Productive complications

Wednesday, April 9, 2025

5:35 a.m. Have ben reading Walden steadily, but almost through now. I have hoped for another session such as yesterday’s. but I don’t think I have energy enough.

Return to Brunton rather than Thoreau (much less [Earl] Diggers [creator of Charlie Chan]), and perhaps your wells will refill. Thoreau inspired you, but that was long ago, and perhaps you now find in him confirmation rather than new inspiration. When scarcely into manhood, you had your eyes opened by him, but by this time you read him – recognizing, it is true, but recognizing is not pioneering. One pioneers for oneself, quite as much as for one’s neighbors, and in fact whether neighbors follow you into Kentucky is mostly irrelevant to the question of where you are going.

That sounds a little like what Henry himself would have written.

It shouldn’t surprise you. Those closest to you will manifest in one resemblance or another. Can you see – we know you can – how vastly more sophisticated your ideas are now of relationships in time, next to where you began?

Of course. Who could go through so extensive a tutelage over 25 years and not be transformed by it? For which – I know you know – I am grateful. You did help rearrange my ideas until I felt the world making sense. Or, I suppose I should say, you helped me rearrange my sense of the world.

I am moved suddenly – listening? – to see if Jon [Holt] wants a word.

I do. You and I never talked about Thoreau, and he was not prominent in my thinking, but I find that he and I are more alike than I would have guessed.

Well, you certainly share an acerbic quality, come to think of it. You didn’t suffer fools gladly; hardly at all.

We shared a thread, you see; that’s my point. Henry, I, you. It made an instinctive sympathy among us.

I feel that, now that you say it.

Sympathy between people is less about ideas or even interests, than something more personal. Like natures

Lost it. “Like natures” was a wrong turn somehow.

That’s one example of how your attunement sharpened over the years. It was a sort of blurring of focus, but you picked it up right away. What I meant was that people who share a thread, a strand, will be linked at a level well below consciousness, and it will mark them the way two brothers may be marked so that even if they themselves see mainly the differences between them, outsiders will first sense the similarities.

Now of course, everybody is part of all one thing, ultimately, but that isn’t as helpful on an individual level, any more than it would be to say that Florida and California are all part of the earth, so they aren’t much different.

On a human scale, they are. And on a human scale, if you are going to make meaningful distinctions, you have to see distinctly! You have to say, a pumpkin and an eggplant are not the same thing, no matter what they may have in common.

Understood. So what is the point here? I know you have one, and I suspect it had to do with my reading Thoreau again.

It has to do with the thought you scarcely remember to have had – that I helped send your way, you might say – that it was our talks last December that discussed the sins and virtues in a way that might help you write the essay you have already half forgotten about.

It is more complicated than I have seen yet, isn’t it, this interacting?

Yes. You tend to think of things as more straightforward than they are, more straight-ahead. But things curl around, and retrace their steps, and flow  back and forth, and all at speed, so your conscious mind simplifies the result into an idea it can hold without getting dizzy.

It isn’t, you contact me, I contact Henery, Henry contacts Emerson, say. It isn’t even, you contact me or I you, and we banter back and forth like this appears to be. And it isn’t as simple as a two-way conversation, with one or more people butting in or joining in or taking over. And it also isn’t a free-for-all. Communication has structure, but it isn’t Roberts Rules of Order.

Go ahead.

Go back to your idea of a 3D mind being like iron in a magnetic field. Think of communications as being a dance of various pieces of iron in that kind of suspensory field. You can see that it  there would be laws of nature applying, but they wouldn’t necessarily be simple and certainly wouldn’t be unvarying in application. It would be complicated. But someone looking at the field from outside – and still more from inside – might not be able to follow every little fluctuation of influence. He would simplify it not so much in his mind as in his perceptions.

I get the idea of that. He would see it simplified because, say, the movements would be too quick and too complex for his eyes to see or his mind to discern.

And therefore this is all at an unconscious level, you see. You can’t be conscious of what you can’t perceive as input.

On a sensory level, not on an intuitive level.

Of course, but in this case the difference isn’t as important as you might think. The point is, as you very well know, if you aren’t conscious of it, you can’t have control of it, even to the point of thinking about it.

Not even abstract thought, sort of blue-sky “what if?”

That’s what I’m getting to. Where do you think such ideas some from , since they don’t come from deduction from sensory experience?

They don’t?

They don’t.

I guess, from our non-3D component, directly or indirectly.

Exactly, and talking to the guys, or my talking to you, or you working with Rita, is all the “indirectly” we’re talking about.

I’ve almost got it. We help each other, across lives, by suggesting things that are clear where we are (for whatever reason) but not so clear to others.

That’s the idea.

This builds on yesterday’s.

Spell it out.

Every life is individual in effect. We are all specialists in our time, our place. This means each of us is open to deeper insight from one particular insight than perhaps anybody else is or ever could be. But we can pass this insight around among ourselves, and it looks to us like they are free-floating ideas, or perhaps they merely feel to us like our own ideas. “Oh, what a bright body I am!”

So there’s the conversation you hoped to have and thought you probably wouldn’t be able to have.

Thanks, Jon. It is very good to be in touch again. I had wondered if we had drifted out of reach of each other.

Does your left arm drift out of reach of your right arm? Have you ever heard that “All is one”?

I did hear that somewhere, come to think of it.

Not every rule people make up is true, and even if true, not every rule is absolute. The world will give you what you need.

I sure couldn’t have gotten you to agree with that when you were in the body!

You get what you need, not necessarily what you want.

Like the song. Okay, Jon, thanks and let’s do this some more. I may call this “Extension, Part II.”

Try, “Productive complications.”

Or I may try that. Thanks.