Wednesday, February 16, 2022
6:05 a.m. If you gentlemen don’t have any particular item on your docket, we could pursue something you said yesterday. But I’ll offer you first choice, and I’ll set my switches to maximum focus, receptivity, clarity, and presence.
At this point perhaps you can see the underlying method in our practice over the years of using whatever bubbled to the surface of the moment. Ephemera are not happenstance; they may better be regarded as tell-tales.
Yes, I see that now. It is one way to proceed, as a rigid predetermined scheme is another.
Different methods suit different temperaments.
Odd to think that artistic free-thinking Jane Roberts would voluntarily tie herself to a pre-determined course of instruction, down to dictated chapter heads and punctuation.
Odd? Or merely an example of compensation, Seth providing a needed psychological balance? Besides, any artist in any field requires the practice of discipline, mostly self-discipline even if experienced through the requirements of the medium in which s/he works.
Interesting thought. Persuasive, I guess. So are we preferring today’s ephemera to yesterday’s?
At some level, such distinctions are not very important. But if you will mention the letters, the cat, and the program series, you will get a brief example and we may proceed to the idea you have in mind as a starting place.
All right. One thing having led to another, I found myself re-reading a cache of letters to and from Colin Wilson, beginning with my first to him in 1995 and ending with the last I can find, in 2004, though there must be others somewhere. I found these in three or four file folders, and decided to three-hole-punch them and put them in a binder, and found myself reliving a younger version of myself as I reread them.
I see what you’re doing here. At the same time, I was doing two other things, that I would not logically associate. And this is how we see our lives in skewed perspective, isn’t it, by our habit of looking at things in isolation by category (so to speak) even though they were occurring at the same time. Thus we miss a set of connections that must have their own logic, but more or less invisible.
That’s the idea. So, the other two?
After I had finished with the letters, it was early evening, so I was on the computer watching the first episode of “The Crown,” which I had watched when it first came out a few years ago. Of course when you have watched several seasons’ worth of episodes, the initial episodes, watched again, are going to have a richness you could not have experienced initially. Now you know what will lead to what, as the writers did and you did not, initially. I suppose it’s sort of like doing a past-life review of the series. Plus, of course, it is a pleasure to revisit well-played parts. Claire Foy and Matt Smith did such a splendid job, as did others whose names I didn’t much note.
And while I was watching events from 1947 onward, suddenly the cat arrives, unnoticed, and jumps into my lap, startling me – and delighting me – as she promptly curls up to sleep. And looking down at her, sleeping so trustfully, brought me back 47 years to when my daughter was a newborn. The feelings of protectiveness and affection are very similar, absurd though that sounds. (And she is sitting sentinel on my desk as I write this, her tail neatly tucked around her leg as they do when they sit hat way.)
Okay, so –?
So, this is not of cosmic significance in and of itself, but for that very reason may serve as an example of unnoticed processes in your lives as you go along. In your case specifically, you are in one small stretch of hours associating events of more than 25 years ago (reminded to you by the letters) with associations backward and forward as suggested by the material of the letters; you are reliving your viewing of “the Crown” initially; you are participating vicariously in the early postwar events that took place before you even knew there was such a place as England; you remember your feelings as what we might call a newborn father, and associate them with a current pet and, in turn, even less consciously, with your interaction with various other cats you have lived with.
You see our point here? None of this is world-shaking; that’s why it is a good example of everyday life. Your daily life is a continuous association in a given time of various lines of thought, of continuity of emotion, of memories and perhaps introspections. No one could ever list them exhaustively. Exhaustion would be the word for it! And this happens every day. You see our point: Your lives are much richer than you commonly realize.
Note, none of this has anything to do with achievements, or grim-jawed determination to do better, or throes of repentance, etc., etc. It is ordinary life (which will be different for each person), seen a little more deeply. We will not – partly because we could not –try to describe even a small amount of the things that go through your mind in a given day; hopefully it will be enough to send out this spark.
When I think of philosophical “explanations” of life, and see how little complexity they take into account, it is to laugh. Even such a small thought-experiment as this, which doesn’t deal with sweeping emotions or significant events, shows how little straight-line logic can explain.
So our purpose is fulfilled. Using ephemera, notice. So, your proposed topic took off from yesterday’s.
[“And, you are connected to your own mental constructions and those of others that you have adopted. We know that this is a strange way to think of it, but it is so. Where do you think the souls of machines come from? How does the zeitgeist arise? How, in short, does the shared subjectivity step down (so to speak) to individual lives?”]
It is mere extrapolation, and will serve anyone well who thinks about it. The souls of machines are not generated by the metal or wood or whatever they are made from. They don’t generate spontaneously.
No, they borrow from their creators.
Better to look at it as, their creators donate to them. And their users land them energy as well, as you and your friends speculated yesterday. Just as animal souls (including humans) do not remain static but alter according to what they experience and what they decide, so with vegetable- and mineral-based souls. They are not the same order of mind as yours; they don’t read books or pet cats, but they do interact with the world they know – 3D and non-3D – just as do you, only in a different way, according to their own nature.
The salient point is that everything is alive with the same dream-stuff, so it ought not to surprise you that there is no real boundary between mentally there and not mentally there, nor between ensouled and soulless. There are different kinds of minds and souls, but nothing can be without either.
And the zeitgeist?
For just this moment (in hope of setting out a spark that may leap between us all), consider the zeitgeist, or “spirit of the times,” to be a more etherealized version of the soul of a machine or some “inanimate” object. Cloud, say, or mountain. A true mind, but a different order of mind, comprising different things, producing different things, than mind on the human level. Can you see that the zeitgeist is a reflection of the contemporary state of the shared subjectivity, hence in a way arises from it?
I can right now. Whether I will retain the link later, remains to be seen. And your generalization about the shared subjectivity stepping down to our level by these processes makes sense now.
Well, not quite “by these processes.” It’s more like the processes are the visible result.
Okay, I see that. Well, thanks, that’s very clear (if only for them moment!), and I hope to incorporate it. Today’s theme?
“Beneath the surface,” perhaps.
Not very descriptive, though allusive, I grant you.
Perhaps “the ephemeral and life’s purpose,” something like that.
“Ephemera, texture, and life”?
Certainly possible.
I’ll decide when I need to save as I transcribe. Our thanks as always.