So You Think Your Life Was Wasted (23)

Live the knowledge

It’s one thing to know a thing abstractly, or theoretically. It’s another thing to know it emotionally as well. And it is yet a third thing, the vital thing, to actually live what you know. As the guys said, a while ago:

[Monday, January 16, 2006]

It is more than a matter of writing a book, or of writing many books. More important by far is the need to live the knowledge. To some extent one serves as a model to others in anything one does, and that serving as a model can occur – must occur – in every aspect of life. If various aspects contradict each other, each aspect – and the contradictions among aspects – serves a different model. This is not to say that one is primarily a model for others. Is one’s life primarily lived for the sake of one arm, or one ear? Yet the arm and the ear are as integral as any other past of the whole

So – this is a time to be transformed. Clever phrasing, eh? It may be and should be read two ways. The times are to be transformed; you are to be transformed in these times.

It is more than a matter of writing books. But you always knew that.

[January 17, 2006]

over-reading and anxiety

(8:15 a.m.) Why did I determine – for it was a conscious decision, practically – to waste all of yesterday?

Your old habit of over-reading got away with you. As over-eating has, and more or less for the same reason: anxiety.

Fear?

Fear of being unable to actually do the job you are here to do, the only job you really want to do – because you have always looked at it wrong way around. You needn’t succeed, you need only do it and that itself is the success. As, Messenger [my first novel]. When you finished, you knew you had done something! But its external failure left your fears and doubts untouched. Had it succeeded externally, you might have been said to have succeeded externally. That isn’t necessarily what you want or need, and so it didn’t occur. But your entire situation differs, now.

[The following discussion refers to the “control panel” that we can mentally construct and modify – adjusting the switches – to modify our lives. This is psychic Ingo Swann’s concept, a brilliant one, I think.]

I would turn off the slide-scale for gluttony – but I still can’t see the reality following the image of setting it to zero.

Then do what you can envision. Envision it at a number on the scale –

60, anyway.

And move the slide-switch down by a percentage. Say, a quarter. More if you can feel comfortable believing it – it is the same process as access to past lives, after all – but not so much that your doubt overcomes your ability to do anything.

All right, 25%. That moves it to 40.

All right, then revisit it as you wish.

And I hear you say, pick up different threads.

Surely, or you will obsess on what you have lost by turning that dial down. It will be as if you have lost something.

I do see that. So — ?

What would you like to pursue that to date you have not?

I’d like more easy perseverance, so that I can accomplish something. To date I have mostly been kicked externally or have not worked. If I could devise a chart – maybe a pie chart – that would represent the jostling elements within me, it might prove useful. Indeed, I hear you saying that I might devise a whole set of simple tools for people like me. Not today though. Today I must make up for some of the time lost yesterday, endless reading and eating, eating and reading, far into the night.

Surely you see that your culture’s way of making you feel guilty about not doing what you want to do, and doing what you don’t want to do, will work only for a certain kind or person, in a certain kind of belief system. So by living it and living it though – or perhaps we should say living through it – you break the way for others who are like you in this. It is not a universal problem, yours is not a universal answer. But you living your life are addressing or not addressing the problems specific to you; this means also that you are addressing those problems for all others who share that thread or those threads – and they are doing the same, also for all others on the thread. This has nothing to do with publicity or notoriety, nothing to do with schools or schools of thought. Mostly this work is done in private and does not achieve publicity afterward either; nor is it noteworthy, particularly. Should one – or rather should everyone – write journals or publish books or make movies about how they learned to walk, or how their pancreas overcomes specific challenges? You see? Everyone is engaged in the same kind of creation-by-decision; that is what human life is. So the only need (if it is a need; but it is something to do, anyway) is to remind people that this is a way of seeing life.

Your lives right “now” are starved of meaning. This is as it should be (in other words, “all is well”) so that new meanings can come into prepared soil. Yours – and this is addressed to whomever reads this – yours is only one, yet it is one, contribution.

It would not be possible to lead a life that did not affect everyone else, but as that seems too vague and theoretical to you, we will put it another way. It would not be possible to live a life without affecting all the threads one comprises; equally it would be impossible not to be affected by all those threads. It is a metaphor, but not a far-fetched one, that you are all in a web of life in and out of Time-Space. There is no isolation.

Mildly frustrating to us, it is, to know how little our plain words will be felt or even heard. We say to you, “you are not alone,” and you, Frank as an individual at one particular point in your life – are utterly transformed (though as it happens across time-slices the process is not obvious to you, or not so much so). But we say “you are not alone; nothing can exist in isolation” and we know that few who read it will do more than nod vaguely and proceed, not realizing that their lives can be utterly transformed merely by the implications of that statement. This is a key – not the only one, but it is one – to totally re-valuing what they know; most will scarcely notice. Nonetheless, all is well. The frustration you know comes not in our wishing something to be done or not done – for elsewhere of course it is or isn’t done – but in seeing that tension between desire and the living-out of consequences. Well, the whole subject – including your mild surprise that we can feel frustration, not to mention your confusion over the whole idea – can wait, perhaps forever.