A question, a dream, and a conversation

Sunday, November 8, 2015
[For reasons that will appear, I need to first type in material from Saturday night.]
[Saturday]
6:50 p.m. Bob Friedman wants me to ask if Papa will give us something we can use to prove our connection, a la the Afterlife of Billy Fingers book.
F: Papa? If it were required, or useful anyway, could you give us information we couldn’t otherwise know, to demonstrate that this is a real communication? You understand, this isn’t my own query here, but I agreed to ask. And, doing it tonight instead of tomorrow morning, I figure we can keep it between ourselves if need be, such as, if I get no answer.
EH: It is a real dilemma, and I recognize it. You also wanted to know why I couldn’t subtly prod various people to be receptive to a common purpose.
F: I know it has been done; the whole 19th-century quest for cross-correspondences piled up plenty of evidence that it can be done. And certainly I have no theoretical objection to the possibility. Whether it can come through me is my only caveat, and I know it is ridiculous, but that doesn’t free me of it.
EH: No, it’s like a phobia, you may know intellectually, rationally, abstractly, that is has no validity, but you still cannot get it out of the driver’s seat.
F: That’s about it. But I’m willing to try, and after all I have learned a lot in the past few years, and I’ve learned to do things I might not have expected to. So, — can you give us that kind of evidence? Let me put it a different way – if I can allow it through, can you provide it?

EH: We are doing just that with a different class of information, as you know. Conveying emotional and intellectual realities proved relatively free for you, obstruction-less and in fact congenial. That information is evidence in itself. However, I recognize what Bob would like to have, and why he would like to have it.
F: And?
EH: The unfortunate thing is that this kind of factual detail is your very weakest point; thus it is the hardest information to convey. Yes, it is true that this would make any such transfer just that much more evidential, but that doesn’t lessen the difficulty.
F: I remember wanting information on your communications and interactions with John Thomason during the sea war in 1942-43, or your abetting revolutionary politics in Latin America in the 1940s and ’50s. But in neither case could I get anything.
EH: No, in neither case did you quite ask for anything.
F: Could I have gotten it if I had asked?
EH: It depends on many things. Are you asking now?
F: Well, I would love to know the story of your relations with the Navy and the Ambassador’s office during the war. There is an important story to be told there, and I know it’s important to you that it be told. Why not begin there?
EH: Go to the UVA library special collections librarian, explain you want to know if they have anything relating to my wartime service in their collection.
F: This, on the idea that I need to build up my frame-of-reference background knowledge?
EH: On the idea that you need to get into the loop of scholarship and curated collections that may not have been examined for such material. And email Mike Curry and ask what he knows about such materials. The easiest way to proceed is by my prompting you where to go, what to do, to obtain physical evidence.
F: But, more directly?
EH: Can’t you feel yourself shying away, wanting to do other things however unimportant?
F: I can, but that doesn’t solve the problem. And sticking with you for an hour at a time has paid dividends. Not sure that quitting would.
EH: And yet you withdraw.
F: Can’t you volunteer information, the way we read of others doing? Something obviously evidential, that anybody could see could not have come from anybody but you?
Long pause, so I guess not.
8:30 p.m. Anything – I’ll try to dream it, maybe.

Sunday November 8, 2015
3:20 a.m. A dream of me having to cross the county four times, I think, to get between parallel roads to reverse course. Maddening to see paths – even paved paths – that would lead across from one to the other, but gated and locked against others using it, and having to travel miles out of the way because of a combination of my own missing the way and lack of access to short cuts and easy ways to recoup mistakes.
I suppose the dream means something. It feels like it means something. I even suspect it refers not only to my life in general but to this business of communicating with – Hemingway? – in particular. I did ask for information via a dream.
In fact, there are those barriers walling me off from easy access to the parallel roads. Very smooth macadam road, straight, short – and I can’t use them because the gates are locked specifically to prevent me and other outsiders from using them.
Routes 29 and 20, it felt like [more or less the western and eastern limits of Charlottesville], so very specific to my life here. The long stretches south of town, or – in other words – between here and Nelson County, meaning TMI and meaning perhaps my life there for a dozen years.
3:40 a.m. So there is always this moment, usually dating the entry, when I’m officially in communication mode. I suppose that I have made it a de facto ceremony, and so my body responds. A very comforting routine, that and the very fact that it is a routine, that I do this not once in a while but most times.
And what if it is all self-delusion? Is that not still possible? Even after so much time and material?
Well, I don’t know. I’m in contact with something, or even different somethings, but there isn’t any way to know if they are what they claim to be or what I take them to be. I can’t see how that could ever be established except by a leap of faith, which establishes nothing. Bringing forth specific information in response to a request for it still wouldn’t prove anything, really – not given that telepathy would be an equally plausible explanation.
I haven’t really gotten much beyond Upton Sinclair in that. (Lanny Budd’s Tecumseh, with his scorn for Lanny’s persistent doubt – “that old telepathy,” he would say.)
I would like to have such direct access as Bob and I were talking about yesterday, and instead I am forced to go miles out of my way because I miss my turn. (And then it is my own lack of sufficient consciousness that lets me miss the same turn another time, condemning me to do it yet again.)
But I’m tired of doing that! Either I need to get a key to those gated access turn-arounds, or I need to not miss my turns.
Or maybe not drive those road between Charlottesville and Nelson County –
I have gone too far to give up this life. That has become my life. Well, onward and upward.
3:50 a.m.
F: Open for business.
EH: Only you don’t know if I really exist, or if I am who you think, or if I am who I think. Tough way to go about this.
F: Nobody wants to hear about it, though, and I don’t blame them. Let’s just keep on keeping on.
EH: That is a fair description of life after a certain point. Everybody reaches that point at different times, probably, but I think pretty nearly everybody does reach it, except those who choose a short life, cut off before they can get there. After that point, life becomes more endurance than anticipation.
F: Which makes death a merciful relief – or, “relief” isn’t exactly the word I want. Release, I think.
EH: Sure. Imagine if everybody lay on their deathbed desperately anxious to keep living but unable to do it. Some do, but mostly if they have a problem, it is being afraid of what’s coming, not knowing.
F: Yeats: “Who could have foretold that the heart grows old?”
EH: And a damned good thing, and a natural thing, that it does. And, being natural, how can that be bad?
F: Where do we go today, then, Papa?
EH: If I am Papa, I know. Remember, you are only so much yourself, too, even though your present life focuses your consciousness on your life-in-3D-at-this-time-and-place drama. You aren’t only who you think you are, and you aren’t quite what you think you are, and that is as natural as anything else. Just live it out. Naturally this refers to anybody who reads this. Our lives beyond 3D are closer to our real nature than our lives within 3D were, because they aren’t truncated in awareness in order to focus one set of aspects.
F: Yeats: “Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.”
EH: He wasn’t wrong, except he kept his focus on physical life – even including the spiritual and mental components of it – and so of course he couldn’t see it in its proper proportions. How can life make sense when one small slice of it – the slice between one birth and one death – is considered as if it were the whole thing? Might as well judge your whole life by any one year in school.
F: I suppose our audience is going to get impatient with this.
EH: Your life is more than your performance, be it public or private. At best you are only a loud or bright rumor to anybody else. Better to reconcile yourself to the fact that nobody really knows anybody. Being able to predict behavior is not the same thing as knowing what invisible processes result in activating the mechanisms that produce the behavior.
F: So I take this to be a sort of reminder that “Hemingway” isn’t just Hemingway, but includes access to unsuspected worlds.
EH: Who doesn’t? Take this as a reminder that when you travel in new territory you shouldn’t be particularly surprised to see things you hadn’t seen before. So if you insist on seeing me as a given thing, you can, until the illusion wears thin or your eyes become more able to distinguish fine detail. But as your vision adjusts, so do your perceptions, and at some point your concepts will either adjust or they will get in the way of your perceiving anything not acceptable to the limits of the concepts.
F: With a half hour of private journaling before this entry, I have been at this nearly an hour now. Does that half hour count against my (self-imposed, I realize) limit?
EH: Limits, like definitions, are there to serve you or they are there to imprison you. Which way it will be depends on who is boss.
F: As I was writing that, I got that limits are definitions, really.
EH: Of course they are. That’s why when you lay down certain threads and pick up others you can, in effect, change, even though of course you are the same total being you always were. Your definitions change how much you can access in what circumstances. Being self-selected, they are under your control if you can become aware of the fact! Not, “aware of the possibility” or of the concept, but if you become aware that this is what is. It makes change a lot easier, and it brings it more under your control, if you want it to be. (Not everybody does. Some people hold themselves within rigid limits, for their own reasons.)
F: I just re-read the stuff I wrote last night and I guess I’ll type that up too and include it, though I hadn’t intended to. It all fits together. Life as a nudist.
EH: We can return to what we were doing another time.
F: But I’m not totally naïve, here. I get that the ground is shifting under my feet, a little.
EH: Altering self-definition, you mean? That isn’t anything new, it is just that you are expanding your moment-to-moment awareness, so you see earlier.
F: Well, if I’m going to type up everything since yesterday, I have 14 pages to do, so I suppose we’d better pause here.
EH: One more thing, though. You have been trying to slice your work up into segments, and you can’t do that. It is true, any different bit can be made one book, but that bit cannot be made to not affect everything else even if you were to make a violent effort to stop it from doing so. Rita’s World and Afterlife Conversations with Hemingway and Chasing Smallwood, etc., are all part of one unseparated mental world, and although the limitations of 3D mental activity prevent you from considering them all at once, those limitations do not prevent one from bleeding into another. In fact, because memories sort by emotional impact rather than by logic or chronology, you couldn’t prevent cross-fertilization if you tried.
F: So don’t be surprised when one thing leads to another.
EH: You might just as well say don’t be surprised to see the ways that one thing is another. Remember the well-paved gated-off direct access between parallel roads? If you want access, get access to a key to the locks. That’s assuming you keep on missing your exits.
F: Strange morning, and it’s only a quarter to five. Very well, “Papa,” till next time.
EH: I keep giving you that verse of Scripture and you keep resisting it: “Be strong and of good courage. Be not afraid. Neither be dismayed.”
F: Okay.