Intent and the question of Which You

Sunday, January 9, 2022

7 a.m. After a false start at 5:30 a.m. Last January I had 10 doctors’ appointments. This month, only the one, on the 27^th, for the hormone shot. Yet I get the feeling that on the one hand, all is well, and on the other hand, things are moving. I had dreams and I have lost them, but they spelled doom, so to speak. I’m not sure why I wasn’t able to get up and record the couple of words I had gotten.

A private session, then, guys.

Predictions don’t suit our relationship. You know that.

I do, but I also know you are not averse to giving me clues as we go along.

You know you must die.

I do, and I know I must live until that point, and well or ill, I will take what comes. But I’d still like a clue.

What you really want, and would make use of, is an indicator of how you ought to be spending your time while waiting.

Yes, that’s true. Much more useful than a timetable or even a diagnosis.

You understand, even “What is good for you to know” depends in large part upon “What you value in life and what you choose to do with whatever time remains.”

Because if I am playing golf, the accompanying attitudes and practices will be different.

Yes but that isn’t really the important thing. If you intend something, certain things follow. If you merely wish it, or wonder about what it would be like, or look at it wistfully, those are different states of being, thus will call to themselves different events. You see?

I do. It isn’t m –

Say, I get that I can write the books I want to write as amusements, as fun, rather than as chores.

How did you write the ones you did write?

How is it that I get so far off base?

Thinking to steal second, maybe.

Hmm. Trying to avoid necessary work, I make it harder for myself?

Notice that periodically you are inclined to clear off your workspace on your desk. This is part practicality, part effective symbolism. The purpose of drawers and shelves is to leave one free workspace.

Periodically, I am led to re-read old novels; nearly all the time, I am immersed in something more serious and less digestible, as well – as Eizenstat on Carter, currently. At those times, I don’t feel able, really, to write. If I weren’t reading, I wouldn’t necessarily be doing anything that I want to do.

But why do you say “I want to do this,” yet find yourself unable or unwilling to actually do it?

That’s my question, and the follow-up is, “How do I overcome whatever the problem is?

Which you?

Is that the problem? No internal consensus?

The problem is that you are too receptive and too little focused, as we indicated. Not that it is not your right to be so, if you choose to be, but if it doesn’t suit you, you must change. No one can change for you.

How is it that sometimes I will get focused, sometimes for many months at a time?

How is it that when you do, you produce another book?

I’ll concede the connection, but you didn’t answer my question.

Did we not, just now? [Meaning, by what happened between my question and this answer.]

I was looking at the grain of the wood of my desktop and my eyes unfocused, but my mind focused somehow, and I was realizing that the desktop had been part of a tree. I thought of somebody who said, “One could go mad looking at” something: meaning, I take it, an endless chain of associations could begin, if one were in that state all the time. It may have been someone’s drug experience, or someone’s mystical experience.

It isn’t focusing your physical vision that is the key, you see; it is all your mind. You know this and continually forget it.

I can feel the urge to slide off, to escape into reading or crossword puzzles or internet or anything routine and undemanding. And yet, “routine and undemanding” is the last thing I want out of life. So why is this?

Which you?

I see. A pity this is a private session; there’s a lesson here.

It’s only private if you make it so. Obviously, we don’t care.

Well, re-reading what we’ve gotten so far, it doesn’t seem so needing to be guarded.

So we will talk a little about “Which you,” and you may send out all or none or some, as you prefer.

You know I won’t resist sending out something if I think someone can profit from it.

If you can act as teacher, you mean. Nothing to be embarrassed about.

Okay. But people may resent the presumption of it.

Then think of yourself as the reporter summarizing for the reader.

You’re right, that is easier. In any case, “Which you”?

In your case you were given the key when you first studied astrology in the 1970s. Sun in Leo likes the limelight, Moon in Cancer shuns it. It was and is your tightrope to walk, and fall off (to one side or the other) and climb back onto. This astrological symbolism expresses that for those born in this month, a plethora or a congeries of conflicting energies would contend within them. Some would contend in private, some in public. Some – depending upon where, and specifically when, and in what circumstances they were born – would experience this tension of opposites one way, others in another way.

Thinking about it, it wouldn’t be a month. The moon was in Cancer for almost a month before the Sun went into Leo. We’re talking about a four- or five-day overlap here.

Yes, yes, that’s true but makes no difference except, we suppose, perhaps it will prevent someone from picking the nit, now that you have already done it. The point remains. Thousands of babies were born with that combination; they were born with it because that is when the times allowed the combination, you see. That is as valid a way of seeing it as to say that because the times were so, the individuals were conformed to it.

You could see it either way, I see that.

Bear in mind, in this context, everybody in 3D is a combination of strands, so everybody is going to face a multiplicity of subpersonalities each thinking of itself as the only valid “I.” Your conflict resolves itself in your particular sun-moon configuration; everyone else experiences the situation differently, according to their own chart. The chart did not create the combination. The combination entered because conditions allowed. But the result is the same: On a 3D level, you did not choose the tightrope you walk in life, but at a pre-3D level, you did. (Given that we are defining “you” as the unique combination of strands in a time-place, you may object that strictly speaking there can have been no prior “you,” only the components of the present you. This is true but is more of a linguistic and logical problem than a real one.)

Thus, everybody at some point, and consciously or otherwise, decides who is going to be “me.” The question of “Which you” is settled by default for some (if the competition is weak) or by unconscious selection by some (if contention among the strands is significantly less than cooperation) or by conscious selection by some (choosing good or bad habits, reinforcing certain traits and repressing others).

And some of us find it harder to select than others do.

It isn’t quite that simple. Is it ever?

Not that I’ve noticed.

There is an inherent tension between comprehensivity [I imagine they meant comprehensiveness] and selection. That is, to want to encompass it all, on the one hand, and to want to function effectively, on the other.

And we ought to defer this till next time, as our hour is up and more than up?

Yes. You can only do so much at a time. But now after you transcribe and send, what will you do? Are you doomed to go along in idle (as you see it), or is there a middle ground between intense focus and throwing the transmission out of gear?

That’s where we came in.

We already answered your question, but you didn’t notice, or let’s say you filed it in a different pigeonhole. Go back to the seeing-the-grain moment. That was not idle and it was not highly focused in this mentally engaged way. It is the key to many things. Take some time to experience it.

Okay. Since this turns out to be a public session – our theme?

Try, “Intending. Which you.”

Something like that, anyway. Okay, thanks as always.