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Friday, September 6, 2024.

I have been keeping this journal 58 years today.

4:25 a.m. Jon, your fourth point amounts to saying that the 3D world’s history both is and is not real, depending on how you view things, just like the rest of 3D life.

So what do you need me for?

Very funny. I think that was an accurate summary, but it doesn’t give us the ramifications you apparently see. I mean, if what I just said it true, it is tautology.

I think what I am getting at is that you shouldn’t say, “Oh, it is only somewhat real, so who cares?” To do that would be to disrespect the realness by overweighting the somewhat-ness.

All I can say is that I have always been consumed by an interest in history. Long before I began to really understand what I was reading, I was reading it for the excitement and intrinsic interest of it. It has always fascinated me. That doesn’t mean I was as interested in one thing as another, and it certainly doesn’t mean one historian’s writing was as clear or evocative as another’s, but I have never had an instant when I felt about it as I feel of most subjects, which is a mild interest, easily satisfied. I can never get enough of reading history and particularly biography. And I am still continually revising my views as I learn more.

So you might ask yourself, Why? You do have other interests, and a few of them are pretty deep – psychology, certainly – but they are more spasmodic than constant. Why history?

I take it for granted that this is illustration of something broader than my own fascinating life.

Why should your biography be less interesting, less instructive to others, than you have found the biographies of uncounted others? But yes, it is to serve a wider point. Your life many serve as an example of something universally true but not widely recognized.

What history is to you, innumerable other subjects are to others. To find a lifelong fascination in the study of chemistry or the practice of gardening or the honing of an athletic or mental skill is the same in one vital aspect, which is: It is a person taking the 3D world seriously. Even the study and practice of the occult is taking 3D seriously.

As so often, a simple statement but it seems new to me.

It’s just that you haven’t thought to look at it that way. Emerson was a minister before he became a writer and lecturer. All the Transcendental Idealists had their vision squarely in the non-3D world, you could say, but they were doing so from a very firm 3D platform, taken for granted, but as essential as gravity.

It is only the 3D/non-3D framework you are in – we are in – that gives anybody a place to stand. It, and therefore we, are somewhat real, but that’s a long way from not real, perhaps even farther than from fully real.

So we should be careful not to let our thoughts “think it away.”

Think it away, if you want to – but then you’re still going to get hungry, or tired, or sick, or elated, or depressed. To really see the 3D world as illusion, you would have to play pretend, because you always have your body to remind you, “Hey, are you listening? You’re still here.”

It is a balance, and everybody strikes the balance differently. On one end, people try to think the world away; on the other end, they accept the world as being as it appears. As usual, everybody is somewhat right, and most people are in the middle between the extremes of the polarity.

Now, this has ramifications that may not be immediately obvious. If you will think of this without forgetting other things you know, such as All Is One, and No Accidents, you will see that everything in your life contributes to your views, to your experiences, to your potential.

Get in a bad mood? It’s going to affect your view of the world, for however long it lasts. That’s true of a good mood, too.

Get sick? Endure a lasting condition? Suffer a temporary or permanent disability? Enjoy a particular gift of exuberant vitality? It all affects how you see the world.

Does your character (put it) match your circumstances only badly? Or, particularly well? You won’t be able to avoid drawing conclusions, even behind your own back.

So the result is a world filled with people drawing different conclusions at different times, and there’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, saying “drawing conclusions” is too strong; it is more like being forced to conclusions. Not only is everybody distinct, everybody differs from one time to another, and frequently doesn’t notice any fluctuation.

So does this point amount to saying, our life interests help remind us to take the world seriously?

Ideally it would say, take the 3D/non-3D world seriously, but also remember that there is a deeper reality beyond it, and you belong to that reality too, of course.

Of course?

You can’t avoid living in all dimensions. You may not realize you’re doing it, but you do.

I take it that the reason for saying it is to clarify the relations between 3D/non-3D on one hand, and the deeper reality.

Yes. People have a tendency to divide the world between “physical” and “spiritual,” as if they were different things. Your guys used 3D and non-3D as a way of keeping the two ends of the polarity from flying apart in your mind, but now we need to go the next step and remind ourselves that 3D and non-3D are part of the same system – the concept of non-3D would make no sense without reference to 3D – and so it becomes 3D/non-3D versus the wider, deeper, reality..

For which we will need to come up with a name?

People have been naming it for a long time. Names often are more nuisance than assistance, as you know. For the moment, “deeper reality” will do.

There was more in this point than I had thought.

It would have been a waste of time, if there weren’t!

True.

And there is one thing more to say. The history means something. It is a record of where you all have been. I don’t mean recorded history; that is always going to be distorted because from one point of view (or even from several; it will never be from all). I mean, the history itself is where you come from. It is what you are that is unknown to yourself. If you were a tree, it would be your roots. As such, it is full of instructive clues.

I almost get it: You are connecting it with psychoanalysis.

I am comparing studying your history to studying your emotional reaction to a given moment. If your emotion is the interface between inner and outer, well, it was so before, too. You could look at history as a frozen picture of past reactions, and that will help you triangulate hidden parts of yourself, if you wish it to.

And that’s enough of this point.

All I can say is what I always say: Thanks, and looing forward to more.

 

Thursday, September 5, 2024

12:50 p.m. Jon’s third point is that life is actually a dream, without weight or substance. But if you can’t sleep or can’t breathe or can’t shut off your endlessly revolving mind, if you are in physical or emotional pain – it sure seems real enough. And I know you know what I mean, Jon.

Of course. Doesn’t everyone? In fact, you will remember I would sometimes protest what I saw as your tendency to believe things were well when they clearly weren’t. but even then, I knew what you meant, of course. But that contradiction is itself a part of life, and you can’t talk it away. Life hurts, your guys told us many times. They knew it. But it sure didn’t feel like they did.

So what is your new perspective?

It isn’t so much of a shift in perspective – a change of ideas or of understandings – as it is a falling-away of certain obstacles.

You can see better now.

You could almost say that now I can see the some things I thought I saw weren’t real. Just as your guys were saying, but the world was contradicting. I’m saying, I was obstructed by phantoms, by illusions. And so are you, and so is everybody. The specifics of the illusions vary by the individual, but in general nobody sees absolutely clearly. At best you see pretty clearly and you rely on faith for the rest. But 3D doesn’t really provide an opportunity for you to live behind the scenery rather than in the midst of the movie.

For instance, gravity’s effects are real, regardless if your understanding of gravity is entirely wrong; that is, even if what appears as gravity is actually a misunderstood something else, the way phlogiston wasn’t real but could nonetheless be used conceptually. Anything in your life that your body insists is real, is real as far as you are concerned until you realize better.

Everything in our 3D life is “somewhat real.”

Your 3D life, and therefore your non-3D life, remember. But yes, real in its own terms, absolutely not real in a wider perspective.

Yet what good does this do if your kidneys fail, or you can’t breathe, or your very bones are trying to kill you? What is the relevance if you are in such acute mental and emotional pain that every day is a struggle and every night a temptation to end it all? As you usually say, how is knowing this practical?

I suppose it is helpful to believe, even if we can’t yet know, that all is well and all that. I know it has helped me.

You once sent a message to your 10-year-old self saying, “Don’t give up, it’ll work out.” Your non-3D selves are giving people that message all the time. Some can hear it, some can’t. Of those who hear, some can believe it, some can’t. Of those who can believe it, some can live it, some can’t. It’s one of those situations where a decision to believe something that may seem “too good to be true” changes your life.

I’m getting a sense of where you may be going with this, but it’s not clear yet.

As long as you believe that the world you live in is real (meaning, is as you think it is, the center of life), you have no chance of penetrating to a deeper layer of reality that may free you.

You see? Your growth, your freedom, depends upon an act of will, which depends upon your ability to believe in the grounds of that act. As long as you think you are in an escape-proof prison, you aren’t going to be setting out on a scenic hike somewhere. For some people, escape means they first have to conceive of themselves as escaping. (No longer an escape-proof prison, you see, so offering chances that can be seized.) But if a need to escape is not part of your fantasy, still you may not know how to use the freedom that you sense you have. Everybody’s path is different.

But it is crucial to realize that our lives are at most only somewhat real, so we can believe in our possibilities.

You could put it that way. Only don’t let yourself think, in the back of your mind, that believing that the world isn’t real in the way that it appears to be is a parlor-trick, a sort of trying to fool yourself. It isn’t that it is true because useful; it is useful because true.

And that’s all we need to say, to give people the clue.

Well, I’m tired anyway, so I’m just as happy to make it a short session. Thanks, Jon.

 

Wednesday, September 4, 2024

6:15 a.m. All right, Jon, point two? Consciousness not what we think it is?

You will notice that even a few hours, or a day or two, spent with a question in the back of your mind, and it clarifies somewhat. That is, if you don’t dwell on it, talk to yourself about it, reason about it. If you just let it be, it changes, just as an author brooding over a plotting problem.

C.S. Forester said plots feel forced if they are developed too consciously. He said a Hollywood script conference is just that kind of forcing process, which explains a lot of Hollywood movies!

Hold the image of – well, of holding an image. It will connect many things.

I’m getting the idea. You will be aware that our small group discussed this point yesterday. Should I include what I got during the drumming?

That’s up to you. It isn’t essential.

Let’s skip it, then. Your move.

• The vast majority – the overwhelming majority – of potential input to the brain is filtered out, necessarily, to avoid overwhelm.
• Those filters have their own internal logic. They don’t filter out reality at random.
• That logic, like all logic, may be followed back to its primary tenets. They are a logic-tree, with one initial decision (or rather, one initial definer of decisions) that multiplies endlessly, specific case by specific case.
• Each of the branching points in the logical chain of filters results from a combination of factors that vary by individual. They combine the “external” and internal situational motivation.
• Therefore, each individual has the potential ability to modify his or her own filters, which will modify the world as experienced.

I realize that this is not immediately clear, but let’s look at it.

Think of it this way. The universal consciousness – you could say, the universe as it is conscious of itself – is at one level. It is a vast sea, without shore or islands or interruption of any kind. To change analogy, it is a universal light.

“And the darkness comprehendeth it not.” That is, it is unshadowed and unequalled. (At least, that’s what I suppose that phrase means.)

Well, universal uninterrupted consciousness. Now here we need a visual image similar to the one of the water level being modulated between different bodies of water by locks, because I want to show individual consciousness as separated from what has no separation.

High tide, low tide, something like that? Connected sometimes, not other times?

No, not subject to that kind of periodicity. Try again.

I know what you want, but it’s physically impossible. In effect, holes in the water where the water layer is less than the rest of it. Or – what about whirlpools?

Yes, let’s go with that. A good analogy in several ways: Whirlpools are temporary, dynamic structures that could never be frozen in place.

So let us envision a 3D/non-3D being as a whirlpool in a vast ocean. For the moment – but not forever – we will ignore the fact that there are uncounted other whirlpools. For the moment we will consider any one whirlpool in the vast unending sea.

You may (and I want you to) envision a whirlpool as a cone inserted into the water, a funnel-shape, broad at the top narrowing to a center at a lower level. The funnel has several salient characteristics:

• It is dynamic. It can only exist as a shaped motion. It is in no way a solid object.
• It is variable. Its shape will alter as various forces interact, but though it may bulge or distort, still it is fundamentally a cone-shaped pattern.
• It is a gradient. That is, if you look at it in relation to the surface, some parts are higher than others, wider than others. This is within the regularity of the structure, but, as I say, variable and continually distorted by various forces.
• It is conceptually separable, yet essentially inseparable, a productive contradiction in terms. It is individual yet only temporarily so, and even while it exists, it is only conceptually separate; it is still the same old sea, in one specific pattern.
• And of course, it is temporary, as whirlpools form and cease to hold their form. Does a whirlpool “die” when its energy subsides and it becomes again an indistinguishable part of the ocean? Its substance was never different, only the shape it was swept into.

Now, combine the two analogies – that of the filter and that of the whirlpool – and although you will not come up with an image, you may be able to grope toward what can’t be said but can only be intuited. (If intuited, then it can be said, perhaps, but what is said will likely be meaningless or at best opaque to those who didn’t get it intuitively. This however is no reason not to try if you wish.)

That’s a more inconclusive conclusion than I expected!

We don’t want a conclusion, we want an active chewing. And again, the best way to proceed, probably, is to hold this in mind, but in the back of your mind, observing insights and ideas as they bubble up, but resisting any temptation to force conclusions.

I am finding it impossible to associate the two images.

Good. But don’t give up. Righteous persistence brings reward, you used to quote.

Yes, and haven’t though of that quote in a long time. Well, we can righteously persist, but maybe better if we get just a hint.

Think of moving up and down the sides of the whirlpool. Think of picking and choosing. Think of bringing your filters to your conscious awareness.

In fact, think of the difference between consciousness per se and awareness. Consider your sense of the two things carefully. You are not aware of your internal functions such as digestion or circulation of blood or respiration unless something goes wrong, perhaps. But your body is conscious of all of it, all the time. So what is the relationship between your individual awareness and the universal consciousness in which you exist? What is the relationship between your share of the consciousness and the sea in which you exist?

I know you would rather have answers than questions, but answers deter growth, and questions stimulate it.

Well, a lot to think about here. And it came quickly, 45 minutes or so.  Thanks, and looking forward to more.

 

Tuesday, September 3, 2024

5 a.m. Jon, I’d like to try to continue what you began yesterday. I know our chances of really clearing it up are slim.

Slim but not negligible. The times, they are a-changing, and what couldn’t be easily grasped before are more easily grasped now. But of course it won’t be easy.

How about it we look at the points you made in order. First was, Life really is different; it isn’t what it seems to be. I take it this is because our 3D environment warps our perceptions.

But you see, even there – that sentence takes for granted the existence of a 3D environment; it makes the world seem real, solid, in a way that it isn’t, and unless people can get beyond that idea – and stay beyond it while thinking this through – they can’t really get the changed perception that will make sense of this. If they can’t eventually see that difference, it will remain all words, all theory, that they may assent to, but that will not change their lives. And of course, I say “they” but I mean “you,” too, and I would have meant, “me.” It isn’t a matter of brainpower; it is openness to an insight.

This first point is the entryway to everything that follows. Although you are holding a pen, writing in a book supported by a desk, etc., etc., all that is real only in its own terms, the way a stage-set in a movie is real in appearance though it is only a wall and some paint. Within the context of the movie, the set is real, and allows its interaction to proceed. But it is a background artificially created to support something that cannot be understood as a movie if you remain within the context of the movie.

But this is all words, and unless you get an insight into the reality they are pointing to, they’re just words. Memorizing them won’t help, and in fact may make things worse (in that the memorization concretizes the finger rather than the idea the finger is pointing to).

Try to let it come real to you, whoever reads this: Real life is garbed in 3D, but is deeper and realer than 3D. and that doesn’t mean that only non-3D is real. Within this context, non-3D is inextricably connected to the concept of 3D: They’re at the same level of reality that we need to penetrate beyond.

I have been quietly awed for years by our audacity here. Either we are damned fools or we are something else – pioneers, I guess – but either way we are saying our whole civilization is wrong: its philistines, its sophisticates, its conventionally pious, its mystics, philosophers, you name it. And common sense says, How can that be? I’ve been over this before, many times: How can it be that everybody is out of step but my Johnny? How much vastly more likely that we are just fooling ourselves, or anyway making some basic error.

And you know the answer to that doubt: New times provide new opportunities, new ways to penetrate deeper into life. Besides, it’s mostly a matter of mistranslation. People have gotten here before, but,

a) They didn’t have all the help available now,

b) They have been misunderstood, and what we know of as their teachings are their teachings as interpreted by those who misunderstood them.

By (a) I mean a couple of things. First, physical metaphors like computers and animation didn’t exist to change their sensory habits, so it was a longer stretch for them to make than it would be today. Second, everybody stands on the backs of what has been said, thought, understood, previously. It is an advantage, in some ways, to see how many people went down so many blind alleys. It potentially increases your sophistication and analysis.

But surely they had teachers we don’t know of, traditions and understandings we don’t.

Oh yes, I’m not saying we have progressed without also regressing. But it is helpful – can be helpful – to recognize at a glance errors that enticed others.

Aha, I just got something that ought to have been obvious before. The guys have said that in forming a new worldview, we will find ourselves incorporating some things that our present worldview regards as superstition, because we will understand its true nature. That applies to religious and metaphysical insights too, I see. In fact, the older and more esoteric they are, the more valuable they may prove to be.

As inspiration, yes. Not as something to be adopted blindly or wholeheartedly. You will find many things in the Vedas that you will understand from your new view that your present civilization had dismissed; but you will not be able to merely accept the Vedas as they were understood in their heyday. That would be an archaism, not a new appreciation.

We are really going to have to hammer on this one point, because if you don’t get this, you don’t get any of it: Life is different from what it is going to seem to be. If you think you can just add this on to your ordinary perception of life, fine, but you won’t change your life, you will blow beautiful soap-bubbles and admire their momentary beauty.

Matter/energy is an appearance, not an ultimate reality. Difference in time (past, present, future) is an appearance (a way of experiencing 3D), not an ultimate reality. Therefore you don’t know where or what you are. No one does. You have relatively firm ideas about your place in the movie, but as long as you believe the movie is “real life,” you aren’t getting beyond appearances to reality.

Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Most people go through 3D life believing in it. After all, it wouldn’t be must of a movie if you couldn’t lose yourself in it. But if you want to go deeper – if something within you says you have to go deeper – the first real step has to be to recognize what is movie-set and what is beyond movie-set.

We have to start by recognizing that we don’t know anything.

Easy to say, but not quite right. It isn’t that you don’t know anything. It is closer to say, you can’t trust anything your senses tell you, and therefore you can’t trust the towers of logic you (and mostly others) have built on what the senses say. If you are going to go deeper, you have to recognize that you are still a beginner, not an expert, and “beginner’s mind” means openness to the new, if it means anything. Yet this “openness to the new” is the very hardest thing to maintain. It feels like, “I’ve wasted my time up to now,” or it feels like “This is just know-it-all preaching.” True critical thinking based in true openness to the new is rare, and essential. Even in those who can do it, it comes and goes.

And in its absence, all this exploration is just flapping our jaws.

It isn’t quite that grim. Integrity, perseverance, intent.

I’m not sure if this clarified anything, but I’d say next time we ought to proceed to your second item.

Little by little gets it done.

Thanks again, and till next time.

 

Monday, September 2, 2024

4:25 a.m. Okay, Jon, ready if you are. Looking back, I see on Friday we left off with the question of who is holding the scales, and for what. Referring to our lives as conduits of vast impersonal forces. What is it all about in its own terms?

Always keep in mind, we are talking in circles here. We go over the same thing time after time, but every time is just a little bit different, and the differences add up.

Was that you, or me?

Maybe you haven’t quite made the link. Nothing harmed. Try again.

Okay. I do “hear” your voice though, not just the words or the meanings.

That should give you confidence. The thing we’re always looking at is, what is the meaning of life, and what is the meaning of one’s own life, and what is the extent and range of the life. That is, is life an in-and-out or is it reincarnation, etc.

Now, the strings metaphor served us well to get us out of the conventional reincarnation model of one life moving to the next. But now let’s go beyond it, remembering that this world is all mind-stuff. By the way, that means the non-3D as well as the 3D. That ought to be obvious, since we have agreed that they interpenetrate, and therefore are more poles to a magnet than different things. Not that they’re “things” in any case.

Since everything is mind-stuff, with the 3D being a more concrete form of dream, it may be more productive to see it as an eternal swirling than as units. And this means that each life is a swirl, an energy-pattern, almost you might say an abstraction, rather than a “thing” even if you define “thing” as energy, or soul, or avatar or whatever.

And that means, even the idea of past lives still being alive in their own present is a metaphor. It isn’t really that way because reality isn’t that way; it is what reality can look like when you retain certain incorrect assumptions in the back of your mind.

This is one reason why you can’t really reconcile a present moment that is separated from all other present moments, all of them alive. This concept contains hidden assumptions that mislead.

And it’s nearly impossible to express.

Well, you’re feeling it, intuiting it, because we are linked. That is probably the best anybody can do, is intuit, because the words deaden and mislead and separate.

But we can try.

That’s what we are doing, but I’m saying, we can’t really succeed at it. The best we can do is turn people’s minds to where maybe they can intuit.

I get that it’s a matter of clearing away wrong concepts.

Yes, except you could very nearly say they’re all wrong concepts. Not just the ones we’re talking about, but everything. That’s why the Tao is described in terms of what it isn’t. The master knew it couldn’t be described; the best he could do is name some mistaken ideas and say, “Nope, not that either.”

I get that the root of the difficulty is that we can’t really get out of our own way. We try to imagine different terrain but we’re always relating it to what our senses tell us, or what we think we know, or what we have been told that great teachers said.

Well, chew on this, see how far you get:

1. There is no matter, no energy, no past or future.
2. Consciousness is not what it seems to be; almost the opposite.
3. Nothing has weight or substance. There is nothing solid nor fluid nor gaseous nor plasmic in life except conceptually.
4. History is real and also non-existent. I don’t mean recorded history, I mean what actually happened, recorded or remembered or not.
5. There is no place to stand and no need for one.
6. There is no plural, not really, only provisionally. Therefore, no judge, no jury, no defendant, no prosecutor. Also no rewards or penalties.
7. And yet, in effect, there are.

That should be enough to start with.

Shall we go through them in order?

We pretty much have to, but bear in mind, all it will do is add to confusion – until, for some, a sudden leap to new assumptions that may straighten it out.

I am aware that the entire process proceeds as if we were plural, etc. I get that the best we can do is follow your ideas without arguing, until they suddenly make sense or never do.

Argument may be how some people bring themselves to the point where intuition kicks in. You can’t tell. In any case, they’ll have their own non-3D nature prompting them.

So, I’ve numbered them, replacing the bullets.

1. Life, reality, is really different from what it appears to be. We aren’t just playing with words. No matter, no energy. (E=mc², remember; they are the same thing.) No past, no future, only “now.” But “now” does not imply a time and a place, it means closer to a being suspended in mid-air.
2. Consciousness proceeds by isolating you from almost all input. It is why you feel yourself separate from “others.” It is why you feel the “material world” as external to you, and the “spiritual world” as separate from the rest of life. Higher, greater, consciousness is by way of opening the valves that produced consciousness in the first place by closing off the overwhelming input that would make it not possible to function as 3D humans.
3. There just isn’t anything substantial. “Life is but a dream,” and if it is sometimes a nightmare, it is because you have to take it seriously.
4. What happened led to where you are, but it wasn’t any more substantial than you are. How could it be? So it is real, it is tangible, is a filament to the web; but it is not any more real than the rocks and clouds and ideas and passions around you and within you.
5. Again, the word is “suspended.” If you look at life as if it were as it seems, you will see “here” and “there”; “now” and “then”; “I” and “other.” Very persuasive and entirely untrue except in appearance.
6. “All is one.” That’s what it means. In the absence of plurality, all the relationships between items, between qualities, between individuals, may be seen as what they are: provisional at best, and mostly illusion.
7. And yet, in effect, the world is as you experience it, which is one reason why it is so hard to get beyond the illusion.

That’s quite a lot, packed tight.

It has to be packed as tight as possible, because it is hard for people to keep long strings in mind at the same time. But a master would put all this in many fewer words. The disadvantage of that is that it makes it harder for people to climb aboard the train.

Bronson Alcott’s Orphic Sayings. They turned out to have quite a bit of meaning, but they were so compressed – took so much for granted, or anyway were so elliptical – that I can see why they didn’t have the impact they should have had.

He did the best he could. That’s all anybody can do.

Well, thanks for all this. It’ll take some chewing.

 

Friday, August 30, 2024

5:40 a.m. Jon, let’s talk. We were in the middle of something and now I don’t remember what it was, but perhaps you do. I suppose we could talk about how our unrequited desires and aspirations are part of our lives.

That’s a good topic, but it isn’t quite that they are part of your lives, nor even why they are part of your lives. It is more like how they are part of your lives. And here as well.

Always interesting to get a sort of overviewing sense of an answer, just by the way you reframe the question.

Asking the right question in the right way is itself the answer, because the asking wasn’t the beginning but the end of the process. It doesn’t look that way when you are functioning in the body because you can only process sequential logic –

That isn’t right, but I don’t know how to fix it.

It’s easy enough, we just try again. The way to say it is that 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.

The result is that your mental and emotional life is chaotic (seen from outside the 3D condition) and if you didn’t have guidance from your non-3D anchor, you would never be able to navigate. You would scarcely be able to swim!

I get the sense that you are connecting “mental and emotional” in a way that the language isn’t quite expressing.

As you told your friends, language follows experience before it can be reshaped so as to be able to express the experience. Yes, current ideas of “mental” and “emotional” are radically insufficient and therefore misleading. But until someone invents a way to describe the swirling sea of interacting influences that is your moment-by-moment reality, it will be difficult to help you keep in mind that at no time are we describing a steady platform.

If we were able to create the necessary verbal shortcuts to do that, you could more easily see that the interaction within you of 3D and non-3D functioning both confuses and often resolves issues. So, by the time you get the question right, you are ready to hear the answer. This may not be clear to everybody, but it will be to some, anyway.

But to get to your question: Your unfulfilled and even your  unfulfillable aspirations, longings, painful deprivations, and so forth, are all a part of your mental makeup when you die, and so remain with you. We were calling it “unfinished business” and that was right in a way, wrong in a way.

It is a simple readjustment, but some will find it impossible to accept: Your frustrations and achievements etc. are as much a part of you as your aspirations and values. Can you see that they are the same thing? It may help if you remember that language always freezes separations, making them seem more real than they are. Just as your mental life isn’t as stable as you think, your categories of thought aren’t as real or defined as you think they are. This is not because you aren’t thinking right, it is because you are functioning in 3D conditions, and that is a skill that some master better than others do.

I once asked the guys about when somebody would realize something (he having passed over, I think; I can’t remember the specifics, only the resolution) and they said, “How soon after you die do you suppose you will approve of slavery?” I took that to mean that what we think and feel are part of us, and it isn’t a matter of learning that we were wrong (or right) after we die.

The important part of that is the realizing that who you are, what you believe, how you feel, what you struggle with, how you have failed in your own eyes – all of it – is part of your experience and therefore by definition can’t be wrong.

A Hitler or a Stalin or a hatchet-murderer is not wrong?

This is going to take some careful considering. Look at it this way, if you came into 3D and became a hatchet-murderer, there are many ways it could happen. Some of these ways are 3D-you following the currents you swim in. in law they might defend your actions as being of “diminished responsibility.” Other ways might involve a conscious choice of evil. Others might be a momentary loss of control, in the way somebody might shoot someone they loved merely because they had a gun handy at a moment of overmastering passion. We aren’t concerned here with the sociology of it, nor the legal or civil aspects. We are looking at how you cannot judge someone else’s actions accurately if you don’t know the swirl of motivations and temptations and confusions that resulted in the action.

The guys have always said, “You never have the data.”

You couldn’t. there’s too much of it and its too evanescent.

Somebody said, “To understand everything would be to forgive everything.”

He had the right idea, as long as you remember that he could know that but probably couldn’t live it, except maybe in fortunate moments.

To return to your specific question, there isn’t anything wrong with dying with your life aspirations unfulfilled. What is real is the aspiration, not the 3D result. Do you see that?

I think you are saying, we turn ourselves into conduits of the vast impersonal forces by our decisions including which aspirations to hold, and this is our achievement.

Let’s say it is your lasting influence. Nothing is forever except life itself, but while your influence lasts, you will have put your tiny weight on one side or another of various scales.

I get the idea, but – what scales? Who is holding them? For what?

Another time.

Thanks again.

 

Saturday, August 24, 2024

8:20 a.m. All right, Jon. It is as if I needed a couple of days off before I could face resuming. True?

It can take some time to absorb new information or new ways of seeing things. I wouldn’t worry about it – and I would ask myself, why do I feel I have to be doing more, sooner, all the time.

That has always been my life – together with not doing it.

That’s not true. You alternate, and you know you alternate. So why pretend you don’t remember?

Hmm. It is always hard for me to come up with a credible judgment on what I do or why or how. It never seems very obvious.

Let’s look at the reasons why. That is what we’re always doing here, by the way, looking at the reasons why. It is true that sometimes you may not know what happened, usually because you aren’t taking enough things into context, but usually it isn’t what you did, or didn’t do, but why. That’s where the insights are.

But isn’t there a danger of – and I hear your answer. To put it down: The danger is in falling for false reasons, and the answer is, that’s what your therapist is there for, to stop you from getting away with it.

Correct. To some extent. We lie to ourselves, but even more, we are lied to, you could say. Our take on our own history seems to tell us one story, and it is plausible enough that maybe we don’t go looking deeper.

So the therapist says, “Don’t you believe it. It isn’t that simple.”

Perhaps a little more gently than that. So why do you feel you should be doing more, better, sooner, longer?

I feel like I’m the guy who buried his one talent rather than putting it to use. [From the parable Jesus told.]

That feeling is more like a symptom than a cause. Why do you feel that way?

I’m saying, the evidence is there. I had so much I could have done, and I did so little, and that so poorly.

You have a high opinion of your talents.

I do. And so did you.

But you aren’t looking at the whole picture, or rather, you aren’t looking at it all at once. Yes, many talents, but at the same time, severe inhibitions and a strongly negative self-image. You can’t get a fair picture by looking at only one side of the scales.

That’s very true. So when I look at one side I say, “What wasted opportunities.” And when I look at the other, I say, “What I could have been, could have done, if not for the severe crippling I received.”

Only, you don’t believe in accidents, or chance.

No. So the inhibitions were part of the package. Well, I guess I have known that, from time to time. I have conceived of myself as a Mustang. Potential Mustang, anyway.

Just for clarity when others see this, if they do, you might explain that.

Officer-potential recruits were sometimes retained in the ranks so that when they were finally made officers, they would know first-hand life in the other ranks.

Remember your political experience.

I’m beginning to sense the deeper currents that have flowed within me, often stymying me.

Externally. Not internally. Politics:

I had just enough of it to see what a powerful drug it can be. You put yourself above the mass, and the mass takes you at your evaluation. Arrogance, ignorance, then self-interest, and a short move to corruption of one kind or another. I had only a taste, but I’m pretty good at deducing from limited experience.

And you think that’s an accident?

No, of course not. Everything I ever did was a peephole into another kind of life that some others lived.

Could there be a connection between the fact that you got fast glimpses that were all you needed and the fact that you repeatedly quit and went on to something else?

For the first time, I associate that with my father’s career, though there is a difference. Dad kept having entrée into different worlds and either passing them by or staying for a while and then quitting. So, in a way he could be said to have bene tasting, too. Only, he knew who he was.

And you didn’t?

Let me say it more carefully. Dad fit into an image: farm boy, small town, Italian, all that, plus of course public school education, radio, TV culture, magazines, books. What I mean is, he had many sides (I suppose most people do), but he fit. He could fit his differences into a model he knew.

I on the other hand didn’t fit. Never did, anywhere. Even in businesses I helped create, even doing things I do very well, even among people with similar preoccupations. My role seems to be to not fit, to be an outlier.

And in some moods, you’re proud of it and in other moods you are wistful, or lonely.

True enough.

So if you come into 3D to be an outlier in 20^th– and 21^st-century America, how have you failed to do that?

I don’t know that I’ve ever said I failed to do it. I have mostly failed to record it.

In print.

Well, in print, yes, but any way you want to cut it. Because a life of being an outsider doesn’t amount to much externally. And the difference hurts.

That’s the most honest thing you’ve said so far.

Yes. I felt that.

Now – did you in fact bury your one talent while the others were investing theirs and multiplying them? Or did you pour your life into experiencing and learning and sometimes teaching by example rather than any more direct method? Most people leave little or no trace on the world around them. You have already left more than most. But who ever fails to live the life their talents provided? It can’t be judged externally. You know that. The guys told you that, years ago and you accepted it. What you aren’t taking into account is that your own assessment of your own life is still judging by externals. Even though you are taking motivation and internal constraints into account, it is still external in that it says, “What external signs that I have lived have I left strewn around?” The proper answer, in a way, is, “Who cares?” Even your influence over others, good or bad, is still mostly external. It does not deal with the only thing you came to do, which is to create yourself further.

But there is a circularity to this argument. If I strongly feel that I should have done more, should still do more, isn’t that feeling a part of who I am? Isn’t it as legitimate a part of me as anything else?

This leads to a longer story, and we can go into it when you are fresh, if you want to. The long and the short of it is that, yes, the unfulfilled things in your life are a legitimate part of the total, but that shouldn’t be taken to mean, “Everything ought to work out even. You should die with no regrets and nothing left on your To-Do list.” A longer subject, and we ought to go into it, whenever you feel like it.

Well, all I can say is, even if I have to keep giving this a breathing spell, it is very stimulating, and helpful. Till next time.