Friday, September 23, 2022
6:10 a.m. So, my friends, I sampled the audio file Bill Ebeltoft sent the link to, and sure enough it reminds me of a state of mind I don’t get to easily otherwise. Not the realer reality I visited once, but, let’s say, one story up from my normal dwelling place. I’ll have to try using that as background while I do something, see how it plays out.
This ties in with my ongoing concern as to whether to do Discovery again.
You aren’t asking for a “Should” or a “Shouldn’t,” as you once might have done. This is good. You are asking, more, “What if?”
Exactly. The pros and cons, please?
In favor of doing another program
- Past experiences almost universally good.
- This specific program, very
- Your hope as always is that the right tool applied in the right way will open the closed door, or will find the lost key – however you want to think of it.
Negative:
- Could it be a diversion, or evasion of doing real work?
- Being with people full time for a week will have its difficulties.
- There is a question of health concerns, and we say no more.
I suppose any course of action, for anybody, at any time, has its upside and downside. These seem pretty minor. Not exactly crossing the Rubicon.
Not like Gateway, no.
I suppose it would be worthwhile to take even an off-chance, if there were the possibility of results as dramatic as Gateway produced.
Only they weren’t what you hoped for, let alone expected; they were an entirely different order of things.
Yes they were. How would I have known what to ask for?
How would you know now?
Looking at your list, the negatives seem theoretical and not too important, the positives mostly hope.
Your choice.
As always, yes.
Then the next question is one of my responsibility – or not – to write a summary of the way we now see the world, in the wake of 20 years of discontinuous but connected instruction by you and by life.
More specifically, why can’t you bring yourself to write the book?
Yes.
But maybe it isn’t another book the world needs.
That would be fine by me.
Can’t you follow where your feelings lead?
I can when it’s a clear direction. Not so easy when it’s blankness.
Now, you know better than that, in a way. That is, you have known better, and now it would be well for you to remember better.
And to do that?
Use what you know. Your ever-twisting acronym, for one thing.
Twisting is right. Latest iteration (and I’m not satisfied with it yet) is PERC: Presence, engagement, receptivity, clarity.
Regardless, center on that. Now, with your mental space clear and you in a state of quiet receptivity, sit with the question. Where would your feelings lead you?
I may have to list things as they come, sort them out later.
That’s a good use of bullets, just as valid as using them to list things you’re sure of.
- Most of the things that are associated with “success” I don’t like. Publicity – particularly reaching for publicity – especially.
- Too much physical activity is beyond me.
- Zoom etc. opens up possibilities I am not paying enough attention to.
- I like to teach, I like to encourage.
- I guess I no longer believe much in books, in my writing them I guess I mean. That’s a shocking statement, but it’s true.
Or is it that you feel defeated ahead of time at the idea of getting your books accepted by a publisher with the ability and will to get them out there?
That too.
Remain in the clear receptive state. Continue.
- I liked teaching those weekend courses. But I would have needed for TMI to promote them, which it did not do. Bob Holbrook was wiling to expand it to a weeklong program, but that was perhaps more than I could do.
- What I really would have liked would have been to have a continuing seminar with the same people, to help them as obstacles arose. At the same time, maybe the weekend was all that people needed. No point in fostering dependency.
- Actually, what I would have preferred would be to be part of an ongoing group, exploring. I don’t have to be the leader (speaking of the blind leading the blind), and I don’t have to be a follower; can’t do it for long even if I wanted to. A group of peers, perhaps alternating leadership according to specialized knowledge or aptitude.
- We’ve been meeting for two and a half years on Wednesdays, but I don’t know what we’re accomplishing. Something, I think, but I don’t know quite what, and perhaps nobody else does either. If this is the group of peers I just mentioned, the form of it hasn’t jelled. And maybe an hour a week isn’t enough to do anything beyond remind us.
Suppose you set out to create a group of just such self-selected explorers. What would you do different from what you sleepwalked into?
I’d have some sort of syllabus, I think. Some road map, however inadequate, keeping us oriented on what we want to accomplish.
You mean, like the road maps Daniel Boone used, in exploring Kentucky.
Very funny.
It’s a more instructive comparison than may appear at first. In exploring Kentucky, Daniel Boone made it possible for people to cross the mountains and create the first state there. [In 1792, eleven years prior to the admission of Ohio.] Did he intend to do that? Did he have any idea he was doing it? Would he perhaps even have had severe second thoughts if he had realized that he was changing his hunter’s paradise into a land of settlements? But knowing what he was doing had little or nothing to do with doing it. He was acting as what people used to call an agent of providence.
Authorized local representative of the universe, as I sometimes say.
Can you say that your life has no such implication? Can anyone? You are all living individual 3D lives centered on yourselves, and at the same time are living as part of a vastly larger pattern, some fringes of which you sometimes see, and other times don’t.
The drawback to seeing things that way – as I do, of course – is that it becomes harder and harder to know one’s own motivations. Am I following a whim resulting from some quirk in my composition? Am I on the beam, doing the will of God, so to speak? Am I wavering between whim and certainty? It’s all mixed together.
And so?
Well, it can be hard to know what to do, when you try to follow your feelings but don’t always know if the feelings are to be trusted.
So?
I know, “Which you?”
It’s always your choice, you don’t have to explore. You don’t have to coast. You don’t have to do anything: Who is going to force you? You don’t even need to decide.
No, if we don’t mind standing on one foot, teetering.
Follow your feelings, knowing that the better you let them clarify, the better satisfied you will be that you are doing the right thing. The “right thing,” remember, for you. That’s who you are responsible for.
This is a little personal, but I’m going to send it out. What shall we call it?
“Indecision”?
As good as anything, I guess. And next time TBA, I get that. Well, my thanks – our thanks – as always.