The flickering reality
Wednesday, August 10, 2022
5:05 a.m. I awaken from a strange experience, something between a dream and a reliving. Mostly gone now. A sense of me among a few other soldiers, edging into town, the rebs edging out, nobody wanting to start something that could get out of hand.
Well, friends, I am enjoying the stroll down memory lane (“the country of old men,” Scoggins called it) and am perfectly willing to continue to stroll, or to talk about something on your minds, whichever.
Let’s talk about what is more on your mind.
Ah, the tumors, yes. A sense that things are ramping up again. Go ahead, then.
Shouldn’t it be you going ahead?
You know more about it than I do, I imagine.
We can give you a quasi-outside viewpoint, yes. That isn’t the same thing as knowing more.
Oh, I rather think it is. You know my inside view, you know what it looks like from outside – how does what I know compare to that?
We can see that it can look that way.
I can’t see that it can be any way other. And I guess I’m not too much interested in pursuing it. An odd bounce, considering how obsessed with knowing the future I was once.
That mistaken idea led you far, though.
Oh yes, no question. But, a mistake.
We don’t need to do a session, of course. It’s only if you want to do so.
I know. I do and I don’t. I do, because I wouldn’t want to get out of the habit, and I don’t because I don’t feel any urgent need for information or clarification. Perhaps because rereading so many conversations has filled that need, for the moment? Perhaps because I can see that the conversing does take its toll, leaving me less able to do the other work, even though I still waste a good deal of time (or maybe am out of gas) throughout the day.
Why is Freddy Prinze in mind? It was the line about the lovers running out of gas, from “Chico and the Man,” so many years ago. Freddy killed himself playing Russian Roulette, if I remember rightly, and one side-effect was to put his fellow actor – who was it? An old man – suddenly out of work, where a moment before he had been starring in a popular show.
[But as so often, I remembered the emotion vividly, the facts only vaguely. Courtesy of duckduckgo, I see that Freddy shot himself deliberately, being depressed. And Jack Albertson, though dying himself (though few people knew it) continued with the show for another season.]
This memory spurred by a phrase – in effect, an overheard phrase – is an example of how your minds process input from all directions, very little of it following intellectual logic; most of it following emotional logic. Your dream-experience, same thing.
So I guess you want to say something about our performing improv.
You should explicitly mention that you are reading John Mack’s book [Abduction], a few pages at a time.
I get where you are going with this. I wish I had the ability to draw it as a picture, in the way we painted our self-portrait of the mind as neuron, that time.
Only, you were thinking of it as a portrait of the interconnection of strands among various lives.
Yes, I was. And of course it is both, I see that now. And as I get up to refill my coffee mug, I remember that lovely film “Mrs. Miniver.” I don’t know why, but I can see the process, more. All sorts of things are associated within our filing system, and they arise – sometimes to the level of our consciousness, but surely mostly not – and they flavor things. Most of these links are not intellectual, I quite see that, but they may have intellectual content attached to them.
A little slower, and remember to set your switches – at least, for maximum Presence – for you are on the way to formulating a new understanding and it will go farther and seat deeper if you do the work, rather than receiving it from us.
This, despite the unreality of the distinction between “us” and “them.”
Yes, but do the work if you want the insight.
It is a prime mistake, in investigating the nature and operation of the mind, to forget that the angle from which it is approached will somewhat determine what will or will not be seen; certainly what will or will not be emphasized. If approached as if logic were the touchstone, or intellectual concatenation, or emotional resonance, or connection with “other lives” or with other elements of any sort, the picture you get will reflect what you went looking for.
You used to be determined to learn how to see “the” future.
I was, and until I gave that up, it was probably impossible that I could come to see that there isn’t any “the” future except from one timeline. The determination in that case was more of a strait-jacket than a help.
Hold on to that evanescent thought you keep having and losing at the periphery of whatever else you are talking about.
Yes, but it’s hard to put into words.
Making the attempt will link it to various anchors in your mind-stream, in your association-machine, and will thus make it more yours.
The world (reality, that is) is continuously changing. There is no set result, no past-to-present-to-future that has to be superseded by another chain if we are to express how
Dammit.
Keep trying. That was only a first attempt. Try bullets.
- We are always deciding.
- The nature of mind-stuff. Can you say one line of thought is duplicated and changed, when you change your mind?
- We’re always changing and being changed, so the whole of reality, if we could see it as a field of colored lights, would always be changing too.
- All times exist; they don’t cease to exist and they aren’t museum pieces or snapshots in an album. They are alive, so they change as things along their various strands change.
- Therefore in effect, all versions of reality exist, but – aha, here is the nub of it – not as duplicates at the same time. It’s more like they all have their 15 minutes of fame.
Yes, that’s the nub of it. It is because 3D time analogies sneak in between the lines that it is hard to see the flickering reality – the ever flickering reality – that is the stage on which you do your improv.
Clear now. Thinking of it as one situation, then that situation changing but remaining in existence as well, then that third situation changing – and on and on, forever – is impossible. It doesn’t make sense. Is reality one vast non-3D Xerox machine? But as soon as w get rid of the implicit idea that something once created remains created, while still changing –
No, I’m losing it in words. A little help, here?
Every split-second situation is as real as it is ever going to be. There is no 3D Moment Hall of Fame. Nothing lasts, in a way. Nothing is ever lost, in a way. Every moment is forever; every moment gives way to another.
It’s one more example of “only somewhat real.”
Yes, but a certain cast of mind will reject this – explosively, probably – as nonsense. Prepare for that. Just as one size never fits all, so one insight never suits everyone.
Thoreau again: The light that puts out our eyes is darkness to us.
Yes, only everything changes, so nothing is as final as everything usually appears.
What is the piece I can feel myself missing?
Your decisions affect what filters up into consciousness, and hence affect future decisions. So, the things that come to mind – Freddy Prinze, Mrs. Miniver, John Mack’s book, your physical situation, reminders from past journal entries, all of it – come partly as a result of subterranean associations that come, in turn, partly from what you have had in mind, and partly from unsuspected or unremembered emotional or logical connections. This is one more way in which your improv affects what will come next. It doesn’t determine anything, but it offers certain things as fodder and perhaps puts other things on back shelves where they are less likely to be seen.
“Improv”?
Could be. Or maybe “Flickering.” Your choice, as usual.
Okay, well, thanks for all this.