[It just keeps getting stranger. Get used to it. It is as if — and maybe not “as if” the whole long set of interactions was planned as a teaching tool, leading me (and now you) into ever deeper waters. Bertram is a Norman monk in Salisbury, England — he wound up as a bishop elsewhere, I believe — that I became acquainted with 15 years ago.]

[Thursday, February 23, 2006]

We in the physical are focus points

Gentlemen, at your service. Who’s up? Pray bring whomever I need.

[Bertram] The word “pray” attracted me, brother. And this, by the way, is why you should watch the words you use – one reason that words are so powerful is that they vibrate particular strings, to use our “rings and threads” analogy, and so an unintended resonance may bring to light something you would rather not rouse. I do not mean this as any threat or fear-rousing picture. In my day these things were better understood than in yours, but our language describing them has become strange to you, and so for the moment our knowledge has been lost to you. Continue reading 37 – Bertram and theology

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

(9:15 a.m.) Late start today. Well, Joseph, I’m very glad for the material on Emerson. In retrospect it is very strange indeed that I didn’t think to ask you about that visit the first time I contacted you.

Maybe that should reassure you a bit. It ain’t a process under your control, though you sometimes like to think so and other times you’re very afraid that it is. The extent of your immediate control is your being open to it. In fact, let’s talk a little about the process. What’s your biggest question about it? I know your biggest fear, that you’re just fooling yourself and some others. But what is the biggest puzzlement? And there’s a reason I’m asking instead of just telling you: it’ll make you think, and the process will be different. Continue reading 36 – The process

[Sunday, February 19, 2006]

Joseph, I don’t know if it was you planting ideas in my head – where do ideas come from, anyway? – but I thought today I would ask you to talk to me about Emerson in your life. That is the connection in which you first came to me, and for some reason I never pursued it. Because of my problems with R, I suppose.[R was a woman in my Gateway. The connection will become obvious as you read this.] Talk to me of your relation to Emerson.

People in your day don’t think much about Emerson, not like in mine. When I was a boy he set us on fire with possibilities – our possibilities, you see – and his influence just kept growing. From your time looking backwards, your people are inclined to see him as the respectable elder statesman whose words seem stuffy and old-fashioned. Spencer and others used his thoughts like “compensation” to justify the worst kind of social robbery. And, Emerson is more English, more old-fashioned to you, so he’s almost needing a translator. Continue reading 35 – Emerson and young men

[Friday, February 17, 2006]

All right. It is 8 a.m., nearly, the start of a cloud-heavy morning. If you’re ready to answer [my brother] Paul’s question – what is the real challenge of our time, what is the equivalent of the Civil War to us – I’m ready to hear it.

You have heard it many times, each time in a slightly different context. You have expressed it many times, enough that it is just another of your beliefs. What is your Iona book about, after all?

Pardon us while we circle around the subject. You know how a dog has to circle before it can lie down and sleep, it is a reassuring habit.

Look at what the crisis can’t be. That will add conviction. Continue reading 34 – Our struggle

[Thursday, February 16, 2006]

(11 a.m.) All right. Typed that up and sent it out. Continue?

Your second questions was, do we communicate up here, and – to throw ‘em both in together – if what you do there affects what I can do here.

Sure we communicate! We do nothing but communicate. But it ain’t exactly like conveying information; more like communicating states of being. This won’t be all that easy for you to get, and maybe we’ll have to call in somebody else, but let’s try. What you learn today, what happens to you inside and outside, changes you, a little or a lot. In your bodies, you don’t notice these changes so much, or so quickly. So what you regard as communicating, we think of as smoke signals! That is, you ain’t communicating very much! You’re hinting. Continue reading 33 – Communication