Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

Sunday, May 27, 2018

Shall we continue? And as I write that I get, start with “Sara’s Notebook.”

That’s right. Again, using the cues from your outer life to illustrate the connection with the inner.

“Sara’s Notebook,” which I watched on Netflix, is a hard story – fiction but illustrating fact. It stirred up in me an active sense of how much deliberate evil there is in the world. Slavery, rape, murder, the enjoyment of inflicting pain, the absence of empathy, the breeding of monsters. The story is about a Spanish woman looking for her only sister, who is caught among rebel forces in the Congo in an area controlled by rebel forces. But the emotional center is her love-inspired sacrifices, trying to rescue her, as against all that hatred and exploitation and suffering.

And the point for you once again was the reality of evil in the world.

We are always tempted to say that because it is not as simple as it may appear, it doesn’t matter, or doesn’t even exist. But it does exist, it does matter, and there is so little we can do about it.

Talk about government and Westernization, commerce, and the native civilization.

I was thinking, I wish my libertarian friend could see the film, to see what happens in the absence of government, for this was no paradise of anarchistic freedom; it was Mogadishu again. It was anywhere in the world where anarchic forces are not controlled by a larger net of rules, understandings, and centralized force. That is, here was what happens without government as protection racket.

Groups of bandits set up their own slave camps, forcing people to mine some precious mineral found mostly in that part of the Congo, needed to make electronic gadgets. Those bandits were armed with guns made in the West; drove jeeps and trucks; wore Western uniforms; used satellite links for communication. Their existence could not be said in any sense of the word to be a native revolt against the West. And the money they were making was only available because Western commerce needed the ore they were forcing people to mine for them.

In other words, it wasn’t racism nor colonialism that caused this evil: Blacks were oppressing blacks. As always, people at the top of the chain of violence profited by the system, and it made no difference to their enslaved people that the oppressors wore the same color skin.

Oh, it was a sharp reminder of so much evil in the world. So how do you propose to build upon that?

You are also re-reading John Sandford novels, all about cops and killers, again glimpses of a part of life you don’t see first-hand. It is important, it is a critical piece of the process, that you (anyone, of course) not allow more sophisticated understandings to overwhelm and drown out active manifestations of what you are studying. That is, criminologists and sociologists and psychotherapists may understand some of what goes into the making of a criminal or an insane or a criminally insane mind; they may see the ways in which monsters are created by maltreatment, neglect, and other factors. But that doesn’t make the resultant monster either less human or less of a monster. And the temptation always is to choose sympathy or clear-sightedness, resulting in a safe distancing from the person.

We’ll keep saying it until it sinks in. Evil exists. It isn’t just a matter of opinion or of inadequately understood manifestations of rage. At the same time, evil is not what it is commonly considered to be.

Well, either I got it long ago and you’re saying this for others, or I haven’t gotten it, and your words are meant to bring me somewhere, but I can’t imagine where.

We may describe vast impersonal forces, and vast personal forces, and individual internal and external realities and heritages and continuities and tendencies – but that doesn’t mean that anybody, much less everybody, understands what we are talking about, because of course you are all doing exactly what we warn against, associating what we say with what you already know or assume.

In other words, we are all editing the message as it comes in and we’re all reading it to mean different things.

And it is always that way. One might almost say, find agreement among those who hear any given message, and it’s a sign of only superficial understanding, or only superficial communication.

So is it worth the attempt?

Probably it wouldn’t be, if your input and your interpretation were dependent strictly upon external sources,. But what is said, heard, caught on the fly, concluded from an experience, whatever, will be used by your non-3D component to nudge you toward the truth, as best it can.

So why doesn’t that process hold for warlords and killers and government thugs and drug dealers and rapists and all who seem to have said, “Evil, be thou my good”?

Here we begin to get to the nub of it. It is because their non-3D component does not share your values. Those people express other impersonal forces than yours, other values. (Only, don’t make the division between people very absolute. It is still a matter of the line between good and evil running through you, not between you.)

Evil needs to express in 3D life no less than good? I can’t say that I like the idea much.

Nor can you say that it is a new idea to you.

Let me put it this way. Suppose Adam and Eve hadn’t eaten of the fruit of the Tree of Seeing Things As Good and Evil. How would what we experience as evil manifest?

An excellent question.

Planted, I have no doubt. Well?

In the absence of polarization caused by perceived separation, everything would be different.

But you have said that perception of things (and time) as separate is a precondition of life in 3D.

And now it is time to modify the statement. It is a precondition of life if lived as if only in 3D.

A light begins to dawn. If we were walking around knowing, living, that we are also connected to the rest of the All-D, everything would change.

Of course it would. Some think of it as the world “ascending” to another dimension. That’s a way of thinking about it, but that’s all it is, a way of thinking about it. The disadvantage is that it brings in the spatial analogy through the back door, unnoticed. (A higher dimension “there” will have different conditions than the one you experience “here.”) You have to travel, you see, in that analogy.

When we merely need to wake up, to open our consciousness.

It’s a big “merely,” but yes, that’s it.

I was thinking, watching that film, that I would gladly murder all those who inflict pain callously or for their own enjoyment, but that if I did, (a) I would be one of them, and (b) ten more would spring up for every one I killed.

That is why it is evasion to try to correct the world by fighting any specific manifestation of evil. New monsters spring forth to replace the old and evil cannot be overcome, but only at best displaced, by doing evil This is not an argument to not resist evil per se. it is an argument to cut the roots, not the branches, and those roots are the firm perception of separation by 3D conditions.

It can’t be overcome by intellectual argument or conviction; it must be experienced. And although this work will appear to be evasion, it is the only real work there is. The key is that it works on your own inner issues and the world’s inner issues together. Indeed, they are inextricably interconnected.

Let us pause here.

Much food for thought here. We have to try to absorb what you say and yet remember than that very process is probably distorting your message somewhat.

You can take a more optimistic view than that. Words are sparks, not stepping stones. If the process is worthwhile for us, it ought to be worthwhile for you.

While we busily misunderstand, eh? Very well, our thanks as always, and till next time.

 

Tuesday, May 15, 2018

Shall we continue?

You have been reading about politics in the middle 1800s.

A history of the American Whig Party, yes. A disgusting chronicle of short-sightedness, petty intrigue, back-stabbing, imbecility – hard to find the right superlatives. Of course, on all sides, not merely the Whigs. Part of it is likely to be the author’s selection of facts, but the facts are there.

Our point here is that such chronicles may serve to illustrate something of the forces affecting a present moment that are beyond any individual’s personal contribution but are more, and other, than the sum of many such individual additions.

You probably know I sometimes fantasize about writing a history in which emotions and shortcomings are the villains of the piece, rather than any specific embodiments.

However, so far this is unlikely to be very comprehensible to many who read this. So proceed to tie it in. Sketch just one or two factors in those decades leading to the Civil War.

I think I see what you’re going to do with it. Well, this author’s thesis is that the breakup of the Whig Party did indeed lead to the Civil War, as is commonly understood, but that the breakup was caused not only by sectional tensions over slavery but by the search for tactical advantage among leading various politicians that led them to adopt this or that position. The inadvertent and unlooked-for result was to sharpen sectional animosities. The stupid bastards on all sides were mostly not malicious, but were petty, short-sighted, opportunistic, fearful, greedy – name it. Obsessed with power, greedy for patronage and the financial results of patronage, eternally concerned with their reputation among their constituents but not nearly so much with any reason for the reputation – they played their games and played to base emotions among the electorate as if thoughts – and emotions! – were not things. In a room packed with dynamite, they threw cherry bombs at each other while always loudly proclaiming how they were forced to do it in self-defense, etc.

Feel better?

Actually, no, I don’t. Reading about it is like wading through a sewer.

You don’t feel better even from the thought that your own day isn’t any worse than the past?

Not really. Should I rejoice that they’re still throwing cherry bombs?

So let’s focus on our point for today.

• People act out of mixed motives; nothing new about that. Politics might even be defined as acting from mixed motives to attain a temporary consensus or decision.
• Ignoring low motives is as misleading as ignoring more high-minded ones.
• High-minded motives may do more damage than low self-centered ones, because of course politics like any other social dynamic represents contradictory forces. Venality may reconcile antagonisms more easily than self-righteousness does, sometimes.
• In some eras, people’s cross-motives result in stacking dynamite. At other times, that dynamite gets unstacked, or scattered, or – goes off.

And those various results constitute what we are calling the weather – the result of personal and impersonal forces over time creating a situation in which you wind up living.

A different example. If you were born somewhere between 1910 and 1930, you were pretty certain to be centrally affected by World War II. You could look at it as

• you came in at that period in order to experience it, or
• you came in for whatever reasons and had to experience it as an unavoidable side-effect.

Neither view quite contradicts the other; neither is sufficient in itself. World War II, its lead-in and its aftershocks, were the weather for that whole century. That doesn’t make it the unique focus, obviously. Plenty of things happened and were going to happen besides the war – but it affected everything.

You could argue that World War I was a bigger event, in that it set the stage for the second war.

But that isn’t our focus here. The point is, people of a certain generation had no way to live their lives unaffected by that central event, even if they were never soldiers or war workers, even if their country remained neutral, even if they scarcely knew it was going on.

I haven’t gotten the crux of this yet.

No. It seemed simple moral. There’s no point in thinking that personal reality extends to changing the entire history of the world. It has its own cumulative inertia.

I came to think of it as changing which timestream we wished to be conscious of, rather than thinking we actually changed anything.

That was scaffolding.

Go ahead.

Envisioning the simultaneous existence of millions of timestreams, differing from each other slightly or greatly, enabled you to escape from the trap of predestination on one side and irretrievable error on the other. But it is only an escape from a false dilemma, not in and of itself accurate.

Reality isn’t fragmented into alternative timestreams. It isn’t fragmented at all, quantum physicists and you to the contrary. What it is, instead, is infinitely plastic, infinitely malleable.

This is difficult to cram into 3D logic, given language with its 3D-driven sequential restrictions.

• All possible worlds exist, yes, but not exactly simultaneously and side by side.
• As an analogy, let’s say all reality is many potential results of flicks on the kaleidoscope. Other situations don’t quite exist. It’s hard to describe.
• It may be better to say that whatever reality the kaleidoscope shows isn’t as real, or as more definite than potential others, as it appears. There’s less difference between what manifests and what doesn’t.

But this still drags us away from the one simple point we are pursuing, or trying to illustrate.

• The reality you experience is not merely the sum of your personal past experiences or inclinations.
• It is not merely an externalized representative of your psyche, either your present life’s (your soul’s) psyche by itself or your spirit’s extended experience over many lives.
• It was shaped by more than that, and a moment’s thought will tell you why that must be.

If reality were merely about any of us (even from our own point of view) it would in effect fragment into ever-more autistic self-absorbed fragments, held together only by whatever connections among us existed as legacies of other times.

That’s a way to see it.

Sometimes simple concepts are difficult to set forth, mostly because sequential logic of presentation – that is, language in 3D circumstances – starts you a long way off. And on that note, let’s pause for now. Remember, in journeys such as these, apparent distance covered is only one measure of progress. Difficulties overcome is another.

 

Monday, May 14, 2018

How is our present moment a trance?

Like a trance, we said. More like a trance than like a physically fixed phenomenon. It is, you might say, always an altered state, altered in the sense of directed, focused, intended, in a certain direction.

Vast forces, personal and impersonal, are always at play, because the moment is always the present moment. There no more exists a dead past or a dead future than there exists dead matter. Everything is alive; everything is continually alive and growing, choosing, interacting. Instead of thinking of a stable picture that gets perturbed, you should think of perturbation as the stability. Continual interaction is the norm. Change is not interruption or incident; it is the air we breathe. This means, you see, that any present moment of reality anywhere involves the totality of being. There is no such thing as a local unconnected incident, if you examine things closely enough.

“All is one” again.

Well, we never said it isn’t true, only that it is misinterpreted, and accepted superstitiously rather than intelligently.

“Everything is connected” does not mean everything is equally important at any given time-place. The relative importance of this and that fluctuates not by size or inherent nature or even by context, but according to intensity. You see?

I am beginning to, maybe. It is different for each of us at any given moment because at any given moment each of us will be lighting up different things. Each of us will be lending this or that some of our own intensity, you might say.

That’s more the idea. What you concentrate on (deliberately or in reaction to some stimulus) acquires greater intensity. In effect, you promote it to greater importance. Not permanently, nor for anyone else exactly, but at that moment and for yourself.

I am deliberately going slowly. I feel like I have about a fingertip’s grasp on the material.

Well, take these sessions as an example of just what we are talking about! You intend to hold a conversation with us. That is, it is held as important in your mind. You sit at your desk, you write. This is intent and what we might call bodily indicators of intent. The bodily indicators help, because they are habits, and habits encourage the mind to return to a familiar routine area of interest. But bodily indicators by themselves do not suffice; they degenerate into rote and superstition unless maintained in connection with active will.

I think of Thomas Merton praying, and knowing the difference between active practice and going through the motions. He must have seen the difference very clearly in his decades in the monastery.

But that individual mental intent flickers, if unassisted by habit. This is the origin of, and reason for, so many religious practices, you see. (We know that it is unfashionable to appreciate them, but after all any attitude toward anything not well understood will soon resemble bias more than understanding.) At any given moment, an independent mind may outshine minds in harness to a routine such as prayer, but over time, prayer bounded by (assisted by) routine and by community will attain a higher average level than the fluctuating individual. One function of a spiritually oriented community is to provide a continuing average encouragement in a certain direction. This applies whether you look at a Benedictine monastery or a Gurdjieff community or a Zen Buddhist temple or whatever. Islam attempts to make every day a day of habitual prayer (five times a day, and in public) as a way of doing what the medieval church in Europe did.

That little aside was to show you that what we are discussing has its practical application in your everyday life. (If it did not, why bother talking about it? Instead we would talk about something that did have practical application.)

Now, as we have said, you continually choose what you want to be, and this is one aspect of that process. If you repeatedly fix your intent upon one thing, it in effect acquires a relatively permanent importance in the scheme of things. You emphasized one thing and in the process automatically de-emphasized its opposite. You said, “I choose to value this, to be this, and not that.” (You might, of course, have said you choose to be this and that. Our point is not rejection so much as selection. Even choosing to accept everything would be in effect to reject the option of rejecting something.)

You are describing the mechanism behind “create your reality.” What we fixate on assumes correspondingly greater importance.

That is a very acceptable way to see it. Now, bear in mind the distinction we are beginning to draw between personal and impersonal forces; between personal and impersonal reality.

Yes, I see it. I don’t have a clear idea of what the vast personal forces are, but I can see that they would be the things that would directly enter into our choice. Seth concentrated on these in order to restore to us our sense of our power. But there are also vast impersonal forces in play that need to be taken into account, if we are to have a more complete picture.

That’s correct. Your intent for the ever-present ever-current living moment is not the whole story – how could you think it is, when your whole lives tell you otherwise? You have to factor in the existence and influence of the vast impersonal forces that create the “weather” in which you do your intending. If you will hold in mind an image of any given present moment being more a trance than an objectively bounded condition, you will be in a place to continue. So let’s pause here.

Okay. See you next time. Thanks as always.

 

Saturday, May 12, 2018

The inertia and the plasticity of the single present moment: So, building upon that –?

Vast impersonal forces, vast personal forces, and the trance of the living present moment.

Okay. Sounds like you have a lesson plan prepared.

We smile. Let’s say, We’ve done this before.

That’s my line.

Most of what we can say depends upon your lines: That is our lexicon, our vocabulary, even to a degree our grammar. That is one reason why we continually encourage others to enter the fray. Every new voice brings to the task a different toolset, and the more skills and experiences we have available to work with, the better we can do. More participants not only reduces the guru factor – a good objective in itself – but reduces the pressure on each of them to think, “I’m nobody special, what can I add?” and  “What if I get it wrong, and mislead people?”

It’s a different form of “Safety in numbers.”

It is.

So. We have been accustoming you to the existence of what we sometimes call “the weather”: Objective conditions beyond the control of individual All-D beings, not malleable by the human will. We have deliberately used the exact same term, Vast Impersonal Forces, because invariant terminology serves to objectify an idea, makes it seem more real, because the name becomes familiar. This may seem ridiculously unlikely, but it is true. What you hear repeatedly in identical nomenclature, you come to believe in. If we had said sometimes vast impersonal forces, sometimes non-subjective factors, sometimes dynamics beyond the human 3D scale, sometimes aspects of reality from beyond the 3D / non-3D interface, our statements might have been equally correct, and they would have lost much of their force.

Repetition sells.

It does. Familiarity may breed contempt, but it also breeds – familiarity. Recognition is half the battle to acceptance. Then the problem becomes being sure that people look at what they have come to recognize. We’ve got their attention; now we need to engage their critical faculties, because as we’ve said often, until you wrestle with a thing, it isn’t yours.

So what are these vast impersonal forces?

I’m getting that the terms has two meanings at least. One, “impersonal” in the sense of “beyond any given individual,” and two, in the sense of “not having to do with human activity at all.”

True as far as it goes. Let’s look at the trance (the spell, if you prefer) that is the ever-enduring single living present moment shared by all humanity and experienced (usually) as if unique to each moment of sequentially experienced time. It could be further subdivided, as you are intuiting, but one step at a time.

Slow down, in other words.

Always a good thing. Once you’re up to speed, it’s helpful to look deeper, slower, more mind-intensely.

Striking, how even the reminder to slow down changes my perceived mental state.

More mindfulness always will.

We need to make a few flat statements for you to provisionally accept, if we are going to be able to continue. After you have absorbed the gist of the next leap in understanding, then it will be time to look back and criticize and parse what we are about to say. That is, then it will be time to wrestle with the material. But you cannot productively wrestle with it until you have understood it, and you cannot come to understand it by trying to fit it in with wherever you are at the outset.

I get it. A leap of faith until we absorb it, then a more careful reconsideration to see if it holds up in the cold light of day.

A little dramatic, but yes. So here it is:

• Everything is alive and conscious, and each part of reality has a different kind of consciousness specific to its nature.

The consciousness of rocks is real, but it is not the same as that of trees, nor either to that of mammals. Extend that. Transitory forms – clouds, explosions, energy vortexes, dust balls – all have their specific unified consciousness as well. Try not to let logical objections derail you, here. Everything solid, liquid, gaseous, plasmic, has its own specific form of consciousness which is an integral subset of the overall consciousness which is reality.

• The overwhelming majority of the kinds of energy that make up reality is not perceptible to the senses.

In other contexts, you know that. Beyond infra-red in one direction, beyond ultraviolet in another direction, your senses have no connect to what is. It is and must be and must remain terra incognita, because you do not have the sensory receptors for it. (Nothing wrong with the situation. How would it help an otter to be able to read a newspaper? How would it help a rock to have a sense of smell? Only, when you come up against a limit, recognize it!)

• All that energy beyond the range of your senses and instrumentation exists; it has its own consciousness; it contributes to the shaping of reality.

This is the same as saying it impacts your life even though you may not be aware of it nor it of you. For the moment, accept as fact that the otter’s mind is affected by the human mind and the human mind is affected by the otter’s. Neither one necessarily recognizes it.

So one restricted definition of vast impersonal forces would be the influence of so many unperceived and imperceptible influences upon your world.

Now, you might say, “If I can’t perceive them, how can they affect me?” But that is a silly argument. You can’t perceive microwaves, but they can cook you. So then you respond, “But microwaves can be perceived by instruments, which means they are within our range, so no wonder they can affect us.” But, you see, that makes our point for us. Forces that cannot be perceived by the senses or by extensions of the senses do affect you, and, as you may say, are therefore detectable somehow. (We realize that this isn’t quite logical, but follow the argument for the sake of where it leads rather than parse it here.) If so, how?

Directly.

Of course. Intuitively. Only,

• what is intuitively experienced may easily be shut out by logical / emotional filters, and if it is, then it might as well not exist for that individual. But, it exists, acknowledged or not. This is one aspect of what we call “the weather.”

I suppose that these forces, that cannot be experienced through the senses nor instrumentation, religions call spirits, genii, demons, angels, etc.

Let’s say, scripture (when it is not prescribing rules of conduct) deals with the existence of things known but not perceived by the senses. These things known may or may not be perceived at all accurately, and the logical assumptions and conclusions connected with them may be very close or wildly wrong or anywhere in between, but they do at least recognize forces that instrument-bound science and “common sense” perception cannot.

“There is more in heaven and earth, Horatio, than your science knows.” Rough paraphrase.

It is in the awareness that the world extends far beyond the bounds of what may be perceived by senses and instruments that an extension of field becomes possible for the All-D creature.

In other words, if we remember that the world is far more than we can ever measure, we won’t allow our filters to leave us half blind and half deaf.

That’s a way to put it. We would have said, “a rather poetic way to put it,” if we didn’t fear you’d think we meant it as a compliment!

Very funny. Okay, thanks for all this, and till next time.

 

Friday, February 10, 2023

Guys, can you tell me what it means, “shining through the 3D”?

[This refers to Wednesday’s drumming exercise, which was, “Plug into the feeling of the non-3D.” I scribbled notes during the drumming:

Against tree trunk

Tree extends upward and down

The roots are beneath 3D

Humans also extend up and down (chakras)

Like an eddy in a river

Movement, patterns, flow, counter-flow

Electrical network

Neurons in a great brain

Local and unbounded

Connected infinitely, but specialized

We are more a small part of something larger, than any kind of unit

Shining through the 3D

[I wrote the final phrase but didn’t understand it.]

It means that 3D and non-3D are as sacred, and as mundane, as each other. If everything is mind-stuff, how else could it be?

Certainly. But – shining through?

It means you – spirit in 3D form – sort of showcase that nature.

I’m not getting it.

Try it this way: Being in 3D allows you to see more clearly who you are and what you are. We have expressed this many times. It also shows you what the world around you is, by what it reflects of you.

I may not be up to speed on this.

We keep saying what you perceive as external is only relatively external. All, being one, of one substance, with differences being local and relative rather than absolute, necessarily contains itself everywhere, which is why we proposed the metaphor of the hologram. As your level of consciousness rises, it becomes easier for you to become aware of the identity. You real-ize the fact that you, as mind-stuff, are in no way separate from the rest of reality.

I guess I’m still hazy on why the word “through” was underlined in my mind. “Shining through the 3D.”

You can see more deeply, see (or, really, feel) the outer dimensions of the stage, beyond the scrims. And their own being shows others.

Okay. Thanks.

 

Thursday, May 10, 2018

More on the nature of the present moment?

We are sketching the present moment as trance, remember. It is real, it exists, but it isn’t what it appears to be. And the deeper one sees into its nature, the more the picture changes.

Any present moment has its own inertia

The complementary attributes of any given present moment are inertia and plasticity. For the moment, we will consider only these two. As you saw, or anyway felt, the number of attributes could be multiplied beyond the possibility of coherent consideration. Slow and steady wins the race.

Plasticity is how the individual chooses among potential realities.

Inertia is the quality that presents a coherent reality in the first place.

That’s enough for you to explicate, so do that briefly and we will expand upon it.

I get that we’re back to Castaneda’s tonal and nagual, or my own distinction between the world of the living present moment and of the dead present moment, in other words between reality as experienced directly and the same reality experienced 1/30th of a second later by the senses. The first is plastic and may be affected – chosen – by the individual will. The second is fixed and is there to be accepted by the individual will. I am sure it isn’t that simple, though, and even as I write it I get that it isn’t correct.

No, but it advances the argument, so it isn’t a waste of time. Do not allow yourself to forget that in describing reality as experienced by intuition and by the senses, we nonetheless describe the same reality. It’s easy, in dealing with abstractions, to allow them to sort out in your mind so that certain attributes are here, contradictory or complementary aspects are there, and in practice you are considering one thing as if it were several. Reality has plasticity and inertia, and that must be remembered, or the picture resulting will be distorted.

Let us consider the inertia of any given present moment, bearing in mind that although we have to consider any given present moment as if it were separate from the rest of reality, in fact there is only one moment, one present living moment, experienced in different circumstances.

I do know that, and I realize that it can’t be explained logically – at least, not in any way I know of – but only intuited. Once we realize that it is all one living present moment, many logical difficulties vanish – like how I in the 1990s could affect Joe Smallwood’s life at a moment in the 1860s, and vice versa. But our 3D circumstances argue strongly against the realization.

That is why mathematicians and other scientists who dwell in the realms of the abstract are closer to you than are those whose logical structures are based in sensory investigation. But we would rather not go down this side-trail, contenting ourselves with notching a tree to mark the place.

The present moment as you encounter it in any one instant of time has considerable inertia whether considered from the intuitive or the sensory.

Inertia from the sensory you should well understand; you experience it all your lives. It is a prime function of 3D to provide that persistence, that drag, slowing events down, slowing causality so that it may be experienced and lived. If you want things to happen in conformity to your will, just come out of 3D – but don’t expect to have it both ways. The increased freedom you experience will be exercised not upon a stable platform as in 3D, but in a wilderness (or playground) of unbounded freedom. It isn’t the same experience as you might expect.

I think you just said, unlimited freedom of will won’t be exercised against a stable background, so there won’t be the Superman effect of vast powers relative to the environment.

That’s right.

Now, we said the living present moment (the living present as experienced directly through the intuitions, which of course means also through your non-3D extensions) has its own inertia. What do we mean by that? Clearly we don’t mean that physical structures or forces or events act as drag upon non-3D forces. So, what do we refer to?

Well, I get that you mean that every mind that participates in that version of the present moment has a presence, a weight, so that any one of us is always vastly outnumbered. We can’t reshape the world mentally any more than we can physically. Or, to be more careful, we can’t reshape it instantly, without effort, without weighing our force against the force of everything else.

In other words, mentally, spiritually, psychically – however you wish to phrase it – the world has a solidity in the same way it does physically. This ought to be obvious, but is often lost sight of.

I get, “In fact, mental and physical aren’t even different things.”

They are different aspects of one thing, so how could they be different things? But that’s how they appear because of the difference in your intuitive and sensory input, and in your mental structures derived from the experience of living that way.

You know that every moment of historical time has its own persistent realty. You all have lived your lives in just that way, having no choice. So couple your experience to your concepts, and realize that although life is not exactly what it seems to be, neither is it entirely different than what it seems to be.

In other words, do the work of thinking these things through as you give us new concepts or new connectors.

That’s the only way you will make it yours. You can’t blindly accept or blindly reject and make any progress. You have to do the work. If the people listening to Jesus or Gautama went away saying, “cute story,” and did no thinking, no absorbing, what did they gain from being there?

So, the inertia of the present moment. You will always have to deal with the reality presented – held – by other people’s minds. It is like the continuity provided by mountains that do not move.

“Minds” wasn’t the expression you wanted, but I couldn’t find it, and decided not to fish for it lest I lose the thread of the statement.

Yes, it’s not an accustomed association for you. Sink into it.

[Pause]

Difficult. I’m getting a sense of people participating in a magical ritual.

Close. Continue.

If you had a group – a village, say – all performing the same ritual, you would in effect have a persistent temporary group mind.

That’s right. And –?

What they held would be in effect a magical creation.

Continue. We know it is slippery so far, but it will firm up.

The spell would somehow amount to the total of what (not who) they all were.

It would consist of all the properties contained in all the individuals, functioning as a group, in all their extensions. A very complex mixture, you see, rife with possibilities and contradictions and tensions creative and destructive.

Just like the life we experience here.

Not like it, it. This is one way of describing what your life is. Or, let’s say, a way of describing one aspect of your life. It is why external life (for that is how it seems to you, external) is so intractable. You can’t just will a thing into existence. If you bring it into existence, you do so by exerting effort against this inertia. You oppose or you steer or you manipulate or whatever, but you do not create against no background, any more than you jump into the air without kicking against the floor.

Think on this, and next time we’ll return to the plasticity aspect of the same unbroken living present moment.

You always go off somewhere unexpected. I can’t tell you how satisfying that is to me, even though I recognize it as, after all, my own accustomed mental life.

And that is a point we need to make now and again: Everything we point out is familiar to you in other contexts. You all are as much experts on life as we are, and you have as much access to what we know as we do. How could we succeed in reminding you, if it were not so?

 

Wednesday, May 9, 2018

We have arrived at the interface between personal and impersonal, or between any one specific consciousness in 3D and all the rest of 3D and non-3D reality that that consciousness interacts with. Your job in 3D is to widen your comprehension of yourself and of “the other.” Naturally you can’t do all of it at once, nor necessarily at the same time, nor necessarily in equal proportions. Every 3D experience is different. But the ultimate goal – not any proximate or immediate goal – is necessarily the same for all.

But it won’t seem that way.

How could it? Everyone’s position is too different. Everyone has different deficits to make up, and different past accomplishments to build on.

This interface is the reason we kept building up the concept of vast impersonal forces, because once one begins to see that one’s ability to shape reality is vastly greater than one had thought, there is a temptation to over-do it, and think one can do everything. But the world is always greater than the individual, even if the individual is greater than s/he had previously experienced itself.

Saying that reality has plasticity does not amount to saying that it has infinite plasticity, for that would amount to saying, “It’s all about you,” for everyone. There is a sense in which that is true, but only a sense. Life is always bigger than any one living thing or any collection of living things.

We got that the first time.

Maybe. And maybe as soon as we change context you lose it again. For instance, Jesus asks rhetorically, “What does it profit somebody to gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” Doesn’t that speak to the infinite value of your own soul to you, when weighed in the balance against the rest of reality?  So, doesn’t that say that it is all about you?

Of course it does. But it equally says the rest of reality exists; it isn’t a figment of our imaginations and it isn’t merely an extension of our own personalities.

True enough. Our point here is that changing contexts always presents the risk of one losing newly acquired perspective, and must be guarded against.

We have been at some pains to reinforce your sense of identity with the world around you and to reinforce your sense that nothing is as it seems. Only, be careful how you digest this. That things are not as they seem stems not from someone attempting to deceive you, but from the unavoidable inadequacies of anyone’s ability to perceive and comprehend.

I got that a while ago. We’ll never get to a “the truth,” only to the highest truth we are able to comprehend at a given time.

Well, having painted your personal dimensions as All-D creatures experiencing yourselves initially as isolated 3D individuals, now we proceed to paint the world

• as if it mattered, rather than you;
• as if it were primary, rather than you;
• as if it was real, rather than you.

And of course, this is how most people do see things, only they don’t see the world any more clearly than they see themselves, and for the same reason.

The reason being – ?

What you pay attention to, you get to know. But if the filters between perceiver and whatever is perceives are strong enough, no image gets admitted that contradicts the filter. A confirmed materialist cannot (usually) see spiritual influences. A Christian Scientist cannot (usually) see physical rather than spiritual obstacles to perfect health. Bear in mind, in citing these examples of filters, we are not taking sides. Each is a legitimate point of view. What they have in common is the limitation in admitted input that the filters enforce.

We have sketched repeatedly how larger parts of yourselves interact with (you might almost say interfere with) your strictly 3D experience. The hard-headed materialist’s convictions may be undermined by contrary knowledge flowing out of the non-3D component. You should be familiar with all that. But now continue with the idea of the world at large as resistance, as obstacle, as contradicter. Once you get to realizing your own internal contradictions, you may begin to downplay those of the reality around you. Nothing wrong with that as a stage in your development, but like every overreach, it needs correcting.

The world is going to influence your 3D experience at least as much as your own internal struggles.

Common sense tells you that the world actually exists, in the way that you do. It isn’t what it appears to be, but it isn’t nothing, either, nor an arbitrary creation of your own mind. It ought to be unnecessary to say something that is so obvious, only once one sets sail on the intuitive seas, it is a temptation to forget about the sensory shores.

Interesting metaphor.

Yes, provided it isn’t taken too literally. It isn’t as if there were one area of life that is intuitive and another that is sensory. It is rather a matter of qualities.

You will remember that we spoke of the present moment (any present moment) as a sort of trance. By that, we mean not that strictly material causes lead to strictly material results. But it is a sort of cumulative total of all forces at that given time. Clearly, times differ from each other if only in that.

You mean, I think, that every present moment is shaped by the cumulative force of everything in that moment, hence has a solidity and massiveness relative to any one of us.

Of course. That is your experience every day. Only it isn’t that simple, and the discovery of the ways in which it is not simple lead you to see that you are more than you thought you were, and that reality is more than you thought it was. At the moment we are going to concentrate on the solidity and force and mass of the external, rather than concentrating (as we do at other times) on its plasticity and impressionability and its phantom nature compared to the inner reality of any 3D being. Both ways of looking at it are true, so we move now to the underreported aspect.

And do we have time to begin?

Try this. You exist in 2018, at the moment. You and everyone in the world are affected by the 2016 presidential elections. It doesn’t matter if you don’t read the news or listen to the radio or discuss it with your friends and neighbors. Even if you didn’t even know about it, you couldn’t help be affected, because of all those around you who care. Can anyone in his right mind maintain that 2018 can be the same as 2014, say?

But to say this is not to say that things are as they appear from any given viewpoint. It is to say, merely – but a big merely – that any present moment has its own “objective” reality that affects one’s subjective reality because of its effect on so many other 3D minds, let alone its expression in 3D external reality.

The 1848 elections changed the country. So did discovery of gold in California. So did whatever was invented in that year, or put into execution. So did Emerson’s visit to Europe, and the revolution in France. So did The Year of Hope in general. And we could look at the world of painting, sculpture, scholarship, technology, whatever, and we would see the changes in that context. The Fox sisters, in New York, or Joseph Smith. I see that what we concentrate on affects how we experience it, and I see that it exists regardless how any of us experience it.

That’s right. The world is there, and is not to be talked away. The fact that it is deeper than it appears does not mean it doesn’t exist. Quite the contrary, in fact. But that is enough for today.