Bertram, how much of what I felt yesterday was me dramatizing, and how much was emotionally true with specifics perhaps invented, perhaps distorted?
[A different “voice,” though not heard.] You overlook the thing that came to you, considering.
Yes, I suppose I do. Dion Fortune – Violet Firth that was – welcome.
Are you in the habit of walking into a bookstore and buying a whole arms’-length of books by an author, as you did in California? [This was the Eat-West bookstore in Menlo Park, more than two decades ago. I bought $135 worth of books by Dion Fortune after coming across The Secrets of Dr. Taverner in the home of Don James, a friend of my brother’s.]
I am not, of course, and your novels have meant a lot to me.
So, as you know, we share a thread, as you would put it.
It ought to have been obvious. When I first learned of you I was thinking in terms of one unit reincarnating as another unit, and I didn’t see how Dion Fortune could have become Frank DeMarco.
Nor did she, of course. But she and he could and do share a thread with Bertram and so many mystically and psychologically obsessed people.
Yes, it ought to have been obvious. Of course there is the temptation/reluctance to assert kinship with famous or accomplished people. Everybody is always the reincarnation of someone famous: It is great fantasy wish-fulfillment.
But this is not your pattern. Yours, if you haven’t noticed, is to be the cherished companion of people on an inner plane, some of whom are known to the world. But you do not think you were Lincoln, say, or Emerson, never mind Napoleon or Joan of Arc or Cleopatra!
Sure, I’d take cherished companion. It could still be wish fulfillment.
It could, and that is a pitfall everybody would be well to be aware of. However, “Suppose you are making it up: Why are you making up this and not something else?” Have you ever thought you had been someone famous?
I tried it on, a couple of times, but it never fit.
But your knowing a certain kind of famous person on terms of affectionate familiarity and equality did fit. Yeats, for instance.
True enough, and I did not try to make that happen. It happened to me. [Contact in 1995.]
You have expected access to inner circles in 3D, and have not quite fit in when it was granted, because you in 3D weren’t quite right for it. But outside of 3D, you did and do most surefootedly.
So it seems.
Seems?
Alright, so it is, provided it is not all fantasy.
Care becomes impediment, carried too far. Too much caution may prevent one from accepting the evidence. It is as misleading, when it comes to that, as is too much credulity.
Intellectual honesty mandates that I at least consider carefully that any manifestation may not be as it claims – nor as I assume – even though genuine. Filters conscious and (mostly) unconscious are always there to distort perceptions. I think “Dion Fortune” but it may be merely the guys, or may be a tendency of my mind. How would I know?
And everyone who follows the path you have been opening will face the same difficulty. You have already indicated that the way forward is to ask different questions.
Yes, I see that. Given that we cannot know who, it may be useless to pursue the question. But we can know how it affects us.
Precisely. Just as you had to free yourself from the idea that contact with the unseen would manifest in archaic language, or different handwriting, or the other things sometimes seen with trance channelers, so you have to be willing to accept that what you tap into may or may not be discernible as different. It will come through your mind, as I am doing now, and so it may take on your mental habits and – more subtly and perhaps more misleadingly – your pattern of ideas. Still there will be a surprising difference at the core of it. Concentrate on connecting with the source of the strangeness, not for the sake of the strange, but for the sake of the commonality.
So now, you thought to evoke Bertram, and got Dion Fortune, not entirely without foreshadowing. The thread is the same. It is not as if you got a wrong number. And you are as much a full part of that thread as any of us, whatever else you or we may be, so there is not really a reaching out aspect to it; more a reaching in. And for you to attempt to connect with my British-ness or my female-ness or my association-ness or my psychiatric-practitioner-ness or my magical lore – or any other of my individual aspects – would be to move from the core to the periphery. Instead, you contact me by moving in to your core, to the shared psychic-experiencer, teacher aspect. That is the connection, aspects of personality are merely clothing over the essence.
Thus Joseph the Egyptian and Bertram and Yeats and Dion Fortune and as-yet-undiscovered-by-you priests, mages, seers and hermits are all essence, not personality. To find “past lives” for the sake of building up one’s importance artificially in the present is to move in exactly the wrong direction. To search within oneself for certain traits, tendencies, longings, “at-home”-nesses, is to perhaps find other connections, and these connections will be – as they should be – peripheral to the task of choosing what you wish to become; they will never be a sort of ratification of your worth. That ratification may come incidentally to other things (or it may not), but it will be incidental, not central in any way. You have at your internal fingertips a vast library of human and ex-human and non-human minds. Use it properly and it enriches you. Use it for ego support and it helps you lose yourself in fantasy, perhaps.
My initial question to Bertram concerned the sense I got yesterday while connected to Jane Peranteau. Are you saying the question of historical accuracy is of no importance at all? I get that the emotional significance speaks for itself. But is this a case where my investment in a skewed concept was strong enough that they had to decide whether it was less misleading to accept it and build from it, or to reject it and yet try to salvage what is true in it?
A decision on your part as to what is “objectively true” is rarely as much use as you tend to think it. Much better to remember that “life is but a dream” while still remembering that 3D is not of no consequence for all that.
Say again?
“Fact” is more slippery, and in some ways of less consequence, than you may assume it to be. Totally inaccurate readings of “fact” may nonetheless lead you to the right place if in context of an overarching intent. Thus, you want to connect with certain forces. Something in you knows how to do it, and leads you there blindfolded. Does it care – and should you care – how accurate the “facts” that lead you to real experience? But the moral of the story is, cling to the experience, and search out its meaning and its implications. Do not cling to the “facts” and the story in and of themselves. If you were mistaken and thought that Abraham Lincoln’s dates were 1800-1865, rather than beginning at 1809, how much difference would it make? A difference in his death year would of course be a different thing. But you see the point.
Yes. It is the opposite approach to a biographer’s.
Not opposite in the sense of searching for the truth of someone’s life, but in its valuation of fact. A biographer would not accept internal fact as evidence. For your purposes, that same internal fact is the only kind of evidence available or needed. What useful light could the facts of Yeats’ life shed on the question of whether it was Yeats who came to you in the 1990s? How could they confirm or refute or explain the feeling of comradeship? To seek for confirmation of internal relationships by rooting around in external facts is to go about it the wrong way.
Besides, you must always remember, you communicate with others along a shared thread. But you, and each of them, have plenty of other threads that you do not have in common. Along those threads you may be able to look over their shoulder, so to speak, but it will not be the same direct experience.
Seems to me you are giving us a precis of how people go wrong in trying to get a grip on dealing with “past lives.”
That’s the idea. Attack a problem from the wrong direction, with the wrong assumptions, using the wrong tools, and you cannot expect satisfactory results.
Well, thanks a million for all this. I’ll never forget the overwhelming impact your novels had on me, going on a quarter of a century ago now. I had no idea anyone could write in that way.
And you responded from a deeper part of you than was conscious, you see. The sharer of the thread brought various of us to your attention, but it still required work on your part, with our help of course, before you could readjust your ideas to bypass certain illusions and misconceptions that were getting in the way. And what they were getting in the way of was not you connecting to us, though that’s what it looked like, it was you connecting to deeper levels of you. And that is always the problem, even though it usually looks like a problem between you and “other.”
Yes, I see that. So we’ve gone 70 minutes or so. Enough for the moment, or do you wish to say more?
Just this germinating thought, for you and for any for whom it sets up a resonance: You are not only a learner and an experiencer and an apprentice (so to speak): You are also a teacher, and a producer of experience, and a master. Regardless of how you feel yourself to be at this time, remember there is always a lesser you and a greater you, a novice and a past master, a seed and a full-flowering tree; it is all in what you choose to identify with.
I had a friend who said he sat down at a potter’s wheel for the first time and said to himself, “What would it feel like if I had done this a million times?” – and threw a pot, right off.
That’s the idea. You, your friends, your unsuspected connections in the moment and beyond: Go throw your pots as if you had already done it a million times, because somebody in there has done just that.
Our thanks not only for this but for your wonderful teachings. Give my regards to Willie.