Friday, July 8, 2022
6:40 a.m. Okay, I get it. I thought I’d start in on notes for the novel, but you have something you want to say. Please do.
Your vague discontentments – health, feelings of comfortableness or not in your body, ennui – it all is also grist for the authorial mill. You tend to shrug it off; use it.
Yes, I can see that. Pay attention, be here, now. Seems like somebody did tell me that, once or twice.
Many feelings are vague and inarticulate, not clearly perceived or understood. A good novelist can make them better seen, better understood, and of course he would gain from this.
Meanwhile working on only two cylinders.
That is a condition readers would be able to identify with, as well.
7 a.m. Okay, getting down to it, after fooling around a bit. Focus, receptivity, clarity, presence.
Your daily sermon-preaching is growing on you.
Very funny. Your preaching, you mean.
Do we?
Oh, I remember what I came across yesterday, something from a while ago – in Egypt, I think, because I reread my journal entries for that trip – to the effect that you and I are not really separate and I should get used to thinking of it that way.
Take responsibility for what you do right, not just for what you do wrong.
A sudden flashback to my very irresponsible youth – maybe 12. Not that I ever did anything very good or very bad, but that I did it in a slipshod fashion, half-engaged. Ah, and that’s what you want to talk about, isn’t it. Something like this flitted by yesterday, I half-noticing it.
To the degree that you engage with the present moment, your life broadens, deepens, satisfies, leads onward. To the degree that you coast, half-awake, your inner life may (or may not) correspondingly gain in richness, at the expense of the outer.
Who am I to criticize your statements, but that one calls out for modification, not that you don’t do it to me all the time.
And, as you don’t mind our doing it, neither do we mind your doing it.
I don’t think it is so much that we gain a rich inner life only by neglecting our outer life. That’s my pattern, but it needn’t be anyone else’s. Thoreau, Emerson, Jung, Hemingway – they paid plenty of attention to their inner life, and nobody could fairly claim that any of them neglected the outer life.
Of course, nor would we mean to imply that. However, it can happen, even though it doesn’t need to happen.
The ideal is a conscious alternation, I suppose.
Well – yes, but that doesn’t necessarily mean just anything that may come to mind.
I’m having a hard time staying focused.
You know what to do when that happens. Or, you can put away the pad for another more propitious time.
Recalibrating. FRCP. Try again?
Concentrate on your outer life, because you are placed here, now by the logic of your entire non-3D and 3D life. Really being here, now, is a means of transforming your inner life, you see. It integrates spheres of attention that otherwise might go their separate ways, unbeknown to you, producing a life lived in two focuses at once, one nearly always much more brightly lit than the other.
People for whom the inner life is negligible.
Yes, or people for whom the outer life is negligible. The outer life has its way of getting your attention, but still it may be neglected, resulting in a person “lost in the clouds,” or perhaps living beset by apparently uncaused circumstances.
Understand, because all manner of lives are normal – are produced as the normal effect of certain combinations of strands living together in certain times – none can be considered unfortunate, or “wrong,” or even unproductive. How do you know how well or badly others are performing their improv? So, we aren’t saying, “This is the desired (let alone the required) pattern for one and all.” We are saying, instead, “This is the pattern that should suit some, and if it resonates, take advantage of a word to the wise.” For you and for many who read this, an attitude of attention to the “here, now” will be of great assistance. Those for whom it has no appeal can, and will, leave it alone.
Paying attention to the fact that you are here, now – that is, you in 3D are firmly ensconced in a specific place, at a specific time – reminds you that your non-3D component is also, in effect, ensconced in that same place and moment. Daydreaming, sleeping, reliving the past or fantasizing the future, whatever, your non-3D, though it roams through space and time, remains firmly tethered to the one time and place that your 3D body is. We know this is obvious once stated; we also know that it tends to be forgotten, day by day.
You are saying, I think, that our mundane life is as much a sacred journey as anything else in our mind or soul.
That is exactly what we are saying. However, at the same time, remember that you can’t live your life at full tension, any more than a bow that is always strung can retain its ability to propel arrows. You don’t, can’t, won’t, live continually in a state of tense alertness, but you can, may, live recognizing that “sacred” doesn’t mean keyed-up, but includes moments of rest, moments of sleep, moments of “nothing happening.”
Your life is a sacred journey and you may live it that way, or you may disparage it, disprize it, take it as a nuisance. However you consider it, it is still a sacred journey, and it becomes much more interesting to those who experience it that way.
I think everybody feels that it should be that way, but they also feel that it isn’t that way.
Let’s stick to you and your friends and those whose truth-meter registers what we are saying. Just as you can’t judge how other people are doing, so you can’t judge what they are doing.
Of course; I sit reminded.
Maybe a habit of being here, now, will look different for different people. All we claim for it is that it will enrich the life – will broaden the stage, one might say – of anyone who makes it a habit.
Well, Ram Dass certainly stressed the centrality of it.
He had learned it, and in turn he taught it. Having freely received, he freely gave.
Theme “Outer life, inner life,” maybe?
That would do.
Our thanks as always.