Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

[from Wednesday, October 6, 2021, slightly edited]

10:50 a.m. Okay, guys, a little late this morning, but unless you have something else in the queue, let’s look at what came to me – prompted, I have no doubt – earlier this morning.

Your slide-switches are set, and you observe the difference it makes.

I do. I was attempting to be patient while waiting so long for the doctor, and for the first time this year finding it a struggle. I didn’t think to address it with the “objective” switch.

It will come easier with repetition, as indeed it already is coming easier.

True. And easier to maintain and to recover.

The insight, prompted or not, was valid, and should repay at least a brief look. Three modes of connection:

• Back and forth along the various strands you comprise – strands that may have little or nothing in common but you.
• Up and down (so to speak) between your strictly 3D-oriented mind and the larger self that you are or are not aware of at any given time.
• Within and within and within the parts of your 3D-consciousness realm that are outside the range of your normal awareness.

This may not be a new way of seeing your situation in the world, but even if not, it may be as well to summarize the situation, to bring it front and center. One tends to think that consciousness is more or less the same although subject to fluctuation.

I know what you mean. Even after we are well aware of how much our consciousness fluctuates from moment to moment – ordinary consciousness, altered states, sleep, whatever – we still tend to think that it is a basic unit that fluctuates. We are less likely to see ourselves as processing from a unit that itself changes, depending upon what it links to, and how strongly, at any given moment. That is, our state of mind fluctuates, but beyond that, the seat of consciousness itself fluctuates. It is not the same, though neither is it different in the sense of something being replaced by something else. The boundaries differ.

And, speaking of boundaries, in the middle of that paragraph I found it was the guys speaking, and I sort of came back in at the end of the next-to-final sentence.

You will find that all sorts of boundaries blur. They were never all that real in the first place, and, as we keep saying, are never absolute anyway.

So let’s look briefly at the opportunities that open up to you when you become aware of them. They were always available as possibilities, but of course that is no use to you until you realize it.

• This has the allure of “past lives.” It needn’t. It could equally well be approached as an exploration of your tendencies, talents, shortcomings, etc. Such exploration provides insight, which can be a powerful lever. And when you realize that the individuals living their lives along the same strands are alive now, choosing now, hence available to you now, you see that you have far more power over parts of your life that have been run by the unconscious-you (so to speak) than you ever dreamed you did. They have their problems; they have things you can help them with. Also, they connect (via other of their strands) to qualities and characteristics you could never access directly, because the vibrations between you and them are so different. There is a tremendous lot of work possible here, not least the possibility of helping each other, hence more consciousness of your total possibility.
• The larger self. A lot of nonsense and of ungrounded speculation centers on the concept of Enlightenment. You would probably do well to ignore the concept entirely. For one thing, it encourages you to think in terms of destination instead of process. For another, it is likely to lead to depression or inflation, depending on your idea of how far along you are. Instead, we would advise you to focus your efforts not on attaining some ill-defined state of being (and certainly not of knowledge) but on continually increasing your receptivity to and your conscious contribution to what may be called your larger self – the being of which any one 3D person is only a part. As with your strands, everything you will relate to, will interact with, is alive and conscious. You aren’t speaking to statues and you aren’t prostrating yourself before gods. A tremendous amount of – let’s call it information, for lack of a better word – can be transferred in non-linear fashion, hence with less distortion. The potential for personal growth can scarcely be over-stated.
• Your inaccessible mind. A third realm containing uncounted treasure, waiting only for you to go exploring. This one has the tripwires that make it dangerous, and exciting, and potentially transformative. The tripwires are of course emotional. Memories, unnoticed things, repressed things, non-logical but definite connections, it’s all there for the discovering. And the payoff for doing the sometimes unpleasant, sometimes dangerous work, is freedom. The fewer tripwires in the unconscious, the less tiptoeing around you have to do in the conscious. This is, of course, the realm of psychiatry and, formerly, of confession to another human being.

So you might think of strands as offering healing, the larger self as offering insight, and the unconscious 3D mind as offering disentanglement.

Enough for today. A short session, but you began later than usual, which means you came with batteries already somewhat depleted, though not seriously.

Call this one –?

“Three paths toward greater consciousness,” perhaps.

Sounds good. Our thanks as always.

 

Tuesday, October 5, 2021

8:30 a.m. Very well, my friends, you said today’s topic was TBA – which makes me smile, remembering myself as a boy, consulting the TV schedules and wondering what the TBA program was all about. And, typically, it never occurred to me to ask anybody.

You’d have been laughed at, maybe.

Is that what was going on?

You didn’t know it consciously, you absorbed it from experience.

You know, I did. That’s very interesting. And that reluctance to ask – or rather, that never even thinking to ask – had lifetime effects in so many manifestations, didn’t it.

Now. Set your switches and we’ll look at something.

Thanks for the reminder. Okay.

Earlier in your life, had you come to this realization, you might well have said, “And that crippled me in so many ways,” or at least, “And that had effects that lasted a long time.” It is a natural reaction, though not the only reaction possible. This time, though, your response was more nuanced, and we can carry it farther. Because, of course, “Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

I can even see that a habit of incuriosity, if we can call it that, might have led to enhanced receptivity.

Well –.

Yeah, I know. “But let’s go slower.” Go ahead, and maybe we’ll learn something.

There are systems that you might call cascades. One thing leads to another. Familiar thought, of course, but it is the same thought, approached from the other end of the tube, to say, “One thing cannot manifest unless preceded by another.”

Sure. That’s obvious. As you say, the same thing.

But as we said, from a different angle. Let’s try it in bullets.

• Forward 3D sequence leads you to say, “X happened, and then Y.” Retrospective vision leads you to say, “Y happened, because X had happened.” Equally valid viewpoints.
• From outside 3D, a different logic applies. Whereas the flow of present-moment time leads those in 3D to think in terms of sequence, the access to all moments of time in non-3D leads to perceiving in terms of gestalt. One could say the 3D sees flow and non-3D sees the whole picture. One is sequence of detail, the other is gestalt.
• Therefore, non-3D has a different idea of your life than the merely-3D part of you does. Your conscience, your higher self, your instinctive self, etc., knows what “will lead” to what, as well as what “has led” to what. It sees whole, you see.

Except that what it sees is somehow only tentative until we choose.

We smile. Certainty it has to look that way in 3D. We have dealt with predestination v. free will many times, you and we, only it is in “another part of your mind” at the moment. Leave that thought, for the moment. From non-3D, your life pattern is evident, including every branch and eddy. The existence of choice does not invalidate the seeing of the gestalt, but it is hard to envision, thinking in 3D terms.

All right, well, I’m taking your word for it, as you know.

• Remember, your non-3D component, being part of you (or, if you prefer, you being part of it), obviously has your best interests in mind. But a friend acting in your best interests, giving you advice that leads away from what you want to do, may be perceived as an annoyance, as well as a friend.

Sure. Just the fact that you know he is offering the unwanted advice from the best motives is annoying, because it means you can’t just dismiss it unheard.

Well, isn’t that how people often experience conscience? And we do not here mean in terms of “sin,” however people perceive that concept. We mean when the small still voice is advocating prudence when you feel like being rash; is advocating temperance, or justice, or fortitude, when you are being overwhelmed by contrary emotions. You want to follow your hot blood; your small still voice is saying, “You might want to think about it.” Naturally, you’re going to be annoyed. Who likes having his proposed course of action argued against?

• Seeing the gestalt and trying to give you the benefit of the wider perspective works two ways, not just one. That is, yes, it often manifests as “You shouldn’t do that; it won’t work out so well.” But it also often manifests as “We know this doesn’t look good, but later on you’ll be glad for it.”

Sure, I see that.

Well, you see, that’s why you all do things sometimes even while wondering why you’re doing them. Sometimes you act “unconsciously” and it really means, sometimes you are working from guidance without consciously knowing it. You can’t count on it all the time, or it would destroy your habit of exerting your mind and your will – you would be living Psychic’s Disease – but sometimes it is appropriate and helpful.

As we write that, I got that it is a matter of consciousness and receptivity. Conscious receptivity is not the same as unconscious receptivity, and the effects are different.

A two-month-old baby is in a state of unconscious receptivity, and it serves him or her very well. It wouldn’t serve so well as an accompaniment to the teen years, let alone various other stages of life. Consciousness is generally preferable, unless it has become petrified by certain beliefs or fears.

• Now, what do we in non-3D do when considering a development that has mixed results for you? And, bear in mind, that is most Few things produce only desirable or only undesirable results. Do we choose? That’s what you are in 3D to do, as we may have mentioned.

But you probably have preferences.

Actually, less often than you would imagine. If we had a firm picture in our minds of what your life should be or not be, it would be easier to judge, though it would still present difficulties). But usually there are so many major alternatives, and who is to say which is the best, from any standard? That is, best for you in 3D, best for us as a whole, best for those you interact with in your life, best for those you interact with via your strands –. What makes us in non-3D better judges than you in the 3D-focused moment? Mostly, we take what comes.

That’s the same as saying you live in a state of receptivity, too.

Should it be desirable for you and not us? If you remember, in this context, that “you” and “we” are part of each other, doesn’t it make sense that a quality appropriate to one part would be appropriate to other parts?

A new thought for me. I need to lull it over.

• (We stick to bullets so that you can reread only the bullets to get the sense of the argument.) So let us take as example the fact that as a boy you rightly or wrongly concluded that asking straightforward questions about whatever you didn’t know would bring you ridicule or at least amusement at your expense. Was this a beneficial or a harmful development?

I get your point. It was both.

What comes unmixed, in the 3D world? Of course it was both. So now, at the end of your long life, as you look back at it, you are closer to a non-3D view of it in one respect. You still can’t see the alternative patterns that, from your point of view, “might have been,” but you can see, a bit, the pattern that did manifest. And what is it that you see?

Well, let’s see. I may need to resort to bullet-points myself. Nudging the slide-switch back to maximum clarity.

• I figured things out, rightly or wrongly
• I relied heavily on what I felt. No, that isn’t true, that is what I thought I should have thought. I leave it in just to remind myself of this wrong approach.
• I jumped to conclusions, not having the data and not thinking to acquire it.
• I let much of the world around me pass by without trying to figure out the whys and wherefores.
• I suppose history – and reading in general, really – were something tangible, something easily understood, that made sense. The fact that I didn’t really understand wasn’t important, it was something I could use that mental faculty on.
• I am tempted to say, history, biography, fiction all allowed me to get inside the facades, where in ordinary life people’s motives and mainsprings were a puzzle.
• I accepted what was taken for granted by people, without trying to exert my judgment on it. This is hard to express. Let’s put it this way: When I asked myself “why,” the answers I came up with were not necessarily supported by data or even sound reasoning. And I never really developed the habit of systematic inquiry.
• I did develop strong opinions, and of course some of them were supported by data. But the important criterion was not the data but the feeling that accompanied the opinion. That is sort of the know-it-all position, and I see now that is how I must have struck people.
• Another connection: I was always chary of asking advice, for who could I trust? And at the same time, I tended to over-trust, if that is a word, in that when I gave my loyalty to a person, I unthinkingly gave my loyalty to that person’s opinions and actions, even if a part of me had its reservations.
• And, come to think of it, this set of habits positioned me to be a perfect candidate for this way of being. I could ask The Other Side, which was presumably all-knowing and all-benevolent, and would not smile at naïve questions. An exaggeration, but not by much.

I feel, at the moment, like I could go on and on, deriving consequences from that initial childhood weariness of being laughed at for asking simple questions. (For instance, I see now that that was more over-sensitivity on my part than anyone’s malicious pleasure.) But we’ve been going at this for about 70 minutes, and I know which of us is going to have to do the transcribing. So, enough, perhaps. This was quite interesting. Title?

Maybe “Sequential v. gestalt,” or “Exploring how guidance sees our lives.”

Neither one seems just right. I’ll think of something. Next time? More TBA?

Perhaps by then you will have caught part of that program on YouTube.

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

 

[From Oct. 3 and 4, 2021, slightly edited]

Gentlemen, last time you said we should “resume with this question next time,” but I see that I am not quite clear on what you meant by “this question,” specifically. I guess the invisible factors in health?

You will notice that remembering to set your switches now automatically reminds you to see yourself and your surroundings from the new viewpoint. Let’s call it 3D-Plus, because it is neither a non-3D viewpoint nor the default perspective you were used to.

I take this as a sort of promise that the new perspective can become the default. Certainly it seems easier to revert to each day. I don’t know how it would be if I were living with someone, or were working with others every day.

Think of it this way. “Nothing human to me is alien.” Anything you can get used to is by definition one version of normal, a new viewpoint, a new mental environment, that you then you live.

You are thinking we have diverted from the topic, but actually, not so. Everything in your life connects, and the less obvious the connection, the more you may want to look at it, because pre-conscious connections may shed light upon another of the filters that separate your idea of the world from the world itself.

Interesting thought. But it’s sort of like following the trail of bread crumbs in the fairy tale.

The point in that tale being, of course, that leaving a trail of stones rather than bread crumbs is a safer procedure. Anything more permanent, less labile, has greater potential to facilitate changes that are relatively permanent rather than impossibly volatile. God knows we have dropped enough pebbles for you, all these years.

I’m smiling, thinking of Jesus saying, “What father would give his children stones when they asked for bread?”

We smile too, knowing that you nevertheless get the point.

So, the invisible factors in health?

Bear in mind, the internal and the external and the interface between the two is not a description of factors in your health alone. It describes your life. It is a matter of viewpoint. Once seen, it will be seen as obvious.

As so often.

That’s the nature of pebbles as markers. The bread-crumbs provide the same guidance, but only until the birds eat them. That is, only until a new set of thoughts replaces the thought of the moment.

You will notice, glancing back at Friday’s, that we said “the interface between the two [external and internal], namely, your body, most broadly defined.” So what do you suppose is your body “most broadly defined”?

I am supposing that this means not only the chemical and electrical systems but also the intangibles that animate it and guide it. Whatever it is that leaves when the body dies is clearly part of a functioning body. We don’t have to be able to define it to see its results.

Couldn’t you say that the body consists of everything that people commonly mean when they say “the body” plus what they mean when they say soul and mind?

I do think so, yes, though I guess I didn’t think that consciously until now. The damn words continually make us think divisions are real that are at best somewhat real.

Well, if doctors (not to mention their patients!) consider only one part of the totality, how can they move from the “how” of a situation” to the “why” of it?

I suppose that’s what Dr. Jung was doing, moving toward the “why” of things.

Invite him in, and let’s see.

Dr. Jung?

It is a great mistake to mystify the commonplace. I was continually being accused of doing this, but in fact I was demonstrating the common-sense reality of things that were being ignored or were being seen as irrelevant.

I have always assumed that you knew much more than you were willing to print or even perhaps to say.

It is closer to the truth to say that I suspected many things that I could not demonstrate. There would have been no point in making bald assertions that could not be substantiated. As it was, the hints I set out were too much for most of my profession.

Then what can you tell us of the connection between health and life and the interface of internal and external?

I would give you one rule of thumb, one practice to fall back upon in such things: Look to the simplest explanations, but then look to see how they may hint at another context. Every experience in life has been repeated many times. Do not look for something new under the sun. But, new truths for new eyes. You understand? What you bring to a subject is all that you can take from it. If you look at a thing with the same old viewpoint, how can you expect to see something new? But if you come to it with new eyes, no effort will be required save honesty and awareness: Your new being will show you the thing in different guise.

So, as usual, a reciprocating process. We change and we can see more. We see more and we change as a result of what we have seen.

As a result of as much of what you have seen as you have absorbed. It is not a passive process. Your intention and your awareness will allow you to see deeper, but they will not necessarily lead you to see deeper automatically. From time to time, yes, they may. But I wouldn’t count on it as a regular thing!

Yes, I see that.

So if you wish to explore the hidden roots of health, or of life itself, first look to what is popularly known, and do not despise what people know but do not easily express. Nor, by all means, should you hesitate to explore the things the learned (and especially the comfortable) have discarded as worthless. Remember, my advantage over Freud was not merely in being younger, or stronger physically. It was also in having been raised among Swiss peasants, and having absorbed things in that way that Freud could never believe in, because he was not as close to the people.

Well, that’s how I felt – and still feel – about astrology, say, and tarot and such things. Intellectually disreputable to think for myself in such matters, but instinct said, “There’s something here.” I was heartened to remember that you had had to force yourself to continue to examine alchemy. It seemed a very similar dynamic must have been operating within you – and the result certainly justified your faith.

But you see, I didn’t have faith, I had what you call a disreputable instinct pushing me. Intellectually, I knew this was nonsense. What they were saying couldn’t be true. Yet intelligent men had devoted their lives to it. How could this be? And why did a traitorous element within me (that I nonetheless could not quite distrust) tell me to press on until I found the key to it? When you press forward despite your better judgment, your faith is not in the subject-matter but in your guidance. And faith, as you know well by this time, is doubt.

So when we look at the body – ?

Begin with what “everybody knows.” Each of you will have a different inventory, for everybody grows up in a different family, lives among different people, reads and absorbs different things. But what you need, your life will have brought to you, and what you need next will be brought to you at the proper time, in the proper way. You can count on this, because there is not only one proper order, only one appropriate stepping-stone. Life provides many possibilities, and you choose among them, consciously and, mostly, unconsciously.

But righteous persistence brings reward, I know. Our thanks for this.

Remember if you can: The world is here to serve you, as you are here to serve the world.

Well you certainly did. Thanks again.

…

“Remember if you can: The world is here to serve you, as you are here to serve the world.” We ended on that note, but although I got the sense of it at the moment – while directly connected – I see now that it could use some exposition. Guys?

The simplest layer is obvious: There are no coincidences. But yes, it could stand further consideration.

The world is here to serve you:

• The external subjectivity provides stubborn, relatively independent, uncooperative (let’s say) alternative viewpoints.
• It provides definite irreducible facts, to be dealt with.
• It provides the timing in which various possibilities emerge.
• It is, in short, everything “external” to the point of view that is your consciousness.
• At the most abstract level, it sets the scene and maintains the playhouse. That is, “the world” is always full of things happening, any one or any combination of which may be of use to you.

You are here to serve the world:

• You are each part of someone else’s shared subjectivity. That is, you are part of their environment. They may experience you as a stubborn fact, and may experience you either first-hand or at many removes. Things that influence someone may be the result of a result of a result of something concerning you. They may never have heard of you and yet be affected by something that changed because you lived.
• Such changes – direct and indirect – may be deemed good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant, important or unimportant, but as usual we would advise you that judgment of the lives of others, or of your own, is likely to be erroneous. So, caution. Still, our point here is that you will be experienced as other people’s “other,” as they are experienced by you as your “other.”
• You make your own change in the local experience of the world, so bear it in mind.

I remember Thomas Merton saying that the qualities of the monks were important to each other’s lives. He said people had lost their vocation because a fellow monk was grouchy, so to speak.

Yes, that’s what we meant. Your own private world is never as private as you may think. Your qualities affect your fellows, for the better or for the worse or – usually – some of each.

• You as a non-3D being in what you and others perceive as a 3D world will similarly affect the shared subjectivity itself, over and above any 3D interactions you may have. “Thoughts are things,” Edgar Cayce heard, and came to believe. This is another sense in which your very being affects the world.

As usual, common sense, but turned in an unusual direction.

There is a reason why “common sense” is often dependable: It is held in common: It is somewhat freed from individual eccentricity by the process of mutual abrasion that is the coexistence of many viewpoints, many different experiences of the world. Common sense is at its weakest when dealing with unusual depths of meaning; at its strongest when dealing with rules of thumb for general guidance.

Hmm, and you are generally doing both: giving us an unusual viewpoint, but then providing rules of thumb as to how to integrate that viewpoint in everyday thought and feeling.

That’s a very good description of what we do. As we say, we wish to be helpful. In your case that is the approach indicated. For someone else, the flavoring would be different. Perhaps it would be  a different menu, probably different chefs.

Well, while we’re on the subject –

Yes, we knew you would wish to discuss points of view.

Then you know the background. Well, you would, of course. It is a problem: People read into your words things that I know you didn’t mean, because we were linked essence to essence; yet you have said many times that words are sparks, not signposts, and therefore it would seem to stand to reason that whatever people get from the material, they get for a reason, and so it must be valid. The conclusion I come to is that it doesn’t matter if what people hear is what you meant, because their own guidance will not lead them astray. But – is that right? It seems like there’s something subtly wrong somewhere in that take on things.

Here is an example of you being there for the world and the world for you. It is reciprocal action, is it not? You speak, another hears, they reply, you hear, and on and on. How necessary is it that the interchange be accurate according to any one standard? What is important is intent. If the intent is sincere, errors will not matter, and in fact may be more apparent than real. Only if the intent is not sincere do problems arise.

I wish you would enlarge on all this. You have made several statements that are not at all self-explanatory. That is, they lead to multiple, conflicting, interpretations.

Well, they will. Multiple recipients guarantees multiple interpretations. But, all right:

• Any one standard. To choose one standard is to choose one set of official interpreters. This has advantages and disadvantages. It is the basic psychological divide between Catholic and Protestant, in effect: authority (collectively determined truth) v. individual conscience (which may include individually derived error). Which way you see it shows where you are personally; it does not provide the way to see things, except for you.
• This point may be obscure, because as usual words make distinctions clearer than they should be in some directions, hazier than they should be, in others. But in general, proper intent will bring you home safely.

Following one’s guidance, you mean. But what about Psychic’s Disease?

Life does not come with guarantees. Every moment is an opportunity and a caution for your best awareness of (a) the situation and (b) your own motives. It is always well to be a bit skeptical of one’s certainties. Today’s certainty may be tomorrow’s recognized error. However, remember that things do not happen at random, however it may appear. So, it isn’t as if you need to be on tense alert at every moment, lest you go wrong. A sort of habit of quiet skepticism of your own infallibility will do.

• Insincere intent. This is the trap to be avoided. Fortunately, it is pretty obvious – only, you must be willing to see it. If in place of knowing the truth as best you can, you place ego or convenience or any form of deliberate self-deflection from knowledge, what good can you expect to follow?

Hemingway, substituting palatable untruths for memories that were too painful.

That’s an example, yes. Or someone putting ideology or politics or any allegiance ahead of knowing the truth. It comes in many forms, and it is always harmful. But this is a pitfall easily avoided or, if necessary, put behind you, by a combination of willed consciousness and sustained intent to know the truth as best you can.

In all this, the indicated result is not uniformity of opinion (which can never happen) but, let’s put it, uniformity of intent. Let each one continually strive for consciousness and all will (continue to) be well.

 

 

[From last September, a helping hand today]

Saturday, September 11, 2021

7:15 a.m. The question was, when we don’t have enough energy to get out of our depression, what do we do? And I already know the answer, or at least part of it. I think you will know best how to convey the sense of it to others in various starting-places.

Conceptually it is simple. In practice it is simple, too, but requires a bit of resolution. As we said, the energy comes as if from outside, and must be summoned by an act of will.

Not necessarily an explosive act, nor a violent exertion of will.

No. Calm deliberate courage in the face of discouragement will do. But it does require willpower. You don’t drift out of depression.

Sometimes it lifts, seemingly of itself.

Yes, but when it does, you don’t know why and you didn’t seem to have anything to do with it. In saying you don’t drift out of it, we don’t mean, once in, you’re in forever. We mean, you cannot get yourself out of it by drifting. Drifting is in fact the opposite of getting yourself out of anything.

Lay out your understanding and we will correct if need be.

All right. I get that there is our normal consciousness, the smaller sphere contained within the larger one, as you described it a while ago.  The small sphere represents 3D-us, the larger sphere represents all that we are beyond (and including) the 3D-us we are commonly aware of. When we are depressed, our awareness is entirely concentrated on 3D-us, as if that were all we are. We can’t get beyond it; the 3D reality seems self-evidently real, true, and what it appears to be.

And to escape the illusion of captivity?

In one way or another, we must reach beyond the bar. Remembering – or, more likely, acting as if we remembered – we reach out for our greater existence., that its energy may flow into us.

You can hear the analogy to the way religious people experience active assistance from prayer. They do not think of it as you are thinking of it, but they experience it the same, for of course it is the same condition of aloneness, the same reaching beyond the bars, the same access of energy.

But in our time, fewer people can pray. For one thing we have been taught, between the lines, that any such extension beyond our 3D-consciousness is superstition.

You mean, you have been taught that thinking of it in a religious framework is superstition.

Yes.

In a New Age framework, it would be considered acceptable, even advanced. And in a sense it would be an advance, in that it created a way forward for people who could no longer use the accustomed religious channels. Belief cannot be forced, so if it is dead in a person, that person will find another way to connect, or will be unable to do so. Either way, the gods don’t reinhabit the temples they abandon.

No. That I realized from the first time I read that Jung had said it. But New Age is as limited as Christianity. More limited, in fact, because it doesn’t have behind it centuries of thought and practice, nor ritual nor other aids to connection. So if neither the established religions, what they call the higher religions, nor the New Age movement – and certainly not scientism – is a way forward, where are we?

Let us remain more narrowly focused. The specific problem is, how, when one is depressed, one can summon the energy needed to break out of the depression. Those who cannot pray, and those for whom ritual does not avail, require almost an abstract understanding, not for the sake of establishing the connection, but for the sake of sensing the blockage that their own unconscious or semi-conscious or intermittent beliefs have constructed.

We need an excuse to believe what we already know, so to speak.

Yes. You don’t need a lightning bolt on the road to Damascus, and you certainly don’t need a mathematical theorem. You don’t need anything proved to you. You need a plausible way to think about things when you are in bad shape. A drowning man does not require a lifeboat or even a life-preserver. A simple piece of wood floating will do. In fact, the more desperate you are emotionally, the more you need simple things rather than complex things.

I think of Lanny Budd’s advice to the sophisticated woman, that she pray in the way she did as a child, in that attitude of trust, because no sophisticated formula was going to help her.

Bear in mind, those were day of war – that is, they were more than 80 years ago – and times have changed, your civilization has changed, and the souls that found entry into 3D are necessarily differently composed. In your time, perhaps some of the older people can pray their way out of depression, but mostly that way is closed, by the changing of the times, the changing of the shared subjectivity, the changing of those who entered the play. Three ways of saying the same thing.

So our way is to remember that we are more than we consciously remember that we are.

Let us say this carefully. You experienced something the other day, and confirmed it later, and can confirm it this minute – as you are doing; good – and this is the way, whether you can quite believe in the reality or not. If you can’t believe in its reality, believe that the feeling is a dramatization within you of a real function, and that will do.

It is difficult to describe, as it has almost no obvious sensory component. Thinking a certain way, remembering a certain way, it feels as if I have moved my awareness higher inside my skull. It is as if I climbed to the third floor, you might say, except I haven’t left the lower levels; I have added the higher level to my momentary awareness. I see from a bird’s-eye view instead of my customary street-level view. My eyesight seems different, in a way. Or, that isn’t the way to put it, I am looking at these hands, this journal and desk, all of it, as if from a little distance. Instead of being unconsciously part of the scene, it’s more like observing Frank writing, yet I have not lost awareness of myself.

This proceeded from the remembered sense of connection I obtained by re-reading our mind-mirror sessions of three years ago. But the sensations aren’t the important part. As I say, they could be dramatizations. The connection is what is important, or rather, the renewed reality of connection, the renewed knowing, feeling, sensing, that I am connected.

Of course it blows away depression like smoke.

It does. I wonder, in fact, if depression is mostly us suffering from the illusion that we are alone in 3D.

No need to generalize. Merely, for anyone needing it, this hint: In whatever manner suits you, actively remember that you are more than your physical body, more than the “you” you usually carry around, more than any limits you can imagine. But you have to actually make this real to yourself. It may require an effort to do so, if you are in a depressed state, because your mood will tell you, falsely, that limitation is the truth and connection is only a pipe-dream or an unimportant thing that occasionally happens. Make the active effort to disbelieve the naysayer. The effort itself will help you to escape the prison of depressed functioning.

And we realize that the prison bars were never real. They felt real, but they were real only insofar as they could persuade us to believe in them.

This is true, but not in itself helpful, because someone who is depressed is not capable  of wishing the bars away, which is how they will interpret what you just said. We know it isn’t what you said, but it is what they will hear. More helpful to tell them that they can get themselves out by actively remembering. And remember, here we are considering you all as if you were disconnected 3D individuals, but the fact is, no matter how it feels, you are never alone. Make an inch of effort to extend from the 3D end, and the rest of you makes a yard, a mile, of effort to meet you.

You might call this “A practical way to overcome depression,” though it is more important than that.

Our thanks as always. Next time?

There is still our list.

Okay. Till then.

 

Condensed from five sessions, Dec. 21 through Dec. 25, 2021

Until now, in discussing the temporary joint mind, we have talked about the sharing of ideas and, to a lesser degree, of feeling. Let’s look a little deeper.

We will use as our entry-point the idea of your being open to influence by other minds not in the sense of invasion, or even of infection, but of diffusion. Water that is heating on a stove does not have one molecule feeling imposed upon because adjacent molecules are affecting it. Each molecule warms as part of the general warming-up process, and how that occurs may be a matter of viewpoint, but, it occurs.

If I read that right, you mean, the process may seem either like one molecule being affected by another, or as each molecule being affected by the general process, and which way one sees it is likely to be mostly a matter of opinion.

In the discussion to follow, we don’t want you (any of you) to hare off into discussing mind control or distant influencing or anything of that nature. Attempts to tamper with natural processes will be better understood once the material processes themselves have been explained, discussed, and assimilated.

So let’s look at the situation.

• “We’re all one thing.”
• Yet at the same time, the world is made up of divisions: 3D v. non-3D; you v. other people; you v. “the world” (the shared subjectivity that seems to be “other”); many other polarities.
• You are all individuals, you are also communities.
• “You” are also “we,” but if there were no distinctions, we wouldn’t be saying “you” and “we.” Similarly with distinctions between “this side” and “the other side.”
• Most notably, there is the difference between those living in the living present moment, and those living elsewhen. The living v. the dead; this life v. other lives; 3D v. non-3D (as long as you consider only the present moment “real” in a way other moments are not).

These background facts must be taken into consideration together if you are to understand what we will sketch. But the largest fact to be borne in mind is the effective division between what you are conscious of and what you are not conscious of. As long as your focus is in 3D, you will have in effect two minds. Living in 3D and non-3D, you will be balancing between two modes of perception and therefore between two coherent realities. Which world you live in depends mostly upon your mental balance. If you are entirely unaware of anything but what your senses report and whatever grist your conscious mind grinds – memories, fantasies, free-associations, chains of logic – that’s a world with no space for other lives, for the non-3D reality, for anything but the shallowest presentation of “what is.” (Bear in mind, for some people this is an appropriate stage of development.) At this stage, one’s awareness of most of reality does not exist as a factor. It influences them, of course, but they are not aware of it. To them, the shared subjectivity is merely “the world out there,” very separate. Other people, other times, other lives – it’s all “other” to someone at this stage of development.

(2)

We began by sketching the mental world of those with no awareness of any connection beyond the sensory. The bottom rung of perceptive awareness to be one that takes for granted that what you see is what you get. Even there, remember, actual connection is far broader and deeper and more exotic than perceived connection.

At the opposite end of the bell-curve of perception would be someone well beyond your ability to imagine. This would be a truly magical being, aware of celestial influences (which include the demonic) and every variation of 3D-level interaction, and everything that stems from connections along all threads, and all natural awareness of non-human forces including the other kingdoms. A fully alive 3D human lives in a world so much richer and stranger than yours, it beggars comparison: It resembles shamanic perception, except continuous rather than episodic, and natural rather than having to be reached for via ritual or psychoactive substances. A truly human existence, fully awake. It is the opposite extreme from what we sketched first, those who live their lives asleep to most of reality.

So now, without trying to sketch various levels between the two extremes, let us consider your situation, remembering that you are, at one and the same time:

• 3D beings
• Non-3D beings connected to 3D beings
• Individual insofar as a melded community may be considered as individual
• Part of “all-one-thing” because, obviously, “all one thing” implies everything without exception (or how could it be all?)

This being true, you perceive using

• 3D senses
• 3D reasoning (we’ll explain in a minute)
• Non-3D-based intuitions
• Data from every source you are not closed off from. Other lives, resonances, 3D relationships of blood, etc.

Understand this: None of this is one-way flow. You are not alone. But that means more than “you are not an orphan in the universe.” It means, too, you are not without responsibility for your influence on the rest of the noosphere. At the same time, you are not necessarily the source of what seem to you to be your thoughts, ideas, propensities, impulses, etc. Being part of “all one thing” as you are, your somewhat autistic ideas about your situation are only an interim formulation, while you gather experience, and wisdom through reflection upon that experience.

Now, see how this affects your understanding of the models we have constructed for you as interim scaffolding. The shared subjectivity v. the personal subjectivity, say, or the consciousness v. the rest of you, with emotions being the laminal layer at the boundary. These are helpful concepts as long as you consider yourselves as individuals existing among others. But when you look at the same situation as part of all one thing, they are less so; may in fact be misleading.

It gets sticky, because either way of seeing ourselves is more or less true. We are individuals; we are part of all one thing.

Precisely. That’s what we said: Models may clarify one aspect of things but they may distort in that very clarifying, if they lead you to think that any one way of seeing it is the only way, or even the best way. The goalposts, rules of the game, composition of teams, etc., is all fluid in the sense that it can all be made to make a coherent picture, but only at the cost of reducing your awareness of other equally valid way of seeing. We told you this when you had us write the ending to Muddy Tracks 20 years ago.

Yes you did, though I didn’t understand it in quite this way then.

How could you have done so?

(3)

Gentlemen, I notice that yesterday you left a thread hanging. In your iteration of the ways we perceive, you said, “3D reasoning (we’ll explain in a minute).”

So we did. By “3D reasoning,” we mean, reasoning taking into account the rules of the 3D world you inhabit.

Which means, if I read you right, whatever set of rules seem to apply to our lives, which depends upon where we are. Magical beings do not experience the world in the same way sleepers do, nor those in the middle.

Your understanding is correct.

You made a point of saying that none of our input was one-way flow. Do you mean, inter alia, that the nature of the input depends upon how other 3D persons experienced the rules of their world? I suppose it would have to.

Yes, and take the next step: How they experience the world – known to you or mostly not – may be altered as a result of how you change. They are integrally connected to you, obviously, if you are integrally connected to them. So if you alter the nature of what they are connected to, must this not influence them?

If it were not for my experience of healing Joe Smallwood’s back on the fourth of July, 1863 his time, I would find it harder to credit this as being more than just words.

It wasn’t the healing of his back that was the main impact: It was being contacted by a powerful being, per se, that changed his world in a way only reinforced by the fact that his physical healing offered testimony that the encounter had been real and not fantasy or fever or wishful thinking.

Yes, I see that. When we’re experienced an angelic visitation – which is how I think he interpreted it – your life pretty nearly has to change.

So let’s move beyond that one experience that you remember, and realize that in all your lives there are many other experiences that you may not remember, or may remember with other explanations. You very calmly did an exercise in a Monroe program that you felt had changed you, but you aren’t associating that with this, until now that we associate it for you.

That’s true. In some program they had us do a tape with the purpose of sending a helpful message to our younger self. I wound up sending a message of great emotional importance to my 10-year-old self (or thereabouts), telling him not to give up, that things would work out, that all was well. As you say, an intervention (from the boy’s point of view) from elsewhen.

We mention this experience because, though it was done matter-of-factly, this too was a deliberate intervention by your conscious self that took for granted relatively magical abilities, and took them for granted rightly. It didn’t matter how you thought of yourself habitually, at those two moments, you expressed a tiny bit of your magical potential.

And if I get you correctly, you are as much as saying, we all do it every so often, to greater or less degree, whether or not we are aware of it.

Yes. You do it and you receive it, on an on-going basis. That’s our point. And one aspect of having “life more abundantly” is being ever more aware of such interconnections.

Our lives are already more magical than we realize.

Yes, and we’re going to interject a word of clarification that may or may not go down well. Quote Thoreau.

“There is nowhere any excuse for despondency. Always there is life, which, rightly lived, implies a divine satisfaction.” I used that as an epigraph on my Master’s thesis 50 years ago.

Yet you don’t or didn’t and perhaps may not again always believe it, always feel it. You – anyone – could make that sentence a touchstone. When you are feeling despondent, it is not evidence that you are experiencing something that is wrong with life, but that something is wrong with the way that you are living your life. Here’s a rule of thumb: If you want to measure where you are on the scale of awareness, that is somewhere between sleeping your way through life (at one end) to magical being (at the other end), check what you believe and what you feel and what your experience.

You had an intense experience of your mind flowing with Hemingway’s, over a period of more than a decade. So you know that it can happen. You have had many conversations with ex-3D humans from their 3D-individual perspectives. Again, you know, now; you don’t have to settle for belief. Generalizing from these experiences, you can see that you all, unpredictably, may connect with others in productive and life-enhancing ways. You are all part of all-that-is, obviously. You are individual, obviously. It is the living both halves of the polarity simultaneously that is the skill to be learned, the new world to be living in.

(4)

Perhaps the context begins to shed some light on aspects of Carl Jung’s thought that some have thought to be mystical speculation, and on scriptural statements that have not been obviously grounded in fact. A racial unconscious, an admonition to be your brother’s keeper: Do they not ring true, do they not suggest further connections, when examined in light of your (our) being both individual and part of all-one-thing?

Certainly they seem self-evident once we remember that what appeared to be separate was and is actually invisibly interconnected in uncounted ways.

If anything you do, think, feel, experience, may alter others in unpredictable fashion, and if at the same time you will be – and are – influenced similarly by others, then “No man is an island” is the merest statement of truth, not exaggerated, not high-flying, not even impractical or without consequences. “Love your neighbor as yourself” has a profounder reasoning behind it.

It was clear that interpenetration of minds means that emotion may be transferred, not merely thoughts. But I hadn’t considered that statement in connection with your earlier analogy of emotions being the laminal layer between an individual’s conscious and unconscious components.

And thus, in effect, any of you may at certain times be affected by emotions that are caused not by your own specific situation but by, let’s call it, spillover from those closest to you in some way.

Hence, crowd panic, group hysteria, psychic contagion.

Hence, too, and not so different, political movements, ideological convictions, fads, manias, shared political hallucinations.

We said earlier, you are not primarily rational beings. Perhaps that statement will seem more evidently true now. Any given individual may be quite rational, but that isn’t going to be true of people in general nor of any of you except now and then. Your periods of being driven by rationality blend invisibly (to you) with periods of being driven by group emotion, even of group thought, which by definition means, by motives not stemming from your individual mental constructions.

None of this is accidental; none of it is an interruption to your program; none of it is static in the recording. (Pick your preferred metaphor.) It is true that there is always chaos within the pattern, as there is always pattern within the chaos. Think of the yin-yang symbol, if you wish to have a symbol of the situation. No polarity is other than relative; life is not a divided thing but a unity, only the unity is not uniform but is endlessly diverse. Intricacy is far more interesting and productive than a sea of Jello would be, you will agree. And the logical corollary, if it is not accidental, is that it proceeds according to laws. The laws are not necessarily obvious, but their effects will be evident, once you learn to look for them.

You are saying, I think, that the sources of disruption in our individual lives proceed from the overall situation in some way.

And now we bring in the vast impersonal forces, you see, linking two concepts after a long, long separation in 3D time. But once you link them in your minds, it will seem clear enough.

That is very interesting. It’s true, I hadn’t connected the ideas. I have been accepting the existence of the vast impersonal forces, mainly on your say-so, but I have had not much of an idea of where they came from, what they were doing, or anything much more than initial consideration of how they affect us.

And now you begin to see. Like every other aspect of reality, they are necessarily “other” only as long as you define them that way; they are necessarily part of you, individually and as groups, only as long as you define them that way. Only, as it happens, you are less likely to assume the latter connection than the former.

Now, we suggest that you all spend some time thinking about the implied connection between discussing the interconnection of minds and the existence and effects of the vast impersonal forces. If you are in the habit of thinking with pen and paper – either writing words or sketching, or both – we suggest that some summation of this topic – and subsequent sharing of ideas and reactions among one another – will pay dividends. If we may offer a word of advice on procedure, don’t wait until you think you can demonstrate a thing logically; don’t think that because it came to you, you are somehow required to defend it; don’t fall in love with it and refuse to let it modify itself as you go along.

(5)

Everything connects to everything, so it is often convenient to comment from wherever you happen to be. A different starting-point wouldn’t necessarily offer any particular advantage. We suggest, BTW, that you all consider this fact in your exploratory endeavors.

Thoreau said the work to be done is always right where we are, we don’t need to go count the cats in Zanzibar.

And that is a part of what he meant, yes. So when you look at your own particular situation, and you bemoan the fact that you are not somewhere else, in some other condition, facing some other opportunities, bear in mind that you are being ridiculous. If you had come into 3D to be Rembrandt, or Helen Keller, or Wilbur Wright, or Joan of Arc, you wouldn’t have come in as you!

All this is obvious, but it has implications that are less so. What you are may be considered to be a discrete individual. Yes, you are a seamless part of all-that-is, and it is well to remember that, but mostly you think of yourselves as individuals. Well, as an individual, you are a combination of wave-lengths. State your understanding of what we’re getting at, and we’ll correct if necessary.

I get that you are saying that we are each, in effect, unique transmitters of energy, each with our own combination of frequencies. I suppose every thread within us contributes its bit to the composite signal. We are each a unique combination of elements. Maybe that’s what an individual is, a particular composite signal.

Each of you (each of us, remember) radiates. You don’t just exist; you don’t just receive. You broadcast.

Instead of “I think, therefore I am,” maybe Descartes should have said, “I exist, therefore I broadcast.”

Actually, though said lightly, that demonstrates a point that is well to hold in mind: In his day, how was he to think in terms of broadcasting, when there was no 3D equivalent? This is one of the ways in which whatever times one lives in expand or limit the mind’s possibilities. In your time, it is easier to think of telepathy and distant influencing and non-3D connection, because so much in your physical surroundings offers analogy. Your grandchildren, growing up in a world in which virtual reality is taken for granted, will have their ideas of what is possible similarly affected by what they take for granted in 3D.

So, we said, you broadcast. Obviously, so does everybody else. Why is not the result chaos?

I would assume that the mind filters non-3D input in the same way it filters 3D input. Faced with a huge volume of potential input, it necessarily filters out the vast majority of it, so that it has only a manageable amount to deal with. Our minds must be layer after layer of successive filters, beginning with the grossest and ending with the finest. At one end, potentially everything, at the other end, a finite amount.

So now consider some of the implications of the model you just sketched. Just noodle.

Okay, let’s see. Our 3D minds still connect to our non-3D components, so it isn’t as if we are on our own. We are open to suggestion, so to speak. That’s what these conversations are, after all. But we are open to some kinds of suggestion more than others, just by what we are, what we have made ourselves. A lifetime’s habits are going to count for something, in terms of what we do or don’t easily accept.

I’m thinking about those grossest filters. I suspect it would be easier to start from this end and work outward.

You are finding this difficult. Ask yourself why.

I know why. It is much easier to be receptive than to be proactive. For me, anyway.

That is more of a “how” than a “why,” but all right. A paraphrase would be, you find it easier to understand our thought than to generate the thought. But that deserves more careful consideration, for what is the difference, really?

I suppose being in non-3D makes it easier to see gestalts, so of course relationships would be more obvious to you than to us.

True as far as it goes, but who is “you” and “us”? We are not only non-3D; you are not only 3D. In fact, at some levels of closeness you and we are the same thing, as we keep reminding you. So why can’t “you” see what “we” can?

We do, sometimes.

Correct. And life more abundantly involves greater ability to do so at will.

In a way, that’s saying, it involves learning to reprogram our filters.

Clumsily expressed, but the nub is there, yes. To a large extent, what you can’t perceive is what would be chaos to you. As you improve your ability to make sense of things, your perceptive ability grows correspondingly. It isn’t that the mainsprings of the world are being hidden from you, it is that you are unable to see. As your vision clears – well, you see it happening in your lives, do you not?

 

The flickering reality

Wednesday, August 10, 2022

5:05 a.m. I awaken from a strange experience, something between a dream and a reliving. Mostly gone now. A sense of me among a few other soldiers, edging into town, the rebs edging out, nobody wanting to start something that could get out of hand.

Well, friends, I am enjoying the stroll down memory lane (“the country of old men,” Scoggins called it) and am perfectly willing to continue to stroll, or to talk about something on your minds, whichever.

Let’s talk about what is more on your mind.

Ah, the tumors, yes. A sense that things are ramping up again. Go ahead, then.

Shouldn’t it be you going ahead?

You know more about it than I do, I imagine.

We can give you a quasi-outside viewpoint, yes. That isn’t the same thing as knowing more.

Oh, I rather think it is. You know my inside view, you know what it looks like from outside – how does what I know compare to that?

We can see that it can look that way.

I can’t see that it can be any way other. And I guess I’m not too much interested in pursuing it. An odd bounce, considering how obsessed with knowing the future I was once.

That mistaken idea led you far, though.

Oh yes, no question. But, a mistake.

We don’t need to do a session, of course. It’s only if you want to do so.

I know. I do and I don’t. I do, because I wouldn’t want to get out of the habit, and I don’t because I don’t feel any urgent need for information or clarification. Perhaps because rereading so many conversations has filled that need, for the moment? Perhaps because I can see that the conversing does take its toll, leaving me less able to do the other work, even though I still waste a good deal of time (or maybe am out of gas) throughout the day.

Why is Freddy Prinze in mind? It was the line about the lovers running out of gas, from “Chico and the Man,” so many years ago. Freddy killed himself playing Russian Roulette, if I remember rightly, and one side-effect was to put his fellow actor – who was it? An old man – suddenly out of work, where a moment before he had been starring in a popular show.

[But as so often, I remembered the emotion vividly, the facts only vaguely. Courtesy of duckduckgo, I see that Freddy shot himself deliberately, being depressed. And Jack Albertson, though dying himself (though few people knew it) continued with the show for another season.]

This memory spurred by a phrase – in effect, an overheard phrase – is an example of how your minds process input from all directions, very little of it following intellectual logic; most of it following emotional logic. Your dream-experience, same thing.

So I guess you want to say something about our performing improv.

You should explicitly mention that you are reading John Mack’s book [Abduction], a few pages at a time.

I get where you are going with this. I wish I had the ability to draw it as a picture, in the way we painted our self-portrait of the mind as neuron, that time.

Only, you were thinking of it as a portrait of the interconnection of strands among various lives.

Yes, I was. And of course it is both, I see that now. And as I get up to refill my coffee mug, I remember that lovely film “Mrs. Miniver.” I don’t know why, but I can see the process, more. All sorts of things are associated within our filing system, and they arise – sometimes to the level of our consciousness, but surely mostly not – and they flavor things. Most of these links are not intellectual, I quite see that, but they may have intellectual content attached to them.

A little slower, and remember to set your switches – at least, for maximum Presence – for you are on the way to formulating a new understanding and it will go farther and seat deeper if you do the work, rather than receiving it from us.

This, despite the unreality of the distinction between “us” and “them.”

Yes, but do the work if you want the insight.

It is a prime mistake, in investigating the nature and operation of the mind, to forget that the angle from which it is approached will somewhat determine what will or will not be seen; certainly what will or will not be emphasized. If approached as if logic were the touchstone, or intellectual concatenation, or emotional resonance, or connection with “other lives” or with other elements of any sort, the picture you get will reflect what you went looking for.

You used to be determined to learn how to see “the” future.

I was, and until I gave that up, it was probably impossible that I could come to see that there isn’t any “the” future except from one timeline. The determination in that case was more of a strait-jacket than a help.

Hold on to that evanescent thought you keep having and losing at the periphery of whatever else you are talking about.

Yes, but it’s hard to put into words.

Making the attempt will link it to various anchors in your mind-stream, in your association-machine, and will thus make it more yours.

The world (reality, that is) is continuously changing. There is no set result, no past-to-present-to-future that has to be superseded by another chain if we are to express how

Dammit.

Keep trying. That was only a first attempt. Try bullets.

• We are always deciding.
• The nature of mind-stuff. Can you say one line of thought is duplicated and changed, when you change your mind?
• We’re always changing and being changed, so the whole of reality, if we could see it as a field of colored lights, would always be changing too.
• All times exist; they don’t cease to exist and they aren’t museum pieces or snapshots in an album. They are alive, so they change as things along their various strands change.
• Therefore in effect, all versions of reality exist, but – aha, here is the nub of it – not as duplicates at the same time. It’s more like they all have their 15 minutes of fame.

Yes, that’s the nub of it. It is because 3D time analogies sneak in between the lines that it is hard to see the flickering reality – the ever flickering reality – that is the stage on which you do your improv.

Clear now. Thinking of it as one situation, then that situation changing but remaining in existence as well, then that third situation changing – and on and on, forever – is impossible. It doesn’t make sense. Is reality one vast non-3D Xerox machine? But as soon as w get rid of the implicit idea that something once created remains created, while still changing –

No, I’m losing it in words. A little help, here?

Every split-second situation is as real as it is ever going to be. There is no 3D Moment Hall of Fame. Nothing lasts, in a way. Nothing is ever lost, in a way. Every moment is forever; every moment gives way to another.

It’s one more example of “only somewhat real.”

Yes, but a certain cast of mind will reject this – explosively, probably – as nonsense. Prepare for that. Just as one size never fits all, so one insight never suits everyone.

Thoreau again: The light that puts out our eyes is darkness to us.

Yes, only everything changes, so nothing is as final as everything usually appears.

What is the piece I can feel myself missing?

Your decisions affect what filters up into consciousness, and hence affect future decisions. So, the things that come to mind – Freddy Prinze, Mrs. Miniver, John Mack’s book, your physical situation, reminders from past journal entries, all of it – come partly as a result of subterranean associations that come, in turn, partly from what you have had in mind, and partly from unsuspected or unremembered emotional or logical connections. This is one more way in which your improv affects what will come next. It doesn’t determine anything, but it offers certain things as fodder and perhaps puts other things on back shelves where they are less likely to be seen.

“Improv”?

Could be. Or maybe “Flickering.” Your choice, as usual.

Okay, well, thanks for all this.

 

[As I re-read old entries, I am noting those that I think will be most valuable to people today. This is one.]

Thursday, September 2, 2021

3:30 a.m. Cool enough (63 degrees outside) that I need a robe and enjoy its warmth. A touch of unease in my lungs. Must be September.

You said to continue to remember the four possible continuations of the theme of community within Life More Abundantly: the specialization that each of us is; the meaning of life; or of our life; the nature of the strands. I had to look back, to remember. I can see that remembering helps keep the focus. Still can’t quite see why it is necessary from your end, but I’m taking your word for it.

Within the general theme of consciousness, we might say a word about depression and ways to counter it.

Finding “What Dreams May Come” on Netflix last night, when I needed it.

Yes indeed. You suspected a bit of steering, there, to bring it to your attention.

I did and I do, not that I mind.

It was a form of re-reading a familiar comforting story, suitable for when your energy was low enough that a movie was easier to absorb than reading a book would have been.

I do appreciate it. And of course every time we see something, more layers of association may have been added, deepening the experience or at least widening the connections one makes. Robin Williams having killed himself, a sense of the pain he lived through, gratitude for that talent and ability to express complex emotions. Then Max von Sydow, the sympathetic character he plays so well, as in “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.” And Cuba Gooding, Jr., who I saw in “A Murder of Crows,” another favorite, all since the first time I saw this film so many years ago. And I remembered watching the movie originally, associating it with Lifeline, and Ken Eagle Feather, and John Nelson and Hampton Road, so many things.

And that is life in a nutshell, a continuing growth of associations, all logically connected in one way or another, by emotional logic if not in what we might call thinking logic. The man who watched the movie last night was not the same as the ones who had watched it previously, so although the movie was unchanged, its effect was somewhat different. Watching it connected you now to other things. Watching it later would connect you to this now, probably. But watching it before also connected you to this now, as watching it “now” connected you forward as well as backward. You will find that easy to accept or difficult or perhaps impossible: It is a matter of temperament and circumstances, as much as anything. In any case it is a good example of how you can help yourself at any given moment by your choice.

Sort of like choosing good companions rather than bad ones.

Very much so.

And thus the value of physical reminders.

You need things to remind you of who and what you choose to be and to become. Some people have altars or shrines in their homes. Some settle for post-it notes on the refrigerator. It all helps.

Here’s the thing. Life in 3D isn’t easy because it wasn’t designed to be easy. You give yourselves breathers sometimes, but mostly you don’t waste your limited time in 3D not challenging yourselves. You learned sixth grade stuff. You could, theoretically, continue doing sixth-grade math just to reassure yourself that you had mastered it, or even, perhaps, to feel the glow of accomplishment. But when you’re ready for the next level of complexity, remaining at previous levels – being faced only with problems of the former level’s complexity, no more – would become boring. You may not think so, but if you will free-associate enough, hang out with your own guys long enough, you’ll know. Life is problems, as much as it is anything else, and sooner or later you are driven to approach that next level of learning.

Paradoxically, making progress can make you feel overwhelmed, inadequate, discouraged, even helpless, because you feel the 3D situation more than you feel the solid achievement.

I’d say it’s more like, it becomes hard to believe in achievement. Did I do anything worthwhile? Am I any better – whatever “better” would mean specifically – than before I enmeshed myself in (or was assigned to) this life? Regardless of our abstract opinion of our life, it may come to feel empty, meaningless, whatever guise depression arrives in.

And some argue with Churchill’s “black dog” of depression all their lives. Some experience it as a continual companion; others, as a frequent visitor.

And I can all but hear you add, “And so what?”

Well, not in the sense of, “We don’t care when you hurt,” but yes in the sense of “This isn’t nearly as absolute, and certainly not as real, as ‘external’ and out of control, as you feel it is.” We are naturally going to see it differently: We see the whole life and you see each moment, one by one. Who is going to have a better perspective?

You say that and I remember walking into my second-grade (I think it was) classroom and seeing things on the wall that I couldn’t understand. 2×3=6, I remember specifically. I can’t tell you what grade they teach multiplication in, but I well remember puzzling over the fact that the “and” sign was crooked, and that 2+3 did not equal 6, so why did it say that? And then at some point in the year we were taught the meaning of the crooked “and” sign, and the little illustration on posterboard was no longer a mystery.

If that memory had been associated with emotional pain because the sign didn’t make sense, it would be a very close analogy. The fact that it did not, may help make the unrecognition factor clearer. Should someone have sympathized with the boy’s puzzlement and asked, in effect, “Why would God do this to him?” From a larger perspective, the genesis of the situation and its eventual resolution was obvious at a glance. There was nothing to sympathize about except whatever transitory discomfort the boy would have experienced.

As we said, this particular example does not involve pain. But perhaps it is all the more useful, not including pain, in illustrating points of view. It is easy enough to factor in pain once the underlying difference in perspective is comprehended.

Now, tie this in with our theme of greater consciousness within the larger theme of life more abundantly. The wider your consciousness – the more “here, now” you are – the better for your growth. But that doesn’t mean a smooth ride, and in fact there’s nothing that says a smooth ride is automatically a good thing. It may be, it may not be. One size does not fit all. It doesn’t even fit any at all times. People change. That is the idea, in fact. It is the intent, the hope.

I was reminded, as we wrote that, of Robin Williams’ character in “Ordinary People” telling the teenage boy (Timothy Hutton) “Let me let you in on a little secret, kiddo: Feelings don’t always tickle.”

And you were reminded of what a good job Robin Williams did in portraying complicated strong vulnerable questing people.

He did. He seemed wonderfully deep. “Good Will Hunting,” too.

His work is a sort of etherealized refrigerator magnet, you see. It is harder to stumble upon (though we suppose you could have a photo of him on a wall, perhaps), but on the other hand, deeply moving in a way a less complicated reminder might not be.

I jumped from Robin Williams in “Good Will Hunting” to Matt Damon, and then to Damon in “Saving Private Ryan,” and to Tom Hanks. Another valuable portrayal.

Encouragements are everywhere, if you are open to them. Encouragement and progress don’t necessarily tickle, either.

“Readiness is all”?

Well – courage is, at least. Your life at any given moment may be easy, but it isn’t a good idea to expect easy. Long-distance races have stretches where the runners give themselves a breather, so that their bodies can come back stronger, but the race is not mostly breather, and it isn’t run for the sake of the breathers.

Runners get tired.

They aren’t required to race every day, and if they get too tired they re-tire. But while they’re racing, they don’t try to persuade themselves they should be on the recliner, or having a beer.

Keep showing up with those reminders. Meanwhile, on with your day, as you please.

Today’s theme, what? Reminders?

Maybe “Ways to remain encouraged,” something like that.

Okay. Thanks as always.