Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

Tuesday. July 26, 2022

6 a.m. I get that you may wish to continue on communication and choice.

Set your momentary-preference switches.

Interesting way to describe them. Okay, setting for maximum focus, receptivity, clarity, presence. All yours.

It was a new thought to you, that there can be too much communication between 3D and non-3D components. But if you will look at the world around you, it should be obvious that not everybody values such communication. What may not be so obvious immediately is that not everyone can afford such close communication.

I can’t see how that could be. Wouldn’t our non-3D know everything about us, moment by moment?

Non-3D knowing is not the same thing as 3D/non-3D communication.

Ah. As in, for instance, someone with a guilty conscience?

That’s one example. Or someone whose experience of the world is, by design, focused on 3D and not on beyond-3D matters. Sam Spade doesn’t have a lot of time for introspection of this sort. Soldiers in battle don’t; there are many kinds of lives that are cognizant of only 3D realities, for a good reason.

I’ll give you this: You’re always ready to contradict the drift of everything you’ve given us over the years.

It appears to be a contradiction. But in fact it is not contradiction but expansion. Until recently we concentrated on people who could and wanted to and therefore in a sense needed to learn how to get into closer contact with this other part of themselves. But it is important that you remember that such people are in the minority, for many reasons. They constitute an important minority, and their example (that is, their living out such increased connection) will help open the way for others to come. But most people experience 3D as an isolated realm, for a reason.

I thought this was going to change, that we would be walking around knowing that we are connected.

You do know how to distinguish the future tense from the present tense?

Very funny. So let me put it this way: I thought we were learning how to live connected so as to help others learn to do the same thing.

Surely you can distinguish between end-result and intermediate process. At least, you can do it when you slow down.

All right. So what is your point here?

For one thing, a reminder that one size never fits all. Everyone’s life is a unique puzzle to be solved, a unique problem to be worked. The tools for one job may be just the wrong tools for another job.

Then, don’t let yourselves fall into the unconscious assumption that people who live connected are somehow morally or even mentally superior to people who don’t. One more time: You never have the data. You can never judge another’s life as a whole, even if you have to judge its results in the 3D world.

Well, I guess Hemingway’s life would have taught me that.

Yes, because you got a glimpse of his internal struggles. Your own Catholic background gave you insight into guilt and repression of memories and rewriting of history. Your reading of some pretty far-out criticisms of what people took Hemingway’s inner reality to be showed you (reminded you) how dangerous it is to condemn, given how hard it is to understand. And, if we may say so, more than anything, our own reframing of your reality showed you how to think of things in a way that made things clearer.

Starting with your saying, years ago – decades ago, now – that even the drunk who dies in the gutter may have succeeded in a difficult invisible task of holding things together.

We said more: We said that all of your lives are flowers, or fireworks, or works of art (choose your metaphor) and are unique, hence uniquely valuable. Well, you didn’t happen to think about it, but – thinking about it now, in this context – doesn’t it follow that people do not need to be in conscious connection with their non-3D in order to live worthwhile lives?

You’re right, I never thought about it that way. I was thinking of it as a race, I suppose, with leaders and trailers.

Even at that, someone may lead in one respect and trail in others. In fact, that is nearly always the case. You aren’t all Mark Spitzer.

He was an Olympic runner, I remember that much. Won six or seven golds, if I remember right. No idea who long ago, though.

Nor does it matter. How many writers are Hemingway? How many politicians are JFK or Churchill? How many would-be psychics are Jane Roberts or Edgar Cayce? And each of them, recognize, cast enormous shadows, necessarily. When you all pass through the pearly gates, don’t expect a winner’s circle, nor an awards ceremony.

Nor a booby prize, nor a ticket to hell.

Nor those. But it can be hard to remember: Regardless of your personal values, nobody is in the 3D world by accident, or as an afterthought, or as a necessary evil. It is often convenient for you to think so, but that is just one more effect of eating the apple from the Tree of Seeing Things as Good or Evil.

I do remember coming to the conclusion, years ago, that if someone had a visceral resistance to getting into closer touch with guidance, they should listen to it.

Life always knows better than any one life. Your guidance always has ways of pointing you in the best direction for you. And, it goes without saying (we hope!) that your non-3D never interferes with your free will, given that exercising your free decisions is what you are there to do.

Interesting, as always. Anything you want to add, to sum up?

We may not have made the point clearly enough: This is about more than conscious access to guidance. We are saying, even manifestations that may seem to you entirely negative are necessary, or they could not exist. Resist the temptation, always, to think that you are smarter than the universe, more moral than God. Do your daily best humbly and you will be doing all you need to do, all you are able to do.

Today’s theme?

Perhaps “Non-communication and choice.”

Perhaps. Our thanks as always.

 

Monday, July 25, 2022

5 a.m. Well, on Saturday I was pretty sure I’d found the answer to my dilemma. By the time I’d written out my idea and sent it around, I wasn’t so sure. And having seen some practical objections, I am even less so. All day yesterday, a sense of evasion, as I read or did other things, rather than give more thought to the matter. And once more, a sense of fatigue, a sense of overwhelm, of futility. I know better now than to accept a mood as an accurate reflection of reality, but still, it’s there to be dealt with.

Setting switches: focus, receptivity, clarity, presence.

I suppose, my friends, that it is as simple as this (which didn’t occur to me until just this minute): I was forgetting to do any real work yesterday. No indexing of past sessions, no construction on, or even thought about, the novel. It’s funny how we forget the simplest things.

You got a little carried away, and first you put out the idea, then you waited for response, and in the process you slipped from receptivity into passivity.

Yes, that’s exactly what happened. When something of the sort happens, can’t you send me some sort of signal so that I can at least choose to be more aware, if I wish?

We could. Have you ever asked us to do so?

Huh. Well, that’s a thought.

Not that we’re putting it on you, but there is a line to be established, and what would be a helpful nudge to one would be interference, to another. You each draw your own lines of demarcation.

However, you know me well enough, I should think you’d know that I would treat a reminder as an opportunity, not an imposition.

Would we?

Well, go ahead. I’m not going to like this, am I? I’m smiling, but I’m serious too.

Wouldn’t it depend upon your mood, and the times, and your decision? Wouldn’t it be affected by whatever conflict was expressing among your strands? What makes you think you are a sitting bird? You are a moving target, always. You all are. Or do you never change your minds?

I guess we don’t usually think of our non-3D component having to deal with a changeable 3D reality. Obvious as you mention it.

De facto or by intent, you each set up ground rules for interaction with guidance. Some of you allow or encourage considerable interaction; some, little or none.

One man’s consultation is another man’s nagging, I suppose.

Not only that, but within each man or woman, it changes day by day, maybe moment by moment, so that what is welcomed at one time is shunned or resisted at another. It’s a matter of our intent interacting with your contemporary situation.

I think you mean, as our moods vary, so does our receptivity.

That’s what we said.

So – extrapolating – we can make second-tier decisions, long-term intent, that sets up the ground rules until we change them.

Yes, but let’s look at that a little more slowly.

Your theme song there, “A little more slowly.”

As yours is, “Hurry up and wait.”

Touché.

• You come into 3D as a certain mixture of traits, habits, desires, etc. That is the starting-point. You do not (could not) come in as blank slates, certain schools of philosophy to the contrary.
• That initial mixture changes as you live. You emphasize certain things, inhibit others. You make decisions as you go along.
• When you attain a certain level of self-awareness, you make second-tier decisions. “I want to be thus and so; I value this and that; I will move this way and not that way.”
• Second-tier decisions, like the rest of your 3D life, are subject to correction. You change your minds; you change your preferences. You no longer want to grow up to be rich or famous or whatever you start as wanting; now you want to be – whatever you now want to be. There is nothing wrong with changing your mind, and a good deal right with it, as we keep reminding you.
• Before you attain self-awareness, though, and in the times when your self-awareness flickers, you make second-tier decisions by default, often not realizing it. What is a bad habit, for instance, but a second-tier decision that your conscious awareness wouldn’t approve of and may experience only as an external force?

And such second-tier decisions, made unconsciously (speaking loosely), may largely determine our experience of the 3D. Of life. Of what we are, and what we can do, and why we are.

As usual, we do not pretend to tell you things that have never been known. We show you your everyday life from a different viewpoint. But isn’t our sketch accurate?

It is for me, certainly.

So, some experience non-3D nudges as helpful, others as threatening. Some forge cooperative partnerships, others form contentious ones, and others yet form flickering, intermittent ones. The possible permutations are as numerous as the kinds of person. No one model is right for everybody, or everybody would have adopted it, long since. But at the same time, “the times” make certain variations more likely and others less. This is one of the variable that in effect determine the characteristics of any particular version of “the times.”

Sure. What’s easy for one generation isn’t so easy earlier, or later. And what’s easy for one civilization isn’t so easy for others in the same time, because the civilization itself – society as a subset of the shared subjectivity – interacts differently with “the times” and produces a different result.

That is one more reason to have different civilizations at the same time.

Yes, I can see that.

So, if you wish a particular relationship with guidance – with your non-3D component – from this time hence, it is mostly a matter of making a second-tier decision. You are not the person of your past – even of your past self, your past habits – unless you consent to be.

We can always choose to be in greater communication.

Greater, or less. It is your choice. We have said all along, the purpose of life is for you to create yourself as you go along, by choosing, choosing, choosing. Even if you choose to disbelieve in the possibility of free choice, you are choosing. You cannot avoid choosing, if only by default, and your life will always show you the result of your choices to date. If you don’t like what you see, change your second-tier choice. How else could anything change?

Hard for me to see what the advantage would be, to be in less communication with our non-3D. It would be like having our arteries and veins less efficient in keeping our extremities nourished.

Yes, hard for you. But suppose your non-3D felt like the equivalent of neighbors quarreling loudly, nagging, throwing furniture around? Would tuning in to chaos help you life more abundantly?

Huh! That’s a new thought, that last.

“Life more abundantly” doesn’t always mean, “being in better touch with all parts of yourself.” For some it does, for others it doesn’t and couldn’t. Life more abundantly always means being alive in the present moment. But a sailor fighting a full gale doesn’t necessarily have a lot of time to ponder the mysteries of life! He may be very fully here, now, without consulting his non-3D. So if that association has snuck into your assumptions – that living here, now, always means being aware of your non-3D self – you might remember, one size does not fit all.

So call this, what? “Communication”?

“Communication and choice” might be better.

Okay. Thanks for all this; most interesting.

 

Friday, July 22, 2022

7:30 a.m. The vivid dream I awaken from put me in one place, but then opening the journal reminded me that yesterday was “Continuity (1)” and so presumably today is “Continuity (2),” although any continuity is clearly not going to be provided from this end! So, I look back at yesterday’s entry.

All right, gentlemen. Setting for maximum focus, clarity, receptivity, presence. (I see I messed up the order, not that I suppose it matters.) More on continuity?

Continuity is a subset of the larger theme of consciousness itself. In 3D, you have limited ability to hold various things in mind at any one time, and, similarly, over any length of time. Just as you can only physically carry so many pounds, or perform any physical task, so mentally you can only carry so much. The amount will differ by individual, but be it what it will, there will be a limit. Limitation is as inherent in 3D life as separation in time and space.

Only – I get that there’s a difference between theoretical limits and practical limits. We don’t do as well as we might.

Let’s put it another way; there’s always room for improvement. What is “life more abundantly” but a promise of improvement?

And that’s one of your continuing themes with us: You’re always encouraging us by saying, in effect, “You can do much better; you aren’t at the limit of your ability; this and that bad habit is getting in your way of living more fully.”

Yes we are, and that is a good summary. As you regain control of your reactions from various robots – as you heal from the effects of various traumas – as you become more effectively you and not just a sort of pale shadow of you – you do not so much change, as come into your own. You are already a much better (and a much worse) version of yourself than you commonly suppose. It is easier to grow into what you already are, than it would be to grow out to something different.

That isn’t yet clear, but I get the gist of it, I think. Much earlier, you said we change not by really changing, but by changing which parts of ourselves we express or inhibit. We lay down some strings and pick up others, and from the outside it appears that we have changed what we are; but it would be closer to say we have changed our internal balance, and this changes what we express.

Let’s look at continuity from a different point of view.

Bullets?

Initially. We can’t yet say whether we will say much that is new, or even much that is important, but as you know by now, a new take on things often begins in chaotic fashion. After you and we have explored it a little, structure will emerge, if it turns out to be worthwhile. But initially, the less structure and the more casting about, the better.

Something like plotting novels.

A similar process, yes. You wish to learn what seemingly unassociated things may productively be considered together. One way to do that is to cast your net widely. The way to cast your net widely is to surrender control of the process initially, so that the unsuspected may get past your own (unsuspected) gatekeepers. The second half of the creative process is the shaping of the materials – the pruning of the tree – but first you need to have something to prune.

So, bullets. Continuity from a different point of view.

• Continuity in any present moment implies continuity both in time and in space.
• That is, you have long-term vectors – perhaps life-long. These are not set up by any present moment. They are deeper in your begin.
• You have a different form of continuity in that you hold together various things of any present moment. You can’t admit everything into your consciousness. Everything you admit serves, de facto, to inhibit the admission of other things.

Be careful what we pay attention to.

Oh yes. And be careful to expand your mental space as best you can, that you may have room for more than a minimum.

• You live in the times you live in. As we have been saying, “the times” encourage the expression of certain energies and inhibit the expression of others. This is true not only generationally (the outer planets, so to speak), but moment by moment (the moon) and day to day or month by month (the inner planets). Yes, astrology is only a metaphor, so to speak, in that this is a symbolic representation and not a causality, but it is a very reassuring metaphor, once you realize that it works: You cannot then think your lives (or anyone’s) chaos, but pattern.
• Thus, your own makeup; the unfinished business of the shared subjectivity; “the times”: three features affecting the quality of your life, always.

I get that you are saying something here about our long-term patterns and our short-term patterns, but I don’t quite have it yet.

Life is change. Life never stands still. No matter how stuck someone may feel, they are “stuck” in a continually moving environment. Thus, their “stuckness” is not static, but is a canoe in a river, temporarily jammed by some obstruction – rocks,, debris, whatever – and prevented from flowing with the river. Even if the canoe never does move again, it is not “stuck” in relation to life, because life flows, and ceasing to flow is altering your position to the flowing forces around your life.

I get that. Looked at from life’s point of view, rather than from our individual point of view, our stuckness is a continuity of a different kind. Hard to put into words, though. (I see as I try to do so!)

If you flow, or if you are stuck, in either case your personal canoe does not move or jam the life around it. Therefore, you are always in “the times” – you are never in your stuck moment, for the moments don’t get stuck.

We’re still not expressing this simple point very well.

We’re getting there, though. You know by now, new points sometimes require quite extensive exposition before they emerge in their simplicity. There is advantage to this, by the way: What is simple for one may require strenuous mental acrobatics from another. Taking excessive time to spell things out may be what helps some “get it” who otherwise would abandon it in frustration.

Can we try for a simple summary statement?

You think we are ready to wrap things up, but we could continue along this line for some time, and perhaps we will. Very well:

• You with your personal heredity are one factor in your life. This is considering you as if you were individual.
• You as part of everything are another factor. You experience this as the shared subjectivity. It is the part of you of which you are not conscious, expressed partly through the common feelings of everyone, living and formerly living in 3D.
• You as a child also of the times you live are a third factor. It is “the times” that govern what can and cannot be easily expressed.

I get: The positive, the negative, and the reconciling factor, the three elements that constitute anything in 3D reality.

Continuity means different things in the context of different things. You as personal will experience it as immediate stimulus and response. You as extended part of everybody will experience it as changing over time. You as fly in amber will experience it as the limits to choice.

Our thanks as always, and I will be interested to see if the theme carries on. This is “Continuity (2),” I presume.

Yes.

Till next time, then.

 

Thursday, July 21, 2022

8:25 a.m. Okay, guys, ready if you are. FRCP.

[The drumming question yesterday was, “How can we connect with earth energies in a productive way?”

[I got:

[Be willing to forward the greater good, not just your idea of the greater good. Be willing to do or think or feel things that “don’t make sense,” and see what happens. Trust that you and the world are one; trust your instincts. Learn from what happens. Don’t think it’s up to you to make the sun come up.]

What you got during yesterday’s drumming is not to be heard and forgotten, but borne in mind. Not that we are saying you don’t, just that it is easy to forget.

Continuity is terribly hard for me. I suppose that is why I have kept writing in journals all my adult life. It wasn’t so much what I was writing as that I was writing. But still, so much of my life is a disconnected series of islands. I get the sense that this is not everyone’s experience.

No, but it is common enough among a certain type of person. Overhead, you might call it, or a cost of doing business in just the way you live.

A connection between living in the moment and a sort of on-going amnesia? Or, that isn’t right, a connection not with amnesia but a very unusual memory functioning?

There is little point in discussing your “coin has to drop into the slot for the memory to be accessible” experience. Some people, observing you, have concluded that you just don’t pay attention. Others, that you are in the early stages of Alzheimer’s.

Which would be more convincing as a diagnosis, if it hasn’t been going on for so many decades, and/or hadn’t been so uneven.

You had forgotten until just now, but Rita asked us about your memory problem nearly 20 years ago, and we said you don’t have a memory problem, you had an access problem.

I don’t remember any practical follow-up.

From our end, the practical follow-up was to let us sketch a model of memory between non-3D (where memories reside) and 3D (where specific brain cells may provide access to certain of those memories).

That must have been in the 2004 sessions in the black box, which I never transcribed, I think. I sort of remember Rita asking it and Skip later saying that he had expected a different answer from what we got.

In any case, the important thing is that the way anyone experiences interaction with the 3D would be different, either noticeably or not so noticeably. But “different” clearly can’t mean “malfunctioning,” unless you believe that everybody else is out of step.

Isn’t that what we usually do conclude?

Yes, if you don’t mind being convicted out of your own mouth.

I’m used to it. But let’s talk more about continuity as a problem. I imagine it is everybody’s problem, to varying degrees.

You’ve heard us say it, many times. It is inherent in 3D conditions, the relative isolation of the current moment from those beforehand. It is what allows you to live.

What was the side-trail I just glimpsed as we wrote that?

We won’t go into it, lest we lose what we intend to get across, but it was an insight that people who experience the present as too intermingled with other times may have a very hard time staying oriented in the world.

ADHD? Autism?

As we said, we don’t want to go into it, at the moment. Perhaps some other time.

So – continuity?

Your continuity – anyone’s – proceeds along lines of interest. This will be obvious after a moment’s thought.

If I were interested in cars, I’d remember every car I ever owned?

That’s a different form of continuity of interest. Call it

Sorry, lost the thread.

You began to worry about why you find the journal’s blue lines harder to follow.

Well, I did, because I do. I’ve been noticing it for some time now. But let’s stay on track. If possible!

In your specific case, you are vitally interested in certain aspects of history, for reasons you never really investigated, because the fact of the interest was so self-evident.

And others might have a passion for something from an early age, and consider that passion a part of who they were.

Yes. People with a passion that is easily converted into a way to make a living call it a vocation – literally, a calling. But it is very possible – common, in fact – to have a vocation that has nothing to do with career. Stamp collectors, for instance, or any hobbyists whose hobby is a passion, fit into the example. There is no money, no prestige, no creativity, perhaps, in collecting stamps. (That is, there need not be; certainly there can be.) But the passion may nonetheless be powerful and satisfying.

Our point is that – in yet another realm – your lives are not primarily rational, despite what the social sciences may think. Primarily, you express what you are, and most of that may be entirely unknown to you. Obsessive interests are one manifestation of the fact, and of course, there is nothing wrong with the fact! Life is not malfunctioning. You as individuals or as collectives are not malfunctioning. You are expressing your nature as 3D allows it to express. How can this be “wrong” or mistaken?

Now, you see, you may experience great difficulties in remembering something that happened just yesterday, yet remember clearly some historical fact or set of facts. You may lose sight of people in your life – perhaps for months or years at a time – yet be genuinely glad when they resurface, and perhaps surprised that you could have let them slip out of sight. Similarly, you may be deeply interested in a given subject (mental, physical, whatever) and then wake up, so to speak, and realize that you haven’t thought about it in years. What kind of continuity is that? Is any of that?

Yet I get that you are going to say that it is.

You must remember that you are always on the move. Continuity comes via your non-3D component that is not being pulled and hauled to every latest moment.

You’re going to need to explain that. I know you’re meaning one thing, but the words themselves are saying something else.

Suggesting, you mean. Very well, your non-3D is and is not being pulled and hauled to every new present moment you experience in 3D. It is, because it is tethered to your experiences, and you can only experience life sequentially. It is not, in that your non-3D does not identify with each moment in the way your 3D mind tends to do. In saying that the mind is in the non-3D and the brain, only, in 3D, we are guilty of distorting things a little. Think of your 3D functioning as a local terminal of a larger computer, and you may get a better sense of it.

And I get that now you are looking at the subject from yet another viewpoint.

We are adding in the concept of “the times,” for just as “the times” allow certain kinds of energy to enter 3D and inhibit others, so they interact with your daily life. Surely this is obvious once stated. The energies activated in the early 1940s were not all about World War II, but they did all share certain characteristics. Say, they all had to pass through certain filters. In not taking into account the fact that every day is different, psychology overlooks a key variable in your lives. Conscious and unconscious continually interact, but the invisible third player is “the times,” limiting what kind of things may pass across the filter.

So if we move from A to B in our lives, partly it is our own conscious or unconscious decision, but partly it is the times.

Don’t you experience life that way, once you see it? You can’t experience life in just the way you did in the 1990s, no matter how clear your memories or how consistent your intent. You are, in important ways, not that person, and also you do continue to be that person.

A psychoactive drug may allow us to relive those moments.

It is the difference between snapshots, even vivid ones, and the thing itself. A person reliving a moment is reliving it in the present moment, which by definition is a later point in his or her life.

Call this one “Continuity”?

Perhaps “Continuity (1)” as there is much more to say. That is not a guarantee that it will get said, of course.

Our thanks as always for all this.

 

Monday, July 18, 2022

1:40 a.m. Endless escaping/being-chased dream, including fleeing to Monticello that was on the crest of a mountain range, getting through the building, out a window – multiple screens – past a dog that turned out to be friendly, and all. It was grueling, even dreaming it. Familiar, too. I’ve had versions of it before. It ended okay, but it was exhausting and I don’t know what it was about.

7:30 a.m. Guys? Anything special in mind?

Just – like Louis in “Casablanca” – take what comes.

Well, mostly I do, with a certain amount of grumbling. But some things do make me morose. I see that Sharon and Jerry Hurtley-Durand, of the old Voyagers list that I sort of rejointed (“sort of,” because clearly I don’t receive all the posts), moved to Russia a couple of years ago. This set off a chain of associations:

• America no longer the land of promise.
• Russia the hope of the world, according to Cayce, once it shed communism.
• The long downhill slide, accelerating every year, since the still-unacknowledged coup of 1963.
• How the plotters thought of JFK as the danger to America, when it was them.
• A stray thought – that I could still, almost, move to Spain.
• Reminders of the history of the United States that I had started, working backwards from the year 2000. Truly, in a way, that year was America at the pinnacle. But, more clearly every day, the pinnacle was a moving target.

Now, I know full well that life is more than the 3D, and I know that the 3D is more than America, and that America is more than my idea of it or my wishes for it. Still, these are hard times to live through. Some newsman wrote his memoirs some years ago (which I haven’t read) and called the book I’ve Seen the Best of It, and I think many of us have to agree. There could still be a miracle of regeneration, but that’s what it would require, a miracle.

And here you are, plopped into this time and place by accident.

All right, that got more than a grin, a slight chuckle. Even so, as they said in “Ordinary People,” “I’ll let you in on a little secret, kiddo: Feelings don’t always tickle.”

Like we don’t know that?

Well, I did say, with a certain amount of grumbling. So make of this what you can.

What do you suppose your dream was about?

I don’t know. The only thing I’m being chased by is the calendar. Every day, one more day to get thorough as best I can. Nothing new there.

Isn’t there a certain quality of endurance in life as you are living it?

Was I running from nothing? It didn’t feel like nothing, though it is true that the pursuing dog turned out to be friendly, or at least neutral.

Why was Monticello (the building) on a sharp Western mountainside, rather than a gentle Eastern one?

I thought it was your job to tell me.

It is our job to help you see, not the same thing at all.

Well, I suppose it gave it more of a frontier quality. Not “Old West” kind of frontier, but like, on the line between known and unknown, or perhaps between familiar and unfamiliar.

So pay attention to the stray thought!

Yes. As I was writing that, a thought came about the series on mind-altering drugs I started to watch.

And interrupted.

Deferred, let’s say.

To watch Roman Holiday again.

And enjoyed it.

No reason you shouldn’t. In fact, that’s part of the point here.

What is?

Season the message to taste: Either, “Do what you want to do,” or, “Long-term purpose does not get deflected by short-term decisions.”

8:15 a.m. Not a very good session. I am not very well centered. Shall we try again, or should I go on to other things? I know it’s my choice; I’m asking for an outside opinion.

Center.

FRCP. All right. (And yes, it is a different mind-space.)

You are on the edge of 3D and non-3D. all of you are. But being there, and realizing you are there, and keeping in mind that you are there, are three different things.

And the living while keeping it in mind is the exploring we are doing.

It is the frontier you are living on, put it that way. And Monticello on a high Western mountain with basically blank space beyond it, means what, to you?

Jefferson was endlessly creative, at a certain level. He was incessantly mentally active, perhaps fearing demons if he stopped, but in any case incessantly active. His personal life and political life – or, say, his inner life and outer – became inextricably connected, at first because he willed it, then because it had a logic of its own. So, a Monticello would be the residence of an explorer-in-place, call him. After all, Jefferson went to Europe, but he never went as far West or as far South as Washington did, for example. His mind ranged freely; his body, less so.

So it is with your fellow explorers who are learning, by living, how 3D and non-3D may be more closely woven together. That is real exploring, and it will ease the path for others not because the  journeys will have been publicized but because they will have been made.

Why was the dream overlain with a sense of exhaustion?

Do we need to answer that?

Wipe that smile off your face! No, I guess you don’t.

Dreams sometimes merely reflect your image to your conscious mind; they aren’t always reporting three-alarm fires.

In other words, just because you nag us, doesn’t mean we have to do anything about what you’re nagging us about.

No, in other words, not every message is a warning that you are about to fall off a cliff, any more than every message announces that you have just won a jackpot. Occasionally (in either case), yes; mostly no.

But bear in mind, Monticello became a world heritage spot. Jefferson became a world figure.  His private and public thoughts changed the 3D world, and, more, the non-3D world that informs the 3D world. What we are saying is that your life, his life, anyone’s life, is never as closed and separate as appearances suggest. Monticello may not be a resting place, but it should be encouragement.

I can imagine someone saying, “But Jefferson was a genius (particularly for a lawyer whose life was spent in politics) and is another order of being. There is no analogy.”

We can imagine someone saying, “But he held slaves and lived in comfort, so nothing else matters.” What would either view have to do with reality? You are each of your time; you participate in your time’s sins knowingly and unknowingly – and why should you expect to be exempt from the burden?

That isn’t how most people think of it.

Always easier to throw stones than to mind one’s own behavior.

Did we end up with a theme, here?

“Living uncomfortably on the frontier,” maybe?

I’ll have to think about it. Thanks, and till next time.

 

[Found this, thought I’d post it.]

A message from the total self

Thursday, March 10, 2022

5:10 a.m. Very well, gentlemen, I thought we might try something a little different today, and I don’t know how to go about it, or even if the idea makes sense. This morning, instead of a dialogue between you and me, I’d like to see if it can be steered not by me but by what Monroe called the total self. Is that possible? Let’s find out. Of course I’m aware that what I’m taking to be my bright idea may well be yours, or its.

The difference will be not in the means of exposition but in the choice of subject matter – the choice of contexts, one might say. Your first-person exchanges have served well to humanize the process. Perhaps now it is time to hint at how much farther people can go, once they get themselves up to speed.

You underestimate yourselves. You also overestimate yourselves. It cannot be helped; it is a concomitant of the 3D situation. But – knowing that you do so – you can (and might make a habit of it) correct for it. That is, not so much continually redefine yourselves, as look more carefully at who you think you are at any given moment, and compare it to external evidence. That is, am I fooling myself, am I pretending, am I missing things?

As in most of life, how you do this is as important as what you do. That is, do not be continually looking at your life wringing your hands, saying oh I should have done so and so, I ought to be thus and so, I wish I hadn’t done or not done this or that. Don’t lie in the dark and weep for your sins, as Whitman said. And don’t be awarding yourselves medals, either, or starting your own fan club dedicated to your ideal image of yourself.

Consciousness. Awareness. Actually living your life. That’s the goal. You can’t do it wrong, but you can always do it more, in one or another sense of the word. Whatever your situation, there is potential for more. More experience, or more satisfaction, or more wisdom, or more introspection, or more fumbling attempts to learn new things, or more outreach to other parts of yourself in this or other lives.

Understand: We are not exactly saying, “Excelsior!” We don’t mean you ought to live continually in a keyed-up nervous state. There is such a thing as a state of expectation that is calm, placid, deeply joyful. It is as available to you as any particular hell you might choose instead. We merely state that it is well for you to remember that it is available as a choice.

Remember, if you remember nothing else we say or have said or will say – you are loved! You are loved because you are worthy of being loved! You are loved not for what you do, or even for what you are, though it can look that way, but because love is to existence as oxygen is to your 3D body.

Let’s say that again, in what will seem a different way. “You are loved” might be restated as “you are love.” Love is what you are made of. It is the air you breathe, the blood flowing though your body, the thread of consciousness that you experience as “you.”

Therefore, anything in your life that leads toward love is going to feel natural and pleasant and in fact joyful. What leads away from love will feel grating and anxious. That’s all the orientation, all the clues, you need. It tells you what you are and how you want to be.

Does that mean that you can move entirely to the “love” end of the “love-fear” continuum? In practice, within 3D conditions, perhaps not. But isn’t it useful to have an infallible compass?

[Me again.] Whew. That came all in one fluent stream. (Fluent means streaming, of course. I’m fumbling for words here.) By the clock it took 22 minutes including my initial paragraph. But I think I’ll stop here. How much could we add to that? Anything more would be dilution, I think.

 

Sunday, July 17, 2022

6:45 a.m. Having difficult nights again. Tiresome. I did get through February’s entries looking for tips on communication, though. Just as predicted, as soon as I began to press, I began to resent it. When I reverted to doing it when I felt like it, the interest in doing it returned.

Guys, do we do a session today, or provide retreads (or nothing) to our friends?

Your choice, always. Want to talk about Janus? [A short poem I wrote yesterday.]

Sure, why not?

Janus

More time for work

On what had been spoiled:

How fortunate!

—

But, so much time

Awaiting release:

So many days!

What about it?

It merely reflects your absorption with T.R. Reid’s book. [Confucius Lives Next Door]. You felt the Asian influence even as you coaxed the poem out of you, or out of the ether, however you prefer to think of it.

It captured my ambivalence, I thought. [The ancient Romans saw Janus as the god of beginnings and endings. He is depicted as having two faces, one looking forward, one backwards.] Surely many people have a similar ambivalence once they reach a certain aga. OT1H, you appreciate life in ways you perhaps could not, previously. OTOH, there’s the “Oh God, another day to get through” factor.

Yes. Not one, but both. It was perhaps to express such ambivalence what you were born into your circumstances.

I’m not sure where you’re going with that, but I heard the clash of cymbals, or the beating of the gong, or whatever, announcing the main event. Setting switches for maximum focus, receptivity, clarity, presence.

There are so many aspects to the question of the mechanism of life and renewed life. We cannot go about it in a systematic way – that is not your strength – but we can, and do, continually relate one thing to another, hoping to help people see in new contexts. So here is an example of the interplay between personal and shared subjectivities, between returned 3D life and specific aspects.

Ah, that’s why “work on what had been spoiled” inserted itself into my little poem.

Yes, but let’s go more slowly. (Have we ever advised you of that?)

Very funny. I was born running. It took time and other things to slow me down.

Nothing wrong with running; nothing wrong with stillness – but each in its proper place.

Yes, understood. And so –?

Bullets, perhaps, to help show relationships.

• After First Life, you are never again a blank slate. Always there are the results of previous decisions, previous situations.
• Even in First Life, you were not in effect a blank slate, for you brought into 3D life a set of proclivities, preferences, aptitudes, connections – if only via your non-3D connections – that in themselves began to generate the unfinished business that you would carry forward later.
• After your First Life, as we said, you deal with the results of your previous decisions.
• In whatever place and time you are alive, you find unfinished business belonging not to you in particular but to that place and time. If you are born into Japan in 1942, you are born into a country at war. If in 1952, a country at peace.
• You work out your own salvation (as the Buddhists put it) and you also participate in the working-out of the problems set by the times. You do this all your life, by the same actions, the same decisions. You are part of the world, be you never so reclusive.
• Remember that our shorthand term “unfinished business” does not imply a finish to the business. We mean, merely, the imbalances that present themselves. The end of unfinished business would be the end of the world. (That is, the end of 3D reality, not just planet Earth.) How likely do you think that is?

So, “work on what had been spoiled” means, “always room for improvement.”

It also means, no need to think you are only marking time. Every day is a gift, even if sometimes a difficult gift. Every day offers opportunity to be a little better, a little more whatever it is what you want to become. None of it is waste-material.

No day is to be dreaded, no day is to be wasted.

More like, no day can be wasted, for even negative choices have an effect, even negligence produces results. But yes, certainly no day is to be dreaded – only, we need to split a hair. What the day contains, what it brings, what it threatens, may well be dreaded. A prisoner of war facing torture, a terminal cancer patient facing another day of physical agony, someone who suffered an emotional trauma (the loss of a child, say) who anticipates further suffering – yes, they may well dread what the day may bring. But!

But?

But it is a different thing to dread the coming of the day per se.  You may have to struggle not to drown in the river, but it is the river that is carrying your forward.

I don’t think that came out very clearly.

Even if your life is filled with blessings, or is filled with torment, or is filled with placid boredom, you always can choose (and will choose, even if only by default) whether you will trust life, or not; accept what comes, or not; nourish a sense of grievance, or not.

We can’t choose what our life brings to us, but we can choose how we will meet it.

Actually, in choosing, you do choose, indirectly, what your life will bring to you. It isn’t as simple as “Wish upon a star and your dreams will instantly come true,” or your 3D life would give you little traction. But persistently wishing upon a star will change your life.

Well, I have learned that it is easier to trust life than to assume that it was up to me to make the sun come up. I notice it comes up without my help.

In practical terms, what we have said is aimed at assisting people with their personal business; the fact that it thereby affects the shared subjectivity does not cease to be true, but one’s life is always more vivid than “the world out there.”

Thanks for all this. Theme?

“Janus,” perhaps, and you add a brief note for those to whom the word would mean nothing.

Okay. Till next time, then.