Saturday, July 3, 2010
6 AM. Okay. Why do I feel so bad? Too much coffee? It can’t be too much food. Too unbalanced diet? Or — what?
Not every illness is attributable to a lack-of, or a wrong choice, or a too-much-of. If that were so, the corollary would be — do it just right and you’ll never be sick.
That makes sense. All right, forget it. Who’s up? Papa, I forgot, in yesterday’s session, that it was your anniversary, even though I knew full well it was July 2.
So what? No reason to build a shrine around it.
It’s just that I like to associate things. The second is the day the First Minnesota took 80-something percent casualties at Gettysburg, for instance, saving Little Round Top from capture.
We could talk about dates and their meanings but you really don’t have the right kind of mind for it.
No, I realize that. It requires somebody very abstract, very — well, I was going to say very Uranian, but Uranus is very prominent in my chart. Still I know what you mean, whatever it is, it’s sort of impractical even though it is also very extended. Anyway, what should we talk about?
Gaps? [In the record of Hemingway’s life, I knew.]
All right. Let’s see. How about talking about you and your sons.
Difficult subject. They suffered, you know. They weren’t first except occasionally when I was teaching them something. I couldn’t very well include them in my working life, could I? You know as well as I do, writing is done alone. And that means that thinking and feeling and associating ideas and emotions is done alone. If you spend a lot of your life doing that, your family and friends get what’s left. That’s normal. But if besides that your inner self isn’t very easily communicable, by the same law of your nature that makes you a writer, people who have a right to know your inner self may feel deliberately shut out.
But isn’t that the universal human condition, to be more or less shut out of each other’s inner lives?
Go back to your own boyhood and remember. Did you feel a part of your father’s inner world?
No, not really. I thought it was because I wasn’t interested in what interested him: racing, horses, farming, whatever else, really. Gambling and enjoying his friends. I sort of took up my mother’s impatience and general disapproval, so I didn’t ever really get inside the hedges.
Well, condemnation isolates, right?
Sure did. And with you?
I had only their earliest years, and that changes things. I have very fond memories of Mr. Bumby [first-born John], as you and the world know. The other two came when I was older and more burdened, and of course they weren’t first. And the presence of nurses and people to take care of them makes life a lot easier for the parents, but it isn’t very good for the child. They tend to get shut out of their parents’ outer lives, as well as their inner. But I wasn’t thinking as much about them as I maybe should have been.
Is this subject too abstract? Too closely personal? It feels like pushing through sludge.
Partly you aren’t as centered as you might be. Concentrate on that pain in your head for a minute.
[After a pause.] Well, maybe slightly clearer. But how about the subject matter?
Maybe we could talk about other things today.
Well — what would be a good topic?
Stay close to the central theme, and the topic of the day will suggest itself (at least, that’s how it will seem to you). The central theme is — do you know?
I’d have to assume it is something on the order of, “the other side is alive and well and ready to talk to you.”
More like, “your life is more than you think it is, and here is a way to learn how much more.”
“Here” meaning — direct communication as a way of life.
Meaning, more, rearranging your ideas of what the ground rules are so that you rearrange your ideas of what is practical, so you can move with the times.
As you know, residing inside my mind as you do mentally, being in contact —
You heard me say, “stop!” You can’t just slide that one in, you’re going to have to explain it, and that will be topic enough for the rest of the session.
Will it? All right. Here is how I have come to think things are, in light of 20 years of gradually changing experience. When we communicate with any mind on the other side, it — being outside of time-space — is as alive to our present as to any other time. I don’t know how it really works, but I think of it working this way: I contact the mind of Carl Jung, say, or Ernest Hemingway, or Bertram the monk of the Middle Ages, or Joseph the Egyptian from far antiquity. No matter when or where they lived, they live in the eternal now that is outside time-space. They are equally alive and, if activated by our thought of them — or I suppose I should say if communication with them is activated by our thought of them — they are accessible to us. But they are not accessible as museum-pieces, knowing only the times they knew when they had body. Those were the times that shaped their mind, but the mind continues to function in the same way that I, whose mind was shaped by growing up in post-World War II America, continue to function even though that world has ceased to exist.
Thus not only can Ernest Hemingway meet Carl Jung via interconnection through my mind, but either of them can meet Abraham Lincoln, or anyone else I meet, regardless of the dates within which they held bodies.
All true enough, and since you are also in contact, indirectly, with those that any of us knew, there are your unnamed “guys upstairs.” As soon as you get rid of the need for Story, you leave space for Perception. And in having contact with any person that you resonate to, you have vast resources consciously available to you. What do you think intuition is, anyway? It is being fed information via non-sensory channels. Well, who do you suppose is feeding you that information? Elves? Some cosmic librarian?
You connect to those who resonate to the keys you resonate to. You have access to information along the lines your mind is shaped to be most receptive to. You are part of the vast cosmic mind of mankind. You — meaning, anybody who reads this, and everybody else too. And you’re part of it now; it isn’t just after you drop the body.
In the three-dimensional world, the physical world, your consciousness has a centered, pointed nature that it does not, prior to or after your experience in the earth. That is why initiative is often yours, and you experience the other side as relatively responding to you rather than relatively leading you. Partly that is incomplete reception, but partly it is true enough, because the non-physical mind is represented, after all, by your own part of the non-physical mind that you call your personal unconscious. So, you are urged and lured and enchanted and obsessed during your life by parts of yourself that are definitely not the conscious mind’s directives. These are the urgings of your larger self, your non-ego-bound self, your connection to the other side.
Once you change your assumptions about the way the world is – which means, changing your assumptions about the things that must be not possible — you start to see that you are not nearly as independent and free-standing as you thought you were, and this is a good thing, because it makes more possible. Think back just 20 years. You had computers but they were free-standing and you worked and played on them that way. Today, most of what you do and take for granted as capabilities are Internet-dependent. Thus you have changed your definitions of your computer, more or less behind your own backs, and you find them more useful, more indispensable, no matter how aggravating, than a stand-alone computer ever was or could be. Surely the analogy, which is closer than many we have used, is obvious.
Now, the existence of the Internet as a functioning capability, as a fact of life, doesn’t mean that it will necessarily be used well or productively. (It also is not necessarily the case that you will know how to judge.) But it is there, and while it is there it changes you. An individual in isolation is not unchanged, for now instead of being the one isolated individual among a world of equally isolated individuals, he or she is one isolated from a sea of increasingly interacting and connected formerly isolated individuals. Again, this is a close analogy.
So, you contact Ernest Hemingway. I, let us say, have not been contacted before. Obviously — well obvious to me, anyway — this is not true factually, but just for the sake of an example. It may be that it seems to me like a wakening from asleep, or, more closely, a coming to attention from a sort of daydream. Or you might look at it as a phone call, a request for attention from a place outside my realm of attention at the moment. (I might be fishing the Gulf Stream, for instance.) Taking away the connotation of needing to put my attention only on the phone call, and not implying either that I am having to split my attention in the way you would in your circumstances in the earth, I connect with you and am aware of your mind as if it were part of mine.
Not all of it, though! First the things in which we are in closest resonance or harmony. Then later, if the connection deepens, other connections are made, much in the way you make friends on earth. And just as in your physical life sometimes you meet people who are instant friends because you just click, so here, and for the same reason — close relationship whether from past association or closely matching makeup.
So that’s the sense in which we reside in your minds, and that’s enough for today.
Yes, thanks. It took me 80 minutes to get this, and it’s just ten pages of Journal.
Well, you had your handicaps. I know what it is like to push through with a headache.
Surprisingly easy to do, actually.
You’ve had a lot of practice. Think how many hours of your life you read through headaches.
Hmm. Apprenticeship?
Useful experience, anyway.
All right. Thanks, Ernest — and why does this feel more right suddenly than “Papa”?
Subject for another talk, another time.
Okay. Till then.