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While working on getting the Bronson Alcott book ready for publication, I came across this journal entry, which amounts to a message in a bottle.

Wednesday, May 26, 2021

5:20 a.m. The smallest disruption of routine can send you off the rails. I am still waiting for my printer’s cartridge to arrive through the mail, and in the absence of being able to print out work materials, I’m sort of stalled on the task of revising Alcott’s first 50 sayings. Perhaps I’d better keep going on the second 50, since I already have them printed up. Yet – something said don’t do it that way, but pause between the two sections.

You gentlemen have anything you’d care for us to do while  we wait for the ink? Or, should I revise on the machine and treat it as a tentative exercise until I can put it onto paper?

You could do that if you wished. It wouldn’t really waste any time, in the end. Or we could talk here, but of course you are somewhat under the same constraints.

No, not so much. Here I would transcribe and send out, and I could print for my own record later. It isn’t a matter of revising on the machine.

Do you hear the humorous echo of your childhood?

I do, in fact. It’s funny how things sneak in, isn’t it? The nuns used to refer to cars as our “machines.” That’s what they called them, and here am I, going on three–quarters of a century later, and I call a computer “the machine,” in much the same way. I wonder what that is about, if anything. Or do you intend to tell us, using that as an example of something?

We could; we don’t need to, but it’s like that  Hemingway short story title.

“I guess everything reminds you of something.” Are you accusing yourselves of plagiarism?

If we didn’t, no doubt you’d be willing do. We smile.

Me too. Well, what, then?

Not everything needs to be a big deal, you realize. Sometimes things you notice are relatively trivial, but even trivial things can prove to be quite illustrative.

Well, I notice that my friend Louis is finding that nearly every Hemingway story he reads sends him back to a very clear memory of something earlier in his life, often something he hadn’t thought of, literally, in decades.

Receptivity is everything. And perhaps that’s our theme du jour, as you like to say: receptivity. It is proverbial that as you age, short-term memories fade in importance, and longer-term memories resurface, often in great detail. Can something that is so universal as to be proverbial be accident? Can it, for that matter, be unmeaningful?

Rhetorical question, I take it.

It is. Not too hard to figure out, given that nothing in life is accidental. All great art contains everything needed, and no more. You think life isn’t art? So if the latter part of your life reminds you of specific and general incidents and themes from earlier in your life, it is superficial for you (anyone) to shrug off the process as “just getting old.” It is far more meaningful to say, “It is part of getting old: What purpose does it serve?”

The second half of life isn’t just a long coasting downhill, putting in time waiting for the curtain. Yes, it often feels that way, we realize.

It’s a long downhill coast if you don’t know how to take it, maybe.

Even there, your non-3D component hasn’t lost the script. Or do you think that this part of you is bored, too? Your life has purpose, from the first minute to the last. It is  increasingly a matter of choice, though it may appear to be the other way around.

Let me clarify that, because you didn’t actually say what I feel you mean. I think you mean, we tend to think our life is one of first greater choices, as life opens up, then of fewer choices, as life closes in. And I know you are talking about our internal life rather than our external life.

That isn’t quite right, but close enough. Your internal and external life, we remind you. are two ways of experiencing the same thing. So in reality they do not diverge. However, in appearance they may, and in function they definitely do, and for good reason.

• Your physical life (barring “accident” or termination prior to the normal lifespan) is a process of expansion, maturity, contraction.
• Your mental life is usually experienced as absorption, homeostasis, and either stagnation or generalizing.
• Your – we’ll call it “spiritual” – life is one of certainty followed by confusion, then proceeding either to new confidence or the assumption that no certainty is available.

These three processes may seem to diverge. They may seem to proceed independently. But, as we say, how could they? Only, each manifests according to its nature, and the manifestations may seem to have nothing to do with one another.

If you will look at your lives as meaningful, undefeated, always in process, and never completed by the completion of a given physical life – we know that may seem paradoxical – you will see your lives in better perspective.

Unlike Yeats, who thought of life as a long preparation for something that never happens.

He wouldn’t have been wrong to say that, provided that he added, “so far as external observers can see, and so far as one expects 3D death to be the end.” And the difficulty here is that it is the end, and isn’t.

Yes. I have the sense of that.

But not everybody does. It is a matter of faith, more than anything, and faith cannot be purchased or stolen or even earned; it is a gift, given or withheld.

By whom, and according to what criteria?

Some other time, perhaps. For the moment, let’s stick to the point.

Life as a given individual does end with 3D death, in that that particular mixture of elements will not return to another 3D life. If it returns, it is as a strand, not as the entire bundle. But it does not end in 3D dearth, in that living is forever, as your old friend [Ed Carter] wrote. The “you” you forge in life is a real achievement; it does not go away. It functions as it always has functioned.

Do you have any reason to feel that your being as it exists at this moment is perfect and needs no further work? To put it another way, do you think there is nothing more you could do, could become, “if only”? Well, it is always that way, up to your last 3D moment, and beyond. But there is a difference between what may be doable in 3D and what may be doable in a larger sphere of action.

This will strike some people as merely words. I have heard someone say you engage in double-talk – which I take to mean, some of your words went dead on her – but still there is the possibility to be guarded against.

The reason your old memories return in or out of context is so you may return to other points in your life. Your added days provide you with added perspective, with added wisdom. If hindsight is 20-20, why not use it?

Use it – I take it – as part of our continuing process of self-refinement, self-creation.

That’s all there is, of course. You will find your “declining years” to be far more satisfying, far more interesting, if you keep in mind that retrospection and rumination is a valid and therefore appropriate activity for this part of your life. The frantic striving to keep your head above water is past; the tangible 3D goals and aspirations are mostly or entirely past. What is now appropriate is the summing-up and the further preparation – for life doesn’t end with 3D death, any more than the 3D world ends with evening.

 

Yesterday may turn out to have been a big day. I’m thinking that my session with psychic / healer Jane Mullen is continuing to show results. That was October 30, and it seems to me it was a turning point. Certainly, a lot has happened, mostly but not entirely internal, in the two weeks since then. And, as we know, “internal” is probably a meaningless distinction from “external.”

And you, my friends, seem to have been an integral part of the process of change, or development, and I am grateful.

The theme at the moment is the practical application of so much investigation. Naturally, practice is going to result in change, or did you do so much work over so much time with the idea of manifesting no more than you already were?

We both know better than that. John Nelson pointed out in one of his novels that so many people want to “change without changing.” I know better than that. I feel better than that, let’s say. But of course change always involves moving into the unknown.

It does and it doesn’t. Let’s talk for a moment about the “doesn’t,” for in a time when sweeping comprehensive change is all about you (“you” plural, you understand), it is well that people be reassured that they are not being swept away by a tornado of unbound and unbounded forces. To change metaphor, they are not wandering, lost in the desert, or adrift on the sea. They are, and they aren’t, depending entirely upon their connection to their larger self which they experience.

It strikes me, that is what this whole long story is about, in a way. Muddy Tracks, first draft written in 1997-98, had as its theme my own stumbling efforts to conceptualize life as connection to what I was calling the larger being. Everything in the time since is variations on a theme. Connection, expansion, reorientation, exploration, consolidation – it has been going on a good long time now.

And finally you are at another culmination point. You as an individual, Frank, and you as a part of a small open-but-closed society, and you as a part of a civilization spanning the globe. These are times of gathering and manifestation. They aren’t the end; there is never a “the end,” but they are a pause for

I can’t find the right word. Not “consolidation,” not “reorientation.”

Call it rolling readjustment, maybe. Not the end of the line, not the end of movement. Not a pause, even. More a moment of recognition, a reorienting.

And, I know, not just me. I do know that.

So. for those who are ready to make such preoccupation practical, we have been providing the specific tools. For those who are not yet ready (including those who will never be ready in this lifetime), nothing wasted; no one can know what seed will germinate at what time, in what circumstance. And it takes many iterations, sometimes, for a given statement to suddenly (or gradually) penetrate layers of dullness or misinterpretation or resistance. But for those who are ready when they read this, or re-read it, or think about it later, our theme-song has been, “You are not alone, you are not lost, you are not damned, or forsaken, or stymied.” You have not foreclosed your future by your past action or inaction.

Some scripture says “though your sins be as scarlet,” you can be lifted above them not so much by divine grace (in the sense of an external agency that offers you a lift) as by your divine nature (in the sense of an innate part of yourself that you can at any time choose to identify with).

[To my surprise I find, it is from Isaiah 1:18: “Though your sins be like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red as crimson, they shall be like wool.” I would have bet it was from the Upanishads. If I properly understand the sense of the chapter, Isaiah, who was a prophet, not a lawgiver, was saying, in effect, that God told him that God wasn’t interested in sacrifices or externals, but in repentance – that is, in voluntary individual reform.]

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This is an edited excerpt from “Only Somewhat Real,” not yet published.

 

Louisa Calio posts a query on my blog that amounts to, Can you give us an interpretation of 3D events that will make sense of the stupidity we live among, or, really, some way of seeing it that will make us feel better about it.

Answering your rough paraphrase rather than her original, we probably should say, “No, we can’t.” But we can give you a few clues, to help you arrive there yourselves. We can suggest interpretations; how you react is always an individual reaction, a merging of new data with old patterns and assumed relationships.

Sure, we can see that. But, subject to that proviso—

Your ways of making sense of things often put the cart before the horse. But explaining how you are doing that isn’t always so easy, given that it involves looking at the same thing from a different point of view, rather than altering or adding to the thing being observed. So you will perhaps be tempted to say, “That’s just talking around it” when we show you how it looks from another perspective.

We’ll try not to do that.

Louisa says – quote it –

“…the nature and purpose of some of these extreme conflicts within the individual…”

It isn’t so much that the conflicts have a purpose as that they express a result.

I know that seems helpful to you, but to us, not so much. A little more explaining?

You come into 3D embodying conflicts, precipitating conflicts around you by what you have within you. That’s one thing that 3D is, an arena, a place and time in which conflicts – and harmony, but we’re talking about conflicts at the moment – come front and center to be transformed. You wouldn’t expect a football game to be tranquil and harmonious; you wouldn’t expect a piano concert to be cacophonous. You expect each event to express in its own way. The thing that makes it hard for you to see, sometimes, is that your football game and piano concert are taking place at the same time, along with drag racing, aerial acrobatic exhibitions, family feuds, three different melodramas being filmed, prolonged mattress testing, and half a million other events including the depths of non-social interactions with yourselves such as monasticism, intense study, illnesses, and other preoccupations. It can get a bit crowded.

Makes me tired just thinking about it.

Yes, but it’s intriguing. Remember how Bob Monroe said AA dived in, because he was fascinated by the raw energy of it all?

I do now that you remind me. Far Journeys, the best of his books.

Well, with all that going on, what could you say is “the point” of it?

Meaning, it won’t have just one point?

Meaning, too, that the purpose of a football game or a concert isn’t just for producing the cheers of the fans or the ovations of the audience.

Aha. Meaning, Loosh may be produced but that doesn’t mean it is more than a by-product.

At this point we advise people to re-read Far Journeys to refresh their memory of what Bob actually said. The Loosh analogy was not, by far, the end of the story, but the beginning of Bob’s deeper exploration.

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This is an edited excerpt from “Only Somewhat Real,” not yet published.