The Dead Present

I encourage you to dip into the various TGU sessions that I transcribed and entered here. It is a wealth of material, with gems repeatedly turning up unexpectedly. Here’s a “fer instance”: In a few short lines, the question of relevance, the introduction of the concept of the Living Present and the Dead Present, and the aliveness of all matter, including plastic.

Rita: All right. I don’t want to ask questions that are trivial and not worthwhile in terms of the general themes, but as I read over our last sessions, things occur to me to ask about. If these questions are too distracting from the way we should be going, just let me know.

Frank: Let’s have a word on that for the moment. We were puzzled when you said it, trying to figure out what a trivial question would be. Because, if the question is in the moment, it’s in the moment, and it can’t be –

Well, let’s see. Could it be?

Given your underlying intent, we don’t understand how a question could be trivial, but – we’re willing to be instructed.

Rita: All right, well I could give you an example. One of the things that came up last week in our discussion was your phrase “everything is animate” and when I read that I thought, “well is that literally true?

Frank: Literally true.

Rita: When we think of something like plastic, is that animate?

Frank: Mm-hmm. Sure, because you can’t make dead things out of living things and the entire world is alive. It seems to you dead because of your state of consciousness, but in the proper state of consciousness you’d recognize its alive-ness. You’ll see it in your shamanic materials, you’ll see it in drug experiences, you’ll see it in people who’ve had ecstatic experiences of a certain sort.

This is not at all trivial, but it would be a detour, so we’re going to put it off for now, but if you’ll bookmark it, we could come back sometime and say to you that what looks dead is because you’re experiencing it in the Dead Present rather than the Living Present. The Dead Present is what your senses report; it’s a thirtieth of a second after what happens; the Living Present is what happens before your senses can report it. All the magic in the world is in the Living Present, and in the Living Present there is nobody with the illusion that there’s anything dead. But as I say, let’s bookmark that for now. We’ll be glad to talk about it some other time.

In fact, Rita, to allay your anxiety, this is why we’re not worried about the questions? When we come across a question that is an important question to be dealt with but won’t lead us where we want to go, we’ll just do this. We’ll just bookmark it, so it’s neither wasted nor disregarded, but neither does it deflect our flow.

Rita: All right, that’s reassuring.

Frank: But you can see that that’s not at all a trivial question. That’s a question that is central to people’s understanding of what the world really is.