Sunday April 9, 2006
F: Reminiscent of the blessed April 9, 1865, another Sunday.
Friend Joseph, haven’t heard from you in a while. Anything to say on the anniversary of Lee’s surrender? 141 years – [pause] Maybe not. Anybody?
JS: You will find your role as respected elder more comfortable as it proceeds a little. Your tack of telling people not to give away their power is precisely what they need to hear, especially coupled with “then test the spirit.” Avoiding extremes. Good.
F: I was surprised to think of Ed Carter in a message this morning. Ed, are you there too, old friend?
EC: Yes I am, and I’ve been watching your career with great interest.
F: Uh-oh!
EC: I’m smiling too. No, you are developing well, and I’m very pleased about much of it. You might have spared yourself a little bit of grief and a lot of aggravation if you had really heeded my last message to you, but as I used to tell you, I don’t know what the right thing is for you to do. Didn’t then, don’t now. It has been very interesting to see the direction you have gone.
F: I feel like I have gradually gotten onto my feet, after a lifetime of floundering around.
EC: Well, you know I always said you were one of the most remarkable people I had met. I didn’t say most common sense or most anything but remarkable!
F: You’ve got me laughing. It’s true.
EC: Well, you were. So was Kelly, but I could see that you weren’t seeing that situation with any objectivity at all. Perhaps given the circumstances you couldn’t. Perhaps she could only be magic if looked at a certain way, and that was important to both of you.
F: I see now – only now – what you were attempting to do in that last phone call, besides saying goodbye, I mean. You were too tactful for me to hear it. But I wouldn’t have heard it anyway.
EC: No, I didn’t think you could. But you know everything can work out for the best no matter what choice is made, provided you follow guidance as best you can.
F: How is Meredith, by the way? I know she came to Ginna during one of Ginna’s Monroe programs (Guidelines, I think).
EC: Meredith is well, and is one of the group that helps you heal; a return in kind, you might say.
F: Well, we did have the sense that she and I had been co-workers in Egypt.
EC: That’s right. Not the same life as Joseph the Egyptian, though, so don’t get confused.
F: The whole subject of past lives and resonances gets more and more interesting to me as we explore it this way. But Ed – I assume you still have access to your methodical commonsense approach to problems – what would be my best way of working on all this, given that I don’t have and can’t get professional training in various fields where it would come in handy, such as psychotherapy, psychology, parapsychology, philosophy, etc.?
EC: Well, Frank, you know I could only approach things step by step. That’s why I liked engineering better than management. If you can lay it out in building-block sizes, you can see it easier, just as you are doing with note cards and your transcripts.
What you do best is what your friend Colin Wilson does best – you act as an association, a bridge, for people.
It isn’t for you to prove anything but to suggest. Your forte is exploring, not systematizing. Think of yourself, as your brother suggested, as Frank Buck, not as Frank Merriwell or as Tom Swift, Jr. In other words, you don’t need to do the things you are lamenting your inability to do. Do what is right in front of you. Explore, report, suggest.
Now, among the things you are exploring are the connections to established fields and known materials. You do not need to be a psychoanalyst or a trained psychological professional to reference Carl Jung’s experiences discoveries and speculations. For you, Memories, Dreams, Reflections is a seminal book because it is his unguarded speech rather than his dressed-up professional language.
F: Yes I can hear you wanting to come in, Dr. Jung. Do, please.
CGJ: The important thing always is twofold: the nurturance and growth of your own being, and, within that, the carrying forth of your message into the world. Woe to the man whose nature is a contradiction, and woe to him who thinks to live by a lie! It is only when we work out of our own integrity – our integral-ness, our unity – that we do not work against ourselves, one hand building up and one tearing down at the same time.
Your nature – yours, Frank – is to be a bridge, it is not to be an architect or even a builder of bridges. It is what you are more than what you say that is the bridge.
Now. This may come to you as a bit of a shock and as a bit of a come-down. You are accustomed to think that you will bring great things into the world. But perhaps it is your fate to be the mother by whom the thing enters, rather than the father that creates it. That is, perhaps you are providing the womb.
This analogy gets tangled, so let us abandon it for another. To put it plainly, you as you are living your life may be more of an inspiration to others than anything you produce as a work of art. An idea of you painting may free people to explore pottery or watercolor or other things, in a way that your own finished products would not. Do you see? This is not a trivial accomplishment, to encourage others to explore. But it leaves you feeling a bit empty, as though you have little to show for your efforts. I tell you, this may be all to the good! The last thing you need is to set up an increased tension between an inferiority complex and a superiority compensation. The easiest, cleverest way to avoid this is to live not comparing yourself to others. In your case this is extremely easy or extremely difficult – depending upon only one thing, which itself changes moment by moment. It is a decision at any moment: Do I compare, thinking there is a standard? Do I remember the vision of the field of stars and the voice saying “who is ahead?” ?This requires faith, and as you live the faith, the faith becomes ever easier. As you fail it, as you sink to an easier but less satisfactory level of being, faith becomes harder to sustain. You see? Sometimes life reduces us to blind faith, and those who can live in faith find their way lighter in two senses of the word. Those whose faith fails find the way darker, and their lives heavier.
Well. So. You explore, you bridge, you provide an example – a lived-out example, if that has not yet struck you – of a way of being. If you also produce material, well and good, and your effect will be greatly multiplied, just as emailing your sessions has greatly multiplied the effect of sessions held in the dark with only one other set of human ears listening. But if no one ever heard any of it, still it would have happened, and therefore it would be a factor in the life of the world,, which is the life of the mind of man.
F: So in other words – relax?
CGJ: In other words, recognize the shape of your work as you go along. To become a conveyor of information is one thing. The information itself is a second thing. You as developed conveyor is a third. Your interpretation of what has been conveyed is yet a fourth. Do you see? Four levels of work where sometimes you are tempted to see one. Now to the extent that you produce all four, well and good, but even three of four is not negligible.
So, therefore, you seek structures. You have been told more than once, but you do not pay enough attention to the answer: Your work must center on the story of your life, because that way the real story comes through. It is not the story of one level of work, but four. To pretend to be a scholar would be to bury three of the four traces, and to foul up the fourth.
F: I get it.
CGJ: Besides, following your nature is the easy way, the pleasant way, compared to working against your nature. You will note, I do not say easy and pleasant – except in comparison to another way. Perhaps our lives would be boring if they were all easy and pleasant.
F: Thank you very much for this. Ed, more to say?
EC: Only to go back to my way of proceeding. Make the links between your work and other fields; make them clear. Point people. Then it is up to them.
F: Yes. Thanks. You were a great blessing in my life, old friend, in not a very long number of years.
EC: Well, you don’t need to think of it as all past tense, you know. There are other lives yet to be led.
F: Pleasant thought. Thanks again.
I really like that idea that what we do or produce in life has other layers of meaning that may be more important than the thing itself, in ways we don’t consciously perceive. And though I might not have much to really show for my life, something I’m doing or thinking or demonstrating might be having subtle, intangible benefits to the whole fabric of life.
Good reminders for me in this post…I get more from someone honestly sharing his/her story of life lived, rather than the “monuments” (if any) produced, be they architectural, artistic (tho I appreciate these as well), or even profession. That’s why I gravitate towards this material, and others who have shared personal experiences; I tend to grow impatient if it’s more of a “how to” (unless it’s a very specific application, whether physical-based activities/endeavors, or simple meditation techniques, etc.), and I especially find I get irritated if I “feel lectured at”, w/out the author sharing his/her personal story, of how he/she came to his/her understanding.
A recent example of the latter category came up when Susan and I briefly joined a book study group, related to our local Unity fellowship. We dropped out after only two sessions; the book/author (a New York Times best-seller) used made us both feel “we had a pathological condition” (“mental chatter”); but the author had not one word (not even in his “bio”!) about how he came to his understanding of “gaining Enlightenment”…Ahh, well, another one for “Not my cup of Schnapps…”
I’m enjoying discussing these ideas, continuing my consciousness explorations; I do have to remember to “balance” this work w/ physical, Earth-based activities. Now that Spring (may) be here, it helps w/ the last category!
Craig