Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

Sunday, September 1, 2019

3:30 a.m. All right, my friends, ready if you are. Still interested in the larger picture. What can we know that helps us live our lives?

Really, you mean, “What is the meaning of life, and how does it play out within and around us, and what is our role in it?”

I do. A description of the meaning of life that did not center on us would be interesting perhaps, but not useful.

Just as to explain the meaning of life to a tree might need to center on the nature of cellulose, or photosynthesis.

Yes. People don’t die inside from lack of facts but from lack of meaning. Lacking meaningful facts, they will attach themselves to anything that promises meaning, disregarding questions of truth.

It is an old, old problem. Religions are created to provide meaning, and what religion was ever created coldly, as a show? But certainty is not

Lost it, off on a branching thought.

You might as well discuss it.

I don’t descend to personalities here, if I can help it, and usually I can.

You mean, you don’t deal with the result of personal clashes here.

I have become accustomed to sharing these conversations. I shouldn’t like to set an example of somebody using this format to settle scores, if only silently.

Abraham Lincoln used to write angry replies, you know; but he was careful not to send them. He relieved his feelings without retaliating.

To post this would be to send the letter. And I don’t like to write these without posting them. It feels like the only thing I accomplish.

Then you will be unable to get assistance. It’s like going to a psychiatrist and carefully concealing anything you think discreditable. That may save your face, but it doesn’t get you the real assistance that an impartial and helpful point of view would offer.

Hmm. Trying to look better than I am?

Perhaps trying to be better than you are. It can be a fine line, and worth talking about, for after all, life is a long series of decisions about which impulses to encourage and which to yield to and which to fight tooth and nail. In a sense, that could be looked at as a process of trying to be better than you are.

And it’s a good thing, surely.

It is, but it has pitfalls, worth exploring a little. So, here you have been insulted by an old friend. Abstractly you know what is driving him. But personally, you resent the insult. Perfectly natural. You are conflicted as to how to respond within yourself. You won’t lash out in return – at least, you resist the impulse, you disapprove in principle. But – internally

Internally I have logical responses that I would like to deliver, and I have the impulse to “ghost” him, as they say – that is, never communicate with him again. I prefer to emulate Lincoln, and Lee, who prayed for his enemies (and this is not an enemy). But there is a potful of forces fighting it out: anger, hurt feelings, resolution to be better than these impulses. All I know to do is to not give in to anything, and ride it out without expressing anything negative. But does that mean I am not expressing negative things internally? That is, can’t we do harm merely by what we feel, even if less than by what we do?

Some careful thought will show you that sometimes anger may be more devastating unexpressed than expressed, particularly if not under the control of consciousness. You know that healing may be facilitated from one person to another non-corporeally. Don’t you know that so may cursing?

I do.

Your only hope of control is consciousness. Otherwise you radiate energies at a level inaccessible to you, and therefore unmodulated. This is why primitive emotions may be devastatingly effective. This is why people ruled by primitive emotions  may be devastatingly effective in the world, while people of mild goodwill are not. But it is also why those who are in control of themselves, who are good by choice, let’s say, have the enhanced ability to do good.

Sorry, I feel what you’re meaning, but I seem to fumble the execution. Or maybe you aren’t as articulate as usual?

The first attempt to put forth something may often be clumsy. No matter, the spark will pass. To try it again: un-conscious goodwill is less effective than unconscious ill will. But conscious good will – focused, intensified, intended – far outweighs ill will conscious or unconscious.

I feel the truth of that. Why is it so?

Water comes out of a hose at the same rate, but its effect varies depending upon whether through a nozzle or not.

I see conscious v. unconscious. But what of goodwill v. ill will, or to put it bluntly, love v. hatred? Even love v. anger?

It is because life has a bias toward love. Love is like gravity, a force tending to hold the world together. Its opposite is fear, a concentration upon separation and difference. Given this bias, any conscious work working with the bias is paddling downstream. Working against the bias paddles upstream.

But when we work unconsciously, or consciously choose fear and hatred?

Then you still paddle upstream, but your paddling is more vigorous.

So, paddling in love will be inherently more effective than the same intensity of paddling against it?

Yes, only of course life is never a simple binary choice, always a combination of binaries. It can be confusing.

You don’t say!

All your lives are cross-currents. There wouldn’t be much choosing to be done, otherwise. (That said, even one who is being carried downstream under terrific force may still have some ability to steer, even if within severely constricted limits.)

By the way, is this “meaning” enough for you? Was a discussion branching off from a personal emotional state less meaningful than a series of more abstract generalizations would have been? But it meant pushing though precisely what was uncomfortable. It usually does, or you get “love and light” New Age clichés that ignore or wish away life’s dark side.

Well, I know better by now than to think you got diverted.

Yes, but we didn’t necessarily plan to go this way, either. ILC is a joint process, by its nature. Look at this session. The question posed was, “Tell us something meaningful to our lives as we must live them.” That offered plenty of latitude, and we merely kept the request in mind and let it play out according to what was active within you. If it had been something else, we still would have steered it to answer the request. It isn’t like there is any lack of possibilities.

And at the same time, it leaves a lot to be said another time.

If we happen to go that way, sure. But sometimes we call the tune, sometimes you do. And when you remember the overlap between us and you, it ought to ease your mind as to agendas.

It does. Our thanks as always.

 

You have seen us using words like soul and spirit, that many people in your day shy away from for all sorts of reasons, from unpopularity in current opinion, to repugnance in association, to emotional reaction against certain attitudes in others.

This is Nathaniel again, isn’t it? Or some in connection with Nathaniel. The language has that same feel of something unfamiliar. Why, I can’t imagine, since my mind is still the one choosing the language when necessary.

This is relevant only in that it is worth your knowing that the source is not one of what you call your ex-humans, but someone (if I may be called a `someone’) at a different level, with a different perspective on the human experience.

Certainly it feels like that – non-human, I mean. Perhaps I shouldn’t have interrupted, but something in the word choice alerted me. Pray continue.

Your time will transcend religious, and anti- and non-religious, thought. “Your time” does not mean the next ten minutes, nor ten years, nor perhaps ten centuries (though that may be a bit of an exaggeration) but you are in process. This is one of the elements of the transformation you are living through. As the inner lives of those in the 1000s in Europe are not the same quality as yours, so neither will that of your linear descendants be. But this does not mean that you will be going into terrain entirely new to you, nor that you will be moving in oscillation to the past. New, but familiar. Familiar, but not identical.

Everything will gradually begin to clarify for you, if you will begin to remember to apply this one insight in all things: Life, even specifically human life, does not center in 3D. Everything else – every readjustment in your thinking – must follow.

But if human life does not center in 3D, where does it center? And, in what way can we say it does not center where you are, as it seems to?

And that is what religious thought centers on, isn’t it, when it is not setting out rules and splitting logical hairs.

It will be a prime mistake and an unproductive diversion, to give in to the habit and temptation to criticize religion as it has been, or even as it is. Remove the beam from your own eyes first, as is said. However, you are not wrong to see the that central concern of churches is, where is the center of human life. Also of philosophies, though they are more apt to take the answer for granted.

Human life in its externals seems clearly bounded: birth, life in its stages, death. This is the life you seem to see all around you, in the vegetable and animal kingdoms. Whether you have any particular insight into those lives is at least questionable, but this is the appearance you perceive, and it is tempting to draw the analogy and conclude that if there’s one thing 3D life demonstrates, it is that physical life is limited.

I would have said, our lives show us that there is an inner life to match the outer. What that inner life amounts to is debated, but I don’t know of anybody who actually denies that we experience it.

You can see that the perceived limits to physical existence (what you may call your outer world) tempt people to conclude that the inner world is equally limited. Some think the inner is dependent on the outer, some don’t, but in any case people tend to work from the assumption that the 3D world is the center of life.

If the 3D life we lead is not primary – if the center is elsewhere – why are we so fixated on things of the flesh? Sex, for instance.

You experience inner life and outer. Some think they are unconnected, some think connected only somewhat, some – as you, once it was suggested – think they are the same thing perceived one through essence, one through personality, so to speak. That is, one through direct feed, the other through the senses. Say it’s so. Then what happens to the inner world when the outer world goes away? You think you have addressed this in Rita’s book [Awakening from the 3D World] but you haven’t.

No?

Let’s put it slightly differently. The 3D body dies. What further connection can you have to the 3D world? Yet, you do have such connections. What are ghosts, what are lost spirits who don’t realize they are dead, what are spirits that are reluctant or unable to “move on” after the death of the 3D body, if not a person’s inner world maintaining a distorted connection with the outer world? Yet if this is possible, clearly the inner world cannot depend upon the outer (else they would vanish) but neither is it self-directed in the way that seems obvious.

We established, years ago, that the inner world is created by elements from beyond the 3D. The larger being is clearly not centered in 3D, and we are each extensions of it.

Then act like it!

I beg your pardon?

What do religions teach, if not that humans are created by, and are part of, something antecedent to their own creature (obviously) and greater than themselves? The fact that they then differ, in that each concentrates upon different aspects of that larger reality, does not change the fact that this is the nub of religious life. So let us take that seriously, and many things will change in the world that no longer recognizes religion as the proper way to go about maintaining the relationship.

We will resume from here. This is enough typing for you, for the moment.

“Then act like it!” had a powerful emotional impact, as you probably know.

Good. It was meant to, for your benefit.

 

(from April 6, 2019, edited)

Saturday, April 6, 2019

4:35 a.m. Reader Hanns-Oskar Porr contacted Hegel – and was contacted by James Joyce – and of course has to wonder if it is out of his subconscious mind or is a real contact. This could become something, if we could develop a community of people doing it and submitting it for each other’s consideration, humbly and in a spirit of joint exploration.

Friends? Any comment?

The potential for such a community is even larger than you can envisage. It could provide a breakthrough for those who participate, and, through them individually and collaboratively, for the human race they represent.

That last phrasing is sort of odd.

We mean to emphasize that the ultimate effect of individuals’ and groups’ efforts can be far greater –more far-reaching over time – than seems probable. As an example, consider that St. Francis of Assisi single-handedly – after listening – created the Franciscan order that arguably prevented the Catholic Church, which in those days meant Western Christendom, from decaying into irrelevance. The ins and outs of how this happened are not the point here: One person’s listening to a voice that he might have dismissed as imaginary resulted in major unsuspected results echoing first among a few, then within an institution, then more generally within society. Francis was not responsible for the distant effects of his efforts, but he did affect his contemporary society, and any of you may be called to do the same thing. See that you do not dismiss such a call out of a false sense of unworth. It is not a question of worth, but of willingness.

I know you do not mean for us to become inflated, however.

What good could that do anyone? Nietzsche, Hitler, a myriad of televangelists, so many possible examples, will show you how initial good intentions may be wrecked by an individual’s inability to deal with the temptations that accompany profound contact with non-3D power and with the resultant distorting effect it may have in terms of other people. Humility is the essential prophylactic antidote.

But only if it is already in place before they arise.

Yes. It is difficult to become humble. Much easier to remain so. But it requires attention, for these temptations are not trivial, and no one is immune.

However, there remains the opposite error of the fallacy of insignificance. Ideally, one would say something like, “In myself I am nothing, but I am capable of being used, and willing to do so.”

“I still serve Ra.”

That’s the idea. And you’d better have a good idea, going into it, just what values you will serve.

Say some more about that.

You won’t really know who you are dealing with. You may assume, you may conclude on the basis of evidence, but how can you ever know you are not in error, or are not being deceived by the other side (which, remember, is always a possibility), or are not fantasizing for whatever reason?

“Test the spirits,” we are told.

Exactly. Don’t believe everything you hear, nor automatically disbelieve, either. Weigh what you hear – and, to do that, it helps to have simple permanent touchstones. The values you want to uphold.

In case this point is obscure, let us underline it. You said as an example serving Ra. We know you meant that not so much literally as figuratively, providing an example. We pointed out you will not wind up serving a personage, but the values you imagine that personage as supporting.

As Jesus is seen as personifying love, say.

Love, humility, authority, obedience to conscience, yes, many things. Nor are such personifications of values necessarily religious. The same characteristics have been attributed to Washington and Lincoln, for example, or Einstein and Newton, or Swedenborg and Emerson. You understand, we are not concerned to bind it to exemplifying individuals. Just the opposite: We are pointing out that in choosing who you will follow, you are really choosing values. You couldn’t very well follow Francis of Assisi while amassing wealth for whatever ostensible purpose.

To return to the central point: It would be possible to spark a voluntary community of ordinary people who made a practice of extraordinary connection, and shared the results of such communication in the spirit of humility and non-certainty. Rather than attempting to lay down the law (“This was X who spoke, and this is exactly what X meant,” etc.), they would say, “This is what I got; what does it spark in you?” No ultimate authority, you see. No false certainty. No psychic inflation. And at the same time, no working in oppressive secretive isolation, no fears for one’s mental stability.

It is an attractive vision.

And available today. Now. Your own efforts, which began in private obscurity, have been gently guided by events and by your own inclinations (which in a way is saying the same thing twice) and by the response of those who have felt called at least to listen if not to contribute. So, that groundwork has been done. Now it is to the point where, with a little organizational preparation, one man’s work can be handed off smoothly to a more enduring form and a more significant community.

 

(From Wednesday, January 23, 2019, edited)

On Monday, January 21, I went to see the movie “They Shall Not Grow Old” for the second time. This is Peter Jackson’s 90-minute film comprising restored footage from the Imperial War Museum (much of it colorized as well as restored) of British doughboys in World War I. The sound track is all veterans reminiscing in their old age (recorded in the 1960s and ’70s). It is not a political film, but a sort of montage, a recreation from original sources, of a time and a way of living and thinking that is very different from anything we would recognize. It put me in mind of my experience in London with David Poynter, a Welshman who spent his life as a journalist, traveler, and psychic investigator, a “past life,” I thought, when my ideas about past lives were simpler than they are now.

I think David died in London in the 1930s. Sometime in 2001 or 2002, I was walking around the Trafalgar Square area, consciously trying to give him a sense of modern London, knowing that he would recognize the buildings, which are essentially unchanged since his time. I walked down to the Embankment, the north shore of the Thames, which is lined with monuments, and went from one to another, interested but not particularly moved. Then I came to one that said only “July 1, 1916,” and although I had no idea what it referred to (other than something in World War I, of course), I was instantly filled with a violent rush of emotion: rage, grief, indignation, despair. I realized, this was David’s reaction I was experiencing, though I was pretty sure he himself had not been in the war. So on the day after I saw the movie, I asked, and he suggested that I look it up, and I searched both “the Battle of the Somme” and “July 1, 1916.”

4:35 a.m. So, David, let’s talk about July 1, 1916. What was the nature and source of that upwelling of anguish that I experienced second-hand, so to speak?

You felt correctly that I was not in the war. I was past the age of enlistment, and perhaps could not have stood the physical toll. But neither was I caught up in war fever. My sympathies were with the poor, not the powerful, and the warfare that interested me was an uprising against the forces that were grinding the faces of the people. I don’t mean insurrection – that couldn’t happen – but organized resistance to the combination of force and law and opinion and judiciary that held society in an unfailing grip.

You were a socialist, I remember thinking.

I was. But my socialism did not have its roots in a belief in materialism, so I was somewhat out of the socialist mainstream in the same way you have always found yourself out of the mainstream of political opinion – and for the same reasons. Any social movement necessarily presumes certain commonly accepted beliefs, and to the extent that you cannot share them, you find yourself having to go along unwillingly, or with mental reservations. This does not tend to make you an effective partisan.

When war broke out in August, 1914, there was a unanimity of emotion that you have experienced only once in your life, the grief over the murder of President Kennedy. But the emotion of August, 1914, was one of enthusiastic springing to arms, a lust to destroy. People didn’t realize it, but they were desperate to destroy the lives they were leading. They wanted to tear down the structure, but they thought they were tearing at something that threatened them from outside. A socialist could see that, if he could keep his head against the group-think. Was I keen to fight for the King-Emperor and the social system I despised? Only, of course it was not so simple. Is it ever? German autocracy as personified – almost as caricatured – by the Kaiser was clearly worse. I deplored the war and did not believe in it – and yet, I deplored Prussian autocracy even more, and certainly could not have rooted for a victory of Germany.

So what did you do?

I sat on the sideline, you might say. I observed, I remained conscious. But this only got more agonizing as time went on.

I got that you were an editor at the “London Illustrated News.”

We would call it a sub-editor. I was a selector of photographs and illustrations, a glorified caption-writer. It was not a glamorous nor an influential position, but it did keep me somewhat better informed than the man in the street.

Surely you had to do some official drum-banging for the war.

Less than you might think. If I kept to describing specifics, there was no need to hint at the self-destructive futility of it, not that any such hints would have had any result beyond getting me fired. But the anguish cumulated as the months dragged on. You cannot envision the change from 1914, when the war would surely be over by Christmas, to 1915, 1916, 1917, 1918, when it clearly was going to go on forever. In 1914, even in 1915, it was possible to imagine that the end of the war would find us unchanged. By 1916, certainly by 1917, it was clear to those with eyes to see that nobody was going to win this war, and it was about who would lose it more thoroughly.

The one date that marked that change more than any other was July 1, 1916.

Per your suggestion, I looked it up yesterday: 57,000 casualties – 19,000 of them killed – in one day, the worst day for casualties in British history. The beginning of a 141-day battle that cost more than 400,000 British casualties and resulted in a six-mile advance over a 16-mile front. To my surprise, I saw that it was no longer considered to be useless butchery that accomplished nothing. Some think it led to the beginning of the end for the Germans, for reasons I won’t go into.

But you asked for the source of my reaction, which you felt that day, and my reactions had nothing to do with questions of strategy, nor even with the question of was it worthwhile even in its own military terms. Mine were rooted in something deeper. How do you think I felt, watching without being able to do anything, as a generation of young men was ground into the mud? Futility, official stupidity, dirty motives of politicians, economics behind it all, deliberate whipping-up of public hatred. It stank, and there was no way out except through it, by way of killing, killing, killing.

I suppose it’s one thing if you can believe the official lies, but it is something entirely different if you can’t, but have to live among those who do.

After the war was over, there came reevaluation, and by the time I was killed, it seemed clear that the Battle of the Somme was pointless and stupidly conceived and directed. The sacrifice of so many men was for nothing at all – so it seemed. I gather that the reevaluation has itself been reevaluated, but that’s the firm conviction I lived under.

Just as for many people Sept. 11, 2001, marks the end of one era and the beginning of another, so for me July 1, 1916, marks the end of a relatively innocent age. Now, you might say, how could I regard the preceding time as both deplorable and innocent. The answer to that is quite simple. No matter how bad a situation, it can always be made worse. Or rather, let’s say, moving from one thing to another may involve a steep descent before the subsequent climb is possible. World War I destroyed Edwardian society and ultimately allowed for the liberation of the common man from the worst excesses of industrialism, but it took decades of depression and another war to do so. Not a trivial effect – and I was dead a decade and more before 1945.

So to focus in specifically on what I felt that day in London –

Imagine concentrating your emotional reaction to all the wrong-turnings you have witnessed in your life, and spraying them out in one burst, like a capacitor discharging. That’s what you were on the receiving end of.

I see. Did that discharge affect you somehow? Vent the extra pressure, so to speak?

That requires more explanation than we can go into at the end of a session. Perhaps another time, if you are interested.

9:50 a.m. So, David, let’s talk some more. How does it affect someone not in 3D to express something to someone in 3D? How did that burst in 2001 or 02 or whenever affect you?

You are thinking of it as if I were sending you a message and you were receiving it. That’s the same idea people in my day had about what telepathy was. But, change metaphors and the nature of the event will become clearer. Think of something that equalizes with something else when brought into contact. A slower, inexact idea would be the way water seeks its own level. Say you were in the Panama Canal and someone opened the gate between your lock and the adjacent one. The water might come in quickly or slowly overall, but it would come from the higher level to the lower as quickly as it could. The higher lock didn’t “send,” exactly, and the lower one didn’t “receive” in the way people think of telepathy as being sent and received. Instead, in the absence of a barrier, the water naturally sought its own level. A lightning bolt may be seen as the equalization of energy too, but the violence of it may distract from the analogy. On the other hand, the suddenness of it does not.

So you are saying it wasn’t so much that you were trying to send a message, just that time and place created the spark that turned hydrogen and oxygen into water?

Not so good an analogy, in that this physical charge changes the properties of the constituent elements. However, let us pursue the rest of your statement, because as you intuited, place is an important part of this.

I have always wondered why it is important for ghosts to haunt specific places, and why they mark anniversaries.

And now perhaps you see the answer. This is one world, not a physical world and a separate non-physical world. Therefore place matters; time matters. Only, it is a matter of conceiving of things correctly. One might say the first of July, 1916 was in 3D on that date, and subsequently is in non-3D only. Yet the non-3D version of events does not pass away, any more than other time-space combinations pass away when the living present moment passes on beyond them. But just as a departed individual may be contacted only in the non-3D, so with departed time-place combinations. Being on the place may facilitate your communication with that place-time that is otherwise difficult or impossible to reach.

A friend once told me, we go to sacred sites not to be transformed, but to be infected. And this seems to have happened to me several times. Of course there was never any knowing what was cause-and-effect and what was merely sequence, but that’s how it feels.

When you reconceptualize the world to remove certain thought-barriers, sudden inflows of knowledge and being are enabled to occur. Such barriers include:

• I am only a 3D being.
• Anyone in the non-3D is accessible only through effort and practice, and perhaps special talent.
• The past is past and beyond touching.
• The future is “the” future, and in any case does not yet exist.
• The world is physical and external, rather than mental and internal.
• We are each alone.
• “On the other side there is no time.”
• The 3D and non-3D worlds have little or nothing to do with each other.
• Mental, spiritual, and physical are three realities, rather than merely three words describing reality from different viewpoints.

Very interesting. Thank you.

 

(Edited from Oct 17 and 18, 2921)

Sunday, October 17, 2021

I want to tell of a thing that happened, and maybe get a word or two about it from you splendid invisible gentlemen.

On Friday I went to Martha Jefferson Hospital for a minor operation. One minute I was talking to the anesthetist, he showing me the latest thing they use – and that’s all I remember till I woke up three hours later. I had gone into the procedure thinking maybe I could retain some awareness at some level. But as I say, I lost even the preliminaries. One moment I was chatting, the next moment was three hours later. This is prologue to the interesting thing.

When I woke up, I woke up. I didn’t feel groggy or only somewhat there, the way you do sometimes when you wake up. I could talk to the nurse and could understand her, and in general I just felt a little tired. By 11:30, I was dressed and being wheeled out to my neighbor’s car (bless him) and then I was home, not too lively, but not in pain.

Over the next few hours I functioned normally. But here is the strange thing I observed. All through the day, two contradictory things were happening. At any given moment, if you had asked me, I would have said I was myself again, I was back. Then would come another tiny increment of presence and I would realize that I was more “here” than I had just been. And this slow making of the tide went on for eight hours, until there was a final increment, a “click,” so to speak, though of course it was no click, and this time I knew I really was back.

But what was all that? At any time I would have said I was there. I functioned, normally, as far as I know. But then, smoothly as the incoming tide and not much faster, another little bit of extra something would click in, and I would realize that, “I wasn’t here till now, but now I’m here” – until the next increment repeated the process.

It wasn’t unpleasant. But I am puzzled. It was like a rheostat, slowly being turned up. The quality of the consciousness didn’t seem to change, but the intensity – the quantity? – did, consistently over the space of a third of a day.

Anything you care to tell us about this?

[TGU] We wanted it on the record, if only to encourage others to examine and perhaps relate their own experiences, for of course some of your readers will have had extensive experience with surgery or with deliberately altered states not caused by the personal, but by the shared, subjectivity. (That is merely another way of saying, caused not by an individual’s own action but by the action of others – in your case, the anesthesiologist.)

A third analogy occurs to me. As I understand it, the difference between a complete hologram picture and any smaller part of that picture considered separately is that of blurriness. The full picture is sharp. Cut off a corner and that corner still contains everything the full picture does, but it’s blurry, or less intense somehow. In a way that’s what I was feeling. I didn’t experience the descent into unconsciousness, but I did experience the long slow float back to normal levels of awareness.

The rheostat, the tide, and the hologram are three slightly differently nuanced analogies that serve well enough. A rheostat gives the sese of a control that may be altered at will, though it has the disadvantage of being a mechanical analogy. The tide, slow, relentless, dependable, natural, gives the sense of a normal biological process of recovery (as, indeed, it was), only omits the ability to interfere with it at will. The hologram well shows the paradoxical nature of consciousness, at once undivided and yet different. This was not an altered state of consciousness; more like an altered quantum of consciousness. More of the same, but still amounting to an ill-defined difference.

And the reason you wanted this on the record for others?

As we said, to encourage them to give some careful consideration to their own everyday experience of consciousness. We may have to invent some new specialized vocabulary at some point, though we don’t like doing that, to distinguish between consciousness and awareness. At present they are sort of interchangeable to casual thought, the way spirit and soul were before we went to some lengths to distinguish them….

Awareness and consciousness (2)

Monday, October 18, 2021

7:25 a.m. Okay, open for business. I got that you had something more to say about consciousness and awareness.

Yes. Think of it this way:

• All the terrain within your eyesight. Everything within the circle of your horizons, in other words. This is what there is to be seen from wherever you happen to be standing.
• But there is also another factor, and that is, how brightly lit is that territory? Even if you are living on a mountainside, or are up in an airplane, and have a tremendously long line of sight, you can’t see much on a starless night! You can’t see as much at daybreak or at sunset as at high noon. How brightly lit the scene is, helps determine how much and how well you can see.
• And there is your intent. If you are very alert, you see more and better than if you are half-asleep or are thinking of other things.

Now, take Hemingway as example. His talent – storytelling – came as a result of a lifetime of practice. He worked to learn how to tell his stories as effectively as the material would allow. But his genius (his innate ability that he developed by all that effort) was that he had a natural intensity of interest, and an inherited expectation

His father had so exaggerated a gift of sight. I think you’re saying Hemingway took that for normal, and overcompensated to overcome his own defective vision.

We are speaking strictly of inner vision here, however.

Well, I’m not sure you are. His inner vision was very strong – his imagination painted him scenes as brightly lit as other people’s external vision – but his external vision was equally keen. He saw detail; he put together clues. He didn’t miss things.

Let’s try saying this concisely. Interestingly (to us, at least) this is the first time both us and you are struggling to express what is a rather simple insight.

Yes. Why is that?

Perhaps when you have strong and definite ideas about a subject and they are not wrong, it makes you less inclined to be patient with our reaching for it.

• Hemingway saw (with his 3D eyes) what was to be seen. Because he learned the habit consciously and unconsciously by watching his father, he observed. A lifetime hunting and fishing reinforced this habit, of course.
• He also saw with his imagination. It was less his working to imagine something than his receiving a movie to watch. The work for him was in finding the right way to express what his imagination brought him, it was not in trying to think what to imagine.
• Most of all, until his body was broken and never fully repaired by the accidents in the 1950s, he was fueled by this tremendous vitality, which in effect was a well of enthusiasm. That was a very high-octane fuel!

So you have a range of consciousness and you have intensity. Your world is bounded by the two.

And this is what I experienced, Friday? The range of consciousness wasn’t affected (as far as I noticed), but I watched the intensity refill its tanks?

This is one more reason why you in 3D should learn not to judge one another. Everyone has a different level of intensity and a different range of consciousness. You already know you don’t all live in the same world. Now realize that you don’t all live in the world with the same range of resources. You don’t acquire an intensity like Hemingway’s by an effort of will. You are born with it, or aren’t. Now, you can be born with that intensity and let it slide, perhaps; you cannot be born without the intensity and build it by intent.

But life can.

Yes, true enough. A hellish situation might smelt someone into a person of greater intensity.

See you next time, then, and our continued thanks for all this.

 

 

(From Oct. 7 and 8, 2021, slightly edited)

What we are and what we experience

Thursday, October 7, 2021

6:30 a.m. I got a thought in the middle of the night but I was too tired to get up and write it. I trusted that if it was important, you’d nudge me. Ideas stemming from the main idea started to come; it felt like how you follow one thought and then follow the branches. The thought was this: What if it isn’t that we are shaped by what happens to us, but that what happens to us stems from what we are from the very beginning? And yes, setting slide-switches to maximum focus, clarity, receptivity, objectivity.

An unsuspected side-effect, you see. You are starting to think like us not merely in ideas, but in how you come to things.

You all know people who have been entirely unable to get over childhood traumas, or difficulties in later life, that seem to be a case of their having been plopped into an insupportable position for no reason. Some blame it on chance, some on a malign fate (that is, on the universe, or, in another age, on the gods). What all this has in common is a sense of injustice; of outrage cold or hot, and, beneath that, a sense of victimhood, of helplessness. Be it bad health, or abuse, or deprivation, or a hostile or indifferent environment, many people find themselves adults who had to struggle to survive. Often enough, adding to their aggravation, even their already white-hot anger, other people may in a well-meaning way suggest that these circumstances had beneficial side-effects such as strengthened character or whatever. The benefits may well be true, but it is no comfort when someone asks “why?” and the questioning itself is part of the pain.

Let alone when someone suggests that what happened was somehow their own fault.

Exactly. And as you all know, in trying to wake someone out of a sense of victimhood, it is very easy to be perceived as saying just that. Because, “If it didn’t happen unjustly, it must have happened justly – and that means, you’re saying it is my own fault.” The insight we hope to explore may help people resolve some of these difficulties, if we go at it slowly and methodically. Remember, the goal is to live life more abundantly (that is, to be freer of hampering conditions), so as to maximize the gift you bring (which is yourself) to The Other Side when your career enters another stage.

The key insight is that the “external” world is part of you, and you of it. Your life extracts from the world what it needs, what it resonates to, what it has velcro for. If you once really grasp that, you grasp the impossibility of injustice in the world, regardless of appearances.

Impossibility of injustice doesn’t mean impossibility of pain, of course.

Of course it does not. But having a tooth extracted by a dentist, or having a tooth knocked out in a brawl, may both produce more or less the same physical pain, but the meaning of the pain is entirely different. If you live in faith that your pain is not caused by chance, nor by the malice of fate, that helps. If you realize that it was not your fault either before or during this life, that helps too. Then if you can get to where you see that the physical perpetrators themselves were less evil than careless, or were less cause than agent, you are very close to resolving something. And it is that resolution we hope to help facilitate.

• All the world is mind-stuff. No matter how solid it seems, mind-stuff, as of course are you.
• There is no “other” except in your perception. If you cannot believe this, you cannot follow the argument even tentatively. But belief, as we said, is doubt. That is, you believe/doubt until you know. Believe, at least tentatively, if you can: There is no “other.”
• There is no disconnect between you as an individual and the shared subjectivity, because there can’t Appearance is one thing, reality is another. You – we – are all part of the same everything.
• “You” didn’t even exist as you, until you were placed into life. You are the product of the combination of many strands mentally and, call it, spiritually, in the same way that you are the product of the combination of many strands of genetic materials.
• The conditions that existed at your birth reflect what you were, or you could not have been born then. You could argue that some compromises have to be made. Still, it remains: You exactly fit your time and place, no matter how little it feels like it, because there is no other way you could have been born.
• Now, along with what you want to do in life, are all the things you have to True in ordinary life, true metaphysically no less. Any given X may be painful or inconvenient, and may or may not bring beneficial side-effects, but it is there because part of you responds to it. If no part of you responds to a stimulus, you won’t even notice it is there, perhaps. At any rate, you will not experience it as a problem. It will be a non-issue.
• By definition, all the things you experience are relevant to your life. But “relevant” is not the same as “obviously relevant.” Many things in your life are a mystery. It shouldn’t be a surprise that pain and the cause of pain should be, as well, sometimes.
• However, and here we come to the nub of it, any given problem, petty or severe, temporary or chronic, has no power to elicit more than a first-tier reaction. It is your second-tier reaction, and your third-tier reaction, ultimately, that determine the effect on you of any given stimulus, pleasant or unpleasant.
• And finally, the question is not, “What happened to you?” It is always, “What are you doing about it?” Are you going to wallow in self-pity? Reinforce your sense of helplessness? Tough it out, ignoring the pain? “Offer it up,” as the good sisters used to advise? Analyze it to death? Channel your sense of injustice toward society as a whole? These are all common responses, and understandable. But do they help anybody do anything more than endure?
• You may forgive, and this is a good first step. But when you see deeply enough, you see that there is nothing to forgive. When you get that far, you have reason to congratulate yourself, if only provisionally.

…

Practical advice on how to live in greater joy

Friday, October 8, 2021

5:55 a.m. I thought we might look at what I got during our drumming session on Wednesday.

“What is our path to greatest joy?”

Openness, because openness is the opposite of shrinking from life. Joy is the path. Follow your bliss and it increases. First, do no harm. A clear conscience leads to happiness. Again, no need for shrinking (from memories). Live in great confidence.

In other words, openness, which includes openness to joy, innocence as best you can achieve it, and faith. Not so complicated a formula.

Some might say, “Yes, but how do we attain it?”

You don’t attain a formula, you live it. And let’s say, as an aside, that “try” and “intend” may sound like the same thing, but they are not. When you intend, that is following a course, watching your compass to be sure you are going where you want to go. When you try, that is saying you are not succeeding, with the implication not only that you have not yet succeeded, but also that you cannot yet succeed. “Try” is an implicit declaration of inability, you see.

So as a practical matter, how do we assure that we are following a course (however discouraged we may be at any given moment) and not silently saying “But I can’t do this, at least not yet.”

You set your teeth, with or without dramatics, according to taste, and you follow your compass. That’s what intend is, it is being pulled by your chosen future, you could say. It isn’t difficult conceptually; there are no techniques to learn (though each person may find it worthwhile to invent or adopt specific rituals to serve as encouragement and reminder). It is really a setting one person in charge, rather than allowing various people to take the helm depending upon any little change in the weather. You all want to crystallize a permanent being. Take this as a practical exercise. Teach your crew to follow one captain, rather than rotating the conn. And there’s no use saying, “I am the captain.” You are more like the shipowner, selecting and then maintaining the captain. (And if you will not do it, who will?) Choose who you want to be captain; that is another way of saying, Choose who and what you want to be, want to express.

So let’s look briefly at what you got when you asked “What is our path to greatest joy?”

• “Openness, because openness if the opposite of shrinking from life.” You should understand this very well. Older people often say the sins they most regret are the ones they didn’t commit. Or, more neutrally, what they regret is far more often the things they didn’t do, not the things they did do. Why is this, do you suppose?

It seems clear enough. The reason we don’t do something we want to do often boils down to fear of some sort. Yes, there may be other constraints, but often enough, we’re afraid, like Mr. Prufrock.

And the two forces in life?

Yes, that’s my point. Love, which is expansion and inclusion – and fear, which is constriction and exclusion. And I don’t know how we can be expanding if we are contracting.

Ergo, a default position of openness is a default position of willingness to love what comes. That may not be obvious, and in some moods may seem to be impossible, but it is true. Now, “to love what comes” does not necessarily mean to greet it with cries of joy, like George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life”: (“Yes, I’m going to jail, isn’t it wonderful?”) But it does mean, “This comes next, let’s see what it brings.” You are going to the hospital, to the unemployment office, to jail, to bankruptcy court, whatever. Scarcely grounds for rejoicing, but it will be a new experience, and you could choose a relatively calm curiosity about it, a trusting that nothing happens by chance. And there’s no use saying of this advice, “That’s easy for you to say.” Whether it’s easy to say is not the question. The question is, are we right? If it’s good advice, it doesn’t have to be hard to say.

As Sam Spade said, “What do you want me to do, learn to stutter?”

Exactly. Easy or not to say, practice is what is important.

• “Follow your bliss, and joy increases.” Surely this is self-evident? Should you expect that the way to increase your joy is in seeking out the things you don’t want to do? It is true that everyone’s life includes things they would just as soon skip, but if you follow where your feelings lead you, it will work out, and probably better than you hope. Just as advocating openness says, “Avoid shrinking from life,” so “Follow your bliss” says, “Not only don’t shrink from it, embrace it, trust it.”

Again, I don’t know why this wouldn’t be transparently evident.

You are forgetting your past in which you did not pursue what would be “too good to be true,” and you are not recognizing the present in which you are still doing it.

Ouch.

Still, you’re right: It ought to be evident. However, like most things in life, it won’t do itself. It can be hard enough to find your bliss, if you look with the wrong tools. (Hint: You want to be paying attention to feelings, not to logic and especially not to “practicalities.”) But once you find it, you still need to follow it, and that often requires a decision of some sort.

• “First, do no harm.” You can’t live without doing harm; that is an impossible ideal. But you can intend to do no harm. You can make your life about not doing harm. You can, in short, do as little harm as possible, and certainly you can live by refusing to do harm either consciously or, to the extent possible, by inadvertence. It isn’t complicated, it is merely a matter of having your captain include it in the standing orders.
• “Live in great confidence.” We should scarcely need to add anything to this point. Everything we have been telling you, all these years, is to this effect. What Jane Roberts brought through, and Cayce, same message. It is a safe universe, it was made for you (in effect).

 

Speed and texture (from Oct. 6, 2020)

[Tuesday, August 16, 2022. Finding such good stuff from the last third of 2020! (And 2021 wasn’t bad, either!) I have many more sessions I intend to cite, but something said post this one today.]

 Speed and texture

Tuesday, October 6, 2020

2:20 a.m. I thought, last night, peculiarities as example. The things that make us different. But you may prefer to begin elsewhere.

Considering your innate differences may serve; we’ll see how it goes. Considering prejudice and obsession worked well enough. The overall idea is to replace judgment with understanding. There are reasons why people see the world differently and act differently. It isn’t just people being perverse. And indeed if it were, you’d still have to explain why they felt like being perverse.

I get that you are correlating on the one hand our lives as we lead them individually, and on the other hand why we lead them that way.

Overall, yes. How can we understand the world and your place in the world if we do not consider them together? But to do that, we need to look at the interface between two streams of data, and that is the boundary layer. Call that layer feelings or call it something else, it is the key to seeing yourselves as part of the world, not as merely rattling around loosely in it.

I am aware as I write this of bits of feeling from the movie “The Two Popes,” that I watched again recently. It is background, not grasped and not at all central, but there somehow. For a reason, or merely a purposeless juxtaposition? I can’t really believe in fortuitous juxtaposition, but I don’t see the point.

Even noticing it, and, better, noticing it and mentioning it, shows increased apprehension. (“Apprehension” not in the sense of worry, but in the sense of grasping.) And you will find that the more you notice and pay attention to, the wider your span of attention becomes. The result may be hard to control for a bit, but the result will be well worth it. Wider consciousness comes at the price of a certain confusion, sometimes, but you get used to it.

That isn’t what I had in mind when I thought of higher consciousness, or greater awareness.

No, but you should expect that reality will never be exactly the way you envisioned it when you were envisioning without the experience of it.

So how does half-thinking about “The Two Popes” while writing about feelings as the interface between our personal life and our interaction with the world serve us?

That isn’t quite the correct question. But even as you phrased it, the relationship ought to be obvious.

Yes, I guess it is. One pope was intellectual, judgmental, inclined to steer life; the other was more human, more accepting, more inclined to learn from life. At least, that’s one way you could see it. Each was idealistic and the idealism is what they had in common; but how they saw and experienced the world – the non-3D as well as the 3D world – is what is illustrative.

So as we provided a line of attack, your larger mind provided an illustration that broadened your application and understanding of the point – only, you had to be able to hear, if you were to respond.

And of course it becomes impossible to continue in a straight-line course, if we attempt to relate various levels of thought and association while maintaining a narrative.

Here you need to consider: You must speed up and slow down at the same time. This is not paradox, nor internal contradiction. It is an attempt to describe an unfamiliar set of relationships.

Let me try. I think you mean, we need to be quicker to grasp the fleeting peripheral thoughts, images, remembered bits of dialogue, emotional associations, etc., that go on continually at the fringes of our conscious awareness; and we need to proceed more slowly in driving that central thread of awareness, so that we will miss less.

Yes. Pretty good. Proceeding more slowly may result in an enriched experience, you see, because instead of trying to maintain a needle-sharp thread of logic or narrative or argument, you will concentrate on trying to accrete as many rich associations as you can, as you go along.

That is two alternate ways of proceeding that usually hate each other, or anyway don’t think much of each other.

See how good an association the movie was? The two men started off thinking they had little or nothing in common, and came to value each other’s deep human knowledge of the world, which of course included themselves as part of the world.

I see it in myself. Like the German, I lived in an intellectual bubble, somewhat divorced from ordinary life, and had to learn a different way of living – a different set of values –

Everyone at some point (and in many cases often, not merely once) finds that life has brought them to a point where they can only grow by absorbing what they had refused, which in practice amounts to saying, “I was wrong. I made wrong choices. I wasn’t seeing straight.”

Ah, I get it. And that can make us feel like failures.

It is exactly when you say, “I am such a fool!” that you pass out of that foolishness into a greater wisdom. And, life not being a linear process, you may expect to come to such realizations more than once in your life! Also, you may expect to be confronted occasionally, or often, or continuously, with the choice: change or maintain. Grow or stay. Feel foolish and change, or defend your position and stay.

That puts a more hopeful spin on what is often a very uncomfortable position.

You’re welcome. (Smiling.) It is a very bad habit, condemning yourselves, and a very good habit, reexamining your conduct and your intent.

Now let us circle back to our earlier point, which this has illustrated. Each of you lives in the world seeing it (and yourself) in a unique way. That way is based in pre-conscious apprehension of “how the world is.” Your layer of feelings interprets the world for you in ways you cannot learn without self-examination. But such examination will prove most enlightening and liberating. And we will tell you straight off: You will tend to say, “I have been seeing it all wrong,” or you will tend to say, “This is the only way to see it.” Neither reaction is right or wrong. Either is somewhat right, though in general we have to say it is closer to say you have been seeing things wrong (that is, incompletely or from a bias) than that the view you see is the only way to see it, except in the sense that it is right for you, at least in the moment.

So our ionizing or laminar level interprets the world for us, and it is up to us to use that view to get beyond it as best we can.

Well – to a degree. It isn’t so much that it’s up to you to get beyond it, as to live it! Life went to a certain amount of trouble to create you as a unique point of view; before you move on, don’t forget to experience that point of view.

I was thinking, a few days ago, that my early life put me in places I didn’t particularly want to be, and I would have had an easier life – and a richer one, I see now – if instead of worrying that I wouldn’t escape, I had spent more time experiencing where I was. In effect, I had a certain window on the world, and a limited time to experience it before that window closed and another opened. I might have lived with less anxiety and friction if I had trusted more.

And of course the same may be said of your experience of life as a whole: It is a window, it is of limited duration; it may be experienced as an annoyance or as an opportunity.

Label this conversation Speed and Depth, if you will, or maybe merely Texture.

Or even Speed and Texture. All right. And next time?

We will continue exploring how your particular window is created and how you maintain and change, how you experience and weigh your experiences. It is all part of the larger task of understanding your function and opportunities in the 3D life you lead at the moment.

Well, it’s very interesting, and we thank you for your enlightening guidance.

Thank yourselves for your interest and attention, as you go along. Be well.

You too.