Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

[After a week of illness following return from Egypt.]

So then, friends. Talk to me.

We’re always talking back and forth. Mostly it doesn’t involve words.

“People are always praying, and their prayers are always answered.” The hired man Tarbox said that to Emerson.

That’s what it amounts to. In a way, we outside 3D are always praying and it is you in 3D answering or denying what we would have you (us) do.

I suppose that is one way to look at the result of the vast impersonal forces, and the vast personal forces, contending.

Contending by what we are, not necessarily by what we wish.

It is difficult to hold on to: We in 3D are always at the center of things, and at the same time are nearly insignificant in the larger scheme of things.

Isn’t that true of your lives in general? Anyone’s? God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.

That’s the first time I’ve understood that saying in that sense.

As you change, everything you know changes aspect. It is just natural.

I feel like this is our first reset after Egypt, after a sort of forgetting.

You didn’t forget, you were unable to maintain. There’s a difference. The spirit may be willing and the flesh weak. That isn’t the same as the spirit deciding, “It’s too much trouble.”

Okay. Why the theological language?

You are going to merge understandings, are you not? They might as well get used to it.

This is for the public, then.

Take it that from now on, pretty much anything is or may be for the public. You’re long past self-consciousness at this point.

When you returned to your home, before you got sick you had a day of functioning in unified fashion. You felt as you are feeling now.

That’s so. I hadn’t quite realized I was feeling it again now till you mentioned it.

Which is why we mentioned it. Describe it, for others and for your own later purpose of comparison.

Everything quiet inside. Almost a need to balance, physically. The body quiet but not lethargic, energy-filled but not buzzing in the sense of uncomfortable urging to random motion, the way one is when trying to sleep through jet lag, say. Awake and alert, without static or competing programming. A nice state to be in.

This was your state, and you got sick. Being sick, you did not forget your intent to remain connected, but you were unable to bring the energy to physical endeavors. Your physical illness did not lead you to forget the connection, you see. You couldn’t do anything, but you knew what you wanted to do, and, more important, wanted to continue to be.

It is like the sexual analogy you drew: The woman is always able but not always willing; the man is always willing but not always able. Like any broad statement, it could do with some qualifying, but it is true enough, and like most analogies, it may be applied in more than one way. You in 3D may be always willing but not always able. More commonly, you are always able but not always willing.

Relative to doing the will of the larger being rather than insisting on doing the will only of the localized 3D consciousness as if it had no larger context.

That’s a decent way to understand it. and now you are more likely – hence, more able – to continue to serve Ra.

Yes, that’s what came to me in Egypt, and not for the first time. Something within said, “I still serve Ra,” and I understood that to mean, not that 21st-century-me served an ideal formulated thousands of years earlier, nor that I am divided among various beings each of whom serves gods of their own, nor that it is strictly a metaphor for willingness to serve the part of ourself larger than the 3D self. It is a little of each of those things, but it amounts to something more.

It amounts to a 3D-shaped consciousness aware of itself not as a unity but as a community, and now proceeding to a sense of itself as an integral part of something that transcends itself and yet depends upon that 3D awareness. Both, not one or the other.

A life spent “serving Ra”, “doing God’s will”, “remaining connected” to the guys or the higher self or call it what you will, amounts to living a life you will find most satisfying, and the way you think about it will be tacked on after the fact, mostly, as usual. Only, don’t be afraid of words, or of other people’s misunderstandings. Lead the life you are called to lead, knowing it will be mostly incommunicable anyway. Your life – anyone’s life – is what you are, not so much what you do. What you do is a pale wavering misleading shadow of the life you really lead. How else could it be?

 

So, guys, for me to stay on track, and not lose this connection – any suggestions?

A better goal is to remind yourself to re-connect, whenever you lose it.

And how do I do that? Intention, I know – but what about when I forget?

You aren’t the only end of the rope. Your non-3D self knows hat you want, and does not forget. That is why it is so important for a person to know what he wants.

Even if the wanting is wanting to be open to whatever comes?

It is still a clear intention. So concentrate not on not forgetting but on clear sustained vision.

All right. Now, how do I use this new clarity and access to do our work?

“Our” work, good. We like that. If you had said “your work” or “my work,” it would have been an error.

I guess everything is “our” from now on, and always has been, but not consciously.

You see?

You mean the ease and swiftness of understanding, picking up the continuation of thought without your having to prod me. So, next question, how do we teach people how to move through whatever barrier they experience? And the answer to that, I guess, is that everybody’s path and possibilities are different, so there isn’t any one road map, only one attitude.

Intent is everything. Give them a sense of what it feels like, let them see that it is theirs for the intending. What else do they need?

How does being in touch with my larger self help anything?

How does not being in touch help anything? The point is not to make your life easier – though it may – but to enrich and orient and stabilize whatever your life happens to ring you.

So it remains up to me to get through whatever happens.

It does, but remember, an emotional over-reaction of any sort merely wastes energy and creates regret. Eliminating that is not trivial.

 

So, gentlemen, open for business, perhaps for the final time in Egypt.[That is, at the end of a two-week excursion.] Open to anything you’d like to convey, if I can receive it

You may congratulate yourself on several levels. You systematically faced and overcame obstacles to do the trip. Of course each obstacle appeared to be external, but of course each was also representative of internal circumstances. Is it a surprise that your health is more or less able to be taken for granted, this trip?

Much more important to me is the increase in my ability to lead people to healing, and my ability to connect to something by not-quite-touching it.

And of course it all connects. Expansion is expansion.

As always, I want to return changed, not unchanged. I wish I felt more confident about my life after I return.

You mean, you wish you could envision new habits and a life built around them. Then begin not with the roof and exterior decoration, but with the foundation and structural underpinnings.

• You
• Your mode of being changes.
• What you wish to do and enjoy doing changes.
• It ripples out.

Start by being concentrated in one time, one place, and that implies living without split focus. Then, remember, without tension or straining, the feeling of heightened perception.

How do I structure my life to not fritter it away because I lose sight of what I am doing?

Simple. Live without split focus. Do one thing, putting out of your mind all other things. Then, periodically stop and ask yourself what it is that you might do, and, among those, what is it that you choose to do.

An alternation.

To us it is a single directed focus, now aimed this way, now aimed that way. Work single-minded, survey and choose single-minded. The alternation maintains needed flexibility and preserves focus.

 

A change of angle of viewing will show entirely different relationships that are no less and no more true. in other words, there is no one way of seeing things; there is only every way, and this of course no one in 3D can ever stretch to encompass. Not only does a different viewpoint reveal a different aspect of a given situation: It alters what is possible, what is true. When you see life as fluid rather than static – as a dream rather than a collection of objects to be moved around – the ground-rules change. What you believe connects directly to what is true (and possible) for you. You know this from experience, many of you, but not all who have experienced it realize what they have experienced.

Beliefs bound your experiences; experiences expand or limit beliefs. As usual, a reciprocating process. One who will not be convinced is, from one viewpoint, firmly rooted in fact, and from another viewpoint, trapped in his own limiting beliefs. This is not an either/or – it is a both/and, as well as a neither/nor.

Choose your beliefs, change your life.

Yes, except that stating it that way implies a firm platform from which to choose. Your life is not as simple as a 3D mind making its decisions rationally and fairly. There isn’t really any point in thinking someone can set out the rules of life. The best you can do is to set out the rules of life as they are for you. Again, looking at life more as a dream than as a staged event will bring you closer intuitively to the reality. Only – some will be unable to adopt that view!

What we believe is what is true for us.

With an implied caveat, always, that no one in 3D knows fully who or what he is, and so never fully knows his own mainsprings. But, subject to that very important reservation, it is true that life will serve up what you expect – but remember that people do their expecting at various levels, not all known to one another.

I have never felt a need to ask for protection, but perhaps that is foolhardiness. I hesitate to make recommendations to others, for fear I may be wrong, or may be pushing my luck, only to discover one day that it runs out.

But regardless, this is your experience, your (inner and outer) world in conformity to your expectations.

So I suppose the answer is, if you think you need protection, act as if you do, otherwise not.

Who and what you are determines the need or non-need for protection, because malevolent forces do exist, in a way, and don’t, in a way. What is within your limits seems real to you, and other things do not, can not. But again, don’t confuse deciding that you believe something with actually believing. In practical terms, it’s always the same prescription: Get into close touch with all levels of yourself. Stay in touch. Reconcile to the degree possible, while remembering that you while you are in the body have the opportunity and responsibility to choose. That’s what you are doing here, choosing. Everyone lives in a different subset of the world tailored for them, of necessity. That is the opportunity; that is the predicament.

I received an email yesterday morning from a man named Hanns Oskar Porr, asking if strands upon strands and communities wrap around “like in a hologram, where each point contains all else and at the same time feeds into the others?” He had an experience of cosmic unity, “maybe best described as an analogy … like being part of a ‘cosmic hologram’ where the part contains the whole and the whole contains that part.”

I think I understand. “Does it wrap around,” meaning, is “higher” and “lower” only a spatial analogy, somewhat misleading? Here is what I think it means: Everything is all one thing not only in being all-connected, but in being non-hierarchical. If this is the meaning of his question, I’d say yes, although not intuitively obvious, that’s true. Reality isn’t divided into enlightened and unenlightened, king and pawn, superior and inferior, advanced and retarded – except in relation to any given point of view. Is this right, and am I reading the question right?

Yes and yes. This clarification may be important for some, and obvious for others. Reality, All That Is, isn’t divided into first class and cheap seats. It’s all one thing, as we keep saying. Reality is neither unorganized nor hierarchical. Instead, it is self-organizing and fluid; it is all one thing and at the same time it is segmented, or compartmentalized, or segregated, or organized in many ways at once, so that different ways of seeing it result in perception of different structures.

You once gave us the analogy of the interior of a crystal, looking one way when a laser shines through it from one direction, and different when shined through differently. Each angle of vision illumines different relationships that exist always but are not necessarily always evident.

You see the limitations of analogy. Words are more fluid than objects, but nonetheless far more static and unresponsive than are the realities they are used to try to capture. Images are somewhat more supple than words alone, but are also too static, too defined, to capture the quicksilver-like nature of the reality they attempt to reflect. Even the simultaneous overlapping of images cannot do it justice. If you were not intuitive beings, in touch with your non-3D natures, you would have no hope of grasping any of it.

Think perhaps of the ongoing process represented by kneading dough. The outside becomes the inside. Neighboring particles become separated; unmixed portions become part of other previously separate pieces. Not the dough, but the process of kneading, is the analogy. A change of angle of viewing will show entirely different relationships that are no less and no more true. There is no one way of seeing things; there is only every way, and this of course no one in 3D can ever stretch to encompass.

 

Return continually to Jesus’ helpful suggestions, all of which were meant to give you reliable ways to proceed. He preached integrity – that is, being the same thing inside and outside. Don’t do things behind your own back. Know your intent and hold to it.

When listening for the small still voice, or talking to the guys, or trying to know what the right thing to do is, the key is not to fool yourself. And how does one assure that he is not fooling himself? Not by judging the content, like the person who only accepts what is reasonable to his own previous definitions of what is possible. What you can judge is whether you proceeded honestly and consciously, as best you could. Good fruit grows from good stock: Good information proceeds from good intent and good execution.

In other words, we don’t need to worry as much about fooling ourselves as about wanting to fool ourselves, or being willing to fool ourselves.

That’s what it comes to. And you can always be aware of your own true intent if you are in the habit of being honest with yourself. If you were the units you appear to be, it would be relatively simple. But you are not units, but communities, and not even communities of units, but communities of communities. That’s a lot of cross-purposes!

Jesus’ saying about not putting new wine in old wineskins, nor old wine in new wineskins may not apply to our lives, our consciousness, our task of bringing our constituent parts into alignment during our life, but it seems like maybe it could.

Well, if you try to cram old perceptions into new circumstances, or new perceptions into old categories, you can see that it probably won’t work very well. Jesus need not have meant the analogy for it to be true nonetheless.

So how do we avoid being led astray by our internal contradictory elements? Some do it by adopting a rigid code, but for those who can’t or won’t?

A first step is to be clear about the distinction between you as present-tense keeper of the ring – the person who has the right and responsibility to decide – and you as arbitrator among so many constituent agents. Same you, different functions.

And how do we distinguish? Intent, I suppose.

Exactly. In your intent as to what you wish to be, you have your guide.

The way some people say What Would Jesus Do, for instance.

That’s an example. The fact that a technique may be misused, or may not fit you, does not mean it is mistaken or worthless. And after all, if Jesus is too exalted an example for you, the world is full of examples. Who do you admire? (We’re talking of character, not achievement or renown.)

And I see that we could take this trait from one, that from another. Lincoln for honest, clarity and humility, Washington for character and obedience to perceived duty. Jefferson for lucid intelligence and all-devouring curiosity, Teddy Roosevelt for sheer vigor and energy and determination, and so on. We could choose among any who were important models to us, regardless of their fame or obscurity, their field of activity, their nearness or remoteness to our actual lives.

Certainly. One’s grandfather or brother or cousin might serve, or a friend. There is no limit to who might serve as model, and, after all, the qualities one infers from observing may or may not be actually present in that other. That doesn’t matter. What matters is not the source of one’s ideal but the nature of the ideal. Choose what you want to be, and live toward it, retaining the sense that you will not attain the goal and shouldn’t (else the goal was not set high enough). If you do attain the goal, merely set another, higher.

In other words, no guilt or discouragement, but no self-satisfaction either.

Well, rules are misleading. Let’s leave it at this. In order to have a compass, you need to set an intent and live it. (Everyone has intent, if only accepted ready-made, as a social convention, or a religious creed. But for people like you, deliberate choice is the only practical path.) You may or may not know who you are, but it is essential to have some clear idea of who (and how) you want to be; who you want to become, who you hope to see in the mirror, looking back on your life. This isn’t for the sake of meeting an expected judgment, it is for the sake of keeping you oriented along the way.

As I look back on my life, it seems to me I didn’t stay conscious enough. I rarely turned the inner spotlight on me, except as a sort of non-introspective self-awareness. I was there, but not thinking about what I was doing or reacting to. I couldn’t learn from experience, because I wasn’t altering my reactions from having thought about past reactions.

You might consider yourself a society without regulation. Rather than by-laws, it’s always ad hoc adjustment. “How do I feel right now?” This isn’t necessarily a fault or a virtue, but it certainly opens some doors and closes others. Of course everyone’s bounds are different in nature and extent. One travels extensively abroad, another travels extensively inward. And beyond this difference, which is still an internal difference regardless of the fact that it plays out in the outer world, there is a difference in what one does with what one lives. So take Bob Friedman, quietly influential over a long lifetime and Colin Wilson.

The commonality being that they liked to think about psychic experience but didn’t particularly want to have it.

Not quite. They wanted to maintain. Both Bob and Colin were thinkers in a way that you are not. They reflected. They pondered. They learned from experience. This doesn’t mean that what they learned necessarily was right; we are concerned here with the nature of their process. Someone considering something new in the light of past conclusions may end up merely adjusting new perception to not contradict older conclusions. But on the other hand, they may learn something. Different ways of living produce different crucibles within the 3D crucible. So if Bob and Colin are intending to live their lives from a stable platform that will allow them clear observation (which is one way of looking at their lives), you cannot expect them to want to jettison that stable platform just when things get interesting. Instead, by not moving, they get front-row seats. And from those front-row seats, they were able to describe the view to others. You by contrast are more like a set of water wings on a lake, or sometimes a river, occasionally on the open seas. What you know is an idea of yourself shaped by your reaction to your surroundings. What you chiefly have to report is your own process, your own journeying.

As time has gone by, I have had a greater sense of my own journey being all I had to offer by way of instruction or commentary or even encouragement.

You share with Colin the reporting of what you think and do – in other words, your experience. Bob did not do that. You share with Bob your own vivid intense inner life, poorly communicated, often misunderstood or unsuspected. The three of you delighted in assisting others. Of the three of you, Bob was perhaps the most self-aware, in that he did not live in a continual whirl of mental and physical activity like Colin, and did not lose his inner compass by throwing himself into new circumstances (inner or outer) like you. He was the quietest of the three of you. And Colin was the one who made the greatest impact, by far, in the span of his life.

James Joyce said history was a nightmare from which he was struggling to wake up. I sometimes think my life is a nightmare, or anyway a dream, from which I am struggling to wake up.

That isn’t quite what you mean. It is more like, your drift is the lack of direction from which you are struggling to become aware enough to overcome. But, you see, the very thought of thinking about it drives you to think of doing something else.

Yes, I recognize that persistent drive to escape. It feels like self-sabotage.

Think of it as true north, and see where that brings you.

Huh! You mean, maybe what I’m seeking is the very thing I must not find?

No, what you are doing is not at all what you think of yourself as doing. That’s a very different thing.

So, in practical terms, what can I (ought I) do?

If toward the end of your life you can live a summing-up, it will be well.