Wednesday, December 15, 2021
5:15 a.m. I can’t remember what dream I just awoke from, but it had me thinking about people’s stupid prejudices. I was talking to myself and heard my “t”s, which I have begun pronouncing more distinctly, these past few years, rather than slurring them as is more common. I didn’t change as an affectation, but because for some reason the slurring became alien to me.
(I wonder, now, if this wasn’t some sort of changing of the guard within. David, the Welshman, must have spoken very differently than Joe Indian, for instance, and they spoke the same language within a few decades of each other. In fact, they must have overlapped chronologically. As others exert more influence on me, is there some natural effect on my pronunciation? Clearly there is on my speech patterns sometimes.)
Anyway, that led to remembering Shaw’s commentary on how Englishmen despise each other when they hear different accents – and then a fast ping-ponging of ideas led to thinking about people’s tendency to reject whatever is different from them. Rather than “embrace diversity,” even if that is a belief one holds, a value one holds, something within us reacts like a pack of dogs, suspicious and potentially hostile, when presented with “other” in any form. I have always found this tiresome, and I wish I could persuade myself that I don’t share it.
Is this our theme du jour, gentlemen? Seems we have discussed herd instinct and outliers many times over the years.
Anything could lead anywhere, as we have also said more than once. If you were to wish it, we could pursue the theme in a new direction – that of ideas and values, rather than of origins and external manifestations. But there is no need to do so; it is one option.
But, I get, you have something else in mind.
Well, perhaps it is an appropriate time to begin a more public discussion of what you sometimes call your legacy, these conversations and their implications.
Fine with me. Setting my switches for maximum focus, receptivity, clarity, presence.
Your friend Dave introduces you to a man who has never heard of you or of us or of what we have been doing all these years. His own life experiences have brought him to a place where he can hear what we have to say, which really means, a place where he has already experienced what we have to say but not necessarily conceptualized it. So you wonder, how do you bring people to a fair understanding of the world-view we have been sketching, given that they will all be coming into the theater in the middle of the movie.
I do. And your metaphor reminds me how old I am.
Yes, but let’s stay on point. Even from our first conversation with you and Rita, 20 years ago, anyone listening in, or joining in, necessarily is “coming in at the middle,” including Rita and yourself! Including us, if you want to put it that way.
This is connected to “everything connects to everything else.” And as I look at that sentence, I smile, though I did not mean it as a joke.
Exactly. In a word, lighten up! You don’t need to find a “starting point” to produce a coherent statement. Anything, at any time, will provide handles for people to grab on to. Their own life, their own non-3D component, their own instincts, will construct the bridging needed. Your job is to provide a clear statement. You are not required to provide on-ramps.
I think of Emerson. Someone said you pick up any of his essays and it is like coming in on a conversation he is having with himself. Actually, whoever it was, I think I really butchered that paraphrase, but the point was that Emerson didn’t bother much with on-ramps.
You can waste an enormous amount of time trying to imagine what people need, where they may be coming from, what they may know or not know. That is all imagining. It is not the same as proceeding surely from intuitive knowing.
Which is why I can’t do it?
Let’s say it is not exactly your strong suit, imagining how others see the world.
I am led to Imagine Yourself Well. I guess I just sketched what I thought were our culture’s incorrect views of how the world works, in one specialized area of health and wellness and their management, and then sketched the rules as I had deduced them from my own experience. If I had tried to widen the context, it would have been unmanageable.
Our point precisely.
So my idea of a summary book is maybe a mistake?
Not a mistake, so much as an illusion. You think in terms of a book that will summarize everything we have said all these sessions, but you can’t really see how it could be done. And in this you aren’t wrong. Not only could it not be done, it couldn’t be readable if it were done. It is like your geography professor said that time: If you were to construct a map of the world on a one-to-one scale, where would you put it? It’s too big.
As you do so often, you clarified in a simple paragraph what had been a swirl of inchoate thoughts and feelings, and it is almost embarrassing how simple the result is. When we converse with someone, we don’t try to include everything we know, let alone also including how we learned it. We stick to what we think we know about a given topic.
As you did with the book on healing. “What you think you know” changes, no matter what the topic, as you learn more. How you learned it is sometimes of importance, sometimes not, but it is rarely central, and often not particularly germane.
So the real question is, What do I wish to discuss.
Of course. Any library is full of books, but none of the books attempts to cover everything. The entire library taken together doesn’t cover everything. How could it? And who could read it all?
The thought that comes flitting by is that this is also an analogy to us in 3D.
Of course. You as an individual – including everyone you connect to via strands – are one window on the world, one viewpoint. That is everyone’s inherent value to the world at large: You are each unique windows, adding your particular pixel to the graphics.
But even if you look at us as all [non-3D as well as 3D elements] being part of one thing, all of us together provide one view (though of course a vastly more expanded view) of reality. The view from Alpha Centauri would be different. (That is an example, not a new path to go down. Let’s stick to what you actively live, for the moment, however intriguing the side-trails this opens up. You can pursue them yourselves at your leisure.)
[Addressed specifically to me:] Here is where you can use your existing contacts to help you see beyond your own limitations. First list the topics that occur to you, then invite others to add suggestions. They will see omissions you will not; they will see possibilities and even needs you will not. That is collaboration at its best. Writing is done alone, but clarifying what is to be addressed is often done best in conference.
Well, okay, we’ve sort of dealt with health. No, rather than my making a list of possible topics, why don’t you do it?
We don’t because that isn’t how it works. That would leave it abstract and divorced from practicality. What you work, you possess. You know that.
What about these conversations?
You think you aren’t working them? Not only receiving and sometimes contending but even, mundanely, doing the writing and the transcribing? That all makes it yours in a way that the identical words merely read in a book (if that were possible) would not.
Certainly a book on the process and its potentials and pitfalls. It is interspersed in 20 years of conversations, though.
Yeah, too bad, eh? What else?
I do think a summary of your world-view – our world-view, by this time – would be valuable.
Say it would. What else?
I’ getting, things oriented around specific problems, like the book I started that I was calling “So You Think Your Life Was Wasted.”
No reason that couldn’t work, only don’t try to explain the origins of the universe. And?
Well, I don’t know. This would be enough to be going along with, not to mention the books we’ve already more or less written but left unpublished. Alcott, Thomas, Nathaniel’s.
So now throw the subject open for suggestion.
Okay. Today’s theme was?
“Finding your message,” perhaps.
Okay. Our thanks as always.