Choosing your experience

Friday, April 8, 2022

11:55 a.m. Maybe a session after all. The cat back next door with daddy, and I having nothing pressing, let’s talk. Guys, any pressing topic you’d care to pursue?

Yes. Set your switches.

Done. F, R, C, P.

Your browsing of your shelves shows a lot of unread books of a religious or philosophical bent, plus no end of material verging on the same topics, if not centering on them.

I know, and here I am re-reading novels.

We remind you yet again, you never have the data to judge. You don’t know why you are moved to read or re-read a given book, nor what the near-term or longer-term effects may be. Why distrust your impulses?

Because of a little concept called Psychic’s Disease.

Which for all you know you made up and doesn’t exist.

My experience argues otherwise.

Your experience is judged by – your judgment. Does that give you a firm place to stand?

Are you saying there isn’t such a thing as Psychic’s Disease?

We’re saying don’t ever be too sure about anything.

That, I can do.

Then, start doing it with respect to your own impulses. You can judge them – that is, weigh them – as they arise. After that, what is judging but second-guessing?

No value in second-guessing? What about learning from experience?

We don’t want to divert to this. Let’s just say that there’s a different between seeing the results of something, and doubting that something before you even see what it leads to. Naturally this means you will wind up leaving a lot of questions open, but haven’t we been saying this right along?

To continue: You have probably two shelves of unread books immediately bearing on the subject interesting you, and more shelves’ worth touching it tangentially or indirectly. Are you waiting for your old age, to read them?

I doubt I will have read all my books by the time I die, no matter how far off that may be. I’m always buying new ones, re-reading old ones.

So look closely: What brings you to read a new book that is not a novel by a favorite author?

I don’t know, it calls to me, you could say. I have known books that turned out to be very important to me to sit unread for more than a year. Radical Man, by Charles Hampden-Turner, given to me by my friend Ross Herrick, sat on my dresser for more than a year until one day I picked it up and could scarcely put it down. It was an important book for me, I remember that. But I couldn’t tell you today what it was about or what chord within me it struck.

We have said many times, books make their impression by changing you, and the fact that later you can’t remember the change or the source of the change makes no difference.

Good thing, too. Otherwise it would be all so much wasted effort.

But you see, the point is, you can trust the pull that brings you to a given book at a given time. So why have you accumulated those books yet have no impulse to read them?

Waiting for the right time to roll around?

That is a valid way of looking at it. And there is a second element, now moving into first place in importance.

I get that you’re going to say something like “Intent,” or maybe “Concentration.”

It is a form of decision, the kind of decision you make every time you set switches to maximize your focus and receptivity and presence. (Clarity is more a by-product than a prerequisite.) Do you intend to begin or pursue or conclude a given investigation? Do you intend to focus your efforts in a given direction beyond these frequent communications?

That sort of contradicts what you just said – or, no, I suppose it doesn’t, considering that you don’t care what we choose to do. If we do choose to focus we go one way; if we don’t, we go another way, but either way, it’s fine with you.

More or less.

I know you have your preferences, but everything I’ve heard is that “It’s your own choice.”

And it is. But do you remember how you used to say to your brothers and sisters, playfully, when they disagreed with you, that “You have the right to be wrong”? That’s our position, often enough.

So if you had your druthers, what would you like me to do?

If we had our druthers and it matched your wishes, we would see you set your intent to read those books. A little at a time will get it done, and it will get done easily if you will set it within bounds of routine intent, as you do with this.

And then do something with it?

You can’t help doing something with anything that changes or reinforces you. It may not be evident.

I don’t know if this applies to everybody, but I’ll type it up and send it out. This is only a half-session, but it’ll have to do.

Call it “Choosing your experience,” perhaps.

Perhaps. Okay, thanks as always.