A current of ink

It isn’t my fault. What could I do? These three men had a conversation in a bar in the middle of World War II, and one thing led to another.

See, in December, 1943, Jack Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway’s eldest son, was a young officer in the military police spending the night in New York City, a few days before his unit was to leave for Europe. Late at night, after dinner and a show, he dropped in to the small bar of the Algonquin Hotel, where he was staying. Other than Jack and the barman, the bar was empty except for two men engaged in a heated argument over which was a better writer, Fitzgerald or Hemingway. He injected himself into the conversation, getting away with it on the strength of his uniform in wartime. As he reconstructed the conversation in 1986 (in Misadventures of a Fly Fisherman):

 

“I think you’re both wrong. I know of a writer I think is better than either Hemingway or Faulkner. At least he’s a hell of a lot better storyteller.”

I had their attention, all right. The near man snapped, “And who the devil might that be?”

“Maurice Walsh,” I said, and then I started to detail his books I had read and that my father had told me he was a truly fine storyteller.

I stopped myself in mid-sentence as I noticed that the near man had blanched. I asked him what was the matter.

He answered, “I’m Maurice Walsh.”

A shiver went down my spine and the back of my neck crawled.  “I’m pleased to meet you, sir. My name is Jack Hemingway and my father is the writer you favored.”

The drinks we had before us, needless to say, were not the last we had that night.

 

Well, I can take a hint. I can’t remember when I bought Jack’s book – a dozen years ago, I suppose, more or less – but I remembered the reference, and after a while I began accumulating Walsh’s novels, which by the way, are indeed wonderfully appealing story-telling. A few titles, in case you’re interested: The Key Above the Door, The Small Dark Man, The Quiet Man, Castle Gillian, While Rivers Run, The Hill Is Mine. They are wonderfully evocative of an Ireland and a rural Scotland now long gone.

But of course chains of references have no end. After a while I noticed that Walsh every so often plugs an American writer, a writer of Westerns that he says is a master. At the time, apparently Eugene Manlove Rhodes was very well known. Today, I guess, not so much. But the other day I bought just one, to see if he was to my taste. At first, he wasn’t. But by the time I finished the little book, Paso por Aqui, which more or less means “he passed this way,” I decided I liked it. This morning, finding that the story stayed in my mind, I re-read it, and I can see that I will have to look out for another, to see if this was an unrepeatable fluke or a sign of genius. My guess is, the latter, or Walsh wouldn’t have gone out of his way to praise his works.

With my luck, Rhodes will praise some other writer’s work, and I’ll be swept along into yet another channel. Seems to me, I owe Jack Hemingway a drink.

 

Interim Report

Chapter 13. Interim Report
So what does this whole book amount to? It doesn’t amount to proof of anything, that’s for sure. For all you know, I’m deliberately deceiving you, or am deceiving myself. My data may be wrong, my reasoning may be wrong, my “knowings” may be wrong, my conclusions may be wrong. As always, you’re pretty much on your own, and you’re pretty much going to believe whatever you allow yourself to believe. The only other choice is to find an authority to follow, trying not to remember that belief in authority is itself a belief, not a known.
I wrote this, not to persuade you of anything, but to present a clear statement of first-hand experience that might suggest to you that your life is more magical than you may have thought. I have seen, first hand, that there’s a lot for us to learn about many things that have been reported for centuries and denied only in the past few hundred years. These phenomena, if taken seriously, cast serious doubt on the materialist fantasy that has passed for science and common-sense in our day. Among those inconvenient reports: ghosts. out-of-body experiences, spirit possession, witchcraft, telepathy, afterlife experiences, the power of prayer, the ability to heal by touch or and at a distance… and plenty more.
Do such things happen? Is the commonly accepted view of the world significantly different from real life? There’s only one way to know. You have to investigate. You can’t just take another person’s word for it, except as an interim report. I know that stepping off the beaten path can be somewhat scary. But the land beyond the beaten path is not a featureless wilderness. I hope that my few muddy (not, I hope, muddled) footprints in the grass will give you whatever excuse you need to go find out for yourself. Herewith, a summary of my own interim report.
.2.
My own experiences (including reading and thinking, trying to make sense of these experiences) convince me of 10 interrelated points.
1) We are immortal spirits temporarily inhabiting bodies. Although by habit we identify with our bodies, this is a mistake, or a partial mistake. We are somewhat material; somewhat mortal; somewhat human. The identity we call ourselves — Downstairs, as I call it — is linked to the Earth in many ways, some known, some not. Our bodies are of the earth. Our genetic memories, our physical ancestry, our everyday interests, are all firmly rooted in the earth. To our physical bodies — the human part of us — earth is home. It is rightly said that we are spiritual beings having a human experience; that human experience is an experience of living “in the earth”, that is, in 3D Theater–physical matter reality. Therefore it isn’t “spiritual” to hate our bodies or our lives, however much our moments of deepest homesickness may tempt us to.
But we are more than our physical bodies. We are spirits, forming and maintaining and living in physical bodies, and neither this beautiful earth nor any other physical place, here or in the next galaxy, can be home to a spirit. We come from Elsewhere (or perhaps I should say Else-non-where); we’re just visiting here. Therefore, neither is it “scientific” or “realistic” to think that the body, or even human existence as body/mind/spirit, is all there is. Too much experience flatly contradicts this. Therefore,
2) This life is not our only life. As immortal or relatively immortal spirits, we lived before we were born this time, and will live after we die this time. Before and after this one physical-matter-reality life, we exist. It seems likely that we’re somewhere (physical or otherwise), doing something (whether imaginable to us now or not). And in fact explorers before and since Monroe have found just this.
3) We “individuals” are all connected one to another. The lives we lead seem to be separated between Me and Not-Me, with the dividing line seeming to be our physical bodies, but even science now knows that the division is illusory. We touch each other and are touched both in and out of body. Our scents, our auras, our thoughts, all touch at a distance. We often know each other’s thoughts, and “spontaneously and fortuitously” intervene in each other’s lives when needed. We engage in dance-like, perfectly executed interactions in ways that do not originate Downstairs and cannot be understood strictly in Downstairs terms. I think this is because
4) We as individuals are fragments of a larger being that cares about us and can be trusted. What Monroe called the INSPEC, what religions call God, what New Agers sometimes call The Universe–something vastly greater than us is yet an intimate part of us, as we are an intimate part of it. It is our connection to the larger whole that makes our lives possible, and gives our lives meaning. We are as fingers of an immense hand–which analogy demonstrates why the intentions of the larger being can be trusted. Does a finger distrust the hand it is part of? And if the finger comes to grief for whatever reason, does it suspect that the misfortune came from the hand’s malice? Obviously not. Where there is identity, there is identity of interest.
5) Nonetheless, this larger being sees things differently. Down here, immersed in 3D-Theater, we can’t help identifying with the here-and-now. Indeed, that’s what we’re here to do! But naturally anything that had its being in a framework outside of time and space would see things differently. What is desperately real to us would be a dream to it, and what was important to it might be nonexistent to our consciousness. We almost always forget the larger reality when we enter this one. Mythology had it that we forgot as we crossed the River Styx. Monroe says the noise of unfocused human mental and emotional activity is too great for us to function if we were to stay at the level of awareness natural to us outside 3D Theater (that is, in the non-physical realm he called Locale II). Other mythologies and cosmologies explain it in other ways. Different ways of saying the same thing. We forget. But the larger being remembers, and it is there to remind us.
6) The larger being is a source of foresight and wisdom. The larger being cannot live our life for us. This would deprive us–and thus itself–of choice and growth, which is the result of choice. But it sees outside of time, and it knows our purpose for this lifetime, as we cannot, and it has insights that can help us stay “on the beam” and live this life to the fullest. Think how wise we would be if we could remember the experiences and conclusions of thousands of other lives from the inside. Think what wise counselors we could then be to one who was within such a life, with its sensory and other constraints. Access to wider knowledge, combined with intimate insight and identity of interest, makes the larger being a trustworthy source of unlimited wisdom, relative to even the wisest and best of us fragments.
7) The larger being contacts us, sometimes sending dreams, sometimes visions, sometimes hunches or “knowings” or precognitive flashes. It works through intuition, regularly, and sometimes automatic writing, spontaneous recall, coincidence, you name it. Any time you hear or see something that resonates, your larger being may be taking advantage of an opportunity to get something across. Monroe said non-corporeal beings communicate exclusively by non-vocal communication rather than by words. Isn’t this precisely what dreams do? Dreams usually set up pictures, scenarios, symbols, leaving us to decode them as best we can. Sometimes, it is true, we get words; sometimes words, even sentences, of great power. But primarily dreams send symbols, which we can learn to read. (Let me say in passing that all means of divination, including Tarot decks, the I Ching, and those not yet devised, seem to me to work by helping the larger being to communicate with us, if only by concentrating our attention on symbols.) And this is not a one-way street.
8) We can contact the larger being. Some call it prayer; some, meditation; some, asking for guidance. The names vary according to time, culture and tradition, but the means of access are well known. Regardless of context, the underlying reality is that we as fragmentary individuals have access to a trustworthy source of relatively boundless knowledge and wisdom, ours for the asking. We need only to learn how to communicate, and to practice doing it.
9) Thus our lives need not be disconnected and solitary. We are always in intimate connection with the larger, wiser being we sometimes call “our” higher self; because we are part of this higher self, as fingers are a part of a hand. (Is a hand a finger’s higher self?) Without this intimate connection, we could not live, any more than a finger could live apart from its hand, or the hand away from its arm, etc. Therefore it is impossible for us to be alone in this sense.
10) Nonetheless, we may often lose communication. The intimate connection cannot be severed, but communication may be, and often is, distorted, neglected or forgotten. Many never even learn of the possibility of such intimate communication, having been taught otherwise. Obviously if you don’t believe it exists, you don’t try to communicate with it, and don’t listen when it communicates with you. And even those who know about the larger spirit sometimes forget, mostly in those times when “the world is too much with us.” At such times, be it a period of forgetfulness or a lifetime, everything you might have learned from that source is closed to you, not as punishment but as a consequence of your own forgetfulness or disbelief. But regardless of belief, we can contact the larger being, using many tools internal and external. Thus our lives don’t have to be disconnected and solitary. Thus we need not live our lives alone, even if all contemporary society says otherwise.
It seems to me that thinking in terms of our connection to a larger being clears up a lot of mysteries. It opens up unsuspected possibilities for us as individuals as well as collectively as a species. It means more, suggests more, than the words God or Higher Self. If the concept still poses perplexities, and if it still leaves vastly more unexplained than explained, so what? That leaves all the more work — and fun — for us and those who follow us. But it does give us a point of departure.
.3.
The experiences I have shared with you in this narrative cease to be inexplicable when viewed in this context. They become what is only to be expected. They become (dare we say it?) ordinary. And the things religions have tried so hard to tell us, these many generations and centuries, make sense in an entirely new way.
We are immortal spirits temporarily inhabiting bodies, and so this life is not our only life. We “individuals” are all connected one to another, if only as fragments of a larger being. This larger being cares about us and can be trusted. It is a source of foresight and wisdom, but nonetheless, it sees things differently. The larger being contacts us, and we can contact it, and so our lives need not be disconnected and solitary. Nonetheless, we may often lose communication.
Immortal spirits, temporarily inhabiting bodies? My contacts with living beings who no longer live on this earth –including some who I did not know when they were alive here–would be enough to convince me, if I needed convincing, that it is demonstrably untrue that “one life is all you get.” The only way that saying is true is in the limited sense that a given personality in a given historical time is somehow significantly different and distinct from other personalities and lifetimes that are embodied by the same soul. Thus, one might reasonably argue that a given life is not really a “past life” of another, but “another life” of some common-denominator soul. Or, one might make the counter-argument that all beings are at bottom part of one great being. It’s only a conflict of viewpoint. I can’t see how it ever could be resolved, and I don’t see that it would be important to do so.
As to this life not being our only life, here are a few of the lives I have found to date: Bertram, a Norman monk of the middle ages; John Cotten, the 18th-century Virginia farmer who married Clara; Joseph (or Josiah) Smallwood, the Vermont nature mystic; David Owen Poynter, the Welsh journalist and seeker of hidden knowledge; Katrina, the Polish Jewish girl; Also Clio, a Roman diviner in fire; Senji-san, a Japanese monk, and unnamed others, including at least one (if the evidence may be believed) on another planet. I don’t expect it to convince anyone else, but it goes a long way toward convincing me.
As evidence of our connection one to another, I might cite every instance of so-called telepathy mentioned in this book, and–more to the point, perhaps–all the mutual assistance so freely offered and received. Think of the interaction between Mary and me, for instance, or Suni and Ed and Dave and so many others named and unnamed. We tend to take love and friendship for granted, considering them to be part of ordinary life. So they are. But the very prevalence in our lives of love and friendship may blind us, sometimes, to how very strange and interesting they are as symptoms (not merely symbols) of our deep interconnectedness.
That we are fragments of a larger being that cares about us and can be trusted has always been an axiom of religion. My experiences, inner and outer, convince me that this is a straightforward description of the way things are. And although Monroe calls that being INSPEC and others call it God, Monroe made it quite clear in his book Far Journeys that INSPEC (on INSPEC’s own say-so) was not God. Yet he also said that he could see how people in the past, catching just a momentary non-physical glimpse of INSPEC, might decide it had seen the deity. Just so, Carl Jung once described what he called the racial unconscious in terms that he explicitly said resembled the traditional conception of God, including, among other attributes, (relative) omniscience and omnipresence.
Certainly a larger being connected to all of us, and existing outside time-space, would be a source of foresight and wisdom. Certainly it would see things differently from those of us enmeshed in 3D Theater. Yet it would be willing and able to contact us, and would encourage such contact. I have given many examples in this book of the simple process of establishing and deepening connection with the larger being. What else was it, when I learned to talk to (listen to) The Boss, or The Gentlemen Upstairs? When, before that, I connected with my Higher Self in the image of a unicorn? The information I have gotten has proved reliable on matters mundane and practical, no less than philosophical and abstract. And when I listen to hunches, it is the same thing.
But you must be willing to connect. What is leading an exclusively Downstairs life, if not loss of communication with Upstairs? This is the long hard solitary Downstairs road, with a vengeance, and it is no fun.
This new overview is all right there within the context of my experiences. I promised, in advance, to speak of what I know of my own knowledge. The same knowledge, by way of different experiences, is available to you. It is merely a matter of going after it.
.4
Every religion I know of testifies that we are spirits in bodies, and that we are an integral part of an eternal being that guides us and cares for us, and is essential to our moment-to-moment existence. “In Him we live and move and have our being.” Religions have greatly discredited themselves by their quarreling over the way they see things. Nonetheless I think it would be a great error, almost a laughable one, to ignore the existence of so many thousand years of religious testimony, testimony that coincides.
Experience unites; opinion divides. Those who give testimony to personal experience of what they call God describe what happened to them as best they can. Of course, their testimony is going to differ as to detail and emphasis. But the reports are similar. It is when we get into opinion about what that experience means that we meet intolerance, the construction of logical prisons, and the laying-down of rules, and the beginnings of religious wars. Little minds attempt to interpret great experience, and the inevitable result is distortion, and quarreling over the nature and attributes of God, and the nature of humans, the nature of reality, the nature (and existence or non-existence) of heaven and hell, and of the afterlife in general.
Different religions emerge, shaped by different types of people, for different types of people. They place their emphasis so drastically differently that they seem to be describing differences in essence when in fact they are describing difference in nuance, or in interpretation. What they cannot spread and often do not share is the experience of the very real existence of the larger being of which we are a part.
One of the greatest Christian mystics and seers in history, Emanuel Swedenborg was also the most famous European scientist of his day. For more than 27 years, beginning in his fifties, Swedenborg conversed with spiritual beings he called angels and was granted visions of heaven and hell. He interpreted his entirely in a Christian context, but they sound remarkably like what Lifeline participants experience. Shared experience does not imply shared interpretation. Yet the experience is real.
.5.
We are in one of those historic moments when a civilization’s old way of seeing things is breaking into fragments, and a new way is not yet born. It is exciting, challenging, liberating–and also disorienting, frightening. No matter. This world we are moving into was not called forth by us and it won’t be banished by us. All we can do is meet it well or badly. And the only way to meet it well is to live our greatest truth as see where that brings us. Neither materialism nor fundamentalism contains enough truth to be worth the distortion they include. Neither offers us firm ground upon which to found our new lives. Only experience, followed by reflection, does that.
So it becomes a matter of personal exploration. My Upstairs link provides me with whatever assistance I happen to want, along with quite a bit that I need but don’t have sense enough to ask for. Do you have reason to think your Upstairs is any less interested in helping you? Is yours any less practical than mine? Why not ask your own questions?
Of course, any process of interpretation includes distortion. As an example, I suspect that often people experience the larger being as an external spirit, because it seems to them to be something outside themselves. In a sense, it is outside themselves: it extends far beyond the bounds of their own personality. In another sense, it is not at all outside themselves: it is an integral (and often unsuspected) internal part of the larger being that they are. Each viewpoint is sort of correct; neither is exactly correct. The distortion caused by viewpoints can be recognized and allowed for, but not prevented.
And the same thing goes for this overview. It is (at best) sort of correct, from a certain point of view. As far as I can see, “sort of correct, from a certain point of view” is about as good as we can do while still being in physical-matter reality. Even at best, anybody else’s ideas and experiences are no more than an interim report.

Vast impersonal forces and us: an analogy

I was lying in bed, drowsing, when an association of ideas produced an image of my kitchen sink, with some dishes in it. The water was in spray mode (as through nozzles) rather than in one undivided stream. It occurred to me, that’s a visual representation of the non-3D and 3D worlds interaction.

* The sprays are the non-3D, the Vast Impersonal Forces, streaming in.
* What the water falls upon is the 3D world we live in.

What the water finds as it rains down has nothing to do with the source of the water, or the volume, or whether it’s hot or cold. The forces just are, for whatever reason.

The 3D situations they meet just are, for whatever reason.

The interaction of the two is what we experience.

Not a perfect analogy, of course, in that we (the dirty dishes? :-)) are changed by the water, and the water flows through us, it doesn’t just go down the drain. But still, even if slightly absurd, an interesting analogy, I think.

In a nutshell

Our society has sold you a bill of goods, and it is killing your happiness, your creativity, your joy. That’s the bad news. The good news is that once you escape from the cultural trance you were born into, you discover a happier world. You discover that you are not alone, not helpless, and not nearly so limited as you often assume. We are all connected, we are all larger and more effective beings, and we are far more powerful, singly and collectively, than we usually dare dream.

The world is not meaningless, and was not created by accident. The conditions in which we live allow certain things to be accomplished that cannot be accomplished without these limitations.

Similarly, your life has meaning. We are here to accomplish those tasks. We aren’t merely survivors of some cosmic train wreck, not are we the butt of some cosmic practical joke. Still less are we the accidental products of an accidentally created system. We are not, as someone said, the supersonic airplane assembled accidentally by a tornado tearing across a junkyard.

Our bodies are mortal; we are not. The strands that comprise us existed before this particular body existed, and do not cease to exist when it does. People talk of “the afterlife,” but it would be more accurate to refer to “the continuing life.” We live prior to arriving here, and we do not cease to live when we depart.

We are all psychic. We all connect to another part of ourselves that is beyond 3D limitations. We all receive guidance from this non-physical component, and sometimes we heed it and sometimes we don’t. And sometimes we don’t admit that it exists, preferring to continue to think of ourselves as limited strictly to the 3D world we experience through our senses.

As you begin to see more clearly, as you change the definitions that have shaped your world, the boundaries change around you.

Which of two

For years, most notably between late 2005 and last year sometime – I spent an hour or so nearly every day, talking to the guys, then transcribing what I had gotten, then sending it around to the Explorers list as well as my own private newsnet list, and then here. Out of those conversations came several books, some of which have been published, some which have not yet been.

For some time now, rather than recording new conversations here, I have been reprinting old ones. Friends have asked when, or rather if, I will resume the conversations, and when I have said perhaps never (though one never knows), sometimes they have not seemed to quite understand. It occurs to me, the easiest way to explain is to quote portions of Emerson’s poem “Terminus.” (His son later wrote that when his father read his that newly written poem, he for the first time realized that his father had grown old, and Emerson was only in his early sixties at the time.)
I encourage you to read the poem in its entirety, but for me to reproduce it here would be to dilute my point. So, excerpts:

It is time to be old,
To take in sail:—
The god of bounds,
Who sets to seas a shore,
Came to me in his fatal rounds,
And said: “No more!
No farther shoot
Thy broad ambitious branches, and thy root.

There’s not enough for this and that,
Make thy option which of two;
Economize the failing river,
Not the less revere the Giver,
Leave the many and hold the few.

Talking to the guys in writing, and then transcribing and posting it, has always been a joy and an education, but it takes time and energy, and at this point to do that is to not do other things, including the novel I am about halfway through writing. “Make thy option which of two,” and I am doing that.

But if the first part of the poem is in a sense negative, the final part is pure positive, and I have identified with this sentiment from the first time I came across it:

As the bird trims her to the gale,
I trim myself to the storm of time,
I man the rudder, reef the sail,
Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime:
“Lowly faithful, banish fear,
Right onward drive unharmed;
The port, well worth the cruise, is near,
And every wave is charmed.”

I don’t know what that says to you. To me it is an almost offhand declaration of faith in life. What the guys apparently came to teach me, Emerson knew long before: All is well, all is always well. There is never the need or excuse for worry.