[My friend Michael Langevin, publisher of Magical Blend magazine, had heard me raving about Lincoln Steffans' autobiography, and got the idea to have me ask Mr. Steffans for advice on the subject -- as Henry Thoreau once put it -- of how to aspire and respire at the same time.]

8:30 p.m. Monday March 13, 2006

I remind myself, I told Michael Langevin I would see if Lincoln Steffans had any advice for him.

Mr. Steffans, if you are here, I want to say explicitly what I gather you know anyway – having access to the content of my mind, it seems – that I found your book the single most enlightening book I ever read. Plus, I love your ideals. Do you have any words for Michael on how to transform society and make a living at the same time?

The only way I could ever figure out was to do what was important to me and figure there would be a market for it sometime, some way, or I wouldn’t be led to do it. You do remember that I was blacklisted for the decade of the twenties after I came back from Russia and told what I saw. If I had not had independent means during that time it would have gone hard for me. (more…)

Session five of ten

Friday, October 13, 2000

[change side of tape]

I’m going to say it just to swat the fly. I was going to be too polite. But the war ended in ’45, not in ’43. Now I can swat the fly and forget about it. [laughs]

S: I must have been thinking of some other reality.

F: Well – I know it’s a joke, but actually I think literally it’s true. All those – the more you look at the history, the more improbable certain things were. There’s no way Dunkirk could have happened, as an example. [pause]

S: So if I understand the perspective that you’ve elucidated it, when I asked you the question, “describe the age the age of faith, describe the age of reason,” and then I might come to you and say, “well describe the next age,” what you’re saying is that that still is – there’s lots of different possibilities of what that age will be once it arrives on the map, and it is in formation.

F: I’d say there are lots of versions of it and they all exist. (more…)

Correcting a mistake. In Black Box session 11-03-00 (3) I scanned the wrong report. The right report, below, demonstrates a session spent dancing the null:

[Wednesday March 8, 2006]

Revolutions

(11:40) I was thinking about what at first seemed obvious – politics follows your interest – and realize it isn’t as simple as it first appeared. I am sort of residually a Democrat. I don’t like them much but I detest so much of the Republican rhetoric and adventurism. But if I were to decide which party to belong to (assuming I had to choose either one!) and wanted to decide it on my economic interests, I don’t know where I should be! I believe the Republicans are ruining the economy, so I can’t see any advantage to me of being with the party that is presiding over ruin – but I don’t see that the Democrats have actually done anything different even when they had power, so where are we? We need a new party but I find it hard to believe that will solve anything.

You are learning. Look at what you just derived simply from asking yourself which party lay closer to your economic interests. Your time has been overshadowed by its own version of the bloody flag – social issues. Abortion, the flag controversies, all the social controversies that have polarized you into units not primarily rooted in your economic interests. Civil Rights among them, I would remind you. This serves certain background groups very well, as they would be seriously outnumbered if people were voting their economic interests. (more…)

I found this via Wikipedia, of all places, which referenced, in an article about Bruce Moen, this write-up of Bruce’s afterlife knowledge workshop that I had placed in the Hampton Roads blog.

July 21, 2005: Exploring the Afterlife – Successfully!

By Frank DeMarco, Editor-in-chief

Bruce Moen‘s “Exploring the Afterlife” workshop, the second in our series of Applied Learning Series workshops, was held in Charlottesville on July 18 and 19^th. I was one of those attending, and the workshop demonstrated what I’ve always thought, that Bruce would be a great teacher.

Starting with 10 people he didn’t know, and me (I’ve known Bruce for nearly 10 years, and edited three of his five books) he set out to teach us, in two days, how to explore the afterlife, contact people who are deceased, and bring back verifiable details to demonstrate that the contact was not just fantasy.

Big ambition! And he succeeded, as I’ll show. (more…)

Session five of ten

[This is a continuation of the transcript]

Friday, October 13, 2000

My chest feels pretty normal, so I think maybe his does too. At least, I hope so. [pause] As soon as I said that, I heard a wheeze, which made me go “not so fast.” [pause]

It’s still amazing how definite a feel of stone there is, that I’m lying on stone. [pause] Must have had plaster of Paris in the waterbed.

S: You talked about these different ages of expression and the characteristic, appropriate, harmonious ways of being in those. What is that lies beyond where we are now? (more…)

Wednesday March 8, 2006

All right, Mr. Bowers, since I’m not doing the work I ought to be doing, let’s resume. I’m half through your book and the comparisons between the Radical Republicans of 1865 on and those of 1995 on are just startling! Stolen elections, blatant disregard of law to get what they wanted, ideological agenda (at least when Thad Stevens was alive; less so afterwards), a huge phony impeachment trial – though they expected to win the one in 1868 – and then giant, massive, unprecedented corruption. Unprecedented for Washington, which is saying something! And perhaps the longest-lived effect, the turning over of government and economy to the monopolies that developed from war contracts.

Our case is different because the slavery and Civil Rights issues are settled, but I seem to see an analogy in the ideology that sees “faith based” – meaning right-wing Christian – groups as being under social attack and needing government support. And behind it all, what Joseph Smallwood would call “hog-ism.”

Racism and class discrimination

I see, also, that your arguments and your impact are blunted by your racism – even if it was the racism of your day. So negroes were to sit with whites on public accommodations. Shameful! So they were to have equal access to theaters, etc. Horrible! We just don’t see it that way and you can’t expect us to.

Nor did I expect you to. But it was worth while to make the attempt. How far you can stretch your sympathies is a matter for your own concern. Let me say this on the subject of racism and then let us drop the subject – unless new questions come up – for some disagreements cannot be bridged. (more…)

Session five of ten

Friday, October 13, 2000

Background

On Tuesday, Jim Self talked to me for an hour from Chico, California, seeing what was wrong with my breathing, tracing it back to an unremembered incident of early childhood (that, perhaps, my mother misinterpreted as my having gotten too cold, when in fact it was an unnoticed scare by a dog – meaning that nobody had every picked up with Jim did). As he saw, he worked at healing, by keeping me in the present.

He pointed out that it isn’t just lungs, but also throat and nasal cavities involved. When I tell Skip this, he points out that everybody hears me as having sinus problems, and once I hear it, I realize that it is one of those things that are so obvious from the outside and not at all on the inside. I had always concentrated on the coughs and ignored, or rather disregarded, the rest.

I had been getting worried, because I wasn’t getting better, and in fact had gotten only about an hour or an hour and a half sleep Monday night. Tuesday night I got about six hours, in four segments, a vast improvement, and each night afterward was better though by Friday morning I was still not normally well. (more…)

[Monday March 6, 2006]

Reconstruction

(12:45) Well, Mr. Bowers, your chapter two on Andrew Johnson was very interesting and the most favorable portrait of him I have ever read, by far. And he seems to have shared Joseph Smallwood’s idealization of the common worker and smallholder. But your chapter three, “With Chase Among The Ruins,” makes a very mixed impression. On the one hand, an interesting portrait of slick, conniving Salmon P. Chase, who Lincoln put on the court mostly to get his vote for certain wartime measures – can’t remember offhand which – that were sure to come before the Supreme Court sooner or later. Chase seems to have been a slimy article, for sure, and certainly his intolerance and narrow-sightedness is clear enough in this picture, given that we can trust the picture as drawn.

But it is precisely in your approving quotation of contemporary mimicry and ridicule of the speech of the freed slaves that you leave yourself open to interpretations of racism. How would you like your pronunciation mocked? It is cruel, and your selection of evidence cuts two ways. On the one hand the difficulties are made clear. On the other hand, you show no side of the issues but that of the white southern society. A reader coming to your book new to the subject might think that no one favored negro franchise but corrupt politicians; and that no negro (soldiers, say) could possibly have advanced to the point of deserving it; or that black as well as white might justly fear powerlessness and seek to have the vote to protect themselves even if they couldn’t spell CAT. (more…)

Friday, May 18, 2007

9:20 a.m. Mr. Sinclair, how did you deal with fakers and self deceivers?

It never came up. Not someone’s reputation but the material itself is the touchstone. You don’t cast pearls before swine, but sometimes you can pick them up from the bed of a pigsty.

Did you and Claude Bowers know each other?

We were acquainted but not exactly close friends. Our temperaments were somewhat different

Here I am feeling all sorts of resistance, perhaps because this is one of those “factual” questions that can be checked, hence my anxiety level is way up.

Well, so what? You can’t guarantee success and you can’t guarantee that you will always be on the beam, as you say. You can only try — or fail to try.

Yes, I know. Well, I’ll proceed as if I believe all this, and we’ll see what happens. 

I don’t know how else you could proceed. The main difference between investigators is that some go forward knowing that they may be fooling themselves, and some go forward not knowing that they may be fooling themselves. (more…)