Sunday, March 27, 2022
6:25 a.m. Remarkable. Just remarkable. I had thought we’d probably skip today, as we haven’t taken a day in a while, and I get that you think I ought to take off one day a week, but in the light of what I got, maybe not.
Yesterday after our session, I set my switches for continued receptivity and presence. Is that why I got the realization at midnight?
In any case, describe the experiences first, and then we will look at what you got.
Yes, I knew you would want me to talk about process as well as result, and certainly I see the value in doing so. Let’s see (looking back a few pages) what I noted.
- Moving pictures.
- The quote from “The Nigger of the Narcissus.”
- The crossword puzzle clue whose answer was Lachesis
- The epiphany at midnight.
- The decision to remain receptive and present, and a troubled night.
[Putting this into Roman because Ronan is easier to read in lengthy passages than is italic.]
No need – no ability, either, probably – to describe it at length. Here is a precis. Bear in mind, reader, that most of my inner life goes unrecorded. Just like yours.
So at 7:40 a.m. yesterday I made his note: “I just had an extraordinary experience of seeing moving pictures as I lay in bed, but they stopped and I couldn’t regain them.” As usual, I had gone back to bed after I transcribed and sent yesterday’s conversation. Sometimes it is only for a few minutes, sometimes I go back to sleep. This time, I was lying there quietly and instead of the usual chain of associations, or daydreams, or descents into and gentle awakenings from unconsciousness, I was seeing startlingly vivid visuals – someone’s head, first, I think; not someone I know – that moved. That is, I was watching something in the way we do with our 3D eyes. The experience stopped when I changed positions, u it was vivid, alive, while it was going on.
Later in the day I copied this extensive quote in which Conrad was clearly describing a type he had experienced often enough in his career as sailor. (For those who are tempted to get on their high horse by his use of the word “nigger,” bear in mind that the word didn’t always mean, in the early part of the 20th century. In the English merchant marine, what it would mean if used today. Nor does the following description refer to the black man, James Wait, but rather to a piece of white trash – I don’t know how better to describe him – from the slums of an English city.)
“They all knew him! He was the man that cannot steer, that cannot splice, that dodges the work on dark nights; that, aloft, holds on frantically with both arms and legs, and swears at the wind, the sleet, the darkness; the man who curses the sea while others work. The man who is the last out and the first in when all hands are called. The man who can’t do most things and won’t do the rest. The pet of philanthropists and self-seeking landlubbers. The sympathetic and deserving creature that knows all about his rights, but knows nothing of courage, of endurance, and of the unexpressed faith, of the unselfish loyalty that knits together a ship’s company. The independent offspring of the ignoble freedom of the slums full of disdain and hate for the austere servitude of the sea.”
That led to many chains of thought, some well-trodden by now. The complexity of 3D life with all its types living together; the ease of making social policy on abstract principles and total inexperience; the individual, working out his individual problem (i.e. who and what he is to become) in so many different ways. Nothing too profound, but as usual with me, trying to tie together different orders of data.
I was doing a crossword puzzle, and had a hard time remembering Lachesis. After I did, I looked it up on the web, to refresh my memory of her relationship to her sisters. It struck me, specifically, how the three sisters make a coherent metaphor for our lives, and, more generally, how we could profit by studying mythology, no less than theology, to regain past understandings of the way life is. Not every way of knowing responds to mathematics.
Fate was represented by three sisters: Clotho, who shapes the circumstances into which we are born; Lachesis, who guides our life; Atropos, who chooses the time and manner of our death. Is this not a reasonable way to suggest the non-3D influences that mold and influence us?
Then came a sudden convergence of ideas that got me up a midnight to jot them down so I would not lose them, and after that, a disturbed night in which sleep was more semi-conscious than usual. A good thing? A bad thing? To be decided. I may have to give the experiment aa little more time, before I draw conclusions.
Now, to what I got at midnight. It suddenly seemed clear to me – and it still seems clear this morning – that 3D life in general is a neural network, just as we as individuals are neural networks. (I forgot to mention listening to an interview on neural networks last night; probably that contributed to spark the mental rearrangement.) Here is what I wrote”
“12:10 a.m.
- The [vast impersonal] forces are like backed-up energy
- The times allow certain kinds of energy to enter
- The energies flow into us, motivate us, sometimes take us over
- We act on each other and within ourselves.
“It is a neural network, analog and not digital, hence our part of the process is that how we have changed out internal balance by our decisions helps determine what we can withstand, what we can transmute. Our lives re not ours alone, nor our actions, nor out thoughts. We are not merely as individual as we think, nor as conscious. Not autonomous, nor meant to be. If this is still clear later perhaps we can flesh it out.”
So, gentlemen, can we flesh it out?
Do you see the connections among the items you were moved to list?
I got the sense that you wanted me to be more explicit about my process, and these seemed important, if only because they were important enough for me to make a note here. But what they have in common? Mostly, I suppose, they are examples of how everyday life is always furnishing us with grist for the mill.
Others might say they are examples of how your mill ceaselessly grinds what comes to hand, or rather, comes to mind.
Doesn’t everybody do the same thing?
You think any two people experience life the same way?
Well, in a similar way, anyway.
What you provided is an example of one ordinary day’s extraordinary realizations as a result of what you have made yourself as a grinder of grain. That is, this is a glimpse for others of your everyday process, but you weren’t born living that process; it developed as a matter of the result of successive choices. Nor is your process effective only when it is expressed. Most of what goes son within most people is unexpressed (except through their lives) and need not be expressed. For you, for anyone, life is not about what you accomplish externally or even internally; it is about living, and in living, in shaping a specialized tool for seeing life.
So even Donkin [the worthless sailor described in Conrad’s story] has his purpose.
Consider what you are saying, in light of these few things you cited. Isn’t Donkin expressing some of the energies that flow into 3D? You don’t like him; you don’t approve of him, but so what?
Yes, this is the answer to cruelty, too, isn’t it? The energy will express somehow, and it will express through humans.
Somebody has to wear the black hat. You all do, to some extent, some more than others. It is when you go to judge God’s creation as “good” or “bad” that dilemmas arise.
Well, it provides employment for theologians and philosophers, anyway.
Call this “Some experiences,” perhaps.
Is that adequate? What about “An epiphany”?
How many people use that word, these days?
Well, I’ll think of something. I don’t think “Some experiences” will do it. Our thanks as always.
– – –
[Wikipedia says: Lachesis (/ˈlækəsəs/; Greek: Λάχεσις, Lakhesis, “disposer of lots”, from λαγχάνω, lanchano, “to obtain by lot, by fate, or by the will of the gods”), in ancient Greek religion, was the second of the Three Fates, or Moirai; the others were her sisters, Clotho and Atropos. Normally seen clothed in white, Lachesis is the measurer of the thread spun on Clotho’s spindle, and in some texts, determines Destiny, or thread of life.[1] Her Roman equivalent was Decima. Lachesis was the apportioner, deciding how much time for life was to be allowed for each person or being.[2] She measured the thread of life with her rod. She is also said to choose a person’s destiny after a thread was measured. In mythology, it is said that she appears with her sisters within three days of a baby’s birth to decide the baby’s fate.