All is well, even when it isn’t good

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

One of the first thing the guys upstairs told Rita and me, nearly two dozen years ago, is that “All is well. All is always well.”

For some people, that’s more than they can swallow. Wars, injustice, environmental catastrophe – even lost elections – convince them that all is far from well. But that is a fundamental misunderstanding. To say “All is well” is not a value judgment about any or all features of a given thing being examined. It is to say, the system is functioning as designed.

There is a big difference between saying “all is well” and saying “all is good.” And it isn’t merely a difference in degree; it is a difference in kind.

Tthe creation story in the book of Genesis has God creating the world in stages, and at each stage observing that it was good. Everything created was good, until –.

Enter the story of the eating of the apple. Adam and Eve ate from the fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil, and ever after were unable to escape from the perception of duality. From that point, everything became good or bad to them.

A friend of mine, a former Catholic priest fluent in Hebrew, told me, in answer to my question, that to translate the tree as “the tree of the perception of things as good and evil” was a permissible translation, and that’s what I think the scripture meant. Adam and Eve (that is, humanity) fell into an inability to see things as a unity, and became able to see things only as duality.

Of course, once you are stuck seeing things as good or evil, you are into judging. So we say, “That’s bad,” and we may mean an anything from “I don’t like it” to “This is evil.”  But evil itself, like good itself, is a value judgment, a partial view.

That habit of judging tempts us to think we’re smarter than the universe, more moral than God.  Not very good thinking.

Of course, mostly we can’t help ourselves. But after we have forgotten, and gone into fear or judgment or whatever, it is worthwhile to come back to a saner state of mind, remembering that we don’t have to wait for everything to be good, for all to be well.

 

Ouspensky on our lives in time

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

My friend Charles Sides writes me: “I thought the following quotations might be of interest to you as you are going through your journals.”

They are, and i think they will be of interest to many. From A Secret History of Consciousness:

P 48 Ouspensky realized that at any time our picture of ourselves is limited by the moment in which we see it, but that the ‘real’ individual is one’s life extended through time. Like Bergson, Ouspensky was aware that all we can study at any separate moment is a ‘snapshot’ of a person’s life, never the whole of it, which, like the rest of the world, is a constant process. And, of course, each snapshot is different. From birth to death, we are in a condition of constant change.

 

Pp 48-9 The key to higher consciousness, Ouspensky understood, lay in a changed perception of time, in an ability to escape the limitations of the present moment and see deeper into the past and future. Just as what is ‘behind’ us or ‘before’ us is still ‘there’ although we no longer occupy its space, in his heightened state Ouspensky could see that the past, which we believe to be obliterated, still exists, and that the future, which in our ‘normal’ state we believe has not yet happened, is already taking place. We are so used to the idea of ‘now’ being the only time we can be aware of that the idea that the past and the future are in some way ‘with us’ seems absurd.

The real crisis of our time

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Just “coincidentally,” I came across this conversation from 18 years ago, and it seems worth sharing.

Friday, February 17, 2006

It is 8 a.m., nearly, the start of a cloud-heavy morning. If you’re ready to answer [my brother] Paul’s question – what is the real challenge of our time, what is the equivalent of the Civil War to us – I’m ready to hear it.

You have heard it many times, each time in a slightly different context. You have expressed it many times, enough that it is just another of your beliefs. What is your Iona book about, after all?

Pardon us while we circle around the subject. You know how a dog has to circle before it can lie down and sleep, it is a reassuring habit.

Look at what the crisis can’t be. That will add conviction.

Can it be political? Economic? Ideological? You have already fought those battles, and everyone is sick of them. Can it be religious? Same answer. People have struggled over these questions, and some always will struggle. But they do not define your time.

In the 1500s and 1600s, religious questions – the relation of religious organization to state power and to society and to categories of everyday thought. Once the state monopoly of Catholic thought was broken up, has anyone been proposing to return to it? No, the West moved on to other questions.

In the 1700s and 1800s – again, staying with the West, because that is where the world’s power was – the destruction of the medieval viewpoint and the birth of the industrial viewpoint came in a long series of political and then nationalistic struggles. You have experienced plenty of social upheavals since – but how many fundamentally transforming revolutions? American, French, Russian, in ascending order of fundamental transformation – and of violence. And, the nations expressed themselves. Are there new nations coming forth? Welsh devolution, Scot devolution, the emergence of French Canada, are mere afterthoughts with sometimes slightly comic overtones, in the way that minor actors playing major roles sometimes are.

In the 1900s, ideology. Fascism, Communism, Nazism, and many minor variants not noted. In your day you see the stragglers, your shrill right-wing and left-wing know-it-all podium pounders. Do you imagine that they are the wave of the future rather than the remnants of the shipwrecked past?

What we are saying is that the energy has gone out of all these things. With all the ill-will in the world, with all the cock-sure certainty, no one is going to be another Napoleon riding on revolutionary fervor or nationalism. There are moments of intensity, but it is a fire of straw, quickly flaring up, quickly burning out.

So do not look in old directions for the meaning of your time, or the fundamental challenge. These are shadow puppets that you are projecting against the wall – and scaring yourselves with! And as to partisan politics, we smile. In fact we laugh. The only thing that partisan politics does is to keep people occupied and out of trouble. It keeps lawyers and ad men and activists happy and occupied; it channels vast amounts of otherwise troublesome public emotion; it expresses but does not create public sentiment. This, except very occasionally.

You are fond of quoting Lincoln’s statement about the purpose and nature of politics, which is to create an effect and then fight that effect. Those who understand this have their fingers on the mainspring of things; those who don’t, should ponder the statement. There is a world of practical wisdom there.

But, we say to you – you having asked – politics is not the mover of anything, it is the result. If one of the major parties were to decide to instigate compulsory vegetarianism, say, how far do you think it would get? But if a movement for compulsory vegetarianism were to spring up, how long do you think it would be before one of the parties discovered that compulsory vegetarianism was deeply entwined in its principles? Try not to confuse cause and effect, or perhaps we should say locomotive and caboose.

Neither are the physical and organizational challenges of your day the central crisis of your time. The challenges are very real, and there are a lot of them – and they are all coming to a head just at about the same time. Isn’t that an interesting coincidence?

We smile.

Nothing of your old ways is sustainable in the spirit in which it operates. Does that not tell you something? Your economies, your environment, your animal companions, your social balance – none of it. You are ringed by the desperately poor economically – and by the desperately poor spiritually and mentally. Is it not obvious?

Hopefully this brief circuit is enough to move you from your accustomed thought. If it is not, then either your accustomed thoughts are closer to ours than the average, or we are meeting no response with you. Here is our thesis, and those for whom it is dead should leave it: Not in politics nor ideology nor religious forms, nor social upheaval is your salvation. Not in technology or scientific investigation or social organization and reorganization is your way out. Not in –

Well, no point in continuing; you get the idea or you don’t.

The crisis in your time is the greatest to be faced in recorded history. (Note the adjective.) it needs to be, to provide the energy to propel you – propel us – to the next stage in human development. And here is where we burst categories. That is what a transformative crisis does – it bursts categories. From the far side of the crisis there is no going back, because everything is different. You are different.

We stress this – and we went on that little survey ramble – because it is easier to say something new than to have it be heard as something new. Without new ears to hear, without (in other words) your being at a new place mentally and spiritually, the news will be filtered through your old categories and will seem embarrassingly vapid, or obviously ridiculous, or – favorite thing of the academic habit of mind – “nothing but” that and that comprising element. Why do you think Jesus kept saying “let those of you who have ears, hear.” He was saying “these words will mean one thing to many, but something much more to those who are in a place to really hear them.” So, here. The ears you bring to the message determine what you hear. It can be no other way.

And this, incidentally, explains or should explain why so much that is precious and even vital has not been absorbed. It isn’t that the masters ever wanted to keep it secret! They wanted to give it away freely, but could find only a few ears able and ready to hear. Think of Jesus weeping over Jerusalem, whose forthcoming destruction must have been plain to him. “How many times did I try to give you the key,” he said, “and yet you wouldn’t and couldn’t hear me.” And – just for an aside to an aside – we deliberately used “wouldn’t” and “couldn’t” to remind you that Jesus wasn’t speaking English! Revere the spirit, not the form.

What can the defining crisis of your time be but a spiritual one? And yet, to say “spiritual” is to mislead. Again, the crisis will burst categories.

In your time the destruction of the materialist illusion proceeds from all sides. It loses its scientific underpinning. It fails the practical test of providing meaning. It offers no hope of a better future. Each of these sentences is an essay in itself, but for the moment we will not stop to provide them. Thought and meditation will provide them for you.

The death of materialism as an operating principle leaves your time as a loss. The poor cannot look to achieving your American standard of living. Americans living it – and Europeans – know that it isn’t an answer to meaning anyway. And the hypertrophy of concentration of wealth demonstrates in any case that a society’s accumulation of wealth is not necessarily to the benefit of any but a predatory few. (And this is how it always has been in uncontrolled society. Remind us sometime to speak of the models that have succeeded.)

You may have guessed that we had a reason for discussing the Civil War. It is the previous step taken. And Abraham Lincoln played a major role in the history – and future – of the world, as is recognized already but only in a restricted context. As matters play out, his ultimate significance will be seen more clearly.

So many essays and side-trails, and we cannot pause for them!

The struggle in your time is between inclusion and exclusion. Here you will find the key to every specific, for every problem in your time will naturally align itself in the magnetic field of the defining polarity. And so you see that Lincoln’s role was to make a major inclusion – bringing the inclusion of another race into the shared idea that was America. In other words from that time it was no more a dream of one race – even a race of many nations but all European “whites” – but now a totally unprecedented expansion to be more than one race. And once black, then there was no logical barrier to yellow, red, and brown. Of course you are still in the initial stage of working all this out – of living the expanded ideal – but the decision was made, and ratified in blood and military success, and there was no going back for the human race.

Yes, for the human race. The American experiment was unique, and might have been held to one race, and would have failed and could not have been re-created. It was to preserve this over-archingly important pattern that states rights was sacrificed, and much more would cheerfully have been thrown onto the fire from this side as best we could.

The struggle is between two ways of seeing things – inclusive and exclusive; unitary and divided; and this means, ultimately, it is between two forces, Love (attraction and interpenetration) and Fear (repulsion and attempted separation.)

Now, don’t say “oh, that’s only Course in Miracles” or “that’s only” anything! You cannot hear without new ears to hear with. But once you have new ears, of course you will find that it has all been said – but you will understand it perhaps for the first time.

Love versus Fear. Faith versus fear. Courage, joy, life – versus fear.

This is the crisis of your time. But you may ask – how is this a crisis? What is the practical working-out of this?

Those of you who are willing to live in love will find your way by always seeking to include, rather than drawing logical or other distinctions and drawing lines saying “us” versus “them.” Now of course this immediately brings in a paradox, in that we’re saying in effect, “the world must not be divided, so don’t be like those who divide things.” This too can be transcended by realizing that everything may be seen as part of a polarity rather than as opposition. If you are a part of a polarity, you are a necessary part; something had to be playing that part. So it takes you beyond the blaming and the excluding. Hitler, Stalin, played their part. They were not arbitrary occurrences – nothing in life is arbitrary, despite appearances. They were, you might say, the personification of social forces.

You will live in love, and will continuously draw nearer to all people, to all animals and birds and fishes, to all things created, to all things not physically manifest. You will rejoice in what is, and will not fear the future, even as you work to affect that future in what you do and – more vitally – in what you are.

Or – you will express the other side of the polarity and will live in fear, and soon in hatred and despair. You will divide, and divide, and divide, until you whittle away your standing-place and are alone in a howling wilderness.

You will contribute toward the creation of a new consciousness – for that and nothing less is what is at issue here – or you will lose yourself in a wilderness of repelling mirrors behind which (you will fear) are unnamed horrors.

This is the challenge of your times, nothing less. Do you think, now, that environmental cleanup or political triumph or any other issue is at the same level?

And, Frank, do you see why we did not begin this last night or yesterday? This has taken an hour and a quarter and you are already tired at 9:15! How far would we have gotten yesterday afternoon?

Yes, well, as always, my thanks, and presumably the thanks of those with ears to hear. I am tired. I hope I will be able to decipher to transcribe.

 

Tides and choices

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Wednesday, July 3, 2024

5:40 a.m. All right, let’s go. How is it that I can want to work and at the same time absolutely not want to work? Conflict of strands, sure, but does that really explain anything? After discussing this problem yesterday in two different small ILC groups, something seems to have freed up, and I don’t understand why that should be either, though I suppose it may be that talking about it brought unconscious factors closer to consciousness. In any case, your advice? Commentary? Assistance?

We gave you the answer in a nutshell in yesterday’s drumming. Quote that.

[“What is the best thig we could be doing now? What obstacles are in the way?”

[The hardest thing to remember can be that All Is Well while you are experiencing things you don’t like. Live in trust but live what you experience, not judging prematurely; not judging at all, if you can do that.

[Everything in life is tides and choices. You are responsible only for the choices; life provides the tides. Emotions are the laminal layer between them, as we have said.

[In short, trust and relax and become ever more aware of your motivations and processes. All not only will be well, all always was and always is well.

[That’s all you really need, trust.]

Tides and choices, you see. And the longer you ponder this, the clearer the situation will become. You are all balanced between outer forces that seem to come at you regardless, and inner forces that can and must respond (if only by default) to the challenge and opportunity of each new moment. Conceptually it isn’t difficult, nor complicated.

But the living-out of the situation is!

It can be. And what have we been doing, all these years, but giving you strategies and tips and conceptualizations designed to help you along the way? Living in faith, believing that All Is Well, identifying yourself as a 3D/non-3D being, reassuring you that you are never alone despite appearances – it is all to remind you that there is never reason to despair, and at the same time there is always work to do, opportunities and challenges to be met.

What is “life more abundantly” if it is not greater opportunity to live? What is higher or deeper consciousness if it is not awareness that goes ever deeper than appearances? What is reassurance that you are here to choose, if not an affirmation that your life matters, that no life can be inconsequential to itself? What is our perpetual reminder that you never have the data to properly judge tour own life, let alone that of others, if it does not tie back to the theme of living in faith that all is well?

Or, you can prefer to believe that things are as they seem, even though you know better. You can believe that you are a “useless passion,” with Sartre – but you know better! Even pretending that you have no meaningful choice is of course a choice. So why not choose what is hopeful and life-affirming, rather than what leads you to despair and ennui? And ennui, remember, is one of the seven deadly errors.

Your energy is still low; there is no need to prolong this session  which still has to be typed into the computer. We have said what can be said at the moment.

I expected more and expected a full session, but this helps. Thanks as always.

 

Communities and units

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

On June 18, 2024, Jane Peranteau, Christine Sampson, Ruth Shilling, and I heard from the guys upstairs in the course of a small ILC group meeting. Their theme: How a few people working together, forming a temporary group mind, in effect create a new level of organization with its own peculiar possibilities, rather like what we are as individuals in bodies. Something to think about.

TGU (through Frank):

You as one individual in one body are a community that functions as a unit. But you [referring to the four of us functioning together at the moment] can form another layer of organization.

As above, so below – the same sense. What you’re accustomed calling a “group mind” is the equivalent of an individual made of communities. It’s temporary, but nonetheless, it’s an individual.

After all, you’re temporary, too, and if you don’t believe us, wait until you die, and then we’ll tell you.

Everything that could describe that larger sense, that larger group mind, could contradict itself if you looked at it from a different point of view – which is what’s happening. So you can look at it and say, “Well, it used to be four different units, now it’s one unit: That’s change.” Or you could say, “They’re the same strands, containing all of them, but now they’re working together: That’s continuity.” Both of those are true.

You could say, “There is conflict among them. There is cooperation among them. There is indifference among them. There is unity.” You see. Reality doesn’t contradict itself, but it contains all contradictions. So, all of those things can be equally true, and it depends upon your ability to either keep your definitions loose or change them.

If you can change your point of view from here to here to here, then you can sort of see it in the round. But the difficulty with one point of view is it gives you perspective, and makes that perspective look real or more definite, more factual, than it is. It’s only a way of seeing things. Okay.

You’re all doing your best, and you’re all working hard to get the communication. That’s why you’ve come as far as you have so far, But to expect to come to a common understanding of it… You can come to a common understanding if you keep it imprecise enough, if you keep it more of a gestalt than a definition. You’ll get a general idea of it.

But to go beyond that… Look, there’s nothing wrong with what you’re trying to do. We’re just saying some ways work easier than other ones.

We will also say, though, that sometimes dead ends are very productive. So we would never say, “That’s a dead end. Don’t do it.” We’ll just say, “Well, that’s a dead end. Do it, if you want to do it.” Because, you know, who knows? It may turn out to be very productive.

 

Turns out, it’s a good thing, maybe

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Drama and life

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Friday, June 21, 2024

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

Isn’t it obvious?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They’re both real.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that’s enough for the moment.

This is very good. Thanks.