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Sunday, October 6, 2024

6:05 a.m. Blank, at the moment. Your move.

Talk a little about fame.

Yes, interesting how that bubbled up after I wrote about it. Sometime later that day I realized, as a boy I was obsessed with becoming famous. We used to play a board game – was it called Life? – that had you choose a formula, how much proportionately you wanted to acquire in life of Love, Fame, Money. The idea was, you’d shoot to achieve some ratio, say 30, 40, 30. I never cared about winning per se, but I would always set my goal impossibly unbalanced. I don’t know if I would try to achieve Fame 100, Love and Money 0 each, but something along those lines. I think it was my non-3D component trying to give me a clue as to what was important to my life plan, if it can be called a plan.

Not that I ever knew any practical path to fame. There were several potential paths, given my particular gifts, and many that could never have had a look in, given my particular deficits. But there was never the link I would have needed. It took a long time for that ambition to not only fade but be forgotten.

Only, look more closely. As a rule, you will find that things in a life that seem meaningless or disconnected, or that seem to have run into the sand, are nonetheless seamlessly connected to the rest of your life. How could they not be? Life often looks as if it proceeds by fits and starts, exploring this or that dead end, but when you look back you can see it is like sewing a seam (although less regular): The thread moves from top, in sight, to bottom, out of sight, but the thread is continuous and it is the up and down alternation that is its usefulness.

You’re saying sometimes we have to proceed behind our own back.

You don’t need us to tell you that. Your own lives will tell you, once you examine them for that characteristic. So, look more closely.

I’m beginning to get nudges. One I never thought of is that my incessant reading of history

But was it incessant?

No, I see that now. Would you like to tell it?

Your reading was much less directed than you remember it, and much less thought-about. Nothing surprising about either fact. You wouldn’t expect a boy to have the same preoccupations or even amusements as he would later. But, in fact, you were vitally part of a few pieces of American history for reasons it took you a very long time to discover.

Lincoln and the Civil War, yes. And World War II, which was only recently concluded, hence being written about.

But the boy was reading all kinds of work, forgotten by the man. Neither history nor biography had yet emerged from all the possible things that might attract his interest.

And I was even concerned with baseball, come to think of it, though I really knew nothing about  what I was watching except winning and losing. But I remember now, it seemed to matter. Mazeroski’s home run in the ninth inning of the seventh game of whatever World Series that was, for instance. And the hapless Phillies, with their not very exceptional roster. But is any of this to the point?

Your life moment by moment is not very much like your life seen as a whole from after the fact.

No, I see the same thing in biographies. Telling it can’t help falsify how it felt to the person whose life is being described. Moment by moment takes so long, has so many hours to fill, has so many random or random-seeming things happening. Biographies don’t detail people brushing their teeth or putting on their shoes and socks, and if they did, who could stand to read about it? But life as we live it doesn’t have the silent fast-forwards that biographies do, and memories do.

And self-made summaries do. So what is the point of looking back and making the effort to recapture the feel of it at various times?

A binocular view, I suppose. We know how the movie developed: It is useful to remember how it seemed at the time.

Now, go back to the boy’s reading of history.

I realize, I always read history as if it was something at my level. I mean, I expected to be a history-maker, it was just a matter of growing up.

Did you have any reason to think that would happen?

It wasn’t a matter of thinking. It was assumed. I guess I thought everybody read history that way.

Just as boys casually assumed they would become baseball stars, or president?

Or astronauts, yes. And I still imagine that most boys did just that. (I hadn’t any idea what girls daydreamed.)

Now, this is useful background, mostly to send you back to the feel of those years. Does it shed light on your later career?

By God, it does, and I would have thought there wasn’t much I could learn about it. I see now, all of a sudden, that is what was behind my irrational assumption that I would go to the war, come out a hero, and enter politics, as Churchill and Kennedy had done. I have always wondered why I couldn’t see that my life and theirs had little in common. But now I see that that cartoonish plan was a stepping stone, a path connecting my childhood assumption that I would live a life among such matters with a way to get there.

Your astonishment is at the expense of your customary clarity.

Yeah, yeah. It’s clear enough. I pieced together what I thought was a reasonable flight-plan. Then Kennedy was killed and a few months later the Navy turned me down because I had asthma. No wonder I was so disoriented, directionless, coming home on the bus from the AFEES center. What was to be a path wasn’t actually there.

But you improvised anyway.

Totally without planning, too. No wonder I took such hare-brained moves. I was still following a path that was fundamentally disconnected from reason and therefore from criticism. I got married, got jobs, marking time until I could run for Congress in 1974, the bit of the plan that still survived, unconnected. I went to school for four years, too, and that wasn’t part of my plan.

You lived at two levels. Consciously you did what seemed sensible things. Jobs, college, marriage, jobs again, school again, and you were marking time. When the time came around, you were carrying out the plan nonetheless without much preparation, without knowing what you were doing, without much of anything except your brother’s support and your non-rational certainty.

And the odd thing is, it all worked out.

Nothing odd about it. You didn’t get the job you weren’t qualified for, but in effect your campaign was an advertisement for certain qualities that were recognized and rewarded, and you were on your way.

And this is just the kind of distorted summary we mentioned.

Can’t be helped. Feel free to describe every time you brushed your teeth.

That isn’t what I mean. I mean, it doesn’t mention my being taken by Colin Wilson’s book nor my sudden overwhelming drug-fueled breakthrough into seeing the world differently, nor my other ambition to write popular novels and make a lot of money so I could be independent.

It doesn’t mention your marriage nor your house-buying nor your putting up wallpaper nor your becoming a father, either. Shall we list the cars you owned, the telephone numbers you had, the grocery stores you shopped at?

I’m just mentioning it. It is as we said, life moment by moment is filled with so many things, and has so many movements to fill –

We keep saying, your lives and your ideas about your lives are not nearly the same thing. This is one more reason why: Memory compresses events, trends, daydreams, obsessions, and tries to make it all seem reasonable. Nothing wrong with the process, only don’t let yourselves be fooled into thinking that any one way of seeing is accurate. It is, at best, a pretty accurate summary of the view from a certain viewpoint. Change viewpoints and some things disappear from sight and others appear, and even the things that remain in sight probably look different.

Seems to me our theme has wandered all over the place today. What was our theme? I thought it set out to be fame.

Perhaps it is more the fact that your lives are a sort of balancing act.

We often feel that. You are setting it out in a different way.

• There is avatar-self at any given time, and
• Avatar-self at other times, that occasionally interact for reasons that may be opaque or anyway cloudy to you, and
• Your larger self that includes all these avatar-self versions, and has its own view of your life, and
• There is what could be thought of as “the self in the times,” meaning a sort of inertia that serves as a ballast for your life. But this is more than can be spelled out so casually.

Let’s begin with that next time, then. So, the theme?

“Many lives in one”?

“Life v. daydream”?

Life as a form of braiding, but we have used “braiding” in another context.

“Many lives in one,” then, unless I think of something else when I sit down to the computer. Thanks as always.

[In the event, I chose “Unseen threading.”]

Saturday, October 5, 2024

5:50 a.m. Curious experience. I was taking down the words of someone purporting to be Nevil Shute – at least, that was my assumption, as he was talking about what he was doing in writing On the Beach, and I had written a page when I realized, with a bitter sensation, that I was sitting in the recliner with my eyes closed, and everything I thought I was writing was smoke, was non-existent. I had been visualizing myself writing, daydreaming it, you could say. The bitterness was for the wasted effort, and I felt what I imagine we feel when we are in non-3D trying and failing to get heard in 3D.

Come to think of it, this isn’t quite the first time I’ve had this experience. Whenever I find myself visualizing, feeling, myself writing, it turns out that I am actually dreaming it, not doing it. It is always accompanied (once I realize it) by a sense of “What a waste of effort.”

To return to the third point I was about to address yesterday when I ran out of gas: seeing things backwards.

At our ILC meeting on Wednesday, Christine had reminded me that I had advised her not to dismiss stray words and thoughts that came to mind, but to pay attention to them as potentially meaningful. The reason I had told her that is that I couldn’t see how anything can come to us meaninglessly. We may not be able to trace the meaning, but still it is there, for one simple reason: This is not a random universe, not a random life. Not that everything that happens is of show-stopping importance, but that nothing can happen without reference to us – else we couldn’t recognize it, couldn’t perceive it. Every moment is filled with omens, but only those that have some connection to us will be noticed.

This doesn’t yet get it. Let’s try again.

Our conscious 3D lives are only special cases of the universal life, the universal consciousness that we exist within but cannot perceive continuously because it is too big and we are too limited. The price of admission to 3D is a great constriction in how much we can perceive of what goes on. Most of our surroundings, and a good deal of our own being, is invisible to us, filtered out before it can become conscious, merely so we will not be overwhelmed. As we have been experiencing in our lives – some of us since childhood, some following a wake-up call – these filters can be modified, played with, removed, and the result is that our lives change.

Hmm. Still haven’t gotten it down. Why is something so simple so hard to say, this morning? The original image is of our looking outward, rather than inward. But I have lost the meaning.

Guys?

We were wondering how long it would take you to call.

Oh very funny. I notice you’re quick enough to horn in sometimes. What’s different this time?

You are trying your wings, and we are in favor of that. For you, for anyone. Just because a practice has become familiar doesn’t mean that’s the end of the line. It can be, if you’re satisfied, but it doesn’t have to be, in practice, and never is, in principle.

So help me out here. What am I groping to express?

Simply that you in 3D are not at the center but at the periphery. Yes, you are at the center of your 3D existence, but even here, not at the center of the 3D/non-3D being you are. And when you turn your sight to the greater world beyond you, you see that ideas, signs, omens, connections, inspirations, nightmares, daydreams, etc. – every possible mental experience – is at least half not engendered by 3D-you. At least half is engendered by the world around you. But this requires quite a bit of explanation, though it is a simple concept ultimately. Do not jump too soon to the conclusion that you understand what we’re getting at, just because our initial sentences spark ideas. Absorb our full commentary first, then there will be time enough to consider it as a whole, rather than as some hastily snatched impression.

• As long as you consciously or automatically consider yourself to be identical to the avatar-self image you and your life have constructed, you won’t be able to see the ways in which this is not and cannot be true.
• When you fully realize that Jung was not exaggerating nor dramatizing when he described the shadow, the unknown and somewhat unknowable part of yourself, you will know that your self-image is not and cannot be complete.
• As we have said many times, you do not have and cannot have the full data even on yourself, let alone others.
• A part of that “shadow” is specifically your umbilical cord to the non-3D and the part of yourself on the other end of that cord.
• Your functioning presupposes a continual flow across that cord, but your ideas about your functioning usually don’t even consider its existence.
• As we have also said, self-identification as 3D-only leads to fear, disorientation, helplessness. What perhaps we haven’t said or haven’t said clearly enough is that self-identifying as 3D/non-3D, though better, is still liable to leave you sometimes lost, directionless, leaderless.
• Consider this. Just as your avatar-self is 3D and non-3D both, necessarily in the nature of things, so that avatar-self as a whole is on one end of an umbilicus to the larger self, and that larger self to what lies beyond. There are no absolute separations in reality. As above, so below: Ponder that.
• The point you are feeling and not expressing: You as avatar-self feel your connection to something greater. That something greater is part of yourself. That “part of yourself” is not outside your mind, but inside This is why stray thoughts may be of value, because they are promptings, in effect, from a part of yourself to the part of yourself you recognize.

And that’s why you had me begin this entry with my experiencing it while on the recliner. Very clever.

Well, can you see that all the most unusual “coincidences” and “omens” and “fortuitous” things in your life may be looked at as promptings from a part of yourself that knows more and has your interests – which are, after all, its interests – in mind?

I work on that assumption, in this part of my life. Earlier parts would have been easier, if I had known it then.

But it is the traveling that provides you with first-hand experience.

So, our theme? Seeing things backwards?

Maybe, “More than you think you are.”

Or “More than we think we are.”

That too. Same idea.

Our thanks, as always.

Friday, October 4, 2024

6:10 a.m. I was thinking, as I lay drowsing on the recliner after feeding the cat, that recently I have had to explain two things about myself, one being asthma and fear, the other being the difference between reputation and accomplishment. I don’t think I’ve done either explanation adequately. but the process has added clarity to my thinking. And even as I pondered, I got a bit more clarity. But I don’t know that the subject is sufficiently fascinating to warrant a conversation.

[TGU:] but how do you know that? You may add in your third area of pondering, how people have psychology inside-out because they think of the 3D/non-3D relationship wrongly.

Can’t even remember the example that had come to mind, though I remember the conclusion.

Sure you can. It was people paying attention to stray thoughts as Christine mentioned on Wednesday.

Oh, yes. So I take it you do think this is of sufficient interest.

Do you have something more important to do at 6 a.m.?

Do the three things have something in common other than how things can be misunderstood or inadequately explained?

They are about life, aren’t they?

Well, I don’t mind putting in the effort, so I guess we’ll see. Fear, concern, and confusion?

Maybe go there first and find out at the end what the theme was?

[Since most of the following is me and not an alternation with TGU, I’ll leave it all in Roman, as easier to read in large blocks than italic.]

[Me:] Okay. Working backwards.

Fear.

Yesterday Robert Cornett and I were talking and he mentioned that asthma attacks – being unable to breathe – must be terrifying, and I had a bit of a time clarifying that that isn’t exactly right. The thing is, when you have dealt with a thing since you were two years old, you just can’t be afraid in the same way you were as a child. How many times can you be terrified of the same thing you’ve gone through hundreds of times before? Tiresome, oh yes. Painful sometimes, debilitating sometimes, aggravating and even perplexing sometimes, yes, to be sure. But after a certain point you know that you aren’t likely to die of it, and you would almost be pretending if you were afraid of something that you were pretty sure wasn’t going to happen. Instead, you might easily feel impatience, dread, weariness, maybe anger, resignation – a whole lot of possible reactions. But it isn’t exactly fear.

However, complicating that, you may easily feel panic. Panic that you might die? No, panic that you can’t get your next breath, and that this might go on and on.

Sounds like the same thing, and sometimes I can make the difference clear to people and sometimes – usually – not. But as I was explaining the difference, I realized one aspect of it that I don’t remember ever fully seeing before. When you are fighting for your next breath in what we may call , for the moment, immediate-panic-mode, you are right there fully in the moment. You have no attention for daydreams or memories or coming attractions. You are held right there, and not for just a moment or two, but for however long it lasts. When I realized that, I thought, “Hmm, and that is good practice for when you can breathe.”

Now, at other times you may be in attention-but-not-panic mode, where your breath is coming regularly, but not unconsciously. You have to pay attention to it, not because you want to but because the situation is there: something like having a headache, I suppose, a continual presence that is more than background noise but less than a shrieking jangle that prevents you from thinking of anything else. This state may go on for hours if you don’t happen to have the medicines to stop it. I well remember so many nights as a boy, sitting on the side of the bed, swaying my body forward and back, fighting for every breath, only without an sense of possibly losing the fight; it’s just that each breath was an effort. I spent time reading, moving the book as I moved, to keep it at the same focal depth.

(And that is how I developed the habit of being in the 3D but escaping into the non-3D – the mental world – pretty deliberately, pretty simultaneously having my conscious awareness both here and there. I should ask Dirk: I’ll bet his situation was similar, except that his would have been continuous while mine was sporadic.)

So, did asthma bring fear? Not in the way people would assume, and not in any way that is easily explained. It also brings gifts, though you may have to look closely to see them.

Reputation and accomplishment

Then there is the difference between fame (reputation) and achievement. This one can be hard to explain too, for a different reason. In my experience (though perhaps I am misinterpreting), I see people very ready to discount and disbelieve certain things, in a way that would be highly insulting normally. Their disbelief amounts to saying that you are either lying or are acting out of unconscious motivations. This, from people who would take your honesty and awareness for granted in almost any other direction.

(Come to think of it, this is what happens to anyone whose experience is sufficiently outside the expected range, when they try to communicate it to someone who hasn’t had and cannot imagine having the experience, be it a UFO encounter, or an out-of-body or a communication with someone who is deceased.)

To me, it seems simple. I am 78 years old. What possible advantage could fame do me? If I knew that I would be famous after I died, again, what possible difference could it make? But to know that I had (or hadn’t) achieved, is something else entirely. And, writing this, I realize that something I take for granted may be the unspoken explanation.

I have lived mostly without feedback. Until recently – the past 20 years or so – no one who didn’t know me well and in person could have had any idea what I was doing. (For that matter, I didn’t have much idea what I was doing. Mostly when I was doing something, I was thinking I was doing something else.)

I have lived my life mostly within my own little bubble, more like Thoreau’s life than Emerson’s. I never linked fame and achievement in my mind. My very first book won a prize – and then was stifled by a legal challenge we should have fought but didn’t. But the achievement was writing the book. The recognition was decoupled from it right at the beginning. It was a bitter experience, but perhaps it was just as well in not leading me to expect external success. You can’t live your life seeking the approval of others and still do your own work. If you work and the approval comes, well and good, but either way, you did the work.

Of course the real question is, did you do the work? Did you do it as well as you could do it? Will it meet recognition? That is, will it be effective and useful? But these questions have no intrinsic connection to recognition of the author. If you have written Walden and none of your fellow townsmen (except Emerson, of course) recognize its quality, does that mean anything to Walden? If you are or are not recognized as the author, does that affect what you did? These are famous people as examples, but what else can I use? The point is, the man is one thing and the work or lasting effect is something different, and confusing the two is – well, is confusion.

Just as there is a radical difference between fear of death and panic over the circumstances of living in that particular moment, so there is a difference between seeking approval or validation, on the one hand,  and finding that you have received it, on the other. What happens to the author is trivial next to what happens to his literary children. Even this doesn’t get it, but that’s enough time spent on it.

The third confusion was about the way people think things are, and the actual facts. But this isn’t easy either, as to make the argument is to assume for the moment that there is any one way of seeing things. Perhaps a better way to say it is that there is a more helpful way to see things and a less helpful way, depending on what you want to do. If you want to understand our mental world while we’re in 3D, I suggest we reverse the usual concepts.

But I suddenly realize, I’m out of energy. Maybe I’ll come back to this later on or on another day. I’ve been at this an hour, and I’ve been doing all the work. Themes?

[TGU:] “Drawing distinctions, perhaps.

Maybe so.

Thursday, October 3, 2024

9:30 a.m. Let’s talk a little bit more on religion and whatever it is we’re heading toward. (As so often, I feel that this is a prompted question, but that’s okay with me.)

You have been hammering on this point sometimes, whispering other times, and wondering if anybody at all is listening.

Not quite. I know some have heard. But naturally I am more concerned about those who haven’t heard, and even more concerned about those who won’t let themselves hear. And before you say it, I realize, it’s their choice, on many levels.

Yes it is. They may consciously reject the idea. Or they may reject it automatically, not realizing that an unknown filter is preventing them from considering the proposition fairly. And, within the duality of causation, they may do so either because the way they are put together, they can’t fairly consider it without breaking or even shattering, or because they are functioning perfectly well, but considering this would make their life-purpose difficult.

You’re saying, it may be a matter of conscious choice or unconscious filtering and this may be because they cannot or should not change whatever course they are on.

Isn’t that what I just said? And –

And, I know, we never have the data to judge someone else’s path.

However, there is something to be said for your side, too. You might as well say it.

If I feel impelled to underline this or that course of action, there isn’t any reason why I shouldn’t do it. And, there may be important reasons why I should do it.

Yes. For you, for anyone, the even-handed rule applies: No one has the right to silence you; you never have the right to cram something down someone’s throat.

Not that either process could succeed anyway.

Oh, sometimes it could, but either way it is an act of violence, though at first it might not seem so, and violence is usually a sign of trying to overrule life.

Now, that statement invites expatiating on, but let’s say whatever you have to say on religion and out future or futures.

Bullets, then, because it will be easier to pull together afterwards:

• All religions have to deal with various kinds of people, various in their level of awareness, various in their capacity for growth, various in their understanding of life and of themselves.
• The world – terra firma – contains uncounted types of people, even countable types of cultures.
• Life never proceeds smoothly and evenly. (Nor would it be an advantage if it did, but that is another topic for another time.) So there are always people and peoples at different levels of personal and cultural development.
• Hence, one-world civilizations, one-world religions, even one-world language, in practice is and must be a pipe-dream. One size never fits all.
• Every person, every point of view, every culture or way of conceptualizing the universe, is and must be partial, not universal. Even a point of view that sets out to be universal is, in the fact that it is a particular intent, partial. Not everybody is going to agree.
• One man’s utopia is another man’s hell. Regardless of the specifics involved, the overarching fact is that every point of view is legitimate to the universe in that it is a part of the whole. This doesn’t mean that everything is morally equivalent; it isn’t. but, you realize, it is or isn’t morally equivalent from one point of view. From another, it may look very different.
• “Peace on Earth” in the sense of a universal sharing of values (and hence viewpoints) is not possible. It would have to be the peace of the graveyard.
• But to say that, is not to say that humanity is condemned to eternal warfare. It is to say you are condemned – and blessed – to eternal contention of ways of being.
• Each way of being, each way of experiencing life and reality, has its exposition somewhere. It may be a set of superstitions, or a mythology, or a primitive religion, or a higher religion, or a philosophy or a hybrid of many types of expression, but in one way or another, it will be expressed, or it could not be shared, hence to all extents and purposes could not be said to exist.
• No one ever comes to the truth, just as no one comes to the future, although to any one person, the future it experiences at any given time seems obviously to be the only “future” there is. All you can hope to do is to embrace as much of the truth as your particular avatar-self is able to encompass. That’s what you are in 3D to do, after all, to conceptualize and embody a point of view.

Now, this background gives you what you need.

I think it does. It says, there’s a reason why we’ll never come to unanimity of opinion, and as usual that isn’t a design flaw in the universe. And at the same time, there’s a reason why some people feel impelled to grow, and some feel impelled to communicate a given version.

And nothing wrong with any of it, yes.

Now, the specific application: the consideration of religion in one’s re-examining the world. Religions are not side-trails, not superstitions, not obstacles to progress or brotherhood, not remnants of inferior ways of seeing things and of structuring lives. They are different because people and cultures are different. They are similar because they look at reality through certain similar filters. They are arbitrary or bigoted or false or even predatory  when the levers of power are misused by those in a position to use them, but this is because they are human institutions. Everything human is partial, corruptible, fallible – and also semi-divine if you look at it rightly.

We say this pretty flatly: If you want to grow, you need to identify your prejudices as prejudices, not as the reasoned balanced judgments they will at first naturally seem to be. No one can do this for you, and no one can force you to do it. But we say to you, your non-3D component will tell you, if you do not block it out.

Once you remove the filter, or turn it down, or even suspend it for the length of time it takes you to look at it, your world will open up. Nothing closes you down faster and more effectively than declaring something Wrong.

It isn’t a matter of spending a lifetime learning about different religions or ways of thinking. If you wish to, that’s fine, but that isn’t the important point. The important point is learning to not shrink away instinctively when certain things come up for consideration.

If you can’t bear to look for the kernel of truth within a belief-system, that’s a tell-tale sign.

If you can’t do it without clinging to the “knowledge” that you are right and this is an example of error you are going to look at, that too is a tell-tale sign.

What you shrink from taking seriously, something of you is afraid of. Don’t take my word for it, go look for yourself, not shutting off your non-3D commentary.

And this applies to more than just religion, I see. It applies when examining anything.

It does. This particular example, though, is chosen because it tends to be a huge obstacle to just your kind of explorers.

I see that. Been there myself, as a matter of fact, but a hell of a long time ago.

What is 50 years? Or 60?

Point taken. Okay, so today’s theme was –?

“Religions and your future,” perhaps.

Our thanks as always.

Wednesday, October 2, 2024

5:40 a.m. I was watching “El Ministerio del Tiempo” last night, and this morning as I was remembering somebody in medieval times referring to “la santa iglesia” (the holy church), I had a thought. There was a time when people thought of it as the holy church. They weren’t thinking of a bureaucracy, nor of a dangerous powerful organization, but of a spiritual family of which they were a part. Everything decays over time, but I suddenly thought, in the beginning perhaps the Christians were thinking of it as just that, a shared mind. And then I remembered, “You experienced it in that way when you were a boy, not even thinking about it, but taking it for granted like the air you breathed. And evidently most of your contemporaries did not, although perhaps your mother did, and your cousin Ann Marie.” Maybe a couple of other aunts, come to think of it. There’s something important here, if we can dig it out, or rather if we can allow it in.

Jon?

You see here the power of an idea, and how it helps shape a person’s way of dealing with a reality that is expressed but not understood.

You’re going to say a lot more about it, I hope.

It is a recurring theme, with you, the church. You don’t feel part of it, and that is a sense of exile, in a way, yet you are loyal to the idea of it but you can’t participate in the practice of it, merely because of the way it is understood and because of the reality behind the reality you remember.

Pretty big “merely.”

Oh yes.

Nobody’s going to understand what either one of us has said here without some connectors.

Bullets, then.

• “These are my people.”
• The simplest of your father’s sisters.
• The cynicism that repels you.
• The group-mind as it frees people.
• Incommunicable experiences and their meaning as signposts and promises.
• The final ritual at Reiki I initiation; your sense of sacrament as you had expected and not received.
• The church in Scotland and your divided reaction.

That should be enough to get on with. This will come better if you piece it together than if you try to take dictation. Working the data helps you integrate, which is a process that associates context to an initial focus. Merely being told only provides the signposts.

Everybody else who reads this will necessarily be reading it, not constructing with me.

They have the ability to construct as they read, if they will read slowly and allow their minds to associate things from their own lives, and then ponder. It is something like meditation over texts that you had George Chiari learn in Messenger.

I may post that chapter online again. I learned a lot, writing it. I see now I was listening.

You were bringing through a message that your avatar-self couldn’t have formulated de novo, but that did come wrapped in your momentary consciousness. That is the process of  creation, in a nutshell.

I think I will re-arrange the bullets you provided, put this in a more logical order.

Do as you wish, but remember that spontaneity has its own logic.

But in any case, get going, as we are half an hour in.

That too.

I can feel it, I am going to learn something more than these fragments suggest, and I suppose it doesn’t matter what order I take them in.

[Because the next part is long, I will put it in Roman rather than italic, for easier reading, resuming the Roman/italic alternation thereafter.]

So, looking back:

• I can’t remember what it was called – attunement, maybe? – but the weekend Reiki I class that I took in 1998 culminated in us sitting in a circle facing inward, while the teacher went around laying hands on each person’s head in turn. When Carol Sabick put her hands on my head (I think it was Carol. It may have been someone else) I felt the energy flow, and I felt then what I had expected to feel, and didn’t, at my first communion at age seven and confirmation a few years later. I remember very well thinking that finally I had received a sacrament.
• And I remember visiting the chapel of Chimayo, in New Mexico, with Richard Leviton and his wife Judith, both of whom were into spiritual exploration, neither of whom were nor had been Catholic, both rationalists in a way I never was. I felt the simplicity and openness to spirt of the people around us – mostly native people of the area, mostly not tourists – and I felt a deep kinship with them, an understanding of them. They reminded me of my father’s sister Rose. But when I said to Richard and Judith, “These are my people,” I met only incomprehension and amusement, as if I were declaring my preference for the lower classes over the educated. (As in fact I do, in a way. The working class usually doesn’t accept me as one of them – to them I suppose I am a Suit, or anyway one who lives in a different world – but I recognize them as my father’s friends.)
• Michael Ross and I visited the church in Scotland – Pluscarden, I think the name is – that had been destroyed by Protestants in the 1600s or 1700s I suppose, currently being rebuilt by some Catholic group. This was many years ago, and I have forgotten detail, but I remember well my split reaction. As long as I was experiencing the sanctified space that can develop when people have prayed sincerely together, I was in touch with something within me that is in tune with that medieval world. But when we came to a sign of contemporary usage, a wall rack of pamphlets such as I think I remember from my youth (though I can’t place where the rack would have been), and more when we came face to face with a priest in robes, my reaction was one of recoil. (As you say, Jon, a sense of exile mingled with a sense of loyalty. I hadn’t thought of it that way.)
• And finally the group-mind as it freed people. (I realize I have proceeded other than one by one, but I have covered the other bullets.) this is speculation, but I wonder if the church as an entity, not as an organization, came from the earliest Christians experiencing a liberation from their previous isolation. This would have come about not in the context of anything they could name out of experience, except maybe close family-feeling, so they wouldn’t have a name for it. It may have seemed to them that they were sharing in the mind of the Christ, and in fact that may be a true enough way of describing it. They were no longer isolated. When two or more were gathered together, there was the Christ, as Jesus had promised. And this sense of being one part of a greater whole would certainly have transformed their lives, from fragment to part of a reconstructed whole.

[Jon:] you see how your examination in a sort of stream-of-consciousness way rather than a strictly logical way brought you to a more integrated understanding?

I do. This also reinforces the sense I have had for some time, that some of what we need we have rejected in the past (or, in some cases, have never been exposed to), in the way that rationalists are going to need to explore astrology and the other mantic arts.

And mention Chesterton.

Yes, re-reading The Everlasting Man, I see clearly how this luminously intelligent man is prisoner of his ignorance of some things, rejecting things for reasons that are inexorably logical from his premises, but were nonetheless valid in ways he did not discern. I keep telling people to read him (though few if any ever do) because of his luminous intelligence, but I think they suspect me of wanting to turn them into Catholics. The fact is, you don’t break new ground by re-settling old, even if the land has been abandoned and the former houses have fallen down. But it is helpful when you are moving across the Cumberland Gap into unpeopled Kentucky, to remember the North Carolina that shaped you.

We haven’t finished with this, I imagine. Scarcely started, in a way, maybe. But our hour is up and I have a pretty good idea which of us is going to have to do the typing. Point us in the right direction, Jon: What shall we title this?

“Santa iglesia” might stir people up, get their attention.

Or turn them off.

How about “Experiencing another reality”? that may mislead them enough to let them read it.

Smiling too. Okay, till next time.

Monday, September 30, 2024

5:15 a.m. Jon, I have gotten through August’s entries. That of the 30^th had something that seems worth pursuing:

 “…in 3D, conscious reasoning is more obvious to you than the unconscious factors that are frequently – you might almost say usually – more important. If your thinking is being fashioned from within a given mood, for instance, the mood may or may not be obvious to you as a factor in your thinking, but either way, it will be there. So many factors go into your moment-by-moment perceptions and thought that you are always working the data while it is changing around you. You don’t have the luxury of working from a stable platform.”

Could you say more? Also, you mentioned that our ideas about “mental” and “emotional” are misleading. Say more on that too?

At this point we begin to potentially repeat ourselves, as you forget what was said later [than what I was reviewing]. It isn’t the end of the world, but it is a pitfall.

Can’t you just say, “We covered that”?

But the fact that you ask this morning is itself significant. The question embedded in the time is a piece of data. It is part of the moment, and deserves to be taken into account.

I’m not sure I get you. That sounds like we would need to pursue anything that popped into our minds, merely because it popped up.

There isn’t any “should” about it, but that would be one way of increasing consciousness. It would be a form of fishing.

Say some more?

Remember, we are looking at expanding consciousness, not as growing something, but as removing the visible and invisible filters and barriers that isolate you from the moment.

If you put it that way before, I don’t remember it. But I like the image.

Keep thinking of your avatar-level consciousness as a subset of what is real, divided from what is real by the swirl pattern of the whirlpool, or screened off by filters (it doesn’t much matter what analogy you use), and you will see that the task and the pitfalls and the opportunities are other than what you think. Again, you are not building consciousness, nor expanding it exactly, but elbowing your way into a larger comprehension.

Well, I think we got that.

It is easily forgotten again, or anyway not brought to mind in this context. And the reason to remind you of the different perspectives is so that you will see that the nature of your task is different. You are not so much constructing as allowing, and that is a very different energy. For one thing, it allows you to lean more assuredly on intuition and less on logic and inference. I realize, you as a particular individual hardly need to be encouraged to trust intuition, but after all we are speaking together to be overheard by others, and some of them will need just that encouragement.

So, in practice –

Someone sitting quietly (or, observing quietly, no matter what they may be doing) will see “stray thoughts” entering the stillness. Unlike in yoga, where you might experience this as an annoyance or anyway as an obstacle, here you look at it as indirect indicators, and you set yourself to follow the clue. “Stray thoughts” are not random in the sense of being unconnected to your life and to the moment. They may be random in the order in which you notice them; they may even be random in the order in which they pop up; but that randomness will be closely hedged in by the fact that only the thoughts appropriate to that particular moment will be able to surface. If there are five of them, any of the five may be noticed in any order, but anything that is noticed will necessarily be one of those that the moment allows. So, call it randomness within order, if you wish.

Anything you observe may link to other thoughts and may be pursued in profitable or unprofitable directions. If you slide into fantasy, the fact that you move into fantasy is itself a datum. If you get lost in the fantasy, that may prove fruitless or productive: There is no way to make a definitive predictive statement.

But it is the observing of the process we’re concerned with?

Observing for a reason, not merely as a curiosity. If you once get a sense of how dynamic and indeed almost chaotic a platform you ride, your life will change, your abilities and prospects and hopes will change. If you already know, first-hand, then you are that far ahead. But being familiar with the idea is not the same as knowing by experience.

I was thinking to ask you to talk about the various components of the swirl of our consciousness, but something says, not at this time.

That’s right. At this time, better to look at “mental” and “emotional.” Straightening out these concepts will help.

You say straightening out; I take it you mean, in context, seeing them from another viewpoint.

That’s true enough. But it is more than saying, “Look at it this way because you can see things differently.” The idea people have about mental and emotional are misleading and harmful.

Harmful?

Anything that leads you away from where you want to go while giving you the illusion of being the right path is harmful.

Even though all paths are good?

All paths are good. Is it helpful to have signposts that mislead you?

Okay.

When people say “mental” they often mean intellectual, logical. They imply that this is the factor that separates them from the beasts. They regard it as reasoning (and silently deny animals the ability to reason that animals nonetheless clearly possess). The word is often used to mean “rational” and is opposed to the word “emotional.” So if you were to take the meaning that most people would give it, you would say “mental” refers to the capacity to think that is different from the child’s world, for instance. You can watch children learn to think as they grow, although the process isn’t as clear-cut either in beginning place or in ending place as it appears.

“Emotional” is often used to mean, “carried away,” subject to untrustworthy moods, carried off balance: “beside yourself.” Good or bad (and these of course are arbitrary labels), emotions are considered to be things that happen to you, whereas thoughts and ideas supposedly are produced by your mental activity.

Let us propose a more accurate model. Rather than you being a rational being occasionally or often derailed by emotion, let’s say you are a swirl of influences and the results of influence

I don’t know how to finish the sentence, let alone the thought.

Bullets, maybe.

• Your consciousness is rooted in two “places” at once, the 3D world the avatar-self inhabits, and the non-3D world you are rooted in.
• Your non-3D component provides the only stability you have, as it is not changing moment by moment as it is carried through each new 3D moment.
• Your 3D component lives in the moment necessarily and by design; it experiences the eternal now no less than the non-3D does, but experiences it I time-slices, always, necessarily.
• Every time-slice is by definition unique in its qualities and therefore in its opportunities.
• Thus, you ride two horses, rather uncomfortably, but you get the benefit of two viewpoints, two experiences. How else could this be generated?
• The real mental activity is observing and reacting consciously. That is a form of construction.
• The real emotional activity is the effect upon you of everything unknown to you, hence autonomous to your mental activity.
• “The world” represents – mirrors – your unconscious nature. Your idea of “I” represents – lives – your own idea of who you are. Do you suppose the two might conflict now and again?

I don’t know how many people will get from this what I do, being connected like this, but that seems very clear. Maybe if people don’t get it (or do) they’ll let us know.

Can you see, now, the benefit of going through past material noting questions and unfinished topics?

I do. After I get through September’s, I’ll start on July’s. I may have to hopscotch back and forth. In any case: Our theme here?

Maybe “Allowing, not constructing.” But that doesn’t take the latter part of the session into account.

Well, I’ll think about it. Our thanks as always.