Sunday, January 7, 2024

Let’s begin with a thought I had early yesterday and did not transcribe from my journal.

9:15 a.m. Well, I have escorted Herbert Hoover to the end of his presidential term, with, as usual, a great deal of sympathy. When I was a young man, I absorbed the liberal and academic party line about Roosevelt, and it took a long time to realize that as usual there was much to be said for the other side of every controversy. It is fascinating now to see so plainly how the personal and the “external” interact unpredictably, so that it appears that little things have large consequences, and small chances produce great detours. It all looks so different now, after decades of reading various conflicting accounts, and absorbing the point of view of so many biographies and being tutored by so many sources: Jung and TGU and Seth not least. “Go, my son, and see with how little wisdom the world is governed.” It’s still the same.

Then came Saturday’s session, transcribed and put onto the blog. This morning, after salivating over the forthcoming reopening of UVA’s Alderman Library tomorrow, I noted that it’s already like the old days (that is, a few years ago!) in that I have a list of books and call letters and am ready to go.

5:30 a.m. For the first time it occurred to me that maybe I had been thinking about [my prospective] “Thoreau and Mr. Emerson” from the wrong end, all these decades. No wonder I couldn’t get anywhere with it. I don’t need to read everything they wrote, or understand Transcendentalism even abstractly, let alone how they understood it. I certainly don’t need to go about it in an academic manner, with apparatus of scholarship I scarcely know how to employ. It should be personal. What they say to me, here, now. What we know and can guess about how they affected each other. Their impact on people like Joseph, factual or not. That could perhaps be accomplished. Swell, one more not-yet-deceased project.

[5:50 a.m.] I was downstairs reading The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, which I am determined to finish this time, and I got a thought about my reading of Seth on the one hand, and history on the other. (Session 818, 2-6-1978.) Seth referred to his “constant state of growth, expansion, and development.” That struck something in me. I remember the guys telling Rita she would never be bored unless she wanted to be, that there is always more to learn. I think this requires an extensive quotation.

[Quotes from between pages 87 and 90:]

“Much of this is difficult to explain, again, for information and knowledge is constantly transformed – almost completely reborn, so to speak, through characteristics that are inherently a part of thought itself. Knowledge is changed automatically through the auspices of each consciousness who perceives it. It is magnified and yet refined. It is a constant language, yet one that transforms itself…. You do not understand or perceive the ways in which your reality contributes to the foundation of the mass-world reality that you experience. Unconsciously, each individual participates in forming that world.”

Really too much to quote but right on point:

• “While our meetings take place in your time, and in the physical space of your house, say, the primary encounter must be a subjective inner one, an interaction of consciousness that is thus physically experienced.”
• “Portions of your consciousness are alive in mine.”
• “You are carried above the land of your usual perception so that portions of you glimpse subjective states.”
• “Your intents and concerns, your interests, your needs and desires, your characteristics and abilities, directly influence our material, for they lead you to it to begin with.”
• “If you can, try to sense this greater context in which you have your being. Your rewards will be astonishing. The emotional realization is what is important, of course, not simply an intellectual acceptances of the idea.”

I perhaps got carried away with the Seth quotations, but the point is that I am realizing that absorbing any branch of knowledge, or absorbing any mixture of first- and second-hand experience, is an active creation, a “doing” that may show no external signs and who cares. Worthwhile and satisfying in itself.

 

Jane Peranteau passed this on to me, and I pass it on to you as well.

[From Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment, Vol. 1, by Jane Roberts, Notes, Session 891.] Seth:

“I wish you a MERRY NEW YEAR, into which I hope you manage to insert a touch of light-heartedness now and then.

“Now if I were you, making a list of resolutions, my list would include feelings and attitudes. Things to do are well and good—very good indeed—but the feelings and attitudes are at least as important.

“I would not presume to make a list of resolutions for you. But in an imaginative endeavor, this is what I pretend I would list if I were you. Though this is a new year, there is nothing really new about the list.

“One: I will approve of myself, my characteristics, my abilities, my likes and dislikes, my inclinations and disinclinations, realizing that these form my unique individuality. They are given me for a reason.

“Two: I will approve of and rejoice in my accomplishments, and I will be as vigorous in listing these—as RIGOROUS in remembering them—as I have ever been in remembering and enumerating my failures or lacks of accomplishment.

“Three: I will remember the creative framework of existence in which I have my being. Therefore the possibilities, potentials, seeming miracles, and joyful spontaneity of Framework 2 will be in my mind, so that the doors to creative living are open.

“Four: I will realize that the future is a probability. In terms of ordinary experience, nothing exists there yet. It is virgin territory, planted by my feelings and thoughts in the present. Therefore I will plant accomplishments and successes, and I will do this by remembering that nothing can exist in the future THAT I DO NOT WANT TO BE THERE.”

(Words that were originally underlined are capitalized)

 

I suppose it is inevitable that as we age, we look back and say, “I wasted so much time! I might have done this, or that, or the other.” I am sure we have all missed opportunities. Who uses all his talents? Who takes advantage of  everything life offers? I don’t see how else it could be.

But maybe this lament belongs among what we might call theoretical regrets. Because nobody can take advantage of every opportunity, how can it be a tragedy or even a misfortune that we miss some? Maybe this is why people say, “All paths are good.”  On the one hand, every step we take forecloses other opportunities. On the other hand, foreclosing (or overlooking, or disdaining) an opportunity opens up new possibilities. Two ways of saying the same thing: There isn’t any one path. There are many paths, including the paths one makes oneself by wandering off on one’s own, and they’re all valid.

That said, I do have my own list of regrets, of course. Don’t we all? High on my list is, “Why didn’t I do the reading and studying that would have given me a comprehensive, first-hand knowledge and understanding of Carl Jung’s writings?”

I know the answer, of course. At least, I think I do. If I had received an academic understanding of Jungian psychology, or even if I had done enough reading early on to really understand what he was saying, I wouldn’t be where I am now, reading his work through the filter of 20-plus years of exposition from the guys upstairs. I would have been tempted to explain away their explanations as “nothing but” what I had read in Jung. Even as it was, I had read enough Jung to wonder. Had I made a through study of his work, it would have been much harder.

Still, as I read him now, in my old age, I see so much that it would have been helpful to have known long ago. While I am propounding a useless “if only,” I might as well concatenate them. So, if only I had:

• made a thorough study of Jung immediately after coming across Modern Man in Search of a Soul in 1970;
• acquired the theoretical background in psychology to feel at home discussing it;
• begun talking to the guys when I was in my twenties, instead of my forties;
• spoken to Jung long before I did, and had the background to ask more penetrating questions;
• begun working with Rita Warren or some equivalent (supposing there was some equivalent) 20 or even 30 years earlier;
• used those connections and that education and those sessions to produce a conspectus on reality as it looks when one looks at the description given by the guys when combined with a Jungian perspective.

I didn’t do any of those things. Instead, I stumbled around in the dark, feeling my way toward an unknown goal, the way we do, and it all worked out, as I imagine it generally does.

But what a lot of work there is left for the future! We can only hope that others will take up the task as they do their own stumbling toward unknown goals.

 

I woke up between 3:30 and 4 because I could not breathe, and while I was using the nebulizer, my thoughts went here and there, and perhaps what I came up with will be of interest.
I thought, how did I come to live in such deep faith? I don’t know how, I don’t know why, but I find it striking, and I cannot believe I am wrong in this faith.
I was re-reading Teresa Crater’s Under the Stone Paw (a novel I edited and helped publish when I was still at Hampton Roads), and came to Dr. Abernathy telling Anne LeClair that the sun affects our consciousness. I jumped to thoughts about people’s fears of sunspots, solar flares, CME’s, etc. I don’t share those fears. I believe that the sun manifests life in the same way everything else does. Call it God, call it All That Is, call it whatever you are comfortable calling it. Where is room for fear of mishaps?
The test, I suppose, comes when you can’t breathe, can’t assume that the next easy breath will come on schedule. You have to get that next breath; you do what you need to, what you can do, but you know that ultimately it is not in your power to command, any more than you can keep the mysterious processes of the body functioning. We are always dependent upon life to maintain itself. And when we die, well, is that somehow a tragedy, an accident, an avoidable outcome?
Whatever produced in me this deep faith in life (regardless of the evidence; sometimes in the teeth of the evidence), I am grateful for it. It makes everything easier, even possible. The other day I noted that my good friend Jon seems to have moved beyond anger at various things he cannot command. I was very glad to see that. After all, what good does anger do us? It’s like fear, “the little death, the mind killer,” to quote Dune.
A while later, I thought, we are groups of strands, each with its own imperatives and its own will. That puts a different light on the saying that “It is better to be whole than good.” That saying recognizes that it is better to realize that we are many things, than to believe that we are one thing with which we can identify.
We aren’t simple, good, unitary, because we can’t be. We can only live our multiple, good-and-bad-mixed community lives as best we can, choosing as we go which strands we want to encourage and assist. And since this is always going to be sort of a messy process, the more faith you can bring to it, the better. The joker in the deck, though, is that trust in life doesn’t seem to come on command. You have to live it in faith before you can live it from experience.
Worth the effort of enticing it to come live with you, though!

In working on my novel, I came to a place where the non-3D group is explaining something to the 3D group that is practicing functioning as a group mind, and a thought came to me that doesn’t (or at least doesn’t yet) have its place in the novel, but seems worth thinking about.
• We are composed of many individual strands, each of which may be its own lifetime currently in process.
• Every life has unfinished business.
• Quite possibly we carry our unfinished business from one lifetime into the here-and-now of another lifetime, perhaps neither we nor it knowing it.
• We all know how unslaked emotions demand attention, like little kids saying, “Deal with me!”
• What if our strands experience the equivalent of sibling rivalry? What if they experience each other (and, by extension, us) as interference?
We have been thinking in terms of helping other lives, but what if, in fact, the primary beneficiary of such assistance is we ourselves? If there is any truth in this, perhaps it would be worth our time to treat each of our different moods as individuals and offer to help, as we would if we saw a 3D person in pain.
Calling Max Goodwin! “How can I help?”