Month: October 2017

Friday, October 20, 2017

3:30 a.m. You said we should resume with the distinction between our ideas of personal and impersonal forces. Not sure what that implies, but I’m ready if you are.

When one differentiates carefully between the personal and impersonal, a clearer understanding of one’s position in the world results.

That sentence feels a little pompous, a little stiff, which tells me we may indeed be contacting you – what Jung called impersonal forces – but not yet translating it into human terms. (And I’m not sure this sentence is quite mine, either; neither the wording nor the underlying thought.)

That is good listening. But there isn’t anything wrong or unnatural about a little initial stiffness. As you should know by long experience, it tends to smooth out.

A little coffee may help, and I hear it is ready. [Filling my coffee mug.] Okay.

We should hate to participate in giving the impression that coffee or any substance is a necessity for this kind of work. It isn’t a detriment, but it isn’t a necessity either. It may be a habit, however, and it is often useful to associate habitual tasks with habitual routines, or, as you might say, props. So, early morning bathrobe and slippers, or the same writing desk, or coffee, or the same kind of pen and paper – it all helps, or, rather, it all can be made to help. But it is important to stay on the right side of the line between helpful habit and superstition. An attitude, an intent, may be habit enough.

Understood. I wasn’t meaning to imply that others should do things my way. I don’t see how anyone can do anything somebody else’s way. But I drop bread crumbs, and those who find them useful may follow, and may get their own ideas.

I notice that often we wind up spending a page or two in such seemingly unnecessary comments on procedure before getting on to the topic at hand. So –

People tend either to take ownership of everything in their lives or

Wrong foot?

Seems like it. We shall try again.

Your lives are pre-shaped, we might say, by whatever internal baffles and conduits and intersections you bring to them by what you are. You know you are not psychologically simple. This may lead directly to that, in defiance of intellectual logic but perfectly following emotional logic laid down by past experience. If something reminds you of something else because they are linked in your mind by an unpleasant experience, the connection may not be otherwise obvious or logical or even sensible, but it will be no less strong for that. You know this; it is your experience of life. Many a psychoanalyst or psychotherapist makes a good living helping people manage under circumstances caused by these often subterranean relationships.

But – I hear – it isn’t necessarily the ideal for a life to be lived free of such connections, which may seem to us mostly obstacles to happiness.

It would be closer to say that life is the working-out of such problems, and that the problems are where the treasure is. Just as you wouldn’t like a movie or book without tension, or a crossword puzzle without difficulty, or a game without adequate competition, so a 3D life without internal problems to be resolved – even if [that were] possible – would be empty.

Instead of pain or trouble or annoyance, think intricacy.

Say some more, please

You are in 3D life to work out (by living them) the problems you bring to it. In the living, you often enough add more problems, or different ones, or new dimensions to older ones, but this is not a failure nor even a marching-in-place. Again we say it is not in result but in process that reality inheres.

Well, you say “again,” but I don’t know that you’ve ever quite put it that way.

But you understand the gist. Just as we said that it is not what happens to you that counts, but what changes in you result? This is the same thing. Emotionally, mentally, physically, the living of the thing is the real work. The reshaping of yourself is the real result. The process by which the reshaping occurs may be said to be of lesser importance, or of overall importance, depending on how you look at it.

That isn’t real clear. It is either a tautology or it is cryptic.

Well, it isn’t complicated. From one point of view, how you get to a new place is incidental, and what is important is where you get to. From another, the journey itself is the thing, and any port in a storm.

That last glib phrase is mine, I think. It floated up and I finished your sentence, but I don’t think it is what you meant.

Not quite, but it’s close, which is why it floated by, as you put it. Your mind (anyone’s mind) reaches for the closest similar thing, as Bruce Moen used to say. Let’s say, the journey is itself the important thing, and it makes less difference where it ends, as any end is only temporary anyway. We have told you, often enough, that we’re always on Plan B. That doesn’t mean that we’re always settling for second-best (or worse), but that we concentrate on continuing the journey, and if the winds blow us here instead of there, that’s no loss.

But the contrary view – that the incidents of the journey matter less than the arrival – is somehow also true.

Correct. Logically self-contradictory, but then, so much of life is. Contradictions are always resolved at a higher level of understanding. As you have been told, the universe contains all contradictions within it, but it cannot contradict itself.

So let’s go back to the point. Are the emotional events of your life personal or impersonal? It’s a matter of viewpoint, but it isn’t a matter of indifference which viewpoint you adapt. Your choice will affect how you see the world (and of course your life in the world) and therefore will alter what comes to you.

That last may be more obvious to you than to us.

Is it? Surely it is obvious that how you see the world affects how you react to the world. Someone convinced that life is a series of unconnected random events would be continually in a defensive stance. Or, if convinced that life was actively hostile, or actively (if we could put it that way) meaningless, or actively benevolent – surely you can see that each attitude would produce differences in interpretation, and that different interpretations provoke different responses which in turn elicit differences in the next sequence of events.

Yes, I can see that. I don’t know that I have ever drawn it quite that way in my mind.

Well, in the largest sense, if a hurricane blows through, are you responsible for the lost palm fronds? Yet, if the hurricane blows through and you have left the lawn furniture out, and a chair smashes a window (yours or someone else’s, doesn’t matter), are you blameless?

Do those two paragraphs connect?

Of course they do. Your attitude toward the world implies your attitude toward your place in the world, and that attitude has consequences. When the hurricane arrives, you have some responsibility for what it finds, because you have had some ability to shape or reshape it, ahead of time.

And if I get you right, the point is not to avoid hurricanes – as that is beyond our scale – but to prepare for them.

No, the analogy breaks down. Preparing for them is a side-effect; that isn’t what we mean here. We mean, what you can do is work on yourselves; what you cannot do is assure that all will be peace and prosperity, and John F. Kennedy will not be killed, nor Abraham Lincoln, and your own days will not be troubled.

Yes, I get that. Again Emerson’s “marching off to a pretended siege of Babylon” after “raising my siege of a hencoop.” Or Thoreau’s mention of “cowards who run away and enlist.”

It is usually easier to aim one’s discontents and outrages and aspirations outward rather than inward.

And I hear an implied caveat: Don’t take this to mean implied condemnation or commendation of a public life or of concentration on external affairs.

That’s right. What you do doesn’t really matter. How you do it (mindfully or otherwise) will be found to matter a great deal.

And that’s it for the moment?

It is.

Thanks, and see you next time.

 

Thursday, October 19, 2017

2:15 a.m. Since it looks like I’m not going to be doing any more sleeping for a while, let’s chat. What’s next on your list of items to discuss?

Let us continue describing your lives in the context of forces beyond the – well, let us say beyond the obvious, or beyond the transient and apparent.

Deeper than what is seemingly common sense.

That’s right. Hard offhand to find a way to describe the difference. If in 3D you see a murder, or even a screaming argument, or even an icy silent confrontation, there is always an immediate cause to it. It can always be ascribed to circumstances, from “He made me do it” to “It was inevitable, given the circumstances.” But there is a deeper causation that may be discerned and described, and this is among the things we have been working up to.

We are what circumstances have made us, and the animating forces blow through us like people blowing a whistle, say. Every whistle sounds the sound it is, and can sound no other.

Clearly you could use more sleep. That is far too mechanical and determined an analogy, and your lives show that it is.

Enlighten us.

You are, if you are anything like an instrument, a pipe with various stops, that may be played. The winds that blow through are modulated by your interaction with them. If you play a flute, your fingers determine the notes emitted, depending on which holes they cover and which they don’t, and in what combinations and in what order. The structure of the pipe does not change, but the effective passage of the wind through the pipe does change.

A better analogy, I concede that.

It is your free will in 3D circumstances that is the point of your existence, after all. Merely being the passive spectator of impersonal forces has nothing to do with free will. Further, it is not what happens to you in your life, but how you are changed by what happens to you, that is the importance of the events of a life. If your ability to react and choose were not there, what would your life be?

But we would like to poke a little deeper than that. Let us say, what you are as you find yourselves in 3D existence is not adequately explained by your circumstances, your 3D heredity or even by what may be called your non-3D heredity – your strands, past lives, extensive connections.

5:45 a.m. Go on.

What you are is explained by circumstances beyond the 3D world. Just as your present-day self is not explanation enough for itself, but must be seen in context of its past, so your physical being cannot be explanation for itself, but must be seen in context of the larger being from which it springs – only, observation of that level of being is not possible.

Not even by intuitive inference? I mean, cannot our non-3D communications provide us the data, just as you are doing?

But remember, we – your non-3D components, and their friends and relations, so to speak – are at your level. We remind you, the 3D and non-3D aspects of yourself – the All-D creatures – are not separate. So in a sense, higher levels are as much a mystery to us as to you.

Plenty of people talk about them, though.

Yes. They do.

But don’t know what they’re talking about?

Let’s say, our information and theirs are not the same.

So say clearly what you mean, here.

If you ask someone for a description of a far country where he has been and you have not, how do you judge the accuracy of the description you receive? You weigh the known biases of the traveler, for one, and if possible you compare his “traveler’s tale” to those of others. But various stories are not always comparable, as they may not be describing the same things. A description of the Sahara desert and another of Cairo and a third of Naples and a fourth of – oh, anywhere – would not necessarily resemble each other, and not because any or all were inaccurate, but because they were describing different aspects of the same world.

Yes, and –?

What is the difference between a traveler’s tale and hearsay, in the absence of any way to verify them?

You tell us.

It was a rhetorical question. The difference is not in the reports, nor in the reporter, but in your own decision about them. That is, you decide what is reliable and what isn’t, but your decision isn’t necessarily accurate either; it’s just that you have to make it. You can keep that decision tentative. You can suspend judgment. But at some point you will have to make it, if only by default.

And we never have sufficient data to base a decision on.

You don’t have sufficient evidence; you don’t have sufficient evidence for a logical fact-driven conclusion. What do you have?

Psychic’s Disease? Uncaused certainty?

Not necessarily. What you do have is a feeling, one way or another, a sort of centering in. This may be Psychic’s Disease, depending upon how reckless you are at coming to certainties, but it needn’t be. It is a perfectly legitimate method of judging things you cannot decide on evidence.

My old friend Ed Carter once told me that at the highest levels of management, all decisions are made on intuition, because if they could be made on logic they would have been made at lower levels of management.

This is merely to remind you that there are areas in which we know, and others in which we don’t, just like your own lives. Nobody knows everything, and nobody’s range is precisely the same as anybody else’s.

So, our take-away here, besides the reminder of fallibility?

It is more than a reminder of fallibility. It is a reminder of levels of being. If you were to ask a cell in your stomach muscles of its opinion of an afterlife, even if it could convey the opinion (or even have one), how likely is it that its reality and yours would overlap sufficiently to provide you with guidance? It is as immortal as you, in the sense that its non-3D existence is not threatened by the termination of span of its 3D existence, but that doesn’t mean your reality and its are any more translatable one to the other. And as above, so below.

I am more than ordinarily in the dark about this morning’s talk, and so I am not sure I’m really on the beam, here.

Perhaps we made too big a leap. Sometimes connections that are obvious to us are not so to you, just as sometimes you intuit a lot from us that needs spelling-out for those who were not there at that moment when the spark jumped.

Vivid analogy.

Remember our larger theme, your souls as conduits of vast impersonal forces that are experienced as personal drives.

You hadn’t added that last phrase before.

We would have thought it went without saying. Perhaps that is part of the gap in communications. It is because you necessarily experience, but less necessarily conceptualize, impersonal forces as personal, that much confusion arises.

Why?

Why does it cause confusion?

Yes.

But – here imagine sputtering noises. We can hardly imagine why it isn’t obvious. If you think a penguin is an albatross, won’t it cause confusion? They’re both birds, and they both like cold water, and that is about all they have in common.

Well, spell it out for us.

[Pause]

It is a difference in responsibility, let’s put it that way. If you think the impersonal is personal, you are likely to assume responsibility for things that are in fact well beyond your control. Thus you may blame yourself for an eclipse of the sun. Alternatively, you may blame the Gulf Stream for your own hasty decision. You see?

It muddles things.

It has to. It is true that sometimes – maybe even many times – the confusion makes no difference, isn’t even evident. But sometimes it matters.

All divination systems have as their basis the connection between inner and outer worlds. Some recognize that the connection is in fact identity, some don’t, but all see at least a connection, and they serve to act as indicators. Astrology, tarot, I Ching, to name but three, all translate the impersonal forces of the world for the individual querent. In short, “How will I likely be experiencing (as personal forces flowing through me) the winds flowing through the world (the impersonal forces)?”

Yes, I see that.

That is a sorting-out, you see, only it is implicit rather than explicit, at least in practice. The person using the system is interested in the factors impacting his, or her, life, not in the factors as an abstract description of the world’s weather. Nonetheless, it is indeed a weather report, and the wise querent is the one who explicitly recognizes that there isn’t anything personal about whether it’s raining, and yet at the same time it is very personal, but in an entirely different sense.

Now, since it helps you to know where we will resume: When we resume, let’s continue with the distinction between your ideas of personal and impersonal. Obviously that doesn’t mean Frank’s ideas except as representative of a 3D individual’s ideas.

All right. I can’t say I’m less at sea about today’s session than I was. Perhaps it will become clearer in retrospect, as I type it in.

That is an advantage to being your own secretary, just as Hemingway saw advantage to typing up what he had first handwritten.

In his case, though, it was to revise as he went.

Which could be paraphrased to say, in his case, it was to get another look at the material, to see it as a whole – which sometimes led to revision.

I see. Interesting. Okay, till next time.

 

Wednesday. October 18, 2017

5 a.m. It is a continuing feature of these communications that I never know – rarely know, anyway – what’s next. I can’t feel a logical flow from one to the next unless you leave bread crumbs at the end of the previous session and say, “start here.” But I see that we do get on, somehow. So, your move.

I think you will find that in exploring, it may be useful to have a general idea of where you are going, but it is less useful to think you know how to get there. That is, you may be headed north, but you aren’t likely to know what lies in the path, and for all you know, to get to your destination you may have to travel sometimes west, sometimes east, sometimes south, even. Ultimately what seem like detours – even what may be detours – still help fill in the map.

That’s all right, as long as I have my Indian guide. It’s when you aren’t sure you still have him, or that he really knows the ground, that you get nervous.

Of course. And you would be reassured if he could show you that he does know what he’s doing.

In any case, I am in your hands. I’m willing to be occasionally “confused for three days, once,” like Daniel Boone, if it happens. I must say, your track record so far is good. “Your” meaning you, Rita, TGU, etc. – all our guides.

It is the quest for an impossible certainty that would trip you up. Otherwise, errors of perception or interpretation will average out

So, today?

Let’s talk about motivation and emotion.

I know where this is going. I had a thought while making coffee. I take it you sometimes put out teasers, like theatrical trailers.

Think of it as an aligning nudge, to smooth communication.

Or like a left jab, to position me for a punch?

We’re smiling too. All right. You look around you, sometimes, and you wonder, how it is that people want things so badly? How can so many things be so important to them? How can they believe so thoroughly and passionately? Why are they so driven?

Very true. And you don’t need to tell me that others would say that somebody who fills dozens of notebooks with early morning dialogues is driven in his own way. It doesn’t feel like it, to me, it feels natural, but I can imagine that that’s how it looks. So I don’t exactly think I’m the only exception to what I’m nevertheless puzzled over.

That’s a good point, that one person’s obsession is another’s natural way of being. But it is the underlying question of motivation that we are interested in, at the moment. Not specific situational motivation, but motivation in general.

Yes. What makes Sammy run, to use the old show title. What is it with us?

What is it with you is that what you used to call 3D Theater is for the playing-out of – well, we are going to say of conflicts, only that needs explaining.

More like confluences, I think. Or just interactions.

That is true once the context is understood, but it requires some spelling-out first, mostly to eliminate potential misreadings.

Life in 3D – which, we remind you, amounts to saying “consciousness restricted in its awareness to 3D conditions of perceived separation, delayed consequences, and constricted experience of time as an invariant succession of present-moments” – life in 3D allows the play of forces to be experienced from within, as it were. It makes it real at an entirely different level than one of somewhat chilly abstraction, which is All-D life as you would perceive it. (In saying that, we are not accusing ourselves of being cold. We are showing you the difference between 3D consciousness and the larger All-D consciousness as it would appear to you.)

If you will remind yourselves that in a very real, if hard to visualize, way, you are all part of one thing, it will be easier to understand. 3D life is the experience of many small parts of all-that-is experiencing themselves as separate. This is not (we keep reminding you) poor design, nor Original Sin in the sense of a culpable act or an error of judgment. It is the result of the eating of the fruit of the Tree of the Perception of Things as Good and Evil – that is, it is the result of the voluntary descent into perception of duality – but it is not punishment nor even an escape from justified punishment. It is the sine qua non of the experience. Without more than one actor, more than one stream of thought, more than one set of motivations, there isn’t much elucidation going on. Monologues and soliloquies only take you so far.

You are implying that our drama is somewhat artificial.

Well, let’s go carefully. Let’s say – we have used the analogy repeatedly, because it is expressive – let’s call you a repertory company doing improvisational drama. You are assigned roles (in 3D’s case, by being born into a certain time, place, heredity), and given baggage (what you sometimes call past lives, other times see as inherited traits, which in a way amounts to the same thing) but are then free to – and required to – make it up as you go along. This is because the theater management, and for that matter the audience, is less concerned with plot than with character revelation and character development. It is the playing-out, less than the play, that is of interest.

No Big Script, no Ultimate Resolution, no Armageddon.

Not except in the sense of the entire working-out process being the script, no. But people like to tack on the idea of a final resolution, for fear of meaninglessness.

Yes, that is a haunting fear many of us come to, after waking up from, or being born free of , belief in the surface appearance of things.

It is harder, or perhaps we should say it requires greater consciousness and therefore involves more self-consciousness, when you are doing improv knowing it, than when you just follow your impulses less consciously, “doing what comes naturally.”

Living life instinctively, I take it. That “doing what comes naturally” leads to thoughts of the birds and bees, and I can’t think of much that is more instinctive or stronger than the sexual instinct.

Sex, survival, flourishing, all aspects of life as divided beings, yes. Powerful motivators, desire and fear.

I take it that is different from the Course in Miracles polarity of love and fear as the two forces motivating humans.

Yes. That one refers to attraction and repulsion. We are referring to a slightly different way to see 3D life, one in which, within the perception of multiplicity, desire and fear are two motivating forces.

I feel the distinction, but we haven’t put words around it yet.

Love versus fear – or vis a vis fear, we should say – refers to forces leading you [either] from, or further into, a sense of multiplicity. Desire vis a vis fear refers to forces within the sense of multiplicity. Neither one tends to lead you out of it, they manifest it within you (or, you might as well say, they manifest you).

All right.

Well, desire and fear make drama. Drama makes for enactment and, in a sense, awareness of, resolution of, the forces themselves, through manipulation of the agencies though which the forces manifest.

Better let me put that into English. You just said, the forces themselves can be felt but not represented except either by abstractions or by characters feeling them.

We didn’t quite say that, but that is the sense of what we meant, yes. What cannot be directly represented can be personified, observed, experienced vicariously, emotionally understood. This transforms the observer and we go on to whatever follows, to be transformed further.

So even when we live our lives feeling them pointless, even intolerably so, we are performing improv and there is a reason for it.

Well, “a reason for it.” We know what you mean, but to assent would be to mislead. Life is. It doesn’t need a “reason for it.” What you mean is, it isn’t ever meaningless, and this is true. However, a sense of it being meaningless is well within the range of emotions being expressed by this or that actor in the troupe.

Does that imply a need to have every possible mood expressed, so that, we might say, “somebody has to do it”?

That isn’t quite wrong, not quite right. Let’s say, the forces are there. the situations are there. the players with their baggage are there. it’s pretty likely that sooner or later everything inherent in the structure will be acted out by somebody.

And enough for now?

There’s your hour. We will see you next time.

Okay. Thanks for all this.

 

[Wednesdays, I am posting pieces of Chasing Smallwood, an early book now out of print. This is a book about four interconnected themes:

• how to communicate with the dead;
• the life of a 19th-century American;
• the massive task facing us today, and

the physical world’s place in the scheme of things.]

[Monday, December 26, 2005] 9 a.m. Well Joseph – James? – I know it is vastly easier for me to bring through values and attitudes and opinions than fact. So, what would you like to talk about?

Mr. Lincoln.

I can’t say that you folks appreciate Mr. Lincoln the way you ought to. There ain’t any use in putting him on a pedestal as if he weren’t just like you. He wasn’t, but he was. He was a man. The kind of man that don’t come twice in a thousand years. Perfectly placed, perfectly suited, perfectly willing – yet he didn’t get all full of himself, so he served without diversion.

Now, you take Napoleon by comparison. Ability in many lines – a genius, really. He was used by destiny to bring the Middle Ages to an end, and he more or less did that. (He died just a year before I was born, like Hitler and you.)

But the man didn’t have any moral dimension to him. He knew he was being used, but he couldn’t help himself from falling into old patterns, feathering his nest, marrying into kings, just spitting on the people who supported him and relied on him to look out for them. He did – when it didn’t cost him nothing.

But Mr. Lincoln, now, he was something different. He was like Napoleon in that he came up from nothing, but Mr. Lincoln didn’t trample on people to get where he wound up. And he believed in self-government, where Napoleon never did. And he believed in the people. He really did. You can see it in his whole career.

We didn’t throw up anybody to match Mr. Lincoln’s character except Washington, but there’s just all the difference in the world between being born rich, and marrying richer, and having a place, and being born poor, and if you married into someone richer, not getting her money but only her ideas on the subject, and not having a place and not even being exactly fitted in when you got into a place.

You see, what you don’t always get about Mr. Lincoln is that he really was a man of the people. He was an extraordinary man – a deep thinker, a careful accurate calculator, a wonderful persuader – but he was always of the people, and nobody who had eyes could make any mistake about it. Of course the nobs looked down on him because of it. They would! They had to! Because he was living proof that breeding and inherited education, if you please, do not explain anything about people. It showed that you couldn’t tell where you were going to find diamonds, and so you’d better take care of all the coal. That ain’t a very good figure, but you do see what I mean.

Now here’s the thing. The Confederacy was all nobs! Because of slavery, you had an aristocracy that compared itself to England when it wasn’t pretending to be the successors to Rome and Greece. That’s why they rammed through secession without asking the people damn-all. Can you imagine a northern state seceding just because the legislature said so? They’d have had a civil war within the state, because if the North was anything, it was a mixture of elements, and no one group running and owning the whole shooting match. It just couldn’t have been done. And that’s also why it took the North a while to organize itself in the face of the rebellion. It had to sort things out, it had to cipher out how it felt about it. In the South it would have been a few families – hot-heads, half of them – coming to an understanding.

I keep straying from the point. The point is the Civil War was about class more than it was about race, even. You can’t see it so easy because of emancipation, but suppose there hadn’t been any emancipation? Suppose old jug-headed McClellan had ended the war before it hardly began, as he could have done two, three times in 1862. There wouldn’t have been any emancipation because the country wasn’t ready for it. And that ought to tell you something!

The reason slavery was key is because it kept the South a sort of hot-house aristocracy, following the old way of doing things, pretending they was England. That’s what was behind all the troubles in Congress – these “aristocrats” didn’t make any bones about looking down on the “clerks” representing the North. (Not that the clerks were any great shakes; they were what the local machines threw up, and that meant they were mostly pretty sorry specimens. Yet they weren’t all worms, either, there was good ones here and there, maybe more than we had a right to expect, our system being what it was.)

The North and the South only came to blows because of slavery, but if there hadn’t been slavery and the South was like it was, they still never would have got along. The slave power wanted what it wanted, and all [the pattern of] its life told it that what it wanted, it had ought to get. So they would be infuriated when in the union they couldn’t get their way automatically, but had to bargain for it. They thought it was humiliating to have to ask; they just preferred to give orders.

Well, and Abraham Lincoln was going to be their President? Abraham Lincoln, who was nobody and came from nowhere and didn’t even have anything much to speak of except a house? It was too humiliating. It was like a bad joke. They weren’t going to bear it. They’d seen plenty of non-entities in there – they’d put them there, to be sure they didn’t get King Stork instead of King Log – and now here was King Stork, and he looked like it too.

There isn’t any way to tell, of course, but to look at other versions of history, but I’d say it would have been a whole lot easier for them if we’d elected Seward. They hated Seward, but at least he was eastern, and sort of polished, and you could treat him as a gentleman’s lawyer, even if he weren’t a gentleman. They might have waited to see, if we’d put in Seward. And chances are, Seward would have temporized and trimmed and compromised and given in, and we’d have had the whole work still to do. I expect it would have come sooner or later anyway. Maybe it would have come under Seward: If it had, I don’t think he could have held it. I think we’d have been sunk. Kentucky would have gone out sooner or later, and that would have been the end of it. Then God knows what would have happened, with the rebs holding the mouth of the river. The way I see it, England would have come ’round playing one against the other, and what that would have meant for the age of the common man instead of the aristocrats is more than I can see.

Of course the common man didn’t do too well anyway, with the size of the war we wound up in. Wars always give some people a chance to pile up fortunes, and that means they get to buy up governments, and you can be sure they don’t use it as Mr. Lincoln would.

I do stray. It is difficult to keep to the point when everything reminds me of something. Let me try it again.

Abraham Lincoln in his body – by what he was, I mean – was a living day-by-day demonstration that the common people ain’t necessarily all that common. In other words, that the uppity-ups wasn’t so un-common, they just had money and a manner and a society of others like them that admired each others – themselves, in other words – and just hogged things as best they could.

So Mr. Lincoln, just by being exceptional and by not having society manners, and by being so obviously kindly and well-meaning while still being sharp as a carpet nail, he, himself, just by being what he was, proved who was right and who was wrong about aristocrats. Your history books don’t tell it because it ain’t ever in the interest of the people who have the say over buying textbooks to put it that plain. But that is the secret of Abraham Lincoln! He was a giant in every way, and he was a man of the people. And that’s why we loved him. We loved him when we could just only see him, and read what he wrote, and see what he did. We loved him even more when the stories about him began to circulate, after he was murdered. Martyred. The stories about his youth, and about what happened in cabinet meetings, and him putting up with McClellan, and pardoning soldiers for sleeping on duty or deserting. It all gave us a clearer and more detailed picture – and the picture never blurred or contradicted itself, it just got more and more detail. And the more we heard, the better we loved him. It didn’t hurt, either, that we could see that he’d brought us through. It was a terrible disaster, an awful blood-letting that seemed like it was going to kill us. But it was none of it Mr. Lincoln’s fault, and we knew that. If he had been somebody we thought didn’t care, maybe the country would have said “enough” when the death-rolls started coming in with thousands of boys in a day. But we knew that he grieved too, but he was resolute that we get the job over with.

I say “we.” I’m talking about people who thought like me, sure. You can’t learn me much about Copperheads and skunk-hollers! But still you’ll notice that the country never deserted Mr. Lincoln, and the longer the war went on – and more so afterwards, of course – the clearer it was that he more than anybody else, more than General Grant, brought us through.

And if all this don’t tell you that I wasn’t in the Army of the Potomac – well, it should! Those boys loved him too, finally, but you know what I mean. They never would hear much against McClellan, at least not till ’64.

Tuesday, October 17, 2017

5:50 a.m. it’s interesting to see the difference between what I experience and what people read into that experience, even people who know me very well. Yesterday’s exchange, for instance. I experienced it, as always, as smooth, even flow. Statement, response. Question, response. One thing leading to the next, no emotion involved. The closest I have ever come to an emotion in any of these conversations, as far as I can recall, is humor. We’ll exchange jokes, or we will be amused by the other’s attitude or assumption or reaction.

But that isn’t what people read. They read into the record, anger, chastisement, even, yesterday, cantankerousness. And it isn’t so much any particular individual’s misreading, but a general atmosphere that establishes itself around the conversations. And, since I can occasionally detect suspicious fingerprints when they are smudgy enough, I suspect that you encouraged me to mention this for reasons of your own. Your move.

Take that same difference between communication as you experience it essence to essence, and the record it leaves, the effect it produces, when people read it via 3D clues (written words, inferred attitudes, analogies to what would be if it were a conventional person-to-person interaction), and you get a sense of the difference between All-D and 3D perspectives on 3D life.

I almost get it, but not quite.

That’s all right, because there is quite a lot to say. Let’s make it easy to follow, by coding it. So, in our interactions, you, the 3D-plus-non-3D intelligence, we’ll call A. We, the non-physical intelligence you communicate with, we’ll call B. Your readers, separately or together, we’ll call C.

So, physical – A. Non-physical – B. Observer – C. Over-simplified, but it will do. These have their counterpart beyond the 3D world, and the part that may be confusing is that A and C extend into the non-3D and know they do, yet continually forget they do. So let’s call your non-3D component A2 and your readers’, C2.

A interacts with B, and C observes. But really, A and A2 interact with B, and C and C2 observe. As you have noted, interactions tend to be experienced this way: A2 and B, and experienced by C as if A and B.

Yes, I’m following you so far.

Well, why should that be? Why (since C and C2 are the same) should it not be experienced by C as A2 and B?

I get it.

Proceed.

It depends on how we observe, doesn’t it? If we observe using sensory cues, it appears to be A and B. Only if we observe giving intuition primacy over sensory do we perceive it as A2 and B.

Close enough for the moment. All right, draw and extend the analogy. Look at the world around you.

Yes, I see it. If we look at it and read only the sensory clues – or, I guess, if we only read the evidence using our sensory apparatus and its reporting, its logic, its deductions – the world looks one way. If we read the same thing in an intuitive way, it reads differently.

Again, not quite. But you’re on the trail. The point remains that the world you experience is only somewhat real, even in its own terms. It is more real, seen through C2 lenses.

It’s a difficult concept to really grasp. We can get it abstractly, easily enough, but when we come to apply it, it can seem like explaining things away.

We understand. That’s what we are trying to do right now, give you an intellectual connecting principle – a hook, you say – to tie in what you experience within yourselves and what you experience outside of yourselves, because it is so hard for you to perceive (as opposed to knowing abstractly) that inner and outer are the same reality experienced through two different filters.

The world hurts! You, observing the world, hurt, because you take it as real. But – it is and it isn’t. What C experiences is qualitatively different from what C2 experiences, and the difference inheres in C, not in the world.

In a way, that’s saying what Hemingway said? That we’re making a mistake in thinking that others react to their situation in the way that we would react if we were in it?

You’ve seen it yourself, and I dare say everybody who reads this, present or future, has seen it too. One’s “personal experience” can never be translated accurately. You can’t express it and the other person can’t absorb it, just the way it is, because there are too many unnamable variables within each 3D individual to make translation possible. Because you extend into non-3D, because you experience partly intuitively, something of the emotional reality and the inexpressible experience can jump, can arc over, but only some. The actual flavor of everyone else’s life can only be approximated, can only be guessed at. Who understands how asthma has flavored your life? Who, understanding this, understands the effects – each combined with the others – of asthma and reading and hero-worship and early Catholicism and a thousand emotional incentives and motivators and what we might call anti-incentives and anti-motivators? Who can add in ambitions and disinclinations, insights and prejudices, penetration and blindness, etc., etc.? Nobody, nor could you do the equivalent for anybody else.

This may not seem a very valuable insight, but when it clicks in, it may. You are all infinite mysteries to each other, you know that. Even when the other is known to the point of predictability, of boredom even, the core will remain a mystery to others and even to yourself. It’s one thing to say “know thyself,” but it is another thing entirely to know how to go about it.

Yet, observing the world, it is that very mistake that you do make, and most naturally. You assume you know what the napalmed child feels. We choose a horrible example purposely; there’s no point in using only easy cases.

It doesn’t take any great insight or empathy to know that the child hurts!

Of course not, and the ability to empathize is part of being human. A very valuable part. However –

All right, let’s extend our analogy. C is the observer, C2 is the observer plus its non-3D component. Another way of putting it, loosely, would be that C is the observer using only sensory input, C2 is the observer observing with intuition as well as sensory data. But what is the outside view of C’s observation-point? What is the view that watches C’s progress through 3D life with interest and involvement, but does not interfere, because to interfere would actually impede? Call that observer C3.

You may need to talk a little more about C3 (bearing in mind that in our world, C4 is a powerful explosive.

Yes, a joke, but you find C and C2 explosive enough, in everyday reality.

What we called B is really B3 as observed by A and C. We, here, do not exist as 3D-only, obviously, and we cannot even be said to be B2, which would imply that we were 3D using intuitive means.

I see that.

Well, from the C3 level, life looks, feels, is, different. It is the difference between watching an execution or a gunfight or a car accident in person (or on a news program), and watching them in a story, characters portrayed by actors. Anyone with empathy is going to be stirred even by drama – that’s the purpose of drama, after all, to stir emotions – but no sane person confuses drama with reality. Matt Damon doesn’t get shot just because Jason Bourne does. Tom Hank doesn’t die in Normandy just because the schoolteacher Captain does.

Well, I don’t know, drama can carry a powerful kick, and some of us can confuse it with reality. I can well remember being heart-sick as a little kid at the ending of Tarzan of the Apes, and I can remember being rapt with tension at some TV show and my father laughing and telling me, “it’s just a story,” and my complicated reaction to that – regretting being taken out of it, and becoming aware of where I had been, and retaining the consciousness of that awakening. And I still get thoroughly involved with characters in some novels [and videos], especially in a continuing series. Hornblower, Castle, Inspector Grant.

And you make our point for us. Remember, these are created beings, like yourselves but at another level removed. Real but not as real. Embodying characteristics made plain by their adventures. To the degree that you care about them – and you can come to identify, in a way, even with characters who embody characteristics opposite to your own, in fact that can be the strongest identification – you enter into their reality. The surroundings and the plots don’t need to be realistic, because it isn’t as if you were identifying with their external experiences. You identify with their reactions. You feel their reactions as if they were yours. They enliven an existing but slow-flowing current within you. Hence the popularity of mysteries and romance novels. As art, they usually come to not much. But as doorways to your own interiors, well, that’s why they appeal.

So we are a TV series to the next highest level of reality?

Let’s say you are actors who are pretty intense, and often get lost in your roles. It is the surfacing to breathe, remembering that you are an actor with, perhaps, a mortgage or a favorite car, that reminds you that life is realer than the drama you are (legitimately) engaged in, immersed in. And that’s enough for now.

Yes, 70 minutes. Okay, more next time. Thanks.

 

Monday, October 16, 2017

12:45 a.m. Dreamed I was dead. Went through initial states of being sure, including floating in air. Talked to [my sister] Margaret, was by myself in a basement trying to take a bath, remembered I needed to call Grandmom but it was 11 p.m. Got to the stage of realizing things were changing, losing touch with the world. Intended to do something, forget what – realized I probably wasn’t dead, tried to see. Very disappointing, still alive.

I ought to be able to use that as at least preliminary framework for [the latest version of] “Papa’s Trial.”

Sure was disappointing to see I was still alive, dreaming!

5:15 a.m. You said, descent into duality is only a relative thing. What did you mean by that?

Remember always, there are no hard and fast divisions in the universe. It isn’t like there is here with one set of rules and there with another. Relatively, yes. In a manner of speaking, yes. But not absolutely. Just as it isn’t 3D here, non-3D there, so it isn’t duality here, non-duality there – except relatively.

Well, we are willing to be instructed, but that isn’t immediately obvious.

If the theme is, it’s all one reality, here is another case of that. Duality isn’t a physical or mental ghetto, a low-rent district. It is a state of mind, in a way, a state of acceptance.

Of acceptance. You mean, only the result of seeing things a certain way?

That sounds like your own thought at the moment, I realize, but yes, the result of seeing things a certain way – of Perceiving Things As Good and Evil.

And does that imply that escaping duality is a matter of decision? We decide to see things as one, and there we are?

If it were that simple, wouldn’t you have done it as soon as you first heard the idea, or at least when you first began to believe it?

Easier to fall in than to climb out? Is that it?

In a sense. But you are ignoring the second half of our statement, that there is a good reason for it.

I hesitated between “is a good reason for it” and “was a good reason for it,” and finally chose “is,” but I don’t know why.

The “why” is because duality wasn’t a one-time error or even a one-time experiment. It is on-going, and the reason for it is on-going, and you know why.

No, I don’t. I know it is about prisms, but I don’t know why that is necessary or desirable.

Why don’t you explain, and as usual you will find insight flowing in as you put your mind in the current.

I get that partial views rather than one all-encompassing view is the difference between many colors and one all-encompassing white light. We’ve had that analogy before. Our very flaws and difficulties act as filters, so that the light of spirit shining through us does not come out clear white (though I gather it remains clear white), but in whatever color results when you shine lights through us. So I can imagine that if it is useful to have colors, we are – duality is – a way to produce them.

That is a description that makes it all seem pretty futile.

You don’t need to tell me!

There are other ways to see it. It could be looked at artistically, for instance: You are (duality is) being used to produce light shows, visual displays, ever-changing patterns. Or, scientifically: It analyzes reality by dissecting it, saying “white contains blue and green and deep red and very delicate violet, et cetera,” showing the innate complexity of existence. Or dramatically: Duality demonstrates tension and resolution, continually flowing. Or religiously or philosophically, so to speak: Inherent in the nature of things are these possibilities.

You will forgive me saying that still seems pretty futile. In a way, why bother?

That is world-weariness speaking. Ennui, one of the seven deadly sins. Sins, you will remember, are defined as errors, as “missing the mark.” They do not lead toward truth and understanding, but away from them.

Well, I’ve said we’re willing to be instructed. But what you have said so far today is not appealing, at least not to me. It makes me feel like a gladiator in a pit, fighting for the amusement of others.

Even if you are at the same time one of those “others”?

Even if.

Then let’s see if we can do something about that. I don’t suppose it does any good to remind you that anybody in duality is there of their own free will, volunteers.

I don’t know that it does. Even taking your word for it, that leaves us in the position of a Marine in boot camp, partway through the course, with a long stretch still ahead of him. He may have volunteered once, but that seems like a long time ago, and it doesn’t make his current reality any easier.

Not a bad analogy, and of course you remember it is one you have been given, and have used, more than once before.

I can’t imagine why the world beyond duality needs veterans of duality boot camp.

No, you can’t, and that is perilously near theory as opposed to something you can use. But, recognizing that it is a real obstacle, let us say just this. The product of a spell in duality is a being that:

• Combines otherwise disparate elements
• Understands unity in a new and more sophisticated way
• Is, in a sense, denser, tougher, more concentrated.

In short, an ex-civilian who is now a Marine, and once a Marine always a Marine.

It is only an analogy, but not a bad one.

We use Marines for difficult combat. Are you implying combat goes on beyond duality?

That isn’t a question that can be answered yes or no without serious distortion. Let us say that life of any kind, in duality or not, always potentially involves contention, relative readjustments. But this does not imply warfare. Don’t carry the analogy too far. And let’s drop mere theory for the moment – anything that doesn’t affect your lives may be said to be mere theory in effect – and refocus on what you are living, hence what you can do.

Still avoiding Emerson’s siege of a hencoop.

It is a continuing temptation whenever one gets too theoretical; the hencoop is at least tangible. People instinctively recoil from the merely abstract. Either that, or they are tempted to lose themselves in it. Immerse themselves, perhaps we should say.

So where are we?

Where we began today, really. All we have accomplished so far is to remind you that duality exists among non-duality, and that the world doesn’t have a damaged section, a war zone, a ghetto.

And you have said that duality serves a purpose.

We’ve done more than that, implicitly. By reminding you that there is a purpose, we implicitly tell you that there is not only meaning but creation within it, and creation being a part of your nature, therefore there is joy. Remember Hemingway and the fireworks.

Hemingway and his wife Martha were in China in 1941, and she was revolted and distressed by the conditions of Chinese life. At one point he said that just because it affected her that way, didn’t mean it affected them that way, or they wouldn’t keep having babies and shooting off fireworks for enjoyment. I take it you are saying, don’t be distracted by the misery of the world, everything is fine.

Minus the sarcasm, more or less. Hemingway’s insight was deeper than her emotional reaction. Again, remember – and keep bringing yourself back to the fact – 3D existence is only relatively real. It isn’t the whole story. Remember too that you don’t, can’t, know anyone else’s inner reality. You don’t know their response to their own private experience of boot camp. You don’t know what it satisfies, what it develops and matures. Blind, shrill compassion is not compassion at all, but a rejection of the universe, the same old “I know better.”

And where does that leave reform? What good is it to see what’s wrong, and sometimes why it is wrong, if the end is to be “you don’t know better than the universe does”?

Notice what this short pause does.

I feel something within me settle, a little. Okay, the question still deserves an answer.

There is a difference between understanding and condemnation. In fact, they rarely run together.

Understanding slavery doesn’t make me any less inclined to condemn it.

Bear in mind, always: Understanding something involves neither condoning nor condemning. Either of those attitudes is to a degree a falling-off from understanding. To understand something is neither to become a partisan nor to become a condemner, a partisan on the other side.

Understanding liberates, condemnation isolates, Jung said.

Rightly.

We are out of time, but I don’t know that we have gotten very far.

You rarely do. [I took this to mean, we rarely know, not we rarely get very far.] Have faith, and persevere.

That’s the motto of the firm, I guess. Very well, see you next time.

 

Sunday, October 15, 2017

5:45 a.m. All right, here we are again. I have had thoughts running through my mind, but at the moment I can’t remember them, and anyway maybe it’s better to give you your head this time. You seem to know where you want to go, at the moment.

Don’t be offended that we remind you that you tend to reach for more than can be grasped before further preparation. No harm in it, provided that you compensate for the tendency once it has been pointed out.

Now, your lives are not lived as reasonable beings. You like to think of yourselves that way, but even the most placid and self-contained among you are driven by emotion, and even, one may say, when it is being driven by the absence of emotion. And, yes, we realize we shall have to explain all that this short statement means.

Think of any story you have ever heard or read. Think of any event from your past that sticks with you. Think of any long-running trait or interest or characteristic of yours that arose, flourished, and died down. Think of the transient things in your life, and the enduring ones. What do that all have in common?

That’s an interesting thought. Is it true?

Perhaps you haven’t grasped it all yet, only in part.

Perhaps not. Well, I was going to say that you were proposing that what we have in common – what the things you listed have in common – is that none of them are determined by thought or decision.

You aren’t far wrong, but it needs, and will repay, a more careful statement. You are not, fundamentally, reasonable beings, living as Sherlock Holmes tried to live, a life embodying logic and order. Look at the life he is painted as living, and you find that he got bored, that he used cocaine to change his mental state when boredom got unbearable, that he had prejudices, blind spots, and animadversions. The man he was (as painted) was radically different from the man he thought he was, or rather, the man he would rather have been. Now, it is true that Holmes is only an invented character, but it is an illustration, as creatures resemble their creators. The important things in your life are always associated with feelings (even though sometimes strong feelings are disguised as lack of feelings).

I feel like the Sherlock Holmes allusion (which set me to thinking of Nero Wolfe) has gotten me off-beam. Oh, yes, I hear that: Center. So, I will. [Pause] Okay.

Your lives – there is so much to say on this subject! – your lives are not yours to mold in the sense that you start with a blank slate and may go anywhere, do anything, change in any way, that you like. You just don’t have that much freedom. If life were the way you sometimes unconsciously assume it is, wouldn’t you all be living quiet reasonable lives, even if you were skydiving or trapeze-flying? That is, regardless whether you wanted a physically quiet or a risky life, you wouldn’t be thrown about emotionally the way you are. You would do things for reasons, and not because you had to. You would do what you wanted to do, not what something else within you forced you to do. Or, to put it slightly differently, you wouldn’t always be struggling within yourselves, suppressing this, encouraging that, outliving this, regretting that.

I get your point. Our lives are battlegrounds.

Fields of contention, anyway. You want this one moment, that, another moment. Or you want two or more incompatible things at the same time. Or you want this action but that result that cannot follow. You pursue an interest with diligence and even obsession – and then the interest is gone as if it had never been. Or, one or more interests seize you at an early age and last you your entire life. And the same, each possible variation, for personal relationships, emotional habits, categories of thought, even forms of physical environment, and forms of circumstance.

The latter two are a little vague.

“Forms of physical environment” means merely you may tend to live in the same kind of physical or energetic surroundings. “Forms of circumstance” means you may tend to create and re-create (or “find yourself in”) similar relationships or habits of life. And, as we said, these may manifest in various ways: sudden changes, or continuity through life, or any variation between the two extremes.

You may ask, Why is this? Why do sudden gusts of anger run through your lives, or fits of unreasonable and undeniable yearning, or steady unquestionable and immovable certainties? Why are you prone to the seven deadly sins and the Eighth Deadly Sin (or the one preceding and causing or anyway enabling the other seven) of Not Knowing What You Are, Or Why You Do and Feel and Think As You Do?

Not a very catchy title.

Call it Unconsciousness of Self, then. The point is the same.

Jung quoted a Gnostic gospel as saying that if we bring forth what is within us, it will save us, but if we don’t, that same content will destroy us.

That’s a little off-point, but applicable enough. The point at the moment is, why is your day-to-day existence not the thing of reason and calm that perhaps you imagine it ought to be? And the short answer is that you are not as you imagine yourselves to be.

Which of you knows yourself as your acquaintances close or not close know you? Yes, you know things they cannot, but they know things about you that you cannot, or cannot anyway [know] in their way. And none of you, separately or together, can have a complete picture. The wellsprings of your 3D existence are mostly hidden.

You live as conduits of vast impersonal forces rendered as personal; that is, the animating forces illuminate and enliven the shape of your lives. No, you say it.

Thank you. That was getting impossible. I hear you saying, the forces of spirit may be impersonal and even neutral themselves, but the structures they blow through are knotted, complex, somewhat pre-formed – or, come to think of it, a better way to say it is, they are the result of so many past entanglements. I can see that. But it kind of begs the question of where these entanglements come from in the first place, doesn’t it? Are humans malfunctioning, as some believe? Was there some equivalent of Original Sin that warped the pattern, setting in motion conflicts that keep building, generation after generation, as each new soul is born embodying past karma?

You could look at it as progressive complexification, yes. But to assume that this is a large malfunctioning is to overlook the fundamental question of where these tangles came from before Adam and Eve ate the apple. And – remember the original sin was to eat of the tree of Perception of Things As Good and Evil.

Which, someone pointed out, was an obvious set-up. Tell a child it can do anything except one thing, and the psychological pressure to do the forbidden thing becomes enormous and eventually irresistible.

Yes. Pretty efficient myth, wouldn’t you say? It encapsulates psychological insight into easily memorable form, as myths do.

So, remembering that descent into duality is only a relative thing, and assuming that there may be a very good reason for it –

But it has been an hour, and so we’ll resume another time. Am I right?

You’re the one holding the pen. But yes, this is a good time to pause.

Okay, till next time, then, and thanks as always.