A jolt

A jolt

Sunday, May 29, 2022

5:45 a.m. John F. Kennedy’s birthday. If it hadn’t come so close to Memorial Day, I imagine it would have become a national holiday in 1964.

My experiment with memory the other day proved what I already knew. My facts were wrong in detail, and the emotional point was very much on target. The attunement that came like a sacrament was the first attunement in Reiki I, not the final attunement in Reiki II. But, as I say, I had the emotional point of it exactly.

And it showed me how to do this work. Not slog through the journals looking for things to pile up as raw material, but let the material surface as it wishes to, and then go to the journals for verification and amplification. Maybe I will have written about them, maybe I won’t, but either way, my own mind will drive, and documentation will be in a subordinate, not a dominant, position.

And the third phase will be for you to reconstruct it in writing if you wish, using your documentation as reference material rather than as scripture to be faithfully preserved.

Yes, I can see that. I may yet write “Son of Muddy Tracks.” Dave Garland encouraged me long ago to write my memoirs, but I didn’t see how I could go about it. (I think it was Dave.)

Mention your spaghetti analogy.

If you envision a plate of cooked spaghetti, all tangled together as it is, you can imagine one strand brightly colored. You would be able to trace that strand pretty easily, no matter how it wound around others. That’s sort of what happens when you let the mind associate: It lights up one string of connected material, either all at once or a bit at a time.

So, shall we do a session? I think I’ll add my comments from when I poked around in my journal after Friday’s session,.

[8:30. And, courtesy of the little crib sheet I made, I quickly saw that 1998 was volumes 56 and 57, and there in January was a long account of the Reiki I workshop, full of things I’d entirely forgotten. It was Jan. 3 and 4, and I wrote it up Jan. 5, Monday.

[This may be easier than I feared. A Jan 6 entry dates my fall in the street to Sept 29, 1990 {though in fact it turned out to be Sept 28}, and the guys’ explanation is Oct. 7. I’ll bet that as I am led from entry to entry, I’ll pick up just such crumbs.

[Reiki II April 11-12, 1998, also v. 56.

[As usual, my memories are exact in re the emotional importance of the event, and wildly off as to the chronology and other details. And I had forgotten almost everything about the weekend, including the fact that I spent Saturday night at Fallen Oak.

[But there isn’t any reason why I have to continue this as one thread to the end, before opening another. I guess we’ll see how it plays out.]

Setting switches, which in itself has become a mnemonic: F, RCP. I really should move to Harley Street. (Although, re-reading The Chequerboard, I see that it is the Royal College of Surgeons. Perhaps they have one for Physicians too.)

Perhaps think about that fall in the street, and we can discuss it before you look it up.

We can do that. I thought I’d mention my bright idea for a table of years and journal numbers, just because it is proving to be so useful.

Go ahead.

Listing which journals covered which years proved quite unwieldy; it took a while to figure out how to do it in a few lines instead. A legacy of my spreadsheet days, I guess. [However, I csn’t make it print here. Sorry.] You have to admit, it is neat and handy.

When you finish preening –

Smiling. When I worked for the Virginian-Pilot/Ledger-Star, I got in the habit of going with my friend Frank Callaham for a beer after work on Fridays. It was his idea, and I fell in with it. When I say “a beer,” that’s what it was, just one beer, drunk slowly, and conversation. Frank was 15 years older than I was, so he was 59 at the time. He was perhaps the kindest man I ever knew, or perhaps I should say the most consistently well-intentioned, benevolent. He had been a newsman most of his life, and had lots of stories. Unlike most storytellers I have known, his stories didn’t aggrandize him. If anything, they would often put him down, as he would tell of ridiculous mistakes he made as a kid, or misunderstandings that got him into trouble, or funny situations he’d gotten into.

Anyway, one Friday in September, 1990, I gather, which would have been after I left the paper and was working a few miles away at Hampton Roads Publishing Company, he and I had had our beer and were walking back to the Pilot’s parking lot from the restaurant. I stepped off the curb and with no flailing around, not even a sense of imbalance, I fell flat on my face in the street.

It was the damnedest thing. It was a side street, and at that moment there was no traffic, which is just as well, because there I was, full length in the roadway. It jolted me, of course, but when I got up, I saw that I didn’t have a scratch. My clothes were untorn, not even scuffed. Frank and I basically shrugged, once it was clear that I wasn’t hurt, because what else could we do? No obvious cause, and no obvious effects. We marked it down as one of those strange things that happen sometimes. My journal says I got the explanation Oct. 7, and I’ll be interested to see what it says, but I remember the gist of it, which is that the jolt was an activation. They – you guys, presumably, or if not you, your predecessors, or the second shift, or the B team – said that something had been deactivated in me years before, I forget why, and it was time for it to be reactivated. As I remember it, I tentatively accepted your word for it, and waited to see if anything changed.

So now fast-forward.

Yes. My friend Michael Langevin calls me one day. It had to have been after 1995, because that’s when we met, but beyond that, I can’t say. I’d guess it was several years beyond that. He had had a weird accident in which he had walked into a door. Endwise, if I remember rightly. It hurt, and he was wondering why it happened. I believe you said it was a realignment then too, though you may not have used the word.

We explained that a physical shock will create an opening for a realignment of energy patterns.

If you put it that way, I don’t remember it.

You’ll see soon enough. The point here is that you remembered your fall in the street, and what welled up naturally, without strain or even effort, was the connected incident (second-hand) of Michael’s jolt. We use this mostly as an example of how to do the recapturing of memories. In short: Set your intent, choose a specific starting-place, and let connected memories emerge. But you have to realize, the connections won’t necessarily be obvious. Your conscious mind won’t necessarily find these subterranean connections, but your larger mind will not experience any difficulty.

All right. I‘ll go looking in my journal for 1990 and I’ll add that to this. Today’s theme?

“A physical jolt,” perhaps.

Our thanks as always.

 

Sunday, October 7, 1990

9:45 p.m. Well boss, was there a connection between my fall nine days ago and a change of perspective?

You fell and jolted yourself awake. As when you fell at age seven, and jolted yourself asleep. Then it was important to preserve something. Now it is important to use that something.

It was a cue, then?

More like an activation. The next part of your life will be very unlike anything that came before, but the long delay and enforced inactivity was necessary. You had to be kept in the ranks, as you once put it. You were preserved from premature success.

A part of me was paralyzed.

Tranquilized, would be a better way to put it. It did you no damage, merely deferred your career until that career would do your character and insight and influence no damage.

And now finally things are ready?

Things began to move in 1985 when you sleepwalked from NNS [Newport News Shipbuilding Co., where I was a computer programmer] to Royster. Before that, when you moved to NNS. Before that, when you took Human Services (Honeywell) rather than take a chance on Treasury (IBM). All is well, don’t worry about it.

I’m not worrying. Just finding it had to believe I might really be going somewhere, finally.

… Use every idea you have; you have always overflowed with them. Now they can be made practical.