’ve known it for a long, long time, even though you repeatedly forget it in practice. Contempt, yes, the dismissal without fair consideration of facts or of entire fields of knowledge or experience. It is in refusing to take into account such sources of data that people often cripple themselves.

Now, this does not mean that every sincere seeker is obliged to investigate every field of study. No one could do that. It does mean, though, that a sincere seeker must not make the mistake of refusing to consider things that appear in the path, merely because they have been dismissed in advance. If they were not relevant to the moment, they would not be there.

I get that you aren’t quite saying, everything we meet has something right in it, but –

That is exactly what we are saying. If Jung could force himself to listen to the inner knowing that said study alchemy, you can listen when you are told that Mormons, or Amish, or Muslims, or various kinds of Christians, or animists, etc., etc., all have a piece of the truth. If you think you know in advance that they don’t, so much the worse for your discernment.

So, to wrap this up for now: In order to get closer to the truth, you will have to find the unnoticed things that bind you to this or that variant of the materialist illusion. Snip the right cords and you will free your balloon to rise. But how are you to know what to snip, if you proceed “at random”? Granted you may be protected by a part of you that has a broader view – still it is still possible to make mistakes. The more careful you are, the more aware you are, the fewer mistakes you are liable to make.

I will be interested to reread this, see what it comes to. Our thanks as always, and see you next time.

 

The cosmic weather and us (from Oct. 16, 2020)

[After several difficult nights, the past couple nights had been much better, but Friday was in some ways worse than before. I was up at 3, at 4, at 4:40, and 5:35, unable to read, unable to work. Finally got some sleep, and when I woke up, decided to have it out with the guys.]

We’re going to have to come to some sort of agreement. I shouldn’t have to fight to get enough sleep when I’m perfectly willing to do the work. It is one thing when the work actually helped me get through the night; it is entirely different when I get the sense that it is in order to get me to do the work that I can’t first get the necessary rest and sleep. Or is that merely my misinterpreting what happened?

You are tending to think you are entitled to a night’s rest first, and that there is a link between what has flowed together and what that has facilitated. To be clear: We don’t approve of forcing anyone to do anything, and that is not what we have been doing.

Well, I didn’t think so – but then, what is the mechanism at work here?

You do realize, you are attempting the same bargain in reverse? “If you won’t let me be healthy, I won’t work,” amounts to, “I will work, but only if you let me have what I want.”

I don’t know .It didn’t feel like a tantrum. I was so tired, so unfocused, I couldn’t even read with clarity, let alone communicate. So why couldn’t I sleep or even rest?

Your thinking wasn’t – and isn’t – clear. Why would we want you to try to do the work when you couldn’t, when you do it so gladly and well when you can?

That’s what I was feeling: Why put me through all this?

Perhaps you should have considered: Maybe something else is going on. Maybe what you were assuming isn’t true. Do you want to know?

I do, if it’s something I can do something about. Or even if I can’t, for that matter.

Cosmic weather. The interaction of 3D-you – which includes your body’s composition, of course – and the “external” world at a given moment, with its particular characteristics.

And you have said that our bodies may be experienced as part of that other.

Well, don’t you? When you are ill and your body won’t do what you want or need, doesn’t it express to you as part of the “external” world? Well – it’s not just you. That’s true of anyone.

So, nothing to be done about it?

One thing to be done – it is sort of a developed knack – is to not take it personally and at the same time take it very personally.

I get that that means, Don’t take it as being aimed at you, but take it as being very specific to you.

Exactly. Well phrased. Now broaden the concept so that you see emotion as the intermediate layer between you and larger-you.

• Overall-you, expressing in 3D terms, comes to a given moment.
• That moment amounts to a coinciding of 3D-you’s situation and the “external” situation as it applies to 3D-you.
• 3D-you experiences that moment as conflict or confluence or both, and the next moment follows. It is the first-tier experience, that coming together of the 3D and its moment. The second-tier experience is how the 3D-you reacts to it.

Yes, I get it. That moment didn’t come along to “teach him a lesson,” so to speak. It came out of the nature of the moment, and one’s reaction to the qualities of that moment is what produced the first-tier experience, and thus (unpredictably, because this is the free-will aspect of it) the second-tier reaction.

So, take it personally, and not personally at all.

Now when you come to transcribe, explain at some length what preceded this, and that’s enough for now.

You want to say more about the junction of 3D and external.

We do. You opened up very productive ground there. If people would get the idea and think about it, they would find an answer to many questions that have puzzled philosophers. The answer is to be found in the particular, the specific, not in an abstraction.

The key being the 3D-you’s interaction with the “external” world in any given moment.

That, in association with the three-tier concept, yes. Many a seeming contradiction between free will and predestination, for instance, is resolved by recognizing that either position is merely a seeing from one viewpoint only, rather than from both. The first-tier experience may be said to be predestined; the second-tier is clearly free-will. Or is it “clearly”?

It is to me, but I suspect others may think that our decisions, too, are predestined from what has happened before.

So that when you change your mind, or have a life-altering realization, it is only because it was inevitable? As usual, we ask, “Does your life feel that way?” And we know that for you, at least, it does not. However, some may need to see things that way.

Now, if you will examine the basics of astrology, you will see that a horoscope amounts to a weather report, and a progression amounts to a forecast of coming conditions. Surely you can see that someone with a lifelong illness or mental or physical condition may be seen to be under the influence of the slower-moving outer planets, so that the correspondences last, perhaps, an entire lifetime, or decades, or perhaps “only” a term of years, though it may seem long enough.

If you will remember that everything is alive and has its own form of consciousness, the idea of planets and stars having an effect on “external” conditions may come to seem no more fanciful than, say, our statement that it is the geology of a place that provides it its stability.

The planets aren’t just “dead matter,” and their interaction with our lives isn’t just a fanciful or superstitious idea.

No. But look a little closer. The astrological influences are twofold in effect. They shape the “external” world’s weather conditions and they also shape the weather experienced by 3D-you as internal. That’s why the mantic arts can be useful at all, you see: They connect inner and outer.

As do we ourselves.

Yes, very good. Each 3D individual mind is, in effect, a tarot spread, or a casting of runes, or a reading of the stars.