Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

[Going through past transcriptions, I came to this one, which seems extraordinarily important.]

Wednesday, January 12, 2022

5:15 a.m. Another variant of that same dream, being in an office with a computer, being totally unable to do the job I was being paid to do, and unable to figure out how to learn to do it. This time I was in a room in dad’s old farm building, and there was no one else around, but the essence was the same. I couldn’t do the job or begin to learn how to do it, though I was getting paid and my employer didn’t seem to notice. The helplessness, the guilt –

There was something too about my using someone’s reserved parking spot and I knew he was going to be mad – but then I sort of remembered he wasn’t coming in that day, or was he? I wanted to ask someone in the next room, but he was engaged in a conversation I didn’t interrupt.

I have had variants of this dream for so many years. Did it begin with my working at Newport News Shipbuilding? Did it begin earlier, with the dreams of not having finished high school, or college? It certainly is persistent. Not constant, but every so often, there it will be again.

A word, please, about those dreams.

As in, a sense of incompletion, or incompetence, inability to do what you are being paid to do? What do you need to be told about it?

The entirely inadequate preparation and lack of training or supervision or teamwork is striking if nothing else would be.

Leaving you feeling guilty. Why not concentrate on the sense of being entirely unsupported, out of your element, lost and isolated? No reason for guilt about any of that, so you don’t concentrate on it.

I guess I have concentrated on the aspect of my inability to do the job, my being paid under false pretenses.

But the level of support, the isolation, are equally important and, as we said, do not (or should not, theoretically) involve a sense of guilt.

So my sense of guilt is more central than the circumstances?

Isn’t that what persists in the dreams, whatever else changes?

Yes.

You could complain; instead you take the responsibility for it.

Interesting take on things. And I know we’re talking about my life in 3D, not just my work life.

Dreams are not necessarily about fixing something or compensating for something. Sometimes they are about showing what is there but may be not being seen by the 3D consciousness.

In effect, telling me it’s all right, that it isn’t my fault I can’t do the job?

We smile, though we are well aware that was not said in jest. No, more like telling you that the isolation and the not knowing what to do or how to do it are there; that you feel them even if you are or are not aware of it at any given time. And – maybe more important – that the sense of guilt is there, so you may deal with it.

How deal with it?

How does one deal with anything? Bring it to consciousness.

And reprogram the robots around the issue?

Guilt is a major unacknowledged theme in your life. If it happened, you feel guilty about it, no matter if it happened thousands of miles away, among people you have had nothing to do with. You felt guilty when John F. Kennedy was murdered! When you read of historical events. When you think of contemporary events, too. Do you wonder you have shut yourself off from active consideration of current affairs?

Does it have a positive side?

Not that we can see. It leads you to shrink your conscious awareness: What does that aid?

So why is it a major theme? And a continuing presence?

Maybe it isn’t specifically you. Maybe it is being conveyed along various strands. And maybe it would help others, not only yourself, if you were to actively fight against this easy acceptance of guilt.

I thought fighting against something was a good way to assure that it continues.

That’s a misunderstanding, rooted in language, which goes away if we rephrase it: Maybe it would help others as well as yourself if you began to consciously deliberately choose not to accept guilt.

That does have a different feel, true. If I hear you between the lines, you are saying this persistent unconscious or semi-conscious or quite conscious tinge of guilt distorts my view of who and what I am and what happens and has happened in my life.

That’s what we’re saying, yes. It stops you from seeing straight.

Since nothing happens without reason, I gather that dealing with this is one reason I was created.

We wouldn’t phrase it that way, but that is a true enough statement.

And guilt, and a propensity to feel guilt, must be one of those things that exist and have to be dealt with.

Understand, though, this isn’t about making you or anybody feel better. And it certainly isn’t about giving out free passes: “Do whatever you want, and it’s okay because it’s you doing it.” It is, as so often, about showing you how you are being prevented from living a fuller more satisfying life, and showing how to overcome the problem.

But have you shown how to overcome the problem? Realizing that we’re always feeling guilty is one thing. Disabling the robot that is producing that feeling is something else.

It isn’t any different from dealing with anything else in your life, positive or negative. Look at it, mull over it, see it, then go from there.

I’m gathering that this goes back to your image of us as smaller spheres contained within larger spheres, and emotions being the interface between what we know and don’t know about our fuller selves.

We are dealing with emotions as the product of interaction, rather than as the cause of the interaction.

And I am getting that this is not a private session but a public one. That’s asking a lot.

But not asking too much. How do you know what will strike deep helpful chords within others? It is in the baring of deep painful things that you help each other, if done in the right spirit.

You do realize, the fact that I am willing to let you talk me into such things is a huge implied compliment to you.

We realize that you value our friendship and cooperation (as we do yours) and you are sometimes willing to rely on our judgment over yours.

So – “Guilt”? “Dealing with guilt”?

Something like that, yes.

See you next time, then, and as usual, our thanks for all of this.

Wednesday, July 13, 2022

7:40 a.m. Starting to feel better. So, guys, how about a session, a public session I mean.

As a way of avoiding work?

I don’t think so. I think, actually, that I’ll stay in better health, talking with you on a regular basis, than letting it go. Looking back, we haven’t had a full session since Friday, and here we are at Wednesday. Our work on the novel is satisfying, but even those sessions weren’t more than a few pages at a time.

And here, you see, is how superstitions begin, and science. Let’s talk about causality.

Interesting. I could feel your sudden quickening of interest, like watching a cat or a dog suddenly perk up, their attention caught by something. I wouldn’t have expected that. I usually assume enthusiasm or quickening of interest comes from our end of the phone line.

If you ever do write your precis of our communication tips, you’ll be surprised at how your understanding of the process matured with experience and contemplation. A lot of mistaken preconceptions arise from the idea that it is us and you, rather than us and us, or you and you, however you prefer to think of it. Why should “we” be different from “you,” except insofar as that we are functioning on different turf, and so see and experience different mixtures of things than you do?

You said that at least as long ago as 2000 or so, when I was doing my final work on Muddy Tracks.

And you are still absorbing nuances of the statement. This is not meant to chastise you, BTW, but merely to point out again that one penetrates more and more deeply into any concept or experience, if one continues to look at it as one changes over time. It presents different facets, as you revolve it.

So, causality.

We should better say, superstition and science, for both are founded in the assumption that this leads to that. The difference between superstition and science is actually vanishingly small. One could almost say that the idea of science is itself a superstition, or, equally, that superstition is rooted in scientific principles.

Now that you have alienated all but the Liberal Arts majors –

We’re smiling too. Since you bring it up, indirectly, we might as well say that belief in – What shall we call it? Anti-science? Non-causality? – whatever we call it, belief that either superstition or science is the wrong road is in itself also an error. But – as so often – we need to go about this a little slower, a little more carefully.

So I need to set my switches, etc. Okay.

Does X lead to Y? If so, why? If not, why is Y so often seen following in the wake of X? That’s the crux of the discussion.

Science relies a lot upon mathematics to buttress and codify its observations. Superstition can’t do that, or anyway if it can (I don’t know how), it doesn’t.

Yes, but that is not the crucial difference – and connection – between superstition and science.

I hear that: It is assumptions about what matters (what’s real) and what doesn’t matter, or is not real.

And if you look carefully, you sill see that just as in your novel the wearers of the white hats and of black hats do not come neatly sorted out, but interpenetrate, so you will find scientifically-minded shamans, and scientists acting out of prejudice rather than data.

“Shamans” wasn’t the right word, but I didn’t want to interrupt the flow.

Yes, and good that you let us finish. The reason you couldn’t find – nor could we supply – the right noun is that it hardly exists. Neither magician nor shaman nor sorcerer nor any such word adequately represents someone using his or her powers of observation to draw conclusions, yet that is what we need to show.

Do I need to refocus, or is it the inherent difficulty of phrasing this thought that is the problem.

Bullets, then:

• Science gathers data, infers relationships, poses falsification experiments, and adjusts its tentative conclusions accordingly. Ideally, an endless process.
• Superstition makes no attempt to measure or weigh or test; it intuits, you might say – or, less charitably, it guesses – then sticks to whatever guess seems to prove out.
• But scientists as individuals are limited invisibly by their assumptions about reality. (As is “science” as received by the scientific mainstream.) A materialist science cannot, will not, take into account things it can’t even tentatively find reason to take seriously. Hence, scientists, and science as a whole, are apt to become superstitious about certain things.
• Similarly, the superstitious, not having systematic ways to falsify their conclusions, are apt to get stuck with someone’s past conclusions even if reality has changed.

You are saying, it seems to me, that one difference between science and superstition is in what each takes seriously.

Scientists don’t believe that black cats bring bad luck, nor that walking under ladders, however imprudent, will bring bad luck. But they equally may believe that reality ends at the boundary of the 3D, that the present moment is the only moment that exists; that “this life is all we have,” etc. Regardless of whether these beliefs are true or false, the way they are believed will determine whether the holder of those beliefs is doing so in a scientific or a superstitious manner.

Similarly, some things that are believed superstitiously are so, even if not understood. Again, the distinction is not in whether a given belief is true or false, but in how it is believed.

How did what I said originally lead us to this?

You were tentatively – actually, unconsciously – beginning to assume that your health may depend upon regular communication with us.

Clearly, an inverse relationship!

Very funny. But, you see, our point is, regardless of the truth or falsity of the specific conclusion, the way you come to it (almost behind your own back) sheds light on both the scientific mind-set and the superstitious mind-set. And this is why it is so –  as we have often said – that a new era’s thinking will retain some things that had been thought of as superstition, now seeing the truth in them.

Like the guy (Tip O’Neill?) who said that in politics there are no final victories, we’d have to say that in the search for truth there are no final certainties.

That does not mean that reality is whatever you want it to be, but it does mean, truth has so many facets, you can only see X number at a time, and the more firmly you hold to one, the more firmly you shut out others, equally valid. This is one reason among many why civilizations don’t last forever. Just as with individuals, death is the opportunity to change windows.

Thanks for all this. Till next time, then.

 

In the past week, three people sent me links to someone purporting to explain the cause and corrective action of our problems with government. The trouble is, they all contradict each other! And that is because they ascribe the wrong causes to our underlying problem. Here’s what I got from Hemingway (or what I take to have been Hemingway) a dozen years ago. It rings true to me. Perhaps it will to you.

 

 

Wednesday, May 5, 2010, 7:30 AM. I wake up, Papa, thinking about you and the Communists (having still been reading For Whom The Bell Tolls, of course). Is that what you want us to talk about next? If not, where would you like to go?

Do you really want an abstract disquisition about politics and government?

More, I’d like something on you and government.

You know my views. Government is a form of necessary protection racket. They have the ability to make you pay, and make you do things, and they use it as much as they dare. You have to have it, I’m not saying you don’t, because if you don’t have one protection racket, you’re going to have another one — but you don’t have to like it, and you certainly don’t have to see it as anything but what is. I mean, you don’t have to put a lot of hopes on it.

How are you going to win World War II, say, without a government? And not having a government won’t make you any safer — won’t keep you out of war. Just the opposite. You’re in the position of one man alone — with a family or others he needs to protect — surrounded by gangs. You can’t count on it, you can’t trust it, but you have to have it there.

That’s what Harry Morgan learned, part of it.

People don’t get what I was getting at with Harry — not that I did as good a job on it as I should have done, but I got distracted. The point about Harry isn’t that I was trying to jump on the “social relevance” bandwagon and become a New Dealer — or, even less, a revolutionary! The point was, Harry found that things were closing in. At one time he could function alone, in a sort of tribal way, just him and his family and community. They didn’t get anything special from the government and they didn’t owe anything special to the government, and they sure as hell didn’t confuse themselves by thinking the government was anything but an impersonal machine trying to milk them (and everybody else) of anything it could get. They lived their lives without paying much attention to the law one way or another. If some law made smuggling rum financially attractive, they noted the fact and did it if they could and didn’t consider themselves as bad men or as lawbreakers except in a technical sense. They didn’t figure that a thing was right or wrong according to how it was or wasn’t legal. They tried to do what they considered to be right, and fit it in as safely and profitably as they could, depending on conditions.

So, for instance, Harry kills one man in Cuba so he doesn’t have to kill the whole illegal cargo of men, and he figures to kill Eddy even though he likes him, just for his own safety, and he is just as glad when it proves to be unnecessary.  He did what he thought was right and necessary, you see. He didn’t take the law into consideration except as one risk among many.

You’ll notice that Max Perkins liked Harry Morgan “even though he was a bad man — almost because he was a bad man.” I doubt that Max ever thought it through, but [Perkins liked Morgan] because Harry wasn’t a bad man, he was a good, responsible, reliable, well-intentioned competent man; it’s just that the times had made his virtues look like vices. If Harry had been a cowboy in the old West, nobody would have thought him a bad man in any respect, and he wouldn’t have been. He would have been a self-sufficient man raising his family, providing for them, reliable to anything his community legitimately asked of him. And there wouldn’t have been government enough to molest him. Not like the 30s — let alone your times!

Harry had his rough side, sure. He was hard as a board and blunt as the side of a hammerhead. But that doesn’t have anything to do with right and wrong, or good and bad. That’s just the temperament he was born with. Fishermen in the Gulf couldn’t be soft, and Harry didn’t have any mannerisms to soften what he was, clean through.

Part nature myth! That’s how much people understood about what I was doing. Sitting there in New York or in some college town, they thought Harry Morgan was an impossible romantic abstraction. I knew a dozen of him. More.

So — to get back to the point I started — government is a necessary protection racket, and the closer the world gets tied together by technology, the more necessary and the more intrusive government gets. It doesn’t have anything to do with intentions, and not much to do with ideology. It’s a matter of technical necessity, you might call it. If you have sailing ships, they go where they want and they can take their chances. But if you have coal-fired ships, now they have to have coaling stations. And if you go to motor ships, now they have to have access to refueling docks. You see? More complex things require a more complex network of support. And then when radio comes, you can do more to help, so you set up stations to help seamen know where they are by triangulating, and to let them have somebody to broadcast to if they are in trouble. But if you have radio, you have to have some sort of regulation of radio, or it becomes chaotic.

And so one thing keeps leading to another, and regulation keeps getting piled onto regulation, and it’s always in response to somebody seeing a new need, whether the need is real or not. The thing that is moving it is technical elaboration — or what people call progress. Well, progress always leads toward something, but it also leads away from something, at the same time, and what it’s leading away from had its value; maybe more than what you’re moving toward. No matter what, you can count on the fact that to some people, what you’re calling progress is progress in the wrong direction. By the way, this is why so many people in your time see conspiracy everywhere. They can feel that current, always pushing toward one goal of more complexity, more regulation, more regimentation. They think it’s designed, when it is really gravity, with some people taking advantage of the downhill slope for purposes of their own.

Do you think we are pretty much doomed to a more complex life, then?

Didn’t Joseph [Smallwood] tell you your life seemed like living inside a machine, to him? And it gets more so every day, you can’t help it. If the stream is carrying you in a certain direction, you can fight it, but that’s still the direction you’re going every minute that you don’t fight it. At some point you realize, this is the trip I’ve signed up for. I can fight it, I can make it compromise with me, I can compensate for it, I can live around it, but that’s the current. How many times did I have my characters say, in effect, what you draw is what you get? That’s how it is and that’s always how it is. How you play the cards is up to you, but the cards get dealt by somebody else.

So what do we do, to play our cards as well as we can?

Well, that’s the point, you see. You have to have a solid place to plant your feet, and to me, that place is in the values you choose for yourself, and then try to live up to. If you don’t choose your own values, you live by somebody else’s. Now, maybe they fit you well enough and maybe they don’t, but you’re fitting yourself into somebody else’s shoes. And even there, you’re going to have to live up to those values or not.

Now you might say, the only values you can live by are the ones you already have, but let’s look at that. Yes, your traits are those you are born with. But you have enough choice that you can turn around, after all. If you’re naturally timid you can choose to be bold. If you’re naturally inhibited, you can become extroverted. If you’re naturally irresponsible you can train yourself to do your duty. So it isn’t like it’s fated, entirely. What is fated is what you start with, what you are most comfortable being or remaining. But you can make yourself into something else (if that possibility of choosing is in you).

When you choose a set of values, or when you take seriously whatever set of values you are born with, or pick up unconsciously from others, you confine yourself — or you accept confinement, let’s say — to the rules that follow from those values. If you value honesty, then whatever honesty means to you, you have to do, or know that you are breaking your own rules, going against your own values. Well, who doesn’t? But it doesn’t come free, that’s the point. To have a firm place to stand is the thing. It lets you stand instead of drift. It lets you hit back.

Harry Morgan had a place to stand. Now maybe you look at that and you say, he wasn’t broad enough, or wise enough, or flexible enough or even smart enough — and that all misses the point. He was somebody in particular. He was a man planted on the earth. It didn’t have a thing to do with him being a tough guy, though he was tough, or with being a cruel hard man, though he could be that, or with being any given characteristic. The point was, he was a definite person, and so he was not just drifting with the tide. Sometimes governments realize that they need guys like him — when they have wars to fight, say, or natural disasters to deal with — but often enough they’ve driven them away, or sent them underground, or turned them into the enemy, and when they need help they’ve got jellyfish. Too bad.

And so?

And so you are in your own peculiar fix, in your times, just as we always are. That fix wasn’t an accident and it wasn’t a plot and it isn’t even, exactly, what you could rightly call a predicament. It’s a fix in the sense of a mariner getting a fix on his position. It’s where you are. Live it.

Wonderful thoughts, Papa. The more I study you, the more amazed I get at how little even the scholars understand you.

That’s because you’re seeing me from the inside more than from the outside. Don’t forget that. Anybody looks different from his own view of himself.

Well, you look pretty good to me. Thanks.

 

Friday, July 8, 2022

6:40 a.m. Okay, I get it. I thought I’d start in on notes for the novel, but you have something you want to say. Please do.

Your vague discontentments – health, feelings of comfortableness or not in your body, ennui – it all is also grist for the authorial mill. You tend to shrug it off; use it.

Yes, I can see that. Pay attention, be here, now. Seems like somebody did tell me that, once or twice.

Many feelings are vague and inarticulate, not clearly perceived or understood. A good novelist can make them better seen, better understood, and of course he would gain from this.

Meanwhile working on only two cylinders.

That is a condition readers would be able to identify with, as well.

7 a.m. Okay, getting down to it, after fooling around a bit. Focus, receptivity, clarity, presence.

Your daily sermon-preaching is growing on you.

Very funny. Your preaching, you mean.

Do we?

Oh, I remember what I came across yesterday, something from a while ago – in Egypt, I think, because I reread my journal entries for that trip – to the effect that you and I are not really separate and I should get used to thinking of it that way.

Take responsibility for what you do right, not just for what you do wrong.

A sudden flashback to my very irresponsible youth – maybe 12. Not that I ever did anything very good or very bad, but that I did it in a slipshod fashion, half-engaged. Ah, and that’s what you want to talk about, isn’t it. Something like this flitted by yesterday, I half-noticing it.

To the degree that you engage with the present moment, your life broadens, deepens, satisfies, leads onward. To the degree that you coast, half-awake, your inner life may (or may not) correspondingly gain in richness, at the expense of the outer.

Who am I to criticize your  statements, but that one calls out for modification, not that you don’t do it to me all the time.

And, as you don’t mind our doing it, neither do we mind your doing it.

I don’t think it is so much that we gain a rich inner life only by neglecting our outer life. That’s my pattern, but it needn’t be anyone else’s. Thoreau, Emerson, Jung, Hemingway – they paid plenty of attention to their inner life, and nobody could fairly claim that any of them neglected the outer life.

Of course, nor would we mean to imply that. However, it can happen, even though it doesn’t need to happen.

The ideal is a conscious alternation, I suppose.

Well – yes, but that doesn’t necessarily mean just anything that may come to mind.

I’m having a hard time staying focused.

You know what to do when that happens. Or, you can put away the pad for another more propitious time.

Recalibrating. FRCP. Try again?

Concentrate on your outer life, because you are placed here, now by the logic of your entire non-3D and 3D life. Really being here, now, is a means of transforming your inner life, you see. It integrates spheres of attention that otherwise might go their separate ways, unbeknown to you, producing a life lived in two focuses at once, one nearly always much more brightly lit than the other.

People for whom the inner life is negligible.

Yes, or people for whom the outer life is negligible. The outer life has its way of getting your attention, but still it may be neglected, resulting in a person “lost in the clouds,” or perhaps living beset by apparently uncaused circumstances.

Understand, because all manner of lives are normal – are produced as the normal effect of certain combinations of strands living together in certain times – none can be considered unfortunate, or “wrong,” or even unproductive. How do you know how well or badly others are performing their improv? So, we aren’t saying, “This is the desired (let alone the required) pattern for one and all.” We are saying, instead, “This is the pattern that should suit some, and if it resonates, take advantage of a word to the wise.” For you and for many who read this, an attitude of attention to the “here, now” will be of great assistance. Those for whom it has no appeal can, and will, leave it alone.

Paying attention to the fact that you are here, now – that is, you in 3D are firmly ensconced in a specific place, at a specific time – reminds you that your non-3D component is also, in effect, ensconced in that same place and moment. Daydreaming, sleeping, reliving the past or fantasizing the future, whatever, your non-3D, though it roams through space and time, remains firmly tethered to the one time and place that your 3D body is. We know this is obvious once stated; we also know that it tends to be forgotten, day by day.

You are saying, I think, that our mundane life is as much a sacred journey as anything else in our mind or soul.

That is exactly what we are saying. However, at the same time, remember that you can’t live your life at full tension, any more than a bow that is always strung can retain its ability to propel arrows. You don’t, can’t, won’t, live continually in a state of tense alertness, but you can, may, live recognizing that “sacred” doesn’t mean keyed-up, but includes moments of rest, moments of sleep, moments of “nothing happening.”

Your life is a sacred journey and you may live it that way, or you may disparage it, disprize it, take it as a nuisance. However you consider it, it is still a sacred journey, and it becomes much more interesting to those who experience it that way.

I think everybody feels that it should be that way, but they also feel that it isn’t that way.

Let’s stick to you and your friends and those whose truth-meter registers what we are saying. Just as you can’t judge how other people are doing, so you can’t judge what they are doing.

Of course; I sit reminded.

Maybe a habit of being here, now, will look different for different people. All we claim for it is that it will enrich the life – will broaden the stage, one might say – of anyone who makes it a habit.

Well, Ram Dass certainly stressed the centrality of it.

He had learned it, and in turn he taught it. Having freely received, he freely gave.

Theme “Outer life, inner life,” maybe?

That would do.

Our thanks as always.

 

Thursday, July 7, 2022

2:25 a.m. I awoke thinking, for some reason, about how the people who haven’t had a given experience get to discuss whether it’s possible – whether it’s real. I thought, there’s a short essay there: Disbelief, belief, experience.

You had your morning blog entry in mind.

I did. I was in mind of one reader who recently commented how he liked to read the blog every morning. I thought, I’d hate to disappoint him, and others who have said the same thing, just because our morning conversations have been replaced by thinking about working on, plotting, the novel, little enough that we do.

You had in mind a couple of other things as well: the advantages of having only a small reputation; the early days of the Monroe Institute.

Also true.

So let’s talk about “Disbelief, belief, and experience,” which might equally be titled “Inexperience, belief, experience.”

Yes. It’s a process. Monroe called it converting beliefs into knowns. I see that a tremendous amount of time and energy is wasted by people writing about what they don’t know.

It amounts to their judging whether a thing is possible, but after all, what else is your life? What was Colin Wilson’s career? What is any exploration? If one sticks to what is already known, one doesn’t make discoveries – but the question to be looked at is – known to whom?

• If you know something from first-hand experience, you are reporting.
• If you believe in something because you believe other people’s reports, you still don’t know it: It may or may not be true, but for you it is still hearsay.
• If you believe something because evidence and testimony together lead you to believe it, still it is hearsay until you yourself experience it.

But is this the end of the story? The chemical composition of the planet Jupiter is hearsay to you, by that standard of judgment. The periodic table of elements is, too. So are many scientific principles that are well established but are not likely to be experienced on a personal basis. In practice – we have said this before, in different contexts – you take most things for granted, by necessity. Many things that are commonly taken for granted by your society, you take for granted too, because if you were to try to examine every little thing, you’d never come to an end of it, and your life would be gone.

Yes, as you pointed out once, in most things, we are of the herd, and only in some things – different things for each person, I gather – are we outliers.

Well, this time instead of looking at that very natural fact in the context of herds and outliers, we are looking at it in the context of fact and opinion.

Commonly held opinion – taken to be obvious, established fact – shapes every culture. If your culture teaches you from an early age that plants talk to people, you will grow up knowing it is so. (Unless circumstances make you an outlier for some reason in that respect. Thus Copernicus was an outlier. People with his same beliefs, born after his time, were herd animals. Same belief, different circumstances.)

In any culture, people who do their own exploring of a given subject are disbelievers in the established story; they may come to be believers in a new story, or a new aspect of the story. If things coalesce sufficiently they may come to know because they have experienced.

I get your point. It’s all more fluid than we sometimes think.

It isn’t a difficult point, just a readjustment. Once you get used to thinking of life as more a dream, a thought, than a thing, fluidity comes to seem more natural, and solidity more an exceptional case.

This also had to do with thinking about Shatner’s commentary in those exploratory shows, I see.

You know full well, any exploration of those themes that could have run the gauntlet to on-air TV time 40 years ago would have had to be far more explicitly skeptical, not to say dismissive. Such were the times. Your times now can’t quite admit the implications of so many discoveries, so much research, but it now cannot dismiss them nor even drown them in skepticism. And of course once something is accepted, it won’t be the subject for the same kind of documentary; it will be more in the nature of a nature special.

We could subtitle this “Shatner’s Eyebrows,” meaning, he tries in his usual way to leave the question open (for the sake of the skeptics) but not disrespected (which would have to be in the teeth of the evidence).

Easy to be impatient with the result, which treats as speculative things that are known to you. But recognize it as also a service, bridging disbelief, belief, and knowns.

Oh, don’t think I don’t hear the subtext: We aren’t to imagine that such truths as we may have discovered are the end of the story, either. Not only is there always more to learn, but there is always more to unlearn.

Columbus unsettled an awful lot of geographic “knowledge.”

Yep. Big mistake, letting him sail.

Done for the moment?

Oddly, we never touched on where you had thought to begin.

That’s true. I had thought to mildly excoriate the fact that exploratory programs are invariably hosted by people who have not themselves experienced what they think they are impartially, (“scientifically,” even), reporting on. By definition, people who claim to know are part of the report; they are not the overall reporter.

That was clumsy. Don’t hurry.

No.

An Eban Alexander reporting on his near-death experience may be treated respectfully; he will not get to be the narrator even of that segment, because to accept him as narrator would be to change the center of gravity from “What if” to “Here’s what happened,” and TV is not quite ready for that.

And you now see why it must be so.

Yes. It isn’t just show biz. It is in the nature of what they want to accomplish,  which includes what the times will allow to be explored in that way. In a few more years, this kind of thing will be relegated to the documentaries about accepted things (though with the disclaimer that “science does not yet fully understand…”), and other things, farther out, will receive this treatment.

Fluidity of belief is a fact of life like any other.

Okay. Thanks as always.

 

Saturday, July 2, 2022

5:30 a.m. I dreamed of a Kafka-esque quality to it, where he didn’t even know – and couldn’t find out – what he was accused of, or suspected of, or perhaps had done. Guys, will you give me the relevant bits of the dream I had requested, and explain?

• Pulling the child’s wagon by the road near the Baltimore-Washington Parkway
• Trying to use the gas pumps that were too advanced for him to figure out. Wanting to ask for help, but the woman in charge was involved in some argument.

Those two elements at least. So, some explanation, if you would.

You associate the parkway with both Baltimore (NSA, Fort Meade) and D.C. (seat of government overt and covert).

True. Nice association, the road. And the wagon?

A child’s wagon, and you associate it with a young Travis McGee hauling his car battery to be recharged, while he was trying to make the car work.

All right.

The gas pumps that are too complicated, or require a piece of technology he doesn’t have, or doesn’t have access to – a sense of technological overwhelm. Note, still no sense of him having a car even while he is trying to get gas.

Maybe the wagon was carrying a fuel can?

Maybe. But the woman – and clearly it was a woman – who could help him is occupied in a dispute with two men, about what, he doesn’t know. These are elements, you see. Not incidents, not yet story line, but elements.

I do see. I’ll note them on cards.

[Time out to talk to Hemingway, who killed himself July 2 in 1961.]

Okay guys, a session today, or do I get to mull?

From Mull to Iona is only a short hop.

Very funny.

It could be a successful mantra, though. It is through mulling , through quiet meditation, that you can come to the connection that was Iona.

A monk’s is one more vocation I was not given.

No, busy enough being you. But being oneself is enough of a job for anyone.

I guess we’re going to skip today.

Nothing lost, if so. There’s plenty of thinking about the novel to be done. Only, will you do it?

I am doing it.

Continue, and you will work through it. Repeated thought – mulling – associates things, and structures reveal themselves.

7 a.m. New idea, while reading notes. What if new souls are created by associating various strands, so that is a new life; and previously shaped lives are sent back repeatedly to be refined by further 3D living. Not either/or, but both. That would reconcile what appears to be irreconcilable opposites. I wonder if it is true. Guys? What say ye?

It is usually sound procedure to gather opposites and consider them in relationship to one another. You cut many a Gordian knot that way.

And in this instance?

You are forever asking “the way things are,” as if the way things are doesn’t change.

Does it change? I thought it was we who change.

And the difference in your experience would be what? You experience what you experience. This means, what “happens” (that is, the part played by the shared subjectivity and the times as you interact with them), and what you experience as happening, which is not necessarily the same thing! So, as you change, your experience changes and it looks to you like something different happened. But how can you know? Is it even a real distinction? You continually change, the times change, the unfinished business changes – where is your fixed point to measure drift from?

So – I take it you are saying, in effect – it doesn’t matter what the unknowable truth is, we will only experience a sort of construct, and the construct is liable to change on us.

Does your experience suggest anything different?

But then, what of the search for truth? For truer, anyway?

What of it? No matter where you are, there will be things that are truer or less true for you. And that’s all you are responsible for.

That seems too free-form to be true.

Think about it in context of 3D life being projected from a realer reality. As a projection – and you are a part of that projection, obviously, as long as you live in the 3D or non-3D world! – it functions much like a dream, a waking dream, call it. Mot people, mot of the time, experience most of reality in the same way. It is the unsleeping shared subjectivity that maintains the continuity of the world, after all, and how many of you can escape the influence of the shared subjectivity? And for how long? So of course the world appears solid, stable, “real.” Equally “of course,” it has strange vagaries that some experience and some do not. So, it is both stable and changeable, both predictable and predictably surprising. So where is the room for any one unchanging truth, let alone a perception of a one unchanging truth?

So the Egyptians looked reality in the face and saw one thing, and we, even looking it equally in the face, may see something different – and neither be wrong.

What is “wrong” in context? They saw what they saw; you see what you see. Where is the room for “wrong”? Given that the observer is part of the equation, it is not as simple as giving an eye exam to any given civilization, to see how well their vision is functioning. It is more like measuring the effect various sunglasses have on one’s vision. Maybe without sunglasses, you don’t see anything! Who can look God in the face, one religion asked. You can’t say it was wrong. The 3D requires that you adopt a viewpoint – that you choose your protective lenses – lest you be blinded by unmodified light.

“The light that puts out our eyes is darkness to us,” Thoreau said, roughly.

And in that, he was seeing clearly.

So it may be a valid way to see reality, as a combination of newly created souls and repeating souls.

There is no need to choose up sides, as if you were going to play philosopher’s baseball. In any basic controversy held intelligently and with integrity, there will be poles attracting people and dividing them from those who were attracted by the opposite pole. There is also a place for someone to see the opposite poles as in fact part of a conjoined dualism.

Interesting. Today’s theme? “Old souls and young”? Or maybe, “Take your pick”?

We smile as well. Try, “Truth and viewpoint.”

Better. Okay, thanks for this unexpected session.

 

Friday, July 1, 2022

6:15 a.m. I had thought to sleep later, but friend cat thought otherwise, and at 5:45 I capitulated. So, no public session yesterday, but progress on the novel. Only a tiny bit, but in the right direction. Any need for a session today, beyond staying in the habit?

Need is on your end. Desire is on ours. Feel free to skip, if that’s your preference.

I did wonder, a moment ago, who is it within me, and what right does it have, to be always reminding me of panful moments, of lost opportunities, of wrong choices or no choices, of awkward or abrasive exchanges with others? Why can’t it be equally fond of reminding me when I did good things for people, or did things well, or had good decisions, pleasant and constructive exchanges? There have been plenty of these too: Why always keep hitting me with bricks?

Those are very good nested questions, if you can hear the answers.

Add that to the list: Why is it so hard for me to hear helpful truths about myself even from you, whose integrity and benign intent I trust from experience?

Restate the questions, then, numbering them, and let’s see what we can do with them. As always you can keep the results to yourself, so it isn’t like you need to not know in order to not spread the word.

1. Who is it within me.
2. What right does it have.
3. Why always reminding me of the negative.
4. Why not also reminding me of the positive.
5. (Perhaps redundant.) Why keep hitting me with bricks?
6. Why is hearing about myself so hard.

As you re-read this list, it doesn’t clarify anything for you. Yet it may be that after we look at it, things will seem obvious; will seem to always have been obvious.

That has happened often enough, and I’m sometimes surprised and always gratified. If you can clarify this, I will be very glad. I have wondered why, for a long time, but it is only today that something clicked to make it possible for me to ask.

You will remember – now, as we tell you! – that this morning in bed you were comparing the satisfaction of creating your own world – that is, constructing a novel – with the difficulties of living in the 3D world. Does this way of phrasing it shed light on the difficulty?

Only in so far as you are saying that the non-3D is more interesting, more attractive, to me than the 3D.

Easier to deal with, too.

Well – except when you’re looking for a plot and can’t find it!

No, look at what we just said. Dealing with the non-3D is easier, because you are not dealing with cross-currents in quite the same way. As you look at it carefully, you see that even in creating in non-3D, you are constrained – or, let’s say, channeled, herded by circumstances – by the unfinished business you bring to the creation. Either way, 3D or non-3D, you are not alone in a universe of your own making nor of someone else’s. Always, you are an individual element among all the other individual elements (sometimes seen as if all one thing, sometimes seen as swarms of individuals).

You are saying, I think, we can’t escape the shared subjectivity and its unfinished business merely by turning inward.

That is almost accurate. Let’s say, turning inward may reduce the volume of the input from “the world,” but of course it will not eliminate it entirely, because you carry it within you, or let’s say, you are carried within it. Still, reducing the volume makes it easier to deal with the non-3D than with the 3D. If.

Yes, big “if.”

If you are in the habit of living with the non-3D as an accepted and welcomed part of your everyday psychic world. But why do you think we are encouraging everybody to do just that? Not so they can all write novels, and not so they can retreat from the outside world, but so that they will have so much larger a field to play in while they are still in 3D.

So now, to your questions that you find so puzzling.

(6) Why is hearing about yourself so hard? Why else but because you are afraid of what you may be told? Think of Hemingway as you reconstructed him in your novel.

Yes, that’s true. When you expect to be condemned, that’s what you hear, pretty much regardless of what is said. And if you have internalized that criticism sufficiently, it looks like the only valid judgment that can be made – even if you consciously object.

So, (3). Why are spontaneous memories usually negative. (We know you said “always,” but that is an exaggeration.) You are being fed “the truth” as it is seen through your filters that are already set up to assure that you see yourself as condemned and worthy of being condemned.

(4). Spontaneous memories aren’t “always” negative; hence, they aren’t “never” positive. But you aren’t capable of weighting them equally, because of that same set of filters. If someone compliments you, you shrug it off. If they insult you, you take it to heart, probably agreeing with it even while disagreeing, and resenting it.

(5). So, the answer is, simply, your filters are set to pass negative thoughts, memories, feedback, etc., and obstruct positive ones. Clearly this isn’t a conscious process: Why would do this consciously? But, equally clearly, because it isn’t conscious, it is beyond your control. The good news is that once you fully admit the process into your consciousness, you can decide to change it. Can change it. But it must first be conscious. Decisions cannot be made without consciousness, except by default, which is the worst way to make them.

So now, looking at (1) and (2) together, perhaps the situation is clearer.

It is. The punisher is a part of me, and its right to do so is that that is its function. Set up by me, by default? Set up by the combination of strands that came into 3D at a particular time? Setup as an interaction of personal and shared subjectivity? It would have to be this last, I suppose.

You haven’t yet gotten this into focus. It isn’t a “punisher,” it is a filter, or set of filters. That is, it doesn’t intend to inflict pain (though that often is a result); it intends to do what it was set to do.

Hmm, I get the memory of that slave some Roman general employed to keep whispering in his ear during a Triumph, “Remember, you are mortal.”

Well, that does put things in a different light, doesn’t it? Remember, these conversations are between us, but they are also for those who can benefit from them. Therefore, it can seem like we’re painting with a pretty broad brush, but that doesn’t detract from out intent nor from our execution. People may come into the world with great gifts and an inadequate sense that they are special but so is everybody else. A set of filters to torment them with knowledge of their own shortcomings may be useful to them until they come to consciousness about it. Once you take for granted that you are not infallible, that you are going to make mistakes, that you are going to disappoint your own expectations of yourself, everything can change. In effect, you can shrug at painful memories, and say – and mean – “It happens. It’s the kind of thing that happens in 3D.” Once you realize that you are only human – once you give yourself the same easy tolerance you give to others – why do you need someone inside you saying, “Remember this? Remember that? You sure messed that up. Is that the best you can do?”

The goal here is not to shut up the inner critic. That is a side-effect. The goal is to realize that your performance is par for the course, and nothing wrong with it.

And – we repeat explicitly – this is for anyone it applies to.

Theme?

“Internal criticism.”

Yes, that may do. Thanks, and, as you predicted, what was opaque is now clear. More than that, what was depressing is now hopeful. Again, thanks.