Our lives and various levels of reality

Saturday, September 16, 2017

5:45 a.m. Case in point, the movie “A Very Long Engagement,” a French film seen via Netflix. World War I was the most disgusting, useless butchery, that solved nothing and destroyed all prospects for happiness in the twentieth century. This catastrophe had its villains – stupidity, connivance, greed, envy, you name it. But was it planned? Some say it was. Does that matter, either way? Because if it was, so much the worse; if it was not, no better.

That misery came from somewhere. Should we try to talk it away? Say it does not matter? Must we not have to acknowledge it? Anywhere you look in history, it comes down to people trying to live their lives and having those lives overshadowed by the times they live in. Even the villains of the piece change according to one’s point of view, one’s understanding of what went on, and why.

It is difficult to put it clearly. I suppose this is why I lived in history, so I could not come to wave it away as illusion. Maybe it and we and everything we know are only relatively real – I do believe that – but within our own terms, reality is what we exist in.

That isn’t said as clearly as it needs to be said.

You say it, then, whoever you are.

The villain of the piece, and the heroes of the piece, never change, regardless of the piece under consideration. It is this that we would have you understand.

Yes, I get what you passed along just now. The villains and the heroes are not humans, so much as qualities.

Haven’t you fumbled with this idea for quite some time?

I don’t much care for the word “fumbled,” probably because that’s exactly what I have been doing. Yes, I have thought of writing a history where Hatred, for example, is seen as the antagonist.

This is still too vaguely expressed. Get your thoughts into gear, as they say. Or rather, apply yourself, don’t just drift.

Whoever you are, you aren’t shy, are you?

It is precisely to loosen that idea of “whoever you are” that we are engaged in the current effort. But, try!

Once upon a time, this work consisted of my willingness to act as scribe, trusting that I was not making it all up behind my own back (a suspicion I have never lost, though that too is too simply put). Then it became a dialog in which my part was as focused as expositor as it was as receptor. Then Rita began encouraging me to express understandings in my own words, so that my part in the enterprise came to be part radio receiver, part translator, part essayist. And now you seem to want me to use an insight conveyed to me as a point of view, and build on that.

From one point of view, what you just said is entirely mistaken. That isn’t what happened at all. But from your point of view, the progression seems natural. Well, it is part of your work to show that this is how you experienced it, and our work to show what it really was. From the beginning, you have been interested in information and we have been interested in process.

Yes, I guess I do know that, though it took me a while to catch on.

Well, where you are now is the skeleton behind the flesh of human activity.

Whoever you are, you are not so much accustomed to words, are you? Yet, you are coming through my mind; why does that not command the language I know?

[A long pause. At least, it seemed long. Less than a minute, I suppose.]

That was quite an experience. The response I got was a deepening of communication, in a few waves of difference, as if my mind settled, bit by bit, into a deeper, calmer place. And this wasn’t during the reaction, or because of the reaction. It was the reaction. Whoever I am in communication with is well beyond words, and needs my access to words if it is going to communicate at all.

That is much better. Can you see how your assumption that you were talking to a human mind – or an ex-human mind, as you like to say – absolutely interfered with the communication process? Absolutely interfered, and, carried farther, might have absolutely prevented.

I get that I have come to the end of the current Rita book, that it should end with my piece on John Tettemer and his importance for us.

Don’t jump to that conclusion, but you aren’t far wrong. You are nearing a fundamental transformation of your understanding of the process, if you are open to it and do not prefer to halt at the relatively stable place you have come to.

No, actually, I look forward to it.

Very well. So, from a mind that has never been human, you cannot expect a human slant on things, even though the words and concepts have to come through yours. Remember, always, that you are in the process. Any communication to humans must have a human intermediary, obviously. This affords opportunities for mistranslation of concepts, but without it, there is no medium of transmission. And of course in speaking to humans, the recipients themselves are equally sources of misunderstanding, mishearing, even deliberate refusal to understand or to hear.

Yes, that’s clear enough.

It is clear, but it is almost immediately forgotten as soon as heard. So, try to bear it in mind.

I’m not writing scripture, I get that.

Oh, but you are! What is scripture but human attempts to convey messages? Any serious and relatively successful attempt to communicate is of the same nature as scripture. However, don’t take that to be elevating you in stature; take it to be reminding you and your readers not to elevate scripture to a level it cannot sustain.

“You do the best you can,” Bob Monroe said. I think he was trying to say something of what you’re implying here, that all communication involves distortion because it is a translation from one set of conditions to another.

Almost from one reality to another. Not quite, but almost. And it requires great patience, practice, sincerity and even a form of recklessness. All of which you have been practicing for as long as John Tettemer was a monk.

Since I don’t think it is Praise Frank day, I take it that is encouragement for any who are impelled to take the same road.

They don’t necessarily require encouragement, but some may find it there. In a sense it is Praise Frank day, only not in a sense you would recognize. It is Praise Certain Qualities day, and you share in their reflected glory to the extent that you shared in their qualities.

I’ll bear the qualifications in mind, and won’t sit waiting for the medal or ceremony.

Now listen, for time is short in the remainder of this session. You have been told that your life as experienced is only somewhat real. This is because your life as you are experiencing it is deeper, with stronger cross-currents, than a mere conflict of compound-beings. You got the idea: Try to express it.

As Rita has been training me to do, I see. Okay, we see history as it affects us, so it becomes a matter of MacArthur and Wilson and Roosevelt and Hemingway and John F. Kennedy and Churchill and Robert Henri, and W.B. Yeats and so on. [In other words, it becomes seen as a matter of individuals.]

And Frank DeMarco, and each of his readers and friends and everyone he knows.

Yes. And to us, this is reality. It combines the external world we experience, even at second-hand, and the inner world we construct or experience as we cooperate in shaping our ideas of what is going on.

Yes. Continue.

But a deeper level of reality involves the same events, the same individuals, but experiences them as forces, as – I don’t know how to put it. As manifestations, I suppose.

Try not to stop there, but continue, for when you return you will not be in the same place.

In a real sense, our 3D lives may be seen at different levels of reality, and our accustomed way of seeing them is relatively superficial. Hatred and fear, in various combinations – all the deadly forces that run through us, as well as the living forces too – they could be said to live their own lives through us. No, that doesn’t get it.

Try!

If you were a playwright, you might try to express certain ideas. You would have to clothe the ideas in characters, and express them in conflict and interaction of the characters. There would be no other way to do it.

Perhaps not “no other way,” but continue.

It would be the interplay of forces that concerned you, and the interplay of the characters you had invented would be secondary.

Well, not exactly. You acquire a stake in the characters as you animate them. You should know that as you think of the Chiari brothers and others you have brought to life and then seen having that life, with its own bounds and possibilities.

I think we should stop here.

That’s fine. Thank you.

It is we who should thank you, I’d say. Till next time, then.