Joseph on what really happens in our lives

Thursday, August 9, 2007

Joseph, my friend, long time no see, but I just got the sense that I ought to contact you.

You will notice that you are listening repeatedly to the Paul Potts album and finding tears in your eyes when he sings “Time to say goodbye.” I don’t think it’s because that’s the only line in English, do you?

I am feeling impending departures?

Your own for all you know. You recently expressed your strong sense of how when time is past, it is past and can never be revisited. This, despite the kinds of experiences we have had that show us that time and death aren’t what they seem. As you said, they aren’t nothing, either.

I should have paid more attention as I was going along, huh? I sort of knew that, but I am what I am.

That ain’t exactly true the way you mean it. Yes, you are what you are – but your choices are so vast, you got plenty of room inside that corral! In other words, what you are naturally is fixed at birth, sure – but what you make of yourself, which threads you pursue and which ones you choose not to pursue, is up to you. That is what you’re alive to do, as you’ve been told more than once, to choose. And your choices are your own business, yet they also affect everybody else of course. How else could it be?

So, if you missed some chances to enjoy the world as you were going by, so what? What you chose may have been rarer, more interesting in the long run. Maybe more valuable too, even the endless rereading of novels. You can’t really tell as you’re going along why you do some of the things you do, or why.

This is starting to sound like a valedictory.

We all die sometime, and it’s rare enough that we know it ahead of time Downstairs, as you say.

True enough. Something has to be the final entry here! And I don’t expect to learn what it is, ahead of time. But is this really why we are talking today?

Your work is partly unknown to you even as you do it. What you choose to concentrate on and remember may be just a way of amusing yourself while you do what your Upstairs component is most interested in you doing. So, you encourage people to write, or to heal, or to live. You think that’s trivial? It doesn’t seem quite memorable to you, it comes so natural, but not everybody spends his time doing it, you know! It takes a little of the sermonizer (and you’ve got enough of that in your background, God knows!) and the buttinski, too – not much afraid of being told to mind his own business.

Interesting perspective.

It’s more than just a perspective, it’s a call for you to continue to wake up. We’ve been telling you to keep in your mind the things that happen together, to get a better picture of what’s really happening in your life, as opposed to the story you’re telling yourself about it as you go along.

Interesting! Yes, I see that. What comes at us, and from us, as a pattern of its own, autonomous like dreams, and so isn’t as likely to be distorted by our perceptions.

Exactly. And maybe you can’t live that way all the time – but the closer you come, the better. You know what you heard Jung say on the recording.

When we look outward, we dream. When we look inward, we awaken.

Well? Do you have any reason to doubt it?

None whatever.

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