TGU — life as structure and flow

Tuesday August 9, 2016

6:50 a.m. I have the feeling that the thought that came to me last night has something to do with this. [I had noted in my journal, “It isn’t just emotions, moods, thoughts, values. It is also pain, illness, suffering, accidents, altercations.] I have noticed, in the back of my mind over the years, that people trying to explain life generally don’t take illness and suffering into account. No, that isn’t the way to put it. They see life, and then exceptions to life. Or, life in health as the default, and then illness as an exception. None of this quite says it – I can see I don’t quite have a handle on what had come to me – so I’m hoping you guys can run with it.

“Fluctuations” is the word you want. Life is fluctuation, yet schemes attempting to describe or analyze life generally treat it as a static or regular event rather than a continuously fluctuating range of possibilities.

That didn’t sound quite right either. You, or me?

Communication has to occur between, not from one or to another. So the question is meaningless.

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TGU — initial explorations

11 a.m. shall we try again? No promises as to stamina, but we can try.

A new focus for your attention, you see, is the fact that there are various degrees of reality, just as you fleetingly experienced. Even this isn’t quite right; perhaps we should say differing degrees of intensity, of aliveness. It is too bad a physical analogy does not suggest itself.

I can think of one, but it is static rather than dynamic. A photocopy may be less sharp than the original, and a copy of the copy less sharp than the original copy, etc.

As you say, the example is static. However, perhaps it offers the beginnings of an image. If we can now find an analogy that is animated rather than static, perhaps we may marry the two.

Duplicates of films or videotapes?

Not really. They are static photos made to seem animated by being shown in sequence.

Perhaps analogies to coma, trance, sleep, awareness, hyper-alertness?

Better. In fact, together they may do. Go do other things and when we resume perhaps our lesson-plan will have been prepared.

Shades of Rita. Okay.

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TGU — dimensions and conceptions and reality

Monday August 8, 2016

5 a.m. can we return to the original point? Irrationality and today’s society and politics? Perhaps we never left it, I don’t know, but it doesn’t seem to me like we got very close to it yesterday.

You are stuck between generalities and specifics and you don’t know what to encourage. This is one of those situations being driven by your end of the polarity more than by the other end – and you don’t have a conceptual structure to accommodate it. So you hesitate. This doesn’t mean that every time you or we hesitate it is because you don’t know where to drive, but sometimes.

I thought that our part was to pose a question, or indicate a topic, and your part was to provide the guest speaker, to so say.

But it is not that simple. If I were to make a generalization about it, I should say that almost always, one’s working concepts are accurate enough to allow progress, but not so accurate as to reflect reality adequately. Our ideas are always in need of refinement.

Your possibilities are bounded by your concepts, you see. If you believe in a wall, the wall exists for you until you cease to believe in it. You understand, we are not here discussing carpentry.

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Jung on turmoil and sociopaths

F: 12:20 p.. I’m ready for more, I think, if you are.

CGJ: Then let us address the underpinnings of your concerns. The underpinnings, because what you think concerns you is phenomenal – superficial – next to the read, substantial, underlying causes.

The problem is not Donald Trump. It is not that so many people see in him desirable traits in a leader. It is not any of the things it appears to be. The problem is that people cannot live forever with lies. Sooner or later, they have to break free or at least make the effort to break free, because if you live in lies you lose the very footing beneath you. Who do you think, among all those citizens, does not have a connection to a non-3D self? Who do you think is all evil, or all ignorant, or all mean-spirited, or all—anything? It is a prime mistake to dismiss people’s knowings, even when they don’t know what they know or how they know it. Even when the ways their knowings express are mistaken, the knowings are not.

F: I think you are saying, opinions are one thing, emotional basis is another.

CGJ: You know very well that anyone, stressed significantly, moves from his preferred mode of apprehending reality to the inferior part of the opposing mode. A thinker becomes dominated by his lowest emotions. A feeler becomes prey to his most collective clichéd opinions. This is not a liberal v. conservative thing, much less a Democratic v. Republican thing. It is not enlightened v. undeveloped, open-hearted v. skinflint, accepting v. bigoted. The factor to concentrate on is stress.

You know I made a study of what drew people to the Nazis.

F: I didn’t know that specifically.

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Jung: The ship is not the captain

Sunday, August 7, 2016

7:15 a.m. [My brother] Paul suggests that I ask Jung’s opinion of the way our politics is being driven by irrational forces. Specifically, he asks about the fears propelling the Trump campaign but obviously extending far beyond that. I’m willing to ask, but I’m also hesitating lest it lead to too extensive an answer. But, I guess I can always quit when I get tired, as usual.

F: Dr. Jung? Any comments on our psychological situation? Or, put it this way, anything you would like to say to us? I well remember your saying to some interviewer that whether mankind has a future depends upon whether enough people do the work on themselves.[Pause. I can feel that there is some obstacle to communication. Bad timing? Or is it that I don’t know where to start?] I assume that nothing has changed; that this is still the case.

CGJ: The difficulty you are experiencing is that you still wish to take ownership of these sessions, as if you were making them up. You may not wish to, but perhaps that is a different “you,” you see. You have driven the doubter to the outer rim of the castle but you have not exiled him; nor can you. A discordant part of oneself is there for a reason; it exists. It is a fact, no matter that you would prefer it not to be so. As I always pointed out to people – who often didn’t believe me – the unconscious is really unconscious. It cannot be lured into the light and revealed. It cannot be made into a suburb of your central city, available for commuting to. It is really unknown to the consciousness, and no sleight of hand is going to make it familiar. This is the difficulty, you see. We don’t want to believe that what we know is not the same as what we are. We want to feel that we are in charge of the castle.

And of course, so we are. In our lives we are responsible stewards for the castle. But we did not build it, we do not really maintain it except by trying not to harm it, we do not know who owns it or what its purpose is. Yet we want to think we do.

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Trying to experience life fully

Friday August 5, 2016

5 a.m. At the dentist’s yesterday morning, I had to wait quite a while. (A temporary crown had broken the day before, and they had squeezed me in.) Rather than succumb to irritation or impatience, I – existed. I remained in neutral. Hard to explain. And therefore a couple of remarkable things happened. Can I recapture them?

One thing, I wondered what it would be like to be entirely present, to be fully aware of my life as a 6- or 12- (or however many there are) dimensional being. We have been told that as we become more aware of other dimensions, our experience of time necessarily changes (because those dimensions are crammed into our experience of time in a sort of spare-drawer or junk-closet kind of way). So what if we were fully aware, what would it feel like?

I knew that it isn’t a matter of how we think about things. And yet that isn’t something to be ignored, either, if only because the way we think can get in our own way. If you think guidance is “over here” or is “them,” your opportunities are going to be lessened than if you thought “they” are right here and are not “them.” So, although we can’t think our way into an experience of wholeness (call it), we can prevent ourselves from having it by thinking wrongly.

So I kept that in mind, and tried not to think but to be. What would it feel like to experience myself as I really am, rather than only as this 3D-experiencing machine with a lifeline to the non-3D? Since it can’t be thought into, I couldn’t use concepts to frame it. All I could do was intend to feel it.

Working from that intent, I held myself in an attitude of not-thinking alertness. (Sorry for the inadequacy of description, but I can’t find words for it, or in fact even concepts to try to describe in words. I think a better observer might come back with analogies, at least.) The result was that I “intended” into a clear mental space whose “feel” I have experienced occasionally. I saw a room, with two main objects in it, one closer to me than the other. I can’t remember the objects but the impression was of a very rich room – like a room in a museum, say, with the walls covered with artwork. Nothing moved, nor did my intent. I was being careful not to “move,” myself. I let it be, and held my intent, and tried hard not to start thinking about it, or associating ideas to it.

I don’t remember how it ended – whether it faded, or I started to think, or what. It only lasted a short time. Less than a minute, maybe, though it seemed longer (or perhaps I should say “timeless”) while it lasted.

I remember resolving to try to stay in a state of remembering at least my intent to experience life as fully as possible, and it did seem to affect my day, as long as it lasted. (That is, as long as I remembered.)

Now, by that phrase, “experience life as fully as possible,” I am not talking about what people often seem to mean when they say something similar, which is, roughly, “cram as many experiences, emotions, etc. as possible into my life.” I mean nothing like that. Rather than compiling “external” events and my reactions to them, I’m talking about expanding my moment-to-moment pattern of perception so that I live in the world more as it really is and less as it appears from a constricted 3D perspective. I don’t know how to do it – I won’t know unless / until I succeed – but I think I know how to go about it, focused intent and stillness. But how to remember intent, moment by moment? That’s a big question.

Obviously this way of proceeding won’t be for everyone, if it is even for me. But it seems worth a try, and now I’m wondering if this is that people aim for by meditating. The trouble with all this exploring is that so little of it can be expressed, and such little as can be expressed can be so misleading. Still, it seems worth pursuing.