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The ego will disrupt communication when it experiences threat. This will be a
reaction to a specific person or persons.
ACIM – Creation and Communication - Chapter Four.
Fri. My focus on mystical experience got me nowhere before, though I did it partly
as I saw it as an area which might be more likely to interest you. So much for that, so
here’s another answer or approach. I’ll just add that if I went by your previous
response, as with the general tenor of the self-selected core in discussion groups, I
would be spending the rest of my life “walking on eggs,” trying to “prove” myself
worthy to be accepted into their company and others like them, meaning a good
section of the population, as well as apologizing for having the gall to have a
different opinion on the subject; or any subject.
One reason I set such store by the Course is it tends to explain in advance what
people will do before they’ve done it and why, such as tell me to get lost, or disrupt
communication in other ways. I certainly touched on this in the other Wilson group a
while back, without going into it in any depth. I also think the very fact I was upfront
about the Course put me at a “disadvantage,” and gives those overtly hostile to its
message or ideas just the excuse or pretext they need to dismiss it out of hand,
certainly after your previous synopses of it in the Afterword to Afterlife. But I’ve had
much the same reaction or variations on it for much of my life with certain people,
and long before I ever came across the Course as well as right up until I did, and
beyond.
In other words, some people have that reaction to me anyway, beginning with
my mother I would say, and that stemmed from projection and denial of her own
hatred. In short, she saw herself as the innocent while refusing to acknowledge or
even consider her own input into a situation, and how she attacked at every turn.
This covers just about the whole of the population.
It might not need my defence, but I need its insights and the transformative
experience it describes where we can look back in sanity and see where we were
mistaken. All I see in others is their own rationalisation and intellectual conceits and
defensiveness. And what you said about Alexander Trocchie in your account in The
Angry Years comes to mind; that writing was his real escape. I've no doubt you're
correct of course, but what good would it do him if he had little insight into the
subconscious guilt his addiction/s stemmed from? You’re more likely I think, to
anthropomorphise whatever I say, saying or at least thinking if anything, I have the
same tendency to project it on to others – and you'd be accurate - but that would be
to not see the wood for the trees, as we all have subconscious guilt over the belief in
the separation from God, otherwise we wouldn’t be here; it applies to all of us with
few exceptions.
Jesus would be one. But I don’t think Trocchie’s even getting himself into a
position – hypothetically speaking, where he might write dismissively on the relative
unimportance – or downright meaninglessness of such central concepts would be
much of a solution for him – or is for anyone else for that matter. But then this
thought-system isn't for everyone.
I also see many parallels between the Course and your own work, as well as the
Ken Carey material, and perhaps this is just as relevant.
Sat. It seems to have taken a lifetime to even begin to understand this, and as for
any worldly notion of ever having been a successful “writer” in any conventional
sense, well this seems to have fallen by the wayside, what with all the general
craziness....not to mention, the people in Nashville. Kidding. From such a
perspective, I can tell myself I’ve failed miserably and am likely to continue to do so,
if it weren’t for the possibility of fiction, but even that has to deal with specifics or
there is no story as such. And there will always be fellows around like your good
admirers and supporters to put the boot in if it hints even at the possibility of
undermining the belief in the reality of sin, guilt, fear and death.
That, and that if it’s too “abstract,” there will always be yourself to point out the
“incomprehensibility” of it, as well as its basic mediocrity compared to the true
discernment of yourself and your true followers – whomever they may be. But unlike
them, or some of them, you do seem to have a vastly more developed capacity for
genuine forgiveness, and open-mindedness for that reason I think.
On the other hand, I think it’s undermined by a rather superficial, or surface
understanding of the sheer magnitude of the problem, and the underlying dynamics of
it; reflected in your reductionist interpretation of the magnitude of the Course. In
short, I don’t think you can get to the content of it because of the form in which it’s
presented. In that sense, you’re no more superior than the rest of us, and a barrage of
intellect and firm opinions become just that; and as much of a hindrance, as a means
of progress. What is interesting and useful for me is discerning why this is so, not
whether you ever come to look upon the Course differently.
It’s utterly tiresome to be looked on as some kind of evangelical simple-minded
Jesus freak – and this after devoting years to studying your work – just because you
seem to be incapable of questioning your own denial on the subject.
Neither that – nor the obfuscation and evasion –and “dirty tricks” – of your
supposed supporters is the way to convince anyone, least of all me, that I’m definitely
on the wrong track. I tend to recognize denial and the denial of fear through
aggression, however disguised, when I see it, and for that reason. It’s also why
Picknett and Prince’s The Stargate Conspiracy focused on and highlighted something
important. And the apparent paradox, that your writing, or most of it, does seem to
be acceptable to what I see as fundamentalist materialists in different guises, often
disguised. What they all tend to have in common is their abject detestation and
hatred of ACIM. Because the ego is one also, and consistent... but insane. It's
anathema to them. Dissociation and projection abound. Without the Course I’d have
far less awareness of this, if I was ever truly aware of it at all. And neither can this be
put down just to your own account of it. If anything, I was more informed about of
your writings than they were. I could go on, but it seems to me the subject was more
than adequately covered in Wapnick’s article The Spiritual Significance of ACIM.
The detractors of the Course seem to be able to hold on to their presuppositions
and outworn premises through the simple expedient of ignoring any insights to the
contrary. Which, generally speaking, makes them, and whatever they choose to
believe, a waste of anybody’s time. In short, they're pseudo-scientists. Part of that
great skeptics club in cloud cuckooland.
I’ve just re-read An Extraordinary Man in the Age of Pygmies: You on Henry
Miller. Very stimulating! It struck me you would never spend the time it takes to
build up any kind of relationship with a true narcissist for example, time-consuming
fuckers that they are, due to your personal and professional obligations, but there is
something to be said for direct experience.
Everything in the world is only a symbol after all, as is the world itself, and
through that experience I don’t need to have read a thousand books – though I
probably have – in order to discern form from content, meaning pick up on the
psychological tricks and often lethal intent behind the barrage of erudition and books
cited and discussed in groups. But what books – ideas, insights – have done is clarify
that experience to whatever degree. And again, it’s a contradiction in terms to be
extolling the joys and superiority of reading and self-study yet dismiss a book which
itself is intended to appeal as much to the intellect as the heart.
A narcissist or psychopath would of course, if this were the case here, collate
any information I’ve given you so far, as well as pool their resources in collusion
with others, then look for ways to use it against me, the goal as always, to see
themselves as innocent at the expense of anothers guilt. And that’s the underlying
dynamic of most individuals and groups – and society, right there. And how
sometimes overly trusting individuals such as your truly tend to trip themselves up.
Nor is it just a matter of “drifting,” but of recognizing the situation for what it is;
dysfunctional, based on a dualistic thought-system incapable of questioning its own
premises sufficiently in order to stand outside of it and see it for what it is – a parody
of life and of self – the ego’s false autonomy in its war with God and our real Self.
This will do, as I added a couple of postings from the group here – written some
months ago:
I was having some good insights earlier, having got up even though I knew I was
short of sleep but as I couldn’t drift off again there was nothing for else for it. I read
another chapter on the book Immortality. It’s “reassuring” to know he writes based
on the usual premises that the brain is the seat of consciousness. All this crap about
freezing the brain – or a person, in cryogenic suspension until they can be revived at a
later date. He also seems to genuinely believe the biotechnicians will one day will
improve in their research over time enough to achieve it – immortality – for he rest
of us. Robert Anton Wilson believed much the same I think. It never fails to amaze
me how people of with such intelligence seem to refuse to take their learning any
further through material that would give them a wider perspective on it. Yes, through
the Course and Carey, but there’s other material out there, such as Barbara Marx
Hubbard, and Jean Houston, and Caroline Myss, and Peter Russell. I haven't even
mentioned Icke. The brain, as an aspect of the body, is only an epiphenomenon of the
mind. The body is in the mind; not the mind is in the body, just as Wapnick states...
But interestingly, and significantly, a later chapter discusses the possibility of life as a
dream. There’s also a section on the film Waking Life, so I look forward to that. He
even brings up PKD.
I’d like to see if I can recall any of the avenues for exploration that came up
earlier. It never pays not to take notes, and I rarely do. This is my notes. I’m
distracted by this “horror” film, Psychomania. 1970’s nonsense. There was a good
movie on police corruption before it, based on fact; The Glass Cage. The Glass
Shield, I meant to say. The former is a Wilson novel, and an automatic mistake on
my part. And I was thinking about it again recently.
But to get on… It becomes obvious again that I have a definite attitude towards
writing and its purpose, or at least that I can pinpoint it enough to try and get it into
focus. But not to make such heavy weather of it in advance – though it’s a bit late to
concern myself with that now – the fact is, it’s always been there. That I see writing
as only a means to an end, or rather, I slip into seeing it as that. I do get a certain
amount of satisfaction from writing for its own sake, as with the autobiographical
material from childhood onwards, but even then I do it with the purpose of clarifying
my perspective, as much as to get it down. And last but not least that my alter-egos
in the here and now and future get something from it rather than have to go through
the anguish and self-doubt I went through, but hey, I'm still here; there's hope for me
yet. You too.