Conversations September 12, 2010

Sunday, September 12, 2000

3:10 AM. Too early for coffee and in fact too early to be out of bed if my breathing would only smooth out.

Last night for the first time I lay in bed actually having a hard time going to sleep — which I rarely have — because of the thoughts swirling around, concerning the material I’d gotten yesterday in two bites. I can’t consciously remember those thoughts, but I have no doubt you all can. Shall we dance?

What, you don’t want to talk about Star Trek?

I sort of do, actually, but I thought I’d stick to business. I watched “Insurrection” again last night, and I’m not sure it isn’t the best of the 10 movies. I like bits of all the others — I like all of The Voyage Home, number four — but I turned on Insurrection intending to watch just a bit of it, and didn’t turn it off till it was over. Beyond entertainment, is there some reason I’m watching all this Star Trek? There was some excuse when Tania gave me all those old TV episodes, but why watch all the movies again?

Why re-read Raymond Chandler?

Don’t know that either. I re-read and re-watch because it brings me back to familiar joys, I suppose. I mean, I don’t re-read what I didn’t like, and don’t watch something I didn’t like the first time so that I can remind myself why I didn’t like it. It’s like hanging out with old friends, I guess. Nothing wrong with that, as far as I know.

So does it have to have a larger justification?

Not a matter of justification, just wondering why I’m drawn one way one time, another way another time. There are plenty of books I own that I haven’t read yet. It isn’t like I’m driven to re-read because that’s all I have: just all I want to read at that moment. It’s a sort of benevolent compulsion. I’ll go on a jag, reading a certain author or, in this case, re-watching a certain series. (Well, come to think of it, Star Trek is the only series I own if you don’t count the Jackie Gleason Honeymooners set.)

Could it be that you’re wanting to be a certain person, so you call forth the external stimulus that brings forth the particular strand-mind?

That’s an interesting thought.

The purpose of this work, remember, is to bring you to see the familiar in an unfamiliar light. Or rather, to reframe your life’s events from a different perspective.

And the examples of reframing don’t necessarily have anything to do with “significant” or “important.”

No indeed. There is a world of significance in tiny things, as much as the great things. More so, in a way, in that there are so very many tiny things in a life; much more opportunity to observe.

So if I were to observe closely I could identify the strand-mind — or combination of them, I suppose — that like Star Trek? Or, are evoked by Star Trek?

To put it another way, by close enough observation you could learn how to manipulate your external environment so as to revoke or encourage particular strand-minds to manifest. One form of that practice is called magic, or ritual. Another is called habit (good habits or bad, the process is much the same). So, you might ask yourself, what parts of myself emerge or are encouraged when I watch Star Trek? Which when I play Free Cell? Which when I read mystery stories, or paint, or take a walk, or do anything at all? Which when I snack, or consciously refrain from snacking? Which when I call someone, or e-mail, or go shopping on the Web for my favorite opinion blogs, or whatever.

The converse: Which parts of myself — which strands — more or less impel me to do things whether I like it or not? Which are the sources and fuel of what I think of as bad habits, and how do they function and what do they get out of it?

So you see, your robot work plays into this. So does anyone’s attempts to shape or reshape their habits and character. And all of this is very much to do with the work we are encouraging you to do, which — in your case, Frank — is examining religious thought for the illumination it can provide. Thought, say, on the virtues and the sins, etc., looking at them not necessarily from the point of view of the theologians, at all, but trying to see what they knew, and fitting it into your own knowing, your own composition. Others will look at philosophy or metaphysics or hard and soft sciences. The field of inquiry will be different; the process similar, and the intent the same.

Man is the measure of all things. As above, so below. Let these be your touchstones. You don’t have to count the cats in Zanzibar.

So, was it worth discussing Star Trek?

The question is, was it worth getting me up at three in the morning. If that was your doing, I don’t appreciate it even for the sake of the information. But actually, I don’t think it was, as it hasn’t really settled down even yet.

By the way, it occurred to me, Commander Data is known to, and loved by, many more people than nearly any real live functioning being. And this can be endlessly expanded — Horatio Hornblower, say, and the Lone Ranger and God knows how many cultural idols. They’re real somehow, as real as if they had a life behind and beyond the stage sets they were created on. And I don’t mean this as metaphor. If our brains record as real what they have seen and heard, and if our minds record what the brain allows them to record — and if this reality is a form of hologram projected from a more real reality (such as I visited so briefly once, 15 years ago or so) — is something created by us any less real than we are? I realize this sounds whimsical, or sounds like playing with words, but I don’t think it’s that. It’s as though — maybe more than “as though”–  in creating ET, or Hopalong Cassidy, or the Terminator, we are bringing a thought-form into strong existence. How is that distinguishable from magic?

Who said it is?

Edgar Cayce said “thoughts are things.” We keep coming back to it, don’t we?

We do — and we keep coming back to remind you that man is the measure of all things. If it affects you, can it be unreal at the mental level? If your neurosis makes you want to do something you yourself as ringmaster don’t want to do — think of Hemingway’s nasty temper, for instance — can the neurosis be unreal? If memories, even false memories, can set up and continue patterns of behavior (good or bad, it doesn’t matter in this context), can the mind’s choice of memory, or its fabrication of memory, be disregarded as unreal?

If I understand you correctly, and I think I do, you’re saying the same insights are to be found in theology, etc., because of course they would have been observed and studied and analyzed over the ages, but interpreted in light of another system of thought.

That’s it. Nothing more complicated than that. And, by the way, speaking of unexpected complications and connections. How different in effect is a motion picture’s presentation of reality, or a novel’s, from a roadmap or graphic or any other abstract representation?

I sort of have that at the periphery of my consciousness. It flew by before and I almost hear it again.

They all evoke living strands within you. (If they don’t, you don’t notice them.)

That’s kind of a big clue, isn’t it?

It is indeed, although we’ve said it in different words several times.

But it’s 4 AM now, and I’m out of business. I don’t have breath to spare to read this into Dragon. I’ll have to amuse myself otherwise.

7:10 AM. So I did send it out, after a bit. And got a little — well, call it semi-consciousness — I don’t know that I would call it sleep, exactly. But there is something quite interesting developing, I think. I am starting to see faces, quite distinctly sometimes. Not representations (abstractions) and so far not anyone I know. But the clarity and presence of the images is startling — and welcome. I think it is a clearing of the inner channels.

The effect of the clearing, rather. You can’t work toward certain abilities and states of being for long periods of time without some chance of actually getting what you want.

Well, that’s good to know. But — I did [know], of course. It has been many a year since I doubted it.

Oh? How’s your breathing? Or isn’t that worth noticing?

You’re saying I don’t want healthy lungs and freedom from periodic asthma attacks.

We are saying you haven’t spent the years working toward that, that you have working toward other things. And this is partly because the possibility of significant change hasn’t seemed all that real to you, nor as urgent.

My old friend Dave Wallis used to say, “Guilty, Your Honor.”

This perhaps is a disadvantage of being an intuitive, in that the physical is not your first priority. But it isn’t that ungrounded if you look at it in light of the concepts we’ve been setting out. So — have at it.

Hmm. I have to think how to go about it. There is a strand-mind, or more than one, who want me to have asthma?

That’s not a necessary way to look at it.

Who’ve had asthma themselves?

That’s closer, but pursue it.

Well, Bertram the medieval monk in England seems to have had tuberculosis or anyway some kind of lung problem. And it seems to me that I have Story about David Poynter, but if I do, it is vague in my mind.

In any case, Story won’t bring you too far.

Another way to look at it besides “want me to have” or “had it themselves.” What about, — well, I don’t know.

Remember, we said that any group-mind has many kinds of strands, not all of them former person-groups. It doesn’t take a former person-group to spend your life processing sugars or regulating your acid-alkaline balance — or keeping the bellows going, either. It would be a damned dull job, wouldn’t it, spending 75 years saying “breathe in, breathe out, breathe in again.”

That makes sense, but I’m still groping for this. There are simpler and more complex tasks to be done to run a life, and there are intelligences of the proper simplicity or complexity for each. Is that what you’re saying?

That’s more or less it, with the significant distortion that snuck in as you worked on it.

I know: the assumption of individuals. But I don’t see how we can talk about much without that concept at least latent.

That’s all right, just keep in mind that it’s there and it’s a distortion. Would you think of each cloud in the sky as a separate intelligence, or each blade of grass (assuming that you would concede the intelligence to them, as you should) or would it make more sense to regard each cloud as part of “cloud” in the abstract, and each blade as “grass” in the abstract — that is, each blade of grass as a neuron or a ganglion in the over-all organism of the ecology called “grass.”

The background you’ve given me over 10 years and more has given me what I need to understand what you just said, but it won’t be clear to everybody.

Feel free.

You said to Rita and me, years ago, that a maple tree might be better considered to be one of 10,000 manifestations of “maple tree” than considered each tree as a separate individual. You said individuality isn’t the same thing for plants as it is for animals. I’d paraphrase you now to have said that maybe there is a soul of “maple tree,” but not every maple tree is the soul of its own.

That’s close. We’d say, the maple tree’s body is in all maple trees, and so there is one maple tree mind, one pattern that says maple tree through the ages no matter what happens to individual maple trees. Why do you think hybrids and grafted stock revert to type? Individual trees or plants of any kind can be altered, bred, manipulated in many ways, but once the interference (for that is how it may legitimately be seen, not that there’s anything wrong with doing it) stops, the plant reverts to the same old pattern it hears the master plant broadcasting. That’s the non-physical aspect of nature, by the way, the broadcasting of patterns.

This would be interesting in itself, but you were intending to illustrate something in human life when I interrupted to rephrase.

Well, remember — or perhaps we’ve never said this in so many words. Very well, a mini-lecture coming up, if you hold out.

A human being is very complicated. It is a temporary collaboration of many forms of energy, all of which have to work together more or less harmoniously. You shouldn’t be surprised when something goes wrong. You should be surprised and grateful that so much goes and remains so right, so long, with so little attention needed from the person-group for whom the work is done.

You are a part of nature, remember. Your body is of the earth — that is, it exists subject to physical laws. It exists only because of the interplay of vast physical forces usually unnoticed. This is not merely a matter of genetics or food and drink and exercise, or a balance of rest and activity. It is not even as simple as proper interplay of electrical and chemical signaling systems, though these are essential. It is not at all the automatically functioning mechanism you experience it to be, any more than Star Trek’s Enterprise is an automatically functioning mechanism.

The control systems, the active monitoring intelligences, function behind the scenes or below decks, or however you want to put it. But the active, functioning, unresting intelligences that run your bodies are of a different order of being than the person-mind recognizes, so it all happens “auto-magically.”

The intelligences that coordinate activity to run your bodies are of a different order, because they are shaped for a different order of task. They don’t watch Star Trek with you; they monitor the glucose level moment by moment, instead, or they regulate adrenaline, or seek out unwanted presences in your bloodstream and seek to destroy them. At this level your body is run by intelligences very similar to the level of mind that enables a tree root to seek minerals or go around a rock.

So when you do your healing work, on yourselves or on others, this is a layer of intelligence that must be accessed, but obviously you and it do not have a common language. You do not in fact inhabit the same mental world, if you will forgive us describing the intelligence that processes blood sugars as having a mental world. We know that sounds strange to you, but how else would you put it?

At the other end of the scale of cooperating intelligences are minds more like what you are accustomed to, but functioning in a different way because in a different environment and on a different scale. Us, in fact. We see wider, longer, we have vastly more foresight, better perspective, uninterrupted consciousness, if of lower intensity.

And in the middle, still several layers. You as person-mind, living in the moment, coordinating or at any rate surviving the interplay of various strand-minds that are of the complexity to have previously been person-minds themselves. But also you as ultimate coordinator of hidden and uncomprehended forces, more abstract than tangible, in a way. Chakra energies. The organs. Groupings or conceptions you use in addressing your body’s intelligences — talking to a shoulder, for instance, finding the underlying cause of a trauma. These concepts you use work, but they are only epicycles. And there are all your innumerable past selves of this lifetime — you 10 years ago, you on March 12, 1956, etc. (Yes, yes; many of you weren’t even alive in 1956; it’s just an example.) All this needs to be sorted out into various levels of mind, each with its own characteristics.

But I’m too tired for that lecture now. Thank you for noticing.

We got in more or less what we hoped we would. It’s too much to expect to sketch in all the detail at once. The crucial point was, and is, that the human body-mind is a vast intersection of many types of energy, each of which has its own characteristic intelligence, its characteristic qualities and the defects of those qualities. Nothing is dead, or mentally dead, not your fingernails, not your red corpuscles. But you must not expect your red corpuscles to read Milton or do algebra or understand speech or the concept of people. What it does, it does well, and it can only do it well by being designed for it — which means being designed to be unable to do things of a nature different from its own. The same may be said of anything, from the simplest kind of mind to the most complex.

Remember this. Just as you came to realize that everything in the world is alive, realize that everything partakes in some form of intelligence characteristic to it. A rock’s intelligence will not resemble yours any more than its life is even recognizable to you. Nonetheless, if you think any corner of physical creation is without life and without intelligence, you are thinking there is some absolute separation in reality, and there is not. Is not. How could there be? Be well.

Thanks for the good wishes, and thanks for that very interesting long entry, that promises more.

7:10 AM. So I did send it out, after a bit. And got a little — well, call it semi-consciousness — I don’t know that I would call it sleep, exactly. But there is something quite interesting developing, I think. I am starting to see faces, quite distinctly sometimes. Not representations (abstractions) and so far not anyone I know. But the clarity and presence of the images is startling — and welcome. I think it is a clearing of the inner channels.

The effect of the clearing, rather. You can’t work toward certain abilities and states of being for long periods of time without some chance of actually getting what you want.

Well, that’s good to know. But — I did [know], of course. It has been many a year since I doubted it.

Oh? How’s your breathing? Or isn’t that worth noticing?

You’re saying I don’t want healthy lungs and freedom from periodic asthma attacks.

We are saying you haven’t spent the years working toward that, that you have working toward other things. And this is partly because the possibility of significant change hasn’t seemed all that real to you, nor as urgent.