Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC)

Sunday, October 29, 2017

Very well, my friend. Not all deciders or decisions created equal?

Surely it is obvious as soon as broached. It is only common sense, after all.

But if there is one thing this work has taught us to suspect, it is common sense.

Point. Very well, we shall look at it. But it shouldn’t take long. There are decisions that matter and those that don’t. There are people of substance and those of far less substance. You see this every day. The caveat as always is that what you see may not be what you get, but that is a separate point that merely reminds you that your judgments are apt to be fallible. But the fact that you may misjudge does not mean there are no judgments to be made.

And, I presume, “judgments” in the sense of discernment, not of condemnation.

Of course.

• Condemnation implies a value judgment, a measuring of how far a given person or action or situation differs from the judging person’s norm or ideal.
• Discernment is exactly the opposite. It is a clear seeing of what is. Ideally, perfect discernment would precede and inform condemnation; that is, no one would condemn until he or she really, thoroughly, entirely understood what was being judged.

Once one understands, the heat tends to ebb from the condemning impulse. But perhaps the saying is too absolute to be entirely true. In practice one knows the difference between important and unimportant decisions in general, if not always in careful specific. To walk down this or that side of a street, to wear blue instead of green, to drive this kind of car instead of another – usually these are trivial decisions and of no great consequence. Once in a while they might be given greater weight by a specific circumstance, but in general, they do not produce decision-points that matter, because they are not decision-points that matter.

I had to think about that sentence for a second. I guess you mean, being themselves trivial in nature, they are unlikely to lead to more consequential choice-points.

Correct. Occasionally, trivial points are decisive, and you call the result coincidence, or chance, or “for want of a nail, a kingdom was lost,” but mostly, no, and we want to pursue the usual here, not the exception.

There are levels of decision that are in themselves significant but may or may not lead to important choice-points. To stick to externals for the moment, the choice of a career, for instance. For some people, their career may shape their whole lives; all their primary energies may flow into it. For others, it may be of much less importance in that their world centers on other things.

A career as mother, for instance, could be as much a real center of interest as anything else. The much-derided “homemaker.”

Or father. Many a person’s life centers in the family they emerge from and the family they create, and these are often very centered, oriented people. A person’s consuming interest in life might have nothing at all to do with making a living, or conducting a career, or raising a family – might indeed be entirely invisible to the world, and yet just as important. And this is true, but tends more toward the point about being careful in judging the lives of others.

Still moving toward matters of greater significance: Two types of very significant decisions may be one-time or, more usually, continuing. These are what to do, or what to be. (As always in analyzing, we are downplaying ambiguities so as to present distinctions more clearly.) These are the defining trends, in a lifetime.

What to do. Either a momentous one-time choice or an equally momentous but less dramatic continuing choice. A definition of action. In choosing any true either/or, one alters the path in a way that is not done by trivial or reversible decisions. Anything is of prime importance that, if done (or, alternately, undone) will have irrevocable consequences. However, the importance may not be noticed, nor perhaps ever assessed at its true value, either by the person or by others.

Such questions of doing may involve a choice of schools or jobs or relocations that result in unanticipated consequences, such as the people and other opportunities that arise as a result. The life one leads because of a move to Cincinnati may differ greatly from the life one leads if, instead, one remains in Detroit. That decision, to do or not do, may not be made out of a conscious intent to bring this or that result, but the result will follow.

People make significant decisions not consciously knowing what will ride on them. And here, you see, decisions of doing and decisions of being are much alike. Both flow as much from what one is as from what one decides.

You mean by that, I think, that what we are (known to ourselves or not) may have more to say about our decisions than we consciously realize. Our decisions may seem to us to be supported by this and that very logical, very rational reason, whereas in fact those reasons are closer to being rationalizations than causes.

And those occasions when your unconscious motivations tend to balance out present your real choice-points. This is when you affect your larger being, your probability-cloud.

So, free will v. predestination, then? Mostly our decisions could have been predicted by anybody who knew us well enough, but sometimes we can surprise them, and maybe ourselves?

You could put it that way. Mostly you are on a smooth glide-path, but sometimes you have to seize control, for only a minute perhaps, or perhaps for a long stretch, and choose what you want to do, what you want to be.

You have not yet addressed differences in substance among people.

This is conceptually simple, but people’s perpetual temptation to judge (to condemn) comes easily into play.

• Some people are weighty and some are not, you know that.
• Some are one-pointed, all of a piece; some are self-contradictory.
• Some are content to skim the surface of life, living the externals; others may scarcely notice the externals in their inward-dwelling life.

I would say you are working toward a distinction in gravitas, and these preliminary distinctions may tend merely to confuse the subject.

It is difficult to make the point, for lack of jointly understood examples. The externals of anyone’s life may be evident; the internals must always be inferred, which is a tricky business, rich with ambiguity and prone to error.

Let us put it this way. In any trade (to use a more understandable, external, example) you have master craftsmen, journeymen, apprentices, tyros. Right? In any discipline, be it scholastic or religious or philosophical or whatever, you have the same gradations. And in any sense of endeavor, the same. Well, no one who discerned clearly would put equal weight on the opinion or judgment or output of any two stages.

Even those being judged wouldn’t dream of setting different levels of experience and skill on a par.

That is correct. And it is exactly thus when we consider a given soul’s gravitas. Some are more weighty than others, as you would expect if previous experiences and decisions mean anything at all. This doesn’t mean these differences may be fairly and safely judged; but they do exist, and they do matter.

 

Saturday, October 28, 2017

I guess we’re ready to proceed.

Then let us proceed to talk about your very interesting speculation.

Yeah, speculation – or maybe a planted idea?

Does it matter?

I don’t know. Okay, here is my journal entry from yesterday. “It occurred to me that our higher self’s choices may be what matter, and our individual choices on each path may somehow sway it. But this may be confused. We’ll see.”

It is, in any case, an interesting change of focus, is it not? Another instance of the productive redirection of thought that may occur when you move your focus of attention from your 3D level to your – higher self, some call it, others use other names. Oversoul, say.

Is that what Emerson meant by the term? Or, for that matter, Jane Roberts?

Don’t concentrate on other people’s formulations. Remember what we said about using the written word as inspiration, as sparks, rather than as logic or textbook.

Okay.

Well, let’s back up a bit, as usual, to draw context.

In 3D you experience yourself as living one life, making choices as you go. You may believe, abstractly, that the alternative lives formed by other choices exist, but it is hard for you to know it in the absence of sensory evidence. Even those who experience inexplicable changes in memory find it hard.

I think you meant, people who remember things that turn out not to be true, or not anymore, let’s say.

That’s right. Even they will usually have to go through a period of adjustment before they can integrate that evidence with that theoretical construct. After all, your sensory evidence works night and day to persuade you that the world is real, is solid, is one time-stream, and explains away any irreconcilable data. When you arrive at seeing the world as innumerable projected equally sort-of-real versions, your own role in things becomes less clear. Now not only is there conflict between sensory and intuitive constructs, but also conflict between the logical consequences that seem to follow (on the one hand) and one’s feelings about one’s life.

Yes. It doesn’t feel like our choices don’t matter, even though abstractly we may believe that it all cancels out  because all choices are made.

That is one dilemma that may arise. We will not revisit the free-will/predestination argument, but obviously no matter which choice one finds oneself committed to, the same conflict with feelings ensures. If you are not free, why does it feel like you are? If you are free, but for every heads you choose, another version of you will choose tails, what could be more futile?

So your underlying question of meaning could be restated: What is the point of our choosing? What does our choosing actually affect? If you say, “choosing changes you,” the question remains.

That’s a fair summary. We don’t want to feel useless – Sartre’s “man is a useless passion” – but we can’t just decide that we matter by a sort of force of will to believe, either.

So, to explore the subject, always coming back to the very useful reminder, “as above, so below,” let us look at things from the next higher level: the probability-cloud, your higher self, your oversoul, the complete results from the expedition sent into 3D in your time and place, using your body and mind.

Sam?

No, not a Sam. The Sam is a higher level out of which you were created. No, this is you in your true complete self. Well, complete except that to make a compact coherent statement we have to treat “you” – even at that higher level – as if you were the isolated individual that you are not and never could be.

You have the accurate insight that the purpose of your 3D creation is to choose. But that insight was given to you when you had a much oversimplified idea of who and what you are. You thought you were the 3D version you were identified with. We now invite you to identify with your complete selves, your full probability-clouds. (And we lapse into the plural merely to remind your readers that this is to them, not just to you. It does not mean more than one probability-cloud per 3D individual; just the opposite.)

If you identify with the completed self, what is its experience of your 3D excursion/creation? Remember, it has seen, it has lived (at one remove), every single possible choice, trivial or momentous and all the way between, from which sweater the schoolboy would wear to – well, name your own significant decision. What does your probability-cloud get out of all that experiencing, all that splitting off this way and that way?

I suppose it gets an exhaustive knowledge of the possibilities of that particular excursion.

Yes. Why? Does it amount to taking a survey?

I don’t know. I can see that panoramic survey of possibilities, but I can’t see any point to it. It is only my own unshakable knowing that this has meaning that keeps me from Sartre’s futile pessimism, I suppose. The answer has to be choice, but – how?

And here we are at the nub of it. Consider this carefully. (It will be easy to become confused).

You have been thinking of 3D life as choosing, in the way your friend Ed Carter described life as perpetually voting. You each do your bit to sway the result. But that leaves out the intervening factor that will help you make sense of it. Each 3D version, heads or tails, in effect votes by what it becomes, and this is what determines the composition of the higher self.

By that, I get that you mean, determines its values, in much the same way that our individual decisions determine our values.

Determine, but express, either way of seeing things is right enough. It is in exactly the same way, only the higher self is in effect tabulating individual 3D decisions, while the 3D versions are tabulating their own pre-existing predilections, including built-in conflicts.

Now, the most likely source of error in your understanding of this is an unconscious assumption that every heads version contradicts its corresponding tails version. Not necessarily so at all. Obviously trivial decisions, like which side of the street you walk down, usually have no effect on your values. But even important choices of conduct do not necessarily imply differences in values.

You’re right, I was making that unconscious assumption.

What becomes critical are those times when you are the focus of conflicting impulses (that is how you will experience them) and can – must – choose which rabbit to follow. Both heads and tails of many, many other decisions may support the same choice. And sometimes, both heads and tails versions have to choose by deciding within themselves what to do, what to be.

But by definition, don’t opposite choices always get made?

Maybe by definition, yes. But in practice not all decisions or deciders are created equal

And we have to stop here, as you no longer have enough mental energy to bring it through clearly, and it would be a pity to muddle what has so far been useful.

 

Monday, June 19, 2023

Reading The Clash of Civilizations by Samuel P. Huntington at the same time as doing other things – including plotting “The Stone and the Stream” – is a unique experience, necessarily, because everything we ingest mingles with what else we have ingested in the past and at the same moment. So how could any two people read it or anything in the same way, obtain the same end result?

I have been talking about the approaching new civilization. Huntington makes a very good case that there won’t be any one civilization, but a continuation of these existing, contending, ones. But maybe the passage of another century or two will indeed pull them together or anyway give them a common tinge they don’t have at present. But my written thoughts never express the subtlety of my unspoken ones.

So, guys, at 5:25 a.m., anything to say on the subject?

Anyone’s input is one drop in the bucket; nevertheless the bucket gets filled by just such drops, no other way. There is no “collective” input, there is no “individual” input. There is only the individual as part of the whole, or the whole as represented by the individual. The logical splitting of this unit is the cause of many difficulties in understanding. It is as if you were to be required to take sides with only your left arm and not the right. You will obtain in that way a one-sided view, not a view in true stereo.

What you do as an individual is in fact done also as a community. What a community does is done only by many individuals acting together. This is almost too basic to bother to say, except it is so often forgotten. So, the emerging world culture will indeed be funneled through subsidiary civilizations. How else could it be? But it is precisely the altering ratios of interpenetration that is at issue.

I think you mean to say, the new emerging civilization that will filter down through regional civilizations will be more open to mixed influences, less hermetically sealed, than, say, the West’s attempt to be a universal solvent.

Hegemony is not charisma.

Fairly cryptic. More?

Why should Western dress be required of Eastern businessmen? Why should Western sports or values or religions be required of Eastern societies, or Northern of Southern? However, there is nothing to prevent Southern or Eastern societies from being attracted to Northern or Western values and institutions. Only, it will be their choice; it will not come as a bundled package.

Certainly.

You say certainly, but consider how a bundled package is to be deconstructed and selectively absorbed or adapted or adopted or rejected. Won’t there be uncounted ways that this is done? Won’t it be done individually more than as groups, more by perceived special need than by someone’s persuasion?

Blue jeans, jazz, rock music, Western film. None of these except the latter perhaps were pushed on anybody. Rather, they were powerful attractors. Could you or anyone predetermine what will attract whom, why, when, in combination with what else? Can you or anyone restrict people’s being attracted to a thing for reasons they themselves probably don’t know?

So, Elvis, the Beatles, any phenomenally popular icon, exerting charisma in some undefined and indefinable way, will unpredictably change what the cultural landscape looks like.

It is hard to state obvious connections without seeming to say nothing. Nobody planned pop culture, no matter how many influences sought to do so. Nobody predicted Dylan, nor manufactured his image, nor fashioned the emotional ties that bound him to his time and place, and yet transcended them. Who could have predicted “For the Benefit of Mr. Kite”? It would have required predicting the Beatles, predicting Bob Dylan, predicting the interaction between them, predicting all the jazz and rock and roll and country and protest songs that went into their individual mixes. Who could have done that? Who could predict the effect of the Beatles, or of Dylan, or of the Beatles and Dylan, or of the Beatles and Dylan and their rivals and admirers and imitators?

They were not produced ex nihilo, nor by formula, nor by any form of inevitability. Could the Zeitgeist predict “Blowin’ in the Wind”? Or Sgt. Pepper? If so, could it predict “Idiot Wind” or “Let It Be”? Yet, again, they were not created by parthenogenesis, nor by an explosion in a chemistry lab. They were “expressing themselves.” They were robins singing their morning song in the trees. Yes, they worked at fashioning what came to them, but “what came to them” is precisely and only what they could fashion. Bob Dylan could not draw on experiences as a Buddhist monk. John Lennon could not create from experience as a college professor or farm worker  or seamstress. They were Western, not Eastern, Northern not Southern, urban not rural, secular not religious, etc., etc., but piling up what they were or were not tells you nothing about why these individual-communities produced expressions that moved millions of people. It wasn’t merely that they were talented robins. It is that they were able to sing the robins’ song. Something that they were shaped and enabled what they did, and what they did interacted in millions of ways then and now and in the future with people who will never be enumerated or recognized, but count.

Ravi Shankar, the same way. Mahavishnu John McLaughlin, same way. The list goes on forever and in all directions. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Kerouac, Salinger, all robins singing their songs, flavoring the morning. Can you call this individual? Can you call it collective? Yes, you can call it anything you like, but perhaps it is more important to see beyond labels than it is to enlist in the ranks of one or another label, just to feel one belongs.

So, civilizations –

As in all things, the more ways you see it, the more facets appear.

Thanks as always.

 

Friday, October 27, 2017

I’m anxious to hear you on predestination and free will.

It’s very simple – or very complicated, depending upon which end of the stick you pick up.

It doesn’t seem so to us. To us it looks like it ought to be an either/ or.

But, remember what you noticed repeatedly whenever Rita would find a contradiction. The universe contains all contradictions, but does not contradict itself.

• Free will means that in a given set of circumstances, at a given moment in the ever-flowing river of time carrying you along in your 3D life, you have the real, not theoretical, ability to go this way or that way. You have a real, not a theoretical, choice. You really can choose heads or tails. You and Rita were told, first thing, that free will is the point of 3D existence, so that you develop as you will, not as puppets, not as chips floating in rapids.
• Predestination means, you have freedom to choose, but your whole history leads you to choose one way rather than another. Not only your past but your future holds you as a piece of iron might be held in an overwhelmingly strong magnetic current. That piece of iron won’t even be able to tumble end over end.

To say that you have choice is to consider yourself as if you were in isolation; to say you are predestined is to see yourself as one tiny element in an overwhelmingly powerful, continuing organizing system; a rapids; a hurricane; a magnetic field. (Organizing systems aren’t necessarily calm or even apparently stable, but they channel immense forces.)

Swedenborg said humans were artificially suspended between equalized forces in order that they might have real, effective, free will.

Swedenborg was a great seer; so was Cayce; so were uncounted individuals known and unknown. But nobody else’s experience and thought and conclusions can ever prove anything for anybody else. What they may do is spark a recognition, and of course that is what we are trying to do here, say things that some will recognize and profit by.

Now, bear in mind, free will and predestination – seeming opposites – both depend upon one way of seeing things, namely that there is one time-stream, one consciousness, one individual will, for each person. When you change those assumptions, everything changes; consequences differ as circumstances differ.

In a reality in which the physical world was what it seems to “common sense” people, there would be only one time-stream. The physical world would be solid, substantial (as it appears) and obviously could not be multiplied millions of times every day as all those people made all those decisions. One reality-stream; real and irrevocable consequences.

In such a one-timestream reality, the free will/predestination argument would naturally arise as people seized on this set or that set of unarguable facts that cannot be reconciled, for in such a system, there could be no reconciling them. It would have to be an either/or, and yet the evidence would be too great on either side for the contrary assertion to be sanctioned. Deadlock, you see.

So the clue is that the world is projected thought.

Projected consciousness; formed not so much into thought as into awareness. There is life without thought; there is no life without awareness.

Okay. The world is projected consciousness, and we have been told  all possible paths exist; all are waiting for us to walk them, and somehow we do walk them all, choosing heads and tails, time after time, with our awareness restricted somehow to only one path, the others remaining only theoretical to us. It often seems only a fanciful idea, even after nearly 20 years.

That is because you have the wrong idea of who “you” are. You are identifying with the Pac-man eating obstacles, rather than with the player playing the game. Or if you don’t like that example, another analogy would be that you are identifying with the character and not the actor, or the movie-goer viewing the final film rather than with the film editor choosing among possible scenes.

We get the idea. Pretty hard not to identify with what we experience every moment, though.

You also experience the other level, when you don’t filter out the evidence as impossible or fantasy or hallucination or merely inexplicable.

Yes, I have a few friends who experience alternate realities poking in, every so often.

A more accurate statement would be that you have friends who are occasionally conscious of it, for you all experience it; only they do not always screen out what they experience but may have no framework for.

In any case, when you realize – or even, for the moment, theorize, pretend, envision – yourselves to be one, single, undivided you that takes all paths, rather than the fragment-you that you customarily experiences as taking one path only (whether or not free to choose), you see that there is no real contradiction at that level.

• Of course you are free, but not free to take only one path: free to identify with this or that part of yourself.
• Of course it is all predestined: the paths existed from the moment the world was created; all you could do was fill them, or as it seems to you, walk them.

And all this has ramifications.

• Because all paths exist, it is easy to see and even visit the future. (And how could anyone see the future if it was not already pre-formed?)
• Because you change timelines – reality-streams, if you will – it is easy to cease to have one future and have another. (How else could real seers nevertheless predict futures that “don’t happen,” like Cayce predicting so many physical catastrophes that did not occur, instead of World War II, that did?)

We keep coming back to the same simple (but not necessarily easy) statement: You are not what you think you are; the world you exist in is not what it appears to be.

We do know that. Our questions mostly amount to, “But who are we, then, and what is the world?”

Bear in mind, it is a continuing enterprise, because you – and we – may come to a resting-place, a comfortable way of making sense of things, and that’s all well and good, but ultimately there is always more to learn, always a deeper way of seeing things.

So we’ll never be bored, I know.

That isn’t the purpose, but it is the effect, yes.

 

Wednesday, October 25, 2017

Desire

“Desire.” That’s the word that finally rousted me out of bed where I lay half-sleeping. Other dreams had been going through the old film projector, but the single word “desire” gave me the sense that this was the theme du jour. Am I correct?

You can be.

Meaning, it’s up to me to follow your lead or propose my own.

We smile.

Yes, I get it. That’s the point in a nutshell.

It is. What you desire in life is what you get.

It certainly doesn’t seem that way.

That is because you are not thinking of it correctly. The very word “desire” often suggests sexual desire, whereas “desires” suggests many random appetites. Neither meaning will do here. Here, at the moment, we are using the word “desire” in only one way, as meaning the thing you really want in life.

It isn’t the way we use it typically. But do you mean to imply that we usually (or always, for that matter, or ever) want only one thing in life? One at a time, maybe? Or, one more than others? How do you mean it?

Perhaps we should rephrase and rather than say “the one thing you really want in life,” say “the one way you want your life to be.” For life is not a simple thing, and desires are not additive but are inter-relating and inter-transforming. Those whose lives consist of desires all of which flow in the same direction lead remarkably able, efficient, single-minded lives. On the opposite end of the spectrum, those whose desires are in deadly conflict with one another may have all they can do to hold it together, let alone accomplish anything or find a moment of rest. And everyone else, as usual, may be found on the bell curve between these extremes.

As I lay in bed I was intuiting that this was going to be about, “Follow your desire, it will not lead you astray.”

Not so far wrong, but not quite that simple either. Matters are always precisely as simple as you wish them to be; no more, no less. But that simple statement is going to require some explanation.

“You,” in the first place. As usual, it is vitally important to understanding to know which “you” you’re referring to at any given moment. Who is the “you” who is doing the wishing?

• The 3D you?
• The 3D-you in working harness with the non-3D you?
• Both of these, with the active assistance of other non-3D friends?

It makes a difference, as you can imagine.

• The 3D-you on its own may have its own ideas about what it wants out of life, and those desires will automatically complicate or simplify the life as far as that life is under its command. But 3D is where you make decisions. In a sense it is not where you make decisions and set up the problem.
• The 3D-you acting in cooperation with its non-3D component – in other words, living in cooperative contact with intuition, with hunches, with knowings – will be less inclined to confuse superficial and essential desire. It will not be so easily misled by surface appearance, and by that we mean not only externally-perceived forces, but internal currents and their eddies. And so on and so forth.

I get it. The deeper we live in connection, the truer our compass.

Yes, with the caveat that it isn’t necessarily conscious connection. But yes, as in physical life, the more attention you pay to your compass, the less likely you are to lose your way.

So, you say our lives are always as simple, and only as simple, as we wish. You need to give us some evidence. I sort of get an inner assent, but it is against the evidence of experience.

It is not against the evidence of your personal experience. You have come to a nice simplified existence that suits you. You go wrong in thinking that desire manifests immediately and automatically.

Yes, I was thinking of my turbulent past, and I keep forgetting that you-all don’t so much care what we have been through, as what we come to.

What you make yourselves (what we make our-selves!) by your / our decisions, yes.

So what does this mean? Look  at what a person came to be, to see what his or her desire was?

Subject to the unchanging and unchangeable fact that you can’t really judge anybody’s life, yes. Abraham Lincoln was haunted – foreshadowed – by the feeling that he had been created to do one momentous thing. He knew, even though nothing in the intellectual or religious thought of his day gave him any excuse to know or any support in knowing.

It’s on the record. He said that to somebody, referring to the Emancipation Proclamation.

Well, he knew. And in support of that knowing, his life’s desire was to reach a position of influence. So, you see his mainspring. And let us remind you, you see it a whole lot more clearly than he ever did! The 3D Lincoln lived in a clutter of impressions, desires (with a small “d,” so to speak), ambitions, enjoyments, harassments, distractions. He had his logical mind always there to pooh-pooh any thought of his really attaining such a post, or of the times bringing such an opportunity. Yet he married the woman whose consuming ambition could only be reached through his career, and who continually prodded him, as he needed. His story-telling ability, his kindness, his sociability, his humility, his awareness of his own worth without a sense of his ability to stand out from others – all this led him to political prominence, and his inclination to deep thought gave him better understanding of his time than those around him in his own professional and political circle, and so lifted him in their estimation.

The 3D-Lincoln didn’t plan that. No one could have done. The best the 3D-Lincoln could do – and did – was to remain in close contact with his intuitions, his deepest sense of reality. This led him where he needed to go, and where others needed him to be.

I can hear at least one friend saying “predestination!”

It can look like that, surely. Only, that idea omits the fact that what is predestined only takes place when and where you make the supporting decisions.

So predestination depends upon free will! Care to expound upon that a bit?

At another time. It is too much for a mere aside. And, by the way, the sentence is reversible. Free will also depends upon predestination. They are intricately connected. They are, in fact, the same conditions seen through different filters.

Well, that ought to be interesting. Are we finished with “desire” for the moment?

It is worth reminding you, and the reader, to do some pondering on the statement that your lives are always as simple as you wish them to be. It is one more reason why “all is well, all is always well.”

 

Tuesday, October 24, 2017

So, gentlemen, I took some time off from direct interaction, and spent the day reading and thinking about things. May we resume? That isn’t actually a question, I hope. I have come to rely upon there being someone on the other end of the line when I call.

And you are thinking of Joan of Arc and her voices that ceased to speak to her, and what was that all about.

I was, vaguely, yes. Joan was an historical character. What she did is not disputed even by the most mechanistic, determinist, materialist critic. The fact that she did what she did cannot be explained without reference to the voices she listened to, the miraculous events that occurred as she foretold, and the power that she came to wield not only as a symbol but in her person. The Middle Ages had no trouble putting the facts into its accepted framework of the world – God and angels, miracles and sorcery, true faith and heresy. We in our half-blind civilization, blind in different areas, cannot make sense of it. The “modern” thing to do has been to talk away miracles and any sign of what people call the supernatural. Only, Joan is history, not merely legend, so the only way to talk away the miracles attending her career is to talk away the miracle that she was, that her career was.

I’m drifting from the point. Captured [by the English enemy forces], Joan was not any more helpless than she as a young peasant woman (disregarding other factors) would always have been. But when her voices failed her, she knew not what to do. Why did they fail her? She hadn’t lost faith, if I remember rightly, but they ceased. Why?

This will seem harsh.

I know what you’re going to say.

You say it for us, and we will correct.

Joan’s task, like Lincoln’s, was to be an enduring symbol, and her martyrdom, like his, sealed and multiplied the effect of her life upon her contemporaries and their descendants. But how could she be seen to be defeated and destroyed while still in connection with the forces that had made her career? It would have been discrediting to the forces as reliable, perhaps, or perhaps as being of God. So, by their withdrawing from her, she was seen to be destroyed in the absence of that connection, which preserved the prestige of the link that there had been, hence preserved the charisma of Joan as saint.

More or less accurate.

Hard on faithful Joan, to die thinking she had been forsaken. Maybe even thinking she was to blame.

Remember to tie this in. Hard on Joan in her role as Joan. Not hard on the actress playing the role of Joan. That is what we mean by not quite real, or not fully real.

The actor playing Hamlet wouldn’t profit if the play were re-written to let Hamlet live in Act V.

He would not.

• At Hamlet-the-character’s level of reality, the tragic ending is implicit in the rest of his life as expressed and hinted at.
• At the actor’s level of reality, the role and the play make a satisfying mini-world for a couple of hours, leading people on an emotional and intellectual journey (at the actor’s own level of reality).
• At what we might call the behind-the-scenes level of reality, the playing of the play, all over the world, all through various centuries, is a useful and interesting pry-bar kind of tool which occasionally lifts people out of their accustomed mental habits or emotional patterns and leaves them temporarily or permanently altered.

Only remember, everyone lives all three levels at once. Just because you aren’t aware of being actor, character, and behind-the-scenes observer doesn’t mean you don’t live all those roles, each at its appropriate level of reality.

How do we play Hamlet, say?

• The life you lead – the external life you are accustomed to take for granted in the way you take your body for granted – is the role.
• Your occasional or continual awareness that you are not your role – that is the actor’s self-awareness, thinking about his career while on stage mouthing the author’s lines.
• Your non-3D awareness – at a higher level than your non-3D at its usual accompaniment-of-3D level – is you as playwright, you as observer, you as co-producer.

And, I get, flashes of greater awareness can interfere with our lives.

Well – “interfere.” Let’s look at it. Is this interaction here interference, or is it enrichment? What interferes is conflict of self-definition and experience. Without that conflict, you get greater richness, greater scope, as you should know. However, yes, the conflict between too rigid a self-definition and inflowing awareness from things not included in that self-definition can be disorienting, even harmful. Why do you think we repeatedly send you angels? The definition of angel is “messenger.”

Disorientation is sometimes the only path to re-orientation. Not always, but sometimes. And one path to disorientation is an influx of incongruous or inexplicable contents from the levels of reality beyond the one of the person to be disoriented.

• Joan as ordinary farm girl was a role useless to herself and to her country.
• Joan as ordinary farm girl inspired by divine voices was a role of a lifetime – a role of the civilization’s lifetime.
• But the early stages were not necessarily any easier for the character than the later stages.

But don’t waste your pity: They weren’t difficult or painful for the actor (except perhaps by empathy). And the role got played.

So what I’m hearing between the lines here is that the character, not merely the actor, had to be disoriented.

No, although in this case that is true. The point is not about the character (the role Joan of Arc that was played upon the world stage) but about the actor, the equivalent of the level of reality you and your readers exist on. That actor wasn’t playing Joan (as far as she was aware) but being Joan. Therefore the identity between actor and character was absolute as long as the play was being performed, but only tenuous, theoretical, once the play had been performed. While it was being performed, everything depended upon the actor.

• Playwright could only watch and see how well or badly the scenes were brought to life.
• Character could only act as she felt impelled, often having no idea why she felt that way, living on faith.
• It was up to the actor how it played.

Except, all possible variants were lived.

Correct. Great performances, flops, revisions, ad libs, every variant – just like the rest of your lives.

So Patton didn’t always slap the shell-shocked soldiers in Sicily, but maybe he didn’t always lead the charge liberating France.

All possible performances exist, you know that. The ones you choose to identify with [i.e. the reality we experience as real] say something about you as individuals, except that it is conscious choice not so much on actor’s level as on playwright’s level. There is, after all, at least a loose plot, and certain desired developments.

Now, don’t get too entangled in this actor, character, playwright analogy. It is useful, but it is analogy. We almost think we should apologize for continually reminding you of that, only we know it is necessary! Analogy, not identity – but useful. You live at different levels of reality, and if you make that real to yourselves, many emotional knots will ease, much of the world’s injustice and cruelty will appear in a different light, and your own potential and burdens and opportunities will all be enhanced. It you do not choose to make it real to yourself, an entirely different array of choices and constraints automatically seem to remain self-evident.

 

Monday, October 23, 2017

Character and myth

Just for a moment, it came clear. Can I hold it long enough to express it? We are real as characters, but not as what we think we are. We are a half-step less real than the next level of reality. And I suspect that that half-step away from reality is another of those “as above, so below” progressions.

I have been reading a life of Ernie Pyle, and specifically have been reading about Hollywood trying to get a handle on him, in making “The Story of G.I. Joe” in 1944. They took the facts and tried to turn it into myth, which is, after all, what story-telling does. And as always I have been reading a steady diet of light fiction, only with new eyes now. And suddenly, just as I was getting back to bed, for a second everything crystallized, and I saw, only sort of understanding. And the process of putting something seen, or felt, or intuited, into words – well, it’s easy to lose the nub of it, or in fact to never quite grasp it.

• We – our essence – are one thing.
• We – the characters we create and play in this improv performance – are not the same thing, not quite as real, not quite us, just as we appear while we are doing the improv.

It may sound like playing with words. It isn’t. But it’s slippery to hold on to.

Nathaniel?

That’s the sense of it. It is one way to see who and what you are. It is not analogy or metaphor or fairy tale or “Let’s think of it this way.” It is accurate, factual, plain. Only, it isn’t the only way to see yourselves.

But as a corrective to other views –

Yes, excellent corrective. It’s hard to put this clearly enough to be sure you have both halves: It isn’t the only way to see yourselves; it is one, valid, illuminating way.

[To myself in my journal:]

There is something I am trying to remember though – and, in trying to remember it, I see even farther, before finally finishing the sentence!

I knew it had to do with fictional characters and situations. I see now it leads to further thoughts on our essential nature as creators. Hornblower, say, or Sam Spade, aren’t real in the sense of having an independent existence. They can’t go where they aren’t imagined to go, they don’t extend to real-life dimensions, the everyday things we never think about. They don’t really breathe or grow up.

They can be imagined, and if their character has been conceived with enough life, they can be imagined in various situations, and the imaginer will know how they might be imagined to react. So, they have a sort of life, and it can be extended. But there is no possibility of Sam Spade or Horatio Hornblower, or Harry Morgan, say, ever seeing themselves as really only an invented character. This is a dimension of reality closed to them, because it is the dimension they were created from.

We, at this level, can envision ourselves as creatures of another level of reality. It leads to sci-fi dystopian nightmares like “The Thirteenth Floor,” but it is the beginning of awakening.

Conversely, movies like “The Matrix” assume that we are real and our environment is not. That takes a vague sense of things and expresses it in totally distorted fashion, but the sense that things are not as they appear attracts people. They blend it with paranoia, they miss the question of whether the personality they identify with is real, but they know that something in everyday understanding of life is amiss.

We know we are creators, created by creators. We can see that we, creators, created Hornblower and millions of other characters at a lower level of reality who are still somehow somewhat real. But it does not occur to us that we, 3D creators, are the creations of the creators at the next higher level of reality, and they are who we really are. The 3D characters we experience being are real, obviously. We live, we breathe, we suffer and enjoy. And yet at a higher level of reality, what seems like everyday life to us is only a sort of stepped-down life.

The thought is clear to me. Put it into words, not so clear. I wish I could paint it, but even if I had the skill, I doubt I could. Some things don’t translate easily into visuals.

The elements of the characters we create are the same elements we possess, the same elements our creators possessed, because one creates only out of one’s own substance. (I doubt that is a totally accurate statement, but it isn’t wrong, either.)

Just as all matter is energy, and all energy is consciousness, and so consciousness pervades “animate” and “inanimate” matter alike, creations, structures, assemblages, are all made up of non-material consciousness, which also permeates all layers. That’s the best I can do at the moment.

But I don’t know how far to push it. Hornblower can’t actually feel emotion, but he can be observed as if feeling it. We actors do feel emotion; what is the comparable “but” seen from our next-realer level? I suppose at that level we see our actor selves as letting the forces flow through our already established channels and not realizing that our consciousness is partial and the events somewhat symbolic, because to us as actors they can only feel real, sometimes painfully real. But, as I say, I don’t know how far to push it.