Author: Frank DeMarco

Monday, September 2, 2019

I don’t know that I have ever fully realized till now how closely the rise of fascism is connected to the inadequacy of liberalism, which stems from the secularist materialist fallacy. There being no center for society to hang from, the structures of unreason try to provide one. Communists, fascists, liberals, conservatives, all try, all fail. Yet we can’t go backwards – as Jung said, the gods never reinhabit the temples they abandon. So what is to provide a center?

Guys? Do you do politics and society, or just individuals?

We try to do practical, and working on the individual is usually more practical than pretending to solve social problems, because that usually winds up advocating this or that panacea. We can talk politics and society if you wish, but we will do it in our context, not in the play-pretend context you are used to seeing. Our context includes humans as

• 3D and non-3D being (subject to internal forces and forces that manifest as external);
• individuals who are in reality communities (living minds past present and future, and therefore passions past present and future).

How can representations of man as homo economicus or homo faber or any other specialized, truncated, parodies of the human experience serve as adequate guides to social thought? Yet many ideologies of your time are still based hopes of social control or social liberation; in division among factions rather than in inclusion as part of a polity.

The New Soviet Man and the Thousand-year Reich of Aryan superman didn’t turn out too well.

No, and neither did any other model that was supposed to reshape society to employ forces not understood or even suspected. The basis of any social movement must necessarily be incomplete, and to some degree self-defeating and at best a poor make-do. If you can’t understand the situation, you can’t prescribe remedies, and if you can only act according to how strongly you feel certain, than as times continue to deteriorate, the proposed remedies will become ever more simplistic and fanatical.

It’s all pretty dismal, at the moment. Pro- and anti-Trump forces are making absolutely fanatically exaggerated claims and denunciations. Each is looking to the imminent downfall of the other, and blaming it for everything wrong, and conceding nothing in the way of self-criticism. They are, as far as I can tell, more ignorant than ever, because listening to only what they already agree with, and leaving no part of their minds open to the small still voice that says, “well, maybe.”

And you do see why?

Because we have little idea what the actual facts are. We have been lied to for so long, and are being lied to from so many directions, that there are “facts” enough to support any half-assed theory you care to name. People are ignorant of history,, and even what they know, they may misinterpret because of the poisoning of the sources of facts. If they hear something they would rather not be true, it is instantly “fake news” and that’s the end of it. And the problem is, we are inundated by fake news, too, only miraculously it comes only from the sources people already disbelieve, never from those they have decided to believe.

But there are deeper reasons than these. We repeat, no one can understand what is going on if they look at it through inadequate filters. You detect a signal more by filtering out noise than by your reception of anything and everything. Without a filter, it’s all noise. And the more unconscious the filter, the more the person mistakes the signal received for truth rather than construct. This is why some of the most closed-minded people are convinced that they are open-minded and open to correction. They never see any need to be corrected, since no contrary evidence ever gets through the filter.

True reform comes only through individual work on oneself. No matter what else you do or try to do or want to do or wish you could do, your level of being will determine your effect on the world. A social moment made of people with a cartoon image of the forces involved may amount to very little, in fact, will often serve chiefly to rouse the forces of opposition. Individuals quietly working on themselves, whether with others socially or not, may actually accomplish more constructive reform. Remember, the world is one thing, invisibly connected by millions of threads. This is true whether or not you believe it or are aware of it.

So, pro- or anti- gun-control legislation won’t bring utopia?

You are welcome to try. And so with any other measure that is advanced to be an item of faith, or a panacea. You can’t produce true meaningful reform by pounding water with a hammer, no matter how vigorously you pound.

 

Sunday, September 1, 2019

All right, my friends, ready if you are. What can we know that helps us live our lives?

Going to a psychiatrist and carefully concealing anything you think discreditable may save your face, but it doesn’t get you the real assistance that an impartial and helpful point of view would offer.

Hmm. Trying to look better than I am?

Perhaps trying to be better than you are. It can be a fine line, and worth talking about, for life is a long series of decisions about which impulses to encourage and which to yield to and which to fight. In a sense, that could be looked at as a process of trying to be better than you are.

And it’s a good thing, surely.

It is, but it has pitfalls, worth exploring a little. So, here you have been insulted by an old friend. Abstractly you know why; that is, you know what is driving him. But personally, you, as the one on the receiving end, resent the insult. Perfectly natural. You are conflicted as to how to respond within yourself. You won’t lash out in return – at least, you hope you won’t, you resist the impulse, you disapprove in principle. But – internally?

Internally I have logical responses that I would like to deliver, and I have the impulse to never communicate with him again. There is a mixture of emotions fighting it out: anger, hurt feelings, resolution to be better than these impulses – a potful of contending forces. All I know to do is to ride it out without expressing anything negative. But can’t we do harm merely by what we feel, even if less than by what we do?

Some careful thought will show you that sometimes unexpressed anger may be more devastating than expressed, particularly if not under the control of consciousness. You know that healing may be facilitated from one person to another non-corporeally. So may cursing. Your only hope of control is consciousness. Otherwise you radiate energies at a level inaccessible to you, and therefore unmodulated. This is why people ruled by primitive emotions may be effective in the world, while people of mild goodwill are not. But it is also why those who are in control of themselves, who are good by choice, let’s say, have the enhanced ability to do good. Un-conscious goodwill is less effective than unconscious ill will. But conscious good will – focused, intensified, intended good will – far outweighs ill will conscious or unconscious. Life has a bias toward love. Love is like gravity, a force tending to hold the world together. Its opposite is not hatred but fear, that is, concentration upon separation and difference. Given this bias, any conscious work working with the bias is paddling downstream. Working against the bias paddles upstream.

But when we work unconsciously, or consciously choose fear and hatred?

Then you still paddle upstream, but your paddling is more vigorous.

So, paddling in love will be inherently more effective than the same intensity of paddling against it?

Yes, only of course life is never a simple binary choice, always a combination of binaries. All your lives are cross-currents. There wouldn’t be much choosing to be done, otherwise. That said, even one who is being carried downstream under terrific force may still have some ability to steer, even if within severely constricted limits.

 

Saturday, August 31, 2019

Could anyone ever really describe his or her life? Detail every bump, so to speak? List every book read, every mental connection made, any coinciding event inner and outer? Obviously not, and if it could be done, who would want to read it? The equivalent would be to have a map on a one-to-one scale. As your professor said, so many decades ago, if you had one, where would you store it? The same goes for maps of moments. However, consider expression to be a process of successive compression.

Interesting way to put it. Selective editing, is what I might have said.

Successive compression gives the sense of it a little better.

• First is the living of it, then
• the rough recording of it in memory, then perhaps
• the jotting down of notes as in journal entries, then perhaps
• the transcribing of some of those notes, then perhaps
• the compilation of such notes as articles or books.

At each stage it is a process of selection and arrangement (even if only by chronology or by topic). The process swells and contracts, for at every stage in the process, notes may need to be more fully expressed, and items discarded as irrelevant. Selection produces clarity. A literal transcript of everything would be useless until condensed according to the need of the user. And this is an exact description of the process, the nature, and the use of ILC.

I remember how hard it was at first, sensing various possible phrases and meanings, and not knowing which was more accurate. I often could not tell which of two words or phrases or even, sometimes, directions, was what “the other side” wanted to convey. I learned to go ahead without so much angst, and eventually I realized that intent is more important than exactness, provided I was intending to do my best, the message would come through.

Eventually you came to see that any of the alternatives would go where we wanted to go – which is what you just said, but we thought it was worth the rephrasing and repetition. Now speak of Jones Very, and you will make our point.

Jones Very was an intuitive, a poet, who came to Emerson with transcriptions (so to speak) which Emerson recognized as genuinely inspired. However, Very would not allow a word to be altered, because, as he said, it was the word of spirit. Emerson is said to have drily remarked that it was clear that spirit didn’t always know how to spell.

Yes. You see, Jones Very was in touch; he received. But he placed too much reverence on the word as he received it, not realizing that he was necessarily part of the process. (Thus, we warned you repeatedly not to treat our words as scripture, but you still aren’t comfortable rephrasing or paraphrasing what you get this way.) Intent is the determining characteristic. All else is technique and detail. To those who read your reports: Lighten up, free yourselves to receive by realizing that you will always be part of the process; confide that mistakes are always corrected in process, provided sincere unflagging intent to be in genuine and helpful connection.

Take this encouragement and go forward.

Friday, August 30, 2019

A reasonable night’s sleep, courtesy of the nebulizer and a good deal of foresight. But what’s this all about really, guys? Is it really just weather all the time?.

You live in 3D, you can’t expect to be unaffected by 3D.

And I am also a creature of non-3D, and ought to have some immunity from 3D.

Do you think so?

I do. I can’t imagine that our 3D limitations are absolute in the way they seem to be. I guess that’s way I always believed in psychic abilities: I sensed that what we see is not what we get.

Oh, but it is, if you will examine the statement carefully.

Yes, I get it. What we see is what we get. As we see more, there is more to see.

More to get.

Okay.

Your depth of connection determines the rules of the world you live in. Change the depth of connection, and you change the rules in effect for you.

As Thoreau said in Walden. It seems to me you told me that our health could also be read as an indicator of where we are, like a barometer.

We said that if good behavior guaranteed good health, the 3D would be much better behaved. But, within limits, there is truth to the statement. Only, measure within yourself, not against others.

For some, physical health is a given; for some, an impossible dream; for some, a position between the extremes. (Just as health varies among people, so do other factors. Intelligence. Emotional stability. External good fortune. Luck, so called. Vitality. Not all pf life’s prizes, nor pains, are given to any one person.) The fluctuations of your barometer that can serve as indicators for you, no one else’s.

I have assumed that good and bad that happen to us don’t happen at random.

In the first place, how do you know the good from the bad? Is it “good” that lighting strikes, or rain falls, or the sun shines, or that temperature rises or falls? Is it “bad”?

It’s just life.

Yes – but what is life? Life is non-3D beings, experiencing 3D constrictions to focus perceptions and shape choices in the process of self-creation, and doing so in the presence of other non-3D beings undergoing the same process.

Somebody must be calling the tune.

Or maybe the tune is being simultaneously and competitively created as you go along. Just because we call them vast impersonal forces doesn’t mean they are vast autonomous forces, but they are impersonal relative to any given 3D individual or the larger non-3D being of which it is a part.

And do those non-3D beings together determine our weather here?

We should have to think how to answer that question, it has so many unconscious assumptions, some of which are right. We are a long way even from making a fair start on the relations between 3D lives and the greater world they are usually only vaguely aware of.

 Tell me more about what changed when I was ten, and again at twelve when I didn’t quite drown.

And, you might add, the time you fainted in church and came back – just before you would have lost consciousness completely – when the ushers got you to the front door, thus allowing you to remember the event if with no sense of its meaning. Three events. And there could be others added. Anyone’s life is fuller and stranger than is realized from inside or from outside – that is, by self or others.

The incident at ten influenced my whole life and I always knew it, but I didn’t really conceptualize it until much later. Yet now we work on the assumption that a message from my future shaped it.

The message reshaped its importance. It reconfigured your second- and third-tier reactions to life, you might say. So this version that you live is more magical and open than the ones in which the message was not received and the encouragement was not taken to heart. Notice that the message and the response were below the threshold of your consciousness. It nearly always is; that allows essence to bypass personality.

The incident at age 12, like the fainting-spell in church, allowed a brief bridging of worlds with conscious observation. Because you did not quite lose consciousness, but came so close, in circumstances that had your attention, you got a glimpse of the existence of more than the sensory world. It came without conceptualization, so could not be rationalized away, even if you had so wished. You passed on to other things and didn’t obsess over what had happened.

I get the sense of our lives being repeatedly tweaked.

Remember that what you experience as external events are in reality dramatizations of what you are and where you are trending at the moment. No two people experience the same event or series of events or background conditions identically.

Thursday, August 29, 2019

Do you care to say more about how other people in other times may bless or curse us? What the variables are? What the potential is?

You might look at it like this: What we were calling the vast impersonal forces may be considered to be channeled among you through personalities, and so in effect this is the potential (the current, so to speak) between lives. Remember the TMI program where you were given an exercise to send a message to your younger self? You sent a message of encouragement. “Don’t give up. It will work out. Don’t give up.” Well, instead of thinking of that interaction strictly from the perspective of 2003, consider – now that you are neither in 2003 nor in 1956 –

Yes, I see. Consider how it was from the 1956 end, to receive a message and an encouragement from elsewhen.

Had that 10-year-old had the concept and the knowledge, he would have realized that he was being contacted from the future. You don’t remember experiencing the contact and realizing it. You well remember July 26, 1956, however.

But this now has the flavor of the science-fiction stories about time travel that I find so irritating, where people are influenced by a future self that only comes into existence because of decisions or actions they take that are the result of that (at that time) nonexistent future.

Reorient your ideas, remembering that

• you are multidimensional beings,
• all possibilities exist,
• any one version potentially connects to all other versions by way of the central self.

It isn’t one person contacting a different person in a different time/space. It’s more like one neuron connecting to other neurons in the same brain. There isn’t the absolute division between components that ordinary 3D life suggests. A puzzling incident in your past may be a clue that more was involved than you know, or perhaps than you could know. So, look at July 26, 1956 again.

This is an extraordinary event that I cannot be making up, for I have always remembered that morning. Seems too much to describe yet again.

No, take the time. It will be worthwhile, for you do not understand it yet. Relive it. A bare-bones explanation will help you connect.

July 26, 1956, the day before my tenth birthday, is the day that my childhood in a certain sense ceased, and a very different life began, though of course I had no insight into it. (One could hardly expect it of a ten-year-old.) Oddly, it came about because of the Lone Ranger, a half-hour Western that aired every Saturday morning.

Okay, something weird is going on. I have never had a need to check if the 26th was a Saturday, but I just did. My Perpetucal says it was a Friday! Wikipedia has the 26th on Thursday! This could easily be an error, but now I have three days of the week for a date I clearly remember as being a Saturday!

Regardless what day of the week it was, I was settled down in front of the TV set because I had been looking forward for a week to the one-hour special that would tell how the Lone Ranger became the Lone Ranger. I don’t remember now how much that nearly-ten-year-old boy knew the difference between fact and fiction. I’m sure I at least partly and maybe entirely believed the story.

Anyway, I didn’t get to see it. The slot was pre-empted for live news coverage of the survivors of the sinking of the Italian luxury liner Andrea Doria arriving in New York City. All my life, I have thought and sometimes said that the net emotional effect of the sight of that huddled misery changed me in one instant. From that time I was either intellectually precocious and emotionally retarded, or, it occurs to me now, empathically enabled beyond my years, so that I felt but did not understand.

Later in my childhood my parents would joke that I had the world on my shoulders. I did. Of course it would look ridiculous and totally disproportionate and ungrounded, but I was always all those things. Still, something had happened, and now you are suggesting that my future self sent me a message.

You may look at that morning as a portal opening up for you. One moment you were a normal ten-year-old boy and the next you were a ten-year-old with only a ten-year-old’s slight knowledge of the world and of life but, suddenly in addition, a glimpse of the human condition seen as from outside, certainly from outside that ten-year-old’s frame of reference. You were given not a glimpse but, shall we say, a doorway was deliberately left ajar. Many things followed from that moment, some of which you know, but it was overwhelming.

Emotionally, it certainly was. It was a lead-lined blanket dropped over that child, and it was all he could do to stand up under the weight, no one understanding what had happened, least of all him.

Yet it was necessary if your life was to take its peculiar course. What followed could have gone many ways, but the bias had been introduced.

I get that things like my belief in psychic abilities is one consequence, even though the subject didn’t really come to mind (as I remember it) until my brother gave me Edger Cayce: The Sleeping Prophet.

You had a bias toward certain non-mainstream views that came not as a result of intellectual processes but by what your strictly genetic heritage made you, plus what part of yourself bled through the 3D barrier, aided by our leaving the door ajar.

So where does the message from 2003 come in?

You had been overwhelmed. It didn’t – to put it mildly! – assist you in dealing with the world. You were put into a situation in which you had no covering on your nerves – to speak metaphorically. You were hypersensitive emotionally and not well developed mentally except in your innate understanding of non-3D realities rather than, and in fact in contradiction to, 3D realities. You were too incapacitated to lead any kind of normal life, which wasn’t in itself a bad thing. Only anything can be carried too far, and it is sometimes hard to judge from non-3D how much is too much.

I should think that you’d be able to tell from looking at future events.

What do you suppose we just said?

It doesn’t seem at all equivalent to me.

We, like you, are continually readjusting. Your decisions determine what you become. Each decision requires a corresponding adjustment from our side in what we can do and what we can see as possibilities and constrictions. You enable and disable potential all the time, as you go.

I think you’re saying, we live and at some point you may adjust the trim, but depending upon how we react, the original intended-to-be-helpful input may have undesirable effects, so that in effect you have to change your minds and perhaps undo your own previous efforts.

That isn’t wrong as one way to look at it, bearing in mind that you are looking at things as if you – 3D you – were in the center of your life. Seems obvious, but of course it is wrong, or how does July 26, 1956 rule your life or be ruled by 2003-you?

You mean, I think, our non-3D self is our center, in that each moment of 3D time in effect passes away.

Well, let’s say no one 3D moment could provide a continuing platform.

So, the 2003 intervention?

The timeline you have been on since 2003 is radically and beneficially different from the one(s) you were on before. In effect, you sent a message to your past. That past changed. (Not physical external superficial events but what you were.) You then found yourself, unnoticeably, on a new and more productive timeline relative to what you concentrated on. You don’t magically change your health, or your relationships, or your understanding of others, or your pattern of action. What changed was an internal assumption of support. Oddly, you will have seen by now how this assumption is relatively rare among others. And now you know why you have it when others may not. Also we have now told them how they may have it, if they value it.

It depends upon what messages we send in a bottle.

It does.

Wednesday, August 28, 2019

We are carriers of the vast impersonal forces you began talking about last year.

Remember we said the same forces could be regarded as impersonal or personal. It’s more a matter of viewpoint than of an essential distinction, and it’s more a matter of what and how they manifest than viewpoint.

All humanity is one thing, and is part of something even greater. There are no absolute divisions in the world. Even the division between  3D and non-3D is only a relative rather than an absolute distinction. All is one and everything interrelates. Since non-3D is an integral part of 3D, time is not the absolute barrier that it appears to be when reality is considered only in 3D terms. Relating across space and across time is not only possible, it is unavoidable, and the only question is to what degree such relations will be conscious rather than unconscious. And that depends upon individual decisions.

All is one – and is also distinct and separate and individual, when you look down the opposite end of the telescope/microscope you put on life. No divisions are absolute, still they exist. If you keep in mind both aspects of reality – all is one, everything is differentiated – you get a clearer picture than if you concentrate on either and lose sight of the compensatory other aspect.

So. Healing. You all have the ability to help heal the world, or help curse it. None of you – fortunately! – has the ability to do so single-handed, but none of you is powerless to do good or evil considered strictly in terms of who and what you are in essence; not dependent upon what you do externally. Remember, the external is secondary to the internal. You are 3D/non-3D beings, hence are not pinned to one time and place. For the sake of understanding things you must experience life that way. But you can know better; you can see beyond appearances, and it is time that you wake up fully to your part in the vast cosmic drama that is human life within a continuing weather of non-human forces manifesting within human life.

Do you choose to curse the enemies of what you hold dear, or bless them? This is not as simple and self-answering a question as it may appear. Which you choose to do results in your addition to the total of a human cursing or a human blessing. Which do you suppose is more therapeutic, seen in all?

I have always been impressed that Robert E. Lee prayed every night for his enemies as well as for his friends. It accounts for that vaguely saintly aura that he shares with Lincoln.

Yes. Neither man slackened in his efforts to have his side prevail, but neither (despite whatever personal weaknesses) ever chose hatred over love.

So when we see politically divisive characters, we may regard them as opportunities to discover who we are, by our reaction to them.

That is one effect, yes. Lincoln did not approve of Lee’s actions;  he did not slacken his efforts to vanquish him and his cause. But he found no need to add hatred to the total of hatreds that had been disfiguring his country for so many decades, and were now playing out in killing 600,000 young men. And nor did Lee. Remember that the external present manifests as the eternal now, the point of power, the place of application. But just as you may bless Lincoln or Hemingway or whomever, so they (in their continuing point of power in the eternal now) may bless you. You – and in saying “you” we are of course saying “we” – continually act as conscious or unconscious conduits of blessings or curses. Choose wisely.

August 12, 2019

The past is raw material for the present, not something to be obsessed over or enshrined for its own sake. You live now, in the living present tense. Nobody lives then, nor in the times to come. It is quite possible and, in fact, common, for people to live obsessed by (frozen in) the past or future, but past and future do not exist as separate things, the way language tempts you to think of them. Every moment of past and future is a present-tense moment. Every moment lives and continues to live, as a stitch in a tapestry does not cease to exist when the needle is busy elsewhere, or has not yet laid down that stitch as seen from a given point of view.

You may spend your present-tense moment thinking about past or future, and the point is not what you are thinking or doing but whether you are present while doing or thinking, or whether you are in a sort of trance. Not that full attention can’t alternate with what might be called slackened attention, or sleep, but that full attention is the only space you can work from.

As Gurdjieff said.

Bear in mind, Gurdjieff lived long enough ago that the mental raw material he had to work with was radically different. The electronic age has its drawbacks, but it has already transformed average human consciousness. Yes, people’s attention-span is shorter. Yes, they are distracted by millions of thought-baubles (TV, internet, games, continual telephonic communications, etc.). Yes, they are ignorant of their ignorance. But they live in a different kind of world, with different sensory perceptions that now routinely extend to ideas and experiences that would have been mind-stretching in Gurdjieff’s day

What you were built who you are, as who you are builds who you can be (that is, lays out possibilities and forecloses certain paths).