Sunday, June 19, 2022
6:30 a.m. Trying to balance working on the novel-to-be and staying in touch with you, hence with myself. Yesterday’s session was a good one: Do you have something cued up for today?
You know that your focused intent helps give point to the interaction. Why not discuss the movies you saw?
Is that really the best use of our time?
Anything will be a point of entry, and there is such a thing as priming the pump.
I wonder if the younger generation even knows what it means, let alone have any experience in doing it. It was quite unusual even when I was a boy. Are there any pumps in the world – in the first world, anyway – still requiring priming? I wonder.
If only for the sake of the metaphor, briefly describe the process. It will have relevance.
How to explain it? There used to be iron water pumps that consisted of a pipe set into the ground, deep enough to hit water. A lever would be pumped up and down – by hand – to pull the water up and spill it onto a spout, at the end of which you’d hang a bucket. The pump would only pull if the gasket between the moving mechanism and the inside of the pipe was sealed tightly enough that air wouldn’t destroy the vacuum that pulled up the water. If the gasket dried out, perhaps because X time had passed since the pump had been used, you had to pour a little water into it, to swell the seal and make it possible for it to pull. You kept a little can there with water in it, as I remember. It didn’t take much, but without it, you were licked.
It is the same with communication between your conscious mind and other aspects of it, whether you think of them as unconscious or past-life, or non-3D beings, or whatever. Your conceptualization means little except insofar as it leads you to act in this way or that. Any metaphor you use may serve, as long as it comes to this: The ability to communicate is always there, but sometimes you need to act from your end, to enable it. “Act,” you understand, doesn’t necessarily mean “Do something”; it can mean put yourself into a receptive attitude. Or you might say that intending to communicate primes the pump, or expecting to be able to, or executing whatever little ritual helps you believe in the possibility, or even, after some success, mere habit and expectation.
If you have never initiated the process, or have done so only on occasion, particularly if you have done so without quite knowing how or why it succeeded, your gasket may be dried out, and you can pump as hard as you wish, and only wind up sucking air instead of water. But a very little bit of water on the gasket – a willingness, an intent, an expectation of success, whatever (it will differ by individual, of course) – and suddenly the water is flowing freely and you can scarcely believe you didn’t always know how to do it.
Well, that’s my experience, anyway.
It is many people’s experience, for people’s problems and possibilities are all different in detail, but similar in general. That’s one reason why about half the material we’ve given you over the years has concerned process rather than (or in addition to) specific content. What we tell you is nothing, next to what we hope to encourage from others.
Which is also why you don’t really care what we talk about: The example itself is the value.
Well, both. We could discuss the value of rare coins and it would touch on other things. That is why each individual’s approach is different and valuable: No two people make linkages in the same way, nor do their databases replicate one another.
And although you don’t specifically say so, I get that everybody is tempted to say, “This is only important to me; nobody else will care, so it can’t be important.”
Gee, what would give you that idea?
Very funny. Personal experience, obviously.
The fallacy of insignificance is closely tied to the fallacy of contingency. Things don’t happen for no reason; what is important to one person won’t be important to everybody, but it will be important to an unpredictable number, perhaps few, perhaps many. And the more personal the material, the more valuable. Ironically, the more personal, the greater the temptation to the person to disregard it as unimportant.
Hmm, which is why you have been encouraging me to do a strip-tease, all these years.
It wasn’t your natural inclination, and it also wasn’t totally repugnant to you. Quite a push-pull.
Which is what happens when you have sun in Leo, moon in Cancer; you love the spotlight and hate it.
A perfect position for an intermediary, is it not? What a coincidence that you should be living the life you lead. And, as always – for everybody, always, if we could only get you all to believe it – doing your work is your reward. Overcoming internal obstacles for the sake of making a contribution produces a freedom within yourself as well as without. How else could it be, since inner and outer are aspects of the one thing?
Well, I’ve been taking that on faith for many years now, and I’d say it has proved out.
You have been taking it on faith a little more as time went on. Initially your area of application was quite small: You recognized little correspondence between inner and outer worlds. You were hiding, in effect, and (by the same token; that is, necessarily) you were being buffeted by “uncaused” external disturbances. Your work life, your family life, your everyday life among the people you encountered, would have been quite different, quite smoother, if you had been then as you are now. But how can one expect to be, at the beginning of a voyage of exploration and discovery, as he will be (or anyway may be) at the end? So, don’t beat yourself up for not knowing the things you had to learn. Resolve, instead, to live what you know now, setting aside regret for the past.
That described my life, I guess. Started at one place, progressed through a succession of blunders and wrong choices (redeemed to some extent by good intent) and gradually expanded my area of internal freedom.
That could be anybody’s story. You all begin with your life’s problem set out in what you are. In the living of it, you change. That’s how it works, how it’s supposed to work, how it has to work. If you began and ended in the same place, what a wasted opportunity!
Thoreau said something like, Don’t call your life hard names, it’s better than you are.
A tremendous lot of wisdom there, if people can decipher the cipher. There was a man, you see, who did not have sun in Leo (as Carl Jung did, for example). Thoreau was Cancer, so was well hidden from the world even when he was proclaiming who he was as loudly as he could. Everybody’s life is different, but you have this in common: What you are is the puzzle you are to solve, or, say, is the erector set you have been given, to build something. How you address the puzzle, what you build, is up to you. We suggest merely that it won’t get you far if, instead of addressing the puzzle or using the pieces, you criticize the setup. Criticizing your life is not working it.
Did you really intend for us to talk about the movies?
It would have primed the pump, but wasn’t necessary. Mention them, anyway.
One was “The Imitation Game,” based on the life of Alan Turing. The other was “Operation Mincemeat,” centering on the true story of how the Allies deceived Hitler into thinking they would invade Greece instead of Sicily. Both well done and, as far as I can compare them to what I know of the back-story, accurate within the limits of dramatization.
And if you had to name a common theme?
Deception?
A little more. Focus.
The intersection of inner and outer, in Turing’s case. I suppose the same in the other movie too, really.
Your lives are always about you, your choices, the obstacles you do or don’t overcome, the feel of it as you live it. And equally they are about the world you inhabit, your effect on others who of course are also living lives with two centers. Nobody ever said 3D life is simple. But it is rewarding, and more so, the more you engage it.
Today’s theme?
“Priming the pump” might do.
Yes, I suppose, or maybe, “Communicating”?
That would do as well.
Our thanks as always.