Conversations June 7, 2010

Monday, June 7, 2010

6:45 AM. Good morning, Papa. And Dr. Jung and any others who are participating. Who’s up?

[EH] Let’s keep going while we are going well.

Okay with me, to put it mildly.

This talk of individuals as being more like communities has not been for the purpose of filling time. The whole dialogue process — extending now more than 4 1/2 years in this new form, and more than 20 in its earlier apprentice stages —

[Went wandering; lost the thread. Sorry.]

The short of it is, we are moving in a certain direction and you are moving with us in that direction, and both halves of the process are meant to instruct and to encourage. We are bringing in new concepts; you are experiencing how it feels to receive them, which is part of the information.

Just as a point of interest, that seemed to start off as Papa, then somehow morphed into one of the unidentified “guys.”

Happens all the time. You don’t always notice. And — you may find it a little hard to understand, or maybe not — it doesn’t matter. If you’re centered on some subject and you’re talking to two or three guys (in-body, I mean) you don’t necessarily care who it is who says any particular thing about that subject. Sometimes you do, often you don’t. Mostly when you do is when that person’s point of view is as important as what’s being talked about; when the subject itself is front and center, who says what doesn’t as much matter, and in fact you’ve been in groups where you felt impelled to say some specific thing, and have refrained from doing so only to hear someone else say it in a few minutes. It is as if the information wanted to be said, and tried first this one, then that one, until it found outlet.

Not so different a process in-body to not-in-body or vice versa — and why should it be? It’s the same process exactly — non-physical communication from one mind to another, with the only difference being the presence or absence of a physical body to channel the thought through.

This wasn’t what we intended to talk about today, but as it’s here, let’s finish.

You, being in bodies, think that your minds are physical or primarily physical, because your concepts (much more than your experience) lead you to see things that way. You push and modulate air, and so you speak. Your ear translates modulated air (so to speak) into sound, and so you hear. Your eye recognizes the written code you have learned, and so you read. Communication is clearly sensory, right?

Wrong, of course. Scientists make themselves look pretty silly, trying to reduce to physical causes what are physical manifestations. Thus Scrooge’s dream (he thinks, according to the science of his day) may be a fragment of an underdone potato.

But what are dreams and where do they come from? And intuitions? And out-of-body experiences, for that matter? What are flashes of inspiration, and psychic hunches that prove true? What are memories and foreshadowings and déjà vu experiences and pre-cognitions?

The body is primarily physical, though intimately connected to the non-physical for sustenance moment by moment, as the scriptures point out. But the mind is not physical, and shares none of the body’s constraints.

Your communication with anyone or anything is non-physical because it is mind to mind, and the mind resides not in the physical world but in the non-physical. That communication may depend upon sensory transmission because you are closed to active non-physical transmission, or for whatever reason of time, space, or attention — nonetheless the communication itself is mind to mind; non-physical to non-physical. It must be, because that is “where” minds reside.

Years ago you were told, everyone who ever reads any particular author’s book is directly connected to that author and to everyone else who ever reads the book. You didn’t have the background then to be told in such a way as to use the threads and rings analogy, so we left it at that, and you were content to take it as given. But perhaps now the mechanism is a little clearer to you.

It is one more way in which life may be regarded either as many interconnected individuals, or as all one thing, sub-specialized but interconnected. If you cannot grasp the inherent uselessness and in fact misleading nature of further “more definite, more precise” definitions, you can’t go where you need to be in order to understand how this side and that side, physical and non-physical and sort-of-either interconnect and function. There is no bigger obstacle to understanding, perhaps, than inability to change viewpoints and concepts without discarding the former and adopting the latter absolutely. No, awareness is awareness of flow and of ambiguity and of what can be said only between the lines.

So, to return to our starting-place, regard the process of communication between physical and non-physical as the same process as the communication you’re used to experiencing in the body. This should take some of the awe, some of the strangeness, out of it. You’re just doing what you’ve always done, but under slightly different constraints. It’s like a long-distance party-line telephone call, perhaps. Maybe there’s noise on the line sometimes and you have to shout. Maybe there’s the presence of other people on the line, horning in on your conversation. Maybe you’ve even dialed at random, or the switchboard mis-connected you. It’s still easier to use the phone than to drive to the other end (and maybe it’s beyond driving distance anyway) and it’s faster than writing a letter (and maybe the post office doesn’t have RFD on the other end) and the Internet hasn’t been invented yet, or if it has it’s still in its beta-testing stage. (This last isn’t a bad analogy for this process, in fact.)

Use the phone. When you pick up the physical telephone, you don’t first prepare yourself with a purification ceremony, or go through a communication ritual, or worry whether you’re intrinsically worthy to use it, or wonder if it will work for you as it does (or so you’ve been told!) for others. Just use it! The important thing is not the deification of the process; it’s what you have to communicate.

All right, that was well communicated. Thank you. It’s 7:30: too early to quit. More, Papa?

Hard to beat that for an encouraging little mini-essay on communication. Here, I suggest, is that column you needed to write for The Meta-Arts. [On-line Magazine]

Good idea. I’ll do that. One item off my to-do-this-week list.

Put a little intro at the top, though, to orient people.

Okay. Don’t know if anybody is reading it anyway. But, one or one thousand, I want to communicate.

To return to the previous topic. If you look at my life while considering me as a community of parts, you will read it differently. For one thing, you won’t feel compelled to weigh and balance traits and actions and talent and work and insults and all and come to some sort of sum, some judgment of me and my life. Leave that to Anubis: You’re not now and never were and never could be up to the task. And in the absence of a need to judge will come the space to experience, to weigh my life in a different manner. You’ve seen it written, perhaps. “Compassion liberates; condemnation imprisons.” That isn’t referring to what is condemned or seen with compassion, but to the person doing the condemning, or extending the compassion.

The hardest thing to get across is that advising compassion is not asking forgiveness or indulgence or partisanship. It is saying that you cannot understand a thing, no matter what, whether it is an action, a political movement, a new way of painting, a life — anything — without putting yourself sympathetically inside of it. Any external view that is not balanced by an internal feel is going to be just that — external; superficial.

The way to know is simple enough. Do you feel self-righteous in thinking about whatever it is that you are considering? Well, if so, then you may as well resign yourself: It’s a sign that you have not gotten inside what you are looking at. Yes, yes, a lot of poor jokes there, waiting, but the point remains: To understand everything would be to forgive everything. Or, as your friend pointed out to you years ago — Everybody’s doing their best. That, along with All Is Well; All Is Always Well, will take you far.

So, to return more directly to my life. You may ask why you are reading Reynolds last-to-first this time, and the answer of course is that the stages of my life were what they were, but reading them out of order reduces that temptation to see a life as a flow leading-from and leading-to, and instead seeing it as the-moment-of-time-in-itself. You need both, of course if you’re going to make sense of anything, but the point is, you do need both. It’s like when you read a mystery novel. The first time, you spend as much time wrestling with the author to see who is smarter as you do living in the story. But after that, you read it to enjoy and live in the story itself, in a way you couldn’t the first time, because you didn’t understand what you were reading. At least, if the mystery author succeeded, you didn’t! If you figured it out, you felt smarter but also cheated, right? Maybe even impatient. So, reading any biography, if the subject of the biography doesn’t interest you, that’s one thing. You cut your losses and don’t read any more. But if he does, you re-read, because the second time, knowing how it came out, you see more and see differently than you did the first time.

Yes, very clear.

Now when you change, you bring a different you to read the pages. Again the equation changes. How can you step twice into the same river?

I understand. And if we absorb or even try out some new concepts like our being a community of whatever-our-constituent-parts-may-be-considered-to-be, we will read things differently again.

Yes. We’ve pointed out before but perhaps there were different “you”s to hear this time.

Well, it’s 8 AM and we’ve been going at this an hour and a half, more or less, including 15 minutes not recorded here, but I think I’m good to continue if you wish.

Perhaps you can see that the two parts of this session — TGU and then me — feel to you like two short sessions rather than one longer one. This is why you’re tempted to continue. That, and eagerness for more, and a sort of disappointment when you quit for the day, like the party’s over.

True enough, and I sort of realized it, but not clearly as now that you’ve put it into words.

Well — and we ought to stop with this — here you see communication. The smartest thing you did, sort of behind your own back, was to just assume (for that’s what you did, whether you realize it or not) that those you contacted on the other side would be alive, and in the present tense, and able to know what you know. This last isn’t quite as true as you think it, in the way that you think it, but we will deal with that some other time.

If not for your assumption that we are alive, of course there could be no communication.

If not for the assumption that we were present tense, we could be only museum pieces to you, stuck where we left off when we breathed our last.

If not for the assumption that we know what you know, there would have to be this cumbersome (and unsatisfactory and ultimately not believable) construct in which you “told” us anything we needed to know, and we carefully kept our information within the bounds of what you could assume or suppose us to know.

Worse, if not for the final assumption, you’d have had a choice of two equally wrong, equally misleading choices:

1) We, being on the other side, know everything. In fact this is where you started, until experience proved that either we don’t or you don’t know how to elicit it, which in practice amounts to the same thing.

2) We, being a construct of your own mind, don’t really exist, in which case you are wasting your time and annoying the pig.

Neither of those assumptions lead anywhere productive, and you are free to consider whether your assumptions were your own bright idea, or were helpful suggestions from the guys. It makes no practical difference and in fact amounts to restating the same thing from different viewpoints.

Okay, enough for now —

Thank you, Papa, and as usual even if usually unstated, thanks to all.