"I of my own knowledge…"

Here, dredged from my journals, a little perspective from our guys on the other side, a cheering message as we enter a new year.

Monday, May 2, 2011

8:15 AM. Okay guys, you’re up. I can’t remember where we were, but presumably you can.

You as ring-master of your far-flung community are in effect continually redefining reality.

What do we mean by that?

First, remember that in life there are no absolute divisions, only the appearance of absolute divisions. Everything ultimately connects to everything else, in different degrees of intensity and different degrees of separation. So, it is literally impossible for you to avoid affecting the universe by anything you do.

At the same time, there is no one center to things. There isn’t a main table in the center of the ballroom, and your table far away at the fringes. In effect, for you and for everyone, you are at the center of your world. All things that happen are measured by their importance relative to you. Despite what centralized media may lead you to believe, there are no unimportant players in the world – your world or anyone’s world. But there are so many [centers]!

(more…)

I wonder if anybody realizes that just because  I am willing to do a psychological strip-tease in public, it doesn’t mean I am necessarily always comfortable doing it. Nonetheless, I proceed, because I am persuaded that it is worth doing for what it may suggest to various people.

This from my journal, rediscovered as I proceeded to perform this version of a past-life review.

Saturday, April 23, 2011

7 AM. I guess it isn’t a matter of what I produce, so much as what I become. I know that, so why is it always a revelation? But any time I am able to make it real to me, it’s like the first time, each time.

(more…)

One of the joys of keeping a journal, however diligently or not one does it, is the occasional review, the look back at roads trodden. Naturally, year-end is a convenient time. Found this conversation with Papa Hemingway which was of interest.

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

7 AM. So, Papa, talk to me about loneliness. For I got a clear sense, last night, of how lonely you got, and how often.

(more…)

Thursday, November 10, 2011

6 AM, nearly. All right, I’m here. [Psychic] Katherine[Rone] said my higher self is mad at me for not listening. I am listening at least at this moment, so please do tell me what I need to hear.

You don’t need to sacrifice your own well-being for the sake of concentrating on your message. In fact, your message can be undercut by contradiction to the message your life itself communicates.

For instance. If you were foolish and financially incompetent and malicious and petty and — add up a list yourself — that would be true and would be seen to be true regardless of whatever you said or advocated; regardless of any true message you might bring forth.

(more…)

Papa, I can see that my work is being sabotaged by my own self-doubt. (Is it really Hemingway online? Will anybody believe it? If they do, will they care? If they would, can I put the material into an enjoyable, accessible format? Etc.)

How would you expect to avoid such doubts? That’s part of the territory. You know the writer’s three fears.

I do. I have nothing to say, I can’t say it, nobody would care anyway.

Well, if you know they are common fears, why give it to them when they visit you? Or dwell within you, if that’s the case?

It takes a monumental self-confidence, it seems to me, to be so sure that what you’re doing is worthwhile and can be done.

Yes, or courage to do it without being sure.

All right. Sort of like me working on the novel, not really knowing how I’m going to do it, not having any surer footing — at all — in what I am doing now.

So? That’s part of the admission ticket.

This month’s column in The Meta Arts magazine. (If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you read this here a while ago.) It’s always a question: Among the competing demands on our  time, how can we tell which are legitimate demands for us? Naturally, the guys upstairs had an opinion.

http://www.themetaarts.com/pages/frankdemarco.html

Monday, October 31, 2011

5:45 AM. Papa, the fourth and fifth dimensions: Time, and then Beyond Time?

Close enough. Or you might say viewpoint over time, viewpoint beyond viewpoint, or overall viewpoint, or really view without the distortion of viewpoint. Now, you can see that to write in such a way as to hint at (for you cannot actually do it) going beyond viewpoint is very difficult, and requires not only skill and luck in the writer but, let’s say, skill and attention in the reader. Luck, too, perhaps, for the reader has to be in the right mental space to be able to comprehend it.

That’s what I was trying for in Across The River. I told the story seemingly from inside Colonel Cantwell’s head, but not precisely. Within his mind — the nonphysical mechanism we all live in, as you recognize — he moves across elements of his past, both what he has experienced and what he has experienced second-hand through reading or other instruction or from appreciating, as in a picture. I believe I achieved that fourth dimension, and it was disappointing to have it not recognized — because of Renata, of course.

Now here is something nobody sees. I achieved the fifth dimension with Santiago, who lay dreaming of the lions at the end. My achieving it was not at the end, though, but throughout, because in careful recounting of his moment by moment actions, and his moment by moment thought or memory, and his moment by moment emotion, I was so close to the moving present that we get beyond time to the timeless. Where else do you think that strange aura around the story comes from?

It is not told fromSantiago’s viewpoint, or from Manolin’s. It may be said to be narrated by God, or the guys upstairs, or the part ofSantiago that lives outside time and space. It is our life described neither from within it nor from without it.

Yes, there is the story itself — the old man striving, and winning, and losing, and remaining himself. There is the effect on the boy. But beyond all that is the strange penumbra that people feel but don’t quite understand, and this is because the story’s atmosphere talks to us of things beyond the story.

I could not have produced the story to order. And it came as a gift, and I passed on the gift. Those who think it’s simple or simpleminded are only one eyed; they cannot sense the presence of that extra dimension.

It is a curious paradox, isn’t it? To get beyond time, one way is to sit on the very edge of the moving line. There are other ways — Tolstoy did it on a mammoth scale — but this was mine.

Just had a very enjoyable chat with Rob McConnell, pre-recording his  show “The X Zone,” which airs out of Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.

I had a great time, and hopefully listeners will enjoy it as well, and perhaps learn something.

After 11 p.m. tonight, Wednesday, you can listen in by following this link:

http://traffic.libsyn.com/xzone/20110817_seg2.mp3

Got this this morning from the guys upstairs. I imagine that it will resonate for some, and not for others. I offer it for whatever you can get out of it.

Sunday, August 14, 2011

6:45 AM. Glancing at this morning’s SchwartzReport depressed me, as it makes me feel that I am missing, or rather avoiding, the real story of what is happening in our time. Leonard Peltier, corruption, the whole works. It makes me sick to read of it, so I don’t read of it. Is that any way to live? Guys? I know you’ve said we should — well, no, you tell me your reactions to my reactions. Am I living with my head in the sand?

Everybody to his own work. What is one person’s true work is another’s evasion.

It is specifically evasion that troubles me.

(more…)

This month’s column in The Meta Arts is the first of three on the subject of talking to the guys on the other side of the veil between physical and non-physical. It’s a process that I often say is “easier done than said,” yet it has its interesting quirks.

http://www.themetaarts.com/pages/frankdemarco.html