Connections, communication, and blockages

Friday April 21, 2006

Saturday April 22, 2006 (8:45 a.m.) Joseph?

So – do the dead watch what happens – or not?

We don’t watch Huntley-Brinkley, as you would have said. Always when you think of us, think in terms of focus as much as anything else. You are alive, been alive 60 years, but how much did you focus on, say, the politics of Chile? Or the intricacies of brick-laying, or the mysteries of the Kabala? It was all going on around you, but your focus wasn’t there.

It ain’t any different among us on this side. We can focus on events in 3D earth, but pretty much we have to have a reason. A person’s interest in us is a reason; sometimes a plan or a working-out of something is a reason. But otherwise we don’t necessarily care what is going on.

So – Sherman as interpreted by historian Lee Kennett?

It sounds pretty much like the man as we knew him. Didn’t know the psychological reasons, didn’t know any details of his life before the war – knew he’d been to West Point, but that was about it. But we knew the hard-driving nervous, always ready to explode man that book paints. We didn’t know he got depressed – got the blues, we would have said – but we sure knew when that “red-headed old cuss” got mad.

Now one thing the author might have pointed out is that by the end of the march Sherman was very popular with the men, and earlier not, for one simple reason that ought to stick out a mile. Look at all he did – and he did it without getting us slaughtered. That’s kind of important to a soldier, you know! He wants his side to win, sure enough – but he would kind of like to be still there standing at the end of it. At Shiloh he was popular because his men knew that if they had been whipped, the Union would have been whipped. (That day, I mean, on that field. Of course I don’t mean the whole show would have folded.) Working with Grant, all the way to Chattanooga, he was respected as a general that knew his business, but nothing beyond that, far as I know and heard from the boys was with him then. I wasn’t at the battle outside of Chattanooga but I never heard his men criticizing him for it, they just thought they’d been given a hard job to do, attacking uphill, and they were plenty glad to have the other troops get ‘em out of their fix by rolling up the Johnnies from the other end. But I didn’t hear anybody blaming Sherman.

Why can’t you tell me the name of that mountain?

Well, now, look at it a minute.

You know the name, even though you will persist in calling it Missionary Ridge – you just read the entire account of it yesterday. If I (who don’t exist, remember) can’t give you the name, and you want to keep the flow going anyway, why don’t you sort of silently provide it and get on with the story?

You’re implying that there’s some sort of blockage there for some reason.

I am. Here’s the thing that is hard for you – but it may be hard for others too, and they’re going to have to get around it somehow – blockages exist, and they are always blocks for some reason, because things don’t happen for no reason! Now, you got Carl Jung to talk about why – but the point is, you can look at those blocks as being inside your mind or you can look at ’em as being between your mind and the other side. You are often tempted to see ’em as existing on the other side, which makes you wonder how that can be, which makes you wonder if you’re making the whole thing up – you know. But your doubts are helpful here, because they’ll lead us clear them up a little. You ain’t the only one to have this trouble.

[sketch: Me, reaching through a parallelogram [“the veil”] to A which is also one of a group labeled B. From the group B a line extends to C, and from C a line extends to D.]

That’s a little sketch to help you. That’s you on the left side – in the 3D world. You connect through the veil – it’s misleading but it’s useful, and you got to have some analogy. On the other side of the veil you got us.

Now when you are contacting one of us – me, say – that’s you connecting over to A. You’re experiencing me as if I was one person only. That ain’t wrong but it is only one way to see it. At the same time you’re thinking of me as A, you’re really connecting to B – which is a bunch of us, A being one of the bunch. So if A is Joe Smallwood, B is the guys upstairs, you see. Remember – I know I’m beating you to death with all this, telling you time and again, but I’m going to do it a little more – remember, all this is analogy; there just ain’t a way to describe a man on a mountain to a fish at the bottom of the sea. It’s your own figure of speech there, so you ought to understand it.

Well, sometimes when you’re talking to A or B the logic of the discussion leads to calling in somebody else. That’s C, that’s reached not by A necessarily but maybe by somebody in B, and maybe you don’t even notice that B got involved, and why should you. But maybe the one we need is far enough from our own vibrations that we need an intermediary – then B contacts C who brings in D. And of course there can be a whole chain of intermediaries and you wouldn’t notice, usually. This is a very long subject but I’ll say just this much. Who you are in 3D, the thread you choose to follow, what you aspire to and lean towards, determines what is closest to you. If you pursue a life of steadfast refusal to look inward, how likely is it, do you suppose, that you’ll be able to talk to Carl Jung? Or that he will be able to use you to talk to others? If you whole-heartedly believe in Jeff Davis, how easy will it be for you to sympathize with Abraham Lincoln? And “sympathize with” is more or less what we’re talking about, here. Think of the word “sympathize” as “resonate with” and you’ll get the idea energetically.

All right, so how do blockages arise? Isn’t it clear? Anything that impedes communication is a blockage. Your time is used to thinking that a block has to be an emotional block, but not so. There’s other kinds. I think we need Dr. Jung here.

Well, I certainly do! I can’t imagine another source of blockages. Dr. Jung?

It is not that you cannot imagine them, but that you cannot recognize what you see. Once you have the key it will be simple enough.

Your time thinks in terms of emotional conflict. This is good; this was part of my own earliest contribution. But it is not good to stop at the first station, if you wish to take a long journey. It was important that Europeans learn to think of themselves as more than their ego selves, and this intriguing clue began them on their journey. If the unconscious could interfere with their thinking process, that meant that it could not safely be overlooked or ignored, you see. It had presence; it created effects. Therefore it could not be regarded as merely fanciful or theoretical.

Yes, I see that.

By the same token, one cannot lead by getting beyond earshot and eyesight. One’s times are prepared to hear only so much and no more – although for those attempting to instruct the times, the limit is apt to be a bit vague, and only to be discovered by a process of trial and error! To speak of the unconscious was one thing, and in its way daring enough. To have spoken of spirit communication and chains of sources of information would be quite another. One might as well have come out with it and endorsed what all the world’s simple people experience – but to do so would be to forfeit one’s respectability and hence one’s ability to lead in that certain way.

In other words, your specialty was to be the psychological pioneer from the world of medicine, leaving to others other ways of exploring.

Precisely. If you were to pretend to be a doctor – regardless your past-life resonances and your intuitive knowings – you would set yourself up for a fall, for you do not have the consciously acquired knowledge for which intuitive knowing cannot substitute.

Why is that?

The process of learning, that seems so plodding and laborious, is the process of making infinite numbers of connections with the rest of what you know, what you are. Most of this process takes place unknown to you, or largely so, and it can only be done in a certain way. This is the reality behind the transference of information from short-term to long-term memory, and is the reason that knowledge acquired by “cramming” does not stick except for things that “happen to” have a certain resonance. The cramming leaves no time for an organic assimilation, and the material is lost because it is not grounded, let us say; it is not tied in to anything. If material that had been acquired by cramming were to be re-learned immediately after the test, it could be permanently anchored but this is rarely done. Perhaps schoolmasters should give tests on the same material two weeks apart!

Of course some knowledge acquired in this frantic fashion meets places already prepared for it. It links up effortlessly, and becomes a permanent acquisition. This is not an exception to the rule; it is a special circumstance. If the student studies conscientiously over the term and learns the material, the connections are made as he goes along. Then a cramming session merely reinforces, and brings it to the forefront. It will seem to be a different result, but the effect actually is the same, only the prepared ground differs.

So. The blockage may be considered to be emotional – which means that at least a part of your soul resists dealing with the thing forgotten – or mental, meaning in this case the mental as opposed to emotional body. (But you must remember that this too is analogy; it is a way of thinking about it. It is not the way, nor is it particularly more accurate. Its usefulness is that it facilitates analogies in certain directions, where other analogies do not.)

It is very true that physical issues may seem to be “why” certain memories – certain families of memories, really – cannot be retrieved. But after all to regard a physical cause as primary – as a cause rather than as a symptom, one might say – requires that one believe in life as a collision of forces. In a sense, of course that is true; but in a wider larger view it is more illusion than reality. Therefore I should not consider physical causes as if they were some accident, some interference with one’s life. In the widest view, there are no accidents, only choices.

If you like you also might pattern it thus:

Physical body – synapses, injury to tissue

Emotional body – resistances to painful associations

Energetic body – faulty or failing connection to the other bodies; lack of integration

Mental body – interference from concepts.

These are the sources of interference with memory. While you are in the body they seem quite different. From the other side they are the same reality expressing through different channels. Thus when a physical deterioration of brain connection occurs, why are these memories affected, and not those? Similarly, any of the four. The same question will produce the same answer, although the identity may be obscured by the nature of the filter through which it is seen.

So you see, you thought to ask a simple question and you got a lecture!

I’m very grateful for it, however. And I can sort of see the answer to the specific question looming.

Yes. Good. It is in the drawing of connections that you make the material yours.

Every time you cannot get a “fact” that you think should be available to you, you are experiencing, on the emotional level, anxiety lest the material discredit itself. In the case of things you – Frank – do not know of your own personal knowledge, anxiety often prevents you from bringing it across, as we have often noted. But in the case of something that you already know – as in the case of this battle outside Chattanooga – anxiety over the source is involved only to a secondary degree, because as noted you yourself could go look it up in a minute, and fill it in. but the question in your mind would remain – why cannot Smallwood, if he exists, bring it forth? “And if I have forgotten the name, and he has, does this not mean `he’ is only a construct of mine?”

Not at all, for it begs the question of why and how the name of the battle is being withheld from you. And I am going to suggest an answer that you may find quite not credible. You cannot find or bring over material that someone on “the other side” – Smallwood in this case – experiences emotional blockages about.

I didn’t think that happened on the other side.

This would repay some thought. You know that people come over with “unfinished business.” You know we come over marked by our physical existence. At one extreme are those souls who refuse to admit that they have died; at another extreme are those who lust for another chance at life so that they may correct their pattern. In any case, you see, “the other side” is peopled not with “perfect beings” as you once thought but with us; you; people, in all our complexity and assortment of motives.

You noted, in passing, that Joseph Smallwood silently mourned his lost wife. It isn’t that she is lost now, of course: He is as dead as she is! But in his pattern was imprinted that reaction to his loss, as John Cotton’s, and others. So there is a lot of unfinished business on this side as on yours, and sometimes you see the results of it as a lack of connection or a lack of ability to obtain certain information.

Joseph has reason not to want to remember that battle?

That would be the inference. Rest now.

Yes, I’m tired. Thank you.