Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

Wednesday. October 18, 2017

Let’s talk about motivation and emotion.

I know where this is going. I had a thought while making coffee. I take it you sometimes put out teasers, like theatrical trailers.

Think of it as an aligning nudge, to smooth communication.

Or like a left jab, to position me for a punch?

We’re smiling too. All right. You look around you, sometimes, and you wonder, how it is that people want things so badly? How can so many things be so important to them? How can they believe so thoroughly and passionately? Why are they so driven?

Very true. And you don’t need to tell me that others would say that somebody who fills dozens of notebooks with early morning dialogues is driven in his own way. It doesn’t feel like it, to me, it feels natural, but I can imagine that that’s how it looks. So I don’t exactly think I’m the only exception to what I’m nevertheless puzzled over.

It is a good point, that one person’s obsession is another’s natural way of being. But at the moment we are interested in the underlying question of motivation.

What makes Sammy run. What is it with us?

It is that what you used to call 3D Theater is for the playing-out of – well, we are going to say of conflicts, only that needs explaining.

More like confluences, I think. Or just interactions.

That is true once the context is understood, but it requires spelling-out first, to eliminate potential misreadings.

Life in 3D, we remind you, amounts to saying “consciousness restricted in its awareness to 3D conditions of perceived separation, delayed consequences, and constricted experience of time as an invariant succession of present-moments.” Life in 3D allows the play of forces to be experienced from within, as it were. It makes it real at an entirely different level than one of somewhat chilly abstraction, which is All-D life as you would perceive it. (In saying that, we are not accusing ourselves of being cold. We are showing you the difference between 3D consciousness and the larger All-D consciousness as it would appear to you.)

If you will remind yourselves that in a very real way, you are all part of one thing, it will be easier to understand. 3D life is the experience of many small parts of all-that-is experiencing themselves as separate. This is not (we keep reminding you) poor design, nor Original Sin in the sense of a culpable act or an error of judgment. It is the result of the eating of the fruit of the Tree of the Perception of Things as Good and Evil – that is, it is the result of the voluntary descent into perception of duality – but it is not punishment nor even an escape from punishment. It is the sine qua non of the experience. Without more than one actor, more than one stream of thought, more than one set of motivations, there isn’t much elucidation going on. Monologues and soliloquies only take you so far.

You are implying that our drama is somewhat artificial.

Let’s call you a repertory company doing improvisational drama. (We have used the analogy repeatedly, because it is expressive.) You are assigned roles in 3D by being born into a certain time, place, heredity, and being given baggage (what some call past lives, others, inherited traits, which amounts to the same thing) but are then free to – and required to – make it up as you go along. This is because the theater management, and for that matter the audience, is less concerned with plot than with character revelation and character development. It is the playing-out, less than the play, that is of interest.

No Big Script, no Ultimate Resolution, no Armageddon.

Not except in the sense of the entire working-out process being the script, no. People tack on the idea of a final resolution, for fear of meaninglessness.

Yes, that is a haunting fear many of us come to, once we are beyond believing in the surface appearance of things.

It requires greater consciousness and therefore involves more self-consciousness, when you are doing improv knowing it, than when you just follow your impulses less consciously, “doing what comes naturally.”

Living life instinctively, I take it. “Doing what comes naturally” leads to thoughts of the birds and bees, and I can’t think of much that is more instinctive or stronger than the sexual instinct.

Sex, survival, flourishing, all aspects of life as divided beings, yes. Powerful motivators, desire and fear.

I take it that is different from the Course in Miracles: love and fear as the two forces motivating humans.

Yes. That refers to attraction and repulsion. We are referring to a slightly different way to see 3D life, one in which desire and fear are two motivating forces within the perception of multiplicity.

I feel the distinction, but we haven’t put words around it yet.

• Love vis a vis fear refers to forces leading you either from, or further into, a sense of multiplicity.
• Desire vis a vis fear refers to forces within the sense of multiplicity.

Neither one tends to lead you out of it, they manifest it within you (or, you might as well say, they manifest you).

Desire and fear make drama. Drama makes for enactment and, in a sense, awareness of, resolution of, the forces themselves, through manipulation of the agencies though which the forces manifest.

You just said, the forces themselves can be felt but not represented except either by abstractions or by characters feeling them.

We didn’t quite say that, but that is the sense of what we meant, yes. What cannot be directly represented can be personified, observed, experienced vicariously, emotionally understood. This transforms the observer and we go on to whatever follows, to be transformed further.

So even when we live our lives feeling them pointless, even intolerably so, we are performing improv and there is a reason for it.

Well, “a reason for it.” We know what you mean, but to assent would be to mislead. Life is. It doesn’t need a “reason for it.” What you mean is, it isn’t ever meaningless, and this is true. However, a sense of it being meaningless is well within the range of emotions being expressed by this or that actor in the troupe.

Does that imply a need to have every possible mood expressed, so that, we might say, “somebody has to do it”?

That isn’t quite wrong, not quite right. Let’s say, the forces are there. the situations are there. the players with their baggage are there. It’s pretty likely that sooner or later everything inherent in the structure will be acted out by somebody.

 

Tuesday, October 17, 2017

It’s interesting to see the difference between what I experience and what people read into that experience. Yesterday’s exchange, for instance, I experienced as smooth, even flow. Statement, response. Question, response. One leading to the next, no emotion involved. But people read into the record, anger, chastisement, even (yesterday) cantankerousness. Since I can occasionally detect suspicious fingerprints when they are smudgy enough, I suspect that you encouraged me to mention this for reasons of your own. Your move.

Take that same difference between communication as you experience it essence to essence, and the record it leaves, the effect it produces, when people read it via 3D clues (written words, inferred attitudes, analogies to what would be if it were a conventional person-to-person interaction), and you get a sense of the difference between All-D and 3D perspectives on 3D life.

I almost get it, but not quite.

That’s all right, because there is quite a lot to say. Let’s make it easy to follow, by coding it. So, in our interactions,

• you, the 3D-plus-non-3D intelligence, we’ll call A.
• We, the non-physical intelligence you communicate with, we’ll call B.
• Your readers, separately or together, we’ll call C.

So,

• physical – A.
• Non-physical – B.
• Observer – C.

Over-simplified, but it will do. But A and C extend into the non-3D and know they do, yet continually forget they do. So let’s call

• your non-3D component A2 and
• your readers’, C2.

A interacts with B, and C observes. But really, A and A2 interact with B, and C and C2 observe. As you have noted, interactions tend to be experienced this way: A2 and B, and experienced by C as if A and B. Well, why should that be? Why (since C and C2 are the same) should it not be experienced by C as A2 and B?

It depends on how we observe, doesn’t it? If we observe using sensory cues, it appears to be A and B. Only if we observe giving intuition primacy over sensory do we perceive it as A2 and B.

Close enough for the moment. All right, draw and extend the analogy. Look at the world around you.

Yes, I see it. If we only read the evidence using our sensory apparatus and its reporting, its logic, its deductions – the world looks one way. If we read the same thing in an intuitive way, it reads differently.

Again, not quite. But you’re on the trail. The point remains that the world you experience is only somewhat real, even in its own terms. It is more real, seen through C2 lenses.

It’s difficult to grasp. We can get it abstractly, but to apply it, it can seem like explaining things away.

We understand. We are trying to give you an intellectual connecting principle, to tie in what you experience within yourselves and what you experience outside of yourselves, because it is so hard for you to perceive (as opposed to knowing abstractly) that inner and outer are the same reality experienced through two different filters.

The world hurts! You, observing the world, hurt, because you take it as real. But – it is real and it isn’t. What C experiences is qualitatively different from what C2 experiences, and the difference inheres in C, not in the world.

In a way, that’s saying what Hemingway said? That we’re making a mistake in thinking that others react to their situation in the way that we would react if we were in it?

Everybody who reads this, present or future, has seen it. One’s “personal experience” can never be translated accurately. You can’t express it and the other person can’t absorb it, because there are too many unnamable variables within each 3D individual to make translation possible. Because you extend into non-3D and you experience partly intuitively, something of the emotional reality and the inexpressible experience can arc over, but only some. The actual flavor of everyone else’s life can only be guessed at. Who understands how asthma has flavored your life? Who understands the combined effects of asthma and reading and hero-worship and early Catholicism and emotional incentives and motivators and disincentives and anti-motivators? Who can add in ambitions and disinclinations, insights and prejudices, penetration and blindness? Nobody.

This may not seem a very valuable insight, until it clicks in. You are all infinite mysteries to each other, you know that. Even when the other is known to the point of boredom, the core will remain a mystery, to others and even to yourself. It’s one thing to say “know thyself,” but it is another thing to know how to go about it. Yet, you assume you know what the napalmed child feels. We choose a horrible example purposely; there’s no point in using only easy cases.

It doesn’t take any great insight or empathy to know that the child hurts!

Of course not, and the ability to empathize is part of being human. A very valuable part. However, let’s extend our analogy.

• C is the observer,
• C2 is the observer plus its non-3D component.

Another way of putting it would be that C is the observer using only sensory input, C2 is the observer observing with intuition as well as sensory data.

• But what watches C’s progress through 3D life with interest and involvement, but does not interfere, because to interfere would actually impede? Call that observer C3.

What we called B is really B3 as observed by A and C. We, here, do not exist as 3D-only, obviously, and we cannot even be said to be B2, which would imply that we were 3D using intuitive means.

Well, from the C3 level, life looks, feels, is, different. It is the difference between watching an execution or a gunfight or a car accident in person (or on a news program), and watching them in a story, characters portrayed by actors. Anyone with empathy is going to be stirred even by drama – that’s the purpose of drama, after all, to stir emotions – but no sane person confuses drama with reality. Matt Damon doesn’t get shot just because Jason Bourne does. Tom Hank doesn’t die in Normandy just because the schoolteacher does.

Well, I don’t know, drama can carry a powerful kick, and some of us can confuse it with reality. I can well remember being heart-sick as a little kid at the ending of Tarzan of the Apes, and I can remember being rapt with tension at some TV show and my father laughing and telling me, “it’s just a story,” and my complicated reaction to that – regretting being taken out of it, and becoming aware of where I had been, and retaining the consciousness of that awakening. And I still get thoroughly involved with characters in some novels and videos, especially in a continuing series. Hornblower, Castle, Inspector Grant.

And you make our point for us. Remember, these are created beings, like yourselves but at another level removed. Real but not as real. Embodying characteristics made plain by their adventures. To the degree that you care about them, and you can come to identify, in a way, even with characters who embody characteristics opposite to your own (in fact that can be the strongest identification), you enter into their reality. The surroundings and the plots don’t need to be realistic, because it isn’t as if you were identifying with their external experiences. You identify with their reactions. You feel their reactions as if they were yours. They enliven an existing but slow-flowing current within you. Hence the popularity of mysteries and romance novels. As art, they usually come to not much. But as doorways to your own interiors, well, that’s why they appeal.

So we are a TV series to the next highest level of reality?

Let’s say you are actors who are pretty intense, and often get lost in your roles. It is the surfacing to breathe, remembering that you are an actor with, perhaps, a mortgage or a favorite car, that reminds you that life is realer than the drama you are (legitimately) engaged in, immersed in. And that’s enough for now.

 

Monday, October 16, 2017

You said, descent into duality is only a relative thing. What did you mean by that?

Remember always, there are no hard and fast divisions in the universe. In a manner of speaking, yes, but not absolutely. Just as it isn’t 3D here, non-3D there, so it isn’t duality here, non-duality there, except relatively.

Well, we are willing to be instructed, but that isn’t immediately obvious.

Duality isn’t a physical or mental ghetto, a low-rent district. It is a state of mind, in a way, a state of acceptance.

Of acceptance. You mean, only the result of seeing things a certain way?

That sounds to you like your own thought at the moment, but yes, the result of seeing things a certain way, of Perceiving Things As Good and Evil.

And does that imply that escaping duality is a matter of deciding to see things as one, and there we are?

If it were that simple, wouldn’t you have done it as soon as you first heard the idea, or at least when you first began to believe it?

Easier to fall in than to climb out? Is that it?

In a sense. But you are ignoring the second half of our statement, that there is a good reason for it.

I hesitated between “is a good reason” and “was a good reason,” and finally chose “is,” but I don’t know why.

The “why” is because duality wasn’t a one-time error or even a one-time experiment. It is on-going, and the reason for it is on-going, and you know why.

I know it is about prisms, but I don’t know why that is necessary or desirable.

Why don’t you explain, and as usual you will find insight flowing in as you put your mind in the current.

I get it is the difference between many colors and one all-encompassing white light. Our very flaws and difficulties act as filters, so that the light of spirit shining through us does not come out clear white (though I gather it remains clear white), but in whatever color results when you shine lights through us. So I can imagine that if it is useful to have colors, duality is a way to produce them.

That description makes it all seem pretty futile. There are other ways to see it.

• It could be looked at artistically, for instance: Duality is being used to produce light shows, visual displays, ever-changing patterns.
• Or, scientifically: It analyzes reality by dissecting it, saying “white contains blue and green and deep red and very delicate violet, et cetera,” showing the innate complexity of existence.
• Or dramatically: Duality demonstrates tension and resolution, continually flowing.
• Or religiously or philosophically, so to speak: Inherent in the nature of things are these possibilities.

You will forgive me saying that still seems pretty futile. In a way, why bother?

That is world-weariness speaking. Ennui, one of the seven deadly sins. Sins, you will remember, are defined as errors, as “missing the mark.” They do not lead toward truth and understanding, but away from them.

Well, I’ve said we’re willing to be instructed. But what you have said so far today is not appealing to me. It makes me feel like a gladiator in a pit, fighting for the amusement of others.

Even if you are at the same time one of those “others”?

Even if.

Then let’s see if we can do something about that. I don’t suppose it does any good to remind you that anybody in duality is there of their own free will, volunteers.

Even taking your word for it, that leaves us in the position of a Marine partway through in boot camp, with a long stretch still ahead of him. He may have volunteered, but that seems a long time ago, and it doesn’t make his current reality any easier. I can’t imagine why the world beyond duality needs veterans of duality boot camp.

This is perilously near theory, as opposed to something you can use. But, recognizing that it is a real obstacle, let us say just this. The product of a spell in duality is a being that:

• Combines otherwise disparate elements
• Understands unity in a new and more sophisticated way
• Is, in a sense, denser, tougher, more concentrated.

In short, an ex-civilian who is now a Marine, and once a Marine always a Marine.

It is only an analogy, but not a bad one.

We use Marines for difficult combat. Are you implying combat goes on beyond duality?

That isn’t a question that can be answered yes or no without serious distortion. Let us say that life of any kind potentially involves contention, relative readjustments. But this does not imply warfare. Don’t carry the analogy too far. And let’s drop mere theory (anything that doesn’t affect your lives may be said to be mere theory in effect) and refocus on what you are living, hence what you can do.

All we have accomplished so far is to remind you that duality exists among non-duality, and that the world doesn’t have a damaged section, a war zone, a ghetto. By reminding you that there is a purpose, we implicitly tell you that there is not only meaning but creation within it, and creation being a part of your nature, therefore there is joy. Remember Hemingway and the fireworks.

Hemingway and his wife Martha were in China in 1941, and she was revolted and distressed by the conditions of Chinese life. At one point he said that just because it affected her that way, didn’t mean it affected them that way, or they wouldn’t keep having babies and shooting off fireworks for enjoyment. I take it you are saying, don’t be distracted by the misery of the world, everything is fine.

Minus the sarcasm, more or less. Hemingway’s insight was deeper than her emotional reaction. Again, remember – and keep bringing yourself back to the fact – 3D existence is only relatively real. It isn’t the whole story. Remember too that you don’t, can’t, know anyone else’s inner reality. You don’t know their response to their own private experience of boot camp. You don’t know what it satisfies, what it develops and matures. Blind, shrill compassion is not compassion at all, but a rejection of the universe, the same old “I know better.”

And where does that leave reform? What good is it to see what’s wrong, and sometimes why it is wrong, if the end is to be “you don’t know better than the universe does”?

There is a difference between understanding and condemnation. In fact, they rarely run together.

Understanding slavery doesn’t make me any less inclined to condemn it.

Bear in mind, always: Understanding something involves neither condoning nor condemning. Either of those attitudes is to a degree a falling-off from understanding. To understand something is neither to become a partisan nor to become a condemner, a partisan on the other side.

Understanding liberates, condemnation isolates, Jung said.

Rightly.

We are out of time, but I don’t know that we have gotten very far.

You rarely do. Have faith, and persevere.

That’s the motto of the firm, I guess. Very well, see you next time.

 

Sunday, October 15, 2017

Don’t be offended that we remind you that you tend to reach for more than can be grasped before further preparation. No harm in it, provided that you compensate for the tendency once it has been pointed out.

Your lives are not lived as reasonable beings. You like to think of yourselves that way, but even the most placid and self-contained among you are driven by emotion, and even by the absence of emotion. And, yes, we realize we shall have to explain all that this short statement means.

Think of any story you have ever heard or read. Think of any event from your past that sticks with you. Think of any long-running trait or interest or characteristic of yours that arose, flourished, and died down. Think of the transient things in your life, and the enduring ones. What do that all have in common?

I was going to say that you were proposing that what we have in common – what the things you listed have in common – is that none of them are determined by thought or decision.

You aren’t far wrong, but it needs, and will repay, a more careful statement. You are not, fundamentally, reasonable beings, living as Sherlock Holmes tried to live, a life embodying logic and order. Look at the life he is painted as living, and you find that he got bored, that he used cocaine to change his mental state when boredom got unbearable, that he had prejudices, blind spots, and animadversions. The man he was (as painted) was radically different from the man he thought he was, or rather, the man he would rather have been. Now, it is true that Holmes is only an invented character, but it is an illustration, as creatures resemble their creators. The important things in your life are always associated with feelings (even though sometimes strong feelings are disguised as lack of feelings).

Emotions

There is so much to say on this subject! Your lives are not yours to mold in the sense that you start with a blank slate and may go anywhere, do anything, change in any way, that you like. You just don’t have that much freedom. If life were the way you sometimes unconsciously assume it is, wouldn’t you all be living quiet reasonable lives, even if you were skydiving or trapeze-flying? That is, regardless whether you wanted a physically quiet or a risky life, you wouldn’t be thrown about emotionally the way you are. You would do things for reasons, and not because you had to. You would do what you wanted to do, not what something else within you forced you to do. Or, to put it slightly differently, you wouldn’t always be struggling within yourselves, suppressing this, encouraging that, outliving this, regretting that.

I get your point. Our lives are battlegrounds.

Fields of contention, anyway. You want this one moment, that, another moment. Or you want two or more incompatible things at the same time. Or you want this action but with that result that cannot follow. You pursue an interest with diligence and even obsession – and then the interest is gone as if it had never been. Or, one or more interests seize you at an early age and last you your entire life, and the same, each possible variation, for

• personal relationships,
• emotional habits,
• categories of thought,
• even forms of physical environment (you may tend to live in the same kind of physical or energetic surroundings) and
• forms of circumstance (you may tend to create and re-create, or “find yourself in,” similar relationships or habits of life)

As we said, these may manifest in various ways: sudden changes, or continuity through life, or any variation between the two extremes.

You may ask, Why is this? Why do sudden gusts of anger run through your lives, or fits of unreasonable and undeniable yearning, or steady unquestionable and immovable certainties? Why are you prone to the seven deadly sins and the Eighth Deadly Sin (the one preceding and enabling the other seven) of “Not Knowing What You Are, Or Why You Do and Feel and Think As You Do”?

Not a very catchy title.

Call it Unconsciousness of Self, then. The point is the same.

Jung quoted a Gnostic gospel as saying that if we bring forth what is within us, it will save us, but if we don’t, that same content will destroy us.

That’s applicable, but a little off-point. The point at the moment is, why is your day-to-day existence not the thing of reason and calm that perhaps you imagine it ought to be? And the short answer is that you are not as you imagine yourselves to be.

Which of you knows yourself as your acquaintances know you? Yes, you know things they cannot, but they know things about you that you cannot, or cannot anyway know in their way. And none of you, separately or together, can have a complete picture. The wellsprings of your 3D existence are mostly hidden.

You live as conduits of vast impersonal forces rendered as personal; that is, the animating forces illuminate and enliven the shape of your lives.

I hear you saying, the forces of spirit may be impersonal and even neutral themselves, but the structures they blow through are the result of so many past entanglements. I can see that. But it begs the question of where these entanglements come from in the first place. Are humans malfunctioning? Did some equivalent of Original Sin warp the pattern, setting in motion conflicts that keep building, generation after generation, as each new soul is born embodying past karma?

You could look at it as progressive complexification, but to assume that this is a large malfunctioning is to overlook the fundamental question of where these tangles came from before Adam and Eve ate the apple. Remember, the original sin was to eat of the tree of Perception of Things As Good and Evil.

Which, someone pointed out, was an obvious set-up. Tell a child it can do anything except one thing, and the psychological pressure to do the forbidden thing becomes enormous and eventually irresistible.

Yes. Pretty efficient myth, wouldn’t you say? It encapsulates psychological insight into easily memorable form, as myths do. So, remembering that descent into duality is only a relative thing, and assuming that there may be a very good reason for it –

But it has been an hour, and so we’ll resume another time. Am I right?

You’re the one holding the pen. But yes, this is a good time to pause.

 

Saturday, October 14, 2017

You might type in the thoughts and realizations that came to you after yesterday’s session. It all comes together, and there isn’t any reason for you to assume that guidance or insight goes off duty when you cap your pen or pick up a book to read. Indeed, part of the lesson of life is living in connection at all times. It enriches your life and changes your ability to be who you really want to be.

[Friday afternoon: Re-reading Rita (3-7-16) I suddenly got that people who see the afterlife as an endless research project, endless learning, are merely projecting an earth-oriented attitude that equates curiosity with part of human nature, and assumes that such curiosity is going to be aimed at “the nature of things” just as it may be while in 3D. But there’s more to life than understanding the nature of things. More even than to understanding our own nature. Even the kind of work I’m doing now is only part “what the world is really like”; it is also, “how can we help those who read it?” In other words, love still trumps brain. We are here – and there – primarily to love. But I don’t know how this works out in practice.

[Later: Re-wiring! That is what moral training is, what discipline is, etc. Where the winds blow, we don’t want to have to react as programmed. We want not only to be able to resist but, in a way, not to have to. Things happen. We react according to our OEM wiring as modified by our software wiring. Over time we can change our reactions, as Washington and Marshall did.]

[OEM = Original Equipment Manufacturer. Software wiring = our own changes in the original configuration. George Washington and George Marshall are two outstanding examples of men who molded their character by rigid self-discipline.]

“Re-wiring,” you see, is a summary of your task and potential in 3D life. You have the potential to be one branch of the decision-tree that changes, that becomes an alternate path for the winds blowing through. If you were the only real timeline, you can see that this would mean you were, to a tiny degree, helping to shape the passage of those forces; to a tiny degree you would be participating in a war of good against evil, say. But, as all possible niches are filled and are equally real, as all paths exist and all paths are taken, this cosmic warfare is only one way to interpret what people would call “spiritual” reality. This is the result when one looks at these forces, and your ability to choose how to channel these forces – if there were only one reality, one time-line, one set of choice-and-results. So you get Manichean warfare of good and evil; Christian and Jewish warfare of God and Devil, same thing; secular versions of fighting for a better world against the forces of evil, same thing.

And those who see or intuit that all paths are taken are tempted to see it all as meaningless play, or chaos.

Meaning and meaninglessness

Neither of these extreme views is correct. The world is neither an on-going Armageddon nor a tedious self-indulgent spectacle.

Well, that’s how I feel, but I admit, I have a hard time justifying the feelings. I mostly have to live on faith that my knowing isn’t wrong. Logic cuts against it. What is the point of re-wiring if it doesn’t matter even to my own moral character, much less its effect on the rest of the world?

You do realize, there is less difference in those two parts of your sentence than appears?

Oh, abstractly. Yes, we’re all so interconnected, I forget sometimes when I’m thinking in other contexts. But even if changing myself amounts to having an effect on all that I connect to – and vice-versa – it is hard to understand the point of it, when all other versions of the decision-tree, mine and everybody else’s,, cancel out. If we are only printing-out the tree in detail, so to speak, what does it mean really? What are we accomplishing?

Go with your deepest feelings, always. They are the “you” of you. Note, we don’t say go with your emotions, your transitory waves of feeling, we say feelings, your nature as it may be felt by you. There is a difference.

Your feelings tell you it is not meaningless. Cling to whatever your feelings tell you. It is a mistake – a natural one, but a mistake – to think that reality translates into human terms, even with respect to humans.

Suppose you were to try to explain the purpose of the universe – and reality-streams, and the passage of waves of emotion through 3D compound beings – to the cells comprising your body. Or to a cloud, or a flower. You couldn’t. They all embody consciousness, as everything does, but it is a different kind of consciousness, each living in effect in its own universe (in that each has its own very different range of inputs).

Just as you couldn’t explain a baseball game to an amoeba, nor the processing of blood sugars to a muscle cell, so we can’t explain things beyond your range. Willingness to explain, and willingness to have it explained, have nothing to do with it. It is a matter, as you often say, of having or not having receptors for the information.

If you weren’t minds existing in the All-D as well as effective consciousnesses living within 3D constraints, we couldn’t even say this much. We would be obliged to try to explain your lives strictly in 3D terms.

I hear you saying, life does have a purpose, but there’s no explaining it, you can’t understand.

Limits to understanding

No need to be quite so taken aback. There is a difference between explaining everything and explaining some things. Just because you cannot expect to understand everything, don’t jump to the conclusion that you cannot understand anything, nor that the amount you can understand must be trivial.

It does seem that way.

That – we say to you bluntly – is because of your intellectual arrogance. You will not understand your potential until you understand that your potential has limits, however ill-defined they may be.

It shouldn’t need saying – but it does! – that in using the words “intellectual arrogance” we are not addressing them to only one of you, or to some of you, but to all of you, without exception. And we have no slightest doubt that each of you will be tempted to exempt yourself, and say, “In my case it isn’t intellectual arrogance, it’s just that I am curious and I am searching for the truth, whatever it may be.” To which we say, in vintage American, “Oh, yeah?”

Surely you are not discounting or criticizing the yearning for understanding that brings us to these conversations.

Indeed we are not. We are criticizing – by bringing to the light of your consciousness – the unacknowledged limits of that sincere yearning, the point at which yearning for truth becomes (unnoticed) clinging to the familiar.

You are saying we tend to think the universe can be comprehended in human terms. But – can’t it?

Certainly it can, but no more so than comprehending it in terms of flowers or rocks or horses.

Each of which would be a truncated version of reality – I get that. So what’s the use of what we’re doing here?

Remember, stay with your feelings. Your feelings tell you this isn’t meaningless and is not a description of meaninglessness. Listen to them. Don’t let an idea overrule your feelings. That is a very common intellectual mistake.

You know, for the first time I feel as well as think and hope and believe that in bringing this information in, I really am in contact with something beyond my own mind.

Well – that difference is less than you realize. Given that everybody and everything is connected, anything you get could be seen as a message from a remote portion of “your” mind. However, in the terms you mean, yes, good. And we think we will leave you for the moment with that shock to the system still fresh. You understand, it wasn’t meant as an insult but as a description.

I do. And, it was a very illuminating one. Very well, till next time, then.

 

Friday, October 13, 2017

Does it ever strike you that the external conditions in which one works reflect internal conditions, hence – mean something?

The thought has crossed my mind, but I don’t know how to read the message. If I am working through a headache, or other aches, or am wheezing, or sleep-deprived, or any other possible annoyance that may be there, yes I can see that it may mean something, but how are we to read the story they tell? I have known people who carry on through unbelievable constant pain. It isn’t so much that they live in pain as that their lives are pain. And others who live their lives dragging a handicap – Christopher Reeve after his fall from a horse left him a quadriplegic, say. We can see the quiet day-to-day heroism so often around us, but other than as opportunities to build character, what do you mean, “mean something”?

Life is the testing, you might say, of prefabricated construction in real-life conditions, with the structure being able to modify itself as it goes along. When you hear a building creak and shudder, it is reasonable to deduce that it is in the presence of high winds. If you live in the structure long enough, it is reasonable to acquire a conscious or unconscious knowledge of the prevailing winds, so that you more or less automatically learn to read and even predict the weather.

Say we do. What good does it do us to sense the forces around us (which I suppose is where you’re going with this), and what would it do to help somebody in Reeve’s condition, where the wind was strong and unrelenting?

Pull back a little from the physicality of the analogy. Our point is that there is you – the pre-formed continuing structure – and there are the seemingly external forces that interact with it, stress it, compel or allow it to modify. Treating those forces as external can bring advantages, but realizing that they are not really external brings other advantages, more appropriate to this stage of your development.

It can be difficult to make simple distinctions, when appearance and customary thought channels tend to blur them. Consider a few facts:

• The soul is a collection of strands living one life together.
• Spirit, we have been describing as the animating force, separate from the soul but essential to it.
• Life, we said, for 3D compound beings, is choice. It is the lifelong moment-by-moment process of reacting to every moment.
• Every heads-or-tails decision is another path down the road, another timeline, all but the current timeline seeming un-
• Your soul’s life is thus a probability-cloud rather than a battlefield, in that every choice is automatically taken both ways.
• 3D reality may be seen as a vast kaleidoscope shining with the result of all those choices, able to show any timeline.

Perhaps it is time to take these facts and ask “why?” Why should it be this way, or, if that question is too hard, what does it mean for us?

If we thought there were only one timeline, the way appearances would suggest, we might say life is a testing, a trial in which we might succeed or fail, and of course many religions have come to just that conclusion.

Or, if you thought that all choice was meaningless, in that some version of you would take every path, you might conclude that life is itself meaningless, mere play, perhaps.

Only, it doesn’t feel meaningless.

Nor is it. But knowing there is a meaning is not the same as knowing what the meaning is, and that knowing may be beyond any 3D logic because you don’t have the framework to make it comprehensible.

Yes, I do know that. I used to think we could learn the meaning of things. Now I think, we’ll be lucky to see the meaning of our own lives in the context we know, let alone in the context of the worlds larger and smaller than us, or the world beyond the All-D at our level. Even our non-3D component can only tell us as much as it knows, even assuming we are capable of understanding that much (which I doubt), but there is no reason to assume you-all know everything.

Indeed we do not. But it is not necessary to know everything to know something. Not necessary for us, not necessary for you. As Rita told you, you’ll never get to know everything, and then be bored.

Testing

There is more than one meaning to the word “testing,” you know. It isn’t always pass/fail; sometimes it is more like assaying ore, a matter of finding out what a given thing is composed of. Your lives may be considered to be subjects for assay, rather than subjects for passing or failing an exam.

“Even the drunk who dies in the gutter created a flower.”

Exactly. You don’t fail a life, you shape it. And you don’t shape it by making this or that choice, but by making all of them. The resulting probability-cloud is more like a decision-tree, as we said, with the tree, not any one branch, being the result. And 3D logic and experience suggests that the only way a decision-tree can be created is to be lived, moment by moment, choosing.

And according to All-D logic?

You know the answer to that. At the very moment of creation, all potential is automatically nascent. All equally real, all equally evanescent. All waiting for the finger of God to touch it, a la the famous painting.

The vast impersonal forces you keep talking about, the animating forces – that’s the equivalent to the finger of God giving Adam life.

No spirit, no animation, correct. And that reality has to be conceptualized some way or the other. It is always going to be an analogy: It is always going to follow 3D logic, even when to do so requires postulating miracles.

So are we talking about forces, or a force?

Dealer’s choice.

It’s all in how we choose to see it?

It’s all, let us say, in how your life to date leads you to see it. Nothing you conclude is going to be 100% right, how could it be? But every conclusion leads onward.

And every version of reality has its place in the scheme of things.

By definition. Could there be a junk reality? Could there, therefore, be meaningless sets of choices?

And this is a convenient place to pause, not only because it has been your accustomed hour.

Okay. I’m going to have to think about this, as I type it up, and see if we really got anywhere.

Not the first time you will have posed that question.

 

Thursday, October 12, 2017

You began a painting yesterday, not knowing its structure or what it is to portray, or anything except “start with four colors and see what happens.” You don’t know yet if it will work or will be another uncompleted or failed painting. You know only that like most of your paintings it tries to express something you haven’t ever seen. Is that any easier than this? Here at least you have intellectual substance, and it draws on your life of reading and thinking, and above all it involves words, as painting does not. What do you have to lose?

Nothing at all, and I’m not complaining. Far from it.

We were using you as an example to others, actually. When you go looking for something new, you can’t expect to know what you’re going to get. At best you will have a technique to lean on, perhaps a legacy of practice from other fields, perhaps the inspiration of the work of others. Not least, you will have invisible support, if you can learn to rely upon it.

“You are not alone,” that vision in Gateway told me 50 or 100 times. In words.

And it was a turning point for you when you gradually came to believe it, and then rely on it, and then live it. As it was for you, it would be for anybody, only they need to let themselves believe.

I do know that.

Forces and structures

So, back to energy flowing through structures.

Is that what we are talking about?

It is one way to look at it. The vast impersonal forces – we’re going to keep repeating the phrase until it sinks in to one and all – precede you, animate you, and postdate you. Like the 3D world, they don’t depend on you for their existence and they don’t depend on you for their activity. They are. They exist. The fact that they animate humans is not the same as saying that they exist for the purpose of animating humans.  Almost the other way around; you might almost say 3D compound beings exist in order to provide channels for these forces. (However, note the word “almost.”) You will never understand your place in the reality, any more than you could understand your place in the world, by assuming that it centers on you. There is a sense in which it does, but only “in a sense.”

“You’re special, just like everybody else.”

That’s right. It’s a truth; it’s a joke; it’s an obvious self-contradicting impossibility. All at once. But for the moment let’s concentrate on one aspect of things, the aspect in which you are not the center of the world.

This is one of those log-jam moments where I feel three or four caveats leading in different directions, and don’t feel which one to follow.

In such cases, staying centered, choose one. It will lead us somewhere, and other aspects will emerge if they are important enough.

But that tells me why any statement from anybody anytime is going to be incomplete. Choosing, we in effect overlook other aspects, equally true, perhaps equally important, and they may never be expressed, because paths lead onward.

True and no harm done, because the purpose of communication is to get the person on the other end of the line to move on his own, her own. It is not to provide a complete statement of the world, which could never be done anyway.

All right. Well, we are the center of the world in our on-going existence. As a practical necessity, just as every cat or tree is the center of its own world, because that’s where its responsibility and awareness lies. But that isn’t the same thing as saying that the world centers on us.

Let’s continue with where we were going. It’s time to discuss the nature and appearance, the essence and the shaping, of those vast impersonal forces as they manifest in compound beings.

Your lives, we have been pointing out, if not in so many words, are experienced not so much in thought or abstraction, in effort or achievement, in seemingly external events, but in feelings. Not events, but your reaction to events. Not thought or intellectual structure. Certainly not in intentions good or bad, and not even in actions good or bad, but the feelings that underlie or contradict them.

To some of you this will be obvious. Others will find it seemingly backwards, perhaps incomprehensible. As always, we proceed in an attempt to provide a staging-point accessible to all. That is, not so slowly as to exasperate those for whom the point is obvious (or agreeable), not so quickly as to lose those for whom the point is difficult to grasp or emotionally hard to accept. If you all get our statement, that’s all we want; from there you are on your own in terms of what you do with it.

If you experience the feeling of lust, say, or anger, are you experiencing something that exists in that form beyond you? That is, does it exist as lust, or anger, regardless of the individual it visits or manifests in? Or are you experiencing a gust of wind that animates what is already in your own being? In other words, does the spirit not so much shape your response as be shaped (in effect) by what it blows through?

Big question.

Yes it is. And as usual the answer is, it depends upon how you want to look at it. That’s usually the answer, because if a thing were only to be seen one way, the question would never come up. As soon as you perceive a question, know that that is a sign that it may be seen more than one way. In such cases, there is never any one right answer, though there may be any number of incorrect ones.

So, in this case. Yes, the animating forces are impersonal, being so far beyond the limits of any one compound being. So you can’t say there is a force of lust, a force of anger, and the individual may happen to be in the way of it and be influenced.

On the other hand, no two individuals are alike, and so what the animating winds blow through has its own characteristic mixture of vices and virtues, and depending upon how strongly the winds blow through, the results will differ moment by moment. So it will seem that the individual compound being is somewhat at the mercy of those forces, as, in a sense, indeed it is. It (he, she) may choose to fight the manifestations, or flow with them (encourage them) or may go back and forth, but the reaction will be in reaction to  the forces, obviously. No amount of clever tacking will move a sailboat in the absence of a wind, even a contrary wind.

Let’s pause here. You want to keep on and fill more pages, which is ambitious, or energetic, but, a little at a time.