Stray Thoughts

A favorite song

 

Thursday, April 24, 2025

10:50 a.m. I am reading Dirk’s trialogue and trying to both absorb his explicit message and remain open to hints and nudges that appear at the margin of my attention as I do so. Not easy. Exciting, in a satisfying and also scary way.

We can’t help coming from our 3D-humanness. We can move on from it, or modify it, or build on it, but 3D creatures we must remain until released. But it becomes ever clearer that our consciousness is limited by more than physical constraints (time, energy, attention, circumstances, competing attractions). We are limited perhaps primarily by the idea that we are 3D units (even if the 3D units extend to the non-3D), and that the 3D unit is the appropriate place from which to experience consciousness. We are sometimes trying to figure out how matter can become conscious, how consciousness can arise within individuals, and that’s all wrong. Its only value is to save the phenomena while letting science continue to envision matter as primary.

If consciousness is everywhere – is woven into the warp and weft of reality – then there can be no existing apart from it. It would be like breathing without air, without oxygen.

If we then begin conceiving of the universe as consciousness – as a great thought rather than as a great machine, as the English physicist Sir James Jeans said in the 20^th century – then we have to ask different questions, such as, How can it be that anything appears not to share in what must be universal?

And if human consciousness resembles cable cars more than taxicabs, what are the implications? Cable cars move by clamping on to the continuously moving cable beneath the street level, rather than being self-propelled. There’s a difference. For one thing, cable cars can go only where there are cables. They can’t originate motion, but by clamping on to the motive power, they can proceed. Sound at all familiar? Presumably AA and BB in Bob’s fable (to the extent that they were individual) were more like taxicabs.

 

My favorite of Thoreau’s poems, included here merely because I like it.

Smoke

Light-winged Smoke,  Icarian bird,

Melting thy pinions in thy upward flight;

Lark without song, and messenger of dawn,

Circling above the hamlets as thy nest;

Or else, departing dream, and shadowy form

Of midnight vision, gathering up thy skirts;

By night star-veiling, and by day

Darkening the light and blotting out the sun;

Go thou, my incense, upward from this hearth,

And ask the gods to pardon this clear flame.

I have begun reading Odell Shepard’s selection of Alcott’s Journals, which Alcott kept for more than 50 years, and it is like finding an old/new friend. A few samples from the first few pages:

• The idea that half my life is gone and so little is accomplished worthy a mind and hearty destined for such noble activities and acquisitions, overpowers me. but I soon rise and again plod on my way, hoping and regretting. [11-2-1829, Alcott not quite 30 years old.]
• … and I see clearly what before was obscured by the gloss of exterior matter: Spirit all in all – matter its form and shadow. [May, 1833]
• [Comparing America to the rest of the world:] Circumstances are widely different. Man is operating in vastly different external relations. We are spread over a wider space; we have freer air; Nature spreads itself around us on a wider scale; our situation is wholly new. [April 24, 1834]
• We investigate the qualities or apprehend the laws of this universe to little purpose if the relations which they hold to our being are not made the primary objects of observation and thought. [January, 1835]
• When God would reveal himself to a people, he entrusts the sacred truth not to that people in their aggregate capacity but to a gifted spirit among them, who transforms it from himself into them. [Jan. 2, 1835]

Someone said that the 19^th century was Emerson’s, the 20^th, Thoreau’s, but the 21^st would be Bronson Alcott’s.  I am beginning to believe it.

Absorbing new material intellectually is satisfying, sometimes exciting. But how hard it can be to actually live it!

It is good to become thoroughly familiar with the Cayce work, or Seth, or scriptures, or the guys upstairs. Certainly all that wisdom can enrich our lives. But if we can’t apply it, what good does it do us? We know so much more than we know how to live. But every once in a while…

Last month, my friend Charles and I were shown a simple concept to overcome a stubborn underlying problem.

Charles is very rational, very intellectual, quite at home with metaphysical concepts. He has done extensive reading in metaphysical and philosophical subjects. (Also, he has a positive genius for explicating complicated concepts by clothing them in entertaining stories. For instance, Motorcycle Enlightenment, the novel that Hampton Roads published.)

But sometimes life and matters of feeling and human relationships leave him baffled. [Gee, I wonder what that would feel like!]

On the one hand, he knows that things don’t “just happen” in our lives; that problems are opportunities, in that they are manifestations of things within us that need attention. But on the other hand, sometimes he looks back on his life and has to ask himself how he could have made this or that bad decision.

From years of introspection, he had come to identify a pattern. As long as a problem involved the rational mind, he could deal with it, and usually quite easily. But anything that involved the emotions – and what human relationships don’t involve the emotions? – led his rational, thinking mind to flee, turning over the helm to an emotional part that reacts – as one would expect – emotionally.

The result was bad decisions made impulsively and regretted at leisure when the thinking part came back. He knew that this pattern developed as a result of an early childhood trauma (which is his business, not ours). But knowing it is not the same as overcoming it.

Talking about it, we found an insight forming, and a practical way to apply it.

Charles is a Virgo, God help him. 😊 He is at home with spreadsheets and anything practical. Business was always easy for him, because, as he says, “numbers made sense.”

As we discussed his situation, the metaphor arose. I said, in effect, “You have two spreadsheets, one intellectual and one emotional, and the problem is that the two don’t communicate. When one enters the room, the other leaves. What you need to do is to sync the two, so that they will learn to work together.”

(Charles points out that the understanding seated in for him when I said that when the emotions were triggered, his IQ went to 0. He says, “That’s what registered first for me. I guess it was because my mental-rational part found it both humorous and partly insulting, so it wanted to understand how it could improve itself…I don’t know. I just know it worked.”)

He tried it, and that began a cascade of positive changes. We can see the results already, sometimes in minor things, sometimes in things that are not so minor. I don’t’ see any reason to think it won’t continue to work for him.

Now, this idea of syncing your emotional and rational spreadsheets may not seem like any big deal, but, if you sometimes find yourself making bad decisions for reasons that baffle you, you might try it. I offer it for what it is worth.