Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

Monday, September 16, 2024

6:35 a.m. Intimations of mortality, Jon. An awful lot of work I might have done and didn’t. More I might do, if I had (have?) time?

You are at least beginning to see the tradeoffs. Nothing comes free. If you are going to do one thing, maybe you can’t do something else – and if you are driven to read, read, read – or do crosswords, or sometimes to watch movies or TV episodes – maybe it is keeping you from doing other things.

Tell me something I don’t know.

You don’t know why.

Very true. And you can tell me.

I can tell you if you can hear. Avoidance is not merely inertia. It takes as much effort to avoid – sometimes more – than to do what you’re avoiding doing. So it isn’t just that you don’t have enough energy to concentrate your mind on something. It is that the “something” does not lend you that energy, where other times it does.

Jim S. would suspect interference.

And so do you, sometimes.

But not usually.

But there is a vast difference between sometimes and never. It is a qualitative difference, not a quantitative difference like less and more.

I see that. I may quote that sentence by itself. But, go on.

You find yourself again browsing through Bowers on Jefferson. You know things mostly forgotten or never even suspected by most of your contemporaries. There is a feeling “I ought to write this,” and a feeling of inability.

Ah, because I am always thinking in terms of books, not essays.

That’s part of it. If you have an insight, say it. It doesn’t have to be supported by – or suffocated by – all the detail you could put it to. Think of your many successful squibs about history on your blog. They are successful – even if nobody read them they would be successful – in that they make something living out of what otherwise had been dead.

You mean, they express something in an alive way that had been deadened by its treatment or by the silence about it.

Yes. But suppose you had to write a book about each blog post subject. (a) You couldn’t do it. (b) Who’d read it all? The books are on shelves. The bare bones information is in Wikipedia or other sites. None of your contributions is original research, it is interpretation, and as you know, those are the only two contributions an historian can make.

I’m getting that I could write an essay a day from whatever I happened to be reading, and post that.

You could, theoretically. What else did you do for so many years, beginning with Smallwood and continuing with Rita and others? The fact that you gathered it into books may have distracted you from the fact that each was, in effect, a thousand-word essay.

My horoscope did say that was my strength, small pieces. Naturally, cross-grained as I am, I determined that only writing books was worth doing.

You didn’t have the patience or the knowledge to go the magazine route. You didn’t know the market, didn’t know how to learn it, never thought to ask anybody.

All true.

But you can still write. Let others pick up the slack of getting the word out. In fact, let the material itself carry the word. People can always google the subject matter.

It still seems like writing on water, like writing editorials that wind up under somebody’s bird cage.

You’re missing the point, which is to give you a forum that will allow you – encourage you – to express what you know in a way that may encourage others to learn more. Isn’t that what you started out to do with your original blog? “Everyday explorations into our unsuspected potential”?

True enough. And I see that unless it was gathered into books, it felt like I was just passing the time.

So?

As I’m thinking about it, I see that in a way this is what Emerson was always doing, writing about this or that, gathering the essays together after a while and winding up with another book.

No!

No?

Yes the essays were made into books, but you’re missing the fact that he was continually lecturing. That material went into lectures, and was given to people first-hand, before it made it into the hard covers. That was his equivalent of a blog, you see.

So the missing link is not a publisher of my essays-into-books but a dissemination of the existence of the blogs.

Perhaps. But your end of it is to be the source of the information. Only you can put your spin on what you have read and thought about. Just as all your authors were the ones to distill source material into their interpretations, so you. That’s how it works.

That’s very interesting. Let’s go back to the subject of avoidance.

You know that authors have to work to a schedule. They don’t work just when they feel like. If they have to waste several hours not accomplishing anything, they do. It is the only way to defeat the avoidance mechanism that says, “This is more work than you have energy for. This is flat and not worthwhile. You aren’t up for this.” Sometimes you have to outsit that.

Why should we have to? What produces that mechanism?

Concentration means just that: centering. It takes an effort of will sometimes. When it doesn’t, when for whatever reason you are ready and able to go, you take it for granted. But when you aren’t concentrated, we’re back to the question of mood. In a sense, your mood says, “This is too much trouble right now,” and you mistake your self for your mood.

Say that in different words?

This is where will-power and habit and workmanlike methods come in. It is a matter of overcoming the mood of a moment with the sustained intent that overrides the mood and says, “Nevertheless, it’s time to work.” If you have a job or a profession that pressures you to work, that helps. If you are on your own, you have to be your own pressure, and that is going to involve will-power and sustained intent.

You make it very clear.

There’s much to be said about moods and how they shape people’s daily experience, and maybe we’ll get to it. That’s mostly up to you.

I’m getting that we sometimes say “moods” or “emotions” where we mean the other.

I’m laughing. You’d never let me get away with phrasing like that!

Smiling too. All right, let’s put it this way: The guys have told us that emotion is the interface between our known self and the unknown self that we experience as the outside world. But what someone might call emotion, someone else might call mood.

And this isn’t because psychology hasn’t clearly differentiated them – regardless what laymen know – but that everybody makes his own definitions, mostly unconsciously, and so everybody hears something difference even if the word is the same. The way around that is to do just as we’re doing – talk about it so people can do their own figuring out what each words means to them.

Well, it’s always a pleasure talking with you.

Likewise.

Next time, then.

 

Sunday, September 8, 2024

6:25 a.m. Jon’s final two points form last Monday: “All is one,” so all relationships of any kind are provisional or illusory, and yet in effect the world is as we experience it. Go ahead, Jon.

As you are feeling, in a way these are the same point, looked at from either side. It is essence versus “essence as experienced.” If you’ll let it sink in, you’ll see reconciliations where maybe you had seen puzzles.

All dualities are actually expressions of an underlying unity. Whether a person sees duality or unity is a reflection mostly of that person’s mental habits. But that is actually an encouraging thought, or ought to be, because how you perceive things is under your control if you do the things you have been taught that teach control.

It may seem circular, but it isn’t, really. How you perceive the world determines the world you will experience. But how you perceive the world may be either only a limitation, or a limitation that affords you the possibility of transformation.

Change your belief, change your perception. Change your perception, change your reality. Change your reality, change your possibilities. In the end it comes to what the guys have told you from the beginning: You are here to change yourself (shape, or reshape yourself) by means of the decisions you make. But it is deeper than perhaps you realized, because implicit is the fact that it is only by choosing – consciously and unconsciously – that you pull yourself up the great chain of being, by your own bootstraps.

Now, that’s really all we need to say about the final two points. List the seven as I gave them last week, not in my words then but in your words now, and see what you make of it.

I’m going to have to go back through the pages to do it, I couldn’t do it by memory.

Fine.

Life is not in any way dependent upon 3D concepts. It is neither material nor made of time.

Consciousness is subtractive, not additive. Our brains filter out most of reality, and we progress by removing filters.

Life is not substance in any way, regardless how it seems. It is made of mind-stuff.

Within the context of 3D/non-3D, what happened shapes us. Within its realm, the world is real.

All of life’s polarities are the result of our perceptual structures. They are true within a context, but not without it.

All relationships are provisional and illusory because divisions are provisional and illusory. But, we live within our world-view, which defines what seems real to us. Therefore, all possibility of growth depends upon our seeing differently.

Print these out without numbers or bullets, to lessen the temptation to memorize, and increase the possibility of grasping (which, as you know, involves letting go).

Okay.

Now, taken together, this will give some people all they need. Some won’t have needed it, and some won’t be able to profit from it, but for some it will serve. If people once get the reality of the fact that the 3D/non-3D system sits on a self-contained floating island in a reality that has very different rules, two things happen:

• Intellectually, they will see more clearly. But more importantly,
• They will know, not just hope or believe, that they can really direct their lives.

That second point is begging to be misunderstood.

Yes, and it isn’t easy to clarify. Clearly I don’t mean the ego-level self taking over and getting what it wants. Yet, in a way, that is a good description of the possibility. The key is the change in the composition of the ego-level self.

If you look at the ego-level self as the chooser of ways in the 3D wilderness (or fun house, or however it seems to you), a change in the sego-self’s understanding of the world is the only way to change the kinds of choices that are made, and the reasons for the choices. In other words, you aren’t trying to bypass the ego-self; you want to transform it. If you didn’t have a non-3D component, it would be hopelessly circular, because the ego would want what it wanted, and only rarely would it stop to question why it wanted what it wanted. But, you do have a non-3D component, so the indicated solution is to increase access, that the ego may get better perspective, and make better decisions.

The joker in the deck is that the ego-layer is very apt to misinterpret non-3D guidance, or defy it. In such case, increasing access may result in acute short-term disharmony far worse than previously existed. But, you can see, that is a short-term result. Longer term, it is the only possible way forward.

I suppose that is true at whatever level we are on. We’re never going to understand what we haven’t yet experienced, so with the best will in the world we’re going to warp the message.

You have been given enough instruction, over the course of human history, in how to gradually purify your perception and understanding. If you get out of the “sin and retribution and atonement” mode and look again at religious and metaphysical teachings, the helpful hints will stand out clearly enough.

“Though your sins are as scarlet, you will float over them,” etc.

Again, you have to look at things with new eyes. Humanity’s age-old scriptures will mean different things to different kinds of people, depending on where they are. You and I are talking about people who find no assistance or sustenance or even sense in older understandings of these things.

And that’s probably enough on this theme. You might suggest that people make their own summary in their own words, tailored to their own needs. That will automatically result in them taking what is most helpful to them.

At the risk of them taking only what fits in with what they already believe.

It’s always that way. You have to work from where you are. The reminder to watch over their own shoulders ought to be enough to help them guard against the ego-level self overreaching.

Well, it has been quite a week, Jon. Many thanks.

 

Saturday, September 7, 2024

1:10 a.m. “No place to stand and no need of one. Suspended, instead.” Jon, I presume you are ready to clarify.

I am. But it should be obvious what I meant.

Obvious I think to some, those who have gotten your meaning already. But others won’t find it means much, if anything.

But you know what it means. Set it out, as you would for the guys, and I’ll correct it if necessary.

I take it to mean, simply, “Don’t keep in the back of your mind the idea that the 3D/non-3D world really is primary. Don’t think it is real. Recognize that reality is not based in 3D/non-3D, but is deeper, not rooted in physical reality at all.

You might think of the 3D/non-3D as an island floating on nothing. Truly, it isn’t really real. Bu it can be hard to adjust your minds to realize that the concept really means something, and has practical consequences.

I know. There’s a sort of halfway house where we start to believe it, are intellectually convinced by it, but still live with our assumptions otherwise.

And it is to people in that place that I address myself. Those who think the idea is nonsense won’t listen, and those who understand it don’t need the explanation.

However –

I know. Well, try to sleep and return when you can. I’m not going anywhere.

5:24 a.m. Okay. Continue?

How can you be sick, how can I have died of a specific illness, if the 3D world isn’t real?

Surely people don’t think the argument is that thin.

Some do. Remember, to some it doesn’t make any sense. Think of your own reaction when you hear something that seems to you to be just playing with words.

Flat-Earthers, say? You get into a conversation with one of them and they can talk forever, giving you all these reasons why what we see is illusion, but they can’t explain why everything in the sky is round and not flat, and it doesn’t bother them. They have a need to believe what they believe, and logic and common sense and even intuition aren’t going to make any headway against it.

Well, what we’re saying sounds like Flat-Earthers, to some. It is too far from their experience. And, interesting you mention intuition. Their intuition tells them you are wrong. Why is that? How can it be? Are their guys lying to them? Are they perhaps unable to hear their guys or maybe believe them?

I expect you’re going to tell us.

This may turn into a sidebar, but that’s all right if it does, it is an interesting subject I don’t remember you ever addressing. You tend to take your connection for granted.

After all this time, I ought to!

But you always functioned this way. It is what made you different. It sometimes made you eccentric, sometimes entirely illogical, quixotic. You did things nobody would do, because it seemed right. (I don’t mean morally right, I mean accurate.)

Sure. Who runs for Congress without backing or preparation ten years out of high school? Who sees it as inevitable, years earlier? Who starts a shopper paper without considering economics? Etc., etc. And yet all those quixotic decisions led to something. They weren’t dead-ends at all, they were just curiously distorted ways to get somewhere.

You see, it was you in the hands of your guidance. Now, your example isn’t necessarily something people should imitate. You yourself probably wouldn’t do some of those things again if you had your choice.

Certainly I’d do some things differently!

A balanced use of intuition checks impulses against logic. Logic may still say, “Do it,” but at least you will have checked. But that isn’t the topic here, prudence. The topic is the absolute certainty that intuition can provide, that cannot be shaken by fact or appearance. Sometimes the certainty is right, and you look brilliant. Sometimes it is wrong, and you look not only wrong-headed but practically insane. It’s a dangerous way to live.

Churchill did it. Some reporter, writing about examples of Churchill’s prescience as a young man, asked rhetorically, “Does he have a demon that tells him things?” Yet Churchill was never trusted by his political partners even when they entrusted him with power, as they did over a fifty-year span, off and on.

And when you were young, your admiration for him was unbounded.

And ill-informed. It took a long time to see the other colors in the portrait.

But the point here is that you took him as a model, unconsciously. Why? Because he was British, or aristocratic, or imperialist? No, because something in you recognized something in him, and I’m telling you what it was.

I see. And as usual I took it for granted and never examined it.

You lived very close to unconsciously in certain respects. You did not calculate – which is the first requisite for a political career such as you thought you wanted. You did not plan, you never got your ticket punched. All this was the same trait manifesting in different ways. This is you scoring 100% for intuition and 0% for sensation on the Myers-Briggs.

And being pleased at that result, until I thought about it.

And it took you a good while to think about it! But my point is, all this led you to be able to do what you did. If you had been more balanced, maybe you wouldn’t have been able to do it.

A guy I knew did say, in effect  – this was 50 years ago, nearly – that someone who goes off half-cocked may be valuable because sometimes you need somebody to get things started.

Here’s the point, or anyway my point. People are often led by their intuition – their guidance – their guys upstairs – and sometimes the result is rational and sometimes it isn’t. Either way, the process is similar.

You’re saying, you can’t trust any process to bring you safely home, but it may.

I was saying, you can’t ever tell which process will take you to where you want to go, but the two statements go together. They’re both true.

Now, to return to the main point. People whose intuition tells them there’s nothing in this will not be convinced by argument, and that’s fine. Others will have an intuitive recognition, and that’s fine too. Sometimes you have to make the statement and let people come to it as best they can. Saying that the 3D/non-3D system is a sort of island in reality is one of those statements.

I started to write (thinking it was you), something like, “How are you going to prove it either way?” But, there’s Paul Brunton.

Who provided you with logical demonstration of what you already knew. Provided you; he won’t provide everybody. They have to be in a certain place.

His books were The Hidden Teaching Beyond Yoga and The Wisdom of the Oversoul, both available in a beautiful paperback edition from North Atlantic Books.

Nice plug, but again, not everybody will get from them what you did, because in every book the author is only half the equation. The reader is the other half. Again, Brunton didn’t prove anything. What he did, most skillfully, was point you in a direction and show the logical consequences of your beliefs. Not that he would necessarily agree that this is what he was doing, but that is the effect.

Feels like we mostly wandered, this time.

It has an inner consistency that may be more obvious to you when you type it up. In any cases, it says all that can be said about the 3D/non-3D being different from the underlying reality. What else could be said?

I’ll take your word for it. This has been quite a week. Our thanks.

We can take the two final points together, perhaps. We’ll see how it goes.

Okay.

 

Friday, September 6, 2024.

I have been keeping this journal 58 years today.

4:25 a.m. Jon, your fourth point amounts to saying that the 3D world’s history both is and is not real, depending on how you view things, just like the rest of 3D life.

So what do you need me for?

Very funny. I think that was an accurate summary, but it doesn’t give us the ramifications you apparently see. I mean, if what I just said it true, it is tautology.

I think what I am getting at is that you shouldn’t say, “Oh, it is only somewhat real, so who cares?” To do that would be to disrespect the realness by overweighting the somewhat-ness.

All I can say is that I have always been consumed by an interest in history. Long before I began to really understand what I was reading, I was reading it for the excitement and intrinsic interest of it. It has always fascinated me. That doesn’t mean I was as interested in one thing as another, and it certainly doesn’t mean one historian’s writing was as clear or evocative as another’s, but I have never had an instant when I felt about it as I feel of most subjects, which is a mild interest, easily satisfied. I can never get enough of reading history and particularly biography. And I am still continually revising my views as I learn more.

So you might ask yourself, Why? You do have other interests, and a few of them are pretty deep – psychology, certainly – but they are more spasmodic than constant. Why history?

I take it for granted that this is illustration of something broader than my own fascinating life.

Why should your biography be less interesting, less instructive to others, than you have found the biographies of uncounted others? But yes, it is to serve a wider point. Your life many serve as an example of something universally true but not widely recognized.

What history is to you, innumerable other subjects are to others. To find a lifelong fascination in the study of chemistry or the practice of gardening or the honing of an athletic or mental skill is the same in one vital aspect, which is: It is a person taking the 3D world seriously. Even the study and practice of the occult is taking 3D seriously.

As so often, a simple statement but it seems new to me.

It’s just that you haven’t thought to look at it that way. Emerson was a minister before he became a writer and lecturer. All the Transcendental Idealists had their vision squarely in the non-3D world, you could say, but they were doing so from a very firm 3D platform, taken for granted, but as essential as gravity.

It is only the 3D/non-3D framework you are in – we are in – that gives anybody a place to stand. It, and therefore we, are somewhat real, but that’s a long way from not real, perhaps even farther than from fully real.

So we should be careful not to let our thoughts “think it away.”

Think it away, if you want to – but then you’re still going to get hungry, or tired, or sick, or elated, or depressed. To really see the 3D world as illusion, you would have to play pretend, because you always have your body to remind you, “Hey, are you listening? You’re still here.”

It is a balance, and everybody strikes the balance differently. On one end, people try to think the world away; on the other end, they accept the world as being as it appears. As usual, everybody is somewhat right, and most people are in the middle between the extremes of the polarity.

Now, this has ramifications that may not be immediately obvious. If you will think of this without forgetting other things you know, such as All Is One, and No Accidents, you will see that everything in your life contributes to your views, to your experiences, to your potential.

Get in a bad mood? It’s going to affect your view of the world, for however long it lasts. That’s true of a good mood, too.

Get sick? Endure a lasting condition? Suffer a temporary or permanent disability? Enjoy a particular gift of exuberant vitality? It all affects how you see the world.

Does your character (put it) match your circumstances only badly? Or, particularly well? You won’t be able to avoid drawing conclusions, even behind your own back.

So the result is a world filled with people drawing different conclusions at different times, and there’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, saying “drawing conclusions” is too strong; it is more like being forced to conclusions. Not only is everybody distinct, everybody differs from one time to another, and frequently doesn’t notice any fluctuation.

So does this point amount to saying, our life interests help remind us to take the world seriously?

Ideally it would say, take the 3D/non-3D world seriously, but also remember that there is a deeper reality beyond it, and you belong to that reality too, of course.

Of course?

You can’t avoid living in all dimensions. You may not realize you’re doing it, but you do.

I take it that the reason for saying it is to clarify the relations between 3D/non-3D on one hand, and the deeper reality.

Yes. People have a tendency to divide the world between “physical” and “spiritual,” as if they were different things. Your guys used 3D and non-3D as a way of keeping the two ends of the polarity from flying apart in your mind, but now we need to go the next step and remind ourselves that 3D and non-3D are part of the same system – the concept of non-3D would make no sense without reference to 3D – and so it becomes 3D/non-3D versus the wider, deeper, reality..

For which we will need to come up with a name?

People have been naming it for a long time. Names often are more nuisance than assistance, as you know. For the moment, “deeper reality” will do.

There was more in this point than I had thought.

It would have been a waste of time, if there weren’t!

True.

And there is one thing more to say. The history means something. It is a record of where you all have been. I don’t mean recorded history; that is always going to be distorted because from one point of view (or even from several; it will never be from all). I mean, the history itself is where you come from. It is what you are that is unknown to yourself. If you were a tree, it would be your roots. As such, it is full of instructive clues.

I almost get it: You are connecting it with psychoanalysis.

I am comparing studying your history to studying your emotional reaction to a given moment. If your emotion is the interface between inner and outer, well, it was so before, too. You could look at history as a frozen picture of past reactions, and that will help you triangulate hidden parts of yourself, if you wish it to.

And that’s enough of this point.

All I can say is what I always say: Thanks, and looing forward to more.

 

Thursday, September 5, 2024

12:50 p.m. Jon’s third point is that life is actually a dream, without weight or substance. But if you can’t sleep or can’t breathe or can’t shut off your endlessly revolving mind, if you are in physical or emotional pain – it sure seems real enough. And I know you know what I mean, Jon.

Of course. Doesn’t everyone? In fact, you will remember I would sometimes protest what I saw as your tendency to believe things were well when they clearly weren’t. but even then, I knew what you meant, of course. But that contradiction is itself a part of life, and you can’t talk it away. Life hurts, your guys told us many times. They knew it. But it sure didn’t feel like they did.

So what is your new perspective?

It isn’t so much of a shift in perspective – a change of ideas or of understandings – as it is a falling-away of certain obstacles.

You can see better now.

You could almost say that now I can see the some things I thought I saw weren’t real. Just as your guys were saying, but the world was contradicting. I’m saying, I was obstructed by phantoms, by illusions. And so are you, and so is everybody. The specifics of the illusions vary by the individual, but in general nobody sees absolutely clearly. At best you see pretty clearly and you rely on faith for the rest. But 3D doesn’t really provide an opportunity for you to live behind the scenery rather than in the midst of the movie.

For instance, gravity’s effects are real, regardless if your understanding of gravity is entirely wrong; that is, even if what appears as gravity is actually a misunderstood something else, the way phlogiston wasn’t real but could nonetheless be used conceptually. Anything in your life that your body insists is real, is real as far as you are concerned until you realize better.

Everything in our 3D life is “somewhat real.”

Your 3D life, and therefore your non-3D life, remember. But yes, real in its own terms, absolutely not real in a wider perspective.

Yet what good does this do if your kidneys fail, or you can’t breathe, or your very bones are trying to kill you? What is the relevance if you are in such acute mental and emotional pain that every day is a struggle and every night a temptation to end it all? As you usually say, how is knowing this practical?

I suppose it is helpful to believe, even if we can’t yet know, that all is well and all that. I know it has helped me.

You once sent a message to your 10-year-old self saying, “Don’t give up, it’ll work out.” Your non-3D selves are giving people that message all the time. Some can hear it, some can’t. Of those who hear, some can believe it, some can’t. Of those who can believe it, some can live it, some can’t. It’s one of those situations where a decision to believe something that may seem “too good to be true” changes your life.

I’m getting a sense of where you may be going with this, but it’s not clear yet.

As long as you believe that the world you live in is real (meaning, is as you think it is, the center of life), you have no chance of penetrating to a deeper layer of reality that may free you.

You see? Your growth, your freedom, depends upon an act of will, which depends upon your ability to believe in the grounds of that act. As long as you think you are in an escape-proof prison, you aren’t going to be setting out on a scenic hike somewhere. For some people, escape means they first have to conceive of themselves as escaping. (No longer an escape-proof prison, you see, so offering chances that can be seized.) But if a need to escape is not part of your fantasy, still you may not know how to use the freedom that you sense you have. Everybody’s path is different.

But it is crucial to realize that our lives are at most only somewhat real, so we can believe in our possibilities.

You could put it that way. Only don’t let yourself think, in the back of your mind, that believing that the world isn’t real in the way that it appears to be is a parlor-trick, a sort of trying to fool yourself. It isn’t that it is true because useful; it is useful because true.

And that’s all we need to say, to give people the clue.

Well, I’m tired anyway, so I’m just as happy to make it a short session. Thanks, Jon.

 

Wednesday, September 4, 2024

6:15 a.m. All right, Jon, point two? Consciousness not what we think it is?

You will notice that even a few hours, or a day or two, spent with a question in the back of your mind, and it clarifies somewhat. That is, if you don’t dwell on it, talk to yourself about it, reason about it. If you just let it be, it changes, just as an author brooding over a plotting problem.

C.S. Forester said plots feel forced if they are developed too consciously. He said a Hollywood script conference is just that kind of forcing process, which explains a lot of Hollywood movies!

Hold the image of – well, of holding an image. It will connect many things.

I’m getting the idea. You will be aware that our small group discussed this point yesterday. Should I include what I got during the drumming?

That’s up to you. It isn’t essential.

Let’s skip it, then. Your move.

• The vast majority – the overwhelming majority – of potential input to the brain is filtered out, necessarily, to avoid overwhelm.
• Those filters have their own internal logic. They don’t filter out reality at random.
• That logic, like all logic, may be followed back to its primary tenets. They are a logic-tree, with one initial decision (or rather, one initial definer of decisions) that multiplies endlessly, specific case by specific case.
• Each of the branching points in the logical chain of filters results from a combination of factors that vary by individual. They combine the “external” and internal situational motivation.
• Therefore, each individual has the potential ability to modify his or her own filters, which will modify the world as experienced.

I realize that this is not immediately clear, but let’s look at it.

Think of it this way. The universal consciousness – you could say, the universe as it is conscious of itself – is at one level. It is a vast sea, without shore or islands or interruption of any kind. To change analogy, it is a universal light.

“And the darkness comprehendeth it not.” That is, it is unshadowed and unequalled. (At least, that’s what I suppose that phrase means.)

Well, universal uninterrupted consciousness. Now here we need a visual image similar to the one of the water level being modulated between different bodies of water by locks, because I want to show individual consciousness as separated from what has no separation.

High tide, low tide, something like that? Connected sometimes, not other times?

No, not subject to that kind of periodicity. Try again.

I know what you want, but it’s physically impossible. In effect, holes in the water where the water layer is less than the rest of it. Or – what about whirlpools?

Yes, let’s go with that. A good analogy in several ways: Whirlpools are temporary, dynamic structures that could never be frozen in place.

So let us envision a 3D/non-3D being as a whirlpool in a vast ocean. For the moment – but not forever – we will ignore the fact that there are uncounted other whirlpools. For the moment we will consider any one whirlpool in the vast unending sea.

You may (and I want you to) envision a whirlpool as a cone inserted into the water, a funnel-shape, broad at the top narrowing to a center at a lower level. The funnel has several salient characteristics:

• It is dynamic. It can only exist as a shaped motion. It is in no way a solid object.
• It is variable. Its shape will alter as various forces interact, but though it may bulge or distort, still it is fundamentally a cone-shaped pattern.
• It is a gradient. That is, if you look at it in relation to the surface, some parts are higher than others, wider than others. This is within the regularity of the structure, but, as I say, variable and continually distorted by various forces.
• It is conceptually separable, yet essentially inseparable, a productive contradiction in terms. It is individual yet only temporarily so, and even while it exists, it is only conceptually separate; it is still the same old sea, in one specific pattern.
• And of course, it is temporary, as whirlpools form and cease to hold their form. Does a whirlpool “die” when its energy subsides and it becomes again an indistinguishable part of the ocean? Its substance was never different, only the shape it was swept into.

Now, combine the two analogies – that of the filter and that of the whirlpool – and although you will not come up with an image, you may be able to grope toward what can’t be said but can only be intuited. (If intuited, then it can be said, perhaps, but what is said will likely be meaningless or at best opaque to those who didn’t get it intuitively. This however is no reason not to try if you wish.)

That’s a more inconclusive conclusion than I expected!

We don’t want a conclusion, we want an active chewing. And again, the best way to proceed, probably, is to hold this in mind, but in the back of your mind, observing insights and ideas as they bubble up, but resisting any temptation to force conclusions.

I am finding it impossible to associate the two images.

Good. But don’t give up. Righteous persistence brings reward, you used to quote.

Yes, and haven’t though of that quote in a long time. Well, we can righteously persist, but maybe better if we get just a hint.

Think of moving up and down the sides of the whirlpool. Think of picking and choosing. Think of bringing your filters to your conscious awareness.

In fact, think of the difference between consciousness per se and awareness. Consider your sense of the two things carefully. You are not aware of your internal functions such as digestion or circulation of blood or respiration unless something goes wrong, perhaps. But your body is conscious of all of it, all the time. So what is the relationship between your individual awareness and the universal consciousness in which you exist? What is the relationship between your share of the consciousness and the sea in which you exist?

I know you would rather have answers than questions, but answers deter growth, and questions stimulate it.

Well, a lot to think about here. And it came quickly, 45 minutes or so.  Thanks, and looking forward to more.

 

Tuesday, September 3, 2024

5 a.m. Jon, I’d like to try to continue what you began yesterday. I know our chances of really clearing it up are slim.

Slim but not negligible. The times, they are a-changing, and what couldn’t be easily grasped before are more easily grasped now. But of course it won’t be easy.

How about it we look at the points you made in order. First was, Life really is different; it isn’t what it seems to be. I take it this is because our 3D environment warps our perceptions.

But you see, even there – that sentence takes for granted the existence of a 3D environment; it makes the world seem real, solid, in a way that it isn’t, and unless people can get beyond that idea – and stay beyond it while thinking this through – they can’t really get the changed perception that will make sense of this. If they can’t eventually see that difference, it will remain all words, all theory, that they may assent to, but that will not change their lives. And of course, I say “they” but I mean “you,” too, and I would have meant, “me.” It isn’t a matter of brainpower; it is openness to an insight.

This first point is the entryway to everything that follows. Although you are holding a pen, writing in a book supported by a desk, etc., etc., all that is real only in its own terms, the way a stage-set in a movie is real in appearance though it is only a wall and some paint. Within the context of the movie, the set is real, and allows its interaction to proceed. But it is a background artificially created to support something that cannot be understood as a movie if you remain within the context of the movie.

But this is all words, and unless you get an insight into the reality they are pointing to, they’re just words. Memorizing them won’t help, and in fact may make things worse (in that the memorization concretizes the finger rather than the idea the finger is pointing to).

Try to let it come real to you, whoever reads this: Real life is garbed in 3D, but is deeper and realer than 3D. and that doesn’t mean that only non-3D is real. Within this context, non-3D is inextricably connected to the concept of 3D: They’re at the same level of reality that we need to penetrate beyond.

I have been quietly awed for years by our audacity here. Either we are damned fools or we are something else – pioneers, I guess – but either way we are saying our whole civilization is wrong: its philistines, its sophisticates, its conventionally pious, its mystics, philosophers, you name it. And common sense says, How can that be? I’ve been over this before, many times: How can it be that everybody is out of step but my Johnny? How much vastly more likely that we are just fooling ourselves, or anyway making some basic error.

And you know the answer to that doubt: New times provide new opportunities, new ways to penetrate deeper into life. Besides, it’s mostly a matter of mistranslation. People have gotten here before, but,

a) They didn’t have all the help available now,

b) They have been misunderstood, and what we know of as their teachings are their teachings as interpreted by those who misunderstood them.

By (a) I mean a couple of things. First, physical metaphors like computers and animation didn’t exist to change their sensory habits, so it was a longer stretch for them to make than it would be today. Second, everybody stands on the backs of what has been said, thought, understood, previously. It is an advantage, in some ways, to see how many people went down so many blind alleys. It potentially increases your sophistication and analysis.

But surely they had teachers we don’t know of, traditions and understandings we don’t.

Oh yes, I’m not saying we have progressed without also regressing. But it is helpful – can be helpful – to recognize at a glance errors that enticed others.

Aha, I just got something that ought to have been obvious before. The guys have said that in forming a new worldview, we will find ourselves incorporating some things that our present worldview regards as superstition, because we will understand its true nature. That applies to religious and metaphysical insights too, I see. In fact, the older and more esoteric they are, the more valuable they may prove to be.

As inspiration, yes. Not as something to be adopted blindly or wholeheartedly. You will find many things in the Vedas that you will understand from your new view that your present civilization had dismissed; but you will not be able to merely accept the Vedas as they were understood in their heyday. That would be an archaism, not a new appreciation.

We are really going to have to hammer on this one point, because if you don’t get this, you don’t get any of it: Life is different from what it is going to seem to be. If you think you can just add this on to your ordinary perception of life, fine, but you won’t change your life, you will blow beautiful soap-bubbles and admire their momentary beauty.

Matter/energy is an appearance, not an ultimate reality. Difference in time (past, present, future) is an appearance (a way of experiencing 3D), not an ultimate reality. Therefore you don’t know where or what you are. No one does. You have relatively firm ideas about your place in the movie, but as long as you believe the movie is “real life,” you aren’t getting beyond appearances to reality.

Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Most people go through 3D life believing in it. After all, it wouldn’t be must of a movie if you couldn’t lose yourself in it. But if you want to go deeper – if something within you says you have to go deeper – the first real step has to be to recognize what is movie-set and what is beyond movie-set.

We have to start by recognizing that we don’t know anything.

Easy to say, but not quite right. It isn’t that you don’t know anything. It is closer to say, you can’t trust anything your senses tell you, and therefore you can’t trust the towers of logic you (and mostly others) have built on what the senses say. If you are going to go deeper, you have to recognize that you are still a beginner, not an expert, and “beginner’s mind” means openness to the new, if it means anything. Yet this “openness to the new” is the very hardest thing to maintain. It feels like, “I’ve wasted my time up to now,” or it feels like “This is just know-it-all preaching.” True critical thinking based in true openness to the new is rare, and essential. Even in those who can do it, it comes and goes.

And in its absence, all this exploration is just flapping our jaws.

It isn’t quite that grim. Integrity, perseverance, intent.

I’m not sure if this clarified anything, but I’d say next time we ought to proceed to your second item.

Little by little gets it done.

Thanks again, and till next time.