Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

[Systematically re-reading past conversations is proving to be as illuminating as it is engaging.]

Meriwether Lewis seconds the motion

Monday, December 6, 2021

6:45 a.m. Meriwether Lewis’s birthday reflections at 31 have a certain relevance for members of our list, given recent thoughts from TGU.

“[August 18, 1805] This day I completed my thirty-first year, and conceived that I had in all human probability now existed about half the period which I am to remain in this sublunary world. I reflected that I had as yet done but little, very little, indeed, to further the happiness of the human race or to advance the information of the succeeding generation. I viewed with regret the many hours I have spent in indolence, and now sorely feel the want of that information which those hours would have given me had they been judiciously expended, but since they are past and cannot be recalled, I dash from me the gloomy thought, and resolved in future, to redouble my exertions and at least endeavor to promote those two primary objects of human existence, by giving them the aid of that portion of talents which nature and fortune have bestowed on me; or in future, to live for mankind, as I have heretofore lived for myself.”

[From The Journals of Lewis and Clark, p. 206, with spelling silently cleaned up.]

Captain Lewis wrote this near the continental divide on the way to the Pacific. Even as he lamented not having done anything much, he was more than 2,500 miles and 15 months into one of the most successful expeditions known to history. And, instead of another 30 years of life, he was to receive but four, dying in 1809 either a suicide or the victim of murder. But of course he couldn’t know any of this in advance. Life doesn’t come at us that way.

His lament over past waste of time is so familiar. Julius Caesar is said to have wept when he reached the age Alexander the Great had died, because he himself had not accomplished anything to equal the conquering Macedonian. Young Emerson a few years later would make journal essays much like this one from Lewis. I could make a list, and of course I and most of you would be on that list.) Goes to prove, among other things, that you never know. You don’t know what’s coming, and you don’t necessarily know what you have already done. It’s all a mystery.

 

(This, from Sunday, August 1, 2021)

1:55 a.m. I don’t need to re-read past sessions to find a suggested theme. I think we need a better description of the external world as shared subjectivity. What we have said to date apparently is not clear enough for everybody. Maximum focus and receptivity. I guess, maximum clarity of expression, too.

You must realize, a sufficiently extreme change in point of perspective will appear to some to be either nonsense, or confusion of thought, or playing with words. The only way anyone can make so great a leap is via their own internal assistance. That is, a spark from someone else is only a potential, unless and until it meets acquiescence from someone’s non-3D intelligence. A spark – as we have been defining it – is really more of an excuse, a sort of external alliance that provides one’s unsuspected consciousness to suggest an emotional link. If a person’s unconscious ally does not respond, the spark is not conveyed. We realize that this is not how the process appears.

That makes sense, though. You suggest an image to me, I write it down, others read it, but the result of reading that image varies person by person. To some it is a revolution, to some a cliché, and to most, it is something in between. You’re saying, the determinant is not, where the person’s mind “happens” to be; it is whether that person’s unconscious mind wishes to take advantage of the suggestion to promote a sense of conviction as to the accuracy or importance of the suggested connection.

If you will look closely at the mental processes you go through, you will see clearly that what appears to be strictly logical, even if the logic is enhanced by intuitive leaps, is in fact far less dependent upon logic as syllogism, and far more dependent upon a sort of recognition which is then supported after the fact by logical arguments. We said before that you are not primarily logical beings, and we explained why this is necessarily so, and why it is not a design flaw.

So are you implying that if someone appears unable or unwilling to understand your explanation, this is for non-rational reasons, just as they might be persuaded, equally, by non-rational reasons?

Of course. Is there any reason why your mental ground-rules would change, case by case?

So if I have made what I consider to be my best case for a concept and can see that my words cannot get through a pre-existing set of assumptions, I should just give up?

We’d say you probably shouldn’t be making the attempt in the first place. We remind you, we are not in the persuasion business.

It is hard to be sure where clear exposition stops and attempted persuasion begins. Sometimes the obstacle appears to be incomprehension, and the temptation is to say it again, clearer.

Clearer? Or merely louder?

All right, it is a pitfall. But how does one ever know that one’s explanation is as good as it is going to get?

You tell us. There aren’t any rules to be laid down about it, so far as we know. You judge case by case, and of course sometimes you judge wrong. That is just inherent in 3D life, slippage.

Slippage. In two sense of the word, I suppose. Slippage between people and slippage within oneself, between intent and execution.

As you sometimes say, “It’s just the kind of thing that happens in 3D.”

How about one more effort to clarify your point of view about how what looks like the external independently existing physical world is in fact neither external nor independently existing nor physical?

We should prefer to rephrase that thus: The world is what it appears to be, in a sense. But deeper insight follows deeper perception, and then one sees that the world is what one now sees it to be – and this is not a closed process, but an open-ended one. Your world is always what you can conceive it to be, and you always have the potential to grow into new, deeper, perceptions, which invariably show you that what you thought were the rules were only a makeshift approximation.

But to confine the argument to the terms you are concerned with at the moment:

• The physical world appears separate from you because on a 3D level it obviously preceded you (you were born into it, after all), and it continues regardless of your preferences as you live (that is, you don’t automatically have everything your own way), and presumably it will continue after you leave it.
• The physical world clearly has its own rules. They may be more elastic than people usually think them, but sooner or later one finds limits to what one can change by will power alone. Even powerful magic can only go so far. Again, the physical world exists, and exists on its own terms. At best one learns to make accommodation to those limits, regardless if the limits one perceives are in fact in any way ultimate.
• The physical world proceeds along certain lines, understood by human minds or not. Just because one does not know a given physical law, one does not acquire immunity from its effects. Again, different people discover different limits, but that is not the same as saying that no limits exist.

However, this combination of circumstances does not mean just whatever one wants them to mean. What they mean is to be explained by any suggested frame of reference. If a frame of reference cannot account for all of them, either by proving that they are only mistakenly perceived as real or by showing that they proceed from other causes (that is, can be accounted for in the new scheme of things) then the suggested new frame is inadequate.

Our reframing – a la Paul Brunton and philosophical idealists of many  stripes – maintains that the external world is not external at all, is not independent of the individual, and is in no way the dead determined thing it often appears to be. So how do we square our reframing with the three points we just outlined?

• The shared subjectivity comprises and is maintained not by any one individual – namely you! – but by the sum total of all intelligence that exists. Some cultures would have said it exists because God holds us in his thoughts. Obviously the physical universe preceded you, proceeds independently of you, and will remain after you have graduated from a 3D existence. But that independent continuity does not invalidate the perception that the world is mind-stuff, as you well realize.
• The physical world has its rules. Everything does, including one’s mental world which may seem so private and particular. The existence of rules is an indication of order, nothing more.
• The physical world demonstrates cause and effect. Again, a product of order.

Now look at our scheme of things.

1. Preceding 3D, there is mind. At that level, “All is one.”
2. The successive and cumulating 3D experience of millions upon millions of souls creates an ever more complex universal mind, complete with hang-ups, traumas, acquired proclivities, and repugnances – all of which sooner or later manifest in the 3D experiences of other souls. (This is Jung’s racial unconscious, more or less
3. This complex of factors manifest as if independent of a given 3D soul. In fact, of course, such independence would be impossible. In effect, however, one soul interacts with the shared subjectivity only at those points where it has its own sensitivities. Thus in practice everybody deals with a tiny amount of reality, and watches as most of reality proceeds apparently without reference to them.
4. Thus we have the seeming paradox of 3D souls interacting with “the world” and the world being intimately connected to them, yet the 3D soul living a life seemingly largely disconnected from this giant organism or machine that proceeds without reference to it.

Each person will make of this what s/he can, and what they make of it is not your concern, if you (we) have done your and our best to set it out. And we are well beyond your hour.

Only by ten minutes. Thank you for that effort.

Remember, sparks, not proof. Suggestions, not attempts at persuasion. That’s all you are responsible to do, and all you have the right to do, strictly speaking.

Okay. Our thanks as always.

 

 

[I think this material, received in two days last August, is downright brilliant. I can’t know if it is true, of course; all I know is that it illuminated the subject in a way I’d never experienced. Among other things, it explained, almost in passing, why we don’t always experience what we would think of as “perfect health.” More to the point, it explains why some people’s health problems are so severe and long-lasting.]

Redefining the body (1)

Wednesday, August 18, 2021

5:35 a.m. Shall we dance?

Let’s see if we can make this session “Defining the body,” or something like.

Okay.

The first thing to realize is that “the body” is a term describing less an object than a stretching-over, a considering-as-one what is actually many things.

Not so different from your definition of us as individuals who are in fact communities.

No, not so different. In fact you may wish to consider yourselves mind/body/spirit, as was fashionable not so long ago.

• Mind, you know, is community of communities, with no absolute boundaries anywhere.
• Body, similarly, is a community of intelligences working together to allow physical existence. Thus, tissues, organs, mechanisms, each with its own community of animating specific intelligences. Processing sugars, as we say.
• Spirit, from the point of view of the 3D individual (only) may be looked at as a community of souls, each with a lifetime’s experiences, preferences, skills, scars.

Well, within this framework, body is a collection – or, say, a hub – of many forms of intelligence that have to work together.

What you are meaning to say is coming vaguely into view, but only vaguely. Am I being slow, or is it a very foreign idea?

What is foreign to one will be familiar to another. The same holds true of time: What fits only awkwardly with one time will be natural to another. We will proceed, and things ought to smooth out.

Body is

• Flesh, organs, “the physical.” Everyone sees this much. But what is it they are seeing?
• Each organ has its own specialized intelligence, as we said. It also has habits, accustomed ways to do things. Where can those habits come from, but one of two ways?
  1. Memories via the intelligence that animates them.
  2. Patterns inherent in that flesh’s DNA.

As in, influences transferred from one person to another following transplants or stem-cell injections?

Yes, because those physical cells come with their own non-3D attachments. In a sense, in transplanting physical tissue you are also transplanting another stylized intelligence.

I take that expression to mean, awareness that has taken on the coloration of a given person (the donor). You have called our minds habit-systems in the past. Are you now also calling us stylized intelligences?

A little slower. Many a term has yet to be defined, many a relationship sketched, before we can reassemble an understanding.

Okay.

• Body is also the continually adjusting interface between the individual subjectivity (“you”) and the shared subjectivity (“other,” or, “the world”).

This is still too scattered, isn’t it? Even with bullets.

As usual, a fundamentally new bundling of information requires a bit of fumbling before we can find the way to organize the explanation.

I’m not complaining, just noticing.

Perhaps noticing will underline the fact that we are not just dishing up more of the same old New Age clichés, nor the standard “scientific” (materialist) positions, nor in fact any existing model. We are giving you something new, and if (as we have cautioned several times) it is taken to be “only X” or “nothing but X in different words,” you will have no chance of actually learning something. If, having considered it in its own terms, you then see analogies to other things you have read or heard, fine. Well and good. Comparison may help identify. But what kills new understanding is being sure in advance that the new material is “nothing but.”

So now we will go at it again.

• The body is a space-suit, or diving-suit, yes. That is, it is a mechanism that holds you in an alien environment so you may function there.
• As a mechanism, it is complex, interrelated, continually adjusting, gradually ceasing to replicate itself. It is created to have a limited shelf-life. That is, no one is born to live forever.
• However, even as you look at the body as a mechanism, remember that the parts are themselves no different from the materials of the shared subjectivity. That is, the body exists in the way that matter exists, and only that much. All the world is mind-stuff: Should you expect that your body is something else? What would that something else be?
• Now, this mind-stuff collection of mechanisms, connected in so many ways to the shared subjectivity of which its substance comes (that is, its physically transmitted characteristics), and connected therefore to all the intelligences of various orders that connect to physical matter, also connects to and responds to you.
• As always, “Which you?” As your awareness and mastery changes, the “you” in effect changes. Do you suppose the body can be unaffected by the changes on the opposite end of the “mind-body” connection?

We are trying to find words to convey a sense of the body as, not some inert piece of meat that responds to stimuli, and not some localized collection of functions operating in relative isolation from the rest of the world, but a fuller functioning active intelligence connecting and responding to and influencing what is commonly called spirit, and matter, and minds, and environment, in all directions including backward and forward in time.

Smallwood’s back, and mine.

Exactly. The connection was there. It required activating, which was a choice within an awareness, but it was there via the strands. Naturally you didn’t stop to consider that “the body” might have something to do with that transformative event. For one thing, your careless definition of the body wouldn’t have provided any anchor-points for the concept. For another, the massive changes in belief-systems involved in allowing awareness of the event (rather than writing it off to fantasy) overwhelmed any other effect. But you will notice, it was the change in your back that persuaded you to consider it and not write it off. And it was the distress of your back, before that, that let you “fantasize” a contact with Joseph that would not have “made sense” had you tried to justify it. That is, it wouldn’t have fitted in with your predominant belief-systems, hence, wouldn’t have made sense.

A while ago, we contacted JFK and speculated about his repeated collapses of health and spontaneous, seemingly miraculous, recoveries. I speculated that it was because of a continuing pressure within him.

No, say it carefully. This will be important to some.

I thought, on the one hand, Jack grew up with his father’s towering expectations overshadowing his life. He loved his father deeply, and feared his displeasure, and strove to mold himself to meet Joe’s expectations. But Jack was also fiercely independent, continually resistant to any reining-in by anybody or anything. Whether passive-aggressively (if that was the only option) or openly defiantly, he spent years obeying and disobeying, pleasing and defying, following first the one fish, then the other fish, as they say of Pisces people’s sudden reversals. (He was not a Pisces; it is only an expression.)

The strain on his constitution was extensive and more or less unremitting. Periodically, some safety-valve would blow, and there would be young Jack at death’s door again. His father counted four times that Jack had been given the last rites. And then he would bounce right back. Years, periodically at death’s door, then back again. And the result was not a crippled convalescent existence, but an active mental and physical lifetime, lived within his limits – or beyond them, sometimes. Very improbable, all of it.

Yet he concurred with your analysis. Now, consider. Such a pattern cannot be “mental” or even “spiritual” and not involve bodily intelligence. Even a psychosomatic illness is objectively real in its own terms; the person cannot wish it away, but must rebuild structures. (Indeed, that’s that the illness is there for, in a way: It is a signpost saying, “Here’s an area needing work.”)

Jack Kennedy’s illnesses were not psychosomatic in any meaningful sense, and yet they were the indirect result of mostly unconscious psychic stresses. You could say that his bodily suffering allowed him to be himself as an impossible stretch between his father’s expectations (hence his own, at second hand), and his actual bent.

It is almost a shame to pause here, but we are past our usual hour. Shall we continue from here next time?

In a way, we have hardly begun considering the body. But as to what tomorrow will bring, we’ll have to see.

Does “Defining the body” still work?

Might be more accurate to call it re-defining the body.

All right. Till next time, then, and our thanks as always.

 

Redefining the body (2)

Thursday, August 19, 2021

2 a.m. Yesterday you concluded by saying that Jack Kennedy’s “bodily suffering allowed him to be himself.” Shall we continue with that thought?

It will be an interesting thought-experiment, for those who will do it, to consider physical illness (temporary) or condition (chronic) to be the thing that allows you to exist in an inhospitable atmosphere.

Oh, I see where this is going. Very interesting! But it isn’t ten words or less.

Is it ever? Factors contributing:

• Your basic default positions, your psychic equivalent to basal metabolism. Your body’s composition, energy, biases other things being equal.
• The varying “atmosphere” you live in. The shared subjectivity as it manifests, moment by moment or year by year, remembering that really there is one moment, but it manifests differently as you go along.
• Your own reaction to ongoing changes in relationship between your default position and the shared subjectivity as it throws up things in your path.
• Your willed reaction to the same conditions. That is, your intent as it manifests, rather than your innate biases as they manifest.

Now, we doubt that is clear as yet. Help us by restating it, and we will correct as need be.

Who we are – what we are – as we come into the world is one thing. Who we make ourselves (choosing among threads, putting down these, picking up those) changes our relation to the world. This changes our body’s relation to the (rest of) the world, necessarily. And, at the other end of the me/not-me polarity, changes in the world will demand or invite changes in us. In either case, the body is caught in the middle.

Well, “caught in the middle” is a pessimistic way to put it. Say, instead, the body is the interface between the personal subjectivity (which is experienced as “you”) and the shared subjectivity (experienced as “the world,” the “objectively there sea you swim in).

The world view you were born into considers the body all wrong, as it does, in fact, pretty much every aspect of your (our) life. It thinks of the body as:

• A sort of organic mechanism, cunningly designed to convey you through life (usually considered without much attention to trying to define the “you” being considered).
• Intelligent only in the nebulous concept of “instinct,” or “natural processes,” etc. No sense of the body or any of its organs or systems having their own intelligence.
• Hence, the body is assumed to have no ability to communicate, and only limited ability (at best) to respond to your wishes. Mostly it proceeds on autopilot, so to speak.
• The body’s health is seen as a combination of its nutrition and care, plus special attention in the case of illness or injury.
• Illness or birth defect is ascribed to accident, or mysterious chance, or innate weakness. More advanced medical practitioners recognize that mental attitude is an important factor.

But in fact the body is:

• A community of cells, organs, systems.
• An exteriorization of who you are, in no way accidental or irrelevant.
• Highly intelligent with its own various levels of intelligence appropriate to their functions.
• Continually speaking and responding to the directing “higher intelligence” (you), bothering you only when it needs to, and sometimes misunderstanding the signals you are sending.
• The body’s health is not – can never be – divorced from its two poles, the individual subjectivity and the shared. It lives connecting the two, and a change in either necessarily affects it.
• Illness may seem to arise out of nowhere, or from a given specific cause, but ultimately it is always a question of relationship between the person and the world.

Now, you, Frank, were born into an incompatible atmosphere. We don’t mean your family or your society, but something less tangible. Dirk too, though of course his case and yours differ. But any person inserted into an environment that they don’t quite fit into may experience this. John Kennedy is another example. It may look like his problem was his father’s expectations, and in fact the disparity between composition and context expressed that way, but the real problem was/is/will be that when a person is born incorporating more of the future than is comfortable, illness may be the result. It is the body stretching to allow the disparity. It is the body’s health “taking one for the team,” so to speak. And if the times move on and the person’s basic state of health improves, it may be a sign that the disparity between individual makeup and its surroundings has lessened.

And we can lessen the disparity from our end, if we know how. It isn’t that we are dependent upon things easing from the world’s end.

That is less of a distinction than you may think. What you experience of the shared subjectivity, remember, is the equivalent of the parts of your own subjectivity of which you are unaware and, in the absence of “the world,” probably would continue to be unaware of. That is a major reason for the split between you and non-you and is the 3D: It provides you with a mirror so you can see behind yourself.

Still –

Yes, of course you know that you aren’t helpless victims here. We merely point out that you don’t want to back into the position of thinking of it as “me against the world.”

So I am getting a sense of the body as less a unit than an electrical field.

Not a bad way to look at it. It is highly active, highly re-active, it connects widely separated things, invisibly. It is easily affected by change in your intent or by change in the intent of the world around you. It is intelligent, can be programmed and reprogrammed, can be read in the way sensitive instruments can be read, to give you a sense of what you cannot know directly.

I know someone is going to wonder why we don’t have perfect health.

You have perfect adaptation to the circumstances of your life. That isn’t the same thing.

It certainly isn’t. Say some more about that?

You naturally assume the normal state of the body would be perfect health. But that would assume that the normal state of “you” would be internally in balance and would be in balance, as well, with “the world.”

I guess I have supposed that that is the case for most people,

Hardly. But the imbalance may be chronic or temporary, internally generated (so to speak) or externally. More important to the topic at hand, it may express physically, but it may express emotionally or mentally.

Yes, I guess you’ve told us this, and long ago, in fact. I’ll have to re-read my book Imagine Yourself Well; I’ll bet I find you’ve said it there.

But different contexts suggest different understanding. All right, enough for now. Since you labeled yesterdays (1), label this one (2), and we will continue next time.

Topic?

We’ll see. It is always a prime difficulty, to pursue a course and not divert in what seems a more interesting or timely direction. Perhaps we should review techniques you can use to exert greater control of our body, only not with the intent to dominate, but to cooperate.

Very well. Looking forward to it. Meanwhile our thanks as always for all of this.

[It is sometimes so rewarding, re-reading old stuff that I’ve forgotten. These two entries belong together, and repay being read together.]

Virtues and sins, effort and drift

(from July 6 and 7, 2021)

 

Tuesday, July 6, 2021

2:40 a.m. Open for business.

Bear in mind what we’re doing at the moment. You cannot possibly have a reasonable idea of your future after 3D if you do not see who and what you are (structure) or how you function or why (purpose). It requires a lot of understanding, to understand anything.

Context, I know.

It is almost more important to not hold mistaken concepts, than to hold accurate ones. Wrong concepts may give you a mistaken sense of certainty that prevents you from seeing what is right there in front of you. But once the path is clear, sparks will suffice.

So, in explaining who you are. You are specific conduits of vast forces, but you are not disconnected either in time nor in space nor in lateral extent. That is, although 3D conditions lead you to see yourselves as existing here, now, alone, in actual fact that is where you focus, yes, but you extend beyond all these.

So, yesterday we were discussing sex as experienced by several lives, each of which became a strand. We did not explicitly say what we should perhaps have said, that it was not a matter of percentages of a given experience, but that each life is a differently experienced nuance. Nuances are not to be compared numerically; they are additive in that each offers an addition to the richness of the inventory; they are perhaps disruptive in that some will undercut or oppose others, but they are not merely a matter of ratio.

But I get that the business about ratios is part of it, that this is one way of assessing things.

Yes, one way; that’s what we were showing. But not the only way, and perhaps not the most illuminating way. It isn’t black/white, but fifty shades of grey, and fifty shades of every color imaginable, and your everyday decisions determine to what extent various colors will express at any given time in your 3D life.

Now remember, this isn’t so much about you, at the moment, but about the forces that express through you. What we sketched about sex we could sketch about all the virtues, all the vices – about every force that is known to flow through the human being.

Interesting. I get a sense of the seven cardinal virtues, the seven deadly sins, but it is much easier to see how you could sketch anger, say, or covetousness – any of the sins – as forces flowing through us, than the virtues, which seem more like ideals than forces.

That is because virtues are seen as ideals to strive for (that is, they require and reward your effort and focus), while sins are seen as pitfalls, snares to avoid. But from a certain viewpoint, perhaps you can see that this is another consequence of seeing things as good and bad.

Hard to see how to put it clearly.

The difficulty is inherent in the discussion. Many people have lost themselves in it. The simplest way to put it depends upon a goal. If you are at sea and have no goal, then perhaps any wind will serve. But if you have a goal, some winds will be good for your purposes, and some bad. They are not good or bad absolutely: Can there be an immoral East Wind? But they may serve or may hinder one’s goals.

Rather than enmesh ourselves in this argument again, let us continue to examine how things manifest, and you can argue out for yourself the ins and outs of it. List the virtues and sins again.

The classic four cardinal virtues are prudence, justice, temperance, fortitude. Christians added faith, hope, charity. The seven sins are lust, envy, gluttony, covetousness, anger, pride and sloth, or ennui. [Pride is considered the prime sin. I list them in the order suggested by my mnemonic LEG CAPS or LEG CAPE.)

Each of these is described from the point of view of an individual, you see. (It should be obvious, after all.) They are described as excellences or defects of character. But let us look at them as the result of impersonal forces flowing into and through a personal limited expression of life.

The image that arises is of the Roaring Forties and the Straits of Magellan.

A pretty good metaphor for 3D life, in its way, is it not? Explain the image.

The rotation of the earth creates wind patterns. The conformation of the earth (mountain ranges, for instance) funnels the wind. The 40s of South latitude channel practically unceasing winds eastward, funneling toward the further South because of the mountains. It took Magellan’s ships weeks to pick their way through the Straits between the South American mainland and Tierra del Fuego because they were sailing into the teeth of storm after storm. Had they been traveling eastward, each storm would have helped them on their way, but to go from east to west required battling winds all the way.

So your life in 3D might be seen as such a voyage. Not every day is stormy; neither is every life. But any given day is likely to face storms, and so with every lifetime. If you are traveling westward, you know you are going to have to contend with headwinds and storms, and there is no use calling them hard names. But a skillful sailor knows how to use all the forces to his advantage, and knows what not to do. Thus, the virtues and vices.

But “How do the virtues manifest in your life” is a different question from “What are the virtues themselves, and what are they expressing?” Different questions, you see. We have looked at the former, at another time. Now we are looking at the latter.

So, temperance, say?

No, that isn’t the way to go about it. Abstract discussion only leaves you hanging. Let’s look at how these characteristic may be deduced after the fact, in various lives.

So take John Cotten’s life, the life of shattered expectations leading to despair. You see?

I’m beginning to. In giving up on life, he fell prey to ennui. He hadn’t decided to express it, but that is a word that describes his state.

That’s right. And when, with the older man’s help, he realized that you can’t give up on life, the forces that he relied upon to get back to actively living might be seen as fortitude, and perhaps hope, though it might be more accurate to say faith, in that he had no specific hopes, and only a generalized sense that giving up was a mistake.

Interesting. I see that.

It wasn’t a decision to fall into error, but it was a decision to climb out of it. In that sense, the virtues always require effort while one need only drift to fall into sin. Sin, you will remember, is sometimes defined as “missing the mark.” But, looked at that way, don’t fortitude and ennui look different?

Yes, they look like definitions tacked on to describe behavior, rather than pre-existent forces.

Well, perhaps we should say they are definitions tacked on to describe the sources and results of behavior. But yes, not pre-existing separable forces, except when seen from the point of view of any 3D individual.

Your hour is up, but this isn’t a bad beginning. We can talk more about the vices and virtues as they express in your lives. We are not preaching the same old thing you may have been raised on, so it would be worth your while to be sure to look to your openness, in considering it.

It always strikes me, at the end of a session, how slowly we claw our way along, yet the pages do get written, and the lessons do pile up.

Think of yourself as sailing westward through the Straits, and perhaps you will find our progress less painfully slow. Others – ourselves at other times, also – may have following winds and clear sailing, but if you sail long enough, you sooner or later contend with pretty much any set of conditions.

Till next time, then, and thanks as always.

 

Wednesday, July 7, 2021

3:45 a.m. I have just spent a few minutes leafing through the past three sessions, trying to remember where we were going next, and failing. We neglected to leave a marker, last time.

You will remember, we said we would talk more about how the virtues and vices manifest in 3D lives. Isn’t that marker enough? At least, it will be, once you release unconscious expectations of control!

Is that what I’m doing? Thinking to control it?

More like, feeling you need to control it, lest there be no one at the helm. But it is not the helmsman’s responsibility to summon the wind, only to respond to it.

Always interesting to see examples of my working behind my own back.

It’s common enough. Now, let’s proceed and we might as well begin right here. The present little difficulty is an example en petite of problems that arise on a larger scale when the 3D self tries to, or feels it has to, function in ways that are properly the sphere of non-3D.

We get in over our head, you mean.

There’s no blame to be attached, not any implication of recklessness. It’s just one of those things that happen. So be aware of it.

Remembering to set my mental slide-switches to maximum receptivity, maximum focus. And immediately, I get that this is why Pride is considered the first deadly sin.

Yes if you look at it in a certain way. The assuming a greater competence than you actually have or could have: That’s pride, in this sense. We are not talking about such manifestations as pride of accomplishment or pride of position. In their place, there is nothing harmful or misleading about such things.

That is, you aren’t discussing vanity, but a misunderstanding of one’s place in the scheme of things. Or do I have it wrong?

That’s close enough. Remember, we are looking at these things as natural phenomena, not as moral failings. So, this morning you mistakenly took on something that seemed to be, but wasn’t, your responsibility, and this interfered with your doing what you really wanted to do. Is this a sign of moral turpitude, or merely of mistaken application? You see?

Lust, envy, gluttony, covetousness, anger, sloth or despair or ennui – aren’t they all going to appear natural, unavoidable, sometimes? They may be sins in the sense of missing the mark, but they are not sins in the sense of destroyers of character, unless actively embraced and considered to be good rather than failings. If there is one thing more than any other single thing that discredits Christianity and turns a helpful belief-system toxic, it is the seeing things as good and evil – which quickly degenerates further into seeing people as good and evil, rather than seeing them as desirable or undesirable, or as useful or harmful.

Yes, it isn’t discernment but condemnation that is the problem.

It is. What is more discrediting to thinking people than the concept of hell, where an all-loving God tortures souls forever? It is not only morally repugnant, it doesn’t even make sense. And it is necessary only if one looks at things through the fruit of Seeing Things As Good and Evil.

But as soon as you look at the same facts in a different light, you see that the scriptures are spelling out how these forces affect you, insofar as you experience yourselves as separate 3D individuals. Then once you extend your self-definition to something closer to the extensive network of traits that you are, the same definitions are seen in yet a different light, and they continue to shine a helpful clarifying light.

So now, turn to the cardinal virtues, and look at them in the same light as yesterday – as choices, not as mandates. As assistance, as tools, as attitudes.

As apps, I suppose the younger generation would say.

As apps, why not. So in your attempt to maximize your life, to express your potential, to grow to whatever extent you can do – and, to help heal your extended self – employ the virtues.

That italicized phrase –

Well, naturally discussions of growth and morality and health don’t ordinarily remember that your present life reflects helpfully or harmfully on many connected “past lives,” but of course it does, as they also do you. Your choices matter in terms of what you become, but they matter, too, in terms of what you help your larger being to become.

Huh! New idea, but at least at first blush, it seems reasonable. If we are here in 3D to choose and thereby decide what we will be – and at the same time who we are reverberates among all the other strands which we comprise –

Haven’t you often wondered why the universe (so to speak) should care about your own little life? Well, the answer is that there isn’t any “own little life”; you all extend in all directions – we all extend in all directions, remember; it isn’t in any way 3D and not also non-3D. So, if you want to change the world, change the people in it. If you want to change people, change yourself. Anything else is secondary. It’s easier to preach and to try to change people’s behavior, but the real work is changing (or maintaining) your self. That’s all you can do and all you need to do.

I realize that you are not saying that external works are useless; they flow from what we are.

Yes, but “They flow from what we are” amounts to, “Can a good plant give forth bad fruit?” What you are is your moment-by-moment creation; everything else flows from it, though it may also flow back into it, as a feedback loop.

So now look at how practicing the virtues – choosing to live the virtues – may have its effect.

Justice. Prudence. Temperance. Fortitude. To the degree that you live these attributes, do you not send helpful messages down the line to all your strands and all their strands? Living in faith, living in hope, living in charity of mind and judgment as well as in deed and activity – are these practices that can be futile?

No, it’s very striking, the practical light you show them in.

They always were practical. Do you think the ancient Greeks, the old Romans, would have bothered with meaningless abstractions? But wisdom disconnected from understanding does appear to be mere words. It is, in part, to help you reclaim the sense of living truth that they embody, that we have been traveling this long road. When you looked at the Gospel of Thomas, when we went through the sins and virtues, it was all necessary preparation. And of course one could always use more preparation, yet one always already has enough to hand.

I am reminded of someone’s saying that all the equipment in the laboratory is only for the purpose of turning the scientist’s gaze in the right direction.

Yes. We’re just trying to get your attention long enough for distractions to fall away, so that you can recognize and remember what you know. In a sense we are saying, “Do pay attention to the man behind the curtain!”

I presume most people will recognize the allusion to The Wizard of Oz.

We’re all about looking behind the curtain, seeing “What Is,” as best we can, and sharing the view.

So, next time?

We are still setting our context for life after 3D, remember. Today’s thoughts should help. Next time, maybe we will glance at what actually happens when one 3D life impacts another. Not necessarily as dramatic as you and Joe Smallwood at Gettysburg; maybe more like the old man’s [spiritual] healing of John Cotten as it reflected to you. So much “time” intervened. So many “lives.” Your own character was already forged and half a century of it lived. What’s the mechanism here?

And after you clear that up, we will have gone five or ten minutes and will have nothing left to say.

We can play pinochle thereafter, except you don’t know the rules and we can’t handle the cards. Checkers, maybe – and in fact, maybe we’ll talk about checkers and Joe Smallwood. Till then.

Till then, and thanks as always.

 

Friday, August 5, 2022

4:40 a.m. The dream had a graduate thinking, “I’m what you needed to produce, but instead you produced copies concerned with jobs and clothes.” Something like that. Was it Kesey? It was someone whose background was different, whose struggle had been different, who as an end-product was different. I said, walking down the hall, if you want me to remember the dream, you have to help me remember it. But this is all I was left with. It is the important part.

5. I have this terrible persistent itch at one point on the front of my neck, that keeps me scratching at it, almost digging into it, trying so hard to stop it persecuting me. Only now did I realize – or anyway think – that pursuing the thoughts accompanying it may be the thing to do. That is, I was treating it as an inexplicable disconnected something, rather than as a messenger. I began realizing that I had somehow backed myself into a corner all my life, and here is a chance to find out how and why, because it is a mechanism as seemingly separate from my main narrative as can be.

And, if I can finally get the connections, I want to do so. It won’t matter if it hurts. It’s going to hurt sometime, and better now than later. It is already too late to adjust for life. I can anyway adjust for life beyond First Life.

Many influences are contributing, most of them only vaguely recognized. Nothing explaining why or how various memories emerge, or in what sequence, or connected with what influences from my reading or viewing.

Let me get my coffee, and then I will cooperate as best I can. I set my switches for maximum focus, receptivity, clarity, presence, and also for minimum self-defensiveness, self-protection. Help me recognize, guys.

For one thing, a background awareness of how many things are connected beyond our consciousness. I can sometimes sense the connections, radiating inward to me from various points of association.

All right, guys, probably a private session, or maybe eventually a public session with strategic elisions of what is nobody’s business save to indicate the kind of dredging necessary and possible.

You were thinking of writing down the comic jingle you were reciting to Louis last night.

            Things are not so bad,

            It’s a nice-a place,

            Wassamatter you,

            Shut up-a you face.

Can you see a deeper meaning this morning?

I was telling him that I was finding the unending medical stuff tedious, now. Still pleasant interactions, but no interest in what was going on – not wanting to bother to look at the screen as the ultrasound proceeded. It is the sheer repetition, and maybe the knowledge that the alternatives for the rest of my life will be between no change and a downward movement. It is the inability (momentarily?) to sustain interest in the process.

Again, a “slight insanity” in your mood?

Perhaps. A depression of function, anyway. So the jingle is saying shut up, and grin and bear it.

Not in any given determined manner, more like a shrug and a return to what does interest you in life.

A lot of associations jump around, always, and I could easily go off chasing rabbits. Much like you guys.

Gee, do you suppose there could be a reason why our processes and yours should resemble each other?

I think that as I proceed, greater openness leads to a closer combination, which moves me closer to your mode than my isolated 3D mode.

Way too fast, but accurate enough. This isn’t what we – what you in 3D and we in non-3D – want to be pursuing.

No. it could be an evasion, I can feel that. I suppose that has been a common theme in my life, avoiding uncomfortable (or even merely boring) realizations by chasing the more alluring mental constructions.

Which thought itself –

Yes, I know. Okay, something had me realizing that from my earliest days there was a mechanism, a habit-pattern, deep within me, that was isolating me from others. It  was sometimes resentful, sometimes angry, sometimes suspicious. It never occurred to me – whoever “me” was – that I and the mechanism might be two separate things. I am tempted to ask, “Who, or even what, was it?” But I got that it is better to ask, “What did it do?” and maybe why.

This is a tricky thing to pursue, and requires some courage and some exhibitionism to discuss in public. But some would find it helpful, not least yourself.

I think I can do it, if you’ll keep me on course, like the time I worked back to the point of my Florida vacation with Charles and realized I had been seeking clarity. That came by following the seemingly unconnected memories that surfaced: lying in bed, sick; going out into the incredibly bright starlight; sitting in a lawn chair watching birds, offshore; remembering how blurry everything was.

Similar process now. Start with what surfaces, and follow the seemingly random chain of associations, as the emotional logic carries you along.

I didn’t come into this life tabula rasa, did I? I have known that, but perhaps only in a superficial way. “Past life” influences means that we are emotionally affected, it’s not merely memories.

Yes. Proceed. Bear in mind, initial observations and conclusions are going to be relatively shallow next to what you may garner by proceeding. It’s like wading out into the ocean: It gets as deep as you could want, but first you have to get your feet wet.

That mechanism that I just observed – that isolating mechanism – may or may not have been intended to isolate me. It is just as possible that it was merely expressing what it was, and the isolation followed.

If Katrina “reincarnated” after dying in a Nazi camp, would you expect her to emerge trusting and easily fitting in? If John Cotton “returned” in you, still hardened and bitter and distrustful of life, would that not flavor your life?

But John learned from the German sergeant that you have to accept life as it comes.

And you think, “Of course I would get John after he was healed, not before,” but – logic aside – does it occur to you thar you (and perhaps others), living John’s situation, are why he could heal, and that then he could pass his healed attitude to you at a later time in your life?

No, it hadn’t, but it should have. After all, when I retrieved Katrina, the crying child I had always felt within me (though I usually didn’t realize it, and never as anything separate from myself) stopped crying. She was healed; I was different.

Only, thinking about it, since the healing of Katrina happened after her 3D life was over, I guess I assumed it was the retrieval per se that had changed things. That wouldn’t apply with John.

Maybe everybody in 3D is connected to others in their own 3D time/space who suffer, and in effect distribute their suffering, so that when any one person is healed (or is further injured), it affects all the others, knowingly or (usually) unknowingly.

Yes, I can see that. So we spend our lives criticizing, or bearing with, each other’s perceived shortcomings, and only with luck do we learn to view them with compassion.

You remember Hemingway’s statement.

Something like, “Youth thinks life is a battle, but it is a morass.”

And perhaps now you see deeper into it.

I do. We think our goal is to live a successful fulfilled life (whatever that means to us specifically), but it would be at least as true to say that our real goal is to live with all these manifesting influences, and try to synchronize them and heal their wounded places and manifest their excellences.

It can’t be done abstractly, though it can be thought about, obviously. It can be done only by living it.

Our lives are to be lived so that we may express them. This does seem a shallow, obvious, conclusion.

But a less obvious jumping-off place. As we said, it is a matter of continuing or not. If you walk back to the beach, you have had a refreshing dip in the ocean. But if you continue outward beyond the depth you can stand up in, well, those are deeper waters.

Let’s go there.

Yes, we thought you’d rather; your time has come round.

And I’d rather not quit, merely because our time is up and we’ve overed a certain number of pages.

We can continue. It is a matter of your wanting to press on.

I do.

So, you come into the world as a congeries of influences, each in itself a congeries of influences. For simplicity we are saying that these influences are threads proceeding from (or through) other individual lives. A more sophisticated analysis would show that the various braided experiences that we are calling threads, or strands, are themselves the product of previous processing of other times’ unfinished business. Just as everyone is so braided that ultimately humanity is all one thing (literally, not merely metaphorically), so all times and places are braided, and of course it’s all here and now.

So our imperfection, our ad habits, our illnesses – our sins, call them – are all part of our whole being not as incidentals but as central themes.

Yes. What you come into life to do is not to be criticized as a failing, nor dismissed impatiently as irrelevant or boring. Life is the working-out of the problem posed by the interaction of strands in a new common life.

That sounds like every life is a First Life.

Isn’t it? When was the last time you were Frank DeMarco? All the strands that went into your composition were real lives, real units, but does their confluence in you make yours any the less a First Life?

Then, what is the difference between a First Life and whatever happens to us thereafter?

In 3D terms (a very distorting mirror, remember, because it funnels everything through the sense of time “passing”),  you get one chance to form who you will be, and that is your First Life. But that isn’t the end of the story, for you are always alive, always affected by others. Almost impossible to express this within the 3D framework, but there it is. Your life as pilot of the ship is your Frist Life. That is the only life you are ever going to pilot. But the voyage doesn’t end.

Its funny, I sort of understand that (in fact, it’s sort of obvious), and I sort of don’t understand it, and in fact it’s sort of nonsensical.

Yes. That is merely you being more aware of more of who and what you are. You all have plenty of skeptics and blindlings among your crew.

And they have their rights too.

Well, they’re your shipmates, aren’t they? And how can you know what is a detriment an what is an asset, when you can’t even know the equation being solved?

Mixed metaphor, but I get the idea.

I thought this might go into heavy psychoanalysis, but instead we went into explanations. A defense-mechanism on my part?

No, and we can give you a touchstone to use whenever you are in doubt: Were you willing?

I was.

So if you were willing to do the work, but the session went elsewhere, maybe the session was doing the work, it’s just that you had a different idea.

I can see that. Evasion is evasion, and willingness is willingness, and either attitude is going to produce results congruent with itself.

That’s a simplified way to look at it, but good enough to be going along with.

This whole discussion obviates the question of whether other-life memories are real or are dramatizations of our own internal tendencies.

“How could you possibly split so fine a hair,” yes. It’s a meaningless question.

We’ve gone a practically unprecedented length of time. Today’s theme?

“At the center of influence,” perhaps.

“Past life, First life”?

Probably would slant it wrong. Try, “Real past-life influences,” or “We are never tabula rasa.”

I don’t know, it still doesn’t seem to get it.

Maybe “Living and choosing.” Possibly too simple, but that is what it amounts to.

Maybe, “Not to be criticized, but lived.”

Yes, that would work.

Profound thanks for all this.

 

Thursday, August 4, 2022

5:05 a.m. I am caught by the date, August 4, the date it all fell apart, in 1914. One hundred eight years later, the dissolution continues to gather steam. It has been a hard fast descent, and no end in sight. It is only faith that argues that rebirth is occurring, hidden in the vortex of changes.

I wake up half-remembering my poem I sent around, the one I wrote about Kesey’s death in November, 2001. I wish I could have all the poetry accessible in my mind, rather than interrupted fragments. But, no point wishing, I suppose.

Yesterday’s ILC meeting got to talking about retirement, and the confusion in our thought that can follow. I’ve had a good long dose of it – if you mean freedom from external routines, as opposed to lack of internal purpose.

And I’ve been re-treading that same old “if only” sequence that would change the events of the war so that the United States was never pulled into it. But the remorseless logic of it called for everything to plunge in. Even Wilson’s care to keep us out after “Lusitania” only bought us  couple of years.

But why go over it and over it? Same story with the second round. As Carl Jung said, better for us to stay out as long as possible, that it damage us less. But still we were plunged into the descent, perhaps faster than ever because of our own sudden predominance at the end of it.

All right, guys, what’s all this? It only now occurs to me that you may have a reason for flicking the fly past the trout that I am to you.

You’ve been reading Maurice Walsh.

Smiling. Guilty as charged. [Fishing plays a large part in several of his stories.] But the question remains: Why do you have me thinking, now writing, about the wars and the descent? Setting switches for maximum F, R, C, P. Looking back a few pages, I remember we were discussing good and evil, yet again.

A recent focus of ours has been aimed at gently encouraging you – anyone reading this – to not endlessly tread and re-tread the same corn, to not endlessly rehash the same tired opinions, reactions, associations. You each have narratives you constructed out of your own life and the life “around” you, experienced second-hand. Well and good, as raw materials. Not so good, as endless reprocessing from an unchanged viewpoint.

I get that that sentence doesn’t quite mean what it first appears to.

No. here’s the point: You, every minute, are slightly or sometimes radically different from who you were before. Each new “you” – each combination of personal subjectivity and shared subjectivity and “the times” – has the opportunity to see things afresh. Don’t be squandering it by playing the same old tapes. By “old tapes,” we mean, not only old familiar topics, but, more, old familiar attitudes. In other words, don’t just drift, allowing old tapes to provide you the illusion of being present; participate. Bring to the present moment a present self, not a tape of a previous self, pretending or assuming that nothing has changed.

I’m thinking of Skip Atwater’s comment, and of the saying that you can’t step twice into the same river.

Exactly. You will find it worthwhile to pursue the thought.

Skip said to me one day – this had to have been many years ago – that he had just come out of a program with a new, striking, realization sparked by a very familiar word. Somebody said “participant,” and Skip said he realized that that’s what he wanted, to be a participant in life. And that’s what you’re saying here. Being in a given moment, we should actively be in that moment.

And the river.

Well, we can’t step twice into the same river because the river is always changing. But – so are we!. Why bring an old version of ourself to a new situation?

Or, to coin a phrase, “Be here now.”

Yet, is it even possible? You’ve reminded us many times that you (we) can’t live always on the stretch; that we need to alternate alertness and relaxation.

Follow the fly.

As I wrote living “on the stretch,” I half-remembered that Thoreau aspired to live always “on the stretch” – his words. It was a part of his continuing resolution, at least as a young man. He was only 30 when he left Walden, after all.

So which is it? Live always on the stretch, or stretch and relax, stretch and relax?

That’s a false dichotomy, I think. If anything, you’re baiting us. If it is impossible to do the one, then clearly we must do the other, or do some third thing.

So then, if you can’t always be on the stretch, in the nature of things, is there any reason to reproach yourselves for not doing what can’t be done? And at the ame time, if stretching to meet the present moment with your full attention is sometimes possible, and is sometimes called for, shouldn’t you give a little thought to how to maximize your chances of living consciously?

I seem to hear a half-submerged theme that I wish I had noted as we went along, the theme being how to take advantage of religious and philosophical instructions to get the clues that would help us live our life more consciously. That is, life more abundantly. The whole explanation of sins as errors and virtues as helpful habits; the concentration on seeing how we are more, and are different, than we usually see ourselves to be; the inculcation of habits to live more deeply even in trivial moments – it all comes to the same thing, really. “Be here, now, and here’s how to do it.”

Other than “trivial moments” (how would you know how to tell a trivial from an important moment?), yes.

And as I get up to refill my coffee mug, I remember Benjamin Rush saying that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, at the convention that declared independence, “thought for us all.” I had a flashing sense that this is what we’re doing, these mornings, thinking about things most people don’t have leisure or background to do.

You could say that that is everybody’s task (and privilege), to think for you all, because you each have lived a different piece of the puzzle. Some people experience with paper and pen, some with interpersonal relationships, some with “external” tasks, some with pondering and feeling. In truth, you all do a little of each, of course in different proportions. But it is important that you not take yourselves too little seriously. You are used to thinking that you shouldn’t take yourselves too seriously, and this is true, in that you don’t want to be misled by trivial egotistic exaggerations. But equally, you don’t want to take yourself too little seriously. The universe doesn’t have any spare parts, and nobody is only an extra in his or her own movie, no matter what else is happening from other viewpoints.

Well, thanks for all this, as always. Or do you have more you want to say at the moment?

Good enough for the moment. What would you say the theme has been?

Some new variant of the same old theme of “Be here, now.”

Then maybe, “Be here, now, a new variant.”

I can’t tell if you’re joking or not. In any case, thanks and we’ll see you next time.

 

Wednesday, August 3, 2022

5:15 a.m. The set of George Gently CDs that I bought with my birthday money came yesterday, and it’s the same story as I watch them, as when I watch anything that has any drama in it at all. At the heart of the drama is always good v. evil. Almost the only exception I can think of at the moment is Andy Weir’s novels, where the drama comes from a protagonist fighting the elements, fighting to survive a situation, not fighting to overcome someone’s evil.

Of, of course there are plenty of examples of drama not predicated on good v. evil; it required a bit of remembering, though, to come up with them.

You need to focus, if you’re going to see it and express it.

Yes, thanks. Focus, receptivity, clarity, presence. It’s simple enough. You are persuading us that good v. evil is only one way of seeing things, not an inescapable way of seeing things. But dramas based on the kind of things that go on in the world – the specifics I’m thinking of, from one of Gently’s cases, is the systematic sexual abuse of children – make it very hard to hold in mind the reality of all being well, and always well. Or, take the five-part Netflix series I watched called “Turning Point,” that examined Sept. 11, 2001, its genesis and consequences. How can you look at all that stupidity and malice, all that deliberately inflicted pain and suffering, all that on-going self-righteous – well, you know.

Even as I pose the question, I am aware of a slight insanity in my mood. I imagine it wasn’t much different for the New England Transcendentalists, confronting the horrifying on-going reality of slavery. There’s a disconnect there, and it is hard to deal with.

Of course if the problem were an easy one, it would not really be a problem, would it? If you were to remain at an earlier, easier, stage of development, there would be no conflict to be resolved. You would believe in good v. evil or you wouldn’t, but you wouldn’t see both prongs of the dilemma.

Yes, that’s it exactly. Many Union men  accused the Transcendentalists of escapism. Many abolitionists, particularly.

Perhaps they accused themselves, no less. But of course, more common it was for emancipation to override their theoretical belief in the non-existence of evil. After all, if evil does not exist, how can you rejoice in the overcoming of an ancient evil? And if evil does exist, what can you do but perpetually re-enlist in crusades to overcome its latest-discovered manifestation, or to  declare, tacitly, that you’ve done all the fighting you’re going to do in one lifetime?

Particularly if you care to see that battling the evil usually results in transforming it rather than eliminating it. That is, evil doesn’t go away, nor even necessarily abate; it goes into other forms.

But this is an ancient trap, and we are working hard to free you – to free us (for of course, being inextricably part of each other, we share your fate) – from just that conviction that half the world’s energies need to be battled and trounced and removed from the scene so that only light will exist, and no dark; only up and no down; only yin and not yang, or yang and not yin, depending upon your tastes.

It’s squaring the circle.

Refocus, breathe, hold your center. If this were easy, everyone would see it.

Yes, I said I’m aware that there is something not sound in what I’m feeling, but that doesn’t make the feeling go away.

Why would you want it to? It is only when you face things that you have a chance to resolve them.

Well, I’m listening.

How many of your friends are firmly convinced that various ills are being deliberately caused by this or that human agency?  The named culprits vary according to narrative, but it usually amounts to, “They are doing this to us, and only those of us who are brave enough to look at the evidence can see it.”

Oh yes. But I’m not inclined to mock their certainties; I just can’t share them, particularly in that the quality of certainty is common, but the object of the certainty is mutually contradictory.

We weren’t mocking anybody or anything. We are pointing out what exists, which is a different thing. People’s certainties are often wrong in their specifics, but still, certainty always proceeds from something; it isn’t as simple as, “People have a need to believe ins something clear and definite.”

That’s sort of the point, isn’t it? What we see as evil exists, and it doesn’t cease to exist because we say, “All is always well.”

No, and that is the point.

I beg your pardon?

A point of view becomes more comprehensive by inclusion, not by exclusion. How hared would it be to construct an absolutely watertight view of the world, if you merely lop off anything that doesn’t fit? If Paul Brunton didn’t know of the evil in the world around him – if Seth didn’t, or Edgar Cayce, or Jane Roberts – how could their resulting clarity be anything but deeply flawed?  It is by seeing what is, but seeing it in a new light, that you advance, not by adopting one stance and rejecting anything that contradicts it.

So we are forced to, “What looks like evil isn’t evil really; we aren’t seeing it straight.” But

Yes, “but.” You are inclined to say, “but it doesn’t feel that way.” No, of course it doesn’t. If it did – when it does – the problem is resolved. The problem, after all, is a conflict of consequences. It always is.

“Consequences”? that doesn’t feel like it was quite the right word.

Call it, then, a conflict of postulates, or a conflict of viewpoints, whatever. If you think one thing and feel another, or if two ways of thinking contradict each other, or two currents of contradictory feeling coexist and roil the waters, there is your momentary freedom from invisible construct.

Hmm. The conflict makes visible to us what is otherwise invisible.

It is what Richard Bach was so good at doing. “Here, look at this in connection with this. See how it puts things in a different light?”

In effect, you are saying it is just the snags in the current that are valuable to us.

Potentially valuable. Or you can let them puncture your inner tubes and leave you swimming for shore.

So I suppose you’re saying, “Don’t be in any hurry to resolve dilemmas or contradictory evidence.”

We are indeed. Evil does exist, no question, in a world where you (in the form of your cultural and genetic ancestors) ate the apple. But evil is only somewhat real, in a world that is itself only somewhat real, as you realize as you struggle out of that trance; hence, cannot be what it seems to be, nor mean what it seems to mean.

And some people will see this as mere playing with words, and some will sense that there’s truth in it, but only sense it and not see it clearly, and some will see it plainly enough that it is obvious.

Yes, only each of you will be occupying any of these positions, depending upon the time of day. Sometimes one position will be obviously true, other times, another. The fluctuation is not in reality but in your consciousness, of course.

Is this why I have spent so many hours of my life reading detective fiction (though not particularly caring about the crime) and spy stories, and reading and now watching so many accounts of contemporary insanity?

There would be no advantage to you or to anyone, to have you spend your time in a daydream of things being all sweetness and light. But neither would it be worthwhile for you to escape into conspiratorial certainty. Both exist; life is somewhat sweetness and light, if you can see it; life does encompass conspiracies and crimes, if you’re willing to see them. But it isn’t ever either/or, but both. And, more than “both,” it is “neither/nor.” If you aren’t hanging on tenterhooks between comfortable but incompatible certainties, you’re not looking deeply enough. And the greater your insight, the more profound the problems that will appear to your sight.

Call this “A slight insanity,” maybe?

We smile. You’d soon overuse it. Maybe “A conflict of viewpoints,” or “A conflict of postulates.”

Maybe. All right, thanks for this. It was pretty unexpected, and led into deeper waters.

Not intellectually, emotionally.

Yes, I guess that’s so.

New territory every time you come to it. But it means, at least, that you aren’t stuck. You didn’t come to the same old place and play the same old tapes.

No, not with you nudging me. All right, thanks for all this.