Author: Frank DeMarco

Just as the seed is a dead predecessor to the plant, so various aspects of what it is to be a soul cannot be understood if examined strictly from a vantage point that assumes that any one level of reality is the only level operating.

A soul is a spirit intertwined with 3D conditions so as to appear separate and limited.

• There is a “you” before you are a soul.
• You live a life in 3D, and the soul is seen.
• You experience physical death, and the soul disappears from view in 3D.

A visual analogy might be to envision a daffodil.

• Beneath ground is the bulb, level 1.
• Above ground is the stalk, level 2.
• Above the stalk is the flower itself, level 3.

If you attempt to understand daffodils by examining only level 2, not suspecting the existence of levels 1 and 3, or, regarding them as unprovable, how well are you going to be able to understand daffodils? You might be able to describe the stalk in exquisite detail, but your very precision is going to further distort your understanding of levels 1 and 3, because of their obscurity and seeming abstract theoretical nature. No one can understand flowers without understanding pollination, nutrition from the soil, photosynthesis, etc., etc. So with souls.

We look at people’s lives and measure the stalk, guess at the bulb, see the flower in this 3D world. I am beginning to see how everything I know, which of course includes everything I think about, makes any message I bring forth unique. It really is true that nobody could do exactly what I can do; and of course, that goes for everybody else, a good reason to encourage others to do the same.

Your accustomed joke which tells truth: You’re special, just like everybody else.

Tuesday, April 9, 2019

Have I lost the connection I had? Am I no closer to what I wanted than I have ever been?

It depends on what you mean. At any given moment, your 3D consciousness will be in a different “place,” as it is phrased. We would say something more like, “At different times, your mind forms a differently charged field, attracting different potential and thus effectively living in a different world.” Bear in mind, this too is only an analogy, though the nature of the metaphor is more subtle, perhaps.

We’re a moving target.

No, it’s more like you are a moving shooter, with an enduring reality your target. It is not that reality moves, but that you (seem to) move in relation to reality, thus continually making it as if you live in an ever-shifting set of circumstances.

Are you saying that explains our continually changing mental states?

Let’s move a little more slowly, here.

You cannot overlook the part that physical circumstances play. That is, after all, the purpose of having you in an “external” world. The moment by moment fluctuations in your “external” circumstances result in your having to continually rebalance as currents shift. You are closer to riding standing on two horses, as in a circus, than standing on any kind of sturdy platform. Surely you can see this once it is pointed out. So, your first task is to create a stable platform. And how does one do that?

I suppose by learning to depend more on the factors that are less dependent upon external circumstances.

But what are “external” circumstances? What makes them external?

Not so easy a question to answer. You can’t absorb Paul Brunton’s understanding of the world and see the word “external” in the same way. External refers to things we don’t seem to produce by what we are.

That is actually a very sophisticated definition, but you need to spell it out and continue from there.

If internal and external worlds are the same reality, experienced by intuition and senses, it is hard to see how anything could be both connected to us and not connected. In absolute terms, it couldn’t be. In practical terms, I suppose it is a matter of degree, and everybody will draw the line in a different place, but it will always be an arbitrary line. Take a thunderstorm, say. Clearly it is external to ourselves in any practical sense. We don’t create the weather around us, yet we have to live in it. But given that all possible realities exist, and given that we have the ability to change timelines at will – which amounts to the ability to choose timelines – then we can in effect change the weather by choosing a timeline in which the weather suits us. And if we can chose something as “external” as the weather, what can’t we choose?

Nevertheless, when you cannot breathe, you cannot just wish the condition away.

No, but that doesn’t invalidate the statement.

Then, reconcile the two ideas: that you can and can’t choose which reality you wish to experience. Either one is not a fact, but a point of view.

So I suppose it is a matter, as so often, of “Which you?”

You are a moving platform, and you see the potential advantage of resting upon more stable platforms. To do that, you would need greater control not over “external” events, but over the effect such events have on your balance, your mental condition, your choice among realities.

We need to crystallize our personalities! This is what Gurdjieff was talking about!

Yes, but go slowly.

If we allow the relationship among the strands that comprise us to remain fluid, we remain fluid, which has its advantages and disadvantages. If we lock them into position, then we are a more definite unit than before.

That’s your idea of going slowly?

Very funny. Well, you do it.

Fluidity and fixity each has advantages and disadvantages, as you said. But why must it be an either/or? Why must it be a choice once and for all? Why must you (in effect) lock on to one reality forever?

The difficulty here is that one must hold in mind many conditions that are not always remembered at the same time. This is why the process of learning “how things are” is so slow and tenuous: If, while considering one aspect, you cannot remember another, you cannot see how they interact; hence you will have only a distorted view of either. And if you see the two in relation, there are always larger relations to be considered, so, it’s never a fixed result. But it is possible to obtain an ever-more sophisticated understanding.

Within any one timeline, it looks like a wilderness of choice and an anarchy of different selves choosing different realities. But that is mostly a matter of one path judging other paths by differences and similarities. You need to move to the next level higher (metaphor, remember) to obtain a platform stable enough to put these alternative selves into proper perspective.

But you are not merely any one version. How could you be? You are all versions, and the fact that “all versions” cannot be experienced from any one version should tell you that somewhere you know that you are more than any one of them, or how could you know?

The crystallization we’re wanting occurs at a higher level than any one timeline.

Yes it does, and every timeline’s version may have its own opinion of the process!

Saturday, April 6, 2019

Hanns-Oskar Porr contacted Hegel – and was contacted by James Joyce – and of course wonders if it is out of his subconscious mind or is a real contact. I have hope that others will begin to do the same. This could become something, if we could develop a community of people doing it and submitting it for each other’s consideration, humbly and in a spirit of joint exploration. Friends? Any comment?

The potential for such a community is even larger than you can envisage. It could provide a breakthrough for those who participate, and, through them individually and collaboratively, for the human race. The ultimate effect of individuals’ and groups’ efforts can be far greater, more far-reaching over time, than seems probable. St. Francis of Assisi, after listening, created the Franciscan order that arguably prevented the Catholic Church (which in those days meant Western Christendom) from decaying into irrelevance. One person listening to a voice that he might have dismissed as imaginary resulted in major unsuspected results echoing first among a few, then within an institution, then more generally within society. Francis was not responsible for the distant effects of his efforts, but he did affect contemporary society, and any of you may be called to do the same thing. See that you do not dismiss such a call out of a false sense of unworth. It is not a question of worth, but of willingness.

I know you do not mean for us to become inflated, however.

What good could that do anyone? Nietzsche, Hitler, televangelists, so many possible examples, will show you how initial good intentions may be wrecked by an individual’s inability to deal with the temptations that accompany profound contact with non-3D power and with the resultant distorting effect it may have in terms of other people. Humility is the essential prophylactic antidote. It is difficult to become humble. Much easier to remain so. But it requires attention, for these temptations are not trivial, and no one is immune. However, bearing that in mind, there remains the opposite error of the fallacy of insignificance. Ideally, one would say something like, “In myself I am nothing, but I am capable of being used, and willing to do so.”

“I still serve Ra.”

That’s the idea. And you’d better have a good idea, going into it, just what values you will serve, because you won’t know, really, who you are dealing with. You may assume, you may conclude on the basis of evidence, but how can you ever know you are not in error, or are not being deceived by the other side (which, remember, is always a possibility), or are not fantasizing for whatever reason?

“Test the spirits,” we are told.

Exactly. Don’t believe everything you hear, and don’t automatically disbelieve, either. Weigh what you hear – and, to do that, it helps to have simple permanent touchstones. Values. The values you want to uphold. In case this point is obscure, let us underline it. You said as an example serving Ra. You will not wind up serving a personage, but the values you imagine that personage as supporting. You couldn’t very well follow Francis of Assisi while amassing wealth for whatever ostensible purpose.

To return to the point, it would be possible to spark a voluntary community of ordinary people who made a practice of extraordinary connection, and shared the results of such communication in the spirit of humility. Rather than attempting to lay down the law (“This was X who spoke. This is exactly what X meant,” etc. ) they would say, “This is what I got; take it for what it’s worth. What does it spark in you?” No ultimate authority, you see. No false certainty. No psychic inflation. And at the same time, no working in oppressive secretive isolation, no fears for one’s mental stability.

It is an attractive vision.

And available today. Your own efforts, which began in private obscurity, have been gently guided by events and by your own inclinations (which in a way is saying the same thing twice) and by the response of those who have felt called at least to listen if not to contribute. So, that groundwork has been done. Now it is to the point where, with a little organizational preparation, one man’s work can be handed off smoothly to a more enduring form and a more significant community.

Friday, April 5, 2019

All right, friends… Any advice?

More important is the insight you got on awakening. Every time you revisit your life, you have an opportunity to resolve to be different than the person who made that decision. This is the value of introspection and repentance, only it is not well understood if seen as merely good intentions for the future, or regret for the past.

An example of the importance as context of the metaphysical understanding people bring, or don’t bring, to their lives. Say you attempt to live the rules your church lays down. If you think life is a keeping of accounts against a final score, that’s one view of life. If you think you will be judged good or bad according to how you acted in your life, that is a second. If you think you will be judged good or bad according to your predominant intent during your life, that’s a third. And all these are only alternative ways of understanding the world that share a way of seeing it: One time, one space, separation from others, you as poor soul vis a vis an immortal omniscient God.

And if you belong to no church, and recognize none?

Still you have to deduce the rules . Why are we here? What is right and wrong? What is worth doing?

Exactly, and that process of deduction will result in whatever your conclusions about reality dictate.

Depending on whether we believe in reincarnation, or “past” lives, or one life, then judgment, or life as meaningless accident.

More, if you believe one reality, or an indefinite number of realities; in your being isolated or in your being part of everything; if you apply “as above, so below” to your speculations about life, or not. All those suppositions and conclusions will have their effect. Now, try setting up a church whose rules will apply to everyone. Try setting out a code of conduct or an explanation of the meaning of life that everyone can even understand the same way.

It can’t be done.

Different eyes and ears will see and hear different things, regardless of everyone’s best intent. That’s why there are so many churches, so many philosophies and schools of philosophy, so many competing and contradictory schools of scientific investigation.

So, back to that insight about revisiting our lives.

This needs to be said somewhat carefully, merely because new ideas are easily misunderstood, due to the human tendency to attach anything new to the already existing understanding, rather than considering it on its own.

It’s hard for us to look at anything new in isolation, rather than in terms of what we already know.

And now you understand what the man meant who wrote, “Do not understand me too soon.” Look at a new idea first without agreeing or disagreeing. Taste it, because an unsuspected inertia will want to accept or reject it, probably modifying it behind your awareness. The more slowly you consider something, the more chance of seeing it in unexpected productive ways, even if you reject it in the end. In other words, sometimes the journey is worth more than the destination, and is rarely justified or invalidated by the destination.

When we say, “revisiting your life,” this is what we mean: You live, choosing, reacting, resolving, intending, regretting, acting, not-acting (that is, inert rather than in motion, so to speak), and the present moment moves on. Most past moments are forgotten, or are remembered without emotional charge, and these we are not concerned with here. But some moments, usually moments you are not contented with, burn in memory. Happy moments rarely obsess people; it is what they should have done, or shouldn’t have done, that obsesses them, and the things that happened to them.

The things where we think of ourselves as being acted upon, and not in any good way.

That’s the idea. All the things one stuffs rather than cherishes become potential field to be explored for buried treasure.

Hence, analytical psychology – or confession, I suppose.

Your friend was not wrong in saying, “Self-knowledge is always bad news,” except in making it an absolute. It is true that in 3D life, you tend to avoid touching sore spots; however, it is equally true, as Carl Jung pointed out, that the part of your mind of which your 3D component tends to be unconscious contains greater, not only lesser, versions of your possibilities.

So. Something happens in your past. Someone hurts you, or life delivers a blow, or you hurt someone. Whatever the specifics, it is not a happy memory. Now, perhaps

• you stuff it and never see it again, or
• it pops up anyway, from time to time, or
• it obsesses you and it requires continuous effort to repress, that you may live. Or
• it slumbers until some certain thing wakes it, and it becomes one of the conditions noted above.

How you deal with it, whether as suppressed memory, or active unrelenting obsession, or occasional irritation, or suddenly aroused uncomfortable memory, depends upon your metaphysics, even if that metaphysics expresses in religious terms, or scientific terms, or aesthetic terms.

Walt Whitman admired that animals did not lie in the dark and weep for their sins.

Weeping for your sins implies repentance, yes, but it also assumes that “what’s done is done,” which is true only in the most superficial view of 3D life. It entirely overlooks alternate versions of your timeline, and it entirely overlooks first-, second- and third-tier effects. The first-tier effect happened, and (at least, for any given timeline) that’s that. The second-tier effect, your reaction to the first-tier effect, and the third-tier effect, your changes in response to past reactions, are malleable. They may be altered at any time, and repeatedly. Your life is written in pencil, or chalk, not in indelible ink, not carved into tablets. And this malleability is the clue you needed.

If you move into an altered state of awareness (rather than your normal preoccupation with the “external” world and the present moment), you can relive those key moments, can visualize a different outcome, can pull to yourself a different present reality rooted in a different third-tier experience from that same first-tier event.

This is powerful and easy, if your assumptions do not paralyze you, but it depends upon an understanding of the facts of time and space that most people do not have, and are not taught. If your church or your school of philosophy or your branch of science does not realize that “life is but a dream,” how can they prescribe useful rules of conduct, or construct useful maps of reality to guide you? Yet such rules and maps are necessary and cannot be deferred until the moment that everybody is awake and aware. Hence, your numerous and often contradictory religions and philosophies. No need to postulate malign intent. Lack of knowledge serves just as well.

Tuesday, April 2, 2019

Anything we should talk about?

You are expecting a “no,” but maybe it would be worthwhile to recall that your real goal is increased and continual awareness of who and what you really are, as a model for others to use in shaping and recalling their own awareness. It is always today, and losing consciousness is always a possibility. Not a catastrophe, nor even an interruption, necessarily, but always a possibility. Just as physical life is an alternation of waking and sleeping, so life in a larger context, only now you want to be paying more attention to the process of re-awakening as a regular part of life.

Me in particular, or us in general?

Both, actually. At your time of life, there is a reason why the need for sleep is less.

I sometimes think infants are desperate for reassurance and re-grounding in their accustomed non-3D world while learning this one, and children are equally needing a safe haven, but even as I write this, I see that my ideas on it are fuzzier than I realized. So, please enlighten us. What is it with sleep and us?

Leaving aside physiological reasons such as repair and maintenance of the brain, and of tissues, there is another function of sleep, which is a safe haven while you return. It isn’t your non-3D component that requires refreshment and reorientation, of course, but your 3D component, and that means something not too often considered, which is that your mind in effect operates two overlapping but distinct modes, 3D and non-3D. A distant echo of this distinction may be found in right-brain/left-brain distinctions, or conscious/subconscious, but usually the distinction is not very clear in people’s minds.

For some reason, Wordsworth’s lines come to mind, from “Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”:

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home”

He had an inkling, you see. He knew that the newborn infant was not tabula rasa, but a power. Perhaps impaired by lack of memory, but – a power. Not an orphan.

We live as orphans, though, when we live without regard to that continuing connection.

Sleep maintains the connection. Deprive a person of sleep long enough, and you deprive him or her of reason.

I can see that we are in effect two consciousnesses, cohabiting one lifetime. One primarily deals with the 3D world’s everyday contingencies and opportunities, the other maintains a less hands-on attitude and reminds the steersman of the course, so to speak.

So, you can see, perhaps, that periodic resynchronization is required, so that the 3D-oriented mind can relax its vigilance for the moment and regain its equilibrium. Think of your lives in 3D as an unending balancing act, moving in effect from one moment of time to the next. (We said, in effect.) That balancing act requires more than merely responding to (or pro-actively affecting) the “external” world. It also involves balancing with the rest of your unseen life. Your life is in one reality, one version of the total of possibilities. But that does not mean that you are not integrally connected to all those other versions! How could you be connected and yet severed? Only, you couldn’t function very well if your 3D awareness were simultaneously aware of more than one. Where would you find firm ground?

It’s so obvious, suddenly, that in all the reorientation over 25 years, it never occurred to me that the different versions of our lives were still part of one life, that they must be connected in consciousness at least potentially as much as, say, our present life is with “past” lives. What are you saying about this connectedness and sleep?

The word “sleep” as used may mean any of several things, not all congruent. One meaning is contrasted with awareness, so that sleep is considered negative, a lapse in awareness. Another is contrasted, as we said, with vigilance, so that sleep is seen as a necessary and beneficial relaxation. You can see that an unnoticed change in definition is going to confuse thought.

But now look at things this way. Sleep is the re-syncing of various versions of your life, necessary if your 3D-limited mind is to keep its orientation relative to the total self rather than relative to the 3D world it experiences as one reality. In such case, sleep is defined as the opposite not of awareness or of 3D-world-vigilance, but of disorienting lack of awareness of its own position relative to all the other versions of this life which, necessarily, seldom or never come into 3D consciousness.

Accepting that, how does it result in our needing less sleep as we go along? I should think we would need more, as the possible selves would be so much more numerous.

Those other pathways always existed. Those other versions always existed, from the creation of the world.

So the potential chaos is actually greater at birth and diminishes as we age.

Well, it can look that way. We would prefer to say, there is a terrific amount of syncing to do early on, requiring substantial “downtime” as it goes while maintaining this unsuspected connection to other versions. But after you have learned the ropes, things settle in for a while, then puberty comes along – but you know the stages of life, no need to spell it out here. By the time you are old, not only are there few momentous choices to be lived, but you are very settled in with the other versions. There is much less need to sync devices, so to speak.

Saturday, August 5, 2023

5 a.m. I had this thought earlier and sketched it into my journal, thinking I might edit it to become a decent post. We’ll see.

I have been reading American Prometheus, a life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, and, as always when I read biographies, I am comparing my qualities (as far as I know them) with those I am reading about. Even when I find large numbers of shared qualities, positive or negative, I now know better than to say “maybe that’s a past life!”

In the case of Oppenheimer it would be chronologically impossible, but take Thoreau, say, or Emerson, both of whom I not only admire but feel strong resonances to. It still has nothing to do with “past lives” the way people think of them.

But it may have everything to do with shared threads, and I think it does. For one thing, the shared threads idea hints at why we can resonate so strongly to some of someone’s traits and dislike others, or be indifferent to them. (I saw this strongly in my reaction to Hemingway, for instance.)

To the argument:

If you say “computer,” you actually refer to not one thing, not two, but three – but we almost always see it as one, or at most as two.

1. All the pieces that go together to make a computer, from the case to the smallest electronic component. They all could have used to make something else, probably, but this is what they made, what they were needed for.
2. The computer as a collection of these pieces. Assembled in a certain order, functioning in a particular manner, they are (in this view) not pieces, exactly, but pieces-as-part-of-a-whole, and, equally, the computer is not a unit, exactly, but a-unit-composed-of-many-interrelated-pieces.
3. The computer as a unit, considered as it if were one thing, even though we know in the back of our minds that it is one thing made of many things. (Of what may that not be said?)

Usually, casually, of course when we hear or say “computer,” we are thinking of (3). Sometimes, particularly if something goes wrong, we may also see it as (2) or even as (1). But how often do we see it, or need to see it, as all three? Rarely.

Similarly, perhaps, we humans are:

1. The strands that we comprise.
2. The individual and strands, living together.
3. The unit they forge during a lifetime.

Now suppose, when we see ourselves composed of strands, we are tempting ourselves into a wilderness of mirrors unnecessarily. Suppose, if we look at it another way, we will still see a very complicated picture (life is complicated, after all), but with a few glimpses of the underlying order.

Let’s start with three strands:

• X and
• Y and
• Z,

And let’s pretend that each of these strands is an original principle, never before incarnated, never before associated with any other. Then, let’s say they enter into three different 3D lives, two or even three at a time, giving new “units”:

• (X+Y)
• (X+Z)
• (Y+Z)

And perhaps, also,

• (X+Y+Z)

Bear in mind, the next time around, we have not only these four new “units” to draw from, but also the original three, which after all didn’t go anywhere. We could wind up with a “unit” comprising

• (X+Y)+(X+Z)+(Y+Z)
• (X+Y)+(X+Z)+(Y+Z)+A or B or C or all three, etc.

I don’t know what these equations would become in algebra, but I left algebra behind when I was 16, and good riddance.)

You can see that things are only going to get more and more complicated, and the possibilities greater, and the percentage of traits that can find scope to manifest during a given life relatively smaller (though perhaps absolutely larger).

If I understand them right, this is what the guys have been trying to tell us, all this time: what we are, how we function, why we are the way we are, why we have the ability (and, really, the responsibility) to choose what we are to become, why it matters, to us, to the world.

I don’t know, maybe all this is totally obvious, but it seemed worth saying.

But there’s more. Consider, all these threads (or strands; I don’t know that it matters which we call them) are alive, and continuing to do whatever it is we do outside of 3D as well as inside. Does this not suggest that we sometimes overhear things that have little or nothing to do with us?

I have become accustomed to thinking of the various strands as being the cause of some of the pulling and hauling we sometimes experience between (or even among) impulses. But what if sometimes our dreams or our stray thoughts or our daydreams or our abstract-but-compelling impulses are stemming not so much from thread X as from thread X in its ongoing life as part of some other person?

Stray thoughts, and certainly not conclusive or even particularly thought-out. Suggestive, maybe.