Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

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.

 

Sunday, October 11, 2020

Perhaps we have inadequately made the point that people see the world through filters that precede thought, and then they alter what they see and what they think by their values and decisions. If you once see that, you have seen the most important thing about emotions and feelings.

Do you think so?

We do. It is only in devaluing feelings, in deafness to emotion, and in what we can only call an idolatry of thought per se (at the expense of feeling) that deadness is enshrined in life.

“Feelings are the language of the soul.”

They are. And if you become deaf to feelings, you no longer have any evidence that the soul even exists, let alone that a soul is what you are. In being deaf to feeling, you make yourself an orphan in the universe; at sea, rudderless, in entire isolation, hence desperate.

That sounds like our world, all right.

More so the Age of Reason, that wound up unleashing horrors upon the world out of the disregarded unconscious mind and minds of men.

I know that you are not advocating that we abandon reason for emotion. But I am a little bit at sea as to what it comes to, in practice, one by one.

What it means in terms of how each of you should live, you mean.

Yes, how you would conceptualize the implications.

Quote the indicated excerpt from Dirk’s email of October 2.

[“First and foremost though it once again highlighted to me that my experience of the world is not usual. It is not how most people do experience the world. And it isn’t even a way that most people can ever experience the world. And so – even though I can describe it to you and others; for most people that explanation either rings entirely false, or utterly alien. It is simply not within the range of available experience to contemplate.

[“As an imperfect analogy, it is like I hear in a different range, which only partially overlaps with how others hear. My default in this analogy is to hear in a part of my range not heard by others, and hence completely outside their ability to relate to.”]

Notice what he says here. It is as if he hears in a different range, beyond the common limits. To some degree this is true of any outlier; whether it is cause or effect, we leave to you to think about. After all, hearing a common range is one aspect that goes into the commonality that is a herd.

Are you saying we are all herd animals, we are all outliers, depending upon who we live among?

Is this not your experience?

You refer to my finding the Monroe community as what I call “my tribe,” after decades of being entirely surrounded by what seemed like herd members living lives alien to me. Yes, it is so.

Each of those herd members is more individual than appear to you. From each person’s center, the world is part herd, part outlier.

I think you mean, we can each identify with some and not others, hence we could each be considered to be a part of a herd, only the composition of the herd would differ.

Again, is this saying anything you haven’t always lived? Depending upon how you slice your life, you are part of a different herd and are separate from others you live among. There are no absolute divisions in life. We keep reminding you of that. Concomitantly, life is replete with approximate divisions, relative boundaries.

In Dirk’s case, for instance, he is distinctly an outlier in some ways, but he is definitely firmly within different herds: managerial, scientific, theoretical (i.e. abstract) thinkers. In none of these three categories is he an exact fit, but perhaps none of you is an exact fit anywhere. And in fact we will draw you an approximate rule of thumb: The more conscious you become, the more of an outlier you realize yourself to be, until you reach a point where your understanding makes a sudden turn, so to speak, and greater consciousness shows you your “herd-ness” in ways you had lost sight of.

Thus – now listen, here, and think about this – how you perceive yourself and the world may be seen as a mood, quite as accurately as it may be seen as a conclusion. That is, the same data seen differently may lead to different conclusions in different mental circumstances, so in what way can it be said to be a logical conclusion rather than a chosen attitude?

That turns things on their head, doesn’t it?

If your rational conclusions actually rest upon a (usually) invisible foundation of feelings, can you be said to be primarily rational beings, or feeling beings? And if, being feeling beings, you reason yourselves into thinking you are primarily rational beings, can it be any surprise that you find life confusing, disorienting, contradictory, nonsensical?

Now extend the argument. If what you consider to be your objective view of the world, of life, is in fact the result of a way of seeing the world, seeing life, and that way of seeing is based in feelings prior to thought (because based in pre-conscious perception), how rational can your view of life be? It is a rational construct, yes. It is not, and can never be, strictly rational reporting of what is.

Thus, your opening thought: People’s view of the world is obviously personal, eccentric, conditional. You can see that by observing anybody else. Your own views, of course, are rational, indisputable – at least, they are until you change them for a new set of rational indisputable views. It is by looking at the effects on others of their prejudices and special ways of seeing the world, that you get a sense of your own.

Now, relate this to what we have been sketching. Other people’s make-up is part of the “other”; part of the shared subjectivity that you participate in but do not define nor control. As such, it is not “you,” yet it casts light on “you.” Or, it can if you allow it to. It is in this sense that the “external” world is said to mirror the internal.

Since you can see that no one else sees life unfiltered, you can see that you don’t either. And that knowledge can be immensely valuable.

And that will have to do for now.

Well, all very enlightening Thanks as always.

 

Thursday, January 12, 2023

5:15 a.m. I suppose you’d like to discuss yesterday’s drumming question at our ILC meeting.

We would, and we should like to recognize and encourage your willingness to open up a little more. It was the kind of question it would have been easy to hide from.

[The five-minute shamanic drumming question: “What is an unconscious bias that I can let go of?”

[Can? Or should? There is a difference. Or, could be willing to?

[You still have a bias that sees your life separate from the world, as if you can do as you please and not affect things. That is a common bias but leads to feelings of futility and ennui and disconnection. Consciously remember that you are part of everything inner and outer, and the same thoughts, emotions, actions, acquire new significance and offer greater promise.

[You believe that everything is connected; you don’t necessarily live it. Intend to live more profoundly.]

I wouldn’t say it was any new perception.

It is an important thing when a known idea penetrates to deeper levels. The more thoroughly one admits a thing, the more profound a third-tier decision it becomes.

Or represents?

Or represents. It is a continuing process.

Beyond a certain point, it is more an act of faith than of knowledge, to think that our most private thoughts are yet in the pool of common human experience.

That is an accurate insight said only vaguely. Should you choose to, you can bring a much sharper awareness to bear.

In other words, recalibrate. True. Very well, explicitly rather than tacitly: greater presence, receptivity, clarity. Let me be more fully here, now.

Established habits become default postures, and so need not be continually spelled out, but every so often one may need to refocus by using one’s little rituals.

Understood. So, what I was meaning is that I have been changed profoundly by the moment-by-moment effects – and still more by the cumulative effects – of so many years of coaching and of sincere conversation. I remember well how quickly Rita’s and my life began to change from our very first few sessions in 2001. And I can see that nonetheless, there is probably never a stopping-place except an arbitrary one. Until we say “Stop, I have had enough changes for this lifetime,” everything we know is liable to be reinterpreted, time after time, we doing the reinterpreting and we being reinterpreted as well, so to speak.

And – to come to the nub of your prior statement –

And, as I said, it still requires faith sometimes to believe what is not necessarily evident. We – I – may fully believe that all our mind is one thing, that life is more a shared dream than a shared and also individual experience, but our sensory evidence persists in saying, “Not only are you alone in this, but there’s no getting out of the closet or out of the locked room around the closet, nor out of the house around the closet,” and on and on. What seems to us so private may not be shameful or even embarrassing. Indeed, it may be something we cherish and protect from possible profanation by the world’s eyes. Still, it may be impossible to believe that it is nonetheless common human property in the non-3D world.

We shall play devil’s advocate, for the moment. What difference does it make whether one’s inmost being is truly hedged around by silence or is spotlighted? What does it matter if common knowledge is in non-3D, if you live your lives in 3D, where barriers are available on every side?

Doesn’t the difference between our self-knowledge and our appearance tend to undermine us?

You should spell out the difference between persona and essence, perhaps.

We cannot help wearing what Yeats called the mask, what Jung called the persona. Since all aspects of us cannot be presented simultaneously (in the way that no one can see all sides of a sphere from any one point of view), in any situation some, and only some, aspects are present and some are hidden, either consciously or unconsciously. Who we are in essence remains unmanifest, necessarily. With the best will in the world, we could  not present ourselves in our entirety even if we could know ourselves in our entirety, which I imagine is not possible.

And therefore you are always in a position of your self-knowledge and your appearance being different. So why (or rather more important, how) should it undermine you sometimes?

I’m going to hand over to you. I sense that it does, but I don’t know that I could say how it does.

You could, it you could summon the energy to do the work, for thinking as opposed to receptivity is work. It is hard work.

Which I should do more of?

Which you are wanting to do more of, as you well know. But perhaps most people would be the better for doing more thinking and more receiving. Whichever they do less of, they should think to balance by doing more of the other. The ideal is not a continuing state of balance between the two, but an enhanced ability to employ either and both.

Well, how it undermines us. Let me try to think it out.

Use bullets. This relieves you of the perceived need to connect various points by logical chains.

Yes. Well, how.

• Sometimes we may feel like a fraud.
• Sometimes, a sense of futility, as the impossibility of translation and expression overwhelms us.
• It spotlights the usual problem: “Which you?”
• It “irks and repents us” as Thoreau or Emerson said. The sheer recalcitrance of life.
• The gulf of incomprehension between people exacerbated by the distortion and insufficiency of words.
• The exceptional shared intuitive moments, by contrast.

That is as far as I can get at this moment.

Yes, that is reception. Now think about what you received.

I see those are various aspects of the trap that 3D life sometimes seems to be. We feel isolated from others, unable to communicate our deepest nature, unsure if we would even meet acceptance if people could see us entire. More than that, we can’t see ourselves entire. So many Strands, so many cross-purposes and half-suspected motives and habit-patterns. It’s Plato’s man in a cave, for sure.

But –

But there is the other side of the picture, the fact that despite these obstacles we do connect with others; they do inspire us, and us them. They do forgive and indeed accept us, and we them. We are somehow important to one another even when experienced only peripherally. All this, I take it, is because on a non-3D level we know each other as all one thing.

Let’s say you recognize the fractal pattern you share. You are never identical, yet you are never unrelated. You each march to your own music, but the music has more in common than you sometimes think.

Perhaps you’d spell out the opportunity and pitfall here.

Sketch the dragon and the treasure it guards, you mean? Yes, we can do that. As usual, they are the same thing in its twin aspects.

Individuality as experienced in 3D is a lonely thing. Connection as experienced in 3D is a promise and a gleam and a sometime thing. Does that mean it is different essentially in non-3D? Try to remember this fact in everything you think about! : 3D and non-3D are ends of a polarity rather than different things. So how different is it going to be in non-3D. It is different, but think, how is it different?

It has to be the difference between perceiving something via the senses and perceiving it intuitively.

Correct. And so?

I don’t know if this is right, but I get that in a way, it is up to us how we experience things. We can concentrate on the 3D (sensory) experience, or the non-3D (intuitive) experience, and while either approach will have its own flavor, either one will contain the other as well.

How you experience life is up to you, in that sense. Viktor Frankl did not put it in these terms, nor did Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, but while they were in prison they learned to see life more intuitively than they had been doing, and this changed the meaning of the hard life they were experiencing. Few of you are in their hard circumstances, but if you were reading this in jail, you would find that it still applied. Your private life is private; it is also in common. And this has nothing to do with how much or how little effort you make to communicate it or even share it by actions.

Think about your life in terms of the dragon guarding the treasure – and dragon and treasure being the same thing – and be reassured.

Well, thanks for this exercise in receptivity and thought.

And that would be a good title for it.

Perhaps it would. Very well, our thanks as always.

 

Thursday, November 18, 2021

Gentlemen, you’re up. More about crossing thresholds?

Your reminder to your friends yesterday, that significant change is not necessarily accompanied by dramatic trappings, was well to say. It is the anticipation of bells and whistles, as you say, that leads many to devalue natural processes that flow smoothly. By the same token, that expectation sometimes leads people to overvalue what may be merely flash and little substance. Do not take this to be criticism of what you are or of what tendencies you may be subject to: It is merely a noticing of difficulties inherent in 3D existence.

I feel well supported by the universe. Once I learned to stop taking setbacks or problems personally, it became much easier to take what comes, as it comes, in faith that it makes sense in context whether or not I understand it. And you reassured us long ago that life sends us no more than we can handle, no matter how bad it may look.

And that is a very helpful attitude, as you see.

I do. Repining against fate, or feeling sorry for myself, or being angry with the gods, or feeling cheated: any or all of these temptations would have the effect of piling on unnecessary emotional miseries, and what good would that do? Much easier to take what comes, living in quiet faith that all is well. I might have saved myself and others a world of grief, if I had learned that earlier.

Life lived alone is a very different thing than life lived among others. Let’s consider it in terms of how the shared subjectivity and the personal subjectivity interact.

That’s a very interesting thought. I have danced around it, but I get a glimpse of what you intend to explore here.

Husband your energy, because although you are on your way to being entirely well again, still you are dragging the results of your year’s physical difficulties. That is, guard your energy level, keeping in mind that your stamina may be less than you are accustomed to.

I get your point. You may fire when you are ready, Gridley.

It may be as well to begin as bullet points, to stress inter-relationships, before going into more extensive discussion.

• Hold in mind the model of emotions as the interface between the conscious and the parts of your mind of which you are unconscious, (for they are all conscious in themselves).
• You experience life as “you” interfacing with “other.” Thus, you v. the world; you v. others; your consciousness v. life that seems to be not your consciousness.
• The personal subjectivity – the “you” you identify with, the part of your mind and being of which you are conscious – seems to you to be a unit.
• The shared subjectivity – the collective energies that make up the world as it is created and maintained out of mind-stuff – seems to you to be objectively “out there,” separate, different from you.
• Your personal subjectivity interacts with various aspects of the shared subjectivity continuously, in countless ways, and your tendency is to experience it as “things happening to me,” rarely as “things happening because I and they coincide and manifest.”
• If there were no shared subjectivity, you would not be aware that you are alive.
• You may experience this in miniature by comparing your mental and emotional existence (1) when you are living in conditions less impacted by others and by the world and (2) when you are actively relating to others or to seemingly objective external conditions.

Aha! That’s one reason for the worldwide pause in our incessant busy-ness, isn’t it? That’s one reason the virus was made to disrupt business as usual? To remind us of life as opposed to trance-living in routines and preoccupations?

Without going into “why,” we can say that one effect has indeed been that many people have been able to raise their heads and say, “Why am I wasting my life and substance pursuing trivial things?” But notice your automatic assumption that the virus and its conditions and effects are “other”; that they are things that happened to you. Indeed they are; and indeed that doesn’t mean what at first it seems to you to mean.

No, I get it. It is the shared subjectivity interacting with our individual subjectivity – presumably to somewhat different effect for each of us – but there is timing involved, and that timing cannot depend on anyone’s personal subjectivity; it must emanate from the shared subjectivity or from something behind it all.

As denoted by the signs in the heavens, as we have said. The nature of the times and the sequence of the changes in the times are marked by (not caused by) the positions of planets, stars, etc., systematized as astrological symbolism. But now if you will carry this one small step farther, you will see that astrology and what it marks can only be part of the shared subjectivity, which means cannot be separate from human existence. (Non-human existence as well, of course; that is what the seasons are. But that’s another subject.) This is why astrology “works,” because it is not and cannot be separate from the human mind – because that human mind is part of the same overall mind. How could the shared subjectivity and the personal subjectivity go separate ways? Does the “tails” side of a coin go separate ways from the “heads” side? Could it ever? Are the two sides, in fact, two? Aren’t they each an aspect of one undivided thing?

Now, to return to our central point at the moment: Anyone may live in such a way as to minimize your interaction with other people and even with the world in general. Your monk living in a cave, what is he doing if not that? But is that a desired end? Did God or the gods or the world or however you wish to think of purpose intend for individual subjectivity to live divorced from collective subjectivity? If so, why not bring everyone into the world deaf, blind, and mute? Why not render all the world autistic? Why – in fact – bring people into 3D at all? No, living divorced from the shared subjectivity is not the desired end-result. But it may be a desired interval, a resting-up, a time for taking stock.

It is a great mistake, to think that practices and circumstances that may be transiently helpful would be desirable in and of themselves for one and all, or from now forever. Yet this mistake is made by many: by the weary, and the sick at heart, and the directionless. So, knowing that it is a snare and a misreading, don’t fall for it.

“Don’t criticize your life,” Thoreau said somewhere. “It isn’t as bad as you are.” Today’s theme?

“Life never ‘just happens,” perhaps. Something on that order.

Two views of life

Monday, January 9, 2023

7:35 a.m. Gentlemen, some people think you didn’t answer my question the other day. I though thought you redirected me, pointing out to me that it wasn’t the right question. Perhaps we might continue by looking at free will v. “the nanny non-3D state.” My coinage and my way of seeing the issue, but it only clarified after our talk.

Why don’t you spell out your thinking and we will comment if it seems called for?

Okay. I think we see two ways of looking at life, here. One centers on the 3D world as if it were important in and of itself. The other centers on the individual human soul as if it were important in and of itself.

Other ways of stating the same dichotomy:

• One centers on result (the actual facts on the ground), the other on process (the ongoing formation of character by repeated choice).
• One values result as if life were the one-time thing it appears; the other values the lessons learned, the changes resolved upon, in the context of continual revision.

Your habit of parallelism is getting in the way of a clear statement.

Over to you, then.

A way of seeing the situation that has not occurred to you: holding both ends of a polarity in mind, v. clinging only to either end. Life is pain and suffering and is real in tis own terms, yet it is a dream, and so only somewhat real.

You as 3D beings function as if separate from non-3D, yet you also are of non-3D and function in non-3D, hence are self-divided in effect.

You are in 3D to function, yet it is important to be in it but not of it. This is a tug-of-war that can’t be merely talked away. It is lived, and therefore presents conundrums for you to learn to comprehend.

Lastly (though of course the list could be extended), you are communities of communities, and so you are largely mysteries to yourselves. Your motivations, perceptions, intuitions, biases, inherited karma (that is, ongoing unresolved results of prior decisions) – it all influences you day by day, whether you do or do not realize it.

Should it be a surprise that you all see the world differently?

And – you’re going to say – nothing wrong with it, and every new viewpoint adds.

Do you dispute it?

Not any more.

So there is your response:

• There is no need for (no possibility of) unanimity of opinion.
• Any partial viewpoint may be productive, and somebody will experience it as truth.
• But it would be silly to insist on a “the” truth. That would be saying, “There is only one valid viewpoint and (surprise!) I happen to have it.”

Nevertheless, we predict that is exactly what will happen. When it does, smile and go your own way, unconvinced that you need to give up your point of view just because someone else is sure.

Yet this doesn’t quite serve. One of those competing viewpoints sees us as victims of non-3D interference, perhaps malign.

You provide a teaching moment, for although you agree with us, you do not act as you believe. Or, let’s say, you don’t see things the way you think you do. Or (a third way to describe the same situation), some of your Strands see it one way and others see it other ways, and you do not have a permanent deck officer in charge of navigation.

I can see what you’re driving at, but I don’t quite see the way out of the dilemma.

It is one thing to recognize a point of view, a very different thing to agree with it. Understanding is vital to your growth, but agreement with everything you understand is a recipe for futility and confusion; to identify with all values would be to be unable to live one set of values.

I might argue, what if my value is to understand them all?

Does that become a value saying sympathize with them all? Exemplify them all? You understand cruelty and prejudice and intolerance: Do you wish to live them?

I see your point.

It is an important point. The proper polarity is not between ecumenical understanding and fanaticism, but between such understanding and an inability or unwillingness to understand. But what you act, what you live, is what you make yourself as you go.

And we can’t make ourselves everything.

You couldn’t if you wanted to, and in fact you can’t even want to. It seems like it, perhaps, in theory, but when you get down to it, in practice it means doing exactly what you hate, and just as thoroughly as doing what you love. Why would you want to do that?

All the actors in the improv represent a point of view, and they don’t go swapping roles.

They do if they want to – but how can they be everything at once?

They can’t. all right, I’d say you answered me. We’ll see what our friends say.

You did not state explicitly the difference you saw.

Didn’t I? Perhaps not. It was that if we are here in 3D to choose, we have to be allowed to make blunders and to commit crimes – with whatever ugly results. That means that the world without war or cruelty or suffering could come only if we all grow up, or if the non-3D were to continually restrict our freedom to choose. The freedom has ugly 3D results, but the non-3D nanny-state would leave us perpetually children. That, I think, is “Why God lets these things happen.”

And you may call this theme “A question of focus,” perhaps.

Perhaps. Our thanks as always.

 

Madoff and me

Saturday, January 7, 2023

So tell me, what is the bottom line for a society in which a fraud of the magnitude of Madoff’s can go unpunished, uninvestigated, unprosecuted, for decades as it continues to build? It seems too enormous to have been the result of lack of oversight. It is “too big to fail” in another arena.

Tell me, guys, what is the real story? Am I right, for instance, to assume that people at the top of the regulatory agencies must have been being paid off, or bought off, or implicated somehow? Could they really have acted so idiotically as to have not investigated things that would have been so easy to investigate? The fact for instance that there was no record of counterpart trades? What would it have taken, a phone call? A written request? They knew the independent agency that exists for just the purpose of recording such trades. One phone call requesting verification. Never made. It could have bene done pro forma, perfunctorily, even while totally disbelieving the allegations, and it would instantly have blown up the whole Potemkin Village. Can there be any innocent explanation why such a call was never made?

This excites you emotionally, why?

Because it reeks of conspiracy that cuts off a scapegoat to prevent investigation higher up. Madoff is assumed to be the head of the scheme. He is assumed to be acting alone as he claimed, with only relatively minor assistance from the 17^th floor. Frank DiPasquale, yes, the two computer programmers who each got two and a half years, yes, a couple of secretaries, more or less. But nobody among the regulators, nobody among the banks. Is there any reason to assume that they were innocent? Case in point, every bank transaction over $10,000 is supposedly looked at. Madoff shuttled not millions but billions overseas in both directions, continually. Never looked at. Why not?

We repeat, why do you care?

Okay, I see your point. Why this particular smoking gun when society is rife with them? Maybe just because I put my attention to it via the Netflix documentary, and am educated enough in history to put it into context. Richard Whitney, for instance. [Whitney was president of the New York Stock Exchange, 1930 to 1935, later convicted of embezzlement and imprisoned.]

No, why does it disturb you?

Perhaps I’m not understanding your question.

You began your life naïve about people and trusting in institutions, but you learned better, long ago. What is essentially different between Madoff and, say, the people behind the oil depletion allowance?

You’re saying, I think, our society is rotten top to bottom institutionally, so why is this any different. Maybe merely because I got my nose shoved into it.

Here insert a tired sigh. Look, you are spending your days going back through four years’ worth of material between us, centering on the question of how to have “life more abundantly.” What does that have to do with whatever rottenness can be found in your contemporary society?

Good and evil? I’m seeing things through the filter provided from eating the fruit of the Tree of Perceiving Things as Good and Evil? Is that it?

You tell us. You’re the one who is upset.

I don’t think that answers it.

Nor do we. So, dig.

Partly, I suppose, I always want to know, and I can see we’re never going to get the truth. Maybe in 50 years, if then. Certainly not in time to discommode the guilty.

And?

There is indignation. I hate seeing crookedness succeed, and at such a scale, and at such an unpunishable altitude in society.

And?

And why should it be so obvious to me and not to the people at the top? Either I’m wrong or they are stupid or – far more likely – complicity is so extensive, so overarching, that even a crook of Madoff’s magnitude is relatively a minor player. I can’t remember the proper name of the bank, nor what they did, but there was this major institution some years ago that was so complicit in so many crimes that they said its initials stood for the Bank of Crooks and Criminals. [Luxembourg-based Bank of Credit and Commerce International.] That’s what I’m smelling here.

We aren’t disputing any of this. What does it have to do with one’s pursuing life more abundantly? Did Jesus advise setting up an investigative agency within the Roman Empire? Did Gautama say that individual enlightenment would be facilitated by a just society? Did anyone ever find himself unable to follow the Noble Eightfold Path because he was surrounded by corruption?

I concede all that. I didn’t intend to abandon my work merely because I watched a Netflix series, any more than if I were to subscribe to a newspaper. But I don’t see that I need to ignore –. Ah, here’s an example. I am rereading Alice Turlock’s biography of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. I have always immersed myself in history, and I have no sense that any of it was wasted effort. How is this different?

You are perhaps misinterpreting our question. We ask, how does this affect you, and you take it as a rhetorical question. But it is a straightforward query. How? Why? Do a little digging, find a buried treasure.

Hmm, I see your point. It is easy to get involved in valid questions that are nevertheless tangential to your proper work.

Isn’t that one of the points you intend to make in your final novel, if you ever write it?

Is it? I hadn’t thought of it that way, but I suppose so. Not the main point.

Consider your friends who immerse themselves in politics, or international affairs, or “the new” in general. What is your habitual response?

Mostly I silently wonder why they bother. Or, no, not that, because after all I have been there at different times in my so-called career. More like, “Don’t get caught up in one viewpoint.” And I guess you’re saying that’s why I’m doing here.

We didn’t say it. Do you say it?

Well, I don’t know. I don’t see what’s different conceptually between studying (again!) Civil War history now more than 150 years old, and looking at a situation still historical, even if only over the past few decades. I don’t see why either study should be necessarily a distraction from the main event. I’ve never lost sight of the fact that, though our 3D life is not quite what it appears to be, still it is what we are living, it is what we are immersed in.

It is not the subject of study that is at issue; it is, do you lose yourself in it, and if so, positively or negatively?

I think you mean, positively as in “the thing that causes you to lose t rack of time,” Joseph Campbell’s measure of following your bliss, negatively as in “forgetting to hold your center,” letting a different “I” captain the ship, unnoticed.

Yes. And the answer is?

I’d say absorption in the Madoff affair could lead in either direction. One could theoretically go down the rabbit hole, chasing clues to a conspiracy so huge that no individual could ever unearth it. Or, one could use it to remind oneself that it is as Hornblower said to his wife: “Very few things re right, my dear.”

Your choice, always. And, after all, it is a valid choice. Nobody says there is no place in the world for Don Quixote’s quests. Somebody has to tilt against windmills, or the idea wouldn’t be in the mind of mankind. But that doesn’t mean it is your job. Only you can decide that.

I’m a little at sea as to the meaning of this little conversation.

Doesn’t it bridge your own experience and that of your news-obsessed friends?

Ah, I see your point. We all do it, only on different topics, at different times.

If there’s one thing at the heart of all our conversations with you, it is be aware of what you do and why you do it. That amounts to learning who and what you are.

Well, you have our thanks, as always. What shall we call this?

“Life more abundantly v. the news,” perhaps.

Very funny. Maybe, “Remembering our center”?

That might do. You’ll think of something as you transcribe.

Till next time, then.

 

Thursday, December 3, 2020

Louise Calio emailed me a while ago, asking if Jane Parenteau’s question had ever been addressed. Jane had asked if we in 3D affected the vast impersonal forces in any way beyond how we expressed them in our lives. “In other words, you could say they hone us. Do we hone them? Or is it just about honing us?” I might as well start by saying, “Beats me. If we do, I don’t know how. If we don’t, I don’t know why not.” So what say you, friends?

Welcome back. And don’t go feeling guilty or even puzzled by the hiatus. [Since I had communicated with them last.] Not everything that expresses in 3D life results from 3D decisions or lack of decision, from 3D action or inaction. And this is part of our response to the question you are finally able to ask us to address. You will remember,

• All is one;
• As above, so below; and
• Each of you in 3D is a unique window serving as conduit of Spirit which exists ell above 3D influence or manipulation.

Holding in mind these givens, look again at the question. What’s the answer?

I don’t know. Is it “Which you?”

That’s part of it, yes. Can you express it a little more fully?

I guess in this context the question is almost meaningless, in that it assumes one definition and forgets the other. The question sort of asks if we in our 3D lives affect the vast impersonal forces. If we were separate from the non-3D, and the larger beings from whom we are created as quasi-separate beings, and all the rest of us via the network of interrelations in 3D and non-3D, the answer would probably be, “No, of course we don’t.” But we are not separate. Our 3D decisions help shape our larger being, because they shape us (who are a part of that larger being) via third-tier consequences. I don’t know if that changes the answer to a yes, but clearly it affects the question.

Yes it does. Here’s an analogy to consider. If a life-experience of some kind changes someone, does it change that persona’s children by how it changes the person? Dos it change its friends, associates, enemies, neighbors, parents even?

I don’t see that the question can be answered yes or no. It’s a maybe.

Of course it is. Being changed, someone may or may not change those around it. If so, then yes. If no, then no. If sometimes, or potentially, or slightly or greatly, then that. But you can’t say “yes” or “no” per se.

But it seems to me that in saying maybe, we are implicitly saying “Yes” to at least one sense of Jane’s question. That is, potentially we can affect the vast impersonal forces.

No, that isn’t a valid understanding. We have yet to make it clear. Not even indirectly will you affect those forces. You may affect how they are experienced – that is, how they manifest. But this is not what you are thinking.

I’m not really thinking anything very clearly. But I was thinking we had gotten somewhere for a moment.

We did, only you went a step too far, too soon. Recalibrate.

Okay.

Let’s return to “you can’t say yes or no per se,” drawing a different set of conclusions. Rather than thinking this demonstrates something directly, let’s look at the nature of things. Does your life change the world? Does it change reality? Does it weigh in the scales in any meaningful way?

Surely you can see that the answer is, “It depends upon the scale you examine the subject in.”

• Day to day among your family and friends.
• Long-term among them.
• Day to day in your world at large, and
• long-term among them.

This is four states right there, at only the most superficial examination of the situation. It doesn’t even begin to address your inner world and its consequences. It doesn’t consider you as part of a network of lives any of which may be affected.

It’s the old “focusing the microscope/telescope” analogy. What you see depends on what your focal length allows you to see. There isn’t any one answer to all situations, only a “one answer” to a specific way of looking at things.

You’re saying (I think) that our question is ether too broad or too narrow to answer.

We’re saying this is the answer: that it depends on your meaning, which as usual depends on a lot of unconscious or semi-conscious assumptions.

I get that it answers part of Jane’s question. It says, it depends on which “you” we’re thinking of. But doesn’t that still support the conclusion I jumped to earlier, that potentially we can affect the forces?

Our qualification was not that you could or couldn’t sometimes affect the world around you even at a higher level: It was that you cannot affect the motivating forces themselves. It’s strictly a matter of disproportion. An atom of seawater, no matter what it does or what happens to it, cannot expect to affect the tides.

Ah! Got it. We don’t affect Spirit, any more than the atom affects the tides. The drop of seawater is part of the sea; it is affected by the tides and cannot not be, but its resistance or compliance (assuming it were capable of such) cannot affect the tide nor the moon that draws it..

Exactly. And if this is not clear, or spurs additional questions, you know where to find us.