Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

Tuesday, August 2, 2022

6 a.m. I just interrupted myself rereading, “Now we know how many holes it takes,” in Demon Box, and heard myself saying to [Ken] Kesey, “I feel so close to you, somehow.” And I had a sudden intuition that this is what happens sometimes – but can I recapture the idea?

Or can I give it back to you, you mean?

I guess. But it’s always so hard to know, at first. Like you said, a nickel valentine to a dead superstar. Still, working on the assumption –

It’s a problem everybody is going to have. Maybe it’s for the purpose of shaking up their certainties, as well as everybody else’s. I mean, we’ve had plenty of experience, dealing with people who are so sure of themselves. Maybe it would be good if they had to remember that they don’t know shit.

Probably would.

You were told long ago that everybody who reads a book connects directly. What do you suppose happens when he keeps re-reading?

It’s a very pleasurable feeling.

Isn’t it like sitting down with an old friend, hanging out together? It doesn’t matter what you’re talking about, if you’re talking, or what you’re watching or listening to, or doing together. The real thing that’s going on is that you are sharing the space and the time,, like you felt with your cat that time, years ago.

We tend to think of non-3D hanging out as ephemeral, at most. I suppose that’s backwards, too.

What are you doing when you talk on the phone to your brother, and he’s on the opposite side of the country? You can’t say you’re sharing the space, but you are certainly sharing the mind-space. So how is that different from hanging out with Hemingway while you reread his stories? How is being together in the place more important to communication than being together in spirit?

Well, I don’t know, it seems like there’s some advantage! I mean, the 3D must have some importance!

See if you can keep it straight in your head. Every day is full of music and talk and pictures – even more in your present moment than when I was alive, and God knows they were everywhere even then. What keeps it all from overwhelming you?

I don’t let it in, most of it. I don’t watch or listen to anything with commercials, for one thing: Haven’t, for decades. I don’t play the radio in the car (nor at home, for that matter); I don’t watch TV or surf the net except when looking for something or when something is dangled in front of me and catches my attention via email. I often don’t even look at most of the few regular reports I let in: the Guardian, SchwartzReport, Futurism, etc., even Detwiler, as interesting as his complied articles often are.

But you read, and you re-read, and so you create a controlled environment. Same with films. If you find something you like, you may watch it many times, but if not, you turn it off.

I hear you: I’m choosing who I hang out with.

People are going to have to remember how to refuse candy from strangers. The younger ones are going to have to learn how, probably the hard way.

I keep coming back to the concept of opportunity costs, from Econ 101. Anything you do stops you from doing something different at the same time. Even if you multi-task like mad, it stops you from doing even more things at the same time. You can’t do everything, so you might want to consider if whatever it is you’re doing is really what you want to be doing.

And while you’re hanging out with one of your favorite authors, or singers, or actors, or whatever, you are also serving as a bridge among all your favorites. That doesn’t mean they all will use the bridge, or any of them, but the bridge will be there, because you’re there. Now take that concept and extend it to everybody who’s walking the earth, or ever did, and see what you get.

I get an endlessly interconnected grid. I imagine that every possible bridge exists, and since we also function as bridges to other bridges – well, they did tell me “You are not alone,” but I had no idea.

And those bridges enrich your life, in turn. If Kesey and Hemingway are both in your mind, and if Hemingway was already in Kesey’s –

I get the point. Certain clumps will have greater weight, greater presence.

Whatever you put your attention to, is going to be a bigger part of your life. It’s only common sense.

I’m getting, between the lines, that our lives are richer and more active in non-3D terms than we ever realize.

I don’t know what would give you that idea. You need to watch more television.

Laughing. Very good to talk to you. You know how I value your books.

But you don’t know why, nor how.

Meaning?

Whatever you have an affinity for, there’s a reason, but the affinity comes first, and you tail after it adding your reasons. The affinity is truer than the reasoning.

I suppose partly it’s compensation.

Yep.

Hemingway was so alive; Kesey too; JFK, the same. All my author friends (that I never met) brought something to the table; experience, background, knowledge, attitude, whatever.

You can only lead one life, physically. For experience beyond that, you are confined to vicarious experience.

And the brain can hardly tell the difference between experience and a vivid imagining of it, we’re told.

So, you suppose you’re the only person who needs more life than his 3D affairs can provide?

It’s an interesting thought. I suppose that’s one reason we love gossip. It’s a way of getting a glimpse through the blinds.

The people spending their days watching television and being manipulated by advertising aren’t malfunctioning either; they’re just doing what you would never do, as you are doing what they would never do. It all stitches together.

Except, from the looks of things, it’s all coming apart.

Coming apart, coming together, it’s all part of the dance. Don’t try to override the caller, you’ll mess up the square dance. But you don’t have to be out on the dance floor, either. Nothing wrong with sitting on the sidelines, sipping cider and eating crumb cake.

I didn’t expect this, and I’m very glad of it. I’ll hire somebody to worry about if it is really Ken Kesey or not.

Hire Hemingway, he’s probably not doing anything.

Smiling. Thanks and good luck to you.

Friday, April 9, 2021

6:50 a.m. Any need to comment on Jane Coleman’s read on your response of April 5 to Martha MacBurnie’s question?

[From Jane Coleman, 4-6-2021:

[Seems to me that TGU cleared the shrubbery but didn’t yet get to Martha’s deeper question: why do we have to have painful or catastrophic experiences to affect change? I checked in with my guidance for more. We don’t have to have these kinds of experiences to change. What we have right now is the results of disconnected living — not living with full non-3D awareness or sleep walking. We have taken the challenge to live in full awareness and support each other in the process. As we continue to do that, we ripple that way of living outwards. As we have a strong preference for change via uplifting experiences, we create the method of change that we want.  It also occurs to me that as we live more connected, we will begin to see “negative experiences” differently. We will trust life and take on the challenge in a different way, not resisting, but looking for the blessing.]

No, as you know, we are in full agreement with her take on the situation. It is, in fact, what we have been saying as we went along: Many of what are considered to be humanity’s failings are the result of stumbling around in 3D without being in connection with the non-3D that has better perspective on things. But that doesn’t mean that the present situation was an accident, nor an experiment, nor a necessary step in an evolutionary process.

Seems to me, that exhausts the list of possibilities.

Sometimes things “just happen,” so to speak, the results of many choices. If humans ate of the fruit of the tree of seeing things as good and evil, was that an accident? An experiment? A necessary step? It was a choice, and choice is a necessary adjunct to free will, which is a necessary adjunct to full participation.

So are you connecting that choice with lack of continuous access?

Reason it out.

Well, let me think. [Recalibrating] I suppose that if we start to see things as good and evil, we lose the faculty of acceptance to the degree that we gain in the habit of judging. (I don’t mean “gain” as a good thing.) And if we start judging everything – I mean, as we get into the habit of judging things – we progressively condemn more and more of what we see.

And what you don’t see.

Yes, that’s where I was going. We no longer accept, so we begin to shut out, to let some things in and leave other things out.

You sunder the world.

There is a vital connection between the two things that is just beyond my connecting them.

It is simple enough, conceptually. When you cease to accept the 3D world, you cease to accept the non-3D world. To the degree that you get into the habit of judging (that is, of choosing to accept or reject), it is a short step to rejecting what is unpleasant, what is painful, and once you begin to do that, you start to lose your way, because you are crippling your innate guidance system.

So you wind up like Hemingway in his old age, losing his connection to what really is going on because he has told himself so many lies about what he has done that he can no longer trace cause and effect.

Hardly Hemingway alone, of course. He is merely an historical example you know. But you and everyone you know or ever will know do the same thing, to greater or lesser degree, and that’s what’s ailing you.

I feel the truth of what you are saying, but still don’t quite have the connecting mechanism between judgment as a habit and losing connection with our non-3D component.

It hurts too much to see yourselves as you really are, because there is too much you condemn! So you stop listening, and you rewrite your biography, and you proceed on your own as best you can. Of course this is not a conscious process. If it were, it could be overcome. Or rather, we should say, “Once it becomes conscious, you can learn to overcome it.”

Which is what you are helping us to do.

Scarcely us alone, of course. Help is at hand for everyone, always, but there must be openness to it. It is to create a space for openness that so many messages in so many forms have gone forth. It is more than 2,000 years since Jesus came that you might have life more abundantly, and he was not the first nor the last. Just as the message has had to be delivered in so many different ways, so there have been many different messengers. Some devote their lives to it, some live their lives in such a way as to offer broad hints, some study and practice in isolation, and work not by affecting another individual – maybe not even one flesh and blood individual! – but by affecting the shared subjectivity.

Hear this: Any and all of you will carry the message, or resist it, or contradict it, or live oblivious to it, but it is how you choose to live in relation to this one question that will determine your life.

I think you are saying, insofar as we open ourselves to our non-3D guidance, our lives will overcome the truncation that follows attempting to live by judging everything.

Provided that you do not succumb to psychic inflation, yes. If you were to say, “I listen to my guys upstairs, I’m pretty special, I’m an advanced being,” – or, worse, “I am a guru and a role model,” well, it is a short step to madness. Being closely connected to your individual non-3D component is very desirable, but it is not a panacea.

Sketch the downside for us, then, because at first glance this seems to contradict what you said previously.

Remember, life doesn’t contradict itself, but it does contain all contradictions. Another way to say the same thing would be to say, “Any valid course is between extremes that are undesirable.” If you want to go East, there is some range that will get you there, and some going-too-far that won’t.  Even if you head due North or due South, you have some chance of nearing East, though that is not an efficient way to proceed. But if you are heading Northwest, say, even slightly, how are you ever going to go East? And of course it is far preferable to confine your range between ENE and ESE, say. This does not judge whether going East is a “good” or a “bad” thing; it says, if that’s where you want to go, there will be a range of courses that will move you in that direction. Anything outside that range will not.

I think this is somehow connected – can’t quite see how – with the idea that it is not desirable to follow our non-3D blindly, even though it is desirable to follow it consciously.

Good. But better would be to say, not “follow it consciously,” but “cooperate with it consciously, ”consult with it consciously.” You are in the body. It is your choice, always. That’s what you’re there for, to choose. Abandoning that requirement to choose would be as bad, on the one side, as refusing to listen to it is, on the other side. Your proper course lies between the two extremes.

I get, too, that our non-3D component isn’t perfect. It isn’t automatically benign. No, that isn’t quite right, but you know what I mean, you say it.

All values are represented in the world, and you won’t approve of all of them. Some cut against others. Some you cannot live if you want to live other, contradictory, values. You must choose. So, the non-3D component of someone living values that are repugnant to you still has its rights in this life. What is not right for you may be right for another.

More than that, you are, as Emerson said, “the child of many sires.” You comprise many strands, some of them perhaps at odds with one another. How are you to live by choosing chaos? You will live by some and will choose not to live by others, and there is nothing wrong with this. But this means, it is not safe for you to automatically follow every impulse, or go down every road that tempts you. You know all this; you live it every day, but it may not have occurred to you in this context.

This is clear, but you didn’t sketch the connection to psychic inflation. At least, if it is implied in what you said, I missed it.

Inflation leads you out of discernment and into automatism. You cease to be human and fallible and uncertain, and you see yourself as divine and infallible and all-knowing. It doesn’t happen all at once, but it is a terribly strong tendency once it gets a toehold.

Yes, I see. Nietzsche as opposed to Jung.

Hemingway in the grip of his myth of himself as opposed to Hemingway searching for his wholeness in the middle of the night. Yourselves in your moments of arrogant certainty as opposed to yourselves when you are conscious, humble, and kind.

So, stay connected to your non-3D (your conscience, in a sense, only without the overtones of something always grading your scorecard), but never forget that it is your guide, your protector – your friend – but not your master or your superior or your boss. Within that range of being is your range of possibilities, your best course to become what you want to become.

And enough for the moment.

You so often surprise me. Thanks for this, as always.

 

Sunday, July 31, 2022

5:45 a.m. Guys, anything we should discuss? I have something ready from 2021 if not; I can send that around.

You might mention suggestions you received a few days ago.

Ruth Shilling suggested that I ask you to give us in one or two sentences the gist of a given discussion.

Sue Hookey suggested that I ask you to give us a practical exercise for whatever we talked about that day.

Dick Werling suggests that you could help catalyze ILC into greater use.

Focus, then.

F, R, C, P. Go ahead.

Ruth’s suggestion is a good one in terms of end product, not so good in terms of process. The work you are currently doing, going back over past entries, is just that. But the benefit of such work is the work itself, not the end-result. If we or you give people a pre-digested summary, we will thereby cheat them of the opportunity of doing what you had to do, to understand Thoreau.

It’s true. I would read two succeeding sentences that would seem to have absolutely nothing to do with each other, and I’d have to work to find out what he meant. The result was always that I would come to understand more than he had said in so many words.

Your summary, if you do produce a summary, will set it out in easily comprehensible form, stripped of digressions and associations. So (rhetorical question) how could that be a bad thing?

The easier it is, the more likely that people will skim the surface, mistaking recognition for understanding. I’m afraid they do it all the time with our daily messages. Hell, I do it, often enough, and I’m in on the process essence-to-essence.

Still, this doesn’t mean it would be a bad thing to produce a clear succinct statement: We once helped you put the whole subject into a 2,000-word statement, after all.

Yes, and some damn fool posted a review saying it must have taken me three minutes to put it together.

But others wrote that they found it valuable.

Still, I’m saying I recognize that what would be valuable to those who can absorb it would be worthless to those who can’t.

When is that ever not true? But, that’s our response to Ruth’s suggestion: Let each person who is really interested do their own one- or two-sentence summary each time, and they will deepen their understanding even of things they had thought they got. While we can’t know for sure, we tend to think our doing it would discourage the process.

Sue’s suggestion, then?

More or less the same response: It is well that people make the effort, and it is less likely that they will do so if it is provided for them. However, in this case, unlike the previous suggestion, we recognize that differences among people are great. Some really would benefit from such exercises. We offer a counter-suggestion: If people will submit their ideas on such exercises, we will gladly give our opinion on the plus and minus of each one. We don’t mean here for people to offer a one-size-fits-all kind of exercise, but different exercises for different material.

Fair enough. So, Dick’s suggestion (which I don’t quite understand, I see, but until now thought I did) that you catalyze ILC into greater use?

Perhaps quote directly from his email.

[“The continued flow of information from the TGUs is definitely of value to me personally…. But greater value comes to me from my personal ILCs with other souls.  How could the TGUs help us catalyze this ILC technology into widespread recognition and use?  Is Hemi-Sync needed to jump start the process?… How to get recognition, curiosity (“What might this mean to ME?”), and opening to ILC among the Muggles?”]

Perhaps you can see that this is a parallel to some of the things that sometimes worry you.

I do as you say it. It is our attempting to make something happen, when it is beyond our scope.

No, slower. Refocus (and that goes for other readers, as well).

Okay, not beyond our scope, exactly, but not our job, either.

Well –

Go ahead, I’m waiting to be corrected.

We are scratching our non-3D heads, trying to untangle this. We know it will seem simple to you, but it would seem less so if you remembered that the same statement (whatever it would be) will be received by people at all ends of the receptivity spectrum, at all levels of awareness, at all levels of willingness and ability to change perspectives so that they may look at a thing in an unfamiliar way.

Isn’t that always the case.

Yes, it is! That’s a continual background condition we deal with. It’s the main reason we don’t make terse, pithy statements that a certain few would get and most would not. It’s why most of your readers will be thinking, always, “Why don’t they stick to the point? Why don’t they just say it? Why are they always telling us what we already know?”

In any case –

Stars, then:

• Yes, great value in personally receiving and mulling our information. That’s why we provide it!
• And yes, greater value, ultimately, in 3D-to-3D communication, with all its additional channels that you may not usually consider. That is, emotional overlay, all the range of sparks that pass between embodied minds which each extend via strands to so many other minds elsewhere and elsewhen.
• Yes, too, that it is a valid and charitable impulse, to want to share such advantages with others. Whenever one finds something of value, the impulse is to share it. This is a good impulse.
• But as we have said many times, wanting to do good is not the same as knowing how to do it, nor as being able to do it. It is an important part of wisdom, to remember the limits to one’s ability.
• Beyond that, it is a continual temptation to try to reform the world, to try to rearrange the people we experience first-hand and second-hand.

But we never have the data.

You don’t have the data, either in terms of individuals or in terms of the times. That doesn’t mean “Don’t try to change anything,” it means “Don’t let yourself play pretend, thinking that feeling about something is the same as doing something.”

Now I’m going to ask you to go slower. I know we will have thrown some people off at that curve.

Course-correction accepted. What we mean to say is, there is nothing wrong with your trying to nudge matters in whatever way you can. Sometimes you may be in a position to make a great contribution – as Bob Monroe did, for example. But sometimes you may want to change things that exist for reasons you don’t understand, that play out in ways you don’t understand. In such cases, what good can you do? Can you fix an airplane engine by doing things at random? Can you fix your own body by medicating at random? Understand: We aren’t saying you never have the data to do anything. Obviously you never know everything, and obviously you couldn’t wait to act until do did know everything. But it is so tempting to move without understanding, motivated by emotion or by unknown forces within your psyche. You have to be careful of that.

I think this amounts to your saying, don’t get carried away with missionary work.

Well, it is our favorite theme: It’s best to stick to real work, and not march off to a pretended siege of Babylon. Do what comes to hand, and leave the larger questions to other aspects of the shared subjectivity. Things do get handled. It isn’t up to you alone.

Good questions and suggestions.

Thanks for all this.

 

[This was from 16 months ago, but perhaps has its relevance.]

Wednesday, March 31, 2021

5:40 a.m. A couple of days ago, we were discussing the virus and society, and you ended by saying, “Pay attention,” in response to my query as to what we might do. Yesterday we went off on a different tack, but I want to come back to that. You were comparing the virus and its effects to the world wars and their effects on society, and on individuals in society.

Yes, and that final phrase you added is important, and shows us (if we didn’t know it anyway) that you understand what we are talking about.

After all this time, I should! You have been telling us for years that the purpose of society is to provide an environment for each individual, as opposed to the idea that individuals are made to form and support a society. That’s clumsily said, but let’s get to your points for today, and just leave it as, “This world is made for the maintenance of individuals and not for the nurturance of abstractions like societies.”

We are very tempted to linger and address this, though. Bookmark it in your mind and we will gladly devote a session (or more if need be) to explicating it.

Okay, but not right now.

No. Very well, here is our point, and all else will be elucidation. It may be worth your while to consider this virus World War III, only not in the sense of one coalition of nations or empires against another; rather, in the sense of an international disruption of “business as usual” that in effect has its own agenda, transcending any and all human agendas. This is the key to many things.

I think some people sense the “agenda” part of it, and are tempted to ascribe it to human agency: to the Chinese, or to Bill Gates, or to whatever sinister force they suspect is really running things.

Like the analogy you and Hemingway developed and explored. Touch on that.

The sense of it was that the nature of technological development – what people call “progress” – instils a constant bias toward interconnection which then brings a need for greater regulation. People who sense the bias tend to ascribe it to some human secret intent, and only rarely see it as an unintended necessary consequence of greater integration of trade, communication, etc.

That same sense of bias leads some to think this virus is created and directed by humans for human ends. Surely you can see that this is a reasonable response.

Reasonable but inaccurate.

Exactly, reasonable but inaccurate. And that goes for every explanation of any phenomenon that transcends categories. You see the analogies to the world wars: Sketch them lightly.

Because less strain for me to do it than to take dictation?

Less emotional strain, for reasons discussed many times.

Okay. Joe Blow and careful historians and everyone in between cite the “real reasons” for the wars, and usually they are somewhat correct as far as they go. So, World War I: protection or growth of empires; competition for trade; personal antagonisms among emperors and statesmen; racial and ethnic hatreds; the sheer inability of older institutions to deal with new conditions; the arms race and its nurturance over decades by what came to be called “the merchants of death” (arms dealers). Even things like the railroads have been blamed to some extent – or, say, technology in general, including telegraph, telephone, and anything else that brought crowded Europeans into closer connection – hence into conflict – with one another.

None of these “deeper” explanations explain, however.

Of course not. Napoleon and Caesar were not created by railroads and telegraph systems. The Mongol invasions weren’t spurred by an arms race. There is no “one size fits all” answer to World War I, or any war.

Now World War II, again briefly, but stressing the difference between the two wars.

Well, that’s why they call it “II”: It was the second act that never would have occurred without the first act. In 1914 nobody in power really wanted war, though they all had their plans in place if war should come. But the second war was the result of a few individuals understanding the changed conditions and using them to attain power: This was the military in Japan, the fascists in Italy, and the Nazis in Germany, all following by a few years and all emotionally spurred by reaction to the Communist revolution of 1917 that marked the beginning of the end of the first war. The first war was a matter of societies bumbling their way into water too deep for them. The second war was an organized cadre in several nations who were out to get revenge for the results of the first, or were to take advantage of the opportunities offered by chaos, or were sheer orgies of hatred and lust for destruction.

In both these examples, this is very simplified, but – what you want?

It will do. Now, in a few words, the change from 1914 to 1945.

You don’t want much! For one thing, the destruction of empires – Russian, German, Austrian, Turkish – and the weakening of the ones like the British that survived and appeared to be among the victors.

The submergence of Europe and the rise of the U.S. and the USSR as superpowers. The beginning of the third-world revolts that would end the last of the European empires within a few years. The transformation of all-out war into an impossibility (though it took a while to be realized) because the atomic bomb would render the fruits of victory “ashes in the mouth.”

But perhaps more fundamentally, the transformation of the lives of ordinary people. The old master-servant relationship that was so taken for granted in Europe broke up, opening the ground for today’s more equitable social structure there. And I sense that this is what you really want to talk about.

You might have made explicit the elevation of technological requirements (what Europeans tended to think of as Americanization) and the continued erosion or demolition of folkways remaining from simpler times, but yes, this is the point that applies to your times in general and to this virus in particular. You are not going to send a generation to die on barbed wire or by poison gas, nor will you die in blitzes nor be subject to extermination campaigns. But you have your own ordeals ahead. And just as with previous ordeals, they will not be understood in advance. They never are. It is because they are transformative that they occur. What transformative event ever came with explanations? With omens, yes. With aspects that later lead you to say, “We should have been able to see,” yes. But never with explanation at the time, much less beforehand.

So, today. It won’t be the past, it won’t continue to be the present. It will be the unknowable future, which will transform society, but that is not something new: The future is always transforming society into something new. The question is: How will you deal with it?

Is that the question? I thought we were going to discuss the effects of the virus on society.

Are we not doing that? To really look at effects, you must understand causes, or at least, must understand the conditions from which the effects spring. And that is your society as it is.

We confine ourselves to America, given that you are an American with only second-hand experience of the rest of the world. Non-Americans ought to be able to apply our words to their situation.

Do you think your present situation is sustainable? (These are to be seen as rhetorical questions, yet real ones.)

Does a society that has as its unstated operative principle “Every man for himself” have a longer shelf-life than one that says “One for all and all for one”?

If technology produces wealth, but does not automatically distribute that wealth – who does? The “invisible hand” that older economists believed in? The dictatorship of the proletariat? Representative democracy? Some technocracy or government of “wise men” as has been suggested from time to time?

If some starve and others overeat, is that the ordained natural order of things or is it bad management or is it malicious indifference?

If the world’s intellectual and emotional treasures can be enjoyed only after a certain amount of preparation, does a society have a vested interest in seeing that its members have that preparation? Does it have a moral responsibility to provide it?

If “without vision, the people perish,” can vision be imposed? Can it be fostered? Transmitted? engendered?

Now, we have taken up your hour, and we know you feel we didn’t get very far, but we assure you, that glimpse at your near history is important for perspective. Your present moment always rests upon the near past, which itself rested upon its near past. It’s dangerous and futile to move in swinging, when you don’t know what has been going on. You can’t correct injustice or inefficiency or blindness by decreeing them outlawed. You don’t repair motors by tightening or loosening bolts at random. You don’t grow crops by good intent and no understanding of what they need. You know all this, but occasionally it is worth restating.

The meta-message today, that we didn’t get to, seems like “Your society is a mess, and it’s going to take something huge to shake up things enough that you start to fix it.”

That might be true in its own terms, but we remind you, the individual is realer than the abstraction you call society. We have to deal with abstractions to make larger statements, but that doesn’t make them realer than they are. This is about you, as individuals who are also communities. It is not about society except secondarily.

That’s my whole career here, as it turns out.

Could we have told you at the beginning, when you didn’t have the terms or the context?

No, I understand that’s always the constraint you work under: How much can we understand at any given time on any given subject.

Fortunately, in each case a person’s own non-3D component will help.

Well, this is 70 minutes. I could continue, but I get that we’re at a place to pause anyway.

We are. Thank you for your attention. We will continue when it is convenient.

Our thanks as always.

 

This, from a year and a half ago, seems as important to day as it did then. What’s the use of allowing our past attitudes to dictate the limits of our present and future?

Friday, February 12, 2021

5:05 a.m. (Dad’s 106th, Mr. Lincoln’s 212th.) Gentlemen? Anything for us on this white morning?

We trust you aren’t asking for a snow shovel.

Anything you have.

We merely say, don’t assume a stance toward “external” affairs that makes a distinction between external and internal that is not real. We don’t care what you choose, whether activism, isolation, intelligent following of the news, specialization, “sinfully strolling from book to book,” whatever – only, whatever your stance toward the world around you, know that it is also the world within you. This is (to anticipate you) so easily said, and is understood only with such difficulty. And even when understood, it may be very difficult for you to make it real to yourself; very difficult to live.

The good news, though, is: It may not. There’s no telling, till you get to the “living it” part.

Well, I think of “living in faith,” how impossible that seems (when seen abstractly) and yet how easy it proves to be once you pass through a certain door – if you can find the door; if you can bring yourself to pass through it.

A reasonable analogy. One cannot quite choose an attitude, so in that sense one cannot choose the gift of faith, the gift of seeing the world whole. And yet, at the same time, it is true that one can choose a set of values to live, and living those values can bring one to a place in which the sought-for door becomes obvious, and attainable, and even in a sense inevitable.

That is where your freedom to choose lies: your choice of what values you are going to live. It is true, your background will limit your choices initially; it is up to you to move from that background in a chosen direction.

It is also true that some people’s background will make it impossible that they should ever get to a place that is easy for another, but to say this is merely to say that everyone’s path is different. We would say, don’t allow intellectual and theoretical objections to get in the way of your recognizing that you always have all the freedom you need, indeed all the freedom you can handle. Many actors play victims as a role, just as many play villains. But there is a difference between actor and role, and we would say it is a difference in reality. An actor is realer than the role s/he plays. You may hark back to our explanations in what was to  be a book, Only Somewhat Real. Your objective could be stated: Become the realest “you” possible. To say that is the same as to say, encompass as many of your possibilities as possible, or to say, become fully conscious, or to say, live in faith and without fear, or to say reduce your barriers within yourselves and between yourself and others. It’s all the same process, all the same progress.

It is so simple conceptually.

Now you say, but it isn’t easy. And to that we say, What would you do with “easy”? Easy would be boring, would it not? A grown-up person doesn’t usually get any great thrill from sliding on a child’s sliding board.

Name any skill you enjoy employing and we will tell you two things about it: It took work to learn it (and there’s always more to learn), and, the harder the task the greater the inherent satisfaction.

And life itself is such a skill.

Inherently. Of course, nobody can force you to practice; nobody can convince you (should you need convincing) that the effort to learn will return great satisfaction by and by.

If you will take on faith our statement that external and internal are integrally, inseparably, linked, then you will see that life makes sense and cannot not make sense, only, it requires that you recognize what you’re seeing. Just as you are largely mysteries to yourselves, so the world is largely mystery to you, and for the same reason. Just as the external seems intractable, so your own internal struggles may seem endless and unresolvable. Yet, internal and external, life goes on. It always goes on.

This is a short statement, but enough for the moment, lest we blur the point.

Okay, thanks as always. Till next time.

 

Thursday, July 28, 2022

7:35 a.m. I can see the appeal of rereading old journals looking for tips on the process and practicalities and implications of 3D/non-3D communication. I finished making notes from January, 2021 yesterday – only four notes, but a reminder of a very medically challenging month. More to the point than “externals,” though, was the reminder of where I was in my thinking and responding. I see that if I proceed in just the right way, this may be an entertainment and an education rather than a chore. Wish I’d realized that, decades ago, but things don’t sink in until they sink in.

So, guys, more today, or do I go my merry way? I know, I know, my choice – but do you have a preference?

To restate that, you are really in effect asking if “the times” have brought something to the top of the stack. Sometimes that happens, and we nudge you, lest the opportunity pass unnoticed. In such cases, you perceive us as having something we want to say. That’s true and not quite true, as hopefully these few words will illustrate.

Interesting. A nuance, but an interesting one. And of course sometimes you have begun an exposition and you preserve continuity, lest the day-to-day distract me.

That too.

And, I realize, we have a few things queued up, if I can find the sheets I printed out. Okay, here are four people’s emails, three of them from the 15^th. Can we start with Martha’s (given that this is her birthday today)?

[Martha: In our small group yesterday we talked about how to live as though the things we see are only somewhat real, how to live without guilt and how to avoid habitual superstitious actions.]

But the gist of her email is what you do not cite, to wit: “It’s the getting from here to there that’s the crux of the issue.”

Well, respond to whatever part of it calls to you.

The answer to making any knowledge real, in advance of the experience which is the only way to bring it into your being, is faith, faith as the necessary halfway-house that will let you pull yourselves into the reality you wish to live in.

Of course, this does not mean, “Click your heels three times and say there’s no place like home.” It does not mean, “It’s all a matter of your conscious choice, and therefore if you are somewhere you’d rather not be, it’s all your own fault.” It is magic, but not that idea of magic.

I’m aware that you’ve said all this before. I suppose you get tired of telling us the same things, over and over again.

Actually, that doesn’t happen, and you know why.

Yes, as we write that, I do. (1) We are never the same person any two times running; (2) “The times” are always different, allowing and inhibiting different combinations of expression. (3) The shared subjectivity’s pop-up stack is also always different. So, every time is different in all three respects, either slightly or radically, and so repetition is also reframing.

Yes, exactly. Well done.

Well, you’re in a good mood today!

If you’d prefer, we could criticize.

No, that’s all right. So, about faith. Having restated what you don’t mean, perhaps restate what you do mean?

In your time, and for quite a while now, the word “faith” has been, in effect, privatized by religious terminology. It has come to seem like “blind faith,” or “faith despite lack of evidence,” or even “faith in preference to evidence, in defiance of evidence.” All these unconscious and semi-conscious associations make it hard for some to realize that faith is simply what your childhood religious instruction said it was: belief in the existence of the unseen.

I’m not sure it was presented that way.

You can look it up, but it doesn’t matter. Faith is listening to your non-rational conviction about the way things are. And yes, as we can hear you realizing, there’s more to be said on the subject.

Well, yes. If somebody has threads insisting that the world is meaningless, or is a trap, or is a tragedy – or whatever – that worldview is going seem to be self-evident, and the result will be that the person will have faith in something they don’t want to be true. As you said, we don’t have a saying that “It’s too bad to be true.” Forebodings of bad news carry their own conviction.

And the result is a sort of trap. But let’s not leave it at that. Some bullets called for, we think:

• If you feel that the world is a certain way, you will tend to act as if it were so. That’s only natural.
• But such actions reinforce the conviction! If you “know” the world is not a safe place, if you “know” that “they” are out to get you, and you act to defend yourself from that reality, you thereby reinforce that reality.
• Faith, thus, is itself a neutral tool. It may reenforce your convictions in any direction. That is, it may be used to constrict your horizons, quite as easily as to expand them.
• The way out of the self-reinforcing feedback loop is to believe what you don’t yet know from experience, but feel in your heart is true. And this is the positive use of faith. This is how you will pull yourself into the reality you prefer.

Only, “Which you?’ As usual.

Well, yes, “which you,” but also, which needs?

Ah.

Perhaps spell out your new understanding, and we will correct if need be.

I get that we sometimes forget to associate our current position with our deeper currents. (Hold on a sec, let me refocus.)

That is, we always want every moment to be smooth, productive, pleasant, whatever, and it is easy for us to forget that we are also (always) in media res. We – no less than the shared subjectivity of which we are a part – always have unfinished business. Our various strands often push conflicting agendas. “The times” often insist that we deal with this or that bit of deferred maintenance. So it isn’t automatic to move to where we want to be.

It is the result of continual second-tier decisions that do not cancel each other out, but reinforce each other.

“Righteous persistence brings reward.”

It does, and the reward is not what you want (or think you want) but what you become. Intend long enough, consistently enough, with confidence that life will give you what you need, and you will find yourself on the other side of that invisible boundary Thoreau mentioned. Rather than a miraculous overnight sea-change, you will likely realize that what you are now, you have been wanting to become. It is miraculous; it is mundane. Both; neither. But that’s really what faith is all about. It is living as if your highest instincts are true; as if you have a right to become what you want to become; as if the universe knows what it is doing. And one day you realize there isn’t any need for you to live “as if” because your life now makes it obvious that the possibility was there all along, only it required that you and the times be strongly in alignment.

Wait, that sounds like you’re saying we can’t necessarily have what we want to become until some external X happens.

Isn’t that your experience of life? But the key is to remember that internal and external are the same thing. If you can’t know that today, believe it, however tentatively, over enough time, and you will be pulled into what you want to be, what you want to live.

Our thanks for this, as usual. Our theme?

“Faith,” surely.

Maybe, “Faith and X,” whatever X would be?

“The practicalities of living in faith,” maybe.

How about, “Using faith.”

Fine with us.

Till next time, then.

 

Wednesday, July 27, 2022

6:20 a.m. Gentlemen, words of wisdom?

You have reread your communications from January through June, and in a few days you can have caught up and can reach back a few months – all last year, say – and continue in that way as long as you wish. You are pretty effortlessly accumulating notes on the practicalities of communicating in this fashion, merely by collecting remarks we have thrown in as asides. If you edit them into a coherent body of tips, you will have accomplished something that people will find useful and perhaps entertaining, without much effort, relatively speaking.

So I should stop worrying about disinterring stuff.

Well, your example will show others how to do it, depending upon the subject they find of interest. Every person would group things differently, so they would each come up with something unique.

Ideally, we’d put it all on the web as one massive file, so people could do a search.

If that would work, you could do it for yourself. That would be a false efficiency.

Today’s theme, I take it?

It may be; let’s find out. Or maybe we say a few words and it runs into the sand.

A sus ordenes.

In re-reading your printed conversations, you had in mind to find anything touching upon practical aspects of communicating 3D to non-3D, and this is happening. But other things are happening in the process, you being about half aware of them. Speaking of half-aware, your switches? This will come across easier if you are more present.

Okay. Setting my intent for maximum focus, receptivity, clarity, presence. Go ahead.

There is a right way and at least one wrong way to do anything. The right way will confer unexpected benefits, the wrong ways will bring with them friction, slippage, resistance, incomprehension. You know this, as a practical matter: It shows up in your lives in anything you do.

Sure. If we’re loving what we’re doing, it goes smoothly. We tend to lose track of time. We are right there, and it is a pleasure.

And if you do a thing under coercion (even if it is your own imposed coercion), all sorts of unpleasant and undesirable side-effects manifest. Plus, you don’t do as good a job. Even carrying stone in a wheelbarrow can be done a right way or a wrong way, and the attitude you bring to it will manifest. How could it not? We repeat: Inner and outer worlds are the same thing. So how could you have concord in one and discord in the other?

I’d have to think about it, but I’d say that happens sometimes.

No, that’s appearance. You may be more aware of one and less aware of the other, and so you don’t see it accurately.

All right, I’ll tentatively give you that.

So, specifically, if you are re-reading so much material and allow yourself to be oppressed by the sheer weight of millions of words to be re-read, you are going to tend to press, to try to get through it faster, to skim, and scan, and not give anything you read time to sink in.

Millions? Well, let’s see, just for my own amusement. Let’s say I talk to you 250 times a year, for 25 years, and let’s say we get 1200 words per session. Holy cow, that’s seven million words. Way more than I thought it would come to.

So now you are faced with the task (self-imposed, but still, a task) of re-reading seven million words, to see what’s there. How do you respond? With overwhelm? With exhilaration? With a sort of grim determination? With despair?

I get the point: The situation doesn’t change. The variable is the attitude I bring to it.

Of course. But that isn’t really the point we’re angling toward. We wish to point you toward an awareness of side-effects you haven’t really considered. And, even those you have considered, others may not have considered in terms of their own tasks, self-imposed or otherwise.

(I just detoured to check my math, but it still comes to 250 days x 1200 words = 300,000 words per year, or six million in 20 years, 7,500,000 in 25 years. It’s still a staggering figure, probably a little undercounted, if anything. No wonder it’s so intimidating a prospect, re-reading it all! Thoreau’s 24 years of saved journals came to a couple of million words, and that’s a lot of words to go through; I’ve only done it once.)

Okay, side-effects?

What is the biggest defining condition of 3D existence? Note, we don’t say “obstacle” or “drawback.” Like anything, it may be seen in positive or negative context.

I know what you’re getting at. It is the separation of the one present moment from all the rest of our lives past or future. Because of that, we can’t experience our lives as all one thing, but more as now v. all other moments.

Hence, your need for reminders. Of course not just you as one person; you as, all of you.

So my re-reading past journal entries would serve as reminder of who I have been, and rereading past conversations would remind me of who we have been, in relation to one another, quite as much as what we have been talking about.

Certainly. If you were to go through your 145 journals since age 20 concentrating on any one subject, they could serve as a thread along which you string beads of memory. Only, what you concentrate on tends to take on exaggerated importance, by leading you to overlook other aspects that may be integrally connected to the thing you have your eyes on.

Isn’t that somewhat circular? I’d be concentrating on something because it interested me. Why did it interest me in the first place?

That is the nature of feedback loops, yes. What you concentrate on tends to deepen in importance to you. Where is the chicken, where the egg? But regardless which is cause and which is effect (and surely you can see that is pretty much a meaningless distinction), the fact remains: What you concentrate on tends to wash out other things. That’s just the way it is.

And so –?

And so one unanticipated side-effect of such research is the connections you will make in your mind now that you might not have made – might not have been able to make – earlier. So, keep your peripheral vision functioning while you go poking into our discussions.

Now, I deliberately decided not to make notes on any subject but your hints about guidance, lest the project overwhelm me. Given that I’m not going to go back yet again after I finish this scan (assuming I even do finish), I guess that means any other topics will have to be found by others as they are led to explore.

Nothing wrong with that. You can only do what you can do, and anyway you won’t always be the best person to collect information on various subjects.

And if it is never collected, well, we put it out there, anyway. We did what we could do.

One can always do better, or worse. But of course that begs the question of what “better” and “worse” mean.

Looking back, I seem to see that you and I have been holding two different conversations, that only touch occasionally.

We’re smiling. You think that’s the first time? Yes, our intent was to advise you to enjoy your re-reading, and not let yourself think you have to work now, enjoy later.

With all that many words to re-read, I don’t see how there can be a later.

Well, that’s our point. Enjoy the moment.

So today’s theme is what, “Carpe diem”?

We’re tempted to ay, “Carpe verbum.” But, better, something like “work and attitude.”

I don’t like that much. I know what you want, but that doesn’t do it.

“It’s all in how you go about it”?

That’s better, actually.

How about, “The right way and the wrong way to work”?

Yes, I think that gets it. Our thanks as always.