Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

You have stumbled upon a promising technique to accomplish two kinds of thing at the same time.

Joint investigation, you mean.

Think of it as a continuing seminar. It isn’t something you have to invent. People have been doing this for as long as there have been people. But this could be a new wrinkle.

The new wrinkle being an open society, an open investigation, rather than something shrouded in secrecy. I read somewhere that these things have cycles – natural cycles, I gather – and will go maybe 100 years in the open, then for 100 years may have to go underground, then rinse and repeat. True?

Not exactly 100 years, of course, but basically, yes. So think of your era as bringing back into the open things once hidden.

Parenthetically, “open” and “hidden” would be better understood as “closely held” and “widespread.” We aren’t talking about a cycle driven by social pressures such as persecution or even incomprehension. We refer to a natural cycle that, in pursuing its natural existence, often generates persecution or ridicule as a side-effect.

Just as a year has its rhythm of seasons, so does everything, only some cycles are long, some short; some are obvious, some aren’t. The cycle of overt and covert manifests in many things, in many ways. In one subject it may been social, in another economic or political or philosophical (that is, abstract and seemingly divorced from the practical). All life is cyclical, and life’s very complexity should show you that it is many cycles, not one or a few.

So in some eras certain kinds of ideas and perceptions are easy, and in other eras they are hard. Thus certain ideas are widespread and accepted in some times, and eccentric and unpopular in others. Same ideas, but different environments.

Yeats had that suspicion. In his Autobiographies, he speculated that some thoughts can’t be widely accepted in some times. He wondered if there was an intelligent force determining the nature of the zeitgeist.

Your lifetime has watched as the cycle moved into openness. The cycle is far longer than 100 years, obviously (though it has sub-cycles 100 years or less). But let’s move to bullet-points:

• The Renaissance was a culture hinge-point for what would be the West, and hence eventually for the emerging global culture. Asia, the Americas, peripheral Europe (that is, Europe beyond the maritime powers), and Africa would all be drawn into one culture, a process that is culminating in your time and just beyond. The Renaissance moved from a magical world to a mechanical one. It didn’t intend to do it, it didn’t realize it was doing it, it wouldn’t even have approved of doing it. But it did it, thinking it was merely moving from ignorance to knowledge, from superstition to wisdom.
• What are misperceived as religious wars could be better understood as political wars waged around banners of religion, and better yet understood as wars between viewpoints, the corporate v. the individual; that is, the universal body of authority v. the individual conscience, the individual response to the voice of God, so to speak.
• But (oddly enough still unsuspected), there was a natural compensating movement. The very mindset that rejected the universal pretensions of the church began setting up an alternative church with universal pretensions, that exalted “science” as an alternative to “medieval superstition.” This tended to be in Protestant states where the universal pretensions of the church lo longer had political or economic or social power to oppose them. The belief system told them that they were believers in individual conscience, etc. This masked or muffled the reality that they had not eliminated their belief in a universal authority but had displaced it.
• You saw in The Sleepwalkers, Arthur Koestler’s history of how medieval man began transitioning into “modern” man, how someone could be both scientist and astrologer (Kepler, Newton, etc.) and then gradually it became impossible to be both. A new cultural matrix emerged, and hardened, and what had been possible for a short time (during the changing of social paradigms) ceased to be possible.
• Your own era, beginning in the dark nineteenth century, has begun to emerge from this strait-jacket, so that you have lived your whole lives – certainly since 1916 or so, after a couple of years of war had begun to destroy the pillars of what had been – in a jumble of what was, and what would be, and what looked like it would be, but never would. This is creation and destruction; both, necessarily.
• A symptom of the change is that your civilization no longer knows what is superstition and what is knowledge. You don’t know what is real. There is nothing wrong with this, but of course it is uncomfortable. Those who say, “Everything is falling apart” are quite eight. Those who say, “We’re finally getting back on track” are also quite right.
• So see your own condition in this context. Your explorations are not random or in any way accidental. You are being guided, and sometimes you are aware of it. Trust that guidance. Test it, but trust it. This is how you explore with confidence.

Now, it may seem like we have gone on a long journey without much reference to what we propose to talk about, but context is important.

Because you are in the beginning phase of the establishment of a new worldview, you have opportunities that did not exist even a hundred years earlier. What were esoteric societies in the 1920s would be seen in your day as much closer to the mainstream. What can be accomplished in your day by a few people working closely together is far greater than could have been accomplished then, because so much of the inertia acting as drag has been attenuated.

 

Gentlemen, yesterday you said specific next time. Ready?

What we meant by that is that we, having set out the background out of which you all are working, now feel ready to talk about the process as it emanates from these conditions. If we were trying to describe “What is possible for you to accomplish” to someone in the Middle Ages, say, or ancient Rome, or Czarist Russia, or Meiji Japan, what we would have to say would be somewhat different, because to some extent you are your times and your place, and time and place make a difference. It is a great omission, to neglect one’s environment in weighing one’s possibilities. You know this as a matter of common sense in your everyday lives: It applies no less in the larger sense of where and when your non-3D self chose to plop you into 3D existence.

So we are between stable civilizations, which leaves us like – oh, particles suspended between opposing fields that to some degree cancel each other out, leaving us freedom of action within greater limits.

The peculiar qualities of your time are rooted in many decades of preparation, and of course they will be in effect for decades to come. But at any given moment within this larger cycle, the interaction of smaller cycles will produce unique combinations of qualities. Be alert to the very specific qualities of this moment. The “now” is always a different opportunity within a larger wave of continuity.

We are attempting, not to describe your time, but the clearest possibilities for people like you in your time. This means, implicitly, that we address ourselves to those open enough, curious enough, hungry enough, practical enough (“grounded enough,” more or less), altruistic enough, to hear what we have to say. We seek the fertile soil of the parable, rather than the stony ground or the thicket of weeds.

If you have been created with a set of qualities that predisposes and enables you to do a certain kind of work – maybe you’d be happiest, doing it!

We don’t intend to set out a list of “have to” instructions. “Have to” is suited to a different type of person. The interlocutor suited to people who respond to set rules would strike you as a drill sergeant. It would be intolerable. But to another type of person, the structure would lend reassurance.

You are saying, in larger terms no less than in personal terms, one size never fits all. What is experienced as tyranny by one may be experienced as firm, reassuring guidance by another. What is a healthy, enabling freedom to one is anarchy or the threat of anarchy to another. Neither is wrong, only the opposite may be true for others at the same time.

Yes, and bear that in mind in your individual lives. Things in your life that chafe may be reassuring if seen from a different attitude – and you always possess the potential to choose a different attitude. That is your freedom, your possibility. That is what freedom to choose is, a freedom to choose your second-tier, and ultimately your third-tier, reaction. Ultimately it is about creating yourself through your pattern of choices, but that freedom is also about your fitting yourself and your life into the situation presented by the interaction of the personal subjectivity and the shared subjectivity. Your present moment is always perfect, if you can adjust yourself to see it.

 

Here’s where we wound up:

“When you live in the knowledge that All is well, that Man is the measure of all things, that to understand it all, you need to remember As above, so below, and that All are one, many things sundered will be seen in their interconnection, and you will be able to live without having to fight a continual background sense of despair.”

 

And here’s how we got there:

 

Angel Capellan (in Hemingway and the Hispanic World) describes very clearly the difference in attitude between Spanish and Anglo-Saxon attitude toward death, hence toward life, but I don’t get it. I don’t identify with either the fascination with death or the studious avoidance of remembering it. Either way, it seems so out of proportion. You live, you die, so what?  Why is something which is universal treated as if it were something to be dreaded, or ignored, or enshrined? It doesn’t make sense to me.

Why is life a tragedy because it ends? Why is it unendurable unless one shuts out of awareness the fact that it is going to end? Both attitudes are so strange. It is as if you were to say that the meaning of life is only Friday, say, or only 3 p.m., or the color orange, or the smell of citron, or the taste of ashes.

I suppose this must be what life looks like if you think of birth-to-death as if that were all there is to see: nothing before, nothing after. It is like looking at a train ride without reference to the place left or the place arrived at.

Guys, you care to help me explain this? (Not that I don’t feel you prodding me anyway.)

What was called Western Civilization began with the Greeks and Romans and their gods and their understandings of the way things are. Christianity supplanted that with a new sense of meaning. As things do, it grew, flourished, produced fruit, and declined.

And I do realize you are having to leave out all manner of side-trails like the continuing contribution of the Jews, the challenge of Islam, the perpetual thread of silent skepticism and atheism in practice. Broad strokes are broad strokes.

Of course. The civilization that could produce the Gothic cathedral is not related to your civilization except as ancestry. The Renaissance was a searching for a more permanent footing, a realer reality, than what the European civilization had declined to. We do not say that the Renaissance participants would have agreed with this statement, but nonetheless it is a productive way to look at it.

The Renaissance was naturally followed by the Reformation, and a century of intense warfare centered on the question of the human relationship to the divine. The belligerents wouldn’t have accepted this description of what they were fighting about, either. The Catholic theology and organization had become too one-sided. The various Protestant revolutions (each expecting to become the equivalent of the former Catholic hegemony) were counter-balancing that one-sidedness, and by their nature could not come to any pretense of universality. Understand, we are not talking about politics or even theology here. We are centered on a civilization’s understanding of the meaning of life and death.

The natural result of warfare plus the Renaissance was the gradual destruction of faith in the Christian scheme itself. Indeed, you could argue that the religious wars were a matter of “protesting too much.” We don’t mean that as a play on words involving Protestantism, we mean that the fanaticism on all sides was partly fear of the other, but was also refusal to see that they themselves didn’t quite believe in the way that, say, medieval man had believed. Hence, an age of skepticism.

But people can’t really live without belief, so when they cannot believe one thing, they grasp at something else: anything to avoid a vacuum. Thus came the ages of science, of economics, of social-engineering, of endless tinkering, of what is called science but is more like science-in-the-service-of-unbridled-technological-experimentation. Capitalism, socialism, communism, fascism, scientific materialism, and on and on – what do they have in common but this? They all try to make sense of life by considering only what shows.

The coming of psychology came as an awful shock; so did the coming of scientific theories based on data showing that time, space, causality, material, energy, etc. are not what they had appeared to be.

So in your day religion is again having a last semi-hysterical upwelling, rooted in fear and even panic, but not rooted in the deepest reality. “Science,” so called, is more runaway than ever, and more enslaved to utility and less open to actual free inquiry than ever in its history. Politics, economic theory, ideology, inspire ever less widespread conviction. Philosophy has become a university major and a profession disputing fine points in learned journals, and is taken seriously nowhere but in its own closed circle.

Can you see that this is all one phenomenon? What is fueling it all, the one  massive current, the irresistible tide rising, is your need for a more profound and satisfying sense of the meaning of life and death. Meaning cannot be snatched at; it cannot be imposed by political force. It cannot be overawed into you, to put it that way. It can only be recognized.

Well, Frank, now on the far end of so much reconceptualization, you find it almost impossible to understand those who are on the shore you left. There was a time when you too lived appalled at the meaninglessness of a life that would be blotted out by death, destroying anything but whatever you might leave as artifact.

I do remember, now that you bring it up. Hard way to live.

Well, there you are.

All right, I get where you have been going with this. I wouldn’t have thought to put it together, but it’s obvious at the moment. This is why I am immune to political or ideological panaceas, or religious certainties, or any of the things people grab onto – not (merely) because they are for herds rather than outliers, but because I do not have the need to fill an empty center.

Yes. Exactly that. It is that unfilled emptiness that drives people to find something to fill it. It may be ludicrously inadequate, but it is no laughing matter to people who are desperately in need. Rather than provide examples of inadequate solutions, let us say this about the adequate solution (which, of course, will not be adequate forever, but may prove to be a reliable and useful scaffolding): It will take account of life and death as parts of one reality. It will not concentrate on the things of life and consign “the afterlife” to the realm of the unimportant or the unfathomable. Neither will it pretend to know that there is no such thing. Neither will it say that “the afterlife” is all that matters, and 3D life is a dream or nightmare. It will deal with everything as if everything matters!

Neither, of course, will it live as if only the measurable exists, but that mistake is already dying naturally.

When you live in the knowledge that All is well, that Man is the measure of all things, that to understand it all, you need to remember As above, so below, and that All are one, many things sundered will be seen in their interconnection, and you will be able to live without having to fight a continual background sense of despair. You cannot expect to live without problems; life is problems. But you need not live as if there were no underlying sense and meaning.

Enough. Be well, and be confident.

 

Into a new world

I would be interested in your personal disquisition on experiencing 3D life as independent time-sharing terminals versus experiencing it as part of an inter-conscious network.

We smile. Those are your data-processing analogies, not quite ours. But you have the general idea. We don’t want to tie the discussion too closely to analogy, for analogy will mislead when you have pressed it beyond a certain point.

Now, remember that we have said that societies change, and each society has different limits and possibilities. The inhabitants of each different civilization experience the world differently. It isn’t just that they think or believe differently: The world they experience is different. Therefore, so are their possibilities.

You have begun to enter into the next civilization, and so your boundaries have shifted. What was once possible is possible to you no longer. What was not passible, now is possible, or becomes possible. And by the same token, what was fringe becomes central, what was pipe-dream becomes practical, and what was common sense becomes evidently absurd and impractical.

In effect, the rules of 3D life have changed, are changing, will continue to change. And this set of changes is not uniform, but is proceeding at a different pace, and in somewhat different directions, individual by individual, group by group. Is it any wonder that you experience yourselves living amid chaos, internal as well as external?

This is life on the cusp between civilizations. None of you now alive will live long enough to experience life in the successor civilization. Your life is to help manage (and experience the nature of) transition.

• The world you were born into assumed individual autonomy; you might say, an almost autistic self-absorption. We don’t mean inability to socialize; we mean an assumption and experience of absolute separation between any one mind and another, or, indeed, any or all others.
• The accepted and experienced rules of such a world made telepathy a very unlikely proposition. Similarly, any form of non-sensory connection or interaction.
• Bear in mind always, individuals might experience or report things at variance with society’s accepted limits, but as individuals, as outliers, as oddballs and presumed fakers or lunatics.
• Society as a whole knew what it believed, and felt (more than thought) that it had a strong vested interest in maintaining the boundaries it accepted. To go too near the curtain was to threaten to bring it down, potentially replacing “reason” with chaos.
• Hence the frequently hysterical and often intellectually dishonest reaction to anomalous reports. Your “Amazing Randi” is always going to feel that he is protecting rationality, particularly when he is acting most irrationally. Your Yuri Geller is always going to be most threatening (by what he is, more than what he does), particularly when he is most matter-of-fact.
• Individuals who are outliers may be so for one or more of many reasons: what is called mental illness; peculiarities of upbringing that allow for different opennesses; difficulties in socialization; extraordinary abilities, and – perhaps primarily – the task they came in to assist with, the midwifing of the successor civilization.
• As society changes, outliers become the norm; average Joes become displaced. What had been reliable becomes questionable. What had been theoretical becomes plain, even obvious.
• The rules change. Not merely society’s agreed-upon rules, which are more reactive than proactive. Rather, the very rules of nature seem to change. After all, if the boundary of your achievable limits changes, in effect your world’s boundaries change, and so your possibilities, your limits, your viewpoint, your view of what is not possible – all change.
• None of it is coordinated. None of it is simultaneous and complete. You all live in a mixmaster, and it’s always running.
• Therefore, and this is the meat of it, several civilizations are functioning at the same time. Your neighbors and you may be living several sets of ground rules of reality, contrasting, overlapping, complementary: in short, chaotic (also wonderfully creative and productive).
• So naturally, your life What you feel yourself to be changes. “External” changes open up paths for parts of you that previously could not express. Parts of you that previously played a dominant role perhaps recede.

New wine in new wineskins.

What Jesus was facilitating in his time was just the same thing. In revisioning possibilities, he ended one world and opened up another. Not that we would encourage any of you to inflate your own importance by the comparison, yet there is a comparison. You don’t need to be Jesus, to emulate Jesus. And when we say emulate him, we don’t mean imitate, we mean, be as open to non-3D promptings, as willing to be intelligent conduits of a new way of being, be as quietly revolutionary by what you are, as Jesus.

Only that?

Very funny, as you always say. Yes, that will do for openers.

Consider what is happening around you at the moment. It is mostly a speeding-up of what was happening anyway. Because of the virus, things are manifesting in a space of weeks that otherwise might have required years.

One specific: meetings in virtual space. Suddenly, millions of people are meeting virtually to accomplish what until then had seemed to require personal presence. Work, friendship, family, common interests, special and routine learning: Suddenly the spur of necessity revealed that it could all be done virtually, and just that quickly, things changed forever. A society with telegraph, then telephone, then radio, then television, then internet, then virtual teleconferencing, changes each time. The observed and observable limits change. The people living in that society change.

This is what Marshall McLuhan meant by the capsule slogan, “The medium is the message.”

Yes. Living within a given set of limits and potentials shapes you; it differentiates you from those living within different sets of limits. A man of Shakespeare’s England and one of 16th century sub-Saharan Africa and one of the mountain men of the early 1800s in the American West, and Abraham Lincoln, and any inhabitant of any pre-literate society and any inhabitant of a radio-dominated culture whether literate or not – they all live in worlds so different as to render the psychic space of each one alien to that of the others. It isn’t merely that they live among different conditions, it is that who they are and what they can feel and think and experience differs. Living even side by side, they would be living still in different worlds.

The world we live in is only partially shaped by the 3D; it is also shaped by the non-3D. And we are each different in what percentage of 3D v. non-3D we allow or experience as our personal reality.

Of course, though not quite so black and white. Bear in mind, you are beads on a string, in a sense. One direction leads toward the individual 3D experience; the opposite direction leads toward the common non-3D origin and continued experience. Each of you is at once connected to your larger non-3D self and is also experiencing the 3D as if separate and unconnected.

Changing 3D circumstances changes the degree to which we live toward or away from personal isolation.

Hold that thought. It is a very simple but very fundamental insight, whose importance grows as you connect it to other things.

Now, here is what is happening. These chaotic disruptive times are loosening the social crust and allowing rapid readjustment. This is well for society, as it may thereby avoid fracture. But it is more fundamentally important to the individuals living in it, considered as individuals. In allowing internal adjustment to “external” circumstances, it allows those who are ready, to change

To change! It allows them to change.

Exactly. If you allow hitherto suppressed portions of your total self to manifest, and if you therefore (automatically, in effect) downplay certain parts of yourself that were hitherto dominant, do you not experience a new birth as a different person? As you experience joint mind in a 3D surrounding, your perceptions and understanding of joint mind changes. New possibilities arise. It might be a Zoom meeting on quilting, or on economics, or on any subject from theoretical to practical, from mundane to extraordinary, and the subconscious realizations will be the same. But if you use this new form of meeting to center on the process itself, conscious realizations are added to the subconscious ones. What you concentrate on comes into better focus.

This is how the newer world is being born, one individual transformation at a time. (In this case “One at a time” means “Simultaneously if in an uncoordinated fashion.”)

You are saying that what I have felt is true wasn’t true in reality, but was true in potential.

You said, “Everybody can do this, and more.” Well, they could and they couldn’t. That yes-but-no still exists as an underlying condition, but the balance is shifting rapidly, much more toward “could” and less toward “couldn’t.”

You were, in effect, an early adapter, and like most early adapters you flocked gratefully to others who perceived your same world. Hence the importance of The Monroe Institute’s programs as gathering places, where some of you could meet others in a shared protected place. The 3D sensory link once established, many things could be accomplished among you unbeknown to your 3D selves. And of course TMI as an enabling link was only one such link. Others found other links, and many live their lives without any external support, however buttressed they may be invisibly.

So. You all wanted the enhanced perceptions and abilities that you (half shamefacedly) believed must exist? You wanted to live in a society acknowledging and fostering those parts of you that were “different”? Here you are. Enter ye in.

 

Bertram, how much of what I felt yesterday was me dramatizing, and how much was emotionally true with specifics perhaps invented, perhaps distorted?

[A different “voice,” though not heard.] You overlook the thing that came to you, considering.

Yes, I suppose I do. Dion Fortune – Violet Firth that was – welcome.

Are you in the habit of walking into a bookstore and buying a whole arms’-length of books by an author, as you did in California? [This was the Eat-West bookstore in Menlo Park, more than two decades ago. I bought $135 worth of books by Dion Fortune after coming across The Secrets of Dr. Taverner in the home of Don James, a friend of my brother’s.]

I am not, of course, and your novels have meant a lot to me.

So, as you know, we share a thread, as you would put it.

It ought to have been obvious. When I first learned of you I was thinking in terms of one unit reincarnating as another unit, and I didn’t see how Dion Fortune could have become Frank DeMarco.

Nor did she, of course. But she and he could and do share a thread with Bertram and so many mystically and psychologically obsessed people.

Yes, it ought to have been obvious. Of course there is the temptation/reluctance to assert kinship with famous or accomplished people. Everybody is always the reincarnation of someone famous: It is great fantasy wish-fulfillment.

But this is not your pattern. Yours, if you haven’t noticed, is to be the cherished companion of people on an inner plane, some of whom are known to the world. But you do not think you were Lincoln, say, or Emerson, never mind Napoleon or Joan of Arc or Cleopatra!

Sure, I’d take cherished companion. It could still be wish fulfillment.

It could, and that is a pitfall everybody would be well to be aware of. However, “Suppose you are making it up: Why are you making up this and not something else?” Have you ever thought you had been someone famous?

I tried it on, a couple of times, but it never fit.

But your knowing a certain kind of famous person on terms of affectionate familiarity and equality did fit. Yeats, for instance.

True enough, and I did not try to make that happen. It happened to me. [Contact in 1995.]

You have expected access to inner circles in 3D, and have not quite fit in when it was granted, because you in 3D weren’t quite right for it. But outside of 3D, you did and do most surefootedly.

So it seems.

Seems?

Alright, so it is, provided it is not all fantasy.

Care becomes impediment, carried too far. Too much caution may prevent one from accepting the evidence. It is as misleading, when it comes to that, as is too much credulity.

Intellectual honesty mandates that I at least consider carefully that any manifestation may not be as it claims – nor as I assume – even though genuine. Filters conscious and (mostly) unconscious are always there to distort perceptions. I think “Dion Fortune” but it may be merely the guys, or may be a tendency of my mind. How would I know?

And everyone who follows the path you have been opening will face the same difficulty. You have already indicated that the way forward is to ask different questions.

Yes, I see that. Given that we cannot know who, it may be useless to pursue the question. But we can know how it affects us.

Precisely. Just as you had to free yourself from the idea that contact with the unseen would manifest in archaic language, or different handwriting, or the other things sometimes seen with trance channelers, so you have to be willing to accept that what you tap into may or may not be discernible as different. It will come through your mind, as I am doing now, and so it may take on your mental habits and – more subtly and perhaps more misleadingly – your pattern of ideas. Still there will be a surprising difference at the core of it. Concentrate on connecting with the source of the strangeness, not for the sake of the strange, but for the sake of the commonality.

So now, you thought to evoke Bertram, and got Dion Fortune, not entirely without foreshadowing. The thread is the same. It is not as if you got a wrong number. And you are as much a full part of that thread as any of us, whatever else you or we may be, so there is not really a reaching out aspect to it; more a reaching in. And for you to attempt to connect with my British-ness or my female-ness or my association-ness or my psychiatric-practitioner-ness or my magical lore – or any other of my individual aspects – would be to move from the core to the periphery. Instead, you contact me by moving in to your core, to the shared psychic-experiencer, teacher aspect. That is the connection, aspects of personality are merely clothing over the essence.

Thus Joseph the Egyptian and Bertram and Yeats and Dion Fortune and as-yet-undiscovered-by-you priests, mages, seers and hermits are all essence, not personality. To find “past lives” for the sake of building up one’s importance artificially in the present is to move in exactly the wrong direction. To search within oneself for certain traits, tendencies, longings, “at-home”-nesses, is to perhaps find other connections, and these connections will be – as they should be – peripheral to the task of choosing what you wish to become; they will never be a sort of ratification of your worth. That ratification may come incidentally to other things (or it may not), but it will be incidental, not central in any way. You have at your internal fingertips a vast library of human and ex-human and non-human minds. Use it properly and it enriches you. Use it for ego support and it helps you lose yourself in fantasy, perhaps.

My initial question to Bertram concerned the sense I got yesterday while connected to Jane Peranteau. Are you saying the question of historical accuracy is of no importance at all? I get that the emotional significance speaks for itself. But is this a case where my investment in a skewed concept was strong enough that they had to decide whether it was less misleading to accept it and build from it, or to reject it and yet try to salvage what is true in it?

A decision on your part as to what is “objectively true” is rarely as much use as you tend to think it. Much better to remember that “life is but a dream” while still remembering that 3D is not of no consequence for all that.

Say again?

“Fact” is more slippery, and in some ways of less consequence, than you may assume it to be. Totally inaccurate readings of “fact” may nonetheless lead you to the right place if in context of an overarching intent. Thus, you want to connect with certain forces. Something in you knows how to do it, and leads you there blindfolded. Does it care – and should you care – how accurate the “facts” that lead you to real experience? But the moral of the story is, cling to the experience, and search out its meaning and its implications. Do not cling to the “facts” and the story in and of themselves. If you were mistaken and thought that Abraham Lincoln’s dates were 1800-1865, rather than beginning at 1809, how much difference would it make? A difference in his death year would of course be a different thing. But you see the point.

Yes. It is the opposite approach to a biographer’s.

Not opposite in the sense of searching for the truth of someone’s life, but in its valuation of fact. A biographer would not accept internal fact as evidence. For your purposes, that same internal fact is the only kind of evidence available or needed. What useful light could the facts of Yeats’ life shed on the question of whether it was Yeats who came to you in the 1990s? How could they confirm or refute or explain the feeling of comradeship? To seek for confirmation of internal relationships by rooting around in external facts is to go about it the wrong way.

Besides, you must always remember, you communicate with others along a shared thread. But you, and each of them, have plenty of other threads that you do not have in common. Along those threads you may be able to look over their shoulder, so to speak, but it will not be the same direct experience.

Seems to me you are giving us a precis of how people go wrong in trying to get a grip on dealing with “past lives.”

That’s the idea. Attack a problem from the wrong direction, with the wrong assumptions, using the wrong tools, and you cannot expect satisfactory results.

Well, thanks a million for all this. I’ll never forget the overwhelming impact your novels had on me, going on a quarter of a century ago now. I had no idea anyone could write in that way.

And you responded from a deeper part of you than was conscious, you see. The sharer of the thread brought various of us to your attention, but it still required work on your part, with our help of course, before you could readjust your ideas to bypass certain illusions and misconceptions that were getting in the way. And what they were getting in the way of was not you connecting to us, though that’s what it looked like, it was you connecting to deeper levels of you. And that is always the problem, even though it usually looks like a problem between you and “other.”

Yes, I see that. So we’ve gone 70 minutes or so. Enough for the moment, or do you wish to say more?

Just this germinating thought, for you and for any for whom it sets up a resonance: You are not only a learner and an experiencer and an apprentice (so to speak): You are also a teacher, and a producer of experience, and a master. Regardless of how you feel yourself to be at this time, remember there is always a lesser you and a greater you, a novice and a past master, a seed and a full-flowering tree; it is all in what you choose to identify with.

I had a friend who said he sat down at a potter’s wheel for the first time and said to himself, “What would it feel like if I had done this a million times?” – and threw a pot, right off.

That’s the idea. You, your friends, your unsuspected connections in the moment and beyond: Go throw your pots as if you had already done it a million times, because somebody in there has done just that.

Our thanks not only for this but for your wonderful teachings. Give my regards to Willie.

 

I was reading a lot of Morris on Theodore Roosevelt in quiet accustomed discouragement at the waste of my own life by comparison. I have to wonder, given that I don’t profit from the examples, and given that these famous lives only dishearten me by the contrast, why is it that biography, and history, has so dominated my reading, for most of my life? It is as if I have been driven to immerse myself in the subject, but for what constructive reason?

[TGU, presumably:] Have you ever heard of specialization of function?

Sure, but is there a need for people who spend their lives doing nothing but looking on at the records others have set?

Apparently there is, or you wouldn’t be filling it, if that is what you are doing. But with everything being part of one thing (or perhaps a better way to put it would be, with everybody being part of one person), surely individuality is precious. You can see that.

We can’t all be King, I realize, nor Queen. So everybody who isn’t born into the royal family can either spend their life resenting the fact, or looking on in awe, or any other possible attitude. And the same with any other eminence, whether of talent or skill or luck or birthright or fortunate disposition. But the question of watching others isn’t quite the thing here; it’s closer to envying not the circumstances but the character traits.

And this demonstrates why envy is one of the seven deadly sins, if sin is defined, as we do, as “missing the mark,” as an unhelpful attitude. To envy another is to not see the justice in the universe. Of course, here we need to untangle the various meanings of the word “envy.”

We say “a decent envy” when we mean something closer to admiration.

Yes, and that one has little or no charge to it. But there is a corrosive envy that is entirely destructive.

And – you’re going to say – every degree between the two extremes.

Well, it’s true. It is always true. Life is a bell curve, not a binary switch.

My friend Dirk points out that with the discovery of fractals, it becomes clear that, just as you say, there is no such thing as a clear boundary, only approximate boundaries that look different at different (equally valid) scales.

It’s all part of the same undivided whole. We keep telling you, the universe does not have fracture lines.

So, in the matter of envy and comparisons and discouragements, an alternate way of judging things, a seemingly irrelevant and frivolous comparison, would be to ask, How well could Theodore Roosevelt lead your life? And of course in this as usual we are speaking to anyone reading this, not only to the one writing it.

Before you answer that, consider all the ramifications of personality, environment, limitation of viewpoint. (You can’t, of course, not literally. But – make the attempt.) To make the attempt as challenging as possible, take a Teddy Roosevelt or an Ernest Hemingway or anyone whose life you are familiar with whose interests were broad, and whose energy was high. In other words, compare yourself to someone you would rate high on the achievement scale and on the personal-energy scale. How well could someone with those characteristics live your life?

But isn’t that the point? That someone with those characteristics would live our lives entirely differently, and would make them come to more?

Not so fast. They would live them differently, but that’s a lot of implied assumptions unnoticed. Recalibrate.

For the first time, I realize that when you say that, you mean it not only for me.

Not only for you, though not necessarily for all. Take it as a reminder that slower is sometimes deeper.

All right, let me take a breath, here.

What looks to you like someone’s life is always more complex and more enmeshed in circumstances inner and outer than can be known. To a small degree this may be obvious, but it repays more careful consideration.

Take John F. Kennedy. With a different father, different brothers, a different body (that is, more reliable health), different opportunities and restrictions – would he have been the same man?

You are implying “which you” about him as well.

That’s inherent in the question, yes. If his elder brother had lived, would JFK ever have developed the unsuspected talents that circumstances brought out? But if his external life had been entirely or largely different, and his decisions therefore different, would he have been the same person?

As I am writing that, I get, “people as fractals.”

Exactly. Expand upon that.

That’s why we can ask “Which you?” Looking at the same person at a different magnification, we see differences unsuspected at other settings.

You may want to make it a little less abstract than that.

Yes, all right. John F. Kennedy as we know him is the individual produced by, and producing by his on-going choices, a web of relationships. His heredity, his father’s achievements, his illnesses, his bookishness, his social and intellectual opportunities, his career trajectory – all of this is Kennedy seen at a certain magnification. But change the scale and we would see (except, of course, we never can see this in anyone else) the essence behind the personality, the spark behind the glow. If all the external circumstances had been different, the spark would have been the same even if circumstances had constrained it to a dull glow, or had rendered it entirely invisible.

That’s more or less what we’re getting at. And the same for anybody else, of course. Even things that appear to be the result of free will applied over time in given circumstances – habits, in other words – are perhaps more the result of circumstance than of innate character. Someone in a receptive environment may prosper, where in a dampening one, they would not have. The spark is the same; the glow is not and never could be, nor is it desirable that different situations produce like results.

The actor is not the role.

Exactly.

And thus if we are cast as Othello we shouldn’t envy the role of Iago, or if an unnamed courtier, Hamlet.

Yes but.

That ought to be the title of my intellectual autobiography, Yes But.

There are worse titles. The “yes but” means, that isn’t the same as saying “All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.” At one level of magnification, yes, all is well and injustice does not exist. At other levels, obviously, you have to measure by different scales. Viewing yourselves as 3D roles, there is room for all the seven sins, all the virtues. From the deeper level of yourself as part of the intricate fabric of reality, maybe not.

Are we finished for the moment? Sometimes I can tell, sometimes not.

That’s because sometimes you are well aware of continuities and other times, more aware of boundaries. But this is as good a place as any to pause.

So, guys, how about elaborating on your statement of yesterday? You said, “Those of you who can, now is the time to take advantage of these heightened energies to work on your own longtime project, which is not this lifetime, yet must work through this lifetime. If you can believe that all is well, when what you see is falling apart, you will realize that what you see is not all that is, and that will be an important clue and a valuable aid.”

When we talk about “all is well” and “things falling apart,” we are talking about your personal lives and about the world around you. In this context, inner and outer are two aspects of the same reality. What seems external and disconnected from you only seems, and not is, disconnected and external. If you can remember this, the next step is to experience it that way. This will lead you to unimagined transformation.

I see you saying that what we are observing around us is also part of us, and I think that could do with some explanation, because so easily misinterpreted.

You will bear in mind your own caveats about how to understand that “the world mirrors us.”

I tell people, the world we meet expresses to us our own unconscious processes, but that doesn’t mean that what we see is what we are, necessarily; what we see may demonstrate to us what we are not. Our reactions may clarify who we are by opposition quite as well as by identity.

To a degree. Not entirely, or let’s say not exactly. When you saw the Kennedy assassination, you did not approve; it did not express your will; it was not what you ever would have had done. So in what way did it mirror your internal world?

I suppose you will say it mirrored my capacity for violence, or hatred? I don’t know.

It showed you the world as chaos, as later it showed you the world as competing forces, and later showed you the world as conspiracy and secrets, and counter-conspiracy and rival secrets, and later showed you that everything that seems separate is actually part of a greater whole. Any of those interpretations could be taken as the truth at any given time. Whatever one takes as true reflects one’s inner being at that moment.

I can feel something very complicated coming up.

Not complicated, so much as intricate, difficult to express except calmly.

So, recalibrate, I know. [Pause] Go ahead.

At any given moment, you are many yous:

• The contemporary you, and
• All the great number of differing yous at various times in the 3D past, and
• the common denominator you for this lifetime (much of which you may not have yet experienced, paradoxically enough).

And that considers only the this-life part of you. To it must be added the whole vast rest of you, in at least two logical divisions

• First, your larger non-3D self that is not restricted to the present lifetime but is your parent-soul, so to speak, though that is a very sloppy undisciplined way to put it, and
• Second, all those other aspects of you – “past lives” and for that matter “future lives” – that do interact with you, whether or not you recognize the interactions.

Can you see that all these various equally compelling, equally valid, equally alive versions of you are unlikely to be in total agreement about the meaning of anything?

Can you recognize that, since they will necessarily have different values, some contradicting others, some shading off by nuances, your own reaction to the world is unlikely to be consistent and finely focused? If it is consistent and finely focused, we suggest it is because you have truncated contradictory manifestations. (That’s why one-pointed men tend to be violent; they are the product and producers of violence.)

Since “you” view the world from so many-sided a viewpoint, it should not be a surprise that the world seems contradictory, ever-changing, perhaps chaotic. It reflects not what you are, exactly; more like, what you express at any given moment.

Now, if you will back away from your current-3D-life perspective, you will see that your non-3D perspective is broader in some ways but is still closely tied to it. To get to the “larger project” we referred to, you need to envision the longer-term arrow into the blue that you are.

Poetic. I take that to mean, our original being as it differentiated from the universal source. I don’t know how to put it better than that.

That is what we meant. Behind any life or group of lives is a vector, expressing or rather intended to express certain values by your 3D-life-choosing. Your reaction to what you experience as external events shapes you, but you are shaped from a starting point that is that vector.

I doubt that that is very clear. I hear you saying, there is the original unity, whatever that is. (It isn’t something we experience, being too fragmentary.) That unity is subdivided into vectors, into incomplete representations of certain values, and characteristics I guess, each of which continually or anyway occasionally express in a given 3D world-time as a person.

Yes, that is what we said. The salient point is that your life is that of a fragment of something far larger and more complete. We use the word “fragment” not to indicate a breaking-up, but to indicate something which is in itself incomplete.

We know we are incomplete. We feel it, we reach for completeness and don’t know how to find it.

It can’t be found. How can green be a full spectrum? How can “this” be “that”? it isn’t your design to be complete, but to be alive and aware as a representative of your particular nature, which could be paraphrased, “of your particular kind of incompleteness.”

I’m starting to get the connection. Yearning for perfection externally is the same as yearning for completeness internally.

Very much the same idea, and of course impossible of satisfaction in either case.

Which isn’t to say that our yearning for improvement, even for perfection, is wrong or stupid or doomed.

No, but understand the nature of things. For any of you to perfect yourselves is to perfect one aspect of reality, is to polish one point of one vector. You aren’t perfect in the sense of reflecting everything, and you aren’t going to be. You are perfect in the sense of expressing to the fullest the potential you are born into. That is, you can become perfect, yet, you already are perfect. It is a matter of turning potential into actual, which is done by a lifetime of conscious choosing.

So, don’t expect Utopia (or, I imagine, Dystopia) externally, and don’t expect to encompass the world internally.

Isn’t that merely common sense? The world is bigger than any of its parts, and even more so when you remember that the 3D shades into the non-3D, and that past and future are concepts more than discrete realities.

It’s up to us to choose who we will be, what values we will uphold, continually.

It is always the condition, but at the moment, like water boiling, you have the advantage of extra energy that you may be able to employ. However, a caveat: It is an entire waste of time to condemn. In every direction you will see things you disapprove, perhaps fear (and therefore, soon, hate). If you fixate on what you reject, how does that help you manifest what you uphold?

The unconscious doesn’t recognize the negative, we are told.

True enough. Say “I am not that,” and it hears an expression of identity: “I am that.” So all you are doing is setting up or enhancing internal unconscious contradictions. It won’t improve your temper and it won’t improve your understanding, and it certainly won’t improve your ability to choose, even though it will appear to express great firmness of vision and will.

 

Emerson and Yeats (from Nov. 30, 2018)

Friday, November 30, 2018

Lately I have been “sinfully strolling from book to book,” as Emerson once put it, re-reading at the same time The Heart of Emerson’s Journals and W.B. Yeats’s Autobiographies. Here are some gems that may be of interest, recorded in my journal as I went along, but sorted by author. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) and William Butler Yeats (1856-1939), are both long dead, sort of, and both as alive as ever, as these citations demonstrate.

Emerson, at age 18 or thereabouts, in his journal: “We forget ourselves and our destinies in health, and the chief use of temporary sickness is to remind us of these concerns. I must improve my time better.”

June, 1831: “A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking.”

April, 1834: “All the mistakes I make arise from forsaking my own station and trying to see the object from another person’s point of view.”

November, 1839: “… although no diligence can rebuild the universe in a model by the best accumulation of disposition of details, yet does the world reproduce itself in miniature in every event that transpires, so that all the laws of nature may be read in the smallest fact. So that the truth-speaker may dismiss all solicitude as to the proportion and congruency of the aggregate of his thoughts, so long as he is a faithful reporter of particular impressions.”

June, 1840: “In silence we must wrap much of our life, because it is too fine for speech, because also we cannot explain it to others, and because somewhat we cannot yet understand.”

1841: “When Jones Very was in Concord, he said to me, ‘I always felt when I heard you speak or read your writings that you saw the truth better than others, yet I felt that your spirit was not quite right. It was as if a vein of colder air blew across me.’”

1842: “How slowly, how slowly we learn that witchcraft and ghostcraft, palmistry and magic, and all the other so-called superstitions, which, with so much police, boastful skepticism and scientific committees, we had finally dismissed to the moon as nonsense, are really no nonsense at all, but subtle and valid influences, always starting up, mowing, muttering in our path, and shading our day.”

1842: “I have no thoughts today. What then? What difference does it make? It is only that there does not chance today to be an antagonism to evolve them, the electricity is the more accumulated; a week hence you shall meet somebody or something that shall draw from you a shower of sparks.”

1847: “I think I have material enough to serve my countrymen with thought and music, if only it was not scraps. But men do not want handfuls of gold dust, but ingots.”

Emerson, 1847, in a quotation I have cherished for years:

The Superstitions of our Age:

The fear of Catholicism;

The fear of pauperism;

The fear of immigration;

The fear of manufacturing interests;

The fear of radicalism or democracy;

And faith in the steam engine.

1848: “Happy is he who looks only into his work to know if it will succeed, never into the times or the public opinion; and who writes from the love of imparting certain thoughts and not from the necessity of sale – who writes always to the unknown friend.” [Itals Emerson’s]

1848: “The salvation of America and of the human race depends on the next election, if we believe the newspapers. But so it was last year, and so it was the year before, and our fathers believed the same thing forty years ago.”

1849: “A feature of the times is, when I was born, private and family prayer was in the use of all well-bred people, and now it is not known.”

1854: “Realism. We shall pass for what we are. Do not fear to die because you have not done your task. Whenever a noble soul comes, the audience awaits. And he is not judged by his performance, but by the spirit of his performance….”

1854: “We affirm and affirm, but neither you nor I know the value of what we say.”

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

 

These quotations from Yeats are from a finished work, rather than a journal, and so cannot be dated.

“Yet it was a Yeats [that is, a member of his father’s side of the family] who spoke the only eulogy that turns my head. ‘We have ideas and no passions, but by marriage with a Pollexfen we have given a tongue to the sea cliffs.’” [p. 23]

Yeats, “I was vexed and bewildered, and am still bewildered and still vexed, finding it a poor and crazy thing that we who have imagined so many noble persons cannot bring our flesh to heel.” [p. 40]

Yeats, “My thoughts were a great excitement, but when I tried to do anything with them, it was like trying to pack a balloon into a shed in a high wind.” [p. 41]

Yeats, “I now can but share with a friend my thoughts and my emotions, and there is a continual discovery of difference, but in those days, before I had found myself, we could share adventures. When friends plan and do together, their minds become one mind and the last secret disappears.” [p. 48]

Yeats, “I began occasionally telling people that one should believe whatever had been believed in all countries and periods, and only reject any part of it after much evidence, instead of starting all over afresh and only believing what one could prove. But I was always ready to deny or turn into a joke what was for all that my secret fanaticism.” [pp. 78-79]

Yeats, “I had as many ideas as I have now, only I did not know how to choose from among them those that belonged to my life.” [p. 83]

Yeats, “We all have our simplifying image, our genius, and such hard burden does it lay upon us that, but for the praise of others, we would deride it and hunt it away.” [p. 121]

Yeats, speaking of William Morris, quotes someone as saying, “He is always afraid that he is doing something wrong and generally is.” J

Yeats, “… I can see some like imagining [that is, some similar imagining] in every great change, and believe that the first flying-fish first leaped, not because it sought ‘adaptation’ to the air, but out of horror of the sea.” [p. 143]

Yeats, “When a man writes any work of genius, or invents some creative action, is it not because some knowledge or power has come into his mind from beyond his mind? It is called up by an image, as I think … but our images must be given to us, we cannot choose them deliberately.” [p. 272]

Speaking of the work that he and J.M. Synge and Lady Gregory had done, and why: “I think as I speak these words of how deep down we have gone, below all that is individual, modern and restless, seeking foundations for an Ireland that can only come into existence in a Europe that is still but a dream.” [p. 554]

And, finally, a quotation from Frank DeMarco! Thinking of the journal entries from 2006 that I have been posting, I wrote:

“I just had this thought: ‘I have not lived without purpose entirely; it’s just that it wasn’t necessarily my purpose.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, that’s good. Yeats would have liked that.’”