Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

(from Sept. 11, 2018, edited)

So, guys, the issue of staying in contact. It’s more complicated than I have been thinking of it, isn’t it? It isn’t clear-cut.

Let’s say it isn’t on/off. A book like Trask has multiple layers. In so far as the story includes the element of a man needing to learn to get into touch with his deeper self, your absorption in the story may actually deepen your own connection. But in so far as it involves an outer set of events – as of course it must – you may forget yourself in the interest of the story, which isn’t the same thing at all. This isn’t black/white either. Reading a story is somewhere between experiencing the outer world (usually as something “objectively” there) and dreaming (usually experienced as “merely” internal, “merely” subjective).

As Paul Brunton well points out.

Yes, only he didn’t happen to discuss the function of story in his exploration of the roots of consciousness and the nature of reality.

Anyway, as one reads a story, one balances awarenesses, simultaneously.

That’s very interesting. I get it as I write your words, of course, so we’re ahead of ourselves as usual. But it is very interesting. I hadn’t been thinking of stacking levels of awareness, so to speak.

Well, we said it was more complex than it first appeared. That is true of pretty nearly everything: Consciousness, life itself. Anything is more intricate, the closer you look at it. So let’s look at this question of how a non-3D mind in a 3D body experiences the world. And in this case it is not only a question of “which you” but of “which world,” or rather, which elements of the world should be included:

• The world of apparently objective, apparently external reality, the world of things that are out there.
• The world of 3D-plus-non-3D, that requires more attention in order to be perceived that way.
• The world of one’s own body and immediate life, seeming equally objective and (in a way) external.
• And the world of one’s relation to the rest of it: to the outer world; to the perceived greater outer world when one includes the non-3D; to one’s own body and life perceived as if external.

You as observer are actually observing and participating both, and to the extent that you are aware of this, you add yet another layer of complexity to the total.

So now, “you” read a novel like Trask. What is happening? Your body sits in a chair, or walks around, or lies down, or whatever it does as you send your eyesight sequentially absorbing the words that are to form pictures in your mind. To any third party observing you, you are just sitting there with your nose in a book, withdrawn from the world.

True enough. but at the next level, the level of 3D-plus-non-3D, your bodily actions are background allowing you to rise from the level of “exterior, objective” reality and experience whatever it is that the author paints (plus whatever associations are called forth out of your own experience, of course). You are aware of your body holding the book; you are aware of your eyes reading the words, but you are more aware of the dream you are reading, with your own inevitable additions and corrections. All your prior life goes into the reading of a book. No two people ever read the same book, nor does anyone ever re-read the same book. At this level, reading the book changes you in the way that any other “external” experience changes you. You bring yourself, as you are, to the experience of reading, as you do to talking to someone or doing anything. There isn’t the difference that people sometimes think there is.

So, reading a novel is experiencing “first hand” seemingly, what you can never experience first-hand otherwise: another person’s life from the inside, or a third-party description of that other person’s inner life. That’s the fascination of it, and the potential reward.

When you read a novel, it is a case of “which you” reading about “which world.” Only, it isn’t any one, but all, at once, only rarely perceived that way.

Let me try to tease that out, as I get that it would be easier. I hear you saying all the various levels of our psyche experience reading, each in its own way, and in fact that is true of everything we do.

Correct.

And I get that a novel is closer to a set of cues, or sparks, than to the logical exposition of one idea or story that we might think it.

True, depending upon the kind of story. A story about a man discovering other dimensions of himself is going to have a different effect (usually) than a story about a detective investigating a crime. It may lead the reader into deep waters by his suggestions along the way, or it may merely take the world for granted. In any case, you can see, there is a difference, even if the exact degree may be shades of grey. Then, as you move down the scale, you may have formulaic exactly-what-you-expected stories like romance novels, designed not to bring the reader into unexpected territory, or horror or pornography or other genres that implicitly take the 3D world for granted in that they depart from them in an attempt to shock or titillate, but not transform.

So if you have multiple “you”s reading multiple levels of story in any given story, you can see the complexity, and this is a good thing, offering potential for free-will choosing. Only, some forms of novels are bounded differently from others.

Reading per se will not lead you away from your non-3D self, nor, per se, keep you in touch with it. The variable is how you are as you do the reading.

When you remember that multiple layers of you are engaged in the same activity at any given time, you may remember that life is much more inward than it often appears. The practical point is this: Whatever you do, you may do with greater or lesser awareness. As you increase awareness, at first some confusion may arise, in that you are aware of cross-currents, and it makes a distraction. But as you accustom yourself to remembering your multiple layers of experiencing reality, instead of confusion there is a clearer perception of the structure within the chaos.

But what you read may help or hinder the process. A novel like Trask, too, may be read in a superficial external way, slurring over what is said between the lines, or in a deeper internal way, taking the external story more for granted and the suggestions more seriously, as the point of the novel.

Thus, one reason for re-reading.

Of course. In re-reading, you can’t help be less taken with the plot and more with the characters; and more, too, with what the author says mostly between the lines.

It’s a cliché, really. What you do, do consciously, and its inner nature will be revealed to you. More to the point, your inner nature will be revealed to you. If you don’t block it, that is. If you remember who you are, what you do matters less. Of course, what you do may assist or hamper your remembering.

 

Saturday, August 27, 2022

7:15 a.m. A late start at 6:30, then choosing and sending a morning message, and here we are. If I get nothing else from re-reading old stuff, I see that it is good material, and I see that I am a better writer than the guys are! Maybe because they have a sloppy but literal-minded secretary. Editing certainly improves their clarity. I will have to decide whether to print out the edited results. I suppose I could keep the binders of the original material and set out the edited in another series of binders. Early days to be thinking of that, though.

So much helpful intent! So much encouragement. I’m very grateful, and I’m sure some others are, as well.

You have never set out the handicap you work from, which is that one who is strong on the inner plane is not strong on the outer. No one leads in both spheres of life.

No one? That’s a pretty flat statement.

It is, but so is “Gravity pulls toward the center.” Some statements merely express relationships, and this is one.

Can you tell us why this is so? (I get that you intend to.)

We will have to do so with half our evidence being invisible to you.

Meaning, I take it, that using famous historical examples provides us with people whose external facts are familiar, but we’re still ignorant of their inner life.

Not, exactly, “their inner life”: more like, “The non-3D as it expresses through them as people.”  That is, we have to move the argument one layer up from the 3D. We can’t treat George Washington as the man who lived 1732-1799. We are dealing with more than “the father of his country,” more than the son of his parents, etc.

Ah, got it. It’s easy to forget, using historical examples, that they too are communities of strands, and hence are more complex than they appear.

It is easy to show that to you, about yourself. But everybody else in the world is hearsay to you, no matter how close you may be to them emotionally or mentally or genetically. You interact with aspects of others, you never can and never could interact with another entire person. How could two spheres touch on all sides? You touch where you touch; all else is unknown to you, whatever your guesses or conclusions.

But can’t we experience each other’s totality in non-3D? And I felt your explosion of delight when I got that, though I don’t yet see why it’s such a breakthrough.

It is exactly our point. In 3D you experience separation. In non-3D you experience connection. Same you, different environment. But – remember – we have said that 3D and non-3D are not in fact two realms but are the same realm seen different ways. So, there can be no barrier between the two, no reason why you won’t be allowed to peep through the window of the house next door.

The barrier is within our ideas of what is possible, I suppose.

Now if you as an isolated 3D individual are particularly suited to a life of 3D activity (in whatever field; this has nothing to do with athletics or acumen or efficient use of resources), this does not carry over to you in non-3D.

I get that I need to remember presence. Focus, receptivity, clarity, presence. Proceed.

Any 3D being is a selection from among possibilities.

Yes, I see that. Our larger being might have chosen slightly different combinations of strands.

Slightly, or greatly, yes. Well, as a selection, you are – how can we put it so as not to mislead? – you are like a shaped implement, pruned of inessential attributes, designed to function in your 3D circumstances. This doesn’t mean you feel like you fit in (or don’t) with your life circumstances. It does mean, your life is not accidental. But this means you are necessarily incomplete; necessarily one-sided; necessarily less than everything, because no one could live expressing everything.

Can’t express pear except by suppressing non-pear.

That’s the idea. This is not tragedy, nor bad design, nor punishment. (We realize, we keep saying that, but maybe you or some of you keep suspecting it.) The 3D has no ability to hold someone expressing everything at once. That’s one reason there are so many people, each expressing some fraction of everything. But if by definition no 3D “individual” can express all of itself – let alone all of reality! – surely you can see that to your non-3D self (your larger sphere, to use our analogy) you as 3D creatures are experienced as truncation, or, to be charitable, as specialized function.

We in 3D and we as non-3D beings can never express as the same thing.

Can never really be the same thing. The 3D person is a subset of the non-3D person. You can grow, to become more aware of your unsuspected depths, but how could you ever establish a one-to-one correspondence with your non-3D?

I get, immediately (even knowing that you meant the question as rhetorical): Emulate Jesus in continually doing the will of the father: Live willingly following the promptings of our non-3D selves. But as I write it out, I see that really isn’t an answer either. It wouldn’t be a bad way to live (assuming we were always able to distinguish true messages from Psychic’s Disease), but even if we did it perfectly, we’d still be a truncated version of who we are beyond 3D.

So now, look at Abraham Lincoln, an example sufficiently familiar to all, but less blinding than Jesus. On the 3D plane he was very effective, enough so as to make his name immortal. Does this imply that on the non-3D plane he was not (is not) effective?

Now you have me counting pages and looking at the clock, wondering if I should quit. I have no idea how this should go, or is going.

We are pursuing our “flat statement.” Lincoln the 3D man was a combination of characteristics that was highly effective in a given time and a given set of circumstances. He could be said to have led on the 3D plane. But do you have any reason to assume that his superiority of character and intellect would be equally the case in non-3D?

In non-3D, to his larger being, Lincoln is just one set of combinations among many, I suppose.

This isn’t a matter of judgment of value; “Lincoln” in non-3D is much more the product of the community of influences that make him up than the “individual” that 3D necessarily makes him appear to be.

All right, you’ve convinced me. Someone who is a leader in 3D, in whatever sphere of life, is not necessarily a leader in non-3D. What about the opposite case? How can someone who is ineffective in 3D be effective in non-3D? I don’t mean “why,” I mean, “How?”

You are thinking “ineffective,” but that isn’t right. It’s more like non-apparent, or, say, inactive.

Okay, I got it, though you haven’t said it. You mean, just as vegetables have greater internal freedom than animals because they have less to do to maintain themselves, so someone may be very little active in 3D external affairs and very much active in 3D internal affairs.

Yes, like monks praying, or you talking to us, or people living quiet lives of integrity and service. You are being led from the non-3D, you see. The non-3D could be said to be active, and the 3D passive. Only of course you need to remember, words solidify things that are not actually plural but single. You in 3D and you inn non-3D are two beings for the purposes of analysis of the way things are, but nonetheless you are one thing.

It takes the fun out of blaming the non-3D for our problems.

Yes, life is unfair.

Smiling. I didn’t expect a session when I sat down with this, but it’s always a pleasure. Our thanks as always.

 

The present center of interest is how you live your lives, and for what purpose. If you can’t get a useful perspective on that, the rest is just spinning theory.

Thoreau’s “Where I lived, and What I Lived For.”

Both halves, yes. Ignore the former part, and you have only theory. Ignore the latter and you have only anecdotes. Nobody needed GPS to tell the lives of the saints, but neither could they make any sense of those lives – by definition they couldn’t – apart from the circumstances of their 3D existence. So you may say that here we are attempting to give you latitude as well as longitude, warp as well as weft, 3D as well as non-3D, so that you would have enough of a complete pattern to be useful. You aren’t getting “the” complete picture only because neither you nor we are capable of comprehending it; but, completer. More useful. Omitting fewer vitally important subjects.

Maps are interesting in themselves to a certain kind of mind and temperament, but they are meant less for admiration of their aesthetic qualities than for their more or less passive assistance in somebody’s journeys. Let’s be a little more active, at this point.

The map is more like a GPS, talking to us?

More like Data in Star Trek, conversing, not merely responding.

Isn’t that what we have been doing, all this while?

To a degree, yes. But it is time to move beyond what we have done to this point.

Well, I’m open to suggestion.

That, in fact, is what we have in mind. Anyone who reads this, quite apart from the irrelevant fact of when they read it, will benefit from reading it in that way, as well as reading what we actually said.

We may have to unpack that. I get that (a) direct mind-to-mind between you and us is not 3D-time-constrained. Two non-3D minds are in contact whenever (within a 3D-time context) they connect, and (b) how we read the material will determine how active we are in the process. Read it for its literal meaning and we get a certain amount. Read it and allow it to suggest, and we get more.

More, and maybe different, maybe contradictory of the literal meaning, if only in appearance. It involves putting greater trust in yourselves and less trust in the disembodied voice from Olympus, or from the voice belonging to the statue on the pedestal.

I see it conceptually. So what do we do differently?

It isn’t a skill involved, so much as an attitude, an approach. It involves closer perusal – you can’t do this by merely scanning the material and then following your fancy – and deeper assaying, feeling for what thoughts, opinions, feelings, memories, half-ideas surface as you do so, and either following them or deciding not to follow them, but taking them seriously. Is the idea clear?

It is to me. And it’s “slow down” all over again, isn’t it?

It is the old railroad sign: “Stop, look, and listen.”

That’s a very good way to think about it.

Now, this entry is a good example of what we’re talking about, because it can easily be read either casually and quickly, and dismissed with a brisk, “That’s obvious,” or “That’s nothing new,” or even “That’s a good idea,” – or it can be pondered, sat with, examined at leisure.

It isn’t as easy to get the idea across as one might think. On the one hand, pay closer attention; on the other hand, pay closer attention to what it stirs up in you, and treat that with at least as much reverence as you give anything else in your life.

It would be to nobody’s advantage to give you one more source or one more body of knowledge to put upon a pedestal. It would be not only to your advantage, but to everybody’s, to give you at one and the same time new information, new clues to your situation, and more confidence in yourselves as navigators.

Yes, I heard the analogy come up as I was writing. Your data as to our position and speed and any possible landfalls and reefs are not meant to be of academic interest, but to assist us to navigate; only, we must do the navigating.

Must do the navigating, must bend the sails, must decide (to some extent) which port to make for. No publisher of navigational charts can be responsible for people’s skill in sailing. That’s up to them. The best the publisher or the chart can do is see to the accuracy of the material that is designed to give the sailor as much useful information as possible.

So, to make it a little more specific, we are tying together two points of view – your lives as they affect your growth, and your lives as part of something far greater than yourselves.

Hmm. Our lives as biography and our lives as part of society.

Is it not true that a “Life and Times of…” biography takes a broader view of the subject than one that sticks closely to the personal and somewhat ignores or takes for granted the context of the person’s life?

Today a biography tends to include what the person customarily had for breakfast. Adomnan, on the other hand, took for granted that any possible reader would know enough about Columba’s external facts (to the extent that anybody cared about them); he set forth the outer evidence of Columba’s inner life, as his qualities spilled out into the world, so to speak. Two extremes, centering on 3D data or on non-3D meaning as it appeared in 3D data.

And there’s nothing wrong with going to extremes, though one may find it difficult to remain there, but it is better if you can touch both extremes at once.

[I can’t remember now how what follows was suggested by the sentence on extremes, but it was and seemed a logical extension at the moment.]

I don’t see you giving us tips on the stock market, or the winning lottery number, or the winner of the third race at Hialeah.

No, you don’t see it. Does that mean it doesn’t happen? Where do hunches come from?

Where do mistaken hunches come from?

That’s easily answered: from wishful thinking. But what of true hunches?

Since I know that you already know that I know that they come from our non-3D mind, I presume the point here is that you are perfectly willing to give us that kind of information as well. And Joe Gallenberger’s course comes to mind as I write that: ESP as source of gambling winnings.

It’s a matter of what is important to you, and here again the question is –

“Which you?” I got that.

Of course. For you to become aware of a hunch, and for you to act upon it (two steps, not one), there must be agreement between conscious and unconscious mind, or call it 3D and non-3D mind, or one will sabotage the other. A conscious mind that arrogantly denies the possibility of valid psychic input will disregard the hunch as self-evidently (by definition) fantasy. An unconscious mind that for good reasons or bad does not want the 3D life to win that lottery will arrange circumstances that result in the number not being played. The two must be in cooperation, and that cooperation obviously cannot be willed by the 3D mind on its own. It must be the product of true cooperation, which will likely take place beyond 3D awareness.

So there’s an hour, and clearly there isn’t much need to do more than lightly scan the material.

Very funny. Okay, till next time, and thanks.

 

In discussing the three virtues the Christians added to the classic four, we are less interested in what Christians may have understood by them historically than in their relevance for today and tomorrow. For, after all, nothing permanent ever changes, but everything seems to change – reveals other facets – as the point of view of the observers changes. Yes, “all is one” ultimately, but in discussing anything short of the ultimate, we end by discussing parts as if they were independent or partly independent units. So how might you usefully incorporate these virtues in the lives you lead from now?

Faith. Faith implies faith in something, if only in the integrity of the universe, or in justice, or goodness. It need not be a credo in the sense that organized religions use it. It may, if that helps you, if it matches your disposition and meets your needs; but it need not. Non-Muslims are neither aided nor harmed by the fact that Muslims believe certain things to be true that they themselves do not, or do not in the same manner. Similarly, non-Christians are no more affected by their own non-belief in the Apostle’s Creed, say, than Protestants and Catholics are affected by their own inability to believe their opposite numbers’ specific creeds. In short, faith has nothing to do with being right. It has nothing to do with anything that can be proved. Faith is not opinion.

This, despite the fact that opinion, and supposed fact, and the assumption that one is correct will shelter behind the word. Faith is what you know it to be, from experience. It is a steadfast unreasoning and perhaps unreasonable belief that something is true, that motivates your action (or perhaps your in-action, sometimes) against all contrary evidence.

As I was writing that, I thought of Shackleton’s men, stranded in the Antarctic, waiting for months for rescue, forming up every day because “this may be the day the captain returns.” Amazing story, showing the remarkable character that inspired such faith, and the remarkable character of his men who refused to consider that he might be unable to fulfill his word.

Plenty of examples throughout history, if you care to set them out.

I don’t know why that particular example came to mind, unless it was because their faith was so unreasoning, even though they knew the perils that might easily have destroyed their leader in his attempt to bring them their salvation.

Even if he had failed, and the men had all died, and the world never heard of it, the second-tier experience resulting from their faith would have remained.

In a sense, faith follows guidance, an unseen presence that is trustworthy, benevolent, and personal. It manifests in convictions that you do not doubt, that lead you safely through fog and darkness past unsuspected dangers. It doesn’t preserve you from life – it isn’t a magic carpet or a cloak of invisibility or an assurance of invulnerability – but it preserves you throughout life, if you allow it to.

Can you make clear the difference between faith and what I call Psychic’s Disease, the certainty that something is true because I strongly feel it is true?

It’s easy. Psychic’s Disease usually boils down to opinion. Faith is more about qualities. That which you believe in faith, is an overwhelming presence in your psyche. You may choose to disbelieve; you may, one might say, choose to go with doubt over faith, but it is there if you are willing to know it is. Faith is not a matter of opinion, though it may look like it superficially. Shackleton’s men were not of the opinion that he would return for them; they knew he would, even though reason would have thrown up so many reasons why he might have been prevented from doing so. Hundreds of miles of open sea would have provided reason enough for doubt. Psychic’s Disease is closer to your seizing on to some idea or conviction that comes floating within range and deciding that, because you grasped it, it is truth. And this is slightly more complicated than may appear.

It is a fine line, sometimes, between faith and cocksureness. The way to distinguish between them – for yourself – is to distinguish how far desire has mingled with perception. Shackleton’s men certainly desired that he would return bringing rescue, but it was not desire, in their case, that brought certainty. It was their shared faith in him and his leadership and ability and his luck, though perhaps neither he nor they would have used the word.

But supposing – to make a slightly absurd example – that among themselves they had been conducting a pool as to which day of the week he would arrive. In such case, any certainty would have been untrustworthy, because no matter how certain one might be, no matter how accurate one’s non-sensory knowledge might be – in actual fact, one might wind up following some other timeline, thus falsifying the knowing.

You see? Very difficult to tell true intuition leading to foreknowledge from true intuition leading to what we might call mistaken foreknowledge. If one judges results by where one lands, that kind of thing happens all the time. It is why prophets are not inerrant. So, faith must be in things other than timeline-delineated things.

I feel we haven’t really said some one thing that would make it clear.

Let’s leave it at this. You can live in faith in all humility, but you can’t live in Psychic’s Disease that way. Remember always that you, yourself, are not uniquely guided in the world, and it will be easier to remember that guidance is not certainty, but always requires and repays doubt.

“Doubt”? Did I get the wrong word? That seems contradictory. Shackleton’s men never seem to have doubted that he would successfully return.

There is a fine shade of difference, concealed by language. They did not doubt his ability, his loyalty, his courage and resourcefulness. This is the basis for their faith. They knew him. But that did not blind them to the possibility that the forces of nature might overwhelm him as they had overwhelmed the expedition’s ship and its intent. They knew he might fail, but there was no percentage in pulling that future toward them (or pulling themselves toward it, however you wish to see it). Instead, they clung to their faith in their leader’s character and ability as they knew it from long experiences, and, we might say, used that faith to pull themselves to a future in which they were rescued.

You see the fine line? They didn’t suppress their knowledge of possibilities, they merely rested on what they knew, and lived as if it would work out, as it did.

Well, as you say, it’s a fine line. Then, how about hope and charity?.

John Anthony West is in your mind, and his manifest contempt for what passes for civilization among you in his day and yours.

Yes. Not much hope for our “civilization” unless it changes greatly for the better, and it is clearly beyond human possibility to design and execute those changes at any 3D-driven level.

Yet in his final statement, he was living in hope, was he not? Would you call that nebulous?

Well, it’s difficult to sort out – which I realize is your forte, sorting out. He was or seemed to be feeling that a great change was nearly upon us, after a lifetime’s struggle against entrenched stupidity and willful blindness. Yet his criticisms of our present day were no less trenchant and biting.

So, you see how quickly and easily we pass to the essence of what hope is. It is the expectation of something that cannot necessarily be defined or even more than vaguely sensed; nonetheless the expectation (as opposed to the formulation of what it is that is expected) is a real, certain, tangible presence.

Start with the difference between faith and hope, remembering that we are concerning ourselves with how these words and qualities may be understood henceforth. Thus, call faith belief that certain things are true. Call hope belief that certain goals may be attained. Do you see how easily the distinction is made?

Abraham Lincoln believed in the people. He believed in human equality. He believed in free government as an idea that had been passed to his generation from its revolutionary forebears. Those were acts of faith.

He hoped, on the other hand, for many developments, some of which transpired and some of which did not. He hoped to keep England and France from interfering; he hoped the South would accept compensated emancipation; he hoped to find a solution to the race problem by the “repatriation” of ex-slaves to Africa. He hoped that whatever latest general he was forced to rely on would measure up. You see the distinction, surely, between faith in principle and hope in outcome. You have faith in human ability to contact non-physical sources of guidance. You hope that we will be able to shed light on a given subject.

Even if a given hope is disappointed, that doesn’t necessarily justify abandoning faith that in general the hope is justified.

We wouldn’t have put it quite that way, but yes, good enough.

Now remember, we are delineating the sins and virtues for a reason, a very practical stocking of your toolbox with cautions and reminders, so that you may have life, and have it more abundantly, as Jesus put it. We aren’t endorsing previously held religious views. We are reminding you that you need all the tools and guidance you can get your head around, if you are to make sense of new inputs, new conditions, new exigencies.

Thus, faith is helpful. Hope is helpful. They are power tools, multipliers of force, enablers of psychic judo, so to speak. Without them, you are half-disarmed. With them, you are half-ready.

And charity?

Charity is different in intent and in effect. Faith and hope are attitudes you may take up with regard to what (seems to) happen to you. Charity is an attitude you may take up to shape how you happen to the world. It is your lodestone, orienting your actions. It prevents you from many a wrong orientation, hence from many a wrong action or thoughts.

Again Abraham Lincoln.

He is an outstanding example of a man shaped by living the three Christian virtues, though he did not regard himself as a Christian and joined no church even in his mind, let alone in his external allegiance.

Faith sustained him in his most difficult times, times when he was young and feared he would be driven to kill himself and when, as an older man, he feared he was inadequate to his great responsibilities.

Hope sustained him, similarly, in the times when logic and common sense made hope seem illusory. Like Churchill 80 years later, he clutched at each reason for hope as it appeared, but did not allow each subsequent disappointment to render him hopeless. If faith was belief in certain principles, hope was disbelief in certain ultimate outcomes.

Charity sustained him, in that he knew he meant well. In this he was like Robert E. Lee, who prayed for his enemies as well as for his friends.

Awareness of their good intent fortified them in hope that they were on God’s side?

That’s a little too definite. They both recognized that “God” could not be on both sides at once, as Lincoln pointed out. But let’s say, knowing that they were operating out of charity rather than hatred cleared not only their minds but their consciences. It could not guarantee success externally. It did enable success individually.

Lincoln and Lee lived the same double-edged life we all lead. The living of their lives concerned them; it also concerned the world around them, influenced by them. Nobody can have things all his own way externally; everybody succeeds and fails to some degree, considered as one person in the world. But that same person’s (seemingly) internal task, the inner life, does not depend upon external success and is not hampered by external failure.

Well, it may be. But the distinction remains. Even though your life is your own affair (on the one hand) and is part of the world (on the other), it is one life, not two, so the effects continually intertwine. Lincoln’s personal qualities affected his relations with those around him. His rise to political influence among the Whigs and then the Republicans affected his own day-to-day sense of himself. It is always a fluctuating balance, that’s how it’s designed.

So, to return to the focus, which is how you, reading this, may benefit from the discussion.

Life seems to happen to you. external events shape your life, day upon day. What is the most effective way to live that life?

You happen to life, too. Internal motivations guide you, moment by moment, and shape how you react and how you pro-act. What is the most effective way to live that life?

Remembering the four cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude will help keep your ship balanced and seaworthy. Remembering faith, hope, and charity will provide a common-sense set of guidelines as you go along moment by moment.

 

You will notice that you have had conversations about the social crisis developing around you, and your (and by reflection, our) views on the causes and nature of the crisis differ somewhat from those with whom you are in sympathy on most other things.

You mean because I am critical of both liberal and conservative intolerance and self-delusion.

As Dirk pointed out at one point, the words “liberal” and “conservative” no longer convey meaning. Nor would “right” and “left,” nor any conceivable synonym such as “progressive” and “reactionary.” But it is easier to see the need for new descriptives than to fill it. This you have not yet done.

If I had symbols and story to couch my understanding in, perhaps I could do better.

Not that you know “the” truth either, of course. But you do have a way to help people see better.

Provided you paint a few signposts for us.

Provided that. And here they are, but these are not battle flags. They are, shall we say, orienting reminders. There is no use choosing sides and thinking that is solving anything. To overcome deadlock, one has to move to another level of analysis. And you can’t get to another level of analysis except by getting to another level of perception.

We are setting out a view of things that will reveal these crippling political and economic and ideological antagonisms for what they are. But this new view requires the ability to see it, It is for the individual capable of comprehending it. It will not be a banner under which anyone can rally the troops to build the New Jerusalem.

Understood. But a clear way of describing the current situation would help those able to comprehend.

It would and it will – only, look what we have to overcome first. Nobody holds political or ideological opinions thinking, “These are only partial views, and no doubt those on the other side are just as right as I am.” Instead, they say, at best, “They are not necessarily evil, just ignorant and being misled by their ignorance and by those who seek to take advantage of that ignorance.” Therefore, almost by definition, anything we say will seem somewhat unfair, somewhat biased, because it will to some degree criticize views people hold in good faith, perhaps with great emotional investment.

It’s a problem. What is the solution?

For you, for those you live among mentally, spiritually, the answer is to stay centered upon your primary concern. How can centering that is off-centered produce stability? Your concern is not centered upon the 3D world, so how can analysis that remains at the 3D level suffice for you? It sounds like a paradox, but is not: To understand 3D developments, you cannot remain within 3D terms. The 3D can only be understood in its larger context, or what have we been doing here these past years?

It is one thing to redefine your view of life and the world conceptually; it is a second thing to begin to learn to trust that view; it is a third thing to live it, and a fourth, following upon the third, to allow that transformed view to transform political and ideological views formed much earlier at an earlier state of your consciousness.

Your views, conservative or liberal, may be very long-held views, but they were not formed at your current level of consciousness, nor with your current understanding of underlying causes and currents and meanings. Discussions conducted on the basis of such slippery labels as “liberal” and “conservative” come to little or nothing, because neither party knows what the other hears in the labels.

Instead, try to hold on to the expanded perception we have been providing:

• The 3D world exists within the context of the larger All-D world.
• You, as individuals who are also communities, exist within the context not only of your personal attributes and backgrounds, but also within the context of vast impersonal forces that affect the world and everything and everybody and every idea in the world.
• Your values – be they whatever they are – are supplemented, or complemented, by other values in a 180- or perhaps 120- or 90- or 60-degree relationship, as all values and forces balance out. There is no room in the 3D or All-D world for leftover positives or negatives. Whatever is, is (that is, exists) of right, not by accident.

Seth, Edgar Cayce, Ramtha, any such voices, were not liberal nor conservative. Their truth cannot be found at the ideological level, because the division and partial-views necessary to such positions are antithetical to the view that attempts to make sense of the world by seeing it with new eyes.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who has no clue as to where we’re going.

It is a very long lead-in to a new point of view, so it isn’t surprising that you should lose the thread sometimes, nor that you should be unable to hold it all at one time. That is why a new worldview isn’t learned, or memorized, but grown into. It is holding together in relationship facts and classes of facts that one has not previously associated, like studying geography and then being told that it really needed to be seen in connection with botany, then biology, then ecology, then sociology, say.

You are saying that a new point of view associates seemingly unconnected subjects, in ways that may seem crazy or, at best, arbitrary. Back when Rita and I were playing 20 Questions with the guys upstairs, they talked about how thoughts we could not think appeared self-evidently nonsensical. Not quite the point you are making here, I see.

Illustrative nonetheless. The person who discovers a mantic art has his or her world-view changed. But discovering that any such art works, including some that are made up on the spot, involves a mind-set that puts its trust in everything being one, everything being inextricably bound by invisible connections to everything else, hence all being ordered. (That isn’t saying everything is predetermined. That would be true if there were only one decision-stream, but if that were the case there would be no need for the 3D world at all.)

Now – apply this to your view of politics and ideology. Can you see the difference between seeing everything as one and seeing everything as antagonistic pieces? This amounts to the difference between non-judgment and judgment. Can you see that chaos has its own implicit order and any order always includes its own chaos, in the same way that there cannot be a stable system in the absence of a trickster?

So where is anybody’s excuse for thinking that if their own values do not predominate, all is lost? Where is anybody’s excuse for thinking that their values are wrong, or are destined to sink without a trace? Mostly, where is the excuse for someone on the one hand believing Seth, who said he came to tell us it is a safe universe, and at the same time believing any of the voices that continually blare that life is not safe?

Now, while reading this you may agree and say, true, true, and it’s too bad people get misled. But where will you be ten minutes after turning from these words? How much of your mind is still living in that unsafe, polarized, divided, hatred- and fear-filled world, with only a larger or smaller ghetto reserved for these beliefs? Instead of thinking that “those” people are wrong, thank them for acting out your own unacted beliefs and tendencies, and send them love, that they may be assisted to overcome their demons, as you hope to overcome your own.

While I was refilling my coffee mug, several further developments flashed by; I trust they are not lost.

Not if you maintain your intent, which maintains the link. That’s why we call it Intuitive Linked Communication, instead of channeling or mediumship, etc.

Well, I got that what you say is exactly right in principle, and very difficult to do in practice. For instance, if one’s ideological vis-à-vis is actively promoting hatred, to pick but one of the antithetical values that may be on the other side of one’s political or ideological views. How do we deal with that? I am aware, again, of Robert E. Lee praying every night for his enemies, but I’m not sure what it means for us in practice.

If nothing else, praying for your enemies would prevent you from falling into hatred, would it not? You could be just as determined to oppose their values and actions as ever, yet would be fortifying yourself from the often unperceived common enemy, which is hatred, exclusivity, judgment (condemnation), isolation, with all its paralyzing and embittering results. So, that is the benefit to you of praying for your enemies.

But it is still better if you cease to think of them as enemies at all. Does your left hand regard your right hand as an enemy when, between them, they carry something? After all, a large part of their function is to systemically oppose each other, in a sense. After all, each of them, though pushing in opposite directions, is pushing toward the center. By definition neither hand is the center. By definition either hand is off-center in symmetry with its vis-à-vis, and that cooperative opposition makes many things possible that otherwise would not be. So even at the common level of such concerns, it is easy enough to see that left and right together assist each other.

There was a split-brain patient whose right and left sides fought each other, each side considering itself the true will, each considering the other as interference. A good analogy?

A very good analogy. However, let us proceed a little deeper into the area such analogies do not touch.

Remember, what we have described so far is first-tier and second-tier experience: what happens and then how one processes what happened. But let us proceed to third-tier experience. How will the same experience affect you in light of your reactions to it?

Seems to have several pieces.

1. No two people are going to experience anything the same way, even physically and mentally, because our base platforms are all different.
2. But even within the specific and unique experience any one individual has, the secondary effects will differ depending upon that person’s decisions past and present. My old example of how a person’s life will differ if s/he reacts to things always from love, or sometimes, or rarely.
3. But there is also third-tier experience to consider, the result of a lifetime’s decisions. You had X event occur, and your reaction was Y. But that doesn’t mean your ultimate judgment will confirm Y. You may come to process that event entirely differently after the fact and, in effect. Overrule it, or modify it (or confirm it, but, not necessarily).

That wasn’t so hard, was it?

 

A long dream, well remembered and recited during the night, and I am going to take some time to recall it here, rather than do a session. There was the dream itself and there were lessons exemplified in it. Let’s see how well, working together, we can reassemble the pieces.

There I was with Jaime Bianch, the actor who plays Salvador Marti in “El Ministerio del Tiempo,” or with Salvador himself. He was showing me my new office – large and square and airy, as I remember it now, though I don’t remember thinking about its size. I think I was the new boss, my first day there. We were interrupted by the secretary saying a woman was there to see me in my official capacity. I invited her into the office, over Salvador’s urgent objections to my seeing her at all, let alone in the office. I didn’t understand why he was objecting, and overruled him. Then he was not in the room and she was. Sitting there, she started talking in a way that I realized after the fact was merely killing time.

There was this huge thump against the office door, which I took as a meaningless interruption, and told her to continue (while I continued to try to figure out what she was talking about). There came another thump, almost as loud as the first, and I opened the door to find Salvador on the floor, looking like he was dying. I assumed he was having a heart attack, and ran to the phone on my desk, but had to think if I needed to push a button to get an outside line, remembered that I didn’t need to, pressed 9 and had to concentrate to remember that the following numbers were 1 and 1. Something made me wonder if he was dying of natural causes or had been murdered. For one thing, the woman was gone, and in retrospect her talk seemed pointless and now looked suspicious. Something important followed. What was it?

[TGU:] You might look first at what you have here.

So. I was the new boss. The outgoing boss was showing me my new office, and was strongly averse to my allowing this unknown woman into the office regardless of her pretext. Because I was new and eager to help, and because he could not give me a reason for his opposition, and because my own inexperience made me too trusting, I let her in, and while she was occupying my attention with meaningless time-wasting things, the old boss – my mentor, I suppose – was either dying or was being killed in my absence. When he made enough noise (either he himself or the event itself), I discovered it, did what I could do without delay, but had to fight through my panic to remember how to request assistance. I haven’t yet remembered the rest.

But looking at what you have here, what comes to mind?

I like the character Salvador Marti. He is old, grey, wise, stern, compassionate, and determined, according to circumstances.

He is the wise old man you’d like to be.

True enough. He’s funny, too, and sees things with the weight but also the wisdom of age. So many things he has observed.

Also, he is an orphan.

Yes he is, but is that relevant?

Did you not have to be told [at Gateway], many times, “You are not alone”? And did that not mark a turning-point for you?

Yes, so it did. All right. I am the new jefe, being shown my new office by the former jefe, presumably retired or retiring. The new office is still strange to me, and maybe I haven’t grown into it yet.

Yes, good. That’s why it seems so unusually big.

The characteristics I bring to the office are turned against me because in my inexperience I do not recognize danger and in my rationalism I do not properly rate the old man’s intuitive but not articulate sense of danger. So, eagerness, kindness, dislike of standing on ceremony. The woman was little more than a shadow figure, not individual at all in the way Salvador was. There was no personal chemistry between us, in other words. I invited her into my office not because she was a woman, but because she asked to be allowed in.

You should look at that carefully.

All right. Are you saying a man making the same request wouldn’t have gotten the same invitation?

Not quite that – but would he have been able to hold your attention with nothing in quite the same way?

Perhaps not.

And in fact if Salvador had had the same feeling that you should not meet a given man, would you have listened more carefully, perhaps?

Yes, I would have. So I suppose your point is that I am more susceptible to danger from women than from men, if only because I am not properly guarded in my attitude. Without examining it closely, I don’t know if it proves true in my life that women are more dangerous to me than men, but I’ll look at it

We didn’t quite say more dangerous to you. It is Salvador who pays the price for your youthful recklessness in not heeding his inarticulate objections. Even if he is dying of natural causes, he is dying with a door between you.

And as a result of that separation?

Look to the dream itself, What does it say?

Yes, I see. Not logically, but emotionally-logically, you might say, that may be the point. While I’m wasting my time trying to make sense of a strange woman’s chatter, my wise old man is dying. I’m listening to her because I think that’s my duty, my new role, and I’m trying to do a conscientious job. And we are assuming that somebody or somebodies are taking advantage of that trust to do harm to another.

Now stop in your tracks and rather than look at this dream as a drama put on in order to illustrate psychological truths – which it also is – look at it as true in itself in a deeper way.

I almost have what you’re getting at, but not quite. It’s a fine point, isn’t it?

It depends upon a very slight adjustment of the microscope knob which, if your fingers tremble, it’s easy to lose.

And it would be better for me to adjust the knob than for you to do it on my behalf.

In a sense, we cannot do it on your behalf. You can lead a 3D mind to water, but you can’t make it think. Only you can do that, because thinking is a form of rearrangement of habits that perdure.

If you say so. Instead of looking at a dream as a staged drama, we could – should, I guess – also look at it as real in its own terms. It is as if we are looking at an interaction of elements of ourselves in their community aspect rather than in their individual aspect. Nancy’s circle of lives rather than an assumed forged unity.

That’s closer to it. Dreams not only deal with your relations with the external world, not only deal with your relations with your internal world, but also deal with the relations among the parts of you. Dreams show how they interact with each other, and with “you as individual” and with “you as individual in the world.” It is much more complex than even Carl Jung realized intellectually, though he did realize it instinctually, and did deal with it almost as side-effect.

You are at one and the same time:

• An individual in 3D, placed into a given time-space situation;
• A community of elements assembled to live together to form (by living) a new habit-pattern called a mind, or soul.
• One element of a higher-level being not perceptible in 3D in which you live and move and have your being.

This is not a description of three different states, but of the one state looked at from three different viewpoints.

I understand. “As above, so below.” From a lower level of integration we look like a success story, I suppose, while from a higher level of integration we look like the new kid in town, still learning the ropes. And from our own 3D level, we look like somebody herding cats, or engaged in a shootout, or conducting a symphony, depending upon the cooperation of the various constituent elements.

Yes, that is one element of the situation, the fact that who and what you are can be seen in any of these three ways, or in more than one, or in all three ways, and either alternately or in succession or fluctuating or tumultuously varying. That situation is one element.

Another element is that from any moment of time, the present is alive with potential, which means in fact that all moments of time are alive with potential, always. So, the better your relations with various lives that are your strands, the greater your ability to affect positive change all up and down the line. However,

Sure, the defect of the quality is, we also have the potential to do equivalent amounts of damage.

But now put together just these two aspects of reality: what you are in sum, and the fact that you can change any of it.

But that isn’t how we experience it. Life around us seems very stable, very stubborn, and does not change merely because we want it to. Nor do we change merely by wanting to. Our own mental and physical habits are very hard to modify. Willpower alone doesn’t do it.

That is one prime advantage of 3D, after all, to resist, to not produce instant manifestation. We can produce instantly in non-3D, but it does not produce the lasting results we get by immersion in 3D. When you make patterns in water, it’s easy – and they disappear. Make patterns in solid substance – wood, steel, cement – and it is difficult, and they persist.

I grant that we can change, if only with difficulty  and slowly (usually).

So then cast back to a few of the experiences you have come to take for granted, such as retrievals; healing “past” lives; communication between and among many other lives in other times and places.

Yes, more magical than they sometimes appear, because it’s easy to take for granted the change of viewpoint that enabled them.

So, two elements: (1) Who and what you are while in 3D, and (2) time is alive everywhere. Add a third: Your possibilities alter according to the external conditions among which you lead your lives. There is internal (your intuitively contacted world), and the apparently external (your sensorially-contacted world which is the same thing experienced differently), and this third element, which we may call the weather. But it will only being you to someplace new in so far as you remember to associate it with the rest of your mental lives.

We have been at some pains to dissect your life experiences as complementary perceptions (intuition and sensory) that lead you to experience life as inner or outer, subjective or objective. It has required books – literally – to lay the groundwork for you to remember that 3D and non-3D, inner and outer, is all one world, not two. Life, reality, “All That Is,” consciousness (call it what you will) has no firm boundaries only boundaries for the sake of logical or perceptual analysis. So if we make a new separation, it is important that you remember that it is for the sake of analysis and understanding, rather than a division into two things.

I can see why you worry about it. The structure of our 3D minds with their limited RAM pretty much assures that what is obvious in one moment seems like fantasy or exaggeration a while later.

So here is the distinction. You as 3D beings live primarily in the present moment as defined by your bodies, birth to death. It is true that you extend in the ways we have discussed, but it is also true that “you” are primarily the you created for one moment of time-space.

Say you are born into the time of the Roman Empire. What is the particular nature of that age? The easy answer is that it was shaped by the decisions and events that occurred before you arrived. This is true, but not sufficient, because what is obvious depends upon the context it is considered in.

You are saying that to see more deeply into the question, we will have to consider it not in “common sense” terms but in terms of the deeper constituents of reality you have been putting us in mind of.

Yes. Yes, that is it exactly. (1) Multiple versions of reality depending upon choices, first of all. This refers to every person, and results in a complex mesh that has unsuspected implications. (2) Continual revision as people change their decisions. (3) Mutual interaction based upon conscious or unconscious adjustment to the changes experienced by or initiated by others. That is a very different context!

We usually think in terms of “Caesar did this, the Gauls did that, this resulted,” etc., as if it were all fixed. We don’t think of it as subject to revision.

You always did.

Yes I did, and now you intend for me to give it to the world, I presume.

Nobody can force you, but why would you wish to cover it up? It isn’t dishonorable, nor was it foolish. There is still a vestige of an earlier you, apologizing for his differences, embarrassed by them, yet unable to disown them or disbelieve what they showed him.

Maybe everybody is used to hiding where they are different, or where they assume they are different. Very well. And I cannot express how strong my reluctance is, to put this on the record.

It will help “you” as opposed to this old robot, for you to do so.

Okay, true confessions. When I was a boy reading history – this is still embarrassing to relate – I felt sure that if I could only read it differently, I could make it come out “right,” meaning more to my taste. I don’t remember specifics, but I imagine it began with Civil War battles where the Federals (the North) lost. But I don’t remember and that doesn’t matter. The point is, I wanted desperately to change what I was reading, which of course everything else around me said was fixed and final.

Come to think of it, another association. I used to know (but couldn’t find out how to do it) that if I just turned “something,” I could fix my lungs so I wouldn’t have asthma. Another association that comes to me is how I used to feel to trapped in time, like taking what seemed an interminably long trip in the car, desperate to move to the end when we should be there, rather than having to endure every moment along the way. I never associated these three things, but look at them.

• I “knew” I could change history.
• I “knew” I could change physical reality to heal my lungs.
• I “knew” I could move in time.

In all three cases, I “knew” it could be done, and I knew I didn’t know how to do it. And it was all crazy, from anything I knew around me. I did have enough sense not to mention any of it. Thank you. I guess, for pushing me to examine that. I can see that the new associations put everything in a new context.

 

Living ideals

Tuesday, October 27, 2020

3:10 a.m. The floor is yours. I don’t know how to pursue this.

Well, think where we are: We reminded you, As Above, So Below. You are not only 3D-human, you are part of something vastly larger. Your ideas of the afterlife always tend to be warped by unconscious assumptions based in your sensory experience during 3D life. And, not least, it isn’t so much a question of you as window on the 3D world as it is of you (from your point of view) experiencing the 3D world as it reflects the light behind it.

It is so difficult to focus on fog.

Which is why you see so many descriptions of the afterlife that are based in assumptions that are easy to grasp. But that isn’t what you want.

No. Do proceed, but I can’t help with a good question.

We will take the question to be the larger question motivating your whole career: What is real, what is it all about, why do I or anybody matter. That question has already taken us far.

The first thing is to hold as large and nuanced a picture of the 3D and non-3D world as you can. To the degree that you can hold this, you magnetize greater understandings to you. Every scheme of things is based on one’s conscious and unconscious assumptions.

In a way, all our explanations are fairy-tales we tell ourselves?

Let’s say, they always are at the level of your understanding. How else could it be? Even the things you believe or half-believe are keyed to your level of understanding. If you wish to understand more, to become wiser, to open up to your greater potential, you must identify with your next larger level of being, and the world will change around you.

We didn’t phrase that well, but I get the idea. This is, again, what Thoreau said in Walden about the laws of nature being interpreted in your favor.

Could a fox, say, imagine the nature and purpose of reality in the same way you could? Could it see even its own fox-hood in a way that would transcend its normal mental world? We do not mean to turn to an argument about the inner world of animals; this is an illustration of the strength of 3D circumstances in persuading you of what you are. And, it isn’t wrong to see yourselves as the 3D beings you experience yourselves to be, but it is wrong to think you are not also more than that. It is in how (whether) you are able to expand your self-definition that all else depends.

I think again of Thoreau’s quote and remember that it begins with his saying he learned at least this by his Walden experiment, that if one takes a step toward living the life one imagines in finer moments –.

Exactly. It was the taking the step, the moving, that brought him to higher ground. After all, he lived in the woods only a little more than two years, but not only is that what he is remembered for, it is what shaped him. He thought he was going there so that he would have leisure to write, rather than having to spend most of his days earning an ability to pay rent. But what he was doing, unbeknown to his 3D self, was living as example to others, just as his friends Emerson and Alcott were doing. So with each of you: You think you are doing one thing, but your lives while you are doing that one thing are themselves doing something else. Your ideals and your lives may to some extend contradict each other; or they may reinforce or transform each other. Or – less satisfactorily but still part of life’s potential – they may have nothing much to do with each other.

Walter Mitty?

Interesting example. Perhaps. His external life shows no traces of his inner; his inner does not affect his outer. Yet, looked at more closely, perhaps one could say that his real life was his inner fantasy and his merely external 3D life was only the support that allowed the inner life scope. Of course he is only an invented character, but that he resonates with so many people ought to show that he is more representative than one might think.

I’m feeling that this entry isn’t very valuable so far.

We love you too.

Walter Neff’s line from “Double Indemnity.”

Well, look at that Walter. Another invented character who resonates with people. And what is his story? He is an ordinary man whose internal fantasy takes over one day when a femme fatale unexpectedly provides the opportunity. In living that fantasy as best he can, he finds that reality contradicts it; that his own character contradicts it. Therefore the external world assures that his fantasy fails.

I don’t think most people would describe “Double Indemnity” that way.

Perhaps not, but perhaps they wouldn’t be looking at it from our point of view.

So let us add a third Walter – Walt Disney. Here is a man, rather than an invented character. His inner life is vivid enough to lead him from thing to thing – from Steamboat Willie to Fantasia to the Mickey Mouse Club to Disneyland. His orientation with the 3D world is efficient enough to allow him to bring his internal fantasies into realization. But without that internal world, what would he have had to work with?

It isn’t like this is a new theme for us: We have been playing this tune right along. But as always, new places to stand open up new perspectives. Looking at it from a point of view that remembers how much larger you are inside than outside; remembering that what seems so objective and real is also only shared subjectivity; remembering that your lives are necessarily animated by vast impersonal forces blowing through the structures you create and experience – looking at your lives from your widest comprehension – you see that you are more than you usually experience yourselves to be, therefore your potential is greater (and more shrouded in mystery) than you usually conceive it to be, and therefore your potential freedom to become is greater than you usually realize.

Taking the three Walters as examples, you may remind yourselves, you may make no attempt to turn your inner visions into external reality; or may do so with disastrous results; or may create wondrous things. To some degree it is your fate; to some degree it is your choice, or let’s say choices.

Well, I think we exercised a little bit of ingenuity, bringing in Walter Mitty and Walter Neff and Walter Disney. Take that, Jane Roberts.

We smile. Till next time.