Friday, October 7, 2016
[The best intro to this is this graf from yesterday’s journal: “Having finished The Patriarch [the life of Joseph P. Kennedy] again, I think, what does all this striving come to? OT1H, an interesting life, high drama, lived full-tilt, and leaving a record. OTOH is it any more significant than doing nothing? At first you say obviously then you wonder.”]
2:35 a.m. I didn’t say what I was feeling. Don’t quite know if I can. So instead, let me ask Joseph P. Kennedy to comment on my reactions to seeing his life’s story again.
But the problem with the way you see another person’s life is that you tend to see it sequentially, which means, it always winds up with the person dead! It’s a pretty limited view. We on the other side, the non-3D side, the spiritual world, call it what you will, are freer than that. We see our lives not as a sequence but as a totality, and believe me, it makes a difference. If you were remembering a football game, you wouldn’t remember the final moments as the important thing, unless there was a dramatic finish. You would remember the big moments, the highs and the lows. The shape of the game, call it.
Well, I can see that.
If you are Jack Kennedy and you come out of that short, tumultuous life, or if you are Robert Kennedy with an even shorter life, do you sit around thinking, “But the game was ended at the second quarter”? Do you say, “Wow, what a tragedy” because you were exploded out of that life in one instant? If you are Joseph P. Kennedy, do you say “None of it was worth anything” because of your final years in a wheelchair and in bed, as if that was the point of your life? Surely you can see that only somebody trapped in a 3D way of seeing things would imagine it that way.
Well, that’s a more cheerful way of seeing things. It’s true, following lives sequentially can be pretty grim.
In practice, you don’t. You read about somebody’s life and you get the idea, but then when you think about it afterward or when you re-read, you don’t obsess over the fact that the biography must end with somebody dying, any more than you concentrate on every day the person is sick, or gets fired, or loses a contest, or something.
I have thought that our way of reading biography suffers from our tacit assumption that this life is all that matters. Adomnan’s life of Columba, say, leaves out many things we would consider important and concentrates on what he and his times thought was important. It makes a difference. Ours looks like almost obsessive concern with detail, in an attempt to recreate the world the subject lived in. It is the difference between Baker’s Hemingway and that of Reynolds, say. Each excellent, but for different characteristics.
So as you look at your life, what stands out to you?
Can you feel what’s happening, as you pause?
I can feel that something is happening, but I don’t know what. It feels like my brain is moving around, so to speak.
It is a having to reach for new arrangements. What I want to say is far away from what your expectations would have been, and so rearrangement is necessary, not between you and me, but between conscious-you and your own deeper extension into non-3D space.
The idea being, I guess, that my unconscious mind, my non-3D mind, knows things that are not obvious to my 3D mind, and there are obstacles between the layers.
Yes, and I’m moving you along to “someone else,” you might say, who is closer to that kind of information. I mention this not because I am “going” anywhere, but because the very fluidity of response on our end of things is important to the subject at hand.
I could vaguely feel the difference.
That’s why we underlined it, to help you recognize it more readily and to fold it into the discussion.
I have noticed recently – the past few weeks in particular, I suppose – that my memories of things in my life seem to be obtruding themselves more, as I do crossword puzzles, say, or even as I read. It is (I suspect) because some internal barriers have lowered, and I am more willing to remember things painful or embarrassing, of which my life has no shortage.
The effort involved in suppressing painful memories can be considerable, and besides that, the barrier you raise in the process is a barrier, restricting access not only to what hurts but to what would be pleasant.
And I suppose my practice of talking to people on “the other side” is a way of opening up to our own suppressed or neglected memories. [I was surprised, typing this up, to notice that “our.”]
Not just memories, but active potential allies. If you see the value of greater access to “past life” memories now that you realize that the past is still alive – how much closer is your “past life” in the life you are still leading!
This goes back to The Division of Consciousness again, that our separation into conscious versus unconscious is the fall of man, so to speak, and is the cause of a lot of problems in the next life as well as this one.
Remember – and obviously this refers to anybody who reads this, not just to you – nothing in your life is without meaning. This means nothing in your life is without the potential to act for you, to act upon you. Good memory or bad, the stronger the flavor, the greater the potential.
I get it, and I’m sure others will too.
This needs spelling out, and there is another whole book in it, once you are ready to go.
I want to write my novel first! I have put it off too long, and it is coming well, and I don’t want to lose it.
Who is going to stop you? And your novels will eventually be an accessible way for people to find their own way, just as you found Dion Fortune’s. So it isn’t like we think you are wasting your time. Only, be aware that there is more to be done in other realms.
Could I do both at the same time? I’m afraid of losing focus.
Don’t force anything. Just work.
So give us a little more of a preview of coming attractions.
Surely you can feel that the subject of changing your inner life to extend to other parts of yourself – which changes your perspective on the life you are leading – has religious ramifications. It will be productive for you to explore them, with a little help from your friends.
By “religious ramifications,” I assume you mean, greater insight into religious ways of seeing the world?
Don’t assume. Wait for clarification when it comes.
One thing it has to touch on – Jesus saying he came that we might have life more abundantly. If that means nothing more than, “Living this way, nurturing these habits, will free you internally,” it is worthwhile.
Well, when the time comes, you’ll see.
I suppose there isn’t any reason we can’t do this every so often while I’m still working on the novel, in the same way that Charles and I will spend a couple of days on his work of summarizing and codifying Rita’s message.
It is up to you, more than up to us. Just as in your day-to-day life the limiting factor is what you hold in active memory, so in the larger version of day-to-day life, the limiting factor is what you allow and what you encourage, for obviously everything that is held reduces the opportunities to hold other things. Everybody makes these choices; that is what life is, choosing. But it is as well that occasionally you are reminded that other choices are possible.
Well, this has been a pleasant surprise. I’ll send it out, and hope to return to Dark Fire later today. Thank you.