Exploring and postponing

[Sunday, January 15, 2006]

6:45 a.m. Another odd night. I was awake repeatedly but didn’t really lose sleep; it was more like a segment would finish, I’d be back here checking in, then another segment, and the times between seemed longer than the clock time indicated.

Another thing; as I went to bed I felt I might be going to get sick. My chest was cold, it seemed to thicken. I think my head started to fill (can’t remember) but I quietly determined that I wouldn’t, and after a while it all settled down and I forgot about it till now.

So. Here we are again. I shied away from that discussion about TGU versus any one of you. Why? It is as if I wasn’t ready to hear it – or as if I hadn’t finished making up the answer! But in fact I don’t know why. So I guess I’m ready for you at least to tell me why I’m gun-shy, and then the rest if you can get it through the pipeline.

This is a bigger subject than you consciously know. You recognize that you almost wish the question had not been raised, but you don’t know why. It is because you know, too, that “here comes another hit on my belief system.” But that is a danger of exploration – that at some point you will find something that reevaluates – or forces you to do the re-evaluating, rather! – everything you think you sort of know from experience.

When you first go exploring, that is the easy part, at least for a certain temperament. You start, knowing that what you think you know is probably wrong and certainly inadequate. For the first long phase, it is all gain. Each discovery is an item, one more useful trophy. If it doesn’t seem to fit very well into anything, that’s all right, maybe it will fit better later; maybe further discoveries will demonstrate where and how it fits; maybe it will be the key to fitting in other things. And in fact this is your assumption, your reliance, and your experience.

But after a while you have begun to accumulate. You have begun to perceive patterns. You have worked at trying this fit, that fit, another fit. At some point impossible to predict in advance, you obtain a pattern that more or less accommodates your new data, and more or less fits in with older data – via a new interpretation – and you feel that you once again have found firm footing, firm ground.

At that point the temptation becomes strong to stop finding or stop recognizing new pieces that might require readjustment of the new footing. Small accommodations, yes, but not major ones. For one thing, it starts to look rash, given that perhaps a bit more data would reconcile the stubborn item with the rest. For another, it may be that the new item is wrong, and the more that has gone before it, and the better it has fit together, the stronger the weight of evidence has to be if you are to justify overthrowing it or even modifying it heavily. And there is sheer weariness. “I’m tired of never knowing where I am!”

Now, in this you will recognize what you have criticized in materialist science. But it isn’t peculiar to science or to theology either; it is a human response to the continual overthrow of the familiar and even the newly absorbed.

Beware premature clarity. Yet – as in all things in the world of polarities and duality – beware never coming to a useful conclusion, never proceeding with what you have, rather than waiting endlessly for a standard of completion and certainty that may be impossible to obtain.

So that is why you hesitated at the brink. And if you choose to move now in another direction, we have no objection. After all, there is a tremendous amount of material you have been given in just the past five years, still unexpressed though we will say surprisingly much of it absorbed and lived – which is the important thing.

Well, I think I’m going to surprise you – and myself, to a degree – and take you up on the postponement. I sense that I’m not ready for more uncertainty – or rather, more at-sea-ness, if that is a word. I need some closure first. I would like to get some of all this out into the world first, and I am rather filled with dismay at the thought of having to do it all again – and mostly the thought of having all that trackless sea around me again. The only reason not to defer this would be if it is in my best interest, or the best interests of the readers of the project itself – “project” meaning our on-going project of bringing light. In short, if it is better in your judgment for me to overrule my desire for some closure at this point, fine, let’s do it. And if it would hamper my future growth, the same. Only if it is a matter of preference between equally valid paths would I say let’s let the new material ride for a time.

Don’t think for a moment that we do not appreciate the willingness to take the less comfortable path. “Your will not mine,” Jesus said. “Let the decision be made by the total self,” Bob Monroe said. Three versions of the same willingness to let the lesser be guided by the greater. This very willingness is the most important contribution that anyone can make, because it puts the center into the center.

There is no reason not to pause, or rather – knowing you – to lay down this particular set of strands so that in a while you may pick up others. You do, in truth, have a daunting amount of work to do.

Yes and let’s talk about that. I feel utterly physically inadequate to the task. It is that I have years of accumulated physical work to do, that is actually getting in my way. So much material, just from my journals! It isn’t like I’m researching elsewhere. It is so much that I’m starting to shrink from it.

Don’t forget to routinize. Get yourself a work schedule – again! – and hold to it. This includes a non-work, even an anti-work, schedule. There wouldn’t be anything wrong in taking that painting course with Carolyn.

(8:15 a.m.) I smile at your methods. “Go have a quiet cup of coffee and watch the sun rise.” Sure, and while there, sit in the white chair that is the only one that faces southeast. Sure, and on the table where you laid it – how long ago? – just happens to be The Secret Vaults of Time, by Stephan Schwartz, that I published but have never read. And – well, the rest of the story follows from the first. James Bligh Bond –a kindred spirit if ever there was one – and his explorations into Glastonbury, and I find my courage renewed. I am not the first one to tread this path, and the ground indeed has been broken for me. It is true, what Smallwood says, how soft we are next to these older ones.

David, is it desirable and possible to speak to James Bligh Bond?

Desirable, no, not on a whim. Possible if you have a reason for the contact. Would you just be wanting his autograph?

I was wanting reinforcement, I suppose. But it is true, I don’t have specific questions. I don’t want to do automatic writing in the way he did – that seems cumbersome to me, next to just sitting down and writing.

Maybe you are farther along than he was, because the times are farther along. “The veil is thinning, as you say.

— A little parable. I was lighting a fire in the woodstove, watching one spot intently to see if it would catch – and suddenly realized that although it hadn’t caught, it didn’t matter, because all around it was aflame. That’s like my work, here, in a way – concentrating so on this or that difficulty, and not seeing what is being accomplished at the margins.

(9:45) Seems clear that Bond was connected in a strong way – a “past life”? – with at least one monk at Glastonbury in the 1500s. Something kept him on the line. Johannes Bryant, perhaps. His love of the place being great enough to keep him there certainly seems congruent with Bond’s similar attachment – from which he had to be blasted out by the malice of others, perhaps really for his own soul’s good.