Author: Frank DeMarco

Monday, January 27, 2020

So, about those vast impersonal forces – ?

We smile too. It seems to you we endlessly circle around a promised coming attraction and make no  move toward it. But as you know, ours method is not chosen casually, nor whimsically. Only by becoming thoroughly familiar with a concept, so that you can take it for granted, can you establish a context for seeing something new, or for seeing something familiar as new, because seen differently.

Shared subjectivity as a concept to replace our idea of objectivity or “the world out there,” as one example.

Yes. When you can see the world as alive in all respects, you can see yourselves and your relation to it differently. How many ways we have said the same thing! And the problem is that most of our words are wasted. Words are among the least efficient ways to convey new understanding. They can do it, but only as sparks (poetry, say) or as long chains of exposition, basically describing everything in order to show anything in a new light. And who can describe everything?

Your words are mostly wasted, I take it, because mostly we recipients consciously or unconsciously take in new concepts only to warp them by attaching them to old concepts.

Yes, and pretty much by necessity. You can’t reinvent your understanding of the world every time you receive a new transmission. It isn’t anybody’s fault, it’s just the limitations of the situation. We ask you to transcend, knowing full well how little able anyone is at any given moment – but also knowing that every so often, the right words spoken in the right way will allow someone to get it. That private, individual, irreproducible, unpredictable moment is the sunflower seed for which all this shelling of husks is worth doing.

I get that. I hope you didn’t strain yourselves with that metaphor.

Oddly, it “came to us,” as you might say, and we adopted it because it gave a sense of a tiny return for a seemingly disproportionate effort.

Okay, Farmer Brown, now what?

Now, another attempt, of course.

• The idea of shared subjectivity is to eliminate the unconscious idea of a division between subjective and objective, between individuals and the world they live in. We’re all one thing. There is no “them and us,” no “here and there,” no “then and now,” except relatively, for sorting-out purposes, one might say.
• Therefore, to speak of “vast impersonal forces” is merely to remind you that the interaction between “you” and “the world” is continuous and at all levels.
• Therefore, too, “vast impersonal forces” and “vast personal forces” are two ways of saying the same thing because they are two ways of experiencing the same things.
• You do not exist in a vacuum. The world does not revolve around you.
• Yet you do not revolve around the world, either.
• Neither do you and the world exist in parallel, nor is the world an illusion, and more than is your life. Mistranslated, yes. Other than it seems, yes. Imperfectly understood, yes. But you live. Your life is real. The world exists. The shared subjectivity is
• The forces that flow through your life may be equally well described as the currents in your particular life reflecting (and affecting) the times you live in. This is a cliché, seen one way. Seen another way, it is a door opening outward.

If a strong wind blows, it will be experienced as good or evil not by its intrinsic nature (which is neither) but by the effect it has. Sailboats react to the same wind as do windmills and trees. Same wind; three different effects. And if it is a hurricane, well, hurricanes have beneficial effects, usually unnoticed because of the destruction that accompanies them, but in any case the hurricane has nothing of good or evil in its composition. It is; it is not good or evil. Its effects may be bad from one point of view and good from another, but its effects have nothing to do with its intrinsic nature.

As I was writing that, I got a sense of a hurricane being a huge release of stress, like an earthquake.

A relative rebalancing, yes. How many people think of a hurricane as a necessary rebalancing of forces? Yet it is so.

I don’t know why it should seem to be a new idea, this uncoupling of a thing’s nature from its effects, but that is how it is striking me.

You are experiencing the effect of seeing it from a different viewpoint. You all your life have seen hurricanes from the point of view of individuals experiencing their effects. Now you saw them from the point of view of the world at large.

Pray tell, how is it helpful to draw a physical analogy to non-physical processes, but not helpful to draw on our metaphysical understandings to incorporate new statements?

Examples provide vivid mental images. Connections to existing beliefs produce logic-chains. It is the difference between a gestalt and a computer program.

Got it. You expressed it better than I could.

No, actually, it’s the same process. Continuing to look at the same problem results, sometimes, in added clarity. Another way to say it, pulling the same bit of yarn sometimes untangles the skein. If you keep at it, clearer ways of seeing emerge, and it doesn’t matter so much whether your 3D or your non-3D intelligence, or both, or both alternately, does the pulling.

But if our minds are in the non-3D –?

Your minds are in the non-3D. Your 3D expression receives that mind partly directly (intuition) and partly indirectly (via the brain), and in both cases expresses through the limited subjectivity that is you. So, there’s a difference. You might say (inaccurately, but productively) that TGU represents the world at large and your own 3D-oriented consciousness represents the unique product of your 3D experience.

Inaccurately?

After all, everything mixes.

Okay, I see that. What may be separated for the purposes of analysis isn’t necessarily separate at all.

Let’s say, rarely or never separates cleanly. The trick is to see things one way, then another, remembering that any one view is only an approximation. The end in view is not to convince but to inspire.

You can’t convince anybody of anything anyway.

Not in the sense of mentally over-awing, no, nor would it be good if one could. But one can set forth a shower of sparks, any one of which may be the one, to ignite the fabric, leading to illumination.

I swear, you are overworking your metaphor-producing machine.

You will find that the image of flying sparks persists beyond the memory of the chain of words that produced it. And enough for the moment.

 

A journey

Beginning always

At the base of the world-tree,

The base of things.

Like moles, like rabbits,

Like tiny organisms and

Large and small predators –

A part of the landscape,

A part of a whole.

Our purpose is to be,

To be what we may become,

No way to be separate,

Or unneeded, or misplaced.

However it may feel.

Feelings are to be trusted,

But as barometers,

not compasses or calipers.

We step away and feel

Adventurous, or fated,

Or rebellious, or orphaned,

All is well with the stepping

And with the feeling.

Nothing goes off-script,

Because: no script.

No constrictions, no conditions.

We stand at the base of the tree

And move or not move, connected.

Sunday, January 26, 2020

I have been asked a question I am reluctant to try to answer, and overnight, it occurred to me there was a very good reason for my reluctance, more than just a hesitation to impose my interpretation.

It’s worth pursuing. Perhaps we are part of the source of your reluctance (assuming a difference between us and you, rather than a difference in emphasis).

I remembered that you said at some point that it is a big mistake to try to understand new material by merely fitting it into our established understandings.

Yes. It is one form of “nothing but,” and prevents or at least retards the making of new connections from a different point of view. It only reinforces the old one.

The specific question was if shared subjectivity was more or less what some people call consensus reality. The first reason I couldn’t answer the question is that I don’t know what either term means, and the second is that although I have a pretty good sense of shared subjectivity, I don’t know at all what others mean by consensus reality. I know what I think they mean, sort of.

You have a deeper reluctance than that, rooted in the ambivalence you have always had about New Age certainties and ideas that became dogmas. However, instead of giving our opinion of what someone may mean about what they may or may not have understood, we can talk of what we know. Let us look at shared subjectivity.

My sense of it is that you are saying that the “external” world is as alive and as eternal as our individual internal worlds; not a dead fixed thing any more than matter is dead units occupying space.

That, but more than that. Internal and external are the same thing, the same process, the same working-out of the interplay of forces. Only, just as any one body is one body among all living and dead humanity, so one 3D mind is one mind among all living and no longer living (in 3D) minds. You are the center of your mental universe; everybody is. Extend that idea and you see a universe of live minds, not a hierarchy.

• You are each the center; hence, there is no one center, no implied hierarchy of “central” and “less central” and “more central.”
• You are each the universe in miniature, and at the same time you are each a splinter of the entirety.
• There is no “then” in the real world. The time is always “now.” The year 1865 is no less alive now. Ten minutes ago is no less alive now than it was then. This has consequences. To think that the moving moment of “now” differentiates between what is briefly alive and what is dead or not yet existent, distorts reality. There is nothing dead, be it moments of time or the things contained in those moments. But your access to any moment except “now” is non-existent in 3D, by design. (Access via non-3D is another thing.) We’ve said all this.
• Every thing, every mind, every moment of time, being alive, where is there room for anything to be fixed, unalterable, dead?
• Everything being part of everything, where is there room for division and separations other than in a relative sense?
• These things being so, surely it follows that “individual” is only a localized version of “universal.”

Not sure that will be understood as meant.

Everything we have said or will say is simple and self-evident when seen from the right standing-place, and is convoluted and even irritating when seen from other standing-places.

That gave me a whole new idea of how you work.

But spell it out.

By giving us descriptions of how things are, sometimes in great detail, you provide us with something to react against. By how irritating or how opaque it is, we can tell how far off we are. When we stand in the right place, it snaps into clarity.

We can’t quite sign off on that way of putting it. That makes it sound like we are confusing people deliberately. But true, that’s the effect. Our plainest statement is mystifying if you try to cram it into an accustomed way of seeing things that does not fit. You can’t believe both that every thing is alive and that the universe is composed mostly of dead matter; nor both that every moment (and its contents) is alive and that the universe is composed mostly of dead matter.

Until you choose a perspective, two contrary perspectives will be a jumble of incompatibles. But an excellent way of realigning your view is to adopt multiple viewpoints, for just that reason.

I’m pretty sure you mean, one way to escape our accustomed limited perspective is to tentatively adopt another, and see the discontinuities between them. Does that mean we can never come to a fixed perspective?

Not at all; people do it all the time. This is for when your previous certainties no longer satisfy but you can’t quite see your way to a higher synthesis. No matter how high your present viewpoint, there is always another to be achieved, now or later.

To learn something new as an added item in your inventory, you connect it to what you know. That is not what we are doing together here. Here we are suspending what we know as concepts. Rather than trying to add something new, we are trying to look at what we already know from a different angle, to see how our new standing-point may be. So, to try to add new viewpoints to old structures is to defeat the purpose.

Again, we have said this many times, but, as we have also said many times, the temptation is very hard for 3D-oriented minds to resist. Addition always seems more sensible than substitution or deliberately imposed uncertainty.

And I’d bet that most people, most of the time, read what you just said, nod agreement, and continue to try to fit whatever you say into their comfortable accustomed mental categories.

You should know.

Touché. Are you accusing me of being human?

We’d never do that; you do it enough yourself. Enough for the moment.

 

Saturday, January 25, 2020

You said we should talk about the vast impersonal forces in the context of “beyond good and evil.”

Do you know how some people blame anything and everything for what happens to them? That is a very human tendency. It stems from trying to see invisible linkages.

Scapegoating, you mean?

Simplifying, call it, in a world of multiple forces

I don’t have enough energy for this, do I? Too well to sleep, too sick to work.

It isn’t that, quite. You could get a little more sleep now if you were to try.

Couldn’t, a few minutes ago.

But you have had some coffee now. Those few sips help.

Counter-intuitive, that.

It is a mistake to assume that the same substances affect different people in the same way. Musicians using marijuana are affected in different ways than, say, lawyers or secretaries or teenagers listening to hard rock.

When you put it that way, it seems to make sense. A + B is not necessarily the same as A + C or A + D. But we are accustomed to thinking of ourselves as chemical compounds, I guess. If that were all of it, then any two people would be affected more or less in the same way by any given physical substance.

You needn’t limit that statement to physical substances. No two people are necessarily affected in the same way by any stimulus, physical or non-physical. And that brings us back to the question of the vast impersonal forces: They manifest in your lives as vast personal forces because no two “individuals” are alike, even identical twins.

• No two 3D people are identical.
• No two larger beings are identical, of course, being far more complex than any 3D manifestation.
• 3D by definition is one time, one place for any (and every) individual.
• The 3D cauldron exists to enable and require 3D individuals to continually choose who and what they are to become. It is always about becoming by being, and choosing from within that being.
• But, choosing among what alternatives? That is where the “external world” comes in.
• You – we – are the external world.

That last statement struck me as, at the same time, obviously true and incapable of being explained.

Any understanding deepens with the attempt to explain it.

• The external world is not some separate thing; it is part of the same thing we as larger beings and we as 3D beings participate in. There is difference, without the difference being absolute. Difference, like separation, is relative in this universe, not absolute.
• Take your subjective world as one thing and your objective world as another, and you have a collision of improbabilities that amounts to chaos. See them as two aspects of the same reality and you can feel your way to understand who you and we really are.
• Think of the external world as your own subjective world and everybody else’s, they being alive in this moment or not.
• If you begin to think of the external world as shared subjectivity, you may begin to see things differently than if you see your own subjectivity as a subset of the universal objectivity. Yet they are only two ways of saying the same thing.

Some people say we are drops of water in the ocean, or soap bubbles.

Yes, and can you see the difference in emphasis, slight though it is, between our explanation and that analogy?

I think it is that the soap-bubble or the drop-in-the-ocean analogy assumes the priority and the permanence of the collective and not also of the individual.

Exactly. Congratulations on seeing that. It is a subtle difference but it makes all the difference. A soap bubble is transient, local, ephemeral. You are not, or let’s say not any more than everything else! The difference between eternal and transient is not between external and internal, but between non-3D and 3D. And you and we belong to both worlds. Your – our – transient aspects die to the world in due time. Your – our – eternal aspects couldn’t “die” if they wanted to. It is a matter of environment, not of different nature.

• Once you see the 3D world as in a sense objectified shared subjectivity, you may be able to see how it can never be dead, nor inert, nor non-responsive. At the same time, it is not necessarily alive and responsive and infinitely malleable to anything you happen to want it to be.

Common sense, after all.

Not all that common. When people first realize that the external world is not disconnected from their own interior world, they often think they ought to have more control over it than they do, or else they feel threatened, menaced, by “external” interference with their own desires.

If we can help you come to a sense of the internal and external world together, as a living consciousness of which you are in intrinsic part, we will feel that we are getting somewhere.

And although you may not see it, this session has indeed dealt with the question of vast impersonal forces and the reality “beyond good and evil,” only there’s so much more to say once the groundwork is laid.

 

A journey

Down the stairs as usual

A pool to the left as I descend

A long dive into the pool

I am breathing water:

No limit to the depth, no limit to my ability to dive.

It gets brighter as we descend.

Still diving, I surface in a new world,

Bright, glistening, silent,

Hushed awaiting the action,

Awaiting the actors.

The sands glisten, untrodden.

The foliage, intense dark green.

No animals, no birds, no fishes:

The scenery, not yet the players.

I am brought back to ordinary life remembering my poem from August 26, 1992, that I, knowing that something big had happened, read to my Gateway class on the Thursday, in the closing circle that December night:

New Land

The older world we grew up in,

grew old in, knew no additions

save in tiny increments. Here

and there, now and then, a Surtsey —

a dab, a morsel of volcanic rock —

hissed and shouldered its way

above the level of the vast sea

surrounding. But the sea was everywhere,

the island a pinpoint.

 

Now, ice melts,

poles move, oceans and lands change,

and two great parts of a buried whole

shrug off the ancient burden.

Ice melts,

hard-pinned rock recoils, and water flows.

From every interior gap, through every pass,

torrents spew outward to the sea,

sanding and battering ice mountains,

punching with bergs and floes, thundering

relentlessly toward the circling ocean.

Hours pass. Days. Weeks. Months.

Still this tremendous hemorrhage,

like water from a sack suddenly slit.

And the land appears. New land,

not buried land uncovered, but

land created in the uncovering.

Terminal moraines — deltas, peninsulas,

whole uncharted featureless countries,

dropped in the thundering, unresting,

violent hurrying. No people, yet.

No animals. No trees, or shrubs,

or even germs. But they will come.

It will be a harsh land, then a wild,

then a pleasant place, another new start.

The ice has gone. The rest will come.

 

— August 26, 1992

 

 

 

Wednesday, September 30, 2020

Okay, guys, up to you. After yesterday’s fiasco, I don’t know where we are or how you want to proceed.

We wouldn’t call it a fiasco. Interesting to watch you redefine things as you go. Your reaction may serve to illustrate, in fact.

We were proceeding smoothly. We hit a speed bump. We had to stop and reconsider our path, you and we, thinking together. But then after the session your life continued, and you drifted from calm interest and quiet anticipation of whatever would come next, to an uneasy sense of failure, and a disturbing wondering if in fact what we were doing couldn’t be done. The lapse of a few hours loosened your grasp of what had been said, and in the absence of a secure ledge to grasp, you felt like you were floating nowhere. All of this might look like thought: It is emotion.

Emotion.

Certainly. Emotions and feelings come with sirens and horns and galloping drama only in a minority of time and events. You couldn’t stand it if that were the norm. Everybody knows at least one relatively hysterical person, probably: Consider if your life were to be lived at that level of ill-controlled intensity, all the time. You’d burn out your fuses.

No, emotions and feelings are more typically your interface with what seem to be “external” events. Nothing more, nothing less. They color your lives, but not arbitrarily and not because they have their own nature or their own necessities. They color your lives in the way that a returning space capsule would be lit up by the friction of re-entry.

You mean, the heat of the friction of reentry at 18,000 mph ionized the atmosphere around it, sort of creating an envelope of fire between the air and the heat shield. You are comparing emotions to the ionization layer, I think.

Not a bad analogy in some ways, you see. That ionization layer was not a thing in itself that interposed itself. It was created, and briefly functioned, and then dissipated as the conditions causing it ceased. That is emotion in your lives.

That is a pretty vivid analogy.

Fire, and things associated with fire, are in many ways analogous to your lives in general and to particular aspects of your lives. Fire requires heat, fuel, and oxygen. The three may exist without manifesting fire, but fire will not exist in the absence of any of the three. In the absence of its actual physical manifestation, fire is only a concept! Or, let’s say, only a potential. It isn’t like fire continues to exist, unmanifested. No, it comes into existence and it goes out of existence in specific instances, therefore at specific times and in specific places. It doesn’t exist on a shelf somewhere, waiting to be activated. Similarly, emotions.

And to continue with the analogy, fire doesn’t have to be a wildfire. It may be a cheering campfire. Drama is not necessarily its accompaniment, you see.

The idea of emotions and feelings as interface between your circumscribed experience of 3D life and the external shared subjectivity it exists in, perhaps makes clearer what we are getting at.

It gives me an image of us always in reentry.

Let’s adjust the analogy, then. Consider emotions and feelings to be like the laminar flow between a moving object and the medium it is moving through. Surfaces may be streamlined or not, slippery or not, aerodynamically efficient or not. In any case, they are the basis for the interface between internal subjectivity and shared subjectivity.

Yes, I see that. Our psychological makeup determines the general pattern of our interactions. It is the hull, or the aircraft’s skin. The interaction between our way of responding to the world and the world itself is the active interface, the ionization layer or the ripples of air or water caused by our passage.

And in the nature of things, you tend to identify with that ionization layer, when you ought to be identifying with the skin composition. They are not your emotions; they are the phenomena that appear in certain situations. They appear personal to you because they reflect your signature, but they are not “yours” any more than the molecules of atmosphere being ionized by a reentering spacecraft are the property of the spacecraft.

Is fire from a campfire objectively different from a fiery reentry from space or from the wildly destructive open fires in forest land? Except for the purpose of analysis, it’s pretty academic. It doesn’t help you live your lives. The analogy of an ionizing layer of air, though, may.

All I can say is that at least at this moment, while I’m actively linked, it seems clear and extremely vivid.

You can see that fire, being considered as an abstract, has so many potential forms of manifestation that the commonality may be all but lost among the variations. Well, that’s emotions in your lives. Emotions may be calm, stormy, destructively rending. They may elate, depress, disorient, fulfill.

Or rather, they may register such states?

No, not exactly. We know it can look like that.

The key thing to take away from this, along with that vivid image, is that the layer is generated by the interaction of two different things. That’s the important thing here.

Taking our 3D lives to be the reentering spacecraft and the shared subjectivity, the “external” world, to be the relatively incompressible atmosphere.

Yes, only don’t confine it to that one dramatic example. Remember, emotion is the interface between your personal subjectivity and the shared subjectivity, so it is the smoothness or roughness of the canoe’s skin as it makes its way in the water. It is the comforting light and warmth of the campfire, interacting with the darkness and coolness it interrupts. It is the holding hands while strolling, or the cuddling one’s baby, or the fist-fight in the schoolyard. It is the inner lightbulb going on when a new concept suddenly gels, and the satisfaction when one gets wording just right, or completes a painting without ruining it.

Hold that concept (only, hold it lightly!) of emotion as the interface between you as you experience yourselves and the “external” world as you experience it. We can build on that.

Perhaps not so much a fiasco?

Touché. Thanks and till next time.

 

I’m up for another bite of the apple, if you are. We were getting somewhere, on emotions.

Perhaps a little more. Emotions are not things, so naming them is misleading if nonetheless necessary for the purpose of discussing them. And anything we say about emotions, we can pretty much say of feelings, too. The reason there is so much confusion about the difference between the two is that the distinctions are largely arbitrary. To name something is to accept that it is in some way a “thing,” a separately existing something. But naming a something doesn’t make it a something. Trying to carve up emotions or feelings as if they could be displayed on a rack is misleading and a waste of time. It is like trying to treat the evanescent colors of a flame as if each color were a separate, distinct, solid something.

In considering emotions and feelings as they manifest in your lives, forget about labeling except as a rough – a very rough – orienting device. Any emotion you will ever feel will be in the context of two forces, one of which will never be the same as in any other instance, and the other of which usually won’t be quite the same.

I hear that. Every time we deal with the shared subjectivity (the “external” world), it is different from what it was before or will be next time. And we ourselves, though we may be the same, usually are different too.

Yes, So jealousy, or anger, or insecurity, or satisfaction or elation – anything, everything –will be experienced as the interface between inner and outer subjectivity, or between you now and you the previous times you experienced them. The air between the returning spacecraft and its descent path is never the same twice. The canoe paddler never dips into the same water twice. You know the analogies, no need to spell them out. At least, we hope not.

As is true for any given feeling or emotion, so is true even more for any combination of them felt in the same circumstances. You know the terms “mixed feelings.” What is that, but an expression of the fact that one’s circumstances may evoke many emotions at the same time – even contradictory ones. But those emotions don’t come off the shelf! You don’t hold them in inventory! They are sparked from the interface. The space program didn’t stockpile ionized atmosphere, it manufactured it anew, each descent. We know this is a different way of thinking about emotions, but doesn’t it bring new clarity?

 

Sunday, December 19, 2021

Life always goes easier in certain directions than in others. But just as in cutting lumber you may need sometimes to rip and other times to cross-cut, so in life you can’t generalize to say, “Only do what comes naturally,” or even, “If you are finding it hard, you’re going the wrong way.”

Same old story, new application: “One size never fits all.”

You will notice that in 20 years we have never told you anything in terms of rules of thumb for conduct in life that you couldn’t have heard in folk wisdom. The things we have offered that are not in common parlance all involve the invisible structure behind what is visible. We are trying to appease the hunger for knowledge and understanding of context that haunts certain natures. But nobody needs us to tell them how to live. At most, we can tell why one should live in a certain way. And you will notice that even there, we are somewhat chary of dictating or seeming to dictate. We started off saying you are here to choose, and we have never deviated from that: How could we?

I’m sure it is a good thing that we all can find the truth in so many places, in so many circumstances. Funny how often people believe just the opposite, though, that truth can be found only in one place.

That’s a matter of them clutching. They have found a truth, and anything that appears to contradict it threatens their certainty. People can lose out even by finding a truth, if they make that truth an idol.

Like the Calvinists Emerson impatiently described as always interposing “their silly book” between themselves and any non-conforming thought, however sincere. Or like Thoreau: “They don’t want any prophets in their family, damn them!”

But, as always, there is something to be said on the other side of the question. Sometimes people clinging to a truth are in the position of a survivor clinging to a piece of driftwood, and that’s the best they can do.

Don’t judge, I know.

There isn’t anything wrong with judging in the sense of discerning, particularly if you remember to keep the judgment tentative. It is condemnation, not discernment, that isolates.

Were you wanting to say more about finding truth in many places? Or about how sometimes we are ripping and sometimes cross-cutting, and neither is per se “right” or “wrong” in life?

The points made should be obvious.

A very short session, then?

Nothing wrong with a short session. Nothing wrong with skipping, from time to time. It’s mostly in your preserving the habit of it, so that habitual usage will keep the path smooth for you. It is like everything else in life: What you practice, improves.

Was it Pablo Casals? Someone, very much up in years, was asked why he still practiced at his age, and replied, in effect, “Because I think I’m starting to get it.”

“Genius is the infinite capacity for taking pains,” they say. Another way to put it might be, “Genius is the willingness to keep showing up.”

In fact, a word or two on the subject. Talent is one thing. Genius is a different thing. Aptitude is a third. We will throw out these distinctions for consideration. We do not mean them as strict definitions, but as sparks.

Understood.

In all three cases, many of the factors involved are invisible in 3D. One’s physical heredity may be somewhat guessed at by looking at the genealogical records, if they exist – but what chart is going to show you someone’s heredity from various threads of other lives? It may be deduced – again, guessed at – but obviously it is going to be mostly a mystery.

They say talent is often based in generations of similar traits, and genius often shows up when two different strands are crossed. Yeats, for instance, or Thoreau.

Yes, but you’d have to explain Emerson, the descendant of generations of ministers, with no exotics to be seen. Not that the generalization is not somewhat valid – Churchill, say – but, like most generalizations, only somewhat.

In any case, our point here is merely that most of the determinants of limits – the extent of the palette, so to speak – are factors not evident to the senses and not necessarily all that evident even to study or to intuition. Your lives are always going to be largely mysteries to you, and there’s nothing wrong with that, it leaves you freer of self-constructed prisons.

Why does that sentence – that final phrase, actually – remind me of the poem I was given in 1995, supposedly from Yeats? *

Beats us.

Very funny.

Well, what’s the use of a “why” question? Won’t the “why” appear in your treatment of whatever event caused the “why”?

Hmm.

In any case, this set of distinctions.

• Talent draws upon life’s inherited reserves. Something comes naturally to you. It may require a lifetime of practice, but still it is an expression of you, that is as naturally fulfilling as breathing.
• Genius is different in a way that isn’t so easy to define. It is as much dependent upon one’s 3D and non-3D heredity as talent, but it is not talent. It may manifest with or without talent, and perhaps that is the best way to glance at the undefinable difference between the two. A Beethoven, a Goethe, a Napoleon, a Lincoln, demonstrate genius allied to talent. Very different fields of endeavor, but that’s part of our point. Genius, like talent, manifests in all walks of life, recognized or not.

For examples of talent without genius, think of any competent practitioner in any field – musicians (including composers), writers, soldiers, statesmen, whatever. They are skilled, but they will never set the Thames on fire. For examples of genius without talent, think of anyone you know who is known primarily for eccentricity and who is not particularly successful in translating his or her native ingenuity into something with practical effect. These are the people who, if they do set the Thames on fire, do so with an air of having done so by accident. History is full of wild mean who clearly are not run of the mill, but equally clearly aren’t quite suited to their genius.

Jones Very? Bucky Fuller, in some respects? Stephen Douglas, maybe? Robespierre?

You will find it hard to find examples of genius truly without talent, for they will not have made their mark. But we give you the clue, anyway.

And aptitude?

• Aptitude is largely a matter of someone being in the right body at the right moment. The times are right, and so the result of genius or talent, or both, finds the way smoothed. Who does what the shared subjectivity is ready for, finds life easy, at least so far as that contribution is concerned.

Shall we call this one “Talent, genius, aptitude”?

It might be more to the point to call it “Ripping and cross-cutting.” But it’s up to you.

Our thanks as always.

* [From Muddy Tracks, how Yeats gave me a poem, if indeed it was Yeats.]

[On Saturday, August 12, I made several trips to 27, the most important of which involved finding Yeats. He talked, and he promised to give me a poem via automatic writing. Sitting in my cabin by a fire, I asked him, this intense middle-aged man of penetrating eyes and prominent cheekbones, if I could succeed in transcribing it. You can get it, he said, but whether you can understand it is another matter.

[I sat down at my journal and was nearly stifled by performance anxiety. I got so far as a title, then a first line—then I was quarreling with the next lines, trying to make something coherent and losing it, then the phone rang. I tried again, and got this:

Sentinel

There are those think the day a long weariness,
Life a long never-releasing swampland clinging.
Can they never in their ceaseless counting and reckoning
Look up to the bird on the wing, or the hour?

Cease telling your beads of worry and amassing.
Your prayers are in every breath you take,
will it or not. The grave’s no prison
to match that spun by blind men building.

We who know pass you this directive;
Live your limitations as a blessing bestowed;
Build your castles but omit the bars;
Pass through the glowing.

[After the poem came to me, I said: “Maybe it’s Yeats, though it certainly doesn’t sound like him. And I can’t make sense of that title and this content. Nor does it sound like great poetry to me—or even competent rhyme. Would Yeats write something unfinished and crude? Ask him, maybe. Can I do that here and in 27? Let’s see. Mr. Yeats—”

[“Different rules apply in new circumstances. What you value may seem child’s play or child’s distraction to us, sense and sound detracting from other attributes. Study the poem and see if it has anything to say to you and you may decide it’s not so bad after all.”]