Wednesday, March 25, 2015
F: 4:10 a.m. Rita, it isn’t that I am tired of doing this, but I wonder if maybe we have reached the point you and I got to in 2002 where we ran out of questions to ask. Not, obviously, because we’ve said all there is to say, or learned all there is to know – then or now – but because we’re sort of without direction. Answering questions from others is all well and good, but can we trust it to carry us forward? Yes, I realize you can use any stimulus to proceed where you are going, so I guess I don’t even know what it is I am asking, or why. So – over to you.
R: Perhaps it is time for you to re-read and consciously digest, as Charles is doing. You two are bookends, in a way. He is likely to do too much analysis, and you too little. Ideally, you would both do both. So, as I say, perhaps it is time for you to change gears. A few mornings spent re-reading and making your own list of things that occur to you would be well spent, and you needn’t worry that your readers will get bored and drift away – re-reading and analysis and questioning is what they will need to do, too, if they are going to get more than a passing amusement out of this.
F: Hmm. Starting today?
R: Why not? And of course you don’t need to make it an either / or. No reason you couldn’t alternate within the same session – half an hour of communicating, half an hour of reading and thinking. Only, if you do this, do it as methodically as you have been doing this, so as to gain the advantages of habit and inertia.
F: I’ll seriously consider it. Meanwhile I wish you could help me find the things I have mislaid in my move, that are making it impossible for me to get things shipshape again. Where are the fasteners that I so carefully put into envelopes, for instance?
[pause]
And why can’t you help me? Even if you didn’t exist — — my own unconscious mind should know, but I cannot dredge out the information. I don’t care why, particularly, I just want them to re-surface. But it is as if they ceased to exist.
R: An experiment for you. You know they exist but you cannot find them anywhere you look, and you have run out of places to look. So, both memory and logic have failed you, and you have only a desperate stab in the dark as your remaining resource – that is, you are asking unseen powers to return them to you. Why not remember and use Bruce Moen’s technique?
F: And describe it for people, I take it.
R: Of course.
F: Bruce said that as long as he said, “I can’t find it,” it was as if the universe would say, “okay, fine, if that’s the way you want it, you can’t find it.” But when he changed it to, “I need X,” he would find it, as if it appeared out of nowhere. And this has worked for me sometimes but does not seem to be working this time.
R: No, and here is the experiment. Instead of saying, “I need those fasteners,” and then proceeding to try to imagine where they could be – which you see is a sort of combination of logic and intuition, but one with the weaknesses rather than the strengths of both – try just putting out your clear statement of the need for the furnishings and then going about your business as if in confidence that they will appear.
F: But their absence is holding me up, in the meantime.
R: And their absence is not any less delaying you by your ineffective method of finding them.
F: True enough. All right, we’ll see. I’ll try to work around them until they show up. Meanwhile, I need to find a system to store and accumulate my questions on this material
R: Easy enough. By the way, you might describe for people how you proceed here, as formerly with Hemingway, and formerly with others and formerly with TGU.
F: Simple enough, and methodical enough.
I transcribe the material into the computer and I print it out, single-spaced with a space after each paragraph. I hole-punch the sheets, staple them together, and put them into a three-ring binder, and thus I accumulate the material in accessible form automatically, a few sheets a day, divided (by month, in my case) by the index dividers they sell, partly to keep it organized so I can find things, but mostly, I think, to prevent it from becoming one intimidating undifferentiated mass.
R: And on the computer?
F: I have a directory I call “journal and messages,” and within it I have subdirectories by ten-year periods, and within them, directories for each single year. Each day’s entry is a file labeled according to the self-sorting method I learned as a computer programmer long ago. So, today’s will be “2015-03-25 Rita” and will thus automatically sort out in place. Why are we detailing all this?
R: Because not everybody will have realized the advantages of such system, and because it will remind you that the same habits will help you accumulate questions and reactions. Make a subdirectory called questions and add it to your other directory, which, you will notice, you forgot to describe.
F: So I did. Every day as I finish spell-checking and re-reading that day’s entry, I save it in “journal” and then resave it in another directory I call “Rita’s book.” The file name automatically sorts it in the same way as it did for the journal directory, and thus I have an automatic backup.
R: Just for completeness, you might describe the rest of your system for accumulating material for books.
F: Why? What’s the point? Nobody is going to care. But – if you say so. I have a subdirectory called “books,” divided into others called “books being written” and “books completed and published.” The former is divided into “fiction” and “nonfiction” and is further divided into directories by title such as “Rita’s book.” Is this really necessary?
R: It is worthwhile to remind people that life is more than intuition, more than communication with the non-physical. System helps keep you grounded and oriented within the work, and will help others as they proceed.
F: If you say so. So, I just realized, no point in starting another journal book just for questions, as I was thinking I would have to do. I can just enter them here as I go along and then transcribe to a computer file and print out as I go along.
R: You can indeed. And it is just such work as will orient you and sharpen your understanding.
F: Well, we’ve spent 45 minutes on this. I hope it is worthwhile. I’m afraid people are going to be disappointed.
R: That isn’t your worry. All you are responsible for is doing your work as best you can. So – use your remaining 15 minutes to get a start on the re-reading / thinking / questioning process, and I will see you when you are ready next time.
F: All right, and no doubt by then my fasteners will have reintroduced themselves into my reality. Till then.
Hi Frank ~ When you said “I need those fasteners,” did you find them easily? Have you used that technique successfully for other things since then?
i found some, but the others i conclude were thrown out unnoticed; i had to improvise to replace them. haven’t needed the technique since then, which is fine with me!
I am not even familiar with the fastener technique. It sounds like a method for keeping your pants on, even metaphorically.