[This entry progressed rapidly. First I was talking to myself; then I thought I’d talk to Hemingway if he was available; then I was talking to – someone. Who it was, hardly matters. Attributing a specific source is unnecessary, which is just as well, given that it can never be proved.]
Tuesday, February 27, 2018
I got a real sense this morning of how Martha Gellhorn was a major bad influence on Papa’s career. If they hadn’t met, he wouldn’t have been tempted farther to the left than his center of gravity naturally was; wouldn’t have found the Finca; wouldn’t have left Pauline, maybe; wouldn’t have been so trapped at the end of his life in a life too comfortable to leave, to constricted to be really good for him. I don’t know where he would have wound up – not Key West anyway, maybe, given how the causeway had changed the island – but maybe the right version of To Have and Have Not, and no For Whom the Bell Tolls, true, but maybe something even better.
Not living in Cuba, maybe no Q-Boat operations, certainly no Crime Shop. If no Spanish Civil War involvement, perhaps he might have been accepted in US Army Intelligence in World War II. No China tour in 1941, but maybe other things, better things. Maybe a second safari before the war broke out, though maybe not. Maybe he would have ended his days in Africa or, like his son Pat, lived there some years.
I do wonder, Papa, what those possibilities would have been.
Okay, here is a lesson in how things are, if you want it.
Certainly.
When you go to thinking about how things might have gone, it is always vague and fuzzy, never crystal clear and never even as precise as your current version of your own life seems to be. (I say seems to be, because it’s a lot hazier than you ever realize while you’re in it, but that’s another discussion.) Why is that, do you suppose? It is because you are trying to take a precise picture of what is actually not an object at all, but a cloud.
A probability cloud.
Yes, but that isn’t the end of the discussion but the beginning.
Where you are at any given moment seems a fixed point. You came from a past, chose among a cloud of probabilities and even possibilities and made one choice or combination of choices your reality. In so doing, you established the launching-point for your own next choices – that is, for your future possibilities. Choices foreclose some paths and open others.
That’s how it seems. But it’s more productive to factor in what Seth said: When you decide to change timelines you pull in a different past as well as different futures. There is no way to make sense of that – if you really think it through – and still reconcile it with the way things seem to be. Your sensory reports tell you that you are in a fixed point emerging from a series of fixed points, with the possibilities ahead of you waiting to be chosen and fixed in turn. That’s the only common-sense way to see your lives.
So how can the two be reconciled, the appearance and the reality Seth tries to explain to you? The answer is, you have to (or get to; it depends upon your attitude whether you see this as a constriction or a freedom) give up the idea that you are on a fixed point or ever were; that you are a point of definiteness among a cloud of probable other-realities; that you exist in order to choose not who you wish to experience being, but who you are going to be, absolutely.
Instead?
Instead recognize that a cloud is a cloud and doesn’t become a pinpoint. But what you perceive, may.
Our vision funnels down from the cloud that exists to one path?
Think of your life – we’re going to go back to an image you were given some years ago now – think of your life as a laser beam focused through a crystal. The angle at which the beam is aimed determines what is illuminated. Change the angle of vision, the crystal remains what it always was, but the illuminated appearance differs, perhaps radically.
Did changing the angle of vision change the crystal even temporarily, let alone permanently? It did not. It changed what you saw, it changed what you experienced. But all the other ways to see it remain, because the only thing that changed is your energy focus, slicing into your sum of possibilities, lighting up one possible path.
You are so accustomed to thinking of your lives as fixed points, it can be hard to understand that the sum of the possibilities of a life is fixed; the individual appearances, depending upon how the beam is focused and directed, are essentially countless. Thus, a cloud, thus a fixed reality. As so often, it is all in how you look at it.
So, you see, the limits of what can be perceived are not so much in any external, but in the habits of the person trying to perceive. If you can’t think of your present moment as other than the only way things can be, given past decisions, you can’t go any farther in understanding.
What you assume about reality limits what you can experience. This isn’t a tragedy or even an unfortunate fact of life. It is just life, for life is limitation, else it is shapeless. The question is, which limitations do you allow to shape your lives?
If you think the present moment is a fixed point, the product of past fixed points, you will feel that either you are the child of predestination or, at best, that your choices will create a series of future fixed points. This lays great stress either on predestination or on free will, or on some combination of the two – usually a very uneasy combination.
If you see that what Seth said means that your past changes with your present decisions, you may be drawn to think of life as a plethora of alternate time-lines, sort of parallel, that may be chosen – jumped to – in the process creating a zigzag path that is a given version of a life. It still has a tinge of predestination in it, in that it is a form of choosing among pre-existing futures. It has the very real disadvantage of seeming theoretical rather than actual.
Yes, I’ve experienced that. This is more or less the view I have been holding.
And it isn’t a bad halfway-house. But the image of the laser shining through the crystal is a more serviceable one, only it requires that you give up certain ideas that for a while seem essential.
The idea of making progress through making choices, for one thing.
No, the idea that a given 3D first-tier experience is real, while your second- or third-tier reactions are not, which is precisely wrong way to. The change in you as a result of your decisions is the reality; the scenarios in which you chose are the stage-setting. We know it doesn’t feel that way; it isn’t supposed to in 3D, after all. Think of reality as the exploration in simulation of all possible permutations. That being so, how can choice be momentous, life-changing, apocalyptic – except in the context of that particular laser-beam illumination of
Yeah, I hear the problem, finding that word. If we say “possibilities” it sounds like we mean, it isn’t real. If we say “reality” it implies that other angles of vision will show things that aren’t equally real. If we say “timeline” we’re back to that disconnect.
In any way of seeing things – put it that way – things may occur that are life-shattering and seemingly cosmically important. What you need to put your minds to, if you can, is that, at the same level of reality, all other angles of vision, with their consequent crises and challenges, equally exist. Thus all contradictions exist and don’t even interfere within one another. The crystal that is all of your life-possibilities doesn’t move, doesn’t change. What changes is your angle of vision, which seems to change everything. And the changes in that angle of vision must come from a different level than the angle itself, obviously.
You say obviously, but it wasn’t obvious to me until you said it. But yes, obvious now.
And that’s why you are well advised to connect to your non-3D component. That’s why your All-D you is well advised to connect to the next higher level it connects to. Freedom cannot be attained at the same level it is sought from. Freedom comes from above, so to speak. If you wish to become aware of the fishbowl and transcend its limitations, your consciousness has to transcend that of the part of you that is the fish. It’s only common sense, after all.