Month: June 2022

Poking around my notes, I found this from 16 years ago, which seems worth sending around. This will have to do, in place of a new conversation today. I note that I began it by saying, “Not being particularly fond of the idea of being laughed at, I still don’t see any choice but to send this out, as either one tells the truth about one’s experiences, or one does not. But this process sure leaves me feeling naked.” I’ve thickened my skin, since then.

“Mr. Bowers” refers to Claude Bowers, author of The Tragic Era.

Thursday March 9, 2006

9 a.m. All right, Mr. Bowers. I was thinking about your point of view – being now within a couple of chapters of the end – and I still don’t entirely agree with you. For instance, I think some form of compensation was owed slaves and slave-owner alike, though I can see why Unionists would ask bitterly why they should give any of their tax money to pay the families who had caused the rebellion and the war. You know Emerson’s response to a proposal that the slave owners should be compensated. He agreed:

But who is the owner? The slave is owner

And ever was. Pay him.

Well, I went to look it up but I couldn’t find it. Something close to that anyway. It seems to me appropriate to take the lands of the slaveholders and divide them among their slaves – not just their slaves, but taking the total pool, dividing it among the total pool of ex-slave families. It would have been a horrible mess to untangle, but worse than what resulted? And the shareowners need not have been left with nothing. In fact, perhaps some form or compensated emancipation could have compulsorily bought the land – thus giving the slave owners something for the capital in slaves they were losing – and giving homesteads to the black families out of that land. If we could give homesteads to white immigrants, why not to black ex-slaves some of whose ancestors had been there two hundred years? I think that your denying any such adjustment is merely taking one side of an argument and ignoring the other.

Ah, I looked it up, courtesy of Google –

Pay ransom to the owner

And fill the bag to the brim.

Who is the owner? The slave is owner,

And ever was. Pay him.

This from Boston Hymn, recited on Emancipation Day, Jan 1, 1863.

(9:40) Hard to really get going this morning. All right, shoot.

You can see from your emails [received] that the material is meeting response. This ought to suggest to you that a significant part of your national story is going untold. That is, if any one point of view is systematically suppressed for whatever reason, tensions build up – for the unconscious knows and the conscious does not, and it is a great drain of energy to maintain a state of not-knowing if you once invest in so doing. This is a major source of much of the craziness in your politics and public life. It is particularly disruptive when not one stream but many are being suppressed, for this means that different rivers of consciousness – call it that for the moment – suppress different parts while others elevate precisely those parts (suppressing others that they themselves do not wish to see). Hence your rivers of consciousness – that is, your factions, your ideologies – do not describe the same world, and meaningful exchange and compromise become ever less possible.

In your time this has built up to the explosion point. Historically what would happen now is the physical suppression of any one side of the argument.

Let me back-track and say it again. This is not wasted effort because, having read what I just wrote (you just wrote, whatever) the reader will be more able to follow me.

In the absence of full consciousness, what is suppressed sets up an invisible tension with the consciousness that suppresses it.

Oh my God! Oh my God, I can feel the difference. Dr. Jung, is it really you? And if so, how could I ever get anyone to believe it? This just gets harder.

It is not up to you to get anyone to believe. That is a fallacy that you should get out of your make-up. People believe because they have a need to believe; because the material for belief meets an ability to receive the material. It is only egotism that believes that it can convince. You may present the material more effectively, and so make it easier for people to align their mental structures, but you cannot by any verbal manipulation bring anyone to believe anything. The proper attitude for anyone who tries to bring messages forth into the world is humility, for the more transparent a medium your ego-consciousness provides, the less distortion there will be in the material as brought forth.

But to return to what I was saying, which people will judge on its own merits, not because it purportedly came from the shade of C.G. Jung! –

You know that I prefer that people formulate ideas in symbolic rather than logical terms. Logic automatically forces its opposite tenets into the unconscious. In other words, the clearer the statement, the more that is at least implicitly denied or omitted! And this sets up a tension, itself usually unsuspected or attributed to other causes. Thus, “thou shalt not kill.” A clear directive – and the mind thinks, “but what of the following situations?” and if the person attached to that mind is pious, perhaps shock at the idea of questioning God’s word sends the questions immediately into psychological no-man’s-land, you see. That person then becomes fanatical on the subject, because he or she cannot afford to doubt, or even to think. And whatever – or whoever, more to the point – attempts to force the logical contradictions or qualifications into the consciousness of another will be seen as a threat, as an attacker. Yes? And here is one key to the vehemence of your contemporary politics, for more and more unacceptable truths have been roughly shoved into people’s basements, and the doors locked and barred – but the doors are bulging outward, and the owner of the house lives in fear that the catch will let go.

If people were accustomed to speaking and hearing in symbols, the logical precision would suffer severely – which would be a good thing! – and more importantly the tension of the unexpressed would ease. Shared symbols help knit and re-knit the raveled sleeve of national life. I do not mean elephants and donkeys! And I do not mean to imply that symbols ought to be used as clubs to beat people with. The political use of your flag as a symbol of like-minded partisans means that it ceases to be the symbol of the nation in its entirety. This confers an additional legitimacy upon those who thus appropriate it, but it is an illegitimate legitimacy, if you will pardon the expression, and can only be a short-term advantage and a long-term loss. Whatever is appropriated by the few – or even the many – is automatically lost as a symbol of all. Surely this is obvious once stated.

So where are your symbols of wholeness, of completion? You used to speak of the melting pot and that was a symbol that expressed more than you logically intended, for – as a symbol – it included the unintended and unwanted and unnoticed effects as fully as the desired ones. Hence its usefulness. The mistake in your politics was to discard that symbol precisely when the disadvantages to that approach were surfacing. That is when its usefulness to you could have been greatest, as expressing not so much what you wanted, or wanted to believe, as what you actually had done, and were doing. If you will give even two minutes’ thought to the melting pot as a symbol you will see this.

Now to the central point of this. Partial minds do not complete or correct other partial minds. Only wholeness heals. That is what wholeness means! Wholeness is health, and it is holy as well. Therefore to heal your politics you must not think of throwing out one baby so as to restore the baby that was thrown out previously. Perhaps it is not so good an idea to throw out the bathwater!

You know that the Buddha is said to have said, “when you make a distinction, you make an error.” Well, how is one to make practical use of that very true insight? For after all we must make distinctions. We cannot live as cows in a field, accepting what comes and making no distinctions. It is not the place of people in bodies to be passive, and so – how live without error when one cannot live without making distinctions? I know only one way – to live making errors because one cannot avoid doing do but remaining aware that one’s distinctions are errors. Not a popular political platform! But it leads to less cocksure certainty, less intolerance, less impatience, less rejection of others – and therefore, you will find, less rejection by others. Surely all these are beneficial effects of a small change in attitude?

Now, if you must persist in thinking yourself right and others wrong, well, life has uses for that kind of certainty. It will not make your life easier but perhaps it is your fate. If so, perhaps you can remember that your adversary is still a part of the human family, that although he may have many disagreeable and even distressing personality traits, he is as valuable to All as you or anyone else – no less, no more. Perhaps without too much discomfort you can remind yourself – that is, you can hold in the back of your mind, at least – that you may be wrong; that you may be seeing incompletely; that your values may be in conflict with other values equally valid and even, potentially equally important to you.

So you say, “that being so, how can we act at all? How can we stand up for the values we cherish? How can we resist evil?” And the answer to that question or set of questions lies in the final formulation. When Jesus said “resist not evil,” do you think he was advocating surrender to evil? Was he perhaps ill-informed of the nature of the Romans, let alone his own people? No, as one would expect, his psychology was entirely sound.

Your New Age rhetoric often says “don’t give energy to it,” which is fine as far as it goes. However it is a capital mistake to attempt to define away evil, to sweep it into non-existence by a definition. Perhaps in the widest view of things there is no absolute evil – or perhaps there is! You should leave open the possibility, you know – but in any case from the point of view of anyone in a body some things are good and others not. How else can it be? It is one thing to point out that what is evil to one may not be evil when seen in the larger view – it is quite another to say that evil as such does not exist. What you value sets up for you what you see as evil. Regardless whether it is absolute evil, for you it is evil. It is good to remember that your partial view is not everything, for much evil comes into the world as a direct result of fighting evil. But it is not therefore desirable that one cease to fight evil.

Poverty is evil, suffering is evil, and inflicting them on others is particularly evil. And yet – poverty doesn’t have to be experienced as evil, and suffering can be transformational, and sometimes they are inflicted as a side-effect of a perceived necessity. So – does it not as always fall back to the question of judgment and perception? But be sure to put perception before judgment, not after!

Perhaps it would be as well to stress again the fact that “fighting evil” is a chief entry point for evil. In fighting Hitler you fire-bombed Dresden and killed 300,000 helpless men, women and children. The evil perhaps consists less in the act than in the fact that war so transformed people that decent men could make that decision and not see it as evil.

“Resist not evil” has other aspects. In resisting you are planting your feet. Is that good for mobility? First must come understanding, so that the times when one must plant one’s feet are reduced to the minimum! Otherwise you spend your life in an attitude of attack and therefore of defense. This is not remotely a healthy attitude.

If you wish to overcome evil, you must absorb it and transform it. And this can only come from extension not from contraction, surely. That is, from love, not from rejection or hatred.

These truths are hard for you to hear, I know that. Everyone has grievances, and fears. But the more you stoke the boilers, the hotter it gets, and the greater the danger that the regulator will fail – and then you have an explosion! It does no good to then say, “that isn’t what I wanted to do, I was concentrating on building up steam for good purposes.” Explosions do not inquire closely into motives.

The steam is caused by the suppression of contradiction, by the logical attempt to set your own values and ideas as absolutes – which they can never be. The internal steam-pressure will blow your boilers unless you begin deliberately to reduce that pressure – by bringing more of that content into consciousness.

In practice this means opening dialogues with those who oppose your views. Not as shouting matches, not as debates, not as revenge or the seeking of revenge, above all. The constructive approach is to seek the common ground – to express from each side the suppressed values in a safe and controlled process – that is, surrounded by love rather than fear. And this may be done more practically with symbols – shared symbols – than with any amount of logical argument. You may be absolutely right – what use is that, if the boiler explodes? And – you may not have been entirely right, you may have been only partially right, and your own denial may have been stoking the fire. I would say to you, it is very likely!

I was quoted in my old age as saying that the world might hold together if enough people would do the work they needed to do on themselves. It was not understood. I trust that you understand it a bit better now.

Yes. Thank you. An honor, you know. I assume that the headache I have been writing this through, this past hour, is merely the result of running higher-voltage energy, so to speak. Well worth it.

Well, you know, all skills require practice – the practice smooths the way and future practices go farther.

Yes. Thank you.

(11a.m.)

 

Monday, June 20, 2022

6:30 a.m. A lot of thought and musing overnight on the themes of the novel. Have nearly completed annotating my three published Chiari novels, but then there is so much unpublished material to go through for ideas and reminders, and a lot of notes made previously. A good lot of work ahead. Six inches of notes down, God knows how many more to go.

I see Patrick Hemingway has a book of letters from his father. I wish I could get Papa’s Trial to him, he might like it. But I guess that won’t happen.

I started to watch a Netflix documentary series on World War II (that uses colorized film footage), and it is remarkable to me – as always – that no matter how well you think you know a subject, there is always some new fact that can revolutionize your thinking about it. Not “new” as in “newly discovered,” either. New, as in “”I’ve never read that anywhere,” in 60 years of reading about the war. I guess it’s true what the guys say, that we’ll never be bored, will never get to where we know it all, even with our expanded abilities in the non-3D

A theme, here? Or shall I go back to making notes from Dark Fire?

It may not be the best use of your time, to describe what you just learned. We can go into the process of learning, if you wish.

Things you haven’t told us?

There is always more day to dawn.

Go ahead, then, and we’ll see.

What is learning but associating? And what is associating but ordering things, making a society out of a collection of things? In so doing, you create, no less than assort.

I think you mean, the act of finding patterns and relationships is more creative than passive.

Let’s say, it is receptive first, then active, then again receptive in the face of the new aspect of things that your previous selection and sorting has revealed, and on and on. The deeper you look, the more you see. Thus you have superficial books and thorough ones and penetrating ones, and philosophical ones, and even metaphysical ones, all on the same subject, all integrally connected to how much time, attention, thought, sorting, looking again, more research, etc., etc., goes into it.

I think of my friend Jim’s researching casualty rates among bomber crews in World War II. I was astonished to learn that in important ways, the casualty rates weren’t ever collected, digested, and published.

And your own life experience – which was neither military nor particularly executive – tells you why.

Certainly. No important constituency ever demanded to know, and several important constituencies probably demanded that we not know. I can’t imagine Bomber Harris or Curt LeMay welcoming a real understanding of the costs.

So that is an immediate superficial reaction. (We do not say it is right or wrong. We intend to illustrate a process.) Look at it again, changing points of view, sticking to what you know, second-hand, from your years of reading histories, memoirs, and biographies.

I don’t know if there is consensus even yet over the effectiveness of the air war in Europe. You’d have to divide it into strategic and tactical.

Do so.

There can’t be much argument that the tactical effects were not devastatingly effective. It seems clear that air attacks, along with widespread sabotage on the ground, destroyed the German ability to deliver a counter-attack after D-Day. Eisenhower ordered the systematic destruction of rail stations throughout northern France, and that sill seems clearly warranted and clearly effective. Similarly, when the skies cleared in December, 1944, the Battle of the Bulge was lost by the Germans at least in large part because they couldn’t win on the ground against Allied control of the air. Merely two examples of the critical effectiveness of air power against troops, ships, and infrastructure.

But.

But Harris and LeMay set out to destroy German cities to win the war from the air, imagining that ground troops would mostly be needed for occupation, not conquest. They had some pipe-dream of an idea that the German people would rise up against their government, once misery reached a certain level. You know, nothing much, just overthrow the Nazis one household at a time.

But.

But Albert Speer’s memoirs, written after he finished his imprisonment in Spandau after the war, pointed out that at one point our bombardment nearly crippled ball-bearing production, which might have brought industrial movement to a standstill.

But.

But there are ways and there are ways. Nobody started off the war inflicting massive random destruction on enemy cities.

No, think that through.

You’re right. Hitler did, deliberately. He destroyed Rotterdam quite cold-bloodedly, to paralyze the Dutch. (Air destruction in Poland, earlier, may have been the same thing, I just don’t know one way or the other.) Still, the West wouldn’t have deliberately set out to flatten entire cities, not in 1939, not in 1940. But after the Blitz tried to do just that to London, attitudes hardened. One thing led to another, and ultimately you had Hamburg, and Dresden, and, in the Pacific, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

So was the bombing campaign unnecessary?

There are other elements involved. With the Germans in control of the whole continent for four years, air power was about all the Allies could apply directly. Until the Allies were ready to reinvade Europe, their ground and naval forces could be used only peripherally: North Africa, Sicily, Italy. For all that time, only the air offered promise of hurting them, and besides, it was crucial that the Allies have air superiority at least over France if they were to invade. Continuous air warfare was designed to provide that superiority and keep it.

But.

But as Jim points out, the campaign of bombing was very expensive in air crews and airframes. Even so many decades later, it is not widely understood how expensive. And in the absence of the facts and of the context for the facts, how can anybody make informed judgments?

This is different from armchair quarterbacking, how?

I’d say it is mostly a difference in intent. The armchair quarterback says, “Here’s what they should have done.” The researcher says, “Here’s what the facts are.” The two can overlap, but there is a difference.

So you could look at the same facts and draw quite different conclusions, depending upon the context you saw them in – a context largely invisible to you.

That’s very interesting.

Well, are you likely to be aware of all the associations you make beneath the level of consciousness? One person’s view of the war (for example) will be very different from another’s, partly because each will have his own personal associations that amount to a bias. We don’t use the word “bias” in a pejorative sense, merely as a fact of life. The way you see the world is not objective, because it cannot be. It is always subjective, with you in the center of the web. Thus, each one has a bias (many biases, actually, but they interrelate to produce one bias in effect).

Surely some viewpoints are more informed than others.

Certainly, but informed in one area may mean ignorant in another area, so the net effect is less predictable than you might suppose. Otherwise Harris and LeMay would have had unexceptional judgment, for they surely were well-informed.

I hadn’t thought of it that way, but that is one hazard of expertise, isn’t it?

Nobody knows everything. Nobody is wise about everything. Nobody is the last word on anything. But after all, that’s a hopeful thing, is it not? Leaves room for the rest of you.

And here I was figuring to be the expert, or at least a consort of experts.

We’re smiling too. Settle for what you have, a team of scholars.

If not comedians. Today’s theme?

“Context”?

Perhaps. Our thanks as always.

 

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.

 

Saturday, June 18, 2022

6:05 a.m. I had a night of dreams about Sept 11^th, my unconscious mind playing with themes for the novel, as best I can tell. But I woke up thinking – as I had thought yesterday – how June 18, Waterloo Day, is mostly forgotten after 207 years, but it shaped our world in ways that are only now, perhaps, beginning to wear off.

Napoleon’s 25 years of warfare destroyed what was left of the medieval mind-set in Europe, but it was the triumph of the English that replaced what had been (feudalism with its bad and good aspects) with what would be: capitalism, with all its bad and good aspects. But deeper than that, a change more profound than capitalism, was the mindset that made capitalism possible, a combination of materialism and dogma that removed the divine from the affairs of humans.

We tend to forget, America’s origins were entirely in the medieval world. Not only Spanish and Portuguese America, but French, Dutch and English too. By the time of Waterloo, France, Spain and Portugal had been in the New World for 300 years. Even the Johnny-come-lately English had been here 200. That is a good deal of time, when a generation meant maybe 30 or 40 years on average. If you look at American history particularly, you’ll see a radical change of assumptions and ambitions, roughly timed to the death of Washington, just before 1800. Washington’s generation considered itself enlightened, secular, practical, forward-looking as it compared itself to its fathers. But Jefferson’s, say – and Jefferson wasn’t really of another generation chronologically,  being only 11 years younger than Washington – was very different in kind. The world had very different fish to fry in the years following Waterloo, and it is only in our time that we are realizing that the smell of burning fish may have something to do with our not having realigned our thoughts and values.

We don’t feel comfortable in the world we were raised in; we don’t want to return to the medieval world even if we could, which we can’t, so (as usual) we find ourselves exploring, partly by desire, partly perforce. But it is clear to me that it is as the guys have said, a new age takes from previous ages some things that have been believed and some that have been discarded, and comes up with a new way of existing that would have seemed chaotic and half-superstitious to people of the age that died out. Thus, moving into the next age is always a stretch, always somewhat uncomfortable.

It’s a sense I often get, guys – that your mental world and ours touch at places but are not nearly identical. I suppose to you these conversations are like it would be for me to talk to a man of the middle ages. And as I write that, I feel you laughing. Yes, I get it: That’s what I have been doing, as when I interact with Bertram, for instance.

Anyone in 3D is a time machine, because you all extend beyond your 3D bounds by way of the invisible strands from so many associated “past lives.”

We don’t tend to think of ourselves that way, of course. We think of ourselves as more unitary than we really are.

That is one of the mental bonds we have been working to free you from. Every wrong self-definition tends to limit your scope.

What are the practical effects of us being time-machines without knowing it?

That is actually two questions, and we will answer them that way: how you are, and how you are, not knowing.

I see that. Consider them asked.

The practical effect of your being time-machines is that you have automatic access to other ways of experiencing life; other codes of conduct; other sets of values. The effect of your not knowing it – of your not thinking of yourselves this way – is that you do not have that ability under control. Existing only in your unconscious, it controls you when it manifests. Make it conscious, and you control it. This is nothing new.

Can you give us an example of how we might live if we did have the time-linking under our control?

Perhaps you should refocus. That phrasing indicates a misunderstanding of what we are saying.

Okay. Maximum focus, receptivity, clarity, presence.

It isn’t exactly a function; it’s more like an awareness. That is, it isn’t a tool to be employed, so much as a means of perception to be taken advantage of. A nuance, but an important nuance. We are talking about not a skill but a way of being. You don’t learn to connect to other times, you learn to recognize the connection that already exists.

This somewhat explains differences between us [in 3D], doesn’t it.

One source of differences, yes. You each connect to different combinations of souls. Therefore you are each naturally, instinctively, more in sympathy with some ways of experiencing the 3D world than with other ways. It is one way in which everybody differs from everybody else. And of course, conversely, those who share connections to a given worldview will feel that shared understanding. Really, this – like most things we can tell you – is only what you already know but think of in other categories.

Well, I’m sure Napoleon and Wellington are glad to be remembered.

You are jesting, but it is true enough. Attention from the 3D is like a flash of light to the non-3D, because your attention, though brief and narrow, is concentrated. That’s one reason to think of your dead, to give them a little light, a little extra energy. Life is more complicated than that, but that is one way to think of it, as if we were all separate even while all being connected.

To answer your question (that you half forgot you asked), if you learn to recognize input from other lives, you see more clearly. You know better who you are, including – importantly – what pulls your strings unconsciously.

In effect, we learn how to disconnect some buttons?

That’s one way to look at it, yes: Your automatic reactions come more under your control. But another way is to think of all those other experiences in how to be (for that is what a life is, is it not? Experience in how to be?) as additions to your road maps. You get the benefit of vicarious experience, in a way. You know without having to retrace those steps in this lifetime.

A retracing that would be impossible anyway, I suppose.

Reality is not a theme-park. You live where you live, nowhere else – except in your mind, which is the point.

Today’s theme: “Time machines”?

Could be that. “Increased access across time” might work, too.

All right, our thanks as always. See you elsewhen.

You might mention your stray thought.

It came to me Thursday, that I could have a dying man saying, “Well, so long. As they say in spy movies, I’ll see you on the other side.” It would indicate a matter-of-fact attitude that’s pretty foreign to a civilization that thinks 3D is obviously real and everything else is conjectural at best.

And that thought is an example of a connection across time: Not transferred thoughts, but transferred attitudes, feelings, experiences.

I see. Okay. Till next time, then.

Friday, June 17, 2022

7 a.m. It is always a problem. When I start a project, I throw myself into it – often at an unsustainable rate, but anyway using up a lot of horsepower – and the temptation is to lose sight of myself, looking instead outwardly at the project. This is a particularly tempting diversion, in that whatever I am writing will seem to be more or less the same thing as being aware of myself here, now. So, Monday’s half session, answering Bob Paddock’s questions, is the last time I’ve tried for a regular session for others to overhear, so to speak. Instead, it has been directed to the practical aspects of writing my final novel. But in my old age I am learning balance, so let’s see where we go.

I don’t see other questions queued up, though it is possible I missed one. In the absence of questions, do you splendid gentlemen have something on your non-physical minds?

Good that you remembered balance. It is another variant of a problem you have always had to deal with: structure v. lack of structure. Easier for you to fill in a structure, yet you often feel constricted and confined by the very structure you work in.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

How would your lives look if you all began saying, instead, “Blessed if you do, blessed if you don’t”?

Hmm, like when you said we never say a thing is “Too bad to be true.”

Exactly. Why expect the down side all the time? What you concentrate on, you magnetize yourself to, and soon it appears as if – and we mean “as if” – only the down side is real. Have you ever seen a roll of duct tape that had only one side, either the sticky side or the non-sticky side? Exactly what could you do with it? Yes, two-sided sticky might have specific uses, but you get the idea. Don’t nitpick the metaphor.

“Please don’t bite my finger, look where I’m pointing.”

Yes. So, looking at your push-pull around structure – and of course not dreaming that nobody else in the world has the same problem – a few words.

What is 3D life itself, if not a confining structure? The existence of an ever-moving present moment, the perception of separation by time and separation by space, the very limited mental world you are constrained to remain within: What is it but a box? So of course you sometimes find it confining. That’s what it was created to do, to confine your consciousness into a (relatively) tiny point, to bring you to choose, moment by moment, in a way you would never do (really, could never do) in the absence of such confinement. However, it’s only temporary. As you were born into it, so you will be reborn out of it. If you can keep in mind that it is only temporary, you will find it easier to remember that your task, your joy, your reason for being, is to be here, now, wherever and whenever you find yourself.

Some people call it the Earth School, some call it boot camp. I’m not particularly fond of either analogy.

Life is what it appears to be. This goes for everybody. Since everybody has a different idea of how it seems, everybody experiences life differently. Surely this is obvious. Same life, different perceptions. Only, you could  as easily say, different perceptions lead to your experiencing a different subset of life, hence, in effect, a different life. So, if you insist on saying a good thing is “too good to be true,” what does that do to your chances of leading a magical life? If you say “damned if you do or don’t,” how does that help you choose joyously or even neutrally? How does it help you attain life more abundantly?

And yes, I get it: Invert those statements and we get a very hopeful result. I will attest, anyway, that it has been true for me. My life for many decades was hard. I didn’t realize how I was living in such a way as to make it hard. It just seemed like I was stuck in a life and a world where I did not belong, did not know the ground rules that everybody else seemed to know. Until that message in Gateway, I really did experience myself as being alone.

You would have said, in those days, that you were a victim of your surroundings and your circumstances and the people around you, maybe.

Yes, overlooking one small environmental factor that just might have had something to do with it: Namely me, as Daisy Mae used to say.

Not that this is particularly unusual. Given that the whole point of 3D is to restrict your consciousness to one point, to concentrate you, let’s say – such feelings of aloneness, lostness, despair, unfocused anger, tedium, etc., etc., are frequent concomitants of the situation. Fortunately nothing around you has to change, only something within you. And that isn’t so much a change as a decision.

Live in faith that all is well despite appearances.

That’s one way. Another, for those who can’t get there from where they are, is to say, “This is what I am, these are the values I uphold, this is what I wish to become.” Only, it is better if they don’t try to apply their values to someone else’s life. You all work out your own salvation, as the Buddhists say. That’s your task and it is your freedom, for no one else can take it from you.

Now, we know that you are tempted to cut this short, but we would rather you said a word or two about the novel, though that is not your practice. It ties in closely to what we’re saying here.

It’s usually dangerous to talk about what you’re going to write; it can bleed the steam right out of it.

You’ll know how much to say or not say.

It is a sequel not to one novel or even two, but three. Messenger told of George Chiari’s 17 years in Tibet after his U-2 flamed out in 1962. Babe in the Woods told of George’s brother Angelo doing an Open Door program at the C.T. Merriman Institute in 1995. Dark Fire told of George and Angelo working together with C.T. and others to save the CTMI from government interference and possible destruction. This fourth book, that I am thinking about as The Stone and the Stream, will center on the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, as it affects both individual and societal life. That’s about as much as I care to say at the moment. I spent the past three days rereading the three books, making notes on the characters, themes, foreshadowings, and events. When I get through doing that, there is all the material I have been gathering, brooding over, forgetting, remembering, to try to bring into note form. When I do all that, then I can begin to find the plot. I don’t expect to be finished in the next few minutes.

There is one more thing we would have you mention, central to all.

First Life.

Yes.

C.T. realized, at the end of Dark Fire, that his life’s work had gotten diverted from his insight during the NDE that led to the creation of the institute (via his best-selling book Extraordinary Potential). It wasn’t merely that we are more than our 3D, it was that this 3D life is the preliminary to life; it is the initial shaping, by choices made, of a structure that lives forever. I read somewhere that the Egyptians referred to 3D life as First Life. And that’s why they kept their attention on the life that would follow. As far as I can see, we have entirely misunderstood them.

Holding that concept in mind will reconcile many seeming oppositions and contradictions.

Today’s theme, then?

“Shaping life by choosing”?

Possibly. Our thanks as always, for this and for all of this.

 

Monday, June 13, 2022

6:10 a.m. I see I have several related questions from Bob Paddock. I edited it down a little; let’s look at the questions posed, which I number (at your suggestion, probably).

• [Bob Paddock:

[One Saturday in 2004 Karen and I were going to cook something on the grill.  She was already in the kitchen. I was about to walk into the kitchen from the dining room. My precognition told me that a plate was going to fall out of the cupboard and break. Just as I was about to warn Karen, behind my right shoulder was a disembodied voice that said, very sternly: “No!  She needs the lesson!” I said nothing. The plate broke and that event led to her needing the Fluoroquinolone antibiotics Levaquin that caused systemic tendonitis. This event was a significant contributor to her suicide in 2013.

[So the perplexing and troubling questions:

• ‘Someone’ knew what I was about to verbalize, and more importantly they knew the future consequences of me doing it. What is this about???
• In 2014 Karen said via Winter, with you present, “I played my part well”. I’m so glad. :-/ Now what part am I to play?
• Who is writing these scripts of this ‘play’??
• a) Why did I not find it odd and troubling that there was a disembodied voice telling me what to do, and b) why don’t I hear from it more often?

[Frank/TGU said on April 17^th” “Psychological, physical, whatever, life’s pain can reach overwhelming levels while other people’s lives appear charmed. Does this show that the world is unfair in reality rather than merely in appearance? Or does it suggest that – as we keep saying – you never have the data to judge?”]

We’ll begin not with one of the questions, but with the final implied question embedded in our prior, rhetorical, question.

Perhaps the best way to respond is to say that both halves of the rhetorical question are true, each in its own sphere. The world is unfair, if seen as if it were absolute and isolated. The world is not unfair – can’t be unfair – when seen as part of an unbroken whole. How one perceives its fairness or unfairness is a sure indicator of the standpoint of the person judging. Once you realize truly the way things are, you cease thinking that you are more moral than God (so to speak), more intelligent than the universe. We would add that if people whose life experience is as painful as Bob’s can accept the wider viewpoint, there is little use for others in easier circumstances to paint themselves or others as victims.

Now, question 4, which is actually 4 (a) and 4 (b). We will speak as if to Bob directly, others overhearing.

1. You didn’t find it odd or troubling because a part o you knew what you were there to do, and knew why something inexplicable to your conscious mind would help you as well as Karen to move to what you would become. After so dramatic an incident, you would hardly be able to ignore your other precognitive experiences. That is, here was something you couldn’t put in a box and tuck away.
2. But would you really want to have disembodied voices telling you what to do? As an emergency alarm, fine. As a daily or even yearly occurrence? Not so fine.

This answers (1), in part. The larger part of you that we often call the non-3D component knows your life and its various choice-points. (It doesn’t have to view your life past to present to future, as is the sensory default.) Knowing it “in advance” (from a 3D point of view) is not the same as creating it, or forcing it. If you set down a ball and it rolls downhill, you may know it will roll downhill, but it isn’t as if it would roll uphill except for your intervention. This is not a difficult distinction, but it is easily overlooked or misunderstood.

In this one event, unusually, your higher knowing intervened; said “no,” and you trusted, even if later you doubted or regretted or bitterly accused.

You know the answer to your second question, because you are living it. You wrote about the experience, in an attempt to awaken the medical community and the public to the dangers. Well done. You continue to live out your commitment. Only, remember, it is your choice. You can rachet your involvement upward or downward, and either way, there is no blame.

As to (3). We have explained the situation any times. Instead of seeing it as scripted, it is more productive, freer, and more accurate, to see it as improv arising from the situation and the characters in the situation, and how they proceed. It is your life, to make of as you please. Bear in mind as a rule of thumb (or as an act of faith) that nobody gets away with anything, and nobody gets short-changed, all in all, despite appearances.

Our thanks. Short session, but I have other things to do, as you know. What would you call today’s?

“Precognition and fate,” perhaps.

Yes, not bad.