The Nature of Linkage


Joan Borysenko describes them as interpersonal bridges; they are the links that tie me to the many identities I hold connection to, whether beloved or abhorred. These bridges, or links, are tenuous in some connections and thick as hamhocks in others, gristled and unrelenting in the overlay they bring in of values, viewpoints, emotional packages borrowed whole-cloth and the impact of remote events.

In direct one-to-one communication they are usually alive, and in the best they are effervescent, an aurora borealis of live opportunity to communicate. In the dullest they are sludgy, reactive, automatic, but at least somewhat alive.

In remote connection they often make up the solidity of the well-indoctrinated identity. They define our sense of community, being one with the good old boys from this part of town or sharing the values of Mom and the D.A.R., or the fellow-sufferers from parochial school or war-torn Lebanon; the old school tie is a thin strand of interpersonal energy that networks me to those who wore the Chartreuse; the language I speak identifies me as one who is permanently bridged to Indiana, Boston, Rangoon or Marseilles.

These bridges are thin, heavy, slow or blazing with the light of live communication between open hearts. When the link breaks, instant chaos of the psyche reigns.

Sudden bad news, a quick dislike for a new environment, a collapse of love into fear -- all these and many others can manifest when the link between Self and Other collapses. It is a collapse of love, a refusal of a reality, a shutdown of communication, and impossibility of understanding. These breaks, more than problems or sins, can degrade the soul of any one person or any collection of them.

What are these links?

Souls meet on the ground of common illusion, an averaging of individual fantasy compounded by millions of views and impulses and averaged into the peculiarly persistent backdrop called Space-time.

Whether they are meeting as meat-coated beings on the fields of Earth or as energy vectors dancing among the meteorites, or as spirit beings in the infrared, they are still meeting on the grounds of joint illusion. If it were not joint, they would not meet. If it were not an illusion, it would not have the qualities of continuance, weight, persistence and stubborn fricative resistance that space continua seem to have (especially ours).

The means which Souls use to discover each other is the broad subject of communication, including intent, telepathic exchange and insight, intuitive two-way understanding, love, taking visual bearings on the motions around one, perceptions of tactile, sound, light, warmth, motion, electrical sensation, significance of every description. All these are communications. They can be found in the ether between bodiless souls or in the way someone hauls his little red wagon or in the speeches in Congress or the whispers in the trenches of Syria or the laughter of lovers or the bullets of war. This means that these interchanges between beings have two parts or ingredients -- communication being one and reality, agreement on, being another.

The third is the raw feel of tolerance, from the highest enlightened "co-existence as one" to the most individuated, apathetic, and withdrawn sullenness. Somewhere between those extremes lies the man or woman you last spoke to, their parents, your mailman, the dog and every life- form. These states, emotional or spiritual, are the feelings generally seen as affinity states.

Dry theory runs on forever in the human brains. The simplicity is that we ARE connected with all things, because we share the entire universe of life energy, like multiple rivers feeding a single sea. The connections between them, like streams between one and another river, form the net of life. When we send (think, act transmit) affinity (the simple WILL TO CO-EXIST) along those connections, the peace of happiness and the joy of our creation are the inimitable;e, ineluctable flowering of our own chosen acts.

Thus, act in the wisdom that love brings; for there is no other. Thus, seek the rewards of joy and of peace from the exercise of Self as Heart; for there no other coins in the world than these.

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