Tuesday, February 21, 2023

On this day in 1977: Letter to Grayce, from Springfield Massachusetts to Rochester New York

 
Context:  Grayce was a philosophy major in college.  Hence the regular visits to the Twilight Zone in many of our letters.  We become friends in tjhe fall of 1973 during our year at the Graduate School of Library and Information Studies (GSLIS) at the University of Pittsburgh.

We've been out of touch since the early 1980s.



Dear Grayce, 

Odd that I didn't comment about that strange individual you met in Pittsburgh.   If I don't have your latest letter at hand, I am more than likely to go my own way and ignore any questions you've asked. But something like what you described is unforgettable. Not having met the person myself, I'm not sure how to react.  (But I won't let that deter me). 

When I first meet someone, I immediately pick up a subconsciously transmitted feeling. Superficially, it may sound like passing judgment after a first impression, but the observation is subtler and deeper than that. Let's say I had been with you during this encounter or had met this person on my own, I would have experienced an immediate sensation telling me "this guy is really nuts" or "wow, he's really gone beyond acceptable boundaries." This subconscious exchange is so intangible I find it extremely difficult to explain how or why it happens. I'm not even sure if I know myself. What I do know is that it is similar to occasional prescient feelings I experience. 

I'm sure I mentioned to you how before my arrest in Montana, I was overwhelmed by a great foreboding. Connie, her sister, and I had gone out to a bar overlooking Lake Union in Seattle. While we were conversing, I verbalized a feeling that had been pestering me for the past few days. I told them that there seemed to be a barrier between myself and my eventual arrival back East. On the following afternoon, I called my parents and learned of what had been brewing for me back in Deer Lodge. 

Here's another example

On New Year's Eve of 1974 (Montana, again), I had a vision (not a dream -- I was awake while this flashed through my brain) of my youngest brother being in a very serious car accident. At the time, I disregarded it as an overactive imagination, despite the fact that I knew my parents were having enormous discipline problems with Dale.  Four months later, he was involved as the driver in an accident where his best friend was killed. The earlier vision had strongly suggested the presence of death, only then the fatality appeared to be Dale's. 

On a more innocuous note, a couple Mondays ago I had planned to use my lunch break to walk downtown and just poke around. As I started to walk out the building, an irresistible force pushed me in the direction of my car. I concluded that if I did return home, I would find my eagerly-awaited income tax refund check in my mailbox. That was indeed the case. 

It would be a challenge to attempt to harness this type of energy, but I am yet unsure how to go about it. If I would begin a program of mental yoga exercises (a point on which I have been procrastinating since last summer), I feel that some answers would gradually begin to appear. It seems both ideal and logical to develop a program of physical and mental discipline and enrichment, but I have yet to follow through with my desires in attaining this goal. The idea of uncultivated knowledge entering into the spiritual body and the spirit leaving the body completely seem to me very compatible ones. Perhaps the idea of extrasensory perception is related to the spirit actually leaving the body in a search for higher truths, but because of our unsophisticated or disbelieving (or even questioning) state, we remain ignorant of such spiritual activity. What we do glean are occasional snatches of new knowledge or odd sensations that merely puzzle us. I do think that it must be possible for the spirit to leave the body before death, although the total being would have to be one in complete harmony. As for entering into the body of another person, do you think it is possible for a person to continue living even though his spirit has abandoned his body? The cliched empty shell of an existence. To me it would seem logical that if a person discovered this loss, he would turn to suicide as the only intelligent alternative. In that way, suicide would be an act of unquestionable justification. Now all I need to do is attempt to convince "the masses" of the rationality of my arguments and discover how quickly one can be locked away as a hopeless, raving lunatic. 

Having experienced the drug-induced expansions of consciousness, I want to add to this foundation natural building blocks of further mind-expansion so that the results will be orderly and clearly perceivable. In this way, I will be able to pass on this new knowledge to others, not in a guru-school type approach, but as an individual to individual basis, much like we have been doing. After all, you were the one who directed me into the practice of yoga, which in itself has been a gratifying consciousness-expanding experience for me. 

The approach to learning as individuals is related to the subconscious exchange that occurs during an initial encounter with someone. It is the power of individuals which must be harnessed before any coherent group activity may begin. Our cities are dying for the reasons (among other, of course) that individuality is being debilitated, the essential building block are crumbling. If I weren't so cynical, I'd probably work more diligently to bring across my philosophy of life to more people. 

With everyone I meet though, I subtly and persistently probe for a responsive chord. Just by making people think about what they put into their bodies, as I have done at work, is enough satisfaction to keep me working for the larger victories. 

Backtracking to the point of the spirit entering another body, I seem to have slipped into the suicide aspect of it and ignored other possibilities. (This type of discussion can become so off-the-wall as to be exhilarating.) What about split and multiple personalities? Do you think that if we learned the secrets of spiritual travelling, we would be able to play a role in these phenomena ourselves. Such spiritual activity goes against the grain of what I am advocating. It seems too destructive for where I would consider a harmonious development. 

As you can gather, this is still a topic of confusion for me. Presently, I am at the stage of free association. There is no structure to my thought here. What I need to examine is the necessity for one's spirit entering another's body. Perhaps it involves the exhilaration of discovering a different level of consciousness from a different perspective of experience. Mind-boggling to say the least. Someday our progress toward enlightenment may lead us to the answers we seek.


As for real life, not too much new has been happening lately. Been continuing with my reading and writing projects. Have one more book to read and outline in Daniel Boorstin's The Americans trilogy in order to complete the major project of the past year.  If you ever feel the urge to freshen up on your American history, I strongly recommend this series. It is an incredibly knowledgeable, fascinating, and readable work of historical scholarship. One of the best I have encountered. 


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