the meaning of life

On June 18, 2024, Jane Peranteau, Christine Sampson, Ruth Shilling, and I heard from the guys upstairs in the course of a small ILC group meeting. Their theme: How a few people working together, forming a temporary group mind, in effect create a new level of organization with its own peculiar possibilities, rather like what we are as individuals in bodies. Something to think about.

TGU (through Frank):

You as one individual in one body are a community that functions as a unit. But you [referring to the four of us functioning together at the moment] can form another layer of organization.

As above, so below – the same sense. What you’re accustomed calling a “group mind” is the equivalent of an individual made of communities. It’s temporary, but nonetheless, it’s an individual.

After all, you’re temporary, too, and if you don’t believe us, wait until you die, and then we’ll tell you.

Everything that could describe that larger sense, that larger group mind, could contradict itself if you looked at it from a different point of view – which is what’s happening. So you can look at it and say, “Well, it used to be four different units, now it’s one unit: That’s change.” Or you could say, “They’re the same strands, containing all of them, but now they’re working together: That’s continuity.” Both of those are true.

You could say, “There is conflict among them. There is cooperation among them. There is indifference among them. There is unity.” You see. Reality doesn’t contradict itself, but it contains all contradictions. So, all of those things can be equally true, and it depends upon your ability to either keep your definitions loose or change them.

If you can change your point of view from here to here to here, then you can sort of see it in the round. But the difficulty with one point of view is it gives you perspective, and makes that perspective look real or more definite, more factual, than it is. It’s only a way of seeing things. Okay.

You’re all doing your best, and you’re all working hard to get the communication. That’s why you’ve come as far as you have so far, But to expect to come to a common understanding of it… You can come to a common understanding if you keep it imprecise enough, if you keep it more of a gestalt than a definition. You’ll get a general idea of it.

But to go beyond that… Look, there’s nothing wrong with what you’re trying to do. We’re just saying some ways work easier than other ones.

We will also say, though, that sometimes dead ends are very productive. So we would never say, “That’s a dead end. Don’t do it.” We’ll just say, “Well, that’s a dead end. Do it, if you want to do it.” Because, you know, who knows? It may turn out to be very productive.

 

Friday, June 21, 2024

7 a.m. What is it that makes us respond emotionally to emotional stories? All of fiction, written, oral, visual, depends upon creating that response. How does it work? Why does it work?

Isn’t it obvious?

I can feel it beginning to be. Something about stories being closer than life.

Not quite, but that’s in the general direction. What happens to you, in 3D, affects you at second-hand, in a way. That is, you seem to interact with an external world, and the interaction has its effect on your mental and emotional life. So, the event happens, and it causes an effect.

You fall in love for the first time – or for the tenth. Your emotional world is transformed. The change is only indirectly affected by what happens next, except if it is punctuated or is truncated or is even reversed, and in any of these cases, a new emotional composition results. Maybe the results are permanent, but usually they are only temporarily permanent – that is, they are final in regard to the starting place, but they are only the initial stage of whatever follows.

I can’t tell if this is making sense of not. I have the feeling that what is clear as a feeling is not getting expressed coherently.

As usual, just persevere and it will come clear. Try restating, not worrying about accuracy in every point, but just getting the general drift.

Well, I think you were saying, our emotions are evoked by a situation, and a particularly charged situation can drastically affect our emotional default position, so that we see life differently. Then other events may reinforce or contradict or in some way modify that new default.

Good enough. And you see, the point is that the strong emotion results from events, and they don’t even need to be external physical events, though they usually are.

We have said that emotions are at the boundary between what you do and do not know about yourself: the line between known-you and unknown-you, in other words. That is why a sudden or extreme or permanent shift in what you know about yourself is likely to be accompanied by strong emotion, though you may mistake cause for effect.

But what causes that readjustment? Doesn’t it have to involve self-awareness?

We advise that you take some time during the day to consider that sentence. Weigh it, make sense of it, decide whether it squares with your experience of life.

Now, you watch an episode of NCIS that involves Gibbs revisiting his childhood home; interacting with his father; reliving childhood conflicts with others; finally, remembering meeting the love of his life when he was a raw marine. You don’t need to have experienced any of those situations to be affected by the story. In fact, if that were necessary, storytellers would be out of business. Instead, what is needed is that you project analogies. “This is like that, that happened to me. This is like that, that I felt as a result of similar circumstances. This is what I might have felt, if I had gone through that.” Et cetera. It is the drawing of analogies that produces empathy. (Or you could equally well say it is empathy that allows the drawing of analogies.) But is any of this a process of mental construction? Clearly not.

No, clearly not. A storyteller who leads you to consciously unpick his weaving, fails to that extent. It comes viscerally, or not at all.

That doesn’t mean that thought is never involved. Sometimes, as in reading Hemingway, you have to think hard to get inside the character’s head to figure out why he or she would do such a thing, think or feel such a thing. But the actual analogy will be not mentally drawn: It will be felt, emotionally, and immediately, and may also grow with your reflection about the story.

Yes. Take Island in the Stream, for instance. It is all about a father’s love for his children and his having to carry on living after they are dead. That wasn’t my experience, it wasn’t even Hemingway’s experience. But the true emotion did come across, because it wasn’t about the specifics but the emotion.

No symbolic statement can ever have the strength of a description of a tangible situation. That’s what drama does.

Now, notice. Drama, fiction, poetry, even fact-telling like biography or history, may convey the emotional truth mind-to-mind directly. That is, it serves in lieu of one’s own physical experiences. It is more direct, so may have more of an impact.

At the same time, your actual external life is usually far less dramatic, if only because it is always seen in a mundane context, and is usually a matter of slow-motion, rather than drama’s severe compression. Yet obviously your own 3D life experiences are in their way more real to you than drama. And of course if your life takes a dramatic turn – a tragedy, an ecstasy – it vastly overshadows anything drama can provide.

Feels like we haven’t quite come to the point here, but I can’t see what it would be.

Your mental life is far closer to real than your physical life. This is not a balanced statement, but close enough.

Which is more real? The physical life contained in instants of 3D time, or the mental life that is what it becomes, and never stops becoming, and is not confined to 3D instants?

They’re both real.

They’re both somewhat real, and the less tied to material circumstances, the realer. Naturally this will look inverted to 3D beings.

You are primarily energy patterns, and by “energy” we don’t mean electricity or anything physical. (Matter, we must remind you, is slowed-down energy. So to think that physical energy is less material than matter is to make a mistake.) The energy we refer to, some call spirit. It is the inflow into your lives that animates them. It is the local manifestation of the vast impersonal forces that are equally busy animating the universe. You are closer to being a local energy pattern – a flute being played by the divine breath – than you are to being a thinking feeling lump of animated matter.

Therefore, it is closer to contact you in spirit than in flesh. The contact comes in concentric rings:

• Most direct: unknown-other to unknown-you.
• Next, that same energy as it expresses in you as emotion, taking emotion to be the laminal layer between unknown-you and known-you.
• Least direct is this input filtered into your conscious categories and perceptions.

You see? Your conscious circle of awareness is the farthest away from the true life that exists beyond 3D. Your emotion registers the differences between conscious and unconscious content, the way an amplifier’s membrane reproduces sound by vibration. And beyond your emotion is this vastly larger part of yourself that functions most clearly, most intelligently, serving as your buffer, stepping down divine energies to the point that they won’t blow your circuits.

Given these truths, how surprising should it be to realize that drama – abstracted reality – should be a very effective way to convey messages from the realer you to the somewhat-real you?

And that’s enough for the moment.

This is very good. Thanks.

 

Tuesday, June 18, 2024

5:40 a.m. Several possible places to continue:

1. Judging by our intent rather than by our actions seems backwards.
2. “As you change your mind, you change your effective being.”
3. The mechanism for internal readjustment.

Your choice, guys.

All good questions. Shows you are paying attention, not merely transcribing.

1. Judging by intent rather than by actions seems backwards.  Yes, it is backwards from how you naturally judge things when you regard 3D as real and non-3D as theoretical at best. And the same point of view would see the moment as transitory and the effects as at least relatively permanent. But do you want to see your lives from outside, or not? If you do, you must at least temporarily lay down your accustomed judgments.

It is very true that the road to hell is paved with good intentions – if you look at life from 3D assumptions. The saying means, merely intending change sometime in the future is the same as clinging to what you already are, for the present.

It is – as so often – the difference in meaning concealed within the use of the same word for different things. “Good intentions” sounds like “sustained intent,” but of course they are very different things. Sustained intent has nothing vague about it, nothing of delay. And it is your sustained intent that leads you to the future you pull toward yourself, for the astrological moment cannot be modified; the only thing that can be modified is your attitude toward “what happens” around you, your sustained intent.

The difference is very clear as you spell it out. Thanks.

2. “As you change your mind, you change your effective being.” We have replaced our previous scaffolding of “laying down some strings, picking up others.” Now we would have you think of it as less material an analogy, less concrete. You are a complex balance of internal dynamics, affected not only by your initial “setting” (determined by your physical and non-physical heredity and the astrological moment and social environment), but also by your intent. In a sense, you decide how to intervene in your own life. You choose among your possibilities.

Yes, that is clear now too.

3. The mechanism for internal readjustment. The question is, how does this occur? How do you turn intent into change?

And I have no idea where you want to go with this one.

Actually, you didn’t have much idea of the two previous, either. You forget what you didn’t know, usually as soon as you now know it. You didn’t know, then you knew, then you disremember the earlier state of not knowing. It’s normal. But this third question is unexplored territory, which is why you feel blank, approaching it.

Some bullet points:

• You comprise all those strands, each of which is a complex energetic pattern, each of which – if acting by itself – would replicate in you the pattern it established in the life it leads elsewhen.
• But they don’t act by themselves. They inter-act, smoothly or otherwise. Your internal life, your impulses and compulsions and contradictions and confusions, all stem from the fact that you are living all those pattens simultaneously in every new moment.
• There is a hidden problem here. Each of those strands exists within you as it existed at a given moment, at death, which was the culmination of that life. That is the pattern. But nothing is frozen, so as that life changes, the pattern you are partly made of changes. How?
• The astrology of your life clearly can’t be the astrology of the various strands’ lives. They’ll all be different., from you and from each other. The living present moment that each is experiencing will have a quality different from any other. How can all this be reconciled?
• Only your intent can reconcile the various clashing or meshing energetic patterns. And the same is true for each of the strands. Is it astonishing that the 3D world is full of conflict? What ought to astonish is that it has as much harmony as it does have.
• Bear in mind, the result is not chaos meaning shapeless, meaningless disorder, but chaos meaning infinite potential expressing in all possible combinations.

And everything boils down to free will exercised within a given framework that itself changes and is changed by the free will of others.

Circumstances are often, perhaps always, produced by others. Your part is always to choose, and of course in choosing you are changing the circumstances for all you connect to in any way, 3D or non-3D.

It’s a little dizzying.

Some time spent pondering will bring you along. Merely the readjustment from physical or energetic analogies would be an advance, freeing up your understanding.

So what can you tell us about the Gates of Horn?

Nothing. Do the work, observe the results, and at some point it will be profitable to talk about it. At this point it would be front-loading.

At any point, it’s going to be front-loading for somebody.

Just mind yourself; that’s your true business. As usual, people will come to it at the proper time for them. Those who come to it before-time will not notice; it will make no impression on them. Perhaps three years later, at the proper moment, it will sink in.

I am feeling we have left too much unaddressed on this third question.

That is true, but it seems best. There’s time. And no harm in a slightly shorter session.

Very well. Next time?

It will have to emerge on the moment.

Thanks as always, then.

 

Sunday, June 9, 2024

5:35 a.m. Gentlemen, yesterday I had an idea and decided to ask you about it. [Here I had left a pair of brackets, intending to insert the question, but in transcribing, I decided to enter that information at the end, for reasons that will become apparent.] Is it true? Somewhat true? Entirely in error?

It is a speculation, and as such is worth considering. But probably it is best that we not respond. Take it as the basis for further thought-experiments.

Because of my possible anxiety over your response?

Not particularly. It is the kind of reorientation that is best done without external validation or invalidation, either of which would result in your having to take our word for it.

How is that different from all the scaffolding you have provided over the past 25 or 30 years?

Well, for one thing, would an answer be useful?

Always useful to learn how things work, isn’t it?

Is that what you would learn? Or would it not be – at best – one way to see things? At worst it might encourage a bad habit of taking things on faith that cannot then be supported by evidence or reasoning.

I don’t see the distinction yet. How is this different from your describing us as compound beings combining threads, or saying that our lives are shaped in the beginning by physical genetics and the cosmic moment and the social conditions and our combination of strands?

We see the similarity as it appears to you. The concept serves to reorient you to see things differently. It shows you the things you have always seen, but relates them in a different fashion, and the new view changes you. So, why not look at the view from one concept rather than another?

“In addition to,” anyway. Not necessarily “rather than.”

[Pause]

And I find that I get nothing. Maybe try again Later.

9:30 a.m. Shall we try again? Your lead. I had had an idea of a theme. Why did it not work out?

Maybe we don’t exist. Maybe we’re making it all up. Maybe you are making it all up. Take your pick, they are all your background worries.

Only in certain directions, I notice. Some themes – and some of them pretty wide ranging, too – we have no problem. Other things we run dry. Why is that?

Should it surprise you? Do you know everything? Does everything interest you? Why should it be different for the information that can come in, given who and what you are?

I hear you saying – and I think you’ve said it before – that information transfer has three parts: sender, receiver, and the intermediate filters between them.

We didn’t put it that way, but that is one valid way to see it. If you were to ask us for a sentence in Mandarin, how could we provide it? There needs to be receptor cells. If you wanted detailed schematics of a nuclear plant, could we provide them in any way you could understand? Yes, there is remote viewing, you think: RVers routinely bring through information that they do not understand. But is ILC the same as RV?

That’s true, I didn’t think of that. In RV one deliberately leaves the mind receptive but without content; ILC is receptivity combined with an active mind concentrated on whatever the subject may be.

You will remember your friend Dana, who was moved (mysteriously to her, at the time) to begin to study quantum mechanics, when she had had no interest in the subject, and no background in physics or mathematics. After she studied the subject, she was able to receive certain kinds of information.

We have long noted that when it comes to history and a few other subjects, I’m your boy, but most of human knowledge is outside my range.

True for everyone, of course. Nobody is familiar with even the rudiments of everything. Thus by nature, every receptor is a specialist.

Only we don’t know in advance what our limits may be.

No, plus they may change over time, as Dana’s did.

So if I wanted information beyond my natural range, could I try to remote-view it?

How do you propose to double-blind your targeting?

I could get someone to help, I suppose.

You aren’t thinking it through. If you have a subject you wish to explore, how can you suggest to someone that at some point he task you “unbeknown to yourself”?

Then perhaps I could task someone else.

A possible halfway-house procedure would be for you to do a shamanic journey on the subject.

Interesting idea. Subject specified in advance, procedure involving no words, or anyway a different mental state than this. Maybe. Maybe I’ll just put out the idea I had and see if anybody picks up on it.

That’s an idea too. In fact, beginning with your idea, a group exploration might produce interesting insights.

Let’s do that. And maybe wrap this up early, unless you have something on your plate.

A short session is fine with us.

Thanks as always, then.

[On Saturday, I had made this entry in my journal, looking to this morning:]

6:10 p.m. I get a sense that there is a certain “quantity” of a given energy that has to enter the world at a given time – envy, say, or hatred – and the astrology of the moment determines how much; the combination of the individuals and their decisions determines how much will be expressed through which people. I will ask about this.

 

Saturday, June 8, 2024

7:10 a.m. Guys? Your move.

You have lost track of the argument, and you are worried that we have lost track too.

Well, yes. It puts me in mind of Rita reassuring me that I couldn’t be making it up as I went along, regardless of how it felt, because the material was consistent and was from a consistent point of view, though she didn’t phrase it that way.

Yes, and you feel the invisible pressure of imagined others disapproving of your uncertainty, though they don’t have the comparable experience.

It doesn’t help.

And, as you noted recently, to the degree that you have become used to feedback, you are less self-reliant than you were when you worked alone.

It feels like that’s the trade-off, yes.

And, finally, you are again oppressed by the sense of time passing fruitlessly.

I am.

And the indicated treatment for all these symptoms?

Ignore the nagging doubts and keep working.

We didn’t elicit this only for the purpose of making you fully aware of half-submerged feelings. It serves as an example of the power of decision.

Hmm. I get that. I’m in situation X and as usual it is up to me to choose what path I will take, if only by default.

Yes. This is hardly a problem particular to you. It is what everyone in 3D faces and was designed to face. It is the opportunity contained (shaped) by the problem.

This may be regarded as a subset of the larger motif of problems being opportunities. A situation (public or not) requires you to choose. Perhaps you usually choose by default, settling for whatever happens. Or perhaps you work rigorously to hack your path through the woods. Either way, it is a pattern of choice and is what really goes on while you are defining it otherwise.

“Life is what happens to you while you are making other plans”?

Yes. You concern yourselves with making the best of your opportunities or with creating opportunities for yourselves, or with managing overwhelming circumstances as best you can. Do you think you (or anybody) will care what positions you held, what possessions you accumulated, who and how you loved and hated, once your 3D life is over? You won’t care nearly as much as you will care what you have become as a result – seemingly, as a side-effect – of all that choosing.

That’s viewing your life from a personal, individual, viewpoint. But don’t neglect to consider it from other viewpoints. You are the child of many strands; you are the opposite end of many relationships of all kinds. You are even a part of the world-drama both 3D and non-3D. if you disregard these roles, your summing-up of your life will be wildly inaccurate, because incomplete. And, even more difficult to keep in mind, because it is so complex and overwhelming: all the other people are choosing all the time, just as you are.

I get that you are finally ready to talk to us about the flickering light-show.

We described reality that way in order to loosen certain assumptions you bring with you, out of your 3D sensory experience, and the unconscious metaphors it spawns. Let’s have a look at them:

• What’s done is done. The past is definite and unchangeable.
• Individuals may be compound beings, but what hey are compounded from is static, like the past they existed in.
• Life progresses from this to that, and progress implies replacement of one thing by another.
• The Akashic Record is fixed, not malleable.
• There is a permanent, stable, underpinning to the world – that is, to 3D life.

These assumptions are at best relatively true.

“Somewhat real.”

Yes, and only somewhat. In reality:

• The past changes continuously, as the things that make it up change.
• You as compound beings are ratios composed of ratios, or let’s say are subtotals that are the result of subtotals – and there is no fixed and final sum.
• Life is not progress but progression; that is, it is not a course with beginning and end points, but a journey that is its own purpose (We can talk about this.)
• Nothing in 3D is stable or permanent, except as seen from within a 3D moment.

Tell us about life’s journey, then.

Envision a database, packed with information and relationships. Now suppose you want to explore every possible relationship, and wish to see what the total picture looks like as each variable changes. Envision every time a different color according to its state, so that a change in state becomes a change in color. Write a search program to explore the whole thing, and sit back and watch the display.

There is and is not a beginning point. There is, because you have to start somewhere. There isn’t, because there was no particular point that had to be the first. So, first by circumstance, not first by nature. There is and is not an end point, for the same reason. But every single possibility will be displayed, sooner or later. And it will be later, for two reasons: complexity and change of characters.

• You don’t’ have numbers high enough to number the possible configurations resulting from everybody everywhen interacting and changing and interacting some more.
• Change of characters. Every time new combinations of strands are created, there is an initial effect consisting of adding a new player, which is included among the possibilities of the situation as the search pattern begins. There is also a sort of expansion of the database as all these new characters add to what is, not merely to what might be.

That’s a new wrinkle.

We can only add what the scaffolding will bear. All this exposition takes time, if you haven’t noticed.

Is this why I am still around?

It is one reason. It has taken a good deal of work to produce a mind that has been brought through so many changes of scaffolding and can record the changes as they process continues. Every time someone retires, there is a certain amount of possibility foresworn. Everybody goes through on-the-job-training, obvious or not.

But the view from a new window is valuable in itself, is it not?

It is, but we are not talking about irreplaceability, but of overlap. Redundancy. What you get, someone else will get somewhat differently. Comparing the two produces binocular rather than monocular vision, a net advantage.

And of course these conditions apply not only to you, and not only to those willing and able to do the work you do: They apply to everybody, no matter what they do or don’t do or do only unconsciously. We have to keep emphasizing, reality has no spare parts. Everybody contributes, and every contribution is unique and of value. Only, don’t go imagining that your contribution or anybody’s is unchanging. It changes as you change. You may be only a tiny part of the pattern, but you are a part, as is everybody else.

What was our theme here?

“Opportunities and changes” might do.

I guess we’ll see. I wish I had a firmer grip on where we’re going.

Just ride the moment. It has worked out so far, hasn’t it?

I suppose. Thanks for all this.