11:15 AM We are running up a nice series here. More?

No point in talking without something to say.

Sure, and you guys have run out of topics, the non-3D not being wired into the Internet..

You might remember, the 3D end of the line is as decisive as the non-3D, when it comes to communication flow.

Okay.

If you wake up feeling lazy, or out of tune, or if something more urgent distracts you, or serious psychological problems — or physical problems for that matter, though the difference between the two categories looks less to us than it does to you — anything can make you unavailable to receive input. Not theoretically, you understand  –theoretically, we are always connected – but practically.

Sure. Next

So let’s look at this from an angle that has not struck you. For someone to freely receive messages, and even more, for someone to conduct deliberate conversations with unseen presences, several conditions need to apply:

1. Conceptual space allowing for the possibility.
2. Psychological openness to the experience.
3. Enough psychic energy to sustain the process (a factor you often fail to consider)
4. What might be called scheduling allowance. That is, willingness turned into routine, even if an intermittent routine.
5. Certain intellectual traits that will shape the process, which we should look at separately.

I just went back and numbered the bullets for ease of reference.

Number one refers to the fact that if your model of reality says it can’t be done, normally it will not be possible, barring some world-changing experience. You can see that a person whose religion equates non-3D voices with evil spirits is not going to do this work very comfortably. Someone with some other set of restrictions on reality will face other obstacles. Ideally, a state of openness to experience, combined with openness to correction by experience.

Number two, somewhat akin to the first point, with the nuance that someone may not be restricted by his beliefs from doing this, but may have no particular interest. Obviously, nothing wrong with that, but it is a factor worth noting.

Psychic energy is a combination of physical and mental energy. Beyond a certain point, doing this kind of work from a failing body would be, in effect, consuming yourself by diverting energy from its primary need – maintaining the body – to what you merely prefer.

That’s what killed Cayce.

It is.

By scheduling allowance, we mean merely, it doesn’t have to be your first priority, but it can’t be priority zero –  that is, last or never, if you ever want to do this. How could you want to do something “someday” and ever do it, unless “someday” came around? It’s like “free ice cream tomorrow.”

And we come to the question of how intellectual traits shape what can be brought across.

• Rigidity or flexibility. Obviously someone who sees things only one way will be able to bring through only certain kinds of material. At least, if certain other kinds come through, they will come accompanied by cognitive dissonance. Your preference is to see things from many perspectives, and this is an advantage that inevitably comes with drawbacks. Any stance does, necessarily. But without choosing sides in an abstract debate between the pros and cons of the two polls, we point out that the question exists.
• Consistency or lack of consistency. A variant on rigidity or flexibility. Someone whose psychic laws demand consistency will filter out exceptions and contradictions, either consciously or –

more dangerously – pre-consciously. At the other pole, someone who makes no attempt to find a center of gravity for the material risks bringing forth a hodgepodge. We know you can’t see that, so here is an analogy. If you didn’t have insist on consistency of language, what would prevent your input from being Hindi, Spanish, Chinese, English, Urdu, etc. etc. in no particular order? What would lead one sentence to follow another on the same subject? Why wouldn’t a phrase in English about biology be followed by a Russian phrase on psychology and a Dutch description of a Polder? That is, only pre-conscious filters prevent the input from being chaotic and hence meaningless. We only stress this because your particular bias, frank, is so strongly toward not being bound by consistency that you don’t realize the limits that do in fact allow you to function.

I see that. Thanks.

• Various kinds of bias. Some are interested in process, some in information. Process may be abstract or personal, practical or theoretical. Information may be, similarly, abstract or practical, and may extend in any of innumerable directions.

And that’s going to be it for today, I am afraid. Out of gas. Thanks as always.

More on the overlap of individual mind and group mind. It is not a case of either/or, but of both. The balance between the two shifts according to time and circumstance, but it’s always a balance.

We think of ourselves as individuals but, less consciously, we are members of groups.

The subject touches on many other subjects. Why did you add the word “other”?

I did, didn’t I? I thought it belonged.

Not in this context. To repeat, the subject touches on many subjects which may seem to have little to do with each other, because usually seen in different mental categories. “Group karma,” for instance, may not usually be connected in your minds with politics or scholarship or religious affiliation or scientific specialization. Madison Ave techniques and psychological clinical practice may seem unconnected with fads and superstitions. Prejudice and conscience may seem to be at opposite poles. But you can see merely by our naming them together that group mind is inherently part of your experience in 3D.

Carl Jung traveled in tropical Africa in the 1920s and said the native tribes were susceptible to a lowering of the boundaries that kept individuals from relapsing into a group identification. I imagine that some people think that was racism. I think it was observation. We see the same process in mob psychology. The marshals in the Old West knew how to break up a mob: they targeted individuals as individuals, called them by name, challenged them as one man not as an anonymous part of a mob, and individual consciousness resurfaced. It is proverbial that mobs will do things none of the individuals within it would have done separately. As Jung knew.

Well, this dual citizenship (so to speak) is a constant fact of your lives, whether or not you are aware of it. You are always members of larger collectives; you are always (to varying extent) individual. The tension between the two roles can be painful. It can also be productive. It can lead to dreadful conflicts between public “duty” and private conviction, or it can inform group impulses with a more individual insight.

I suppose it can lead us to our best and our worst moments.

Let’s rephrase that to say it can lead you to become your best or worst selves for the moment. It can lead you to channel energies in productive or counterproductive ways, depending.

We’re talking about the vast impersonal forces that have come up from time to time?

Your lives are, de facto, expressions of those forces as you experience them, accommodate them, direct them. On a group level, the mixture and interplay of those forces is what some call the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times. On an individual level, that same interplay is what you might call temptation and whatever the opposite of temptation may be.

Aspirations? Or, let’s say, opportunities.

Inadequate, but better than nothing. The point is that what you experience as the external world is those forces as channeled through group awareness and action, and your internal world is those forces as channeled within you, running them through your complexes and abilities and tendencies.

I may have lost the plot, here.

You are each individual; you are each part of groups. Just as individuals aren’t unitary, despite your assumptions, so you aren’t members of only one group, nor is your membership of anyone group necessarily permanent. Life is flow.

Does it take catastrophe to lead us to change groups?

Not at all. In earlier years, from the 1940s to the 1960s, receipt of a draft notice was all that was required for someone to add military membership to his list of groups. Maybe later he added injured veteran, or uninjured veteran. One example, small. But anything you add to your CV adds to your group membership, whether or not that is on your mind. Get a driver’s license, or a pilot’s license, or any certificate of skill – you’ve joined groups of similar syllables. Become a mother, or a father, or an aunt or uncle, same thing. Hold a job, or lose one; build a career or change careers, join a church or leave one, study this, that, or the other – it’s all choice, and all we’re pointing out is that without your paying any attention to it, you are becoming members of different group minds as well as living your own life.

Similarly, opinions. Political, or anything, birds of a feather tend to have prejudices together. That can be a good thing or a bad thing, but either way it amounts to individuals working together on a level beneath their consciousness usually and above their level of consciousness occasionally.

Accepting all this, what does it have to do with our previous question about spreading the word?

You want to explore the practicalities.

It would help, I think.

What we just gave you is designed to help you put things in new context. It refers not only to the goal but to the process. The fact that you are operating on subconscious as well as conscious levels ought to change your ideas about possibilities.

As soon as you put it that way, it does. And the thought that comes to mind is, How do we avoid having White Magic turn into Black Magic?

Nothing simpler. If that were your major problem, you’d be home free, and no struggle. White magic benefits others; black magic benefits yourself.

I know that, though stated that way it is a little oversimplified, don’t you think?

It is, but the nub of the distinction is, are you trying to do good by good methods, or are you trying to get what you want by any means, fair or foul.

Yes, that seems a more complete statement. In any case, you are saying — I think — the way attract the people who can profit from the material is to call them.

Yes. You see, given that you are members of the same group — the same family, in effect — you are naturally connected. Use that connection, communicate at a group level rather than merely at an individual level.

“If you call them, they will come.”

If you don’t call them, will they know you’re there?

To be continued? Thanks for all this.

Completing the Partial Mind

Reflections on Colin Wilson’s The Outsider, seventy years on

Christopher R. Nelson

My introduction to Colin Wilson’s work was through The Occult, in my early teens. The book induced a surprise of recognition when Wilson wrote of ‘holiday consciousness’ — the sense of freedom and possibility that seems to open within us when we drop our habitual inner tension. For someone experiencing this:

It is as if a spring of vitality [has] suddenly bubbled into consciousness. He has ceased to be passive and depressed . . . He is no longer wasting his vital energy . . . The pleasure he gets from the sight of a tree in the rain means that his senses begin to reach out, to expect things to be delightful and interesting, which in turn means his springs of vital energy become more abundant.[1]

There is a participatory quality to this kind of experience. Our minds actively engage with reality. We as perceivers, and reality as perceived, both become more real, more alive, more connected. We become aware of meanings that normally evade our everyday consciousness — even if we can’t put them into words.

What I didn’t realise when I first read The Occult was that in effect it represents Wilson’s answer to the problems he raised in The Outsider, which happen to be some of the foundational mysteries of human experience.

There is often a quality of unreality to life, a sense of meaninglessness and stagnation. The Outsider feels this with a kind of paradoxical intensity. He sees ‘too deep and too much’ but this wider vision doesn’t bring him closer to connection with anyone or anything. Instead it alienates him from society and from himself, because ‘what he sees is essentially chaos.’[2] When he looks around he finds ample evidence that something is wrong: people striving ceaselessly and often futilely for security in a world that seems utterly indifferent — even hostile — towards them. When he directs his attention inwards the judgment is even more severe at what he discovers there: undeveloped potential, anger, insecurity, self-loathing.

The problem is a kind of fragmented consciousness, a sense of disconnection from life. Wilson writes of T.E. Lawrence in The Outsider that he could not ‘achieve the immediacy of perception because he could never stop thinking.’

For such a person, the world is an unbelievably colourless place, without vivid perception of sights and tastes to remove the attention from human beings and their inanities. The result is a state of unending mental strain.[3]

By ‘immediacy of perception’ Wilson means that experience of ‘holiday consciousness’, when a tree in the rain serves as a gateway to deeper meanings. Elsewhere he writes of Outsiders:

Their problem is the unreality of their lives . . . The ordinary world loses its values, as it does for a man who has been ill for a very long time. Life takes on the quality of a nightmare, or a cinema sheet when the screen goes blank. These men who had been projecting their hopes and desires into what was passing on the screen suddenly realize they are in a cinema. They ask: Who are we? What are we doing here? With the delusion of the screen identity gone, the causality of its events [is] suddenly broken.[4]

Wilson is writing of Outsiders, but he’s also describing a fundamental human experience that most of us have had at one point or another. For some it may pass like a bad dream, for others it may manifest as a crisis of faith or trigger a deep depression. For the artists and thinkers in The Outsider it is a problem that — once identified — cannot be let go of. Not just because it is a pain point demanding relief. And not just because it directs our attention to a fundamental challenge of civilisation — the complexity of which requires a concomitant fragmentation of consciousness. Most of all it is that this sense of disconnection points towards the possibility of reconnection — with something broader, deeper, richer, more alive than anything we can imagine in our day-to-day experience. That something else is the counterpoint to the sense of unreality that plagues the Outsider.

Wilson again references T.E. Lawrence, who writes of an experience on a desert morning during World War I:

We started on one of those clear dawns that wake up the senses with the sun, while the intellect, tired after the thinking of the night, was yet abed. For an hour or two, on such a morning, the sounds, scents and colours of the world struck man individually and directly, not filtered through or made typical by thought: they seemed to exist sufficiently by themselves, and the lack of design and of carefulness in creation no longer irritated.[5]

We could frame the problem as one of fragmentation versus unity. There are two modes of perception here: one sees the world in bits and pieces, the other as a unified whole. One is filtered through thought, which leads to judgments, calculations, distinctions. It is a state of consciousness that requires standing apart from what is perceived. The other mode is receptive, holistic, embracing, participatory. It allows for a “lack of design and carefulness in creation.” It is an entirely different kind of engagement with life: deeper, richer, more connected and meaningful

Wilson would later write about the different modes of perception between the right and left sides of the brain. More recently, neuroscientist, philosopher and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist has explored these ideas in a way that can, I think, be helpful in understanding the Outsider’s dilemma.

McGilchrist takes pains to make clear that the latest neuroscientific research indicates both hemispheres of the brain participate in ‘every conceivable activity — language, visual imagery, and all the things we thought in the past distinguished right from left’. Yet, he also shares, there are significant differences in the manner in which this processing occurs. For example,

The right hemisphere is better at making connections between things: it tends to see things whole, whereas the left hemisphere sees the parts. The left hemisphere tends to see things more in the abstract, the right hemisphere sees them more embedded in the real-world context in which they occur. . . The right hemisphere seems better able to appreciate actually existing things in all their uniqueness, while the left hemisphere schematises and generalises things into categories. But since much of what matters in experience depends ultimately on not being snatched from the context in which alone it has meaning, this is a vastly significant difference. All artistic and spiritual experience — perhaps everything truly important — can only be implicit; language, in making things explicit, reduces everything to the same worn coinage and, as Nietzsche said, makes the uncommon common.[6]

McGilchrist points out that a world filtered more or less exclusively through left-brain perception would appear fragmented. Knowledge would take primacy over wisdom by nature of being quantifiable instead of holistic. The left brain, like language, excels at grasping things; it has trouble perceiving and valuing the relationships between things — how they exist together in a broader context. Consequently, in a ‘left-brain world’, practicality would be valued above more ineffable qualities like love, warmth and connection.

The impersonal would come to replace the personal. There would be a focus on material things at the expense of the living. Social cohesion and the bonds between person and person . . . would be neglected . . . as both inconvenient and incomprehensible to the left hemisphere acting on its own. There would be a depersonalisation of the relationships between members of society, and in society’s relationship with its members. Exploitation rather than cooperation would . . . be the default relationship between human individuals and between humanity and the rest of the world . . . We would expect there to be a resentment of — and a deliberate undercutting of — the sense of awe or wonder: Weber’s “disenchanted” world. Religion would seem to be mere fantasy. Art would be conceptualised, cerebralised; beauty would be ironised out of existence.[7]

This is precisely the world that the Outsider is resisting. He has seen its counterpoint. He has sensed his latent power to draw from some infinite wellspring within. We have already read Lawrence describing his morning foray into the desert. Here Wilson quotes Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf after his first taste of wine transforms his apathy and useless rumination — his left-brain perception:

A refreshing laughter rose in me . . . It soared aloft like a soapbubble . . . and then softly burst . . . The golden trail was blazed and I was reminded of the eternal, and of Mozart and the stars. For an hour I could breathe once more . . .[8]

The dominant feature of left-brain perception is a sense of separation, of alienation. It does not see the whole, only the parts. In its admirable efforts to grasp and understand the world it attempts to reduce everything it perceives to manageable thoughts. In the process it cuts off half, or more, of our lived experience. It does not realize that thoughts are dead, that they are mere representations of reality, not the actual thing.

This issue is compounded because we tend to identify ourselves with the left brain. It seems to be the home of the ‘I’, the ego, the part of us that stands outside of and analyzes our experience. McGilchrist points out that the left brain is in command of ‘language, logic and linearity’.[9] These are the currency of our modern world. We give the left-brain’s perspective more weight than our ‘unfiltered’, right-brain mode of perception, which we tend to devalue because we cannot fully understand it. By definition its way of being is not reduceable to terms the left-brain can comprehend. Wilson writes in The Outsider:

Nijinsky knows: ‘I am God in a body’, he knows because it is a realization that has come to him many times while dancing, the self-transcendence, the Outsider’s glimpse of a ‘power within him’. He has seen that power, and he knows: ‘I am God, I am God, I am God.’[10]

We can draw another example from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, wherein Father Zosima says:

Much on earth is hidden from us, but to make up for that we have been given a precious mystic sense of our living bond with the other world, with the higher heavenly world, and the roots of our thoughts and feelings are not here but in other worlds. That is why the philosophers say that we cannot apprehend the reality of things on earth. God took seeds from different worlds and sowed them on this earth, and His garden grew up and everything came up that could come up, but what grows lives and is alive only through the feeling of its contact with other mysterious worlds. If that feeling grows weak or is destroyed in you, the heavenly growth will die away in you. Then you will be indifferent to life and even grow to hate it.[11]

The left brain would simply not know what to do with the words of Nijinsky or Zosima or countless other mystics and Outsiders; it would likely dismiss them — and the experiences they are trying to convey — as nonsense.

What this points to is that our sense of alienation is due to an incomplete perception of reality. When T. E. Lawrence relaxes in the desert morning or Steppenwolf sips his wine or we experience a surge of a joy or a profound depth of love, unfiltered life flows in. The world becomes more than the sum of its parts. Such experiences do not negate one half of life in order to embrace another; in them we somehow move to a state that encompasses both — and more. These experiences are the opposite of Sartre’s nausea, of that sense of the banality and fragmentation of existence. They seem to infuse the world with the blood of meaning — a meaning that may escape entrapment by words, but which nonetheless revitalizes our inner landscape and sense of connection to something bigger than ourselves.

We could not exist without that ‘something bigger’. This is not a matter of faith but of logical deduction. What is it in you that makes sense of this as you read it — not just of the words as written but of the holistic meaning they are attempting to express? What is it in me that wrote it without knowing in advance what words and structure would come through me as I wrote? Thoughts serve an invaluable function. They allow me to organize, categorize, structure my experience. But they are dead the moment they are expressed. They are the bricks with which I construct my understanding of reality — but not my experience of it. Too easily we forget there is something deeper within us from that generates the thought.

The Outsider understands this. He has experienced a more holistic mode of perception — ‘Mozart and the stars.’ The juxtaposition of this vision against the horrors and fragmentation of the modern world and the inner self creates a strain that can be too much to bear. But ‘seeing too deep and too much’ only remains a curse if it is accepted as a static state of affairs from which there is no escape. It can be a blessing if it points us towards deeper engagement with who we are and what we are capable of becoming.

This is the challenge Wilson rises to in The Outsider and all his subsequent work. In a remarkably prescient way that anticipates his own future work as well as McGilchrist’s, Wilson writes:

Man is not a unity; he is many. But for anything to be worth doing, he must become a unity. The divided kingdom must be united. The deluded vision of personality that our Western civilization fosters and glorifies, increases the inward division.

By the time Wilson wrote The Occult and his later books on the same subject, he had determined that an expansion of consciousness represented the way forward. In his preface to Beyond the Occult he writes of experiences of mystical or heightened consciousness that ‘they all teach us the same thing: that our “ordinary” consciousness of ourselves is superficial and deceptive.’[12] I suggest that such moments could even be interpreted as a kind of overflow of right-brain consciousness into left-brain awareness — a flood the left brain can’t ignore, even if it is unable to truly understand the experience. Yet Wilson’s work illustrates that there’s no need for enmity between the two sides; in fact, the division between them can vanish. He quotes W. B. Yeats to this effect:

Know that when all words are said

And a man is fighting mad

Something drops from his eyes long blind

And completes his partial mind,

For an instant stands at ease

Laughs aloud, his heart at peace . . . [13]

In such moments — and we have all had them — there is a literal meeting of the minds that heals the Outsider’s division and opens us to new worlds of meaning.

— — — — — — –

Originally published in

Colin Wilson’s ‘The Outsider’: 70 Years on: 1956–2026: 37 (Colin Wilson Studies) 24 April 2026, edited by Colin Stanley

Available at Amazon.co.uk

[1] Wilson, Colin. The Occult. Watkins Media. Kindle Edition.

[2] Wilson, Colin. The Outsider (p. 15). Diversion Books. Kindle Edition.

[3] Wilson, Colin. The Outsider (p. 77). Diversion Books. Kindle Edition.

[4] Wilson, Colin. The Outsider (p. 67–8). Diversion Books. Kindle Edition.

[5] Wilson, Colin. The Outsider (p. 76). Diversion Books. Kindle Edition.

[6] McGilchrist, Iain. Ways of Attending: How our Divided Brain Constructs the World (p. 17–18). Abingdon-on-Thames, England: Routledge.

[7] McGilchrist, Iain. Ways of Attending: How our Divided Brain Constructs the World (p. 30).

[8] Wilson, Colin. The Outsider (p. 58).

[9] McGilchrist, Iain. Ways of Attending: How our Divided Brain Constructs the World (p. 26).

[10] Wilson, Colin. The Outsider (p. 99).

[11] Dostoyevsky, F. (2006). The brothers Karamazov: A novel in four parts with epilogue (R. Pevear & L. Volokhonsky, Trans.).

[12] Wilson, Colin. Beyond the Occult: Twenty Years’ Research into the Paranormal. Watkins Media. Kindle Edition.

[13] Wilson, Colin. Frankenstein’s Castle: The Right Brain: Door to Wisdom. Ashgrove Press.

Colin Wilson

Iain Mcgilchrist

7:00 AM. Alright, guys, I’m ready if you are. Yesterday you seemed to indicate that people wanting to profit from your advice might form study groups such as the ARE does for the examination and living of the Cayce material. Was that merely an analogy, or was it a pointer, or what?

It is on the same principle as “when two or three are gathered together in my name.” Any group activity is vastly stronger than the same activity done alone. This is true of anything you can think of. Two or three high-school students studying for an exam together will be more present, more focused, than any one of them by themselves.

Assuming they do any studying at all!

Yes, smiling, but the principle is sound. It is the formation and maintenance of a group mind, and what is the chief advantage of forming a group mind about anything?

“Continuity” is the word I get.

Yes. Continuity. That is a huge advantage.

Because it counters our tendency to fall asleep without knowing it.

Or becoming distracted, yes. Even the mere scheduling of meetings at a fixed time helps anchor you. It need not be a meeting in person. Virtual meetings are as old as telephones, or broadcasts. The critical thing is the focusing of attention at the same time.

That squares with experience. Our ILC group has been meeting, virtually, every week for years now. The fact that the weekly conference is always set does add a little structure to the week.

Let’s look at that statement. It doesn’t so much add structure as expectation. You are aware that it is going on; you are tuned in, even when you are doing other things.

We are? How does that work?

This will be a new idea to you, perhaps. There are different kinds of group mind:

• One-offs, or what some call “one and done.” A non-3D manifestation of a casual encounter that may be of no particular importance. A momentary contact (regardless how short or long the moment), with neither expectation nor desire for continuation.
• Marriages. That is, long term intertwining of influence and interaction, perhaps over years, perhaps spanning multiple areas of interest (intellectual, emotional, conceptual, and or physical, that is, involving what Gurdjieff called the moving center).
• Between the two extremes, perhaps: task forces. Deliberately constructed joint enterprises entered into for the sake of furthering some goal. These will tend to be intense in one area of life, and minimal or nonexistent in others. They may be long-lived or short, and will center not on an individual’s needs or objectives, but on the fate of the common enterprise the task force is centered on, is created for.
• And then there is the type of group mind we are concerned with at the moment. Call it transformational. Its goal is not so much one common external change as it is the provision of a mutually helpful common space that is aimed at helping each participant to achieve his or her own personal goal.

Except, there really can’t be any private goal unaffected by the group goal, can there?

On the one hand, “very good.” On the other hand, “not so fast.”

I’m willing to be instructed.

Yes, you are all connected, not only in the sense that “all is one,” but in the more individual sense that a group-mind created around a goal persists, and therefore binds, for better and worse. It’s like joining a secret society that doesn’t let you leave: once you are in, your very identity is altered.

You make it sound like a group-mind undertaking is an irrevocable decision.

Nothing is irrevocable in the sense of “you can’t change your mind.” You can always change your mind. What you can’t do is go back to what you were before you began.

You stir a very fond memory I haven’t thought of in many years. It was the Sunday morning of Gateway; in other words the beginning of the first full day of the program, and we were sitting in the debrief room, everybody mellow and composed after a tape (if I remember correctly). The quiet contented atmosphere was miles away from the disconnected, discordant energy we had started with. (And it was only the beginning of the first full day!) Bob Mccullough, I think it was, smiled at us and said, “And that is what we don’t tell you in advance; you can’t go back to what you were.” Obviously that probably isn’t a direct quote after 33 years, but that’s the gist of it. It was very satisfying. We hadn’t yet gotten started on our week’s quest and already it was clear that there were things to be had.

And probably at the time you took this to be your personal interaction with the tapes, rather than realizing you were now part of a group-mind experience.

That makes it sound like we were becoming assimilated by the Borg!

Did you experience it as subtraction?

Hardly!

Did you experience it as loss of autonomy?

Hardly!

But did you experience it as something unique in your experience?

Well, I would have said I did till you just asked me.

And now we’ve asked?

I think you’re getting at “Did you realize you’d experienced group-mind energy before?”

Not a bad question, but not the one we’re asking.

I guess I don’t remember. I know I felt we all felt it; I don’t think I even had a concept of group-mind at that time.

Have you felt constrained in the years since?

No. If anything I have become more aware of just how alone my life had always been — and how alone it remained.

Yet you had often been part of group-mind endeavors, even your time in  school, without recognizing it. And you have since, as well.

Okay, the point being?

It’s always better to be conscious of what you’re doing than not. The more you realize, the realer it becomes. That’s what “realizing” is.

So today’s theme wasn’t really what next steps can we take. More like –

Varieties of group mind, and how they manifest.

Our thanks for all this, as always.

8:10 AM. So let’s continue from yesterday. I just reread our 80 minute conversation (mostly a monolog from me) and I want to know what you are getting at.

We would think it would be obvious that we are fleshing-out (from your experience) that enterprises morph to meet new situations, and, in morphing successfully, become something they did not initially envision. Cayce did not set out to become an institution; Neither did Bob Monroe. Neither did you and Bob Friedman. Nobody ever does. You live concentrating on one thing or set of things, and perhaps your life leads you toward others. Perhaps your invisible goal has been there all along, perhaps not, But almost always it is true that where you arrive is not the destination you had in mind – if you did have any particular destination.

Well, I don’t think you are hinting that our conversations are going to create an institution, so what’s the connection here?

Your response illustrates the process. All you can envision is some membership institution like ARE, or some participatory institution like TMI, and you know it cannot be either. But what about the other part of the comparison?

People becoming transformed by the material in some new way.

Just as you turned customers into virtual acquaintances, then often into investors and friends, and the process helped Hampton Roads and helped people feel connected.

Yes, a win-win. I see that, but I don’t see the analogy in any practical terms. We aren’t seeking money and people who have been reading your stuff — our stuff — for so long already feel connected to the material, presumably.

Yes but what about transformation? What about deepening? What about process leading to deepening connection to the material )not to the writer nor the writing but to the material itself, you understand). People don’t feel a deep urge to connect with you nor with your guys, let alone with your friends and acquaintances. They feel a deep urge to connect with their larger selves, their expanded self definition if you will, — just as you did. They want to willingly transform themselves into something greater, something more “them,” something closer to their possibilities. That transformation is what we will or will not assist, and the more we assist it, the better for one and all. While Hampton Roads concentrated on that, it thrived effortlessly.

I’d hardly say effortlessly!

We smile. No, not effortlessly in the sense of “you didn’t have to work hard,” but in the sense of “your efforts met response in unplanned and even undreamed of ways.”

The latter, I’ll accept. But we put plenty of work and worry into it.

Well, we just agreed that that is so.

Now, consider your position. On the one hand you hope to cap your own part in the work, to leave a couple more manuscripts. On the other, you hope to see that the material will not be neglected and lost, and you have no idea how to help the process except to leave it in the hands of a cadre of caring others.

And we don’t really see what to do beyond assuring that the original material isn’t lost.

So now think of your readers.

So I’m dead and there isn’t anybody else who is going to do exactly what we’ve learned to do over 30 years. Rereading, even memorizing, the material that is in print wouldn’t make up for the loss of new day-by- day material. It’s going to be up to them to live it as best they can, to grow into it, where necessary. But that’s always been necessary — for me no less than for them.

Yep. So what’s the historical precedent?

Emerson comes to mind. His work was clumped into about 30 years too, come to think of it, from 1836 to about 1866. But he influenced people for a long, long time. Or rather, the material he produced influenced people.

And that material came from his taking seriously his intuitions.

His unacknowledged guys upstairs?

How is it ever different? Thoreau, Alcott, William James, C.G. Jung, and on and on. Life circumstances differ, but inspiration is always the same process: you learn to listen. Everything else is in the nature of being pointers, to shape your conscious awareness.

It seems to me that anyone who offers thought to the world is going to be seen as much an individual as a mouthpiece.

Cease trying to avoid giving offense to someone who may object to your way of phrasing things; it interferes with your expression.

Alright. Well, I was trying to avoid saying “his” lest people read into it something I don’t mean. There is advantage, not only disadvantage, in language saying “he” or “his” while meaning “everyone” or “everyone’s.”

Yes but get on with it; the clock continues to tick.

Everybody whose thought is studied winds up being studied as much for things peculiar to himself, or his life occurrences, or his psychological quirks, as for the important things that he brought forth. So people studying Emerson or Jung and they say, “this or that is a sign that he –”etc.

Not your concern. Why should you or anybody care? Concentrate on the people who are looking for the food they know they need.

I guess I’ve always worked on the assumption that getting your words into print — into a book particularly — was the way to be sure that the food would remain available.

But can you say that your culture remains book-oriented? Print-oriented, even?

The only thing I’m getting, I don’t much like. I’m not sure the world really needs TGU Study Groups.

You might polish up your crystal ball.

[Pause]

Well, that’s an interesting idea, come to think of it. I don’t see the practicalities of it, but I can see advantage to people getting the benefit of each other’s presence.

Let’s stop here, with the initial idea. Practicalities can be addressed later.

Later, and I hoped by somebody else! Thanks as always.

Why, and how, all is well

Well, we aren’t trying to say that people in 3D conditions ought to be able to overcome them; just the contrary, in fact. 3D life was designed to work, not to be superseded or outmaneuvered. Our point here is that this systematic distortion in how you understand the world, rooted in how you experience the world, helps explain how “all is well” and “all is not well” can coexist, both being true depending upon viewing point.

It still comes perilously close to saying, “It’s all a show; those mangled bodies don’t mean anything.”

No, what we are really getting to is that the reality is the energy flowing through those lives, it is not the external incidents that you can see, that result from energy flows, and redirect energy flows.

I’m starting to get what you’re driving at. They are real forces, real consequences. But the reality is in the real part of us, and not in the merely physical part of us.

You’ve gotten it by a spark leaping mind to mind, but your readers may not get it from the words they’ve read so far. Some may, some may not.

Well, how to put it any clearer? Our emotions, and that includes all the emotions of anybody in any news event, are real, and they are the point of the experience. They – and whatever changes they result in, within ourselves – are what we will take with us (so to speak) in the realer All-D world. Nobody carries a burned building or an exploded bomb or a deadly virus from 3D into All-D. They are all, you might say, local phenomena. In that sense, it hardly matters what happens externally on earth (i.e. in 3D). What matters is what happens internally to each of us, because that is what is real and that is what will persist. In that sense, all is well no matter the train wreck. Although, it does leave the fairly large question of what about the psychological debris caused by the physical train wrecks.

That has everything to do with those same forces we keep promising to discuss. And of course, your time being up –

Next time. Okay, thanks.

My friends, we had a nice run this week. Can we continue?

You and your friends and readers should put some thought into how to spread the word. For three decades we have brought forth assistance from Non-3D as best we could. You, operating correctly on the principle of “freely you have received, freely give,” have put it out there, charging only for books and other product that requires money to produce, such as your weekend workshops. Now you will want those who have freely received to take their turn at freely giving. You think in terms of them each buying a book, to support your friend the publisher. But there are other ways to contribute.

Pray continue. The response to my shameless request that they each buy a book isn’t what I’d hoped, and what more can I do, post new begging emails every day?

But you are making a mistake. You think, “the material can’t be worth much to them, if they won’t even pay the price of a book”. But that isn’t as conclusive as you may think. To some, the request may seem like a bill they’ve been expecting, which makes them question whether they have been manipulated. Others maybe just aren’t oriented toward buying books, electronic or hard copy.

In the middle of that last sentence, I got the sense that you’re about to go into new territory.

You might not realize this, but sometimes when you take the time to register your perceptions of what is coming, what is going on behind the scenes, it impairs the frail link between one part and the next part of something we want to say.

Now that you mention it, I have been half aware of that, from time to time. But by the time I realize it anew, it’s usually too late. But I take your point and I’ll try to watch it. Can you continue?

There is a difference – and you have experienced it many times  – between feeling like a consumer of something and being a participant in it. Commercial advertisers know this well, and they are skilled at manipulating people into feeling a commitment, as a way of extracting more money from them. But just because Madison Avenue perverts the process doesn’t make the underlying psychology invalid.

It is the difference between feeling like an anonymous outsider and feeling like part of something. That is the distinction at its grossest level.

Think back to you and the ARE, and you and TMI; also between your first attempt at a free newspaper and your experiences at Hampton Roads.

[The rest is all me, not the guys, so I will leave it in Roman type, which I think is easier than italic to read in large chunks.]

Interesting juxtaposition, the groups on the one hand, the businesses on the other.

Back in the 1980s, I moved to Virginia to be near the ARE. I wound up living and working 50 miles away, but that was as close as I could get at the time. The job in the shipyard was the only one I could get that would pay to move my family from New Jersey. I had read about Cayce for years, since my brother had given me Jess Stearn’s book about him. Nothing in my life connected me to him, but I wanted to be connected, and moving there was all I could think to do. I was already a member, receiving whatever it was they sent out, but I wanted more.

But I was 50 miles away, and besides, if you visited, there was the bookstore and the library and otherwise only mementos of a unique man’s career. (There were transcripts of the readings, of course, but how much could you read in a day visit?) I was now closer to the headquarters, but I was an outsider. By that, I don’t mean I wasn’t recognized (What was there to recognize?) but that I had no place. There was nothing I could do to participate, nothing I could add.

Over time I did enter a local study group in Newport News, where I was living, and I took an Atlantic University course, by Dr Richard Drummond, on “Parapsychology And Religion.” But that was it, and I never was able to find a way for the ARE to help change my life., which I realize now is what I was hoping for.

My experience with the Monroe Institute is a good counterpoint. Hmm, thinking about it, I’m seeing connections I hadn’t seen.

• I didn’t feel anonymous. Bob Friedman had led me to meet Bob Monroe, and Joe and Scooter, before I ever did a tape, let alone a program.
• For two and a half years, the tapes were my experience of TMI (after that initial visit). I practiced with the tapes diligently, if ignorantly and awkwardly, because unlike ARE which never promised you could learn to do what Cayce did, the tapes did promise, implicitly, that maybe you could follow Bob’s example. The tapes were something active that I could do.
• The Gateway Voyage program itself concerned process rather than information, though I wouldn’t have thought to put it that way. Gateway was truly a door you could go through.
• The shared experience led to bonding with others. The bonds eventually led to the creation of the Voyager’s Mailing List (courtesy of Tony Sanders, whom I met on his Castaneda mailing list), then TMI Explorers, then Explorers, as the community developed.
• My gladly publishing books about TMI (beginning with Using The Whole Brain) gradually raised my profile in connection with the Institute. I was never an insider, but I felt a loyalty to it and received benefit from more than a dozen programs over the years that followed.

Quite a different experience rom ARE! And as I think about it, I could draw a distinction between an organization centering on information (the ARE) and one centering on process (TMI). Very interesting.

Now, the distinction between the shopper newspaper I had from 1976 to 1980, and Hampton Roads Publishing Company as I helped to develop it from 1989 to when I left at the end of 2005.

The essential difference is not in scale, nor in the fact that in the former I had no partner with experience and with the latter I had Bob Freedman, who had been publishing books since 1976. And what is essential is 1) motivation and 2) response.

In publishing Down Jersey, I was trying to make money so I could support myself and my family. I was also hoping to build a vehicle for my political ambitions. What I didn’t do was think of what was I offering my readers. That enterprise failed, and deserved to. What had I given anybody, that they should identify with us or even wish us well? I wrote a couple of columns for each issue, and I encouraged locals to contribute columns, but that was it. Everything else was strictly business, which in context amounts to “merely” business.

But Hampton Roads was a different story. Bob and I had common interests and experiences, though he had far more experiences than I did. (The Poseidia Institute, for one thing.) We set out to create a commercial success, but we both wanted to make a difference in the world. Gradually HRPC morphed and became more participatory.

Bob had told me at the outset that “nobody notices the publisher’s name,” but we gradually changed that We began to specialize in a certain type of book not that common. When New Age became Body Mind Spirit we found ourselves with a sea of competitors, but at first we were valuable to people looking for that kind of information. Also, I created a newsletter and filled it with descriptions of our latest books, and news of the staff’s doings. I made it personal. In those pre-Internet days, putting out a newsletter was a lot of work and a certain amount of expense — printing, postage, etc.  — but they helped create a Hampton Roads community, and they paid for themselves and sold books.

Beyond that, when we needed to raise capital, I invented a form of partnership that allowed readers to lend us money at a good rate of interest (less than we would have had to pay to a bank if a bank even would have lent it to us, and greater than individuals could have received from banks or pretty much anywhere). This not only raised capital, it turned many readers into investors, and then into friends. They felt (rightly) that they were no longer outsiders but contributors. We were giving them something they valued; in return they were giving back. (And they were making money, I am glad to say. One of my readers turned investor turned friend told me later, she was never so surprised in her life as when she received her capital back on top of the interest it had earned and the free books we had sent her as they came out.

I don’t know whether you intend to continue but we’ve gone 80 minutes, and I’m out of gas. Maybe more next time. Thanks for the pointer to memory lane.

And why should you want to buy the book? Here’s the epilogue, as a reminder.

Epilogue

Nathaniel – or whatever his name is – and I have worked hard to present a different way of seeing the world. I think it’s coherent, it explains a lot, and it is endlessly hopeful in its implications. But is it true?

Can it be true that this 3D life that seems so real to us is only somewhat real?

Is it a fair description of our lives, to say we’re always doing improv?

It may ring true, that we are creators by nature. Does it also ring true that our real work is to create ourselves?

Vast impersonal forces flow through us, animate us, and are deflected or are redirected to some degree by our decisions. Does this ring true to you?

We are all interconnected; thus in a sense we are all part of one thing. True? False? Debatable?

We are called to create ourself through our choices. Thus it may be said that we are the center of the world. Everyone else is called, equally, to create themselves by their choices. Thus it may be said that none of us is the center of the world. Nathaniel holds that both statements are true, that it’s all in how you look at it.

Free will is a given. (Choice without free will would be a pretense, a farce.) Predestination is a given. (Wherever we find ourselves, we are at the end of a long chain of cause and effect that could have led nowhere else.) Nathaniel says both are true, not just one. Do you know any way to reconcile the two other than Nathaniel’s?

These are big questions, big statements. The book is full of big questions, big statements. Is it safe, is it wise, either to reject them out of hand or to accept them without examination?

In short: What are you doing to do now?

Everything in this book may be true – I hope it is – but you won’t know until you test it for yourself. Knowing can’t be passed on through words or even by example. It must be lived. Until you live it, it is only hearsay to you.

It is true, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, but that step begins with the decision to take the step. Until you decide to take that step, you aren’t on a journey, you’re toying with the idea of taking a journey. Similarly, sometimes you have begun a journey and you decide to pause. Nothing wrong with that. Choice is what it’s all about, after all.

But when you’re ready to start, or ready to resume, the things Nathaniel has given us in this book are things you might wish to test, so see if they will bear your weight.

Whether you are just beginning, or beginning again after a pause, or reading this while already traveling,  I wish you a productive journey. After all, I have a vested interest: Your success is mine, as mine is yours. It is very true, we’re all in this together.

8:00 AM. A week’s worth of communications beginning Sunday the 7^th. Need to reread to see if I can gear up for more. I had the sense it wasn’t finished, and I’d like to be sort of oriented toward whatever comes next logically. Or, not logically, exactly, but I get a sense that an argument is flowing and is going to be aided if I have the previous bits in mind.

Sunday – The neuron analogy.

Monday  – Process versus concentrating on results.

Tuesday  – Do it willingly.

Wednesday  – Concentrating over time by retaining contact with non-3D.

Thursday  – Syncing inner and outer.

8:30 AM. Alright, guys, shall we continue?

What you just reread and summarized in a few words should provide continuity of the overarching thought. In leading your lives, not merely in producing results, you all face similar situations that requires similar adaptations. Some of you need more of this; some, more of that, because every mixture of traits and experiences is different. But if you think of yourselves as each functioning like a neuron in the universal brain, and recognize that freely giving yourself to whatever it is you do, staying right there rather than gritting your way through it in order to get to some envisioned result; if you realize that retaining communication with your non-3D component allows continuity over time, and syncing inner and outer periodically preserves that communication, it will be well.

Put that way, it seems genuinely helpful. And I wonder if the “stray thought” I had while writing it applies. I thought, I wonder if that is why Jesus said if someone requires you to walk one mile with him, walk two. Was it a matter of, “Whatever you do, do consciously, do willingly”?

You tell us.

I don’t think I will. I’ll leave it an open question. It is striking, though, how often something you say will lead me to remember something Jesus said and suddenly see it in an entirely different way. Sometimes, as now, it is something I remember but never had any sense of why he would say that. Why should we respond to external coercion by seeming to accede to it? If it is a matter of maintaining your inner awareness, it makes sense I’d not thought of. Commonly it is seen as some form of meekness, I think. “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild,” when he was neither meek nor mild.

Are we finished, so soon? Or — well, let’s sit with it and see.

[Pause.]

Very good. You see how a sense of “I could be doing other things” may poison the moment?

“Poison” is a little strong.

Is it? Not every poison kills, but if poison is too strong, how about mind pollution?

Sounds like porn.

If an environmental factor interferes with function, that is pollution as far as the person attempting to function is concerned. And such factor may be a habit, or a prejudice, or any emotional disturbance.

Anything that pulls us off center.

You could look at it that way, yes. Anything that detunes you.

In a fast billiard-ball carom, I go from Thoreau saying you can be detuned even by drinking too much water, to wondering if the religious sects that make a big deal of prohibiting spirits are trying to avoid detuning.

If they are, would you say they succeed?

Sometimes yes, sometimes no, like anything else in life. I imagine if you are concentrating on avoiding alcohol lest it detune you, you might be detuned by self-righteousness, or gluttony, or who knows what.

Naturally there is no universal solvent.

Not even syncing 3D and non 3D?

Concentrate too much on that, and something else will sneak in from somewhere you aren’t watching.

Hmm. That could be seen as again concentrating not on process but on desired result. Is that what you’re saying?

There’s no need to live your lives at full stretch, never relaxing, never enjoying. What kind of life would that be? Only — live your life. Be aware of what you live. Nobody else is living life exactly in the way you do, so make the most of it.

And that does feel like the wrap-up. Our thanks for all of this, as always.