Author: Frank DeMarco

A friend said meditation often seems to him a waste of time, and I sense that you wish to comment.

Meditation isn’t the right tool if you aren’t using it on the right job. You can’t tighten screws with hammers, or pound nails with screwdrivers. At least, not very efficiently! But this hardly exhausts the subject.

Meditation is one tool, Intuitive Linked Communication is another. Applied logic is a third. Careful analysis is a fourth. Careful observation is a fifth. Different tools for different jobs, and different combinations of tools for different jobs.

Suppose you are living your life taking the 3D world as all there is, taking your varying moods as if they were a stable platform, placing all your attention on the external world and not even realizing that your internal world is primary. Meditation may help you stop the machinery long enough for you to realize that there is more going on than you realize. Silencing the noisy clanking and banging and whirring may let you hear the birds singing. It may be a revelation, a revolution.

Or suppose you are well aware of the inner world and are somewhat unaware of the outer world. Your internal trance, your daydreaming your way through life, may need a corrective. Mediation may be such a corrective, but maybe an experience of ILC, or a course of logic, or applied effort at acquiring a skill, say, may be more helpful. And so forth.

It creates confusion when people don’t differentiate between different starting points, which may include:

• Needing to clear your mind of chatter
• Having an endless calculating machine operating
• Ceaselessly collecting the data presented by life
• Needing to slow down an internal daydreaming trance

An analogy would be, taking psychotropic drugs. The effects of such pharmacology will vary not only by the circumstances in which it is used but – and primarily – by the person who comes to the experience! Compare the results obtained by Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzger on LSD, as opposed to Ken Kesey, say, or musicians on cocaine or marijuana. These are all creative people, but what they brought to the experience couldn’t help affect the experience they received. It’s only common sense, after all. So if meditation does nothing for you, or perhaps no longer does anything for you, why persist in it? However, that doesn’t mean, forget about internal exploration. It means, try a different kind of tool.

For years, people would ask me if I meditated, and were puzzled when I said I did not. It was only last year that I realized that I didn’t need anything to wake me up to the fact that I as observer was other than appearances. I needed a way to better interact with the world. I needed to develop logic, and needed to apply it to the world around me.

Everybody’s life may be looked at as a problem to be addressed, a puzzle to be engaged. You are always trying to accomplish a task some of which is invisible to you. The lapse of time makes it clearer what your life was about, but doesn’t not necessarily make clear what it is about.

In other words, where we have been is always clearer than where we are, let alone where we will be.

Isn’t that your experience? Moments of clarity alternating with moments of opacity? And of course the proportions of each vary, by the individual and perhaps also by the moment. Meditation is not going to be productive for everybody, nor is it necessarily going to be effective for any given person forever. There is no guaranteed path to heaven.

I get the image of a priest saying his breviary, the prayers he is required to say every day.

Yes. Such practice may concentrate a young man’s mind on the continual existence of the non-physical world, may serve to help him remain on a path of consciousness. But such practice can degenerate into mere rote, accomplishing nothing. Do you have any reason to think that meditation per se is any more universal, any more infallible?

Nor is ILC for everyone.

Nor psychotropic drugs, nor any conceivable path. Don’t put your trust in a method, any more than in any particular creed, to bring you infallibly home. Sincerity and persistence will always bring you through.

Your means of deepening your conscious connection to your non-3D self will vary; the connection itself does not vary. You need not fear becoming unanchored. It’s just a matter of allowing, not of forcing. So, doing what you are led to do (following the pattern of your life) will always result in your pursuing the right path for you. The thing to monitor is your intent. Intend, and your inner life aligns in turn, obviously.

I know that “obviously” refers to inner and outer being parts of one thing, hence never decoupled.

They may appear to be decoupled, because there is a lag in manifestation to the degree that there is a separation between intent and resolution. Intend consistently and alignment follows consistently. Waver, and what can you expect but a wavering result?

Intent that wavers brings irresolution in its wake.

Rather, it is irresolution. What it brings in its wake is the appearance of separation, to which the  conditions of 3D life renders you susceptible anyway.

 

Spending time accomplishing many little practical things is not a waste of time, is not “killing” time. Neither is doing nothing in particular. The idea that one must be continually doing something in order to be productive is a mistake rooted in the idea that one earns one’s place in the world. But you don’t earn a place; you are here by right, each of you. (Each of us, remember – for we remind you, the separation of 3D and non-3D worlds is only one of degree. The separation is no greater than the identity. That is, yes, separate, to a degree. Yes, identical, to a degree. One world, one people, so to speak.)

You do not earn your place in the world. It is a gift. You may treat that gift well or badly, but gifts do not have to be earned, and in fact can’t be earned. Strictly speaking, they can’t be deserved or undeserved. A gift is free, or it is no gift but a bargain. Therefore, do what pleases you. Do what is true to your own nature, and you will not go wrong. However, knowing what is true to your nature does not mean, “run riot,” nor “I am the only person who counts,” nor, “Follow any whim.” Just as we often ask, “Which you?” so should you ask of an impulse or a pattern, “From which ‘me’ and for what purpose?”

That will sound contradictory to many people.

Practical life will clarify it. In day to day life, there are abiding urges, purposes, and transitory ones, whims. They don’t necessarily pull in the same direction. They may cut against each other, or may represent an alternation of energies. You realize one day, you don’t feel like working on your book, nor reading. You’re feeling cooped up, and you are tempted into wandering for a couple of midday hours in the nearby woods. Is that a whim or a deeply rooted urge that is worth listening to? How can you know?

In practice, usually the rest of the pattern of our lives indicates.

What of a situation where the breaking of bounds is the best thing for you? Everything might (and, likely will) make it difficult for you to break these bounds: Does that mean that breaking them would be a good thing? A bad thing? Can you safely depend upon the world’s guidance in such things? Can you safely depend upon your own unexamined reactions?

I begin to see the point you are moving on, here. Don’t proceed in one direction only, but remember that the opposite direction has its own validity.

By all means follow your intuition, only don’t discard common sense. Wisdom lies in using both halves of your brain, logic and intuition.

How do you differentiate intuition and other non-rational impulses? How do you avoid reductionism without becoming a flake? We would like to say a word on the discernment process. A close connection to your non-3D component, with its sure access to knowledge from other mentalities, is certainly a resource to be developed. But what of the interaction within you of so many strands, be they “past lives” or tendencies? These may mesh smoothly or conflict bitterly, or anything between the two extremes. Surely you can see that this complicates the question of listening to guidance.

Sure. Carl Jung said that his anima tempted him to say that his drawing of mandalas was not science (analytical psychology) but art, and he had to insist that they were what he felt them to be. He said that if he had accepted the anima’s judgment, she might later have said, “Nonsense, they are nothing of the sort.” I take it that he was expressing something of what you are saying.

In the day he lived in, only so much could be said and conceptualized. He was doing his own bursting of bounds, personally and on behalf of his culture, and so had limits on what he could think or experience or express, as is always the case. This is why people are only as wise as their times allow them to be, and people who live in later times may surpass the insights of the giants who preceded them, even if they themselves are inherently less wise, less experienced, less learned. Too much reverence for past wisdom and accomplishment and insight may distance you from your own perhaps more germane understandings.

It is not always easy to know the difference between valid and invalid, appropriate and inappropriate, germane and irrelevant. The existence of different strands within you means you do not have a platform from which you can deliver objective judgments to yourself. You may “get carried away”; you may find yourself unable to transcend certain prejudices; you may become overcome by desires, whims, ideas that seem self-evidently true at the moment, and perhaps self-evidently false not so much later.

In short, we have no infallibility. That isn’t news.

Well, you have no infallible way to discern which impulses or biases stem from an infallible source and which do not. That’s why judgment – discernment – always comes into play. It isn’t safe to follow every whim; neither is it safe to follow every rule, internally or externally imposed. Life is more complex than that, by design. Therein lies your freedom.

 

Thursday, November 23, 2017

All day in the company of Tom Cutter, yesterday. How many times now have I re-read Nevil Shute’s Around the Bend, and it is still as fresh as ever.

Several people have asked, is this to be a book, and I have said I presume so but don’t know. Do you have a theme to set out, book length or so, and then perhaps another, or should I regard this as a continuing series that may be chopped into convenient segments, or what?

You are torn between the goal of delivering books and that of providing day-by-day guidance, or entertainment, or company, however you wish to see it.

True. And the answer to that dilemma is?

You might look at this as a bite-size precis of life on earth. You can shape your experiences into convenient units around a theme or you can regard your life as an unbroken whole, which has its own meaning. There is no “right” answer; it is a matter of choice. You have been doing a little of each.

Awakening from the 3D World certainly had a theme. Rita’s World did, and yet not so focused a theme. Well, actually – looking down the list – every one had a theme; every one was also an installment in the on-going saga of waking up. Even Imagine Yourself Well and The Cosmic Internet, very separate and themed books, were also part of a developing theme. I suppose you could say it is all one book, continuing as I continue. Maybe more than anybody cares to read.

Times change. A book is no longer the letter from author to reader that it once was. The coming of the internet’s continual interaction has meant that any given book may be dribbled out moment by moment – and, same thing, may be created in continuous interaction with those who participate as it develops. You are moving into a future with your assumptions shaped by a past, as necessarily happens. In this instance, your idea is to bind your experience first into words, then into collections of statements. That is, first transcription, then collation as physical books, a more permanent form than evanescent electronics. It is the two-sided reality that results in your two-sided efforts.

It’s true. To reach people instantly is good for them and good for me, but in itself results only in a few people printing out the sessions and (presumably) three-hole punching the pages and holding them in binders that are not a particularly attractive way to re-read them. Those who don’t print them out see them once, perhaps twice if they re-read, and then not again. Nothing seen in little daily increments can be grasped as a whole. Its only impact can be cumulative, which means it has one chance to be effective; it relies on the reader paying attention day by day, changing in response, and then, changed, experiencing the next. That’s too much to ask. If there is a book, it will sit there on the shelf waiting for whomever to pick it up and receive several months’ worth of effort in as little time as the reader cares to compress in reading it. Only, books need to be created, sold, and read. As you imply, there’s something to be said for both phases of the information-dissemination process, but I prefer to wrap it up into books.

There is another factor.

Yes, I got that. The day-to-day interactions may need pruning. Not every golden glowing word needs to be immortalized.

Like you, we’re smiling; like you, we agree on the problem. How do you know what is meat and what is fluff? How do you know what little detail, or misunderstanding straightened out, or casual aside, or any seeming irrelevancy may be safely omitted? Yet at the same time you know that saying a thing in the fewest words possible greatly increases the effect. However, it is very frequently the case that people edit out what seems to them redundancy or prolixity, and in the process haul up the only ladder that would have allowed some people access to the ship.

That is pretty direct and unambiguous guidance. All that is missing is the “how.”

Now we have passed beyond smiling, into chuckling.

Meaning, “that’s all the guidance you’re going to get, buddy”?

Meaning, it is as we said. It’s like life. No clear unambiguous path for you; your choice.

This morning I woke up thinking, more than ever, that I can’t write my – spiritual autobiography, call it, my interpretation of my internal life as it has manifested externally – if I keep doing this. Not that I don’t

[!]

New idea, eh?

Well, yes it is. Stopped me cold. An interesting idea, for sure. Write it in the same way we’re writing this, working with you in the same way, putting it out on the blog day by day in the same way. Autobiography on the fly. The drawbacks probably won’t be any greater.

Only, give yourself greater latitude. Revise freely. Consider your morning sessions to be your first draft. One would never publish a first draft; neither should you. But you could consider the readers of your blog as your editorial committee, your readers pre-publication (in the editorial sense). And thus you could accomplish all your goals in the only way that takes advantage of the instant-access of the internet and the later more permanent published form of books.

It hasn’t been clear to you, but a part of your problem has been your wish to preserve our words intact. In other words, you didn’t feel justified in editing the process except in the sort of minor correction that amounts to scratching out typos and inserting the intended word. That is no longer necessary, and perhaps not even appropriate or desirable.

In that –?

In that you have demonstrated what you set out to demonstrate. Anyone wanting help in doing this work can read what you have produced. It’s there. But you don’t need to keep repeating the demonstration. Those who come to your work later in the process will be able to follow the line of books backward, as you followed Colin Wilson’s when you found him.

So if I’m hearing you correctly, you may go underground, so to speak. If I concentrate on a theme, working with you as I go, there is no reason why it has to come out in this dialogue format, or, if it does, why it need remain that way.

As we say, just like the rest of life. And if on this day of thanksgiving you choose to consider this your final entry in the book of Nathaniel, that’s fine with us. We have said what we wanted to say; anything more would be repetition, which has its uses but quickly loses savor.

You know, it is an appealing idea. I may do it. Thanks for all your help, and I look forward to whatever new form of collaboration may follow.

Just like life in general. Very well, maybe take a day or two to do other things, and to prepare, and – as people say – we’ll see you on the other side. In this case meaning, on the other side of your decision.

That’s less drastic than saying “when you die”! Again, our thanks.

 

Wednesday, November 22, 2017

Definitely feeling better. A pretty good night’s sleep. Gentlemen?

What about your reaction to “Beat the Devil”?

I can’t say I much cared for it, though it had some funny lines. Basically a waste of time.

And – why?

I guess spoofs and take-offs bore me. It’s so easy to take potshots at other people’s creations, or even at entire genres. There’s something snide and vaguely destructive about it. I don’t like it, even if I like the actors involved, like Bogart here.

It isn’t serious enough for you.

Well, I’m not sure that’s it, exactly. I love laughing, and some of my favorite movies are funny or have funny moments in them. “Galaxy Quest,” for instance, is ridiculous, and it is a spoof of the entire Star Trek series, but I saw it many times, and loved it.

Then, the difference? Is it between films, or is it between different states of you, depending upon different circumstances?

I’m not sure what you mean.

It isn’t news to anybody that none of you are consistent. What may be news to some is that consistency isn’t always helpful or even appropriate. Consistency can harden into unadventurous rigidity, unable to cope very well with new circumstances. One of the circumstances that produces inconsistency is

I turned that sentence around somehow, didn’t I?

No harm done, we merely proceed, noting the momentary hesitation (that’s what it amounts to) that was that slight wrong turning. The easiest way to proceed is sometimes to restate where we were when it went wrong; an equally appropriate response, sometimes, is to go off on another tack, so as to avoid the distractions. Sometimes the one, sometimes the other. Use what works, and don’t fight it. It is an extension of the obvious fact that you are never exactly the same from one moment to the next. We need a good metaphor here.

It would be a steady-state that nevertheless varied continuously. What about a carrier wave?

Perhaps.

This is probably not accurate physically, but, basing my analogy on what I think is so, may serve. I gather that a carrier wave is a steady signal sent out that is itself modified, the modifications being the things that carry meaning, the carrier wave itself providing continuity. So, our day-to-day consciousness while in 3D would be the carrier wave, and the fluctuations would be the information.

Let’s say the fluctuations would result from, would indicate, would embody, the information. Not a bad analogy. For one thing, it dramatizes why you can’t necessarily meaningfully distinguish between “your” input and “input from others.” You are having to judge the theoretical ownership from the information itself, thereby inferring (guessing) ownership. You can see that in the circumstances, rigidity beyond a certain point is not going to be a helpful trait. On the other hand, you will need a certain amount of rigidity (expressed as consistency) if you are to keep your bearings at all. As in all polarities, you will have your range, and it will be different from perhaps anybody else on earth, and so what? Or, it may be quite close to some, and you will regard each other as kindred souls even though in many respects you may have little or nothing in common.

So, employing your metaphor, you can see that you will always have a core of consistency – the carrier wave itself – and you will always fluctuate – the input, the processing, the output, always going on. This is normal, desirable (what advantage in being unresponsive?). Only, recognize it.

Don’t think ourselves more consistent than we are.

Don’t think consistency an absolute virtue, for one thing. Recognize that you are meant to fluctuate. The very characteristics in yourself that you may deplore are part of your being, your voyage in 3D. Don’t allow yourselves to think you know better, and could have done a better job in construction, than those who made you.

Stop beating ourselves up for not being something other than what we are.

Yearning to be better, to grow, to develop, may seem to be the same thing as continual self-criticism, but it is not. The appearances may be the same; the reality is as different as could be. Aspiration seeks to grow, expects to grow, encourages growth. Self-criticism shrinks, fears to know, expects nothing better.

It is the difference between love and fear, in a new context. Expansion v. contraction.

Also faith v. lack of faith. Not, faith v. doubt, because doubt and belief are two sides of the same coin, seen from different angles. Belief /doubt within reason is always going to be a part of an on-going process. But lack of faith – often enough, what might be called anti-faith – has nothing positive or constructive about it. It leads nowhere. You might say despair is one of the deadly sins.

And I am led back to the question of why I don’t like certain kinds of movies even if they are technically well made. Some don’t lead on; they discourage.

No, you can do better than that easy generalization.

I sensed the insufficiency as I was writing it. Well, let’s say, some movies exude a negative atmosphere.

Not it yet, or do you want to cling to movies with a happy ending?

Nothing wrong with a happy ending, as long as it is not obviously contrived or tacked on in a dishonest way. But a movie doesn’t have to end happily to end in a satisfactory way. “The Bitter Tea of General Yen,” for instance.

Still, press on a little more.

I suppose it isn’t as static a situation as I usually think it. The same movie seen at different times encounters a different me, so the equation is different.

That’s closer. And a given movie will be closer to your more habitual position, and so will satisfy more often. Another may match only a less usual, or perhaps a quite un-usual position, and so will be one of those exceptional or even once-in-a-lifetime experiences that change you, or seem to. And of course what is said of movies goes for other things in your lives. Books, people, anything. They don’t meet an invariant carrier wave (which would indicate no signal), hence the interaction varies.

 

Tuesday, November 21, 2017

I have no idea where we go from here and can’t remember the theme.

No need. That is our job. We’re making things practical, remember. This is less a matter of presenting new material than of presenting various familiar concepts in a new light by presenting them as they relate to each other. You already have all the material you need; it is all around you, but it is like the scientist’s equipment.

They say that the equipment in a laboratory is designed for only one thing, to turn the scientist’s head around.

It is another way of saying that words are sparks. That’s what we’re doing, and it is all you need, sparks. That is one reason why questions and objections serve as catalysts.

I have received a few, but I don’t have them handy. I haven’t printed them out. Meanwhile –?

Meanwhile, we’ll give you a very practical how-to. We’ll try, anyway. Start with anything that is on your mind, particularly if you don’t exactly know what you feel about it, or don’t know why it is on your mind.

That’s easy. I learned last night that my old friend Frank Callaham died two years ago, and I didn’t know.

First, look at what you do know about your reaction.

Well, I was sorry that we had been in so little touch that he could have gone and I not known, nor that I would not be fresh enough in his family’s mind for them to remember to notify me. So many years since I’d seen him last. I could have called.

So, that is one: regrets. And?

I see, writing this, that my reaction to Frank’s death generalizes, and reminds me how little touch I am in even with people I like very much. That is, it reminds me that I don’t touch their lives, nor they mine, in a meaningful way on a day-to-day basis – or even, often enough, year-to-year. That’s another regret, more general but not less true.

And does it lead to resolutions?

Not really. Somebody told me a few years ago, people don’t really keep resolutions. If they change behaviors, it is because of a change that occurs, not because of a determination that they ought to change.

Let’s pause right here. (We didn’t have to go very far at all with this. In fact, it almost spoils the example. But let’s pursue it.) Can you see that the right question raises awareness within you? Now, such awareness can be shunted off into guilt, or steely-eyed negation, or indifference, and none of these (or other) automatic reactions will do you a bit of good. Automatic reactions in themselves never lead to greater self-awareness, although observing them can. This is a way to observe them, then create the possibility of actively modifying them. You see the distinction?

Making a resolution, by itself, doesn’t change anything, because it doesn’t touch the underlying dynamic. The same automatic mechanisms will continue to operate in the same old way. But making those mechanisms conscious creates the ability to modify their instructions, so to speak, and get them working for you instead of (inadvertently) against you. I wrote about this years ago, in Imagine Yourself Well.

Yes, but this application of that technique didn’t occur to you. It amounts to bringing into active awareness whatever is vaguely in your mind, seeing what is involved, and deciding about continuing or changing or discontinuing whatever habitual reaction-pattern you discover. It needn’t involve trauma, or guilt, or any of the negative emotions. It may be as simple as realizing that you enjoy doing X and maybe ought to do more of it. The common denominator here isn’t “fixing things,” but “consciously deciding.”

So, in this initial example you became aware that you wish you had kept in physical contact with someone you cared about, then allowed the specific to generalize to a description of your relations with people (not to say the entire outside world!). Had you left matters there, it would have amounted to a vague regret, even a pointed regret, and nothing changed. But as we held your attention there, we tacitly pointed out that you were assuming an inability to change your pattern. Like all assumptions, it was automatic, unconscious, hence not within your control. Like all such uncontrolled mechanisms, once made conscious it became under your control. So once you looked at it, you saw that of course there is no need to assume you can’t change; only, neither grim determination nor blind optimism will do it. You need to know what, you need to know how. It isn’t hard, but you need to use the right tool for the job. Hammers don’t turn nuts, and neither do good resolutions. Wrenches do; possibly you can even turn it by hand; but you don’t get torque by hammering.

I get it.

So next you look at the roots of the unconscious assumptions.

• What made you think you couldn’t change pattern? Then,
• how did the old patterns serve you? Then,
• how have your needs and possibilities changed? Then,
• how could you reprogram that particular robot or habit-system or Helpful Henry so as to give you what you want right now?

And it is always what you now want. You may change your mind later, but consciousness is now, not then. You may be conscious of other times, but you are still conscious – if you are conscious – only now, whenever now may be.

I remember struggling to understand what Ram Dass was talking about in Be Here Now. It seems so obvious.

Times move, and you move with them. Every external age has its unique pattern of what is easier or harder. This is an aspect of “external” that so far we have ignored. But, not today. For today, yes, Be Here Now. That is the key, because no work can be done in sleep, as you know Gurdjieff said.

Suppose I hadn’t given you a place to pause around the issue of choice. What might have come next?

It might have gone in any of several directions. (And it still may, of course. It’s up to you, and certainly doesn’t need to be done in public.)

• One might be, what did (do) you get out of leading so unnecessarily solitary a life.
• Another, what led you there?
• Another, what are the trade-offs involved, and are your first assumptions about tradeoffs accurate.

It could go in many directions peculiar to you the individual involved. But the generalized pointer we are providing is simply: Pay attention to the things that seem to be floating around in your semi-conscious moment-to-moment mind; these things will provide you with a menu of things available to be more fully understood and, if desired, changed or eliminated. The rest is merely technique, and a pretty simple one, at that, as described.

And there’s your hour.

Interesting. Shorter than usual, but filled with meat. Our thanks, as always.

 

 

Monday, November 20, 2017

For the first time in weeks, I find my lungs more or less at rest even while I am lying down, sleeping or half-sleeping. Now why is that? I instinctively relate it to my change of state, noticed yesterday and Saturday. But I still required the inhaler Saturday night, and I needed the nebulizer, though only to a small degree, last night. Yet it feels like I’ve really changed – like somebody inside got the message. Any light you fine citizens care to shed on the subject?

Think of it as a reason for thanks giving.

Nice pun. And –?

Why does there have to be an “and”?

Because usually, there is one.

You’re a little late, learning that.

I’m a little late learning most things. So what’s going on?

Why would you think that what you already know needs to be confirmed by a process that you half-suspect (half-correctly) is you talking to yourself?

I do love your straight answers.

I thought you told people the process never gets contentious.

Maybe it should, sometimes. But I take it that as usual we’re playing Socratic games?

Our rhetorical question was equally a straight question: How would confirmation from a source that may well be only a part of your own mind be confirmation? Of anything?

You, and others, have pointed out many times that sometimes we need to hear input from outside ourselves in order to give it the weight it deserves. I realize that by some definitions this does not count as input from “outside” myself, but I don’t know what that would mean anymore anyway. Even if this is a willed semi-disassociation, that may not be a meaningful distinction. If we are all one thing, our entire lives are, or could be described as, a willed (or sometimes unconscious) semi-dissociation from the rest of ourselves. And that is probably the only way 3D can function, maintaining the illusion of separation.

That is the way 3D does function, but it is not the only way it does, and is certainly not the only way it could function. You were told years before that the next step will be for people in 3D to walk around as now, only do so knowing they are connected. Well, that will amount to their experiencing themselves being connected to each other as well, even if (conceptually) at one remove.

At which time we will realize more fully that in speaking to “others” we are always speaking to an extended part of ourselves. It is true that at the moment we can at most accept that idea only theoretically. It doesn’t yet feel as true as we can accept it to be.

Realizations come incrementally. First perhaps one cannot imagine not being a closed unit. Then perhaps one’s system shifts to allow for the possibility of non-physical communication. Later, that communication may become more closely defined, so as to envisage or recognize (take your pick) specific individuals. Then perhaps the system shifts again and you realize – or imagine – that those other personalities are either dramatizations of part of yourself or are extensions of yourself that you have merely begun to recognize. And so on. Definitions are structures, and may function as scaffolding or as prison cells, perhaps alternately.

And I’m comfortable with proceeding in the absence of any decision as to what is “the truth.” So, back to the substance of my question. Let me rephrase. I feel intuitively that the

[!]

You see? A chunk of awareness hits – interrelated bits of information, thoughts, memories associate themselves and suddenly relate to your larger pre-existing mental structure – and you stop in your tracks and say “aha!”

Yes, it’s interesting. I haven’t yet tried to describe the experience. The pause and the implied aha seem necessary to seat it in, though of course I don’t know. It happens more usually when I am writing out what is coming through.

Subtext.

Subtext, yes. The words are saying one thing and the context tells me something else, either confirmation or expansion or settling-into-context or mental leap. Always satisfying when it happens. So, I was starting to say that I intuitively felt this latest change connects somehow to – well, I don’t remember what I was going to relate it to from yesterday, but I realized that, as I had suspected, this goes back directly to my session with Jane Mullen three weeks ago. For just a moment, I saw connections more clearly. Let me pause, sink in, and see if I can retrieve that awareness.

[Pause]

I went away somewhere. Don’t know that I came back with what I went dredging for, though.

Oh sure you did.

I did?

Start to express it and it will manifest.

You know, I know you’re right, but logically that sounds backwards.

It’s called priming the pump, and you used to be very familiar with the process.

Not in this context, though.

No, not specifically as a means of recalling information you already know you have but cannot place. But the process is the same. Open the pipe, expect it to flow. How can that work less effectively than sitting by the closed pipe, wishing for water?

Smiling. Okay, let’s see.

It is a feature of a temperament like mine that on the one hand I am open to miracles, and on the other hand I tend to expect them. That is, I underrate the importance of process, and rely upon quantum leaps. So when I have a transformative experience, I fall into the trap of expressing results in binary: on/off, yes/no, whereas they may well come like turning up a rheostat. Rheostats may be turned smoothly or in increments, but in no case do they more than superficially resemble an on/off switch. So, I can’t remember exactly what Jane and I discussed, nor even if it was absolutely a discovery but more a placement into new context. I could look it up (I wrote it out, I think), but it isn’t necessary. The work loosened the knot. Something over the weekend loosened it more.

Yes. Seeing asthma less as a disconnected physical problem and more as an indicator of an internal situation that can be triggered by external circumstances allows you control.

I think I’ll have to spell that out for people, and perhaps for myself as well, lest I forget the connection that at the moment seems so obvious.

Asthma exists. It is a systemic weakness. Environment affects it. There isn’t any talking it away as only this or only that. Mary Baker Eddy [founder of Christian Science] might have a difficult time removing it by concentrating on proper thought. And yet she isn’t exactly wrong either. It is a matter of context.

We all have weak points, circuit-breakers, the things that are going to go first, given sufficient stress. Asthma has always been mine. Well, you can look at asthma, and at specific asthma attacks, in one of two ways. The one would be, “Something specific (Fall, dust, mold, whatever) caused it and the only thing to do is to find the counter-agents that will control it – pills, inhalers, nebulizers, whatever.” The other would concede all this, but say, “Why is it the weak point in the first place? If we correct the weakness, the same causes will no longer trigger it, as it will not exist in that vulnerable form.”

But perhaps the most productive approach would be to recognize weaknesses as indicators, and correct the imbalance they are warning against, so that they don’t even need to be disabled (“cured”) but may continue to operate as sentinels, without necessary triggering.

We can wrap it up on that note – you’ve been at it an hour – but let’s add this one thing. “Perfect health” is a misnomer for “absence of symptoms.” It stems from assuming that an absence of indicators of distress is in and of itself an absolute good. Certainly it is more comfortable; it is not necessarily as informative, or as trans-formative.

I know you aren’t saying illness is necessarily good for us.

No, but it isn’t necessarily bad for you. Or, let’s say it differently, it isn’t necessarily as helpful to have no flashing indicators as it would be to have a more delicately calibrated mechanism that would sound the alarms more frequently. But that wouldn’t serve everybody. Some want growth more than comfort, some don’t.

Again I get that you are aiming that particular statement beyond me.

Think of yourself as a telegraph wire, sometimes.

Humming with electricity. Okay, till next time.

 

Sunday, November 19, 2017

[On Saturday, I drove down to Chesapeake, spent a few hours with my long-time friend John Nelson, then drove to the Virginia Beach waterfront for the night. After a short time on the beach, and then supper, I went to bed, expecting and hoping to be able to do a session after a while. In the middle of the night, I was up with pen in hand.]

Very well, gentlemen, I took yesterday off, and here I am. A sus ordenes. And, a pause. Nothing to say this morning? Want me to try again later? What?

Look out at the ocean. You can’t see it because it is middle night, and the streetlights (boardwalk lights) light not the sea but the boardwalk. Yet you know the sea is there, and if you were to open the door you would hear it. Open the door, just for the moment, not long enough to get cold.

Yes, lovely sound – and I can see the white of the breakers rolling gently in.

You retitled your novel about Angelo’s awakening That Phenomenal Background, because he looked out at the stars that in his normal city-bound existence he rarely saw, and he thought,

• the stars were always there even if in normal life humans were unaware of them; even if they never saw them, and
• the same thing applied to the hidden realities about life that he had begun to see.

The world is a deeper and more magical place than at first it may appear.

It certainly is – and it need not be unexperienced (if that is a word) merely because one’s surroundings are not particularly conducive to seeing it. Once see the magic and the beauty and the power of your lives, and you have all you need. It is merely a matter of remembering.

Big “merely.”

Yes it is. But not as big as the word impossible.

No argument here.

Fiction is a way to suggest truths that cannot be said straight out, a way to remind you of the unsuspected background.

Okay. I take it you have a point, here?

Your lives are always going to be about something; they are also always going to have an unsuspected phenomenal background. Maybe for any given person there is not going to be any reason to be aware of the background, maybe there will be. Either way, it is there, and anyone who denies its existence is either unaware of it or is perverse. So – and this is aimed specifically at certain of your readers present and future who will recognize themselves – on the one hand, no need to proselytize; on the other hand, no need to apologize. In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man need not expect to be understood. But he doesn’t need to pretend to be blind, either.

All right.

Doesn’t sound like much of a message, to you. But there are those to whom it will come as a revelation.

Really?

Oh yes. Remember, your differences from your environment may lead you to assume that you and it cannot both be right, and that it is more reasonable that you are wrong than that everyone around you is.

Shaw said that all progress depends upon the unreasonable man, who will not adapt to his environment.

On the other hand, that iron-willed determination produces a Lenin, or a Mao, or fanatics of any political stripe. The trick is to set one’s reforming instincts to reforming oneself, which is already a recalcitrant enough potential victim (or subject, to put it more kindly).

Always much easier to see what is wrong with someone else.

Yes, only in this case we are calling you to see what is right with yourselves. Like Whitman, we see no advantage to your weeping for your sins. If you have progressed far enough to forgive others, no reason not to start forgiving yourselves! And after all, what is forgiveness but sympathetic understanding of the circumstances behind the action or attitude in question?

Forgiveness is a sort of freeing-up, isn’t it?

That is exactly what it is. No progress can be made while you are glued to the floor unable to move because you are busy regretting what cannot be changed – by which we mean not so much something you may have done as something you may have been.

“That’s the kind of thing that happens in 3D,” I say now. I take it that something pretty much like it is our attitude once we have crossed over. At least, I hope we have a better perspective on it then.

It is a function of the purgatories and hells that people construct for themselves (by the belief-systems they adopt in life) to get one beyond such limitations. But it is easier, faster, done while in 3D, plus it frees you for further adventures in this life rather than in some future life.

And that’s enough for now.

Sort of slow, this morning. A little more than five pages in 45 minutes.

Not every session needs to be Moby-Dick, or War and Peace.

Till next time, then, and thanks as always.