Hemingway – a question of focus

Monday, November 9, 2015
F: 3:45 a.m. I think I will print John Wolf’s comment on my blog post “A question, a dream, and a conversation,” from yesterday, as we seem to be getting material together. Cross-correspondences, in a way.
[JDW: Often I have longed for named attribution (which I have not received beyond a “committee) and once for proof. My note from about a year ago on the proof test: “The test indicated that I could definitely not distrust the validity of the input but it also said that I could not disengage my own thinking and discernment from the process. (Which means among other things that I could misinterpret, and accuracy can suffer in the translation.) My Exco (guide committee) said afterward, “We’re not here to be fortunetellers, or make it so you don’t have to think!”
[From today’s notes:
[“Attribution is tricky. Humans need it because of their belief systems. Einstein is an established “genius” in your world. If Einstein were to provide some new revelation from the non, you would believe it, of course after some kind of “verification” that it actually was “him” giving you the revelation. Change the nature of the information, and substitute any other well-known source like Jesus, Mary, Buddha, or even Elvis, and you have the same phenomena. But these entities aren’t only the personality you thought they were, or might still think they are, and the information flowed through them, as opposed to originating inside them anyway. (I think Rita said this well, although not about these specific personalities.)
[On getting facts to verify a source: there are people who do that quite well. There are large numbers of well documented “correspondences” that can be “validated” to have come from attributable sources in the non to personalities in 3D. That ought to prove the existence and reality of it. Yes, it is confidence building to receive verification, and it has its application, but does that kind of verification need to accompany every single thought transfer? And how do we move you to the next level of understanding and living reality?
[In seeking attribution, you are in a way asking us to undermine some of what we are trying to teach, by continuing to masquerade as something we’re not, so that you can feel comfortable in your old belief system that we are trying to move you away from! Put yourself in our shoes (which you are already in of course!) What would you do?” (Said with humor)]

F: Looking back on the material I have printed up just since late May, I see it must be three or four times the material we printed up as Rita’s World. There isn’t any way such a volume of material – let alone all the rest of the communications since early 2006 that I have not yet found a way to use – could be put into less than a series of volumes, and then who would read them? So it seems the ongoing dissemination via TMIE has been the publication. In other words, that’s the publication they’re going to get, unless I find some way to clump them by theme. It may be that they were mainly for my own amusement and education, and I don’t need to think how to get them out there. Seems a pity, though, to have gotten what seems to me valid insights from so many sources of direct knowledge of historical events and yet not use them. As though one would have conversations with Hemingway and not make notes of them as Hotchner did, and then have them lost forever.
EH: Well, that isn’t a bad analogy, if you think about it. It isn’t like anybody’s every conversation could be recorded, or should be. Much of life is on the fly, for the moment only as far as recording it for others is concerned.
F: But then take a book like The True Gen, Papa. Lovely book, that I’ll re-read sometime. Full of people’s memories of specific conversations and actions of yours that they witnessed. A very immediate sense of you.
EH: That’s fine. How well would it have worked if the author had tried to include every reminiscence he accumulated, and tried to include every word of every reminiscence? And suppose he had tried to get every one of them to report on every moment of their interactions with me? It would take you longer to read about it than it took me to live it. And there would be a lot of material that wasn’t worth its space or the time it took to read it. Compression is your job, not merely transcription.
F: I always took way too many notes, as a reporter. I remember Al Wallitsch [an older reporter on the hometown newspaper where I started] telling me you should be able to come out of a meeting with less than a page of notes.
EH: What he could have said – and what you could profitably have learned to do – is that ideally you wouldn’t need notes at all because you would be able to remember it. That means listening in a different way, at a different stage of alertness that can be experienced but not described.
F: Yes, I’ve done that sometimes. I used to be able to do it easily, but not in any reporting context.
EH: It was when you were fully engaged in your experience of the moment. Think of your Gateway notes, made after the fact, or your novel we wrote 15 years later. You remembered and you could recapture not because you had made notes but because you were fully present in the moment instead of half elsewhere.
F: Instead of half elsewhere as usual.
EH: That’s a major difference between us. I was fully present.
F: That calls for some more coffee, because I get that we just stumbled onto our theme du jour.
EH: You mean, you just tumbled to it.
F: Touché.
So as I padded down the hall in what has become an established habit, I thought, “Oh, this works so well!” and I was thinking of my new digs – new although I’ve been here more than seven months now – but then I remember that this spurt of information really began with Rita coming in last December, while I was still living at Brandywine. I can hardly remember my routine there already – at least I couldn’t until I just now put my mind to it, and I recalled sitting at this same desk in a different room. Anyway –?
EH: The difference between us and what we are doing can be sketched this way: I was fully present in the imaginal world or in the physical world. That is, I lived in one or the other at any given time. Even when I was telling stories rather than writing them, the “being fully present” was in my contacting the imaginal world and relating a tale I could spin from it. That’s close to what you are doing now, and is why what you are doing right now is when you are most fully present in your life. But otherwise you are living what seems to me a blur – half in one world, half in the other – and the net effect is very different.
F: Not quite the same thing as people living with a screen of thought / fantasy / storyline / memories / ungoverned associations between them and the world, but closer than I might wish.
EH: Let’s go a little slower.
Your world is half physical and half imaginal. That doesn’t mean that either term means whatever it may happen to evoke.
The physical world includes movement, thought, emotion; in other words, not only actions and reactions, not even automatic robotic going-through-the-motions. The physical world involves you, as condensed awareness located in what seems to be a specific time / space, functioning. You remember, you project, you plan, you fantasize – you do all those things in your mental world, and your mental world is part of your physical world. In the division I am drawing here, the line is not between mental and physical, although it often seems that way. It is between physical focus (which of course includes your mental world, or how could you function) and, on the other side, focus on the imaginal world, which does not mean fantasizing.
The imaginal world is not sensory. In fact, the more you concentrate your focus there, necessarily the less aware you are of the physical. Your reaction to the imaginal world may have physical effects, just as you may awaken from a dream with your heart pounding, but those are effects, not an integral part of the connection to the imaginal.
Now, in your case you are always, or almost always, tied into the imaginal world even as you go about your day in the physical world. This makes you less efficient in either world, and it gives you nearly unparalleled access to both. That is why others mostly don’t do as you suggest to them that it is so easy to do: Their daily lives are different from yours in a way that you are only now realizing.
F: It’s true. In fact, it suddenly seems odd that it wasn’t obvious to me. I just thought it was a skill that I had picked up mostly by realizing that it is natural.
EH: You don’t suppose that could be by somebody’s design, do you?
F: Very funny. So –?
EH: So I concentrated on what was in front of me, and intensely lived it. A lot of alcohol to relax that humming dynamo, because otherwise the strain could have been – sometimes was – intolerable. If I was with you, I was with you, not half elsewhere. If I was in the imaginal world, I was there, connecting my awareness and translating as best I could, even though I wasn’t nearly as facile with words as you might expect. It took me hours to write very few words, not because I was lazy – I never was lazy where writing was concerned – and not entirely because what I thought of as a first draft was in fact the result of a continual process of revision as I went along. It took hours because I was translating, and that took time and effort and continual readjustment. You have not understood that because you don’t need to go through that process, so between that and your lesser standard of craftsmanship, it has been swifter and easier to write what you could get, but much harder to get what would amount to a story. I don’t expect you to immediately understand the implications of this, but it will serve as an entry-point.
So maybe now you can see why people don’t well understand the human phenomenon that was Hemingway. They aren’t taking into account an intensity of focus that militated against an easy acceptance of life that might have smoothed some of the edges.
You, on the other hand, put an equal intensity into an entirely different –
Well, let’s try that again. Your intensity is like a light shined through a prism. If you and I were both laser beams, mine would be unmediated and in its intensity might burn a hole through steel. Yours would be run through a defocusing prism, or rather through a prism that divided (not defocused) the light into simultaneous diverging paths. So your consciousness is less intense at any given point on the scale because most of it is elsewhere but at the same time – well, we may have to drop the prism analogy, and say that your physical and imaginal awareness is so intertwined that you are rarely only right here in either realm. As evidence – what you are doing right now! You can do this easily, [as long as you are] participating, but can’t do it at all, otherwise. You thought you’d like to be a trance channel because that was the only model you knew, and even with Rita sharing the same idea you couldn’t do it. However, let’s not push that idea too far. For one thing it would lead too far into the theoretical and we want to remain within earshot of the practical.
So, to sum up for the moment, I have been drawing two or three worlds directly and by implication. There is the physical world as a focus of attention, and the imaginal world, and a blend of both. That’s three. But there is another distinction to be pointed out, and that is between being fully present in any of these three states of focus, and being mostly not present. And that is a difference we should discuss at length. It was necessary to first draw the distinction between a state of focus on the imaginal (which can look like mere daydreaming) or a state of dual or prismatic focus (which can look like absent-mindedness) so that neither of these become confused with the state of lesser focus that we want to describe and discuss next time.
F: Whew. A lot of material, and 70 minutes. Thanks, Papa. Till next time.