Monday, February 14, 2022
1:40 a.m. Since I can’t seem to sleep any longer at the moment, let’s try a session. Setting switches. Do you have an agenda, or shall we go with what came to me last night as a possible topic?
Let’s try that. Anything “uncaused” or out of left field, as you say, usually has a topical interest, or why would it surface?
Very well. Here is the sentence I wrote at 9:50, about four hours ago. “Maybe tomorrow explore how I am re-experiencing aspects of my life without necessarily cringing, but seeing it clearly for the first time, seeing the continuing lines that I experienced as isolated episodes.”
Several things worth noting there. Where would you like us to begin?
Well, let’s list the elements, and you can begin where you choose.
- I am re-experiencing aspects of my life
- without necessarily cringing
- seeing it clearly
- for the first time
- seeing the continuing lines in my life
- that I experienced as isolated episodes
Yes, an orderly way to proceed. Very well:
- It is relatively new for you to be experiencing remembering your life in this particular way at this time in your life. You know it is not unique to you, because your friends recognize the phenomenon when you mention it. Retrospective weighing and measuring is to some extent a natural concomitant of advanced years, like difficulty in retrieving certain words, or indeed like difficulty in retrieving certain memories at will, as opposed to their popping up on their own schedule
- What is even more new for you is to have memories surface and you not react with embarrassment or guilt or regret or any such negative emotion, but instead experience yourself calmly weighing the meaning for its own sake. You might look at this as an experience of escaping judgment as to a thing always having to be deemed good or evil.
- Because you get to examine moments as they were, rather than as you experienced them at the time, or as you have experienced them in retrospect, your judgment is discernment rather than condemnation; hence is more just. It shows you, better, how a thing happened, why it happened. You are looking from the point of view of the judge rather than prosecutor or defense attorney.
- And this is new because you are not the person you were when you were younger and were in the thick of things. Passion motivates, but it usually distorts, if only by not weighing conflicting evidence. Passion is always a partisan for a certain limited (hence, distorted) emotional summing-up of your inner life at that moment. Be the passion what it may be – anger, lust, desire for a given result, whatever – it never takes into consideration contraries. Conflicting passions may lead to that result, but no one passion ever does.
- And it is because you are examining your life dispassionately in these moments, that you are for the first time seeing as continuing lines of development (for better or worse) things that had recurred throughout your life, unrecognized as such.
- You had experienced such moments from within a passion. When you were no longer within that emotion – were no longer contained within that bubble, one might say – the tendency was to forget it, or to see it as an aberration. To this extent, your family and friends knew you better than you knew yourself, because they saw from outside and never from within such moods.
That’s all very clear. Does it have any particular importance beyond its reassurance that the development is normal and helpful?
Clarity is usually good in and of itself.
To be sure. But – that’s it?
For the moment. You can probably get some more sleep now, and we can continue when you return.
TBA.
Okay.
6:50 a.m. Re-reading that, very interesting, as usual. It is very clear to me, the superficiality of my conscious perception and judgment, as opposed to the greater depth of insight you so easily provide.
You may choose to look at that as the difference between entire absorption in the here and now, and extension over a wider “here,” a wider “now.”
Odd. Usually you are encouraging us to be sure to be in the living “now.” “Be here, now,” you’re always saying, and I certainly wouldn’t argue against it. But here, you seem to.
That is a language problem, making different things seem similar and similar things seem different. You need to be “here, now” because that is the only time you are present in the living moment, rather than half in a dream somewhere. But what we are saying here doesn’t contradict that. The difference is in the nature of “here, now” for those in 3D, experiencing time in time-slices, and those in non-3D, experiencing time in an entirely different way. And even here, you need to remember that you extend into non-3D and we extend into 3D, so in a sense we each have a mixed experience.
Shall we talk about your wider “here,” wider “now”?
It would be a little bit more immediately practical to continue on the theme begun earlier.
Fine with me, but let’s remember to come back to this sometime.
That depends upon many things. It is true that everything connects to everything else, but it is also true that the passage of 3D time tends to channel certain lines of thought in a progression. That is, one thing leads more easily to a certain other thing than to other things that are theoretically equally available. Nothing wrong with it; it’s just the way things are.
Sure, I understand that. It’s basic “opportunity costs” applied to the use of time spent communing with spooks.
Very funny. We don’t necessarily work with or for the CIA. Nor necessarily against it, either.
I can’t remember offhand which of my friends used to refer to the spirits he or she communed with as “spooks.” Dana Redfield, maybe. That’s her whimsical style. But it may have been somebody else. So, to continue where we left off a few hours ago –?
The thing we want to point up is that other people know you better in some ways than you know yourself. That is, they better recognize the patterns of behavior. At the same time, you know yourself better than they ever can, because you better recognize the motivations and the – what shall we call it? – the self-invented narrative that explains your life to you.
This isn’t something you don’t already know, but – if we may say so without insulting you or your friends – only at a relatively superficial level. It is obvious to you that there is no way to convey a portrait of the intricate pattern that you are. It is also obvious that you can see in others things they cannot see in themselves. But perhaps it doesn’t occur to you often enough, constantly enough, that both halves of the communication equation are always true. You are always misinterpreted. You always have only a partial sense of another person. That’s just how it is.
So we ought to be careful in our judgments.
Now see, that’s just what we mean by a relatively superficial reaction. We are meaning something a lot more pointed and immediately practical than that.
I sit corrected. Go ahead.
We would underline this entire paragraph if we thought it would call your attention to its importance, but we recognize that it would only tend to confuse things. But anyway, pay attention, if you want to get our view of this: You broadcast your Ives, all of you. The life anybody else sees will not be you as you are, but you as you are experienced, are seen, by another. And of course if that is so for one, it is so for all. And that means: Well, that is another sense of the analogy that has you as actors playing a role. The essential you is always incommunicable to anyone else, no matter how deeply loved or how essentially simpatico. You can only get aspects of them; they can only get aspects of you. And this is true no less of your communication with yourself! You only experience aspects of yourself; you don’t experience yourself from the outside except fleetingly.
That sentence just led me to renew focus. I’m all ears.
It is natural, at the latter part of your life, to slow down the input and process previous experience. This can be an enjoyable process, if not overlain with futile self-recrimination. Your snippets of the past are not being provided for the aske of encouraging you to make New Year’s resolutions.
Got it.
What you have been reading of Whicher’s assessment of Emerson’s mental life ought to serve as an example of how little you know of one another. Here is a scholar’s friendly assessment, and you can see how wrong it is, and why it is wrong, in a way that Whicher himself would not have been able to correct.
Sure. He is making assumptions about the internal world Emerson inhabited, as if our inner worlds were of the same essence,; as if reality were as billiard-table flat as it sometimes seems, rather than having “cliffs of fall, no-man-fathomed,” as somebody said.*
The scholar brings to his subject of study one limitation he or she cannot escape and often does not even suspect: one half of the communication equation is always the nature of the person doing the inquiring. If you forget that, your judgments are going to be flatter, more definite, because it is going to seem to you that “the facts speak for themselves,” you not realizing that some of the facts – those you silently bring to the inquiry – are hidden and perhaps unsuspected.
Now, you have to live within these limitations; therefore you have to make judgments that are only somewhat true, and you have to be the subject of the judgments of others on you that equally will be only somewhat true. But given enough willingness to see your life as your non-directive mind (your so-called unconscious mind) serves it up, you can get a broader view.
And that rounds out what we have for you on the subject.
Well, thanks. I find it interesting that we continue to operate in somewhat changing ways. In this case, I had a thought for the theme. Did I have it or did I receive it? Was I actor or acted-upon? And I have a feeling that this is actually a meaningless question. Very well, today’s theme could be titled –?
“Seeing clearly”?
“Seeing more clearly,” perhaps. Okay, well, our thanks as always.
[* Gerard Manley Hopkins, as it turns out. Courtesy of the Internet:
[“O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there.”]