1. Can we know?

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Saturday, April 27, 2024

5:05 a.m. Mt friends, I have decided that if we resume our regular chats, I want us to work on the summary book together. I will do my best to steer it by questions – and I will hope that others will contribute questions as well – only this time we will work on explicit ground rules (which, of course, may change as things develop). This time we’re going to produce entries for the blog and for email lists, but with the understanding that I may change things extensively when it comes time to produce extended discourse. That is, I may rewrite.

It was never our intent that you reproduce us as if being a scribe and an acolyte or even a translator. We told you that repeatedly.

You did. But doing it my way left a record – a more or less verbatim record – documenting the process. From here we will concentrate on a clearer exposition. I consider that if this process hasn’t been demonstrated on the record by now, there is nothing more we can do by way of demonstration.

Well, we never fought you on the idea, merely reminded you that the restriction was on your end, not on ours.

True. So, to work? Let us address ourselves to the eventual reader. That will reduce the burden of rephrasing when it comes to putting it together.

So, first question: What is the practical use of changing our view of the way the world works? Life has plenty of obvious and serious problems. Why divert ourselves by trying to know what can’t be known?

If it couldn’t be known, there would be force in the question. It’s true, “Life is real, life is earnest, and the grave is not its goal.” [Longfellow] But consider.

  • Is it true that “the way the world works” can’t be known?
  • Is it true that, if it can be known, the question is not practical?

We would say that the answer to the first question depends entirely upon one’s definitions of “known.” It can be known, enough to be of use, as we will show. And the second question is an easy, “Yes it is practical to ask.” And we will give our reasons why it is practical.

As to knowing the meaning of life – which is the same question, really, as knowing how the world works:

What do you mean by “knowing”? The same word may mean different things. There is the knowing that can be established by scientific instrumentation, testing a hypothesis to see if it can be falsified. Clearly this kind of knowing is not what we mean.

On the other end of the scale is the knowing that relies entirely on “what feels right.” This strictly intuitive approach is legitimate, but it has its pitfalls and its limits. We can’t rely on individual intuition to provide us with the answers to the meaning of life, to the way the world functions. Because it is individual, it is subject to psychological vagaries that not only may send you off the track, but in any case may make it terribly hard to communicate with your fellows. What is true for one may provide sure guidance in life for that one. Yet what is true for one may not be at all true for another.

The most productive approach to investigation lies between these two extremes, or is an alternation between them, or uses one to correct the other. This may seem a very insecure platform to rely on, but perhaps it is more reliable than it seems at first sight.

The first rule of investigation is to measure by the tools proper to the matter being examined. You don’t do psychological testing to see if a given geological area was the product of certain physical phenomena. Similarly, you don’t measure weight, density, etc. to see if human life has purpose. The right tool for the right job.

It isn’t like the questions haven’t been asked over the years. Why are we here? What is the meaning of life? Is there a God? What should we do with our lives?

  • Some ask these questions relying heavily upon logic and thought, using other people’s previous answers as data, but subjecting everything to the test of logic. You call such inquiries philosophy.
  • Some ask as the result of personal experience (painful or ecstatic) or strictly out of a burning curiosity, and their investigation relies heavily upon other people’s testimony about their own experiences. This is the part of religion that attempts to trace what reality is, not the part that attempts to deduce or transmit what this implies (or commands) about human conduct. You call this theology.
  • An intermediate discipline attempts to come at the truth by taking personal testimony seriously – as evidence of the human mind’s functioning, not necessarily as evidence that what that mind concludes is correct. It also applies thought and logic to that data, and you call it psychology.

There are other approaches as well, but they are all variants of the two extremes, science and religion, and the intermediate position of psychology.

Using these methods of inquiry, yes, the world can be known. Human life can be understood. Only, bear in mind, true understanding will not produce only one answer.

This may seem contradictory: How can there be more than one truth?  But in fact, truth has so many facets that it can never be known in full. It can only be known from a given viewpoint. Every different viewpoint will show truth in a somewhat different perspective.

Perspective – the necessary result of viewpoint – produces different partial views, none of them necessarily “wrong,” or even “incomplete” or “misleading” – provided that you remember that they are partial views, not one (impossible) comprehensible 360-degree view. Try to imagine a view that sees not only 360 degrees around the horizon, but also every 360-degree view that can be drawn through every degree of altitude from the horizon to the zenith. It can’t be done. The only way to get to such a comprehensive view is to leave 3D limitations and move to a non-linear – non-3D – framework. But this you cannot do while still in the body. You may be able to conceive of it, you will be unable to accomplish it, any more than a rifleman could shoot in all directions at once.

But just because you cannot get a universal view beyond viewpoint, doesn’t mean you can’t get all you need, because (as we will show in its proper place) you represent a viewpoint. You are one bit of data out of the entirety. Just as you are not everybody, so your viewpoint cannot be everybody’s, and this is as it should be. But the one bit is valuable, and if you will think holistically, you will understand that every bit contains the whole.

Next time we will show why it is practical to ask these larger questions.

This seems to have worked well. Thanks.

 

God’s spies

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Friday, April 26, 2024

Every time I write the date in an entry – or, not every time, but often enough – I am reminded of the months I spent wondering if the final entry would be any time soon. It seemed it must be – but never was. Well, someday.

Okay, guys, ready if you are. It is 4:35 a.m. (rounded as usual) and I have my very welcome coffee.

Consider your pleasure in writing in your accustomed journal book rather than the off-format one you endured for three months, and remember your thought about the philosophers.

Yes, I get it. I thought, yesterday, reading about Colin’s thought and life, that so many schools of philosophy were built upon totally inadequate models of human life. Incomplete, actually wrong, clearly demonstrated in  years since how incomplete and wrong they were, and yet their influence persists. Tabula rasa, for instance. Clearly wrong. Sartre and so many existentialist thinkers making assumptions and perhaps not even seeing that they were assumptions rather than facts, and so concluding that man is a useless passion, that life is inherently meaningless, that everything is contingent. And the link you are making is, I think, an example of how many connections we make that have nothing to do with logic or thought. In this case, the physical familiarity of the journal book and pen, the pjs and robe, the early morning coffee and the surrounding world’s quiet, with perhaps the distant sound of cars or trucks on the highways outside. Such physical clues are missed, just as are more debatable ones as heredity, affinity, past-life memory, etc.

The reason we wanted you to write the book interpreting our words is that no one else will be able to do the job you could do. Others will be able to do what you cannot do, but they won’t be able to do what only the one on the inside of the process can do.

Maybe I already did it in The Cosmic Internet.

To a degree, you did. But you know more now than you did then.

Well, I don’t know what to do about it. It’s like “The Stone and the Stream” manuscript that I looked at yesterday, for the first time since ceasing work on it in October. I can see that it won’t do; there isn’t any point in finishing it. But I can’t see how to go ahead with a new version, nor how to fix what I have. We may have to settle for what is done.

We aren’t the ones concerned about it.

No, but you are the ones quietly nudging me, I think. Or maybe not, maybe the distinction was never more than relative. In any case, I enjoy the feeling of being back in contact with you. I had reconciled myself to having finished all this, but I prefer it. And I bought a six-pack of these journals, as a sort of act of faith,. I hope they get filled with substance.

If I had the energy and the reason to do it, maybe I’d write a sort of autobiography. Colin thought I should, and that was before Rita and I even began our 2001 sessions.

As usual, it is your choice.

Let’s talk about something. I know it’s my choice, theoretically, but maybe it will get done or, more likely, maybe it won’t.

Consider your drawings.

I have gotten a good deal of pleasure out of the process of drawing in pencil, then later coloring the drawings with colored pencils. I have done hundreds of black-and-white sketches, and have colored a small proportion of them. I just framed and displayed nine of them on my dining room wall, as you know. Satisfying, fun, effortless in the sense of hard work, yet not effortless in the sense of time and attention spent doing them. None of this can come to anything except for myself. Maybe journaling is no different, despite that background sense that says, “This ought to be made available.”

Maybe it isn’t an either/or. Maybe things done for their own sake are accomplished regardless whether anything further is done with them. [They meant, I think, are an accomplishment either way.]

Like Charles absorbing 50 years’ worth of philosophical and religious reading, or my reading of so much history and biography.

The mental association is work; it results in a product within the mind you are, regardless if it is ever put into the world in overt form. We said this long ago. No one’s life – communicated to others or not – is “wasted.” No one’s connections are ephemeral. It is hard for people to realize that: It is one thing we still hope you will work at getting across to them.

Something of a contradiction there. It isn’t important that such things be communicated, and then it is.

You can untangle that yourself. It isn’t very complicated, and isn’t much of a contradiction.

I see that. You’re saying all our lives are important records of experience and connection (besides what else they are), and so whether we communicate to others isn’t important. But you are also saying it can be important to tell people this so they know.

One thing you came to do is to encourage people. What more encouraging for them than to be reminded that their inner world is not “inconsequential unless expressed.” And this ties in to your earlier thought about the failed philosophers.

Yes, it does. They judged us as if we were merely disconnected individuals, no Upstairs (non-3D) component at all, no psychic links and transmission, no purpose, not even any innate wisdom or radar. A totally inadequate model of what we really are, and we suffer from accepting that model to some extent except when we happen to wake up to its falsity.

If the inarticulate private citizen once realized that every mind registers, think what a heightened sense of responsibility and purpose and hopeful construction may result. “Mute, inglorious Miltons” may be seen as not having been wasted at all; they are closer to being God’s spies.

“God’s spies.” From Lear, I think. I have had that thought over the years. Most of us do not have access to the media megaphone, whether we would or would not want it. We live our lives as private things. We report (silently) on the world as it is beyond the media spotlight.

All paths are good, the life lived in the spotlight, the life lived in deliberate or inadvertent obscurity, the life mostly private and a little bit public, the life public but still unavoidable private. There is no preferred mode, as far as we are concerned, and no mode that is unfortunate. The more that people realize this, the happier and the more satisfied they will be.

I was thinking, the other day, I’ll bet every concept you’ve given us over the past 25 years can be found in my earlier journals. Many of them, anyway. It is as if I already knew it, but needed someone sort of external to call my attention to it.

“Sort of”? We are external to the degree that anything can be external, and internal in that we are all part of the one thing that is. And if your readers will remember this, they will see why it is impossible that they be disconnected or unimportant or disregarded, regardless of external circumstances or appearances; regardless even of how it feels to them.

We are going to have to find a way to bring the insights of religion back into our lives without at the same time carrying the rules and superstitions that accreted to the insight, to the mind-awareness, to the stance more in the All-D and less in 3D-only.

And that’s enough.

Fifty minutes, not bad. I’d say you earned your money today.

And we’d say you earned your coffee.

Which is cold, the little that’s left of it. Our thanks as usual.

 

Braiding (5) A word from the guys

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

While writing Muddy Tracks, I asked the guys upstairs if they would indicate the inner meaning of the events of 1970, and this is what they said:

Of course. And welcome to you, reader. What Frank calls The Gentlemen Upstairs, at your service. Perhaps he will not mind if we cast some of this in the third person. It will be easier for him to hear, and easier therefore to slip it through his mental filtration.

Frank was functioning exclusively Downstairs, as he calls it, all the years from the time he was shut down at about age seven until he gradually learned to consciously reopen the tap as a middle-aged man. The point of these early sections is to remind him—and you—of what it is like to live continuously Downstairs, without conscious access to other levels of your being. It isn’t “wrong” to do so, in any moral sense. It isn’t even “incorrect” to do so, for all paths are good, and all lead to growth one way or another. But while it isn’t wrong, and isn’t incorrect, it certainly is doing things the hard way. People do things the hard way sometimes because they are stubborn, and sometimes because they feel they have no choice. But usually they stop doing it the hard way when they learn that there is an easier way.

One purpose of this book is to convince you to try the easier way.

When Frank’s friend died, and in a way even more so when his earlier “friends”—his heroes—were killed, he had to deal with it exclusively from his Downstairs resources, and not even all of those. Because he thought he shouldn’t fear death, or mourn it, he convinced himself that it shouldn’t hurt, and that therefore it didn’t. Unable to acknowledge his feelings, he was of course unable to process them, and they remained violently alive within him. (So it seems to you in bodies, anyway.) Repressing awareness of feelings takes enormous amounts of energy, even when much of the emotion becomes locked into the physical structure. The violent unacknowledged feelings sloshing around inside made him prone to violent, unpredictable, uncontrolled mood swings, as those who were around him then could well testify. And the situation divorced him increasingly from the world around him, as he tried to cope with the world—with others—strictly from unacknowledged, therefore unknown, feelings. People were already a puzzle to him; they became even more so. He had no feel for who they were, or why they were as they were. He couldn’t understand the simplest things about what motivated them. And he had no idea how he appeared to others. Some were attracted to him, some were contemptuous, some puzzled. In no case did he have any idea why.

What all this has to do with Colin Wilson jumps the gun a bit, chronologically. Frank’s helplessness in the face of his friend’s death appalled him—though he scarcely realized it. And his dissatisfaction with his own life was so acute, his belief in the reality of any realistic path so nonexistent, that he was feeling trapped. He thought in terms of writing books, making lots of money, and living an independent existence not requiring him to go to work five days a week, but to his puzzlement he made little attempt to do the writing that would lead to the goal. He thought in terms of running for Congress in 1974, but made no attempt to lay any groundwork for the plan. He was stranded. At a deeper level, he was purposeless. (We speak here strictly of the Downstairs level that he experienced.)

Colin Wilson’s books gave him an opening he could believe in: the development of mental powers! The achievement of supernatural abilities, paranormal skills! He didn’t know whether he could believe in them or not, but here was a writer who was investigating reports of such things, and doing so from a point of view quite similar to his own: open and inquiring, yet skeptical and wanting to make sense of it all, rather than merely accepting someone’s word for it.

Wilson’s book came into Frank’s life—something he is about to learn as we bring him to write this—at just the time needed to provide him a bridge across despair. The Catholic Church had failed him, or so he would have put it, in that its rules and its perceived completeness and rigidity left no room for things he somehow knew were not as they had been described. (He called that knowing intuition then, not yet thinking in terms of layers of being.) The materialist worldview had no appeal; he similarly knew that was even less true than what he took the Catholic Church’s position to be. He was looking for a way out of his logical prison that said, “There is no God; or anyway, not as I have been taught; yet we are more than the accidental collection of chemicals.”

Wilson was there, to lead him to many others. The Mind Parasites inflamed him with the nonrational certainty that mental powers were there waiting to be developed. The Outsider and the succeeding books in Wilson’s Outsider cycle were crammed with references to others who seemed to see the world, if not just as Frank saw it, at least closer than anyone he knew in the flesh.

 

The guys on reacting to the news

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

[This stems from a comment made on the Voyagers Mailing List.]

Tuesday, March 19, 2024

[First day of spring. Also the day Rita Warren died in 2008.]

9:25 a.m. Okay, guys, you said that reacting to life in any way but living in faith would be “the equivalent of pretending to affect world affairs by your reaction to the latest news.” Care to elaborate, and clarify? Don’t we affect the world by our reactions to thing, even distant things? The analogy is to prayer.

This is partly a linguistic tangle, as you suggested to your friend in the mailing group, but more, it is a misunderstanding of our intent. We might have expressed ourselves more clearly, and here is an opportunity to do so.

There is a difference between intent and reaction, between conscious decision and the playing-out of old tapes. And this is the key to many things.

How does one watch the TV news, or read the newspaper, or surf the news websites? For that matter, how does one relate to others in oral or written conversations centering on the news? How, makes a difference, because what seem to be the same thing may prove to be very different in nature and in effect.

Bullets?

Perhaps, or a numbered list, better.

  1. Impartial interest. You want to know what’s going on, just to know.
  2. Partisan interest. You feel that you have a stake in the outcome (not of course necessarily any material stake, but an interest, a commitment). You take sides.
  3. Outraged interest. You ascribe right and wrong, and root for the right and detest the wrong. This in turn subdivides into:
    1. Historical
    2. Ideological
    3. Emotional
    4. (Call it) logical connection

So, 1 is perhaps well grounded in facts, or perhaps not, but in effect you are sure you know what happened to bring this about.

2 is more the way a committed Communist intellectual would have parsed a situation through “dialectical materialism” or whatever. Events can only be seen through a consciously adopted filter (which may have become so automatic as to function invisibly.)

3 always roots for the underdog, or instinctively sees disturbances as threats to civilization, or in any way plays off of prejudice that is seen as analysis.

It is a little more complicated with 4. This is a sort of combination of the first three, or rather of some elements of each of the first three. It says, “This probably connects to that, and my reaction to that is already set, so that governs (shapes) my reaction to that.” It is a form of analysis, but one far from being as coldly logical as the thinker supposes.

That’s all on one side of the ledge. The other side is one’s intent.

That isn’t clear. I thought what you just listed was intent.

Hmm. We see that. Let us have a moment to process. The exposition is new to us, not only to you.

Hard to see how that can be, but okay. We’ll wait.

[Brief pause]

Let’s back up and start again from another angle.

The power to bless is the power to curse, as you know. Similarly, the power to heal is the power to harm. This is one reason why it may be considered a safety-valve that most people are not powerful healers. It is one of those abilities that is well served by being kept out of the hands of the ill-intentioned or even the careless. As people’s emotional maturity increases, as they learn to live in love in bad times as well as good, the ability may be safely spread more broadly.

Now, what is a person’s reaction to the news, if an emotional one, but intent to aid one side and harm another? Not consciously, perhaps, but it is much like rooting for one team over another, only with elevated stakes.

Well, if you hear that the X conflict has flared up again, your reaction may be tempered by many things. You may distrust the news you get; you may read more into what you hear, for good or bad reasons. You may accept what is given as fact. In any case, your emotional reaction may be rage or exultation or anything between. Or, you may be indifferent, or merely interested but no more.

Can you see that this is a relationship with variables at either end? On the one side, the information, on the other side, your reaction. (And we have not mentioned, nor do we want to consider here, how your reaction interacts with other factors in your life.)

All this is to say something pretty simple. Your reaction cannot directly affect what happened. Your sincerest wish could not get Kennedy un-killed. No partisan could by intent cause any event to un-happen. (We are not talking here about alternate time-lines. That is a different subject that would only add confusion in this context.)

But what your reaction can do, and does do – you might say must do – is add to the emotion on one or the other side of this ledger: bright or dark, love or fear, hope or despair. This is the effect you have, and it is not trivial.

So when we referred to people pretending to affect world affairs by their reaction to the news, we did not mean to say, “What you experience makes no difference,” nor “You and your reaction are trivial.” Rather we meant, there is a difference between what you think you are doing and what you are doing. You may think you are affecting one side of a conflict by cursing it. What you are doing is adding to the total of hatred and fear and darkness.

You see? You do not affect the situation itself, you affect the aura surrounding it.

That’s pretty clumsy. I think you mean, the 3D features of the situation are not affected: We can’t make a rocket miss its target, nor undo damage that has already been done, but we can affect the non-3D aspects by adding our efforts to whatever tug-of-war is going on.

That is an acceptable rephrasing. The argument is full of logical holes that we can’t fill. For instance, non-3D efforts certainly affect 3D conditions all the time. But what is important here is not making a complete and accurate statement – which is beyond us here – but providing a finger pointing to the moon.

This has been an interesting exercise. It feels like you were struggling. Is this because my own mental world didn’t provide you ruts to run in?

Partially. Any new way of seeing things presents difficulties. But partly it is a matter of us having to organize connections on the fly. We remind you, you have experienced this in the past.

Not very often, though. Mostly you have your scripts prepared plus you are pretty good at ad libbing. In any case, thanks as always. I suspect we will have to revisit the subject, and that if and when we do, it will flow more smoothly.

Well, we’ll see, won’t we?

Indeed we will.

 

The guys, on living the present

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Monday, March 18, 2024

8 a.m. You boys seem to enjoy putting the cat among the pigeons, and every time you do, it seems some people profit by it. So, anything on your minds today? How about continuing from where we left off?

Perhaps it is worth saying on your behalf that we do not experience your questions or comments as stemming from discouragement or desperation, but from curiosity and often perplexity.

I have often said as much to various friends but for some reason it seems to come across as an emotion I am not feeling – much like when people sometimes experience you as chastising me when we are only joking or when it is an even, straight, exchange. But given the limitations on using words, I don’t know what can be done about it. Nothing, I imagine, and so what?

Well, there is a line to be walked. OT1H you don’t want to give up on the idea of conveying a sense of atmosphere; OTOH, just realize that precision is not to be had outside of telepathic contact, and even there the “flavor” of the minds  involved will flavor the soup.

I’m not worried about it if you aren’t. It just seemed something to be mentioned.

A mention, yes, not a full-length disquisition, unless for some reason that becomes warranted.

So – more on why we’re still here, or on vertical community?

Let us return – continually return – to the practical. Any theory or even any description of the way things are that we may engage in is always aimed at practical use. We don’t want you (plural) building castles in the air unless, like Thoreau, you intend to put the foundations under them. So everything we have given you in 25 years has been intended to help orient you to the way things are, so that you may better live your potential. Not so you may admire an abstract scheme, but so that you may use the scaffolding to get a bird’s-eye view, the better to work from.

If you are not in 3D to live, what are you there for? But of course, the question is, what does “live” mean for you, in this moment?

I hear you saying, All paths are good: scholar, adventurer, soldier, idler, whatever. The externals of our life aren’t what you are concentrating on.

No. you will each shape your life by a combination of the existing possibilities (predestination) and what you do with them (free will). But from our point of view, your internal life is what is real.

That didn’t come out right, did it?

It was hastily put, let’s put it that way. Your internal life and your external life are, of course, part of one life. Either may be considered in the absence of the other, but it is only a partial view.

Bullets?

Perhaps. Let’s see.

  • The internal world is your life as experienced intuitively.
  • The external, as experienced via the physical senses.
  • In effect, right-brain internal, left-brain external, and they are designed to complement each other.
  • Thus (this will be obvious to some, and we have said it many times), inner and outer worlds are not different, nor disconnected, much less one real and the other not. They are one reality, experienced in alternative ways.
  • This identity being so, which way of looking at life should be considered more profound? You will have a preference; the answer may seem obvious. But in fact, it is dealer’s choice and depends upon your psychic composition.
  • We, based in non-3D, naturally see the intuitive, gestalt, non-sensory perception as realer, more reliable, than the sensory, detail-oriented, sequential view that is channeled through physical senses.
  • But again, it isn’t that simple. (You could print that out and hang it on the wall: “It isn’t that simple.” It never is. Anything can always be explored more deeply.) Your view of the external world is inextricably mixed with your thoughts, emotions, complexes, etc. Your experience of the inner world is highly variable depending upon your physical circumstances such as fatigue, disorientation, etc.

That seemed to go well.

Yes, good suggestion. Now, the question remains for you, for anybody: What are you doing with your life right now? What you did yesterday, what you might do tomorrow, may be interesting, but they are not centered in the way anything is centered that deals with here, now, because that is what is real in terms of –

Yes, I was wondering how you were going to finish that sentence.

Well, it’s the usual problem with words, less “How do I say it so as to be understood” than “How do it say it so as to lessen the chances of being mis-understood?” That’s why we’re always circling around a subject, to sketch enough context to hopefully orient the reader to look in the right direction.

Bullets again?

Maybe not. Let’s put it this way: Your entire life, past, present, and future, is theoretically available and interacting with you at any moment. This is true, if counter-intuitive. But it is also true that your only moment of application is in whatever “now” you find yourself. You can choose now, no time else. The confusing thing is that every moment is experienced as now when you are in it; still, your awareness is in one “now” no matter how wide a net you cast.

Yes, I have been aware for some time that we need some bridging concept to make clear to us how it can always be “now” and yet each other moment of our lives have its own “now.”

We doubt if it can be contained within 3D awareness. You can grok it, perhaps. We doubt you can establish it as a law of nature. (However, we could be wrong.)

Hold this in mind. Different angles of vision from the same place produce different vistas. That is a function of vision and perspective, not of some contradiction in reality or some flaw of observation.

So, looking one way, we say every moment of time is as if separate, just as you in each of those moments are as if different from what you are in other moments. Looking another way, we say nothing passes, least of all time. There is only the one living moment, so therefore you – we – live only in that one living “now.”

Put the two seemingly contradictory views together (you can intuit its truth, even if you can’t build a logical structure of it). You will see that’s your life. You in the present can learn to range backward and forward, but the only time you feel fully alive is when you are consciously in the living “now.” We said consciously in the living now, notice. You are always there (as there is nowhere else to be) but if you are distracted by daydreams and old tapes and robotic repetitions, you may not be living in the present in effect.

The present is life. Awareness is life. Choice, delight, pain, all the experiences of the 3D, are life. A greater non-3D awareness while you are still in the body is life.

What does any of this have to do with the externals of your life? Viktor Frankl had a hard life while in the concentration camp, but you can see by what he brought out of it that he lived. Can any of you say that your life is harder than his? And, if it were, would that necessarily be a bad thing? Maybe it would be life more intensely.

Interesting thought.

Hold this: The practical thing to do is always to live as awarely as you can. All the details will vary from one person’s life to the next, but the common factor will be, “You are living this life. Live it as you please, but live it.” And if you can live it in calm joy, so much the better.

Our thanks for all this, as always.

 

TGU on Why am I still here?

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Sunday, March 17, 2024

10:50 a.m. Hard to figure out how to begin. Wondering why I’m still here, how much longer, if there’s anything to accomplish, etc., nothing new there. Beyond that, no interest in doing anything, even leaving the house. Is this going anywhere? I am of course in mind of Rita asking herself why she was still there. Now I am in the same position. Reading doesn’t seem to be much of a life, and I’m pretty well finished with writing, I guess.

Guys?

You are still the only “you” around. When you are no longer in a given 3D moment, who can look out on the world from your point of view?

Nobody and so what?

Yes, in a way “so what” and of course every life comes to an end. But what if your observation is required (or anyway desired) for a specific series of events?

But, is it?

This is a tangled subject.

Tell me about it! How about untangling it some?

You never had a clear view of your life going forward. In general, people don’t. Too much clarity would actually restrict your effective range of maneuver.

So why change now, is that it?

Don’t slip into an assumption of being acted upon rather than also acting. You are not guinea pigs, you are explorers: What you explore is partly a matter of your context, partly a matter of your decisions and their consequences.

But we usually know when we’re on the beam, don’t we?

Do you? Think how many times you sleepwalked into your future, when clearer insight might have made you less certain, or let’s say less able to follow non-rational but critical paths.

Okay, granted. I never claimed to know what I was doing, or why I was impelled to do it. But let’s talk specifically about this end of my life, when I presumably am playing out the clock rather than preparing for some new adventure.

If you wish to define it that way.

Meaning, we never know. Well, it is highly irritating. It is one thing to live in faith, as I think I do. It is something else to live in deliberately produced obscurity [that is, lack of clarity; opacity], as it sometimes seems I am doing.

Do you remember when you hungered and thirsted to know the future?

A good part of my youth.

Would it have helped or hindered?

How can I know? It didn’t happen.

Au contraire. It did happen but not in a way you have recognized until just this moment.

That’s very interesting. I knew I would run for Congress in 1974. Knew it years before, though it made no sense. That was knowing the future but it felt like waiting for the time to roll around until I could do it.

Was that predestination or free will?

I see your point, it wasn’t either, in a way. It was being drawn to an outcome.

How you ran, whether you ran (for you might have looked at the odds and said no) were up to you. But the running itself was as if set in stone, not because it was predestined (though it could look like that) but because it was a major rock in the stream that was your life. If it were not to be encountered, it would have to be avoided, but it could not be ignored.

I’m not sure I have the sense of it. How is something that must be dealt with different from predestination?

So long as you look at this through 3D logic – past, then present, then future, created sequentially – it will tangle. Look at it as we do, that all the potentialities of your life, of everyone’s life sharing your time, are inherent from the creation. Seen that way, it becomes a matter of current and steering and storms and drift and propulsive power. A canoeist exercises his free will in going down the river, but freewill cannot move the canoe outside the river or to another time. Life does provide portages, it is true, but fewer than you might think.

So, a salient point in Rita’s life was her questioning of you in 2001-2002, unbeknown to herself ahead of time?

Yes, but don’t think external tasks are necessarily the important thing. How do you know but that something you will assimilate, something you will put together mentally and never mention, may be an important thing in your life?

I feel like at this point I am to sigh and say, “Living in faith, okay I can do that.”

Suppose you didn’t. where would be the advantage of frustration or anger or worry or indignation or any reaction other than living in faith that all is well? Wouldn’t it be the equivalent of pretending to affect world affairs by your reaction to the latest news?

Point taken. I get the feeling there is more to be said, but I’m finished for the moment. Our thanks as always.

1 p.m. Typing this up, I am aware that this barely scratches the surface. Perhaps others will have comments or questions that will lead to something.

 

The guys on vertical and horizontal communities

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Saturday, March 16, 2024

9:10 a.m. I figure it’s time for a chat with the guys. Nice to have enough energy again. So, boys, what’s on your mind?

Let’s briefly discuss Memory Lane, its uses and possibilities.

Discuss away.

Your poking into your past memories via journals and – especially – fictionalized recounting set into print long ago – offers you a time machine. Not only do you get an automatic correction of dates and sequence, you get vivid reminders of what you felt then, and you get vivid comparisons between what you concluded whenever you wrote what you now read and what strikes you from this vantage point so many years – decades – later.

And what was that? This: You are not the same person. (We should hope it is clear that this must apply to any and all, but it never hurts to make it plain.) In that sense, it is not a time capsule alone; it is also a time capsule opened by a different person than originally sealed it. We know you know on some level that you are not –

Well, maybe we’ve never said this explicitly.

I don’t think you did, no, at least not what I’m hearing so far. Proceed.

Horizontally (so to speak) you now know that you are not one but many, or, if you have done the work, are one made from many, although the many retain their separate existence.

But look at yourself vertically – that is, as you proceed through time during your years of life. You will see that here too you are not one but many. And it can be harder to make one out of the many than it is to make one out of the many strands.

We need a better focus on this. Horizontally, strands. Vertically, –?

The naming will somewhat define your understanding, so we will proceed carefully. If we were to say one version of you for every moment of awareness (or rather, for every moment lived, regardless how aware your 3D self was or was not), you might see that as a clear statement, but when you came to try to use it, what could you do with it? Let us say you are different at 3:35 p.m. one day than you are at 3:36. How can you really imagine in any useful way a life made up of hundreds of thousands of slightly different versions of yourself? Not everything that is true is also useful.

So how make the distinctions still true but also useful, useable?

Simplify, simplify, simplify.

There is really no alternative. The saying is, “The map is not the territory.” Of course not, it is a simplified representation. It is in the simplification that its usefulness inheres. Simplifying relationships makes plainer their relative positions. If one over-simplifies, one distorts beyond the value of usefulness, but until that point, the simplifying process is a clarificatory one.

Not sur about “clarificatory,” but I get your gist. Only, everybody is going to have a different dividing point between useful and oversimplified.

Certainly, but that’s true of everything. Individual judgments always differ. That’s one of the advantages your non-3D component derives from having 3D representatives.

Parallax.

Essentially. Now, to return to what we may call vertical community. What would be an acceptable level of simplification?

I suppose, most grossly, childhood, youth, young adult, middle age, old age, something like that.

Yes that is one way one could begin to learn one’s vertical components. So, a conference table or campfire or whatever, populated by the child you were, the youth etc., and – personalizing these abstractions – see what you can be learning from one another. This is one way, and we may say a very basic way. Basic, as in, easy to do, but limited in possibility.

I get that maybe we could set up (find?) representatives of who we were before and after certain turning points. Not sure how practical that would be, though.

“Practical” implies “for a certain end.” What end would you foresee?

Oh, I don’t know. Self-awareness, I suppose, what else can we call it?

Consider what you did in posting your articles on “Dave.”

They haven’t appeared yet, but okay.

You are a long way beyond that 23-year-old whose life was so brutally punctuated. By rereading old words you in effect brought together the “you” in the immediate event, the “you” who later wrote about it, and the “you” who has had a long lifetime ‘s experiences beyond that.

Now, this is difficult to say because it has so many elements.

Bullets, maybe?

  • The strands active at any of those times.
  • Interaction among them, outside of time.
  • Emotions, thoughts, physical sensations, unconscious resonance from each player involved, that is, from each moment of time.
  • Judgments and their interactions. What a 25-year-old sees, feels, decides will not necessarily mesh with a 50- or 75-year-old.
  • Ongoing conclusions, not quite the same thing as judgments. “What’s the lesson in this? Where do I go from here?”
  • Pass-forwards and pass-backs: In effect, telepathy among different moments of time. Unexpected insights; emotional flashbacks; seemingly disconnected memories and themes.
  • All of this, remember, also going on among all your strands, each of which has its own life.

All these elements in play, all the time, mostly (necessarily) beneath your level of consciousness, if only because of the sheer volume of input it would  represent. So when you revisit your past, you stir the pot.

Unless.

Oh, I hear it. And this is going to tie up a couple of loose ends, isn’t it?

Tie one, create two more. But yes. The “unless” is – unless in revisiting your past you insist on seeing it always the same way. You play the same tapes, you’d say. And this, as you immediately intuited, ties in with Life More Abundantly. Tell why in your understanding.

Life playing old tapes is in a rut. It is stuck. It clings to the sides of the sliding board, determined that, no matter what happens in the future, at least the past isn’t going to change. And good luck to that.

Life More Abundantly is all about increasing your room to maneuver, broadening the amount of your life that is under your control. Or, no, not “under your control,” that gives the wrong idea. Let ‘s say, it broadens the scope for you to shape your life, past, present and future.

It is so clear to me, though still mostly beyond words. We are meant to widen our scope, not in pursuit of self-aggrandizement, but to function well as part of the larger organism of which we are a part. When I read Colin’s Mind Parasites fable, it resonated because he was saying what I hadn’t known I knew: Our lives are not essentially trivial, accidental, meaningless. Our possibilities are real but not obvious. But even as I put this into writing, it loses its noumenal quality and becomes mere words. Doesn’t matter, it’s still true.

Vertical communities, as well as horizontal. Thanks, guys.