Monday, October 18, 2021
7:25 a.m. Okay, open for business. I got that you had something more to say about consciousness and awareness. In fact, I remember an idea coming to me (that’s how it felt) of a comparison with Hemingway.
Yes. Think of it this way:
- All the terrain within your eyesight. Everything within the circle of your horizons, in other words. This is what there is to be seen from wherever you happen to be standing.
- But there is also another factor, and that is, how brightly lit is that territory? Even if you are living on a mountainside, or are up in an airplane, and have a tremendously long line of sight, you can’t see much on a starless night! You can’t see as much at daybreak or at sunset as at high noon. How brightly lit the scene is, helps determine how much and how well you can see.
- And there is your intent. If you are very alert, you see more and better than if you are half-asleep or are thinking of other things.
Now, take Hemingway as example. His talent – storytelling – came as a result of a lifetime of practice. He worked to learn how to tell his stories as effectively as the material would allow. But his genius (his innate ability that he developed by all that effort) was that he had a natural intensity of interest, and an inherited expectation
Let me do it. [I could feel them fumbling.]
Yes. You have the idea, anyway.
His father had so exaggerated a gift of sight that (I think you’re saying) Hemingway sort of took that for normal, and overcompensated to overcome his own defective vision.
We are speaking strictly of inner vision here, however.
Well, I’m not sure you are. His inner vision was very strong – his imagination painted him scenes as brightly lit as other people’s external vision – but his external vision was equally keen. He saw detail; he put together clues. He didn’t miss things.
Let’s try saying this concisely. Interestingly (to us, at least) this is the first time both us and you are struggling to express what is a rather simple insight.
Yes. Why is that?
Perhaps when you have strong and definite ideas about a subject and they are not wrong, it makes you less inclined to be patient with our reaching for it.
You calling me a know-it-all?
A know-this-particular-thing, anyway.
So –?
- Hemingway saw (with his 3D eyes) what was to be seen. Because he learned the habit consciously and unconsciously by watching his father, he observed. A lifetime hunting and fishing reinforced this habit, of course.
- He also saw with his imagination. It was less his working to imagine something than his receiving a movie to watch. The work for him was in finding the right way to express what his imagination brought him, it was not in trying to think what to imagine.
- Most of all, until his body was broken and never fully repaired by the accidents in the 1950s, he was fueled by this tremendous vitality, which in effect was a well of enthusiasm. That was a very high-octane fuel!
So you have a range of consciousness and you have intensity. Your world is bounded by the two.
And this is what I experienced, Friday? The range of consciousness wasn’t affected (as far as I noticed), but I watched the intensity refill its tanks?
This is one more reason why you in 3D should learn not to judge one another. Everyone has a different level of intensity and a different range of consciousness. You already know you don’t all live in the same world. Now realize that you don’t all live in the world with the same range of resources. You don’t acquire an intensity like Hemingway’s by an effort of will. You are born with it, or aren’t. Now, you can be born with that intensity and let it slide, perhaps; you cannot be born without the intensity and build it by intent.
But – I get – life can.
Yes, true enough. A hellish situation might smelt someone into a person of greater intensity.
So I’m still feeling a little lazy. Shall we put off addressing Orphic Saying #85?
Yes. As we said, come to this one not as afterthought.,
See you next time, then, and our continued thanks for all this.