Chasing Smallwood — .35 Scattered.

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

(9:15 a.m.) Late start today. Well, Joseph, I’m very glad for the material on Emerson. In retrospect it is very strange indeed that I didn’t think to ask you about that visit the first time I contacted you.

Maybe that should reassure you a bit. It ain’t a process under your control, though you sometimes like to think so and other times you’re very afraid that it is. The extent of your immediate control is your being open to it. In fact, let’s talk a little about the process. What’s your biggest question about it? I know your biggest fear, that you’re just fooling yourself and some others. But what is the biggest puzzlement? And there’s a reason I’m asking instead of just telling you: it’ll make you think, and the process will be different.

Okay, if you say so. My biggest question about the process.

Odd, I can’t really think as well just thinking as I can writing as I go along. I suppose that trait is what led to my doing this in this fashion.

My biggest question about the process. I guess, this: Assuming it is real, and assuming I am contacting others in one or another relation to me – whether “past lives” or just friends or assigned guidance or whatever – how come I get some information and not all information at will?

The question answers itself, you see.

Well, yes, I guess it does. And I suppose that’s why you had me work to pose it.

Sure. It wouldn’t have the same conviction if I just told you, instead of your figuring it out. And it won’t have the same conviction for others – can’t – because they didn’t work themselves into the spot but just had it given to ‘em. And you’re going to have to spell it out – you will or I will – or they won’t understand what you just got, because it is too connected to where your mind is. In other words, it ain’t obvious except because you’ve just been thinking about something. And how often have you seen the same thing talking to the guys, as you put it?

That’s true, I’ve often been surprised, re-reading a transcript, to see the mental leaps I had made, though they seemed natural enough at the moment. Well, what I just got as I posed the question why I got some information but not anything I want is – because the process is not entirely under my control. In other words there is someone else on the other end of the conversation! And this is just what you would expect, if it is real.

Correct, and with that reassurance behind us for the moment we can proceed.

No, looking again at that answer, we came out the same hole we went in. Assuming the world is round, why, look! The world is round! That doesn’t actually get us any farther. What of information that ought to be available but that I can feel you don’t have? All the innumerable details about the life and times of Joseph Smallwood that you – being I take it in an a sort of permanently expanded state, ought to have access to. I may not be able to remember my street address or telephone number from 30 years ago, or 40, but if I had timeless command of my memories – as presumably you do – why shouldn’t I then?

You are making assumptions and not noticing them. You think I’m in a “permanently expanded state” and by that you mean I’m like the guys, with access to everything and (relative to you) focus on nothing until you create focus by your interest, at which times (you assume) there is total access. All this stems from ideas you’ve got that came from here and there – your childhood, your religious training, your reading at various levels of understanding over many decades – it isn’t an integrated consistent system and you wouldn’t want it to be except in so far as you feel like you have nailed in one piece of another of truth.

Well, care to paint a better picture?

You are too scattered. You cannot do this work with half your attention. Come to it joyously or not at all.