Friday, January 7, 2022
2:50 a.m. Friends, I have a couple of questions about yesterday’s topic if you don’t have anything more pressing. But if you do, by all means proceed.
It’s a big topic. Plenty of time. It’s good to deal with questions as they arrive.
All right, well, Louisa Callo was taken by your mention of Egypt. This from an email to me:
“Physically carrying your body to Egypt was necessary to enable non-mental, non-abstract influences to rattle down the ages, so to speak. Physical presence – particularly on a desert, forever swept clean by the winds, unchanging in the way the sea is unchanging – sets up memories through the flesh rather than merely through ideas or intent or even emotion. You don’t remember any given moment, nor do you necessarily remember anything at all of “another life” there (though, you might; we say merely that you don’t necessarily). But your body experiences a gestalt, and the memory of a gestalt may be as strong as the memory of a scent. It isn’t a conceptual type of memory; it is much more basic and unformed than that, but for that reason all the more accessible and sometimes tangible.” I find the highlighted sentences about memory and the flesh golden and evocative. I would love to hear more about the memory of scent one day too. I do understand the memory of a gestalt well and it often provokes the poetry in me.
Your response?
She gets our meaning, you see, because it matches experience she has had already. It is usually easier to recognize the familiar, even in a new context, than to grasp the essence of something not yet experienced, however well it may be described. This is why so often we seem to take so long on concepts that are really quite simple, even obvious. Yes, if you have had the experience, it is a simple explanation, an obvious reference. But if you have not had it, or have not yet been able to see it in a certain way, you may need quite a bit of explanation that will later seem to have been tediously prolix.
And in fact will have been tediously prolix for others.
That’s right. That is an unavoidable cost incurred in explaining to people at different levels of understanding, with different backgrounds, in the same words, and in the absence of their physical presence at the moment.
As to scent, we used that merely as an example of a sensory conduit into memory that is particularly vivid and relatively pristine. Unlike dogs, whose experience of the world is so largely one of scent, humans use that sense in only a background sort of way. For you, visual is primary, followed by auditory and tactile. Taste and scent are used less but therefore are – shall we say – less cluttered in their databases. A taste may be evocative, and a palate may be educated. But a scent may come from a distant past and be recognized yet not identifiable; the scent is familiar but cannot be placed. That is the analogy we were drawing. Of course scent is part of taste, but no need to pursue it farther.
Okay. And I’d like you to say more about physical objects and memory. It seems to me you are giving us an unusual slant on psychometry.
Let’s use that as a jumping-off point in our continuing discussion. It connects and is not a diversion, but only if we pursue it in a certain direction. Set your switches.
I was aware that I had not set them, but it didn’t seem to make any difference.
After all, visualizations are merely manifestations of intent; we don’t mean for you to make fetishes out of them. You lived perfectly well for a long time without needing them. But our suggestion now is so that you will sharpen your attention.
Yes, I see that. Very well, proceed.
Psychometry, like psychiatry and like so many new aspects grafted onto an essentially incompatible mental framework, is being seen out of context.
By which I think you mean, a materialist view of reality may be forced by evidence to admit phenomena that explicitly contradict its premises, but the admission is going to be grudging, and the adaptation awkward at best.
Yes, very good. Anything is understood differently depending upon the context it is seen in. There is no use in thinking that objects have an “objective” reality untouched by context, any more than thinking you as an observer can be “objective” as if the context that your life is (and has been) did not exist or did not affect your point of view. The whole idea of a “point” of view is that the point defines the perspective. Different viewpoint, different perspective, thus different pictures.
So let us look at things from an Egyptian point of view, so to speak, remembering that of course this is literally impossible (except for those of you in certain relationship to Egyptian lives, and even then only in certain contexts), but may be approached.
I’m getting, there is a commonality to the point of view across many cultures, in the same way that Michael Harner was able to distill common elements of shamanic practice from many cultures by pruning cultural specifics from the shared content.
Of course. There is, ultimately, one reality, in uncounted numbers of guises. As we said (or anyway meant to convey), what we will sketch here, today and elsewhen, will not be exactly what any given Egyptian time would recognize as theirs, but they would recognize the elements of the world-view. Indeed, what they would have had difficulty recognizing is the concept of “worldview”; like most cultures, they divided worldviews into “ours, which is correct,” and “others, which are inaccurate to the degree that they disagree with ours.”
Them too, huh? Too bad they aren’t alive now, to share our pinnacle of meaning and wisdom.
Yes, we smile too, but after all, it is only natural that every culture think itself right and others wrong, or why would it cling to its own beliefs and not adopt from others?
Which in fact is what is happening, though, isn’t it?
Yes, and it is always happening. Cultures are not unitary, not unchanging, and often are not even particularly stable over time. Egypt and China are the only two examples you have of cultures spanning thousands of years, matched by aboriginal cultures, the so-called stone age cultures, that are a different order of culture, such that they were often not recognized as cultures by their contemporaries at all.
I have been sensing a list of bullet points coming up, though I don’t have much of a sense of what they will comprise.
How could you, before we provide them? Sometimes, yes, but this is new material proceeding from old. Set your receptivity and presence switches yet again, and allow this to come slowly.
- The difference between 3D and non-3D is more conceptual than real. “Physical” things have a “spiritual” aspect. “Spiritual” essence exists within the “physical.”
- Nonetheless, the distinction is (as so often) somewhat A commuter on the highway is not interchangeable with a ghost.
- Nonetheless again, 3D and non-3D are They are part of the same everything.
- Ghosts are non-3D presences tied to 3D places and, often, 3D times. You sensed this truth decades ago.
- Psychometry is a way of sensing the non-3D aspect of a 3D object. You knew this too.
- The 3D can hold the place, so to speak, for a non-3D intelligence. We started off with that idea in your story “The Stone” that you were unable to finish.
Put these things together and you get something a little different than you might expect. And here is one more example of how the new civilization is going to be built partly on past ideas, insights, and practices that your current culture had discarded as superstition.
Psychometry, shamanism, belief in spirits, the concept of sacred sites, etc.
All of that as specifics, and, more profoundly, all of that as only specifics, pointing to an absolute rearrangement of the pieces science has placed on the table. Right now, you have a display that looks like an orderly array accompanied by a jumble. Rearrange it and some of the orderly array will be seen to be only somewhat true, and some of the jumble will be seen to be essential to a new array.
As so often, it feels like we didn’t get very far in the hour.
Slow and steady. Righteous persistence. You have been working an hour at a time for more than 20 years, with long recesses, and you aren’t exactly where you began. Slow is actually better in some ways, or why does one read a savored book as slowly as possible so as not to come to the end?
I usually don’t read it slowly. I re-read it, and more than once.
The point remains.
I know. Very well, thanks as always. Oh, the theme?
“Seeing differently” may work. Something on that order.
Okay, thanks again.