TGU: attention and energy

Saturday, May 29, 2021

3:25 a.m. [John F. Kennedy’s birthday. It was never in the cards for him to live long, but he would have been 104 today. Someone said that he, and his son, were given every gift except length of years, but length of years per se would have been, at best, a mixed blessing to one whose health was so unreliable. In any case, nether one was to live long enough to even begin the slow descent.]

For some reason, I am always too impatient to recover my dreams. Sometimes I recover parts of them; very rarely do I recover as much as I actually recall. The operative thing this morning is, I was in bed reading about something that made a big impact on me. I reached over my head, lifted up off the pillow, placed the book face up on the pillow, open to the page I had been reading, and put my head down firmly on the book. A minute later, aghast that I would do such a thing to a book’s binding, I reached up and snatched it away – and came up with the pillow. No book: I had been dreaming that I had done that. Had been dreaming that I was reading in bed, dreaming that I had put the book on the pillow and my head on the book. Now, when I awakened I remembered what the dream was, but this is the only part that survived the process of getting to the journal. And, as I say, I get the sense that I remember what was important, though I think that I thought the dream itself was interesting, at the time.

So, guys, I get that you intended to use this little description as a jumping-off point for your continuing discussion. Yes?

It has its use, as an example of the interaction-point between sleep and waking states, or – to put it into a geographical analogy – between the area of semi-conscious, and the area of conscious, recall.

You say “geographical analogy” and I get that you are referring to a series of concentric circles, with the smallest (innermost) being the range of our conscious awareness, tapering outward in all directions to things less well defined but broader and more extensive.

You could say that it is a simple matter of relationship between intensity and, inversely, extent. The wider the area, the less intense your focus can be. Only, the circles move. Explain what we mean.

Yes, that’s interesting. Should be obvious, I guess, but I hadn’t happened to think of it. It isn’t like we’re discussing a fixed geography; it is more like a scientific law (I’m sure there must be one) associating in inverse relationship the intensity of concentration and the breadth of what the concentration is spread among.

A given quantum of attention, spread over an acre (so to speak) of subject matter must necessarily be spread thinner than that same quantum spread over a mere ten-foot circle – and must be spread far thinner if the area affected extends to miles. The inverse relationship between intensity and extent is an unvarying rule, but it is not fixed among any one given set of subject matter. Wherever you go mentally, whatever you ponder, the same rules apply. You have seen this vividly in your black-box experience and in recalibrating.

Yes. As you drill deeply, your awareness of surrounding factors diminishes. I have been told by a combat veteran (Joe McMoneagle) that in fierce situations your sense of hearing appears to go away; your vision may become tunnel vision. You may even lose your sense of color, temporarily. I take this to mean that our CPU ceases to report anything it deems dispensable while it concentrates on whatever is needed for survival.

Hemingway’s genius depended partly upon his willingness and ability to work as hard as any slave – but it depended primarily upon a phenomenal ability to perceive  and to remember. He was right there, always, so of course stories came to him.

Wait. That relationship may be clear to you; it isn’t to me. He was “right there” so “of course” stories came to him.

He was awake! He was more awake than the people around him. That’s why he made such a splendid interpreter of the world to people who seemed to be living in the same world but who nonetheless could not see as he saw, remember as he remembered, associate things as he could.

Okay, got it. And –?

And that’s what we’re getting to: He was more aware of the non-3D, as well, because there really isn’t a difference between 3D and non-3D except a conceptual one which becomes in effect a perceptual one. The intenser the consciousness, the more it can see, and the wider – and not merely in what are considered to be 3D topics.

I am getting this. And I can feel myself trying to clarify relationships suddenly half-seen because of your words (and, I suppose, also because of your presence, thinking with me).

Think of Hemingway being told he used ESP in life.

Yes, I see. In my novel, I had Papa responding negatively to the idea that he had used ESP in life. He resisted the idea because he associated it with his mother’s mystical ideas that he found vapid and irritating. But then he is asked: How did you know what a fish was thinking, 30 fathoms down?

And that was a good example – because a down-to-earth one – of how your everyday consciousness extends in all directions (vertical as well as horizontal, so to speak) naturally, matter-of-factly. And the corollary is that people with a different level of X live in different worlds with different boundaries, different perceptions, different ground-rules.

I could feel you grappling for a word, so used X to hold the place so you could finish the sentence. Do you know what X is?

Our hesitation came because several words would more or less express it, and all of them were very subject to being misinterpreted. Intensity, consciousness, energy, concentration – they are all aspects of it, but not it.

Carl Jung said he survived his encounter with the unconscious (in his forties) while Nietzsche had been shattered by his, and the difference between them (Jung speculated) was perhaps a matter of sheer physical strength, endurance. Nietzsche was sickly; Jung had all a peasant’s strength.

This approaches an important point, and perhaps it is as well to remind people that 3D life is all difference and distinctions, and that it is not therefore unfair. You and your neighbors and your families and your associates and friends are all very different in your strengths, weaknesses, proclivities, failings – so it cannot be otherwise than that you experience the world differently. Don’t think this is an accident, or a design flaw! Every part of your 3D experience is designed to enable you to become a unique window. If God (so to speak) wanted clones, clones you would be. Being individual, you are going to be very different, one from the other. Thus, you can cooperate, but it is the cooperation of difference, it is not the erasing or disregarding of difference (and still less the bemoaning of difference).

Now, this may seem to have strayed from our point, but our point was not a dream, nor the fact that you dream. It was, and is, that the quality of your consciousness, no less than the subject matter, varies over time. This is leading, remember, to an attempt to discuss non-3D life when it is not tethered to 3D consciousness, but we are edging away from the most familiar to the less familiar, hoping to hold your attention and your comprehension as we move to less and less familiar, 3D-oriented, ground.

It strikes me that Rita didn’t actually try to describe non-3D life except in terms of its difference from 3D life.

Yes. We are not repeating, but moving into new territory.

And there’s our hour. Thanks as always.

 

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