Thursday, July 1, 2010
6 AM. All right, I’m ready if you’re ready — or if you- all are ready. Papa, being that tomorrow is the anniversary of yourself-decided transition — and next year makes 50 years since then! — how about if you start?
There will be a time when 50 years as a space of time doesn’t impress you as it does now. Consider how your reaction is different now from even 20 years ago, and then try to see yourself over here for 50 years.
And maybe that provides the topic of the day, for I am curious about the experience of time.
I may not be the guy to explain what nobody has ever been able to explain, and be understood, all these years —
Let’s try. You could always observe and report; you had that kind of mind. Let’s try.
All right, let’s try. That image that flashed through your mind a second ago was the key. It is one key, anyway, one way to approach it. Care to describe it?
Well, just for a second I had a sense of a moment being shot with intensity, I can’t really describe it. It was as if your interest lighted it up.
That isn’t bad. Now in everything I am going to say about time, remember that this is one aspect of our lives here. Unlike your conscious lives, we are not dominated by time. Like your unconscious lives, we roam unimpeded through it, landing now here, now there. Say, do you suppose there could be a reason for the similarity?
I can feel your humor and irony, but I’ll footnote it here, because in cold print it may look like your sentence is actual surprise rather than play.
That’s why you’re on that end of the line, as interpreter.
Well, you might profitably think of life on the non-physical side as dreaming alternating with lucid dreaming alternating with very focused experiences, all within a permanent out-of-body experience. Make the mental effort needed to imagine such a state of being, and a few things will become clear to you.
Then, remembering that you there are more a community than a unit, remember that on this side our group-ness is more obvious to us than our separate-ness, and that will give you another aspect of our existence.
Really, just remember that you there are we here, on different turf, just as we told you “way back when” in 1998 when you were writing Muddy Tracks, and this will give you a better sense of it than anything.
The chief reason why people are unable to get any good sense of the afterlife is that they will persist in imagining themselves as individual (which they are not, even in life) and separate (where there is no physical structure to produce the illusion and experience of separation) and conscious in the way you are in the presence of a passing moment (where there is no ever-passing moment). Think of us as your own unconscious mind — which is pretty close to the truth.
This is why they chose you to tell me — you as artist are used to speaking between the words, thus conveying a sense of what can’t be said.
You’ll notice this has been our way right along.
That’s twice you’ve said “we.” Do you mean to imply that you — Hemingway who was — have been one of my guys upstairs from the beginning, I not noticing?
Not “from the beginning” — and what would “the beginning” mean anyway? When you were born? When you attained the age of reason? When you began to reach across consciously? When you began to have conversations?
I get it. Can you tell — do you know — what brought you into the combination? Was it something I did or said? Some topic we broached?
Don’t fall back into the mental habit of thinking that things occur only at your instance, or in response to your activity or attention. It’s all well and good to experience yourself as the center of life and the world, as in practice you do and everybody does, but it’s misleading in connection with this side as it would be on your side to think that everything proceeded from yourself.
Yes, I hear what’s coming next: “And anyway, who is the `you’ we’re talking about? Which you?”
That’s right. Good listening. Your own self-definitions are perhaps the most stubborn screens that distort your view of reality. Our work with you over 20 years — which is almost the same as saying your work with you over 20 years — has been to give you grounds to change your self-definition so that further opening-up could have space to occur in.
Well, as I remember the person I experienced myself as, back in 1992 when I did Gateway, I am pleased to see how far I’ve come.
Yes — now here is something that if we can get it across will be worth something to you. Sticking to the point, which is how do we on the other side experience time, realize this, even though upon thought it involves logical difficulties. Given that the ground-rules are different [between the two sides], it would! You’re going to have to ignore them at least long enough to get the shape and flavor of what we are saying, or you can’t get anywhere.
We’ve said — how many times! — that you aren’t a unit but are a community. You have taken this, rightly, to mean that different aspects of yourselves, different threads or strands, are coexisting within one container, the symbol for which is a physical body. But it is also true that you are a community in another sense — what we might call a community of time-selves.
Yes, more jargon. But we don’t see how it can well be avoided: Jargon evolves from the necessity to have a symbol that contains a complex thought, so that more content can be packed into a small enough container that can be processed with other things in your time-bound minds. Think of symbols as packed data, perhaps.
Anyway, you are each (and the word “each” in this context should make you chuckle, but such are the limitations of language) a community of time-selves. You at age 5, you at age 10, you at age 18, only much more infinitely divisible then this. Not just the time-self for every day, sometimes a time-self for every minute, depending on the intensity and complexity of any given reaction to the moment’s situation.
As within, so without. You were once given a sense of us in non-time or rather the non-physical as an endless or apparently endless collection of snapshots of moments, rather than any given moment’s self passing away and being replaced by that of the next moment. You heard, but didn’t have any context that would make sense of it, so you put it on the shelf for later explanation. This is that later you were waiting for.
So, the self that you, Frank, were on the day you drove up to the Institute to start Gateway is somewhat alien to you, so many years later, and is intimately close to you at the same time. That self did not cease to exist, any more than that moment ceased to exist. A moment’s thought will tell you that if one persisted, the other must have persisted, for they are of the same fabric. And, when you mentally access other times, do you not see that you do so through the self that experienced those times?
There is much here. Let Dr. Jung bring it a little further.
[CGJ] Alienists know that trauma can make a part of a person’s total personality unavailable to them. Thus people talk of split-off portions of the psyche, or in your time they speak of the process of retrieving lost parts of the soul. These terms and their context imply a recognition that a portion of the person having particular connection to the trauma remains connected to a particular time associated with the trauma. As long as the medical or shamanistic or psychological communities cling to the idea of the individual as unit, however, they will be unable to bring this practical knowledge into a larger theoretical understanding. Naturally so, for the theory needs correcting.
Alter the assumption from individual-as-unit to individual-as-community, and see how many mental epicycles become unnecessary. Recognize that the mind exists in the non-physical world and follows the laws of existence of the non-physical rather than the physical world, and more epicycles discard themselves (for it is scarcely necessary to make an effort to discard them; they drop off of their own weight).
A traumatized individual may split off awareness from the person being traumatized in order to be able to live. What is that splitting-off but a ceasing to communicate with the person being traumatized so as not to experience that pain? What is a soul-retrieval but a re-establishing of diplomatic relations? And, notice how often it is necessary to reassure that split-off fragment that it — that he, or she — is no longer rejected, no longer identified not with the pain it bore for you but with the person or situation causing the pain, which is manifestly unjust and is experienced that way.
All your best moments, all your worst moments, continue to live in your mind; in the akashic record; in the non-physical. Three ways of saying the same thing.
In effect, each moment of intensity in your life is a separate person that can be accessed and in any event can influence you or others depending upon the circumstances. Nothing goes away. Just as the present moment does not evaporate in the non-physical, neither does the person of the present moment, for the same reason, because they are part of the same moment’s reality.
I am getting a continually refreshed and strengthened sense of how much interpreting has had to be done over the years in order to get any of the results of this reality through my interfering mental concepts.
It is difficult, which is one reason why explication of concepts by the written or spoken word is helpful. Providing new concepts allows different information to come through and, more, provides the opportunity for people to experience life differently. A different form of information-experience.
Yes, I see. Are we at a natural place to pause? I can do a little more, if not.
This is a good place to pause. Go in peace.
I have never had greater peace, greater ease, than when doing this work. My thanks as ever.