Friday, August 5, 2022
4:40 a.m. The dream had a graduate thinking, “I’m what you needed to produce, but instead you produced copies concerned with jobs and clothes.” Something like that. Was it Kesey? It was someone whose background was different, whose struggle had been different, who as an end-product was different. I said, walking down the hall, if you want me to remember the dream, you have to help me remember it. But this is all I was left with. It is the important part.
- I have this terrible persistent itch at one point on the front of my neck, that keeps me scratching at it, almost digging into it, trying so hard to stop it persecuting me. Only now did I realize – or anyway think – that pursuing the thoughts accompanying it may be the thing to do. That is, I was treating it as an inexplicable disconnected something, rather than as a messenger. I began realizing that I had somehow backed myself into a corner all my life, and here is a chance to find out how and why, because it is a mechanism as seemingly separate from my main narrative as can be.
And, if I can finally get the connections, I want to do so. It won’t matter if it hurts. It’s going to hurt sometime, and better now than later. It is already too late to adjust for life. I can anyway adjust for life beyond First Life.
Many influences are contributing, most of them only vaguely recognized. Nothing explaining why or how various memories emerge, or in what sequence, or connected with what influences from my reading or viewing.
Let me get my coffee, and then I will cooperate as best I can. I set my switches for maximum focus, receptivity, clarity, presence, and also for minimum self-defensiveness, self-protection. Help me recognize, guys.
For one thing, a background awareness of how many things are connected beyond our consciousness. I can sometimes sense the connections, radiating inward to me from various points of association.
All right, guys, probably a private session, or maybe eventually a public session with strategic elisions of what is nobody’s business save to indicate the kind of dredging necessary and possible.
You were thinking of writing down the comic jingle you were reciting to Louis last night.
Things are not so bad,
It’s a nice-a place,
Wassamatter you,
Shut up-a you face.
Can you see a deeper meaning this morning?
I was telling him that I was finding the unending medical stuff tedious, now. Still pleasant interactions, but no interest in what was going on – not wanting to bother to look at the screen as the ultrasound proceeded. It is the sheer repetition, and maybe the knowledge that the alternatives for the rest of my life will be between no change and a downward movement. It is the inability (momentarily?) to sustain interest in the process.
Again, a “slight insanity” in your mood?
Perhaps. A depression of function, anyway. So the jingle is saying shut up, and grin and bear it.
Not in any given determined manner, more like a shrug and a return to what does interest you in life.
A lot of associations jump around, always, and I could easily go off chasing rabbits. Much like you guys.
Gee, do you suppose there could be a reason why our processes and yours should resemble each other?
I think that as I proceed, greater openness leads to a closer combination, which moves me closer to your mode than my isolated 3D mode.
Way too fast, but accurate enough. This isn’t what we – what you in 3D and we in non-3D – want to be pursuing.
No. it could be an evasion, I can feel that. I suppose that has been a common theme in my life, avoiding uncomfortable (or even merely boring) realizations by chasing the more alluring mental constructions.
Which thought itself –
Yes, I know. Okay, something had me realizing that from my earliest days there was a mechanism, a habit-pattern, deep within me, that was isolating me from others. It was sometimes resentful, sometimes angry, sometimes suspicious. It never occurred to me – whoever “me” was – that I and the mechanism might be two separate things. I am tempted to ask, “Who, or even what, was it?” But I got that it is better to ask, “What did it do?” and maybe why.
This is a tricky thing to pursue, and requires some courage and some exhibitionism to discuss in public. But some would find it helpful, not least yourself.
I think I can do it, if you’ll keep me on course, like the time I worked back to the point of my Florida vacation with Charles and realized I had been seeking clarity. That came by following the seemingly unconnected memories that surfaced: lying in bed, sick; going out into the incredibly bright starlight; sitting in a lawn chair watching birds, offshore; remembering how blurry everything was.
Similar process now. Start with what surfaces, and follow the seemingly random chain of associations, as the emotional logic carries you along.
I didn’t come into this life tabula rasa, did I? I have known that, but perhaps only in a superficial way. “Past life” influences means that we are emotionally affected, it’s not merely memories.
Yes. Proceed. Bear in mind, initial observations and conclusions are going to be relatively shallow next to what you may garner by proceeding. It’s like wading out into the ocean: It gets as deep as you could want, but first you have to get your feet wet.
That mechanism that I just observed – that isolating mechanism – may or may not have been intended to isolate me. It is just as possible that it was merely expressing what it was, and the isolation followed.
If Katrina “reincarnated” after dying in a Nazi camp, would you expect her to emerge trusting and easily fitting in? If John Cotton “returned” in you, still hardened and bitter and distrustful of life, would that not flavor your life?
But John learned from the German sergeant that you have to accept life as it comes.
And you think, “Of course I would get John after he was healed, not before,” but – logic aside – does it occur to you thar you (and perhaps others), living John’s situation, are why he could heal, and that then he could pass his healed attitude to you at a later time in your life?
No, it hadn’t, but it should have. After all, when I retrieved Katrina, the crying child I had always felt within me (though I usually didn’t realize it, and never as anything separate from myself) stopped crying. She was healed; I was different.
Only, thinking about it, since the healing of Katrina happened after her 3D life was over, I guess I assumed it was the retrieval per se that had changed things. That wouldn’t apply with John.
Maybe everybody in 3D is connected to others in their own 3D time/space who suffer, and in effect distribute their suffering, so that when any one person is healed (or is further injured), it affects all the others, knowingly or (usually) unknowingly.
Yes, I can see that. So we spend our lives criticizing, or bearing with, each other’s perceived shortcomings, and only with luck do we learn to view them with compassion.
You remember Hemingway’s statement.
Something like, “Youth thinks life is a battle, but it is a morass.”
And perhaps now you see deeper into it.
I do. We think our goal is to live a successful fulfilled life (whatever that means to us specifically), but it would be at least as true to say that our real goal is to live with all these manifesting influences, and try to synchronize them and heal their wounded places and manifest their excellences.
It can’t be done abstractly, though it can be thought about, obviously. It can be done only by living it.
Our lives are to be lived so that we may express them. This does seem a shallow, obvious, conclusion.
But a less obvious jumping-off place. As we said, it is a matter of continuing or not. If you walk back to the beach, you have had a refreshing dip in the ocean. But if you continue outward beyond the depth you can stand up in, well, those are deeper waters.
Let’s go there.
Yes, we thought you’d rather; your time has come round.
And I’d rather not quit, merely because our time is up and we’ve overed a certain number of pages.
We can continue. It is a matter of your wanting to press on.
I do.
So, you come into the world as a congeries of influences, each in itself a congeries of influences. For simplicity we are saying that these influences are threads proceeding from (or through) other individual lives. A more sophisticated analysis would show that the various braided experiences that we are calling threads, or strands, are themselves the product of previous processing of other times’ unfinished business. Just as everyone is so braided that ultimately humanity is all one thing (literally, not merely metaphorically), so all times and places are braided, and of course it’s all here and now.
So our imperfection, our ad habits, our illnesses – our sins, call them – are all part of our whole being not as incidentals but as central themes.
Yes. What you come into life to do is not to be criticized as a failing, nor dismissed impatiently as irrelevant or boring. Life is the working-out of the problem posed by the interaction of strands in a new common life.
That sounds like every life is a First Life.
Isn’t it? When was the last time you were Frank DeMarco? All the strands that went into your composition were real lives, real units, but does their confluence in you make yours any the less a First Life?
Then, what is the difference between a First Life and whatever happens to us thereafter?
In 3D terms (a very distorting mirror, remember, because it funnels everything through the sense of time “passing”), you get one chance to form who you will be, and that is your First Life. But that isn’t the end of the story, for you are always alive, always affected by others. Almost impossible to express this within the 3D framework, but there it is. Your life as pilot of the ship is your Frist Life. That is the only life you are ever going to pilot. But the voyage doesn’t end.
Its funny, I sort of understand that (in fact, it’s sort of obvious), and I sort of don’t understand it, and in fact it’s sort of nonsensical.
Yes. That is merely you being more aware of more of who and what you are. You all have plenty of skeptics and blindlings among your crew.
And they have their rights too.
Well, they’re your shipmates, aren’t they? And how can you know what is a detriment an what is an asset, when you can’t even know the equation being solved?
Mixed metaphor, but I get the idea.
I thought this might go into heavy psychoanalysis, but instead we went into explanations. A defense-mechanism on my part?
No, and we can give you a touchstone to use whenever you are in doubt: Were you willing?
I was.
So if you were willing to do the work, but the session went elsewhere, maybe the session was doing the work, it’s just that you had a different idea.
I can see that. Evasion is evasion, and willingness is willingness, and either attitude is going to produce results congruent with itself.
That’s a simplified way to look at it, but good enough to be going along with.
This whole discussion obviates the question of whether other-life memories are real or are dramatizations of our own internal tendencies.
“How could you possibly split so fine a hair,” yes. It’s a meaningless question.
We’ve gone a practically unprecedented length of time. Today’s theme?
“At the center of influence,” perhaps.
“Past life, First life”?
Probably would slant it wrong. Try, “Real past-life influences,” or “We are never tabula rasa.”
I don’t know, it still doesn’t seem to get it.
Maybe “Living and choosing.” Possibly too simple, but that is what it amounts to.
Maybe, “Not to be criticized, but lived.”
Yes, that would work.
Profound thanks for all this.