Jon Holt on focus and access and health

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Monday, August 12, 2024

5:10 a.m. Several things. Can I put them together?

  • Breathing. Sneeze impulse. By extension, control over the idea of the body, just as I always dimly knew, if not how to direct it.
  • “Thinking is the hardest work there is, that’s why so few people do it,” as Ford said. It applies to metaphysics, spirituality, every aspect of life and reality.
  • Blogging – as diversion?
  • If I have only so much energy, I can still use it if I don’t fritter it away.

But even this faint summary taxes me.

Jon [Holt], you ought to have an enhanced view of the human body now. Am I wrong to think as I am thinking this morning? Or – better – any input of any kind would be appreciated.

You always resisted the common-sense approach, but I admit, now I see why. It is as you thought, and forgot, earlier this morning: What you want to do, and think you are doing, isn’t necessarily what you wind up doing. You plan one thing and it has a very different result.

You tended to see interference or at least indifference from the non-3D side.

I did. And some people see life as a huge well-woven plot against them. That isn’t any righter than people seeing everything as coincidence.

Can we confine the argument to matters of health – or, let’s say, confine it first, so we get at it before my energy wanes?

Well, even the idea that your energy may wane is an idea. It is an idea formed out of your experience, but it is still an idea, not a law of nature. At one level you always knew that, but it doesn’t help you live until you understand what it really means, because only then can you use that understanding in the right way.

That idea of waning energy truly has taken hold of me. Hard to wish it away, or “see it not there,” or however I should think of it.

You understand, focus is the point of 3D limitations. So when you’re in non-3D, you sort of have to depend on the limitations – the focus – of whoever you’re talking to in 3D.

If I had known that, I’ve forgotten it.

Well, keep it in mind. It is the prime limitation, focus. In 3D you experience the limitation aspect of it, in non-3D you experience the focusing aspect. Same thing, seen from opposite ends. So it is up to you in 3D to do the work of keeping your energy and attention focused. You do that, and you can get whatever you want to know. But it isn’t as easy to do as you might think. It takes intention, and practice. In other words, willpower and practice, willpower and the application of skill.

All right, well we’ll concentrate on health first.

In your book [Imagine Yourself Well] you sketched out the different worlds people live in depending upon their beliefs. That sketch was true. What id didn’t go into so much was how to change your beliefs.

“As a man thinks, so he is.”

Yes, but you think according to what your experience seems to teach you, so the question is, how do you learn to reinterpret your experience to justify a different set of beliefs. You didn’t know it, but that is something I always admired in you: You were always ready to believe in advance of evidence, provided it led in a hopeful direction. If the evidence led in a direction away from hope, you wouldn’t see it, or wouldn’t accept the conclusions. That exasperated me sometimes, but I always admired it. Common sense isn’t everything in life.

I suppose it was particularly hard in that it went against so much of your training as a doctor, let alone as a psychiatrist.

How about as a fellow human being living in the same world and drawing very different conclusions?

I’m smiling. Okay, so how does it look now?

As you said, people are different, and different rules apply according to their psychological makeup. What some can do, others can only hope to do, or maybe can only shudder at the thought of doing. But I know what you want. If you can hold focus and deny that voice that says, “You don’t have enough energy for this,” we may be able to get into it.

When you were a boy, some experienced part of you knew that you could be well if you could just adjust – something; could just tweak some dial you couldn’t find. It had the practical effect of leaving you in rebellion against the limits that practical medicine seemed to prescribe. And that led you to question so many common-sense rules. It shaped your attitude to life.

What if you had been able to find that dial?

You tell me.

Don’t let yourself fade away from this. It is a running away.

As a psychiatrist I imagine you saw a lot of that.

I did. And now it is easy to see from the inside as well as from the outside. Hold your focus until you get what you want, or anyway what you need.

That is an aspect of “knock and it shall be opened” that I hadn’t considered.

If the door doesn’t open right away, keep knocking! Don’t hit it once and then give up. Perseverance is an aspect of focus.

You thought finding that dial involved willpower, and you weren’t wrong, but it involves more than that, as you found out. If you could get anything you wanted as soon as you asked for it, what would be the point of being in 3D?

I’m laughing, almost, thinking of you reacting against just these limitations.

That isn’t exactly what was going on, but let’s stick with you. You willed to be well, but you did nothing physical except whatever you were given – pills, shots, emergency measures when need be. Later you tried to think your way to what you still knew (irrationally) was available somewhere. You read of Cayce’s work and you were intrigued by his access, on the one hand, and by the promise that the access would provide the answers you needed. And behind your back, that morphed into a desire to become connected, not necessarily as a means of acquiring health, but for its own sake.

But I assume that came from other times, other lives.

In practice it doesn’t make any difference where it comes from. I see now that people are potential containers of certain kinds of energies. Some are open to some, others to others. It isn’t like anybody can hold the whole universe, except in the sense that everything is contained in everything.

The world in a teacup, eternity in a moment.

Yes. You are limited.  You don’t have to like it, but you might as well accept it. The thing to do isn’t to spend your life wishing you weren’t limited, but to expand as much as you can within the limits that shape you. You’ll find that more than enough to fill your time! Saying that everybody is limited, and everybody’s limits are different (even if unknown) is only saying what everybody knows. It is those limits that make individuals. It is what is beyond these limits that holds everything together.

Now, for those who can hear it:

  • Belief is a halfway house to your new life. Until you have had the experience, the best you can do is believe – so be careful what you choose to believe.
  • But not all beliefs are a matter of choice. Some come with the package, and if you don’t like them, you’ll need to struggle against them. But “struggle” is not merely about willpower. Partly that, yes, but not solely.
  • You have to learn to live “as if” in a certain way. Pretending won’t do it. Walling-off won’t do it. You have to dare to believe that life is broader than you are experiencing it, and then find ways to tentatively live that belief.

I don’t see how that asthmatic boy could have been helped by living as if he wasn’t sick.

No, you do see that clearly enough. What you can’t see is how he could have done it. In practice, the best he could do was ignore consequences. That is a sort of crippled form of “as if.” You will remember, you knew you didn’t know where to find the dial. But even not repudiating the idea that the dial existed was an achievement. It made many things possible as your life flowed.

It is only now, this month, that I am getting a new handle on this.

Maybe your life isn’t over yet.

Enough for now?

This will do for a start. Remember, it is always your part, in 3D, to focus. If you can hold the focus, we can provide the connection. Our little group on Wednesdays already demonstrated this, although that isn’t what anybody thought we were doing.

Well, Jon, it is very good to talk to you. I didn’t know if it would happen.

To quote a friend of mine: “Ask.”

Very funny. Till next time, then.

 

Every day a gift

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Sunday July 21, 2024

8:35 a.m. Guys? A conversation.

Another beautiful day in the neighborhood.

It is a beautiful day. Why are you channeling Mr. Rogers?

Why not? Did anyone ever hear him say it would be a beautiful day, “if only”?

Every day is a gift, I know that now. My life would have been easier if I had learned it earlier, but I did learn it.

We have a serious point to make, not a particularly profound point, but an important reminder. Life can be looked at in two ways while you are immersed in 3D. (1) Life is an external drama in which you live, or (2) Life is an internal drama carried on through an external setting.

Of course really there are not two ways but three, the third being that life in 3D is both external (a drama with its own complicated plot line, or perhaps its own continuing improv performance) and internal (a process of development that takes place in 3D but not for the purpose of advancing any external agenda).

Feels to me like you are floundering.

You say it, then.

If the world is mind-stuff, and therefore every bit of it, including us, is literally part of the same only-thing-there-is, and if the non-3D’s seeming externality is only relatively external to us, and if emotion is our experience of the known-self meeting the unknown-self, and if we are truly both herd and outlier –

Well, I don’t know where you were going with it, but I’d tend to say that all can’t help being always well, despite appearances.

Nothing to criticize in your precis. Only, people should take it a little farther, should chew on it, should connect their thought with their feeling.

Specifically?

At one time, people went crazy with undefined fears centering on divisions within Christianity. Another time, it was the initial disruptions caused by the industrial revolution, as opposed to the familiar, slower, more rural life – with all the social changes nobody intended but everybody experienced. Then it became ideology, “left” and “right” repeatedly redefined and becoming more murderously opposed as time went on. Then culture wars, the counter-culture, etc. You can name them for yourselves, you have all lived in them, though each of you in your own subset, greatly or subtly different from others depending upon your own makeup, which is a way of saying “depending upon what you needed.”

As a child puts away childish things, each of you put away previous needs, beliefs, assurances. Every day is new, and this may be experienced as a blessing or a curse or both. Every day offers something new, if you want it, and often enough, if you do not want it. How do you react? Anticipation? Joy? Caution? Fear? Disassociated terror? Your instinctive reaction is not yours to choose: You respond out of what you have been. But your acceptance or rejection of that instinctive response is yours to choose: That is the “free will” part of your life.

Yes, you have said predestination is the result of the past, free will is the situation in the present.

We didn’t put it that way, but, true enough. So, pick the worst day you ever lived.

That’s easy. November 22, 1963.

For others it will be something else. But everybody will have one, by definition. There is always a “worst” and a “best”; they are comparative terms. Well, on November 22, 1963, did you have any reason — looking back from who you are today, we mean – did you have any reason to say, “All Is Well”?

That’s hard. I know the response you want. Can I really say it?

But if you cannot, then you do not believe that all is always well, which, we keep reassuring you, it is.

I know you don’t want me to parrot what I am supposed to say, nor to pretend to feel what I don’t. But I haven’t ever looked at it this way.

That’s what we’re offering you the opportunity to do. Dredge, remembering that nothing but your truest perception will help you. (Naturally, we mean this for any who read it, as well.)

The best I can do is divide it into real and somewhat real. Really, absolutely, thinking of things in All-D terms, certainly all was well that day as every day. No event personal or social could disrupt the world that exists so that we may express ourselves in limited surroundings and continue to create ourselves by successive choices.

But –?

But in 3D terms, catastrophe is catastrophe. Life hurts. Living in the aftermath of trauma, be it personal or social, hurts. The 3D world is real in its own terms, as you have so often said.

So, seeing Kennedy murdered was worse than being murdered myself. It was a shattering of many futures I had taken for granted, as well as the killing of someone I loved and admired. In 3D terms, it was the worst day I ever had, if only because I had such slim inner resources then. I don’t see how it would have been possible to be in conversation with you then, but it would have helped.

You are rewriting your emotional history. If you hadn’t turned from God and your religion – in effect saying, “If you can allow this to happen, I’m done with you” –you could have used the religious connection from this life and other lives and found grieving and solace and acceptance. In effect, you would have been feeling our presence, and accepting what emotional help we could give.

That sounds true. It took me many years – discovering Carl Jung in 1970, I think – before I began to find an intellectually acceptable way to move toward connection.

Here is the point. On the worst day you ever had, did it leave you unaffected?

Ah, the light comes. When my friend Charles told me, a few years ago, that the death of his dog had broken his heart, I instinctively responded that it had broken his heart open.

Haven’t we said that we do know that pain hurts, but it is so useful? It isn’t useful to us except insofar as it is useful to you. But remember, we have also said, you don’t need to learn through pain, you can learn through joy. And what better pathway to experiencing everyday joy than “All is well” regardless what happens? It isn’t cloud-cuckoo-land, it isn’t Pollyanna, it isn’t even the three princes of Serendip. It is merely practical.

And this is regardless of what else we get out of it.

Every day is a gift. Viktor Frankl knew that. Survivors always know that, however mingled with other emotions their reaction may be.

Have we gotten what you wanted to say, or is there more?

Don’t concern yourself with what this or that person may think of it. All you can do is say your truth.

Gandhi was asked why he said something when the week before he had said the opposite, and he said, “Because this week I know better.”

There is no all-encompassing be-all-and-end-all Truth accessible to 3D minds. The best you can do, and it is enough, is to find the truest thing you can find from the point of view you were created as. You may change viewpoints, and therefore may see things differently, but right here, right now, there is a truest true to be found. Why settle for less?

Thanks. This was good. I live in hope of more.

Hope is always good.

 

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.

 

Organization and Scheduling

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Friday, July 19, 2024

7:30 a.m. I suppose it is time to get to work again. When the weather cools off even temporarily, the same conditions that may lead to breathing troubles often lead to a burst of productive activity. That’s how it feels this morning. So guys, a few tips would be appreciated

We have a “no tipping” policy.

Very funny. Come to think of it, that is the first joke you’ve made in a while.

It has been a while since your inner pressure has risen high enough.

So it’s the old “Tides and decisions both, not decisions merely.”

Doesn’t everything in your experience show you this? You all have to act as if you were independent of one another, and often enough as if independent of circumstances. But how could that be? It is the better part of wisdom to recognize that everything that is shaped is therefore bounded, and this goes for intangibles such as possibilities, no less than for physical objects or even abstractions such as something pictured. The very thing people kick against – limitation – is what makes them distinct, with their own possibilities.

Some people think our lives are predestined, though that makes no sense to me.

We have said, predestination and free will are intricately connected. It is only in seeing one in the absence of the other that you can go wrong. As usually, “both, and” or even “neither nor”; not one or the other.

Well, if my inner tide has risen to the point that we can go back to doing something more than passing the time, what can you tell me? On this, or on anything you care to discuss.

You had a dream that held your attention. Paraphrase your description.

This was yesterday morning. I dreamed of being in a vast room, surrounded by boxes or cartons – containers of some kind. I knew I was packing and also seeking visas, and it was an overwhelming task. I think I was trying to get papers for the cat, too. (Not genealogy but, again, visas.) I wasn’t panicked or frantic or even rushed, but I was overwhelmed. So much to do, and no one to help, come to think of it, and no structure, just all these boxes on all sides. And when you and I talked about it here, it became clear that it wasn’t a sense of urgency, just overwhelm at the extent of the clutter.

And in that recounting just now, you heard something.

Yes. Lack of structure. That has always been a problem for me. If no external structure, you have to provide one for yourself, and I haven’t been doing it.

You have done it sporadically, and occasionally, usually tied to one specific project which, accomplished or abandoned, leaves you again without structure to lean on.

This shouldn’t come as any great revelation, but I see that the simple habit of getting up to talk to you whenever I couldn’t sleep or had had enough sleep provided a structure.

It provided half a structure. The habit was half; the activity was the other half. When you had both, you functioned. When either failed you, you couldn’t. although, saying “when either failed you” is misleading.

No, actually, it’s clarifying, because sometimes the material dried up, but other times I wanted to keep on but for some reason I couldn’t. Or – come to think of it, that’s what you just said, it’s a matter of tides and decisions both.

There is something within you that rebels against compulsion every once in a while. It may be your own rule, your own resolution, but at some point you decide you’ll be damned if you will.

As my old friend Dave Wallis used to say, “Guilty, your honor.”

This is why every rule should carry within it the exception. A Sabbath day of rest makes the other six days bearable; it is a formula for continuity.

You have to un bend the bow every so often if you’re going to be able to use it.

Tastes and needs differ, but  regular periodic unbending is usually more reliable than unbending only when you happen to think of it (on the one hand) or unbending whenever you happen to feel like it (on the other).

I could use a realistic schedule I could keep to.

Again the schedule is half. The other half is awareness of what you want to do. It can be chasing rainbows or grinding corn; the nature of the task doesn’t matter. But clarity is always helpful.

So set up a schedule of projects always a little ahead of where I am, so never come to a gap?

That sounds practical, and for some it may be. For you, probably not.

What, then?

If you come to the end of a project, there’s nothing wrong with using the pause to survey your situation. Only, use the time. That is, actually consider what has been done, what needs to be done, what can or can’t be done.

Should I set up a definite amount of time when I work? I know that some writers resolve to sit in front of a blank wall for X time if need be, only not doing anything at all if they don’t write – which of course gets them writing, soon enough.

You wouldn’t observe the rule anyway, and there’s no need. If you schedule yourself for an hour, you will get something done, if only sifting things in your mind. But of course this will work differently for different people. That’s as it should be.

Often enough, all I accomplish is one of these conversations.

So?

Yes, I get it. The process, not necessarily the result.

Remember, this started with the realization that all those resources are clutter unless organized somehow.

But what about the travel aspect of the dream? Not urgent, not panicky, but definitely a presence.

One way to look at it, you aren’t going to live as you are forever. Another way is, in creation as in everyday life, you want to go somewhere, which means moving. Few people ever crossed the ocean by rowing with only one oar. Going in circles is not the kind of movement you find satisfying.

Neither is standing on a wharf surrounded by luggage!

You are neither on a wharf nor surrounded by luggage. Your dream describes you as isolated in a room among a clutter of background materials.

Well, I’ll send this out, see if it strikes people. And I’ll try to figure out how to apply it. Sitting at a desk willingly is one thing, but doing it to effect is something different.

You can do as you often do: Make lists, see what strikes you.

At least organize the boxes, anyway. Okay. Thanks as always.

 

Emotion and telepathy

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Wednesday January 23, 2019

Watching Peter Jackson’s 90-minute film “They Shall Not Grow Old,” comprising restored footage of British doughboys in World War I, I remembered an experience I had in 2001 or 2002. I was in London, walking near Trafalgar Square, trying to give David Poynter (experienced as a past life) a sense of modern London, knowing that he would recognize the buildings, which are essentially unchanged since his time. I walked down to the Embankment, the north shore of the Thames, reading the monuments, not particularly moved, but interested.

Then I came to one that said only “July 1, 1916,” and although I had no idea what it referred to, I was instantly filled with the most violent rush of emotion I have ever experienced: rage, grief, indignation, despair. I realized, this was David’s reaction I was experiencing, though I was pretty sure he himself had not been in the war. So after I saw the movie, I searched both “the Battle of the Somme” and “July 1, 1916.”

So, David, let’s talk about July 1, 1916. What was the nature and source of that upwelling of anguish that I experienced?

You felt correctly that I was not in the war. I was past the age of enlistment, and perhaps could not have stood the physical toll. But neither was I caught up in war fever. My sympathies were with the poor. The warfare that interested me was an uprising against the forces that were grinding the faces of the people. I don’t mean insurrection – that couldn’t happen – but organized resistance to the overwhelming combinations of force and law and opinion that held society in an unfailing grip.

You were a socialist, I remember thinking.

I was. But my socialism did not have its roots in a belief in materialism, so I was somewhat out of the socialist mainstream in the same way you have always found yourself out of the mainstream of political opinion – and for the same reasons. Any social movement necessarily presumes certain commonly accepted beliefs, and to the extent that you cannot share them, you find yourself having to go along unwillingly, or with mental reservations. This does not tend to make you an effective partisan.

When war broke out in August, 1914, there was a unanimity of emotion, an enthusiastic springing to arms, a lust to destroy. People didn’t realize it, but they were desperate to destroy the lives they were leading. They wanted to tear down the structure, but they thought they were tearing at something that threatened them from outside.

A socialist could see that, if he could keep his head against the group-think. Was I keen to fight for the King-Emperor and the social system I despised? Only it was not so simple. Is it ever? German autocracy as personified – almost as caricatured – by the Kaiser was clearly worse. Privately I deplored the war and did not believe in it – and yet, at the same time, I deplored Prussian autocracy even more, and certainly could not have rooted for a victory of Germany. I sat on the sideline. I observed, I remained conscious, but this only got more agonizing as time went on.

I got that you were an editor at the London Illustrated News.

We would call it a sub-editor. I was a selector of photographs and illustrations, a glorified caption-writer. It was not a glamorous nor an influential position, but it did keep me somewhat better informed than the average man in the street. I had been there for some three years, maybe four, by the time the war began, and I was there for a decade or so after the war concluded.

Surely you had to do some official drum-banging for the war.

Less than you might think. If I kept to describing specifics, there was no need to hint at the self-destructive futility of it, not that any such hints would have had any result beyond getting me fired. But the anguish cumulated as the months dragged on. You cannot envision the change from 1914, when the war would surely be over by Christmas, to 1915, 1916, 1917, 1918, when it clearly was going to go on forever. In 1914, even in 1915, it was possible to imagine that the end of the war would find us unchanged. By 1916, certainly by 1917, it was clear to those with eyes to see that nobody was going to win this war, and it was about who would lose it more thoroughly. The one date that marked that change more than any other was July 1, 1916.

I looked it up yesterday: 57,000 casualties in one day – 19,000 of them killed – the worst day for casualties in British history. The beginning of a 141-day battle that cost more than 400,000 British casualties and resulted in a six-mile advance over a 16-mile front. To my surprise, I saw that it was no longer considered to be useless butchery that accomplished nothing. Some think it led to the beginning of the end for the Germans, for reasons I won’t go into.

But you asked for the source of my reaction, which you felt that day, and my reactions had nothing to do with questions of strategy, nor even with the question of was it worthwhile even in its own military terms. Mine were rooted in something deeper.

I can feel a certain complication here, a reluctance to dip into it.

Yes, it is powerful, isn’t it, still? What you are calling first-tier and second-tier effects. And the third-tier effect went into the making of you, you understand.

In that you are a dominant strand comprising me.

Yes. You might be fascinated reading about military history (that was another strand’s influence, of course) but you could not enter whole-heartedly into such a career even if your health had allowed, because I knew better.

How do you think I felt, watching without being able to do anything, as a generation of young men was ground into the mud in France, and Gallipoli? Futility, official stupidity, dirty motives of politicians, economics behind it all, deliberate whipping-up of public hatred. It stank, and there was no way out except through it, by way of killing, killing, killing. Just as for many people Sept. 11, 2001, marks the end of one era and the beginning of another, so for me July 1, 1916, marks the end of a relatively innocent age. World War I destroyed Edwardian society.

So to focus in specifically on what I felt that day in London –

Imagine concentrating your emotional reaction to all the wrong-turnings you have witnessed in your life, and spraying them out in one burst, like a capacitor discharging. That’s what you were on the receiving end of. You are thinking of it as if I were sending you a message and you were receiving it. That’s the same idea people in my day had about what telepathy was. But, change metaphors and the nature of the event will become clearer. Think of something that equalizes with something else when brought into contact, the way water seeks its own level. Say you were in the Panama Canal and someone opened the gate between your lock and the adjacent one. The water might come in quickly or slowly overall, but it would come from the higher level to the lower as quickly as it could. The higher lock didn’t “send,” exactly, and the lower one didn’t “receive” in the way people think of telepathy as being sent and received. Instead, in the absence of a barrier, the water naturally sought its own level. A lightning bolt may be seen as the equalization of energy too, violently and suddenly.

So you are saying it wasn’t that you were trying to send a message, but that time and place created the spark?

As you intuited, place is an important part of this.

I have always wondered why ghosts haunt specific places, and why they mark anniversaries.

And now perhaps you see the answer. This is one world, not a physical and a separate non-physical world. Therefore place matters; time matters. Only, it is a matter of conceiving of things correctly. One might say the first of July, 1916 was in 3D on that date, and subsequently is in non-3D only. Yet it is not gone, as conventional thinking would have it. The non-3D version of events does not pass away, any more than other time-space combinations pass away when the living present moment passes on beyond them. But if you were to stand on the Marne battlefield today, it would be the same place (to all extents and purposes), which might facilitate your communication with that place-time that is otherwise difficult or impossible to reach.

When you reconceptualize the world to remove certain thought-barriers, sudden inflows of knowledge and being are enabled to occur. Such barriers include:

  • I am only a 3D being
  • Those in the non-3D are accessible only through effort and practice, and perhaps special talent.
  • The past is beyond touching.
  • The future is “the” future, and in any case does not yet exist.
  • The world is physical and external, rather than mental and internal.
  • We are each alone.
  • “On the other side there is no time.”
  • The 3D and non-3D worlds have little or nothing to do with each other.
  • Mental, spiritual, and physical are three realities, rather than merely three words describing reality from different viewpoints.

The pursuit of happiness

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

[At yesterday’s ILC meeting, we wound up with a somewhat open-ended drumming session centered on the question of happiness. I said, “Guys?” and got the following.]

Happiness as in joy? Or Happiness as in “going with the flow”? They can be but aren’t necessarily the same.

Tranquility is living in minimal friction with what seems external. But living without friction is not automatically the best thing. It may be, it may not be. But if not tranquility, what?

Acceptance, not quite the same thing. It amounts to living in faith that everything that comes to you is for the best, regardless what you may think of it.

Acceptance, not bucking the system, is productive. Trying to get what you want may be productive, but may not be. If you are on a counterproductive path and don’t know it, how will you correct course except by receiving something you may not want, may not like, may not believe is for your benefit?

It would be easy to raise logical objections to this, but more helpful to yourself to tentatively accept it and see what you learn.

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.