[Tuesday, January 17, 2006]
(8:15 a.m.) Why did I determine – for it was a conscious decision, practically – to waste all of yesterday?
Your old habit of over-reading got away with you. As over-eating has, and more or less for the same reason: anxiety.
Fear?
Fear of being unable to actually do the job you are here to do, the only job you really want to do – because you have always looked at it wrong way around. You needn’t succeed, you need only do it and that itself is the success. As, Messenger. When you finished, you knew you had done something! But its external failure left your fears and doubts untouched. Had it succeeded externally, you might have been said to have succeeded externally. That isn’t necessarily what you want or need, and so it didn’t occur. But your entire situation differs, now.
I would turn off the slide-scale for gluttony – but I still can’t see the reality following the image of setting it to zero.
Then do what you can envision. Envision it at a number on the scale –
60, anyway.
And move the slide-switch down by a percentage. Say, a quarter. More if you can feel comfortable believing it – it is the same process as access to past lives, after all – but not so much that your doubt overcomes your ability to do anything.
All right, 25%. That moves it to 40.
All right, then revisit it as you wish.
And I hear you say, pick up different threads.
Surely, or you will obsess on what you have lost by turning that dial down. It will be as if you have lost something.
I do see that. So — ?
What would you like to pursue that to date you have not?
I’d like more easy perseverance, so that I can accomplish something. To date I have mostly been kicked externally or have not worked.
As we have told you explicitly.
I know, I know. But you are giving me better tools now.
If I could devise a chart – maybe a pie chart – that would represent the jostling elements within me, it might prove useful. Indeed, I hear you saying that I might devise a whole set of simple tools for people like me. Not today though. Today I must make up for some of the time lost yesterday, endless reading and eating, eating and reading, far into the night.
Surely you see that your culture’s way of making you feel guilty about not doing what you want to do, and doing what you don’t want to do, will work only for a certain kind or person, in a certain kind of belief system. So by living it and living it though – or perhaps we should say living through it – you break the way for others who are like you in this. It is not a universal problem, yours is not a universal answer. But you living your life are addressing or not addressing the problems specific to you; this means also that you are addressing those problems for all others who share that thread or those threads – and they are doing the same, also for all others on the thread. This has nothing to do with publicity or notoriety, nothing to do with schools or schools of thought. Mostly this work is done in private and does not achieve publicity afterward either; nor is it noteworthy, particularly. Should one – or rather should everyone – write journals or publish books or make movies about how they learned to walk, or how their pancreas overcomes specific challenges? You see? Everyone is engaged in the same kind of creation-by-decision; that is what human life is. So the only need (if it is a need; but it is something to do, anyway) is to remind people that this is a way of seeing life.
Your lives right “now” are starved of meaning. This is as it should be (in other words, “all is well”) so that new meanings can come into prepared soil. Yours – and this is addressed to whomever reads this – yours is only one, yet it is one, contribution.
It would not be possible to lead a life that did not affect everyone else, but as that seems too vague and theoretical to you, we will put it another way. It would not be possible to live a life without affecting all the threads one comprises; equally it would be impossible not to be affected by all those threads. It is a metaphor, but not a far-fetched one, that you are all in a web of life in and out of Time-Space. There is no isolation.
Mildly frustrating to us, it is, to know how little our plain words will be felt or even heard. We say to you, “you are not alone,” and you, Frank as an individual at one particular point in your life – are utterly transformed (though as it happens across time-slices the process is not obvious to you, or not so much so). But we say “you are not alone; nothing can exist in isolation” and we know that few who read it will do more than nod vaguely and proceed, not realizing that their lives can be utterly transformed merely by the implications of that statement. This is a key – not the only one, but it is one – to totally re-valuing what they know; most will scarcely notice. Nonetheless, all is well. The frustration you know comes not in our wishing something to be done or not done – for elsewhere of course it is or isn’t done – but in seeing that tension between desire and the living-out of consequences. Well, the whole subject – including your mild surprise that we can feel frustration, not to mention your confusion over the whole idea – can wait, perhaps forever.
“tension between desire and the living-out of consequences”. Yes this makes a sort of blockage. An energy leak. Stuck on the fence, not really deciding. If there was genuine decision, the desire would pass. But making genuine decisions requires a lot. A Gurdjieff point, if I recall right. And repressing desires will cause a rebound. And the harder the repression the bigger the rebound. There’s research that proves this. So war is not a solution to our desires, dissolving the desires is not available to many. Living them out will make the consequences felt. So desire is a sort of an engine that propels us into life, making us swim in the soup. Without desire we might not move. Since we’re having this life there is still things waiting to unfold.
I am finding that personalizing my strands helps in having conversation. Auseinandersetzung Jung would say. All tribe-members have something useful they bring, but when they run things from behind the curtains it will sabotage the higher intention.
Thank you this was timely and useful!
I have sometimes thought that without the desires stemming from sex — all the manifold and hidden currents emanating from desire — we might not have much to do with each other in this life. People might not have much interest in each other. So, I resonate to your statement that “desire is a sort of an engine that propels us into life, making us swim in the soup. Without desire we might not move.”
And this comes to me: lifetimes spent repressing desires will be interesting additions to the collection of strands we are made of. How strange that we can eat the cake and still not have it, when the forbiddennes or shame or some other mind-trick will make satisfaction impossible to register. In a way it is so simple: enjoy having the desire, enjoy satiating it. But the hard part is to take in the hurting when the desire cannot be satiated. Not doing the evasions like I did not really want it and so forth. And sometimes satiating a desire leads to perdition. It is like they say about spouses: can’t live without them, can’t shoot them. Interesting.
Reading your comment, it occurs to me that the very unwillingness or inability to choose is itself a trait, which will manifest.
Could you describe this a bit more? What I perceive in me is a hermit-strand that says goin’ swimmin’ in the soup is futile and useless and troublesome, better to sit at home&observe and all will pass anyways. This strand wants to pull back the strands that want to be more expressive in the world. So it looks to me 2 strands pulling in different directions lead to both being frustrated when neither is getting what they would choose.
So how would you describe a trait of not-choosing?
I’ll ask for clarification.
Frank, if you come up with any tools, I would love to see them. I fight with myself constantly about this same thing.
Could you be a little more specific? Tools to accomplish what, how?
I think “fear of being unable to actually do the job you are here to do, the only job you really want to do–because you have always looked at it wrong way around…you need only do it and that itself is the success” really resonated with me. That and, “Your lives right now are starved of meaning. This is as it should be…” Powerful.
[FYI: By a circuitous (that means guidance) route yesterday, I came upon “The Changing Light at Sandover,” by James Merrill (1926-1995). It’s a three-volume set of narrative poetry about what came through the Ouija Board for him and his partner in the ’70s. Unbelievably, he won the Pulitzer Prize for it (1976), along with the National Book Award, and several other awards. It’s compared to Milton and Dante and others and considered to be one of the best epic poems ever written–and it came through the Ouija. He was wealthy (Merrill-Lynch family), educated (Amherst), well traveled, and well published–wouldn’t seem a likely candidate for overt conversations with the other side. He talks about the discomfort of ending up in and speaking for a club he didn’t know he’d ever be a member of.]
“He was wealthy (Merrill-Lynch family), educated (Amherst), well traveled, and well published–wouldn’t seem a likely candidate for overt conversations with the other side.” Maybe not, particularly, for conversations, but it’s an excellent springboard for winning a literary prize!
“… you are utterly transformed. We say ‘you are not alone; nothing can exist in isolation’; few will [realize] that their lives can be utterly transformed merely by the implications of that statement. This is a key to totally re-valuing what they know.”
Frank,
This 12-year-old message echoes and resonates strongly. I count myself lucky to be one of those few … deep appreciation as always!
Jim