I am not in the same state of calm focused concentration I was in when I returned from Egypt. Yesterday I got a nice section of my novel written, but in general, I feel I have been sloppy and undisciplined. More than that, wasting my life, still without a clue. How can this be?
Yes, if you are willing to chime in, I am willing to listen.
How do you expect to justify your life? What makes you cling to the idea that lives can be, should be, must be, justified? It is not that justification is there but may be invisible to others. It is that your life is your experience, whatever it turns out to be. What you did not create, you cannot fully understand. What you cannot understand, you cannot fairly judge. How do you know what your score would be on the great cosmic scoreboard?
But if you feel that you are wasting your life, shouldn’t that feeling count as evidence? If you get advice from your friendly neighborhood guys upstairs, and you don’t follow it, shouldn’t that indicate that you might be doing better than in fact you are doing?
Nobody dies content with what they have lived, perhaps. Their own opinion of the life they lived may not be the only way to see it, though.
We don’t seem to be talking about the same things. The pattern of my life is to want to do great things and then not really try to do them, and feel dissatisfied that I do not, yet be unable to use that dissatisfaction I feel.
Maybe you aren’t doing what you think you are doing.
Look, I’m not talking about external achievement, here.
A life conducted according to your own ideas of how it ought to be conducted may be regarded as an external achievement, surely.
I’m thinking more of my internal life.
And we are pointing out that internal and external are more directions of viewpoint than different realities. Caesar’s life was enormously significant for the world, but it was at least as significant for himself! Do you think Caesar had accomplished everything he wanted to accomplish?
You continue to revert to what seems to me to be a focus on external. The real question would be, was he in his character as he wanted to be? Was he satisfied with the choices he had made as to what to be?
Would you like to ask him?
I have no confidence that I could. What links can I have with him? Oh, my attitude of admiration, I suppose, as with Lincoln.
Plus, facilitation from the non-3D may be available at this moment that is not available at every moment.
Well, I guess we can try this entre nous. I don’t think I’ll be sending it out!
Why not? Do you not tell them to discern for themselves?
If it wouldn’t sound flippant, I would say Hail Caesar. If that much-admired man is willing to speak, I am certainly willing to listen.
You labor under a mistake if you think of the dead and yourselves as speaking as one island to another. There are endless chains of connections, link by link. How would Caesar move people still, if there were not? Someone connecting to you after you are no longer in 3D thereby connects to a link to all those whom you valued. This is true for everyone, of course. Plato, for instance, Sophocles, Homer. Their influence has spread enormously over the years, because generation after generation has forged links of affection, admiration, identification with them and their works. In your case, your established habit-pattern would serve as a way to reach Abraham Lincoln or John F. Kennedy or Ernest Hemingway or Caesar. After a time, external works are less important than their function as conduits.
An aspect of the “All is one” and “Everything is alive” that I had not considered. I’m getting the suspicion, suddenly, that people like me who read widely in history and biography may serve as connectors.
But don’t limit it to only what interests you. Someone suffused in the world of science or of sports or of any given pastime, trivial or otherwise, similarly serves as a node. This is one of the invisible things people accomplish merely by living.
Caesar serves as an enormously wide node.
In Caesar’s sphere, yes. No one embodies all the arts and sciences, and no one connects closely to everyone or everything. However, it is true that one’s significance may broaden after death, depending upon how others make use of the connection. Lincoln, for instance, would have been unrecognizable to the 3D Lincoln, yet the transformed legend is not untrue to the man he was.
Let’s talk about Caesar, unless you prefer to talk about something else. Did you die contented with what you had done? Or let’s put it this way, when your consciousness connected with your larger being after you died, what can you tell us of where you were?
A sudden death is convenient, but it is also a shock, you understand. So what you ask may not be exactly what you want to know.
Tell us whatever is appropriate, then.
Dissatisfaction was inherent in the nature of the man Caesar was. The man Omar Khayyam was not yet born, but his sentiment about wishing to remold the scheme of things entire expresses Caesar’s nature perfectly.
[From the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, quatrain 88:
“Ah Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire,
Would not we shatter it to bits – and then
Re-mold it nearer to the heart’s desire!”]
You were awake among so many stupid people!
You have said yourself, in the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is regarded as an hallucinated lunatic. The same may be said of a man half-awake.
From what I know of your life, you had enormous charisma, which I take to be the result of an integrated personality. But how did you appear to yourself?
Clear-sighted. I could see situations not only from my own vantage point but as they were, in and of themselves. Few others could do that. Politics is the art of seeing what can and cannot be done: at any given moment, and in the short term, and in the longer term. It repays the ability to see, to understand what you have seen, and to act upon that understanding. But what is politics? At one level, a game played by the ambitious. At another, a struggle among interests whose interests are represented by the ambitious. At another level – but rarely very consciously – it is an attempt to reconcile forces so as to produce a desirable result.
Therefore, political success may come to the most ruthless, or the cleverest, or the clearest-sighted, or the person moving in the direction that events are trending. To put that last another way, the person whose personal ambition and vision enables him to see openings that others do not.
As in your conquest of Gaul followed by extending Roman citizenship to them, which resulted in extending the republic to the Atlantic without thereby incorporating a nation of embittered rebels.
Yes, a good example. It required thinking of citizenship in a different way. To Caesar’s opponents, it was an opportunistic perversion of an historical right. To Caesar, it was a practical measure.
You saw yourself as clear-sighted, commonsensical.
I did. If I pursued visions others could not grasp, why would that make me other than methodical and commonsensical in my approach to them?
So when you died, what was your summing–up?
Here you may envision a shrug of the shoulders. I had succeeded in some things, I had failed in others. I had lived as fully as I could, had tasted pleasures and absorbed responsibilities and had amassed deeds I was proud of and deeds I was ashamed of. How it is different for anyone?
No sense of gnawing incompletion, such as the projected invasion of Parthia?
Do you expect to die with no unfinished business? But you will find that you see things differently when you are freed from so many constrictions in your viewpoint.
Only move with confidence. You don’t know the shape of your life: Who ever does? You don’t even know the date of your death, which is the first thing people after you will know about you. Your view of your life is always prospective, so how can you expect to see it clearly? On the other hand, you can see, looking back, that your lives do make sense, so, move confidently.
Aspects of communicating mind to mind across time
I get that we’re going to explore the question of transition between lives, and if so, that would be of great interest to me, and perhaps to others. I don’t feel we have ever had a fully coherent picture.
It was necessary deconstruct older, inadequate, models, before a closer approximation to reality could be apprehended.
This isn’t “Caesar,” I take it from the last sentence. Not that it matters who.
Don’t forget, Caesar thought in Greek and Latin, not in English which hadn’t even formed in his time. We always communicate person to person in “thought,” not in whatever language we are perceived in. So if a sentence is wordy or pompous or has more syllables than you like, whose fault is that? (But this is a joke, which you also don’t expect.)
The point is that your own preconceptions and assumptions as receiver shape your communications to a greater extent than you realize. You aren’t a blank slate receiving language, any more than in receiving concepts. You are not limited in who or what you can connect with by any arbitrary limit, be it time, distance, ethnicity, gender, whatever. However, certain orientations will be closer to you than others, and these will be the easiest and most productive to approach. You may think of them less as individuals than as interests, or traits, or – well, orientations.
I get that this means the “feel” of a mind, the general outlook or, I suppose, any one aspect of a general outlook. Come to think of it, we’ve touched on this before. When I connect with Hemingway, I don’t necessarily connect with the hunter or fisherman or avid sportsman.
Yes, and it is always so. You see, if you change your model from unit to component, the possibilities and limitations change. [That is, change from thinking of ourselves as units to thinking of ourselves as bundles of strands, as cohabiting communities.]
And that’s what you were saying, it is more like communicating trait to trait, say, than Frank to whomever.
It is one more complication, or perhaps simplification, that comes when you change concepts. Frank as a unit talking to Caesar as a unit isn’t nearly so likely as Frank in his communication aspect talking to Caesar in his communication aspect.
Writer to writer, you mean.
Yes. With someone else it may be different aspects. But they will be aspects you embody, or else where is the connection.