Monday, March 14, 2022
7:40 a.m. EDT. I thought we’d skip, but maybe not. When I lay back down on the bed a while ago, I found thoughts going through my mind, and I can’t tell any more which are “mine” and which are a word from our sponsor, so to speak.
There was a fast chain of association of ideas, ending in my remembering a thought that Yeats put into “The Trembling of the Veil,” one part of his Autobiographies. So I went to the book and had to leaf through several pages of post-it notes – I must have 30 or 40 of them in the book – till I found the passage. As usual, it wasn’t quite as I remembered it, but as always the point was as I remembered.
There is so much that one could quote from Autobiographies. I have ben reading it, at great intervals, since I suppose 1972 or 1973. Then in Ireland in 1976, at Thoor Ballylee, I bought it, and Yeats’ Collected Poems, and his summary of his wife’s mediumship, A Vision (which I have yet to get through!). But I go back to the Autobiographies again and again, for sustenance. Can it be true that my David Pryor was friend / younger acquaintance of Yeats in the 1890s? “Yeats” – or someone – did give me a poem in 1995, during Lifeline at TMI. And the interesting thing, to me at least, is that it is his later poems that move me, not his earlier. I’m not much for the Celtic Twilight, though I’m not dismissive of it either. It was Yeats the mage, and Yeats the prophet, who interested me, from the first time I read “And what rough beast, his hour come at last” in Freshman year English Lit. [Actually, “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last.” From “The Second Coming”]
So, enough prologue. I’ll set my switches and see what we are to see today. Focus, receptivity, clarity, presence.
You, and everyone of course, have a library of associations, gathered in the course of your 3D existence with all its extensions: past, future, other lives, books, movies, everything. It is an extensive data base in which connections may be made in many alternative and equally valid ways, and not only when you are in 3D but after (and before, in a way, but that’s a different story, and would be better explored by the scientifically minded). Your minds, after all, exist imperishably in non-3D, as we have often said. This localized data-base of associations is one function of the 3D experience, perhaps not sufficiently realized. You are created as specialized tools, but you are therefore equally created as specialized libraries.
Or, as the acquirers and curators of specialized libraries.
Yes, an acceptable correction.
Now, you began with the thought of social inequalities and injustices, etc. Some people have so much more than they could ever need, while others subsist on the barest minimum, and even less than the barest minimum. Your thought moved quicky to the half-remembered Yeats thought. Though you couldn’t have quoted it, you well remembered the upshot. When you transcribe this, quote just the one paragraph, and expound upon it to provide a minimal context.
Okay. Page 263:
Yeats was an artist, an organizer of artists, a mystic, an Irish nationalist. He had much practical experience of magic and of the transference of thoughts and of the use of magical symbols to direct the thought of others, unbeknownst to themselves. He and his uncle George Pollexfen often worked together, testing the limits of the possible. He spent much time considering how the things that he was experiencing in various worlds fit together.
“From the moment when these speculations grew vivid, I had created for myself an intellectual solitude, most arguments that could influence action had lost something of their meaning. How could I judge any scheme of education, or of social reform, when I could not measure what the different classes and occupations contributed to that invisible commerce of reverie and of sleep; and what is luxury and what necessity when a fragment of gold braid or a flower in the wallpaper may be an originating impulse to revolution or to philosophy? I began to feel myself not only solitary but helpless.”
Add your brother’s suggestion.
Paul, looking up something else on Wikipedia, suggested that I should have my own entry, adding that Frank DeMarco is a retired Canadian hockey player. I looked him up, saw him described as “left winger” which I assume is a position rather than a political statement, smiled, thought to myself that I have often been left wing, but not so much as I learned more about the world.
And you can’t remember where in the chain of associations the though was placed.
No. Does it matter?
It does not. The point is that it was part of the chain. There is no point in trying to decide if a given thought is “yours” or is prompted by others, whatever “others” would mean. Most of your mental associations are invisible to you anyway, either because they are fleeting or are invisible or are deceptive (that is, appear to be this but are really that). The point, always, is to live the chain, not necessarily to analyze it.
Except that analyzing it can be part of our life.
Yes, of course. We mean, don’t overstress the importance of analysis per se. it has its place (which will be different for each person), but only its place. Life trumps analysis, even if analysis is part of life.
I get it.
Now, you see, any given item in a data base may be linked to any other item.
Yes, that’s the difference between a data base and a flat file.
Not all your friends were programmers.
“Flat file” means a file stored in a permanent unchanging order of items. Name, DOB, SSN, address, etc. They may be sorted by different fields, but they will not change relationships among themselves.
And a data base stores each item separately and allows linkage in many ways. That is a serviceable analogy to 3D humans. Each of you is an extensive data base internally and externally. That is, you experience your lives in various ways depending upon how you look at them. You interact with one another in a similarly flexible way. This is very valuable, spectacularly flexible, and is the basis of further creation. In a restricted sense, this characteristic could be said to be the basis of free will.
Huh?
If your lives were flat files, as they sometimes appear to be, your future would be predetermined. But the concept of predetermining a data base is not exactly meaningless, but is so broad as to be meaningless in practical terms. Nothing forces you to link fields in this way rather than that way, nor to maintain (nor to break) links once made. It’s up to you, that’s the point.
So, this morning you decide to take the day off (and there would have been nothing wrong with that). You read a little in the Travis McGee you are re-reading. It leads to the thought about social inequality. That leads to memories of Yeats’ experiences and conclusions, as he wrote them long ago. One thing leads to another, seamlessly and continuously, and this association-machine – which is experienced by some as the drunken monkey, when it is out of control – is a vital part of your on-going task (everybody’s on-going task) of creating and following and changing links as you go along.
We want you to quote the poem Yeats gave you, but give it context. Don’t just hint at it.
As you say that, I realize, whatever I choose to say will be the context, in effect, and the unsaid will not be, for anyone but me.
Exactly. And this is true for everyone. You each maintain your own data base and can communicate it to others only in the sketchiest of form. You must be mysteries to one another, merely in the nature of things.
That data base analogy is going to be more suggestive than it looked, I see.
It will strike sparks for some. So, Yeats.
Somehow it seems a lot of work to explain it.
That is because this requires you to construct a new link. Construction is work, sometimes hard work. But if you can find the passage in Muddy Tracks, from a time when it did not seem like so much work (we smile), that will do.
I found the pages, and will quote them.
One final thing today, then. If you begin to see yourselves as data bases, and realize that thoughts, memories, fantasies, conversations in and out of body (that is, with 3D or with non-3D beings), anything you read, and anything you think about what you have read, and associate with other thoughts about other things –
I get the idea. It’s all grist for the mill.
And it renders doubly useless the concern about “Am I making this up.” What’s the difference among them?
Besides that, remember that your chains are linked in various ways. You tend to picture the chains as chains of thought, but they are equally linked by emotion, or by bodily sensation (a remembered scent, the feel of a breeze, whatever), or by other criteria. Don’t think logic is particularly important as a linking factor. It is one way your fields can be linked; far from the only one. Not even primus inter pares.
Enough for the moment.
Not quite the day off I had anticipated. Many thanks for all this.
– – –
[Lifeline, 1995, an exercise on Sunday, the first full day of the program, in which we were to go to what Monroe called Focus 27, a sort of analog of our ordinary 3D life, only self-created.]
After a moment of floating, I ask to see someone I know. I am taken to Britain, then up to a northerly part of an island, and I know it is the west coast of Ireland up by Sligo, and I know that the person I see wandering alone by the sea and the mountains is Yeats—W. B. Yeats, the poet, my old friend in the life of the Welshman David. Willie Yeats, still there after all these years. And suddenly I am right there with him.
I establish contact, saying, “It’s Owen.” In that, I surprise myself, for all this time I have been thinking of the Welshman as David. A part of me asks myself (in the middle of the experience) if maybe my name really had been Owen; then I think that maybe it was Yeats’s name for me because I was Welsh. Only when I began writing this book did I find in an old journal that in my one and only hypnotic regression in 1987, which I had thought a failure, I had called him “David Owen.” Nothing my subconscious mind wouldn’t know, of course, and if you will tell me what a subconscious mind is, I will be entirely persuaded that there’s nothing in all this.
I say to Yeats, “I was younger than you when we lived, and I died earlier, and I came back after you were already dead—and now I return to find you still here! It’s time for you to move on.” I tell him, “Make your presence known, remember the physical, and then go, my old friend.” We agree that he is to get a brief taste of the physical again and then go on, after making his presence known.
In the CHEC unit after the tape is over, I recite what I can remember of one of his poems, “To Be Carved on a Stone at Thoor Ballylee.” Why that one, I don’t know, but Kelly much later points out that this poem was Yeats’s statement of his personal identity, as opposed to his family, and maybe that’s it.
So why don’t I mention this in debriefing? I don’t want to seem to stand out; don’t want it to look like I am nurturing delusions of grandeur. And part of me suspects that this is exactly what I am doing.
I wonder what the others are not reporting.
…
On Saturday, August 12, I made several trips to 27, the most important of which involved finding Yeats. He talked, and he promised to give me a poem via automatic writing. Sitting in my cabin by a fire, I asked him, this intense middle-aged man of penetrating eyes and prominent cheekbones, if I could succeed in transcribing it. You can get it, he said, but whether you can understand it is another matter.
I sat down at my journal and was nearly stifled by performance anxiety. I got so far as a title, then a first line—then I was quarreling with the next lines, trying to make something coherent and losing it, then the phone rang. I tried again, and got this:
Sentinel
There are those think the day a long weariness,
Life a long never-releasing swampland clinging.
Can they never in their ceaseless counting and reckoning
Look up to the bird on the wing, or the hour?
Cease telling your beads of worry and amassing.
Your prayers are in every breath you take,
will it or not. The grave’s no prison
to match that spun by blind men building.
We who know pass you this directive;
Live your limitations as a blessing bestowed;
Build your castles but omit the bars;
Pass through the glowing.
After the poem came to me, I said:
“Maybe it’s Yeats, though it certainly doesn’t sound like him. And I can’t make sense of that title and this content.
“Nor does it sound like great poetry to me—or even competent rhyme. Would Yeats write something unfinished and crude?
“Ask him, maybe. Can I do that here and in 27? Let’s see. Mr. Yeats—”
“Different rules apply in new circumstances. What you value may seem child’s play or child’s distraction to us, sense and sound detracting from other attributes. Study the poem and see if it has anything to say to you and you may decide it’s not so bad after all.”
I asked if that was the “indisputable sign” of his presence that I had been promised.
“No. This is the sign: David Poynter. Little Portraits: Waterborne Reflections 1887–1913, printed 1921 in London. Murragh printed it. Limited edition of five hundred. Available in a few places, not so highly valued. Look in belles lettres. Good-bye and my thanks to you.”
TGU, asked about it, said, “Yes, what you have experienced has been solid, has been—as you put it—real. Even the thing with Yeats—David.”
“Wise guys,” I said. I reflected that at least I knew what to look for, but that whether it did or did not prove accurate, it wouldn’t prove a thing about Yeats. “Why is it that the thing that had the most evidential value for me was his farewell: ‘… and my thanks to you’?”
You know the reason for that. It was a human touch, a thanks from a man who had been rescued by an old friend from wasting time on illusion. More or less. And you went looking for him among the Order of the Golden Dawn, you think; in fact, you will recall you went looking for David among the Order of the Golden Dawn, and found him [Yeats]. A different story, no?
And in fact I had forgotten that this is what I’d done.
I didn’t see how the poem could really have been from Yeats. It wasn’t at all his style, and didn’t seem to me very good poetry; scarcely poetry at all, though perhaps I am no judge. Yet when I posted it to the Voyagers Mailing List, along with the story of how and why it came, one of those on the VML said that reading it solved a psychological problem she’d long had. I can’t figure that out, though I’m glad it happened.
True encounter? Fantasy? Still undetermined. Such is the nature of the unconscious life I live (or perhaps I should say, such is the nature of the compartmentalization of my life) that I had forgotten that Yeats—if it was Yeats—had given me that name of the man and the name of the book. I never followed up on either, though one would think it would be easy enough. On the other hand, what would follow-up prove to anyone but myself? For me to say that I had found verification would still leave you, the reader, wondering if I was telling the truth, or at least wondering if other insights might explain it away. I am content to report what I find—to act as a sort of pointer—and leave it to others of a more scientific bent to do controlled experimentation and verification.