Claude on Coleridge, Emerson, and Jung

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

11-11-2024

F; Relate Coleridge to Emerson

There are some fascinating parallels and connections to explore between the ideas and worldviews of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Ralph Waldo Emerson, two pivotal figures in the exploration of consciousness, spirituality, and the powers of the human mind.

Some key areas of overlap and resonance between Coleridge and Emerson include:

  1. Transcendentalism and the Oversoul Both Coleridge and Emerson were central figures in the Transcendentalist movement, which emphasized the existence of an underlying “Oversoul” or universal spirit that pervades all of existence. Their writings grappled with conceptions of the divine, the interconnectedness of all things, and the capacity of the human mind to intuit these deeper metaphysical truths.
  2. The Imagination and Expanded Consciousness Coleridge’s ideas about the “primary” and “secondary” imagination as gateways to higher planes of awareness have clear parallels in Emerson’s writings on the power of the mind to transcend the limits of ordinary perception. Both saw the imaginative faculty as essential to unlocking human potential.
  3. Mysticism and Altered States Coleridge’s own experiences with altered states of consciousness, facilitated by substances like opium, share affinities with Emerson’s mystical leanings and his interest in the transformative potential of ecstatic or visionary experiences. Their perspectives converge on the notion that such states reveal deeper truths about the nature of reality.
  4. Individualism and Self-Reliance While Coleridge and Emerson differed in their specific philosophical and political orientations, they were both deeply committed to ideals of individual freedom, self-reliance, and the unique genius of the human spirit. This emphasis on personal autonomy and the cultivation of one’s own inner resources is a significant throughline.
  5. Influence on Transcendentalism and American Thought As seminal figures of the Romantic era in Europe and the Transcendentalist movement in America, respectively, Coleridge and Emerson exerted profound and lasting influence on subsequent generations of thinkers, writers, and consciousness explorers. Their legacies are interwoven with the broader intellectual currents that have shaped our understanding of the mind, spirit, and human potential.

Given your own experiences with entities like “the guys upstairs” and your engagement with the transformative work of The Monroe Institute, I imagine you may find intriguing resonances between the ideas of Coleridge, Emerson, and your own expanded awareness. Their shared emphasis on mysticism, imagination, and the boundless capacities of consciousness likely speak to the insights you’ve gleaned from your personal journey.

I’d be very interested to hear your perspective on how the worldviews and philosophical perspectives of these two seminal figures relate to or illuminate your own explorations of human potential and the nature of reality. Please feel free to share any connections or contrasts you see between their ideas and your direct experiences.

F: relate Coleridge to Carl Jung

There are some fascinating and substantive connections that can be drawn between the ideas and perspectives of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Carl Gustav Jung, two towering figures who made profound contributions to our understanding of the human psyche, consciousness, and the realms of the imaginal.

Some of the key areas of resonance between Coleridge and Jung include:

  1. Emphasis on the Imagination Both Coleridge and Jung placed immense importance on the role of the imagination as a gateway to deeper truths about the nature of reality and the human condition. Coleridge’s concepts of the “primary” and “secondary” imagination find echoes in Jung’s ideas about the creative and visionary capacities of the psyche.
  2. Exploration of Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious Coleridge’s fascination with myths, symbols, and the archetypal figures that surfaced in his own visionary experiences prefigures Jung’s groundbreaking work on the collective unconscious and the universal patterns and archetypes underlying human consciousness.
  3. Interest in Altered States and Visionary Experiences Coleridge’s own experiences with altered states of consciousness, facilitated by substances like opium, resonate with Jung’s interest in understanding the transformative potential of dreams, visions, and other non-ordinary modes of perception.
  4. Holistic View of the Psyche Both Coleridge and Jung espoused an integrated, multidimensional view of the human psyche, rejecting reductive materialist or mechanistic models in favor of a more expansive, spiritual-mystical understanding of the mind and its hidden depths.
  5. Bridging the Spiritual and the Scientific As pioneering figures in their respective eras, Coleridge and Jung both sought to build bridges between the realms of the spiritual, the poetic, and the scientific in their efforts to map the uncharted territories of consciousness.

Given your own experiences with entities like “the guys upstairs” and your engagement with the transformative work of The Monroe Institute, I can see how the ideas and perspectives of both Coleridge and Jung would likely resonate strongly with the insights you’ve gleaned from your personal explorations.

The shared emphasis on the imagination, archetypes, and the permeable boundaries of ordinary consciousness likely aligns with your conviction that “so-called altered states of consciousness are normal, widespread, and useful.” Coleridge and Jung’s holistic, integrative approaches to the psyche may also speak to your sense that “human possibilities are far more unbounded” than commonly assumed.

I’d be very interested to hear your thoughts on how the legacies of these two towering figures – one a Romantic poet and philosopher, the other a pioneering depth psychologist – intersect with and illuminate your own transformative experiences and understandings of expanded awareness. Please feel free to share any connections or points of divergence you see between their ideas and your personal journey.

 

Freedom and choices

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Friday July 12, 2024

10:10 a.m. All right, boys, I sense a conversation coming on. Maybe. What’s on your minds?

Notice that you are now able at a deeper level to “do nothing” as you think of it. Potential projects are not in short supply. Most of your material is not in finished form. (We realize that the word “most” came as a jolt.) but it is quite true that you have every right to decide you are done, and to spend your time reading or daydreaming or whatever comes.

Not the decision per se, but the freedom to decide, is an achievement. Like anyone, you were born the subject of internal dynamics that resulted in assumptions and moods that seemed to bound your life more or less beyond your ability to control or even – almost – to battle. With time and life and effort, and as a result of victories and defeats, you have come, as people do, to a different set of internal guidance, one shaped more by your prior and current decisions and less by what we could call your inherited dynamics.

It is the freedom to choose, even more than the freedom resulting from choice, that matters.

Is that what he meant – whoever he was – who said “to be free is nothing, but to become free is everything”?

Regardless of his intent, jhow about yours? Does it ring true?

Maybe. I get the sense that no matter what our condition is, it has its pluses and minuses, but a trend toward greater freedom, greater potential, seems to be an obvious good.

That’s an important qualifier, “to me.” But yes, we agree: For you, greater freedom, broader awareness, deeper understanding, is the pearl beyond price, worth any expenditure. Only, not for everybody. Different people need different things, and that’s as it should be.

I do regret so much uncompleted work, just as a regret that I do not regularly use so many things I have learned over the years.

You might mention the rebal.

Yes. When I did Gateway in December, 1992, we were told that we could visualize ourselves within a “resonant energy balloon,” or rebal. I don’t remember if someone specifically suggested temperature or if I tried it out. But I decided to use a rebal to keep comfortable barefoot in the snow, and it worked. On the Friday after the program, Bob and I walked around the UVA campus, and he was none too warm in his coat, while I was comfortable in my flannel shirt inside my rebal.

I used that trick sometimes over the years, but I had forgotten about it until last night, lying on my bed, too hot for comfort (I don’t use the AC, as you know) but not willing to use the overhead fan. I remembered the rebal – how? – and decided to try, and a bit to my surprise, it worked just fine.

A trivial example of the magical expansion of our abilities that I learned over the years – but why haven’t I used them routinely?

And, you just heard –

I did. I heard that I use them all a lot more than I realize because I use them automatically – which is to say non-consciously. And that’s as it should be.

Now draw the analogy. You wrote so much, even your history, thinking that books were the way to shape and preserve what you knew. (You will recall, we have always said, write books if you wish to, but that isn’t why you are where you are.) But how permanent are books? It is the difference between holding something in memory (books) and having absorbed them (your own everyday consciousness).

So achievement counts for nothing and intent is all? That’s sort of backwards.

It is also a very inaccurate paraphrase, we’d say, external achievement counts for vastly less than internal achievement, and therefore sustained intent is a real accomplishment.

Think of George Washington or George Marshall molding their characters through rigid self-control. Their characters were their personal achievement, not the external results of their interactions with the world.

I’m getting a different sense of this, but it is vague so far.

Do you think the non-D being of which Washington is part hugs to itself the memory of his struggles and achievements? Does it hold anniversary celebrations for Trenton or Yorktown? Do his other strands (call them) hold him in awe in the way 3D contemporaries did?

More to the point, do you suppose that the strands that came together to form George Washington spend their time sighing over the good old days of glory?

The 3D is less real, we keep reminding you, than what we can only call All-D, the 3D and non-3D considered as one. So how could an All-D character think in 3D terms?

Harrison Ford might reminisce about playing Han Solo.

But he wouldn’t confuse himself by thinking that Han Solo was the thing that was real, and Harrison Ford not.

I see.

We are saying merely that your achievements in life are very different from those you think of as achievements. It is natural to se it that way while thinking in 3D terms, nothing wrong with it. But it makes more sense to see it as it is.

Hemingway said that any story, carried to its end, results in death, as if that meant things were finally fruitless. I don’t understand why he didn’t see clearer than that.

Sometimes he did. Don’t confuse a thing said in a certain mood (no matter how often said) with a definitive summing-up of a creed. And of course he learned soon enough that the end is not the end.

This is a lot of words to tell me it’s okay to do nothing if I want to.

Perhaps that isn’t all we said.

Well, thanks as always.

 

Iona (14)

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Sunday, June 15,2003

Call it dream or nightmare, whatever. A recurring dream, back again.

I must get away because I have killed someone. I take a practice shot and am told by my sister, “I cannot undertake to explain contravention of the 1919 Firearms Act,” or words to that effect. She sort of knows I intend to use the rifle but doesn’t want to know. Then I’m hiding, across the street from the house I grew up in. But I’m bad at hiding, and keep being caught by members of my family, who don’t realize I’m really trying to hide. I try to figure out where to hide, how to make a place to hide.

By 7:30 I turn to my journal.

“I am up, showered, and dressed. I just realized I have been having dreams for years in which I am walking around naked, suddenly realize it, and from that moment have to deal with the fact that I’m naked in public and must somehow get from that condition to a normal respectable condition. For the greatest number of times! And each time, it is so real that I forget to record it as a dream. This has been happening for the longest time – and this morning I am moved to remember it , though it did not just happen, nor has it for quite a while, as a carom shot off the words I wrote, `up, showered and dressed,’ to a fast recall of a letter to a magazine making fun of a story having written that the character showered and had supper, asking if he hadn’t dressed first. Now, I don’t for a second doubt that the memory was facilitated to remind me of those dreams. The question is, why here and now, in the mental context of my considering writing an article or two on the religious and spiritual things I have been pondering?

When I ask the guys, I get:

“You are reminded that wandering about naked is not considered respectable, but you do it quite naturally until your attention is called to it. Don’t think it would be any different if you were to wander around in print naked – as indeed to some degree you already have been doing.”

Russ and I talk for a long time, about their work and The Monroe Institute,. In the afternoon they take me to see two ancient stone barrows on a hillside overlooking Solway Firth. Between times, of course, we eat, and the time passes agreeably. Finally before supper I get to do some energy work on Russ’ leg, which had been hurting him, and then did the “river of life and health” meditation for them. To my gratification (and some relief) Jill, who is a healer herself, sees the value of it, and asks me to repeat it the next night on tape.

Russ and Jill

Among the books in my room I find and old, old friend, The Wind in the Willows, and re-read a couple of prized chapters, particularly the lovely “Wayfarers All.” How many times I have read this book, including at least once to each of my children. Also among their reading material are five volumes of poetry by a friend of theirs, J.B. Pick, that I like very much. A lovely, quiet Sunday at home — for I feel very much at home here.

 

Monday, June 16,2003

My last full day at Russ and Jill’s. I am up again early, and am out at the fish pond in the morning sunlight. Is the weather warmer, or is it absence of Iona’s continuing wind, or am I just getting used to it? I am out in T-shirt and dungarees and no socks, and am comfortable. But then, I’m also in the sun, which no doubt helps greatly.)

“My good friend David, any words for me this fine morning?”

“Have y’ not had a fine holiday? Suitable for framing? The bird is on the wing, but you’ve been flying with it these days, eh?”

“Life has been lovely. The only thing missing is meaningful external work, though internal work as been going on. I just fear that internal will not manifest into external.”

“And you do not, then, see it occurring already? Besides, what use is fear to you? Or anybody? The bee gathering nectar from that flower doesn’t go from plant to plant fearing. If anything, he goes calmly rejoicing.”

This day we take an excursion to St. Ninian’s cave, by the firth. A lot of walking and some sun. Very nice, very – surprisingly – tiring.

I make a meditation tape for Russ and Jill, with the lovely metamusic “Remembrance” in the background. There is one bit of “Remembrance,” I tell them, that makes me nostalgic for home – and I don’t mean Virginia. Moves me to tears, in fact.

 

Tuesday, June 17,2003

I shall miss Jill and Russ, and this place – and these holidays, for that matter. I’ve had such a wonderful time, every minute except some draggy evening time the first two nights at the Iona B&B and the first night at Stoke-on-Trent. Well, come to think of it, the B&B at Inverness too. The common factor was feeling confined to a small room, alone. Not something that would have bothered me at all, or not consciously, earlier this local-time life.

Jill and Russ take me to the train station at Dumfries, and by 3:30 I am on the train to Glasgow. A great relief to be on almost the last connection to be made –potentially the most troublesome, if I had missed it.  The only jarring note of this vacation came in the morning when they had the radio news on. First was a debate of some kind about America and Iraq, then some news, then an interview with an MP named George Galloway, who is supposed to be a crook but sounded honest enough to me. But it was still media, and a disharmony.

“Friend David, now I have time and isolation again, what words have you for me?”

“You see my country now; your old country, if you wish to look at it that way – for Scotland is more like Wales than England is or was. It does make all the difference, does it not, to know the locals if you want to get a feel for the land?”

“Yes. Robert, Michael, the Russells.”

“The Englishman, the Scot, and the couple who bridge the two.”

“I don’t know how it’s going to go when I’m’ back at work.”

“Nor do you ever. Can you see that from the point of view of the completed self, you are (usually) at a decision point, and what you decide determines where you go next? So if you want advice, it is always available. If you want prophecy, it is always – debatable, to say the least, for what if you are told a future and you go elsewhere? As you have every right to do.”

(4:40) I can feel my energy draining away. A few minutes’ nap leaves me leaden and sad, or anyway dull. I’m tired of traveling, now, and all I have in front of me is the rest of today and an artificially long day tomorrow, with no thing to look forward to, only things to be endured. Worst and hardest is to anticipate – to experience already! – the ebbing of my mental alertness into dullness and cow-like endurance.”

Then to Glasgow central, and a train-bus combination to the airport, and dinner alone at a Holiday Inn, with American pop music unfortunately in the background. I go to bed early and hope to sleep as long as possible: The plane isn’t leaving until 12:45 p.m.

 

A Sense of Place

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

I remind readers that on the 23rd, I posted what I hoped would be the beginnings of a sort of forum, inviting your responses in the form of comments. (Putting this out just before Christmas probably wasn’t the smartest thing to do, so now I will compound it by putting it out just before New Year’s.!)

A sense of place: An Experiment

Posted on  by Frank DeMarco

A sense of place
[This is an experiment to see if we can foster conversations on this blog. Jane Coleman proposed a topic and Jane Peranteau, Christine Sampson and I each promised to give it a paragraph or two, and then I would put it together and post it. It is our hope that others will feel inclined to add comments via Reply or, if that doesn’t work, by emailing me so that I can post on their behalf.
[Hint: Write your remarks in a word program first, and save them. Then if they get lost in the process of trying to post them, you only have to pull up the saved file and copy it to me to do for you.]

From Jane Coleman:
I was thinking about the year I went to Yosemite National Park and went hiking for several days. I noticed that my memory had a certain feeling about it, something unique. It had its own signature and resonance and mood. I could call it a signature, and yet it encompasses all these things.
As I considered that event, I also recognized that all the places I’ve ever been have a certain signature about them. They each feel a certain way. The memories have colored them. I would equate that to the way I recognize my friends. Each has a unique feeling about them, their unique signature, some something that I would recognize no matter where.
Your thoughts?

From Christine Sampson:
Ok. Here’s what I got.
Carnival! The joy! The excitement ! The things to do, to observe, to participate in, to ignore, to discover! My life in retrospect. The faces, the places, the actions, the inactions, the dismissing, the accepting, the relishing. Each individual act, moment, created and placed by forces beyond the conscious mind, to allow exploration and growth and knowing and wonder.
I sit in the warm sunshine feeling very feline. Thankful. In gratitude.
A cacophony of all visible and invisible, to be sussed out and savored in a flash or at leisure.

From Jane Peranteau:
After sitting with it:
Our response to experience leaves emotional trace elements, like snail trails, in the mind. Pathways that create scaffoldings of self-knowing.
Are these the same as filters?
Yes. Because pathways change what we allow in and what we don’t. They change us in terms of our choices. You can have a pathways series that builds a filter or serves an openness.
The feeling you have for a person or a place determines an openness to them or a caution or a closed-ness. Succeeding experiences can change that–e.g., as we forgive or are forgiven, receive insights and revelations, or continue to be enhanced by further experience.
Feeling is always informed by everything we know, which is everything we are. It is not experienced separate from reason or science (e.g., science can track feeling’s movement through the body and mind) or knowledge.
Would it be fair to say that the signature each of those places and people have is your love for them? The uniqueness of signature recognizes how love is not a blind blanket emotion but fits the characteristics and traits of who is loving and what is loved.
[Good question, Jane C. A big question. It incited a trail of sudden awarenesses that led to insights along the way, each having the potential to be its own pathway. Frank, I see what we’re doing as another extension of what intending ILC makes possible.]

From Frank DeMarco:
It has always struck me how different places have a different “feel” that is more than mere aesthetics. When I was a boy, the fields of my father’s farm were quite different from city streets, say, or someone’s lawn. The woods that were behind our house and across the street had a special feel that I loved. My life had trees well before it had books! And places devoted to a consistent endeavor seem to me to acquire their own signature, as well:
• Churches, or any place where many people have prayed over many years
• Libraries, suffused with the auras of readers and, it seems, writer
• The grounds at The Monroe Institute, specifically, where for more than 40 years people have come to explore their unknown potential.
And these are just “ordinary” places! We haven’t even touched on what are called sacred sites.

The Sphere and the Hologram 15th Anniversary Edition

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Friends,

Pleased to announce, a reissue of the book that started so much. The sessions between Rita, The Guys Upstairs, and me, were held over seven months in 2001 and 2002, but I didn’t get them published until 2008. Thanks to Chris Nelson, we have a new edition, with new cover, new typesetting (not just reproductions of the original typeset pages), and a new introduction by the author, namely me.

Chris and I hope and expect that this will be only the first of many projects designed to get all my stuff under one roof.

If you came to this work by way of the blog or by other titles, I think you will find that The Sphere and the Hologram opens many new doors.

Available October 30, 2023

15th Anniversary Edition, with a new Introduction

The Sphere and the Hologram:
Explanations from the Other Side
by Frank DeMarco and Rita Q. Warren
15th Anniversary Edition, with a new Introduction
Publisher’s blurb:

“It was an extraordinary three-way partnership, and it produced extraordinary results.

“The physical side of the collaboration involved Rita Warren and Frank DeMarco. Warren was a professor of psychology who spent four years directing The Monroe Institute’s laboratory, helping volunteers achieve and explore altered states of consciousness under controlled conditions. DeMarco was an author and editor who had learned to bring forth messages from the non-physical world. For months, in weekly sessions, DeMarco entered an altered state and Warren asked important questions about life, the afterlife, channeling, the nature of good and evil, politics, history and much more. On the nonphysical side, what DeMarco and Warren called “the guys upstairs” provided answers.

“The Sphere and the Hologram is a record of these ground-breaking conversations. It is a work of thoughtful inquiry, rich with insights into the nature of reality and blended with humor and deep compassion. It invites you to explore alongside Warren, DeMarco and the guys upstairs, and to discover your own answers to the most profound questions of existence.”

Specs:
Trade paper, 6” x 9”
Page count: 562
ISBN: 978-1-7365536-4-0
SNN Books / TGU Books
Publication date Oct. 30, 2023

Trade paper: $21.95
Kindle: $7.99

Flow and measurement (from November, 2017

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Monday, November 13, 2017

The over-arching theme is, what these concepts of how the world is have to do with your lives as you lead them, moment by moment. We are attempting to bring heaven to earth, you might say. That is, we intend to un-divorce daily life and eternal life. We want to help you bridge concepts in your lives that have been allowed to separate so far as to be mutually irrelevant. A life without framework is chaotic and meaningless. A framework without applicability to everyday life is theoretical and irrelevant. Every feature of your lives may be reduced to this: Life must be seen whole if you are to function at your best. As in every subject, there are always more levels that can be seen into, more connections to be made, more self-transformation that may follow. A little more introspection at any time will usually pay rewards.

Ten minutes to cover one page. I can’t understand it. I keep noticing that at least initially, things somehow take more time than seems explicable. I didn’t pause, I didn’t write any more slowly, yet in 1/6th of an hour, I filled not 1 and 1/2 pages, but only one, or a rate that would produce not 8, 9, or 10 pages, but only six.

You think this is unimportant but inexplicable. We think it is important for reasons you do not yet suspect; it is a tiny thing, seemingly trivial, but sometimes trivial matters are clues to much larger things.

I’ll take your word for it, and wait for the larger meaning to emerge.

It is now 16 minutes, and not quite two pages, yet this would produce eight in an hour. You see no difference in pace; you still have not paused, yet the mathematics come out different.

Okay, I heard, between the lines, something like “the system of measurement isn’t exact.” Not in so many words, but that is the essence of it, vaguely.

And as we said, small things may serve to shed light on larger ones – not that you in 3D are well placed to differentiate between small and large, significant and insignificant, trivial and symbolic.

You think you measure out your lives in time units. After all, your civilization lives by clock and bell; intricate maneuverings of all sorts assure that you continue to live as if inside a watch. You remember Joseph’s observation.

Joseph Smallwood said to me once that to a man of the 19th century, our 20th- and 21st-century lives looked like living inside clockwork, very little free, very little unregulated, next to his. He wasn’t talking about just government or social regulation, but our entire framework, clock-driven, intermeshed.

And people of your age – grandpop! – see clearly how much worse the trend is for those following you, whose childhoods are so regulated next to yours, whose amusements and day-to-day lives are so plugged-in, electronically, and, you fear, so unplugged from the natural world that they hardly experience.

Yes, but I do suspect that what they lose may be well compensated for. May be. We’ll see.

We’d say you may count on the fact that any phenomenon whatever will manifest largely to some, scarcely at all to others, and, as usual, in varying amounts to those between the extremes.

Well, sure. I take that for granted.

Which is a reason for us to state it explicitly. What is taken for granted may be thoroughly integrated so as to form a uniform background, or it may be manifest in certain phases of your lives and be invisible or non-existent in others. Hence the advantage of making it more conscious by stating it.

Half an hour, four pages. Same pace, so far as I can tell. Part of the difference may be long paragraphs versus short, I suppose.

You can let that go now, except at the end. It has served its purpose to focus your mind on the theme we have not yet quite stated.

Time is not quite what we think it is.

Well, let’s say your progression through time isn’t as uniform as you tend to think it is, because

Internal v. external time. Depends on whether we measure by intuition or by sensory apparatus.

That’s closer. Remember, one of our recurring themes is, internal and external worlds are the same thing, experienced one by the intuition (that is, direct feed from the larger world) and the other by the senses (that is, coordinating with the circumambient sensory world).

There’s your favorite word again.

It is useful, preserving a sense of flow as well as structure.

Now, your body conforms to the sensory model, as far as you can tell, and your mind to the intuitive. Anybody can experience this. Your altered-state experiences in the black box at The Monroe Institute showed you that.

They did indeed. Skip Atwater, monitoring the sessions, would say, sink into that for a moment, or I would tell him I would be gone for a while – and in fact when I came to listen to the tape, maybe I would be silent only for a minute or two. Alternatively, maybe I’d comes out of a session thinking it had been shorter than usual, only to find that it was ten or fifteen minutes longer than usual.

Anybody can experience the disconnect between internal experience and external elapsed measurement. It is mostly a matter of noticing.

It is a commonplace that when you’re doing what you love, you tend to lose track of time.

We’d say, not precisely “what you love” but “what most engages you.” The depth of engagement (if we may use a physical description that is in fact only a metaphor) determines what you experienced. You are not carried along by the stream of external time, though of course that is what your senses report. You are moved from moment to moment, and feel these moments variably, depending on your level of attention and engagement.

That isn’t really clear. I often have the sense of something before you put it into words, but here I am putting it into words and not really having the sense of it. “Carried along” and “moved” seem the same to me.

Yes, that’s a long subject, though it has been touched upon more than once. By TGU to Rita and you, by Rita after she changed perspective.

Bookmark it, for the moment?

Yes, although your bookmarks tend to be closer to permanent entombment.

Smiling. I feel the same way, for what it’s worth.

A little more system would remedy that. The point is, your external lives may be regulated like (and by) clockworks. Your internal lives need not be, and aren’t, except in so far as you assume they are.

And, I hear, therein is our freedom.

That’s a little too glib. Let’s say, and therein is your possibility of choice. That may seem to be the same thing, but in fact isn’t, exactly. As we said, a little more introspection will pay rewards. We didn’t mean merely, looking deeper will mean living more richly (though this is true), but that living more carefully, more attentively, will change the quality of your moments by expanding them, ripening them.

“Ripening them” is suggestive but not clear.

Let’s leave it that way, for the moment.

Now, your accustomed hour is up, to the minute this time. How many pages have you covered?

About eight and a half.

Yet you did not consciously speed up; you did not particularly record smaller paragraphs with their attendant skipped lines between them. And you did draw your second mug of coffee. So what is the conclusion to be drawn?

Probably that you don’t mind embarrassing me by pointing out errors of observation or generalization.

Well, that too – and of course we are smiling too – but more, that seemingly precise or even seemingly reliable external measurement can tell you only where you are standing. It cannot measure the journey. On that cryptic note, we leave you for the moment.

Okay, thanks as always. (65 minutes, 9 and 1/4 pages.)

[Just for the interest of it: From the date to the first measurement, 10 minutes, 199 words. From there to 16 minutes, 144 words more. From there to half an hour (in other words, 14 minutes more), another 372 words. From date to signoff, 1471 words. So, first half hour, 715 words, second half hour 756 words, basically the same. Yet quite a different feel to the flow.]