May 21, 2007
Okay, I could use some guidance here. Who’s up?
Who do you wish to be up?
I see. Things have reached another level, haven’t they?
Well, it’s a more finely developed skill, and you’ve done some work on perceptions.
Yes. All right, who am I talking to right now?
Your on-duty angel, let’s say.
Let’s say more than that.
Do you want story, to embroider your perception?
Perhaps I do. It’s interesting to see how that “perception versus story” insight has colored and shaped my idea of what has been going on – it is a worthwhile theme in itself.
Your very public angst about whether you were making it all up serves you well. Otherwise you might have been inclined to pretty up your research – which would have been making it all up! In following your instinct to continue without fully buying into the material, you came out with something valuable.
Yes I did. I feel a little melancholy sometimes, thinking about how much this long search has cost me. But I never wanted – and was unable to live – a normal life.
So – who is up?
Your initial response to your own question is to come up with an answer: Irene. Raymond. George. What good is any of that? You need to work from the other end of the stick. First the identification, by signature so to speak; the name and detail come later if at all.
Thus you had Smallwood as a concept, and David, and Bertram, because someone else gave you the names (except David which was a different case) and the rudiments of the story and then you learned to hook in (work to reorganize).
So my question becomes, in the absence of someone external to cue the process, how does one learn to recognize, interact with, name and learn story from someone from (on) the other side?
That’s right. If you had taken careful notes, or – much better! – if you will learn to reconstruct in your active mind that which you know as background from memory and experience blended with our interpretation and additions from this side, you will see a series of steps as one way to learn how to interact starting from a dead stop, so to speak. You had boatloads (as you say) of preconceptions and mistaken ideas and misunderstandings, of true teachings and/or true understandings of mistaken teachings. Working your way through all this, you emerge with two things: a record of your journey as an example of how to blaze a trail; and the trail itself. The trail will be more important than the process of blazing the trail, to some. Others will learn much more that applies to their own processes from the journey rather than the map.