Wednesday, February 9, 2011
5:45 AM. It seems interminable, but I guess the job is getting done. Packing books. Who bought those books? But that is mostly accomplished, and I can move on to other things. Books were the biggest job.
Okay, Papa, seeing things more clearly.
You have been seeing life at one remove, and you have been half-seeing a side of life that is not obvious to most. So it puts you in a curious position of knowing little about what everyone else knows, and much, or anyway something, about what everyone else does not know.
My ignorances often discredit what I know, I think.
Perhaps they make you look more eccentric than you really are by temperament.
That’s an interesting thought.
Consider. People judge mostly by appearances, as that is the most obvious thing they have to judge by. A good first impression, you know. Part of that first impression is a person’s indefinable energy, the “feel” of them. Part is their track record, if they have one, the reputation – that sets up what other people are prepared to find. And only a third part is what the person thinks or how he is – and that third part has to fight or complement or reinforce the other parts – the feel, the reputation.
So if nobody has heard of you, you start with a blank slate and they’re reacting just to what they can feel in your presence. If they’re very intuitive, they may make deeper guesses than if they judge by physical appearance, but either way, sensory or intuitive, some people are shrewd judges of character and some aren’t. In the long run, it’s what you say and do that will form their picture of you – and if you don’t or can’t explain yourself and your actions, you’re likely to leave some people baffled by what they consider your inconsistencies or your alternations of character – your “split personality” almost, though not to a pathological degree – or the changes over time, and often the difference between how they have experienced you and how other people report experiencing you.
Marjorie Rawlins was struck by how gentle and shy you appeared with her, when she had expected this rough perhaps insensitive character. That was the Myth operating.
Oh sure. Well, that illustrates another aspect of it. How we are depends on who we are with, because different people – different types of people – bring out different strands in us. With some people it’s natural to be kind and want to be helpful. Others raise your hackles right off. First impressions are going on both ways.
So —
So we’re talking for a minute here about how you sort of explain yourself as you go along, or you don’t, and maybe you can’t.
Henry [Thoreau] said nobody can ever explain himself to anybody.
Doesn’t mean we don’t try, though. You have to try, just to get through the simplest relations. Even a store clerk and a customer explain themselves if they see each other often enough, long enough, even if they don’t ever say a word to each other. What you are shines out, and you make stories out of what you see shining from others. These stories may be accurate or far wrong or anywhere between, but you make them. You understand, I’m not talking about composing conscious fiction when I say “stories” here.
I do.
But if the world you live in is different enough from the world the other guy lives in, you can’t explain much, and the clues you give off may mislead, more than they illustrate anything. Think of Henry Thoreau!
That’s what the Monroe community has given me, all these years.
Yes, a community of people who could understand parts of you that have never been understood. And it was the experiencers as much as the trainers or staff. Now, think about them sequentially beginning from 1992.
This is an exercise like yesterday’s, then.
Sure. It’s a skill to be learned, and it can be learned only by practice, and others can look over your shoulder and can get what they need to do, themselves, whatever part of it they hadn’t already figured out.
All right, 1992. December. Gateway.
No, you’re starting too late in the year. Start in October, and July.
Of course. Well, I’ve told the story of how Kelly Neff showed up just in time to wake me up for Gateway. Told it many times including in Muddy Tracks.
But this isn’t telling the “how” of it – as you always say – but the “why” of it.
Seems to me we’re doing just the reverse.
No, it only seems that way. I am showing you the how of finding out the why.
You are?
Skip it for the moment. Do it first and we can discuss that after the fact.
All right. In October I met Kelly in person after having briefly talked to her on the phone in July and having read her Martha Jefferson manuscript with fascination.
What was your first impression of her? Where was she standing, what was she wearing, what was going on?
Years later – too late for me! – my brother gave me the concept of what they call a trans-channeler, a person who connects through the sixth chakra but then converts it to a second-chakra energy. When he told me that, I realized that that is what had happened with Kelly that night.
You’re about to learn something about why you had only those few hours with her.
I see it. It was enough to establish a magical link, and not enough to dilute or contradict it by the frictions of our personalities in conflict.
Now – answer the questions.
She was standing in our hallway upstairs – at least, that’s the image that immediately comes to mind, and it’s the image that has always come to mind when I thought of that moment – and I don’t really know what she was wearing, as that isn’t the kind of thing I notice, but she was wearing some kind of pants – brown, maybe, with the impression of corduroy – and boots. I saw this trim athletic figure who looked like she would be outdoors-oriented. She gave me the impression of having been riding horses, come to think of it. She certainly didn’t look glamorous or even pretty, particularly, just young and healthy and outdoorsy. Self-reliant, too; that came through. Very intelligent, and focused on history to a degree greater than I ever was.
And what happened.
What happened is that she started talking to me in some excitement of having found Martha’s childhood home – the actual foundation, I mean – and I was wondering if we were going to have to talk about archaeology and Martha Jefferson all night – for that was the context that I had her in, to that point, when I suddenly realized that she was saying that she found the place by actively interacting with what she called “the guys upstairs.”
I didn’t have then the categories I have now. I jumped to, “She’s a psychic! She can tell me about my past lives!” The thought that she – or anybody – might be able to show me by example how to get direct communication with what TM I always called Guidance was nowhere in my mind. That would have been in the “too good to be true” category.
Now, don’t re-tell the story of your conversation that night and your connection thereafter. In this case that’s the “how” of it.
I just realized, maybe I’m the trans-channeler!
In this case you both were. That is what made the relationship temporarily irresistible.
Temporarily irresistible. I like that. Like my friend Dave Wallis’s saying, “they fell in lust.”
But continue with the process.
Well, that mutual trans-channeling was what was going on, wasn’t it?
Whose life is it? You tell me.
It was. We established a magical link – or it was established for us; I don’t know how else to say it. And that broke my isolation, and her saying I already knew how to do what she was doing set up anticipation, and so I went into Gateway in a state of great hope after 46 years of trying to live as if Downstairs life was important, never feeling it, or
Remember, to figure out what you are feeling and thinking, concentrate on some concrete image and follow where it leads. Otherwise you are going to be led into logic, because the process of writing is sequential left-brain activity.
All right. Well, she left at four (six?) In the morning to drive to the airport to catch her flight, and I heard the click of the door lock and got up and saw her walking out to a rented car, and thought, “I may never see her again.”
You’re straying into “what” if not “how.”
We kept that link by letter and telephone for the next two months, a little less, and a part of myself that I hadn’t had access to began to show itself. The image that comes to mind is my talking to her over the phone, I standing in my dining room (where she and I had spent six hours talking). Probably I was looking out at the marsh behind our house part of the time, but I was really nowhere physical; I was engaged in that conversation.
You were there, wholly engaged.
I was.
Now you’re almost ready to talk about Gateway.
In images.
In words describing what the images suggest, and that coming from the images putting you back in that mental state so that your state-specific memories can surface.
Then, a theoretical question – for Dr. Jung, I think (and don’t think I don’t recognize or anyway suspect prompting). When somebody can’t remember large parts of their life, it has to do with state-specific memory in some way, doesn’t it?
If you will think of your accessible consciousness as a federation, you will be able to see easily that some parts may be in closer connection than other parts. What happens when any given part is in control – is shaping and reacting to interactions with the world – remains specific to that part unless the consciousness is well associated. A severe dissociation – a disruption in the social links, you might say – may prevent the accessing of memories formed in one state by any other state.
And this can be overcome?
Your task in life – everyone’s task, in a sense – is to increase the functioning links and decrease the internal isolation of various elements. As you accomplish that, renewed access follows automatically. In fact, renewed access to memories that had been relatively or totally inaccessible may be taken as an indicator of success in strengthening internal links. And the process – to anticipate your question – is first and foremost to suspend judgment, especially condemnation, and be willing and even somewhat eager to learn what is and what was. “What is” means, the existing conditions under which you function. “What was” means, what happened, with all the associated connections, in the states to which you have not previously had good access.
Thank you both.