Our strands and our stories

Tuesday, November 24, 2015

9:50 a.m. Well, my friend [Hemingway], that was a shock. Granted, probably a salutary one, but a shock nonetheless.

The secret to life is to pay less attention to what happens and more attention to what it leads to. I don’t mean don’t look around, I mean don’t invest so much in avoiding pain or trouble; invest, instead, in making the most, and making the best, of whatever happens. Of course this advice is like my advice not to worry – I know it’s good advice because it isn’t what I was able to do.

All right, then, let’s go back to your watching Pauline suffer.

Don’t throw away the baby. That was one part of me. Other parts had other reactions, and they all had a fine time fighting it out. It made me dizzy, the twists and turns.

See, this is another example of the perils of foreshortening I was talking about. From a certain distance in time – if it is yourself judging – or distance in personality and information and preconception, a life’s bumps and veerings smooth out into an average course which may connect two points but does not accurately represent the journey. You could –

Let’s put it this way. If you were to ask every active strand within me – every strand that was actively involved, I mean – to write or tell the story of what happened, every story would be different, every one would be true, every one would be that strand’s best attempt to be impartial – and neither separately nor together would they add up to “the truth.”

This is a job for the Akashic Record! I’m smiling, but I’m sort of serious, too.

You’re serious, but you aren’t thinking it through. Why do you think people’s past life review shows them the same incident from different points of view? As moral instruction? That may be an effect, but it isn’t the cause. The fact is, the Akashic record can only contain what happened, in all its ramifications, and tied to every conceivable viewpoint. What it does not contain is one authoritative God’s-eye story, because there is no such story. There is only what happened as it was experienced in various ways by various people.

Initially I thought, well, that makes sense. But now I’m thinking, well, what about D-Day, for instance? There isn’t any ambiguity about the landings and what happened.

There is no memory of “D-Day” any more than there is a physically tangible thing like “France” or “foreign policy” or “economics.” [That is, these are abstractions rather than distinct entities.] There are the experiences of everyone involved, whether they were in the fighting or listening to news reports on the radio, thousands of miles away, or not yet born but affected in some direct way. The aggregation of all those individual stories  would approximate the story, but who could do it? Texts summarize, they select, they approximate. Well, the Akashic record doesn’t do that. It preserves what happened to everyone involved. It preserves their relationships in space and their relationships backwards and forward in time. It presents no abstractions.

To return to my point, each part of me experienced my life differently; each part contributed in different proportions at different times. And they conflicted plenty. One of my major jobs in life was holding it all together.

So you got a glimpse of the hard-eyed self-righteous, imperious one. He did me a lot of good and caused me a lot of trouble. He was perfectly happy to see my marriage to Pauline bust up – he threw as many bricks as he could manage. And he didn’t care about the consequences that I would have to live with. He wanted out, and he was happy to push matters along. Same thing with Martha when it came her turn. He tried with Mary, too, but there he met his match.

But he wasn’t the only player in the game. Another time, when you are fresher, we can look a little farther.

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