(From Wednesday, January 23, 2019, edited)
On Monday, January 21, I went to see the movie “They Shall Not Grow Old” for the second time. This is Peter Jackson’s 90-minute film comprising restored footage from the Imperial War Museum (much of it colorized as well as restored) of British doughboys in World War I. The sound track is all veterans reminiscing in their old age (recorded in the 1960s and ’70s). It is not a political film, but a sort of montage, a recreation from original sources, of a time and a way of living and thinking that is very different from anything we would recognize. It put me in mind of my experience in London with David Poynter, a Welshman who spent his life as a journalist, traveler, and psychic investigator, a “past life,” I thought, when my ideas about past lives were simpler than they are now.
I think David died in London in the 1930s. Sometime in 2001 or 2002, I was walking around the Trafalgar Square area, consciously trying to give him a sense of modern London, knowing that he would recognize the buildings, which are essentially unchanged since his time. I walked down to the Embankment, the north shore of the Thames, which is lined with monuments, and went from one to another, interested but not particularly moved. Then I came to one that said only “July 1, 1916,” and although I had no idea what it referred to (other than something in World War I, of course), I was instantly filled with a violent rush of emotion: rage, grief, indignation, despair. I realized, this was David’s reaction I was experiencing, though I was pretty sure he himself had not been in the war. So on the day after I saw the movie, I asked, and he suggested that I look it up, and I searched both “the Battle of the Somme” and “July 1, 1916.”
4:35 a.m. So, David, let’s talk about July 1, 1916. What was the nature and source of that upwelling of anguish that I experienced second-hand, so to speak?
You felt correctly that I was not in the war. I was past the age of enlistment, and perhaps could not have stood the physical toll. But neither was I caught up in war fever. My sympathies were with the poor, not the powerful, and the warfare that interested me was an uprising against the forces that were grinding the faces of the people. I don’t mean insurrection – that couldn’t happen – but organized resistance to the combination of force and law and opinion and judiciary that held society in an unfailing grip.
You were a socialist, I remember thinking.
I was. But my socialism did not have its roots in a belief in materialism, so I was somewhat out of the socialist mainstream in the same way you have always found yourself out of the mainstream of political opinion – and for the same reasons. Any social movement necessarily presumes certain commonly accepted beliefs, and to the extent that you cannot share them, you find yourself having to go along unwillingly, or with mental reservations. This does not tend to make you an effective partisan.
When war broke out in August, 1914, there was a unanimity of emotion that you have experienced only once in your life, the grief over the murder of President Kennedy. But the emotion of August, 1914, was one of enthusiastic springing to arms, a lust to destroy. People didn’t realize it, but they were desperate to destroy the lives they were leading. They wanted to tear down the structure, but they thought they were tearing at something that threatened them from outside. A socialist could see that, if he could keep his head against the group-think. Was I keen to fight for the King-Emperor and the social system I despised? Only, of course it was not so simple. Is it ever? German autocracy as personified – almost as caricatured – by the Kaiser was clearly worse. I deplored the war and did not believe in it – and yet, I deplored Prussian autocracy even more, and certainly could not have rooted for a victory of Germany.
So what did you do?
I sat on the sideline, you might say. I observed, I remained conscious. But this only got more agonizing as time went on.
I got that you were an editor at the “London Illustrated News.”
We would call it a sub-editor. I was a selector of photographs and illustrations, a glorified caption-writer. It was not a glamorous nor an influential position, but it did keep me somewhat better informed than the man in the street.
Surely you had to do some official drum-banging for the war.
Less than you might think. If I kept to describing specifics, there was no need to hint at the self-destructive futility of it, not that any such hints would have had any result beyond getting me fired. But the anguish cumulated as the months dragged on. You cannot envision the change from 1914, when the war would surely be over by Christmas, to 1915, 1916, 1917, 1918, when it clearly was going to go on forever. In 1914, even in 1915, it was possible to imagine that the end of the war would find us unchanged. By 1916, certainly by 1917, it was clear to those with eyes to see that nobody was going to win this war, and it was about who would lose it more thoroughly.
The one date that marked that change more than any other was July 1, 1916.
Per your suggestion, I looked it up yesterday: 57,000 casualties – 19,000 of them killed – in one day, the worst day for casualties in British history. The beginning of a 141-day battle that cost more than 400,000 British casualties and resulted in a six-mile advance over a 16-mile front. To my surprise, I saw that it was no longer considered to be useless butchery that accomplished nothing. Some think it led to the beginning of the end for the Germans, for reasons I won’t go into.
But you asked for the source of my reaction, which you felt that day, and my reactions had nothing to do with questions of strategy, nor even with the question of was it worthwhile even in its own military terms. Mine were rooted in something deeper. How do you think I felt, watching without being able to do anything, as a generation of young men was ground into the mud? Futility, official stupidity, dirty motives of politicians, economics behind it all, deliberate whipping-up of public hatred. It stank, and there was no way out except through it, by way of killing, killing, killing.
I suppose it’s one thing if you can believe the official lies, but it is something entirely different if you can’t, but have to live among those who do.
After the war was over, there came reevaluation, and by the time I was killed, it seemed clear that the Battle of the Somme was pointless and stupidly conceived and directed. The sacrifice of so many men was for nothing at all – so it seemed. I gather that the reevaluation has itself been reevaluated, but that’s the firm conviction I lived under.
Just as for many people Sept. 11, 2001, marks the end of one era and the beginning of another, so for me July 1, 1916, marks the end of a relatively innocent age. Now, you might say, how could I regard the preceding time as both deplorable and innocent. The answer to that is quite simple. No matter how bad a situation, it can always be made worse. Or rather, let’s say, moving from one thing to another may involve a steep descent before the subsequent climb is possible. World War I destroyed Edwardian society and ultimately allowed for the liberation of the common man from the worst excesses of industrialism, but it took decades of depression and another war to do so. Not a trivial effect – and I was dead a decade and more before 1945.
So to focus in specifically on what I felt that day in London –
Imagine concentrating your emotional reaction to all the wrong-turnings you have witnessed in your life, and spraying them out in one burst, like a capacitor discharging. That’s what you were on the receiving end of.
I see. Did that discharge affect you somehow? Vent the extra pressure, so to speak?
That requires more explanation than we can go into at the end of a session. Perhaps another time, if you are interested.
9:50 a.m. So, David, let’s talk some more. How does it affect someone not in 3D to express something to someone in 3D? How did that burst in 2001 or 02 or whenever affect you?
You are thinking of it as if I were sending you a message and you were receiving it. That’s the same idea people in my day had about what telepathy was. But, change metaphors and the nature of the event will become clearer. Think of something that equalizes with something else when brought into contact. A slower, inexact idea would be the way water seeks its own level. Say you were in the Panama Canal and someone opened the gate between your lock and the adjacent one. The water might come in quickly or slowly overall, but it would come from the higher level to the lower as quickly as it could. The higher lock didn’t “send,” exactly, and the lower one didn’t “receive” in the way people think of telepathy as being sent and received. Instead, in the absence of a barrier, the water naturally sought its own level. A lightning bolt may be seen as the equalization of energy too, but the violence of it may distract from the analogy. On the other hand, the suddenness of it does not.
So you are saying it wasn’t so much that you were trying to send a message, just that time and place created the spark that turned hydrogen and oxygen into water?
Not so good an analogy, in that this physical charge changes the properties of the constituent elements. However, let us pursue the rest of your statement, because as you intuited, place is an important part of this.
I have always wondered why it is important for ghosts to haunt specific places, and why they mark anniversaries.
And now perhaps you see the answer. This is one world, not a physical world and a separate non-physical world. Therefore place matters; time matters. Only, it is a matter of conceiving of things correctly. One might say the first of July, 1916 was in 3D on that date, and subsequently is in non-3D only. Yet the non-3D version of events does not pass away, any more than other time-space combinations pass away when the living present moment passes on beyond them. But just as a departed individual may be contacted only in the non-3D, so with departed time-place combinations. Being on the place may facilitate your communication with that place-time that is otherwise difficult or impossible to reach.
A friend once told me, we go to sacred sites not to be transformed, but to be infected. And this seems to have happened to me several times. Of course there was never any knowing what was cause-and-effect and what was merely sequence, but that’s how it feels.
When you reconceptualize the world to remove certain thought-barriers, sudden inflows of knowledge and being are enabled to occur. Such barriers include:
- I am only a 3D being.
- Anyone in the non-3D is accessible only through effort and practice, and perhaps special talent.
- The past is past and beyond touching.
- The future is “the” future, and in any case does not yet exist.
- The world is physical and external, rather than mental and internal.
- We are each alone.
- “On the other side there is no time.”
- The 3D and non-3D worlds have little or nothing to do with each other.
- Mental, spiritual, and physical are three realities, rather than merely three words describing reality from different viewpoints.
Very interesting. Thank you.