Friday, June 24, 2022
6:40 a.m. The convergence of inner and outer becomes more evident, the more attention we pay to it. So, I am trying to plot a complicated story of inner and outer relationships centering on the events (and the meaning!) of Sept 11, 2001, and I find a series on Netflix called “Manhunt: Unabomber,” which addresses many of the themes at the heart of it. [A little internet research tells me that the series aired in 2017.] Ted Kaczynski had nothing to do with Sept. 11, of course, but apparently his life was warped if not destroyed by his being an unwitting subject of MK Ultra. And the issues of government-sponsored –
No, that isn’t the point. That is the rabbit-hole down which people on the left and on the right lose themselves. Blame is easy; demonizing individuals or groups is easy. Accepting an official narrative or adopting an alternative narrative is – well, if not always easy, let’s say not always very well avoided. The issue and the problem is deeper than that, and Kaczynski seems to have realized it. What he could not find is a way to express his insights in a way that could be heard. The thing to realize about the Unabomber is that his craziness and his sanity, his crimes and his attempted service, were interconnected so closely as to make it nearly impossible for anyone to separate them unless they could bring to his story great empathy as well as clear understanding. The makers of the series have come pretty close to doing that.
There’s another thing. It is always so much easier to see the problem than the possible solution. If you come to see that the industrial revolution has resulted in our losing our individual autonomy at an accelerated rate, if the results are altering the ecosystem, even destroying the earth (however, this is a big “if” containing several unproved assertions), that does not tell you what if anything can be done about it, because the industrial revolution isn’t going to be repealed. Blowing up people – even if you could find the people most responsible for doing the damage today – isn’t going to reverse anything. If anything, it will reduce individual autonomy, reduce anyone’s ability to resist the machine. Sept 11, 2001 ought to have taught that to anyone who didn’t already know it.
An interesting counterpoint to Kaczynski would be Noam Chomsky, probably as smart, certainly as insightful. Chomsky has been deliberately marginalized, because his insights were so acute. But his personal demons didn’t drive him to send bombs in the mail. Instead, he has done what he could, knowing that any effect he was having would only be marginal. That is, after all, what it means to be marginalized. Maybe they can’t shut you up, but they can muffle your voice.
Okay, guys, this is different from our usual format, but I didn’t have any sense that it was digression from our usual theme. So – you’re on.
If one’s theme is consciousness, and the nature of life, and life more abundantly, how could nay sincere discussion of any subject become a diversion? That is, provided that one does not lose sight of the theme. You could discuss the use of traffic cameras, or parking meters, or – oh, tarring streets, say – and there would be a connection with consciousness to be found, if your mind ran that way or if you had accustomed it to run that way. “As a man thinks, so is he,” in a different context. All your lives have a central theme, a preoccupation, or let’s call it a dye, that colors whatever it encounters. Find that theme, follow it, lead it, center on it, and your life will run clear (if not necessarily smooth). If you do not find it, your life may puzzle you, but it will still have a theme, and it will still align itself around the theme, but you may not discover what it was until you leave 3D – drop the body – and remember who you are in total.
Okay, so –
Well, you aren’t interested in writing one more book about victims and villains. Even in Dark Fire, you were unable to paint the adversaries as evil. And there’s your theme.
I have always had difficulty believing in people’s evil nature, though I can see clearly enough the evil we do, unconsciously or consciously.
It is worthwhile that people be reminded that a society that does dreadful things, and is sometimes steered by awful men, is still never black and white, except that seeing makes it so. The truth is always more complex than binary thinking paints it. You haven’t been remembering – until this moment – that we deliberately set you away from this kind of thinking.
I couldn’t tell you when it was, other than that it was sometime after I started the journal, in 1966, because I remember writing it down. It was well before I came into conscious contact with you – that is, with non-3D beings experienced as sort of separate from me – so it had to be well before 1987, say. That’s a 20-year window, not that the “when” matters.
No, usually the “when” of a thing doesn’t much matter, which is why less is “lost” in your journal than you sometimes think merely because you wouldn’t know how to find it. You know; that’s what you need.
It was a very definite thought, and of course in those days I assumed ownership of anything that crossed my mind. I don’t remember even what I was trying to analyze, but initially I came up with the usual “either/or” and I got this definite prompting to make the effort to find a third alternative, or a third factor, whatever it was. The point (at least, the thing that had a lasting effect) was this sudden non-rational conviction that anything could be resolved into at least three things, not merely two. That didn’t come out very clear; perhaps you can improve on my phrasing.
What happened is largely behind words, so is difficult for you to understand or express except in its observed effects. Basically, we liberated you from binary perception whenever you were alert enough, awake enough, conscious enough, to remember to see things as not binary but multiple. This vastly deepened your insight when you applied it. The analogy to Ted Kaczynski is that your own demons – robots, complexes, scars, biases – often enough prevented you from being conscious enough to see straight.
Well, it will sound like a joke to others, perhaps, but I always knew I had enough rage to snap sometime. Just as I avoided liquor and drugs for fear of becoming dependent (another tendency I sensed), so I would never had had a handgun, for I could never have trusted myself not to have had the one moment’s loss of control that is all that is required.
I was fortunate not to be isolated as Ted Kaczynski was. Unlike him, I had family and always at least a friend or two. Plus, I was not genius IQ, and although I couldn’t tell you why, that helped too.
You are forgetting your major safety valve, call it, or let’s say your infallible protector.
Yes, this seems to be the day for remembering things. I read a science-fiction story – way back in the days when I read science-fiction stories – and in fact I’ll bet I still have that issue of Analog, from the early 1960s. [May, 1961. The story is “Identification,” by Christopher Anvil.] It had a story whose point was that nobody could do evil deliberately if they felt exactly what their victims would feel. That didn’t change anything, but it did show me what I had already felt. I couldn’t even get in a fistfight, because I could imagine too vividly what the other guy would feel if I hit him. This didn’t save me from fistfights, but it sure changed my consciousness.
Otherwise you, living so much in your head, might have found it even harder to believe in the reality of other people.
Family and asthma and a sense of what the other person would feel, and a bias away from dualistic thinking. Strange combination.
Kaczynski didn’t have any of that, and, as you intuited, he was additionally hampered by a genius-level IQ, which made his feelings comparatively opaque to him, reducing his control. Clearly, you cannot consciously control what you cannot bring into consciousness in the first place.
We’re run through an hour, but it isn’t clear to me what today’s theme has been.
Call it “Consciousness and Choice (1).” Assuming we continue as we expect we will, the title will clarify as we go along.
Very well, and, as always, you have our thanks for your efforts to clarify our lives.
It can only be done among the willing. Since it is a process satisfying to us as well, we return the thanks, as we always do tacitly, and sometimes do explicitly, as now.
ac