Rings and threads

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

About the photo: Originally the guys said spools instead of rings. This was to show that various “threads” (traits) were shared by different containers, and that, from TGU’s point of view, it was as accurate to say that a given thread connected various spools as vice-versa. Of course, each spool contained not two or three but hundreds of threads, maybe millions. This was merely intended to give the general idea.

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

6:30 AM. Open for business – if somewhat later than usual. Our spiritual heredity?

The temptation here will be to retreat into cliché or evasive generality, which we suggest is what Rita Warren experienced in questioning people in the black box. But they had only a short time to concentrate; it is natural.

They had about as long as I have in any given day. It’s true, they didn’t come to it day after day. Miss Rita, I get the impression that you are waiting in the wings to help, this heavily raining morning. [Pause] Or maybe not. Not sure I can really feel your presence. Well, anyway —

There is a logic behind your existence in any particular body at any particular time-and-place. Now listen carefully to that statement. The logic changes according to the time, according to the place. That’s why you change locations or change occupations or change pre-occupations. You live many lives within any given life – as child, as adolescent, as young relatively irresponsible adult, as functioning social unit primarily driven by the needs and motivations of the larger society around you, as older person with a longer perspective, as – perhaps, elder, either known for wisdom or ignored as irrelevant. All this is familiar to you from a social viewpoint. Now think of it from an internal or spiritual viewpoint.

You live many lives within each life. Why is that? How is that?

Of course you will see that part of the answer is that your person-group expresses different constituent parts in different circumstances – including the chronologically-biologically determined circumstances you think of as different stages of life. It should be easily comprehensible that throughout your lifetime you are necessarily different persons. That is, different aspects manifest in turn, and not necessarily once and then not again. You have heard of terms like “arrested development” or “reversion to an earlier form” but may not have considered them in this context.

How different is it when you consider your larger existence? Suppose yourself a being with many threads each of which, or each combination of which, expresses at different times in different circumstances, and how different is that from your present circumstances? As above, so below.

Okay, big jump but I see it. Our common thread here is not so much the body (except at any given moment) but the mind, the consciousness, that somehow has both the moment-to-moment consciousness (and ignorance) and the overview of the life. And you’re saying, in a larger self we are beings – well, you say it.

Nice jump. Yes. As above, so below, because each level is the same scheme, the same pattern, as the level below or above, and so understanding one’s own level is the way to understand all other levels. And after all, how else could you (could the ancients, could the wisdom-keepers) obtain first-hand knowledge of other levels of being? (This doesn’t mean that everything that is experienced is understood in the same way; it does mean, though, that it is the same thing being experienced. Thus, with sufficient insight, one can examine any testimony, correct for its bias, and see the same thing as it appeared from a different viewpoint.)

Bias – I well remember Rita explaining to me – means not unfair prejudice, but inherent inclination. One’s bias in any given matter is how one is most inclined to see it, the easy road, the conclusion one would tend to jump to as opposed to the conclusion one must be prodded toward.

And notice, in mid-explanation you might be said to have “forgotten” whether it was “you” or “us” speaking.

I did notice. The veil keeps getting thinner, doesn’t it?

Or, your awareness of a process that functions continually is becoming more acute.

Well, that’s good. And to continue? (Or do you expect me to do it?)

Yes, a joke, but less of a joke than you might think. As it is not your definition of “you” who speaks, so it is not necessarily your definition of “you” who reads, or hears. Our awareness is your awareness, it’s just that the identity is not obvious to you in your daily lives except occasionally – until you really get it, at which time you truly realize that it has been all along as seemed too good to be true – you are traveling gods in disguise, as Henry Thoreau once put it. Yet it is also a most matter-of-fact piece of news, just as he was very matter-of-fact.

Now, since you have jumped to the way that makes more sense of things, let us look at it a little closely. Again, the easiest way, the richest way, the most fully textured way that will include emotion as well as logic, is to examine this in split-focus, looking carefully at the life you know well, in order to intuit by extrapolation the life you do not know so well.

In any given life, there are stages of growth, times of decay, sudden discontinuities, bewildering crosscurrents. There are strong influences from others, pleasant or unpleasant or alternatingly pleasant and unpleasant or combined intense pleasant-unpleasant flavors. You have intellectual “abstract” interests, artistic “aesthetic” appreciations, strong and weak emotions, satisfactions that are not easily classified. You learn skills, you endure hardships, you – in short – experience life.

Now, what happens during this experiencing of life? One scheme – our scheme – consists of person-groups cohabiting a bodily locus and so experiencing a day-by-day identification with each other, strong or weak or unwilling or unaware, just as you do with external society and for the same reason, because the nature of “inside” and “outside” is the same.

So, at one stage of life any given combination of traits may be – activated, let’s call it. Evoked. Exercised. Experienced. Relied upon. Developed. At another stage, another combination takes the stage (so to speak) and this combination may have little or no or much or conceivably even almost entire continuity with the previous combination, hence “you” change to meet new circumstances. If you were describing just the same process, but were considering it in terms of “reincarnation” as it is called, can you see that it’s the same process?

If you as an “individual” should really be seen as a person-group consisting of many strands, can you see that your particular person-group may be seen as one strand in a many-lived person-group? And so up and down the scale?

We’ll hammer that home a little, though it will be evident to some.

Your “higher self” and your mind are not exactly the same thing seen in different contexts. Your mind, your mental world, is non-physical, yes. But just because your higher self is also non-physical does not mean it is the same as your mind, any more than the fact that your physical body is physical means is indistinguishable from a chicken.

I get what you’re saying; it is conceptually clear to me, but just like your rings-and-threads analogy, I can see that more words are only going to confuse the issue if we can’t pass on the understanding, right-brain to right-brain.

So send out the picture we had you paint for Rita at that time. It will serve as well to illustrate the same concept at a higher level as it did at a lower level.

That’s an interesting thought. And the fact that the same sketch serves for both reinforces your point.

Yes. Care to provide the commentary?

Any advantage to my doing it, as opposed to your doing it?

Communication with the other side need not be expensive and difficult now – our new fiber-optic system combined with satellite uplinks puts it a range of everybody’s budget. Now it’s a matter of your ingrained attitudes being updated to adjust to the new reality.

All right. I’ll provide the commentary here when I find the JPEG to send with this.

 

Keep the channel open

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Courtesy of a comment by Irene Kendig, this video of Meryl Streep reading a poem to the accompaniment of famous cellist Yo-Yo Ma.

Six minutes. Do watch and listen to the words. This is one way to describe our life, and the meaning of our lives.

https://vimeo.com/35600074?ref=fb-share&1&fbclid=IwAR17I-cPFPSqoSTl72-ibaYCFeDrC1McYsLQ19NLEtX5y2iynhY6NQ8k4jMhttps://vimeo.com/35600074?ref=fb-share&1&fbclid=IwAR17I-cPFPSqoSTl72-ibaYCFeDrC1McYsLQ19NLEtX5y2iynhY6NQ8k4jM

 

Egypt: My real journey

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Not that what I have been writing hasn’t been real, but it has been, necessarily, superficial. Travelogue is all well and good, but it is, as Thoreau once wrote about any biographical facts, like a journal of the winds that blew while we were here. Our real lives are internal, reflected in the external, not the other way around.

As my body was transporting me from place to place, from event to event, I was not necessarily as interested in where I was as in how I was. I went to Egypt not in search of photographic subjects nor interesting information, but in search of me.

Now, you might well ask, how could any particular geography affect one’s internal affairs? Landscape, scenery, even the people you meet and interact with – how can any of that touch you at your core? Yes, you might have interesting experiences, but you might have had interesting experiences at home. Why should the foreignness of a foreign land have value for you, beyond satisfying your curiosity?

It isn’t that easy to explain. Here’s my best attempt so far.

Our society thinks that time works like this: a present moment that is real, surrounded by past moments which were real but have ceased to exist, and future moments that will be real, but don’t exist yet. In effect, the modern mind thinks, we leap from a present moment that is crumbling beneath our feet to another present moment that isn’t yet there.

That would be some acrobatics! But there’s another way to look at it that makes more sense to me.

Look at it this way: What if every moment of time exists and continues to exist whether we have “come to it” yet or not, whether we have “moved on from it” or not? In other words, what if moments of time are more like our everyday experience of geography than like this hairbreadth-harry idea of the present moment being the only thing that’s real? In geography we would never dream of thinking that the place we just left had ceased to exist, and the place we were moving toward hadn’t yet been created, even though, so to speak, the railroad tracks were headed there.

If this idea is new to you, it may seem fanciful. But play with it, and perhaps you will find that it makes sense of many of the conundrums of life. Either way of seeing the world shows us the present moment as our point of application; common sense does the same. That’s our experience of life, after all. But only the view that says that past and future moments exist and continue to exist makes sense of well-reported time-slip phenomena.

But this isn’t the place to try to “prove” what can’t be proved. You are either going to consider it as reasonable or reject it. (Either way, your reaction will probably have more to do with your emotional makeup than with intellectual process.) The point here is that if all moments of space-time exist and do not cease to exist, then, since we cannot revisit past times at will, perhaps we can connect by revisiting the places associated with those times. And that’s what I went to Egypt to try to do.

Of course, any such attempt comes with potential pitfalls rooted in our psychology. It is so easy to fool ourselves! It is so easy to (on the one hand) persuade ourselves that something is so because we want it to be so; thus we come home convinced we were King Tut, or Nefertiti. It is equally easy (on the proverbial other hand) to persuade ourselves that nothing is happening, because it is important to some part of our psychology that nothing could be happening. Thus we come home triumphantly convinced that nothing happened because we are way too rational to believe in such nonsense.

You can fool yourself in either direction, with too much credulity or with too much skepticism. The trick is to be open to experience without structuring it, thus avoiding both pitfalls. How I set out to do that, and with what results, will constitute another post.

 

 

The Great Pyramid by night

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

 

As I said in an earlier post, on Tuesday night we 15 people had the entire pyramid to ourselves from 7 to 9 p.m. What a privilege!

(photo by Ruth Shilling)

I was watching my energy level carefully, and didn’t know if I had enough to visit all three chambers (what they call The Pit, the Queen’s Chamber, and the King’s Chamber), so I opted to visit only the latter. Those of you who are familiar with the internal layout of the pyramid will recognize this shot of the Grand Gallery. All of it isn’t all this high: Parts of it require that you advance bent forward. It’s no place for the claustrophobic.

A long hard climb, sometimes under a very low ceiling

 

But when you have mounted so many steps, and have made your way through a couple of quite constricted passages, when you enter, you see only an empty room, other than what they call a sarcophagus, and modern lighting and ventilation equipment. Like this:

What they call The King’s Chamber, empty to the eye

Similarly, you look into the sarcophagus, which is big enough to lie down in, and there is nothing to be seen. But is what can be seen by the eye all there is? I don’t think so!

What they call the Sarcophagus, empty to the eye.

So, if what you see is not what you get, what’s going on?

I’m pretty sure we are seeing the empty stage after the show has closed. That is, I am convinced that the King’s Chamber was a place of psychic initiation, which of course would involve the creation and maintenance of astral thought forms. So what the priests and the candidates saw (with their non-physical knowing, so to speak) was not cold stone forming an empty cube, but – whatever the priests created for those rituals. Naturally, the thought-forms would have been deconstructed at the end of each ceremony. We can hardly expect to see the scene as it presented itself to priests and candidates: We were never supposed to.

We interlopers from the 21st century stood or sat or lay in what seemed an empty chamber, and for quite a while, by prearrangement, we lay in total darkness and silence, and what we made of it was probably different for every person there. An experience to remember, in any case.

 

Bob Friedman and the endless chain

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

The February Issue of the Echo World is on the stands, so I can post my tribute to Bob Friedman which appears there. I was glad to see tributes there by publishers Michael Langevin and Sofia Axelsson, as well, and author P.M.H. Atwater. (To read the issue, go to http://theechoworld.com/Magazine/magazine.html.)

Bob Friedman and the endless chain

By Frank DeMarco

Our lives are tied to others by invisible connections. Who we are, what we think and feel, what we do – it all affects those around us. Some of these connections (with family, friends, associates, casual acquaintances) we see. But our influence upon others doesn’t stop there, not by a long chalk. Bob Friedman’s life is a good example of how our lives are part of an endless chain of influence.

Bob Friedman’s life (Feb. 15, 1942 to Jan. 7, 2019) affected uncounted and uncountable others. He co-founded The Donning Company in 1974, co-founded Hampton Roads Publishing Company in 1989, and founded Rainbow Ridge Books by himself in 2009, in all publishing more than a thousand books, some of which have already changed our world.

In the 1980s, Mary Summer Rain was unknown. Her manuscript had met so many rejections that she was almost ready to give up. Bob read it, showed her what needed to be cut, and added her to his list of authors. If her books had never been published, how many lives would have been diminished?

Similarly, Neale Donald Walsch. As soon as Bob saw Conversations with God, he saw the potential that other people (including me, as I had already rejected it) had missed. How many people’s lives have been changed by the Conversations series? And these are only two of those he shepherded into print.

Only an author can know what it means when someone is willing to invest time and money to get his baby out into the world. Bob’s long-time friend John Nelson, author of five books Bob published, wrote (as part of his yet-unpublished book of Zen poetry):

98.

A friend passes on, and one feels sad.

What do you recall from your first meeting?

A promise of success, or the kind eyes offering it?

Bob spent more than 40 years making it possible for authors to get their brain-children into print. In that alone, he changed their lives, regardless of the book’s subsequent fate. (And, remember, many books with limited sales nonetheless are deeply important to some.) More invisible links. And those affected readers lead lives that then affect others in turn, continuing the chain.

As an Aquarian, Bob valued friendship. I don’t know how many publishers number their authors among their friends, but certainly he did. For that matter, some of his friends dated back to high school years. He kept his friends.

And how many people he influenced! I should know. Over more than 30 years, he and I were friends, then business partners at Hampton Roads, then again friends, and publisher to author. If I had never met Bob, my life would have been unimaginably different.

Up to this point, writing this was relatively easy. But it is difficult to write about our various relationships. Bob and I were extremely close, and bitterly incompatible, and instinctively aligned, and living in different worlds, depending on the time of day. We worked together and pulled off some amazing things, and we worked against each other and wound up losing what we had built from nothing, and then, being forced to work together again, without others (and, in fact, against others), we rediscovered what we had valued in each other, so that our final dozen years were again productive and mutually satisfactory. But nobody else could really understand the good and the bad that went on between us.

What stays with me is the feeling I have had since learning that Bob was on his way out. On the one hand, “Bon voyage!” which is how our mutual business partner, friend and author Ed Carter and his wife greeted the news of someone’s graduation to whatever comes next. I don’t regard death as a tragedy, just as another departure in lives filled with departures. I am fully confident that the spirit that clothed itself as Bob is on to other things.

But for me, as for others who are left behind, what a sense of loss! Over the past dozen years, whenever I transcribed and posted new sessions – with the guys upstairs, with Rita, with Nathaniel – I had this strong sense of Bob as supportive background presence. One after another, he published my books, even though they made him little money. Early mornings, transcribing, I would wonder what Bob would make of the latest sessions. I won’t have that background presence now. (Or perhaps I will, in an entirely new way. Time will tell.)

That’s a small example of how Bob changed lives, in the way our lives all contribute to the great chain of consciousness and connections and consequences.

Bon voyage, old friend. And, well done.

—–

Frank DeMarco lives in Charlottesville. He is the author of many books on communication with those in the Non-3D world. His website is www.ofmyownknowledge.com. On Facebook, frank.demarco.10.

 

An example of quiet service

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Different people will find different things in this obit of Mary Boyd Higgins. What I take away from it is an example of how your life may accomplish things from the shadows, given quiet dedication.

Wilhelm Reich was a great man; his work was important enough, ground-breaking enough, to threaten the existing ways of thinking. As a result of his honesty and integrity and his go-it-alone dedication, this man was successively persecuted by Nazis, then Communists, then both conservatives and liberals in the United States. Quite an achievement!

After his death, this then-unknown woman, working alone, gradually salvaged what otherwise must have been lost, and thereby put future generations deeply in her debt, though of course they knew it not, and would not have thanked her for it. It’s worth remembering, sometimes you find your life’s work, sometimes it finds you. Either way, pay attention.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/obituaries/mary-boyd-higgins-dead.html

Judith Pennington talking at TMI, June 2018

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

For those who would like to hear Judith Pennington’s hour and a half talk to participants in last June’s program at The Monroe Institute:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JREAYLkF_rU

This is not the webinar from which I shared her eight-minute introductory remarks, but prepared remarks explaining Mind Mirror per se, illustrated by results obtained during the week-long program.

For more, search Judith Pennington, and/or Institute for the Awakened Mind, and/or Mind Mirror.