Author: Frank DeMarco

Monday October 14, 2024

3 a.m. Okay, Jon, I think I’m finally ready to do another session. If I post this – that is, if we get something worth posting – I will throw in a little explanation of what Dave Garland and I did while he was here before his TMI program. But beyond that, what can we talk about?

Once again, you are worrying because you can’t set out a logical agenda. Even after all this time, there is the temptation to think it all depends on you.

I know. But, I’m here. So what do we talk about?

There isn’t any reason not to talk about specifically that little experiment that proved so beneficial. And of course you take for granted that it wasn’t so much “your” idea as your listening to a sudden idea that came from nowhere.

I take it for granted, by now, that there is no ownership of ideas. This is one of those realizations that started off as something told to me by the guys, and I think read somewhere (or intuited by a carom shot off something I read), and then over time becoming convinced as I observed my mental processes more closely. We call them “our” ideas, but they are ours only in that we paid attention. We didn’t generate them.

And that is easy enough to prove. Anybody trying to generate an idea will find they can’t do it. They have to wait for it, and the most they can do is prepare themselves to be receptive if it comes.

I think of Wilbur Wright, twisting that cardboard box absent-mindedly while talking to a customer. God knows he was immersed in the problem he was trying to solve, but he didn’t – couldn’t – reason his way toward the idea that worked. All he could do was keep the problem in mind, consciously and unconsciously. Then, when the analogy suggested itself, he was ready, and snagged it. But he couldn’t generate it at will.

It is a simple distinction, but an important one. And how different is your situation – anyone’s – when you sit down to have a conversation using intuitive linked communication? You may or may not have a topic, you may or may not know where you want to go with it. You may or may not be receptive enough and active enough to do it successfully – but in any case, you won’t know what you are going to get. As you often say, if you knew where you were going to go and what you would see when you got there, what kind of exploring is that? And I’m saying this for your audience, whoever it may turn out to be, because you never can tell when one more repetition may be enough to get the idea through.

So talk a little about what you and Dave discovered in a few minutes, and maybe we will talk about why it could be important and what it could lead to, for any who wish to employ the technique.

Dave and I are well accustomed to working together in short spurts, dating back to the days when he used to come to TMI for a program and spend time before or after, visiting  I was living in Rita’s house in those days, so I was right there. Dave is a shaman by nature and training, though I don’t know if he would be totally comfortable announcing himself that way. But that is how I experienced him. He is a very nice combination of openness, curiosity, creativity.

Like so many of your friends.

True. But everyone has his or her own specialty, and Dave’s centers on short journeys, usually involving drumming. Until he and I began working together, I had never known anyone to do drumming sessions shorter than half an hour at least. Dave gets in and gets out in five minutes, and it is highly effective. He has taught our ILC groups that habit by example, which is of course the best kind of teaching, the kind that says, “Here, it’s easy. Just do this and see what happens.”

Which itself is an idea that you pick up from “somewhere,” whether or not you think of it as your own idea.

Yes. Well, we were sitting around in my living room talking, and as usual looking at the things behind the obvious in our lives. “This happened and then that happened and it had this result. And what was the gift in the situation? Well, maybe this. Let’s look.” Etc.

Then we came to a health problem we both have, and I suggested we “go upstairs” and ask what we can do about it, and before we could begin, I said, let’s do it for each other. That is, rather than my going upstairs and asking for insight into my own situation – a process that often comes up with little or nothing – I would ask about Dave’s situation and he would ask about mine, and it worked like anything.

You bypassed the obstacles that present themselves when you seek to get greater insight into your own problems.

Exactly. It’s easy to get for someone else, because the impulse to help is a reaching out, an expansion. It isn’t always so simple when you are reaching for yourself.

And you both saw the implications for future work.

Sure. After all, this was a version of the first exercise they gave me in Guidelines, more than 30 years ago, paired intuitive questioning. One person holds the question, the other offers an answer out of whatever comes to him. Only in this case we both knew the question, and of course we were a long long way from the days when we didn’t know if the process could work.

And so you saw a possible way it could develop.

Sure did. One way would be for any two people who trusted each other to make a habit of teaming up to answer each other’s questions. If they could bear to hear honest answers, they could make huge strides against problems that otherwise might resist their own best efforts for years, maybe forever.

Before we look at the second idea, of pairs that change by situation or by subject, let’s look a bit at what happens. You might ask yourself not so much why the process worked, but how.

All yours. Go ahead.

The psyche constructs filters to protect its self-image, and those filters are very effective. Every analyst learns how well defended people are against change, even change they are paying good money to have happen, change they are desperately hoping for, but can’t bring about.

We’re talking about “Which you?” here?

That’s a way of looking at it. If you as a 3D/non-3D mixture are contending with an avatar-level mechanism that has been set in motion long before, it can seem like you are wrestling with another person. Call it a robot (and calling it that is an advance in that it recognizes that what seems like “you” is not simply you) or call it past-life influences, or the remnant of trauma, or whatever, the fact you are dealing with is that the process of getting information to flow is impeded.

Someone else may know the truth you cannot see (because of these effective filters), but even if they tell you, you won’t believe them, because they will be telling you of something of your shadow, so what they say won’t feel right. It may make you irritated, or even angry, or perhaps indifferent, but you will not respond with “Oh, now I see! Thanks.” You are far more likely to explain to them why they are wrong and are not seeing what they think they are seeing.

But if you are working intuitively – that is, if both of you are working intuitively – you have the chance to bypass the defense mechanisms and get a clear view.

This requires trust, and a certain facility with intuitive rather than merely logical processing, and openness not only with each other but, of course, with various levels of yourself. But given those conditions, you can do remarkable things, miraculous things.

Is this one of those things you said was a puzzle when you were here and is now so clear?

The bypassing of the defense systems is, yes. There’s lots to be said there, if I can find the right person to connect with.

One trained professionally, I take it.

Not that so much as a certain cast of mind, hard to describe. I’ll know it if I can find it.

You said there’s a second idea beyond pairing.

Not beyond pairing, beyond any specific pairing. There are advantages either way.

• The same pair continue working together. They can go deeper and deeper, also can range farther in subject matter – that is, beyond personal subjects – as their teamwork matures.
• Different people can form pairs for one session or more, continual or intermittent or repeated. The flavor of any twosome will be different, as will the possibilities and limitations.

Our theme?

Call it, “The next step,” if you wish, or “Bypassing the robot,” or maybe “Self-helping each other.” That last may intrigue.

Well, a good session, after a couple of days when I couldn’t get started. Thanks and till next time. 

Monday, October 7, 2024

5:45 a.m. It occurred to me last night, we could do a session on filters theoretical and practical, if you like.

Your idea of asking your friends to each contribute a list of every practical suggestion they can remember having been made is a good one. Many heads are better than one, in the same way that many hands make light work.

I’ll put out the call. Some, at least, may respond.

They could equally list the theoretical explanations we have played with about filters.

That would be more work than listing practical applications.

You can’t know that. For some, it may be easier. It is a matter of how their minds work.

Okay, well, we’ll see. Meanwhile –

It will serve you all well if you quietly change your idea of what you are into something at once more malleable and more persistent than you sometimes think yourselves. That is, it is easier than you sometimes think it is, to manifest differently. Yet at the same time, it is safer than it may sometimes appear, because your greater life center of gravity cannot be easily thrown off the rails. You can change how you relate, how you experience. You cannot accidentally lose yourselves, nor any part of you that is vital.

Is fear a part of this, then?

Fear is always a factor. Bob Monroe’s brilliance consisted in centering in removing the fear from the process of exploration. Just as life is impossible without the force of love, so life in 3D is impossible without the balancing force of fear. The defining question is always, what is the ratio of either and both that you allow into your decisions conscious and unconscious. It is fear that teaches you about hot stoves, but it is fear that populates your childhood nights with imagined monsters. It is a useful force that is to be kept within manageable limits. What those limits are, only you can decide. As you decide, so your life will be. Change your decisions (conscious and, mostly, not conscious) and your world changes. As we have said many times.

I think we get confused sometimes hearing – and believing – that love is all, that all is love, that “perfect love casts out fear.” It makes us think that experiencing fear in any form is a sort of failure.

This is a linguistic difficulty, not a logical one. All is love; that is like saying that everything is held in place by gravity. But what you feel and express is the balance – as we just said – composed of love and fear (expansion and contraction) in productive and protective interaction.

As example. You may have a fear of heights (which is really a fear that you will be unable to prevent yourself from casting yourself off your place of safety into the abyss before you). It need not affect your life badly, or it may. The difference is the control you exert. Can you see that one effect of such a fear might be that it serve as a continuing examination into how far you are controlling fear in that form? Like any limitation, it has its productive aspect, being there – as is everything in your life – to show you to yourself and to give you something solid to push against.

I see that. But I thought we were going to discuss filters.

Someday it will occur to you that everything connects. Our fault for never mentioning it, perhaps.

Very funny. So, connect.

Is the connection between fear and filters not evident, once you think about it?

In that fear can create filters? Or, in that filters can result in fear? Which?

Look a little deeper. That is, sit quietly and dredge, see what surfaces.

I can see clearly that some filters may create fears, whether or not we intend that.

We’d better take this explanation. We can see it would be hard for you to straighten out the connections.

Yes, why is that? I felt it too.

A new approach with several elements is more easily set out by means of stream-of-consciousness bullets. Otherwise it over-stresses your logic, forcing you to concatenate variables, leaving you gasping, so to speak.

Inarticulate, anyway. Very well, take it.

• Filters are by definition outside of the range of conscious awareness. By what they filter out, they shape that awareness, hence cannot be seen.
• And yet, in the right circumstances, and certainly when you exert intent, they can become clear to you. It is of course only when you become aware of them that they can be modified or at least compensated for.
• Dealing with anything that has been beyond your consciousness is always going to be a surprise, of course, and sometimes (not always) a very unpleasant one.
• The filter’s very existence can complicate efforts to modify or remove it. It helps define your reality, so, to modify it or attempt to remove it may well seem to you to be nonsense, a sort of wishing-away of something real.

Yes, I can see that as you say it. It may feel like playing pretend. I often see that reaction in others (easier there, of course, than in myself) when I suggest they do something that I know perfectly well, from experience, is practical and even sometimes easy (that is, requiring only a decision to see things a certain way) but that is not only outside their experience, but outside the experience that a given filter or set of filters allows them.

Quite right. That is what is happening. In such a case, might you not experience fear? Something is proposing to remove one of the props of your reality: How far can you trust them to know what they are doing?

I see this in an unexpected connection.

It was what you call “a long time ago.”

Well, 50 or 60 years isn’t just yesterday.

No, not experienced in time-slices. But, mention it. It will serve as a good example.

When I was first drawn to study the occult, as it was called, or New Age thought, or the perennial philosophy, call it what you will, I really struggled. Like Carl Jung studying alchemy, come to think of it. Something told me, “There’s truth here, there’s life here.” But what a pile of undigested and indigestible superstitions around it! Or – were they superstitions? Just because I couldn’t see why things should be connected the way this or that tradition insisted they were, didn’t mean they weren’t. But in the absence of a teacher, and I being unwilling to find and follow a school (especially one demanding a vow of silence over anything learned), what was I do to do?

In many ways, the connections taken for granted were the very connections and kinds of connections that science had severed centuries earlier. Was I smarter than science? On the other hand, was science necessarily smarter than the occult science it supplanted?

Yes, and now you see how it was resolved for you.

Well, not quite. I begin to, maybe. I’m thinking now that I had filters preventing me from believing the materialist view of the world. Implanted by my Catholicism, I suppose (or maybe, the Catholic surroundings were provided in order to support the filter. I hadn’t thought of it that way.) And other filters cut against this, leaving me fully in 20^th century materialist America at the same time, however logically impossible this was.

Now, can you see that complementary filters may act to support your freedom?

Yes, I do. They help keep us suspended, leaving us free – or, if you want to look at it another way, forcing us – to choose who and what we want to be.

So you see, by this process we come out at an unexpected fact.

Yes, that filters may be useful to growth, not only to maintenance.

Should that surprise you? Life is many things, often contradictory things, all of which have their place. Naturally every tool has more than one use, every plan has more than one Plan B.

Moral of the story being, be a little careful what you discard?

Moral being, keep your eyes on the ball as you proceed. If your intent is clear and your integrity is preserved, you won’t be disappointed. And if you are disappointed, there’s always next time, and we don’t mean “Next life,” we mean, next decision, next intent.

Do encourage your friends to send what ever occurs to them as examples of filters and practical steps to affect filters.

Till next time, then. Thanks.

Sunday, October 6, 2024

6:05 a.m. Blank, at the moment. Your move.

Talk a little about fame.

Yes, interesting how that bubbled up after I wrote about it. Sometime later that day I realized, as a boy I was obsessed with becoming famous. We used to play a board game – was it called Life? – that had you choose a formula, how much proportionately you wanted to acquire in life of Love, Fame, Money. The idea was, you’d shoot to achieve some ratio, say 30, 40, 30. I never cared about winning per se, but I would always set my goal impossibly unbalanced. I don’t know if I would try to achieve Fame 100, Love and Money 0 each, but something along those lines. I think it was my non-3D component trying to give me a clue as to what was important to my life plan, if it can be called a plan.

Not that I ever knew any practical path to fame. There were several potential paths, given my particular gifts, and many that could never have had a look in, given my particular deficits. But there was never the link I would have needed. It took a long time for that ambition to not only fade but be forgotten.

Only, look more closely. As a rule, you will find that things in a life that seem meaningless or disconnected, or that seem to have run into the sand, are nonetheless seamlessly connected to the rest of your life. How could they not be? Life often looks as if it proceeds by fits and starts, exploring this or that dead end, but when you look back you can see it is like sewing a seam (although less regular): The thread moves from top, in sight, to bottom, out of sight, but the thread is continuous and it is the up and down alternation that is its usefulness.

You’re saying sometimes we have to proceed behind our own back.

You don’t need us to tell you that. Your own lives will tell you, once you examine them for that characteristic. So, look more closely.

I’m beginning to get nudges. One I never thought of is that my incessant reading of history

But was it incessant?

No, I see that now. Would you like to tell it?

Your reading was much less directed than you remember it, and much less thought-about. Nothing surprising about either fact. You wouldn’t expect a boy to have the same preoccupations or even amusements as he would later. But, in fact, you were vitally part of a few pieces of American history for reasons it took you a very long time to discover.

Lincoln and the Civil War, yes. And World War II, which was only recently concluded, hence being written about.

But the boy was reading all kinds of work, forgotten by the man. Neither history nor biography had yet emerged from all the possible things that might attract his interest.

And I was even concerned with baseball, come to think of it, though I really knew nothing about  what I was watching except winning and losing. But I remember now, it seemed to matter. Mazeroski’s home run in the ninth inning of the seventh game of whatever World Series that was, for instance. And the hapless Phillies, with their not very exceptional roster. But is any of this to the point?

Your life moment by moment is not very much like your life seen as a whole from after the fact.

No, I see the same thing in biographies. Telling it can’t help falsify how it felt to the person whose life is being described. Moment by moment takes so long, has so many hours to fill, has so many random or random-seeming things happening. Biographies don’t detail people brushing their teeth or putting on their shoes and socks, and if they did, who could stand to read about it? But life as we live it doesn’t have the silent fast-forwards that biographies do, and memories do.

And self-made summaries do. So what is the point of looking back and making the effort to recapture the feel of it at various times?

A binocular view, I suppose. We know how the movie developed: It is useful to remember how it seemed at the time.

Now, go back to the boy’s reading of history.

I realize, I always read history as if it was something at my level. I mean, I expected to be a history-maker, it was just a matter of growing up.

Did you have any reason to think that would happen?

It wasn’t a matter of thinking. It was assumed. I guess I thought everybody read history that way.

Just as boys casually assumed they would become baseball stars, or president?

Or astronauts, yes. And I still imagine that most boys did just that. (I hadn’t any idea what girls daydreamed.)

Now, this is useful background, mostly to send you back to the feel of those years. Does it shed light on your later career?

By God, it does, and I would have thought there wasn’t much I could learn about it. I see now, all of a sudden, that is what was behind my irrational assumption that I would go to the war, come out a hero, and enter politics, as Churchill and Kennedy had done. I have always wondered why I couldn’t see that my life and theirs had little in common. But now I see that that cartoonish plan was a stepping stone, a path connecting my childhood assumption that I would live a life among such matters with a way to get there.

Your astonishment is at the expense of your customary clarity.

Yeah, yeah. It’s clear enough. I pieced together what I thought was a reasonable flight-plan. Then Kennedy was killed and a few months later the Navy turned me down because I had asthma. No wonder I was so disoriented, directionless, coming home on the bus from the AFEES center. What was to be a path wasn’t actually there.

But you improvised anyway.

Totally without planning, too. No wonder I took such hare-brained moves. I was still following a path that was fundamentally disconnected from reason and therefore from criticism. I got married, got jobs, marking time until I could run for Congress in 1974, the bit of the plan that still survived, unconnected. I went to school for four years, too, and that wasn’t part of my plan.

You lived at two levels. Consciously you did what seemed sensible things. Jobs, college, marriage, jobs again, school again, and you were marking time. When the time came around, you were carrying out the plan nonetheless without much preparation, without knowing what you were doing, without much of anything except your brother’s support and your non-rational certainty.

And the odd thing is, it all worked out.

Nothing odd about it. You didn’t get the job you weren’t qualified for, but in effect your campaign was an advertisement for certain qualities that were recognized and rewarded, and you were on your way.

And this is just the kind of distorted summary we mentioned.

Can’t be helped. Feel free to describe every time you brushed your teeth.

That isn’t what I mean. I mean, it doesn’t mention my being taken by Colin Wilson’s book nor my sudden overwhelming drug-fueled breakthrough into seeing the world differently, nor my other ambition to write popular novels and make a lot of money so I could be independent.

It doesn’t mention your marriage nor your house-buying nor your putting up wallpaper nor your becoming a father, either. Shall we list the cars you owned, the telephone numbers you had, the grocery stores you shopped at?

I’m just mentioning it. It is as we said, life moment by moment is filled with so many things, and has so many movements to fill –

We keep saying, your lives and your ideas about your lives are not nearly the same thing. This is one more reason why: Memory compresses events, trends, daydreams, obsessions, and tries to make it all seem reasonable. Nothing wrong with the process, only don’t let yourselves be fooled into thinking that any one way of seeing is accurate. It is, at best, a pretty accurate summary of the view from a certain viewpoint. Change viewpoints and some things disappear from sight and others appear, and even the things that remain in sight probably look different.

Seems to me our theme has wandered all over the place today. What was our theme? I thought it set out to be fame.

Perhaps it is more the fact that your lives are a sort of balancing act.

We often feel that. You are setting it out in a different way.

• There is avatar-self at any given time, and
• Avatar-self at other times, that occasionally interact for reasons that may be opaque or anyway cloudy to you, and
• Your larger self that includes all these avatar-self versions, and has its own view of your life, and
• There is what could be thought of as “the self in the times,” meaning a sort of inertia that serves as a ballast for your life. But this is more than can be spelled out so casually.

Let’s begin with that next time, then. So, the theme?

“Many lives in one”?

“Life v. daydream”?

Life as a form of braiding, but we have used “braiding” in another context.

“Many lives in one,” then, unless I think of something else when I sit down to the computer. Thanks as always.

[In the event, I chose “Unseen threading.”]

Saturday, October 5, 2024

5:50 a.m. Curious experience. I was taking down the words of someone purporting to be Nevil Shute – at least, that was my assumption, as he was talking about what he was doing in writing On the Beach, and I had written a page when I realized, with a bitter sensation, that I was sitting in the recliner with my eyes closed, and everything I thought I was writing was smoke, was non-existent. I had been visualizing myself writing, daydreaming it, you could say. The bitterness was for the wasted effort, and I felt what I imagine we feel when we are in non-3D trying and failing to get heard in 3D.

Come to think of it, this isn’t quite the first time I’ve had this experience. Whenever I find myself visualizing, feeling, myself writing, it turns out that I am actually dreaming it, not doing it. It is always accompanied (once I realize it) by a sense of “What a waste of effort.”

To return to the third point I was about to address yesterday when I ran out of gas: seeing things backwards.

At our ILC meeting on Wednesday, Christine had reminded me that I had advised her not to dismiss stray words and thoughts that came to mind, but to pay attention to them as potentially meaningful. The reason I had told her that is that I couldn’t see how anything can come to us meaninglessly. We may not be able to trace the meaning, but still it is there, for one simple reason: This is not a random universe, not a random life. Not that everything that happens is of show-stopping importance, but that nothing can happen without reference to us – else we couldn’t recognize it, couldn’t perceive it. Every moment is filled with omens, but only those that have some connection to us will be noticed.

This doesn’t yet get it. Let’s try again.

Our conscious 3D lives are only special cases of the universal life, the universal consciousness that we exist within but cannot perceive continuously because it is too big and we are too limited. The price of admission to 3D is a great constriction in how much we can perceive of what goes on. Most of our surroundings, and a good deal of our own being, is invisible to us, filtered out before it can become conscious, merely so we will not be overwhelmed. As we have been experiencing in our lives – some of us since childhood, some following a wake-up call – these filters can be modified, played with, removed, and the result is that our lives change.

Hmm. Still haven’t gotten it down. Why is something so simple so hard to say, this morning? The original image is of our looking outward, rather than inward. But I have lost the meaning.

Guys?

We were wondering how long it would take you to call.

Oh very funny. I notice you’re quick enough to horn in sometimes. What’s different this time?

You are trying your wings, and we are in favor of that. For you, for anyone. Just because a practice has become familiar doesn’t mean that’s the end of the line. It can be, if you’re satisfied, but it doesn’t have to be, in practice, and never is, in principle.

So help me out here. What am I groping to express?

Simply that you in 3D are not at the center but at the periphery. Yes, you are at the center of your 3D existence, but even here, not at the center of the 3D/non-3D being you are. And when you turn your sight to the greater world beyond you, you see that ideas, signs, omens, connections, inspirations, nightmares, daydreams, etc. – every possible mental experience – is at least half not engendered by 3D-you. At least half is engendered by the world around you. But this requires quite a bit of explanation, though it is a simple concept ultimately. Do not jump too soon to the conclusion that you understand what we’re getting at, just because our initial sentences spark ideas. Absorb our full commentary first, then there will be time enough to consider it as a whole, rather than as some hastily snatched impression.

• As long as you consciously or automatically consider yourself to be identical to the avatar-self image you and your life have constructed, you won’t be able to see the ways in which this is not and cannot be true.
• When you fully realize that Jung was not exaggerating nor dramatizing when he described the shadow, the unknown and somewhat unknowable part of yourself, you will know that your self-image is not and cannot be complete.
• As we have said many times, you do not have and cannot have the full data even on yourself, let alone others.
• A part of that “shadow” is specifically your umbilical cord to the non-3D and the part of yourself on the other end of that cord.
• Your functioning presupposes a continual flow across that cord, but your ideas about your functioning usually don’t even consider its existence.
• As we have also said, self-identification as 3D-only leads to fear, disorientation, helplessness. What perhaps we haven’t said or haven’t said clearly enough is that self-identifying as 3D/non-3D, though better, is still liable to leave you sometimes lost, directionless, leaderless.
• Consider this. Just as your avatar-self is 3D and non-3D both, necessarily in the nature of things, so that avatar-self as a whole is on one end of an umbilicus to the larger self, and that larger self to what lies beyond. There are no absolute separations in reality. As above, so below: Ponder that.
• The point you are feeling and not expressing: You as avatar-self feel your connection to something greater. That something greater is part of yourself. That “part of yourself” is not outside your mind, but inside This is why stray thoughts may be of value, because they are promptings, in effect, from a part of yourself to the part of yourself you recognize.

And that’s why you had me begin this entry with my experiencing it while on the recliner. Very clever.

Well, can you see that all the most unusual “coincidences” and “omens” and “fortuitous” things in your life may be looked at as promptings from a part of yourself that knows more and has your interests – which are, after all, its interests – in mind?

I work on that assumption, in this part of my life. Earlier parts would have been easier, if I had known it then.

But it is the traveling that provides you with first-hand experience.

So, our theme? Seeing things backwards?

Maybe, “More than you think you are.”

Or “More than we think we are.”

That too. Same idea.

Our thanks, as always.

Friday, October 4, 2024

6:10 a.m. I was thinking, as I lay drowsing on the recliner after feeding the cat, that recently I have had to explain two things about myself, one being asthma and fear, the other being the difference between reputation and accomplishment. I don’t think I’ve done either explanation adequately. but the process has added clarity to my thinking. And even as I pondered, I got a bit more clarity. But I don’t know that the subject is sufficiently fascinating to warrant a conversation.

[TGU:] but how do you know that? You may add in your third area of pondering, how people have psychology inside-out because they think of the 3D/non-3D relationship wrongly.

Can’t even remember the example that had come to mind, though I remember the conclusion.

Sure you can. It was people paying attention to stray thoughts as Christine mentioned on Wednesday.

Oh, yes. So I take it you do think this is of sufficient interest.

Do you have something more important to do at 6 a.m.?

Do the three things have something in common other than how things can be misunderstood or inadequately explained?

They are about life, aren’t they?

Well, I don’t mind putting in the effort, so I guess we’ll see. Fear, concern, and confusion?

Maybe go there first and find out at the end what the theme was?

[Since most of the following is me and not an alternation with TGU, I’ll leave it all in Roman, as easier to read in large blocks than italic.]

[Me:] Okay. Working backwards.

Fear.

Yesterday Robert Cornett and I were talking and he mentioned that asthma attacks – being unable to breathe – must be terrifying, and I had a bit of a time clarifying that that isn’t exactly right. The thing is, when you have dealt with a thing since you were two years old, you just can’t be afraid in the same way you were as a child. How many times can you be terrified of the same thing you’ve gone through hundreds of times before? Tiresome, oh yes. Painful sometimes, debilitating sometimes, aggravating and even perplexing sometimes, yes, to be sure. But after a certain point you know that you aren’t likely to die of it, and you would almost be pretending if you were afraid of something that you were pretty sure wasn’t going to happen. Instead, you might easily feel impatience, dread, weariness, maybe anger, resignation – a whole lot of possible reactions. But it isn’t exactly fear.

However, complicating that, you may easily feel panic. Panic that you might die? No, panic that you can’t get your next breath, and that this might go on and on.

Sounds like the same thing, and sometimes I can make the difference clear to people and sometimes – usually – not. But as I was explaining the difference, I realized one aspect of it that I don’t remember ever fully seeing before. When you are fighting for your next breath in what we may call , for the moment, immediate-panic-mode, you are right there fully in the moment. You have no attention for daydreams or memories or coming attractions. You are held right there, and not for just a moment or two, but for however long it lasts. When I realized that, I thought, “Hmm, and that is good practice for when you can breathe.”

Now, at other times you may be in attention-but-not-panic mode, where your breath is coming regularly, but not unconsciously. You have to pay attention to it, not because you want to but because the situation is there: something like having a headache, I suppose, a continual presence that is more than background noise but less than a shrieking jangle that prevents you from thinking of anything else. This state may go on for hours if you don’t happen to have the medicines to stop it. I well remember so many nights as a boy, sitting on the side of the bed, swaying my body forward and back, fighting for every breath, only without an sense of possibly losing the fight; it’s just that each breath was an effort. I spent time reading, moving the book as I moved, to keep it at the same focal depth.

(And that is how I developed the habit of being in the 3D but escaping into the non-3D – the mental world – pretty deliberately, pretty simultaneously having my conscious awareness both here and there. I should ask Dirk: I’ll bet his situation was similar, except that his would have been continuous while mine was sporadic.)

So, did asthma bring fear? Not in the way people would assume, and not in any way that is easily explained. It also brings gifts, though you may have to look closely to see them.

Reputation and accomplishment

Then there is the difference between fame (reputation) and achievement. This one can be hard to explain too, for a different reason. In my experience (though perhaps I am misinterpreting), I see people very ready to discount and disbelieve certain things, in a way that would be highly insulting normally. Their disbelief amounts to saying that you are either lying or are acting out of unconscious motivations. This, from people who would take your honesty and awareness for granted in almost any other direction.

(Come to think of it, this is what happens to anyone whose experience is sufficiently outside the expected range, when they try to communicate it to someone who hasn’t had and cannot imagine having the experience, be it a UFO encounter, or an out-of-body or a communication with someone who is deceased.)

To me, it seems simple. I am 78 years old. What possible advantage could fame do me? If I knew that I would be famous after I died, again, what possible difference could it make? But to know that I had (or hadn’t) achieved, is something else entirely. And, writing this, I realize that something I take for granted may be the unspoken explanation.

I have lived mostly without feedback. Until recently – the past 20 years or so – no one who didn’t know me well and in person could have had any idea what I was doing. (For that matter, I didn’t have much idea what I was doing. Mostly when I was doing something, I was thinking I was doing something else.)

I have lived my life mostly within my own little bubble, more like Thoreau’s life than Emerson’s. I never linked fame and achievement in my mind. My very first book won a prize – and then was stifled by a legal challenge we should have fought but didn’t. But the achievement was writing the book. The recognition was decoupled from it right at the beginning. It was a bitter experience, but perhaps it was just as well in not leading me to expect external success. You can’t live your life seeking the approval of others and still do your own work. If you work and the approval comes, well and good, but either way, you did the work.

Of course the real question is, did you do the work? Did you do it as well as you could do it? Will it meet recognition? That is, will it be effective and useful? But these questions have no intrinsic connection to recognition of the author. If you have written Walden and none of your fellow townsmen (except Emerson, of course) recognize its quality, does that mean anything to Walden? If you are or are not recognized as the author, does that affect what you did? These are famous people as examples, but what else can I use? The point is, the man is one thing and the work or lasting effect is something different, and confusing the two is – well, is confusion.

Just as there is a radical difference between fear of death and panic over the circumstances of living in that particular moment, so there is a difference between seeking approval or validation, on the one hand,  and finding that you have received it, on the other. What happens to the author is trivial next to what happens to his literary children. Even this doesn’t get it, but that’s enough time spent on it.

The third confusion was about the way people think things are, and the actual facts. But this isn’t easy either, as to make the argument is to assume for the moment that there is any one way of seeing things. Perhaps a better way to say it is that there is a more helpful way to see things and a less helpful way, depending on what you want to do. If you want to understand our mental world while we’re in 3D, I suggest we reverse the usual concepts.

But I suddenly realize, I’m out of energy. Maybe I’ll come back to this later on or on another day. I’ve been at this an hour, and I’ve been doing all the work. Themes?

[TGU:] “Drawing distinctions, perhaps.

Maybe so.

Thursday, October 3, 2024

9:30 a.m. Let’s talk a little bit more on religion and whatever it is we’re heading toward. (As so often, I feel that this is a prompted question, but that’s okay with me.)

You have been hammering on this point sometimes, whispering other times, and wondering if anybody at all is listening.

Not quite. I know some have heard. But naturally I am more concerned about those who haven’t heard, and even more concerned about those who won’t let themselves hear. And before you say it, I realize, it’s their choice, on many levels.

Yes it is. They may consciously reject the idea. Or they may reject it automatically, not realizing that an unknown filter is preventing them from considering the proposition fairly. And, within the duality of causation, they may do so either because the way they are put together, they can’t fairly consider it without breaking or even shattering, or because they are functioning perfectly well, but considering this would make their life-purpose difficult.

You’re saying, it may be a matter of conscious choice or unconscious filtering and this may be because they cannot or should not change whatever course they are on.

Isn’t that what I just said? And –

And, I know, we never have the data to judge someone else’s path.

However, there is something to be said for your side, too. You might as well say it.

If I feel impelled to underline this or that course of action, there isn’t any reason why I shouldn’t do it. And, there may be important reasons why I should do it.

Yes. For you, for anyone, the even-handed rule applies: No one has the right to silence you; you never have the right to cram something down someone’s throat.

Not that either process could succeed anyway.

Oh, sometimes it could, but either way it is an act of violence, though at first it might not seem so, and violence is usually a sign of trying to overrule life.

Now, that statement invites expatiating on, but let’s say whatever you have to say on religion and out future or futures.

Bullets, then, because it will be easier to pull together afterwards:

• All religions have to deal with various kinds of people, various in their level of awareness, various in their capacity for growth, various in their understanding of life and of themselves.
• The world – terra firma – contains uncounted types of people, even countable types of cultures.
• Life never proceeds smoothly and evenly. (Nor would it be an advantage if it did, but that is another topic for another time.) So there are always people and peoples at different levels of personal and cultural development.
• Hence, one-world civilizations, one-world religions, even one-world language, in practice is and must be a pipe-dream. One size never fits all.
• Every person, every point of view, every culture or way of conceptualizing the universe, is and must be partial, not universal. Even a point of view that sets out to be universal is, in the fact that it is a particular intent, partial. Not everybody is going to agree.
• One man’s utopia is another man’s hell. Regardless of the specifics involved, the overarching fact is that every point of view is legitimate to the universe in that it is a part of the whole. This doesn’t mean that everything is morally equivalent; it isn’t. but, you realize, it is or isn’t morally equivalent from one point of view. From another, it may look very different.
• “Peace on Earth” in the sense of a universal sharing of values (and hence viewpoints) is not possible. It would have to be the peace of the graveyard.
• But to say that, is not to say that humanity is condemned to eternal warfare. It is to say you are condemned – and blessed – to eternal contention of ways of being.
• Each way of being, each way of experiencing life and reality, has its exposition somewhere. It may be a set of superstitions, or a mythology, or a primitive religion, or a higher religion, or a philosophy or a hybrid of many types of expression, but in one way or another, it will be expressed, or it could not be shared, hence to all extents and purposes could not be said to exist.
• No one ever comes to the truth, just as no one comes to the future, although to any one person, the future it experiences at any given time seems obviously to be the only “future” there is. All you can hope to do is to embrace as much of the truth as your particular avatar-self is able to encompass. That’s what you are in 3D to do, after all, to conceptualize and embody a point of view.

Now, this background gives you what you need.

I think it does. It says, there’s a reason why we’ll never come to unanimity of opinion, and as usual that isn’t a design flaw in the universe. And at the same time, there’s a reason why some people feel impelled to grow, and some feel impelled to communicate a given version.

And nothing wrong with any of it, yes.

Now, the specific application: the consideration of religion in one’s re-examining the world. Religions are not side-trails, not superstitions, not obstacles to progress or brotherhood, not remnants of inferior ways of seeing things and of structuring lives. They are different because people and cultures are different. They are similar because they look at reality through certain similar filters. They are arbitrary or bigoted or false or even predatory  when the levers of power are misused by those in a position to use them, but this is because they are human institutions. Everything human is partial, corruptible, fallible – and also semi-divine if you look at it rightly.

We say this pretty flatly: If you want to grow, you need to identify your prejudices as prejudices, not as the reasoned balanced judgments they will at first naturally seem to be. No one can do this for you, and no one can force you to do it. But we say to you, your non-3D component will tell you, if you do not block it out.

Once you remove the filter, or turn it down, or even suspend it for the length of time it takes you to look at it, your world will open up. Nothing closes you down faster and more effectively than declaring something Wrong.

It isn’t a matter of spending a lifetime learning about different religions or ways of thinking. If you wish to, that’s fine, but that isn’t the important point. The important point is learning to not shrink away instinctively when certain things come up for consideration.

If you can’t bear to look for the kernel of truth within a belief-system, that’s a tell-tale sign.

If you can’t do it without clinging to the “knowledge” that you are right and this is an example of error you are going to look at, that too is a tell-tale sign.

What you shrink from taking seriously, something of you is afraid of. Don’t take my word for it, go look for yourself, not shutting off your non-3D commentary.

And this applies to more than just religion, I see. It applies when examining anything.

It does. This particular example, though, is chosen because it tends to be a huge obstacle to just your kind of explorers.

I see that. Been there myself, as a matter of fact, but a hell of a long time ago.

What is 50 years? Or 60?

Point taken. Okay, so today’s theme was –?

“Religions and your future,” perhaps.

Our thanks as always.