Which of two

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

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.

Some hints from Thoreau

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

From A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, his first book, though not his best.

It is easier to discover another such a new world as Columbus did, than to go within one fold of this which we appear to know so well; the land is lost sight of, the compass varies, and mankind mutiny; and still history accumulates like rubbish before the portals of nature. But there is only necessary a moment’s sanity and sound senses, to teach us that there is a nature behind the ordinary, in which we have only some vague pre-emption right and western reserve as yet. We live on the outskirts of that region. Carved wood, and floating boughs, and sunset skies, are all that we know of it. We are not to be imposed on by the longest spell of weather. Let us not, my friends, be wheedled and cheated into good behavior to earn the salt of our eternal porridge, whoever they are that attempt it. Let us wait a little, and not purchase any clearing here, trusting that richer bottoms will soon be put up. It is but thin soil where we stand; I have felt my roots in a richer ere this. I have seen a bunch of violets in a glass vase, tied loosely with a straw, which reminded me of myself.

…

The anecdotes of modern astronomy affect me in the same way as do those faint revelations of the Real which are vouchsafed to men from time to time, or rather from eternity to eternity. When I remember the history of that faint light in our firmament, which we call Venus, which ancient men regarded, and which most modern men still regard, as a bright spark attached to a hollow sphere revolving about our earth, but which we have discovered to be another world, in itself,—how Copernicus, reasoning long and patiently about the matter, predicted confidently concerning it, before yet the telescope had been invented, that if ever men came to see it more clearly than they did then, they would discover that it had phases like our moon, and that within a century after his death the telescope was invented, and that prediction verified, by Galileo,—I am not without hope that we may, even here and now obtain some accurate information concerning that OTHER WORLD which the instinct of mankind has so long predicted. Indeed, all that we call science, as well as all that we call poetry, is a particle of such information, accurate as far as it goes, though it be but to the confines of the truth. If we can reason so accurately, and with such wonderful confirmation of our reasoning, respecting so-called material objects and events infinitely removed beyond the range of our natural vision, so that the mind hesitates to trust its calculations even when they are confirmed by observation, why may not our speculations penetrate as far into the immaterial starry system, of which the former is but the outward and visible type? Surely, we are provided with senses as well fitted to penetrate the spaces of the real, the substantial, the eternal, as these outward are to penetrate the material universe. Veias, Menu, Zoroaster, Socrates, Christ, Shakespeare, Swedenborg,—these are some of our astronomers.

There are perturbations in our orbits produced by the influence of outlying spheres, and no astronomer has ever yet calculated the elements of that undiscovered world which produces them. I perceive in the common train of my thoughts a natural and uninterrupted sequence, each implying the next, or, if interruption occurs, it is occasioned by a new object being presented to my senses. But a steep, and sudden, and by these means unaccountable transition, is that from a comparatively narrow and partial, what is called common sense view of things, to an infinitely expanded and liberating one, from seeing things as men describe them, to seeing them as men cannot describe them. This implies a sense which is not common, but rare in the wisest man’s experience; which is sensible or sentient of more than common.

In what enclosures does the astronomer loiter! His skies are shoal, and imagination, like a thirsty traveller, pants to be through their desert. The roving mind impatiently bursts the fetters of astronomical orbits, like cobwebs in a corner of its universe, and launches itself to where distance fails to follow, and law, such as science has discovered, grows weak and weary. The mind knows a distance and a space of which all those sums combined do not make a unit of measure,—the interval between that which appears, and that which is. I know that there are many stars, I know that they are far enough off, bright enough, steady enough in their orbits,—but what are they all worth? They are more waste land in the West,—star territory,—to be made slave States, perchance, if we colonize them. I have interest but for six feet of star, and that interest is transient. Then farewell to all ye bodies, such as I have known ye.

…

What is called common sense is excellent in its department, and as invaluable as the virtue of conformity in the army and navy,—for there must be subordination,—but uncommon sense, that sense which is common only to the wisest, is as much more excellent as it is more rare. Some aspire to excellence in the subordinate department, and may God speed them. What Fuller says of masters of colleges is universally applicable, that “a little alloy of dulness in a master of a college makes him fitter to manage secular affairs.”

…

In the life of Sadi by Dowlat Shah occurs this sentence: “The eagle of the immaterial soul of Shaikh Sadi shook from his plumage the dust of his body.”

 

Brainstorm

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Sunday, July 24, 2022

2:15 a.m. So I promised myself I’d review my big idea here, and send off our discussion to the lists and see what people think. Only, I’m not sure I have the energy to do it now. What do you think, guys?

You can at least set out the background, and if your energy flags, continue later.

Yes, that makes sense. But – even saying that, I realize, no, I don’t have energy enough to do it justice. So, later.

6:20 a.m. Okay, let’s begin. Did I discover that the answer to my abiding concern had been in front of me all along, lacking only one thought, to come to completion? I feel as if that’s what happened. But I need to discuss it with others, see what I may not be considering.

For the past several months, particularly, I have been worried about what happens to all the work I’ve done, once I die. I hate the idea of it being lost and forgotten, even though that is naturally what happens to nearly everything humans do. Yes, everything lives on in the human mind, and yes, the critical part was the living it, not the remembering having lived it. But I never made the impact in life; it would be nice to think there was a chance, at least, that I could make it after death.

You might go into that a little.

Well, as I wrote that, I realized, there is usually a window during which time one’s writing can still be understood – even, perhaps, be understood more easily than when one wrote it. A generation, two? A hundred years, maybe, stretching it? After that time, too many things need interpreting. Very few works survive a century mark and still make an impact. Who today reads Sartor Resartus, for example?

Well, you did. There are always a few, and those will influence others in their turn not by quoting the books they have read but by quoting who they have become. Thoreau read all those English poets. Hemingway read all those Russian authors. The influence of a few is easily underrated.

Still, you know what I mean. Neale Donald Walsch’s Conversations with God books were very influential for a while; he wrote best-sellers. But will they still influence anybody when they are read only by a scattered few?

Your point really is that some books influence immediately, and some only after the fact, and since yours didn’t do the former, you hope they will do the latter.

Yes, good summary. All those books, all these conversations, so much you have given us, and so carefully; for that matter, the record of my mistakes as I learned my trade, so to speak; I can’t believe it has done what it can do. And, I very much feared that once I am gone, it would disperse, forgotten and unused.

We recognize that this is not you doubting the universe, but you realize, that’s what it will sound like.

Oh, I know. I’m just setting out the situation.

And you never felt able or willing to do the things people do to get seen.

True. I hate most aspects of competition. It always seemed to me that if you, or the universe, whatever, wanted this material to get out there, you could do it. And if you couldn’t, I didn’t know how I could. Take the Rita books. I went through six months of talking to her, transcribing, sending each day’s talk to my lists, and I wasn’t thinking of publication at all. It was Bob Friedman, reading the daily reports, who suggested to me that we put them into book form, and it was Bob who shepherded Rita’s World I and II, and Awakening from the 3D World, and It’s All One World. Valuable stuff in those books – but then Bob died and what do I do?

Your attitude, basically, was and is, “I’m doing what only I can do, and why should I be expected to do the other necessary things that I can’t do?”

Right again.

And so you were stuck.

Well, Chris Nelson was (is) willing to get the material into book form, both printed and electronic. That’s how we put out Papa’s Trial. But that still doesn’t answer the one question every publisher faces. As Bob said to me long ago, “The product is never the problem.” The problem is, how do you let the person who would be interested in the book know that it exists? In the days when we started Hampton Roads, the established paths were obvious. But even then, it was never easy. Today, with the industry having been restructured repeatedly, and with my not even knowing the ropes as they currently exist –

And yesterday you recognized what you could do.

I did. We can give it away. But even that raises issues.

That’s what we are here for.

Of 14 books published, only two involve a publisher with a contract. I could give away the others at my discretion, and I think maybe that’s what I should do.

To be more specific, I could send people the electronic version of my books; the computer files from which they were published. No need to do this for US citizens; they can buy eBooks via Amazon. But foreigners might not find it so easy, and sending them the file – telling them to give it to anyone they know who would be interested – would potentially put an English-language file in many foreign countries where there is no availability otherwise. In other words, we skip the process of finding an agent, and a publisher, and a translator. Anyone who can read English could have the book available.

So, you see why we nudged you to write all this out, asking for people’s opinions.

I do. I see that it isn’t as simple as I thought for a moment. But I think the potential is there.

Making your work available for free does not give it any assured visibility, even among those who would be most likely to value it.

No, but word of mouth is what always has sold books; surely word of mouth combined with an immediate, free, book would be effective.

You are making a distinction between domestic readers and all others. Why not offer the books free to anyone interested?

Somehow that seems like begging: “These books aren’t worth anything. Take a virtual copy off my hands.”

Yet you don’t feel that about foreign language countries.

Chris set up SNN Publishing partly so I would have a way to get my manuscripts into eBook and print format. Doesn’t he deserve to make a little money from those who can easily afford a book?

So you really want a hybrid operation. An English-language publisher domestically and a free-distribution list for anyone in other countries.

I suppose. One step would be to get Chris the various files so he can manage all the books, not just Papa’s Trial. Another step would be to activate the small group I had asked to help me preserve the legacy, see what they think.

So ask yourself, what do you want from the people you send this to? Opinions? Advice? Cautions? Suggestions?

All those, I guess. I suspect that some people will see things I don’t see.

But all this started from a charitable impulse.

It did. Sharon Durand has a friend in Russia who liked Muddy Tracks, so I thought, why not send her more things to read? Then I thought, she may have similarly inclined friends; let them get the files from her, and they’ll have the books too. Then I thought, if Sharon had all the files, she could given them to people as she met them, as she found people who might be interested. Then I thought, why limit it? And that is about as far as I’ve gotten.

Besides, you have more manuscripts ready or nearly ready, and no publishers.

Yep. Okay, let’s send this out and see if anybody has anything to suggest.

 

Sorting it out (but how?)

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

The guys have often said that when one age ends and another begins, we reconstruct our view of reality – of what is possible and what is not – by picking and choosing. Some things we were raised to believe, we continue to believe. Other things, we discard. Some things we were raised to dis-believe, we come to see the sense of, and others, of course, we continue to disbelieve.

Case in point, the new Netflix series “The Unexplained,” featuring William Shatner as his most irritatingly dramatic. The thing is, though, the subjects being explored can’t be brushed aside as obviously woo-woo nonsense. Shatner’s melodramatic delivery aside, the producers have put together very interesting commentary from experts in various fields. (True, some of the experts may not be all that expert, but in the three episodes I have watched, none has been obviously loony, and some have been impressive.)

The episode on “Mysterious structures” concentrates on three places that interest me: the pyramids at Giza, the circular staircase at Loretto Chapel in Santa Fe, and the Coral Castle in Florida.

“The Oak Island Curse” provides fascinating information on a puzzle that has been being probed for about 13 decades now, a puzzle that goes back nobody knows how far. As I say, fascinating. You know that some of what you’re hearing must be nonsense, but the disquieting thing is, you can’t say for sure which part.

In fact, watching the episodes has given me a funny feeling. I get a sense of what we must look like to some people. We’re talking about what we have experienced, and what we deduce or suspect from those experiences, so to us, it’s all straight-forward. But to those who don’t know anything about it, do we look like crazies?

Particularly, given that we don’t know?

Stay tuned.

Fathers and sons

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

This print looks blurry to me as i post it. In case it’s still blurry when it posts, it says this:

“And, I would argue, this is the problem behind not only different ideologies, but most nations’ foreign policies.
“Let’s not forget, Luke Skywalker was Darth Vader’s son. How far from the tree does the apple fall? Could it be that our self-righteousness is helping kill us? Certainly it is a powerful force dividing potential allies.“

 

 

Rewriting Alcott

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Tuesday, May 25, 2021

5 a.m. Well, you never know. We struggled, yesterday, and I wasn’t sure how well we had done, but apparently our result was helpful.

I think maybe I’ll skip doing a session today and instead will post, as an interim measure, my rewriting of Alcott’s first ten Orphic Sayings – see if they make anything clear to people. I intend to do all 50 before proceeding to decipher the second 50. At least, that’s the current fantasy, as Ken Kesey used to say.

Orphic Sayings:

A summary of first 50 sayings

  1. SPIRIT.

Listen to the inner voice, and write what you get, because you can live in the spirit and speak directly to the inner soul of others. Clothe your words and your thought like nature, elegantly and simply.

Despite appearances, life is complete and alive and filled with the presence of God. Nature is the expression of divine life. (The 3D world reflects and participates in the nature of the non-3D.)

Science can only see the world of the Dead Present, never the Living Present. We can perceive the living moment only intuitively, never through the senses. Wisdom is not to be found in a materialist conception of reality. Trust the inner voice. Great is the man whom his age despises, for you can be of the herd or you can be an outlier, and only the outlier can remain true.

Praise and blame as little belong to the righteous as to God. Virtue transcends circumstance. Wisdom waits with a long patience; nor working, nor idling with men and times; but living and being in eternity with God. Solitude is Wisdom’s school.

The soul is neither saved nor judged by proxy; she saves or dooms herself. Nobody can sin for another, nor atone for another’s sin. Redemption is a personal, private act. Blessedness consists in perfect willingness. It transcends choice, and is one with the divine will, That is, aligning the 3D will with the non-3D nature is the way to “serenity, triumph, beatitude.”

  1. ENTHUSIASM. Believe your heart; trust her, obey her divine leadings. Let yourself be fired by the flame of enthusiasm, which is the hope of the world, the life of sanctity and genius. Intuition knows where life wants us to go, and will bring us there safely if we will follow it. We tack on reasons – logic – after the fact, to persuade ourselves we are doing things for perfectly logical reasons, but intuition has wrought all miracles since the beginning of time.

III. HOPE. Hope is the prophecy and fulfilment of the soul’s destinies, the thing that brings us closer to divinity. God is our idea of excellence; the complement of our own 3D being, it is something both internal and external, something that is the 3D being and yet also transcends it.. He is also saying that as we aim higher in our self-creation – in our choosing what we want to be – so our prospects expand, and our abilities, and the world we live in. In other words: “You create your own reality.”

  1. IMMORTALITY. You see the world one way, and it conforms to your vision. And then you live in the world you (in effect) have shaped, and in turn that affects how you see it. Until you can believe that you are more than the world you live in, you will not be able to form a conception of life that is equal to its richness, its value. A change of attitudes toward life brings consequences. Only the person who lives nobly can live an everyday life in 3D while remaining aware of and true to non-3D reality.
  2. VOCATION. Engage only in right livelihood. You reform the world by your example, not by your argument, and still less by coercion.
  3. SENSUALISM. He who marvels at nothing, who feels nothing to be mysterious, but sees everything at only the sensory level, lacks both wisdom and piety. Reality is deeper than the senses alone can report.

VII. SPIRITUALISM. The scientific method is not the only way to understand the world. You can come to a profound understanding entirely outside of science, deeper than science, in that it deals with the laws behind the laws. This is not a dead universe of dead matter. Those who approach life and the world in a spirit of reverence, of intense and continuing appreciation, experience life and the world as holy in essence, however difficult or discouraging or even tawdry appearance might be. Miracles are not violation of natural law. “God, man, nature, are miracles.”

VIII. MYSTICISM. One who lives to the soul and one who lives to sense do not live in the same world. How could you possibly? Each lives in the world whose laws s/he can deduce or feel in the heart.

  1. ASPIRATION. We, who are partly of 3D and partly of non-3D, can never be satisfied with our life here, considered as if 3D were all there is, or all that mattered.
  2. APOTHEOSIS. Every soul feels at times her own possibility of becoming a God; she cannot rest in the human, she aspires after the Godlike. Every act of admiration, prayer, praise, worship, desire, hope, implies and predicts the future apotheosis of the soul.

—–

Frank DeMarco, author

Papa’s Trial: Hemingway in the Afterlife, a novel