Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

In June, 2018, I attended the Monroe Institute’s weeklong residential course titled Discovery. The attraction for me was that all participants would be wired up to Mind Mirror software that recorded brainwave patterns during the exercises.

In the very first exercise, which was as much calibration as anything (measuring our base lines), facilitator Judith Pennington was surprised at the level of integration I was able to achieve. When we talked about it, I suggested that it may be because for 20 years I had been accustomed to staying in a slightly altered state (talking to the guys) while not only interacting with them but writing it all down.

After the program ended, we came to my house and she wired me up to see just what the process of talking to the guys looked like electrically. The following transcript of that session may be of interest.

 

Session for Judith Pennington

Friday, June 29, 2018

10:15 a.m. Beginning. Guys, you know what we’re doing here, I know. What would you like to say to Judith and me?

We approve the idea of verification by electronics, although it isn’t necessary, of course, strictly speaking. Yet – it is. There is a type of person – you should know! – who needs to be sure “I’m not just making this up.” Electronic signatures don’t give content but they do give an indication that something is happening.

Now, looking at your whole week at Monroe, you cans see that merely seeing electronic signatures of brainwave activity validated your process to you even though you didn’t really understand what was being measured, nor what it really means.

Yes, I know. Sort of a circular process, I thought. They tell me it’s real and I say, “See, this proves that it’s real.”

Nonetheless, it did help. Your difference from others – or in the case of Dirk, your similarity and difference – shows you in isolation.

Not “isolation,” I think. “In relief”?

Yes. Better.

So subjectively as you know I feel like things changed. To go from a housecat to an eagle is if nothing else great symbolism.

You already knew it was going to be a big week.

True.

Well, must have been a coincidence.

Very funny. Ready for questions?

You can try.

[I had thought to allow Judith to ask questions, but she had none at this time.]

What can you tell me about where I go from here? I get that you want me to write out the gist of the material I have been given all these years, but – beyond that?

It isn’t so much a “beyond that” as a “how to do it.” It begins with seeing yourself differently. You have come to that, this week. Decide and execute. Once you know what you want – and decide to get it – the way clarifies.

Specifically?

There is the speaking aspect – interacting persona to persona, so to speak – and the writing aspect – interacting mind to mind, or, in TMI-speak, mental body to mental body. You can see which one has the potential to reach the largest number of people.

Go at it through the emotions, in other words.

Not exactly. Slow down.

Okay.

Emotions are a part of the persona-to-persona interaction, but that doesn’t mean “emotional” in the sense of drama. It means, your whole essence, who you are in toto – in relation to the given listener – rather than merely mental constructs. Mental constructs can be as valuable as anything else, but they are limited, and that limitation has advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, it puts things in isolation, eliminating misleading context. On the other hand, the “extraneous” aspects it weeds out may be (necessarily are) important in the overall scheme of things, and their absence results in a distorted picture.

It is a matter of words as sparks versus words as markers.

Yes. Direct speech in someone’s presence – even virtual presence such as a telephone or internet connection – allows for a greater jump of understanding between the two (or more) people. Fixing the speech in writing – still more, in print – reduces, though it does not eliminate, that potential, with the corresponding advantage in permanence of presentation.

So I need to be taking the show on the road, so to speak.

Yes, but virtually does at least as well as physically. Telephone, skype, web seminars, anything that brings it present-tense to present-tense, will serve the purpose. You don’t have to be P.T. Barnum.

Okay, I hear that. A word on process. I am very aware of Judith watching the monitor as I do this, and in the back of my mind I’m wondering, will any of this show? Will it demonstrate that I’m fooling myself? Now, I know it isn’t that, yet the background worry is there. Is there anything to be done besides ignoring it?

Just remember the doubt as part of the process. If you still occasionally doubt in unusual circumstances after 25 years, what must the person trying it for the first time (on faith, so to speak), experience? Remember that and allow for it.

Allow for it, how?

To a great extent, merely mentioning the problem reassures people that you are not qualitatively different from them, and so reduces the perceived distance they have to go.

Okay. I can’t understand how we can have covered so many pages in 20 minutes.

Perhaps you are a bit hyper being under observation.

Hmm. Maybe so. All right.

[Later when we looked at the charts, we saw a difference right here. My energy became less spiky, and more normal.]

 Can we talk about housecats and eagles? [Two images of myself that came up during exercises.]

Housecats balance energies unnoticed. Self-contained, alert, curious, they interact without much being interfered with. Eagles live away from everyday human activity and may serve more as a symbol of freedom and flight than as an everyday part of life. But both have their place. What you really want to see is the movement from seeing yourself as a housecat to seeing yourself as an eagle. The progression is a different thing from either given state.

Your life becomes less your own, and becomes at the same time of more consequence. People tend to hang their drama upon symbols, and, as you learned from watching Hemingway, public attention can be like the drag of a fishhook in a fish’s mouth.

Gary Powell is facing that concern.

It isn’t a unique problem. Life involves tradeoffs.

Somehow during the program – I’ll have to look back among my notes to remember how – I changed my image of things. Seeing myself as “a point of awareness extending” means that past lives, etc., are all part of my extended being.

You will find it much less constricting. You are already living as if; now you will live not as if, but as.

I think I’ll bring this to an end (I’m tired), unless you have more you’d like to say.

No, enough for now. Good work. Be well.

Thanks, and you.

[I then told Judith that I was ready to quit, and she had something for me to ask.]

Judith has a question. “What are the conversations that I’ve been listening to just now?”

Your framework has been slipping, so to speak, just as Frank’s. You are no longer seeing yourself as separate in the way you did previously – if only from sitting among so much evidence to the contrary all week. You are so much more than your consciously identified presence – “Judith” – and your awareness is now extending to be more conscious – more actively conscious – of interacting continuously with those other elements. At first they will seem to be “other” but in time they become familiar.

“Is this the astral realm that I’ve been listening to?”

To say yes or no would be to implicitly affirm a way of seeing the world that we do not share. Let’s say merely that you are experiencing greater range of —

“Range of motion” isn’t right. What is?

Greater range, let’s leave it at that.

[end 10:55 a.m.]

 

In the past 120 years or so, science has come a long way toward overthrowing all the theoretical bulwarks of the materialist way of seeing things. The guys upstairs must be smiling. In the absence of a functioning website at the moment, here’s a place-holder:

 

https://www.schwartzreport.net/2023/01/31/why-more-physicists-are-starting-to-think-space-and-time-are-illusions/

 

 

Saturday, July 24, 2021

Yesterday’s information seems to me to have been quite densely packed. A tremendous lot there, if someone is ready for it. or maybe it’s all something everybody already knows. You said, think about it and ask any questions that arise. The only question that surfaces for me right now is the nature of the living present moment, that you described two weeks ago as the organizing principle.

Recalibrate now. Receptivity and focus are different activities than looking to remember something.

Okay. Slide-switches, as usual.

Now, stop looking at the clock! Be here, now. And, by an odd coincidence (we smile), that directly ties to the theme.

• Your experience of time divides into two: (1) the living present moment, and (2) everything else.
• We have said, many times, there are no absolute divisions in the universe.
• You have accepted that all moments continue to exist, and somehow exist living, rather than in a state of preservation like museum dioramas.
• We remind you that “life is but a dream,” projected from a “realer” reality, and therefore the laws governing it are those of the psyche, not of mechanistic 3D interactions.
• You know yourselves to be immortal and invulnerable; and you also feel contingent and helpless, often enough. That is, either you haven’t decided or the reality is self-contradictory, or what you are living is – as we have said – only somewhat real.

Does this carry you over the difficulty?

It may begin to. I get that you are saying that how we experience life depends upon what part of the overall experience we concentrate on.

Well, you got a lot more than that! Expand on it a bit. Nobody will be able to follow the jump without intermediate sign-posting.

Okay. I got that our life at this level is a dream of a larger reality, and that we are both actor and audience. Whether we are also scriptwriter, director, stage manager, etc., I don’t know, but for the moment the important thing is that we are actors doing improv, and audience losing itself in observing. Both elements are equally real within us.

Yes. Good so far. Continue.

Another way to look at it is as our being both insiders and outsiders. As outsiders, we accept the play, the scenery, the cast, even our part in the improv, as objectively “there.” That is, we participate and cannot help participating, just as physically we cannot help having our body being in any one place at a time. As insiders, we know better than to take any of it at face value. We cannot wave our hands and wish the world into non-existence, but we aren’t taken in by its appearance of solidity, either. My sense is that we, at some level way above 3D consciousness, are in connection with the dreamer dreaming the dream. Probably we are that dreamer, to some extent, though I think it would be too simple (and too inflated) to think we are it in any sense in which 3D intellect would participate.

Again?

I just mean, Jung could get glimpses and it enhanced his wisdom; Nietzsche identified with the divine level of things and it destroyed him, the level of forces cracking his vessel like an iron bar against fine porcelain.

Continue.

I doubt there is any absolute division here, any more than anywhere else in the world. We probably partake in divinity just as we partake in 3D restriction – partly, not entirely. Thus we are somewhat at home in either aspect of reality, but not entirely.

Isn’t your whole life one of uneasy coexistence within you of elements that are never entirely “at home”? This is so not only (not even primarily) because of the coexistence of strands, but because within each strand was the same uneasy living on borrowed time, in rented quarters, so to speak. 3D life is inherently a “settling for,” among things that are not only contradictory sometimes, but are out of different realities that have little to say to one another.

Now, the important point here is that you, living at this moment, are alive, you are real, you can choose. You are not dead, nor an abstraction, nor a puppet. As you concentrate on those living features, your life expands – you have life more abundantly – and it has no reference to “externals” of any kind. Being more alive does not necessarily alter your social position; it does necessarily alter what of you can be experienced at that moment.

Annoyingly, it seems to be slipping away.

Stop watching the clock and counting pages. Merely focus and maximize receptivity. But actually, let us use this process as an example. Through all these journal entries, every letter written was written in the living present moment, which in effect moved on, or moved you on, so that you could write the next letter. So in effect you could say

1. Your entire entry, every time, was written word by word in the living present, but
2. The whole thing is part of the past, and became part of the past as fast as it came through.

Is this not your life, all of you? Moment by moment you experience this uniquely alive feeling, and moment by moment that feeling detaches and moves along, carrying you with it. Do you not see something strange in this? Doesn’t it strike you as strange?

It does me, as well you know. If it does others, I don’t know.

Well, this is a huge clue to reality, staring you in the face at every moment. What could be stranger? If you accept life as a past, present, future progression, in which the past continually disappears and the future is continually not yet created and the present moment is the only thing that is real, you can make a sort of sense of life. But once that becomes impossible, then what?

Impossible, I take it, as we experience or acknowledge contact between times, between lives, etc.

Among other disturbing anomalies, yes. But it is no advance to say “On the other side, there is no time,” or, for that matter, “Life is but a dream,” if you don’t understand in what way what you say is not true. Life is so arranged that during your 3D existence parts of you may experience things that don’t fit into any scheme you devise. That is, there are always distracting, niggling, irritating things that don’t quite fit but can’t be dismissed. The biggest of these is the nature of the present moment.

 

Friday, July 23, 2021

Just as we in non-3D are not quite as we are commonly defined, nor you in 3D, so neither are you in your 3D/non-3D entirety seen correctly, usually. Thus your nature, your limitations, and your potential are misunderstood, for how much correct understanding can filter through so much wrong definition?

I have been feeling for your meaning, and I began to get a sense of a very common-sense picture, but it relies upon so many interlocking definitions. The result isn’t complicated, it’s elegantly simple, as I suppose we should expect. Truth usually is elegant, simple, straightforward and self-evident, but only when seen straight. Until seen straight, it will look like a mass of contradictions, side-trails, irrelevancies, and unknowablities.

Thus, Newton’s laws, and the re-visioning of Copernicus, and Einstein’s mathematical pulling-together of the two concepts of matter and energy. Thus Jung’s grasping exposition of psychological types. Any clarification of previously known but mystifying phenomena depends mostly upon seeing them from a new point of view.

But although I can more or less feel it, I couldn’t yet express it, which is the same as admitting that I don’t really have it.

No, it is the same as saying that you have done the spadework, immersing yourself in various aspects of the problem, and you are Wilbur Wright standing in his bicycle shop, talking to a customer while absent-mindedly holding a flexible carton and twisting it in opposite directions.

Even after he had the clarifying bit of insight, he had to do a lot of work testing what he suddenly knew, intuitively, was the key to control of a vehicle in flight.

Genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration, you know that.

Well, this would be a good time for you to throw in your 1%.

We smile. So you tell us.

I guess I’d say, we don’t go anywhere when we die. We don’t become anything we aren’t already. We continue.

Yes. Nobody and nothing is disconnected. There is no individual unit to exist or cease to exist or come into existence. What there is, is one vast whole, of which you and we are part, and “you” and “we” are relatively individual, communities of communities, and ourselves parts of larger communities. If you once grasp the reality of this interconnection, you see that “you” cannot die because “you” never existed in the way you usually see yourselves.

• You are combinations of strands.
• Each strand is a combination of strands.
• Each moment of time exists forever, and thus so do everything in those moments.
• However, all time may be divided in effect into the one present-moment as experienced, and all other moments.
• Everything interacts! One strand may connect many different centuries or territories. It is not possible to affect any one thing without affecting every
• 3D existence does not exist in the absence of non-3D connection. It couldn’t. The difference between the two states is a relative difference, not an absolute.
• Existing within 3D constriction, you yet exist outside of it, as well.
• Physical death, like physical birth, is a moment of transition, the culmination of a process, not a change from one thing to another, but from one set of environmental ground-rules to another.
• As a thought-experiment, consider yourself a bundle of strands existing equally after as well as before the process of bundling. You will see the superficiality of 3D existence as a physical unit.

I think you mean we’ll see that the only thing that changes is our experience as a relatively isolated unit.

Yes. You will watch as the superficial lining of 3D definition falls away, leaving and revealing (and, in fact, liberating) all the elements of yourself that 3D existence tended to obscure and submerge.

I’m still not sure we have conveyed the “aha!”-producing insight.

It is a Copernican shift, and you have known it for more than 20 years, but you have been unable to fully appreciate the idea as long as you remained enmeshed in the idea that a 3D body was the same as evidence of individuality in the sense of isolation.

Yes, that’s it, isn’t it? I see.

You see because you were born seeing it, groping your way to it. But although it is clear at the moment, perhaps it will be less so after we pause. It will be worth your while to spell out your understanding.

Every description of life or the afterlife is misleading in so far as it is based on the idea (usually implicit) that there is the unit (a “me” separate in some real way) and there is everything else. Thus any first-hand experience of the afterlife, or retrievals, or the meaning of life is all incorrect in so far as it is based on wrong definitions. But change the definitions, and the experiences remain, but they can be seen to be something different than we thought them to be.

Yes.

• You don’t have to step off a high wire when you die.
• You don’t have to find Charon or not get across the River Styx.
• You are not required to appear in court and be judged.
• You are not sentenced to rebirth, and neither are you liberated from the wheel of life and rebirth.
• You do not cease to exist.
• You do not leave Earth and the things of Earth;
• neither do you have to pretend to continue a 3D existence by what Monroe called belief-system territories and Moen called hollow heavens.

In short, anything people have posited or concluded or experienced or feared or looked forward to is true or not true, accurate or not accurate, reliable or misleading – depending upon the one definition that everything hangs on.

I get it. Either we realize that there are no absolute divisions in reality, or we don’t. If we think there are, then there are all those projections that appear real. If we see that there are not, then clearly we already are what we are.

Let’s put it this way: Just as the “external” world is not separate from you, regardless how 3D conditions make it appear; just as the “material” world is mind-stuff, in the same way your psyches are, so the present-moment is as much a part of everything as are all the other moments, but 3D conditions mask the reality.

And this hour has been very productive indeed. At least, we hope your friends will find it to have been. There is more to spell out, but this is the crucial insight. Change this one idea, and see how things that seemed chaotic and disconnected fall into place, or rather, are seen to be what they always were, harmonious parts of an undivided reality.

I take it we resume from here, but how, I don’t quite see.

Merely concentrate upon questions that arise as you think about your perpetual existence as part of all that is. We will help you, to the degree that your receptivity allows.

 

Thursday, January 26, 2023

6 a.m. Gentlemen, yesterday at our ILC meeting it was decided that I should ask you for exercises our group could do in re retrievals. That is, taking into account all you have told us over the years about the true situation, how can you help us think about the process? This is to improve our efficiency, I gather.

You are not focused.

No. Hard to concentrate on it. Hard to see the point of it, really. What we do, works. It’s – oh, I suppose the analogy would be remote viewing or anything that has been redefined for our mindset. Shamanism a la Michael Harner, for instance.

It is a process of translation, so that people in the midst of transition may learn to think of a thing in a new way, hence take seriously what they could not take seriously in the old context.

Prayer. Talking to spirits, all that.

You have moved away from the past and you are in a halfway-place to the future, so there will be difficulties of understanding. But of course you are always in a halfway-place; life never stops. Your time, though, has the shared subjectivity in a halfway-place, not merely many individual subjectivities.

Hmm. I think I understand that. The renaissance was such a bridging, as Koestler well described in The Sleepwalkers.

You’ve known it a long time, consciously, and of course everybody in a body has known it since before they entered 3D. That unconscious knowing is one source of their discontinuity with the times they were born into. We’ve said all this.

Yes, and we’ve hard it, I think. But everything is different when considered in a new context, I’ve learned that much. Tell me, this thought that just flitted through as I was writing that last sentence. Is that your prompting? I got that it is time that Dirk, in particular, begin posting in my blog.

There is that “ownership of ideas” thing again. The question is less “Where did it come from,” than, “Is it a good idea.”

Is it?

That isn’t for us to decide (ever). It is for you to feel, and reason. We can and will and often do respond with our opinion of your opinion, but really, these things are for you to decide about. That’s why you are in 3D, did we ever happen to mention it, to choose?

The idea came as a corollary to a blip I got, that Dirk’s responses to drumming questions at ILC meetings have come to be quite articulate and smooth, as have Bill’s. The thought came that perhaps it is time for Dirk and perhaps Bill (and others so inclined) to begin posting at will, converting the blog relatively seamlessly from centering on me to centering on communication with you. We’re talked about it from time to time.

And you are wondering if it is time to give people another nudge.

I am. Dirk has talked about writing books: This would be a step toward it, and he already has administrator status, so could post without any middleman. Whether Dirk or Dave or Jane or others wish to move in that direction remains to be seen. But maybe Dirk posting on an occasional basis would segue into his posting on a regular basis, and he would show the way.

The variable being, time. To do this work, it cannot be last on one’s to-do list.

The more I ponder it, though, the better I like the idea. We aren’t asking Dave’s question, but let’s pursue this a bit.

People will face the author’s proverbial three obstacles:

• I don’t have anything to say.
• I don’t have the ability to say it.
• Nobody will care anyway.

All they need to do is face the obstacles, and they will see them as illusions.

• People don’t have the urge to write without it being a concomitant of having something to say.
• “Ask, and it shall be given.” If you have something to say and you work sincerely at saying it, the ability will develop, or rather, will be recognized as being there already.
• Just as no one has the urge to write without having something to say (known to the conscious mind or not), so no such urge manifests in the absence of a potential audience.

And we have created a pretty good venue for them to practice in:

• A protected defined space with a small number of interested readers.
• A venue open to a few sentences, or a few paragraphs, or a full-length essay or series of essays.

Yes, you’d think someone had been shaping the possibility behind your backs.

Oh, we’d never think that. Okay, very funny but very encouraging too. I think I’ll send this to just the list rather than posting it.

You should stop and think first. What do you hope to accomplish by doing it that way? That is, what is the advantage of not posting on the blog what amounts to a call for papers?

The idea keeps morphing. First I thought we were going to discuss reworking our understanding of the retrieval process.

Then as a stray thought came the realization that Dirk has been silently, casually, growing in his ability to articulate in mini-essay form what is shown to him.

Then the renewed thought that he might start posting, and the hope that others in our group might, as well, and the remembrance that at one time I had hoped to set up a forum for many people to share posts, then the sense that we have already done that, and now it needs to be consciously recognized and used.

And you are wondering, should this be kept within your present group of list recipients, or put out to one and all via the blog.

And now I get, what’s the advantage in shutting out those who are not already in what could be seen as a self-selected inner circle?

That is not a self-answering question. Any course will have plus and minus aspects. A self-selected inner circle has its place in the nurturing of new ways of seeing things, or they would not continually appear as patterns. What is the pool of Monroe graduates, if not a self-selected inner circle? The balancing act is to cooperate without closing ranks against those with similar by different backgrounds.

So maybe I should post this as “A call for papers.”

You haven’t done the thinking, so far. So far, you have reacted.

As usual. All right, well, here’s my thinking.

• The forum is in existence physically. Dirk and Dave have gotten it in hand. It exists, it is administered, it has a track record going back to March, 2007, nearly 16 years.
• Till now, it has been nearly entirely conducted by me, with technical assistance from Rich Spees, and Larry Giannou before him. But I have done nearly all the writing.
• Clearly I am going away, however long the process. When I am gone, it will be far better if the forum is already a forum and not a monologue.
• I have watched Dirk learn to bring his guys through, I having had almost nothing to do with it after the initial experience. I’m getting that it is time for him and others to develop the habit of transferring understandings to writing, and this is a good halfway house between ideas and books or even essays.
• There are several others I have in mind, and doubtless some I have not yet in mind, who are poised to be contributors, but seem to lack the final ounce of self-confidence, or perhaps of motivation.
• Those reluctant to seem egotistical may be persuaded if they think of it as perhaps helping people. Certainly that worked for me!
• I’m really getting the sense that it is time, now. We can move from individual effort as it has been understood, into a new model of individual cooperative effort, both between 3D beings and, within them, between 3D and non-3D components, actively, consciously
• This requires (repays) the desacralization, the mundane-ization, if you will, of the process of passing on information received non-physically. This may aid the process.

So your conclusion is?

This should go out on the blog, so that – among other things – people who do not yet consider themselves part of the inner circle may begin to reconsider their possibilities.

You will find that making the implicit explicit is the equivalent of Jung’s “making the unconscious conscious.” That is one function of writing, whether it is you or those of the inner (and outer!) circle.

Maybe we’ll get to Dave’s question next time. This was worth the effort. Thanks as ever.

 

Wednesday, June 20, 2018

You will note that some of your readers have gotten the point of all this, and have said so, emphatically. The same passage that strikes some as theoretical and others as mildly interesting strikes some to the core, and they wake up. But what does that mean, to wake up? Is that to imply that the rest of humanity sleeps?

I don’t see what else it could mean.

Well, say that is so, we have yet to explain what we mean by the difference between waking and sleep. It may seem obvious, but, as with so many matters, the closer you look at it, the more facets it presents, and the more potentially contradictory implications.

Gurdjieff said humans were asleep, and that no work on oneself could be done in sleep. I begin to see what you may be driving at.

Your friend Colin Wilson often used the analogy of a neon tube under insufficient power, that flickered rather than glowed, or a pot of water under insufficient heat, that couldn’t quite be brought to the boil. The image is of discontinuity. Twilight, then a momentary illumination, then twilight again, a repetitive but not regular alternation of states. Your own long quest began when you were first exposed to the idea, and you went in search of a way to connect those moments of lucidity.

His novel The Mind Parasites made me aware of the problem, but I didn’t know what to do. It is hard to pursue mental clarity and continuity when beginning from a position of flickering awareness.

And if you will – slowly, ploddingly – sketch out the situation as you experienced it, we will get where we want to go.

If you say so. It seems obvious enough.

I wanted that clarity of mind and continuity of consciousness that he had brilliantly suggested in that book. But I was not yet 24 years old, and I felt I had already missed so many opportunities! I had drifted through my college years, drifted into an early marriage, drifted into a job, all the while waiting until I should be old enough to run for Congress and emulate John F. Kennedy’s career. My internal life was mostly divorced from my external life. That is, I was waiting to begin what I felt was going to be my career, but I did nothing to bring it about.

Yes, but go even slower, allow yourself to sink deeper. Don’t skim over the surface of the subject; don’t go into Story, but feel your way through it.

I was living a pretty meaningless external life, while dreaming an entirely different internal one. I read incessantly, but what I read wasn’t aimed at anything, even vaguely. I can’t remember what kind of books I was reading. Anything by Colin Wilson, but beyond that, what? Anyway, I was leading one life externally, a different life internally.

Look at that more closely. This does not involve you alone, nor even you as an unusual case study. It is closer to you as a typical example of a not-so-widely-understood phenomenon.

My mental world and my physical world didn’t really coincide. Externally I was a young news reporter trying to do a job for which he was entirely untrained (and would receive no training), a young husband with no idea of what married life should be and no imagination to envision the emptiness of my wife’s days back when we had only one car and she had no job.

Internally I was dreaming, though I can’t quite remember any more what it was I dreamed of. I expected to be a writer and make my living by my writing, but I did nothing to connect that internal dream, or expectation, even, to reality. Similarly, my political career-to-be, I –. Oh, now I get what you’re after!

If you can hold it. Go ahead.

I never knew what it was all about, no matter what “it” we refer to. In politics, I could see results but no causes, could respond but not initiate, could relate anything to my dreamy ideas and feelings, but could not relate any of it to the core of me.

Still more carefully.

Well – I guess it was like I was trying to play a game without knowing the rules or the objective, and without insight into the other players’ motivations. I don’t know that I ever felt the reality of other people. They and the world existed, but I existed sort of next to them, not with them or among them. Is this what you’re wanting?

Let us take it from here. We would say that the nub of your problem was that although you were experiencing your life as disconnected from the world around you, really you were disconnected from your own inner motivations. You had ideas about your life. That is not the same thing as participating in it. Now you might say, “How can anybody live without participating in their life?” And we would say, “Look around you. For that matter, look within you.” That is the source of people’s sense of futility.

Take someone who has found the only thing for him or her to do :

• Picasso painting,
• Hemingway writing,
• Churchill attempting to steer society,
• Georgia O’Keefe painting,
• Jacob Riis or Lincoln Steffens trying to bring social reform

Anyone in any field who was consumed with a task not as a means to achieve fame and fortune, or even to keep body and soul together, but because they knew that this is what they were put on God’s earth to do. It doesn’t matter how messy the rest of their lives may have been, nor what else they may have spent their energies doing, nor even how successful or not they were. Examples are usually success stories because they are known, but the reality isn’t any different for those who do not become known.

When someone knows what they are in 3D to do, their life has a continuity of consciousness not between moments of time, nor between themselves as individuals and their fellows. It is continuity of connection with their deepest self. This is why they are single-minded about what they do.

That may not be as clear as you think it is.

The difference between being engaged in something and merely going through the motions has little to do with one’s relation to the external world, and, consequently, little to do with success or failure of their efforts in any particular thing. It has to do with connection.

This is what you are considering as continuity of consciousness. You quote Carl Jung to the effect that he who looks outward dreams; he who looks inward awakes. Does that really mean anything to you, or is it just words? For, you can look outward while dreaming that you are looking inward, and that is the most difficult trap to emerge from. If you dream that you are awake, what will spur you to awaken in real life?

Your connection with your non-3D component, presumably.

We don’t know what else could do it. But suppose you live in such a way as to be not in conscious connection, then what?

Then a feeling of lostness, I suppose, a feeling of marking time and losing ground.

But you often feel you are marking time even today. Would you say your internal life is what it was at 24?

No, not even close.

The difference being?

Somehow I am more here, now. It feels like I wasn’t really there, then, not fully formed. Hard to put it into words.

You had not had the experience of being consciously fully present. A child is fully present as its natural state, but with the coming of the age of reason, at year seven or so, its world divides into inner and outer in a way difficult to define but familiar to all. To return to that childhood state of non-division, consciously, is the point. And you did not experience that until your experience with mescaline in 1970 and then not again until your Gateway experience 1992.

Yes, I see that. And the penetration into reality is what has made the difference. Not that it made my life any easier, but –

Oh come! Of course it made your life easier. What you mean is, “Not that it made my life automatically without problems, and not that it made me able to function smoothly and flawlessly.”

Correction accepted. You’re right, that’s what I did mean. Life still had difficulties and I made no end of embarrassing and even painful mistakes, but from that point I had a touchstone.