"I of my own knowledge…"

[I have a friend who remembers a life that ended in the old West, after the Civil War destroyed his life in the South. That Confederate soldier, named Hank, never overcame his bitterness. Curiously Jim and I, in this lifetime, perhaps serve as a bridge between Hank and Joseph who, so far as I know, never met in their lifetimes.]

[Sunday, February 5, 2006]

Anybody care to fill the final three pages of this journal book for me / with me?

This is Joseph [Smallwood]. I liked what you said to your friend [Jim] and I would like to add something for him to tell his friend Hank. (more…)

According to Mary Todd’s sister, the young Mrs. Lincoln as a girl used to say that she was destined to marry a president.

Well, so she was. And while perhaps a good number of young girls thought the same, their being wrong does not make young Mary’s “knowing” meaningless. To say that young Mary’s knowing expressed the fact that she was ambitious is merely to explain it away. It would be as sensible to say that she was ambitious because of that knowing. And maybe the most accurate view is that the two went together. She had a knowing and she was ambitious, and the pattern of her life did not contradict itself.

I compare that knowing to the things I knew as a boy that the boy himself had no means of knowing and almost no excuse for thinking. For instance, as a boy afflicted with asthma, I somehow “knew” that neither pills nor injections nor other medical remedies would be necessary if I could only remember how to maintain health using mental powers alone. It took nearly half a century for me to actually learn how to do it, but nonetheless the boy that I was did know. It is as if a part of me that lives outside of time and space was nudging me, throwing out hints.

And, as with everything else I have experienced, I assume that if it is true for me it is true for others. We may not be destined to marry a president, or to learn how to overcome asthma, but those are only specifics. What we have in common is access to the part of us that knows. Probably it’s worthwhile to listen to it.

[Thursday, February 2, 2006]

Now, I don’t want to give the impression I was thinking this all out. I couldn’t think! All I could do was feel, but this one thought was sort of mingled up in it. Everything else was groaning and campfire light and smoke – for some reason the smell of smoke was real strong – and rain.

Things are confused. I see myself lying out in the ground by a smoky fire, but I see myself lying on a cot inside a tent – my tent, maybe – begging the boys to help me find some comfortable way to lie down or sit or something! After a while they quit with the wine and went back to whiskey and this time it was better and I could hold it down. (more…)

Robert Johnson said that psychologist Fritz Kunkel told him there are three ways to learn psychology: read all the ancient Greek mythology, or read all of Jung, or wait and watch: “that is really the best way.” I knew Jung was the important man the first time I read anything by him. I really have been guided by an automatic pilot. Probably we all are, if we listen.

I don’t claim that this is believable. I merely claim that it is true. In July 1994, when I knew a lot less about this stuff than I do now, I interacted with Joseph after he had been wounded at the Battle of Gettysburg. I wrote about it in Muddy Tracks, but here Joseph tells it from his side.

[Thursday, February 2, 2006]

(4 a.m.) I reckon you can hear it now, maybe. We’ll give it a try anyway and if it don’t work out, nothing much lost.

I was wounded at Gettysburg, you know. At least you sort of know. Back in ’94 you contacted me – the uncompleted me, a version of me that was in the battle at that time. (more…)

[Thursday, January 19, 2006]

7:95 a.m. Starting again, not without apprehension. Can today’s transmission possibly measure up to yesterday’s? Can it continue and flow into a seamless and meaningful whole? Stay tuned.

You are doing fine. Faithfulness is all. It isn’t up to you to provide the content. If it falls down, it falls down – but yesterday didn’t turn out so bad, did it?

Yesterday was wonderful. I’m ready if you are. (more…)

(6:15 p.m.) Joseph, I set you off on an extremely interesting tangent – a tangent nonetheless – about Napoleon and Caesar. It certainly is persuasive, and of course since it can’t be verified I can’t choke up on it.

That’s right, but there’s more things in the world than can be proved, and anyway there’s a hell of a lot more that’s personal opinion than you’d sometimes guess.

So let’s talk a little bit about the winter of ’64, sitting in Virginia freezing our tails off waiting for what we hoped was going to be the last act. (more…)

“Everyone is engaged in the same kind of creation-by-decision,” my friends say; “that is what human life is.”

[Tuesday, January 17, 2006]

Surely you see that your culture’s way of making you feel guilty about not doing what you want to do, and doing what you don’t want to do, will work only for a certain kind or person, in a certain kind of belief system. So by living it and living it though – or perhaps we should say living through it – you break the way for others who are like you in this. (more…)

[Sunday, January 29, 2006]

The events of the past few weeks have showed me that I was going about it all wrong – 180 degrees wrong – in trying to deduce past-life connections. In fact it applies to anything that is connected below (or above) consciousness. Search first – and you can hardly call it searching, it will be right in front of you – for what you resonate to. If you feel connected to the South Seas (I don’t) chance are that the South Seas are important to you. If you like cowboys, it doesn’t mean you were a cowboy – but look.

It’s only sense. I don’t know why it took so long to penetrate. (more…)

I wonder, is there a form of inflation in too much humility? Can there be the wrong type of humility that fails to bring forth what one was entrusted with because one wrongly identifies with the gift? To pose the question thus is to answer it.

What is psychic inflation but the ego taking credit for that which is working through it? What is excess humility but the ego shrinking from putting to use the talent that was entrusted to it? In either case, it’s a matter of misdefinition.

If we have been given a gift, we are supposed to learn to use that gift. There is no danger of our becoming inflated so long as we remember that it was entrusted to us, not created by us, and therefore the fact that we have it is not a sign of our worthiness or superiority.

Neither burying the talent for fear of losing it, nor forgetting that was only entrusted to us – that’s the tightrope we are to walk. All the dangers of inflation and false humility boil down to a question of keeping things sorted out between the ego and the higher self. Unless we let the ego take credit for what was given it to work with, all will be well.