This conversation, which took place via Intuitive Linked Communication seven years ago, is of even greater interest to me today.
[Wednesday January 4, 2006]
(9 a.m.) All right, gentlemen, let’s resume. Who’s up?
David [Poynter]. Let us describe the American Civil War as it appears from across the ocean.
Okay, if that’s what you want. I admit, I don’t have much of an idea what you will think about it.
Not much use in our going through the process to give you information you possess already, is there? This way you will get the process and information together, and the one will reinforce the other.
All right. Can you tell me why the information?
That will emerge.
Now then. You yourself are aware, but your potential readers will not be, that I David Owen Poynter was born in Wales in the 1870s – 1877 to be exact – and lived my life in the British Isles – you will note I didn’t say England! – with extensive traveling along the way. And you know — but they will not – that a major theme of my life became the investigation of psychic phenomena and the search for remaining elements of valid traditions in other parts of the world. It would be worth you while, probably, to resurrect what you know of me and set it out, so that people may obtain a feel for the process, and so that they may obtain the information. Finally, you know – but they may not – that you have identified me as the source of so many promptings to write, from the time you were 13 (not 14 as you remember it) and that I am perhaps responsible for your two stints as a paid journalist.
This background does not directly concern the information, but it does concern the process – as you shall see.
Now, you know of course that you were fascinated by the Civil War and especially by Lincoln. You yourself would be surprised to remember just how much you read about him and how often. Do you now – yes, now you do – remember the book that was composed entirely of short vignettes on Lincoln, many only a paragraph, that delineated his life and work in so many dimensions.
It may not be entirely a meaningless coincidence that you ordered Herndon’s life of Lincoln last week and devoured it – at the expense of this work, you thought – in several long sittings. I did the same, myself.
Here is what America meant to us. You were the great contradiction, the prime hope and the prime disappointment, or perhaps I should say worry.
You have identified me as a socialist, and that isn’t quite right, but perhaps close enough. I wasn’t a socialist, I was Labor. There’s a big difference between the two, but the difference varied over time and anyway explaining it to Americans is waste of breath.
My politics were short and sweet (“like the old woman’s dance,” Mr. Lincoln said in his youth). I was for the people. Well I ask you, who in all the history of the world was more for the people than Abraham Lincoln? He was of the people, and for the people. He was no Johnny-Jump-Up, scrambling for place and covering-over his origins, forgetting the very people who lifted him. (like Lloyd George, I’m sorry to have to say.) He never forgot who he was; he never saw reason to be any different, and in that he knew he was one of a kind, this only reinforced his belief – his knowledge – that you can’t judge people’s worth by their social position present or past.
Now when I say I was for the people, what does that mean? Am I advocating class warfare, no. And neither am I saying that the poor are the same as the people.
The people means – the people. Everybody. All the family, eh? (I know, you think I’m going Canadian on you. Do you think no one else but Canadians used the expression, that it sprang up on the plains of Manitoba?) There’s a big crucial difference between a sentimental attachment to the poor and a realistic attachment to the idea that everybody counts in the whole.
It is the tremendous weakness, the Achilles heel, of aristocracy that those at the top flatter each other into believing that they are the civilization; that they matter and no one else does, or does only peripherally. Aristocrats have their own bit to add – you know that I was a great admirer of Winston Churchill, and that of course before his surprising last acts, that happened after I was gone. (And why do you suppose you were as fascinated by him as by Lincoln? It isn’t every teenager who saved money week by week to buy his history of the second world war. But I was interested.)
[I should add that David died in the 1930s. Specifically –?]
1932, in Bath, by a lorry, by my Upstairs intent, as I told you once. January. 23rd.
So – you see where this is heading. I believed in the people as all one thing, which means society as an organism, not a damned machine as they were trying to see it. (Believing that society was all one thing – rather as you now see people on either side of the veil – how could I not see that we interconnect in many ways unsuspected. Thus, the psychic investigation – looking into things I could not judge yet having no alternative than to make at least provisional judgment. An uncomfortable position – as you know.)
Yes, I digress as much as our friend Smallwood. Small wonder. Family resemblance, eh?
The American experiment was of vital interest to all who wanted to believe in the people rather than the few. We would not have removed the few; we would have re-placed them that is, adjusted their place, so that they were again in a proper relation to society. It is not good for a society to have its members in wrong relation to one another. Too many rich means too many poor. Too many of either means too few real, enjoyable, tangible, liberties for the middle.
I am of that middle, of course, and so are you and so are all of your readers, for being of the middle is not dependent upon a level of income, but a certain way of seeing the world. You may be of the middle and have scarcely a penny to your name, like young Shaw or young Yeats – or young Poynter, come to that!
If America could not hold together, if would, as friend Joseph correctly indicated, have been taken as a clear sign that government is the prerogative of what they called “the ruling class” and that while that class might be broadened, perhaps, it could not be supplanted.
You might think the issue settled before I was born, but in fact 1865 settled only one question – whether the union was a rope of sand, that would have to give at the first tug. It at the same time, and for the same reason, saddled upon the young republic a different kind of aristocracy, one of money – and friends of the American experiment were saddened to see that matters appeared to be validating Plato’s prognostication, or diagnosis, rather: monarchy, aristocracy, republic, democracy, plutocracy, dictatorship and begin again.
In my time – and by that I mean from when I went to London to when I was killed, say 30 years from the turn of the century on – in my time America was a coming power, then – after the war – the power that had overwhelmed ally and enemy alike because we were all bled white, economically no less than physically.
I died before the second war or the New Deal. It was a dark time for one who felt himself an old man. The depression hit earlier on our side than on yours, and we had even less idea how we should ever climb out of it. And there was Japan, and Germany, and it was all nascent for those who had eyes to see. As my work at the News gave me access to information, so did my connection with the family of Bulwer-Lytton and the Golden Dawn members, some highly connected to what you would call our power structure, or our establishment. It was easier to see the difficulties than the way through.
You are getting tired. I sum it up this way: Your political tradition buoyed us; your economic reality submerged us. Mr. Lincoln spoke of the government of the people being by and for the people, but what we saw was the people being governed by money, for money. And if this was the result of the American experiment, what hope was there for us?
Money-power fastened itself upon your government during the very war that destroyed the grip of the slave-power. War always strengthens the money power, unless the war is lost. So, once the Civil War came, the people had to lose, whichever side nominally won. Do you think this has no application for you today? And do you think that “psychic matters” in your day can long be kept separate form the rest of life? No! You are at the great change! And as you know, this is very good news.
But this doesn’t mean it will necessarily be easy, or pleasant.