Thursday, September 23, 2010
4 AM. Welcome to autumn. Awake at about 3:45, slight wheezing, a very acceptable night’s sleep. As I lay down I felt some wheezing and said, “No, I’m not going to do anything about it anyway at this time of night” [meaning, if you’re trying to get my attention, stop] – and the wheezing stopped and I had my night’s sleep. I could probably get more, but I’m anxious to try the way of making notes that came to me in the middle of the night. Once again, file cards, but organized by topic instead of date of session. A simple change, but should yield significant results. The simple apparatus of scholarship. And I’m going to work on that first, before conversing, and see how that works.
5 AM. I am starting to get crowded out of this table, despite all leaves entered and thus the surface extended. Notes, a book for questions, binders, a place for this journal –. But anyway a pretty good idea, finally, of how to proceed with notes.
5:30 AM. So?
You have begun actually sorting through the entries. This will be a long job and not a particularly congenial one, but as your correspondent said, it will pay you. You can do this better than anyone else, because you understand the inner connection of material that flowed through you, and you are balanced on the edge between introversion and extroversion (by accident, or coincidence, no doubt), thus equally interested in/adept at communication and communication – that is, talk with us, expression to them and with them. Being unique in this, don’t let the preparation go to waste. You must choose to do what you came to do – that’s true for everybody, and not aimed only at you.
Okay. Tomorrow’s workshop on robots will be sparsely attended, which should allow for a very intense experience for our test run.
And you want to know, what are you going to do/say.
More or less.
Well, either you’ll plan it or you’ll find out at the time, won’t you?
I guess so. Any hints?
If you would just muse, with pencil in hand, all would come clear pretty easily. It’s a sort of getting-great-ideas-in-the-shower, or -when-driving, combined with putting them down on paper so they may be manipulated and digested.
Again, not just for me.
No. The world is full of people who don’t quite have the knack of connecting inner and outer in that way.
Hmmm. I wouldn’t have thought of it, but as you put it that way, it seems an obvious description of what you’re advocating – connect right-brain insight with left-brain analysis.
Another way to say it is, connect to us, connect to yourself and to each other. That is, connection to Guidance is apt to be evanescent, but, if fixed by notes or other means, is as helpful and practical as anything else in your life, because the information is information; it is the means of connecting to it that is different. In connecting to Guidance, you are by intent connecting to (merging with) group-mind, higher mind, trans-personal mind, and then decoupling afterward (because person-mind is not intended to function split between group-mind and person-mind; you can’t be looking inward and outward simultaneously all the time with any precision or even savor). When you decouple from your group-mind, you will lose what you got if you do not fix it within person-mind, as when you awaken from a dream.
Listening to that, I get that you are beginning to nuance our connection with the guys upstairs and with other strands, yes?
You are not quite prepared for the change in concept, only because you need a little more concept-painting. But yes, we are going to tie in your group-mind, your strand-minds, your physical neighbors – that is, minds and bodies that you interact with as you come into physical or virtual contact – relatives, friends, foes, heroes, villains, fictional characters, reconstructions of people who lived, and – more that we don’t even care to name at this point.
Remember, everything is part of one thing. Divisions assist perception and analysis but are never absolute. So, in the interest of reminding you of this fact, we are going to keep going back and taking this or that concept that we set out in isolation and show how it connects with other concepts.
Remember, too, we have (you have) a purpose in doing this. It isn’t just to fill the time. It is to let you change yourselves by giving you the conceptual tools to free you from previous conceptual tools that were suited for their purpose but are now outdated.
And someday we will find these concepts of yours inadequate.
With luck, yes.
All right, I can hear the smile. So what else for today?
That’s enough.
Enough? Is this because I did e-mail first and did some note-taking?
And some Free Cell? Not exactly. You have energy enough to do more. But put that energy to working at indexing so that you may make sense of this material to date, and you will be in a better position to do more thereafter.
A word on the process of scholarship. You review materials, and make notes that hold the essence of the thing noted. Those notes allow you to hold a wider range of material in your RAM. In effect, they expand your temporary-consciousness while you use them. You digest given relationships, turning the entire relationship into one symbol. Manipulating the symbols is first rearranging and creating relationships of a more complex order, then condensing that new relationship in turn into a symbol. In this way you in effect widen your effective consciousness far beyond its unaided ability to see.
But if you don’t concretize it, fix it, somehow, you will not be able to maintain your relationship to the new expanded vision. You will remember, perhaps, that you saw it differently, but it will be like trying to remember the essence of a dream that left you knowing that you have just left something transcendent.
If you think of the drudgery of notes etc. as your link with a wider consciousness and the permanent expansion of what and who you are and what you can do – does that make the work seem less tedious?
Not less tedious, but certainly it shows why it’s worth doing.
Well, one more thing. You long for somebody else to do the donkey work, as you call it, but it is in the process of doing that work that you – and only you – can absorb into temporary memory things that are (in that process) associated differently than when originally received, which is an advantage. Like Hemingway transferring writing to typing, it deepens your connection to the material.