Friday, February 11, 2011
5:30 AM. All right, Papa.
Continue as prompted.
They called mine “the Gateway that never came together” I suppose the universe had called together a bunch of loners, with different agendas and at different levels of being . We all found a special person or two, I think, but it is true that the program never came together as every other one I attended did. Or – come to think of it —
You see that as you reconsider while in a feeling place, your judgments change. And speaking of judgments —
Yes. I meant to write it down, thanks for the reminder. Last night, at supper with Jim and Carol, I realized that the reason logic alone can’t bring access Upstairs is because logic is a form of judgment, and judgment and perception are two very different modes. They are complementary – we need both – but they can’t work simultaneously. At best they can function in rapid alternation.
Now, return to an image of that Gateway, either connected to what you started to say, or not, remembering that the spirit has its own agenda, and so may override connections or sequences that seem to you logically inevitable.
Right, another image. I think of the guy who knew it all, and my attempt to correct the situation anonymously.
Proceed, staying in the feeling about it.
In Gateway, of course, not only do the participants not know each other, they haven’t had any experience of the process, so they don’t necessarily know what works and what doesn’t. We had one guy – I’ve forgotten his name after 18 years, not that it matters as I wouldn’t use it here anyway – who clearly was a success at what he did. He had confidence. And he knew some stuff. The trouble was, he would expand on what the trainers were saying, basically lecturing the rest of us on what he knew, he assuming that we didn’t know it.
In those days I was very timid socially among strangers, and couldn’t bring myself to object to him, either in public or (it never occurred to me) in private. So I asked one of the trainers if she would have a word with him. So she did [during a session] – and then looked at me and said, quite pointedly, “did that take care of it, Frank?” (or something equivalent). Thus of course deliberately blowing my cover, either not considering that I might have had my reasons for not wanting to be known as the source of the criticism, or being irritated by it and deciding to retaliate, so to speak. Or, maybe, thinking it would be better for me if I were out in the open, though I don’t think that was it.
So where do you go with it?
I don’t know that I go anywhere with it. This is the first time I’ve ever written about it, even in my journal of the time. (I didn’t write much in my journal during Gateway, which is why I wrote about it extensively on my return, to fix it in my memory.)
Yes? But this unwritten-about scene remained pretty firmly fixed.
It did.
So where do you go with it? How do you deal with it? It came up, so it has an importance. How do you learn what that is?
I remember chiefly my feeling of being betrayed when she made such a point of making clear to everybody in the room that she had delivered the message only at my behest (even though she agreed with it) and that I had not wanted to be seen as the source of it. It was a valid message, and she had phrased it carefully – that we should all avoid assuming that we knew stuff nobody else knew, or
Now! You have only a general idea of how she said it. But the memory exists, and you can retrieve it. That is the water jumping off the tightening fishing line. What did she tell him?
“We want to be careful,” I think she said, but I don’t remember her words after that, except that her question to me ended, pointedly, with my name.
Believe it or not, you can do better than that. Don’t reconstruct the memory; you’ll wind up falsifying it. Remember it. Put yourself back in the room.
I’ve already done that. I was sitting behind him and to his right, and he was sitting pretty near the front, on the right side of center (seen from our point of view, not that of the trainers). Can’t remember his name or face, and can’t remember where anyone else was but the three of us, but I do have that fixed in my mind. I think it was a morning session too, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was Monday.
What was the last thing he had talked about, that led you to ask the trainer to ask him to ease off on lecturing?
My initial reaction is, “that I can’t remember” – and then I realize that I’m trying to force the process. Well, it would have been the night before, I imagine. What did he talk about? I know that he spoke as if he had studied these things and the rest of us knew nothing. I remember, too, he wasn’t doing it out of ego. It was as if he was genuinely trying to be helpful.
Any different from what you’re doing these days?
Not much, in a way. He might have made fewer assumptions about his audience. Over the years, I have never concentrated on his lecturing us, but on the trainer’s deliberate slap at me – that’s what it felt like. Come to think of it, I don’t think he ever lectured us again, but I don’t remember him contributing or not contributing. I mean, I don’t think that gentle admonition shut him down. If it had and if I had noticed, that would have bothered me extremely. But maybe I just never noticed. Uncomfortable thought. I wasn’t noticing much.
Let’s try this with coffee.
You got the first part of what you need. You have the visual memory which, notice, you never lost. You have the emotional memory because of the sting involved. You have the general summary of the situation because that is the tag you hang on it. But you haven’t had a clear run-through of the event. It isn’t a big event. It didn’t have huge consequences. No matter. It is all connected, and if you regain access, you regain access to everything it connects to – and those are going to be emotional connections, not logical ones. So, there’s no telling in advance what you’re going to find.
Return to the image not of her pointedly looking at you and blowing your cover, but of something connected with him.
The first night, Saturday, we had had the introductory talk and had done the first tape, and I was forcing myself to socialize, down in what was then the participants’ dining room. I really had to force myself, but I didn’t want to hide in my room, which is what it would have amounted to. The only thing I remember about that time is asking him – whatever his name was – what he did for a living. He hesitated, said almost to himself that he guessed it was okay to talk about our other life on the first night of the program, and told me he made custom cases for instruments for professional musicians.
And the emotional point of that memory?
A sense that he was highly successful in an unusual field. A sense that he was conceding something in talking shop – either responding to my ill-concealed nervousness or choosing to agree to talk to somebody he wouldn’t have chosen himself.
You were still feeling like an outsider.
That’s about it. I always did.
So, looking at it from your new perspective?
He was a catalyst, just by being there, and probably never realizing it, for activating several of my robots. He was self-assured, prosperous, successful. I wasn’t any of these. He had a tendency to think he knew much more than any of the rest of us, and I resented it even though I wasn’t able to say what I knew, and wasn’t able to ask him to consider that the rest of us knew things too. And then the trainer’s pointed remark showed me that my asking her to suggest to him that he tone it down looked sneaky to her
And then he disappears from view.
Basically. I don’t know whether I talked to him again or not, but I don’t remember any significant interactions at all. I seem to remember that I had a better opinion of him by the end, but really, I can’t say. He not only disappears from view, his very name and face are gone, though I could find it in my papers.
Enough for now. Enjoy your day.
Thanks, Papa. I’m enjoying the tutelage, if I’m not always sure where it’s leading.