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Friday, November 17, 2017

All right, my friends, what is on the agenda for this morning?

Talk a little about the incessant reading you are doing.

Re-reading the six Dion Fortune novels, Moon Magic being the last. Reading Henry Adams on the U.S. during Madison’s administrations, currently reading about the War of 1812. Dion Fortune’s The Magical Battle of Britain, again, though hardly begun. Still on The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events. Still on Awakening from the 3D World. Never finished Holy Ice, a book about crystals. Set aside Parkman for the moment. Read one short story in Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life, which arrived yesterday.

And what does all this amount to?

Avoidance? Habit? I don’t know.

Talk about your lungs.

I haven’t been really well since asthma started up again, as usual, in the Fall. September wasn’t bad, but it got going pretty well last month and was tenacious enough that I realized, I was just holding my own, between nebulizer and inhaler. But then yesterday I sort of had it out with it. Or, no, it was as if I were saying goodbye to it, as a long-time companion. I remember thinking I’d miss it, in a way. Immediately I thought that, it changed. It didn’t exactly disappear, but the intensity lessened, and I do suspect it will be going. Not entirely sure what this is about.

Talk about the alligator.

If I must. When I was working with Jane Mullen on the 30th, at one point she saw what she apologetically described as an alligator within me, very tough hide, great snapping teeth. We both took it to be a defense-mechanism instilled or installed or developed at an early age. I could see that it had been needed. I could see that it was needed no more and in fact had caused me a lot of trouble, I not being aware of it. So I talked to it and we encouraged it to leave, which it did without struggle. I felt the difference immediately.

And finally, talk about your ambitions and your steps not taken to achieve them.

The things I’d like to tidy up by writing them, as I did Dark Fire, rather than leaving them in limbo.

That, and the ones not yet begun.

Lots of work to be done, but instead other than these conversations and their accompanying labor of transcriptions, I don’t do the work, I read. I watch movies sometimes. I do email. But mostly I read. I take it you have a reason for having me trot this out? I’m not very discreet, but this seems unnecessary.

Few people would describe their lives in a way that would agree with the way others see them.

Natural enough, I’d think. The view from inside is always going to differ from the view from outside looking in.

Indeed it will. But the view from inside may be as different from “the truth” – meaning, a closer description of cause and effect – as the difference you sometimes cite between intent and effect.

Yes. I point out sometimes, we judge ourselves by our intent, and judge others by their actions (and, often enough, by the effect of their actions). So?

So here is our view, neither internal nor external, both internal and external. The middle two terms of four-place logic, you see. [Rather than either “identity” or “non-identity,” four-place logic includes “neither” and “both.”]

Maybe it isn’t anybody’s business.

And maybe it isn’t discreditable and you don’t need to worry about it.

And maybe it isn’t anybody’s business anyway.

And maybe it is.

Well, that stopped me. It is?

From our point of view, one’s intent means more than one’s execution. That doesn’t mean, “We forgive you for not doing X; your heart was in the right place.” It means, what you really do and what you appear (even to yourself) to be doing, are not the same thing. Not now, not ever. And of course none of this is special to Frank, it is one life being used as an illustration of Life.

You having to find somebody willing to be dissected in public.

We wouldn’t have put it quite that way. But, say it is so. It is a valuable contribution, that willingness.

Now, you don’t know which you’d rather hear less, praise or criticism. Of the two, you are better at dealing with the latter.

There is a saying I don’t understand that comes to mind: “Praise to the face is open disgrace.” As payment for services rendered, you might explain that one. It’s sort of how I feel, but I don’t know why.

Oh certainly you do, you just haven’t connected it. Think of your reaction to literary criticism. One praising (or criticizing, but let’s stick to praising) another, in a sense assumes the right to do so; that is, assumes that s/he knows enough to have the right to judge.

I don’t think that’s quite fair. Mostly, when people say they like this or that, they are describing how it affected them. What’s wrong with that?

As a description of how it affected them, nothing at all. As you have pointed out often enough, appreciation of one’s work by others is an artist’s reward, second only to the work itself. But if the praise or criticism pretends to be an objective judgment, then the would-be judge had better have some credentials, or it is a bit of unconscious or conscious arrogance, and an implied ranking of the artist by an authority.

I see the argument, but it seems a little far-fetched.

To your conscious mind, yes. We suggest it is familiar enough to other levels of yourself! And how much less is anybody willing to concede to another the ability to judge your life and your being?

People judge all the time, and are judged.

Yes, and what a world of good it does them!

I always smile when you get sarcastic, don’t know why. Anyway –

You have described your life as you see it, and although you don’t quite realize it, that was a description of doing, not of being. And we would venture to guess that anybody you would ask would similarly describe what they did, not how they were.

For one thing, doing is easier to get a handle on than being. You’re asking the fish to describe the taste of water, when he’s lucky if he can describe the fishbowl!

Aren’t we willing to describe the taste of water for you? That was our point. And, as always not so much for you as through you, as example for others, because everybody is naturally going to be concerned primarily with the life that is their responsibility, and only indirectly with the life of others. What they can see done for someone else they can extrapolate for themselves.

A pitfall for biographers, I always say, is thinking they have the right and the ability to judge, just because they have a lot of facts. The portrait they wind up painting is a portrait of how those facts affected the biographer. My life of JFK whom I never met would be very different from those of others, even those who knew him well, because I would see or think I saw different things.

So, to describe you, we would do the same thing, though you don’t quite see it. We would describe you as the interaction of your 3D and non-3D selves. That unseen element is what people guess at, be they biographers, family, friends, or spectators. And we, having a ringside seat, in describing you who are willing to drive the pen, can thereby help others see their own unknown territory.

Here is how we see you being, as opposed to doing. You live a receptive life,

Stopped dead. But, try again.

If people respond, you respond to them. If you read, you respond to what you read and to what it suggests. If you

Gritting my teeth, in a way, not because of anything you’re saying, but for some reason this is hard.

The process – particularly when it involves a description of yourself – requires you to maintain a difficult and uncomfortable position, neither passively conveying nor actively shaping, neither comfortably objective nor comfortably subjective. The content has less to do with the discomfort than the position itself.

It isn’t what you do on the 3D level that expresses your life, it is what that doing does to who and what you are – and that is an on-going process. The nurse who helps a succession of patients, the lawyer who treats a succession of clients, the theoretician who examines a succession of possibilities – the list could be added to endlessly – all of you do something that is easily and inaccurately defined, but that doing is not the whole story. What you want to be, what you work at becoming, what you hope against hope is a possibility, is your realer life, percolated through that maze of doing.

See, as an abstract statement it wasn’t hard. But the concrete example is what would let people anchor it.

Oh go ahead then. I’ll let it through if I can.

If you will hold in mind any aspirations you ever had, and look at them, you will see your life differently. You wanted to become a saint, as a boy. You wanted to be a statesman, a famous author. Three easy if not altogether compatible illustrations. But you wanted other things, in different parts of your mind. Soldier and war hero, for instance. Explorers, pioneer, adventurer, a la Daniel Boone. Cowboy, like so many boys of your time. Later you found other ideals. None of this shows you, now, but they illustrate the fact that what you yourself remember of the life that shaped you isn’t much more accurate (that is, doesn’t include so much) as what others see. And of course we are leaving out what you would cross out anyway.

You, day to day, moment by moment, are an ever-moving combination of various ideals and daydreams, various responses to 3D and non-3D stimuli – that is, the books, and the thoughts and reactions the books stimulate – and a thousand unconsidered but very real everyday reactions as you go about your life.

This has gone on for nearly an hour and a half.

We won’t embarrass your further, and as usual we suggest that you take tomorrow off.

I can see I’ll need to. Very well, till next time.

 

Thursday, November 16, 2017

Gathering and manifestation

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, you will recall, 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 – and before, of course, given that I wasn’t writing theory but trying to make sense of experience – 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 – 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.

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 (an external agency that offers you a lift) as by your divine nature (an innate part of yourself that you can at any time choose to identify with). [To my surprise I find, it is neither Hindu nor Buddhist nor Sufi nor Christian: 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.]

A difficulty of scripture is that it is words rather than someone’s presence; hence the words may be taken out of context; their meaning may be seen only one way; they may be used as law rather than as assistance. But remember, everyone who reads a book is directly connected to the author, hence to everyone else who ever reads it. This is as true of scripture as of any book else.

A two-edged sword, there, isn’t it? I can see why not only literalism but sheepitude are dangers there. The sense of being one of a huge number visible and invisible, living and departed, may convey a sense of certainty, and that sense (correct enough as far as it goes) may extend to a self-righteous exclusionary cult mentality.

You know full well that you cannot have a tool sharp enough to do your work without it being sharp enough to cut the unwary. Scripture is a very powerful tool, and therefore it gets misused and injures the unwary. Is that reason to discard it, or to post warnings for the unwary to have more care?

Not that they are likely to listen, being unwary.

(1) You never know.

(2) The point is that you don’t want to deprive yourselves and others of that powerful assistance because the unwary may misuse it. And yet that is exactly what has happened among seekers who are intelligent, and independent, and sincere – often enough, desperate – yet so afraid of becoming sheep that they dare not take the food that will feed their life.

Not a new idea to me. Hard to apply, sometimes. I see it in some of my friends (or seem to). If I mention God or cite scripture, it is as if I betray that I am childish or superstitious or, let’s say, had not overcome the difficulties of my childhood. I saw that reaction in Colin Wilson, for one.

The touchstone always is a person’s sincerity and perseverance, not his conclusions or his walled-off areas. You yourself are not particularly open to scientific arguments that might tend to “prove” a meaningless or contingent universe. And, why should you be? That isn’t the “you” that it is your job and joy to express.

Yes, I know that. Obviously I am well aware of the value of Colin’s work in opening a space for seekers who are of a certain background and disposition – as I myself was.

Wouldn’t it be a reproach to a teacher if his students never went beyond his limits to their limits?

That’s a good way to think of it. I like that.

We return to the point one last time (for now!). It is time to make all this dedication and inquiry and good intent and exploration and resolve practical. That is what we have been sketching out, not the way but anyway a way. This is not the time to leave your castles in the air.

Thoreau: “If you have built your castles in the air, your work need not be lost. Now put the foundations under them.”

Exactly. So, not two worlds but one world. Not spiritual or physical, but both human and divine. Not predestined or free, but both and neither. Not stuck and lost and hopeless, only thinking one is.

As a man thinks in his heart, so he is?

That’s one sense of it, surely.

And, like Daniel Boone, never been lost in the woods but once confused for three days?

Also true.

Very reinforcing and encouraging, as usual. Our thanks, also as usual.

 

 

Wednesday, November 15, 2017

[Up again after maybe an hour and a half – not sleeping, exactly, but resting, anyway.]

Very unsatisfactory session today. because no coffee? Because no idea where it would go? But either and both these conditions have been true in the past. Stage-fright lest Bruce come in? This is the first time I am left with so unsatisfactory a feeling about it. It occurs to me, perhaps I am shirking.

Bruce, is it you, wanting to come through?

Of course.

Well, I don’t see that there’s any “of course” about it, necessarily. It has been years since we met or even talked.

Not that that makes any difference.

No, maybe not. So – how are you doing? Surely you haven’t adjusted so quickly?

Why not? I wasn’t taken by surprise, and I had a firm idea of what was to come. Any surprises would be incidental; mostly I knew.

That’s reassuring.

It is as you have been told. The closer you establish the link while you are alive, the easier it is to change your base of operations.

I don’t suppose you will have completed your past-life review.

Again, why not? It takes place in an instant – it only takes a long time to describe if you have to string words together in sequence.

I trust you are satisfied with what you saw.

Anything can be improved on – could have been improved on, I mean. But, it could have been worse, too.

You did make a difference, Bruce. You came a long way.

It is very gratifying, but the strongest gratification is in the people I loved and who loved me. You’ll find it the same. Anybody will. Expressing and experiencing PUL [pure unconditional love] is a solid achievement. Other things are well and good, but they’re more transient, more tied to the moment.

Well, you always said so. I remember you telling me of how as a boy you were walking down the road and pulled the ability to feel and threw it away, because it hurt so much. We who knew you only as an adult watched you recover and develop it. It was very interesting.

Sometimes you have to lose something and get it back, before you can appreciate it.

Many, many people benefitted from your work on yourself, Bruce, even though only at second-hand.

You’ll find it is always that way.

So now you are with Bob Monroe and Ed Wilson and Dave Wallis and Ed Carter, with Laurie Monroe and with Rita presumably. Old Home Week?

Well –

How well I remember that, Bruce! I’d ask you a question, and you would pause, take a drag on your cigarette, let the smoke out, look up and to your right, and start by saying, “Well –.”

See? Some things never change.

I don’t know, Edgar Cayce said once, “Where I am going, there are no cigarettes.”

Hasty conclusion. As to my friends, bear in mind that anybody may have mutual friends with somebody else, but the mutual friends are going to be only a small percentage of the number of friends and loved ones he has in all. Right at the moment, relatives I lost years ago are more front and center. But you know that is misleading. It isn’t quite that way, but that is one way to describe it. Anyway, the TMI portion of my life is one portion. There were many others, and what is important and productive and pleasurable and even urgent – we have urgent here too, although you might not think it – is going to change from moment to moment. Don’t forget, one realm, not two. We here and you there is a way of seeing things, but it isn’t really any more accurate than we here and you here, or we there and you there.

Any messages for your old friends?

Let’s say this is like having my manuscripts edited, all over again. I knew what I wanted to convey, and it came out in my words, but the editing process certainly changed the result.

I get that anybody you contact is going to in effect participate in editing your thoughts – if only by putting them into 3D sequential language – so we shouldn’t worry too much about consistency among various messages.

And you shouldn’t treat them as scripture, as you say. But there isn’t really any need for more at this point.

Give my regards to our friends as you encounter them, and congratulations on your new freedom.

I won’t go into it – ask your sources – but in the absence of 3D time, you are as “here” and as free as I am. But I know what you mean. Thanks.

See you another time, maybe. I’d say “Be well,” but I guess that is no longer a concern.

Finally.

I know what you mean! Okay, till another time.

Our deepest wish

[Later:] Okay, I finally got it. My reaction to being expected to post my conversation with Bruce is an example of the attitude I need to overcome.

Correct. Modesty, even humility, is a very good thing as opposed to egotism. But any good thing can be carried too far. As we said this morning, you have begun to express deeper levels of who you are. You want to, but your own self-contradiction is getting in your way. And here is the thing: No matter how much the world might want and even need a decision, no one has the right to overbear someone’s free will. In fact, it is more than a matter of right; it couldn’t be done anyway. How does one force another to make a free choice? And an unfree choice is no choice at all, so has no force.

I take it that, as usual, this is not just for my benefit.

No, not just; but it is for you to pay attention to. We most earnestly implore you to pay attention to your own soul’s longing.

Interesting. It is in this issue of appearances that I am affected by public opinion. I, who am always congratulating myself on not having to hide. Presumably if heads-me declines to take the indicated path, tails-me will, so what’s the difference?

In a way, free will is an attempt to have heads and tails both come out in the same place, which tips the balance, you see.

No, I don’t see, actually.

A long time ago down the chain of decisions that is your life, the path not taken by you – by the version you are tracing today – led to mastery. If we can encourage tails-you to take decisions that lead to the same result that that very old heads-you chose, the entire weight of your total being will be moved.

I still can’t say that I see. But I don’t need to understand it. I know what my deepest wish in this life has been, only it seemed impossible of attainment, without teacher, without school, without a discipline to lean on.

Don’t you know that people’s deepest wishes are apt to be granted? And, does it occur to you that your deepest wish is rooted in your deepest nature?

Meaning we already are what we long to be?

In a sense, yes, or why would you long for it? What would bring you to recognize it?

I get that I am depending upon the inner knowing that has always sleepwalked me when necessary.

You are not alone. You may have heard that.

I see. Well, all I know to do is what Emerson said, “Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime.”

That’s all anybody could ask, and all you or anybody could need.

And I suppose the next step is to transcribe and send all this, and stand naked.

No one could or would force you to do so. It’s up to you.

Yes. All right.

I suppose this is why you have had me reading Dion Fortune novels, which are all about people discovering their built-over selves. But this is no small thing you’re asking me to do. If I do this, I think surcease from asthma is not an unreasonable price to demand. But that isn’t the kind of payment in advance one can exact, I suppose.

[Later] If I type it up, I’m liable to send it. So – hesitating. No small thing, this; yet I suppose if I do not do it, it’s shallows and miseries for me. I just don’t know.

 

Wednesday, November 15, 2017

Bruce Moen died yesterday, apparently peacefully, after many months’ slow approach to his transition. I presume that he was as well prepared for it as anyone could be. My friends, any comment on that?

You are finding it more difficult, these conversations being neither private nor public, but a mixture of the two.

Indeed I am. I presume my difficulties are no greater than others may experience.

Each person’s experience will be slightly different from anyone else’s, as the individuals are slightly different. Each will be similar, as you all have many things in common. This is so in all aspects of life. And, you see: part private, part public.

I don’t see what is to be done about it.

Who said anything is to be done about it? Be aware of it, make the adjustments as the need for them indicates. What else could you (anyone) do?

Very well. So, today’s theme?

You must now learn to express a deeper part of yourself. This means letting it well up within you, thoroughly mixing with what it finds as it does so.

I get the image of something boiling up through a liquid, roiling and mixing as it rises, sort of tumbling things in waves.

It is a good image, conveying process, steadiness, disruption becoming transformation, injection of additional energy, plasticity of form.

I keep thinking “ice cream” but that doesn’t have any of those characteristics, a fermenting, slow-boiling process that is just out of reach.

Not everything that may be perceived or conceptualized need be named. The important point is that they be followed. Fingers pointing to the moon, not the moon itself, not even the finger itself.

Yes, I get that. Life precedes understanding.

Well, sometimes. It is a reciprocating process, sometimes one leading, sometimes the other. This is an example of the fact that the work can proceed in the absence of clear understanding or precise description.

Another image comes: river rapids. It’s all water, of the same salinity, chemical composition, etc. The difference is in what happens to any given part of the water as it is tumbled. Some gets aerated; gradually I suppose it all gets aerated.

Wild ride, sometimes; perhaps even wild for water.

If there is a theme here, I don’t see it. We have mentioned expressing a deeper part of ourselves, but the mention is all we’ve gotten to.

You are painting a self-portrait as we go along, all the better since it comes out in asides and unconscious allusions. It is well for anyone doing the work to remember it is okay to be a normal human being, in fact unavoidable. Only, normal doesn’t necessarily mean typical, and typical doesn’t necessarily mean anything at all except a vacuous abstraction.

Stirring is another image that comes to me. Stirring one element into another, producing a new homogenous liquid that is neither the one nor the other. I’d say it could be solids stirred, too, only there isn’t the sense of transformation that liquid has.

Stirring will do, so will boiling or churning. The general idea is more important than the specific clothing.

[Much later, I realized that the word I wanted was “Swirl.” That’s why the vague idea of ice cream, I think, a subconscious association of words.]

There is something I intended to ask or say, and it keeps almost appearing, then disappearing again. Presumably you know what it is.

We do because you do, on an equally non-3D level. But if you cannot receive it through your own internal channel, why would you expect to be able to receive it from an “external” channel still internally received? That may apply in cases where you have not been paying attention, but scarcely when you are.

That is a puzzling aspect of things, come to think of it. It applies to the whole process.

You must remember not to fall into the habit of thinking yourself in control of the process, merely because necessarily the material must come through your mind.

It is a temptation, that’s true. Sometimes it is obvious that I am interacting with a different intelligence; sometimes that it is me; and sometimes not clear at all. Despite that, there is the unconscious tendency to think it is or ought to be under my own control, when of course, that is the last thing I’d want, and the last thing any genuine interaction could be. But. We’re all interconnected. You and my mind are linked, or we couldn’t be having the conversation. So why wouldn’t you be able to tell me things like what it is I am forgetting?

The question expresses a certain lack of clarity, if we may say so.

Abstract reasoning is not my best thing. But I presume that you know how to bring more clarity to the question.

Not at the moment.  You’ve been at this 50 minutes and there isn’t really time for more. You do the best you can. Remember always, you don’t know, nor need to know, who will get what from any of it.

Tuesday, November 14, 2017

Last night I thought I would take a glass of wine to relax. To my great surprise, it made me dizzy when I tried to go to bed early. As dizzy as if I were drunk, dizzy as in, that whirling sickening feeling when my eyes were closed. It is sufficiently strange that I think to ask you, my friends, what is going on?

Good that you not only noticed – how could you not, though, in the circumstances – but remembered that things don’t just happen; they happen in a context.

Am I being told to stop drinking alcohol entirely? I’m not a very alcoholic person. It isn’t like I have a drink every day, or every week, or even every month.

Usually in your life (everyone’s, we mean) it is a more productive question to ask what something is in aid of, than why it happened. They may seem like two ways to say the same thing, but they aren’t.

The one is map-reading, the other is analysis of where we’ve been. Similar activities, but a different orientation.

You will remember Thoreau saying that he had discovered that one could over-do anything, even drinking water. He wasn’t blaming himself for having had too much water, obviously. He wasn’t gnashing his teeth, nor setting his teeth in grim resolution to reform. He was merely observing. He had done X; Y resulted. He would not do X again, as he didn’t want to de-tune himself.

He may have had a tendency to generalize rules for others from what was true for him.

Any observation one makes probably describes a tendency in yourself to be watched. That is, if you say it of others, look for it in yourself.

Biography as cautionary tales, eh?

Well –this could be a long discussion. Let’s at least take a step or two along the road. The fact of the matter is that mental experience is no less an education than social experience.

I take that to mean, we may learn from the story of other people’s lives in the same way we can learn from actual observation of people we interact with in the flesh.

After all, in the last analysis, all experience is mental; which means, all experience is you, reacting; which means, all internal and external events are more or less the same in their effects. Or, not quite that. More like, your real life is your choosing your attitude toward what comes at you. Therefore it follows that, to the degree you are more attuned to the inner life, the greater its influence. Not quite right, but you try, and we’ll correct if need be.

I think the nuance is, if one lives primarily “in one’s head,” like me, the majority of one’s important input will come from that world. If one is oriented primarily toward the objective, outside-world life, then that is where one will find the input. Interesting, this shouldn’t be hard to say; it is a simple concept, even an obvious one, but I am getting the sense that we still haven’t quite said it. Which tells me it isn’t as simple as I am inclined to think.

Well, the word “important,” for one thing. Is the air you breathe important? Yet it may not be noticeable. “Important” is not the same thing as “noticeable,” nor is episodic the same as habitual or even constant, but you may not know the relative importance of any of them. In fact, that is a major point in itself: As we have said in other contexts, you never have the data that would be required to judge your life. But observation need not be tied to judgment, and in fact is more likely to be accurate when it is not connected to an attempt (one-time or continuing) to judge.

Whitman said,[in Song of Myself]:

I think I could turn and live with animals,
they are so placid and self-contain’d,
I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

You see, the point that is half-eluding stating is that observation and rumination (speaking of cattle!) are key.

Are we back to Socrates, the unexamined life is not worth living?

Notice, he didn’t say, the unjudged life, the unrepented or un-rued life. Like Whitman, perhaps (though that may seem an odd pairing) he is saying, see your life as it passes; experience it. Analyze it, if that is to your taste, or don’t if it is not, but notice. But notice what your life is, not what others say it is, or what they – or you – think it ought to be.

I get it. Saying “experience your life” is not the same thing as “Go out and collect experiences.” This idea of a bucket list – a list of thing you want to have accomplished before you kick the bucket – is easily trivialized. What’s wrong with your bucket list containing only one item, if you prefer, which is, “Don’t make a bucket list”?

Probably your life will not have been wasted even if you never learn to ski, never experience life as one of the rich or one of high society or one of whatever elite impresses you. Probably you may live your life fully and successfully even if you don’t (or do) drink heavily, smoke, carouse, fast, devote yourself to acts of charity, spend your days reading or watching movies or taking long walks or playing cards with friends or strangers.

Why, to listen to you, you’d think we are here to be what we are and what we want to be.

Yes, imagine that. We, like you, are smiling. We, like you, are entirely serious. Your lives were given to you for you to express yourselves by continuous interaction between what you are and what comes to you.

I got what you meant: Our input may come from anywhere, objective or subjective; our task and our entertainment, our artistic task, is to react to it, to interact with it, to continue to work with ourselves as a sculptor works with clay, to mold it to the shape, or anyway toward the shape that pleases us.

And don’t worry too much about what you bring to yourself. A little worry, fine; not too much.

In other words, don’t over-steer.

You can second-guess yourselves right out of what you know is true and helpful.

It’s an odd feeling, this morning. I can seem to hear you saying some of these things specifically for people I don’t necessarily know who will be reading this.

That is always true, of every author and every reader, only there is no way (and no need) for those involved to be aware of it. Your 3D components are meant to relate to the world around you, which means the place and time you live in. That place and time includes records of the past and foreshadowings of the future, but it is still a definite orienting locus. So it is no surprise and no malfunction, that a writer or artist does not know who any particular work is to have special significance for, and it is equally unimportant that any particular recipient be aware of a particular connection. Nonetheless it is there, and in a very real sense.

I was told once that everyone who reads a book is directly connected to the author and thus to everyone else who ever reads it. I suppose that goes for musicians, composers, sculptors and painters, no less.

What about architects, builders, anyone who shapes the world in any way?

Meaning, the workers in factories? Farmers in their fields? Trash collectors, police, anyone?

Who do you suppose is unneeded in the world? Homo economicus [“economic man”] is only an abstraction, like homo ludens [“playing man,”] or any other abstraction. You are all there, you all interact in ways known and unknown. The man who founds a publishing company, or a distribution company, or a book store virtual or physical – do they not all impact the world around them? The people who grow fruit, or package it, or ship it, or display and sell it – are they unnecessary, supernumerary, merely because you can do without them without ceasing to live? None of these interactions need be obvious; that doesn’t make them any less important to the world. Important to the individual, important to those the individual affects.

Henry Adams certainly wasn’t thinking of me when he wrote his histories of the United States during Jefferson’s and Madison’s administrations, yet they are having their effect on me, 100 years later.

No one’s 3D component knows or can know the effect of his or her thoughts and actions 100 years hence. The fact that the interactions are invisible is not the same as saying they are non-existent.

Well, there’s our hour, but it seems a bit unshaped. Have we been merely rambling through the grass?

If the theme of “the importance of self-observation” be merely rambling though the grass, yes.

Smiling. Okay, till next time.

 

Sunday, November 12, 2017

You have been thinking about Bruce Moen.

Yes indeed. He is dying or, for all I know, may be dead already. Naturally the news brings back memories.

And, perhaps, reminds you that the difference between “being used” and “gladly participating” is mostly a matter of the attitude one takes to it?

Sure, but I gather that you’re wanting to say something on the subject, and we’re all willing to be instructed.

So much in your lives depends less upon what happens than upon what you make of it. The prime decision you make at any given moment, in fact, is usually, “How do I see this thing that just happened?” The “thing” in question may be a physical event, or a memory, or anything that presents a choice of attitude. Forgiving may be a decision, or forgiving oneself. Taking heart, or ceasing to struggle. Putting another or oneself or an abstract cause first, may be another. The permutations are endless, but remember if you can, decisions look like decisions to do or not do some action, even if the action is to harbor or reject a thought or an accustomed idea. But really, decisions are you rebalancing the ballast, adjusting course. Most such adjustments are going to be minor, of course, but not all. And some that appear minor will in fact be seen later to have led to major consequences.

Viktor Frankl again.

Yes, because his experience and his testimony (by his life, not merely by his words) has weight. Has gravitas, as you like to say. Only, don’t thereby conclude that this is necessarily a grim aspect of reality. It can be, but mostly not. Most people don’t have to spend most of their time defying fate. But even for the happiest, most tranquil life, still it remains true that every moment presents a choice of attitude. One may be miserable in a palace, or contented, or ecstatically happy, and it is the same palace.

I seem to remember that it was the emperor/philosopher Marcus Aurelius who wrote – citing the advantages of his position, all that he had been blessed with, etc. – that he had counted the number of happy days he had had in his life and they amounted to five, or seven, or some such single-digit number. His conclusion was, don’t look for happiness on this Earth.

Our conclusion would be, don’t count your felicity by tallying external circumstances, nor consider yourself a neutral observer of your life.

Do you mean “neutral,” or “helpless”?

Actually, closer to powerless-to-affect-matters, however you would phrase that. The point is, he in his philosophic attitude toward his life was deciding the nature and meaning of the ups and downs of it. He may have been thinking he was applying philosophy to make the best of a bad situation – life! – or he may, more likely, have been saying, “Don’t expect life to be smooth and easy,” without any nuance of complaint. In a way, he was saying the same thing we are, that your attitude is the thing that is realest in your life.

The specific application we wish to make of this general truth is that in choosing one’s attitude one really, not metaphorically, not theoretically, not in a  wishful-thinking way, determines what one’s life is going to be, to mean, to feel like, to – well, everything.

Poor structure there at the end, but your point comes through.

The specific illustration may be the way you and Bruce Moen met; what he had experienced before the fact; the agency of Ed Carter, etc., etc. When you look at that smooth blending of energies in a way that neither Bruce nor Ed nor you were aware of on a conscious 3D level, and when you trace backwards the events in all of your lives – and Bob Monroe’s life, and Ed Wilson’s – that were required in order to bring you together in that time and space, you can see the weaving of the web, and might easily conclude, “It was a set-up.” That is, you might draw the usual predestination argument, because you might say, “Given what you were, that’s what was going to happen.”

I’d be more inclined to say, “Given what we were, that’s what was enabled to happen if we played our parts right.”

And we would be inclined to say both, and also, more importantly, “That’s what was set up to happen, courtesy of your cooperation and the cooperation of so many others in your pasts, and it remained to be seen if you would all stay on script.” Only, improv doesn’t use scripts, it uses setups and sees what happens.

I get the strangest feeling, here. It’s that I sort of know what you’re driving at, and you are sort of saying it, but, in each case, not quite.

No, it’s slippery. Any time we attempt to bring in a fine nuance, it is actually harder than hitting you with your proverbial 2×4.

Harder because more slippery.

The recipient – you, and anyone who reads this – is likely to (mostly unconsciously) let the nuance slide into some already accustomed category. A radically new concept, you’ll have to accept or reject or at least ponder. A nuance may just keep sliding around.

So, trying again?

You choose how to receive what comes to you, easily seen when “what comes” seems to be external, less easily seen when it seems to be “merely” internal. You choose meaning. Some choose to see it as predestined, some as free-will, some as meaningless chance. Same event (physical or mental). We still haven’t quite succeeded in expressing it.

How about, “You choose viewpoint”?

Better. You have the idea now, you try to say it.

If we look back on our life, our present attitude toward it will incline us to see it in a certain light. If we change our attitude, the same look will present an entirely different profile, perhaps. More likely, many different profiles.

That’s it. It is a matter of changing perspectives by changing viewing-points. Same objective reality (so to speak) but many different scenes, different landscapes.

Parallax.

Well, a shift in viewpoint, anyway. No need to extend the metaphor. The operative point is that how you choose to see the workings of your life determines the possibilities you create for yourself. If you look at so much orchestration and consider yourself to be the acted-upon (rather than also the actor), it is easy to slip into victim mode. From victim mode, you will find evidence enough to persuade you that nothing you do will free you from the spider’s web, and that at best your meaning in your life is that you are food for the cosmic spider, so to speak. Or, if you look at it all and conclude that you are as integral a part in the play as anybody else, even if you don’t know your lines or don’t have any lines, you may easily feel included, and important (that is, not contingent or without meaning), and that attitude may lead you to either overestimate your role (inflation) or to treat your life with a little more seriousness, a little bit more self-respect.

So, Bruce and Ed Carter

• just happen to take the same program.
• They just happen to share the same two-person table at a meal.
• Ed just happens to have bought into Hampton Roads and gotten a few business cards.
• Bruce just happens to tell Ed something of what he has experienced, and
• just happens to mention that for no reason he could think of, he
• just happened to bring an article he had written about a retrieval he had done.
• Ed just happens to call me and suggest that I join them for breakfast Friday morning, as there is a potential author he’d like me to meet.

And so on and so forth, and none of us having any idea what we were helping to orchestrate.

And this could be sketched out for all of you – for anybody and everybody – for your entire lives. Life is always orchestration and the dance. That isn’t the meaning (pretending for the moment that there is a “the” meaning) of your lives. That is the improv, but what of your training and rehearsals, and your learning about your characters? What of the living-out of your life for yourself as well as for the improv in general? To weigh life fairly, you need keep all these factors in mind, if you can. It isn’t easy; it’s a lot of geese to juggle. That’s one reason why people often choose one or another position and disregard the rest.