Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

Tuesday, November 8, 2022

4:05 a.m. Guys, I feel like we still haven’t gotten to the nub of our question about artists and the world. But I don’t know how to rephrase it for greater clarity. Let’s try this: I spend so much time reading stories of other lives: Where is my life? That isn’t a very clear question, but it is the best I can do. Presence, receptivity, clarity.

You aren’t seeing it right.

“Right”? There’s a “right,” now?

Let’s put it this way: If you want to get to Omaha, say, and you are on the road, any turn you make will bring you closer to it or farther from it, so will be right or wrong relative to your position and goal.

Okay, I see that. A right turn at a given place, or a left turn, or continuing straight ahead, can only be right or wrong relative to a desired end-point.

Of course. It is simple – and easily overlooked. Everything is situational. That’s what choice involves, that’s what choice is, really, a decision within context. Many a mistaken turn is taken because the chooser doesn’t put the choice within context. Not everybody wants to go to Omaha; those who do, don’t necessarily always want to go to Omaha. Those who do don’t always want to go there directly; perhaps they need to stop off in Cleveland on their way. So, it’s easy to make rules too strict for the situation. (“Always turn here, or you can’t get to Omaha,” or, even worse, “The entire Interstate Highway system was designed only to get people to Omaha, and any other location is illegitimate.”)

You see our point. It is one thing to say, “helpful in the circumstances,” or not. It is something else to say, “always helpful,” or not. And it is easy to confuse “helpful or not” with “right or wrong morally.”

So, we will rephrase. In thinking that continually reading of the lives of real or imagined others is in opposition to your really living, you are casting your life in an erroneous light. Better?

Clearer in context, anyway.

Everybody’s life is choice within context. Everybody is one part of a vast whole. Everybody is also part of a dream spun by mind-stuff. Now that you have come to understand these things, you will have to remember them, if things are going to continue opening up. We have provided you a more accurate context; employ the concepts that will allow you to build from it. So now:

• How could you rate lives in order of importance? You couldn’t.
• How in order of relevance, or potential? You’d never have the data.
• How could you weigh what input is helpful, or even necessary, and what isn’t?
• What would “wasting time” mean?

Choice is always within context. Your 3D life is always within context. One of the things that keeps it interesting is, “You never have all the facts.” You never know all the context. You never get a list of all the unfinished business. Do you imagine that life would be better if you had such a list? Easier? More productive? Superficial thought might lead you to say, “Of course it would,” but a few moments more, and maybe not. It’s like the question, “Would you like to know ahead of time when and how you are going to die? Or even, to broaden it out without expanding the sense of dread that may come with the question of death, “Would you like to know ahead of time everything that is going to happen to you?”

Hardly. It would make living so tedious. Plus I imagine you’d feel helpless, being carried from one preordained event to the next, with nothing you can do about it.

Well, the alternative is to be always flailing around in the dark, with or without flashes of insight; or else it is proceeding not in the dark, but, let’s say, in a fog, doing the best you can, proceeding always on inadequate information. In such case, you steer by instinct and you use such navigational aids as may be available; you hone your skill and you do your best, and sometimes it’s smooth sailing even without clear views, and sometimes it’s continual knuckle-biting anxiety perhaps punctuated by terror or panic.

I am reminded of one of Dion Fortune’s characters (Wilfred) who describes two forms of asthma that he experiences, and says he doesn’t know which one he prefers, “The one I don’t have at the moment, probably.” When we’re in the dark, we wish we could see. When everything is too plain, we wish we had a sense of mystery.

More or less, yes. The grass is always greener elsewhere.

So, now, you were considering your own life in the context of all lives, and you just illustrated an emotional position by means of a fictional character. Can you say that reading Dion Fortune’s novels impoverished your life? Or even left it as it was?

Certainly not, and I see your point. Input is input. But still, I don’t think that fully answers the underlying point.

Oh, you think second-hand experience is inferior to first-hand experience. We’ll be glad to agree, if you can explain to us what is first-hand and what is second-hand.

Surely it is the difference between my own experience and what I have read of other people’s real or imagined experience.

That distinction vanishes, if you touch the adjustment knob of your telescope/microscope. Remember that you are mind-stuff participating in a dream, connected to everything else in the dream, employing a somewhat-real context to focus your decisions as to what you wish to be, to stand as representative of, to uphold, to combat.

Put it another way. Say you are in training to be a soldier or an EMT or to learn any skillset you care to postulate. Your training will be largely in how to react to situations you will be imagining in training. Soldiers-to-be are not sent out immediately against enemy forces. First comes toughening up, then acquisition of skills, then live-fire exercises, etc. And similarly for any acquired skillset: Before you can actually do it, you are in one way or another pretending to do it. That is, you are practicing.

Now, the analogy isn’t as helpful as it might be, because it implies that your life is only pretend until you can get to the real thing. That is not the point we wished to make. The point is that what is imagined is not much different from what is experienced, in a way. Naturally there is all the difference in the world between war and training, or between fighting fires, or saving lives, or anything, and training. But in terms of learning, there is less than one might think.

It seems to me you are confusing things a little. You mean to say, I think, that input is input, and the processing is much the same.

It is the kind of thing that is not easily said in such a way as not to be misunderstood. To some it will seem as if we are defining away life. To others it may seem so painfully obvious as not to be worth the words spent on it.

Well, try one more time, maybe.

Life needs every kind of thing it includes – or it wouldn’t include it! Reality has no spare parts. So if some people spend their lives in ceaseless activity among things (that is, working in one way or another with inanimate objects like airplanes or tractors or power saws) and others spend their lives associating (that is, coordinating people’s activity, teaching, say, or selling insurance, or directing traffic) and others spend their lives with animals, or others spend theirs dreaming – which kind of life is a mistake? Which is obviously useless? Which is wasted?

None of them, of course.

So what is left of your question?

Point taken. Today’s theme?

“Choice,” perhaps.

Or perhaps, “No spare parts.” Very well, our thanks as always.

 

I hope I’m equal to what I’m sensing you want to give us this morning. A series of dreams in the night, and they had the same trend: something about our road forward, though I don’t remember most of them. Can we skip recording the dreams and just go to the point?

If you will set your slide-switches

Okay. Focus. Receptivity. Clarity. Presence. I see a difference when I say them distinctly and slowly, rather than rattling them off.

It is merely a matter of attention. Anything you do with presence is going to have an enhanced effect on you.

You were given dreams. (Or, we could say you were in the vicinity of factors that  produced dreams. It works either way. And you could conclude either that the dreams are leading you, or that they are the result of where you are. The difference in concept is perhaps of interest, but not at this time.) The point here is that indeed something is happening in your vicinity.

I presume that “your” refers to us, not only to me. That is, many people, maybe even all people.

All, only of course to different extents. It must be all, obviously, if we are all one thing. It must be to different extents, obviously, if each individual-community has its own situation, its own past, its own part of the overall equation to work out.

Everybody works out his own salvation, I think the Buddhists put it.

In practice, isn’t this obviously so?

• You are part of one thing; you are a part of one thing.
• You are individuals who are also communities. Everything in your 3D and your non-3D environments should tell you so.
• You are not everything, nor are you nothing.
• You cannot live in isolation and you cannot live in denial of your individuality. Even on the animal level, you are responsible for maintaining your existence, and even on an animal level you require others for you to be able to do so.

Yesterday I became aware of a disturbing interpretation that is being put on your words as penned by my hand. It makes me shiver, in a way.

There is nothing to be done to prevent misinterpretation but to be as clear as we can be, and as clear as you can translate us. When we told you many years ago that people who misled others are responsible for what those others do, we were referring to those who deliberately mislead. There is all the difference in the world between setting forth an honest message with honest intent, and lying. Lying comes in many forms, including pretending to know when you don’t know, but is always is based in a lack of integrity; that is, in a difference between what one is and what one pretends to be.

Aren’t we all guilty of that?

No, you are not all guilty of not being what you pretend to be. But we can see why it looks like that, and it is well worth going into.

• You are a bundle of threads, right?
• Your job in 3D life is to continually choose among them, which to manifest and which to discourage, right?
• And you as an individual and as a community are part of the one thing that comprises us all, right?

What part of the human mind can be alien to you? You may wish you were all good. You may strive to be all good. You may consistently make choices that have as their third-tier effect to move you consistently toward goodness, or toward greater goodness. But you will do this in the context of a bundle of threads that contain the entire human spectrum. No one is only good threads or only bad threads. How could they be, and still be human? (And bear in mind, the division into “good” and “bad,” though necessary for the analysis, is only one way of seeing things, though a very persuasive one.)

If your chosen values include certain characteristics, they are perforce going to reject, if only by default, the opposites of these characteristics. If honesty, perhaps dishonesty, or perhaps subtlety, or perhaps tact, or perhaps awareness of nuance. What we are meaning here is that the qualities are not the binary choice they may at first appear to be. What the opposite of a given quality is, will depend upon the angle from which the quality is lived.

But let’s keep it simple. Suppose your value-system rejects cruelty. That still isn’t as clear-cut as it appears, because in such matters what is important is not the action but the intent behind the action. Is a surgeon cruel when s/he cuts into living tissue? The difference between surgery and torture is not inherent in what is done to the body, but in the intent. Surely that is obvious once stated.

Obvious, but of course difficult of application in 3D. We can judge our own intent (to the extent of our self-knowledge), but not that of others, not very well.

True, but let’s stay within the compass of the individual. You choose – and not just once, but on a continuing basis – to eschew cruelty. This is a pole-star of your morality. Nonetheless there will be within you every impulse, or let’s say the source of every impulse, that would lead anyone to the cruelest acts. It is not that you do not include in your makeup such characteristics, it is that you choose not to manifest them. You see the point here? Restate it for us.

Well, I get that you are saying, “Nothing human is alien to me,” meaning that I myself include within myself everything, good, bad, and indifferent. It’s all in my palette, and what I paint depends upon which colors I choose. It isn’t like my palette (or anyone’s) consists only of bright colors.

Now this has been merely to show the difference between pretense and integrity. One might pretend or even believe that this or that characteristic was not in one’s makeup, but this would be at best sloppy observation, and at worst hypocrisy. (Parenthetically, this goes for good qualities, as well. It is just as easy for you to not give yourselves credit for certain virtues as to deny yourselves certain vices. You are none of you as good or as bad as you may think. How could you be? You are part of one thing, as we keep pointing out.)

So, integrity does not (because it can not) mean that one is devoid of certain traits. It means that you don’t encourage internally what you discourage openly. Integrity has less to do with “image” or with one’s relations to one’s followers than it does with one’s relations with one’s self.

That won’t be immediately obvious, I think.

We don’t quite see why not. Your 3D life is choosing among qualities. By implication that means there must be alternatives to choose from. All the alternatives cannot be equally desirable, or what are you accomplishing by choosing? So if integrity meant, being free of certain characteristics, it wouldn’t refer to choice but to happy circumstance. And if it referred to one’s dealings with others rather than one’s dealings with oneself, that would be placing social relations above individual self-creation. It would pretend that influencing others could be of greater importance than the one job you are there to do.

I think the difficulty is that when we hear the word “integrity” we think of it as how it expresses in life, which is between people.

But that is not how it expresses. That is a mere side-effect. The real danger of lack of integrity is that it creates a civil war within the individual, pulling both sides of a  tug-of-war.

I’ve never seen it put that way.

If you notice, everything Jesus said about how to deal with your fellows actually stems in what those dealings do to you.

Can’t say I did notice.

Well, look, and think about it. You aren’t in 3D to reform the world or to reshape each other or to do anything that is primarily 3D-oriented. You are there to use 3D conditions to do what can be done only in such conditions. If in the process you help each other, that’s well and good, but we have said more than once, it is easier to want to help than to know how to help. All you can really know is your intent, and even to know that much can be an accomplishment.

We’ve gone a little over; I hope we got across what you wanted to get across.

It’s all seamless. Everything connects. Don’t worry about it.

 

Sunday, November 6, 2022

4:15 a.m. Perhaps a little more abut the lives of the artists who see through the scrim of 3D life, yet work hard through it? As opposed to those who take the reality of the world for granted? Presence, receptivity, clarity.

It is a great mistake people make, when they view other ways of life with contempt. Misunderstandings are inevitable, but charity toward the uncomprehended is a better attitude than contempt. You are all in it together; none of you is markedly better than the rest of you, appearances to the contrary. None of your attitudes or your ways of understanding or your conclusions or your efforts or lack of efforts is “right” and others “wrong.” So, in considering this topic, bear it in mind: The strange (to you) is not therefore the “odd” or “eccentric” or “perverse.” Really, you must avoid judgment in the sense of condemnation, though not in the sense of discernment.

The reason we begin with this elementary reminder is because there is nothing more common than people unconsciously assuming that theirs is the obviously correct way to see life, and therefore all others are less correct, ranging from the self-indulgently wrong to the merely misdirected. We cannot emphasize too strongly how crippling to understanding it is, contempt.

All right.

One might ask, What good does it do life, to have 3D souls living while not believing in what they are living? Why is it necessary, or even helpful at all, that some experience life as a treadmill, and others that –

I get the idea.

You should. And there are those who seem contemned to toil without belief, as others toil without reward.

I am reminded of Vachel Lindsay’s poem “The Leaden-eyed,” which went something like this:

Not that they toil, but toil so dreamlessly.

Not that they sow, but that they seldom reap.

Not that they serve, but have no gods to serve.

Not that they die, but that they die like sheep.*

I have always felt the pity of it.

We can expand the inquiry to include that aspect, as well, the dulled, beaten-down endurance that in some respects is the opposite of the poet’s, and in some respects complements it.

Don’t, if it will divert from the thing you originally set out to discuss. Do, if it will not.

Well, consider the range involved. Those who see beyond appearances on one end of the scale, those who see only appearances (and not even meanings within appearances), at the other. Can you see that these help illumine the nature and fate of all, including the great majority who live within the limit of these extremes?

Once again, we remind you that reality is not “things in space” but mind-stuff spinning dreams in the guise of solidity. If you do not hold this underlying reality in mind, you will become misled at some pint by apparent contradictions and constraints and impossibilities. Plato knew things Aristotle never made sense of.

Only, we can’t contemn Aristotle either, according to you.

We smile. Well, you’re listening. But, humor us: Follow our argument assuming that Platonic Substances are realer than atoms.

Go on, then. I do, of course.

If you remember that you are all souls constructed of non-physical components, living connected (consciously or otherwise) to the non-3D at every moment, and if you remember that every “individual” life is not individual at all, but communal in two senses (subassemblies, so to speak, and Strands), where is the excuse for considering some people to be morons and others geniuses, some fully alive and others barely human? Yet this is exactly what you seem to see.

It is. The paradox of it never struck me till you just pointed it out. It is as if we are seeing gradations of the fundamental materials. Yet, the differences are real, we see them every day.

It is another variation on the theme. Differences among people are only somewhat real.

That’s really striking. It’s humbling, in a way, realizing that I have been taking for granted that some are more worthy than others, because that’s how it looks.

Did Jesus or the Buddha ever give you an excuse to think that some are more worthy than others?

That’s what’s humiliating, to see that I haven’t been treating that as a fact.

Your actions have perhaps been better than your assumptions, but yes, this is a very common failing, thinking that whatever you are is the norm, and variations are a falling-off from that perfection, or perhaps a not-yet-attained improvement. But life is not an assembly line, and it does not employ nor require quality-control mechanisms. All life is good. All manifestations are good. Everything is as somewhat-real as everything else, and has its purpose in the dream, or could not manifest.

I remember smiling years ago, when I was wondering if a non-3D intelligence would find it hard to live a life in which the 3D had Downe’s Syndrome or was retarded, and you said, “It’s not that different.” I took that to be a subtle dig at our assumptions of superiority, as well as a straight statement of fact.

Expand it now. Just as you are all sinners and all God’s children, or all ailing and all in perfect health, or all fragmentary and all complete and whole and perfect, so you are all made of the same cloth, so to speak. You aren’t divided into premium and generic. Regardless of your opinions and preferences, you are all manifestations of the same processes within the same rough parameters. There isn’t any excuse for self-satisfaction nor for abasement. You are all – we are all – part of the same all-that-is, we remind you. (The more you hold in mind assumptions and rules of thumb such as “As Above, So Below,” the easier it becomes to see connections usually unnoticed, and draw conclusions from them.)

But the appearances are quite convincing. Who would equate Himmler and Einstein? Stalin and Lincoln? Drunkard and mystic? Criminal thugs and EMTs?

Those are very convincing differences. Nobody can say that 3D Theater does things by halves.

All right, I see that. Still, it is just those appearances that convince us.

Would we need to bother to warn you against appearances that were too flimsy to convince?

Point. To return to the question of artists living while seeing through life –.

That is one stance, as activism is another. Neither is truer, neither is absolutely more useful or desirable. Mostly the difference is in how things look when considered only within a 3D context. That’s where tragedy is contained; that’s where absolute judgments are most easily rendered. You may consider the 3D context as a cutting-off of extremes, so that one’s consideration ceases at either end of the scale, and only the theater stage remains within view. There really isn’t a need to say more; it’s all contained in this paragraph. However, if people require more, let them ask a question and we will attempt to respond to it.

Today’s theme?

“Deceptive differences,” perhaps.

Our thanks as always.

—–

* Not quite. “Starve,” not “toil.” The full poem:

Let not young souls be smothered out before
They do quaint deeds and fully flaunt their pride.
It is the world’s one crime its babes grow dull,
Its poor are ox-like, limp and leaden-eyed.
Not that they starve; but starve so dreamlessly,
Not that they sow, but that they seldom reap,
Not that they serve, but have no gods to serve,
Not that they die, but that they die like sheep.

 

Saturday, November 5, 2022

4:10 a.m. I see that your point yesterday is not quite clear. As Jane Coleman said in an email, the penny still haven’t dropped. Care to take another crack at it?

Focus, then.

Yes. Presence, receptivity, clarity.

On Friday, we in effect looked at why people have such different views of what is real and important. But look back to Thursday’s discussion, which is what Friday’s was taking off from. This was all about the reality of suffering. We know that wasn’t what it was about ostensibly, but it really centered on that. Your suffering, and that of anyone who ever lost someone they loved deeply, personally known to them or not. The suffering of people in general over one event, or over a prolonged process, or over enduring conditions.

That is, for example, a one-time tragedy, or a drawn-out tragedy like a senseless war, or an on-going tragedy like people living blighted lives.

Yes. That is really what is at stake when people consider the reality or otherwise of 3D appearances. Nobody cares whether life’s joys are real, they take them as given. But life’s ills give people something they have to react to, one way or another. You may take good for granted, but you have to take some stance on evil. It is real or not, and if evil is real or not, the question necessarily broadens to, Is life itself real or not. So that’s what we began to look at, starting with, Why is there no unanimity of opinion?

All right, I see that.

There is unanimity of opinion about so little in life! One might say, without exaggeration, that there is none, about anything, because even on the things about which there is widest agreement, still there will be those who dissent. You may disregard that dissent; you can’t wish it away with a wave of your hand.

Thus anything we say will meet dissent. Only those people whose psychological makeup leads them to find comfort in numbers will say to themselves, “X number of other people I respect also believe this; that’s pretty good evidence that it is true.” And even they will have to concede, if pressed, that this is illogical as demonstration of truth, for obviously most people do not believe along with them.

After all, the Flat Earth Society members – at least, many of them – believe sincerely, and perhaps strongly, that established scientific opinion is wrong; that physical evidence is misleading; that most people are acting like sheep in trusting to scientific opinion without independently examining the evidence. Sincerity, individuality, conviction: yet they are wrong, and mainstream opinion is right.

Yet mainstream scientific opinion is wrong, on so many issues. Being wrong is a necessary step in the process of learning what is truer than one had seen. And – crucially – “progress” is not a one-way street. Knowledge does not win victories over ignorance every time. Ground once won may be lost again. And, as we have told you many times, sometimes looking at things from a new starting point will require that some old truths now be recognized to be not as true as they appeared, and some old superstitions may be required to be accepted as truer than they seemed, even if for different reasons than the ones that had led some to uphold them.

Astrology. The mantic arts in general.

Yes. Anything that saw invisible connections that a materialist view could not concede. And similarly chance, coincidence, randomness, disconnection in general: Now they may be seen as more superstition than fact. Yet as we tried to tell you earlier, truth depends more on the context and vector than on its independent existence. It is a process, a reducing valve, not a position to be held as permanent standing ground.

So, someone like Bobby Kennedy, passionately engaged in life, taking it for real, cannot be said to be mistaken. Dealing with the 3D world on its own terms, certainly he affected the shared subjectivity and was affected by it. But that doesn’t mean that’s all there is to be said on the subject. The world remains only somewhat real, but in its own terms, reality is reality. We don’t know how to say it any plainer.

Let me try, then, for I think I get where you are going with this.

Go ahead. Sometimes 3D focuses the awareness that non-3D feels and even knows but cannot easily express. That’s the advantage of connection, of course.

Couldn’t we just say that the reason 3D exists is to focus efforts on the shared subjectivity’s unfinished business, and in order for people to do so, they have to take it seriously? And couldn’t we say that there is also a valid place for those who see through appearances? Both positions, not only one, being necessary?

You touch on a point we have thought we have made, but perhaps not explicitly: The unfinished business of the shared subjectivity is generated not only by 3D events but by things before and beyond 3D. You deal with the results of the vast impersonal forces being filtered into and through 3D conditions.

You’re saying, in effect, “It isn’t all your own fault if the world is such a mess; if it is  filled with suffering.

Yes, in effect. But that does not mean, “The non-3D is deliberately torturing you, or even is allowing you to suffer.” For one thing, that view would illegitimately separate non-3D and 3D whereas in fact, as we have been repeating, the two conditions are not separate but are ends of a polarity, seeming more separate than they are because words emphasize separation. It would be closer to the truth to say that the 3D is where reality helps deal with itself.

That doesn’t cut it, but I felt myself freeze up, trying to phrase it.

The ultimate causes of suffering in 3D may stem from other than 3D, but it will be difficult to explore the subject in the face of the way words distort understanding by chopping up unities and lending reality to what are really only concepts.

It comes to me that we will need an image, if we are to get the gestalt of it rather than merely the disassembled pieces.

Probably. Can you furnish one?

Not a very good one, perhaps, but let’s try this. If one is standing in a river, the water comes flowing from some source, and it continues beyond where one stands, going on toward its destination. In a sense we could think of the 3D world as our spot on the river, with the conditions of our life coming to us from elsewhere, and interacting with – affecting – us, and then moving onwards out of sight. Not a perfect image, but perhaps it will do.

Actually it will do nicely, provided one does not unconsciously confuse the image with another process that may seem the same, the passage of time.

Yes, I see that. We do sometimes talk of the river of time.

Perhaps you could think of the 3D world as an airplane, flying through conditions not of its making (except insofar as its choice of direction might be considered to be part of the conditions it encounters). Also not a perfect image, but the two together may help convey the idea.

In either image, you can see that it would be an error to take personally the fact that life entails suffering. It isn’t that somebody wants the suffering to be there (though, as we have said, it is so useful to you). It isn’t as if better management or better design would have obviated the necessity. And it isn’t as if the suffering is meaningless or futile, just because it appears so. But, to grasp this, you need to be able to see that, as we have said, life is only somewhat real. Take 3D life as being nothing more than it appears to be, and you will conclude that it is a terrible mistake, or is the product of someone’s malice, or is a botched process.

I suppose one would conclude that about an internal combustion engine, if one only looked at the explosions and never at the purpose.

Also a fair image.

Today’s theme?

“Invisible connections.”

Yes, I think so too. Thanks as always.

 

Friday, November 4, 2022

6 a.m. Yesterday you said that politicians, for instance, take the reality of the world for granted, “for who would put all that effort into something that was clearly illusory?” and then, immediately, you added, “But that isn’t the end of the story, for artists work hard too, even if they see through the scrim.” I gather that this is our jumping-off place for today. Presence, receptivity, clarity. All yours, guys.

We also said, “Life is meant to be lived.” That is as universal a statement as can be made, but as usual, people will hear different things in it, because the statement will mix with what received it. Nobody ever hears neutrally; that isn’t what soul-creation, or call it soul-shaping, is about. Naturally your individual subjectivity is going to flavor, or color, what you hear us saying. It flavors every other input you process, why should this be different? And that’s our point above, as well.

I think you’re saying, all the ways people approach life, or live life, or even just think about life, stem from who and what they are, quite as much as from what the deed or word or thought is, and that it’s natural and therefore is fine.

Yes, and even that statement will be received differently by different people. It isn’t a matter of some people being perverse or ignorant. If you will remember our analogy of 3D life as a processing machine, transforming what the vast impersonal forces of life present into some form of output affected by the 3D individual’s choices, you may be able to grasp (emotionally) that such differences in perception and reasoning and concluding are not only natural but are desirable.

That’s a different way to see it. I guess we – or anyway, I, to claim ownership of my own tendencies – assumed that there is truth and there is error, and sincere effort allows us to distinguish between them. If there is not, where in the world are we?

The thing that may be hard to grasp is that there is indeed a truth and an error – you are not condemned to live in a wilderness of mirrors – for you. Each person has a pole-star, and so long as you follow that pole-star, you will find your way. But your pole-star is not the same as any other person’s.

Hard to see how that can be, in practice. We all live among the same shared subjectivity, though we experience different parts of it.

Isn’t that what we just said?

Hmm. In effect, we each live in a different world.

And, in effect, any similarity between the world you experience and the world anyone else experiences may be merely –

Not the way to go about it. Bullets, perhaps, let’s see.

• You are each individual in effect, even though you are composed of communities via Strands.
• Being individual, you are to greater or lesser degree different from everybody else. You are each a unique unrepeatable combination of Strands, adding up to something none other can equal.
• Everyone alive at a given time partakes in the same shared subjectivity, “the world” in all its physical and psychic components. But no two people take exactly the same things from the pile.
• Each of you processes as you live. That’s what you do. Life comes at you moment by moment, and you choose, and choose, and choose, sometimes actively, more often by default (i.e. in conformance with past choices).
• You could think of your lives as continually shifting alliances, as the tides of life bring you together with this one and drift you apart from that one. No two people necessarily share the same pattern of relationship, but relationship is necessarily a shifting reality.
• Thus, you each see the world as a different reality. To some, it is what it appears, to others, it is this or that abstraction. Each of you think “This is how it really is, regardless of people’s theories,” but of course, “how it really is” is the one thing no one knows, because life is so much bigger than any fragment of life.
• But given that you see life differently, it is not avoidable that you react to life differently, and so any way of reacting to life is valid. How could it not be? Despair, nihilism, cynicism, predation, whatever, may be repugnant to your personal values, but how could they exist if life found them not valid?
• So where is the possibility of cooperation, affection, love, in a world of mutual incomprehension? You know the answer.

I do. It is in our non-3D connection that we connect, even if we attribute the connection to 3D factors like personal chemistry, or “like minds,” or shared opinions or tastes.

As we said: You know. Communication of ideas, of values, of emotion, is extremely difficult – really, literally, impossible – in strictly 3D terms. There is no medium of transmission. It is only via non-3D that you even comprehend each other, let alone influence each other.

That’s very emotionally persuasive, though I need to think about it.

In 3D terms, you are all autistic, more or less unable to sense or experience others except as background noise, or, let’s say, as part of an undifferentiated shared subjectivity. Just as you could not live in 3D if you were not connected to (supported by) the non-3D, so you could not perceive nor interact with your fellows.

That’s hard to grasp, at first, but then I think of mothers and their telepathic link to their newborns. The newborn has to learn to live in 3D, and while it is doing so, it is guided by its non-3D component.

Why not just say, you are all in continual connection with the non-3D, recognize it or not? And then remember connection laterally, and you’ll have it.

“Laterally” meaning, I take it, our Strands – which provide connection sort of about 3D life, even though themselves not 3D.

It requires slow thought. We can only provide the initial spark here. But consider: Any life is non-3D and 3D both. You live in 3D, and you live as part of non-3D. that is, input is both sensory and intuitive. So is output. It doesn’t matter if you recognize this or not, it remains an unvarying fact of life.

The penny hasn’t dropped yet.

Every aspect of life that you can consider is necessarily both 3D and non-3D. (The two intertwine, remember; they are separate mostly in analysis rather than in any real sense.) Strands relate to you via non-3D – via intuitive pathways – but they are composed of individuals who had (have) a 3D existence. Your thoughts, your emotions, your most private feelings or fantasies or longings or imaginings, it all stems from 3D experiences and non-3D experiences.

In this situation, you can hardly expect unanimity of opinion about anything, and neither can you expect total inability to communicate. The realty – as you all know from experience – is somewhere in the middle.

But recognize that there is not really a clear distinction between conclusions drawn from logic or emotion, nor a clear distinction between 3D and non-3D input, nor a clear distinction, even, between “self” and “other.” It’s too complicated for you to understand intellectually except by separation by logical distinctions, but in reality, as opposed to logic, life is all one thing, always coming at you, as you are coming at it, and always more than you can comprehend. Be comforted: This is not a design flaw. It is better to live a life that is mystery than it would be to live a life that was only known. That’s why it is so.

Looking back, we’re a long way from what I thought you were going to address.

No, we just went at it in a way you did not expect and perhaps cannot yet see.

I’ll take your word for it. So, today’s theme?

“Different worlds, different lives.” It is subject to being misinterpreted at first, but no matter.

Okay. Our thanks as always.

 

Thursday, November 3, 2022

5:15 a.m. The experience of watching the four-part Netflix series on “Bobby Kennedy for President,” and discussing with Paul our experiences of that time, has stirred up feelings I hadn’t visited in a while. A man of 76, confronted with emotions and memories of emotions, images and memories of images of his own, from when he was 22, and before that, ranging back to 1958 – powerful brew, and of course different from the same mix experienced earlier. I remember particularly the year 1988, 25 years after JFK was killed, when I finally came to terms with it.

OT1H, the world is only somewhat real; OTOH, it sure feels real! And this is surely most people’s experience. Even people who protest that they do not believe in free will – which surely ought to leave them feeling like puppets soullessly going through the motions – experience the pain and suffering of the 3D world as plenty real enough.

What struck me was watching this very alive man breaking through the veils of power and privilege and applied intellect and success – and suddenly seeing! Bobby had loved his brother, had invested heavily in him, probably identified with him (as that whole family seems to have identified with one another). He also had to know that his own actions had stirred up enemies who killed Jack. That is, he had to have felt somewhat responsible for his brother’s  death, and for the shattering of the position they had used to good effect.

Powerful mixture of emotions to have to deal with, and boy, was it there to be seen in his face. The particular mixture of Strands that he was, resulted in propelling him  (after a period of shock and bewilderment, and despair, I imagine) into action. Kennedy boys were raised to change the world, to make their mark. Joe Kenney in 1968 was lingering, still crippled after the stroke in 1961, but he had done his shaping of the boys and had done it thoroughly, long before. He had instilled in them a work ethic directed at public service, never at making money. That emphasis – combined with Jack’s and Bobby’s skills and drive – had propelled Jack to the White House. It might or might not bring Bobby there too, but it was not going to cease to impel him in any case.

But his pain, and the aftermath of the shock of seeing how we are at the mercy of fate, and perhaps the guilt, and the love, and the sense of unfinished business, and the incessant urge to fix things –

What was the result for him? It opened his eyes wide to human suffering. He in his turn opened the eyes of society, because he was a tremendous generator of publicity, so when he visited the Mississippi delta, or an Indian reservation, or visited the farmworkers and received Communion with Cesar Chavez, or toured the slums of our inner cities – the cameras came too, and they showed the real underbelly of the country, rather than the glossy sanitized version we usually got.

But not everybody was made like him. Or, no, let’s look at that a little differently. Bobby was known as a strong hater. It is the intolerant shadow side of passionate conviction, very evident in his ruthless pursuit, as Attorney General, of Jimmy Hoffa, a pursuit somewhat justified by overzealous.

Well, Bobby’s very person and personality, and then more so his actions, constellated that hatred in others, and our sick society had so many haters! You can see it in contemporary news footage. He saw poverty and ignorance and illness and neglect, and perhaps he thought, “Once people realize this, they’ll work to help overcome it.” But I think many people took it as criticism of themselves and their way of life and their ancestors. So the ugly, twisted, snarling faces on people who were shouting and hitting people – you know how it was. They were conduits of hatred, and it ran hot in their veins. Police, and politicians, and wealthy powerful men and women, and the scum that every society has somewhere. Bobby pointed out what our society was really like, and they hated him for it. They had to deny what was in their faces; they had to see him as an “outside agitator.” (Implied: “You don’t understand, you don’t really care about this anyway, you are doing this only to feed your own sense of superiority. Therefore you are a hypocrite and a wanton destroyer of our lives.”) And they hated him for it.

This is not to blame Bobby’s nature for the way his person catalyzed hatred. His brother Jack was, above all things, the man of reason, confident that people could come to terms, and yet the haters killed him. But in his case, it was because they feared him, I think. You’ll notice, people usually didn’t hate Jack Kennedy, they hated “the Kennedys,” meaning Jack and Bobby, because Bobby was seen as the instigator of so many disruptive events.

No reasonable person could say that the Civil Rights movement was begun or encouraged or even particularly protected by the Kennedy bothers, nor by the government they led. They didn’t originate it, but as the tide swelled, they were forced to respond to it. That meant, learn from it. That meant, respond as human beings.

No reasonable person could blame the Cold War on Jack Kennedy, nor the massive involvement in Vietnam on Robert Kennedy. But their actions – Jack’s in trying to defuse and even end the Cold War in 1963, and Bobby’s in opposing the waste of resources and the self-evident futility of the war, beginning in 1966 – aroused  fear, and fear leads to hatred.

Now, I’ve been talking to myself for 45 minutes, but I sense that this is a larger issues for you, my friends. Proceed.

The question everyone faces, implicitly or otherwise, is “How real is this world? Is it merely a very convincing screenplay? Is it life and death the way it appears? Is it – ?”

Yes.

False dichotomy. It is real in its own terms, as we have always said. But “real in its own terms” doesn’t mean, “the realest thing there is,” it means you can’t see through the scrims just because you know that’s what they are. Your mind may tell you that what you are feeling is not ultimately as real as it seems, but that isn’t going to do you much good.

Think about Robert Kennedy’s shock, and his helpless concern, and even his anger at other people’s complacency, when he experienced the reality of hunger and ignorance and deprivation and suffering in general. Those were real feelings. It was one individual subjectivity, suddenly up against a shared subjectivity that predated him, outnumbered him, resisted his efforts to change it, and survived him. That’s your experience in 3D, in a nutshell: The shared subjectivity always precedes you, outnumbers you, resists you, outlives you.

Does that mean life is futility?

It can feel that way. Certainly it can seem that hope is illusory.

Of course it can. But, in practice, you have your life to live. You may say to yourself, “This is only somewhat real,” and be right in saying so, but you’re still going to have your somewhat real breakfast, and proceed with your somewhat real day.

Life is meant to be lived. Different eyes will see it to be different things, for the world has room for all kinds of people and tasks. But everyone breathes. Everyone gets through life one day – one moment – at a time. What differs is how you see it, and that difference can change everything.

Bobby Kennedy took it for granted that the world is real. So did his brother. So, perhaps, does every public figure, for who would put all that effort into something that was clearly illusory? But that isn’t the end of the story, for artists work hard too, even if they see through the scrims.

I don’t know where you’re going with this, but I’m sort of out of energy, it having been an hour. Sorry to have taken up the time.

You may be sorry, we are not. It is the beginning of a good discussion, and worth your expressing it anyway.

Shall we just call this one “Bobby”?

Maybe “The reality of ‘Only Somewhat Real”.”

Maybe. Okay, till next time.

 

When I watch shows with particularly evil or arrogant villains, my response to them is – as the writers have intended it to be – “Kill them; they have no place in the world.” It would be useless, of course; new villains spring up all the time. Worse than useless, because you become like the worst in those you fight. The only practical plan I have ever read was Anselmo’s in For Whom the Bell Tolls: Make the miscreants work until they come to realize the error of their ways. This might or might not reform the villains, but at least it would not destroy those who confronted them.

The key here, as you well know, is that your emotional reaction to anything may be as powerful as anything you do or say. It is your second-tier and third-tier reaction that counts, and this is one reason people of ill will do such damage: They rouse the righteous indignation that outdoes them.

By the end of a war, people are enthusiastically doing things to others that they would have been horrified to consider at the beginning. Fight fire with fire, is the saying.

Yes. That works out better in forestry than in human relations. In human relations, it is merely arson, and arson that incinerates friend and foe and self alike.

And why does it have to be this way?

Your question is, why is human life prey to evil.

I hadn’t put it quite that way, but let’s look at it that way. I understand that life in duality must include both ends of every stick. Somehow, though, that isn’t terribly comforting.

Evil is good balanced. We know you don’t like it, but he longer the stick, or the shorter, still the center is where it will balance, nowhere else.

If I just heard you right, you are saying too much goodness constellates too much badness.

Well – almost. Another analogy would be intensity. A black-and-white negative may be muted or vivid. It may consist of highly contrasted lights and darks, or tones that are much more in the center scale.

But this life does not seem to have any excess of goodness. What I see chiefly is excess of violence.

Yes, that’s what you see. That’s what is pictured. There is no entertainment value in portraying goodness, except occasionally as a change of pace. You know how it is.

The news media used to have a saying, “If it bleeds, it leads.”

Precisely. Plus, people want to feel alive, and if their ordinary lives offer too little, you will find young men running to get into a war, as in 1914, for the sake of smashing things. They have no idea why they feel that way, having no idea how intolerable their lives were that they are fleeing. And of course long after the enthusiasts volunteer, men are unwillingly conscripted to continue what was begun and cannot now be allowed to fail.

Why? Why is 3D life made into such an endurance test?

It needn’t be. It could be a life lived more at the mercy of what are called natural forces. But one way or another, 3D life is going to express duality in full, not only the half you prefer.

Couldn’t we modulate the evil that has to manifest?

You could, but it involves wholeness in place of goodness, as you have been told.

I can’t remember who said it. More or less, “When a man realizes that it is better to be whole than to be good, he enters upon a harder life that makes his previous goodness seem like flowery license.”

It is true, and there’s a reason for it. It involves bearing your own share of the world’s evil., and thereby helping to corral it, to curb it from wild manifestation.

I don’t know. Jesus said it is inevitable that evil comes into the world, but woe unto him by whom it comes.

Yes, but that refers to ushering it into the world, not holding a piece of it that already exists and has manifested.

& & &

On so many subjects like this, you must remember that context is everything. Look at something while forgetting what you have learned about reality, and you cannot see with greater perception. But bring these new, seemingly unrelated, perceptions to the subject, and the maze may become penetrable. So, here.

Every religion is at least in part an attempt to see why evil exists in the world, and an attempt at strategies to overcome it. Every serious philosophy must grapple with this question. So far, none has found an answer that others find satisfactory. Manicheans see the world as battleground between extra-human forces. Some philosophies say that evil is merely the absence of good. And all other attempts fall somewhere between these two poles.

Partly it is a question of appearances. How do conditions seem, as opposed to how are they really? Partly it is a question of meaning. How should we see this or that in connection with what else we know?

And partly it is a question of values? Of what we wish to uphold or stave off?

We can see how you would think that this is so. But, not really. Your values are chosen partly by what you were, pertly by what you are, partly by what you wish to be. It is a cycle, a reiterative process. A cycle looks like a circle sometimes, but it involves an additional dimension.

It is a question of depth.

Yes. Depth or lack of depth will affect your perception of how things are.

Now, we said appearance and meaning. This too is part of an iterative process.

• How things appear depends upon the inner resources one can bring to the perceiving.
• What things mean depends upon the connections one can make.

In both cases, changes in the observer lead to changes in what can be observed, and thus both appearance and its meaning seem to change, leading to further changes in the observer. There are two reasons, not just one, why you can never step into the same river twice. Yes, the river’s flow makes it impossible. But so does your flow. You are not the same, even between two attempts.

“But” – we hear you object – “there must be some ultimate view of reality.” Perhaps; perhaps not. In neither case can you get to the bedrock of things. At most you will get to an explanation that satisfies you, now. Don’t expect to get one that will satisfy everybody, nor one that will satisfy anybody forever.

People like certainties. They find it hard to deal with uncertainty and with leaving open-ended questions open-ended. Thus so many “final” answers, mutually contradictory but similarly certain. We or you or anyone could and can (and, often enough, do) decide, “This is the way it is,” but that is mostly a decision to stop looking.

Obviously as you change, the reality you can perceive changes, and you learn to deal with it. When you think “All is one,” it is a different world to you from when you think all is chance and accident. When you realize that there is no “external” unconnected to who and what you are, it is a different world from one in which unconnected forces exist. But even as perceptions change, your assigned meaning changes, and not mechanically. You choose to see one meaning or another, and the choice helps determine the next thing that happens to your perceptions

It’s almost a fun-house, set up to distort perceptions.

No! And that’s a good example, right there, of how the process of assigning meaning to perception may result in conclusions of great definiteness that may have little relevance to anything but one’s momentary state of being.

Now, it may appear that we haven’t advanced an inch on our task of examining evil in 3D life. But surely you can see that the discussion that follows will be different from what it would have been if your mind had not been turned by this bit of brush-clearing.

& & &

Perhaps it has not yet become evident that this is a conflict of perception, not of essence. It isn’t better for a person to be whole than to be good, it is better for that person to picture himself, herself, as whole rather than as good. If it were possible to be entirely good, who could argue against it? But it is obstructive to be one thing and think oneself another.

Well, that puts it in a different light entirely. This, then, is a conflict of ideals, rather than of states of being.

Yes, but that will take some spelling-out.

I don’t see why. It’s simple enough. If our ideal is to be good, we will suppress awareness of, and manifestation of, every part of ourselves that is not good. But this will force that part of ourselves into the unconscious, where it will be beyond our control. If our ideal is wholeness, though, we will welcome awareness of what we are, without manifesting it deliberately but without disowning it when it does manifest, hence keeping it more in our consciousness, hence more under our conscious control.

Occasionally you surprise us.

It suddenly clicked, and became clear. It never ceases to amaze me, how things can be murky one minute, clear the next.

After a flash of insight comes the work of assuring that the new insight remains in context, so that it does not become like the cryptic scribbles that are left from a dream in the night.

Bear in mind, this insight is a very practical insight. It tells you what to do, how to live. It does not shade off into the question of why evil exists or how it manifests in the 3D world. Practical is worth more than theoretical, if you have a choice. It’s just that sometimes you need to re-examine the theoretical in order to provide new practical awareness.

So we’re bailing out of the larger question?

We are anchoring an important insight before proceeding to that or any other matter.

Everyone lives according to an ideal, or to multiple (often conflicting) ideals. If you were units, you could have one ideal, perhaps. As it is, each of your sub-selves has its own ideal. How are they all to be harmonized so that you are not working against yourselves? One way is to have one over-arching ideal that all can agree upon.

This will not be possible at all for some self-divided people. It will be possible to some extent for others, and possible to a great extent for a relatively few others. Someone fused into one thing, such as Jesus, can have, will have – cannot not have – one ideal.

One over-arching ideal. What can serve so well as wholeness? What other ideal can contain everything? Goodness, by comparison, is continually choosing, discarding, rejecting, criticizing. You can measure up to an ideal of wholeness, acceptance of what you are and how you have been created and faith that you are as you are for a reason. But how can you measure up to an ideal of goodness?

Hemingway is a case-study of a man whose impossible ideals tormented him, wracked him with guilt, led him to deny what he had done, filled him with remorse and despair and yet continued valiant attempts to reach the unreachable.

He certainly provides a valid example. He would provide insight into the faith-filled despairing lives of the saints in terms comprehensible to your age. To have as your ideal to be good is to invite repression of all in you that is evil, and to set yourself an impossible task, because one man’s evil is another man’s good. This refers not to other 3D beings around you; it refers to the multitude of strands within you.

It almost sounds like the proper ideal is tolerance.

If tolerance did not shade so soon and so easily into indifference, that would be so. Anyway, wholeness is a belter ideal. Tolerance will come in its wake, but it will be a judicious tolerance. There is no great advantage in learning to be tolerant of mass-murder, or torture, or any of the manifestations of individual or social insanity that are liable to pop up.