Wednesday, July 27, 2022
6:20 a.m. Gentlemen, words of wisdom?
You have reread your communications from January through June, and in a few days you can have caught up and can reach back a few months – all last year, say – and continue in that way as long as you wish. You are pretty effortlessly accumulating notes on the practicalities of communicating in this fashion, merely by collecting remarks we have thrown in as asides. If you edit them into a coherent body of tips, you will have accomplished something that people will find useful and perhaps entertaining, without much effort, relatively speaking.
So I should stop worrying about disinterring stuff.
Well, your example will show others how to do it, depending upon the subject they find of interest. Every person would group things differently, so they would each come up with something unique.
Ideally, we’d put it all on the web as one massive file, so people could do a search.
If that would work, you could do it for yourself. That would be a false efficiency.
Today’s theme, I take it?
It may be; let’s find out. Or maybe we say a few words and it runs into the sand.
A sus ordenes.
In re-reading your printed conversations, you had in mind to find anything touching upon practical aspects of communicating 3D to non-3D, and this is happening. But other things are happening in the process, you being about half aware of them. Speaking of half-aware, your switches? This will come across easier if you are more present.
Okay. Setting my intent for maximum focus, receptivity, clarity, presence. Go ahead.
There is a right way and at least one wrong way to do anything. The right way will confer unexpected benefits, the wrong ways will bring with them friction, slippage, resistance, incomprehension. You know this, as a practical matter: It shows up in your lives in anything you do.
Sure. If we’re loving what we’re doing, it goes smoothly. We tend to lose track of time. We are right there, and it is a pleasure.
And if you do a thing under coercion (even if it is your own imposed coercion), all sorts of unpleasant and undesirable side-effects manifest. Plus, you don’t do as good a job. Even carrying stone in a wheelbarrow can be done a right way or a wrong way, and the attitude you bring to it will manifest. How could it not? We repeat: Inner and outer worlds are the same thing. So how could you have concord in one and discord in the other?
I’d have to think about it, but I’d say that happens sometimes.
No, that’s appearance. You may be more aware of one and less aware of the other, and so you don’t see it accurately.
All right, I’ll tentatively give you that.
So, specifically, if you are re-reading so much material and allow yourself to be oppressed by the sheer weight of millions of words to be re-read, you are going to tend to press, to try to get through it faster, to skim, and scan, and not give anything you read time to sink in.
Millions? Well, let’s see, just for my own amusement. Let’s say I talk to you 250 times a year, for 25 years, and let’s say we get 1200 words per session. Holy cow, that’s seven million words. Way more than I thought it would come to.
So now you are faced with the task (self-imposed, but still, a task) of re-reading seven million words, to see what’s there. How do you respond? With overwhelm? With exhilaration? With a sort of grim determination? With despair?
I get the point: The situation doesn’t change. The variable is the attitude I bring to it.
Of course. But that isn’t really the point we’re angling toward. We wish to point you toward an awareness of side-effects you haven’t really considered. And, even those you have considered, others may not have considered in terms of their own tasks, self-imposed or otherwise.
(I just detoured to check my math, but it still comes to 250 days x 1200 words = 300,000 words per year, or six million in 20 years, 7,500,000 in 25 years. It’s still a staggering figure, probably a little undercounted, if anything. No wonder it’s so intimidating a prospect, re-reading it all! Thoreau’s 24 years of saved journals came to a couple of million words, and that’s a lot of words to go through; I’ve only done it once.)
Okay, side-effects?
What is the biggest defining condition of 3D existence? Note, we don’t say “obstacle” or “drawback.” Like anything, it may be seen in positive or negative context.
I know what you’re getting at. It is the separation of the one present moment from all the rest of our lives past or future. Because of that, we can’t experience our lives as all one thing, but more as now v. all other moments.
Hence, your need for reminders. Of course not just you as one person; you as, all of you.
So my re-reading past journal entries would serve as reminder of who I have been, and rereading past conversations would remind me of who we have been, in relation to one another, quite as much as what we have been talking about.
Certainly. If you were to go through your 145 journals since age 20 concentrating on any one subject, they could serve as a thread along which you string beads of memory. Only, what you concentrate on tends to take on exaggerated importance, by leading you to overlook other aspects that may be integrally connected to the thing you have your eyes on.
Isn’t that somewhat circular? I’d be concentrating on something because it interested me. Why did it interest me in the first place?
That is the nature of feedback loops, yes. What you concentrate on tends to deepen in importance to you. Where is the chicken, where the egg? But regardless which is cause and which is effect (and surely you can see that is pretty much a meaningless distinction), the fact remains: What you concentrate on tends to wash out other things. That’s just the way it is.
And so –?
And so one unanticipated side-effect of such research is the connections you will make in your mind now that you might not have made – might not have been able to make – earlier. So, keep your peripheral vision functioning while you go poking into our discussions.
Now, I deliberately decided not to make notes on any subject but your hints about guidance, lest the project overwhelm me. Given that I’m not going to go back yet again after I finish this scan (assuming I even do finish), I guess that means any other topics will have to be found by others as they are led to explore.
Nothing wrong with that. You can only do what you can do, and anyway you won’t always be the best person to collect information on various subjects.
And if it is never collected, well, we put it out there, anyway. We did what we could do.
One can always do better, or worse. But of course that begs the question of what “better” and “worse” mean.
Looking back, I seem to see that you and I have been holding two different conversations, that only touch occasionally.
We’re smiling. You think that’s the first time? Yes, our intent was to advise you to enjoy your re-reading, and not let yourself think you have to work now, enjoy later.
With all that many words to re-read, I don’t see how there can be a later.
Well, that’s our point. Enjoy the moment.
So today’s theme is what, “Carpe diem”?
We’re tempted to ay, “Carpe verbum.” But, better, something like “work and attitude.”
I don’t like that much. I know what you want, but that doesn’t do it.
“It’s all in how you go about it”?
That’s better, actually.
How about, “The right way and the wrong way to work”?
Yes, I think that gets it. Our thanks as always.