Chasing Smallwood — .35 Scattered.

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

 

 

 

 

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

(9:15 a.m.) Late start today. Well, Joseph, I’m very glad for the material on Emerson. In retrospect it is very strange indeed that I didn’t think to ask you about that visit the first time I contacted you.

Maybe that should reassure you a bit. It ain’t a process under your control, though you sometimes like to think so and other times you’re very afraid that it is. The extent of your immediate control is your being open to it. In fact, let’s talk a little about the process. What’s your biggest question about it? I know your biggest fear, that you’re just fooling yourself and some others. But what is the biggest puzzlement? And there’s a reason I’m asking instead of just telling you: it’ll make you think, and the process will be different.

Okay, if you say so. My biggest question about the process.

Odd, I can’t really think as well just thinking as I can writing as I go along. I suppose that trait is what led to my doing this in this fashion.

My biggest question about the process. I guess, this: Assuming it is real, and assuming I am contacting others in one or another relation to me – whether “past lives” or just friends or assigned guidance or whatever – how come I get some information and not all information at will?

The question answers itself, you see.

Well, yes, I guess it does. And I suppose that’s why you had me work to pose it.

Sure. It wouldn’t have the same conviction if I just told you, instead of your figuring it out. And it won’t have the same conviction for others – can’t – because they didn’t work themselves into the spot but just had it given to ‘em. And you’re going to have to spell it out – you will or I will – or they won’t understand what you just got, because it is too connected to where your mind is. In other words, it ain’t obvious except because you’ve just been thinking about something. And how often have you seen the same thing talking to the guys, as you put it?

That’s true, I’ve often been surprised, re-reading a transcript, to see the mental leaps I had made, though they seemed natural enough at the moment. Well, what I just got as I posed the question why I got some information but not anything I want is – because the process is not entirely under my control. In other words there is someone else on the other end of the conversation! And this is just what you would expect, if it is real.

Correct, and with that reassurance behind us for the moment we can proceed.

No, looking again at that answer, we came out the same hole we went in. Assuming the world is round, why, look! The world is round! That doesn’t actually get us any farther. What of information that ought to be available but that I can feel you don’t have? All the innumerable details about the life and times of Joseph Smallwood that you – being I take it in an a sort of permanently expanded state, ought to have access to. I may not be able to remember my street address or telephone number from 30 years ago, or 40, but if I had timeless command of my memories – as presumably you do – why shouldn’t I then?

You are making assumptions and not noticing them. You think I’m in a “permanently expanded state” and by that you mean I’m like the guys, with access to everything and (relative to you) focus on nothing until you create focus by your interest, at which times (you assume) there is total access. All this stems from ideas you’ve got that came from here and there – your childhood, your religious training, your reading at various levels of understanding over many decades – it isn’t an integrated consistent system and you wouldn’t want it to be except in so far as you feel like you have nailed in one piece of another of truth.

Well, care to paint a better picture?

You are too scattered. You cannot do this work with half your attention. Come to it joyously or not at all.

Pinpoints and probability-clouds

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

[This entry progressed rapidly. First I was talking to myself; then I thought I’d talk to Hemingway if he was available; then I was talking to – someone. Who it was, hardly matters. The material conveyed will resonate or it won’t; will be found helpful or not. Attributing a specific source is unnecessary, which is just as well, given that it can never be proved.]

Pinpoints and probability-clouds

Tuesday, February 27, 2018

7:10 a.m. I got a real sense this morning of how Martha Gellhorn was a major bad influence on Papa’s career. If they hadn’t met, he wouldn’t have been tempted farther to the left than his center of gravity naturally was; wouldn’t have found the Finca; wouldn’t have left Pauline, maybe; wouldn’t have been so trapped at the end of his life in a life too comfortable to leave, to constricted to be really good for him. I don’t know where he would have wound up – not Key West anyway, maybe, given how the causeway had changed the island – but maybe the right version of To Have and Have Not, and no For Whom the Bell Tolls, true, but maybe something [even] better.

Not living in Cuba, maybe no Q-Boat operations, certainly no Crime Shop. If no Spanish [Civil War] involvement, perhaps [he might have been accepted in US Army] Intelligence in World War II. No China tour in 1941, but maybe other things, better things. Maybe a second safari before the war broke out, though maybe not. Maybe he would have ended his days in Africa or, like [his son] Pat, lived there some years.

I do wonder, Papa, what those possibilities would have been.

Okay, here is a lesson in how things are, if you want it.

Certainly.

When you go to thinking about how things might have gone, it is always vague and fuzzy, never crystal clear and never even as precise as your current version of your own life seems to be. (I say seems to be, because it’s a lot hazier than you ever realize while you’re in it, but that’s another discussion.) Why is that, do you suppose? Is it because you have a failure of imagination? Is it – Well, forget the rhetorical questions, here’s why. You are trying to take a precise picture of what is actually not an object at all, but a cloud.

A probability cloud.

Yes, but that isn’t the end of the discussion but the beginning.

Lower my energy [i.e., slow down], I get it. Okay.

Where you are at any given moment – anyone, of course, not just you Frank – seems a fixed point. You came from a past, chose among a cloud of probabilities and even possibilities and made one choice (or combination of choices) your reality. In so doing, you established the launching-point for your own next choices – that is, for your future possibilities. Choices foreclose some paths and open others.

That’s how it seems. But it’s more productive to factor in what Seth told you [all]: When you decide to change timelines you pull in a different past as well as different futures. There is no way to make sense of that – if you really think it through – and still reconcile it with the way things seem to be. Your sensory reports tell you that you are in a fixed point emerging from a series of fixed points, with the possibilities ahead of you waiting to be chosen and fixed in turn. Face it, that’s the only common-sense way to see your lives.

So how can the two be reconciled, the appearance and the reality Seth tries to explain to you? The answer is, you have to (or get to; it depends upon your attitude whether you see this as a constriction or a freedom) give up the idea that you are on a fixed point or ever were; that you are a point of definiteness among a cloud of probable other-realities; that you exist in order to choose not who you wish to experience being, but who you are going to be, absolutely.

Instead?

Instead recognize that a cloud is a cloud and doesn’t become a pinpoint. But what you perceive, may.

Our vision funnels down from the cloud that exists to one path?

Think of your life – we’re going to go back to an image you were given some years ago now – think of your life as a laser beam focused through a crystal. The angle at which the beam is aimed determines what is illuminated. Change the angle of vision, the crystal remains what it always was, but the illuminated appearance differs, perhaps radically.

Did changing the angle of vision change the crystal even temporarily, let alone permanently? It did not. It changed what you saw, it changed what you experienced. But all the other ways to see it remain, because the only thing that changed is your energy focus, slicing into the crystal that is your sum of possibilities, lighting up one possible path.

You are so accustomed to thinking of your lives as fixed points, it can be hard to understand that the sum of the possibilities of a life is fixed; the individual appearances, depending upon how the beam is focused and directed, are essentially countless. Thus, a cloud, thus a fixed reality. As so often, it is all in how you look at it.

So, you see, the limits of what can be perceived are not so much in any external, but in the habits of the person trying to perceive. If you can’t think of your present moment as other than the only way things can be, given past decisions, you can’t go any farther in understanding. If you can’t think of a present moment – no, again, skip the rhetoricals. It slows us down.

The rhetorical questions stem from a mental habit of mine?

Well, whose mind and linguistic habits are we employing? They are, let’s say, the reflexive channels your mind goes to. I mean, in the largest sense, all your mental processes contribute to the flavor of the communication. That’s why frequently someone attempting honestly to channel someone famous will produce an inadvertent parody of the person’s speech patterns; they are trying too hard, trying to be what they aren’t, not realizing that what they may be thinking of as interference or even as partial failure is merely inevitable blending.

So, to resume the thought: What you assume about reality limits what you can experience. This isn’t a tragedy or even an unfortunate fact of life. It is just life, for life is limitation, else it is shapeless. The question is, which limitations do you allow to shape your lives?

If you think the present moment is a fixed point, the product of past fixed points, you will feel that either you are the child of predestination or, at best, that your choices will create a series of future fixed points. This lays great stress either on predestination or on free will, or on some combination of the two – usually a very uneasy combination.

If you see that what Seth said means that your past changes with your present decisions, you may be drawn to think of life as a plethora of alternate time-lines, sort of parallel, that may be chosen – jumped to – in the process creating a zigzag path that is a given version of a life. It still has a tinge of predestination in it, in that it is a form of choosing among pre-existing futures. It has the very real disadvantage of seeming theoretical rather than actual.

Yes, I’ve experienced that. This is more or less the view I have been holding.

And it isn’t a bad halfway-house. But the image of the laser shining through the crystal is a more serviceable one, only it requires that you give up certain ideas that for a while seem essential.

The idea of making progress through making choices, for one thing.

No, the idea that a given 3D first-tier experience is real, while your second- or third-tier reactions are not, which is precisely wrong way to. The change in you as a result of your decisions is the reality; the scenarios in which you chose are the stage-setting. We know it doesn’t feel that way; it isn’t supposed to [in 3D], after all.

Think of reality as the exploration in simulation of all possible permutations. That being so, how can choice be momentous, life-changing, apocalyptic – except in the context of that particular laser-beam illumination of

Yeah, I hear the problem, finding that word. If we say “possibilities” it sounds like we mean, it isn’t real. If we say “reality” it implies that other angles of vision will show things that aren’t equally real. If we say “timeline” we’re back to that disconnect.

In any way of seeing things – put it that way – things may occur that are life-shattering and seemingly cosmically important. What you need to put your minds to, if you can, is that, at the same level of reality, all other angles of vision, with their consequent crises and challenges, equally exist. Thus all contradictions exist and don’t even interfere within one another. The crystal that is all of your life-possibilities doesn’t move, doesn’t change. What changes is your angle of vision, which seems to change everything. And the changes in that angle of vision must come from a different level than the angle itself, obviously.

You say obviously, but it wasn’t obvious to me until you said it. But yes, obvious now.

And that’s why you are well advised to connect to your non-3D component. That’s why your All-D you is well advised to connect to its next larger being – not its Sam, probably, but the next higher level it connects to. Freedom cannot be attained at the same level it is sought from. Freedom comes from above, so to speak. If you wish to become aware of the fishbowl and transcend its limitations, your consciousness has to transcend that of the part of you that is the fish. It’s only common sense, after all.

And that is well over your hour, and is a good place to pause.

Well, this was unexpected, and a pleasure. Thank you.

 

Angels to each other

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

[In the course of going through old journal files, I came across this from October, 2004, which may be of interest. It looks like I sent it to friends. Can’t remember now who. I could equally well title this entry “God’s hands.” I am well aware of what a blessing friends are in our lives.]

Friends,

Over the weekend, a reminder of how we are angels to each other.

Last weekend I was scheduled to do the Universal Life Expo in Columbus Ohio, sharing a booth with Books Etc. (an Orrville, Ohio bookstore owned by my friends Charles Sides and Jenny Horner) and, on Saturday, speaking and doing a workshop.

The trouble was, I got sick  the week before, a cold that developed into asthma. It kept getting worse, even at the airport waiting for my flight out. Flew out, and on Saturday gave the talk, gave the workshop, and had a fun supper with Richard and Tara Sutphen (but felt myself getting sicker as the night went on).

Sunday by pre-arrangement I slept late, hit the show about noon, toughed it out through the afternoon. (First time I ever did a trade show sitting down.) Got back to Charles and Jenny’s in Orrville, had kind of a hard night, coughing up phlegm – or trying to – for most of the time. Even sicker Monday morning, but had just one thought in mind: Get back home.

I have been dealing with asthma for more than half a century. It has been a continuing challenge to my self-reliance and independence. Many of my friends think I am far too resistant to getting medical assistance, perhaps not fully realizing what my life looks like from inside. It is often hard to be sure that independence and self-reliance have not passed into pig-headedness, and I have to make the judgment call one incident at a time. When in doubt, I usually have erred on the side of independence, regardless of discomfort.

Monday became decision-time, in a big way.

Charles and Jenny drove me to the airport. I was stopped by security (turned out to be my inhaler causing the beeping) and could scarcely stand unassisted during the wanding. Had to sit and rest before and after putting my shoes back on. It was hard getting to the plane; the few steps down and then up wore me out. The stewardess saw me sitting white-faced and rigid in seat 1A, smiled and asked if I were nervous! All I could gasp out was “asthma.”

It is only a short flight to Pittsburgh but by the time I’d gotten into the terminal, totally breathless, I had to grab a couple of seatbacks, and wait to be able to continue. I had an hour between planes, but didn’t think I could get to the other gate. I flagged a cart and asked for a ride, which represented a first crack in the do-it-yourself-at-all-costs philosophy. Asked if I could pre-board. Second crack. When the plane arrived in Charlottesville, I thought about how far away my car was, and asked the stewardess if they could get me a wheelchair and wheel me there. Third — major — crack in the structure. They did, and as they wheeled me out to the car the guy persuaded me that we should have the guys from Pegasus – a sort of air-rescue unit – check me out. I thought about it and said okay.

The Pegasus guys gave me oxygen and a nebulizer treatment, took blood pressure, pulse, etc., and strongly suggested that I go to the hospital via ambulance. I fought the idea, figuring I could drive home (driving isn’t actually much physical exertion; nowhere near as much as walking, for instance) and then see my doctor. I had just about decided to do that, but then thought that it would be muddle-headed to overrule so much strong advice from so many experienced men — at least half a dozen by then – who were there to help me. And the ambulance was already sitting there. So I gave in, and the rest of the day, and the next day, was a luxury of being cared for by others instead of having to struggle through it by myself.

The entire stay was interesting and I may write about it, but all this is merely leading up to this. There is an old saying that God has no hands to work through but ours. Regardless of your theology, surely you can see that the saying is not only true but obvious. It is never more obvious than when your life is in another person’s hands, which is more often than we usually realize. I watched the functioning of the emergency room for several hours, and what it amounted to was that all these people – doctors, nurses, orderlies, various technical types – are there every day, waiting to help whoever comes in needing help. I woke up early today and put into the form of a cinquain.

E.R.

No breath.

Resource’s end.

Surrendering control

To these calm strangers, knowing them

God’s hands.

 

Be well, my friends. I send you my love.

 

America’s Journey: Lincoln and Douglas

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Lincoln and Douglas

The last politician who could walk both sides of the street inside the Democracy was none other than Stephen A. Douglas. And it was Abraham Lincoln — clever, long-headed, calculating Abraham Lincoln – who stopped him. Lincoln, as we shall see, was a popular and successful lawyer, well known throughout the state of Illinois. Brought out of political retirement by the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the birth of the Republican Party in 1854, he was a political power in the state, but was relatively unknown elsewhere in the North. The campaign’s seven Lincoln-Douglas debates were printed in the newspapers and were carefully followed throughout the nation, much as, a century later, the televised Nixon-Kennedy debate was followed. The 1858 Senate campaign against Douglas made Lincoln’s reputation, because those who didn’t know him expected him to be chewed up by “the little giant.” When that didn’t happen – when in fact Lincoln more than held his own – the North’s anti-slavery men saw that they had a new champion. And then events made him president, as we have seen – but it was the contest with Douglas that displayed Lincoln’s strengths to the national audience.

And it was the Freeport Doctrine, which Douglas set forth in answer to one of Lincoln’s questions, that doomed his 1860 presidential campaign in advance. To understand why, you have to know about the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, handed down the previous year, in which, in a 7–2 decision written by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, the Court held that the federal government had no power to regulate slavery even in the federal territories acquired after the creation of the United States. (The ruling also held that nonwhites could not be citizens, regardless whether they were free or slave, but that particular injustice is not the thread we are pursuing here.) To opponents of slavery, this looked like one more piece of a conspiracy to remove all constitutional and legal barriers against the expansion of slavery. It raised the specter of slavery being legalized everywhere, and thus spreading to the free states.

So, in the second debate, in Freeport, Illinois, Lincoln forced Douglas to commit himself on the question by asking, “Can the people of a Territory in any lawful way, against the wishes of any citizen of the United States, exclude slavery from their limits prior to the formation of a State constitution?”

Douglas answered: “It matters not what way the Supreme Court may hereafter decide as to the abstract question whether slavery may or may not go into a Territory under the Constitution, the people have the lawful means to introduce it or exclude it as they please, for the reason that slavery cannot exist a day or an hour anywhere, unless it is supported by local police regulations. Those police regulations can only be established by the local legislature; and if the people are opposed to slavery, they will elect representatives to that body who will by unfriendly legislation effectually prevent the introduction of it into their midst. If, on the contrary, they are for it, their legislation will favor its extension. Hence, no matter what the decision of the Supreme Court may be on that abstract question, still the right of the people to make a Slave Territory or a Free Territory is perfect and complete under the Nebraska bill.”

With that answer, which may have been sincere, Douglas tried to square the circle. Had he answered “no,” he would have alienated the anti-slavery men of the North. But he didn’t dare answer “yes” – give the answer his presidential backers in the South wanted to hear – because he was too well aware that he could lose his Senate seat if he did. So he saved his seat, probably thinking he’d weasel his way out of his words in the next year or so. Rejecting the decision, he would alienate Southerners. So, he tried to wiggle through by delivering what people were soon calling the Freeport Doctrine.

And with his answer to Mr. Lincoln’s question, Douglas’ chances of getting the nomination went glimmering, because the Southerners weren’t ever going to trust him. They were ready to keep using him in the Senate, and they were willing to elect him president if they had to, but when he said the people of a territory could prohibit slavery from entering, Southern fire-eaters would have nothing more to do with him. It didn’t matter why he said it, nor how he qualified his statement, or even if he meant what he said. By this time the supposed right to expand slavery into new territories had been made into a dogma. Douglas might come into the national convention with a majority of delegates, but with the fire-eaters opposed to him, there was no way he could assemble the two-thirds vote then required. His answer in Freeport marked the beginning of the end for him. Mr. Lincoln blew it all up before John Brown, and the only people who noticed were the politicians, who weren’t going to say it in public. But probably it was only a matter of time. The people in the north with the money wanted their way, too. Sooner or later the Democracy was going to have to choose, when the ground of compromise ran out.

 

Chasing Smallwood — .34. Emerson’s message to youth

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

[A book with four interlocking themes:

  • how to communicate with the dead;
  • the life of a 19th-century American;
  • the massive task facing us today, and
  • the physical world’s place in the scheme of things.]

[Sunday, February 19, 2006]

Joseph, I don’t know if it was you planting ideas in my head – where do ideas come from, anyway? – but I thought today I would ask you to talk to me about Emerson in your life. That is the connection in which you first came to me, and for some reason I never pursued it. Because of my problems with R, I suppose.[R was a woman in my Gateway. The connection will become obvious as you read this.]  Talk to me of your relation to Emerson.

People in your day don’t think much about Emerson, not like in mine. When I was a boy he set us on fire with possibilities – our possibilities, you see – and his influence just kept growing. From your time looking backwards, your people are inclined to see him as the respectable elder statesman whose words seem stuffy and old-fashioned. Spencer and others used his thoughts like “compensation” to justify the worst kind of social robbery. And, Emerson is more English, more old-fashioned to you, so he’s almost needing a translator.

You yourself – Frank – know the difference in you between Emerson and Thoreau. Emerson is clearly an older man of an older time; Thoreau could be living next to you. Does, in fact. Of course that don’t mean that a man born 100 years after Henry Thoreau got thrown in jail overnight is as far from him as people born more than 125 years after he died. All I’m saying is, time moves on, people recede, and they need translating, and Henry will too. You’ve thought to do it. If you don’t – even if you do – someone else will, for he still has things to say.

It took my breath for a second – I thought – Henry too?

It would be a big thing to you, wouldn’t it? The only reason it ain’t on the program is it would make things too hard for you right now. But sure, if you can talk to Lincoln, it ought to show you you can talk to others. The thing is, have some reason to talk to them. You wouldn’t just call them on the phone without a reason – or if you did you’d embarrass yourself, maybe. But if you have something to say, or something to ask – well, the phone is free.

Perhaps at some point I will work up my nerve to do that. Meanwhile, Emerson?

Emerson, all right. Might as well start with why I visited his house, if I even knew why. I had read him while I was at Harvard – lots of us did – but certainly not as required reading! Not even as permitted reading, you might say – but we read him, and for just a couple of us, he was a whole new world opening up. I started to say, you –your time, I mean – thinks Emerson was sort of stuffy, sort of conservative and obscure. You ought to have read him with our eyes! Here was this man, had been a minister, was related to one of the oldest families in Massachusetts – ministers all the way back to the code of Hammurabi, as they say – and he says you don’t need ministers to bring you to God, God is all around you and within you. He says, you came into this life to be something: Be it. Don’t follow in some old mold just because it is expected; throw over the traces and see for yourself what you can be. Trust! Trust the universe, you people in your time say. Well, Emerson was saying it in my time.

I ain’t going to try to Explain Emerson. Anybody can read him, it just takes patience with the stuff you won’t find familiar. But I can tell you what his effect was. He was just dynamite to the young – and dynamite was what we needed. We were living in a new world, and in new country – for after all the frontier when I was born was in Ohio somewhere, or Illinois; you know what I mean. We were in a new political system – the first republic since the Dutch and to our mind the first republic since the Greeks and Romans. We had new careers, new opportunities, new political arrangements, new social arrangements – for the old-fashioned ways were breaking up, tainted with Tory-ism. And now here came Emerson with American versions of Carlyle and the Germans, the Transcendental Idealists, you know.

Remember, this was when romanticism was still new enough to be exciting. It was when we could see the steam engine changing everything around us day by day. Electricity! (The telegraph, you know.) Railroads! Steamboats, steam power equipment instead of river – well, you get the idea. Everything new, everything possible, and what were we waiting on?

And Emerson says, “hold on boys, with everything new and changing, hadn’t you ought to change how you think too? How you talk and write and see? Hadn’t you ought to start to be Americans instead of second-hand Europeans?

Now, I know that sounds different to you because in your time you’ve got tired of the everlasting bragging about America being the best at this, the strongest at that, the smartest, the bravest and all that. But, see, the difference is in the circumstances. You were born just at the time America had climbed to be cock of the hoop. In 1946 you could have beat the rest of the world put together, probably. (Not that it would have been a good thing, of course, it would have been a disaster for all everybody, but that ain’t the point.)

When Emerson started publishing, though, it was 1836. It was a whole different story. In 1836, England called the tune and sold you the fiddle too. America had enough people, and it was far enough away, on the other side of the ocean, that England couldn’t beat it in a war – 1812 had proved that – but when it came to world affairs, England was everything and America was just nowhere. The best fashions was English, the best books, the best education, the best culture. At least, for Americans it was – and that, even for people didn’t particularly like England. It was a lot like it was with America when you were born, or like it was inside America with New York for a while. If it came from there it was the best, because it came from there.

So when Emerson said, let’s think our own thoughts and say them in our own way and not be looking over our shoulder at England all the time, and France – why, it was like nobody had ever thought it: He said the right thing at the right time, you see, and – bang! –the whole works went up.

But that was only for openers, as  they used to say, playing poker. If that had been all he had had to say, it would have been thank you very much and on to other things. No sir. The biggest thing – the thing his old connections never could forgive him for, because they could never understand it – was his saying that it is morally wrong to rely on outside authority over your own conscience.

He didn’t say it in so many words, but that is what it amounted to. You are on your own in this world, if you want to live in the truth. You can explore here and there, you can lean on this person and that one, but the minute you give your own conscience to the keeping of somebody else – or some thing else, like an institution, which is worse – why from that moment until you come to your senses and reform, you are dead.

What a sermon to preach to young men!

Now, it ain’t any use saying (not that you would, Frank, but some would) that you can make plenty of mistakes following your conscience. Sometimes you get the facts wrong, sometimes the implications, sometimes the moral of the story. But life is about mistakes; you can’t always get it right, and you can go a lot farther wrong following some code or some group thought than you can by trying to follow the guidance God gives you minute to minute if you will only just listen to it. What do you think Jesus meant by the blind following the blind and winding up in a ditch?

If you have got to make mistakes – and you do; you can’t help it; even doing nothing is sometimes a mistake – if you have got to make mistakes, make your own mistakes, that come out of your own nature, they come out of who you are, what you are – and ultimately if you faithfully listen even your own mistakes will turn out all right. But if you turn your back on your inner light, you are lost. Getting lost don’t mean you have to stay lost. But it does mean you wind up straggling around not knowing where you are for a time. It can be damned uncomfortable. You know, they asked Daniel Boone if he’d ever been lost in the woods and he allowed as how he’d never been exactly lost, but one time he was confused for three days. Make your own mistakes. At least you will know where you are.

Well, you can imagine the rest. I got out of school, went back to western Massachusetts where my brother was living, but then I took it in mind to go west, and before I did – because I didn’t figure to ever be back east again – I thought I’d try to tell Mr. Emerson thank you for what his words had meant to me. So I went to Concord and took a room at the Inn and walked over to Emerson’s. Couldn’t very well make a phone call, you know, they’d have been forty years putting in a line. (That’s a joke for you.)

The little girl opened the door and said she’d see if Mr. Emerson was in – which meant, was he open to visitors, you know – and next thing there he is, tall, thin, sort of stately. I don’t mean pompous; he wasn’t that. Dignified, sort of. Naturally a bit reserved. Shy, maybe, come to think of it. I was 20, 21 at the time, I didn’t think that this older man – he must have been about 40 – might be shy just meeting a young college graduate. He was courteous and friendly, invited me in, and instead of going to his study he walked me though the hallway that led down the middle and into the dining room – that’s what you’d call it – where he introduced me to his wife.

Well, Frank, you know this part of the story. This is how you and me got introduced, you might say, in your Gateway vision. I looked at her and I recognized her, and you in your vision recognized her too but we were recognizing different people, you might say.

She was surprised that I actually looked at her and saw her. She was used to young men coming to see her husband and thinking of her like the maid, you might say. But she saw that I actually saw her as a person. Of course, you know what was going on: John Cotten had been married to the woman who was – how shall we say this? – related to her. It was a “past life” as you say, though you know the difficulties with that way of thinking about it. She “was” John’s wife that had died, in the way that I “was” John. So there was that recognition that passed between us. And then on your end, you were dealing with the woman who “was” Lidian Emerson, and John’s wife, so the recognition was pretty powerful to you – a sort of three-way recognition – John and me and you, all dealing with the same “family” so to speak of identities. And of course that is why that moment was given to you – to wake you up. It took a lot!

Well, so I made polite noises, because of course I didn’t have any idea what was going on, just knew she seemed important somehow. And then at some point I got introduced to Henry Thoreau, who Emerson thought we’d get along being about the same age. And Henry was five years older than me, and he was living with Emerson, so it made for a little distance – as if his own personality with strangers wouldn’t have been distance enough! But we all  went off for a walk – walked down to Walden Pond, though none of us had any idea it would become famous, or why – and Emerson kindly tried to draw me out, and I tried to tell him what his ideas had meant to me, which wasn’t any easier for Henry being right there, prickly pear that he was. But after a while we left off talking and just went along enjoying the day, because we all three greatly liked walking in silence through the woods, listening. And that smoothed things out some, and after a while we sat by the side of the lake – well, Henry and I sat on stones, or a log or something, and Emerson stood, I remember that, benignly smiling down at us – and maybe we did exchange a few true words.

Not every communication takes place with words, you know. Ask “the guys” another time about people as sacred spots. But that’s enough for now. You’re tired.

Thank you my friend. It is always a pleasure.

Journals, dreams and the non-3D

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Tuesday, February 20, 2018

6 a.m. Shall we dance? I had a dream and it seems I am processing things in my non-3D time, call it. Or do I always, as is said, and am only now aware of doing it? Aware, if only temporarily?

Well, whatever you’d like to talk about –

Going through past journals looking for quotations means you skim – in fact, you scarcely glance at most of it, certainly not at long conversations with Hemingway or others that were transcribed. But it does allow us to call your attention to specific passages here and there, things you’ve forgotten or at least things you never think about. It allows you to associate states of mind separated by long stretches of elapsed sequential 3D time. That is the value, to you, of 50 years of journaling. Others with different types of memory, different patterns of daily attention, would not need to, nor be able to, function in that same way – which is why relatively few people keep a journal decade after decade, wondering why they are doing so.

I never really knew why I started; I only knew that it was important, and one day in 1966 I realized, nobody was going to give me one as a birthday gift, so I’d have to get one for myself, and did. Over the years, I have several times gotten sick of carrying it around (as I did, for decades) but not using it, or writing in it but nothing ever coming of it, and – all that time – really not knowing why I kept on.

It has been a minor revelation, this last little time, so see how my use of the journals exploded since I began to use them for conversations at length. Not sure where that starts – the end of 2005, presumably, when I left Hampton Roads – but to realize that in the past seven years I have filled more than 30 books, most of them 150-sheet books, or 300 pages – well, that’s a lot of writing, much of it transcribed.

For different immediate purposes, but for a continuing over-arching purpose over time. What we are encouraging you to do at the moment is to have the experience of non-3D time, you might say. The material is all there, but you don’t need to traipse through it sequentially. You can soar over it, alighting here and there. And by following your interest, you can easier associate like threads.

Let me. I have the sense of it now.

Go ahead.

The guys told us years ago, to them in non-3D, the connecting threads on the back of the tapestry are as evident as the seemingly disconnected pattern they form on the front side, which is what we in 3D see. If I get you right, you are saying that my skimming the journals, pausing to read only the patches that call to me, is like the way we function in non-3D. The like passages can be followed like-to-like, rather than experienced as separate islands separated by spans of time to be traversed between them.

Your life is still sequential, of course, but to some degree that is a fair analogy. Only, it’s easier in your dreams, because you don’t continually interpose 3D assumptions, logic, conditions. The flow is better.

I can’t decide if this is really something different or not. It seems like I’ve always known what comes to me now, and yet it seems that I’m realizing it for the first time.

Any reason that it couldn’t be both?

I would have assumed it would have to be one or the other.

Not at all. That’s 3D logic – two-value logic, at that – entering into play. Life isn’t so much either-or as it is a matter of degree. Not an on-off switch but a rheostat, as you sometimes put it. Don’t you find yourself every so often making a new discovery, then realizing that you knew that, only now you understand it at a deeper level?

I’ll insert the Thomas Merton quote. I have it rattling around in my mind, and I suppose you put it there.

You put it there [originally]; we merely reminded you.

[Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas, p 204: Keeping a journal has taught me that there is not so much new in your life as you sometimes think. When you re-read your journal you find out that your latest discovery is something you already found out five years ago. Still, it is true that one penetrates deeper and deeper into the same ideas and the same experiences.]

Can you see that there is a form of non-3D processing working within 3D limitations? 3D segregates and sorts by elapsed time (and space, but that isn’t important in the matter of ideas, memories, emotions, mental-states). Non-3D segregates and sorts by emotional connections, logical connections, and other forms of association rather than, almost in the absence of, almost disregarding, separation by time.

So dreams associate things (mental things, you understand) that physically occurred or let’s say were experienced in times that were separated. Those separations are quite impermeable in 3D first-tier conditions. But they do not exist as barriers, scarcely as obstacles, in non-3D dreamtime. So, while in 3D, dreams or hallucinogenic states or, sometimes, delirium or even coma may be the only way for a 3D-oriented mind to see the larger picture. The tricky part is then sorting out the insight from the delusion, and even that may be more a matter of definition than appears.

And that’s enough for the moment.

Because that rounds off the topic? We’ve only been going half an hour.

Enough for now.

Okay. Thanks.

 

 

Figuring it out

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Seven years ago, in January, 2011, my friend Charles Sides and I drove down to Marathon, in the Florida Keys, and spent two weeks at a home borrowed from my friends Linda and Neal Rogers. During that time we went twice to Key West, where Hemingway had lived for a dozen productive years, and I bought a lot of books as usual and mostly we enjoyed the sun and the warmth and didn’t feel the need to do much more than sit around and rest.

I was pretty unsettled. I had just written The Cosmic Internet, I was actively considering moving to Charlottesville after 13 years living in Nelson County near The Monroe Institute, and, not least, I was sick. A few days after I returned home, I had a conversation with Hemingway that made some things clear, and taught me a technique that I think others may find useful.

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

4:20 AM. Can’t sleep. Well, the fruit stand is open. Papa?

Continue with the exercise.

And that is?

That is, to see your life to this point and see what it has led you to, so that you can begin to express what you have never felt able to express. For, it is this lack of ability to understand your life (partly because you can’t express what you know, which would make you more able to understand more) that is a very common problem. As people see somebody working it out in public, they will get their own ideas on how to do their own sums.

Is this a particularly appropriate time for the exercise?

Can’t you feel it?

I do, actually. The vacation in Florida, which already seems a good while ago, marked a sort of intermission, a time away from normal, and was dominated by thoughts of moving, and by a strange sickness that wasn’t asthma, and a sort of gathering of forces, maybe.

That last statement. It doesn’t really say anything. Say it, or give up hope of understanding what you mean and what you’re only half perceiving.

I begin to see what you are doing. You are showing me how you worked and why you did what you did.

But do the work.

All right. Gathering of forces. What did I mean? I had a sense that both Charles and I were preparing somehow for a new phase in our lives. There was a sense of anticipation of change, and a readiness for change, in fact an impatience with a continuation of the old.

How? How did you feel that?

It’s beyond any “how.” I just felt it.

If you’re going to communicate, you’re going to have to hand the reader something definite. The by-product will be that you will hand it to yourself, at a deeper level of understanding than you have ever known. How did the sense of anticipation of change manifest?

I don’t know, really.

Remember specifics.

I would sit on the deck looking out at the water. I had books about Hemingway. I had just been to Key West (the first full day in the Keys). I had other books I had brought, that I had no interest in reading at the moment. I had this journal, though I don’t remember using it much.

Having said that, I just looked back, and I see that in fact we [Hemingway and I] had some substantial conversations. I suppose I never transcribed them, or, no, I think I did, but I didn’t send them to my Papa list because of technical difficulties. Posted them to my blog, maybe.

But anyway, it looks like my time went to reading, talking to you, planning to move, and talking with Charles. And being sick, and a little sightseeing, not much.

How did the sense of anticipation manifest itself?

I don’t know!

Yes, you do. Or, you will, when you do the work.

I am put in mind of sitting in the chair on the deck. That’s what keeps coming up. Not sitting at the breakfast bar or lying in bed or driving around, but sitting on the chair there. Charles and I both did a lot of that. It wasn’t when I was reading, or even writing, but when I was just sitting.

You’re getting there. And?

Well, I don’t know “and” what. My sleep was disturbed once I got sick. I slept practically all the way back to Charles’s house, two days in the car. I slept a lot while down there. But what can I say about what happened when I slept?

Pursue the thread. This is the work I did in silence, that never showed. This is the iceberg-beneath-water.

But in regard to different subject matter.

Do you think so? Different externals, yes. But a man’s internal experience of life can be experienced with superficial understanding or can be deeply understood, and mine was as deep an understanding as I could achieve. Yours to now has not been.

I can see that. Partly it was not knowing how.

And mostly?

Yes. Mostly it was that so many memories hurt, or were embarrassing, and that didn’t encourage the process of examination any.

And?

And, as I say, I didn’t know how to go about dredging. I can easily help others dredge, but I am more or less terra incognita to myself.

Or that is your cover story. Just be willing to see. What happened when you were just sitting?

Things were going through my mind, probably. Stuff about your life, all kinds of thoughts, but I don’t remember what.

So remember the water and the island and the sky at night or in early morning or in midday or evening. It all changed continually.

Yes, of course it did, and sometimes — often, in fact — it was a little chilly. Particularly after I got sick, it wasn’t always entirely comfortable, but usually more comfortable than being inside. I don’t see how to get to whatever you’re trying to get me to, here.

You tell others about state-specific memories. Doesn’t it apply to you?

Oh sure, it isn’t an intellectual thing at all, it’s a matter of getting back to the emotion that will connect up to the memory of where I was when I felt that emotion.

Isn’t that what I said when I advised people to remember what specific detail had caused an emotion in them? The water jumping off a tightened fishing line, for instance?

I didn’t understand it that way. In fact I didn’t understand it at all. I could see that it was giving you something, but I couldn’t see what.

So now that you know, apply it. Do you remember what you were looking at?

I remember the wading birds. Charles thought they were always waiting for dinner. I figured much of their day involved other things that birds might understand but we don’t. But for all I know they do think about food all day long.

Did you look?

I sure did. My eyes aren’t very good for distance anymore — I often saw only a blur where Charles would see birds — but I’d see the ones close —

You know, thinking about it, that inability to see detail or even clear outline was on my mind that trip. I’ve come to accept it but it was getting in my way. I could see color changes, but even color is off when you can’t see in focus.

So your life was out of focus?

You could put it that way. So — how out of focus? In what way? Telling, I guess, that I can always read, with or without glasses, even if I can’t read road signs or see birds or trees or anything else clearly.

Yes, in fact, my life was feeling somewhat out of focus. I’d just finished the Cosmic Internet book, so I should have been feeling pretty good about that, and in fact I did. But I was feeling impatient about the time I waste. I was feeling, obscurely, that I was on the verge of stagnating. Can’t say why I was feeling that.

Oh? Can’t you?

Can’t if I don’t know why.

State-specific memory. You don’t remember the individual thoughts, you get back into the emotional place where you connected to those thoughts. Watching the blurred but pleasant scenery, enjoying the day or night. Waking up, that time, to the intense star shine that you’d never experienced before. Why were you feeling you were stagnating?

For some reason the idea of living in town was growing on me, and had been for a little while. Somehow it seemed that the townhouse I was thinking of at the time (which didn’t materialize) was going to encourage and force me to consolidate, to concentrate. I would center more on myself and less on my surroundings — which is ridiculous, as I center on myself continually, practically to a pathological degree.

Follow, don’t judge. Judgment automatically cuts off access; it is not a mode of perception.

There was this feeling that I wanted to concentrate on expressing what I know, and somehow to continue to live on the New Land as I had for more than a dozen years would not aid but hinder that process. I had a strong sense of “more lives to lead,” like Henry leaving Walden. It was time to put some things into the past so as to see them more clearly.

Oh?

Yeah, I heard that. To see more clearly. But I think I’m pretty much done for the moment.

Maybe you learned a skill here, though.

Maybe I did. We’ll see. Thank you, Papa, I do appreciate it.