Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

Gentlemen, anything in particular for us this morning?

Nothing in particular. We are available, as usual.

Sometimes you get moving on some topic, and things flow.

From our perspective, we could say the same of you. Perhaps neither perspective is complete in itself.

Hmm. Okay, I felt the gears engage as soon as you said that, but the act of mentioning it may have disengaged them again.

You shifted position slightly. Merely move back to receptivity rather than formulation.

Okay.

You experienced the slight feel – the subtle feel, we should say – of connection. There are moments when you can feel yourself as part of a larger consciousness than your usual, habitual, experience.

Before we had scarcely gotten into that paragraph, I remembered Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain’s sudden feeling of identification with the Union Army one day. It had nothing to do with battle, as far as I remember, but something in the visual perception of this vast organized mass of men, and he a part of it, struck him.

Yes, same idea. People experience it many ways, usually mystically, but not always (in fact, rarely) intellectually worked out. It is easier to feel than to understand, and easier to understand than to put rules and bounds to.

I get that it is the sort of knowing that is very much dependent upon what a person’s society allows for.

A little slower. You have the idea, but take the time to express it more carefully.

Some forms of society take our connectedness for granted, though each society may conceptualize differently what is happening. Others assume it is not possible. The degree of freedom that an individual feels and experiences to communicate such experience makes a difference.

No, you are still divided. Spit out the distracting thought so you may continue.

As I used to do in grad school, opening my journal for stray thoughts so they would not distract my reading. Okay, I merely thought I should post something on Facebook suggesting that people talk about the society they would want to live in, rather than what they feared. Positive, not negative. I think they’d find that many people on opposite sides of various issues were seeking the same thing; it would lower the tension within whatever individuals chose to refocus their attention that way.

Now resume.

If a society – a church, say – encourages its members to expect to receive messages from spirit (no matter how they define spirit or define messages), those members will be more open to the experience and will be more open to sharing the experience, which in turn will open the way for others. It is a virtuous cycle rather than a vicious cycle.

The bump in the road may be that the terms in which the experience is described may be unfamiliar, and so may be suspect. The usual confusion of tongues.

That’s where we are today, isn’t it?

Not exclusively “today,” but yes. In the change from one era to another, much is lost in translation. However, realize that losing things in translation also allows for – encourages, almost enables – things to be found in translation.

I suppose it is an advantage of ILC that it comes with little cultural baggage.

Such baggage as it carries is of course transparent to you, because it is in the air you breathe. But let’s say it is encumbered with little previously generated baggage, as was Bob Monroe’s system, similarly. The less of the past one has to drag around, the more nimble one may be. However the opposite danger (at least, seemingly opposite) is that if one disconnects from one’s past entirely, the result is not so much freedom as ungroundedness.

And the happy medium?

You yourself live there naturally. You are personally well grounded in the history you know and feel. (Others may be well grounded in the contemporary society they know and feel.) You being grounded, your expression of what you experience will be grounded, provided you intend it to be.

Meaning, provided we make our meaning as clear as we can, considering our readers.

Yes. As in literary style, so in this: Write as clearly and simply as you can, so that who and what you are comes through, and that is all you can do, and all you need to do.

Now, let us return to the original point. You happened to become aware of the different “feel” of being in connection and not being in connection. Given that we are in connection always, what can that mean, said more carefully?

Well, I thought we were saying it is a matter of being conscious of the connection. It is one thing to breathe; another thing entirely to be aware of the fact that we breathe. Ask any asthmatic!

And is there any particular advantage to being aware that you are breathing?

Immediately I want to say, “Yes, of course,” though I might be pressed to say what it is. But I “heard” you ask, “Then is there a disadvantage to not being aware,” and I remembered that lovely affirming vision I had during Gateway 27 years ago: “You are not alone.”

Precisely. Do you not suppose that the sense of never being on their own –. Or, let’s state it positively: St. Columba on Iona, the Apostles in their wandering, any hermit or monk or nun or cloistered being; any mystic, any person devoted to an art, or to living, may feel this, and be sustained by it, and it does not in the slightest degree depend upon their idea of what – or who – they are experiencing. This is the reality behind any religious or artistic or scientific or philosophic conceptions.

I don’t think that came out as clearly as it might have.

You are welcome to edit us, and we will edit you if need be.

I believe you just said – and I fully agree – that this sense of communion with a non-3D reality may come in many forms

May be experienced in many forms.

May be clothed in many belief-systems, but is the same enabling force.

It may lead to fanaticism, mind. It may lead to self-righteous certainty; it may even encourage someone in disastrously misguided directions. It isn’t a panacea.

No, it is the Age of Aquarius.

Very good. It is that.

By which I mean, the Age of Pisces had its own characteristics, and so will the Age of Aquarius, but there is no excuse for thinking that this new age will manifest only positively, any more than the old one did. That isn’t how duality works.

Yes. Very good. Very good. That is a long stretch from “I feel the gears engage.” Good work.

I guess we’d better quit while I’m ahead.

We’re smiling too, but this insight, though not entirely new and seeming not particularly important, may take us far.

I look forward to it. Our thanks for this communication and for our being in communication, as always.

 

Wednesday, October 12, 2022

I read this in Nevil Shute’s novel Around the Bend, and I thought I’d share it.

“One did not need any interpreter to see how greatly they valued his advice. All through my life I had seen him gain this influence over people …. I do not think he ever worked for it, or sought this influence. When simple people came and told him things that troubled them, which they did very often, he gave them straightly what advice he could, and his manner of doing it encouraged them, so that they came back with more important and more intimate matters for his ruling. I think that’s all there was to it.”

It seemed to me, copying this into my journal, that this is a very good description of Guidance in our lives, with the major variable being our willingness to listen.

All right, let’s proceed. Jane Coleman wonders (and so do I, now that she brings it up), who uses the view from all the windows? That is, if each of us in 3D is a window into 3D reality, who is it who benefits from all that observation? And this amounts to one more angle on the question of what it’s all about.

A question of enough magnitude and importance to intimidate you.

Well, yes. It’s times like this that I’d wish to be an unconscious conduit like Edgar Cayce or Jane Roberts, so that the information could just come forth, without psychological conflicts centering on, “Am I just making this up?” or, just as bad, a locking up of the gears.

Yes, the latter condition being the equivalent of asthma.

I beg your pardon?

Is not one aspect of asthma the inability to leave an unconscious process to the unconscious, as conflict brings it to the surface against your will?

Say that is similar. What follows?

In your momentary state of quiet panic, you wonder how you can manage those processes: That is, how can you bring to consciousness things you have no clue to. Only you don’t seem to have psychic nebulizers or inhalers or pills. You do have an exercise you can do, though, just as physically.

Force myself to exhale, you mean, even while (because) feeling that the need is to inhale? That would be the equivalent. Not quite sure how to apply the analogy.

The analogy amounts to, Express even though instinct tells you to Inhale. Expression will create room for more inspiration which will occur naturally on its own, once you create room for it.

Hmm, a sort of asthmatic corollary to Beginner’s Mind.

You could put it that way. And here is why:

• You know that Beginner’s Mind means, a mind cleared of previous ideas, so that new ideas may enter.
• Your conscious mind (anyone’s) is filled with what you know. It isn’t filled with what you don’t know, obviously.
• Poise, confidence, assurance, all stem from your reliance on the fact that you know what you are doing. Even exploration of new territory may rest upon assurance of past success at exploration.
• At times, one moves beyond the skills one knows. Trauma or a deliberate plunge into deep water (via psychotropic drugs, say, or ecstatic practice of one or another kind) may leave you coping without the use of your accustomed coping skills. This may lead to overwhelm, and overwhelm may lead to a throwing-up of your hands, followed by breakdown or breakthrough.
• Alternatively, a lifelong crisis (alcoholism, say) may lead you to recognize that 3D-you isn’t really capable of functioning without reliance on what is called “a higher power.” This may become a darker, perhaps more traumatic, version of the same journey to a new place.
• Alternatively again, one may freely surrender and live in trust.

In all these cases, you see, 3D-you ceases to drive the bus – and, given that the bus is going 60 mph down the road, with no way to stop it, the question of who is going to steer if 3D-you stops becomes sort of urgent.

Very funny. Yes, it does. You’re making me think of Neal Cassidy of the Merry Pranksters, who had done so much acid and other things, for so long, that he could drive the bus without continually looking at the road — which of course terrified anyone on the bus who wasn’t used to it.

The question of trust always boils down to, “Is there something there to be trusted?” If so, no problem. If not, then trust is foolishness.

Thoreau wrote somewhere that his contemporaries couldn’t understand reliance on providence: It was just dead reckoning to them, he said.

And you grew up with examples closer than that.

Indeed I did. I smile when I think of it, because it is a nice memory of people trusting who didn’t really believe in trusting but were doing it out of the goodness of their hearts.

I forget where and when I heard the story. It had to have been in the 1970s, I suppose, when I was back in my home town after a few years away. Some craftsman was telling about doing some work for the nuns. He was Catholic, so he was doing it out of loyalty, but he was a businessman, so it seemed to him to be an insane way of proceeding. He said the nun in charge had laid out the description of the work they needed done, and he had asked where the money to pay for it was going to come from, and the nun had said, casually (and not in any sense in an affected way, but in a taking-for-granted way), “God will provide.” In telling the story, the guy was at least figuratively shaking his head, but he did the work and he did get paid. It wasn’t his own recklessness or foolishness (or however he thought of it) that he was fixed on, but his incredulity at how the good sisters lived, routinely and successfully. It was beyond him.

As Thoreau said. And examples could be found from anyone’s life, recognized or not. Doesn’t people’s entirely unconscious assurance that their next breath is coming sometimes strike you?

It does.

Don’t you occasionally wonder if your deathbed-moment will be a flowering of your belief that All Is Well, or a reversion to your moment of panic lest your next breath not come?

I do.

Well, that’s the tightrope you walk: Faith or doubt, confidence or concern, automatic reception or grasping for straws.

I thought we were going to discuss who it is who looks through the windows that we are, and why. Instead we have explored this very interesting analogy. If nothing else, a nice way to defer grappling with the question.

You know our methods, Watson: It is always a mixture of process and data.

And part of the data here, as opposed to the process, has been a reminder that paying close attention to the life we actually lead can bring unexpected insights.

Twenty years ago, we could never have led you to compare receptivity to asthma. Ten years ago, we might have been able to bring up the subject, but the analogy would not have struck. Things take as long as they take.

The significance being—?

Trust where you are, no less than who you are.

A little more on that?

You are a window by what you are, what you live, what you decide as a result of what you live. But the window that was Jefferson at age 33 was not the same window as when he was 23 or 43. Your lives have stages, and although you experience yourselves as pools, you are more like rivers. That is to say, you are always a work in progress, and any given moment’s perspective may differ radically from any other moment’s. The more open you can be to the present moment, the closer you can be to your truest, most inmost self.

Which still leaves Jane’s (and my) question unaddressed.

Does it? Stay tuned.

Okay. Well, your thanks as always, and see you next time.

 

Tuesday, October 11, 2022

6:40 a.m. “3D accidents of attention.” You used that term, and said we could discuss it at another time, in a session on Sept. 16, 2020 that I sent out again this morning. Care to do the elaborating today?

We can, if you wish.

Anything you’d prefer to discuss instead?

It might be more to the point to continue our more private discussion.

Fine. What else is there to say?

You notice the calmness that came over you as we sketched why you had lived as you did, and you realized that there’s nothing wrong with it, and, mostly, that you don’t need to accomplish anything to justify your existence. You never did – no one does – but you, right now, in the latter part of your life as you have lived it, can do or not do anything you wish, and you won’t be wrecking the pot you are throwing, won’t be leaving the painting unfinished, won’t be leaving an Edwin Drood or a Schubert symphony.

It’s true, there’s a difference between knowing it abstractly, and feeling it.

Of course, it goes deeper than that, deeper than you realize.

Doesn’t it always?

There is no reason why you can’t leave it at – or, another way to say it, can’t intend – people coming to you to do the work needed to preserve the understandings we brought forth together. That can be their gift. We brought it forth, they can help translate it, us, you, to anyone interested.

It still sounds like The Legend of Frank DeMarco.

But, nothing wrong with that, if it is organic, inherent, rather than artificial and engineered. Your life is going to be somewhat interesting to those who are influenced by our work, in the way you were interested in the life of others whose work touched you. It’s only natural, and need not exaggerate its own importance.

I think you’re right about letting people come to me, now. Chris Nelson wants to republish Sphere and Hologram, and that seems a natural step.

You may proceed in different ways now, only, choice is required. You can’t be like the cowboy who jumped on his horse and “rode off in all directions.” You know all about opportunity costs.

I do. How about sketching out the crossroads as you see them.

Not so much crossroads as alternative directions still without beaten paths.

That’s certainly my experience so far!

You wouldn’t have been comfortable with anything else. The beaten path bores and constricts you, Mr. Boone.

So, anyway –?

• Doing what you like doing, considering the heavy lifting to be in your past. Cleaning up odds and ends, but with no particular impetus.
• Undertaking one or more new projects as they occur to you and appeal to you.
• Finishing the projects begun to date, either completing them or writing them off, but either way clearing the slate.
• In general, living with reins slackened or with reins taut. That is, reading, and watching Netflix, and daydreaming, or intending, regardless of exterior manifestation as works.

In a way, it boils down to, treating my life as more or less completed, or as still to be shaped in more than a few stray details.

Yes. Or both, if you prefer.

Both? How both?

Openness to life, combined with acceptance of what you have done, and have become.

That doesn’t sound so hard.

Not where you are now, no. You couldn’t have even understood the idea, when you were thirty.

Perhaps not. Okay. Since we’ve been at this only half an hour, how about a few words on the question I posed initially? What did you mean by 3D accidents of attention?

Think of yourself as suspended among various forces. An iron filing in the air between magnetic poles, or something. That is, existing among strong forces whose balance leaves you free to maneuver, within certain limits. Those forces (unlike a set of magnets) fluctuate and change nature moment by moment, so last moment’s adjustment isn’t necessarily still appropriate at this moment. That’s the situation for any soul in 3D.

The times bring opportunities good and bad.

Let’s say, rather, the times bring inclinations, tendencies, that may result in actions (mental and/or physical) that you may think of as good or bad. How you respond to those invisible currents helps determine where you go from any particular moment.

Sure. Our second-tier decisions are influenced by our first-tier decisions, I imagine.

That is true but insufficient. Focus?

Presence, receptivity, clarity.

The shared subjectivity’s unfinished business is always going to have bits that seem aimed at you (that is, to have bits particularly apposite to your personal situation) and bits that don’t affect you. No two people experience any moment’s qualities in exactly the same way. You couldn’t expect them to, each of them being necessarily different. This means every moment offers each of you particular opportunities seemingly tailored to you.

And there are many of them, not only one, and we choose.

And your choice is partly conscious and mostly not conscious – which means, not sleepwalking, but guided by what you are beyond the level of 3D-consciousness-only.

And what we don’t choose consciously is what you called 3D accidents of attention.

No, just the reverse. The 3D accidents of attention are the connections you do make consciously, that lead you on. They are accidents in the sense that various ones were of more or less equal importance, each leading you in a somewhat different immediate direction.

Okay, I see that.

This is “accident” in the sense of a choice among roughly equally important (or unimportant) alternatives, as opposed to choices that will shape your life profoundly.

But I get that second-tier choices can sort of over-write past choices. In effect, anyway.

Yes, but where would you be if your life hadn’t brought you to the concept of second-tier choices? Choices may be reconsidered, and revised, but they still have consequences, because they had consequences.

They brought me to wherever I am when I’m reconsidering them.

Yes. You just can’t tear down the pyramids before you build them, even if you decide after the fact that building them was a mistake.

That’s opening up something I almost get. I think you’re saying, our decisions help shape the world, as well as our individual lives, and even if we reconsider them, they’ve still had their effect.

Yes from a certain point of view. But don’t get distracted, if you can help it, by theoreticals. Stick to your own life, and it will put everything in a helpful perspective. You will never understand the world except by understanding yourself.

Except that we will also never understand ourselves except by understanding the world. To understand A, you have to understand B, but to understand B you have to understand A. Stepwise progression.

Isn’t that your experience?

That’s what we’ve been doing here, I’d say.

Till next time, then.

Till then, and thanks as always.

 

I forget where we were. In general, we were investigating our feelings and emotions in the larger context of 3D life as it relates to non-3D life, but if you have a syllabus, it is transparent to me.

Not a syllabus, merely a familiarity with the terrain to be traversed. If we don’t do it one way, we can always do it another way. Just so we don’t give up, we’ll get there. There really isn’t any neat systematic way to go about it, not when one end of the process is in 3D, subject to 3D accidents of attention.

Curious phrase. Care to elaborate?

Some other time. You know what it means more or less. The pressures and cross-currents of the ever-moving living present assure that you will always have a harder time sticking to the point (any given point) than you would if you were standing on an unmoving platform.

Now let’s look at how living in 3D results in your having continuous opportunities to refine your ore. The very things that can make your life difficult and painful can make it  rich and satisfying. Can. May. But it isn’t a given: It depends on you doing the work.

Go ahead, we’re listening.

The thing we are least confident of having conveyed is the sense of 3D life as both an individual and a shared subjectivity. It is an individual subjectivity in that it feels like it is lived alone among externals. It is a shared subjectivity in that you all interact at so many more levels than you sometimes think, and, more importantly, because you as 3D individuals relate to everything in your world. That is, nothing is experienced “by chance,” regardless how it appears.

A simple concept, but revolutionary, and if we once ever succeed in giving you the living sense of the truth of it, your lives cannot fail to be transformed, for you will know, and you will realize that you are free and always have been free – provided you choose to realize it.

The boy I was in my teens and twenties would have a hard time recognizing the mental world I live in. As a teen I rebelled against the church and its rules and assumptions, nor was I wrong in doing so. In my twenties, I lived a life that assumed pretty much what our society assumes: an individual life in 3D amid a bewilderment of people whose motives I didn’t understand, and external events whose connection to myself I didn’t understand, and internal motivations and dynamics that moved my life, I never understanding why or how.

But in the long second half of your life you gradually came to see the world differently.

I did, and the process continues, and you are no small part of it, as you have to know. And the point I started out to make is that the very scriptures that were dead to me (or, I suppose, that I was dead to) in those days, today seem nothing but uncommon sense.

Let’s put it this way: You outgrew the superstitious sense of your religious exposure and worked your way into its deeper meaning, in the way one might graduate from fairy tales about George Washington and the cherry tree not by throwing out the testimonies of history, but by learning to read them with sophistication. And “reading with sophistication” means reading in light of everything your life teaches you. You learn to sort the essential from the merely accidental; you learn to recognize truth where and when you find it, not (1) rejecting it because others read that same truth in a superstitious way, nor (2) rejecting it because they see others reading it in that superstitious way.

That got a little tangled. I hope I fixed it up properly.

Merely restate it. All you are doing is preventing misreading. No harm in trying.

I saw that you meant that people often reject religious dogma – and, worse, religious scripture – for either of two complementary reasons.

Yes, and here is the point you didn’t finish making: Jesus said he came that people might have life more abundantly, and you now have a better idea what he meant.

I do, and it was there all along but I didn’t see it, and nothing I happened to read or hear pointed it out.

You had to grow into it. Everybody does. But remember that however random life appears, nobody attains a vision or misses anything “accidentally.” What you grasp or don’t grasp today, you do as a matter more of choice than of accident. However, the less conscious your choice, the less control of life you will appear to yourselves to have.

So, again: a simple concept. The 3D world as it appears to be, in all its seemingly objective materially real otherness, is not something “out there,” is not an independently existing thing into which you have been dropped and enmeshed. It is you, in a very real sense. This is not metaphor nor analogy nor high-flying comparison. It is sober truth, and once you recognize its truth, you see that your life cannot have been what you thought it was when you thought you were a pinball being bounced among bumpers.

Life does feel that way, sometimes.

Of course, or there would be no point in our saying that it is not so.

The 3D is there to support you in your process of self-purification, self-refinement if you prefer. That isn’t all it’s there for, but in terms of any given 3D individual soul, that is its salient characteristic and its prime use.

It is how you can experience your unconscious aspects and, with luck and perseverance, can make them conscious. And you do this not to keep score, nor to placate some implacable scorekeeper in the sky, nor to make up for your insufficiencies, nor to atone for your sins. (In a way, that is the same thing said four ways.) You do it so that you may take what is dead within you and give it life. You do it so that you will be less the captive of old habits and scars and defensive reflexes, and will enter into joy that is not hostage to circumstances.

Yes, that’s the sense of it I get, and sometimes feel and even live.

To the extent that you learn to trust life (not as an intellectual or theoretical process, but as a taken-for-granted attitude), you escape that sense of doom or of confused resentment, or of an active embattlement, however it may manifest. Casting out fear, you see how fear has distracted your reactions, has muted your satisfactions. Trusting life, accepting whatever comes, you save that immense expenditure of energy in anger, shame, guilt, dread. Instead of enduring life, you live.

So that even painful memories and active regrets become opportunities to assimilate and accept and transform.

They don’t become those things; they become realized as having always been those things. Life didn’t change, you changed. But, you changing, life as it presented around you showed itself to have been different all along. It was your vision that painted it one way, and your improved vision that now paints it another way. Same world, but a radically different experience of the world.

And still it feels like we didn’t quite say it.

If Jesus couldn’t get it across, perhaps we may be forgiven for not doing any better.

Very funny. I keep thinking you will find a way to say it, or I will, but it seems to slip through our fingers. It is so simple, so fundamental, so absolutely common-sense, but all we can do is point toward it.

You know the joke you like.

“Please don’t bite my finger. Look where I’m pointing,” yes. I don’t get the feeling that anyone is tempted to bite my finger, but I do sense them more interested in examining the skin of it, pore by pore, than merely using it as a rough guide.

Some will, some will not. Some will get it today, some won’t get it until another combination of time and thought. You do the best you can, and leave it at that. It isn’t under your control, nor ours. You have to leave people their space.

It’s frustrating nonetheless to be unable to find a way to say convincingly what has become so plain.

The frustration is a sort of partial throwback to an earlier way of thinking that assumes a conflict of forces in an arena allowing random interaction.

In any case, there’s your hour, and we think you will see we did better today than you might think.

Well, as always, my thanks will have to fill in for the thanks of others that you may or may not sense. Till next time.

 

Wednesday, June 3, 2020

[Yesterday I sent this to our little ILC group: “I get the feeling that it would be a really good thing for us to try some exercises in telepathy. I know that several members of our group have studied Remote Viewing, at TMI or elsewhere. Would one of you be willing to design a few experiments in telepathy for us?” In response, Provi said, “I’m not clear what you want Frank because remote viewing and mental telepathy are not the same thing…. For me, mental telepathy is ‘mind to mind’ or ‘thoughts through space’ that one can tap into.”]

3:50 a.m. Somewhere the guys once gave me a concise description of how psychic functioning appeared to be different in different circumstances. I wish I could find it. A fast scan of the table of contents of the four Rita books does not disclose it. Maybe Only Somewhat Real [an unpublished manuscript from the source I named Nathaniel]? Nope, nor the material from earlier this year. It would take some searching to find it, and that is a shame, as it is very a propos right now.

[TGU:] It is a simple enough concept. Easier to re-state it than to go burrowing.

Well, that would be a convenience to me if you would.

All is one, therefore all is connected. But how does that manifest? Well, you live it.

• ILC conducted with us, you call connecting to guidance.
• Connected to others in non-3D, you may call connecting to past lives, or may call spiritualism.
• Connecting to past times (not necessarily to past minds) you may call psychometry, or alternatively, remote viewing.
• Connecting to each other in 3D bodies, you call telepathy.

It is the same process of removing the conceptual barriers (the only barriers there are) between your mind and the other end of the connection. Same process, no matter how differently you may conceive of it, no matter what different rituals you may evolve to practice what seem to you to be different skills to different goals.

Telepathy occurs non-3D mind to non-3D mind, like every other “psychic” manifestation. As we said before somewhere, the chief difference is in who is on the other end of the line.

Thus, in a sense you shouldn’t need to adjust the dials to move from ILC as you are thinking of it, to ILC as a carrier of telepathic thought. You aren’t doing anything different, you are thinking about it differently. In short, it is very easy provided you can see things differently, and impossible if you can’t, and of every degree of ease or difficulty depending upon where you are in the scale between the extremes.

Thank you. That is as clear and simple as I remember it from before, whenever that was. But although I entirely agree, I still don’t quite know how to adjust the dial.

You have to understand going into it, the skill will change you. No one can change without changing. Neither can anyone gain without losing. That doesn’t mean it is a zero-sum game; it means, in becoming someone new, you leave off at least something of what you were. How else could one change? How else can the word “change” be understood? As one analogy, gaining sexual experience involves losing one’s previous naiveté or innocence. You can’t say this is a bad thing; you must say, though, that it is a real change, a substitution of one state for another, not an addition of something new to a base that remains unchanged.

These are opportunity costs. I understand that. Doing X means not doing all the other things one might otherwise have done.

3D life might be described as several decades of exploring opportunity costs. Yes, that is what choosing is by nature, the acquisition of this and the laying-down of that.

So, if you prepare to learn something, you might say you are preparing to become something. It may be a large change or a small one, but change means change, it doesn’t mean “the same only more so.”

I guess I can see, in this context, some things that have puzzled me. I always wondered why Colin Wilson didn’t want to do a Gateway when I had arranged for Laurie to invite him to do so. He was all about our acquiring greater abilities, and I thought, “I know what you want, and I know where they sell it,” but he declined. He did visit TMI, and he and Joy each got a session in the black box and enjoyed it, but he never did Gateway. I wondered why (beyond the obvious: It was clear that it wasn’t his path, but I wondered why it wasn’t). I suppose his guidance was saying, “Stick to what you’re doing.” Or maybe not, of course.

You might ask him.

For some reason, I have not felt impelled to do so, nor even confident that I could.

Yet you wish to learn telepathy.

The link between my statement and yours is not obvious to me.

It ought to be. Consider the plight of empaths, unable to not connect only at will.

You mean, I think (eliminating the double negative), empaths have no ability to discriminate.

In your initial attempts to learn another way to communicate, there is potential for unanticipated jolts until you learn the ropes. That is, you will need to learn ways to get what you want rather than anything and everything that is “out there,” and while you are learning you will flounder about.

And so?

And so you may hear straight truths you won’t like; you may find communicating bone-to-bone, so to speak, raw, unmodulated, even bruising.

Even when we are connecting with old friends, in or out of the 3D world?

It isn’t the person on the other end that may be the problem; it is the unmediated glimpses of yourselves that may be disconcerting, even painful. Mind-to-mind does not come with tact. You learned that years ago, speaking to the non-3D. You won’t find it any different speaking to another person in 3D, because of course the connection will be “your” non-3D to “the other person’s” non-3D, then to the respective 3D minds.

I have avoided such speed bumps by not contacting those likely to lead me through them, but on the other hand, I don’t think I have made any particular effort to avoid the speed bumps when they arrived, as they have generally proved useful.

It’s all part of the learning process. We merely point out that it won’t be as smooth as some might expect, and it will repay a certain amount of caution.

Caution how?

For one thing, as usual in such matters, anyone with a strong reluctance to go down this road should listen to that reluctance as a message from guidance. This is not for everyone. Much depends upon one’s willingness to work on oneself, for that is the chief initial obstacle and reward.

Okay.

We are not going to create a list of cautions. That would be to create a list of obstacles rather than of opportunities, at least that is how it would appear. But the obstacle is the opportunity. Better, if you are going to go down this road, to go in confidence that your own non-3D component knows what it is doing. Only, do not abandon normal caution. Trust God but tie your camel, the Arabs say.

Sounds like the first step is a little self-exploration to see how our communities feel about the potential risk v. the potential gain.

Introspection is usually helpful, and this is no exception.

Very well. More at the moment?

We doubt that you or anyone reading this really heard us the first time: Learning this skill will change your life. Unexpectedly, except in that it will be toward greater openness as long as it is in a positive direction. Should you put your foot in a bear trap, it is possible that you will move to greater closed-ness, perhaps entire closed-ness for the rest of your lifetime. However, absent that, you will have to live in a more open, accepting, self-aware manner than ever before. As we said, it won’t necessarily be comfortable.

But it will be exploring.

It will that.

Okay. Thanks as always.

 

Saturday, October 8, 2022

5:30 a.m. All right, guys, let’s look some more at this question of illness (as an example of things we experience that we tend to label as negative, but probably ought to see as neutral) and the times and the relationship of any individual’s experiences to the experience of the life going on around them.

In the phrasing of the question is an indicator that you have moved quite a bit, over the years, toward a broader perspective, which is of course beneficial to you, and productive. You may wish to pay attention to your slide-switches.

Okay. Presence, receptivity, clarity. I was re-reading our past several sessions, trying to help us pursue whatever it is you are pursuing, if only by reducing the drag of my own unawareness.

Always good to strike a balance between receptivity and passivity. Too little mental participation would be as unhelpful as insensitivity to non-sensory input. Active receptivity is the desired balance here.

Let’s continue looking at your 3D lives from a systems viewpoint. It will show you things by indirection. Some things that can’t be said may however be hinted at, may be backlit, let’s say.

First begin by remembering that in trying to see life straight, you are having to overcome the effects of eating the apple. It is one thing to know that you shouldn’t judge things as good and bad; another thing entirely, to be able to avoid doing so. This is particularly the case in anything you have not consciously considered. In other words, once you put your attention to it, you see that this or that example is something you have reflexively judged. Until you put your attention to it, though, you don’t notice.

To state it as clearly as we can: The effects of eating the apple do not manifest so much in how you consciously decide to see things. They manifest in how you unconsciously see them; how you assume things to be. Those peoples who descend from cultures that didn’t eat the apple do not experience life in the ame way, even if the externals are identical, because they do not label.

I can see that, as you say it. And you guys are what I used to humorously describe myself as, you are the Apostles to the Christians.

Someone has to do missionary work, if the world-pot is to be stirred! But seriously, this work could be considered, in toto, as an Epistle to the Unaffiliated. And of course what we hope to convert people to is not an orientation but a way of approaching life; not dogma but the habit of seeing ever more deeply.

Life more abundantly.

That is always the goal.

So – this diversion aside – peoples who descend from those who did eat the apple tend to label things good and bad; they tend to do it indiscriminately, unconsciously, and (therefore) erroneously. But it may take some explaining to show how we’re seeing it.

I get the idea of a hurricane hitting, and people labelling it a bad thing because of the destruction it leaves in its wake.

Yes, that’s a good example, and we will add to it, contagions such as the 2019 virus you are still experiencing worldwide. Who is considering either of these phenomena neutrally? They are clearly “bad.”

I’m edging toward your distinction. Clearly they are destructive. I know you aren’t disputing that.

That merely backs up the argument one level. It becomes that destruction is “bad.”

I think I’m beginning to see.

“Fortunate or unfortunate” is not the same as “good or bad,” though at first glance you may think so. Nobody is likely to regard a hurricane or a viral plague as fortunate, but that doesn’t mean they must see them as “bad.” The good or bad is a tag you add on, unconsciously, reflexively, and quite unhelpfully.

Now, you might ask how such labelling can be unhelpful, but consider – how much analysis do you do, once you have begun by looking at something as bad? You may analyze the cause and effect, in the way that a social worker may look at juvenile delinquency, say. But that isn’t the same thing as understanding that accepts.

That may be misunderstood, I think, by any who come to it when not linked to your mind that originates it. I take it that this is in line with what Jung says, about condemnation always isolating, never helping to heal.

Yes, only it can be slippery. In saying that people judge hurricanes to be bad, we are not imagining that they really treat them as malign. Some animists may, but mostly when people talk about “nature’s fury,” it is a threadbare expression. Still they are seeing it as “a bad thing.”

Hard to see why they would see it as a good one.

But you see, that’s our point. As long as you continue along that good-bad continuum, you cannot escape the blinders. Why does a storm or a virus have to be good or bad? (Indeed, how could they be?) Fortunate or unfortunate, yes, but not good or bad. To insist on labelling things in that way is to cling to your blinders lest you have to waken to uncomfortably new ways of seeing.

In case we haven’t really absorbed your point, would you mind going into the difference, as you see it, between good-bad and fortunate-unfortunate?

This seems hardly necessary. Isn’t the difference obvious?

I don’t think it is, actually, especially for those of us who haven’t really rooted out the reflexes left over from generations of Strands shaped by that eating of the apple. If we have thousands of people on the various Strands we participate in – that’s a lot of  drag to overcome.

Yes, true enough. Very well, look at it this way. When you were a boy in the 1940s and 50s, it was common to expose young boys, particularly, to what were called childhood diseases, so that they would acquire immunity that would save them from danger after puberty.

Mumps, for one.

Yes. Measles, chicken pox, mumps. You were expected to contract them, you were expected to recover from them, and life went on. They were considered neither good nor bad; they were mostly inconvenient, but just something to be encountered in the ordinary course of life. That was a sound and healthy attitude. But polio, say, was another story.

Nobody would call polio good. And “unfortunate” doesn’t do it.

No indeed. So was the polio virus bad?

Ah, aren’t we teasing out a linguistic ambiguity here, such as we found in the word “judgment,” which can mean discernment or can mean condemnation, two very different things? “Bad” as in effect is not the same thing as “bad” as in intent; using the same word for each introduces (or anyway expresses) confusion.

Yes, and thank you for clarifying our point. That is indeed a part of what we’re trying to get across. Seeing polio as an unfortunate effect is different from imagining it as a malign effect. “God,” or “the universe,” or “blind fate” did not punish the person who contracted polio, or AIDS, or any socially prevalent infection. There was no malign intent; it was closer to being in the wrong place at the wrong time. (Only, don’t let that slip into a sense of “accident.”)

Now, it took an entire session, nearly an hour, to clarify this one point, but that is time well spent, because anyone who internalizes the logic will have acquired the key to gradually undoing layers of conditioning – and remember, what you do for yourself, you do for everyone. Working on yourself is never a matter of one person, though it usually looks that way.

Let’s pause here. Call this one “Redefinition,” perhaps.

We could use that label for practically any session we’ve ever had.

Well, you suggest.

“The apple and our unconscious assumptions,” perhaps?

Your choice, always.

Thanks as always.