TGU on untying knots

Sunday, June 23, 2019

4:20 a.m. All right, let’s resume. I have been reading the Urantia Book’s massive section on Jesus, holding in abeyance the question of whether it is or isn’t the truth – that is, whether it is or isn’t a true account brought forth by the anonymous channelers whose work it is. All I can say for sure is that if it is accurate, what we’ve been bringing forth here is not.

And naturally it tends to shake your confidence.

Naturally. I suppose this is one reason why I haven’t read channeled material – other than Seth, and not so much of that – all these years.

There are advantages and drawbacks to any method of proceeding. Too much isolation, too much careful attention to the work of others – either way can lead you astray. But either way has its advantages. The ideal is a mixture, but the ideal mixture is different for everyone, just as the message received, and the goals aimed at, will be different for each. In your case there were and are good reasons for you not being too aware of consensus reality in any form. You are highly impressionable; it is desirable that you receive your impressions from your intuitions (and this [process of communicating with TGU] is a form of intuition) more than from external evidence.

It has made my life interesting, but not easy.

Would you trade? Now, or in retrospect?

I don’t think I would trade, but I might be ready to work more with others and less by myself all the time. Only, I don’t necessarily do well, playing with others.

You are right on the edge of realizing something, but you need to relax just a bit.

I’ll recalibrate.

Okay, what?

Consider your past, to see your present more clearly. What is your experience with team effort?

I’d say I’m great at encouraging people, not so great at directing them.

No, go deeper.

The right question will help, probably.

Your Hampton Roads experience encompassed every aspect of working with people in a common enterprise. You were at various times underling, overlord, team player, organizer, fixit man, hanger-on, visionary, and so forth. Your organization went from three people to 30-some, and down again and out.

Yes, I’ve said the company was never the same for very long. In effect it was a new organization and I was in a new function every so often. And I just had a glimpse of what you’re after, writing this, but I’m not quite holding it.

It’s flirting with you.

It is. Something about how and when I was effective and how and when I was not. It’s almost irritating, the way it says just out of sight.

You could organize what you could understand.

Yes I could. And I was so often amid what I did not understand, for lack of knowledge and lack of knowledge of where to find the knowledge.

Dig.

And that brings us to lack of communication, doesn’t it? Bob didn’t communicate, which made life hard, and it is only recently that I realized, neither did I! I over-communicated in some ways, so that he, and I suppose others, stopped listening, and I entirely did not think to communicate what I was feeling and needing and not receiving, except in bursts of anger.

And what was communicated then was the fact of the anger but not the cause other than the apparently trivial immediate cause for it.

Yes, very true.

But think more – dredge more, perhaps we should say – on the question of your work singly and in tandem.

I can still feel the realization or the conceptualization just over the horizon.

When did you work best alone?

Editing. I could take a manuscript and reword things to help the author say what he or she wanted to say but wasn’t quite communicating. I could bring clarity to the work. Only, I was too timid about it, usually. I saw that later. In everything I did, I didn’t have the confidence to put my thought above theirs beyond a certain point.

You should clarify that.

Well, Bruce Moen’s manuscripts. I taught Bruce how to write without repetition, and he very intelligently learned. Same with Robert Bruce. But in both cases, I didn’t reshape the manuscript to the degree that I should have: I could have been far more drastic and the result would have been better. Eleanor Friede said as much, in effect, only I still didn’t have the confidence to put my judgment over the author’s when it came to content as opposed to phrasing and organization.

So what was your gift to your authors, beyond recognition of the value of their work?

I could help them state more clearly what they wanted to say. But I could not help them do it in a way that would appeal to others, not having that gift myself.

You are close now. Don’t slide away from it.

It’s the same limitation, I guess. I could see the thought but I could not see what needed to be done beyond clearly expressing the thought. If the subject matter was inherently interesting – Moen, Bruce again, for examples – the books did make their way. But if it was a subtler message, not so much.

Now, when did you work well with others? Beyond encouragement, beyond clarification, what was your contribution?

I organized behind the scenes, until we got too big and until it all got beyond the point of –. No, until we split down the middle due to lack of communication and its results. Bob couldn’t do what I could do, and vice versa, and we rarely both worked on the same thing together. It’s a big regret. He could have helped my books, and didn’t. Presumably the same could be said of me, though I was aware of one and not the other. After a point, pretty early, we were not one house but a house divided, and sure enough, it could not stand.

Perhaps this will help you get to it.

[Always a strange feeling: Got that far and no farther, in this case because I distracted myself by recognizing that I didn’t yet know what the “this” would be. But, let’s try again.]

You each listened to your own drummer, and it brought you a certain way. What you didn’t master was coordinating your visions without watering them down.

Seriously mixed metaphors!

Yes, fine. But pay attention.

Oh, I got it. If Bob and I had found a way to communicate our emotional position to each other clearly, we could have prevented so much friction and counter-hauling, and our joint judgment would have been better.

More consistent, anyway. Now apply that specific example to your life as a writer.

Who is it I need to communicate with?

Is it not – the whole book trade? Your potential audience? Those who would be glad to enlist in the same cause?

Say it is. Where is the invisible barrier that I have not penetrated?

You know the answer, even if you do not know you know it.

Well, that’s helpful.

It is, actually. You need to put yourself out there more openly.

Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ, as the character says in “Outlander.” How many people would put as much of their life out in the open as I have been doing for the past 20 years/

It isn’t a matter of who else, it is a matter of you, what you need to do.

It is the one thing that would be the most painful. What I already admit to is shameless.

No, do you remember when you used to be ashamed of having asthma, and would not mention it?

I had forgotten. It has been a while.

Was there any disadvantage at all in learning to talk about it as a fact of life rather than as a shameful secret?

Just the contrary, it was very freeing, in ways I didn’t suspect ahead of time.

There you go.

Well, what is the specific application here?

You have to unknot yourself.

In order to give myself enough rope to hang with, I suppose

You don’t undo a knot by pulling on it, but by reversing the process that created it.

Just tell me what will be the advantage to me of putting this on the internet.

You know the answer. It will help people, and that’s what you do.

Meaning, so that’s what’s right for me.

It could hardly be any other way. Equations always balance, or they do not equate.

Splendid. Did I get the answer to my question of how to proceed?

We can’t say. Did you?

Very funny. Okay, till next time.

— Finishing this, I then realized, maybe talking about the needs and the process in public may be what will be helpful in magnetizing the new situation we need.