Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

Steiner quote of the day, particularly appropriate today, I think.

ON SEPTEMBER 9, 2022 BY RIDZERDIN ANTHROPOSOPHY, SOCIAL RENEWAL

Through a deepening of social life a new understanding of man must be found, and must permeate human development.

Instead of having eyes only for the man of flesh, apprehending him in a naturalistic way, devoid of the spirit, we must reach the stage of a spirit-filled social organism, wherein the activity of the gods in other men can be recognised.

But we shall not attain to this unless we do something about it. One thing we can do is to strive to deepen our own life of soul. There are many paths to that. I will mention only one, a meditative path.

From various points of view, and with various aims, we can cast a backward glance over our own lives. We can ask ourselves: How has this life of mine unfolded since childhood? But we can do this also in a special way. Instead of bringing before our gaze what we ourselves have enjoyed or experienced, we can turn out attention to the persons who have figured in our lives as parents, brothers and sisters, friends, teachers and so on, and we can summon before our soul the inner nature of each of these persons, in place of our own. After a time we shall find ourselves reflecting how little we really owe to ourselves, and how much to all that has flowed into us from others. If we honestly build up this kind of self-scrutiny into an inner picture, we shall arrive at quite a new relationship to the outer world. From such a backward survey we retain certain feelings and impressions. And these are like fertile seeds planted in us — seeds for the growth of a true knowledge of man. Whoever undertakes again and again this inward contemplation, so that he recognises the contribution which other persons, perhaps long dead or far distant, have made to his own life, then when he meets another man, and establishes a personal relationship with him, an imagination of the other man’s true being will rise before him.

Friday, September 9, 2022

7:45 a.m. Very well, gentlemen, I hear you knocking on the door. What would you like to talk about?

Elizabeth and you.

Really? Very well. You aren’t intending to hint a close relationship, I trust.

You jest, and of course we don’t mean it in the “past-life soulmate” kind of way. We confine our theme not to you, nor, really, to her as an individual; not even as communities.

As expressions of something?

Perhaps you might set your switches for maximum focus, receptivity, clarity, and – above all – presence.

All right.

“The Age of Elizabeth” is more than a convenient phrase bracketing certain decades in a common binder. There is a real quality to it that will interest you. Only, in what we hope to say, do not let yourself forget that the generalization, like any generalization, is not the only correct way to see things. It is one clarifying example. Others, including some that would seem to directly contradict this one, would equally illuminate certain aspects of time and life.

Whatever this is, Churchill had an intimation of it, didn’t he? His eulogy of King George VI ended with a harking-back to his youth in the age of Victoria, and cast forth the sense that perhaps the new young queen might bring forth a new Elizabethan Age. Was that more than an orator’s phrase? Was his immense sense of history nudging him?

You are closer to the idea in talking about his “sense of history.” History has structure, of course, in the way that geography or psychology has structure. Not everything that influences can be seen; not everything invisible leaves visible traces. But some do.

I get that you are hooking together history and psychology and geography perhaps more as actual interrelations than as the examples I first thought them to be. They are aspects of astrology.

You might equally say that astrology is an aspect of each of them, but yes, that’s the idea. It is not merely historians and journalists who coin and employ phrases like “The Age of Roosevelt” or “The Steamship Era” or suchlike. These catchphrases express something real.

I’m recalibrating. I’m getting a sense that either you’re finding it hard to phrase what you know or I’m insufficiently focused to allow it in.

Initial attempts to express new understandings are often accompanied by fumbling first efforts, you know that.

I should by now!

As usual, and by your preference quite as much as ours, we speak not only to you as individual, but to any who care to listen.

Yes, I understand.

You have been thinking, maybe you have run through the subjects we can or will bring through, and maybe all that is left to you is editing. But there is always more, if you care to do the work on your end as well.

Leaving our present base camp and doing some more climbing, you mean?

If you wish to do so.

I will assume that you wouldn’t begin something you couldn’t finish.

That isn’t your affair.

No, I suppose not. Even an interrupted task leaves what had been done to date. Okay, let’s.

If you will look back (conceptually) to our very first efforts in this line, you will see a progression in which we attempted to quietly remove distortions in the way you saw your selves, your lives. The theme kept broadening to become in a way less about any individual and more about larger and larger generalities. Individual communities in one lifetime; extensions of other lives (“past lives”); reconceptualizations of time and analysis (“All is one,” “As above, so below,” “The other side”); bringing in of topics that at first seem unrelated, seeking greater and greater examples of the fact that the universe (that is, reality) has no hard and fast boundaries, yet has firm repeating structure.

Now let us tie in your individual lives, your lives in 3D societies, your (our) lives in All-D, and the unseen and somewhat unknowable extensions of life upward into the celestial kingdom and downward beyond the mineral kingdom – in all of this, remembering that 3D is a projected reality of mind-stuff; it is not rocks in space. A big “therefore” that until now we haven’t much addressed is that the aspects of life that are realest are those that appear (to the 3D mindset) the least real.

My mind immediately assents to that, even though I don’t really know yet where you’re going.

How did your mind assent to it, without knowing? That is an example – trivial example, but an example – of the fact we intend to examine. The realest part of your lives is the seemingly non-physical; that is, the mental, the spiritual.

But as usual it isn’t that simple. I can hear you trying to line up the “howevers.” Bullets?

Perhaps. Let’s see.

• 3D and non-3D are not really separate, let along antagonistic.
• Sensory and intuitive, similarly, are polarities, not opposites.
• Conscious and unconscious; same thing. They shade into one another; they are points on a polarity, not opposites, let alone unrelated.
• Therefore there is no “mental” without a physical component, but, by the same token, no “physical” without a mental component. These are logical divisions, not actual ones.
• Where we intend to go involves examination of “strictly mental” or “strictly physical” aspects of your lives – and we remind you at the outset, there can be no “strictly” either one. But for the purpose of analysis, we need to proceed as if the divisions were real.

I think that got it.

Yes, it should. If any miss the point, it ought to become clear as we proceed.

So, Elizabeth and us?

Elizabeth and you, Frank, as an individual, to serve as example. And there’s a reason for proceeding this way. We mean for everyone who reads this to take the example to heart: That is, we want each of them to take it seriously, a personal individual relationship with what will seem only an abstraction. To leave it vague would be to fail to show what we want to show. To leave it as if it affected only one person, or only some people, would still not only miss the point, but obscure it.

This is for everybody, not for any one of you. But it will only come clear (if it even does come clear) as tied to one person, and who better than the one driving the pen?

Only we aren’t going to get any farther today.

No, but well begun is half done.

I’ll bet we’re a long way short of half! Very well, our thanks as always, and I’m interested to see what this winds up coming to.

 

Sept. 8, 2022

Different societies allow and encourage and almost require different abilities to emerge in the individuals comprising them. But this is far from a simple statement, given that the individuals involved are themselves communities learning to function as a new unprecedented individual, learning to synthesize background experiences, abilities, tendencies into something necessarily unique.

Something new is not necessarily something unprecedented – hence our earlier discussion about mind crystallizing or not. But, sometimes they are. That’s the goal, you might say, not only of an individual’s existence but of a society’s existence, of humanity’s (or other species’) existence.

It isn’t “all about you” in any 3D sense. But let’s remain on firm ground: your lives. That’s what concerns you – and rightly so – when you are in the body. Only, once you make the Copernican Shift and put your full self in the center of your life, rather than only the part of you known or knowable to 3D senses and 3D logic, you are in a different mental world. Similarly, once you put your society (your civilization) into the center, rather than you as individuals, you see the limits of what is called individualism, the distorting effect that always follows putting an unreality in the center.

You can easily see that societies built upon false premises cannot help be distorted in their beliefs, practices, perceptions, priorities. But recognize, that goes for yours too. You can’t judge the truth of information by whether it does or doesn’t conform to what seems reasonable within the confines of your society’s assumptions.

Sure, we know that.

You do not know that. You know it sometimes; you know it sporadically; you know it in one corner of your mind, while other corners believe other things. Nobody is always a sheepdog or even always a wolf. In some circumstances, anyone will be a sheep.

By which I take it you mean, we accept unthinkingly more than we realize we do.

Yes. It’s necessary, you can’t doubt everything. But it is worth remembering that you do so.

Now, when we use the word “society,” we are folding several meanings into the one word, with confusing results:

• Your civilization
• Your part of that civilization (that is, your nation or state)
• Your ethnic and linguistic subset of that part
• Your particular family background
• Your community of being (strands).

Is it any wonder that so tangled a mass of cross-references, continually sliding in your mind, results in confusion of thought? So, it is not surprising – shouldn’t be surprising, anyway – that each of you distorts your society’s false premises in your own fashion. However, it is also true that each of you brings in your own sliver of truth in your own fashion. Such is the value and the disadvantage of individual lives lived in a given time and place, and forwarded (so to speak) into the non-3D as a new unique vantage point.

 

The overarching theme is that societies change, and those changes interact with individual potential, and new individuals change society as well. It is a continuing interactive process, sometimes so slow-moving as to appear glacial or even non-existent; other times, changes come in torrents, and old people look in bewilderment at a landscape unrecognizably different from the one they grew up in. Not only are institutions and mores changed, but the very nature of their children and grandchildren is alien to them. Your grandparents experienced it.

Doesn’t any generation, that lives long enough?

You are reading the Adams-Jefferson letters. They comment on the changes in the social situation, but does it seem to you that they saw people as having changed?

Very much the opposite. These two literate, classically trained men of the world – and Abigail Adams, who contributed to the dialog – saw human nature as intractable, for better or worse. Any changes they noticed, they ascribed to the influence of a new society that they had helped to emerge from its European background.

So even in an era of revolutionary change, changes in human nature may not be obvious; may not exist. But sometimes they do occur, slowly or quickly, and you see the differences between what men believe between one era and another. An ancient Roman might not have felt terribly out of place technologically in the Middle Ages, say, but he would have had a hard time encompassing its mind-set. And the disparity increases and the time-lag shortens, as you near your present moment.

Of course there are always forerunners and throwbacks, but the mass is fairly compact for any given time and place. Even a jangled mass – New York City in its immigrant-packed heyday in the late 19th century, say – is as self-coherent as miles of Iowa cornfields and villages, say, or California boomtowns, or New England fishing towns. And it is the same in your time, only in some eras, change occurs slowly and continuity is more obvious, but in yours, continuity scarcely is visible. What is continuous is the flow.

Now, our point here is simple. Change is good, continuity is good, and everyone welcomes each in different proportions, and differently in different mental contexts. So – liberal or conservative, depending upon the issue, depending upon the time of day, depending upon one’s family traditions of thought and emotion. It is not a war of different kinds of people, though it is somewhat a war of perceptions. Rearrange your political thinking, and your view of the world and the society’s possibilities changes accordingly.

If I hear your subtext, you are saying we can’t really afford to continue to consider politics and psychology and metaphysics etc. as separate subjects without application one to the other.

Well, you can’t understand what you firmly mis-understand. If you cannot see the connections, you will be bewildered, frightened, disoriented, perhaps despairing, anyway. Sound like any society you know?

And more so every year.

The readjustment pains are necessary. The extreme disorientation and accompanying fear are not: They will increase or decrease according to people’s level of understanding of what is going on.

Understandings cascade down into society from a few – maybe originally from only one – to a larger few, then a larger few yet. That is, understandings diffuse into societies in an organic rather than in a random way. And this takes time, and is assisted by the existence of societies. This ties in to your previous statement about society having many ways for people to associate. We were talking of it in context of ways for an individual to have a place. Now we’re looking at it as the way the individual moves society.

Esoteric societies move society in ways individuals working alone can’t. How? By using magical powers directly? By exerting occult influences on the minds of society’s movers and shakers?

I don’t know, but when you posed the question, I thought of Dion Fortune saying (through her character Morgan LeFay, who does work mostly alone) that to enter new ideas into the mind of humanity, you must live them, not merely speak them.

A part of living your highest truths is living in the world as it is, living your life where and when you are. How else can a body function, save in time and space? How else can one person influence another, save through what he or she is?

Not, also, what he or she does? Says? Preaches? Teaches?

Do they not flow from what s/he is?

What of the solitary hermit in the desert?

The fact that you even heard of them shows you that they had their influence, influence that proceeded from what they did, or said: ultimately, from what they were. It is Emerson’s mousetrap.

Emerson said if somebody invents a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to his door even if he lives out in the woods somewhere. But the mousetrap can’t quite be said to proceed from what the man was, can it? Or – can it? I guess the  lightbulb came because of what Edison was, which led to what he did.

Individuals transmit change to the world around them. Even on the most mundane subject – light bulbs, mousetraps – individuals cannot function without others. What good would it to do invent the lightbulb if there were none to provide the raw materials, to assemble it, to sell the concept and finance the initial capital requirements, to string the wires and build the generators and produce the lamps, etc., etc.? Jefferson constructed the moldboard plow by applying mathematics to a practical problem. Where did he get his knowledge of mathematics, if not from his teachers?

If you are eager to change what people can be (to remove previous limits and set new ones), you can’t do it alone, any more than inventors can acquire and make practical their bright ideas. The specifics of what kinds of help you require are different, but the situation is the same otherwise.

My friend Dana Redfield said (I think in her novel Jonah) “no one crosses alone.”

And we could expand that to say, no one even exists alone. Be you ever so solitary, even lonely, you can’t possibly be alone in the largest sense, because you exist as a community, in a community, therefore for a community.

To paraphrase Mr. Lincoln, it is a matter of enlightenment of the people, by the people, for the people.

Yes. It is not a few high priests enlightening the masses. The absolute differences between the most and the least “enlightened” is relatively small. How could it be otherwise, given that you (we) are all one?

 

Sept. 7, 2022

Successful societies: I (from Dec. 9 and 13, 2018)

Let’s address people’s request for clarification of something you said on February 17, 2006.

The fact that you did not intend to copy the first part of the paragraph shows that you were misconstruing what we meant, at least to some extent. The maldistribution of resources and rewards is a symptom; it is not itself the problem.

[The complete paragraph read: “The death of materialism as an operating principle leaves your time at a loss. The poor cannot look to achieving your American standard of living. Americans living it – and Europeans – know that it isn’t an answer to meaning anyway. And the hypertrophy of concentration of wealth demonstrates in any case that a society’s accumulation of wealth is not necessarily to the benefit of any but a predatory few. (And this is how it always has been in uncontrolled society. Remind us sometime to speak of the models that have succeeded.)”]

Materialism sets accumulation as the measurement, and would be the problem even if distribution were fair.

The question isn’t about result; it is about process. You don’t live in “result” except as preparatory ground for further “process.” People who are satisfied with past results attempt to preserve them; those who are not, attempt to change them. But depending upon the issue, anyone is for maintenance (conservative) or overthrow (liberal) – and nobody is on only the same side of the maintenance / overthrow fence on every issue.

Thus, people defining themselves as liberal or conservative are misleading themselves?

Let’s say they are blurring the issue.

Would you care to clarify the issue?

Anyone is liberal or conservative in approach to any given concern. If everything were weighed on any one issue, then yes, you’d have populations divided beyond hope of reconciliation. But since members of Army A (so to speak) are members of Army B on a different issue, it should be clear that people group by comfort-level more than by belief or even vested interest.

Your times encourage you all to think in terms of fixing something broken. (That is why you experience yourselves as at war.) Instead of looking at societies that have succeeded in fixing something, let us look at a couple of attributes of a successful society. This is not an inclusive list, and of course does not describe a perfect society, for such society does not and cannot exist.

Because –?

Because there are too many kinds of people, with too many kinds of needs. Swiss security may come at the price of Swiss smugness. Scandinavian concern for universal welfare may come at the price of an implied and accepted conformity, etc. Any excellence implies a corresponding defect somewhere. To search for an impossible perfection is to automatically reject whatever is. No society succeeds or ever could succeed at everything. So let’s start by asking, “a society that succeeds” – at what? At giving its members a sense of participating in a true community.

A tribe does that. Your American Indians, your aborigines in Australia, your primitive peoples all over the world: primarily held together by a sense of being an extended family, tied usually by interdependence, regulated by what you might call a social sense of humor, that renders certain social offences not so much wrong as ludicrous. Invisibly governed by a shared assumption that every member is a member for life. You can see, perhaps, that this description has nothing to do with economics or technology or ideology or state of civilization. The Oneida or Amana or Mormon communities functioned in a somewhat tribal fashion. Immigrant ghettos to a lesser degree, in looking out for one another as brothers among strangers, so to speak.

The “success” we are looking at here is a sense of being included in a community that cares about you. Such community could exist on a larger scale, but of course it becomes more difficult to maintain a tribal closeness among hundreds of millions. America’s secret (that it has to a large degree lost sight of) was the huge number of overlapping societies its members could belong to.

If you can belong to various organizations, you can experience different levels of membership. You may be a newbie in one, a master in a second, a willing worker in the ranks in a third. Same “you,” same lifetime, but many different levels of experience, hence many different satisfactions. You don’t have to measure yourself by only one yardstick, hence an obscure existence in one may be balanced by frustration in a second and perhaps by excellence in a third. It makes for balance for everyone.

…

More on the subject of success and societies, please. My brother suggests more on the subject of overlapping societies.

Yes, as a subset of the larger topic, which is the challenge to outdated ways of thinking and being that marks your times. Again, it is not political or ideological in and of itself.

A thought experiment. Suppose either “liberal” or “conservative” values were to win the on-going tug of war, and therefore organized your society. What happens on the day after?

This is an impossible example, isn’t it? The defeated qualities would continue to dissent and exist, if only underground. Plus, didn’t you point out that liberal and conservative are more mood than conviction?

Well, let’s say innate temperament. Some people want to move fast, some slow; some emphasize conservation, others, reformation; some see bad where others see good – and this is so on every issue, and no one is entirely one or the other on every issue. You may call yourself conservative or liberal, but on another issue, in another part of your mind, your natural place to stand may be with the “enemy.” A different group of your constituent strands will be in charge. But suppose the issues were settled, all of them. Then what? Do you suppose contention would have gone out of the world?

After the religious wars in the 1600s, people stopped trying to make Protestantism or Catholicism prevail, and accepted that neither was going to happen. Is that the kind of analogy you are drawing?

Notice that it fills our conditions, without an unreal perfection. That is, plenty of people were still bitterly divided in their hearts. Interfamily warfare – for that’s what it amounted to – continued and in some places continues to your own time. But outside of Ireland, where political and economic issues attach, who in your day is likely to enlist in a war of Catholics against Protestants per se? That conflict doesn’t threaten. Society readjusted to religious fragmentation.

In your time, people think they are fighting for freedom against present and future oppression. But that is how it always seems! Liberal fears center on economic oppression and conservative fears center on governmental oppression. But let’s pretend one or the other “side” (which are coalitions rather than bandings, despite what they think) overcomes the other. You won or you lost, but either way you have to live with the result. Now what?

First, I’d imagine, if you won, you’re going to be disappointed.

Yes, because reality is never tidy. Successful coalitions immediately find cracks in their unity, producing bitter accusations of treason and tyranny. The most extreme ideologues – the most unrelentingly logical, the least reality-bounded – always find that the war is not over, because of treason or at least fuzzy-mindedness within the successful ranks, which of course must be rooted out.

And if you lost, still you go on living.

So you put aside lost causes (or hug them to yourself in bitterness or mourning, preventing yourself from moving on) and concentrate on the parts of your life that you can control.

In either case, what had been a reason to live becomes a past reason to live. After a generation passes, it is harder to respond to “The Redcoats are coming! The Redcoats are coming!” It is  part of the history that shaped you, but it is not alive, it is not a day-to-day decision to be made, no matter how active a patriot or loyalist you were, or your parents were.

But your psychological makeup will express nonetheless. Life always offers sides to choose among. After American independence, other generations fought among themselves over the question of the relation of the new federal government to the pre-existing states, and to the new states carved out of commonly owned territory, then to the new states made from newly acquired territory. Other controversies arose as people adjusted to new conditions. Farmers v. commerce. Old ways and new. Industry, tariffs, banks, canals and then railroads. Eventually, monopolies, holding companies, trades unions. In other areas of life, slavery, women’s emancipation, various religious and secular experiments designed to overcome the shortcomings of the new society. And on and on. Life flows eternally, and nothing that is settled ever ends the flow of forces – nor would you want it to!

In your day, older issues all resurface in different forms, because although social conditions change, human nature does not. Human nature expresses differently in different conditions, which is the reason for having different civilizations. But within those civilizations, it does not change to any noticeable extent. Human nature is not “perfectible” in the way various hopeful reformers have assumed. And good that it is not! One man’s perfection is another man’s hell. Look to the Soviet Union’s attempt to force people into a mold. Similarly, people are not “homo economicus” as those who believe in only material forces believe and would like to try to demonstrate.

Okay, I get it. You are edging toward pointing out that various people get their meaning in life from different things. So if their political or ideological cause is lost, they turn toward their deeper satisfactions.

Not “satisfactions” merely, but their deeper roots in this particular 3D life. Some may collect China dolls, or identify with their extended family, or lose themselves in this or that arcane or esoteric study, or perfect a skill, or concentrate on perfecting their own moral character. There are a million things to do in the world, and everybody can find one, or more.

Which doesn’t imply that everybody succeeds. Some may find their meaning in a bottle, or in drugs, or in this or that fanaticism, or in active pointless rebellion.

It’s all human; it is all expression. Nothing is as clear-cut as it seems. That is why logical fanatics find the world so disappointing.

(more tomorrow)

 

[A conversation with Joseph Smallwood]

All right, Joseph, proceed. And this time I’m going to raise objections and questions as I see them if only to help you to deal with your unseen audience.

You do know how few people could do this, at this time. Part of the trick is to get people in general doing it – interacting with the other side, as you call it, on a matter-of-fact basis like talking on a telephone. That is going to cause its own problems, but it is the ticket, for a couple of reasons.

All right, you were asking for suggestions and I made one that startled you.  Let’s see if it startles your friends. You have been getting the feeling that we have been doing this for some practical reason, as well as developing your ability, and you are right. I will lay it out and we’ll see.

I told you, in your time you are facing the same problem we faced, and the same problem “the people” always face – some people are hogs and want the rest of the world to be their slaves, making bread but not getting to eat it. This is not attacking any particular family or group, because “hog-ism” is something anybody can fall into. The reason it has to be contained by society’s structure, and not just by a few trials here and there, is because it is a part of human nature, and so nobody should be trusted to not be a hog; everybody should be protected from each other and from themselves, from being or becoming run by “hog-ism.”

The communists sort of had a notion about that, but they believed in the perfectibility of man – which they helped disprove! – and they trusted people with power – and disproved that too – and, worst of all, they had this fuzzy idea that there shouldn’t be rich people and poor people but all one level. Well, that just goes against everything in people, and animals too. Even among my [Indian] family some had a lot of horses and some didn’t, and what is the point of having talent if you can’t use it to get ahead. But it is when getting ahead means pushing people’s heads under water that things are out of control. What you want is not a society without classes but more what we were building before the anti-slavery crusade threw up so many rich combinations because of the war.

You need an anti-slavery society of your own, a world-wide anti-slavery society, set up to agitate against slavery in your time, the way the anti-slavery societies did in my time.

It wasn’t the Republicans that saved the union and destroyed slavery, and it certainly wasn’t the Democrats or the Whigs before ‘em. It was the people, and if you don’t understand that you don’t see the key to your own struggle. You once get the people understanding what is at issue and who is on one side, and who is on the other, and your battle is half over. It wasn’t the Republicans that began the idea of resisting the spread of slavery – it was the idea of resisting the spread of slavery, of wiping it out, that created the public opinion and the events that created the Republican Party!

You are going about it the wrong way if you think you can vote a party into power and have them protect you. What you have got to do if you are going to have a prayer of succeeding is to get the people to understanding what is going on – and then organizing right along with it – and then becoming a force. Once the force is there, one or the other parties will attach to it, or a new one will spring up around it, and then you will have a chance, if you remember not to trust them either but to stay on the watch. Power corrupts, and if you think you are an exception, why then I would set two guards on you first off.

But – you see? First you need your Worldwide Anti-slavery Society. Then you need to get out the word – not just in your country but in all countries where you can. Then the people got to throw up organizers, and workers, yes and martyrs too, for there was never  a crusade without sacrifices. And then at some point political leaders will come.

Don’t make the mistake of racism or class-ism. Just because somebody’s rich don’t mean he don’t have a conscience. Just because he’s poor, don’t mean he’s listening to his. And some Mexican or Frenchman or Chinese or Hindu Indian may be your Abraham Lincoln, or more likely your Elijah Lovejoy or maybe your John Brown. This is a worldwide struggle now because all your time is becoming one thing.

I could get quietly excited over this. It almost seems a way forward.

It is a way forward, and maybe the only way forward for millions of people. And, you see, all the threads we been weaving these past sessions are a part of it.

Now, consider. If you’re going to have a world-wide movement, one thing you don’t want is a center and somebody in charge. That’s just King Stork all over again. But instead you are going to see a whole boatload, as you say, of different movements, different organizations, different bodies, and the only thing they’ll have in common, maybe, is that they start to see the problem in more or less the same way.

Talk about strange bedfellows! You’re going to find union members and ex-communists and ex-Republicans and farm laborers and protestors against globalization and conservationists and NRA members and all – and if you’re serious about opposing slavery you will learn to get along and save your difference of opinion for other times. I say, if you’re serious for there’s always yapping dogs that love to pretend they are a wolf pack. But a wolf pack means business and mongrel curs don’t. That’s the difference.

You know the history – tell ‘em! Tell ‘em how the Republicans came together out of a rag and bobtail bunch of the damnedest people, some of ‘em that couldn’t cross the street safely, as you’d say in your time, and others as shrewd as bank robbers, and as cold. You had ten thousand shades of opinion, and a thousand vested interests, and people who would just as soon lay down with wolves as trust each other – but they finally got the idea that they had to hang together, and they did. They was not a collection of saints, exactly – they was a cross section of everybody in America that had come to realize that this can’t go on!

When you get to the point that a majority of people realize this can’t go on, then you win, and it don’t matter how much money or how many guns or how many lying newspapers the hogs got. Once you start hitting ‘em where it hurts, they are going to react stupidly, and every reaction will wake up more people.

I am not saying it is going to be easy – why should it be easy, when you have left it till after the last minute? But it shouldn’t take 30 years, either, like it did from Elijah Lovejoy to Sumter. Every thing is speeded up in your time, and the word goes around the world in a second.

All you’re doing, you see, is waking people up. Once they see what is happening, things will take on a life of their own. You’ll see. Intellectuals always overestimate the effect of their acts, and they overestimate how much they’re needed. Mr. Lincoln understood the strength of the people and when the match lit the powder, it was the people, not the intellectuals, who put it through. It was Lincoln, not Herndon, in other words. But Herndon did his part; you need intellectuals to be the thinking mechanism, to put two and two together for people. But it’s no use expecting thinkers to do the work of doers. When the doing starts their work is half done. Most done, until the next time the people get confused and need light.

Keep Mr. Lincoln’s saying in mind. There’s work for everybody and not everybody can do everything that needs to be done, but “them that can’t skin can hold a leg.”

It sure looks like a long row to hoe.

But what is your alternative? You know what your friend says – the difference between doing it and not doing it is, doing it.

You don’t have to have class warfare the rest of your time, and you don’t have to have war between Muslims and Christians and Jews and what have you from now till kingdom come, and you don’t have to have continuous attempts at revolution here there and everywhere – and, mostly, you don’t have to have most of the people of the world being slaves. But the way to avoid all that is to help people wake up, and there isn’t any use thinking there are short cuts. Lovejoy died, and Lincoln died, and 600,000 men died between the two, but the first part of the job got done. What is the worth of millions dying in the Second World War if you don’t keep fighting slavery? What is the use of anything if you don’t keep fighting slavery? And do you think it is going to be better over here if over there you let the balance tilt that way? I’ll tell you what is going to happen soon or late if you keep on the way you are going – it’ll be the end of that particular experiment, and we’ll have to focus on other places. It won’t be the end of the world to us, but it will to you. I can’t say it plainer than that.

Now if you are taking this at all serious, you have got to see that you cannot afford to keep playing Republicans and Democrats, Christians and Muslims, conservatives and liberals, intellectuals and practical. All those divisions are real enough, but the primary division is on the line of values. Are you for the people or for the hogs? Are you for ever-greater participation, so the American experiment becomes the world experiment, and everybody has a piece, and everybody gets to contribute – or are you for a small bunch of hogs and everybody else nowhere? Are you believers in democracy – which means people having an independent place to stand, not depending on others for permission to sneeze – or are you for everybody hemmed in with rules and fear?

You can’t be for everything being all part of one thing and still base your belief and action on hating people. You never saw Lincoln hating people, and in that he was like Jesus. Be like Jesus. And that means you can’t be a party to violence as a means of action.

Now, I know that statement is loaded with material for endless debating – what were we carrying guns and swords for, if we weren’t for violence? But it is one thing to use it when you have not got a choice, and another to use it on principle or because you prefer it. And I am not going to argue this because this is just the kind of argument that is a substitute for action, and it is past time to act. But the thing is, act in the way that is right for you. There will be plenty of soldiers if it comes to that – but a lot fewer people will die if it is kept peaceful and does not raise the fears of the other side. People will do things to protect their lives that they will not do to save all their property, and they will do things to save at least something that they wouldn’t do to save everything. So the key is – don’t threaten anything but slaveholding.

If you do it right you can destroy slave holding without destroying the current slave holders – you can even bring a lot of ‘em to their senses, for don’t make the mistake of thinking that you are moral and they are not. It is the condition and the tendency you must fight, not primarily the individuals or families.

Go on and send this out now – and don’t expect a chorus of hallelujahs! This is going to mostly provoke irritation, because it is new. But you are nor responsible for people’s reactions, just for faithfully transmitting the message.

Yes, but I like the message, even if I can’t imagine how it can be translated into action.

That ain’t up to you. Lovejoy didn’t plan for a Civil War, and Garrison didn’t count on a Greeley popping up – and nobody expected Lincoln. The thing is to clarify what is going on and what is at issue.

 

Monday, September 5, 2022

Poking around old files, I found this from five years ago. It refers, of course, to the day armed lunatics converged on Charlottesville to protest the removal of a mounted statue of Robert E. Lee from Lee Park.

It still looks like this to me today, only, of course, five years worse. We’re a long way from hitting bottom, but extremists on both sides seem determined that we get there. When there is a massive splat, of course, it will be all the other side’s fault

 

Sunday, August 13, 2017

5:50 a.m. Well, the extremists got what they wanted in Charlottesville yesterday. Apparently, cadres within both sides wanted violence that could be blamed exclusively on the other side. And, as I said, they got what they wanted, and now we wait for the next provocation.

Isn’t it interesting how the people who push for confrontation never consider that perhaps they would lose an all-out conflict? What was the Civil War but the final settlement of an ongoing series of provocations and outrages that dated back at least to the 1830s? The slavers never considered that they might lose, but they did. The right wing today never considers that it might lose. It has the government, what it thinks is a majority of the people, and what it thinks is right on its side – just as the slavers did in the 1850s.

The left doesn’t have the government, but it has certainty of being right, and many within it are so intransigent that they want confrontation in order to – they think – make right prevail. Have any of them even heard of Weimar Germany? Do any of them consider that the fear they evoke is fueling the right-wing fanaticism quite as much as any talk-radio moron? No. They know they’re right, so they are immune to any suspicion that they may be also wrong.

I think historians will trace all this to the election of 1964, when people who were still reacting emotionally to the murder of John F. Kennedy voted for Lyndon Johnson. He, thinking he was Franklin Roosevelt, rammed Great Society legislation through his temporarily acquiescent Congress, and suddenly we got a glut of new federal programs that changed everything. Naturally it would take time to digest all this; naturally it would create backlash. The 1966 Congressional elections were a massive reversal of the 1964 mandate for change At the same time we got another war by fiat and indirection (the Gulf of Tonkin incident) which added its own confusion. (The right believed that in wartime, you supported the government; the left believed that it was wrong to support the war). In 1968 – after Robert Kennedy’s murder – a combination of George Wallace and Richard Nixon edged the Democrats out of the presidency.

The result was an intensification of the war between cultures that has poisoned our national life for more than 50 years so far.

What the right-wing and left-wing extremists have in common:

• They don’t think of themselves as being extreme. They think they are protecting the United States from those who would destroy our culture and values.
• They think that in any clash of extremes, they would “obviously” win, because they “obviously” represent the majority.
• They think their own values are being subverted deliberately by one or more conspiracies, and it never occurs to them that their own actions (including their words) may be fueling the fire.
• They feel justified in provoking violence if need be, to “wake people up.”
• They have no tolerance for other viewpoints, and little or no respect for other people’s right to express it. The left thinks it has the right to tell others how to speak (political correctness). The right does too, typically by engaging in violence against those who are too articulate or too prominent. (Someone should compile a list of social commentators who have been murdered by right-wing fanatics.)
• Somehow people can’t understand that fear breeds hatred, and hatred breeds counter-fear and counter-hatred, and the wheel ratchets upward, or rather, downward.

Oh, my country!

The odd thing is that Martin Luther King knew all this, and not only knew it, but helped organize an entire movement around the principle of non-violence. Had the Civil Rights protestors of the 1950s and early 1960s been violent, they would have been repressed by the forces of government at all levels, not merely at local and state levels as they were in the South. Instead, their non-violent examples aroused the conscience of the North and of many in the South, and, helped them carry the day. Kennedy’s wonderful TV speeches explained the moral heart of the issue in a way that would have been impossible if violence had been used by demonstrators as well as their official and unofficial opponents.

Non-violence worked! And as soon as it began to work, other more militant voices abandoned it.

Stokely Carmichael and others I can’t remember now thought non-violence was a manifestation of the Uncle Tom mentality. They intended to force change. Of course, what they did was to call forth a reaction that undercut the forces of reconciliation within the white community. Once Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were killed, where were the effective voices of reason and reconciliation? Where were those who appealed to hope and to our better nature, rather than to fear and our instinct to repress whatever opposed our values?

I have a friend who used to join antiwar protests until one day she realized that the emotional tone of the antiwar demonstrators was exactly the same as what they thought they were protesting. As somebody said, “I won’t attend an anti-war rally, but if you ever have a pro-peace rally, call me and I’ll be there.” Until people see the difference between acting from fear and acting from hope, between thinking they can combat hatred by opposing to it their own hatred, things will only get worse. What else could happen?

The way to pacify a situation is not to give in to hatred but to demonstrate that you have heard and understood the reasons for it. Demonizing does nothing but create more demons. We’ve gotten pretty good at that.

Two words that seem to have vanished from the national consciousness: Repentance, and Forgiveness. One repents not someone else’s sins, but one’s own. (And if you don’t think your side has any sins to repent, you are part of the problem.) One forgives as an extension of asking forgiveness. But neither of these is a popular platform. So much more satisfying to hate others! So much more satisfying to envision their overthrow!

So puzzling that fear and hatred continue to grow.

Inexplicable, isn’t it?

 

Conceptualization precedes change of active circumstances; at least, it does sometimes. Once you have overcome prior conditioning, new possibilities arise.

Put plainly, you are saying that once we know enough to discard past limitations, they no longer bind us, and we are free to live differently.

Free to – and responsible to. Knowledge not lived is sin.

Edgar Cayce.

Cayce’s source had to use the vocabulary, syntax and grammar Cayce had developed in his life, but did not need to limit itself to his concepts and definitions. How could anything new have come from doing that? So not “sin” as Cayce’s fundamentalist church would have defined it, but “sin” as deliberately choosing not to do what you know you should do, or as choosing to do what you should not do, yes.

A lot of definitions packed into that sentence, especially around the word “should.”

Yes, but the point is, when you know something, you have a responsibility to live it. Whether you live up to that responsibility is another matter – but you do have it.

I take it that doesn’t mean a responsibility to live it in a certain way. Or – what does it mean?

That answer will depend upon each of you. Different circumstances amount to a different mission. One of the laws of life we keep reminding you of: One size does not fit all. Let each person consult its own conscience.

So what is it you are referring to at the moment?

What is the next step from functioning separately? Functioning jointly.

Since that doesn’t necessarily follow logically, I assume you mean to just state it flatly.

Take it or leave it, yes. Or would you prefer to waste time and temper defining smoke?

This seems very unlike your normal teaching mode.

We aren’t in the mood for playing around, you might say.

You have me wondering. I’d say, whatever mood you are in, it is a bad mood, impatient, dismissive. I don’t know that I like it and I certainly am not used to it. So it may be a quality of the moment, or it may be connected to my speculation about the wheels within wheels behind the chaos erupting on America’s streets, but for whatever reason, I get the feeling that I am tuned into a station I don’t much like. I think I’ll try again later, see if I can get a better station.

6:05 a.m. Interesting. Thought I’d go back to sleep, but not sleepy. I realized I had a slight headache, rare these days, and I also realized I hadn’t used any formula such as “at my own level or higher.” Now, I rarely do, but that doesn’t mean it can’t help or in fact may not be needed sometimes.

So, let’s try again. I wish to connect to whatever sources are available and willing to communicate information that will be for the highest good of myself and those who read it. Any sources resonating to my “lower strands,” call them, are not to interfere or try to communicate directly, but may communicate by way of strands that have my best interests at heart. That formulation may itself be logically suspect, but I think it will serve. And – circularly enough – I had the feeling that it was being as much dictated as discovered.

Well done, on several counts

• You always have the right to choose among sources.
• You always have the right to reject offerings, and are well advised to do so when they come as dictates rather than as suggestions.
• However you are also well-advised to listen to parts of yourself (as reflected in voices such as you just “heard”); therefore the question becomes how to listen safely and comfortably.
• Headaches may be as informative as anything else, and are better heeded than chemically dissolved. One insight may be worth as much as many aspirin, and may work quicker.
• Asserting control is preferable to living in fear, and of course far preferable to allowing yourself to be dictated to. That isn’t the sense in which we mean you to take dictation!

Well, it’s all pretty circular. Using guidance to protect myself from guidance. Developing a mantra (in effect) by relying on guidance to give me the concepts that will let me keep guidance within bounds.

Yes, but from our point of view, it isn’t any different from your listening and then saying, “I’m probably just making this up.”

So why did our dogmatic mutual friends surface around the question of how we are to use what we have learned?

It came more or less when the question of functioning jointly raised your anxiety levels. That brought in distrust of the information, which amounts to distrust of the process. Distrust is more or less self-division, and that concept should look different to you when seen in the context of an individual who is also a community, rather than the concept of individual as unit.

Hmm. And if self-division opens the door, that is another thing that the Energy Conversion Box, or a protective mantra, or meditation, may protect against.

You’re learning!

Very funny.

Well, we’ve been holding up that realization for a long time, but you couldn’t or wouldn’t see it because it conflicted with your strongly held belief in freedom from rules and rituals.

So let’s go back to “functioning jointly.” Kindly give me the source and nature of their objections to the topic. And as I write this, the headache returns, so I’ll follow Skip Atwater’s advice from 2000 and will ask what I may be learning from it.

Every time you have left a familiar state to become someone new, anxiety has accompanied the move. After all, the old was well-known, even if uncomfortable or unpleasant. The new is terra incognita.

Something within fears a form of death?

More or less. You might look at it as relegation to the sidelines, or being voted out of office, or being jilted. Everyone wants its place in the sun.

So, to return yet again: functioning jointly.

Can you see that this implies a really major redefinition? Not necessarily for everybody; Some may take it in stride. But for you at least.

From lone wolf to part of the herd?

Greater. More like from cat to dog, or from amphibian to bird. It is shape-shifting in its true meaning, not putting on and putting off bodies but natures. This is more than learning a new skill. It is dying and rebirthing.

…

A couple of things strike me, from yesterday. One, you, in your different combinations of being, might be looked at as different “moods” of one being. I sort of said that here yesterday, not noticing. Similarly, we in our different moods may be expressing a temporary dominance of certain members of the community we are.

You will find this less new than you think at the moment. You have entertained your half of the visualization before: Yesterday merely extended it to us. A valid way to see things, we should say. And?

I hadn’t thought to think of the Energy Conversion Box as a way of focusing by detuning or temporarily muzzling certain parts of myself. I had thought that focusing meant, merely, removing a tendency to be distracted. I hadn’t thought to ask about the nature of the process of being distracted.

You might think of your minds as a pack of hunting dogs, or a pod of whales – not to say, a herd of cats! To think of your mind that way may make it more obvious that when some go off in one direction and others in other directions, a certain confusion will result. A closer analogy would be you as conductor of an orchestra, trying to assure that all the different instruments played in synchrony.

Or even played the same tune!

That too. Not so bad an analogy, in that each of the instruments is there for a purpose, and has a right, a need, a utility, to be heard. Only you don’t produce a symphony with only one instrument, nor with the same combinations playing all the time.

You’re right, that is a better analogy.

The families of animals isn’t bad either, in that, unlike the analogy of the symphony, it does not imply that there is a prescribed tune. Neither does it imply that you are aware of one and all, nor that you have an overall plan, nor that you and your constituent groups, considered together, are agents of a pre-decided pattern. Consider the different analogies together, remembering that analogy is never identity. There is always slippage in the transmission. And -?

“And” meaning what else struck me? The implication that we are moving toward active use of telepathy in our everyday life. That sounds pretty science-fiction-y, but so would Remote Viewing have done, once, or access to guidance, for that matter. I hesitate to say it, but it occurs to me that just as the military used and uses remote viewing, so maybe they learned to use active telepathy. Naturally if they did, they would lie about it, as they lie about remote viewing. But this is speculation on my part.

Now, we would say there is only one way to find out what is possible, and that is to try. A  knowing isn’t proof, and can never be as useful or as ultimately convincing as the results of wrestling with facts.

And you intend us to open this particular door?

That is your choice, one way or the other. We wish, but it rests upon your also wishing, as usual.

I don’t know that I’ve ever heard you put it quite that way. That melds free will and your preferences.

Yes it does. We have preferences, but we make no attempt to enforce them. That would be self-defeating, usually.

In that we are here to choose, yes. But this implies that much of the struggle we sometimes go through is more between our various internal cats than between us in 3D and something in non-3D.

A proposed action or refraining from action may stir up the community that you are. Some want to go one way, others another way. The disagreement may be anything from mild to bitterly antagonistic. It may seem like “you” arguing with some external entity, but it is you arguing with you, with all players assuming that they are the real “you,” the true carriers of the flame, the others being betrayers, or being in error. Even the concept of your better self and lower self assumes a “true” you, or at least a “better” you, and inferior others. Can such a state of civil war ever be comfortable?

So when my community is in sync with our higher self, there is no strain and so we experience ourselves more as a unit. When I as a unit am not in sync with my good angels, or whatever, I may still experience myself as a unit, but perhaps as a rebellious one. And when various cats wish to go in various directions, any guidance from you will encourage some and discourage (enrage?) others, and I am very well aware of myself as a self-divided being, or as a community of disparate inclinations.

Yes, a good summary. Doesn’t that match your experience of life? Sometimes smooth, sometimes turbulent; sometimes seeming protected, sometimes vulnerable; sometimes all of one mind, sometimes conflicted?

It does, though I seem to see a progression in my life from chaos toward greater harmony.

After all, that is one purpose of your 3D lives, an on-going process of learning to bring a community to functioning smoothly and productively. As you learn to give each part of yourself its rights, you find that greater cooperation results, and greater tranquility.

That is one reason why life is sometimes hard, by the way! Adversity can forge singleness of intent, which may generate a greater sense of teamwork in the way basic training instills a group identification in what had been unconnected individuals.

This has been pretty good work today. Each of these themes was dealt with economically and each will repay further thought. We find that thorough examination of context ultimately proves an efficient way of proceeding. Bringing unnoticed aspects of things to the surface is one way of wrestling with the material. It doesn’t have to be an unpleasant or painful or even strenuous process, wrestling; it may be done via a tour d’horizon.