Monday March 13, 2006
I’m open to suggestion, if anybody is queued up to talk.
When you don’t ask for anyone in particular, your default guidance kicks in. your guardian angel, your conscience, your guidance system. Even when you don’t ask for anyone you occasionally get one identifiable personage, just because that one time and occasion are lined up, but that doesn’t mean you should expect it to happen. So, your friend Henry [Thoreau] shows up because it was the time and the occasion – that is, you were mentally in the right “place” – even though you hadn’t thought to ask. Lincoln showed up after you concluded that Joseph had been talking to him after Lincoln’s death, and suddenly it was clear that you could do so as well. Bowers, more or less by request, and Wilson distinctly by request. So you may look upon your connections – anyone’s – as a vast interconnecting library of people. Perhaps a simpler analogy now, that would have been incommunicable in earlier eras, would be to compare us to the internet. It is as if you were hooked into the individual internet, with the difference that here everyone is linked up. You may find someone on line or you may not – but they are linked.
So now you are at about the right place to begin sketching out your new understanding of the way things are with guidance. And, you see, you have been working right along, know it or not.
[A few years later, I reworked and expanded this idea considerably, and published it as The Cosmic Internet.I had forgotten, till I came to re-read these journal extracts, that the germ of the book came as early as this.]