Wednesday, January 24, 2018
1. You can learn more sometimes from books that don’t quite make it than from more successful ones. An Old Captivity [by Nevil Shute] is interesting enough in that it details all the things that go into a long flight. It doesn’t quite have enough emotional conflict or development in it to carry it. The conflict doesn’t rise to meet the necessary plodding. It is Babe’s description of Gateway without the description of what happens to people in Gateway. [Refers to my novel Babe in the Woods, now republished as That Phenomenal Background.] I’ll keep it in mind.
But here I am at 71 still thinking of writing stories about life, when I haven’t lived and never shall.
You say “never lived” as if that were a possibility.
You know what I mean.
We do, and you might as well mourn for never having played professional basketball. There’s many a kind of life. Did Daniel Boone consider that he hadn’t lived because he never saw the ocean? Did Helen Keller, because she never saw the world around her, no matter how near?
It’s an interesting disconnect. Intellectually I know that everybody’s life is a unique lens on existence, valued by life for just that uniqueness. But emotionally I can’t help noticing that the most of life has passed by, unnoticed.
It is always that way, for everybody. Arctic explorers don’t live the life of suburban commuters, nor either one of them the life of a soldier, or scientist, or professional actor, or farmer, or homeless person, or professional student, or anything. It is as impossible for any two lives to be identical as it is for any two souls to be, and for just that reason. When one gets discouraged about one’s life and how one has lived it, it is because one is looking at life as if the word “external” meant anything, in that context. Your – anyone’s – life is you, writ large. Your difficulties and smooth stretches, your inclinations as they interface with your opportunities – it all amounts to you looking in the mirror and acting from there.
You mean, we live our lives sort of awkwardly sometimes because we are moving in reference to the mirror, rather than from within. Something like trying to cut your own hair and finding that the scissors move in the wrong direction when you try to move them the way the mirror makes it look like you should.
That’s what we meant, yes. Life can get awkward when you judge it – still more when you try to control it – second-hand, so to speak. Athletes don’t think their movements; they couldn’t possibly. All that practice is to enable them to move automatically. Their thinking is about strategy, not how to make the movements that will execute the strategy.
Clear enough – although, some people do seem to live from sensory rather than intuitive promptings.
No, that is beginning to muddle things.
I’m sure we would all appreciate your un-muddling them.
Everyone’s life operates from a combination of sensory and intuitive intelligence. Psychics still need to remember how to feed themselves. Hard-headed materialists still function from their own center, aware of it or not. Your lives express your souls; your external circumstances are precipitated by what you are: None of this is dependent upon what your opinions of it may be.
The specific texture of your life – what you pay attention to, what you dismiss, what you scarcely notice, what you never dream exists – is a different mixture for each of you, and if you didn’t have communication at the non-3D level, perhaps you would never be able to get any two people to cooperate to do anything.
So, for each of us, the text is something like, “Don’t go thinking yourself so unusual”
Much less, so weird, so unsuccessful, so indolent, so hyper-active, whatever.
Well, you have consistently said, we don’t have the data with which to judge ourselves.
You have enough rough data to take fixes on your position, but as to what it amounts to, no, you never do.
“All be the same in a hundred years,” Shute has Turner say, habitually.
Yes, and The Chequerboard is a good parable of the intricacy of ordinary life, how every life is ordinary and extraordinary.
2. It was suggested I ask, “Who are you to me?” I can tell a planted question by now. So?
You know already; it is the putting it into words that causes confusion.
I know. I have done what I could to say that in my opinion the people we interact with are those we resonate to, and that the difference between being them and resonating with them (if it even exists) isn’t very big. But people seem to want to make the non-3D as divided as the 3D. So, can you address that?
It will clarify for people if we can come up with the right metaphor, the right non-verbal image. Everything needful has been said, but saying it divides it, because the image is chopped up into words that are then strung together, which isn’t ever very satisfactory.
You came up with ice cubes and water, once. [I.e. we in 3D are like ice cubes, the non-3D like water; same substance, but different appearance and different qualities.]
Yes, but if that doesn’t do it, we’ll have to try something else. Do you have any ideas?
That’s an odd question. I always get the impression that the bright ideas I come up with are from you.
Given that we and you are part of the same thing, wouldn’t that be a bit circular?
I suppose so. But then where do they come from?
Your receptivity is a crucial part of the process of snagging ideas and relationships (which is saying the same thing twice). The 3D positioning makes it possible to bring forth this idea now, another idea then. And of course difference among receivers means different possibilities. So in effect, three variables: time, space, receiver. Together they produce the potential to receive ideas. What you (anyone) do with the potential depends on you, of course.
I see. And that’s one reason why civilizations and ages differ in quality – different kinds of orienting ideas are available in one, unavailable or unpersuasive in other.
That’s right. So, your image of the relationship between us and you?
Well, fishing for it. I get that I’m somebody holding a bunch of balloons on strings. Strange sort of image. Is that what we want?
It’s a beginning. Keep trying.
I think of radio, but that imposes the idea of distance.
Keep trying.
Really, I come back to my Cosmic Internet idea. I, here/now, can connect with anything if I have the right URL for it, or the right search engine, or, say, the right keywords. I don’t know that we’re going to get any better than that.
Oddly, you gave one to us. How about – your own brain, as analogy?
That’s very interesting. I as one brain cell and you-all as others.
A much more intimate analogy, is it not?
Yes it is, and immediately persuasive, too.
You see the difficulties it hurdles.
Oh yes. One doesn’t feel compelled to name or personify other brain cells, and at the same time the question of identity or non-identity is overleaped. I can arbitrarily name you Nathaniel or TGU or George, but that doesn’t signify any more than a name change to an IP address does to the computer, though it does of course to the user.
So for the purposes you put it to, we could say you and we are all cells in the same brain, you centered in 3D orientation, we not. It’s still only analogy, but the analogy may enable you – may encourage you – to think in different ways.
It’s only a slight extension of what I’ve come to long ago. You and we are part of the same thing.
That’s right, only we’re again reducing the distance.