[Slightly edited from a conversation held July 10, 2011]
A little bit discouraged, Papa. What I’m putting out isn’t all that new, most of it. Remind me, what’s in it for the reader.
Just because everything you’re saying could be found here or there, or could be inferred by reading between the lines of enough books, doesn’t mean it’s going to be available to anybody else. Not, necessarily, to scholars, even. You have the irreplaceable thing you were told about when you were very young — a viewpoint. That viewpoint can’t be duplicated anywhere, by any means. It is the same as your description of minds in The Cosmic Internet — any mind is irreplaceable and can’t be duplicated exactly. The thing is, is that mind different enough, is what it knows special enough? Yours is. You know me from the inside, you’ve had quite a bit of experience from the outside — reading books about me, I mean — and your other experiences give you a unique view of what is going on. Plus — who else could bring Carl to the subject?
You’re going to have to let go of the idea about something the scholars take seriously. That’s the wrong set of scholars! Not Hemingway scholars, but scholars investigating trans-personal communication. There’s your audience. You aren’t going to convince the Hemingway scholars because you and they will talk right past each other. Your evidence — my point of view, our conversations — is just no evidence at all to them. They could agree with everything; it would still not be evidence, just opinion.
But your conversations are evidence of something else. They show how conversations may occur and become habitual and provide increased access to knowledge and to understanding. They ground a subject that too often flies off into the air. And the point of view you begin from is in itself a reorientation. Historians and amateur students of history do not tend to be the same people who explore nonphysical realities, as you well know. So, exploring from that viewpoint in itself is it a departure; in itself. Can you see that this in itself would prevent Hemingway scholars from taking this book seriously in their own terms? And Jung scholars, too, of course.
I can now that you mention it, yes.
Well? That being so, doesn’t that refocus your intent on showing what is or isn’t possible?
What isn’t possible is a little clearer to me than what is possible.
Settle in. Think in images. What image arises when you think of this project?
Me sitting here writing, early in the morning, day after day, and quite happily.
Convey that.
And yet, a straight transcript of our conversations wouldn’t work.
Too much life in between; too much explanation needed of what you’d been reading, how it had affected you, what other conversations you’ve been having. So what can you do about it? Go back to images.
The image that is right in front of me is all my loose-leaf binders and all my journals.
Why do you suppose you chose that image?
There’s a sort of continuity there — a lot of years of work.
Could you publish them as they are? Of course not, nor would you want to. They are your source-material, not your finished product. So are our conversations — yours, mine, Carl’s, Abraham Lincoln’s.
The various famous men — mostly men — are all queued up for a different book on society, I have assumed.
They could be. But first the fact and the value of the communication has to be established, and that is the purpose of this book.
It is?
It is. Look at it. Your career has its own logic, although it hasn’t been obvious to you. Muddy Tracks is your initial exploration. It’s the one that gives newcomers entrée. Sphere And Hologram carries it forward — here’s what you can get moving forward. Chasing Smallwood starts the next phase, that of direct communication about life as it is lived. Cosmic Internet sets out a theoretical structure for it, using it. And [Afterlife Conversations with] Hemingway shows you moving out a little farther, addressing a subject well enough known to draw attention and to serve as a check on your statements. After all, if you produced a book like that channeled biography of George Washington that had all its “facts” wrong, it would be ridiculous and would be seen as ridiculous. When you come up with something that holds water and occasionally startles by bringing new clarity to a subject that seemed well understood, you help bring the two sides of the veil slightly closer. And that is the primary purpose, remember, not any correction of the Hemingway Myth, however desirable that would be.