Hemingway and authenticity — hidden in plain sight

Thursday October 29, 2015
F: (5:35 a.m. Morning, Papa. My friend Dirk suggests I talk to Teddy Roosevelt, which I am hesitant to do because I am not so much in sympathy with him as I was when I was young, but it makes me wonder if you and he have connected. There were so many similarities between you, and he was one of your heroes when you were a boy, I know.
EH: Yes he was, but the war did lead me to reassess him and everything else I had believed. Maybe we will discuss Roosevelt and Hemingway at some point, but I’d rather continue with our present discussion. Your question does not amount to tourism, or autograph-hunting, because it is a valid question connected to my life then and now, but it does lead in a direction I’d rather people didn’t go. I realize that the distinction between kinds of questions may not be obvious, but it is real. The same question asked for one reason may be valid while the same question asked for another reason may not be. It is a matter of motivation, and of tendency.
F: All right. Sometime I would like to pursue the question of the striking similarities and connections between the two of you, though.
EH: And we can do that. It will be another of your pairs of comparisons and contracts like Emerson and Thoreau. But not today. Let’s return to the question of authenticity.

F: All right. (And I note as a matter of interest how sometimes – as just now – the process sort of stops until I write what is to me a neutral or meaningless comment like “all right.” It isn’t as if it is waiting for me to assent, for there is no decision involved. It appears to be almost a matter of a beat in music or in drama, a moment that preserves the rhythm. Why this should be, I have no idea, but I’ve noticed it over many years, and never commented on it until just now.)
EH: Notice and make note of such things, for you are as much about the process as the contents, as much about encouragement of others as personal satisfaction.
But to continue about authenticity. This is the hidden clue to Hemingway. It is well hidden in plain sight because it is so closely intertwined with my confabulating.
F: And, as time went on, with other things.
EH: Let’s go slowly. Remember, that is the key here. The slower you go, the more closely you can examine the passing scenery. I was very quick on the uptake, with senses wide-open, so in effect time around me passed slowly. But if you are mentally quick without that quickness of perception, you are going to miss things by rushing through them, or I should say rushing by them.
It was no accident that you began by questioning me on my lying about my war experiences – that’s how you saw it before you understood what I was doing. That initial question went to the very heart of who and what I was. You might quote that question and my answer.
F: Easily done, it’s in my book about us, and it’s on the computer amid my journal directories.
Looking at it, I see that in our first conversation in May 2006, it was only a brief mention of what it was you couldn’t stand – “phonies and pretentious phonies and pretentious phony fools.” It wasn’t until the end of July, 2007, that we had the conversation – while I was in England reading The Young Hemingway – about how could you say you couldn’t stand phonies (which, you obviously couldn’t) and yet do “so much pretending and rearranging and lying and misremembering and leading people on.”
EH: Notice that, as so often, the reality is slightly different from the way you remember it, yet is closer to the sense of what you are being told. Memory is a frail reed next to direct timeless access to knowledge. In any case, it may be instructive to some for you to quote that second passage, my response to that accusation.
F: I will. But why?
EH: Because as always these conversations are a matter of continuous refinement of perception and understanding, and the answer that satisfies you today, or piques your curiosity, or baffles you, will elicit a different response when you come to it with a different mind, or will be restated, rephrased, self-contradicted, even argued against, when changes in you or in the time make it necessary (or possible) to do so in order to enhance clarity.
F: Here is the excerpt, from pages 20 and 21 of Afterlife Conversations with Hemingway.
[beginning of excerpt:]
Pretending and Lying
F: Tuesday, July 31, 2007. 6:05 a.m. Mr. Hemingway, you said you couldn’t stand phonies, and clearly you couldn’t. How do you reconcile this with so much pretending and rearranging and lying and misremembering and leading people on?
EH: That is quite an indictment, but I have to concede it. In my defense I could say this. It is one thing to pretend until you can achieve — fake it until you make it, as your business partner says — and another very different thing to pretend that you are what you are not. It is true, there isn’t much difference in a boy.
F: I am sorry, I can’t see much difference in a grown man protecting a territory of lies however young he was when he created them.
EH: Perhaps you can see it this way. Lies, stories, imaginings, have consequences. Some are internal, the stories you tell yourself in order to bring a better you into existence. Others are external, and you have to live with them. If you tell someone you are 22, and you are barely 20, at some point you may have to overcome the consequences of even so small a thing. The internal consequences may be small or nonexistent — you were, after all, merely wishing yourself a little farther along the path. But the external consequences may be larger, or even maybe important, depending on what that lie or exaggeration does to the person you told it to. Will she then know to distrust your facts? Will she distrust you? But there isn’t any going back once you’ve made the wrong step.
F: Why isn’t there?
EH: If I said I was in the Italian army when the truth is that I wanted to be with the Italian army, and wanted to be a soldier among the soldiers, to correct this story would be merely to adjust it to the externals rather than the internals. Why do you think I was in harm’s way in the first place? I wanted to be a soldier among soldiers, a man among men. There was no reason for a Red Cross man to be at a forward post except wanting to be among the men at the lines, and do what I could even if it was only bringing them little comforts. To correct my story would have been to dishonor that aspiration, as I saw it then.
F: You were improving on the truth.
EH: I was reporting what I was experiencing on the inside.
F: And wearing the uniform and the cape afterwards?
EH: You should understand clinging to what had been.
F: And I understand your needing to remind yourself that you were not merely what you appeared; were not fated (doomed) to return to your hometown and revert to being seen as what you didn’t want to be.
EH: I had an eye that would have kept me out of it entirely, so life found a different path for me to get the taste I needed, then pay prolonged consequences.
[end of excerpt]
F: It is interesting to me that here it is, 6:20, 45 minutes in, and I have been working as diligently as usual and the material has been coming as smoothly as usual, and yet we have covered only five pages, ordinarily half an hour’s work. Looking up those quotes didn’t take two minutes, even. Where did the other time go?
EH: Don’t worry about it. Now, authenticity and pretending look different if you look at them through the lens less of what people do and say than of what they are. And since normally we judge that by (through) what they do and say, you can see this is a process open to misunderstanding.
F: Open to your own bias, too.
EH: Of course, but so are your considered judgments. Reliance on logic and evidence is not inherently any more reliable than reliance on direct perception. It all depends on the person. What is one man’s insight is another man’s jumping to conclusions. And I don’t mean that in any external sense; that is, I’m not saying it may differ in appearance. I am saying it may be different, depending on who is doing it.
You (and Reynolds and others) called me on my pretending. But you (and Reynolds and others) could also see that the pretending was to a purpose. It wasn’t pretending to be something I wasn’t, exactly; it was more pretending that external events had happened in a way that would have shown what I was – and, much more importantly, continually in fact – it was practicing so that I could cleave to an image of myself that I could live into. Notice I said “live into,” not “live up to.” The latter implies justifying myself after the fact; the former implies giving myself a template to help me become externally what I already was internally. And you can see how little response this would have met from my contemporaries even if I had been able to put it that way.
F: Well, when you do put it that way, I can see it as setting goals for yourself.
EH: You could even see it – as flitted through your mind – as hero-worshipping a self I wasn’t yet. That may seem disrespectful to you, but how do you know where the thought came from or why it came?
F: And there is our hour, somehow.
EH: There’s our hour, and it wasn’t wasted. Post it and go about your day, and remember what you were told 14 years ago.
F: All is well. All is always well.
EH: That’s it.
F: Okay, till next time, then. Thanks.

2 thoughts on “Hemingway and authenticity — hidden in plain sight

  1. I’ve been working on understanding the concept of making our own reality and how that fits with the latest wisdom from Rita et. al. about ourselves, our greater being and our shared reality.

    The following comes primarily from Seth and my own joint mind; however, I have gone through the published and yet-to-be-published Rita’s World material and the Sphere and the Hologram and detect no significant discrepancies. That still doesn’t make it “right” or anything more than one perspective. I can say that any incoherence is coming from the 3D part of me as I wander through new territory (for me).

    There have been recent statements such as the following from Hemingway through Frank (on 10//28):

    F: 3 a.m. All right, Papa, so yesterday you explained how your inner world changed and then your outer world changed to meet it, and then you responded to the new externalized challenge and the process continued.
    EH: All that was to show you a way to see that the Ernest Hemingway of any given moment may have been responsible to react to circumstances, but he was never in charge of bringing things into being.

    In addition, comments from Inger Lise, and the event of hurricane Patricia were further motivation to try to understand more on the subject.

    I have little doubt that I am responsible for the experience of something straightforward in my life, like getting a haircut. But do I really believe we create a hurricane Patricia experience? On the making of our own reality, Seth summarizes in the following excerpts from “The Individual And The Nature of Mass Events (A Seth Book)”:

    “The coincidences that seem to happen, the chance encounters, the unexpected events—all of these come into your experience because in one way or another you have attracted them, even though their occurrences might seem to have insurmountable odds against them.

    Your world and everything in it exists first in the imagination, then. You have been taught to focus all of your attention upon physical events, so that they carry the authenticity of reality for you. Thoughts, feelings, or beliefs appear to be secondary, subjective—or somehow not real—and they seem to rise in response to an already established afield of physical data.

    You usually think, for example that your feelings about a given event are primarily reactions to the event itself. It seldom occurs to you that the feelings themselves might be primary, and that the particular event was somehow a response to your emotions, rather than the other way around. The all-important matter of your focus is largely responsible for you interpretation of any event.

    ….Try to view normal physical occurrences as the concrete physical reactions in space and time to your own feelings and beliefs. For indeed your subjective world causes your physical experience.

    Even those of you who intellectually agree that you form your own reality find it difficult to accept emotionally in certain areas. You are, of course, literally hypnotized into believing that your feelings arise in response to events. Your feelings, however cause the events you perceive. Secondarily you do of course then react to those events.”

    Adding to this from someone somewhere connected to my own joint mind:

    “Physical life emerges from inner to outer, from the non-physical to the physical, from the subjectiveness of feelings and beliefs to the objective. The Universe responds to your thoughts and beliefs, especially when they are in alignment with those of your greater self, which are automatically in alignment with the greater good (there is a bias in the Universe toward the greater good of all), and the Universe brings to you, presents to you, the events you have attracted to yourself, to be experienced in a time-sliced physical way, and stored for eternity.

    When the word choice is used (in conjunction with paths or timelines), it doesn’t mean that you go to a “holographic computer” and review all the possible paths and choose the one you want. What it means is that you can choose your inner nature, where your emotional energy is “at”, and the Universe will respond to bring to you your intentions. Your choice of your inner nature, your beliefs, become reinforced by the physical experience (and subsequent reactions to that experience), molding you into what you become. (“Universe” used in this sense is the rest of you and the rest of all consciousness.) You will not be presented with physical experiences that are inconsistent with the nature of your inner belief systems. (This was not meant to imply this is the only method by which paths and timelines are selected.)

    There is something (else) that needs to be addressed. There is the inside-out, non-3D to 3D mechanism for creating the physical and the events in the physical and in parallel with that there is the internal integrity (or “unity”) of your being as you perceive and think. You are beginning to recognize that perception itself is important, and that you can put yourself into an “external” mode focussing on the manifested physical experience and reacting to that. You are supposed to do that. If you didn’t do that, there would be no reason to be incarnated.

    Or you can move your perception into the mode of the greater you that is producing experiences with you for it’s purposes; not only producing but coaching, prodding, nudging you to go certain directions with what is yours to ultimately decide.

    There are not two (or more) you’s, in spite of your ability to identify with one part of yourself or another. Your mind is you, regardless of how that mind functions with respect to its internal orientation or the external environment it’s put into, or that’s created for it, or that it brings into view for itself to experience. (The latter depends on which point of view one wants to take.)

    When you really get into something—like you are supposed to do—your “internals” fade and your focus is on your external life. Many people are never aware of anything else, and that’s OK. But as your awareness grows, you realize there is the internal and the connectedness and the mechanisms going on behind the scenes. You get to know more about the rest of you, the “unflawed” part as you might (erroneously) think of it. Then you learn that there is no separation and that it’s all you. The coaching and the nudging is for you to get the most out of your experience in the context of the greater good. You are vectoring you to where you want you to be. And there is no such thing as a “flawed” and “unflawed” version of yourself. (There is no doubt that some of this was brought to my joint mind by my reading of Seth. See below.)

    As the ramifications of this joint mind forming settle in and become lived versus merely an intellectual assessment, it is natural to wonder who is doing the thinking, the choosing, the producing, the acting, the experiencing, the reacting because it’s all inside a part of one mind. It’s an Identity issue.

    You can focus externally and be that identity without compromising or hiding the greater identity that you are. You can be the greater version of yourself without losing the external face you see in the mirror. Your head and your heart are parts of a single body.”

    Seth concludes his book with the following:

    “Most of you understand that All That Is is within you, the God is within creation, within physical matter, and that “He” does not simply operate as some cosmic director on the outside of reality. You must understand that the spiritual self also exists within the physical self in the same fashion. The inner self is not remote, either—not divorced from your most intimate desires and affairs, but instead communicates through your own smallest gesture, through your smallest ideal.

    This sense of division within the self forces you to think that there is a remote, spiritual, wise, intuitive inner self, and a bewildered, put-upon, spiritually ignorant, inferior physical self, which happens to be one you identify with. Many of you believe, moreover, that the physical self’s very nature is evil, that its impulses, left alone, will run in direct opposition to the good of the physical world and society, and fly in the face of the deeper spiritual truths of inner reality. The inner self then becomes so idealized and so remote that by contrast the physical self seems only to more ignorant and flawed. In the face of such beliefs the ideal of psychic development , or astral travel or spiritual knowledge, or even of sane living, seems so remote as to be impossible. You must, therefore, begin to celebrate your own beings, to look to your own impulses as being the natural connectors between the physical and the nonphysical self.

    Children trusting their impulses learn to walk, and trusting your impulses, you can find yourselves again.”

    John

  2. Thanks John,hm,hm,very true.

    It occurs to me somewhat the possibility in falling into “a trap” by the “over-empathizing” upon the inner knowledge vis a vis the outer projections…and dismissing the visible objects(made in the physical materials),as “spiritual;” As the inner faculties ARE MADE VISIBLE.
    The importance of the inter-relationship between the inner and outer realities, both the same. Both will be intimately related, no distinction exists according to Seth.

    F.inst.Either you are to become a Yogi in solitude upon a remote mountaintop or in a cave…or sitting in a traffic-jam…or digging a ditch on a farmland…or to do nothing…it is the very same, it is spiritual never-the-less(what a relief).I am beginning to believe it is true. Because then it is what Rita says: All is well. RELAX ! We are what we are — indestructible.
    LOL,Inger Lise.
    P.S. Peace of Mind is the very best of it all-
    Deep Peace(smiles).

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