Sunday, May 29, 2022, 8:25 p.m.
Sitting quietly and starting with one thought proves quite doable. I sat experiencing something hurting – already I forget what it was – and I let my mind wander around the theme of injuries, and the memories emerged swiftly and easily. I won’t try to reproduce the sequence, but it included ankles – Huayna Picchu, particularly; I was in a cast for some reason, my right arm, but it don’t think it can have been my wrist. Using the trackball exclusively with my right hand to relieve the left hand that does all the writing. A few concussions. Endless back pain over many decades. A broken little toe. Lime in my right eye as a child. The concussion at age seven, and the subsequent spinal tap. Headaches over many years.
I thought, I could do the same process concentrating on friends I have lost. Johnny Perelli, Larry Canino, Bill Toutant. Tom Oleszczuk. Dave Schlachter, Dennis Crabb. Dave Segal, Art Kravetz. Rick Simons. Tim Nash. Don James. Bob Friedman, Danny Lliteras. Frank Callaham. Michael Langevin, Rita Warren, Dave Wallis, Bruce Moen, Dana Redfield, Kelly Neff, George Cheety. Many by death, many others by drift or by dispute. Many more names I might add, too. Not to mention many who might have become closer friends if I had paid attention. I won’t list those friends I still have, if only out of a superstition against losing what I might name.
But these are two different fields that the four memory types easily brought forth, that could be followed up on, as extensively as I cared to.
I could probably do physical ailments, too, if I need to, or significant relationships past. Anything, really, I imagine. To “Sail Away, Mr. Roberts,” I might add Dreams as another method, which I guess would make it “Don’t Sail Away, Mr. Roberts”: Dreams, Specifics, Associations, Matching, Reverie.
God, if I were to start on books! Or even TV shows when I was a kid. Or people who made a real impact on my life. It’s a process more common-sensical and natural than I would have thought. The information is there, sorted probably in order of its emotional importance; it’s just a matter of going after it in the right way.
I could let my mind wander among so many people’s biographies, calling to mind what they meant to me, stringing them like beads along given topics. You’d find some very surprising companions –.
This began with the thought of recapturing sacred moments, and that is probably quite doable. As long as one need not attain completeness, plenty ought to surface. Our lives are much richer than we usually realize. Suppose we set out to remember something as seemingly trivial – though really emotionally important – as all the pets we have had in our lives. With the list would come many associations.
Teachers we have had who were important. Mentors formal and informal. People we knew and admired. People we admired from afar. Those who I used to call Friends I’ve Never Met – authors who changed my life, enriched it, sustained it.
I think I’ll transcribe this and send it out tomorrow, with or without something from the guys.
Or – well?
You’re doing the work, and as you see, it can get done almost off-hand. But of course it will only help those who try it out. Encouragement may be contagious, but work isn’t. It must be done, if it is to be done, one person at a time.
I’d kind of like to remember my friends I still have, only the risk of forgetting to name people is too great. Safer to stick to what is gone.
Perhaps acknowledgement is best given one at a time.
I agree. But I have so many friends – in delightful contrast to my childhood. It would take a long time. I’m afraid they are going to have to settle for an inner acknowledgement.
You might consider remembering difficult people, and difficult situations.
Because they contributed. Perhaps. I suppose I’d learn which memories still hold charge.
Worthwhile bringing that to consciousness.
It might be worthwhile to remember all the people who helped me over the years who I never acknowledged, maybe scarcely noticed. That one might grow to uncomfortable size.
What about remembering the sacred sites you visited?
Which reminds me of Robert Clarke, a friend I valued. And of course that leads to Colin Wilson, who introduced us, and Richard Bach and – by connections unnecessary to spell out – to Harry Stoneback and Walter Houk, neither of whom I met but both of whom seemed kindred spirits in our email correspondence. And the more time I spent on this, the more connections I would make, I imagine. And if it’s true for me, presumably it’s true for anybody interested.
Once you find an effective technique, applications appear on all sides.
Seems so.
And as you become progressively more comfortable with the technique, you may wish to move into psychologically more hazardous terrain, letting into consciousness things self-protectively buried. The key to the dragon’s treasure, remember, is that you have to brave the dragon.
Thanks for all this. I can see that it is of real value, for those who put it to use. Whether I will be one, or will forget it in a week as usual, time will tell.
Either way, you will have put the uses of the technique on the record for others.
Monday, May 30, 2022
6 a.m. I guess we don’t have to have a full session today, given that I have the equivalent of about three-quarters of an hour’s worth of material from last night. But I’m open to suggestion. Should we talk about decline, since it is on my mind again?
Why not?
Why not indeed. Focus, receptivity, clarity, presence. As usual, I don’t know if it’s my own idea or is at your prompting.
And as usual we remind you that that is a pretty meaningless distinction. The key is not the prompting but your intent. If it is something you want to follow up, why do you care whose idea it was, when there is no ownership of ideas?
Old habit, I guess. Well here it is, in a nutshell. It is beyond me how anyone cannot see that our civilization is not only changing radically but is in precipitous decline. A civilization that cannot provide nutritious food, clean air, pure water; that systematically rewards the adulteration of everything good; whose literacy rate continues to decline; whose use of addictive substances is rampant (no one asking why people are so desperate to avoid facing everyday reality); whose sense of social cohesion frays ever more rapidly – where is that society’s future? I could go on, but it would sound like the age-old plaint of the old, that the world is going to hell, just because it’s changing. I don’t think it’s that. There are so many more indicators I could add. Am I seeing things through dark glasses?
Let’s say that for the amount you are seeing the dissolution implicit in the chaos that also includes creation. What you see is true, but there are other things to see. It would be fairer, safer, to say that the materialistic civilization is breaking down of overweight, as its destructive tendencies manifest more and more evidently. That is not the same as saying it’s the end of the world.
I don’t think I was calling it the end of the world.
If you can engage in hyperbole, so can we. You see the point.
All right. And just to be clear, I didn’t say, or think, that this means all is not well; I was merely saying I can’t see why people can’t see what is so plain.
What makes you think they can’t see it? They’ve been seeing it your whole lifetime; however, their views as to causes vary. Where do you think left-wing and right-wing politics come from? People concentrate on different aspects of the same problem, come up with different scapegoats (personifying institutional evils), and pin their hopes on different panaceas. The more prominent the problems, the sharper the divergence.
I’ve been coming to see that for some time now. It’s why I am not a liberal or a conservative in their current extreme manifestations: They’re both too one-sided.
Plus you don’t like herds.
Plus I don’t like herds, although I recognize the herd animal within myself, no less than the outlier.
Well, what do you tell people who scoff at the idea that all is well, all is always well?
Ah, is that what we’re pursuing here? I tell them that the 3D is the free-will zone, created for us to choose who and what we want to be and to become. You can’t have choice in a vacuum; it only makes sense if you experience it as actions and consequences. Thus you experience a play of forces. Drama. It’s real within 3D theater; hence, real pain, real tragedy, real heroism, real villainy. But it’s only somewhat real, because 3D is only part of the story. This First Life is how we shape ourselves; after that, we go on to do other things, whatever they may be.
In other words, given that the 3D is a theater of choosing, some will choose evil – or what seems clear to you is evil – and therefore evil is an intrinsic part of the world.
No, I get it. “Evil” is how we see it because of the apple. People of other cultures don’t see things as good and evil – that is, don’t see evil as something avoidable – but recognize that life is always going to include bright and dark.
In other words, they see that all is well.
There are problems with that, though. The East seems to have a colossal indifference to human suffering.
And the West does not?
Touché.
Enough for the moment. You already have a lot to transcribe.
Today’s theme?
Perhaps “Remembering, and judging,” given that it is really two.
Okay. Our thanks as always.