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Friday June 19, 2015

For months I have been silently concentrating on getting my weight below 200. Although I have brought my average weight down by several pounds, I have broken the 200-pound barrier only once, and then shot right up again. Today I thought to ask what’s going on.

205.5 at six a.m., and for the first time it occurs to me to ask, is there a reason I can’t get to the weight I want to be? Is there some reason I need to be at a different weight?

I don’t know who[m] to ask, so I’ll throw it out for anyone who can help. Is there a reason why I am held to a weight above 200 pounds? Or, if that’s too big a question, what are the factors in play?

Weight is not the issue; a percentage of body fat is. Just because you don’t want the necessary factors doesn’t mean you can perform your functions without them.

I get from that that a certain percentage of body fat is needed almost as a battery, to deal with the energies I deal with. I that what you mean to say?

It is what we just did say. Your body operates as a shock absorber, to some extent. A thinner body has less – well, let’s begin again.

Obviously it isn’t as simple as “a certain body type or shape, or a certain percentage of body fat is needed in order to be a medium, say.” If it were that simple, wouldn’t everybody know it? It would be in the folklore.

Bob Friedman pointed out years ago how many women were hefty who did this work.

But then there is slight Jane Roberts. And it isn’t even proverbially true among men. Edgar Cayce, for instance. So as I say, it can’t be that simple, even if you were to regard these as exceptions.

All right. So?

So think of the variables involved. Different body types, different mental types (some sluggish, some hyperactive, and anything between). It isn’t only your health that is a ratio between mind and body, it is everything. In fact, that is the same thing. Looked at one way, you are describing health of lack of it, because that is what you are concentrating on. Looked at another way, the same data can tell you things about proclivities, aptitudes, dis-abilities (not meaning handicaps, here, so much as anti-abilities, areas of least aptitude and skill potential).

So if you are looking to find aptitude for mental communication with other beings, or shapeshifting, or sorcery, or ultra-rationality, you could find it if you knew how to  read what you received.

I’m hearing that someone with one type of mind and body – no, clarify, please?

You know the conventional wisdom of the four body types and the diet best suited for each. Well, you could know it. You know of it.

Yes.

It isn’t understood very well yet, but the gist of it is that different blood types require a different mixture of nutrients to function at optimal capacity. Is isn’t quite thought of that way, but that is about what it amounts to. This may be regarded as fine-tuning an engine. No, that’s too crude an analogy. Think perhaps of the training table in a sports establishment, where the gladiators are fed steaks rather than, say, a vegetarian diet. A certain diet for a given body type maximizes effect and minimizes internal friction and unnoticed continual adjustment.

Rather than use the actual blood types, let’s use the non-existent types E, F, G, and H. Otherwise there will be a theoretical danger of someone applying an example as if it were a prescription.

Suppose blood type E. it has its specific requirements for optimal functioning. But it is not the only variable involved, or there would be only four types of people in the world instead of the multitude actually in existence.

And those other variables are?

Nationality, for one, or rather ethnicity. Blood type E in a Chinese lineage will not be the same – that is, will express differently – than E in a lineage from an Incan, say, or an Italian.

Again, if things were that simple, different ethnicities would have different blood types and they would be incompatible. That just is not so. But it does not mean that the ethnic heritage of a given body is a matter of indifference in considering the expression of the blood type. Again, type E will be different depending on which genetic markers it interacts with.

Similarly, mental acuity, or perhaps we should say intensity of natural focus. By this we don’t mean the ability to focus on any given thing, nor, quite, the intensity one can bring to a subject. Rather, it is the natural, resting-state, degree of intensity in the mind under consideration.

Somebody probably has made a study of typing of mind, but I don’t know what it would be.

Of course you do. Astrology, for one. Any system that attempts a comprehensive description of humanity is going to have described different kinds of minds. However, it may not be described or thought of as such.

Astrology would look at Mercury in Leo, say, and say the mental characteristics will be thus and so.

Exactly. Regardless of attribution of cause, description of result. Well, Mercury in Leo will express differently in an Irish type E than any other combination of the three variables.

But – is there any such thing as an unmixed ethnicity? I’m 100% Italian, ethnically, but what does that mean really? If you go back far enough, surely every possible ethnic strand is intermixed, despite dreams of “racial purity” or “pure whatever-ness.”

Of course, but note:

• Any given person’s ethnic mix will have a different composition, but most will have a dominant strain.
• It is the very richness of ethnic heritage to choose from that allows individuals to take what they need. This is the converse of an individual taking on a hereditary disease.

So, as opening gambit, consider the mixture of blood type, ethnic derivation, and what we might call environmentally-allowed factors – that is, the range of possibilities allowed by the moment of one’s birth. We have not yet begun to explore the effects of choice and lifestyle and diet and other more behavioral factors, and already perhaps you can see that the situation is a little more complex than it might as first seem.

I thought I was asking a simple question. I gather that I have opened a larger discussion.

Notice how tentative you are, vis a vis the material, how much less sure-footed than when dealing with matters outside 3D, or matters involving 3D as a sort of interface with non-3D. But what do you think health is, but one specific example of such an interface? And what is nutrition but one specific example of the subject of health? It is time for your understanding to broaden in a different direction. You are not disembodied minds. (Not yet!) Neither is your body merely a carrier of mind [in order] to give it the 3D experience. It is that, but it is not only that. In fact, you might think of it as the densest part of the densification that is life in 3D. Your mind operates within that density to the extent that your awareness centers there. But your brain operates within physical rules, which is denser yet, and brain tissue, like bone tissue, is about as solid, about as dense, as you are going to experience in 3D. Depleted uranium is heavier than brain cells, but it is not denser in the sense we mean, that is, participating in the densification that is the 3D part of the world.

Well, this is all a surprise. I thought I was asking a simple question that would get an answer describing unsuspected emotional problems, or telling me to get more exercise, or something. But I think you are leading us into deeper waters.

Diet, exercise, and all that can’t be deemed irrelevant. But what we are trying to do – to answer your question and lead it in a direction you will find more interesting than calorie-counting – is put the known variables in the context of some unconsidered variables.

Well, I’ll be interested to see where it leads. I’ll post and we’ll see if we get response. Are we already working on a sequel to Rita’s World? This doesn’t seem like Rita; you don’t have that feel, but I didn’t want to interrupt anything by asking.

Nor is it necessary. Continuing weighing the material for resonance and you will get there.

All right, I’m game. Till next time, then.

 

 

[Hemingway talked of achieving the fourth and fifth dimension in his writing. I asked if those dimensions were Time and Beyond Time.]

Close enough. Or you might say viewpoint over time, viewpoint beyond viewpoint, or overall viewpoint, or, really, view without the distortion of viewpoint. To hint at going beyond viewpoint (you cannot actually do it) is very difficult, and requires not only skill and luck in the writer but, let’s say, skill and attention in the reader. Luck, too, perhaps, for the reader has to be in the right mental space to be able to comprehend it.

That’s what I was trying for in Across The River. I told the story seemingly from inside Colonel Cantwell’s head, but not precisely. Within his mind — the nonphysical mechanism we all live in, as you recognize — he moves across elements of his past, both what he has experienced and what he has experienced second-hand through reading or other instruction or from appreciating, as in a picture. I believe I achieved that fourth dimension, and it was disappointing to have it not recognized — because of Renata, of course.

Now here is something nobody sees. I achieved the fifth dimension with Santiago, who lay dreaming of the lions at the end. My achieving it was not at the end, though, but throughout, because in careful recounting of his moment by moment actions, and his moment by moment thought or memory, and his moment by moment emotion, I was so close to the moving present that we get beyond time to the timeless. Where else do you think that strange aura around the story comes from? It is not told from Santiago’s viewpoint, or from Manolin’s. It may be said to be narrated by God, or the guys upstairs, or the part of Santiago that lives outside time and space. It is our life described neither from within it nor from without it.

Yes, there is the story itself — the old man striving, and winning, and losing, and remaining himself. There is the effect on the boy. But beyond all that is the strange penumbra that people feel but don’t quite understand, and this is because the story’s atmosphere talks to us of things beyond the story.

I could not have produced the story to order. And it came as a gift, and I passed on the gift. Those who think it’s simple or simpleminded are only one eyed; they cannot sense the presence of that extra dimension.

It is a curious paradox, isn’t it? To get beyond time, one way is to sit on the very edge of the moving line. There are other ways — Tolstoy did it on a mammoth scale — but this was mine.

 

 

[Slightly edited from a conversation held July 10, 2011]

A little bit discouraged, Papa. What I’m putting out isn’t all that new, most of it. Remind me, what’s in it for the reader.

Just because everything you’re saying could be found here or there, or could be inferred by reading between the lines of enough books, doesn’t mean it’s going to be available to anybody else. Not, necessarily, to scholars, even. You have the irreplaceable thing you were told about when you were very young — a viewpoint. That viewpoint can’t be duplicated anywhere, by any means. It is the same as your description of minds in The Cosmic Internet — any mind is irreplaceable and can’t be duplicated exactly. The thing is, is that mind different enough, is what it knows special enough? Yours is. You know me from the inside, you’ve had quite a bit of experience from the outside — reading books about me, I mean — and your other experiences give you a unique view of what is going on. Plus — who else could bring Carl to the subject?

You’re going to have to let go of the idea about something the scholars take seriously. That’s the wrong set of scholars! Not Hemingway scholars, but scholars investigating trans-personal communication. There’s your audience. You aren’t going to convince the Hemingway scholars because you and they will talk right past each other. Your evidence — my point of view, our conversations — is just no evidence at all to them. They could agree with everything; it would still not be evidence, just opinion.

But your conversations are evidence of something else. They show how conversations may occur and become habitual and provide increased access to knowledge and to understanding. They ground a subject that too often flies off into the air. And the point of view you begin from is in itself a reorientation. Historians and amateur students of history do not tend to be the same people who explore nonphysical realities, as you well know. So, exploring from that viewpoint in itself is it a departure; in itself. Can you see that this in itself would prevent Hemingway scholars from taking this book seriously in their own terms? And Jung scholars, too, of course.

I can now that you mention it, yes.

Well? That being so, doesn’t that refocus your intent on showing what is or isn’t possible?

What isn’t possible is a little clearer to me than what is possible.

Settle in. Think in images. What image arises when you think of this project?

Me sitting here writing, early in the morning, day after day, and quite happily.

Convey that.

And yet, a straight transcript of our conversations wouldn’t work.

Too much life in between; too much explanation needed of what you’d been reading, how it had affected you, what other conversations you’ve been having. So what can you do about it? Go back to images.

The image that is right in front of me is all my loose-leaf binders and all my journals.

Why do you suppose you chose that image?

There’s a sort of continuity there — a lot of years of work.

Could you publish them as they are? Of course not, nor would you want to. They are your source-material, not your finished product. So are our conversations — yours, mine, Carl’s, Abraham Lincoln’s.

The various famous men — mostly men — are all queued up for a different book on society, I have assumed.

They could be. But first the fact and the value of the communication has to be established, and that is the purpose of this book.

It is?

It is. Look at it. Your career has its own logic, although it hasn’t been obvious to you. Muddy Tracks is your initial exploration. It’s the one that gives newcomers entrée. Sphere And Hologram carries it forward — here’s what you can get moving forward. Chasing Smallwood starts the next phase, that of direct communication about life as it is lived. Cosmic Internet sets out a theoretical structure for it, using it. And [Afterlife Conversations with] Hemingway shows you moving out a little farther, addressing a subject well enough known to draw attention and to serve as a check on your statements. After all, if you produced a book like that channeled biography of George Washington that had all its “facts” wrong, it would be ridiculous and would be seen as ridiculous. When you come up with something that holds water and occasionally startles by bringing new clarity to a subject that seemed well understood, you help bring the two sides of the veil slightly closer. And that is the primary purpose, remember, not any correction of the Hemingway Myth, however desirable that would be.

 

[Edited from a conversation held in August, 2010, first with Carl Jung, then also with Ernest Hemingway.]

It was interesting to read the pieces from May 24 and 25. I had forgotten that it was from Carl Jung that I first got the concept that Hemingway represented a complete man, that his great attractiveness to people stemmed from his wholeness. Obviously that didn’t prevent him from experiencing and ultimately succumbing to serious personality problems, but it does change the picture.

All right, so here we go. Dr. Jung, I have been using a quotation of yours as a part of my signature in e-mails for some time, but only yesterday — at your prompting? — did it occur to me that I didn’t quite understand it. It rings true intuitively but it could do with some explanation. “The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering.” What is “legitimate suffering,” and for that matter what is mental illness, and how are they thus so intimately connected?

You have asked the question even though you are anxious. This is good. Always, when you meet an obstacle, push through it, beyond it, or it will surface again in a more difficult form. Challenges never get easier except sometimes as a result of prior failure leading to reduction of capacity — in which case they still are harder relative to the capacity one brings to them.

To understand the sentence, one needs to understand the definitions. Mental illness. Legitimate suffering. For that matter, unwillingness.

You have been told that there is no such thing, as such, as mental illness, but we will stick to common parlance. For our purposes, we may define it as the inability to

Wow! I see it, all at once! In connection to Hemingway! Sorry to interrupt, but it was so striking, to go from not understanding to understanding. Please, proceed.

Define mental illness as the inability to experience reality in an undistorted form. Define legitimate suffering as — for instance — bearing the knowledge of what one is, or what one has done. And define unwillingness as a conscious choice (become unconscious because repressed) to see in distorted fashion.

That is so simple, so obvious once said.

You will find that our readers find it less obvious, until we put into words the understanding that leapt mind to mind between us. However, it is true that some will be able to join in that intuitive communication, and thus will get it as you got it.

So, to plod. (I was Swiss, you know. We Swiss are great plodders.)

Ideally a mind experiencing a life does so with inputs open and understanding functioning without distortion, and in this way smoothly assimilates what occurs externally so as to experience it internally and thus come to greater consciousness of its own nature and limitations and possibilities. (By the way, those three words are restatements, one of the other. To know one’s nature is to know the others, and to know them is to know what one is fundamentally.)

This is the ideal. Of course it is rarely if ever approximated.

To the degree that one refuses to see one’s shadow side, one distorts one’s experience of reality. “It wasn’t me. It was circumstance. I was an innocent victim. He provoked me. Anyone would have reacted in the same way.”

Such distortion, if continued long enough and consistently enough, obviously results in the person becoming ever less able to respond appropriately to circumstances, because circumstances as reported to the conscious mind are reported in the distorted form required by the refusal to acknowledge and accept one’s own actions, motivations — ultimately, a part of one’s own character.

Yes, it jumped out at me when you began — Ernest Hemingway was not sufficiently aware of his shadow side, and therefore couldn’t acknowledge or often remember certain types of actions, and such actions — those that led him to break with friends, for example, or that led him to be unable to restrain his competitiveness — repeatedly had ill effects on his life. Yes, Ernest?

I don’t think Carl was quite finished.

No. Our friend is particularly enthusiastic today.

Let’s blame it on the coffee. I would never do something like interrupt. It wasn’t my fault! They made me do it! Anybody would have!

All right, we are smiling, but a little bit goes a long way. If you meant it, that would be a good example of the mechanism.

To continue the thread I was following, though it may be obvious, one can reach a point from which there can be no return, because incoming reality as perceived bears so little resemblance to incoming reality in and of its own nature.

Thus, Ernest had to blame certain situations on others because it would have become unbearably painful to admit to himself his own responsibility. That is the common way to understand the situation. However, in the way we are sketching out, we would rephrase it this way. Ernest’s person-group comprised such extremely disparate elements as to be held together largely by the fictions he told himself about who he was and what he was. He shaped himself to an ideal, and the price of that was disenfranchising parts of himself that didn’t measure up to the ideal.

He could not acknowledge them, and therefore he lost the ability to integrate them, and therefore they functioned suppressed until they exploded, then were suppressed again. A part of his conscious personality knew that the explosions occurred, but experienced them as autonomous — a primitive would have described them as evil spirits that had entered and taken him over — and therefore had extreme difficulty taking responsibility for what seemed to him not really his own doing.

Another part of his conscious personality remained unaware — as best it could! — that the explosion had taken place at all.

But this in turn caused further problems, for in the aftermath of an explosion one sees an altered situation, that has to be accounted for somehow. If ex-hypothesis one denies that an explosion took place at all, or denies at least that the explosion had anything to do with one’s own action or being — well, somebody has to be at fault! Find them!

Oh, I see the mechanisms, all right. And I suppose that few people who read this will fail to see it from personal experience.

You can see, then, that if this process is allowed to get too advanced, a person may wind up inside so elaborate a labyrinth as to be unable to return to clarity without trusted outside help. And the farther one has proceeded inside the labyrinth, the less able one will be to trust outside help of any kind. Carried sufficiently far, the only way out is via death and release, which thankfully is available to all.

But. If a person is willing to see the person-group as it exists — the disreputable characters as well as the saints; the bums as well as the hard workers; the drones and the dullards as well as the inspired creators — then there is hope, and health. For if one can hold an ideal while remembering that while in human form with human limitations we cannot attain (but can only approximate, or tend toward) ideals, then one still has a touchstone for conduct and aspiration, but one need not deliberately ignore the unavoidable shortcomings, nor be crushed by guilt nor overcome by hopelessness.

And it hurts to see what we really are rather than what we would rather be. Is that it?

Not everyone is mentally ill. Not everyone holds an ideal unattainably high, and suffers from the failure to attain the unattainable.

Ernest?

This should render my life more comprehensible. On the one hand you’re being told that I was an example of wholeness. On the other hand you’re seeing how unable I was to deal with certain themes that ran through my life, and you see how my life spun out of control. You tend to put too much blame on the alcohol. The cause is as Carl said — I couldn’t see myself or my life straight, and so I got farther and farther off course.

[CGJ] That isn’t quite right. You found it too painful to see the past as it had been, so you shrank from it and walled yourself off from incidental reminders as best you could. But your life — look at it now! — was not, objectively, something to shrink from realizing. And if you had seen yourself more accurately you would have seen those around you more accurately. It would have relieved the anxiety, the paranoia, the depression, it would have turned down the valve on the rage and the manic highs.

But it was all tied in with your idealization of yourself that was the means of creating yourself and holding yourself to your impossibly high standards of craftsmanship that you did largely achieve.

I can certainly see it. By holding yourself to a high enough standard, you can make it guaranteed that you are never going to do good enough or be good enough to satisfy yourself. Hence the bragging, hence the anxious competitiveness.

[CGJ:] And hence the need and the use to you of the Catholic Church, Ernest. Your critics don’t seem to understand the psychological importance to you of confession as a way of shedding guilt. But the structure of the Church “in our time” didn’t match with the rest of our world, so it wasn’t enough, and this without entering in to the question of the Church’s politics in Spain and elsewhere.

So, to wrap this up? For we have been going more than an hour.

I sum it up as I continually summed up situations. Do not judge another’s life. Judgment — condemnation — never liberates, it only oppresses, isolates, and condemns judge and judged alike. You never have the data. Ernest’s life cannot be understood as if it were a simple man’s, nor a man comprising a harmonious low-pressure collection of threads.

[EH] Yet my life must not be seen as a series of bad decisions or of unfortunate external circumstances, either. It was as I was, and if I had realized that consciously as I realized it unconsciously, I’d have had an easier time of it.

I thank you both. I think many people besides myself will find this helpful. But don’t think I don’t see manipulation when I experience it — at least once in a while!

We smile as well.

 

Monday, July 5, 2010. Yesterday I re-read Adios Hemingway, a novel by Leonardo Padura Fuentes, a Cuban writer. Just a detective novel, but by a Hemingway aficionado, but one who, reading about the life that you lived, has serious reservations. In fact, he is repelled by The Hemingway Myth, the pointless killing of animals, the meannesses, the out-of-control behavior, even while he recognizes the generosity, the warm-heartedness, the serious craftsman.

You would find it a sobering thing, to see the opinions others hold of you. Even the exaggerated good would be a reproach; the bad opinions would sting as much because they were out of true proportion as because they were true.

You say “the exaggerated good.”

Well, if people see only the good sides of you, isn’t that a reproach, showing you what you might have been, if you’d had a better handle on your other selves? And if they see only the bad sides – or let’s say the unpleasant sides, put it that way – it is still a reproach, showing you how often you fell down, how many things you did that you wish you hadn’t. And if they had a truly balanced view of you, do you suppose you’d agree with the balance?

I’ve always known you were a highly moral man.

I was a perfectionist man. Like Jake [Barnes, in The Sun Also Rises], I wished I was a better Catholic. But, remember, we’ve been trying to get you into the habit of seeing yourselves and each other as the communities you are rather than the units you think you are. So if you look at my life you might profitably look at it again as an example of seeing from this new point of view. That is the point of your extensive reading of and now about Hemingway, remember — a public life that can be re-examined with insight gleaned from the inside. So think of “me” — the essence of the person — as the ringleader of so many individual elements. Think of “me” as the guy who got stuck paying the bill for whatever the guys inside broke. Of course, I also got the credit for what they accomplished.

I feel where you’re going, but let’s spell out some what and why.

Hemingway the borracho, for instance. Do you know — can you imagine — the trouble that brooding drunk cost the rest of me? Even the happy drinker brought problems as well as relaxation and exaltation. And what about the ones who married women, seeking something that others didn’t want and couldn’t stand? How about the violent clashes within me of so many elements that sometimes couldn’t stand one another? And above all, what of the resulting fly-off-the-handle temper, and worse the mean pursuit and getting-even and the right-at-any-cost element? I ask you, imagine yourself as ringmaster of so many strong contending elements — and the nervous strain that holding them altogether took, and produced. If you can see me as holding together what our mutual friends TGU are calling a person-group, a lot of complexities and perplexities in my life and in your lives will be cleared up for you.

I’ve said it before, but once again, you can’t really say this in life and be heard; It sounds like special pleading, asking for mercy, or even for what people call “understanding” which often amounts to forgiveness without repentance. Nevertheless even if it can’t be easily said, it remains true: I, you, we, everyone — we are not individuals in the way your society assumes that we are, and therefore we don’t function in the way we are assumed to function, and therefore most of our lives go unexplained and, as Thoreau said, they have to go unexplained, because even the explanations would have to be explained.

Theft again.

Can I help it if you leave stuff around to be stolen?

Smiles on both sides. Okay, and so –?

Well, if you look at my life and you try to see it as reasonably consistent, you get these puzzling anomalies, don’t you? How can one person be so controlled and so uncontrolled? So generous and so suspicious and even grasping, so great a friend and so treacherous a friend, so gracious and so snarlingly offensive, so this and so that endlessly? And you say he has “moods” or “streaks” or sides to him that this or that brings out. But these explanations don’t explain! They sort of explain away. Think of yourself. Who — trying to see you from outside and having a pretty good experience of you — could do more to understand you than to construct a more or less fictional individual who could have done and said what you have done and said, more or less consistently, more or less staying in character? And even that construction is going to show puzzling sides to it. The reason why isn’t far to seek. It’s because such a construction is a cover story, a papering-over of reality with an image that looks like what could be expected — at the price of not resembling what it really is!

Yes. This is ground we’ve covered before.

I think you’ll find that it isn’t enough to say a thing once. You repeat it, and the person hearing it is in “a different space” as you say; in actuality a somewhat different group of themselves is reading it than read it previously. You may have to say it ten times before enough of the person-self’s constituent parts have heard the message.

That’s an interesting concept.

Just consult your own experience. You read something, it makes an impact. You read it again and it makes a different impact, as if the words were different. It isn’t the words, it’s the “you” that’s different! And if it’s a different enough mixture, the words may seem almost brand-new, and you’re thunderstruck that you never thought to understand them that way when you read them before. Well, you, in that sense, didn’t read them before. Other parts of you did.

Yes. And what’s the specific practical application you’re putting this to? For I can feel there is something.

To transform your lives, it is necessary for certain new ways of seeing (hence, of being) to percolate all the way down. They don’t do this right off, it takes repetition in different contexts. So when, a while ago, we spelled out the way of seeing yourselves as a person-groups functioning within social-groups, we were loosening the hold on you that the socially accepted — assumed — fiction of the individual has on you. Once see yourself differently, and everything can change. But to see yourself differently is not usually the work of one flash of insight, but of the slow working of that insight into this and that corner of your existence.