Friday July 12, 2024
10:10 a.m. All right, boys, I sense a conversation coming on. Maybe. What’s on your minds?
Notice that you are now able at a deeper level to “do nothing” as you think of it. Potential projects are not in short supply. Most of your material is not in finished form. (We realize that the word “most” came as a jolt.) but it is quite true that you have every right to decide you are done, and to spend your time reading or daydreaming or whatever comes.
Not the decision per se, but the freedom to decide, is an achievement. Like anyone, you were born the subject of internal dynamics that resulted in assumptions and moods that seemed to bound your life more or less beyond your ability to control or even – almost – to battle. With time and life and effort, and as a result of victories and defeats, you have come, as people do, to a different set of internal guidance, one shaped more by your prior and current decisions and less by what we could call your inherited dynamics.
It is the freedom to choose, even more than the freedom resulting from choice, that matters.
Is that what he meant – whoever he was – who said “to be free is nothing, but to become free is everything”?
Regardless of his intent, jhow about yours? Does it ring true?
Maybe. I get the sense that no matter what our condition is, it has its pluses and minuses, but a trend toward greater freedom, greater potential, seems to be an obvious good.
That’s an important qualifier, “to me.” But yes, we agree: For you, greater freedom, broader awareness, deeper understanding, is the pearl beyond price, worth any expenditure. Only, not for everybody. Different people need different things, and that’s as it should be.
I do regret so much uncompleted work, just as a regret that I do not regularly use so many things I have learned over the years.
You might mention the rebal.
Yes. When I did Gateway in December, 1992, we were told that we could visualize ourselves within a “resonant energy balloon,” or rebal. I don’t remember if someone specifically suggested temperature or if I tried it out. But I decided to use a rebal to keep comfortable barefoot in the snow, and it worked. On the Friday after the program, Bob and I walked around the UVA campus, and he was none too warm in his coat, while I was comfortable in my flannel shirt inside my rebal.
I used that trick sometimes over the years, but I had forgotten about it until last night, lying on my bed, too hot for comfort (I don’t use the AC, as you know) but not willing to use the overhead fan. I remembered the rebal – how? – and decided to try, and a bit to my surprise, it worked just fine.
A trivial example of the magical expansion of our abilities that I learned over the years – but why haven’t I used them routinely?
And, you just heard –
I did. I heard that I use them all a lot more than I realize because I use them automatically – which is to say non-consciously. And that’s as it should be.
Now draw the analogy. You wrote so much, even your history, thinking that books were the way to shape and preserve what you knew. (You will recall, we have always said, write books if you wish to, but that isn’t why you are where you are.) But how permanent are books? It is the difference between holding something in memory (books) and having absorbed them (your own everyday consciousness).
So achievement counts for nothing and intent is all? That’s sort of backwards.
It is also a very inaccurate paraphrase, we’d say, external achievement counts for vastly less than internal achievement, and therefore sustained intent is a real accomplishment.
Think of George Washington or George Marshall molding their characters through rigid self-control. Their characters were their personal achievement, not the external results of their interactions with the world.
I’m getting a different sense of this, but it is vague so far.
Do you think the non-D being of which Washington is part hugs to itself the memory of his struggles and achievements? Does it hold anniversary celebrations for Trenton or Yorktown? Do his other strands (call them) hold him in awe in the way 3D contemporaries did?
More to the point, do you suppose that the strands that came together to form George Washington spend their time sighing over the good old days of glory?
The 3D is less real, we keep reminding you, than what we can only call All-D, the 3D and non-3D considered as one. So how could an All-D character think in 3D terms?
Harrison Ford might reminisce about playing Han Solo.
But he wouldn’t confuse himself by thinking that Han Solo was the thing that was real, and Harrison Ford not.
I see.
We are saying merely that your achievements in life are very different from those you think of as achievements. It is natural to se it that way while thinking in 3D terms, nothing wrong with it. But it makes more sense to see it as it is.
Hemingway said that any story, carried to its end, results in death, as if that meant things were finally fruitless. I don’t understand why he didn’t see clearer than that.
Sometimes he did. Don’t confuse a thing said in a certain mood (no matter how often said) with a definitive summing-up of a creed. And of course he learned soon enough that the end is not the end.
This is a lot of words to tell me it’s okay to do nothing if I want to.
Perhaps that isn’t all we said.
Well, thanks as always.