Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

Part one

Saturday June 16, 2018

Let us look at the different ways humans – that is, citizens of the All-D experiencing a span of consciousness limited to 3D perceptions in 3D conditions – interact with what we are calling the weather.

You could look at it in three ways:

1. External events are the weather,
2. External events are affected by the weather,
3. External events are produced by the weather (via our reactions to it).
4. External events are the weather you live in. First, you must remember and grasp (not merely accept) that there is no “external” as such. External may mean “seemingly unconnected to one’s direct being,” but that is about as far as the meaning can be stretched. You are of the same substance as the rest of the universe; it’s all one thing. We are all one thing. There is no “disconnected” any more than there is an “elsewhere” or an “other.” All distinctions are approximations, not exact descriptions of relationship or – still less – lack of relationship.

Now, to say that “all is one” is not to say that all the parts are experienced as one. Your own experience every day tells you otherwise. How could any two things interact if there were no relative separation into units? Anything may be seen as individual or connected; sometimes it is useful to think one way, sometimes the other way. But, extremes are never true except as one end of a polarity. Ultraviolet light may be separated out of white, but it does not exist as an absolute, only as part of the spectrum.

We may be over-stressing the connectedness of everything, but we doubt it. The concept is easily agreed upon but only applied now and again, because sensory evidence argues otherwise.

So, external events seem exterior; seem to be disconnected from interior events: that is, your inner world. To that extent, exterior events may be said to be the weather you exist in. Your inner life is affected by events, and you cannot control them. If you don’t like the election results, or disapprove of a war, or wish you had clean air and water, or grieve over the continued existence of suffering in the world, or even want this or that external influence on your life to go away, well – too bad. External life exists and you must live your life within its confines.

2. External events are affected by the weather. They have their own logic. If you have not already built the pyramid, you cannot look at it, nor write on the walls, nor tear it down. If you are in the middle of World War II, your next moment obviously will begin from – the middle of World War II. There are no magical discontinuities in events. You do not experience in external life (as you do in dreams, perhaps) a building suddenly appearing or suddenly disappearing. Things happen in the context of the stream of events that produced them.
3. External events are produced by your reaction to previous external events. Certainly as a description of the 3D world as experienced commonly, this is a truism. That’s what you do! Events produce an effect upon you, and you react, and your reaction helps set up the next set of external circumstances. Billions of humans react to the events of the moment, and that’s how pyramids get built, or get torn down. That’s just common experience.

However, when you look a little more closely, you see that this applies on an inner as well as an outer level, and accounts for psychic influencing of external events. This third definition is the main point here, the primary interaction of inner and outer worlds, of subjective and objective reality.

When people first escape from the 3D trance, they face a lack of theoretical structure for what they nonetheless feel is true. This is the bird emerging from the egg. The 3D aspect is confused at the change in situation. The non-3D aspect knows full well what is required. Birds, unlike humans, do not suffer from an interruption of sure connection between 3D and non-3D, so you don’t see birds pausing while trying to get out of the shell, wondering, “What’s the point of all this? Why should I have to go through this? Why am I not somewhere else or something else or some-how else?” Birds don’t suffer 3D-only consciousness any more than they suffer envy that they are not jaguars or otters or humans.

But the human’s situation is different. As a baby, yes, as a young child, usually the connection is uninterrupted, and so the baby can rely on what are called instincts. It breathes; it sucks; it systematically and enthusiastically exercises the various functions of the body as it conducts its pre-flight tests. But as a slightly older child, or a teen, or an adult, the connection is broken, usually by those with whom the new individual interacts (who have themselves been shaped by their society) insisting that sure connection is illusion or even illness.

To those no longer in conscious touch with their non-3D components, the world is internal or external, inner or outer. When people first begin to realize that the 3D trance is only a strained attention on this rather than on this and that, they are tempted to go off the deep end. They are tempted – you should know! – to build theoretical structures to support their new experiences, and perceptions, and such structures cannot hope to be as sophisticated and elaborated as those that have been constructed previously over many thousands of years. Religions, philosophies, shamanic practices, all are available, all would serve somewhat to express the new experiences and perceptions. But, only somewhat. New wine requires new containers. We are talking now about magical interaction with the external world.

Sunday, June 17, 2018

You said, “We are talking now about magical interaction with the external world.”

Yes, in the context, remember, of two other aspects of external reality as you experience it. It is the fact that external events have these three aspects, rather than any one of them, that confuses the issue. Anyone seeing clearly only one aspect, or even any two aspects, will have a firm but incomplete idea of the nature of reality, and this will lead him or her to draw incorrect conclusions excluding certain aspects of what is real.

You mean, I think, they will become materialists, or spiritualists, or whatever, as a result of not seeing how the other aspects can be equally true.

That’s right. They will have lost beginner’s mind, in that respect, and so certain doors will be closed to them. They will be pushing on doors that open toward them. So, as we discuss magical interaction with the world, keep in mind that the other modes of interaction remain true. They don’t go away merely because this one is also true.

And that is analogous to the levels of control over our health that you once sketched out.

Yes. Don’t go into it in any detail, but give the general idea in a sentence or two.

Our level of control over our health depends upon the ground-rules of the world we live in – and that depends upon the level of integration of 3D resources. I put it into Imagine Yourself Well as a table of five levels of interaction, ranging from no effective access to the miraculous abilities of someone on Jesus’ level. That is a concrete example of what you’re talking about here.

Yes it is. And the central point is: Your interaction with the external world is not under your total control (obviously), but it is potentially qualitatively different depending upon your effective level of integration with your non-3D components. Some people live in a constricted, determined environment; others live in a world of magical potential. Same world. Some people’s every wish is frustrated; others get what they really want, as if by automatic pilot. Same reality. And, even more importantly, some people at a high level of integration nonetheless do not get things they very much want, and no one, even at the highest level, the most magical and miraculous level, gets everything they want.

The highest levels of integration produce miracles, not merely experience them, and even these levels do not get everything they want. This is just common sense, but it tends to get lost as one explores these rarified realms of speculation. In other words, it is an aspect of reality that gets lost when one discovers the truth of other aspects. We don’t want you to be among those who lose sight of it, or you won’t go any farther than established thought has gone long ago.

The world is larger than any of its parts. Dion Fortune’s group – and Hitler’s, for that matter – had certain ways it wanted the world to be, but for all their magical abilities, they had to fight for them; they could not merely will them into existence, nor did their going into battle assure their success.

Again, this is only what your experience of the world tells you every moment, only you must integrate what you know in one part of your mind with what you know in another. External reality is as real as internal reality, even though neither is quite as simple as they may appear. They may either one be ill-defined; they do not thereby go out of existence. They must be taken into account, or your mental construction (deduction) of the world will be seriously distorted.

Yes, you magically affect externals. No, externals are not under your sole control. Really, we can see that the first statement might not be obvious, but we should have thought the second would be. Only long experience says otherwise. But let us spend a moment on the question of how and how far and under what conditions your individual selves affect external reality magically.

How. Remember, it is an All-D individual affecting an All-D world, and cannot be otherwise. Although you may be entirely unaware of your non-3D component, still it is there. Although you may be entirely unaware of the world’s 3D component, still it is there. The difference in your level of integration determines the difference in your conscious control of the situation, not the nature of it. Your full being is only partly in 3D; to treat 3D affairs as if only the 3D mattered is to – well, find an analogy.

Someone thinking that the physical radio set produced the message rather than reproduced it.

Good enough. Not bad, in fact. The transmission over the airwaves is invisible to one who places his faith only in what he can see. The radio exists, the program is experienced, so obviously it would be superstition to assume that the radio program can have been produced elsewhere and transmitted without wires. A valuable analogy if not over-stretched.

But let us defer further consideration of how, so that we may dispose of how far, and under what conditions, if possible.

How far. The limitation is partly within the individual and partly inherent in the time the individual lives in. One’s level of integration clearly determines one’s ability to command one’s innate resources, but even here, individuals vary widely. Two people each in full communication with their non-3D components will not be identical. They will each be their full selves, but that full self will be different. Obvious, isn’t it, once pointed out? You came to 3D to express your difference, to see out of your own private window and make your unique contribution. And, at the same time, the canvas upon which one paints one’s life is not self-created, but in existence before one makes an entrance.

As to “under what conditions,” remember, again, that you are All-D creatures affecting an All-D world. External reality could be looked at, for this purpose, as the entirety of all the affected All-D creatures, taken together. Again, a common-sense understanding, though here somewhat unusually defined. External reality isn’t some animate or inanimate “thing”; it is the product of so many individual All-D reactions and interactions to what is presented.

We will resume with more on the “how” of individual integration with the external world, next time.

 

Thursday, June 14, 2018

It occurred to me to look at the 3D world from outside rather than under the impression that it is its own raison d’etre.

Looking at the 3D world as if from outside may assist us to find a helpful image. We had come up with the image of a light show, remember, with all the lights continually flashing, changing color, forming new patterns, as individual minds fluctuated. We would like to find an image of that sort, and tie it in with the concept of the vast impersonal forces affecting the light show. In other words, the light show changing not so much in terms of interactions among its own components, but of interactions of the entire show with forces from outside it.

You’re seeking to integrate larger and larger aspects of reality, in other words.

It is always a two-part process, now building up from individual building-blocks, then looking from a higher synthesis to see how the blocks interrelate to form a system. The world can never be understood merely by adding to an inventory of parts; nor by sweeping generalizations that cannot be illustrated. So, first one way, then the other. We don’t know any other way to proceed.

That’s what an image does, then. It summarized previous understandings.

The world cannot be captured in words, in sequential processing. An image is closer to a gestalt.

Does this imply that what cannot be summarized in an image or metaphor has not yet been properly understood?

That’s a pretty flat statement. We’d want to think before signing off on it. While we wait for the proper clarifying image to suggest itself, let us return to the question of the weather you exist in and the non-3D elements of the situation. After all, considering the 3D as if it were a world unto itself is only somewhat true.

We tend to think that this is the world, and we’re of realizing that we extend into the non-3D.

Nothing wrong with that; one’s surroundings always loom largest, whether in space or time. “Here, now,” is what 3D is all about! But it is truer to life to say that the non-3D is primary and vastly more extensive, and the 3D secondary and only a local phenomenon. It is even truer to say that the All-D is all-encompassing reality, and both non-3D and 3D are specialized expressions. Neither the 3D nor the non-3D is an entity that can exist.. Each is only an abstraction.

Ah, got it! We constructed “non-3D” as scaffolding to help us see that the “3D” we commonly experience is incomplete. The non-3D means all the aspects of reality that are not obvious in 3D.

All that do not obviously manifest, yes. So this is a reminder that the reality of things is neither material, as 3D appears to be, nor only non-material, as non-3D was defined to be, but, always, All-D. Reality is never in pieces. Do not confuse the scaffolding with the stonework.

What we have been telling you to clarify relationships also, inadvertently and necessarily, distorted larger relationships by ignoring them. This couldn’t be helped. If we could say everything at once, we would, gladly, but saying “All is one” is useful only to move people out of a sense of things as separate. Once you see that everything is connected, “All is well” does not necessarily bring you any farther in practical understanding. So, rather than soaring over the landscape, we plod. Then we soar again to give you a sense of the terrain from the air. Then we plod so that your feet will feel the changes in elevation, the roughness of the path, the view from ground level. This repetitive alternation may seem frustratingly slow, but it is the only way we know.

People have the idea that if they could find the proper guide and reach enlightenment (whatever that means to them) they could then begin to live. But that is a confusion of ideas. It assumes that enlightenment is a “there,” rather than a way of being while one travels.

So, we are always saying, “Now, how your new viewpoint reinterprets what you used to perceive.” Not so much “used to think,” as “used to perceive.” Your world changes as you see it differently, and you see it differently as it changes. As so often, a reciprocating process.

When you begin from the thought that reality by definition involves all dimensions and not only some of them, then what you have learned, have experienced, have seen with new eyes opens yet new vistas. Spending time in an older framework was not time wasted. It is what allows you to move on from a higher base camp.

• You see that the 3D world is a subset of the entire world.
• Then you see that the separation is only for the process of analysis, and must be reunited to take account of the larger reality.
• Now you begin to see that neither 3D nor non-3D exists as such, but only as abstractions.

And I think you’re about to say, “And the very concept of dimensions is only an abstraction, something unreal but useful for the purposes of analysis.” I have had this thought more than once.

This will be a stumbling-block for some, because their senses tell them that height, depth, width obviously exist and compose the substance of the 3D world.

But they don’t, of course. They are merely ways of describing orientation in space.

Yes, but go slowly now. The spatial dimensions are similar to the temporal dimension in this respect: They are measured, hence are assumed to be real, as if they were objects rather than relationships.

Time is measured in seconds, minutes, hours, in the same way we measure inches, feet, yards. In both cases, the measuring medium could be looked at as merely a measurement of relationship. You can’t box up a dozen dimensions, whether height or minutes. They don’t exist; they measure.

It might be better to say, “They don’t exist as such; they are inferred from relationships in time and space.”

So if dimensions are abstractions, they cannot be barriers or destinations. We don’t move to the 4th, 5th, 6th, etc. dimension. There isn’t any place to move to. It would be like moving to seconds or minutes.

However, that doesn’t render the metaphor invalid or even, necessarily, misleading. It only reminds you that a metaphor is a metaphor and not a road map.

 

Friday, June 15, 2018

You suggested that we begin with a description of how life in 3D looks from an All-D perspective.

In a way, you might say that this is what we have been doing all along.

I see that. A double translation – 3D into All-D perspective and then back to us.

Except that you are in both “places,” always. If we could once get across how this is, most of the translation errors would go away automatically.

But let us look at 3D life as a thing only partially seen, partially understood, because strictly speaking the 3D world is only a subset of the All-D world. The 3D world you experience could never exist by itself, as neither could you exist as bodies that had width and height but no depth. It isn’t that it wouldn’t be likely, or hard to imagine: It is that it would not be possible. It is an error in translation, an error in perception.

The 3D world that you experience is part of the world. It is a special set of conditions supported by the framework of the rest of the All-D. Clearly anything understood in isolation is going to be understood differently, depending upon where the boundaries are drawn. This should not be a difficult thought. Everything is understood in isolation, and everything is understood in relation to the boundaries drawn around it.

So that any subject is defined in advance by how we choose to think of it. “This belongs to this subject of examination, this does not,” and so we define a subject into existence and then think that the limits we put on it in advance are the natural and inevitable limits.

Of course. When Galileo decided to study only the observable properties of objects, he defined away in advance certain attributes that he decided could not be of interest because they could not be measured. This decision made possible a science of celestial mechanics – but it shaped, rather than revealed, that science. If celestial mechanics had been required to include properties such as color, it would have come to very different results. We are not saying this could have been (or even should have been) done, only that definitions affect what is to be examined in powerful and often unnoticed ways. That process has resulted in the powerful but one-sided civilization that is in its terminal flourishing state in the world.

The Western worldview that began with the Renaissance and the Protestant Revolution resulted in creating a global civilization, first by empire, then by trade and technology. The non-Western world is currently enchanted with the new possibilities, so it looks like that world-view is not only triumphant, but still gaining strength. But it is gaining strength in the way the Roman Empire expanded, not as an outgrowth of strength but of an unhealthy hypertrophy of certain traits at the expense of more human possibilities which will reassert themselves, even if it requires the overthrow of the empire and the institution of an age of feudalism. This is all analogy, but not a far-fetched one.

Correct, only remember that these processes require time. Meanwhile, your whole lives are to be lived. So let us continue with our larger, but scarcely irrelevant, field of inquiry.

You incarnate into the 3D world. You live, you make choices as to how and what you wish to be. Then, you die, you reunite your 3D-limited consciousness with the unlimited consciousness of your Sam. You have thus added a new bit of awareness to your Sam’s total. Then you enter another life, perhaps as one strand of many. Regardless how prominent or non-prominent a part you play in this new intelligence, this new soul in formation, you play some part. Therefore by definition your previous experiences play a part in that new soul’s repertoire. Then that soul returns, and is used as a thread in another existence, and so on. You see our point? What was experienced continues. It doesn’t necessarily dominate, or even emerge now and then, but it is always there, always flavoring the soup.

When John F. Kennedy won the presidential election of 1960, massive consequences followed. The hundreds of millions of people affected by the New Frontier idea, and by the assassination of the president and by the long consequences of that action, would have been affected quite differently if the 1960 election had gone the other way. Can the alteration of so many hundreds of million souls be of no consequence to the library of souls that is your Sam, and all the other affected Sams? Yet it can hardly be said that the external events in and of themselves matter, except in so far as they affect people.

Depending upon where you set your boundaries for this investigation, that sentence will seem tautological, or nonsensical, or arguable. Surely, an external event matters in itself, if only because it is the bridge between external circumstances. But that doesn’t mean it matters because what happens externally matters in and of itself. Instead it – external reality – matters because of the changes it produces in the souls living in that event. In a sense, external events are the weather you live in.

 

Saturday, January 21, 2023

7:20 a.m. All right, guys, a little help?

Your thought – “your” thought! – that you are thinking to explain too much, is valid. Much of it has been explained in other books, and you don’t need to be saying it all again. This time, concentrate on life more abundantly: that is, the promise and the problem and the way forward. You are expressing a point of view, it doesn’t have to be perfect.

My point of view?

Let’s say, ours. We have poured out, as best we could. You have absorbed, as best you could. Now you need to translate, as best you can. How could such a three-part process not be personal? To make a comparison that may illumine by its very audacity, would Islam be the same if it had come rom someone other than Muhammad? Would Jungian or Freudian or Adlerian psychology have come into the world in some abstract way, unconnected from the humans who translated?

This is precisely the inflated view that I have feared and resisted from the beginning.

It is not. To illustrate anything, we use historical examples, because that is your alphabet, your dictionary. As Newton might have understood via mathematics, or Upton Sinclair via observation, or the Webbs via statistics, so you see through the lens of story. But that means that we must use examples that are known to history. We cannot use your friend Louis, for example, because the example would need as much explanation to others as what we were using it to explain.

We are not comparing you to Muhammad, nor your task to creating or revealing the elements of Islam. But we are comparing the process through which non-3D understanding must enter 3D terms. It always comes through an individual, and grows from that one small seed. Therefore, no new way of seeing things could ever be free from viewpoint, from personal bias. This is a part of the reason why ideas become contended over: Equally serious people see the truth of it and the individual peculiarity of it, and of course different people slice it in different ways.

So, the Catholic position of group understanding of revelation, and the Protestant position of individual discernment.

Both, yes. And of course both Catholic and Protestant organizations contain both positions, to varying degrees at various times.

Only, we aren’t trying to start a religion.

Oh, it could be seen that way. Every new understanding is the underpinning of a new religion. But in the sense you mean, yes, of course we aren’t. What we hope to do is to instill a little specific yeast into the dough of the worldview that is emerging in your nascent global culture. And, lest that worry you, we remind you that millions of other injections of yeast are taking place all the time. It isn’t like it’s all that important that any one specific vision “succeed,” whatever that would mean. It is merely that some versions of the truth are more accessible to certain groups than are others. A phrasing that is appropriate to 21^st century America is not necessarily equally relevant to 21^st century Peru, say, or Ghana, or Italy, or China. Every place, every culture, every time, will have its own expression of truth available to it, just as Emerson said.

[Emerson, February, 1855: Munroe seriously asked what I believed of Jesus and prophets. I said, as so often, that it seemed to me an impiety to be listening to one and another, when the pure Heaven was pouring itself into each of us, on the simple condition of obedience. To listen to any second-hand gospel is perdition of the First Gospel. Jesus was Jesus because he refused to listen to another, and listened at home.]

We repeat: our point of view, yours and ours. Every thing within you, every active Strand, every emotional response to conflict, every story absorbed, fiction or non-fiction, every mental construction – it all made you you, as it all makes anyone. That’s what we have to work with; that’s what you have to offer.

I recognize, but want to make clear, that in saying “have to work with, have to offer,” you aren’t saying “must” but are saying “what is available.”

Correct. And of course what is true for you is true for everyone, only not everyone writes.

We don’t all write, but we can’t help living.

Precisely. It is in living that you write on the Akashic record, put it that way. Your input into the development of the shared subjectivity comes not primarily from what you do but from what you choose to uphold. Actions are the manifestation in 3D of decisions arrived at (consciously and subconsciously and unconsciously) by a non-3D intelligence functioning within 3D constraints. Actions are not negligible, but they are secondary to the mind itself. The 3D world, remember, is not things in space; it is an expression of mind. Which is more important, Caesar’s day to day life, or his legacy? Which is more important, his specific actions or the trend of his vision? This will not be clear to one and all, but for those to whom it is clear, it will perhaps open the way.

So, to speak specifically to your task.

• You want to keep it practical. Therefore, bring in “the way things are” only as need be. Don’t go explaining everything just because you have a clear view of it. Leave some work for others who have a slightly different center of gravity.
• Keep it focused on human life as experienced here and now. The ancient Egyptians spoke to their own time. Use them as illustration if appropriate, but not otherwise.

I’m hearing, make more flat statements as background, rather than trying to explain, justify, convince.

People will absorb that for which they have receptors, nothing else, regardless how it is packaged. Take this as a relief.

Well, it will be, if I can do it. But I have always had a hard time with people’s flat statements.

You can only do your best, and trust.

• Sketch the human situation and leave it for people to weigh it. Concentrate on revisioning things people are overlooking.

Envision a great weary sigh. We are writing a religious book, when you come down to it.

Should you have ever doubted it? If religion is not about life and the meaning of life and how to live, what is it about? Certainly not rules.

People would say it is exactly about rules!

That is because they would confuse the essence with the manifestation of it. Or, to put it more plainly, they confuse truth with attempts to organize truth in society. The latter is no more a possibility for you than it is a desire. You really can’t create anything useful if you worry how it may later be misused. People misuse fire! They misuse water! They’d misuse the very dirt under their feet if they could do so. That doesn’t mean those things shouldn’t exist. It means merely that they too may be used to help people grow up by living their 3D experiences, choosing.

So here is one way you would structure it:

• A sketch of the condition you find yourselves in, interpreted by what you have learned over the years: the constriction into one time/space, etc.
• Possibilities arising from this way of seeing life. Old obstacles dissolving, new bridges appearing.
• Methods of deepening awareness, including
  • Removing obstacles
  • Developing abilities
  • Clarifying vision

That is one way, not (by far) the only way, and not necessarily the way best suited to you. The point remains: Keep it practical, focused, limited, hopeful.

I have been thinking this would go out to the blog. Now I am not so sure.

Your choice, always.

Thanks for all of it. Till next time.

Friday, January 20, 2023

8:05 a.m. Working on indexing July, 2021, I got that if I can get the internal logic of it better – by continually reexamining and refining categories – I could write it as a series of essays, themed. Thus, communication, etc., which, I see, is the same idea I wrote down less than an hour ago, only redirected toward the book, not the blog.

In the end, it will boil down to a few central ideas that have been there right along

• The 3D and non-3D aspects of one world
• The world as dream rather than things in space
• Humans as communities choosing what they are to be
• The nature of our awareness, our potential, and our problems.
• Helpful things to do, to achieve life more abundantly

Really, it is all contained herein. And – is this a back-door structuring for me? (For when I began that paragraph, I was thinking it was me and only gradually realized it was also them.)

It is a suggestion, responding to your desire, put it that way.

I think I’ll ask my friends what they think, see if anybody makes specific suggestions for additions or changes.

A very good idea, for only your readers can give you “external” feedback, and of course each of them can give you things we cannot.

Because I wouldn’t notice yours?

Let’s say, because the forces that would produce an impulse in someone to contribute an idea would be the product of their own long development, no less than of the times. It is a way of triangulating.

I hadn’t thought I’d post today, but this will be worth doing. Thanks.

 

Thursday, January 19, 2023

4:15 a.m. Well, guys, a command performance, huh? I gather that our small group of four engineers was told that I should talk to you about how to move to the next level, in terms of connecting to guidance. I didn’t get any particulars, but I figured you’d go where you wanted us to go. So, you’re on.

You no longer invoke presence, clarity, receptivity explicitly, so it is as well to remind people that they should make some such habit implicit if not explicit. The first need in communicating is to be present, and that is more complicated sometimes than it may appear to be. You are communities in many respects, cooperating entities functioning “as if.” It is as well to remind yourself at the beginning that you wish everybody present. That means all here, now, attending to the same effort at outreach, or, let’s say, all looking and listening in the same direction.

It is one thing to do that as an individual who is also a community. How do you do it as a community of individuals – which means, obviously, a community of communities, each of which is itself a community? Our point here is that the process is vastly more complex than it may appear if you think of yourselves as each units cooperating with one another.

So, first, as individuals and then as what we might call temporary individuals (which is one way a temporary joint mind may be seen), concenter yourselves, within yourself and among yourselves. A simple ritual usually suffices: All you’re doing is ringing the dinner bell, getting everyone’s attention.

A desire for, an expectation of achieving, clarity helps reduce unconscious worry that the task might be beyond your expectations. It isn’t. You won’t be called to do something beyond your strength and ability, though you often will be called to do things that stretch those abilities, heighten those strengths. These exercise periods may feel like failures. They aren’t. Remember that nothing happens in disconnected fashion. A failure would imply a disconnect. We say no more about this than that you should think about this statement. Insights will present themselves, but you need to be quiet enough to hear them and to work out the chains of thought that suggest themselves to you as you do.

That of course segues into receptivity. Intending to be receptive is slightly different from a request for clarity. It is a promise of cooperation, more than an act of faith, if you see what we mean.

We know this doesn’t seem to be what is requested, but, it’s all there. If more had been needed for you as an individual, Frank, we would have provided it. Why should this be different? The answer to “why?” is of course because it is the same kind of seemingly uncharted territory that you thought was uncharted when you entered it, so many years ago. Whenever one looks back, one sees that the way ahead was always clearly set out by the experience of others, only they could not change your own unrealized expectations. Communicating with us is mostly a matter of releasing the ideas that make it seem impossible or difficult or even unusual. So why set out rules that will seem to be helpful but in fact will silently reinforce false expectations of difficulty?

Presence. Bring all parts of yourself to the same moment of time – the eternal present manifesting in 3D.

Receptivity. Direct them all to be open to instruction in whatever form it may take: words, images, feelings, promptings. Reassure recalcitrant parts of yourself that receptivity need not be gullibility. Receive first, then discern later, but receive, or there will be nothing to discern.

Clarity. Expect – program – that what you receive will not be beyond the logic of the time and place. You will have asked: Expect to receive, and expect to be able to work out what it is that you did receive.

This implies traits such as integrity, benevolence, openness – you know the drill. If a given group wishes, it may make up a short ritual to be said, in the way Bob Monroe wrote his affirmation. It isn’t necessary, but it may be helpful. It may be helpful, but it may tempt some into idolizing the form rather than the intent, so beware of the possibility. You aren’t creating a church, nor a superstition, so be careful of the rituals you embrace, however helpful.

As I was finishing writing that, I got something – part of something – about Edgar Cayce and the Lord’s Prayer. Did he use it as part of his ritual?

Not explicitly, nor is that exactly the thought you perceived. It was built into him, you might say, because this was a man who read the entire bible every year of his life. But – fortunately – he never thought to make it or any prayer “essential” to his work. Instead, he tried to live the attitude the Lord’s Prayer sets out:

• Our father (that is, the non-3D being sustaining the world, of the same essence as the 3D beings invoking him)
• Who is in heaven (existing in non-3D but, implicitly, accessible to those in 3D, or why pray to him?)
• Your name be blessed. (We love and reverence you.)
• May your kingdom arrive (may we get past our sense of being separated from the divine)
• May we do your will
• In 3D as in non-3D.
• Give us our daily requirements (that is, we trust you to do so)
• And remove obstacles between ourselves and you, as we remove them among ourselves.
• Don’t lead us astray.
• Deliver us from evil.

Not so sure, any more, about that last part, “deliver us from evil.”

You could put it, save us from the consequences of the apple from the tree of Perceiving Things as Good and Evil.

Ah. Well, that does make more sense.

And, good ex-Catholic that you are, we spare you the final sentence added by Protestants, but remember it too is true.

So here’s the point of this. If you (anyone) had to have a ritual, one grounded thousands of years ago, across cultures, might serve well because it originated so long ago and far away. There would be less temptation to idolize it. But of course, ex-Christians would have emotional resistances, so it might balance out in difficulty. There really aren’t any rules that apply everywhen and everywhere, beyond our admonitions to presence, receptivity, and clarity.

I am surprised to see it has been nearly an hour. It flowed smoothly and easily.

You’d think you had invoked presence, receptivity and clarity.

Very funny. But our thanks for this. In a way, thanks mostly for not complicating it.

You put your finger on the most important thing we set out to accomplish. More ambitious undertakings do not require ore complicated instructions. If anything, just the opposite, and you may take that for a general rule. Follow your intent with integrity and simplicity (“like a little child”) and you have all you need.

Very well, our thanks as always.

 

Wednesday, November 20, 2019

All right, gentlemen. You said you had a larger topic queued up. Still have it?

You might consider it fairly major. But you need to relax about it. The key question for many, sometimes assumed, sometimes assumed to be unanswerable, is: Does your life matter and if so, how?

Sure. You’ve been talking about that right along.

We have, for that is the question we set out to answer, long before you consciously posed it. It will have looked like we were conducting a tour d’ horizon: human life; things you can’t know first-hand; the meaning of things you do know when seen from another perspective, etc. But this has been in the service of showing you (not telling you) how your lives matter, and to whom.

And I hear, now we have cleared away the shrubbery, we can get to the heart of the matter.

More like, now we have told you the things you were likely to find easiest to accept, we come to the things you have real resistance to. Here you cease being spectators or students, and choose to become participants or practitioners.

You can choose. In fact, in 3D you cannot help choosing; that’s what 3D is. But you may choose at random, or by default, or inconsistently. Better to fasten on to an ideal and choose in accordance with that ideal. Not every impulse is beneficial, not every habit leads toward your goal. (This of course presupposes a goal, or, as we put it, an ideal.)

You have long reminded us that an ideal can only be lived toward, it cannot be encompassed.

It is your pole star, keeping you oriented. You need to know where North is. Maybe you don’t intend to go anywhere near North, but North tells you not so much where you are, but which direction you are facing. And that is the important part! You could know exactly where you are, but head off in the wrong direction. You could be mistaken as to where you are, but if you know which direction is where, you can find your way eventually. Tendency matters far more than any place you happen to find yourself.

Like Dante waking up and finding himself lost.

Precisely. The trick is finding Virgil to orient you. [As in “The Divine Comedy.”]

And the bitter medicine you are preparing to administer?

It isn’t bitter medicine nor non-bitter medicine. But it requires mental and – shall we call it moral? – effort. It isn’t anything we haven’t been asking of you right along, but it is in an area more sensitive.

The familiar part is the effort to readjust our mental categories to incorporate a new viewpoint which includes some elements previously excluded.

Yes. As we have said, a new view will include things excluded by the previous view: Not all of them, but some, and it will require an effort, like Carl Jung forcing himself to study alchemy and eventually finding the solid productive generative core that had been buried.

The unfamiliar part is that you are exhorting us to take religion seriously.

That’s a shorthand way to put it, but really we don’t care what you think of religion in general or in terms of any given religion. What we do care about is your openness or otherwise to the things religion concerns itself with! And here we know we will encounter massive resistance precisely from those who are potentially most able to receive what we have to say and to benefit from it.

When your conscious mind has one firmly settled idea or group of ideas, and an unconscious part of your mind has opposing ideas, it creates a tension. The greater the internal (unacknowledged) tension, the more intolerant the expression. People half-convinced of a political argument are among those denouncing it most hysterically. Believers in “reason” may become screechingly irrational at external opposition that happens to reinforce their own unacknowledged doubts.

So. Look within. You want to come to the root of things. You want to discover who you truly are, what your limits and possibilities truly are. You want to grow. Well, we guarantee you, there are counter-forces within you that want the exact opposite, or a slightly or greatly diverging goal. The first step in dealing with them is to become aware that they exist. And how do you do that?

Simple. You observe what pushes your buttons.

That isn’t the whole story, but it certainly is a strong first step. Only, because your buttons are pushed, it becomes hard to remain present enough to observe it.

Which is what our non-3D is for.

It is if you don’t ignore it, yes.

And some of these button-pushing words are God, Jesus, Allah.

Sin, duty, surrender, sacrifice, sure. To permit ourselves a vast generalization, we would say that anything people label “religious” rather than “spiritual” offers the opportunity for growth because it presents button-pushing structures and allows them to be examined. Saying you are “spiritual but not religious” is one thing when you mean you take the spiritual world seriously but you can’t be, or won’t be, bound by any religion’s rules and dogmas. It is another thing, and not a helpful one, when it morphs (unconsciously, usually) to become “I take the spiritual world seriously, so long as I don’t need to learn anything of how it interacts with us and don’t have to limit my actions.”

That may not be quite a fair summary. For many people it is a fear of drifting into a situation where they find themselves bound by the rules and dogmas.

The reality is this. Truth comes with a duty toward the truth. Once you know the truth, you have a responsibility to live it. You will never get to “the” truth, but you always have “the truth as you know it.” You can’t go beyond that, but you can get closer to deeper truth, higher truth, if you put in the effort. But you can only attain more truth by living the truth that you have already come to.

Is that perhaps what Jesus meant by saying that the only sin that can’t be forgiven is a sin against the holy spirit?

If you rephrase it, it will become obvious: You can’t move North by moving South. You can’t benefit from wisdom by ignoring it, or by contravening it. Or, to put it another way, nobody is going to turn you around. You have to do that, and the preceding step is to decide to do it, or, let’s say, to decide to cease to resist doing it.

 

Wednesday, August 28, 2019

[I was working on my novel about Hemingway when I got a sense to talk to the guys.]

Has it occurred to you that the specific kind of illness that terrified him centered in the lungs?

It hadn’t, actually. He was thinking of the flu, but I take your point. He feared his lungs filled with fluid.

More. He feared. You haven’t really connected with his fears of death and of “external” hazards such as illness. A mistake to allow him to continue to hide from it. It doesn’t help him and it distorts your portrait.

Help him?

It isn’t too late. Didn’t you help Joseph [Smallwood], and Bertram?

My lord, I never thought about it in that context. If we all connect –

There is vastly more you can do. Obviously, not only you, but everybody.

We are carriers of the vast impersonal forces you began talking about last year.

The same forces could be regarded as impersonal or personal. It’s a matter of viewpoint. Humanity is one thing, and is part of something greater. There are no absolute divisions in the world. Even the division between  3D and non-3D is only relative rather than absolute, as you know.

Since non-3D is an integral part of 3D:

• time is not the absolute barrier that it appears to be when considered in 3D terms. So
• relating across space and across time is not only not impossible, it is in fact unavoidable, and
• the only question is to what degree such relations will be conscious rather than unconscious.
• And that depends upon individual decisions.

If you keep in mind both aspects of reality – all is one, everything is differentiated – you get a clearer picture. You all have the ability to help heal the world, or to help curse it. None of you – fortunately! – has the ability to do so single-handed (so you needn’t fear doom and you mustn’t rest on your oars), but none of you is powerless to do good or evil in terms of who and what you are in essence; not dependent upon what you do externally.

Remember, the external is secondary to the internal. You are 3D/non-3D beings, hence are not pinned to one time and place, although you must experience life that way. But you can know better; you can see beyond appearances, and it is time that you wake up fully to your part in the vast cosmic drama that is human life within a continuing background of non-human forces manifesting within human life.

Do you choose to curse the enemies of what you hold dear, or bless them? This is not as simple and self-answering a question as it may appear. What results is your addition to the total of a human cursing or a human blessing. Which do you suppose is more therapeutic, seen in all?

I have always been impressed that Robert E. Lee prayed every night for his enemies as well as for his friends. It accounts for that vaguely saintly aura that he shares with Lincoln.

Yes. Neither man slackened in his efforts to have his side prevail, but neither ever chose hatred over love. Lincoln did not slacken his efforts to vanquish Lee and his cause, but he found no need to add to the hatred that had been disfiguring his country for so many decades. And nor did Lee.

To bring it back to Hemingway, and to remind others of their possibilities, remember that from your point of view at any time, the external present manifests as the eternal now, the point of power, the place of application. But just as you may bless Lincoln or Hemingway or whomever, so they (in their continuing point of power in the eternal now) may bless you. You continually act as conscious or unconscious conduits of blessings or curses. Choose wisely.

 

Thursday, August 29, 2019

Do you care to say more about how other people in other times may bless or curse us?

Remember the TMI program where you were given an exercise to send a message to your younger self? [Timeline, in 2003.] You sent a message of encouragement: “Don’t give up. It will work out. Don’t give up.” Well, now that you are neither in 2003 nor in 1956 –

Consider how it was from the 1956 end, to receive a message and an encouragement from elsewhen.

That 10-year-old could not realize that he was being contacted from the future.

I see it now. Don’t remember being contacted at all, of course.

No. You don’t remember experiencing the contact. You well remember July 26, 1956, however.

But this now has the flavor of the science-fiction stories about time travel that I find so irritating, where people are influenced by a future self that comes into existence only because of decisions or actions they take that are the result of that future.

Reorient your ideas, remembering that:

• you are multidimensional beings,
• all possibilities exist, and
• any one version connects to all other specific versions by way of the self.

It isn’t one person contacting a different person at another time. It’s more like one neuron connecting to other neurons in the same brain. There isn’t the absolute division between components that ordinary 3D life suggests. A puzzling incident in your past may be a clue that more was involved than you know. So, look at July 26, 1956 again.

This is one of those extraordinary events that I cannot be making up after the fact, for I have always remembered that morning. Is that the day I was contacted by my future self?

Relive it first. A bare-bones explanation will help you connect.

On July 26, 1956, the day before my tenth birthday, in a certain sense my childhood ceased, and a very different life began. All week, I had been looking forward to the one-hour TV special that would tell how the Lone Ranger became the Lone Ranger. I don’t remember how much that boy knew the difference between fact and fiction. I’m sure he at least partly and maybe entirely believed the story.

Anyway, the slot was pre-empted. In the night, the ocean liner Andrea Doria had collided with the Stockholm in Long Island Sound, and had sunk after a few hours. Live news coverage showed the survivors arriving in New York City, and somehow the sight of that huddled misery changed me, in one instant, putting the weight of the world on my shoulders. From that moment, I was (pick one) intellectually precocious and emotionally retarded, or empathically enabled beyond my years, so that I felt but did not understand. Of course that reaction would look ridiculous and totally disproportionate and ungrounded, but still, something had happened, and now you are suggesting that my future self sent me a message. So tell me what happened.

You will need to go slowly, staying with us. You may look at it as a portal opening up for you. One moment you were a normal ten-year-old boy and the next you were a ten-year-old still with only a ten-year-old’s slight knowledge of the world and of life but suddenly, in addition, with a glimpse of the human condition seen as from outside that ten-year-old’s frame of reference.

Emotionally, it was a lead-lined blanket dropped over that child, and it was all he could do to stand up under the weight, no one understanding what had happened, least of all him.

Yet it was necessary if your life was to take its peculiar course. What followed could have gone many ways, but the bias had been introduced.

I get that my belief in psychic abilities is one consequence, even though the subject didn’t really come to mind (as I remember things, anyway) until my brother gave me Edger Cayce: The Sleeping Prophet.

You were overwhelmed. You were put into a situation in which you had no covering on your nerves, hypersensitive emotionally and not well developed mentally. You were incapacitated from leading any kind of normal life, which wasn’t in itself a bad thing. Only anything can be carried too far, and it is sometimes hard to judge from non-3D how much is too much.

I should think that you’d be able to tell from looking at future events.

What do you suppose we just said?

It doesn’t seem at all equivalent to me.

We, like you, are continually readjusting. Your decisions determine what you become. Each decision requires an adjustment from our side. You enable and disable potential all the time, as you go.

I think you’re saying, as we live, at some points you may adjust the trim, and depending upon how we react, the original intended-to-be-helpful input may have undesirable effects, so that in effect you have to change your minds and perhaps undo your own previous efforts.

That isn’t wrong as one way to look at it, bearing in mind that you are looking at things as if you – 3D you – were in the center of your life. Seems obvious, but of course it is wrong. No one 3D moment could provide a continuing platform.

Our non-3D self is necessarily our true center, in that each moment of 3D time in effect passes away. So, the intervention from 2003?

In effect, you sent a message to your past. That past changed: not external events, but what you were. You found yourself, unnoticeably, on a new and more productive timeline. You didn’t magically change your health, or your relationships, or your understanding of others, or your pattern of action. What changed was an internal assumption of support, and you will have seen by now how this assumption is relatively rare among others. And now you know why you have it when others may not. Also we have now told them how they may have it, if they value it.

It depends upon what messages in a bottle we send ourselves.

It does.