human potential

Chasing Smallwood

[A book with four interlocking themes:

• how to communicate with the dead;
• the life of a 19th-century American;
• the massive task facing us today, and
• the physical world’s place in the scheme of things.]

.19. The plot thickens (or, What’s really going on here?)

[December 27, 2005. 8:20 a.m.] All right, Joseph—let’s revert to my question the answer to which got interrupted [the night before]. What’s going on here? Where are we going? What is all this in aid of?

[I can always tell when it’s TGU – or, anyway, I can always tell now – because for one thing everything is “we” with them. When I hear “we” I know it isn’t one individual unless he’s doing what I often do. I often say “we” – I do it all the time when I’m talking to myself. “We’ll just do this,” etc. Anyway – as Joseph says a lot – I thought this a short diversion but I begin to see that it is part of what is happening. Rather than just sit down and report what has happened with me in re guidance, or analyze the rules that seem to apply—which is what I thought I was in the process of doing once I conceptualized folding the healing and guidance sections together—instead I’m experiencing new growth in access and understanding, so it will become a more profoundly important book—because after all who cares about someone else’s experiences except insofar as they shed light on the listener’s own potential?

Okay, back to our regularly scheduled programming.

And I have to laugh! I see that what I experienced as me giving an aside about the fact that “I noticed TGU were going to answer the question” is the answer, and I didn’t notice it till I was at the point of posing it again! Well, that brings up a related point, simply that for most of my life—and presumably this applies to other people as well!—I was assuming the speaker was this part of myself when in fact it was, or was largely, another part. Hell, it took years (I think; I’ll have to re-read my journals to see, but I remember it as years) before I realized that “they” are not “they” (rather than I) in any absolute sense.

So, that is one more strand to weave. Recognition of what is you and what is not. I need to compile my experiences and questions and problems and lay them out—it will result in a nice survey, which is what I was proposing to write. As with healing, I have more to offer than sometimes appears. And it seems that now it the time when I am able to do it!

All right, Joseph—and for a while I am going to avoid questions of fact, even the ones that have occurred to me as questions, such as “did he actually call himself Joseph even though his given name was Elijah or something” until I can have a session with Karen.

A friend – Rich – saw an analogy between how we treated the freed slaves and how in this century we treated the Iraqis (with no plan for it, in other words); is that what you’re doing, suggesting analogies?

Your mental processes furnish the analogies, always. That’s what they do. What somebody sets in front of you is one thing. The connections it suggests is a different thing. That is why three people looking at the same thing not only have their different opinions about it among them—they each are in their own world about it in a way. They each think about other things that suggest themselves. So you can see how rich this makes things. You take a thousand men surviving a battle, or even a hard winter, and they will each one of them have been associating it with stuff from their past before that – and not just in that lifetime, either! Everything they are is affected by everything that happens to every part of them. You think that’s simple?

It ain’t that it’s hard to understand how disagreements arise. It is more surprising when any two people see things the same! That’s why if you want to persuade people, you have to do it with pictures. And that was Mr. Lincoln’s specialty.

Now, don’t fight me on this, and you might learn something. State your objections so we get it on the record, so to speak.

Well, I know where you’re going, of course, but I don’t think of Lincoln’s painting pictures like Hitler (“the soldier at his hearth” and all that). I think of Lincoln’s speeches as being masterpieces of logic. You read his Cooper Union speech for instance, and it is just a remorseless piling up of fact on fact, conclusion on conclusion, till at the end you just can’t doubt that he has proved his point. I don’t see him drawing word pictures.

All right, that was a good summary of the objection. And it shows how words mislead. I’m saying Mr. Lincoln drew pictures and you are saying no he did not. That’s pretty black-or-white, ain’t it. But I don’t have to deny his overwhelming strength of logic and I wouldn’t if I had to. There was nobody could equal him in long term conviction – bringing you to it, I mean – because he didn’t do it with tricks or manipulation but with just what you said, a remorseless piling up of fact on fact.

Douglas could persuade you if you already wanted to be persuaded. Mr. Lincoln could show you things you hadn’t thought, and show ‘em to you so you never doubted ‘em thereafter even if you couldn’t remember how he got you there. And this was his genius, you see, and this is why you aren’t yet seeing him (you are as I write this long sentence, but until now you didn’t)..

Mr. Lincoln would start with a proposition that sounded simple and flat as old beer. Then he would start piling fact on fact, as you say, and entirely without bells or flourishes and ornament. Flat, steady, one small step at a time. Dull. Undeniable. And that is the way he would lead you – not trying for emotional effects along the way; avoiding those effects, until at the end when you got there you were in a frame of mind that said there wasn’t any other straight way to see it. And you felt like you reasoned it out with him. You had been taken there by your own steps, it felt like, and you couldn’t not see it – not when he was at his best – unless you either started from a position too far away, so you never hooked up with that he was building, or you were listening only intending to get ammunition to shoot against it. And even that, Mr. Lincoln didn’t mind. He encouraged it, in fact, because then when you began shooting at his argument you were shooting at the people he had already convinced!

You see it? Mr. Lincoln was a prairie lawyer. He had spent his life in politics and in law. They both involved the same thing – persuading simple people to see complicated things and see ‘em his way.

What is taught to you without tricks, you remember and you trust. What is just arm-waving and logic-chopping and emotional appeal, you may be persuaded for a while – but then when something else comes in to contradict it, you don’t have the same staying power. And if it happens that the facts support what you persuaded ’em about –in other words if things happened just about the way you said they had to, why, you’d be a fool not to listen to somebody who’d done the work of thinking it out for you. You couldn’t repeat the logic you had heard, and you couldn’t say any more why you knew what you did, but it didn’t matter. You was changed. Now ain’t that painting pictures?

You were thinking I meant painting scenes that tug on the heart-strings like Uncle Tom’s Cabin. No, that kind of picture makes clear to people where they stand on something. It don’t tell ’em what to do, and it don’t tell ’em who to trust to know what to do. Mr. Lincoln’s pictures were pictures of the situation. We were here, says he, and then this happened, and it meant this; and that happened, and it did this to things; and then this happened and the result was so—and now here we are, and if we ain’t careful (he’d ’a’ said “keerful.” I can hear him still) we’re going to wind up here and then what will we do? You see? For people who didn’t know what the meaning of things was, it was irresistible! They left different than they came. I knew I did, the only time I had the honor and pleasure of hearing him, back in ’58. I went into that meeting not expecting anything special but having just a vague hope that maybe this tall sucker could hit a few licks at the little giant, but like I saw, not hoping for too much – because we hated the power that little man had over crowds, and we hated what he’d done with it, but we feared him, too.

Now, go look for your book that has the excepts from the Lincoln-Douglas debates, I want to show you something. And by the way, it ought to occur to you that this is the way to do research – get a guide, and then use the power-tools that are other men’s research.

[I don’t seem to have the book I thought I had, or can’t find it now. Somewhere I have read at least some of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. While looking I kept hearing “Alton” so I guess that’s where Joseph Smallwood heard Mr. Lincoln. I didn’t know where Alton was – thought it was probably up near Davenport and Smallwood just slipped across the river, but it is down across from St. Louis. Still on the river, more or less, though. I should look more – maybe the computer could give me the Alton speech.]

I find that the Alton debate was the seventh and last, and is considered to be either the decisive debate or a reprise of the sixth. A crowd of 6,000 heard the debate that was – as I’d sensed – held out of doors. This was Oct. 15, 1858.

(10:30 a.m.) All right, now. So you re-read the Lincoln half of the debate and you marked a couple of passages, with me looking over your shoulder, so to speak. Not everybody’s going to be interested in Mr. Lincoln—not those who think his spirit is dead and the past is dead—but patch in those two pieces, and show ’em where to find more, and some will follow and some won’t. The two pieces will show his power of exposition. And all the typing that will go along with entering this will get you ready for more. You ain’t ready right now, though you don’t know it.

[Excerpt from Mr. Lincoln’s speech at Alton, which was a reply to Douglas, who preceded him, and followed him with a rebuttal.]

And if there be among you any body who supposes that he, as a Democrat can consider himself “as much opposed to slavery as anybody,” I would like to reason with him. You never treat it as a wrong. What other thing that you consider as a wrong, do you deal with as you deal with that? Perhaps you say it is wrong, but your leader never does, and you quarrel with any body who says it is wrong. Although you pretend to say so yourself you can find no fit place to deal with it as a wrong. You must not say any thing about it in the free States, because it is not here. You must not say any thing about it in the slave States, because it is there. You must not say any thing about it in the pulpit, because that is religion and has nothing to do with it. You must not say any thing about it in politics, because that will disturb the security of “my place.” There is no place to talk about it as being a wrong, although you say yourself it is a wrong. But finally you will screw yourself up to the belief that if the people of the slave States should adopt a system of gradual emancipation on the slavery question, you would be in favor of it. You would be in favor of it. You say that is getting it in the right place, and you would be glad to see it succeed. But you are deceiving yourself. You all know that Frank Blair and Gratz Brown, down there in St. Louis, undertook to introduce that system in Missouri. They fought as valiantly as they could for the system of gradual emancipation which you pretend you would be glad to see succeed. Now I will bring you to the test. After a hard fight they were beaten, and when the news came over here you threw up your hats and hurraed for Democracy.

[A little later]:

That is the real issue. That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles–right and wrong–throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, “You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.” No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle. I was glad to express my gratitude at Quincy, and I re-express it here to Judge Douglas–that he looks to no end of the institution of slavery. That will help the people to see where the struggle really is. It will hereafter place with us all men who really do wish the wrong may have an end. And whenever we can get rid of the fog which obscures the real question–when we can get Judge Douglas and his friends to avow a policy looking to its perpetuation–we can get out from among that class of men and bring them to the side of those who treat it as a wrong. Then there will soon be an end of it, and that end will be its “ultimate extinction.” Whenever the issue can be distinctly made, and all extraneous matter thrown out so that men can fairly see the real difference between the parties, this controversy will soon be settled, and it will be done peaceably too. There will be no war, no violence. It will be placed again where the wisest and best men of the world placed it.

[2 p.m.] I still don’t know where we’re going with this.

You can’t go someplace new and still know where you’re going ahead of time. you can have an idea in your head, but that doesn’t mean the trip is going to look like your idea.

Now that is enough about Mr. Lincoln for a while. I saw him that evening, sandwiched between Douglas and when I heard Douglas speak I was a bit downhearted, for he seemed to have the crowd – though maybe that was just the usual loud-mouths giving that impression, cheering and applauding and calling out. And his arguments sounded plausible enough, and while he was still talking, he had you. But then he had to sit down, and old Abe Lincoln stood up and started slow and just skinned him. And when he stood there looking at Douglas, asking him a question he couldn’t have answered even if it had been his time to answer, the effect was just tremendous.

[What Lincoln said, in part, that Joseph said created such a tremendous impression:

And when Judge Douglas asks me why we cannot let it remain part slave and part free, as the fathers of the Government made it, he asks a question based upon an assumption which is itself a falsehood; and I turn upon him and ask him the question, when the policy that the fathers of the Government had adopted in relation to this element among us was the best policy in the world–the only wise policy–the only policy that we can ever safely continue upon–that will ever give us peace unless this dangerous element masters us all and becomes a national institution–I turn upon him and ask him why he could not let it alone. [Great and prolonged cheering.]

Et cetera.]

And then when Douglas got up to give his reply to Mr. Lincoln’s reply, it was pitiful. At least, I thought so. They were both pretty good at poking fun at each other, but when Douglas used his first minutes to talk about Lincoln’s opposing the Mexican War! – well it showed the difference between ’em. I never read of Lincoln wasting shot and shell on side-points. He’d hammer away, but it wasn’t never at a side-issue. And the other thing between ’em was this. If you were really on the fence, if you weren’t a committed Republican, if you weren’t a die-hard Democrat, and if you came there not quite knowing how to think about things, more chances were you came out of there remembering Lincoln’s arguments than Douglas’. And when you read it in the papers, it was Lincoln’s that stuck with you, because his didn’t depend on cheap effects or momentary emotions. He knew how to let you persuade yourself, by following along and saying yes or no as he built his case. The trouble for Douglas, you see, is that he made it too big, too fast, and so he never had to learn how to persuade a jury of farmers about a patent infringement case.

Well, I did say that was enough about Abraham Lincoln. But there can’t ever be enough, and certainly there can’t be too much. He is still the key in your time, if you can find it.

Now. You have had ten days of this. Time for you to do the other part of your preparation – go through making notes. You can come back to me when the time is right. You will know, and I ain’t going any where.

Chasing Smallwood

[A book with four interlocking themes:

• how to communicate with the dead;
• the life of a 19th-century American;
• the massive task facing us today, and
• the physical world’s place in the scheme of things.]

.18. Steamboats and slavery

By now, you are probably wondering the same thing I was wondering: What is going on here, and where is all this going? I was fascinated by Joseph’s story, and it was interesting to get a different slant on things than I had ever heard, and his opinions were not necessarily opinions that I had ever formulated consciously, which gave me a little more confidence that perhaps I was not making this all up. But what was going on? Why had it showed up just now?

Remember, my conscious intent was not to produce material from talking with Joseph, but to write a book about the use of visualization in healing. For several weeks I regarded my work with Joseph as a form of goofing off. It was pleasurable, interesting, but I thought perhaps mere self-indulgence. It took awhile for me to begin to suspect that war was going on here than I was consciously aware of. Not that that’s any change.

[Monday, December 26, 2005] [7:30 p.m.] All right, Joseph, let’s do it again.

You want to know what’s the hurry, what’s up my sleeve, as you say. We’d have said, where

where are you coming from??!!

Would you prefer “what’s your agenda”? We smile.

Very funny. Not Joseph, then. [What I meant by this is that I could “feel” a difference in the energy coming through. I was accustomed to dealing with what I call the guys upstairs, who seemed to be several individuals, never very clearly defined, that I took to be guidance of some sort. Before Joseph began coming in, I mostly dealt either with David, the journalist and psychic investigator, or “the guys” in general.]

Just slow down. You are too far “up” in your energy. Calm down, slow down, that’s it, less intent, much less pressing to get the next thing. More like it. Now –

It is a skill and I’m still only at the beginning, aren’t’ I?

Ain’t I, we would have said, speaking of correcting each other’s speech. Well, I wouldn’t say you are at the beginning, but there’s a way to go yet. And if you keep careful track you can teach.

[Interruption. Long phone call.]

[9:30] Joseph, more?

Let us talk about steamboats. You know the commerce of the river ran one way until steamboats. They’d build big rafts, float them down to the city [New Orleans, of course], break up the rafts after they sold whatever they were hauling, and then make their way upriver in small boats as passengers.

Steam changed all that. Now they were going up river and down, carrying passengers and freight just as regular as trains, and before they had many trains, especially out there.

Now how many steamboat companies do you suppose they had that were put together by southern gentlemen, and how many by northern corporations? And railroads, the same way. And factories, and every thing that had to organize people and money and materials and all the thousand details that have to be put together. The slavers couldn’t do it because they didn’t have the brains, didn’t have the training, didn’t have the liquid capital and – mainly – they couldn’t admit to themselves that it was a thing worthy of “gentlemen” doing. The long and the short of it is, the slavers ran the south. They couldn’t turn themselves into capitalists or corporations and they couldn’t let others in to do it for them. If they had, they’d have put themselves out of business.

I know it ain’t entirely true; you can’t say a thing that’s going to be entirely true, but it’s true in the main. For every Atlanta, how many Charlestons did you have? For every railroad line, how many thousand square miles of dirt roads and no rivers? For every Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond, how many places did you have that could even make cartridges let alone rifles?

It was all because of slavery, and just as General Grant said in his book it was the best thing we ever did for them, making them get rid of it.

We missed a big chance at the end of the war though. I wonder if Mr. Lincoln would have missed it. What we had ought to do was confiscate the property of the slave owners and divide it among the slaves. That would have solved a lot of problems, and kept ‘em solved. It would have caused other problems, but everything causes problems; we could have dealt with them somehow.

We didn’t spend any time thinking about what to do with the slaves, like I said. So we freed ‘em, and – there they were. Put into terms you will understand better, it’s like they were all unemployed and they didn’t have any savings or income or education, and they were supposed to make their way.

We could have given them all the land they’d been working. Given them help learning the business end of farming it. Maybe set the craftsmen among them to working building the things they was all going to need. But nobody gave it much thought, and look at all the evils that followed – the carpetbaggers, the Ku Klux Klan, the rebs re-elected to their old seats in Congress, and then reconstruction again with all the chances that gave people to make fortunes (like I said, the carpetbaggers). We needed long-headed Abraham Lincoln to help us find a way, and they’d put him in the grave with so many other of our soldiers.

Now, you’re happy enough to be receiving all this but I can hear you clear enough asking what it’s all about. You’re not fixing to write a history of Joseph Smallwood, so what is going on?

What is going on is an education. But maybe that’s all we can do for the moment. It is 10 p.m. and you are tired.

Does that mean I’ll lose the ability to focus and so won’t get it?

It means your life is more than scribbling.

https://rudolfsteinerquotes.wordpress.com/2017/10/22/there-is-a-hundred-times-more-hatred-than-love-among-human-beings-3/

I put this one on FB with the comment that whoever picks these quotations is sure picking good ones. And this is appropriate to what Nathaniel is bringing through, as well.

What could I (or anybody) add?

Double egoism

The following is the Introduction to Awakening from the 3D World. This, in a few words, is my attempt to tell you how the book came about, why it is worth reading, and what’s in it for you. As I point out, this book can change your life.

Introduction

Anyone who does any serious exploring into the question of “what is real and what is not” is soon presented with difficulties. It is difficult to envision life on “the other side.” How do beings there spend their time? What is it they do, and why do they do it? What if anything is their relationship to us? For that matter, what is our 3D life all about?

The world’s scriptures have been addressing these questions for centuries. That’s what scripture deals with: models of interaction between the physical and the non-physical aspects of the world. The problems, the techniques, the models are, after all, just so many varieties of packaging. The reality remains the same. But in our time, neither science nor religion — neither believers nor materialists – give us a credible picture of the meaning and nature of life, nor a picture of the afterlife that we can relate to. So where can we find one?

Well, the closest to first-hand information that we can get, at least until we ourselves drop the body and cross over, is direct communication with someone in the non-physical.

Of course I am aware that common sense would argue that we and the deceased cannot communicate. The trouble is, “common sense” depends upon two unstated assumptions. The first says the past is gone and the future is not yet created and the present is all that exists. The second says the dead either cease to exist or exist beyond our range.

Understandable assumptions, but neither one is true. Centuries of recorded experience testifies to people seeing the future and communicating with the dead. Souls live on after life in the 3D universe, as alive as when they were here, but outside of time and space. Being outside of time and space, all times and all spaces are available to them, which is why we can communicate with them about things in our life that happened long after they were gone.

That doesn’t mean that we can know for sure that we aren’t just making it up, nor that we know just who we are interacting with, nor that the information we receive is true. But those are the wrong questions. The only thing we can know, and the only thing we need to know, moment by moment, is—does the material resonate? In other words, does it feel true? Is it useful to think that way? From that point, what you do with what you have found is up to you.

Explorers by definition move into poorly mapped or unmapped territory, intending to help fill in the map for those who follow. It cannot be required of them that they always know what they are doing, or where they are going. If you were to stick to “respectable” or “common sense” explanations and pathways, what kind of exploring would that be? Sometimes you have to just keep on going and trust that eventually things will sort out. Exploring is the only alternative to either taking things on faith, or refusing to think about them at all. All that can be required of explorers is that they be resolute, honest, and a bit skeptical even of the maps they themselves help to draw.

 

This is the third volume of a series of conversations I had with my old friend Rita Warren, who died (or passed over, or changed state, or dropped the body – however you want to put it) in March, 2008, at the age of 88.

Rita had been the first director of the consciousness laboratory at The Monroe Institute (TMI), and she and I were was very familiar with the use of Monroe’s technology to assist people to enter into altered states of consciousness. In the autumn of 2000, I did a series of ten sessions in TMI’s isolation booth, or black box, and posted the transcripts to a group of email friends, naturally including Rita.

In 3D life, Rita was 26 years my senior, and our backgrounds were different in many ways. But we shared an intense interest in the hidden nature of things. So, in the summer of 2001, she and I set out to see if we could get the answers to a few simple questions. Instead, what we got was a new picture of interaction between the physical and the non-physical aspects of the world. We sat down once a week for several months, she asking questions about the hidden side of life and I, doing my best to stay in a mildly altered state, relaying whatever answers came to me. She and I both knew that information obtained this way is subject to error, but we also knew that it could provide valuable insights.

Session by session, “the guys,” as we called our interlocutors, introduced and built upon certain themes, and as we absorbed the picture they were painting, our lives changed. We decided that the material had importance for others besides ourselves, and I started to edit the sessions for publication, and got Rita to write an introduction.

But by the time the book of transcripts (titled The Sphere and the Hologram) came out, Rita had already made her transition. She died March 19, 2008, and came to me in a dream to assure me that she was fine, and I assumed our work together was over.

Six and a half years later, in December, 2014, I dreamed of her saying she was ready for us to work together again. I was surprised, but pleased. The next morning, I sat down with my journal and announced myself ready. I was prepared for anything or nothing, as usual in this business of communicating.

(When working alone, I write down a question, or even just state my readiness, then I move into a receptive state and take down whatever comes, alternating between questioner and receiver as the material dictates. Sometimes it comes fluently and I can write it down word for word without thinking. Sometimes I have the sense of it, but need to do the phrasing. Occasionally we wind up arguing over meanings, or over the sense of the material.)

That was the first of six months of sessions, usually every day, with the exception of one two-week hiatus. Throughout that time, Rita set out to answer the same questions she had been pursuing in 3D life, with the benefit of her new vantage point. That seemed to be about as direct a communication with the non-physical side I was likely to get.

In mid-May, we seemed to reach a natural place to pause, in and that was all right with me: We had accumulated quite enough material to change anybody’s life. Bob Friedman, my former business partner at Hampton Roads, now heading up Rainbow Ridge Books, offered to publish the new transcripts, and I was delighted to accept. He broke the transcript into two three-month segments, and Rita’s World, Volume I was published in September, 2015 – a remarkably quick turn-around. Volume II was slated for publication the following September, and again I thought perhaps Rita and I had completed our task.

Then, in February, 2016, I was lying down in bed when a sudden thought came to me, like the sun cutting through fog, and I knew that Rita was ready for me to get back to work. So I got some coffee and sat down at my desk, and we were off to the races once again.

In reading the material that follows, it will help if you keep these concepts in mind.

• “Sometimes, to understand A, you have to understand B, but to understand B, you have to understand A.” One of the most enlightening concepts I have come across, which Rita gave me while she was still in the 3D world, this explains why some things can’t be said directly, but must be hinted at until other changes in your viewpoint allow you to see it more clearly.
• “The 3D world and the non-3D world are not two things, but one.” Divisions in the universe are never absolute, only relative. The implications of this one just keep expanding as you mull it.
• “We are not so much individual units, as committees learning to function as individuals.” This very important concept explains a lot about life and relationships. We are more like bundles of threads, connected in all directions to others, than we are like the images that the word “individual” summons.
• “As above, so below.” As said from ancient times, different levels of the world are scaled differently, but structured similarly.

In earlier volumes I was careful to preserve the flavor of the interaction — to preserve the sense of play between equals; to emphasize how natural such communication can be; to remind the reader that such communication takes place among the incidents of ordinary life. This time, I have edited myself out somewhat, in the same way that I have silently eliminated many false starts and rephrasings, in order to make a more compact statement. I trust I have not edited the humanness out of the resulting document. In any case this material can change your life, if you let it.

A third volume of conversations with the person who was Rita Warren, centering on what the great transition from the 3D world to the non-3D world — as it appears to the soul as it is leaving the and as it is arriving. (The first two volumes were Rita’s World, vol. I and II. A related fourth volume is The Sphere and the Hologram, which comprises transcripts of sessions Rita and I did when she was still alive in the 3D world.

Available for order now. https://www.amazon.com/Awakening-3D-World-Enter-Next/dp/1937907538/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1505157533&sr=8-1&keywords=awakening+from+the+3d+world