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.]

 

Consent Forms, By Rob Werling, M.D.

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

[Change of pace. My friend Dick Werling sent this, that his son wrote, and i found it so entertaining that I thought I’d pass it along.   In concept, it reminded me of “The Human Holiday,” which some of you may remember from many years ago.

[I hope you enjoy it.]

Consent Forms

By Rob Werling, M.D.

Are you still there? Okay. A representative from the organization is ready to speak with you and will be with you shortly. Be advised that this conversation is being recorded for training and legal purposes. I will remain on the line for support as needed. Please hold.

Okay, uh, your complaints have been escalated, and Org tells me we need to get to the bottom of this as quickly as possible. Can you briefly tell me exactly how long ago you ran out of consent forms and what steps you’ve taken to resolve this problem?

No, I’m saying. Listen…thank you for taking my call, but I’m saying—if you’d look at your documentation—I’ve been putting it in my reports all along. This planet never got any consent forms. From the beginning, there weren’t any. And what steps I’ve taken–

Wait, stop right there… Are you saying you’ve been sitting on this problem for four billion years?! Are you saying that you can’t document that any of the clients on this planet was ever informed of the risks, benefits, and alternatives of incarnation before being subjected to it?!

Well, of course we’ve been working on it! Looking for forms—we tried to adapt an income tax form we found, but it was too complicated for any of us to work with. We’ve tried various workarounds and stopgaps. I send a request every single time I file a report, and this is the first time I’ve had an inkling that Org was even aware of the problem, much less cares about it.

Oh, people care about this one. (Mm hmm…) You’ve been sending our customers willy-nilly into their mind-boggling existences, certain to be hungry, angry, and overwhelmed, basically against their will. Now people at Org know about it, and they care. (Mm hmm…) And if I were you, I’d be worried.…

I have been worried, as I’ve been reporting this whole time! This is a frighteningly fluid situation. It started out slow, but once it got up to speed—I mean, we’re just playing Whac-A-Mole here. Everything changes so fast! Honestly, we’ve been considering just filling out the paperwork to have the planet condemned, because it’s so badly infested with life.

Well, now, we’ll see about that. Let’s get the data first. Condemning a planet is a major undertaking. Can you start from the beginning?

Yes, of course. Sorry. Uh, let’s see. After the usual dust-gas cataclysm, etc., etc., there was a fairly standard Brownian soup. It was unusual in that it accumulated a lot of liquid water, and we did start seeing some interesting chemical anomalies, but it was nothing we hadn’t seen before.

Just so we’re all on the same page, “water” is an oxygen atom with a couple of hydrogen knobs at one end, if you aren’t familiar with it. Curiously, the thermal range between its melting and boiling points is pretty narrow, and coincidentally, this particular planet has had zones well within that range for most of its existence, due to its stable orbit at a peculiar proximity to the pleasant star it revolves around.

Right, and we knew that having an excess of liquid water is a risk factor, but we had all been through Org’s water-and-other-unusual-liquids management module, so we knew what to look for. Still, I think we were caught off guard when nucleotides started combining and actually replicating.

Nucleotides…

Nucleotides are often referred to as the “building blocks” of macromolecules known as DNA and RNA. (Right, right.) Depending on your perspective, they are like Pringles, or cars on an LA freeway, or Mentos. They fit together and make nucleic acids, which [as far as people on Earth reading this transcript know], are the basis of life. [Without which, there could not be potato chips or a city of angels, or puppies, or your mother.]

At one point, as you know, I was able to get set up with waivers for those little mindless macromolecules, because the risk of “getting into anything ethically problematic” (Org’s words) is just so small that it was a formality, really.

Right, standard, just waivers. No actual signatures required.

But once the polymerizing self-replicating macromolecules stumbled into lipid bilayer envelopes (oil bubbles) and iterated on that a beaucoup number of times (too numerous to count, literally), we were dealing with cells (self-replicating oil bubbles), and then I knew we needed help.

Right, because then they basically had self-replication and metabolism, which—mind you—almost never happens. So obviously at that point you were obligated to file the appropriate forms.

That’s when I started sending my reports with supernova distress signals on the covers. Evidently that wasn’t enough to get anyone’s attention.

Well, we do have documentation of responding to a supernova’d report on macromolecules.

Yes, and thank you—obviously—but when I finally learned there was a huge pile of macromolecule waiver forms supposedly en route, most of the replicating chemicals were either spinning themselves out in nonsensical infinite loops, or else they’d gotten themselves integrated into actual viable cells, and the horse was out of the barn.

The what was out of the what?

(This is a local metaphor for “it was too late.”) Horses are herbivorous ungulates, usually domesticated but not killed and eaten by humans, in contrast to their close relatives cows, who, together with their human domesticators, make up roughly 96% of mammalian biomass on the planet, and are just delicious. [Proc Nat Acad Sci, 2018-ish.] Barns are buildings where horses and cows usually stay, waiting to be killed or whatever.

But the pity is, I honestly think we’d have been okay if Org had gotten involved back then, because single cells are so simple. It was over a billion years of single cells just minding their own business, replicating and dying, leaving behind a carpet of dead cells, which nourished all the future cells, coming along. We were able to handle the ethics of that kind of life on our own for quite a while. We just kept using the macromolecule waivers, and everything seemed to be fine.

It was so quiet. Bacteria are such simple creatures. Each perspective is unique and clean. They have their tiny little selves and their infinitely humungous soup-world. They twinkle for a bit and then go out. They get hungry and move toward food; they get cold and move toward heat. They self-replicate, okay, whatever; it’s no one’s business, really, what happens in bacterial bedrooms.

Well, you sort of know pornography when you see it, don’t you? I don’t think this business of cell division qualifies, but it is mesmerizing to watch. (See for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbNp9DBbTkU). Sorry. Please, go on.

You get used to that quiet hum of hunger, and their little life-lights popping on and flickering out. Looking back now on that almost-contemplative serenity, I see that we may have gotten complacent. Maybe we could have pushed harder for a response from Org.

Maybe you should have, because who has ever been satisfied with being a grease bubble, eating nothing but old dead grease bubbles? Obviously. Can you blame them for wanting to introduce a little drama into their billion-year-old soup? And it’s a slippery slope from there. You simply can’t commit someone to the vicissitudes of the first-person perspective without prior informed consent! 

I see that now, because the shit really hit the fan when they stopped just eating the carpet and started eating each other, before the lights had flickered out, consuming the life force while it still had a perspective. Worse, they started enslaving each other, engulfing and expropriating other cells with impunity. Can I tell you about eukaryotes? Cells with nuclei? Each cell has a passel of slaves, mini-cells, inside of it! The nucleus for the genetic material, mitochondria for energy production, and all sorts of other “organelles.”

Those “organelles” were all originally separate single-cell organisms, humming quietly along, but they got systematically incorporated into bigger hungry cells,…

Eaten…

…but they didn’t get digested. Instead, they stayed alive and kept on doing their work, which was way better than just surrendering their nutrients to the eater. Well, the results were as satisfying as they were surprising! They ended up making these new super-cells, which we call “eukaryotes.”

And the eukaryotes then outcompeted the bacterial schmucks who still haven’t figured out this primordial expression of capitalism.

No one had time to consider the ethical repercussions of “slavery” in that context. That’s when it got confusing, and we could have used some help from Org.

Right. This does complicate the consent process. Because whose perspective is it, then, when you have the one big cell, but also a bunch of little industrious individual cells inside of that one, doing much of the work of metabolism for it? That would need to be referred over to Ethics. I’ll need to make some calls.

But it gets worse. The new super single cells weren’t satisfied with that level of complexity. They started to “team up.” They have these “teams” that we’ve taken to calling multi-cellular organisms, for lack of a better term. How they differ from slave colonies, though, is a distinction I’m not really prepared to make or defend. One cell may be in charge, but the question of perspective becomes tricky. Whose cell is it? Whose organism is it?

Do we consent each cell? What if some of the cells are willing, and others aren’t? Remember, it’s a team, an organism. It seems to “think” that it has its own single perspective.

Right, this is for Ethics. I was not briefed about any of this…

Wait, I’m just getting started. Once there were multi-cellular organisms, the asymmetries, enslavements, murders accelerated logarithmically. “Animals,” as we call the mobile complex organisms, are almost all cannibals, eating other animals as a matter of course, or else eating similarly complex but immobile organisms (“plants” and “fungi”). It’s abominable!

Right. Audaciously, “spider wasps” anesthetize their prey and keep them alive in their underground lairs for weeks at a time, while their babies eat them. But the most egregious are the peculiar clever animals that have entire civilizations of fellow complex life forms, maintained generation-after-generation (“domesticated”) for the sole purpose of killing and eating them. Leaf-cutter ants do this with fungi, and humans do it with plants and conspicuously, as noted above, cows.

Oh dear. So it isn’t just Ethics. We’ll have to get Coms involved… Probably Public Relations… There is going to be a lot of paperwork.

But it keeps going. Some of them get really complex. They get these internal communication networks, we’ve been calling them “nervous systems”.

(Not just because they make people nervous; that’s another story.)

With nervous systems, eventually they literally think. It isn’t just metaphor anymore. At first, they just feel their way around and process environmental information, but then they start thinking. When they start really thinking they’re thinking, then it’s chaos. Because imagine these hungry greedy cannibals actually making plans and acting on them.

Definitely PR needs to be involved. This is getting escalated…

By the way, regarding the problem of thinking life-forms specifically, we thought Org might want to know that we were at least able to create a software patch to make sure that most of them didn’t remember anything prior to the moment of incarnation.

A patch?

Oh, uh, please hold for a moment? …

…

…

Yes, yes ma’am. Uh, yes, I will. Okay. Thank you.

… Okay. This pre-incarnation memory-obliterating “software patch” you mentioned. Org has a problem with it. The interpretation is that you not only coerced the clients into living, but on top of that, your team also deprived them of any kind of perspective for the endeavor! Looks like Legal is getting involved, and probably Risk Management as well.

Transparency is central to any durable system of ethics. The subjects have to have perspective if they’re going to get anywhere interesting. [For Earth readers, why did you encourage your children to believe in Santa Claus if you did?] What are we doing here? If you have no idea why you exist, how do you know what you want? Where do you plant your flag? Do you even have a flag to plant? If you have planted your flag, do you maintain the flexibility to examine it honestly, to look longitudinally at what it stands for? What you stand for? What if you pull someone from a burning building, saving his life, but then he turns out to be Adolf Hitler or Ted Bundy? Now what have you done for the things your planted-flag stands for?

Okay, at this point, sue me for all I care, but as far as we’ve been concerned, the thinking is the least of our worries. They have other organs, too. Not just nervous systems, but digestion systems and breathing systems, hormone systems. Entire communities of like-minded cells in organs forced to do the will of the over-organism. It’s soul-crushing, what they’ve come up with.

And since the whole thing started with self-replication, it isn’t at all surprising that some of them developed a special organ system just for reproduction.

It’s diabolical…

Right! The things they do to each other! Inserting an organ from one complex organism into the body of another one and injecting nucleic acid? How can you even begin to make sense of it, ethically?

These amalgamations of slave-colonies rub against each other and recruit their reproductive organs to combine their perspectives into new, fantastically flawed copies of the instigators. (We’ve been calling the commingled organ systems “parents” in this situation. Some of us think the poetry of that terminology makes up for the off-the-wall insanity of it all.)

Okay, well, I think this qualifies as an Emergent Situation. I am going to see if I can expedite a Mitigation Team out to your planet. If Org approves, the team can usually be there in under a million years.

Finally! All due respect though, it can’t happen faster than that? A lot can go wrong in a million years. We have billions of these complex organisms popping into life every single year here (each containing, as noted, billions of individual cells), and none of them is getting consented. And with the advent of sexual reproduction (maybe a billion years ago), they do this evolution thing.

As bizarre as it sounds, taking two of them and mixing their genetic material up all skiwaddly into each offspring, means they’re constantly changing, from generation to generation. The time scale is literally over just thousands of years or even less. For example, the systematic civilizational cannibals mentioned earlier (humans and their food-colleagues), have covered the entire planet—like the bacterial carpet of quieter times—in less than a million years. Who knows what changes will happen on that timescale now?

Better let the Mitigation Team know, too, that once they started reproducing sexually, they also started forming into communities of complex organisms. So the problem is compounded yet again, see? Groups of groups of groups, with necessarily different perspectives and often-contradictory requirements and goals at every level. The enslavement and murder and cannibalism continue. And the rubbing.

But I mean honestly, in their defense, …the joy! The love, the contentment; eventually, for some of them, even laughter, and slow glowing sunsets.

Please hold…

Actually, come to think of it. With the sunsets and everything… You know, maybe we should just…

Hello?

 

The plasticity of the present moment (from May 2018)

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Friday, May 11, 2018

Very well, shall we talk about the plasticity of the present moment? Remembering that it is always the present moment, and that somehow it is the same present moment.

And remembering to hold contrasting qualities in mind as we do so:

  • The inertia that amounts to the drag of other minds holding an attitude toward it, and
  • The quality that balances that inertia.

They must be examined while keeping in mind their essential unity, lest the idea arise that what is one thing manifesting two ways is actually two things each manifesting separately.

Understood, but – “the drag of other minds holding an attitude toward it”?

It should come clear as we discuss plasticity.

All right.

You know that someone described magic as the art of changing reality in conformance to the will. You have seen Dion Fortune’s lucid explanations of the use of magic, and have read many times in her novels her descriptions of how magical manipulation is accomplished. You have read other accounts, some lucid and many not, all having the air of someone honestly describing things experienced. And of course you have read accounts of magic that were not thought of as magic by the very author of the account. On a personal experiential level, which outweighs all reading (but may be brought into focus by such reading), you have had your own experiences.

You also know that you have always been drawn to history and magic both, although most are drawn more to one or the other, rather than both. Or so you have assumed. The reality is somewhat different. The reality is that you were looking equally outward and inward, and most people prefer to look inward or outward. That is the distinction you noticed, which appeared to you as their outward manifestations.

I see it as you say it. For me, history is the opposing pole. For some it was mathematics or science or fashion or money-grubbing or politics.

Yes. The opposition was – is – between looking inward and looking outward. For some the inward gaze manifests as psychology or religion or philosophy or abstract metaphysics.

Think of it this way: People gazing outward maintain the assured reality of the 3D world. Those gazing inward retain the possibility of altering it by altering themselves. Only – don’t expect this to make sense right away. There is more reorienting to be done, first.

Jung said those who gaze outward dream, and those who  gaze inward awaken.

That may be more a paraphrase than a careful statement of fact, but it is in line with what we are saying here, only that statement refers to the effect of such orientation on the individual aspect of reality, and here we wish to look at it on the communal aspect.

Jung was asked if the world could avoid nuclear war and he said it depended on whether enough people were willing to work on themselves.

That’s right, and our discussion here may shed some light on how that relationship between the two could be. He did not mean, It depends upon enough people getting together in coordinated group activity. He meant what he said, because he knew the indivisible unity of the human mind. He also knew that the overarching mind has local divisions, but he knew that the unity was there.

So if you will hold in mind our discussion of the inertia that holds the world in being, you will perhaps redefine plasticity as a different kind of inertia, the inertia that holds the world in being as it changes aspect.

Let me try.

Yes, go ahead.

Inertia may be defined as the force (or tendency, or whatever) that makes an object at rest want to remain at rest, but it is equally the force that makes an object in uniform motion remain in that motion. This is stated clumsily, but I can see that an object at rest and an object in uniform motion are actually the same condition, only language makes them seem like two different states. That’s why inertia covers them both, because they aren’t really a “both,” but a unity.

Good, so try again.

In terms of your present exposition, inertia v. plasticity doesn’t mean no-change v. change. It means, the continuity aspect v. the alteration aspect. That’s the best I can do at the moment.

Not so bad. The important distinction to be drawn is that it is not a matter of two forces – or even of one force seen in two aspects – enjoining either stillness or motion.

But the point here is that that living present moment has its inertia, a living moving thing, not a dead unmoving thing that must be overcome. “Drag” is a relative term meaning, in context, a tendency to be slower than the desired motion. This is not a scientific description, mind you.

So I guess the question at hand is somewhere between, “What causes change in the living present moment?” and, “How can any of us or several of us working together effect such change?”

And we say, in practical terms, look to scripture and magical practice. In theoretical terms, we’ll continue.

The scripture I had in mind was Jesus advising people to pray two or three together, though that wasn’t quite the context. Magical practice isn’t so different, I suppose – or maybe prayer should be considered to be a magical practice.

And what does prayer or magical incantation seek to do?

Yes, I get it. They seek to connect humans to a super-human level of power or awareness or state of being.

The vagueness at the end of your statement shows you the vagueness of your thought in that respect. Vagueness is always a flag indicating an area that could do with some thought.

A better way to say it would be –?

Prayer – any magical incantation – seeks to remind a 3D being of its essential All-D nature so that it may transcend the limitations that follow from its self-definition as a (merely) 3D being.

But to say that is not to say that there aren’t forces at a higher level.

Of course not. But it moves beyond the obvious “reaching for assistance from higher forces” to the more subtle fact that those “higher forces” are in intimate unbreakable relation to the 3D beings themselves. In a sense, everybody is connected not only laterally (so to speak) bit hierarchically.

Because 3D humans can focus, they are useful to the rest of reality.

Because they tend to get stuck in that focus, they require assistance.

And I guess this brings us to consideration of the vast impersonal forces you have been mentioning?

Not quite. It brings us to consideration of vast personal forces, which are not the same thing. These are not the weather but the raincoat, though that seriously diminishes their role. They are your allies in the battle, your assistance in bringing in the crops before it rains, your larger mind helping you function. Any number of analogies possible; season to taste. For the moment, say the personal v. the impersonal, and leave it at that, while remembering that all oppositions, all polarities, are ultimately part of one unbreakable unity.

Well, there’s our hour and a little more, and as so often, it doesn’t seem like we’ve gotten very far.

Yes, and do you know why it feels that way sometimes? It is because you get a sense of a larger field of view, and the contrast between what you vaguely sense and the little that we can spell out at the moment is discouraging.

I suppose. Very well, till next time.

 

Toward the superhuman (from December 29, 2021)

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

So yesterday you said 3D is a way of seeing, and it led me to an insight that has now become cloudy again.

The central insight is of several parts:

  • You are not victims, nor laboratory rats, nor even volunteers involved in some sort of experiment.
  • Your condition is neither permanent nor deplorable nor even awkward.
  • You are active, not passive; acting, not merely acted upon.
  • There is a reason for the inconveniences of 3D conditions, a reason that makes 3D life worthwhile.
  • The dichotomy between 3D and non-3D is really a connecting polarity. The two ends of the polarity are opposite extremes of one They are, you might say, the ends of a ranges bridged by a slide-switch: If there were no differences, there would be no range; if no connections, there would be not one thing, but more than one.
  • Being, as you are, on both sides of the 3D/non-3D experience of reality, your awareness may flicker. To some degree, living in 3D has required that you pretend to know less, experience less, than in fact you do.
  • And, naturally, perception follows conceptualization, just as conceptualization follows digestion of new perceptions. We realize this may sound cryptic or perhaps precious, but the reality is that perception and conceptualization are two parts of a reciprocating process.

That came out fluently enough, and none of it seems to be a stretch. I don’t think I could have itemized it like that, but it was easy to recognize as you were floating it.

So now you can see that the bottom line is merely the same thing, arrived at from a somewhat different route.

The world we live in changes according to our belief, and our beliefs are changed by our experiences combined with our thoughts and feelings, and it is a never-ending process.

Never-ending, but not necessarily proceeding without pause. Such moments of rest need not give you anxiety if you will merely have confidence that there is a difference between rest and stagnation.

But it is curious how our lives can seem to be such hard journeys. Our weather sometimes feels like it is always heavy weather. And of course it can feel so pointless, or tedious, or painful, or even insane.

When it feels that way, you can be sure that you are looking at your life from the 3D perspective only. When you view the “only somewhat real” as if it were absolutely real, it’s going to look that way. So let’s look at the martyrdom of saints, not in a pious way, nor in a debunking way, but as a fact attested to by history, not once, nor in only one time, but repeatedly, and in all times. Neither need it be confined to martyrs as religions may define them (and may seek to appropriate them). Life is full of known and unknown examples of people sacrificing themselves for others, and what is that but martyrdom, only without the element of malicious persecution.

I know where you are going with this, but that seems an excessively long approach.

We smile. It seems so because you do know. If you were not linked to us at the moment, it might not seem so painfully obvious.

Martyrdom is not explicable in 3D terms if considered only in 3D terms. Neither is religious enthusiasm, nor the transformation of fishermen into charismatic leaders of a new way of existing. But all this is easily understood, both in concept and in mechanism – how?

By the individual being somehow lifted from a 3D-only perspective to a 3D-seen-with-non-3D-understanding.

Yes, only “understanding” is too weak a word, too faint a concept. What happened is that these ordinary 3D people – ordinary, like all of you – learned to experience themselves as more than 3D-only. They came to believe, then realize, then live, not a sense-limited 3D life but a 3D life that was a truer life, in that it included parts of themselves that until then they had been unconscious to.

They didn’t cease to be what they had been. They didn’t suddenly become all-knowing, nor necessarily did they overcome all their bad habits. But what they had been was now part of a larger effective whole. They were much farther along the scale we defined a while ago. From having been simple 3D humans, perhaps asleep, they became closer to the superhuman beings that is the other end of the scale. How? By having awakened, but of course also by having been prepared to wake up, and willing to wake up.

I wonder how people will hear this. I suppose it depends upon how much they know of the history of religions in truth, as opposed to the history first glossed over by ignorant piety, then counter-glossed by ignorant prejudice.

You forget, everyone has an inner non-3D guide ready and willing to provide whatever is necessary, waiting only for the willingness of the 3D mind. But you might say a word about the history of religions from this standpoint.

Well, to me, the elephant in the living room is that every religion proceeds from a few changed people. Men, historically, but I think that is a bias introduced by the leadership opportunities afforded men in the past, and also by the selective rewriting of what actually happened, because I don’t think people actually change all the much over time, and in our day it is clear that the initial people who “get” a new way of seeing are mostly women. Think for example of the women around Carl Jung. I doubt it was very different for Gautama or Jesus or Muhammad except insofar as cultural norms would have made it difficult. But it is historically on record that Jesus treated women as equals, in a time and place where this was not the norm. and apparently in the early Christian church – that is, in the time when the initial followers were followers because they had been changed, not because they had been born of believers – this was so. We know that various women led congregations, in the days before the organized church adopted Roman forms.

But I didn’t mean to concentrate on gender equality, though it is an indicator of the level of consciousness of the believers, regardless of their cultural background. That is, if they couldn’t see that we are all part of one thing, are all “brothers and sisters,” they hadn’t been changed much!

The point I intended to make is that religions are spread initially by people who have been changed. They are almost literally different people. They live in a world with different rules and possibilities. It isn’t really a matter of belief; it is a matter of experience. It only becomes a matter of belief when it is not accompanied (preceded) by experience.

Therefore you all may wish to look at yourselves in a different light. Like Jesus, we say we have come that you may have life more abundantly. When? In some future life? In the between-3D-lives state? In the same tomorrow that promises “free pie tomorrow”? Or do we mean something real, something tangible, something attainable? Rhetorical question, this. You know the answer.

We do. By living our full being (or as much more of it as we are able to absorb) we can transform ourselves and in effect transform the world we live in.

Consider the conversations you have had centering on fear in people’s lives.

I do. You would think that a life without fear would be tremendously attractive, but I guess people think it is only a feel-good concept without practical application.

And that is why we mention martyrs. What does it take for a man or a woman – ordinary 3D mortals like yourselves – to go to torture and death willingly, uncomplainingly, sometimes even smilingly, like the man who joked with his executioners as he was being burned on a griddle. In purely 3D terms, it would be inexplicable. But they weren’t living only in 3D, and neither do you have to. They were closer to the superhuman end of the scale, and if that isn’t life more abundantly, we can’t think of a more striking example. You might say, “Not much of a life, given that they are in the process of being killed,” but that comment in itself would demonstrate that you are still looking at life from a 3D-only viewpoint.

This is something to think about. There’s your hour. Call this, perhaps, “Toward the superhuman.”

Okay. Our thanks as always.