Some advice on productive communication

Monday, November 30, 2015
F: 3:25 a.m. well, I don’t quite know what this is leading to. First, last December, it was Rita resuming our interrupted discussions. Then for a while only sporadic contact with anybody. Then, from late September, daily or almost daily talks with Hemingway. And now, we’re back to the days of TGU except we seem to be blurring even that very loose definition. It seems whoever is on the line truly is not interested in these newer communications being compiled into a book. As was said a while ago, come to think of it. So – what? You just want to talk day by day and let people draw their connections with their lives?
TGU: We felicitate you [originally it came out “facilitate you” which is a nice touch] on your diligence. That is its own reward, is it not? And you have put together an economical platform from which to get the word out to others who may be interested. Maybe the book is an outmoded form, and maybe the writing of books is an outdated ambition.
F: I hardly know what to say. I’m sitting here more or less blank, yesterday’s Nevil Shute running through my mind.
TGU: Different talents produce different results. Nevil Shute wrote a score of fine novels. That isn’t your forte. Does it need to be?
F: No, apparently not. Well, what do you want to talk about, then?
TGU: You are forgetting which is the record and which is the needle. Consider what is most important to you, and that is what we should talk about.
F: Well, that’s an interesting question, isn’t it? I mean, say I’m interested in the nature of the world, or life. I may not know what to ask. In fact, any questions I had might only lead us in the wrong direction, because I started from wrong assumptions. How can I – how can anybody, I mean – be non-directive and directive at the same time? Directive and receptive?

TGU: That question is an excellent example of the confusing nature of language, or rather it is an example of how language may express confusion in such a way as to increase it rather than clarify.
In the first place, what seems like a dichotomy, a crossroads only one of which may be taken, a choice between alternatives (even between opposites) may be defined entirely differently as a situation requiring two complementary attitudes together rather than a choice between them. Receptivity and direction, not one or the other. And a moment’s thought will show you that this is what you do – what anybody does – in any line of inquiry. Einstein or Edison or Newton or Kepler or Emerson or anybody seeking for answers did not come to their quest in an unfocused state. They had their attention generally or specifically focused on one specific problem, in fact often on one very specific aspect of a problem. They held in suspense the elements of what they knew, and they pondered or else went about their business with the surface levels of their attention perhaps on something else. By holding their basic preoccupation ever in mind, they allowed their daily activities to interact with it spontaneously – which allowed the possibility of a “random” – that is, an unplanned and unforeseeable – connection to make itself manifest.
They did not obsess in such a way as to try to force things. Neither did they allow themselves to become distracted at a deeper level from what they were pursuing. You see? It isn’t a choice so much as a combination of attitudes, or attributes of consciousness.
“Follow your bliss” may be interpreted in this context as “allow your attention to remain on whatever most interests it”; you don’t need to (probably shouldn’t let yourself be bullied into) cut against the grain. If you are led in a certain direction, probably there’s a reason for that. Do you have any good reason to doubt that your life, in leading you there, is self-guiding?
One man’s fascination is another man’s boredom. Isn’t it obvious? If everybody does what they find fascinating, everybody is happy and the work gets done – that is, from a universal viewpoint, all the bases are covered. You can get all the bases covered by being sure that everybody is doing what makes them miserable, too, but why in the world would anybody design the world so that everybody’s miserable?
F: So when we are most on the beam, it may feel to us like we are goofing off?
TGU: Suppose you conceived of the idea that your role in life was to investigate the intricacies of football.
F: I’d just shoot myself and get it over with.
TGU: Precisely. Yet others would be enthralled, and say “how did I get so lucky as to get paid for doing this?” But they, if tasked with reading histories and biographies, would pry the pistol out of your hand and use it on themselves. And anybody else – listen, here, and not just you, Franks, but anybody who reads this – anybody else will not match exactly your range of overlapping interests, hence will be at least a little bit disengaged at some places. Only you will be interested in precisely any one combination of topics, hence only you will be able to hold in suspension exactly a certain combination of ideas, concepts, experiences, speculations, daydreams, fantasies – in other words, nobody else will or ever could be exactly the same combination of receptivity and curiosity in specific areas. Thus, as we have said more than once, no two people can make the same impact on the world.
F: Buckminster Fuller said that decades ago.
TGU: He said it and you noted it. And long before you read it you realized that viewpoint was each person’s unique gift from the world and to the world. If you were to re-read your very early journals you’d find it.
F: I vaguely remember it.
TGU: At the time, did that particular insight seem valuable to you? You took it as sort-of-true because you were in the habit of simultaneously valuing and devaluing any thought you took to be “yours,” and that was that. Another item to be placed in your display case, so to speak. What you didn’t know and couldn’t have known is what might be built upon that building block. But first you would have to accumulate others, of course. That’s called life-experience, and it doesn’t refer only to “external” experience.
So – we can cut this short by saying, the better the question, the better the answer. If you want to pursue a subject, all the world will conspire and inspire and respire with you. It need not have anything to do with a book or a blog or a journal. Do you think the things people concern themselves with disappear from the Akashic record (so to speak) unless printed?
F: So I in particular should come to this with whatever is on my mind, however it may have gotten there, and that will focus things.
TGU: It always does. But the more preparatory work you have done, the farther your realignment can go. Yes, realignment. Isn’t that a perfectly valid way to describe the process?
F: I wouldn’t have put it that way, so I suppose that is an example of realignment, of how this process is a realignment.
TGU: That’s what thinking does, what receptivity, what living, do. You as a miniature version of All That Is can hold only a very limited amount of things in your mind. It is that very limitation that is the reason for the existence of 3D. You are a crucible. What good would a crucible be it if contained or could contain everything? Yet you are not a completely or permanently closed vessel that cannot interact with the world. How could your uniqueness work to anyone’s advantage?
So, till next time, whenever that may be – and it can be months, for all we care, because this is not the only thing you are really doing in the world – whenever you come to this, use the tool in the way it is meant to be used. Have a question in mind that interests you. (Emphasize each of those two words in turn. Interests you. Interests you. Different effect than emphasizing both together.) You are doing a search, not taking instruction or preparing for a test.
Do a search, but realize what that means. It means being interested and conscious (present) but also relaxed and non-directive, taking what comes but keeping your eye on the ball. You are taking advantage of everything you have become up to the moment – everything you have read, experienced, thought, wondered about – you see? Much of what you bring to the question will seem to you irrelevant – “only stuff from my ordinary life.” But you don’t know what is important to the question and what isn’t. So – don’t disregard anything that comes up, but view it in the context of “no accidents.” Just because you can’t immediately trace connections doesn’t mean there aren’t any.
This is not addressed only to Frank! Nor only to writers. Nor only to those sharing any specific combination of curiosities and obsessions. It is a general statement of how to facilitate communication between localized 3D consciousness and non-local consciousness which can’t quite be called non-3D, but certainly is not-only-3D.
Now there’s your hour, and ten minutes more. Next time, whenever that may be, bring your own priority – beyond communication itself, we mean.
F: And if my priority is communication itself?
TGU: Well, as you see, you get an answer responding to it.
F: I do see. Very well. I had a good time, most of yesterday, reading No Highway. I have seven more Nevil Shutes lined up on my desk, so who knows? And I think I’ll copy the three lines of John Maesfield from the front of the book. They speak to me and presumably they will speak to others. Till next time, then.
Adventure on, for from the littlest clue
Has come whatever worth men ever knew;
The next to lighten all men may be you.