Saturday, February 5, 2022
6:20 a.m. Seems to me that Thursday’s homily on choosing proved itself pretty quickly, at least judging from yesterday’s organizing session. Of course, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, but still, a good start. So what’s in the magic cupboard for today?
Switches?
Yes, I’d forgotten. Thanks. So now –?
Perhaps you needn’t keep doing this every day, but can move to the other, more private, pole, more private sessions closely connected to whatever you find as you go through your lifetime’s journals. It isn’t like we would ever run out of new things to say, but wouldn’t it be nice to bundle them – as you have been wanting to do – rather than let the long stream dwindle formlessly.
Your metaphors need work, this morning.
Perhaps they do. But you see the point. You can continue this conversation in various ways, and which way you choose will lead to different results.
- Talking to us of the larger questions of life, so that you can put the resulting transcript out to your friends.
- Private sessions on practical matters for your own life that sometimes will and sometimes will not have application for others, and so will or won’t be appropriate to disseminate, respectively.
Private sessions that become public sessions, you mean, in effect.
Yes. And
- Private sessions that stay private, so that you have the advantage of inner perspective without needing to overcome reluctance to put its subject on display.
We make this distinction among three kinds of session because some who read this may find that it opens a way for them to do the same.
People seem little inclined to do so, at least so far. I don’t know what more I could have done, or could do going forward, to encourage them.
Encouragement is always good. Expectation would not necessarily be good. Everyone’s path is different, just as are everyone’s gifts and mission. Besides, these things take time. How long was it between your first attempts and your confidence to share with even a limited, self-chosen group of co-conspirators?
I thought you chose that word “co-conspirators” in a playful way, and then I realized that it also carries the suggestion of people breathing together, sharing inspiration.
Yes. Tell about Skip Atwater and your black box sessions.
That was a long time ago already. More than 21 years. Amazing how time flies but also creeps.
Those few weeks laid the foundation for the rest of your life, as you well know. But there is a purpose for others in your telling the story today.
Okay. I’ve told it somewhere, can’t remember where.
I moved onto the New Land (the area around the Monroe Institute) in the summer of 1998. A couple of years later, I emailed Skip Atwater that I liked living there, but I felt like I wasn’t getting the benefit of being there really,. I didn’t feel like taking a program at the moment, but I did want to do something. Skip suggested I buy a series of 10 PREP sessions. [Altered-state exploration in an environment carefully shielded from outside distractions.] So that’s what we set up. I took off Fridays, beginning Sept. 8, 2000, and each Friday spent a couple of hours in the morning: talking to Skip, then doing the session, then spending a few minutes debriefing. Later I would transcribe the day’s recording – quite a tedious job! – and would send it to a list of a few friends, and to the Voyagers Mailing List, a predecessor of the current Explorers list.
From my introductory remarks to A Place to Stand, my book of transcripts.
[By the time that date came around, the idea of doing a session on that day seemed ridiculous. I had spent most of the day before in bed, on the verge of having the flu. My ears were blocked, and so I was having a lot of trouble hearing things. If I couldn’t hear, how could I listen to the tapes? But something inside said to do it anyway.
[I had no idea what it was going to lead to. How could I? To know, I would have had to be a different person, and it was the journey I was about to begin that would make me that different person.
[So there I was, lying down in the dark, hoping I would be able at least to hear the tones in the earphones!]
What I had told Skip as we began the sessions was that I was feeling flat, and was hoping for inspiration. He remembered that, and at one of the later sessions, when I was well again, he heard me yawning repeatedly, this terrific series of yawns, and said how glad he was to hear them, and compared my free, easy breathing to the state I had been in when we began. And, he said (always good at hearing nuances), remember that I had sought inspiration, and here I was taking these huge infills of breath.
And refreshing my memory via A Place to Stand has led me to open the book here and there, and has reminded me of things I’d long forgotten. I guess I’m going to have to re-read those sessions, maybe ask Chris Nelson to publish the book in eBook format. It is a striking prelude to The Sphere and the Hologram. And little did I know how much would flow from these sessions.
Now if you don’t mind, we’d like to point out the layering of accomplishment that occurs in anyone’s tasks.
Using mine as concrete example, you mean.
Exactly. Look what happened:
- Feeling a need for inspiration.
- Contacting Skip to see if he had any ideas.
- Accepting his idea and arranging your life to make the sessions possible.
- Showing up and doing the sessions. Being there, in all senses of the phrase.
- Transcribing the session, each time.
- Sending out the transcripts, each time.
- Discussing the sessions with Rita each Saturday night when you went out to eat.
- Much later, after so much water under the bridge, publishing the collected transcripts and the accompanying electronic charts.
Each step added, you see. You could have stopped at any point, and no blame would have attached. (And in any case, who would have the right to assess blame for what was a voluntary contribution?) But each additional step widened the ripples.
It is the same for anybody. Any step that you add may seem – may even be, in itself – of little importance. But you cannot tell, going forward, what it may lead to. Your non-3D self may nudge you to continue for reasons that your strictly 3D persona considers insufficient, but if you will follow those impulses, you will not usually regret doing so.
Well, certainly I don’t have any regrets. It is a bit amazing, actually, looking back at it. So what is today’s theme, in your view?
“Conspiring,” perhaps? “Breathing together”?
“Sleepwalking,” more like.
That would do too. But perhaps best would be “Little by little, if you choose.”
Or something like that. Very well, thanks as always. And thanks for luring me toward yet another bit of re-reading, down memory lane.
If you think of it, rereading the events of Autumn, 2000, will fit in nicely with the project we discussed at length yesterday.
If you say so. Till next time, then.