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Turns out, it’s a good thing, maybe

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

My old friend Louis and I were comparing notes, trying to figure out how we could have been such unaware idiots when we were young. (I realize, confining this to “when we were young” may be giving ourselves a free pass on our state today, but let’s be charitable.)

Specifically, we were realizing how little we usually knew about what was going on around us. Louis said something – can’t remember what – that suddenly lit the light bulb. I thought, “Of course we don’t usually realize what’s going on around us. It isn’t merely lack of self-reflection, it’s deeper than that.”

Looked at from a systems approach, you could say that living mostly unaware of what’s going on keeps us out of ruts. If we knew what we were doing, wouldn’t we usually (maybe almost always) tend to do what we were accustomed to do? If we knew what was going on, would we ever step outside our comfort zones?

The guys have defined emotions as the layer between the parts of ourselves that are known and unknown to ourselves. If we were always functioning from within the known boundaries, would we even have emotions? Would we ever grow?

Wouldn’t it be funny if all our stumbling around like blind kittens was in fact all for the best?

Not saying that’s the way it is, but it’s an interesting speculation.

 

Stray thoughts about the future

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Saturday, June 22, 2024

9:05 a.m. This is the day Hitler invaded Russia in 1941, a fatal mistake. I was thinking, a while ago, someone could look back at our history since at least 1914 and reinterpret everything as the gradual reemergence of the non-western world, partly through the west’s civil wars and partly through the natural effects of western ideas and technology on the other old civilizations. It would give people a different way to look at things.

So many contenders:

  • The Latin Americans, closest to western culture, and their attraction to and resistance to the Colossus of the North.
  • The Chinese, recovering from 300 years of decay and stagnation, first reawakened by Japan in the 1930s and then finding their way once they rid themselves of their fleeting dependence upon Moscow.
  • The Japanese, first imitating, then defying, then conquering, then being conquered, then beginning again.
  • South Asia, profiting from European institutions and then rejecting Europe’s role. India, Indonesia, Indochina, Thailand, etc.
  • The Muslim world, taking advantage of the war against the Turks, then Hitler v. the West, then the U.S. v. Britain, then Russia v. the West. Oil its greatest asset and greatest problem. Its greatest internal problem, secular v. extreme religious beliefs.
  • Russia and the other borderlands, half western, half anti-western, continually vacillating but always seeking a valid path into the future.
  • Finally, Africa, the land of the future in the way people used to call Brazil the country of the future. Sub-Saharan Africa looks like its going to take a long, long time to emerge, but you never know.

And there is the West itself, in all its contradictions. It is no longer Christendom. At the moment it appears to be secular materialism, but there is a remorseless quiet backlash growing, from several directions. It will take an external defeat, perhaps many of them, before the ruling paradigm is overthrown, but it must come.

And from all these competing fragments, each previously sovereign in its own area, each driven to distraction by the newly intrusive presence of the others, something new will arise, a world civilization infinitely complex and both familiar and alien. We who are alive today will not live long enough to see it, though the youngest among us may see the beginnings.

 

Drama and life

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Friday, June 21, 2024

7 a.m. What is it that makes us respond emotionally to emotional stories? All of fiction, written, oral, visual, depends upon creating that response. How does it work? Why does it work?

Isn’t it obvious?

I can feel it beginning to be. Something about stories being closer than life.

Not quite, but that’s in the general direction. What happens to you, in 3D, affects you at second-hand, in a way. That is, you seem to interact with an external world, and the interaction has its effect on your mental and emotional life. So, the event happens, and it causes an effect.

You fall in love for the first time – or for the tenth. Your emotional world is transformed. The change is only indirectly affected by what happens next, except if it is punctuated or is truncated or is even reversed, and in any of these cases, a new emotional composition results. Maybe the results are permanent, but usually they are only temporarily permanent – that is, they are final in regard to the starting place, but they are only the initial stage of whatever follows.

I can’t tell if this is making sense of not. I have the feeling that what is clear as a feeling is not getting expressed coherently.

As usual, just persevere and it will come clear. Try restating, not worrying about accuracy in every point, but just getting the general drift.

Well, I think you were saying, our emotions are evoked by a situation, and a particularly charged situation can drastically affect our emotional default position, so that we see life differently. Then other events may reinforce or contradict or in some way modify that new default.

Good enough. And you see, the point is that the strong emotion results from events, and they don’t even need to be external physical events, though they usually are.

We have said that emotions are at the boundary between what you do and do not know about yourself: the line between known-you and unknown-you, in other words. That is why a sudden or extreme or permanent shift in what you know about yourself is likely to be accompanied by strong emotion, though you may mistake cause for effect.

But what causes that readjustment? Doesn’t it have to involve self-awareness?

We advise that you take some time during the day to consider that sentence. Weigh it, make sense of it, decide whether it squares with your experience of life.

Now, you watch an episode of NCIS that involves Gibbs revisiting his childhood home; interacting with his father; reliving childhood conflicts with others; finally, remembering meeting the love of his life when he was a raw marine. You don’t need to have experienced any of those situations to be affected by the story. In fact, if that were necessary, storytellers would be out of business. Instead, what is needed is that you project analogies. “This is like that, that happened to me. This is like that, that I felt as a result of similar circumstances. This is what I might have felt, if I had gone through that.” Et cetera. It is the drawing of analogies that produces empathy. (Or you could equally well say it is empathy that allows the drawing of analogies.) But is any of this a process of mental construction? Clearly not.

No, clearly not. A storyteller who leads you to consciously unpick his weaving, fails to that extent. It comes viscerally, or not at all.

That doesn’t mean that thought is never involved. Sometimes, as in reading Hemingway, you have to think hard to get inside the character’s head to figure out why he or she would do such a thing, think or feel such a thing. But the actual analogy will be not mentally drawn: It will be felt, emotionally, and immediately, and may also grow with your reflection about the story.

Yes. Take Island in the Stream, for instance. It is all about a father’s love for his children and his having to carry on living after they are dead. That wasn’t my experience, it wasn’t even Hemingway’s experience. But the true emotion did come across, because it wasn’t about the specifics but the emotion.

No symbolic statement can ever have the strength of a description of a tangible situation. That’s what drama does.

Now, notice. Drama, fiction, poetry, even fact-telling like biography or history, may convey the emotional truth mind-to-mind directly. That is, it serves in lieu of one’s own physical experiences. It is more direct, so may have more of an impact.

At the same time, your actual external life is usually far less dramatic, if only because it is always seen in a mundane context, and is usually a matter of slow-motion, rather than drama’s severe compression. Yet obviously your own 3D life experiences are in their way more real to you than drama. And of course if your life takes a dramatic turn – a tragedy, an ecstasy – it vastly overshadows anything drama can provide.

Feels like we haven’t quite come to the point here, but I can’t see what it would be.

Your mental life is far closer to real than your physical life. This is not a balanced statement, but close enough.

Which is more real? The physical life contained in instants of 3D time, or the mental life that is what it becomes, and never stops becoming, and is not confined to 3D instants?

They’re both real.

They’re both somewhat real, and the less tied to material circumstances, the realer. Naturally this will look inverted to 3D beings.

You are primarily energy patterns, and by “energy” we don’t mean electricity or anything physical. (Matter, we must remind you, is slowed-down energy. So to think that physical energy is less material than matter is to make a mistake.) The energy we refer to, some call spirit. It is the inflow into your lives that animates them. It is the local manifestation of the vast impersonal forces that are equally busy animating the universe. You are closer to being a local energy pattern – a flute being played by the divine breath – than you are to being a thinking feeling lump of animated matter.

Therefore, it is closer to contact you in spirit than in flesh. The contact comes in concentric rings:

  • Most direct: unknown-other to unknown-you.
  • Next, that same energy as it expresses in you as emotion, taking emotion to be the laminal layer between unknown-you and known-you.
  • Least direct is this input filtered into your conscious categories and perceptions.

You see? Your conscious circle of awareness is the farthest away from the true life that exists beyond 3D. Your emotion registers the differences between conscious and unconscious content, the way an amplifier’s membrane reproduces sound by vibration. And beyond your emotion is this vastly larger part of yourself that functions most clearly, most intelligently, serving as your buffer, stepping down divine energies to the point that they won’t blow your circuits.

Given these truths, how surprising should it be to realize that drama – abstracted reality – should be a very effective way to convey messages from the realer you to the somewhat-real you?

And that’s enough for the moment.

This is very good. Thanks.

 

The flow state

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Yesterday’s ILC group discussed the flow state – that state where you are “in the zone” and can’t put a foot wrong, the state where we are in touch with our creative potential. And, as is our habit, we then did a five-minute drumming session, in which we asked guidance about it.  This is what i got:

“This could be stated, How do I maximize my chance of creative interaction? Same old answers: Intent, Receptivity, Integrity.

“intent – so you don’t wander.

“Receptivity – so ego doesn’t drive.

“Integrity – so pretense and other forms of interference are held at bay.

“but you don’t want to be in a state of intense flow all the time. Breath is a regular alternation of influx, outflow. You need to relax if you don’t want to overstretch the bowstring. So – beyond intent and receptivity and integrity – rhythm.  It is not appropriate to be in the state 24 hours a day even if it were possible.

“However – part of intent is continuity of awareness. remember your intent and any little incidents will self-correct.”

Blazing trails

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

I am convinced that one of the biggest obstacles to a new understanding that people face is the reflexive rejection of religious understandings worked out over thousands of years.

Just as Jung found a whole new understanding by studying the seemingly pointless, even ridiculous subject of alchemy, so the study of religious texts and dogmas is going to open us up to new ways of seeing. We aren’t going to be believers in the old ways of seeing things, but we don’t have to reinvent the wheel, either.

But how many people have the time, the background, and the drive to do the in-depth investigation that will pay off? Not many. But it only takes a few to blaze new trails. Here is an example of how it’s done.

Morning Contemplation 6-19-2024 | From My Reading (wordpress.com)

Aspects of changing

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Tuesday, June 18, 2024

5:40 a.m. Several possible places to continue:

  1. Judging by our intent rather than by our actions seems backwards.
  2. “As you change your mind, you change your effective being.”
  3. The mechanism for internal readjustment.

Your choice, guys.

All good questions. Shows you are paying attention, not merely transcribing.

  1. Judging by intent rather than by actions seems backwards.  Yes, it is backwards from how you naturally judge things when you regard 3D as real and non-3D as theoretical at best. And the same point of view would see the moment as transitory and the effects as at least relatively permanent. But do you want to see your lives from outside, or not? If you do, you must at least temporarily lay down your accustomed judgments.

It is very true that the road to hell is paved with good intentions – if you look at life from 3D assumptions. The saying means, merely intending change sometime in the future is the same as clinging to what you already are, for the present.

It is – as so often – the difference in meaning concealed within the use of the same word for different things. “Good intentions” sounds like “sustained intent,” but of course they are very different things. Sustained intent has nothing vague about it, nothing of delay. And it is your sustained intent that leads you to the future you pull toward yourself, for the astrological moment cannot be modified; the only thing that can be modified is your attitude toward “what happens” around you, your sustained intent.

The difference is very clear as you spell it out. Thanks.

2. “As you change your mind, you change your effective being.” We have replaced our previous scaffolding of “laying down some strings, picking up others.” Now we would have you think of it as less material an analogy, less concrete. You are a complex balance of internal dynamics, affected not only by your initial “setting” (determined by your physical and non-physical heredity and the astrological moment and social environment), but also by your intent. In a sense, you decide how to intervene in your own life. You choose among your possibilities.

Yes, that is clear now too.

  1. The mechanism for internal readjustment. The question is, how does this occur? How do you turn intent into change?

And I have no idea where you want to go with this one.

Actually, you didn’t have much idea of the two previous, either. You forget what you didn’t know, usually as soon as you now know it. You didn’t know, then you knew, then you disremember the earlier state of not knowing. It’s normal. But this third question is unexplored territory, which is why you feel blank, approaching it.

Some bullet points:

  • You comprise all those strands, each of which is a complex energetic pattern, each of which – if acting by itself – would replicate in you the pattern it established in the life it leads elsewhen.
  • But they don’t act by themselves. They inter-act, smoothly or otherwise. Your internal life, your impulses and compulsions and contradictions and confusions, all stem from the fact that you are living all those pattens simultaneously in every new moment.
  • There is a hidden problem here. Each of those strands exists within you as it existed at a given moment, at death, which was the culmination of that life. That is the pattern. But nothing is frozen, so as that life changes, the pattern you are partly made of changes. How?
  • The astrology of your life clearly can’t be the astrology of the various strands’ lives. They’ll all be different., from you and from each other. The living present moment that each is experiencing will have a quality different from any other. How can all this be reconciled?
  • Only your intent can reconcile the various clashing or meshing energetic patterns. And the same is true for each of the strands. Is it astonishing that the 3D world is full of conflict? What ought to astonish is that it has as much harmony as it does have.
  • Bear in mind, the result is not chaos meaning shapeless, meaningless disorder, but chaos meaning infinite potential expressing in all possible combinations.

And everything boils down to free will exercised within a given framework that itself changes and is changed by the free will of others.

Circumstances are often, perhaps always, produced by others. Your part is always to choose, and of course in choosing you are changing the circumstances for all you connect to in any way, 3D or non-3D.

It’s a little dizzying.

Some time spent pondering will bring you along. Merely the readjustment from physical or energetic analogies would be an advance, freeing up your understanding.

So what can you tell us about the Gates of Horn?

Nothing. Do the work, observe the results, and at some point it will be profitable to talk about it. At this point it would be front-loading.

At any point, it’s going to be front-loading for somebody.

Just mind yourself; that’s your true business. As usual, people will come to it at the proper time for them. Those who come to it before-time will not notice; it will make no impression on them. Perhaps three years later, at the proper moment, it will sink in.

I am feeling we have left too much unaddressed on this third question.

That is true, but it seems best. There’s time. And no harm in a slightly shorter session.

Very well. Next time?

It will have to emerge on the moment.

Thanks as always, then.

 

Rebalancing

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Monday, June 17, 2024

4:50 a.m. Did I have one of those dreams? [I had gone to sleep intending to have a true dream from the Gates of Horn, as will be described below.] I was expecting something like a film, a narrative, but maybe I got something more like a presentation of memories and thoughts. In the little while between finally getting up at the cat’s behest, and now, all details or even outlines are gone. But I think I’ll try again tonight. I wish I’d stop thinking Lion’s Gate (a film company) instead of Gates of Horn.

I am going to copy Jane Peranteau’s email of Saturday, as I get the feeling it is directly connected to the question of our relating to ourselves, whatever that specifically means, that you ended with yesterday.

[Seth:

[There is something that I would like you to do. During the week, before you sleep, tell yourself, if you want to, that you will have a true dream that will come from the Gates of Horn. Now that is an ancient suggestion given by the Egyptians.

[The Gates of Horn.

[I do not want to tell you what it means yet, simply to ask you to give yourselves the suggestion – those of you who want to – a true dream that will help harmonize the portions of your being. Now that is part of the suggestion. Ask for a true dream that comes from the Gates of Horn, that will help harmonize the portions of your being.

[Now such dreams will help you recognize some of your beliefs and will charge your being with energy. The class is quickening. I am giving you assignments. Some of you will follow them, and some will not.

[But the means will be here for those of you to follow who want to badly enough – I should say, goodly enough – but those of you who are willing to take the time and the energy, those assignments that you have not as yet discussed in class are important.

[It is important that you do them, whether or not they are discussed in class, though many of them will be. The time of quickening is here for many of you, so take advantage of it.

[I return you, therefore, to yourselves. And those of you who will trust…give the suggestion that I have told you…will find some excellent and even astonishing results.

[It is very important that you read the undersides of class…that you read the undersides of class…and not skim along what you think of as the surface.

[I return you therefore to the integrity that is your self, and I challenge you joyfully to recognize it!’’

[ESP Class, May 28, 1974. © R. Butts 2010]

If you want to leave this at that for the moment, that would be useful enough. Those interested would have time to make a preliminary experiment before we comment. But if you wish to continue now, that is all right too. There are always valid alternate routes toward the same goal.

Well, how about a clue or two?

You don’t quite have a way to put into words your image.

I do now, and oddly enough it is someone’s description of General William Sherman as a powerful engine with a few screws loose. Today when we say somebody has a screw loose, we mean he’s a little crazy, or at least eccentric. But I think that guy meant that the soldier who was sometimes called Old Brains had a very powerful thinking apparatus and worked under high pressure that loosened the things holding the machine together. The excess steam blew off as temper, and if it had had no way to be released might have blown the boiler. But I get that image of us as having many large component parts only loosely coupled, thus leaving great play between and among them. It is as if we are makeshifts until the connections can be tightened and tuned.

That image will do very nicely. Combine it with the underlying idea of many previously independent strands coexisting in a new unit. You can see there would be friction involved.

And the Gates of Horn exercise is designed to help aid the connections?

There are disadvantages to using mechanical analogies to describe 3D living, yet in some ways it is very appropriate, for 3D conditions by their nature require and produce rules, routines, grooves. You don’t just wing it. So it can be instructive to think of yourselves as mechanisms, so long as you do not carry the analogy too far. You are not machines; your lives are not mere cause-and-effect obedience to pre-programmed instruction. There is an element of this, but only an element. It is, once again, the difference in nature between 3D and non-3D, and you partake of both.

Looking at your lives mechanically, you could say you are packages containing ingredients that come in bundles. But it’s confusing if you let the analogy become too specific, because, for instance, the bundles have things in common that might be viewed –

I see your problem. If one life had X percent of a given trait, and another had a percent of the same trait, if you look at the total one way, it is this previous life and that one, etc., but if you look at it another way, it is this cumulative percent of this trait (adding from all strands) etc. Same reality seen from different angles.

Yes, that’s right. So the analogies should be kept loose. As usual, multiple analogies or images for the same thing brings clarity, but you need to do the thinking: What do the analogies have in common, where to they differ.

Consider your lives:

  • Multiple strands contribute to the making of a new individual. But this is not stacking bricks to make a wall, it is more like finding inspiration in various models.
  • A strand is not a thing, even as much as you might be seen as a “thing.” It is a pattern, a template, a set of predilections.
  • Different patterns coexisting will each respond somewhat differently to inflowing energies of the changing astrological moment. (You understand, we are using “astrological moment” as shorthand for the combination of energetic conditions moment to moment.)
  • How can the emerging consciousness of the new unit experience these coexisting patterns save as multiple? They are multiple. It is the individual’s task, and fate, to coordinate them well or badly by successive decisions.
  • But people change. Indeed, that’s what you are there for, to change. How does change come, but by rebalancing of internal energies? We have said “putting down some strings and picking up others,” but you can see that is pretty crude. Really, change is rebalancing of relative strength.
  • As you change your mind, you change your effective being. Think a moment on this statement.

Now, just as life is not about peace and quiet but about expression and growth, so your internal changes are not necessarily aimed at harmony and order. For all you know, your ideal result will be very one-sided. Balance is all well and good, but balance overall is not the same thing as balance in every part. An imbalance one way here may compensate for an imbalance another way there.

Indeed, we could almost say that imbalance is desirable for movement. Just as physical organisms move away from pain and stress, so mental – spiritual, if you will – organisms move away from what is less desirable to what is more desirable. Perhaps not the end-point but the movement is what is important at any given time.

And what is the mechanism for such readjustments? We will resume there next time. Meanwhile we encourage you to experiment with the “Gates of Horn” exercise.

Thanks as always.