This material was originally posted in five parts, from July 2 thru 6. For your convenience, I am reposting it as one long post.
Saturday, June 30, 2007
Nearly 10 a.m. awoke thinking of something worth recording here, but too many things between awakening and picking up the pen. That’s why I often do my morning’s work before I shower and shave.
So — if one of you splendid gentlemen will deign to get on the line and remind me — or set some other rabbit running — I’d be obliged as usual.
I had a stray thought that I put on the blog this morning — I used to think that what a person made of his mind — the things he learned, the connections he made — were lost when he died. It made everything seem so pointless. Realizing that the pattern of mind created by that effort survives and is there to be used recasts it in a different light entirely.
There is much more, obvious to me but probably not to others (because of just the kind of work I have been doing, it occurs to me!) and would need to be spelled out.
It’s hard to find the organizing principle that will let me spell it out, who and how this network is used. So, friends — David, if no other is more appropriate –
We appreciate the difficulty — perhaps now you will appreciate ours, over the years!
A drawing?
That’s right. We’ll try, anyway. Right-brain pattern appreciation, remember, because words can explain and amplify and clarify but alone they can only mislead.
All right, you’ve got a clean page to work on. Okay, I heard that, I’ll do it in pencil against the need for revision, and comment as you or I decide it would be helpful. Do you want to talk about it first or draw first? Draw first, I heard it, and heard the reason why: so I don’t get into the act more than can be avoided.
[Minds on the other side, the arbitrary non-existent line between 3-D and non-3-D, and minds in 3-D The lines are links of affiliation, temperament, etc. that organize the entire field.]
Every conceivable situation exists — some are great networkers. Some are much more solitary. But ultimately everyone connects, on either side of the veil.
And bear in mind here, this is radically simplified. It takes no account of the multiple overlapping layers of relationship that become more obvious as you look more deeply in time and space.
Nonetheless you can see that things connect not simply and uniformly like single-cell organisms, but complexly like the physical body. Envision this diagram extending backward into the page and forward from the page — in 3-D in other words, and you will begin to get a visual sense of the complexity that would require some level of drawing skill to suggest.
Now, it is a good working model to say “I’m going to connect with the guys upstairs” assuming that you come from a place of confidence and altruism — then you won’t run afoul of uncongenial spirits (to put it mildly) because you will not be “calling” on their wavelength.
Go back, now, and pencil in letters for the circles on what you call the other side. Just do it arbitrarily; there is no meaning of hierarchy implied by the letters. Now number your individual’s on your side. This will make it easier to describe the process.
Suppose A knows chemistry, B psychology, F practical politics, and J is an artist. That’s enough complexity to be going along with.
Now if you were to think of these things as abstractions you’d have a logical, probably symmetrical structure, probably pretty static.
But considered as minds, you can see that it is much more dynamic. Perhaps A connects to G because one is parent and the other is child. Perhaps G in turn connects to C, D and L by profession, affection, and kinship respectively. (And here you see the tip of the iceberg of complexity: if G is kin to A and L, L is in some way kin to A as well as G.)
This is all from one point of view, by the way; another person’s map of the same minds might have some ties more prominent than here and others less.
Now if 1, say, which is to inquire about chemistry, he may need to talk to A. If they are close enough in wavelength that it may be done directly, well and good. If not, then silently and unobserved by 1 or openly and described to 1 (as a “control,” say), whoever 1 can reach links to A for him. So it may be that 1 can link to I (a good networker). The chain may have to go like this: 1 = I -> B -> E -> H -> D -> G -> A and back! But once 1 and A have once linked up, the intermediate chain may be dispensed with, as they will by the process of information transfer have established a direct link.
In a future exchange, 1 could then perhaps go by way of A (silently or explicitly) to reach G and any that connect via G by a shorter or more direct route. Thus the network is ever changing.
Note — this beginning of an explanation does not address the question of active cross-communication entirely on the side. Neither does it do more than hint at the effects that are made possible by communication of, say, I and A via 1. Thus, Hemingway meets your father, and both learn the latest news of Earth (so to speak) which becomes a part of them and changes them — and it all is continually changing and becoming ever more complex.
That’s enough for now. You haven’t the energy available to begin a new complex thought.
Okay.
Sunday, July 1, 2007
All right, I’ve been putting off starting this morning. Don’t know why. Yesterday’s very interesting transmission hasn’t been typed in yet, and it is somewhat vague in my mind except for the sketch I have before me. Okay David, now what?
Not me. I am handing you off. I mentioned it only to start you thinking regularly of the handoffs that usually occur silently. I’ll perhaps pop in here and here — and you will usually recognize those moments –
[Interruption]
All right, then, whoever would like to continue talking about an organizing principle explaining how minds on the other side interact with each other and with us –
You will remember — that is, it is well if you do remember — that explanations are analogies. Only that which does not need to be explained can be presented as itself, everything else is made to be “like” the nearest similar thing — as Bruce Moen well explains. You can say that the color orange is “like” red, and also “like” yellow — a statement that is truly incomprehensible to anyone who has experienced red and yellow but not orange – or you can say “orange” knowing that the observer has already experienced orange. In the strictest sense explanations always mislead to some extent, regardless the best efforts of the explainers. You know, or you do not yet know, and there can be no third position. Explanation is a bridge between the two that sometimes bridges and sometimes collapses.
You are looking for God, here, though you haven’t yet realized it — and although neither the religious or the anti-religious would concede it!
Mankind has mostly believed in a God, a personal God, or Gods, who interested Himself or Themselves in humans and their affairs. There is a reason for this and it is not the stupid presumption of “moderns” that their ancestors were stupid and superstitious lunatics who confused “natural” events and “supernatural” causes. The reason people invented Gods is that they had experienced them! What simpler? But this requires explanation involving a few side-trails.
You seized on the insight that perception gives rise to story, and that the stronger the perceptions, the greater the temptation to give greater credence to the accompanying story. We would suggest that here in a nutshell is how humans invented gods. The experiences were undeniable. The presence and their interest in humans were felt. Older eras being more open to things your age is only beginning to reawaken to, there was no doubt or belief involved: the perception was shared among the members of each community. But of course each community created its own story about the perceptions, and hence as formerly isolated communities came into contact, they discovered that their neighbors worshipped other gods. If they were tolerant of each other this did no harm. If they were not, their neighbors were worshiping false gods, and must if possible be destroyed. Here it is your key to the early books of the Bible: genuine perception, inflated story — result, repeated genocide.
But the underlying perceptions of an extra-worldly (so to speak) superhuman presence taking a very real interest in human affairs not only socially but individually was accurate. The rise of the higher religions may be seen as the ascent of greater abstraction. That is, the sense of the diversity of forces was subsumed into a stronger sense of the underlying unity behind forces.
So the Muslims cry out in testimony, “There are no gods, but only God,” and this is saying (in a sense) “the world is not a contending chaos, but a conscious design.” Muhammad’s insight — bred from his experience of the Jews and Christians and their books — led his people to a new conception of the world, a higher level of what we might call usable abstraction, than they had had previously. This was well and good, only it had the result of emphasizing one set of characteristics (design) over others (chaos, for instance, or free will). From our point of view this is productive, as one society emphasizes one set of characteristics and another seizes upon another, either radically different or largely overlapping or anywhere in between.
You see the Hindus seizing upon the multiplicity of forces, subdividing them far more than did, say, the ancient Greeks and Romans. These gods are still believed in and revered, by uncounted millions. Others in that society, Western-oriented, now hold these beliefs in a part of their minds (like Sunday Christians) divorced from practical considerations. Still others scorn them as the superstitions of their stupid ignorant ancestors (who somehow created a great civilization out of their stupidity and superstitious-ness).
You see today’s materialist scientists concentrating on laws — on the impersonal aspects of the creation — and correspondingly undervaluing the antithetical aspects, as is only natural.
You see what we are saying? Each of these perceptions, save the last, is followed by story that results in a personal God or Gods. The last — the secular West — leads to mankind as God, in that it systematically removes from consideration any perceptions that in fact the other side interacts continually on an individual or societal basis.
Now — to bring it to you, Frank, as an individual, for explanatory purposes, you
[Lost the thread]
Perhaps I lost the thread because I got nervous? But I didn’t feel nervous. I think it was as simple as the urge to replace a comma with a dash, and the conflict that set up, which is the equivalent of woolgathering, in this state.
(1:30 p.m.) To continue? (I thought your red, yellow, orange explanation brilliant, by the way.)
You often refer to God in a casual way that leaves your hearers uncertain. Usually they hear only the pious use God in common conversation — and certainly not in the manner you do. You do not give enough thought to how you make people work to try to understand you. Most don’t make that effort — and so you are dismissed, which, we realized, doesn’t mean much to you, but more importantly to you your thought is also dismissed.
Maybe I haven’t thought it out in any detail. Maybe I can’t take the time to explain all the time. Maybe nobody would stand still for a long explanation anyway.
Well, that’s why you were created to be a writer, and a writer in this electronic age. People can give it as much or as little time as they can and will.
So — that is what we are doing, nudging you as necessary — so that what you have internalized may be passed to others in detail — that is, in fixed words — and thus have that much greater leverage.
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
7:25 a.m. I suppose it should be reassuring that I have no idea what comes next, and don’t even know what has come so far — that is, I can’t recall except by effort both sessions. I don’t know what is being created and of course I am wondering if there will be any more. There is no angst about this, it is way too familiar, but there you are.
All right, David — I don’t know what is next, so I sure hope you do. But then, I assume it.
We mentioned that you use two analogies — Upstairs/Downstairs and this side/that side, both geographical analogies, so to speak. We started to say that you had once realized that conscious/subconscious also implied a separation in space, as the difference between the top of a wave and the body of the wave (and the wave in turn could be seen as the tip of greater depths, as Upton Sinclair more or less saw the individual and the race).
All these analogies are useful distinctions but — like all distinctions — they are partial, tentative, dependent upon the point of view of the observer. In a very real way, distinctions obstruct or blur the realization that distinctions are by nature falsifications no matter how carefully drawn.
Furthermore you are coming to realize that what we are giving you here is the root of the problem of Western civilization. Nothing less. And that is: Being unable to believe in immortality, or being unable to conceive of immortality as anything but a vague continuation of existence, because of conclusions that for a while seemed forced by reason in the light of science, western civilization split into three parts that each went its own way (except that each, regarding itself as the only legitimate and accurate representation of reality, also regarded itself as the only legitimate authority around which society was to revolve, thus setting the scene for endless struggles, or Kulturkampf). These three may be subdivided but that would only blur the lines I am drawing to show you the outline.
Religion. Received belief, corporate bodies revolving around scriptures as they interpreted them.
Science. Continual investigation into physical reality, being willing to (and expecting to have to) reshape its view of reality as new data is derived or discovered.
Humanists, call them. Willing to draw from science and religion but basing itself on an idea of
Lost the track.
You’re trying to deduce, again.
Yes. I can’t imagine what this third force will shape up as. Well, proceed.
If you don’t want to call them humanists (shades of the accusations of Secular Humanism thrown out by the fundamentalists some years ago in your path) I can name them something else. The essence is this: they do not rely upon Scripture or on investigation, but upon something neither Science nor Religion easily recognizes. Call them perhaps the Intuition-ists? The Rooted-Nature-ists?
You see? Emerson, Thoreau, Goethe, Whitman, Coleridge — not merely artists, not exactly mystics, not quite scientists. It is not a matter of temperament, though it may easily appear so because certain temperaments gravitate toward certain points of view and those accustomed lines of thought tend to shape people into these temperaments.
So you have those who follow scriptural authority, others who follow investigative authority and still others who follow instinct informed (depending on the person) by different combinations of scriptural and scientific information.
Each of these has a different worldview. Each in a very real sense lives in a different world. They all perceive different facts, deduce different rules, arrive at different conclusions. This after all is what your blog is all about — the world is fragmented.
As I said, each division can be subdivided. Catholics and fundamentalists and Quakers have huge differences among them, not to mention the differences between any of them and Muslims, Rastafarians, Hindus or Buddhists. Nonetheless, you can see a rough commonality among them when seen from this particular categorizing scheme. Similarly, physicists live in a pretty different world from sociologists, and either from psychologists, yet clearly they all look to experientially derived data for their authority. And Goethe may have significant differences from Ken Kesey, and each from Hemingway, say — but they are all making sense of the world less from Scripture or scientific investigation than from personal intuition.
Again, this is only a classification scheme. Goethe could be put in among scientists, as could Thoreau. Newton had a foot in at least two worlds. The point is not to pick holes in the scheme but to pick an implied (or anyway an inferred) whole out of it.For this is what it gives you, you see. Once you see the culture as consisting of a positive, a negative and a reconciling force (to use Gurdjieff’s terms) you see that none of the three may be dispensed with. Each is necessary, and will be present one way or another. It is not the presence or even the overdeveloped presence of any that is the problem.The problem of the West — and hence of the world — is not that there are three means of receiving data but that the three means appears to be delivering contradictory data! This is why each set goes off to sulk, or comes out to do battle, instead of playfully and creatively cooperating and competing to each make its own contribution and recognize the contributions of the others. This is why it is a struggle in terms of tug-of-war rather than, say, a foot race.
Now, in spelling out to you a scheme of what life is really like — that is, taking both sides of the veil as an interactive system — and in pointing out that the means of personal verification are available to each of you, have we not given you the clue that society could follow to reunify its vision?
If scientists as scientists (not as individuals with divided minds, putting their science aside on Sunday mornings, so to speak) can obtain first-hand knowledge of the essential immortality and interpenetrating nature of life –
If the religious as seekers of religious truth can do the same, and interpret their experience in light of the scriptures (and then, soon enough, learn to use the scriptures as roadmaps of what they are likely to discover, or should watch out for, or tools that they may be able to use) –
If the poets and mystics as intuiters of truth can fashion a reconciling view respecting both religion and science –
Do you not have your next civilization in its essence? You will not live long enough to see it flower but you may easily live long enough to see it take root — and you will continue to actively participate (with greater freedom and sureness) from the other side.
So, that is what you are up to.
I see to my surprise that it has been an hour.
Yes, go. But today we can probably give you more — assuming you wish to receive it today.
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
11 a.m. All right, so let us bring our charts to another level of complexity. Again, do this in pencil so that you will be less prone to anxiety about it, knowing that you (we) don’t have to get it “right” the first time. And of course what applies to you applies to many others, who will find our anxiety-avoidance techniques useful, perhaps.
You remember the basic diagram. Copy it in when you put this on the machine.
Now, looking at it, realize that each circle is not a unit but is in itself a complex structure, or meeting-point, or focus (however you would like to think of it) all parts of which may come into play in different circumstances. Let’s start on your side for convenience, working this from the familiar to the less familiar (although “familiar” is a very relative term, and in a way could be considered to mean “the unknown that you think you know”).
You see we start off with 1A and 1S, your dimensions — your heredity, as Yeats would say, physical and nonphysical. Putting one above and the other below is merely convention: they could be portrayed in reverse order, or side-by-side — only why overturn convention without specific reason? It only makes things harder, by introducing another complication.
You see the value of sketches, and of pencil (or rather, of eraser!) — increased clarity results and in turn is depicted. Thus you erase “connections” and write “heredity” as you realize that “connections” belongs to a different order of affiliation.
So, you add 1R for those nonphysical beings with whom you share resonance (thus bypassing questions of reincarnation) and 1F for physical beings with whom you share residents, F for a friend.
So we begin the other drawings. Looking at 1A we find: genetic inheritance of characteristics, genetic and habit-formation inheritance through the family, and the overall influence of the culture one is born into. These all affect the individual every day but usually mostly below the threshold of consciousness.
Looking next at 1S for your nonphysical heredity: developed tendencies of thought and inclination, and closely related to that, skills and knacks developed over repeated lifetimes. Also past associates of the blood or otherwise, which differs from 1R because while you are on the same wavelength with those you resonate with (by definition), any given life will shovel you into relationship with people you don’t resonate with. You have some point in common, or you could not meet — but you are not naturally in instinctive sympathy. Nonetheless the shared experience provides a link that otherwise would not be there. (It is, remember, one prime advantage of life in the physical that it allows one to associate with others of such different wavelengths that they would never easily meet on this side.) Finally we could add that which you have loved or valued. If you reread Moby-Dick seven times, or read the Bible every year like Cayce, or if you were an admirer of Napoleon or of Wellington, or if you haunted the opera or the theater, or if you were bonded to animals or trees or loved to play cards or — anything — that old connection survives, perhaps unsuspected or experienced but inexplicable to you.
Of the presence in your psyche of 1F, friends and lovers, there should be no need to say much. This is always well known. The tie between friends or between lovers may be more mysterious or complex — certainly more volatile — than is commonly experienced; nonetheless no mammal — and you are mammals while in the body, however you may think of yourselves — no mammal can live alone without shivering.
Of your nonphysical associates (1R) you have been getting some slow education. If you as a conscious creature in time-space contain all these elements, think how complex is your energy signature! Think how many, many different ways-lengths you may resonate to. Again, it is in physical matter that the universe as we know it gains so many possibilities of self-referencing incremental complexity.
That’s enough for the moment.
Yes. I think I’ll merge these three drawings into one.
Do, and copy it here, and more can be (and may be) added in time.
Thank you as always.
6:15 p.m. Now, remember that “the physical” does not mean humans, or humans and animals, or humans and animals and vegetables and minerals, and it doesn’t mean all the earth or even all the galaxy. It means all of the part of creation that exists within sequential time and what that implies (time-slices, delayed consequences) and separation by space and what that implies (a seemingly absolute division rather than division into units only provisionally or, shall we say, “somewhat”).
Alpha Centuri the star? Yes. Any of its planets? Yes. Any lifeforms existing there, whether recognizable as life to you or not? Yes. Everything that exists in 3-D space is part of the physical aspect of the world. (And we use “the world” here as it used to be used in earlier times, as a synonym for all physical creation.) The reason to stress this point is that you will find an unconscious tendency to divide things between the vast and mysterious and vague “other side” and not all creation, but only earth, or often enough, only humans. That would be a total absolute distortion and is to be avoided.
You see, the interaction we are painting is not a matter of humans on one side and us on the other side. It is not even a matter of Earth life on one side. It is all physical matter anywhere, even if Earth never hears of it. How else could it be? Could you have a local part of the universe in connection with the other side, and not all?
Now consider what we are saying. You Downstairs, on your side, connect with us Upstairs, or on our side. We in turn connect with others on your side.
Some of those others may live on Alpha Centuri, or in far galaxies of which you will never get a glimpse or have an inkling. Do you think they are any farther from us (where space is not local, nor time) than you are? And since both you and they may connect to us, obviously one potential for your communication as it improves is that you can communicate through us, and ultimately without us.
Welcome to the universe.
And there is more than that. Since you by your decisions affect us and they by their decisions affect us, and we reciprocally affect you and them — in essence to greater or lesser degree, more consciously or less, you affect each other.
Really, you each affect reality, which affects you, but it comes to the same thing.
You see, physical matter with its delayed consequences and its ability to form ever more complex relationships among its inhabitants, is central to the universe (the world; we need a bigger term; to physical and nonphysical reality considered as one).
Do you still feel like insignificant inhabitants of a third rate planet circling a sixth-grade star at the edge of the universe, or does that view begin to look a bit myopic?
9:50 p.m. And still the picture is not even nearly complete. You may contact all the past, all the future, anyone and everyone in the physical or nonphysical part of the world. So just what can’t you reach?
The key is to redefine yourselves, redefine the world, so as to disable the thought systems that disable you by persuading you that it is not possible. It is that simple, that easy, that overwhelmingly powerful.
“But?” For you must feel the presence of an implied “however,” or why hasn’t everyone done it? But — merely — it is harder to do as individuals than as part of the herd. (We gave you this years ago.) The pioneers have to contend against the specific gravity of the species, so to speak. It is harder to do what hasn’t been done, because one’s internal weigher of probabilities and possibilities exerts a formidable drag. The Wright Brothers were aided immeasurably not only by all those who had attempted to build flying machines but — more, in fact — by those who had opened their minds to the possibility of practical flight and had thus hacked invisible paths into the surrounding jungle of certainty that it couldn’t be done. A positive confident attitude did not by itself provide the formulas and experience that led to success — but it did help in ways that are scarcely suspected and never seen.
Anyone reading this and listening to that inner voice saying “yes, that’s the way it is; this actually can be done, though it is going to require work and practice” — just listening to the voice helps break the logjam. Making your own attempts helps more. Overcoming your own skepticism and making the effort to not negate results by declaring that you made it all up helps even more. Working with friends is another step. Coming out into the open about your experiments and your experiences adds vastly to the effect. And so it goes, as each one pioneers as best he or she can. Every attempt — even if made in silence in a darkened room on an island without telephones, so to speak — adds its weight to the scales. We see so clearly on the side what you often have to strain to bring yourselves to believe — every effort counts. You all create together, even when working separately.
And, it should be obvious (but, we would bet, isn’t until we say it) so do we.
It is from lack of a plausible model more than from any other single thing that the division between seen and unseen world has come to seem so absolute. Well, we’ve given you a model to work with. More, we are giving you the tools to do your exploring (and hence your model-repair) with.
That is what this long effort has been about, and really there’s no need to be saying more. Everything you need has been given. It is up to you to do it, or to decline to do it.
That sounds sort of final.
No, it’s just the breaking off of the thread. You can only spend so much time telling people to walk through a doorway. At some point your telling them more becomes a substitute for them doing it.
Yes David — and I can hear that you are David. Who was it, came in, there’s last two entries?
Do you care? If I said William the Conqueror, would it matter, or Robert the Bruce, or Spiderman?
Story would tend to blur perception?
You have the idea. It’s a lot you’ve been learning, the short time.
Are you becoming a stage Irishman?
I’m only adding some local color.
Thanks for all of us.