Month: March 2022

Thursday, March 17, 2022

8 a.m. Focus. Receptivity, clarity, presence. And I’ll follow wherever you lead.

Glance back at recent topics. No need to discuss your Alcott project. That one, you will do or not do, but you know what you need to know, for the moment. Meanwhile, recapture our larger theme.

You can’t just jump in?

We can. You can’t, or not so easily.

[A pause, as I leaf through the binder, looking at entries for March.]

As I skim, I stop of Friday, March 11, where you say that redefining our understanding of our 3D self and its relationship to the larger being is what you are about.

Yes, and that way of finding things will always work for you – for anyone, you understand – to the degree that you are willing and able to be steered by your non-3D component, which can see in the dark, so to speak.

It feels slapdash, from this side.

It would. It will, until you learn to trust it, then it will seem as natural as any other method you employ to sort through massive amounts of data swiftly.

So let’s talk about that?

Yes. Consider this to be one side-benefit of opening up. And, as always, bear in mind that what is new territory for some will be tedious rehash for others.

Sure. It pretty much has to be.

It does. We are always preaching to a congregation of mixed condition. Everyone is, always. Any group necessarily requires a range of exposition, a scatter-shot approach, in a way. But “hit or miss” has its advantages as well as its disadvantages. A shotgun is going to miss with most of its pellets; it only needs to hit with one or a few. “More or less” is effective; it obviates “A miss is as good as a mile.”

In any case –

In any case, let’s look at how you make sense of the world, and how that technique varies according to your own openness.

This is going to be one of those simple points that require careful exposition at greater length than will seem to have been necessary by the result.

Probably, but most of the exposition will be the sketching of context – as usual – so that you will see not the objects but the mostly invisible linking of the objects. It is context that is often lacking, and in the absence of context you end up with what seems like a mass of unconnected elements. It is absence of context that leads people to believe in chance.

Refocusing. It feels like you are having a hard time, which usually means I am insufficiently transparent as the medium of communication.

Remember our analogy of the smaller sphere contained within the larger sphere. Every part of the smaller sphere is contained in – is a part of – the larger sphere, but not vice-versa. Now, remember, the model is not of your being, but of your awareness of  your being. You as 3D being are not

No, let’s rephrase that. You see yourself as a 3D being. That is a truncated view of what you really are, which is:

• A 3D being of flesh and blood and electrical and chemical systems, and what we might call mechanical awareness. That is, the intelligence of the cells and organs and systems.
• A 3D being that extends into the non-3D : that is, mental and feeling abilities and awarenesses. A consciousness centered on the one 3D being.
• A 3D and non-3D being that perforce extends far beyond a specific time and place, aware of the far greater pattern of that lifetime.
• A 3D and non-3D being that, as a unit, also relates to other beings as units, experiencing them as non-3D only, although they in their living awareness experience themselves as 3D and non-3D, as you do.
• A 3D and non-3D being, with all its associated threads, that is a part of the larger being of which it was created. Thus, you and all the other lives with which you are intimately connected are equally part of something greater. The grandfather analogy, which you can explain later.
• A being that therefore participates in that larger being’s life, in ways beyond your ability to imagine.

All of these layers are one layer. They seem distinct because each layer is perceived (or, you could say, is sort of created) by the psychical condition you perceive them from.

I think you mean, how we are at any given moment determines what we are able to perceive.

It determines what seem to be the boundaries of who and what you are, yes. You could say that your level of awareness determines your horizons. What you see within your horizons depends upon where you move to, and how you direct your vision, but the limits of those horizons depends upon how open you are.

So, to tie this in. You need to find something and you don’t know where to look. Or you need to remember something and you can’t fetch it. Or you need to know more about a situation or a relationship than is apparent. In any of these cases, what can you do?

We can expand our awareness.

Exactly. ESP, and every variant of ESP, is merely the expansion, deliberate or otherwise (we should say, directed by the 3D awareness or otherwise) so as to know what is obvious from a higher consciousness.

I get that you mean that quite literally, too.

Quite literally. This is why the attempt to achieve a higher consciousness is attended by the acquisition of unusual abilities and by the experiencing of unusual phenomena – and is why teachers caution their pupils against concentrating on the phenomena rather on the quest. Seek ye the kingdom of God and all else will be added. Sound familiar?

It isn’t an exact quote – though I suppose it is an acceptable paraphrase from Aramaic, come to think of it – but yes, I recognize it.

To sum up: As you expand your consciousness, your life may not (or may) become easier, but the things you need to do, or even want to do, become easier, if you let them.

That is, is we don’t insist on doing things the old way.

Yes. The old way you trust, but it won’t now be as efficient and smooth as the new way that you may learn only slowly to trust. Then when you do, another increment of consciousness is likely to arise, and further challenges (and, therefore, opportunities) will arise.

The grandfather analogy you cited comes from a John Sandford novel, where the character was an Army man, I think, who found that the Pentagon had done something to support a Marine against the Army’s interest. It reminded him of visiting his grandfather and realizing that his grandfather was also his cousins’ grandfather. That is, the relationship was one-way looking upward, but more than one way, looking downward. (Sandford would probably cringe at this summary, but he isn’t here.) The larger being is my grandfather, but he is also the grandfather of every other 3D-and-non-3D being he fostered.

That’s the nub of it.

So, today’s theme?

“How to see in the dark,” maybe?

Something a little more serious.

Don’t underestimate the pulling power of setting out a teaser to get people’s interest.

I see. Well, I may try that. In any case, interesting and provocative. Our thanks, as always.

 

Wednesday, March 16, 2022

6:10 a.m. Guys, let’s talk about making Orphic Sayings into a book. Setting switches. Maximum F, R, C, P.

Look at your manuscript as it exists.

As of now I have it in a three-ring binder in sections:

1. All 100 sayings, without commentary.
2. Sessions from May 11 to May 27, examining sayings 1 to 50.
3. The gist of these sessions.
4. Wikipedia article on Alcott.
5. The sessions again, with subheads added.
6. A free translation of the first 50 sayings in a few pages.
7. Sayings 51-100 in the original.
8. Sayings 51-100 in free translation.
9. Sessions Oct 11 – Oct 25, translating 51-100.

And it has taken 10 minutes to go through it. So, back to you.

You see, you have the skeleton you need. Your text could be 1, 5, 9, 6, 8. That is, the original, the process of deducing what the original means, and then a listing of the translated sayings. Short, sweet, to the point. This would need to be framed. An introductory session to lay out the problem; a concluding session, to suggest some implications.

Yes, that makes sense.

The real point of the book is

1. To demonstrate that Alcott was a true visionary because for some reason he was living in the practical, bustling, 19^th century with perceptions that would not be clear to others (save a precious few) for nearly 200 years.
2. To clarify what he say but could not clearly write (though he could say).
3. To show by implication that Thoreau and Emerson saw and valued, even if often exasperated by Alcott’s 3D-person’s crochets.
4. Thus to show, by implication, that Transcendentalism was not a literary conceit nor “the latest form of infidelity” nor impractical abstract posturing, but resulted from a different experience of the world.

However, having said that, we hasten to add that this is not to be a massive unreadable scholarly tome, semi-competently executed in an attempt at respectability. It is to be, as your work with Hemingway was, an attempt to state certain things clearly from our point of view, not that of the world, which includes the world of scholarship.

And I must restrain my tendency toward archivist’s preservation of the process.

Yes. Showing people the process with all its blind alleys and learning-by-doing is for other books. You have done that. The reader of this book will have to judge the material by what it is, not by how it was accumulated.

So, talking with Chris Nelson, I realized we will need a title and a cover, both more important than they might seem.

Your title will emerge from what you wind up with as a final product. That’s why Hemingway chose his titles last, not first. It will reflect what you have created, shaped, come up with.

All right. And fortunately, we are under no kind of deadline. So what about the intro and the conclusion? How do I learn what I want to say, except by saying it? But you might give me a few hints. And I hope you will. [A realization.] Oh my. I heard, “Why not contact Bronson Alcott himself?” For some reason, that hadn’t occurred to me.

Because you had criticisms of me? Because you don’t feel close to me, as to Thoreau or Emerson? That is no barrier. You connect to me through them, if need be, and you connected to Henry immediately.

Yes I did. And Stow Persons [my thesis supervisor in graduate school] suggested to me that I write my thesis examining your recently published journals. I couldn’t have done that at age 24, I didn’t know anything like enough. I could do it now, if I had the time and inclination. But as soon as I opened Walden, I knew a kindred soul, and examining what he left of his journal’s first ten years [for my master’s thesis] was a labor of love.

You will profit yet by reading my journals, though of course you needn’t.

What would you think I should say in an introduction to your Orphic Sayings?

Begin by quoting a few of the harshest criticisms. Point out that I had spiritually powerful friends, one of whom was well known to the wide world. Remind people that my conversations were clear and were valued by some. Show Emerson’s and Thoreau’s appreciation of me by a scant few examples. Point out what is obvious, that I had vision without the gift of written expression.

“Mute inglorious Miltons.” [ from Thomas Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” though I had to do a computer search to find out what I was remembering.]

Yes. Vision does not always come with a simultaneous translation. Think of Blake. Finally, you will have to explain the nature of your conversations – how you examined my work, and you can present it on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. As you now know, there is no persuading anybody. Strike sparks, and then leave the bulk of the work to strike its own sparks, if possible.

Yes, that seems straightforward.

Then you are left to summarize what my sayings mean to the contemporary reader, whenever that may be. Someone reading it now, or in 10 years, or 100, would get different things, because one’s own life goes into the reading of any book, but my end of the equation – or I should say our end, because we will have each added something – will be a constant. Suggest how I see the world, saw the world, as a model of perception. That is, not that you or anyone should see what I saw, but that you would profit by seeing as I saw, at least sometimes.

Yes, I see that. Well, thank you. Anything more? Suggestions on a title?

Forgotten so soon?

No, but I was fishing for something that would help me point it as I go.

Do it Hemingway fashion. Text first, title and cover second. And of course you have editorial assistance available as you go.

It must be a relief to be able to speak transparently, after your 3D experience of being unable to write clearly.

Don’t be too sure. What is clear to one is not clear to another. My life was inwardly lit but outwardly directed. I was very much aware of community responsibilities. Much of my life – most of it – was in active interrelation, not in putting words on paper. That is one more reason why I wasn’t very able to put my thoughts into print. I was accustomed to the medium of speech, with its reliance on sensory clues from the other person. Writing was like speaking without the ability to see the listener.

I get it. Well, perhaps at least a few of us will see you more clearly by the time we get though this.

That shouldn’t be the point. I am long dead to the world of fashion. What lives is what I related to, that others can relate to.

Concentrate on the moon, not on the finger pointing to the moon.

That’s it exactly. And, as I say, you will have help. Anyone would.

Thanks very much for this and for help to come.

And as always, our thanks to you for making the effort.

Guys? Today’s theme?

Surely, “Working with Alcott.”

Yes, all right. Till next time, then.

 

Monday, March 14, 2022

7:40 a.m. EDT. I thought we’d skip, but maybe not. When I lay back down on the bed a while ago, I found thoughts going through my mind, and I can’t tell any more which are “mine” and which are a word from our sponsor, so to speak.

There was a fast chain of association of ideas, ending in my remembering a thought that Yeats put into “The Trembling of the Veil,” one part of his Autobiographies. So I went to the book and had to leaf through several pages of post-it notes – I must have 30 or 40 of them in the book – till I found the passage. As usual, it wasn’t quite as I remembered it, but as always the point was as I remembered.

There is so much that one could quote from Autobiographies. I have ben reading it, at great intervals, since I suppose 1972 or 1973. Then in Ireland in 1976, at Thoor Ballylee, I bought it, and Yeats’ Collected Poems, and his summary of his wife’s mediumship, A Vision (which I have yet to get through!). But I go back to the Autobiographies again and again, for sustenance. Can it be true that my David Pryor was friend / younger acquaintance of Yeats in the 1890s? “Yeats” – or someone – did give me a poem in 1995, during Lifeline at TMI. And the interesting thing, to me at least, is that it is his later poems that move me, not his earlier. I’m not much for the Celtic Twilight, though I’m not dismissive of it either. It was Yeats the mage, and Yeats the prophet, who interested me, from the first time I read “And what rough beast, his hour come at last” in Freshman year English Lit. [Actually, “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last.” From “The Second Coming”]

So, enough prologue. I’ll set my switches and see what we are to see today. Focus, receptivity, clarity, presence.

You, and everyone of course, have a library of associations, gathered in the course of your 3D existence with all its extensions: past, future, other lives, books, movies, everything. It is an extensive data base in which connections may be made in many alternative and equally valid ways, and not only when you are in 3D but after (and before, in a way, but that’s a different story, and would be better explored by the scientifically minded). Your minds, after all, exist imperishably in non-3D, as we have often said. This localized data-base of associations is one function of the 3D experience, perhaps not sufficiently realized. You are created as specialized tools, but you are therefore equally created as specialized libraries.

Or, as the acquirers and curators of specialized libraries.

Yes, an acceptable correction.

Now, you began with the thought of social inequalities and injustices, etc. Some people have so much more than they could ever need, while others subsist on the barest minimum, and even less than the barest minimum. Your thought moved quicky to the half-remembered Yeats thought. Though you couldn’t have quoted it, you well remembered the upshot. When you transcribe this, quote just the one paragraph, and expound upon it to provide a minimal context.

Okay. Page 263:

Yeats was an artist, an organizer of artists, a mystic, an Irish nationalist. He had much practical experience of magic and of the transference of thoughts and of the use of magical symbols to direct the thought of others, unbeknownst to themselves. He and his uncle George Pollexfen often worked together, testing the limits of the possible. He spent much time considering how the things that he was experiencing in various worlds fit together.

“From the moment when these speculations grew vivid, I had created for myself an intellectual solitude, most arguments that could influence action had lost something of their meaning. How could I judge any scheme of education, or of social reform, when I could not measure what the different classes and occupations contributed to that invisible commerce of reverie and of sleep; and what is luxury and what necessity when a fragment of gold braid or a flower in the wallpaper may be an originating impulse to revolution or to philosophy? I began to feel myself not only solitary but helpless.”

Add your brother’s suggestion.

Paul, looking up something else on Wikipedia, suggested that I should have my own entry, adding that Frank DeMarco is a retired Canadian hockey player. I looked him up, saw him described as “left winger” which I assume is a position rather than a political statement, smiled, thought to myself that I have often been left wing, but not so much as I learned more about the world.

And you can’t remember where in the chain of associations the though was placed.

No. Does it matter?

It does not. The point is that it was part of the chain. There is no point in trying to decide if a given thought is “yours” or is prompted by others, whatever “others” would mean. Most of your mental associations are invisible to you anyway, either because they are fleeting or are invisible or are deceptive (that is, appear to be this but are really that). The point, always, is to live the chain, not necessarily to analyze it.

Except that analyzing it can be part of our life.

Yes, of course. We mean, don’t overstress the importance of analysis per se. it has its place (which will be different for each person), but only its place. Life trumps analysis, even if analysis is part of life.

I get it.

Now, you see, any given item in a data base may be linked to any other item.

Yes, that’s the difference between a data base and a flat file.

Not all your friends were programmers.

“Flat file” means a file stored in a permanent unchanging order of items. Name, DOB, SSN, address, etc. They may be sorted by different fields, but they will not change relationships among themselves.

And a data base stores each item separately and allows linkage in many ways. That is a serviceable analogy to 3D humans. Each of you is an extensive data base internally and externally. That is, you experience your lives in various ways depending upon how you look at them. You interact with one another in a similarly flexible way. This is very valuable, spectacularly flexible, and is the basis of further creation. In a restricted sense, this characteristic could be said to be the basis of free will.

Huh?

If your lives were flat files, as they sometimes appear to be, your future would be predetermined. But the concept of predetermining a data base is not exactly meaningless, but is so broad as to be meaningless in practical terms. Nothing forces you to link fields in this way rather than that way, nor to maintain (nor to break) links once made. It’s up to you, that’s the point.

So, this morning you decide to take the day off (and there would have been nothing wrong with that). You read a little in the Travis McGee you are re-reading. It leads to the thought about social inequality. That leads to memories of Yeats’ experiences and conclusions, as he wrote them long ago. One thing leads to another, seamlessly and continuously, and this association-machine – which is experienced by some as the drunken monkey, when it is out of control – is a vital part of your on-going task (everybody’s on-going task) of creating and following and changing links as you go along.

We want you to quote the poem Yeats gave you, but give it context. Don’t just hint at it.

As you say that, I realize, whatever I choose to say will be the context, in effect, and the unsaid will not be, for anyone but me.

Exactly. And this is true for everyone. You each maintain your own data base and can communicate it to others only in the sketchiest of form. You must be mysteries to one another, merely in the nature of things.

That data base analogy is going to be more suggestive than it looked, I see.

It will strike sparks for some. So, Yeats.

Somehow it seems a lot of work to explain it.

That is because this requires you to construct a new link. Construction is work, sometimes hard work. But if you can find the passage in Muddy Tracks, from a time when it did not seem like so much work (we smile), that will do.

I found the pages, and will quote them.

One final thing today, then. If you begin to see yourselves as data bases, and realize that thoughts, memories, fantasies, conversations in and out of body (that is, with 3D or with non-3D beings), anything you read, and anything you think about what you have read, and associate with other thoughts about other things –

I get the idea. It’s all grist for the mill.

And it renders doubly useless the concern about “Am I making this up.” What’s the difference among them?

Besides that, remember that your chains are linked in various ways. You tend to picture the chains as chains of thought, but they are equally linked by emotion, or by bodily sensation (a remembered scent, the feel of a breeze, whatever), or by other criteria. Don’t think logic is particularly important as a linking factor. It is one way your fields can be linked; far from the only one. Not even primus inter pares.

Enough for the moment.

Not quite the day off I had anticipated. Many thanks for all this.

– – –

[Lifeline, 1995, an exercise on Sunday, the first full day of the program, in which we were to go to what Monroe called Focus 27, a sort of analog of our ordinary 3D life, only self-created.]

After a moment of floating, I ask to see someone I know. I am taken to Britain, then up to a northerly part of an island, and I know it is the west coast of Ireland up by Sligo, and I know that the person I see wandering alone by the sea and the mountains is Yeats—W. B. Yeats, the poet, my old friend in the life of the Welshman David. Willie Yeats, still there after all these years. And suddenly I am right there with him.

I establish contact, saying, “It’s Owen.” In that, I surprise myself, for all this time I have been thinking of the Welshman as David. A part of me asks myself (in the middle of the experience) if maybe my name really had been Owen; then I think that maybe it was Yeats’s name for me because I was Welsh. Only when I began writing this book did I find in an old journal that in my one and only hypnotic regression in 1987, which I had thought a failure, I had called him “David Owen.” Nothing my subconscious mind wouldn’t know, of course, and if you will tell me what a subconscious mind is, I will be entirely persuaded that there’s nothing in all this.

I say to Yeats, “I was younger than you when we lived, and I died earlier, and I came back after you were already dead—and now I return to find you still here! It’s time for you to move on.” I tell him, “Make your presence known, remember the physical, and then go, my old friend.” We agree that he is to get a brief taste of the physical again and then go on, after making his presence known.

In the CHEC unit after the tape is over, I recite what I can remember of one of his poems, “To Be Carved on a Stone at Thoor Ballylee.” Why that one, I don’t know, but Kelly much later points out that this poem was Yeats’s statement of his personal identity, as opposed to his family, and maybe that’s it.

So why don’t I mention this in debriefing? I don’t want to seem to stand out; don’t want it to look like I am nurturing delusions of grandeur. And part of me suspects that this is exactly what I am doing.

I wonder what the others are not reporting.

…

On Saturday, August 12, I made several trips to 27, the most important of which involved finding Yeats. He talked, and he promised to give me a poem via automatic writing. Sitting in my cabin by a fire, I asked him, this intense middle-aged man of penetrating eyes and prominent cheekbones, if I could succeed in transcribing it. You can get it, he said, but whether you can understand it is another matter.

I sat down at my journal and was nearly stifled by performance anxiety. I got so far as a title, then a first line—then I was quarreling with the next lines, trying to make something coherent and losing it, then the phone rang. I tried again, and got this:

Sentinel

There are those think the day a long weariness,

Life a long never-releasing swampland clinging.

Can they never in their ceaseless counting and reckoning

Look up to the bird on the wing, or the hour?

 

Cease telling your beads of worry and amassing.

Your prayers are in every breath you take,

will it or not. The grave’s no prison

to match that spun by blind men building.

 

We who know pass you this directive;

Live your limitations as a blessing bestowed;

Build your castles but omit the bars;

Pass through the glowing.

After the poem came to me, I said:

“Maybe it’s Yeats, though it certainly doesn’t sound like him. And I can’t make sense of that title and this content.

“Nor does it sound like great poetry to me—or even competent rhyme. Would Yeats write something unfinished and crude?

“Ask him, maybe. Can I do that here and in 27? Let’s see. Mr. Yeats—”

“Different rules apply in new circumstances. What you value may seem child’s play or child’s distraction to us, sense and sound detracting from other attributes. Study the poem and see if it has anything to say to you and you may decide it’s not so bad after all.”

I asked if that was the “indisputable sign” of his presence that I had been promised.

“No. This is the sign: David Poynter. Little Portraits: Waterborne Reflections 1887–1913, printed 1921 in London. Murragh printed it. Limited edition of five hundred. Available in a few places, not so highly valued. Look in belles lettres. Good-bye and my thanks to you.”

TGU, asked about it, said, “Yes, what you have experienced has been solid, has been—as you put it—real. Even the thing with Yeats—David.”

“Wise guys,” I said. I reflected that at least I knew what to look for, but that whether it did or did not prove accurate, it wouldn’t prove a thing about Yeats. “Why is it that the thing that had the most evidential value for me was his farewell: ‘… and my thanks to you’?”

You know the reason for that. It was a human touch, a thanks from a man who had been rescued by an old friend from wasting time on illusion. More or less. And you went looking for him among the Order of the Golden Dawn, you think; in fact, you will recall you went looking for David among the Order of the Golden Dawn, and found him [Yeats]. A different story, no?

And in fact I had forgotten that this is what I’d done.

I didn’t see how the poem could really have been from Yeats. It wasn’t at all his style, and didn’t seem to me very good poetry; scarcely poetry at all, though perhaps I am no judge. Yet when I posted it to the Voyagers Mailing List, along with the story of how and why it came, one of those on the VML said that reading it solved a psychological problem she’d long had. I can’t figure that out, though I’m glad it happened.

True encounter? Fantasy? Still undetermined. Such is the nature of the unconscious life I live (or perhaps I should say, such is the nature of the compartmentalization of my life) that I had forgotten that Yeats—if it was Yeats—had given me that name of the man and the name of the book. I never followed up on either, though one would think it would be easy enough. On the other hand, what would follow-up prove to anyone but myself? For me to say that I had found verification would still leave you, the reader, wondering if I was telling the truth, or at least wondering if other insights might explain it away. I am content to report what I find—to act as a sort of pointer—and leave it to others of a more scientific bent to do controlled experimentation and verification.

 

Sunday, March 13, 2022

3:40 a.m. The process could get complicated. I say, “Let the total self drive,” but suppose the total self wants TGU to drive that day? In the first place, how would I know the difference, in the second place, what difference would it make, in the third place, doesn’t this bring us back where we started, following impulses as best we can and  hoping for the best? These are not rhetorical questions, but do I take it that the fact that I pose them shows that they were suggested to me? Or, what? Setting switches, and let’s see what happens. Guys?

Valid questions, and they serve to point up your situation, which means, everybody’s situation in 3D who tries to be as responsive as possible. It will not have occurred to you that these problems are faced by everybody in every variety of your situation.

I may not be as awake as I thought, judging from that couple of sentences. Try again?

Anyone trying to live life sincerely and thoughtfully must consider the sources of their conduct. Some adopt a moral code, some –

No, this is too general. You do not realize it, but your predilection nudges the answer toward your comfort zone. You are more comfortable with abstractions than with personal examination, and so you nudge it.

Not consciously.

No; we said you don’t realize it. Still, you do it. And this behind-one’s-own-back editing and steering is also an inherent part of the human situation when attempting to communicate with the un-embodied voice in your head, even if the voice isn’t a voice but a feeling, or an impulse, or even words appearing on a page.

So this is why we’re going to be doing more of yesterday’s down-memory-lane stuff? Keeping it specific?

That avenue accomplishes more things than merely one.

And I take it you could probably proceed from nearly everything?

We prefer that you let us steer, at this stage in your life’s experiment.  We’ll waste a lot less time.

If you say so. Well, yesterday we proceeded from memories I woke up with.

You did not. We proceeded from the chain of associations you allowed to come through.

So we did. So I should sit quietly and be receptive, and then jot down what comes?

Yes. Try it. It will be slightly harder if you allow self-consciousness to enter into it. Yesterday you didn’t know what was coming, today you do; that’s the main difference, but it could impede your receptivity, if you were to let it. Don’t let it.

Well, all right, we’ll see. I’ll sit here with my coffee mug and the cat sitting on the blotter, and will close my eyes and try not to clutch the sides of the sliding-board. And as I write that, the cat walks away. A sign?

4. Maybe I’ll lie down and see what happens. So far, I got tags to my conversation yesterday with Charles, and something else, forgotten, and coffee and then Gibbs of NCIS and his perpetual coffee-drinking. Perhaps lying down will let me give over more.

It might, but it doesn’t depend upon physical position. You saw in the Mind Mirror measurements four years ago.

Still, it requires a certain attention to sit up in a chair rather than back in a recliner, as yesterday.

Even this argument will be instructive to people as an example of the new problems that may arise. But please just sit quietly and give the process five minutes.

[Pause]

Okay, I get the point. At first it was hard because I kept trying to seize anything that came; “Maybe that was what I was given!” Finally I realized that the very effort to grab and retain was an example of me – 3D me – retaining control. Letting the mind blank and setting my intent to not-interfering allowed the higher self or whatever I’m talking to, to take control.

Not control.

No, not control, but I allowed an image to form. Or rather, an impression of an image – an impression of a great stone face, without any detail; more the idea of a stone head than the head itself, and the one word, “Samoa.”

Let’s concentrate for the moment on process. You see the ramifications for your life as lived to date? Not worrying, for the moment, about how your life could change, could develop, look at how it has been to date.

You’re talking about living in the present?

We’re talking about an inability to live in continuity while living in the present. Your difficulties and your accomplishment are intertwined, of course. They always are. Indeed, they are part of the same thing –  your life as it proceeds – only, because they are considered from different mental buckets, as you say, they may not be seen as the same thing.

I can’t decide if I am inadequately focused or if the nature of this conversation is sort of diffuse.

You know your intent. Concentrate on sincere intent, always, and you will have done your share of the communication process. You are not responsible for the result, only for the effort.

Okay.

This feels diffuse because you can’t see the point of it. The point is instruction in what it feels like. How else are people to recognize aspects of their own experience that they may not have placed into context?

Now, the abstract content is this: Someone in 3D becomes used to living in an extended, and distorted, and useful, form of the present moment. You retain association from what just happened, you maintain chains of emotional association that masquerade as logical or even as chronological chains. You get used to seeing the present moment only through a haze of associations. Only in moments of crisis or of a sudden focusing for some reason do you experience the present moment as it is – and you call that an altered state. Well, it is altered, in the sense of “different from what I’m used to,” but it isn’t altered, but pure, in terms of actually experiencing the world as best you can while dealing with unavoidable sensory delay.

When you are in this “altered state,” it becomes impossible to maintain those chains of association without great effort. When you come to an altered state through chemical assistance, it may not be possible at all. When you come to it by intent in a protected setting – as when doing a Monroe tape in your CHEC unit, for instance – it would be possible to maintain such links, but chances are, you won’t want to do so. The point of the exercise, after all, is precisely to experience something different from everyday life.

So you, living a combination of intense isolated focus and chronic lack of insight

No, strike that. Let’s try again. You came to live more and more in the present moment without links to past associations except when a specific stimulus prompted a memory. Nothing wrong with this – except inconvenience perhaps – as an interim state, but you now will be moving through that stage, to another way of being that will more closely resemble ordinary consciousness, yet will be different precisely in that you will have returned to it rather than never having left it.

Call this “Altered states as a way of life,” because it isn’t so much about the past as the way forward from here.

And, I take for granted, it isn’t just about me.

Let’s say, “just about you” is a way of saying, “also about everybody, each of whom will experience it as ‘just about me’.”

So we don’t talk about Samoa, I take it.

We’re talking process, so far.

Thanks for this, and see you next time.

 

Saturday, March 12, 2022

5:50 a.m. Let’s see if I can recapture it. Snow coming. Last snow? Premonitions, often wrong. 1962-3-4 and the Phillies. When I get some coffee, I’ll ask about it. Something says my total self has it in mind to talk about.

6 a.m. All right, setting switches. Do I infer correctly that you want me to explore this?

It will be of interest to your friends and perhaps ultimately to you. As usual, it will explore an aspect of the human condition and, as your friend Thoreau said, any man’s sincere account of his life will be a report from a distant country.

I had thought to skip this morning’s consultation, perhaps, as I haven’t skipped in a couple of weeks. But I don’t mind being prodded. The cat woke me up a few minutes ago, always polite but desperate for food, as this was later than usual. So I got up, staggered downstairs, fed her, and sat in the recliner for a couple of minutes. My back hurt, as often when I first get up, and I could feel the effects of drinking some Irish cream last night. When you don’t drink much or often, the subtle things wrong the next morning are obvious. The slight, very slight headache, the dryness of the throat, an indefinable something in the sinuses. I suppose a hangover is merely an enlargement of the symptoms. Anyway, I was noticing the physical sensations and deducing the cause; not anything dramatic, just observing.

As I sat there quietly, there came a slow cascade of associations that I noted down 20 minutes ago so I wouldn’t forget them in the course of starting the coffee, taking my morning pills, etc.

• I could hear the rain. I remembered that midday snow was predicted.
• I thought, it will only be a light snow. My last snow, I wonder?
• That was a premonition. It came to me that I had been having such premonitions all my life, and most of them were wrong. But, not all of them, only (come to think of it now) the dramatic ones. And that made me think of the Philadelphia Phillies.
• As a very young boy, I became a baseball fan, and in South Jersey that meant either the Phillies or, less frequently, one of the New York teams. But Philadelphia was much closer culturally and geographically than New York, and one of the TV channels described itself as “The Philadelphia Phillies’ baseball network.” They showed lots of games, and the radio broadcast all of them. So we grew up listening, even if we didn’t actually know anything about the strategy of the game.
• Well, in 1961, the summer I turned 15, the Phillies had a dismal year, losing I think 107 games out of 154. If I remember correctly, they lost 23 games in a row, all that dismal August. We were used to them coming in eighth – last, in pre-expansion times. (They were about as bad as the Senators, of whom it was said: “Washington: First in war, first in peace, last in the American League.”) But for some reason I got it into my head that I knew what would happen: They would be 7th in 1962, 4^th in 1963, and would win the pennant in 1964.

And that’s more or less what happened. When the 1962 season ended with them in 7^th, I felt reinforced in my premonition. In 1963, sure enough, they finished fourth. The year 1964 was overshadowed by other emotions, but still I was interested to know that they were on track to win the pennant, as predicted, but then Gene Mauch, their manager, saved me from getting a premature case of Psychics’ Disease; he choked, tried to cinch it, overused his two starters, and managed to lose the last ten games of the season. I think it was the Cardinals who won the pennant, but it was the Phillies who lost it.

So – I thought – my premonition was wrong? But, for two years and all but 10 days of the third, it had been right? How could it be both right and wrong? As I say, Gene Mauch saved me from getting inflated with pride in an ability I didn’t have.

And as I write that, other associations arise. Trying to know the future. I was always trying to know the future. Why was that? It was important to me, and I wanted to be able to do it, but I can’t remember why.

Oh, sure you do.

Do I? I knew that if I experienced it, I’d know it was real and not something people had lied about and merely invented. Hell, that’s a thread I never laid down; I still feel that way. If it hasn’t happened to you, that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, but it does mean that to you, it’s still hearsay.

All right, now we will take over. A good summary, showing your emotional logic as one of the strong invisible connectors of events.

Resetting switches, as (probably) nudged.

It was always going to be an important thread of your life-story, that you would start from ground zero and learn your way into knowing, and leave a record of your explorations, as example and encouragement. But how to do that? It is a more intricate problem than may at first appear. You had to be able to move in a certain direction; you had to be sure-footedly following an invisible path; and you had to be doing it behind your own back.

What you may not realize – you, and anyone reading this later – is that this is so in effect for everybody, always. You are all sure-footedly proceeding, in your confusions, along a path that you were made to pursue.

Let’s be clear about this. This is not to say, “It is all predetermined, and you are only puppets, or recordings, tracing a path already laid out.” It is not to say, “Your free will is only an illusion.” It is not to say, “Do what you want, try as you may, you won’t get away from what something else wants you to do.” None of these conclusions would be accurate, nor would the corresponding opposite conclusion that your lives are all chance.

“There is a destiny that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we may.”

[ A slight misquotation. The correct line is, “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.”]

He knew a thing of two, as you say.

But here’s the point. Your lives proceed according to your decisions. You truly do decide who and what you are going to be, deciding as you go along. But every so often, you may receive a nudge. You can recognize those moments by their disproportionate impact.

Rita wanted to know about the effects of childhood trauma, and the guys pointed out that its effect could set up a psychological pattern that would allow repeated investigation of a given state of mind.

That was looking at the useful effects of a trauma. This, by contrast, is examining the useful effects of what may be inexplicable, seemingly uncaused, but nonetheless momentous events like your knowing in advance the standings of three years of baseball seasons, and then – as a sort of teaser, leaving you open to doubt – a twist at the very end, the very last day of the third year.

And so I lived expecting more, not receiving more, casting about for any stray thought or feeling, trying to will myself into being able to know what was going to happen.

Ingenious, wasn’t it? It took the strong and weak points of your character and used them to keep an interest open. And, your brother, having been witness to your predictions, and having similar interests and unremembered resonances himself, gives you a book about Edgar Cayce.

And in the summer of 1968 I tried hypnotizing my roommate, and Dennis, to see if we could elicit stories of past lives – and then was unable to decide if I believed what we got. [It occurs to me, transcribing this, that if David had been there that summer, rather than home in Iowa, he surely would have entered into our experiments. If other lives of ours really had been connected in a teacher-pupil relationship, as I got much later, surely it would have come through.] And they tried hypnotizing me, and I seem to remember thinking they didn’t and thinking they did. I wonder if I have any record of what we got. We taped our sessions, I know, on an old reel-to-reel machine I had bought, and I think I made some notes. In any case, I hadn’t thought about that for years, and hadn’t thought about it in connection with my Phillies prediction, but the connection is obvious enough.

Predictions in 1961, hypnosis in 1968, astrology lessons in 1973, Shirley MacLaine in 1989, Kelly and Gateway in 1992, and you were fully launched. Not so many nudges.

And I was fully able to choose this rather than that, except that internal guidance said, “This way!”

Sometimes. Well, often enough, actually, only it can be seen another way. You might look at it that who you are, what the sum total of the associated threads comes to, all the flavor of everything in your known and unknown background, predetermine an inclination, a proclivity. But how that manifests in various versions of the present tense is up to you, and always was. That’s the point of free will, after all: free choice. But the point of predestination is not remote control, but free will only within certain limits. Gender, geography, time of entry into 3D, etc., – they are all limiting factors – delimiting factors, definitions.

I’m liking this letting the total self drive. What shall we call this?

Try, “Premonitions.”

Tempted to say, “Predictions are always hazardous, particularly when they involve the future,” but it’s too long.

Actually, “Premonitions and afterthoughts” might work, or “Foreknowledge and doubt.” In any case, you always have us on your side. Try not to doubt that.

I don’t.

We are not speaking only to you.

All right. Thanks for all this.

 

Friday, March 11, 2022

3:35 a.m. Yesterday’s experiment worked well enough, I’d like to try it again, only this time I hope to be able to ask questions. Yesterday’s statement was so strong and beautiful, I didn’t want to risk spoiling it by an anticlimax. So, I set my switches for maximum focus, receptivity, clarity, and presence, and I ask my total self to direct us as it chooses.

Bearing in mind that this requires an act of faith, nonetheless it can represent, as well, an abdication of responsibility as a 3D focus. It is a delicate balancing act, to continue to perform your specialized function and to loosen the control on your end so that higher direction may come through. This is a knack and a skill, to be learned like any other. Do not be discouraged when your early results are erratic. No one learns anything new by beginning as an expert.

[I did not think to write it down at the moment, but it was clear to me throughout that all this is very much aimed at everyone who will ever read this. They are talking about you as well as me.]

Sometimes people display astonishing aptitudes – Mozart at age four, for instance.

But a prodigy is bringing into a life talents developed at a prior time. Those talents were learned, honed, at some time. The person who was Mozart was not the beginning of the story of the development of those powers; only, the invisible links make it seem so.

By the same token, then, any of us may show what seems like astonishing natural aptitudes.

“Seems” is the operative word. We say, merely, do not be discouraged when new endeavors are not instantly successful. If they should happen to be so – if you reap what looks like an unearned increment – well and good, but even a Mozart might have to learn a different skill starting from scratch. A prodigy in one area of 3D life is not a prodigy in all areas.

Okay, understood. So I take it that you are saying this as encouragement to one and all.

We are saying it is the direction of the current, culturally: Your future sees more of this and less of the former inability to communicate easily and freely between 3D and non-3D – and between various levels of non-3D, which is what we propose to discuss today.

As in, my larger being, as opposed to my immediate non-3D components?

That is a reasonable initial way to look at it. It is to redefine that understanding that we propose to move. Do not think to obtain results in the way others did, be they Cayce or Roberts or Monroe, in your time, or saints or mystics or mages in other times. New wine, new wineskins.

At one level, you have seen trance mediums, their everyday personalities set aside, their ordinary consciousness in abeyance. You have seen saints rapt with communication with heaven, conversing with saints, angels, God, jinns. You have seen ordinary people, in other words, having their lives transformed by utterly non-normal experience apparently not of their volition or instigation. At most, some may have consented or, indeed, enthusiastically participated. But perhaps they were, instead, frightened, or puzzled, or for some reason reluctant. This is one extreme of transformation.

The reason this phenomenon is not seen clearly in your time is that religion has been privatized (as you put it), so that one either believes or disbelieves – that is, one either is one of the flock or is not – rather than accepting the phenomenon as one undivided but multi-faceted experience.

An experiencer of a UFO-related experience, a person who sees an image of Mary in the sky, they may seem to be in different worlds – or may be seen as equally liars or hysterics – depending upon one’s mental categories and prejudices. What they have in common is in experiencing something as if it were exterior and yet uniquely personal to them.

I get, the three children at Fatima, Portugal, in 1917.

You could compile a list of attested miraculous appearances in a religious context. They would be – or we should say, they have been – accepted within their religious community’s contexts, and disregarded or denied outside of it. The same goes for UFO experiencers. A John Mack may scientifically investigate such testimony and render as his profession opinion that they are not mentally ill, and the only result initially will be that he reinforces belief among believers, and reinforces doubt and derisive skepticism, ramping up to rage, among non-believers. It is the same thing, you see, so of course it produces similar results.

You have said many times that we cannot persuade anyone of anything.

Have you ever done so?

Not that I know of. Nor has anybody ever persuaded me. If I am willing to move, evidence sways me. Not otherwise.

No, and this is not a bad thing, but is a useful one. It prevents everyone from going off the rails at every new piece of evidence. But maybe now the times are changing in this regard.

So that we will be more easily swayed by ground-breaking evidence?

Not that, exactly. More like, the mountains of evidence in what has seemed to be different fields, coming together over a century or more by now, are having their cumulative effect.

The river is eroding the stone.

So to speak, yes. But the invisible part of the process is that “the times” are allowing into 3D only souls open to the new changes. We mean, not that there will be any unanimity of opinion, but that the social situation people will be born into, combined with the outer-planet situation, as astrologers would see it, will guarantee that certain categories of thought and perception previously difficult or impossible will now be mainstream.

This is why the new global culture is coming into existence?

“Why” is too pointed, but your underlying sense of it is correct. Let us say that the new culture will necessarily be very different in several essentials than what preceded it in any of the many cultures around the world that will contribute to it.

Am I losing the focus I need? That is, does this burn energy faster?

You are stretching a little farther, but after all that is only an analogy. Intend, and you can find the energy.

Okay.

But we will conclude as soon as convenient – and do not be tempted to return for more until you sense that the wells have refilled. This is not some evanescent phenomenon that may go away if not carefully watched. You can depend on it, limited mostly by your own willingness to make the effort.

To round this off for now, then:

• Religious and non-religious, scientific and non-scientific, esoteric and mundane, verifiable and non-verifiable – all these categories are going to be redefined as it is seen that old boundaries divided things artificially.
• Therefore, past testimony will have to be reexamined, and present experience will have to be examined in the context of these new understandings.
• Therefore, as has been said to you, much that seemed superstition will be seen as valid, and vice-versa. That doesn’t mean that reality changed; it doesn’t even mean that perception changed. It would be closer to say, it will be more convenient to see things this way rather than that way. (This is always so.)
• This opens a space for new ways of doing old things, and mediumship is not least but, in a way, first among them. This is the easiest and most powerful way to extend your experienced world. Of course it comes with pitfalls, among them that of hubris, self-delusion, and unwarranted certainty. But then, any tool that can do any good can also be used incorrectly. It is up to you to be alert.

Enough for the moment.

Thank you.

 

Thursday, March 10, 2022

5:10 a.m. Very well, gentlemen, I thought we might try something a little different today, and I don’t know how to go about it, or even if the idea makes sense. This morning, instead of a dialogue between you and me, I’d like to see if it can be steered not by me but by what Monroe called the total self. Is that possible? Let’s find out. Of course I’m aware that what I’m taking to be my bright idea may well be yours, or its.

The difference will be not in the means of exposition but in the choice of subject matter – the choice of contexts, one might say. Your first-person exchanges have served well to humanize the process. Perhaps now it is time to hint at how much farther people can go, once they get themselves up to speed.

You underestimate yourselves. You also overestimate yourselves. It cannot be helped; it is a concomitant of the 3D situation. But – knowing that you do so – you can (and might make a habit of it) correct for it. That is, not so much continually redefine yourselves, as look more carefully at who you think you are at any given moment, and compare it to external evidence. That is, am I fooling myself, am I pretending, am I missing things?

As in most of life, how you do this is as important as what you do. That is, do not be continually looking at your life wringing your hands, saying oh I should have done so and so, I ought to be thus and so, I wish I hadn’t done or not done this or that. Don’t lie in the dark and weep for your sins, as Whitman said. And don’t be awarding yourselves medals, either, or starting your own fan club dedicated to your ideal image of yourself.

Consciousness. Awareness. Actually living your life. That’s the goal. You can’t do it wrong, but you can always do it more, in one or another sense of the word. Whatever your situation, there is potential for more. More experience, or more satisfaction, or more wisdom, or more introspection, or more fumbling attempts to learn new things, or more outreach to other parts of yourself in this or other lives.

Understand: We are not exactly saying, “Excelsior!” We don’t mean you ought to live continually in a keyed-up nervous state. There is such a thing as a state of expectation that is calm, placid, deeply joyful. It is as available to you as any particular hell you might choose instead. We merely state that it is well for you to remember that it is available as a choice.

Remember, if you remember nothing else we say or have said or will say – you are loved! You are loved because you are worthy of being loved! You are loved not for what you do, or even for what you are, though it can look that way, but because love is to existence as oxygen is to your 3D body.

Let’s say that again, in what will seem a different way. “You are loved” might be restated as “you are love.” Love is what you are made of. It is the air you breathe, the blood flowing though your body, the thread of consciousness that you experience as “you.”

Therefore, anything in your life that leads toward love is going to feel natural and pleasant and in fact joyful. What leads away from love will feel grating and anxious. That’s all the orientation, all the clues, you need. It tells you what you are and how you want to be.

Does that mean that you can move entirely to the “love” end of the “love-fear” continuum? In practice, within 3D conditions, perhaps not. But isn’t it useful to have an infallible compass?

[Me again.] Whew. That came all in one fluent stream. (Fluent means steaming, of course. I’m fumbling for words here.) By the clock it took 22 minutes including my initial paragraph. But I think I’ll stop here. How much could we add to that? Anything more would be dilution, I think.