Black Box session 08-03-01 (2)

[change sides of tape]

F: [sigh] The thought came, “well, maybe that’s what’s wrong with my breathing,” and then as I started to say it, there was a wheeze. [chuckle] Too simple, maybe. [sigh] Now I’m freezing. [pause]

You gentlemen care to tell me anything that will persuade me whether I was making that up or not? [pause] I get a sense of them laughing at me. “Exactly what do you need?” I had a glimpse of a green grass field, seen from between – behind – green trees, but that’s all it was, just a little flash. [pause] I think I’m ready to move if you are.

S: Very good. Um, let’s move on then, on to 21.

F: Any suggestions you have, at any time, are always welcome.

S: I was wondering about something we talked about before the session, of you being um, you used the word – I can’t remember the exact word right now, but about a time in your life where you were to yourself; I don’t know if you actually used the word isolated at that time; and now you find that that was a luxury but also you’re moving away from that period of your life now into something else. And now here in the booth there was a concept of focus 15 being to isolate you from something, and so you might take a look at the perspective in 21 and see if there’s something for you there. So let’s move on to 21, keeping in mind – what’s the pattern here?

F: Already, as soon as you said it, I got the answer. I shouldn’t have said – if I did say isolation, I should have said concentration. They wanted me in 15 to stay here, to hold it here, the focus of my attention, rather than to let it dissipate. And the externals would have been what we were talking about earlier. My earlier life concentrated me on me rather than on – and my attention outwards. [pause]

[sigh] [very long pause]

There was a moment a couple weeks ago in a meeting when I was looking at the rug and I saw the rug as energy suddenly, literally saw it that way, and I would like for the to happen on a regular basis. I’d like my normal senses and normal visions to expand to whatever point would be appropriate for me. I would like to be able to see more. In all senses of the word see. My sense is that what you all have in mind is that I’m doing your work, you’re happy enough with that. Let’s expand the playing field some. [pause]

Freezing. [pause]

Well, they go back to that initial vision that I got. Instead of a crystal it’s sort of like a Quonset hut? The same sense, an expanded playing field. It’s – they’re in full accord with that. It’s probably their idea. That the world I will live in is – well, it’s the same world it was, but my perception of it will be wider and broader and —

S: Yes, yes–

F: –richer, deeper

S: — yes.

F: I always felt that, it’s just that I don’t always express it that way. I know the world isn’t going to change that way. And the initial concentrating experience is required in order to see wider and broader and all that. Because one needs a place to stand. Which is the result of the previous set of [prep] sessions.

S: And, what you said previously in this session, about the guy in the sand.

F: Very calmly, firmly, relaxed-ly anchored. He’s a part of it all. There’s no – divisions. In fact, I get a sense that the sand could be used in a way that the waterbed is, in a way, if you do it so that it’s very comfortable, you begin to lose the division between yourself and other. [pause]

Again it’s so simple that it’s almost impossible for them to give it to us. The mental turn needed is so slight, that we try and make a big deal out of it. Or we don’t – no, that’s not the way to put it. [pause]

It’s true that behind appearances is a whole different world, but it’s also true that what you see is what you get. They’re contradictory but all reality is – all reality is contradictory in that, seen from one level it’s one thing, and seen from a higher level it’s the opposite thing. It’s in that contradiction that the richness is. On this level we’re individuals, on that level we’re all part of the same individual. On this level is only appearances. On that level, there’s only – well, it’s a different set of appearances, really. After all, it’s a matter of definition, if you think everything is one, that’s one appearance. If you think everything are individual things, that’s a different appearance. Since they’re both, you can’t really say it’s either – and therefore either one is just appearance. You pays your money and you takes your choice. But it’s better not to choose; it’s better to – it’s more freeing, more – uh, it’s got more potential, when you can change viewpoints. Or hold them together. Just as they said in the book. Okay, I’m tired of lying in the sand, let’s go do something else.

S: It would seem to me that lying in the sand would have its advantages over burying your head in the sand.

F: {laughs] Not if you’re an ostrich. [pause]

It is true that living an everyday ordinary life could be seen as burying your head in the sand. But it’s also true that so could seeing it all as one. The only way not to have your head in the sand one way or the other is to be at the interface, or go back and forth, at the interface. That’s an easy message to give people, but it’s an important one.

Oh! This is interesting The reason the New Age movement hasn’t come to more so far is that it doesn’t include the contradiction, it only attempts to see the world from one new way, and that new way was so appealing and so seemingly liberating that they threw out ordinary life, in a sense. And so it’s just a matter of bringing it back and saying okay, this is true, but this other is also true. There are no contradictions, but, while you’re inside 3D Theater, there are contradictions. But there aren’t, but there are. And THAT – oh my! – and that is actually the meta-game, because it’s just a way of stretching people to a new level of being in which they’re not dependent on one viewpoint. And when they get accustomed to the new level of being that can shift viewpoints, then there’ll be other levels beyond that. So this very message, if it didn’t do anything else except accustom people to not only the validity of more than one viewpoint, but to shifting back and forth routinely, would, in itself, bring them to a new level of being. [pause]

I sure hope your tape recorder didn’t jam on that one.

S: It was beautiful. [pause]

F: I get a sense – how would they say it? – that what our concepts aren’t nearly as important as what the concepts do to our way of thinking. Or, another way of looking at the same thing, what our concepts are aren’t nearly as important as the processes that get us there. So that we never see anything right – you know, this is all in my book; these guys are reading my book. [laughs] You know that you’ll never see anything, quote, right, because there’s no one right way to see it. But every way, every viewpoint has its own – attraction. Its own rewards. Its own– If you’re looking toward the ocean, it’s really beautiful. But if you look away from the ocean, that might be really beautiful too. And if you look up, or down, or whatever. Or in. [pause]

And if you can look in from the ocean while you’re remembering seeing the ocean, it adds texture. It adds richness. [pause]

You know what else it does? It also reminds us of our position as central in our world. We’re always central in our own world, and if one in looking south remembers what it looked like when one looked east, one is less likely to forget that one is the one looking, rather than identifying with whatever it is that one is looking at. [pause]

It keeps us central. That shifting of perspective keeps reminding us that we are central, not what we’re looking at. [long pause]

S: I think you’ve hit on a perspective that was unanswered in Neale’s Conversations with God. One of the questions put forth was, from Neale to God was, “is there something larger than you? If you are all there is, is there something larger than you,” and God’s reply was, “yes of course, but that’s beyond our discussion here,” and it was sort of left there. And it would seem to me that what you just touched on was, the idea of us focusing on the oneness and the reaching out of the New Age bliss of oneness and unity and then flipping back into individuality and then unity and then individuality. And therein lies the focus of being more than God, is the new dimension that it offers, to be able to walk the edge and to experience both realms, the unity and the oneness.

F: Mm-hmm. That’s what God’s doing, I expect. If it’s God. That is to say, I don’t know if we ever experience God. We experience another level up, but who knows how many more levels up there are, until the ultimate – if there’s an ultimate.

S: We can, by definition, not not-experience God, but in experiencing God and individuality, by definition then we experience more than God.

F: Who’s making these definitions? [pause] Interesting, while we’ve been talking, my hands are now resting on what I think is molded stone. I sent myself out toward the monk in England, and I believe this is an express—this is a sort of a – [sigh] I go out beyond words and it’s frustrating me, I can’t remember what the words are. [Laughs] I’ll have to tell you later, it’s like – they’re reassuring me that I’m in touch with him, I can’t think what the hell the word is. But at the same time that I’m reaching out to him, you’re talking about God. And I thought that was quite interesting. Because that would have been Bertram’s life. It would have been the way he saw things, you know? A symbol, a metaphor or something. Some word like that. The fact that it feels like stone is them reassuring —or giving me a – oh anyway, he’s here, I think, to a degree. I’d like to explore this. How, in what ways, and in what manner can he experience me and I experience him? I know he saw that steeple through my eyes, I felt that, when we were there in Salisbury. But I don’t think he could have under- I don’t think he could have experienced the car that we were driving in, before that. Give me something about this. I don’t know why it’s important, but it kind of feels important. How do we experience each other? [pause]

Wow! An immediate sense of vaulting arches above – you know, church arches. Very strong. There again, in fact. In fact, in Salisbury Cathedral. If I were there I could tell you just where, too. I know just where this is. [pause] Why?

Oh, wait a minute, that ‘s the answer to my question. I can experience it – that’s what he’s looking at. But I have been there physically, so I have the advantage that I can – it’s in my memory banks, okay? He doesn’t have to send it by way of a concept, he can send it by way of – it’s not him sending it anyway, but it can be – Whew! Okay, let’s think about this. He, standing there, looking at his church, it goes up to the larger being, who can bring it back to me, although all the movement is misleading, but that’s language. Because I have seen the church with my physical eyes, the larger being can give me that vision just as it did, because it’s all there. But it couldn’t send him David Francis Hall – it could give him an idea of it, but it couldn’t send him a memory of it – because it doesn’t exist in him. Now let’s see if that’s true or not; let’s look at that a little. [pause]

The process seems to be that I express my understanding as best I can, and then they refine it. Oh, and they say that’s because expressing it actually crystallizes it. That it’s, it’s like when you teach something, you learn it. You – when you say it, it crystallizes is into a form that can be edited. All right, so? [pause]

He and I were – or David and I – shared, when I was in England, things at the feeling level, which is the most widespread language – it’s the common language among us all, you know. A feeling is a feeling; that doesn’t need translation into symbols. That’s exactly it! That’s exactly it! He – I – I looked with my eyes at that tower and that spire, and he somehow saw it, and the way that I knew that he saw it was the feelings that I felt. [pause] And when David saw that monument to the first war, I think he – I don’t know whether he had seen it when he was alive, I think he did – but it reminded him all of the sudden out of the blue, the wave or grief and – and all was so – I, and so we could share that. It didn’t require symbols, it was a common language. What requires symbols are intellectual concepts, or – I get a vision of a church being built, like a mountain, level on level on level. It’s like we build on things [pause] I got a little lost on that one [pause]

It certainly, it’s — the feelings are the universal language. We can share feelings. In fact, we can share feelings with animals much easier than we can share thoughts, and we can almost not at all share concepts. And we could share feelings with trees. Or plants, I mean. Hmm. And in fact that’s what’s been going on with the crystals – I’m sharing feelings and they’re sharing feelings with me. But I having no mental block to put that idea into, had no idea they were sharing feelings. Now, going back and interacting with the feelings, with the crystals, I’ll be interacting with the feelings. I’ll, I’ll – now going back –

Hey they’re still answering the first question that I asked them, aren’t they? This is what’s going on!

S: [laughs]

F: You stop that! [laughs] Going to get a different monitor here. That’s – that’s how you do it! I asked them how you do it and they’re telling me how you do it. [pause] We need to have — some people anyway need to have a mental structure to allow them to experience. Now, if you have a very simple person – I mean, in an emotionally simple person, I don’t mean simple-minded—if you have a simple person, they might just go right to it and relate to it. As, for instance – AHH! Well, well, well. That’s – that may be, anyway, what Jesus meant when he said you have to be as little children. The children don’t have the – um, the mental structures that get in their way. But in order to get to the point where you don’t have those structures, sometimes the easiest way is to create a different structure. Sometimes you can get beyond it, but sometimes not.

So, because I had an unconscious mental structure that led me to the assumption by definition unconscious that the crystal couldn’t be communicated to in feelings, in other words, it wouldn’t be something I’d ever have thought of one way or another – because I had that totally transparent unconscious mental structure, it couldn’t happen. With now the awareness that that mental structure existed, I can set it aside. But I’m better off than if I had never had it in the first place, because now I know – at least conceptually – how to go about seeing the world as magic. As the magic that it is.

In other words, I have a friend who sees gnomes. Well, I’m willing to see gnomes, but I couldn’t do it, you know? Now I think I can see – at least conceptually – the process of finding and eliminating those unconscious, very real barriers. And those barriers come in when we’re about seven years old, when our mental – when our accustomed mental – I don’t know, this is beyond me; it’s like, when brainwaves shift. I don’t think it is brainwaves, but it’s like the brainwaves shift at that age. When that happens, we get unconscious mental structures. [long pause]

Just as a matter of interest, where are we? Are we still in 15? Are we in 21?

S: No, we’re in 21, and you have oh, five or ten minutes left here.

F: Oh, I knew that was the climax of things, but–

S: You might think about what we talked about earlier, about the forming of the new you, the birthing of the new you. There’s been some comment about that now, about moving into a world which has been there all along, but you have not seen it. So it isn’t so much leaving one thing behind for something else, but seeing the world differently and thereby identifying as being something new or different and yet it’s been there all along.

F: Well that’s like what they said the other day about movement. There isn’t any movement, but it seems like movement. There’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s not – the world doesn’t change, but you can walk into a very much changed world. It’s what you were saying. It’s certainly what happened at Gateway. [pause]

We have all kinds of barriers that sort of set themselves up as the result of assumptions that proceeded from our culture’s unstated – and therefore unconscious – way of seeing things. We are a really in a very real sense – well, I want to say the prisoners of our culture, but anyway the creatures of our culture, in a far greater way than we realize commonly, because – because the freedom of thought and feeling and expression that we have is circumscribed by walls that we don’t see, and, not seeing them, we don’t know how to take them apart. Or see them not there, to put Bruce’s words on it. [pause] There’s a lot in that. That—that’s– There’s a lot in that. Because that’s part of the magic trick – of dismantling the walls. What I mean is, there’s a lot in that in terms of us teaching people. That can be expressed – I can do it – in a way that people will hear. Big surprise.

S: [changes the sounds, back to focus 10]

F: What’s your take on that being that I experienced?

S: That was an interesting thing. I think that when you re-listen to your tape later on, I think it will be interesting to see how it plays into context of the overall story of your session today, so what I’d like to do is reserve comment on that until you go through your session again, and see where it falls into the pattern of the story, and the answer may emerge from that.

F: You won’t forget what your own impression is, though?

S: Oh, absolutely not.

[etc. as Skip counts me back]

As I had forgotten to bring my tape recorder, I could not record our very interesting debriefing session.