Author: Frank DeMarco

Monday, February 4, 2019

Hanns Oskar Porr asks if people who are murdered choose to be murdered. “Is it part of any greater plan ( call it a life-plan, probabilities, test, an exit strategy, etc.)?  And here is the important one:  if it is a choice, is it always a choice or are there also freak accidents?”

I am inclined to think that the answer is in something he quoted in his email: “A change of angle of viewing will show entirely different relationships that are no less and no more true. in other words, there is no one way of seeing things; there is only every way, and this of course no one in 3D can ever stretch to encompass.” But – is that right? Would you comment, please, to a sincere question?

The quotation is apt beyond what you were thinking. It is more profoundly true. Not only does a different viewpoint reveal a different aspect of a given situation – it alters what is possible, what is true.

That is a truism, I think.

Only from a certain point of view! From another, it may appear to be fantasy, or debatable, or disinformation. When you see life as fluid rather than static – as a dream rather than a collection of objects to be moved around – the ground-rules not only seem to change, but in fact do change. What you believe is directly connected to what is true (and possible) for you. You know this from experience, many of you, but not all who have experienced it realize what they have experienced.

Your beliefs bound your experiences; your experiences expand or limit your beliefs. As usual, a reciprocating process. Someone who will not  be convinced is impregnable in his unbelief, and thus from one viewpoint, he is firmly rooted in fact, and from another viewpoint he is trapped in his own limiting beliefs. This is not an either/or – it is a both/and, as well as a neither/nor.

Choose your beliefs, change your life.

Yes, except that stating it that way implies a firm platform from which to choose. Your life is not as simple as a 3D mind making its decisions rationally and fairly.

Unless that is our ideal, I suppose.

Not exactly one’s ideal; more like, one’s firm idea of how things are. You understand, there isn’t really any point in thinking one or another person can set out the rules of life as they are. The best you can do is to set out the rules of life as they are for you. Again, looking at life more as a dream than as a staged event will bring you closer intuitively to the reality. Only – some will be unable to adopt that view!

I see it. So your definitive answer to Mr. Porr’s question is, “The rules of life depend upon how you see them, so there isn’t any way to answer this question, except arbitrarily.”

That isn’t wholly representative of our answer. But perhaps it is best to pause there and wait for reaction. On to your second question.

All right. Alex Bee, citing the case of Canadian investigator Joe Fischer, author of The Siren Call of Hungry Ghosts, asks if Fischer killed himself or was murdered by malevolent beings. More specifically, he asks how to protect against malevolent beings.

The two questioners are linked in more than the accident of chronology, you see. They illumine each other. Let us think for a moment about luck, and divine protection, and evil or malicious spirits, and intent.

Oh, I see that clearly enough. Again, what we believe is what is true for us.

With an implied caveat, always, that no one in 3D knows fully who or what he is, and so never fully knows his own mainsprings. If you believe you need a ritual of protection, you will. If you don’t, you won’t. However this is not as simple as deciding to decide. Again, what you are in various aspects of the community that is you will determine your range of choice. You may consciously think “I am not afraid” and unconsciously cower. Or vice versa, for that matter. But – subject to that very important reservation – it is true that life will serve up what you expect.

Surely “what you expect” isn’t right.

Well, it is, provided you remember that people do their expecting at various levels, not all known to one another.

I have never felt a need to ask for protection, but perhaps that is foolhardiness. So far, so good, anyway.

But in your external life you do the same, and again, so far so good.

Although I do hesitate to make recommendations to others, for fear I may be wrong, or may be pushing my luck, only to discover one day that it runs out.

But regardless, this is your experience, your (inner and outer) world in conformity to your expectations.

So I suppose the answer is, if you think you need protection, act as if you do, otherwise not.

Let’s say who and what you are determines the need or non-need for protection, because malevolent forces do exist, in a way, and don’t, in a way. That is, what is within your limits seems real to you, and other things do not, can not. But again, don’t confuse deciding that you believe something with actually believing.

So in practical terms?

It’s always the same prescription: Get into close touch with all levels of yourself. Stay in touch. Reconcile to the degree possible, while remembering that you while you are in the body have the opportunity and responsibility to choose. That’s what you are doing here, choosing.

Or at least, that is my/our take on things.

Yes, very good. Everyone lives in a different subset of the world tailored for them, of necessity. That is the opportunity; that is the predicament.

 

Tuesday, January 29, 2019

[A man named Hanns Oskar Porr sent an email asking if strands ever wrap around as in a hologram, each point containing all else and at the same time feeding into the others. He (noting the problem with using the words “higher” and “lower”) asked if a higher level might feed back around into a lower level. He had had an experience of cosmic unity which, by analogy was, “like being part of a ‘cosmic hologram,’ where the part contains the whole and the whole contains that part.” He added that “the idea of the hologram is incomplete, because the holograms we know here in our 3D always have an outside observer/viewpoint,” and in his experience he had been the cosmic hologram. ”So, you see, this is what I mean by ‘does it wrap  around?’”]

Here is what I think it means: Everything is all one thing not only in being all-connected, but in being non-hierarchical. If this is the meaning of his question, I’d say yes, although not intuitively obvious, that’s true. Reality isn’t divided into enlightened and unenlightened, king and pawn, superior and inferior, advanced and retarded – except in relation to any given point of view. Is this right and am I reading the question right?

Yes and yes. This is a clarification that may be important for some, and may be already obvious for others. The world (that is, reality, All That Is) isn’t divided into first class and cheap seats. It’s all one thing, as we keep saying. Reality is neither unorganized nor hierarchical. Instead, it is self-organizing and fluid; it is all one thing and at the same time it is segmented, or compartmentalized, or segregated, or – well, organized in many ways at once, so that different ways of seeing it result in perception of different structures.

You once gave us the analogy of the interior of a crystal, looking one way when a laser is shined through it from one direction, and different when shined through differently. That is, each angle of vision illumines different relationships that exist always but are not necessarily always evident.

You see the limitations of analogy. Words are more fluid than objects, but are nonetheless far more static and unresponsive than are the realities they try to capture. Images are somewhat more supple than words alone, but are also too static, too defined, to capture the quicksilver-like nature of the reality they attempt to reflect. Even the simultaneous overlapping of images cannot do it justice. If you were not intuitive beings, in touch with your non-3D natures, you would have no hope of grasping any of it.

In sum, think perhaps of the ongoing process that is represented by kneading dough. The outside becomes the inside. Neighboring particles become separated; unmixed portions become part of other previously separate pieces. Not the dough but the process of kneading is the analogy. Don’t fall for the idea that some people are first-class citizens and others hangers-on. A change of angle of viewing will show entirely different relationships that are no less and no more true. There is no one way of seeing things; there is only every way, and this of course no one in 3D can ever stretch to encompass.

And this, although very brief, is enough for the moment. Summarize the query before citing.

 

Friday, January 25, 2019

As I look back on my life, it seems to me I didn’t stay conscious enough. I rarely turned the inner spotlight on me, though in another sense that is all I ever concerned myself with. It’s hard to express: A self-centeredness that was not egotistical, or a self-awareness that was not introspective. I was there, doing (or usually reacting), but I wasn’t there thinking about what I was doing or reacting to. I couldn’t learn from experience, because I wasn’t altering my reactions from having thought about past reactions.

I’m not getting it expressed clearly, which suggests I may not be conceptualizing it very clearly. Guys?

You might consider yourself to be a society living by ad hoc adjustment. “How do I feel right now?” This isn’t necessarily a fault or a virtue, but it certainly is a condition and a predicament! It opens some doors and closes others.

I can see that. In the same way that openness to experience opens doors.

And closes them. Danial Boone’s life was as bounded as anybody’s, but everybody’s bounds are different in nature and extent. One travels extensively abroad; another, extensively inward. And beyond this difference, which is still internal regardless of the fact that it plays out in the outer world, there is a deference in what one does with what one lives.

So take Bob Friedman, quietly influential over a long lifetime. Not his external career but his internal career is all but invisible except to those with eyes to see, either from a close vantage point or an affinity of nature. In the same context, consider Colin Wilson.

The commonality being that they liked to think about psychic experience but didn’t particularly want to have it.

Not quite, though not wrong, either. They wanted to maintain.

Are you contrasting it with my wanting to transform?

Both Bob and Colin were thinkers in a way that you are not. They reflected. They pondered. They learned from experience considered. This doesn’t mean that what they learned necessarily was right; we are concerned here with the nature of their process. Someone considering something new in the light of past conclusions may end up merely adjusting new perception to not contradict older conclusions, or they may learn something.

Well, I think I get that. People who live their life by a rigid code can be an admirable result. George Marshall. George Washington. But, maybe George Patton!

It is the difference between rigidity and suppleness, only without an implied judgment that one is good and the other bad. Different ways of living produce different crucibles, each with the defects of its qualities, all within the 3D crucible.

So if Bob and Colin are intending to live their lives from a stable platform that will allow them clear observation (and of course this is not all they were doing, but it is one way of looking at their lives), you cannot expect them to want to jettison that stable platform just when things get interesting. Instead, by not moving, they get the effect they wanted: front-row seats. And from those front-row seats, they were able to describe the view to others (although this is only one aspect of what they were doing).

And I by contrast?

You by contrast are more like a raft on a lake, or sometimes a river, occasionally on the open seas. You are a moveable platform – or, not so much a platform as a set of water wings. What you know is an idea of yourself shaped by your reaction to your surroundings. You are aware of “external” changes, you think of yourself as changing and unchanging, and what you chiefly have to report is your own process, your own journeying. Only, can it be called journeying when it is more like being rafted along?

It is true as time has gone by, I have had a greater sense of my own journey being all I had to offer by way of instruction or commentary or even encouragement.

Well, triangulate, for greater clarity. You share with Colin the reporting of what you think and do – in other words, your experience. Bob did not do that.

To put it mildly!

Well, you share with him your own vivid intense inner life, poorly communicated, often misunderstood or unsuspected.

The three of you delighted in assisting others.

That’s true. Publicly and privately, Colin was very generous with his time for unknown writers and thinkers. Bob set many an author in print. And I am like them both, in that.

Of the three of you, Bob was perhaps the most self-aware, in that he did not live in a continual whirl of mental and physical activity like Colin, and did not lose his inner compass by throwing himself into new circumstances (inner or outer) like you. He was the quietest of the three of you.

And Colin the noisiest?

Certainly the one who made the greatest impact, by far, in the short term (meaning, in the span of one’s life).

James Joyce said history was a nightmare from which he was struggling to wake up. I sometimes think my life is a nightmare, or anyway a dream, from which I am struggling to wake up.

That isn’t quite what you mean. It is more like, your drift is the lack of direction from which you are struggling to become aware enough to overcome.

Is it?

Rita’s words about your lack of introspection were the beginning of a different understanding of your life, were they not?

I need to think of this.

But, you see, the very thought of thinking about it drives you to think of doing something else – Netflix, perhaps, or another novel.

Yes, I recognize that persistent drive to escape. It feels like self-sabotage.

Think of it as true north, and see where that brings you. What you are doing is not at all what you think of yourself as doing.

So, in practical terms, what can I (ought I) do?

If toward the end of your life you can live a summing-up, it will be well.

s

Saturday, December 5, 2020

In considering emotion and our lives, two inputs, one from Bill Ebeltoft, one from Dirk. How about it, guys? Compare and contrast? Or at least comment?

[Bill suggested that we don’t so much change our emotions, as interpret them through our own filters. How we choose to react can change the filter, and thus change our subsequent reactions. He reported his guys as calling this a reasonable interpretation, if a bit simplified. “But a good place to start.”]

It is an interesting starting-point, the question whether in your 3D lives you

• change the emotions you experience, or
• interpret and react and, in your reaction, you change your end of the interface.

May I rephrase? I think you mean, “or do we, by reacting, change what we are, which changes the equation.”

Same thing. Let’s rephrase the whole situation.

Emotions are the boundary between small 3D-you and either the “external” world or your larger 3D and non-3D you, whichever way you choose to see it. So emotion per se is beyond your control, in the way the weather is beyond your control. You can carve out a greater amount of control over how you react, but that isn’t the same thing.

In other words, the emotion you interface with may be regarded as a constant that you cannot affect) but your reaction to it, hence your degree of freedom, is a variable that is potentially under your control, in that you by your second-tier reactions can change the equation. The same input may express differently depending upon what it interfaces with.

George Washington controlling his temper by a lifetime’s rigid self-discipline.

Yes. To look at it merely externally for the moment, would an undisciplined Washington have experienced the soul-searing experience of the winter at Valley Forge in the same way that in fact he did? And would such a version of Washington have been able to command the respect and allegiance of his officers and men? Life in 3D is not primarily about externals (though it looks like it is), but here is one external that should illustrate the point.

So in response to Bill’s interpretation we would say it isn’t exactly the filter of perception that you change. Rather, it is the mechanism of reaction that changes.

Not so much that we perceive differently but that we choose to react differently.

Yes. By choosing how you will react to something, you choose what you will see subsequently. You change the world coming at you, hence you change the emotional layer interpreting and intervening in your life. The laminal level – the smooth or turbulent connection between inner and outer world (for this is how it appears to you) – changes automatically if one or the other end of the equation changes, or if both do. It is a boundary and a bridge, an energetic, dynamic, barrier and bridge, not something solid or static.

So, moving on to Dirk’s analogy to physical systems —

[Dirk said that when engineers want to change laminar and turbulent flows, they have choices in how to do so. He asked if similarly we might have many ways to change our emotional interface.]

One way would be to consider the habitual reactions you can build, the second-tier reactions we discussed. What is that but redesigning aspects of yourself so that the same input from the emotional layer will meet a different you, hence express differently.

[Pause]

That’s it?

You need more?

I don’t know, somehow I expected it would require a more in-depth discussion.

We don’t see the need, but if questions arise, you know where to find us, as we said earlier.

Anent that, since we have some time, Bob Washburne’s email of Nov. 16 said he had used TMI’s Gateway Experience CDs many times, but didn’t seem to be getting anywhere.  “That is, I can readily attain the different levels at will without the CDs, but I don’t seem to be able to do anything with them. For one thing, I never see anything but black.  No images, no sounds other than the ringing in my ears, no voices, no emotion downloads. Just black. Second, my awareness seems to be nailed right behind my eyeballs and nothing can shake it loose. So is there a self-help group for slow psychics?]

And as you know, many people experience excruciating difficulties in connecting.

Yes, they do, and being individual they respond in different ways. Some take it personally, some assume they are at fault, some travel hopefully, some despair.

And many of us move from point to point along that scale, until we succeed or we concede failure. I well remember the two or three years  before I did Gateway, using the tapes, trying, intending, hoping and not succeeding.

Your second-tier reaction to that long preparation served you well. You did not get angry, nor did you despair.

I sort of hoped against hope.

Righteous persistence did bring reward. But remember, what you learned at Gateway was that you had been expecting things to appear in the wrong guise. Your unconscious expectations added to your difficulties.

Very true, and after nearly 30 years of experience, I have learned to advise people of some of the usual pitfalls. But a listing of obstacles, and a listing of suggested ways to overcome them, does not amount to a magic formula.,

If there is a magic formula, it is “Persist, live in faith, live your life knowing that although it may not be what you wish it were, it is right for you.” Not so easy a formula to follow, yet not impossible.

You can understand that to us in 3D it sounds a little like “It isn’t under your control, so ride with it.”

And is that erroneous? Your life is not under your 3D control, and it is well that it isn’t, or your life would be a maze with no exit. What is under your control, we remind you, is how you react to what happens to you. Seen in a certain light, that is no different from George Washington continually molding his character.

So what of someone trying sincerely and seeming to get nowhere?

The operative word – as you knew when you wrote it – is “seeming.” But life can require a lot of patience and faith, because often what you are really working on is not what you think you are working on.

Yes, I’ve seen that often enough in my life.

It’s an inevitable effect of your 3D consciousness being less than your larger consciousness that has a better perspective. You may strive earnestly and diligently and seem to get nowhere. But the striving itself is “getting somewhere,” if you can realize it.

So our life is not so much Sisyphus, everlastingly pushing a rock uphill, only to see it fall to the bottom, making him continue an endless fruitless labor. It is more George Washington, a life presenting endless possibilities to work on character?

Don’t carry it too far, but yes. Success in what you want is not necessarily the same as (or worth as much as) success in what your intent and actions make yourselves.

 

Saturday,  December 30, 2017

6:55 a.m. I watched Michael Ventura’s full-length commentary on John Cassavetes’ movie “Love Stream” again last night, and I am reminded that metaphysical conversations have a tendency to glide lightly over the hard questions that serious filmmakers and writers come up against all the time. Sex, love, hatred, conflict, anguish, dead-end situations, white-hot impulses, years of drift and indecision and lostness – all the sharpest flavors of life, all the things that make life hardest and brightest. Somebody (a Hemingway, say) lives his life overshadowed by the awareness of unpredictably imminent death, feared and longed for. Or, he spends his life in productive but also destructive alliance with alcohol, or drugs – or coffee or bread, for that matter, anything that forms an unbreakable chain that is both anchor and fetter. He burns for sexual union, or for fetishes that for him replace sexual union. He burns for success, or money, or revenge, or whatever it is he burns for. He struggles against fate, against circumstance, against his own demons or weaknesses, against betrayal.

In short, his life is struggle, and it may be struggle against comfort, against boredom, against discordant parts of his own nature, against anything, but even the most tranquil life includes struggle, conflict, drama. Any system of metaphysics or psychology or religion that did not address this fundamental reality of life would not be real.

Guys, hasn’t the flesh and blood of life tended to escape the confines of these conversations?

Only if you define struggle too narrowly. Struggling to understand can be a real hunger too, a real ongoing drama. Struggling to create a coherent view of life that makes sense of life as you in your times experience it is little different from struggling to paint a masterpiece, or write one, or carve one, or direct and produce one, or to sit alone, building careful chains of thought and logic, to think something into existence. Or, to change fields, to struggle with material objects and an evolving comprehension of motivating forces, to invent an airplane, or a 3D printer, or a molecular rearranger, or whatever; or to create a garden, or any useful or decorative item.

Yes, life is struggle, but struggle is not solely mental, or emotional, or physical, and it is not solely negative or positive in nature. Just as they day drama is conflict, well, so is life. It is only in the conflict of forces of whatever kind that one lives a 3D life (which, let us remind you, is a deliberate constriction of consciousness into one moment of time and one locus of space). The ever-changing present moment is, above all things, a crucible. And if a given moment (even a moment stretching for years) seems to have nothing in particular happening, no conflict, no drama, no progress, no regression, still such moments are part of a larger rhythm of ebb and flow.

Yes, but how it is that we tend to –. Oh, of course. Our conversations tend to be relatively bloodless because I am on the 3D end. Someone else might bring in something more red-blooded and equally true.

Well –

What? What’s this long pause?

It’s difficult. You don’t want us spilling your discreditable secrets, but you don’t want us sanitizing either, and this is true for everybody. So how do we tell the truth without telling the whole truth? Yet this is always the case.

I remember Thoreau saying, in Walden, I think, that he could tell a sorry enough tale on himself if he chose to. After all, some struggles are private. I think Hemingway deserves way more credit than he usually receives for being as honest about himself as he was.

It is true on one hand that everyone is entitled to a private life; it is also true that everyone’s private life is to a degree a self-created prison (or, to be charitable, call it a cloister) beyond which he will not venture. Thus our repeated reference to the fact that the specifics in your lives are animated by the vast impersonal forces that run through them. Life is not a matter of cause and effect confined to material forces. You know that. Everybody knows that. And neither is it the result of the logical working-out of whatever a person contains.

Logical George Bernard Shaw to the contrary.

Yes. Life is more vital than bloodless theorizing, and at the same time not as rich as it appears when taken at face value. The only way this can be reconciled is to remember that 3D life is not a thing of itself, but is, so to speak, suspended between non-3D forces beneath and above it. Thus, “vast impersonal forces,” and any attempt to understand life without balancing its extremes of true drama and not-so-real reality is going to fail to some extent. Bloodless from one point of view is insightful from another; realistic from one point of view is deluded by appearances, from another.

This is a function of art, isn’t it? To include as much as possible while being unable to include everything.

Everybody specializes, and not merely “everybody in 3D.” (If you can remember that 3D and non-3D are part of the same reality, statements such as this will become superfluous.)

I am tempted to go into my usual generalizing. I’d say religion tends to concentrate on the 3D-suspended-among-other-forces end, and detective stories, say, concentrate on 3D drama seen as if fully real.

Many such dichotomies might be drawn, all somewhat accurate, none particularly enlightening. What is most helpful is whatever is most useful, meaning whatever is most able to be applied to a person’s daily challenges.

Surely that is different for everybody, and different at different times.

Of course – and neither you nor they can know what is going to be the bell-metal and what is going to be the “clunk,” at any given time. But your, and their, non-3D awareness is not restricted to one time-and-place locale, so it will get you, and them, to where you all need to be.

And that is enough for the moment. No need for a full session; this brief discussion contains enough food for thought.

 

Friday, December 29, 2017

I’ve lost track of where we are and what you are explicating.

Again, a logical progression makes less difference than you might suppose. Is it too much to expect that the pathless path – freedom in all directions – would be explicable in more than one way? It isn’t a treasure map, leading to one definite point, nor a radio schedule dependent upon position in time. It’s closer, much closer, to saying “The journey is the reward.” Just accompanying us along the way reorients and magnetizes, so to speak. The incidents of the journey are thus less important than the journeying.

So, today –?

Let’s talk about geography and consciousness. The fact that one may be living on Terra Firma this lifetime says nothing about where one’s strands may have lived, nor about what resonances may arise from other people’s strands (so to speak) who may be from other places. And, don’t forget, the same goes for people in other worlds relative to Earth: For them, a Terran life is the exotic factor in their heredity.

So when a psychic says, “You are originally from the Pleiades,” it may not be quite as definite as that.

Let’s say, the psychic may be speaking in a hasty shorthand, knowingly or otherwise, that assumes a singleness in the individual that is not in accordance with the model we have been painting.

I take it this is your way of saying, “Don’t overinvest in our model either.”

Well – almost. It’s a way of saying that the ways in which people have seen the world cannot be said to be absolutely wrong or even inadequate for their purposes and their time, so don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. Different conceptual schemes divide reality into categories according to perceptions, strategies, meta-goals.

To make an analogy, the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation that extends from below infra-red to beyond ultra-violet is conventionally divided into colors by arbitrarily beginning at one range and ending at another. Even though the beginning and ending ranges are ranges and not points, still the division is arbitrary. Red, orange, yellow, do not exist per se as definite colors. You agree to see them that way. (That’s why children have to be taught their colors.) Divide that same spectrum another way, and you would experience your colors differently.

It’s easy to get that idea, but it is hard to imagine it, as a reality.

It will be less so if you think closely about the shades of blue and green toward the perceived boundary between the two. Obviously artists and scientists of light know there is no hard and fast boundary, but society in general assumes that there is, so assigns aqua, teal, cerulean, etc. to one or the other “primary” or “secondary” colors. But the designation of some colors as primary and others as secondary stems from a conceptual decision. It isn’t even as absolute as you might think in terms of “These colors may be blended to produce other colors.” The primaries are different between paint and light, say.

If we drew the lines differently, we would educate ourselves to see differently.

You would, it’s inescapable. The vibrations would be the same, but you would experience them in different units. Of course that alternate scheme would be no more correct than your present scheme, because any scheme depends upon discerning divisions, which are always going to be more or less arbitrary, like dividing a tree trunk. You might choose to see a tree trunk as logically divided into X and Y, but the trunk is (seen one way) one and indivisible, or (another) a flow of associated elements.

We have gone to a great deal of trouble to provide an alternate scheme in which the concept of the individual as a unit has been downplayed, and the concept of all the elements of humanity being interconnected is emphasized. This is because the way you draw distinctions has consequences. If you could remember from moment to moment that such divisions were necessarily somewhat arbitrary, no harm would be done. But the circumstances of 3D life in the absence or abeyance of a strong connection to a sense of non-3D reality means that such conceptual schemes come to assume a greater importance and permanence than is warranted or helpful. At another time, in civilizations with different assumptions, we might downplay the associative aspects and stress the relative individuality. It is not orthodoxy we are trying to encourage, but consciousness and in a sense consciousness is never easy within any scheme.

I get that you mean, not that it is difficult but that it doesn’t rest easy.

That’s right, though the second meaning isn’t exactly wrong. So, speaking of your extraterrestrial connections, which is the unspoken basis of today’s discussion –

Yes?

If all the universe is connected (and, we assure you, it is), and if the connections and divisions one discerns are arbitrary (which is equally true), you will find that the difference between “alien” and “family” is more a reflection of classification schemes than of “reality.” This is true among humans on earth; it is no less true among all the sentient beings on earth, and in the vast 3D world you call the universe. Obviously there exist relative divisions, relative species. To say that “All is one” is true, but only true as “All is a vast interlocking scheme of relative differences.” A moment’s thought should show you that this is true in your everyday experience. You sort by categories. You experience rhinoceros differently from daisies, even though both are made of the same building blocks. You experience races even though on close enough examination they shade off into one another.

On the one hand it seems you are saying our Sams, are not local in the sense of all its components being from one place any more than of one race or even on species. But on the other hand, I get the sense that our Sams have a center of gravity, so to speak, and that one planet, say, is more like “home” to it than others, and certainly than some generalized “all places” locale. What’s the story here?

We return to the larger topic of “vast impersonal forces.”

I don’t quite see how. Unlike sometimes, when I get a sense of coming attractions, even if I can’t yet express it, this time I don’t have any of it.

We are at the end of an hour, and perhaps it is convenient and useful to give people time to think about it before setting out our view.

 

Sunday, December 24, 2017

So where are we in your syllabus?

We are still in the process of tying together concepts that have become so widely disassociated in your lives as to remove the center Yeats was talking about. * [See below]

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. That is what happens when a civilization’s central stabilizing tenets lose their ability to compel people’s belief. (We don’t mean “compel” by force; no one can compel belief, only external pretense at belief.)

Given that no “the” truth can be found by 3D minds conditioned by 3D circumstances, no society can be founded on “the” truth. Finding things that are true enough will do, must do, because that is the best that can be done. The question isn’t whether a society’s beliefs are the truth; it is whether its truths hold together.

But you aren’t saying that a society based entirely upon consistent lies and errors is more viable than one that is less consistent but closer to reality.

Way too many assumptions and definitions there. but it does remind us to go a little bit slow.

All societies may be said to be based somewhat upon errors, whether or not upon lies as well. Yet, all societies will be based upon some values, conscious or unconsciously held, so in effect every society will be based upon at least some potential truths. Nazi Germany, which is in your mind, still drew upon powerful constructive beliefs held by the German people.

And perverted them.

It did, but that isn’t the point. Beliefs in one’s duty to the state and to the society around one; willingness to sacrifice personal interests for the sake of the greater whole; pride in race and culture; defiance of fate and circumstance – all these values were there to be exploited. It is not the fault of the people that they were no match for the malevolent manipulation that called forth the dark side of those same values.

I might have argued against you, in my youth, but I have spent my adult life watching the same process turn my own country into the dark counter-figure of what it was before the coup of November, 1963.

Yes, but the issue is much deeper than you know, certainly deeper than they know who attribute motives and causes to ideology and politics. America’s sins come from the very defects of its qualities; people can only hijack what is there to be hijacked. And they can’t do that until a people’s grip on their central myth has been loosened. Until then, they may be misgoverned and cheated and lied to and manipulated, but the unifying myth will hold things together. Only when the myth decays or is shattered, as with Communist Russia or Nazi Germany, may a social order based on certain shared perceptions and beliefs be destroyed.

Yet this is still speaking on a superficial abstract level. Countries, societies, civilizations, do not fall or fundamentally transmute themselves merely from internal causes however serious. The fundamental transformation of human society won’t happen uniformly, and its effects will appear very different in different societies, for the impact of any given present moment’s circumstances always interact with that society’s past. That is what is there to be interacted with!

I have seen us at a point between two ways of seeing the world at least since reading [in the 1970s] Koestler’s The Sleepwalkers, describing the transition from the medieval mind to the mind of what is called modern times. And, there is Toynbee’s Study of History. And Bob Monroe’s description of “the gathering.”

As we say, it has taken time for the concept to broaden, deepen, and transform your conscious mindset and your underlying assumptions. The process is that of loosening the existing web of beliefs so that it may be tightened again in a new configuration.

Let’s see if I can put it into words. This ties into the globalization of culture.

Geography, linguistic differences, all the barriers that have kept human societies divided, no longer do so. There is no getting away from anybody else any more. The internet, radio, TV, a thousand forms of inadvertent cultural exchange are continually battering at the walls dividing human societies. The process shakes old certainties,. draws members of one society to aspects of other societies. So, it loosens the net of any one given civilization. Old beliefs no longer exist in isolation, and so there is a continuous below-conscious-level counter-pressure undermining them. The new global civilization will self-construct, and that will be the retightening of the net.

Not that the new society will embody “the” truth, nor that everything it will believe will be truer than everything it rejects. But it will again embody a set of truths, of values, capable of playing a constructive co-creating role with us in the non-3D world. And if you don’t realize that that means, with your own beyond-3D self, we have been wasting our time!

Societies rest upon shared beliefs about what is real, because values are chosen in light of those beliefs, and a society orders itself around those values. It rests not upon conscious choice – that would be a very fragile and tentative support – but upon conclusions that seem to follow inescapably from the accepted premises. So, if you can help a society see deeper constructive truths, you will have a far more profound (if hidden) effect than those who manipulate daily situations, overtly or covertly.

I get the feeling that what you want to say this time hasn’t yet been said clearly.

The difficulty is less in expressing truths than in expressing relationships between truths. We are trying to show you how to read negative space. As you like to quote from Kerouac.

“What can’t be said, can’t be said, and it can’t be whistled, either.” So –?

So, explorations in effect redefine negative space. This work does have an effect. It’s just that the effect is delayed. By your measurement, decades go by and nothing moves. But the transformation of civilization does not take place on human-life schedules, nor at human-life pace. Much of what appears to you to be chaos is merely counterpoint seen too close up. Each of you is working alone, yet you are working together with others and with forces that are far beyond you.

But have you made your point?

Remember, words are to inspire exploration by resonances they set up. They are not hammers to nail things down. Therefore it makes less difference than you might think where we stop and resume.

– – – –

* [The very well known poem by W.B. Yeats:]

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?