Hi S,
It’s the 27th of November and the thermometer shows 80 degrees outside, the official record was last reported at 78 and it is a record for this day, ever, obviously, but it’s not over yet. We’re apparently going to get back down to seasonal 50’s and then another warm front within 24 hours after this front has passed which is not a big front, about one day, apparently, then we’ll get back to winds from the south again.
It’s been fairly consistent—we’ve had exactly one hard freeze and I’m really interested in the greenhouse effect and observing all of the catastrophes that are going on with a certain amount of enjoyment, actually. The more problems there are, the more people will start seeking, it’s as simple as that, and people will really, if they’re here they are really trying to seek, right? Because it’s graduation—seniority by vibration.
I remember Ra said just about nobody comes into this world without a specific plan and it may well involve a great deal of suffering—not suffering but it may well involve a great deal of loss. As a matter of fact I think it probably is guaranteed to make a great deal of loss happen in your life because you’re trying to learn and you learn best in the series of crisis situations—small and large, this is more of a life changing event than most, I’ve been told, and I no longer disbelieve it in the least because I’ve injured myself about ten times real fast and it’s not funny any more trying to exercise and I’ll be lucky if I can stay out of a wheelchair—what I’m doing is making myself go to the bathroom upstairs, that way every time I need to go to the bathroom, I’m guaranteed a walk up and down the stairs and I figure that’s seven times a day, plus getting up, plus going to bed, plus other things, and I’m just going to have to hope that is enough because I can do that without getting hurt, but I can’t sit up anymore. I either have to be moving, or lying flat or I am in a whole lot of pain as opposed to a reasonable amount of pain.
So another lesson in patience and acceptance and I’m ready. I didn’t come into this life to do anything but watch, not just watch but act, to take catalyst, to process it, to choose whether I want to have a negative response to it or a positive response to it. I’m in the business of polarized positive so I try and eventually succeed in discovering the opportunities in just about everything really.
And I think really that I came here to express love, not to receive it. I receive enormous amounts of love of course, there’s always something. With Don I had a very romantic love because he denied himself me, he was not a homosexual, he was not indifferent, he was extremely heterosexual but he chose to live in a certain way which really tested my ability to accept. It really made me finally start doing completely unorthodox thinking about what really matters in the world. What really mattered wasn’t the wedding bells, but the fact that you’d made an agreement, and that’s what I wanted to talk to you about.
I was thinking about all these seeming losses. D loved me but was not particularly passionate about me except as his youth and natural drive drove him, sometimes, but other times the fact that I was his wife prevented him almost completely from seeing any attractiveness in me whatsoever. Not because he was ever indifferent, not because…but because he had so many problems at that time that he had not worked out in his head that he was pretty much a basket case—you know how he was back then. He just flat needed a helping hand and I was really glad to be there to give it to him.
But he did leave me and I think that was also necessary because you see that was not the first time that I had loved and lost. Everybody I’ve loved I’ve lost and I think that the losses, whatever they are—loss of freedom, loss of mobility, loss of romantic love, I don’t have it with Jim. He’s broken my heart basically, if you want to be romantic about it, because he’s the only person I’ve ever known who could live with me for ten years now and never fall in love. He had an infatuation with me, but it simply didn’t last. Jim is just a real practical no-nonsense kind of guy, so I discovered a marriage based on mutual love, as in best friends, closest companions, and the work that we two make as one person. I wouldn’t be in the world if it weren’t for Jim, I don’t think. I probably would have wiped myself out one way or the other. Jim is extremely helpful and continues to be.
But at any rate it is a loss, and once again I’m looking at what I said in the transcript—I came here in order to study giving love without expectations. I think that’s basically not learning about love but learning about wisdom. I think I was too far over on loving when I came into this incarnation and not only the wisdom of another reality, not this reality—it’s all very well to be wise in the way I am, but we also have to deal with life as real, which you and I do and which both of us have had long experience with a man who simply changes reality in order to compensate for being a very idiosyncratic person—D’s not crazy at all, he’s very idiosyncratic, and I think eccentricity is typical of high IQ people.
I’m eccentric in a nicer way because of my basic nature. I think D is seriously debited on the compassion side, although he certain has passion and he’s certainly has worked out a life he can live with and I don’t have any criticism of it except that he’s not using catalyst which would become available to him if he would open himself up and trust you. He’s basically unchangeable. I never tried to change him—he’s a very fixed personality, but I could see a great deal of opportunity for him if he’s given his freedom and I kept explaining that he had his freedom, that the piece of paper didn’t matter, what I had agreed with him mattered. But he simply couldn’t break away that quickly from this really oppressive Baptist upbringing that you and he shared.
“That’s not right!” He was really firm about right and wrong. And this isn’t the place to be firm about anything. You just have to remain in a constant state of realizing that you’re a beginner in every present moment and really pay attention because this time is so precious and if you’re
suffering it’s because you’ve chosen to at some level, and I am not talking about you specifically, I’m talking about anyone, me—I’m learning from my experience, not yours.
So I just wanted you to know what I was thinking about before I plunged into this idea that I had. As you know, I can do very little in the physical, but I can think pretty well, so I felt it was important always to study every single moment but some moments hit you in the head with a two by four and as I said, if you pay attention to absolutely everything, I don’t think we’d need much to happen in our lives for a lot of catalyst to happen but what most of us do is fail to recognize that our mind is a computer and we can program it—hypnotism is just a program that you allow somebody else to make in your head and it changes the reality and you’re there.
If you had the conviction that you could do it yourself then you could do it yourself. I don’t—I am basically in a state of complete unknowing but I just choose to worship the unknown and the mysteries that have created us in such a wonderful manner and gave us such pleasure and of course this being the universe of thesis and antithesis, or opposites, within the illusion there’s always the other side to everything—upside and downside to everything.
I feel that the rest of my life is a grand opportunity and I’m starting to look at it that way—I don’t think I’ll ever be back where I was before all this occurred because my neck is permanently unstable according to the doctor, and the way I feel I’m pretty sure that he called it correctly and trusted me enough to tell me the simple truth so that I can deal with it because I think he knows by now that I do deal with things. He’s very communicative to me because he knows I’ll listen and that I’ll take this seriously because I really love this little animal that gave itself up to be my body and I really love life, whatever it hands me is fine, however big my physical world is I don’t live in much anyway, obviously, but I live there enough to get my catalyst, and that’s important.
You can’t just be an observer, I’m afraid Don proved that with his suicide and Jim is proving it by being profoundly other than who he really is—he’s put on a persona that allows him to endure life, and I think it’s really a sad choice and within the situation he has with you, if he were willing to work with you as he was only willing to work with me when I was a Jewish Mother which I don’t think you have the capacity to do and I would never suggest it.
If something was wrong I just felt it deep down at the level of communicating—anybody, if I know them well enough, can communicate to me just about any mood they have. I can’t identify them—pain, anguish, grief, anger—all of those things feel about the same unless they’re really marked. I know that something’s wrong and with that conviction I’m like a little terrier—I’ll try coaxing, I’ll try anything, because I figure if I know the person’s problem I could come up with some help—in fact, it’s what I’m the best at, though I have chosen to use my mind only in service not to use it in ambition. Just to pay attention, I think that’s what this life is all about.
So, I feel that you’re in a great position this year spiritually in terms of opportunity and in order to make a positive response to that class, this is what I would do, and I know this sounds novel, but I think that the kids you are teaching are old enough to grasp what you’re saying if you really put yourself on the line.
Life is a series of honored agreements. A person is as good as his word. No matter how much money, how much power, how much clout, how much of anything you have, really, what life revolves around is what we agree to do. And how close to 100% of the time we can come to honoring that which we agreed to do. This is the only way I know of to create ethics in a non-ethical world, that is to say, an amoral world which calls “ethics” that which is “situational ethics.”
I do not feel that those two words belong next to each other—it’s an oxymoron—a contradiction in terms. Ethics are not relative, ethics are spiritual principles that are timeless and we’re born with an instinct for them. But they do have to be reinforced or they can be overridden by the many many distortions of the mind.
What I’ve tried to do in my life is see more and more clearly and since I’ve been at it this long, I’m beginning to see a little bit past the top of people and life and be able more with compassion to view a situation and figure out the most positive response possible, and here is my suggestion:
Write up an agreement: On one side of the page let there be a line for every teenager in the class. Get each of the young men and women in the class one day and say: “this is not a class of English; this is a special class I’m giving you in ethics and in living because you young adults have grown up in a period in which often the parents did not have a feeling for lasting and serious principles, so you’ve pretty much grown up without the benefit of any system of ethics except situational ethics, that is: any means are okay to a good end. This is incorrect. It is an incorrect premise.”
You can’t build ethics on that, all you can build is going along with the world, which is what we do in this illusion. There’s no absolute in this illusion. Ethics is fine if you’ve got the money and the leisure and so forth, and you’re not important. But get yourself in a positive of power and everybody will find, I think, in this day and age, that people we are dealing with all over the world are not friendly with us, but rather regard us as interlopers which I must admit I agree with. I don’t know how to get out of it, but I agree that I can see their point of view very much.
All this stuff with Nixon, all this stuff with Reagan, involved not a misuse of ethics but an astute use of situational ethics. That is, this was a terrific means to a good end. The fact that they were involved in helping people smoke cocaine who did not smoke it yet—and I do think there is a distinction between the guy on the street who is hustling and he’s a victim himself—either of poverty or the drug itself—it’s a way to make money—and some guy who’s in a position of responsibility who chooses to do an illegal act.
I think at that the point I have to say that is a situational ethics situation—that’s worldly, that’s totally acceptable, that’s the way the world wags, but I don’t accept the reality of it, except to learn my lessons from it, and neither, students, should you, because most of what people tell you is garbage. You are what you choose to be.
Now up until today, we’ve had some problem. I would like to start again. I would like you to know who I am and what I’m about and I would like to know who you are and what you are about. I would like to help you and I have a feeling you would really appreciate that, so let me explain some things about ethics.
The first step in ethics is to open your heart to unconditional love because if you truly love your neighbor as yourself your ethics will be instinctual. There are things that you will not be able to do to people if you respect them as imperishable souls just as you respect yourself. Love your neighbor as yourself doesn’t mean just giving him bread, it begins with a vision, and this age lacks vision; lacks guidance, and I’m telling you what I think and you can think anything you want, you don’t have to believe me, but I think you’ll see the wisdom of what I’m going to propose.
Since this involves loving, I would like permission from each of you, and I will go around the room to make sure it’s all right, to simply kneel down beside you and look at you for a while and let you look at me—really look at me, look into my eyes, you can tell a lot about a person from his or her eyes, and see if you see anything there but love and a desire to help you out, and then I think I would simply go to each person and ask permission of that person as an equal to become more familiar with them.
I would spend at least 30 seconds looking, and I know you can do this because you’re a straight ahead character and you always look straight at people—look at each person and send and feel love—open your heart, even if it might get trodden on, it doesn’t matter that you might get trodden on, that’s just experience. That’s going to happen, but you can, I believe, say to people who are not comfortable looking at you and ask you not to, “okay, but let’s give it try after you’ve been in my class until Christmas, or something like that, or let’s give it until Easter and see if we can do this.”
I would then get out a paper, the agreement, and the agreement would have two sides—the students and you. I think I would put down—now I’m giving you the idiosyncratic or person version because I don’t precisely want to give you advice because I don’t want you to feel guilty if you don’t agree with me or if you are not capable of doing it. I am a rather blunt person when I need to be and everybody that knows me has, at one time or another, been misunderstood by me because I’m so straight, but that’s the name of the game, you do the best you can and if you’re wrong, you’re wrong, you correct the error and you go on.
It seems to me that if you keep positive about the thing, even if you’ve had a negative outburst and you’ve gotten catalyst and you’ve worked it through, that if people trust you enough you can get through about anything, I really think so, more so as I get older, but I’ve had more experience and I’m a tougher warrior—I’m beginning to be an old warrior.
At any rate, agreements I would put down for myself are: I agree to open my heart to you and my experience to you; I agree to answer any question that isn’t too personal for me to speak about in front of anybody but a confidante (there are things that are strictly personal), but if there’s anything in my experience that will help you or I think will help you, then I’ll do it; I will not simply teach the subject, I will respect you—you’ll have to write this shortly, but I’m giving you the version where they’re reading one sentence—I will open my heart to you insofar as I can without revealing confidences, I guess that would be the first one, and then talk about it for a while before you got them to sign it because you’ll have to explain it obviously.
I guess I would structure it this way—oh, I’d better do the students first because that’s the side that you’re having the most trouble with, because I think as a teacher you’re already doing the loving and the open heart bit and it just hasn’t worked because these kids just happen to be a crop that are more in need of teaching.
I said this to you years ago when you were thinking of going into teaching—I said remember when you’re teaching anybody at any age that you’re not just teaching the subject, you’re teaching by the way you are, and since people don’t have much guidance from their parents or somebody at church—kids have a grandmother, I’m not worried about them—but have an exposure to an absolute set of ethics, even if it is repressive, one gets the idea that one can have impossible dreams and impossible ideals and that they’re real even if they’re not apparent in this world—that’s called faith.
That’s where D got off the track—he decided that faith really wasn’t worth anything because he couldn’t prove it. Same mistake Don made—strange because they were so wise and still are, but the lack of really getting in there and giving it his best shot has really defeated him because of the fact he has not been able to get himself out of his self-imposed rigid structure and change which is painful and I don’t think he can take much pain, he’s a very sensitive person and keeps it all in. You have to kick him to get it out of him—I once had to break an egg over his head. But he discovered I was safe and that I loved him anyway that I just wanted to know what was wrong.
By the end he was happy with me under any circumstance—he thought I was a great gal, he just couldn’t stand being married, he finally saw the difference clearly after seven attempt to leave me and left.
Okay, back to the rules: I will attend class on any day I am scheduled to be in class except in case of illness that is really illness—no lies please. I want to help you, I don’t want to make you suffer. If you don’t have a clue as to what I’m talking about you need to get up and tell me. I will go over it as many times as you need. If you feel that I’m wrong about anything or if you have another opinion, I’m interested in your opinion. I will allow you up to five minutes to express your opinion—most opinions can be expressed more succinctly that would be another rule, I’m just saying the code would be one sentence, but it’s an agreement and you have to explain it. This is not the part that would be on paper, this is part that’s coming out of me talking to students being real.
See if you like the approach, if you don’t forget it. I don’t want to put you in an awkward situation by having you do something you can see is wise but it isn’t your personality.
Okay, third rule: There are no late tests except in cases of a parental note or the doctor’s note or whatever you have to get. The usual protocol for explaining sick leave. In case like that I would be inclined to give the student as much time as they needed because in my life I’ve been sick for months and then gone back to schools and been very grateful that I had some teachers who realized what I was up against and spent a little time helping me catch up.
I didn’t need to catch up on anything but Latin, that was something I hadn’t learned yet and I got an 87 for the year. I was only in school for a month or six weeks—that was a long year when I was 15.
Anyway I’m grateful that people did it for me when I was a kid and I would do it for you, but on your honor, this is an agreement and I will keep my word and you will keep your word because we can choose whether we have a positive or a negative response to a thing. If we choose to agree wholeheartedly to this agreement I will spend a year, trying, to the best of my ability to demonstrate to you that there is a better way to run society than models of ambition and greed. We can be, all of us, a community that respects each other, not for how we behave, or what we look like, or how much money or power we have, but who we are inside.
Often the wisest people are people who have been through a lot and look pretty beat up.
I will not cheat on a test. You don’t cheat on a test for the simple reason that it doesn’t do any good. You’re not here to impress me, I’m just here to help you. The grades are a way of enabling you to see how well I think you’re doing. You know my judgment—you have to say this kind of thing in an English class, you wouldn’t in a math class, where everything is not relative at all—it all has to do with numbers.
This is a class in which my opinion counts. I have the most experience, I’ve been helped in my experience by teaching before and by various theories I’ve been able to test out and discover were helpful or useless and basically made a lot of choices as a teacher. You can dislike me or like me, but what I want you to do is respect me. I doesn’t really matter how you feel about me because I love you anyway. I see all of you as people who I’ve been privileged to be helping. And what I’m doing with this day is trying to establish an honest and real relationship between “I’m a teacher and you’re a student.” That doesn’t mean I’m always right, it doesn’t mean you can’t ask me, it doesn’t mean you can’t correct me.
But when it comes to the tests, the tests are as much for you as they are for me. You’re not supposed to cram for a test—you’re supposed to dink away at it a little at a time. By doing it a little every day, you make the process as painless as possible. Learning is not easy for most people and I will go too fast for some of you so you have to ask the questions, but when it comes to the tests realize that you’re not just getting a grade, that’s not what it’s all about—you’re furnishing your mind. All the rest of your life people will unfairly, but they will, judge you as to not only your manner of dress and your manner of appearance, but how well you speak, how well you can speak for yourself and for the truth. You need to know the truth about yourself, and there’s nothing truthful about cheating except you then know you’re capable of cheating, which is no surprise to anyone—all of us are capable of just about anything in poor circumstances, but this is a really good circumstance—I’m a really nice person and I really expect you to give me some trust back—this is not a one-way street.
What you’re doing now is laying the groundwork for a more interesting life because the people that interest you, the writers that interest you, no matter what you’re reading—you could be reading love-struck romances for the rest of your life, or adventure novels, and they will still come up with the things, in history, in literature, in science, that you didn’t know before, but they will also, especially in the fiction and non-fiction biography, both which are very easy reads usually, and fun to read, you will find, no matter what level the person is on, references to this and that.
The more interesting a person is, the more he’s likely to give a reference that you need the education to know about. If someone says “you look like Venus, this morning, darling”, you have to know who Venus was considered to be in an old mythological system that we have replaced with Christianity in this country.
We worship a different God now, and I think a better one, but you will, for instance, in college be forced to read poetry. Your ability to read that poetry depends on how I do here and the ability that you have to get through college will pretty well seal your fate. If you don’t have a college degree you will not get ahead in most jobs unless you go to where you are so needed that you’re hired in desperation without any experience. Without a degree (or a trade) you won’t get a job. You need to be starting to think a little bit vocationally so that when you get to college you can use the time to enhance your gifts, not to improve your defects.
Start trying to figure out what you really like because the rest of your life will go the way you start making decisions way back. If you can look over your life and find decisions that you maybe felt were incorrect then you need to go back and heal those so that they’re finished and so that everybody has forgiven everybody (or you’ve tried) and then just stay up, day by day.
Be honest with people and be real and you can’t be real until you know who you are, and this is the place literature teaches you, not how to behave but who you really are, in a way that makes behavior come from within and not be dependent on styles or fashions, or anything but those impossible dreams that are actually real and are the glory of the human being, and that is the ability to choose to love or to fear.
Now all this year, I’ve been a little bit scared. It’s just one of those times and one of those classes where I felt more than say, last year’s class, and certainly not as much as some other classes I’ve had, that you were expressing the very difficult phase you are going through in a variety of negative ways, and though these negative ways will teach you, they won’t teach you as quickly as positive ways unless you really want to be negative. And you can be negative and still get into the framework of imperishability but it takes a long time, much longer than a positive path, so basically I am here as an advocate for evolution of the spiritual kind—that’s what we came here to do.
So, to stay real you do not cheat…[inaudible]…I will do my homework, unless I have an incredible inspiration that is so compelling I just have to do it and I can’t do my homework. I can understand that—I’ve been there—but I want you to come and tell me about it. As a matter of fact, that’s part of our agreement.
If you do not do your homework, you will stay after class and explain why, and I’ll give you as long as I have and if it’s a good excuse, falling in love, or losing a love, or some real trauma like that—if there’s something going on, just tell me about it. I don’t judge people. I’ll see if I can think of some advice to help you, but we all have our own universes and I’m just trying to help you see if there is a way to have a good life no matter what happens to you.
This is very important because you will have difficulties in your life and this gives you the strength to meet them—the ideals, the choices that you make, the more self-confidant you are, the more esteem and love you have for yourself, and the more you recognize your neighbor as part of the same spiritual essence, you will have so much more of a leg up on life than if you don’t examine that life.
Not examining your life is like not bothering to reincarnate. If you’re not going to use the life why did you come. So I’m just here trying to optimize your ability to choose wisely by showing you that this system will work.
I will not be late to class. If I am late I will stay after and explain the reason. Again, if it’s a pressing traumatic matter, I will understand. If it isn’t I will ask you to sit and listen while I cover any material that you missed, at a later time or then, depending on whether I have time. But at some point I will stay after school with you to go over the lesson until the point at which you came in the door.
And I think that all these symptoms are asking for attention. If a kid cheats on a test—if a kid is late, if a kid is staying home or truant or just wandering around all day—he’ll just have to face it later on in life, you might as well tell him the truth even if he can’t understand at that point. I think it might open a lot of kids’ eyes to realize that there are people who will keep their word no matter what; no matter how uncomfortable or how difficult it might be for you to handle the other person’s trauma at least they know that you’re there for them and almost nobody is there for anybody in this strange world of numero uno.
I’m afraid D has chosen, unwittingly, a very negatively oriented worldly path and I don’t blame him for it because he was virtually unable to function until he did that. He made the sacrifice because he thought he was right. I don’t think it has anything to do with his affection for you, I think it simply has to do with the fact that he had an enormous amount of catalyst with his mother and never worked it out, and she really traumatized him, she really got in his shit and she stayed there (I’m just talking to you, S). So it’s teaching …
[End of Side 1 of Tape.]
[some words are missing here due to Carla’s difficulty turning the tape over]…and it’s probably much better for me at this point in my life to lie back and let myself heal regardless of whether it records or not, than fuss over it. For a good five days I couldn’t even do that, I had to just sit here over the weekend and I’m still, if I do one thing too many, I get the most incredible headaches, and you know it’s nature’s way of telling me to pay attention.
Like I said, the spirit usually hits me with a two by four so I can’t really imagine how people don’t recognize when spirit is talking to them. It gets my attention—whap! But then I’m sensitive and I’ve thought for myself since I was a kid—I never took anybody’s word for anything that didn’t sound right to me. I’ve been a hippy all of my life—my first sentence was “Put me down!” That sort of expresses a love of reality because my mother didn’t love me at first—I can see that being my first sentence—I don’t like being with people that don’t love me, why bother. But unfortunately you are in a situation where you have to be tougher than that, but you see the kind of rules that I’m trying to put down.
Okay, continuing with your rules. I will give one test, a small test per week. I will take the three lowest scores and I’ll throw them out. They will count two-thirds of your grade so if you do your homework every night and get a passing grade on it, you are likely to pass the course. That takes the pressure off the final. But there is a reason for the final.
The final exam at the end of each (whatever your periods are—six weeks I believe); I’ll give you a test so that you can go over the whole subject that we’ve covered for six weeks and kind of see the sweep of events and see in a wider sense what we’ve been learning in class, and again, it’s to furnish your mind with the ability to think.
Now this isn’t easy, but you can, just like with homework, prepare for a test in small amounts. And then I think I would probably take the time—this might take two days, but it would be worth it for the rest of the year for you if you could work out this situation. I guess I’d probably use a lot of chalk, because it’s hard to get concepts the first time—they have to see it several times, or you could just copy down what you write on the board with it not making any particular sense and when you talk about it, they keep notes on each thing and their own opinions and so forth, then they’ll basically have a guide for the rest of the year as far as what the limits are, what the agreement really is and what the class is all about—the class is about living, not about English.
Anything you learn is secondary to the fact of what you make of it, what you’ve thought about it, what you’ve learned from it, because we’re here to pay attention
Okay, open your heart; explain carefully and absolutely about the grading system and that would be my grading system, I thought Don had the fairest grading system in the world and I think that was it. The homework counted one-third, and the weekly tests where you only had to remember what you’d learned that week, made it small enough so that it wasn’t that big a sweat to study for, so if you did your homework and were a plodder, you had a good shot at passing the class and I really liked that system and I pass it on to you as a legacy from Don. He always dropped the bottom three scores, because everybody has a bad day, but that was it.
If you didn’t come and take the test and there wasn’t an adequate excuse, you got a zero. You were responsible for your actions, but the terms were relatively gentle, yet I could live with them absolutely, because of the fact that I’ve discovered in life that people do get pushed beyond their limits and there’s nothing you can do about it so you might as well have compassion for everybody because we’re one of them—we’re all bozos—and we’re learning our stuff and they’re learning their stuff—we’re just all helping each other and if we can get that across to students—when I was a librarian I sort of did this—explained at the beginning of the school year what I requested people to do in the library.
What I would do is go over and ask a real troublemaker to—I explained perfectly straight-faced that there was trouble in some of the students studying and some of the students really wishing that they weren’t there and I certainly understood it, but some of the students did want to study and it was not acceptable to cause them to be unable to study no matter how much fun it was, it needed to be put off unless you were capable of writing notes and being silent in which case I probably wouldn’t notice what you were doing and you wouldn’t be bothering anybody.
I’m not insisting that you study—I’m just asking you to be quiet. I’m talking about no whispers, nothing, if you want to write notes—fine, that way the people that want to study, can study—that’s the way I handled it as a librarian. Then, if I had trouble with one of the rebels, I would go up and say, very sweetly, “there seems to be this situation, I wonder if you could be my agent because this table is definitely the noisiest—would you mind helping the other people at this table in honoring the agreement that we made at the beginning of the school year?”
Because you know on the first day of school people will agree to almost anything that sounds like it will make life easier—if you don’t have to study, if you can just flake off as long you don’t make any noise then the kids have a chance to communicate by note which was actually teaching them how to communicate so that’s perfectly acceptable to me—in terms of what I’ve learned it’s really useful, that’s the most important thing that anybody can ever have.
Then the best learning time is probably the last two years of high school and college because you’re beginning to care about something at that point and so you have more at stake so you pay more attention.
Back to rules for you. Anyone that has anything to say may say it, but I am the teacher and you are the student. I have had much more experience than you because I am an old broad—I’m going to be forty one of these days—that was just for your benefit—I’m going to be fifty and let’s face it, I’m on the other side of the power curve. My body isn’t up to factory specs but my mind works better than it did when I was a kid because I’ve had more experience in which to feed my computer and think about things and come to some grasp of the actual situation we’re in here. D looked at the same situation that I did—we sprang from the same seed, we’ve been inspired by the same spiritual aids—the meditation group, but he simply chose to put it behind him because had, in order to follow his own very austere ethic, he had to get married, he had to produce children, because that was about all he could do toward solving this mystery—that was his thinking.
Now, of course, the mystery can’t be solved, so the guy’s on the wrong track. He thinks it can be solved although he’s living a positive ethic, he’s living it in a negative way, and he has the choice to live it in the positive way. He doesn’t have to have faith to start looking for it, he doesn’t have to believe doctrines or dogmas, that was the Baptist distortion but it was so bad for him that I think he’s basically allergic at this point to any kind of—he just looks at it as high-falutin’ nonsense and that’s what it is to him and it will be that way until he stops being so cold with himself. He’s the hardest person on himself that I’ve ever seen, and it’s not done him much good as far as I can tell. He’s joyful sometimes but he’s in sorrow too.
Back to the rules: What other things do I think it’s important for you to promise? You may wear anything you want to wear as long as you’re not naked or uncovered in some private area. You may wear your hair any way you like—you may wear whatever jewelry or makeup you like, men and woman, I will not judge you. Be what you want to be in this class and I will accept you as you and help you as much as I can.
Let’s see—what else do kids need to know that you’ll promise. If you’re having trouble before a test and I haven’t spotted it and you come to me and say I need help, I will find the time to tutor you, especially if you can get over to my house on the weekend.
In other words, what I’m saying is you have an impossible task with J—he is a fixed personality and so are you, I believe, I’m not sure. You don’t seem to be nearly as fixed as him, maybe you can change easier than he can. I know you are a very authentic person and may not be capable of that much alteration because you’re already giving it all you’ve got—I don’t know if this is some thing you can do or not—this is just a stab at telling you what I would do, maybe you can derive something from this that can help you.
What else do I think is important for a teacher? I will not punish you for being mad momentarily—we all go through those periods—I will accept what you give me whatever it is and you agree to accept me, that way we can cooperate and trust each other—just in this class, a little slice of another reality, because I don’t like dealing with kids that are real confused and ignoring the fact that they are confused and that they really haven’t been given any encouragement at all about who they are and no matter how sophomoric that sounds, how naïve, how sweet, it isn’t sweet because if you live a life of faith and love and trust and service you’ll be hurt again and again by this world.
Now this world is temporary and you are permanent so it’s a matter of patience, endurance, stamina and faith. If you have faith, nothing can happen to you that is so bad that you can’t muddle through because you simply have faith when things are too much for you, that they won’t always be too much for you.
So that even if you’re in extreme pain one way or another, all you need to do is accept that—it is part of life, pay attention to it, honor it, don’t push it, don’t do anything you’re not ready to do—really appreciate yourself and esteem yourself and realize you’re going to have trauma. We live and we die—not at the same time—people die all around us, more so as we get older, so life is life, and at this point in your lives I imagine you feel pretty much eternal, but you know you’re not and at some point your body is going to tell you you’re not, so it’s a lot better to be working on what’s in this world that can be of help to your eternal spirit, than to work on the greed and the ambition that drive many people with the numero uno attitude.
In a life of faith, power is replaced by charity. You don’t simply bear with people, you actively express in your mind the affirmation that that person who is aggravating you is merely giving you catalyst and what you need to be concerned about in the moment is not your reaction to the catalyst which you may have, this can be put aside and expressed by yourself in a better time, when somebody else is going through it, you need to be able to take anger, all those elements that come with change, and life lived with ethics is a life of a great deal of loss, because there are changes and change hurt.
Since you know about computers and they know about computers I think you would be better than I at explaining how their brains work, that they are computers, that they have an infinite ability to work and that IQ is not a measure of intelligence precisely, it is a measure of how quickly the computer runs. Given the length of time necessary, anybody with a minimum IQ, a normal IQ of 100, can make a great anything of himself if he will be patient.
So if you’re slow, don’t feel that that means that you’re dumb, it means your computer runs at a slower speed—it’s just as capable as the smartest kid in the class—it’s just slower. You know, some people move real fast, some people move more slowly, we all have our gifts, some people have the gift of high intelligence, some people have the gift of normal, most people are in the normal range, which means they aren’t really smart; they aren’t really stupid, they’re perfectly able to reason, but they will take longer to do it.
So if you do not finish a test, and you need more time, you come up and tell me before the end of the class that you are going to need more time—or at the end of the class—it doesn’t matter which. Give me your test paper and I am prepare to give you the rest of the test—as long as you need, after school today. Now this would entail your being there longer and working even harder, but I think the more you give, the more you get. And if you gave the precious incredible gift of your love and your presence then you are a wise one.
I don’t know if you are fifth density or sixth density, I haven’t copped to that yet, you do seem very very wise to me and I think it likely that our connection was made in fifth density because I remember you in hypnotic regression as being a very spiritualized person that spent an awful lot of time alone, learning from teachers, rather than working with people, so this is probably just the incarnation that you called to yourself—you’re very very wise, and you have great passion and dedication, but I think maybe the lesson here is compassion, forgiveness, forgiveness of yourself for your limitations, forgiveness of them for theirs, and establishment of good, clear, honest, “I can live with that” rule and then ruthlessly enforcing it, because you really can’t be swayed from an agreement like you can if you haven’t made one.
In this day and age, you really need to explain how your mind works, because you see you’ve got that great gift to give, more important than any English assignment in the world, and I believe it will make the rest of your year a more joyous one and it will help the kids see what the actual purpose of teaching is, because you will definitely be teaching these kids something that they’ve not heard about before, or if they’ve heard about it, they’ve not had someone with the gift of communication that you have.
Lean on your gift, lean on your strength and give yourself a break and don’t stress yourself. What I’m seeing here is you’re stressing yourself because you’re shy, and you do not wish to reveal yourself, because it hurts when you reveal yourself. I understand that completely because as a matter of fact, I have another friend who is far along that road—much farther than you, actually—she doesn’t speak. She doesn’t communicate—ever. She’s always talking about things that happened and the way she feels about them, but she doesn’t get real, and so in a stream of consciousness way, what she’s thinking makes you realize she was brought up very rigidly by a mother that was a teacher all her life and expected her to be the best of everything, so she was never able to please her even when she fulfilled various of her mother’s dreams by marrying well and being Miss Kentucky and doing all the right things. The mother has absolutely never been thrilled with anything—she’s the most critical person I know except my own mother and maybe it’s the relationship that’s at fault, rather than the person. Mothers just seem to be hard.
I realize that it would change you to do this and I realize you maybe can’t do this—maybe not this year, but at some point I think you’ll begin to see what I have seen of life because I think it really rings a personal truth—you may describe it differently, you may have different agreements that you would need to make because of your specific personality, but I think if you can even begin to confront the problem you can do your best to solve it
Everybody knows there is a problem, but nobody knows what to do about it. Everyone that’s the age that you are teaching is totally caught up in their changing bodies, and most of them are just muddling through and I think we’re here to help that process and we here also to learn more intensely, because we’ve already learned them once and passed that test, and this is graduate work, right?. But it’s work just the same—it’s graduate work relative to this density, it’s not graduate work relative to our own. If we hadn’t thought that it would polarize us towards positive we wouldn’t have wanted it.
We really didn’t come here to do anything but serve and how to serve has always been my question and I think in terms of you and the kids at school, I think they are old enough for you to be able to do some serious teaching and be prepared to answer a lot of questions and stupid questions and a lot of adjustments, because it’s so foreign to people to have somebody be real with them—to sit down and tell them who they are and let them look into your eyes and see your soul, as well. Few teachers make that kind of sensitive effort to the kids, few show that kind of love, and I think what kids need to feel at that age more than anything is that someone accepts them unconditionally, because as I recall in high school, no one accepted me unconditionally, no one—not teachers, not students, not anybody.
Those were really hard years and I think I would have appreciated a teacher who would have given me personal rules between me and them—that would have helped a lot. Now I followed the rules one-sidedly because I was already thinking ethically but not many people have that head start on life—I think what differentiates me from D was he had a spoiled childhood and I had a traumatic and difficult one and I just gained a lot of maturity.
Somebody who has to help her mother at the age of three or so, with a miscarriage and she’s the only one in the house so I toddled over to the telephone and punched the numbers she told me and got the doctor and I was able to explain in my little voice that my mother had had a miscarriage and that she needed an ambulance and she needed help—I got all the right people going—then I helped her get to a more comfortable position on the couch and I remember her telling me about this, I don’t remember doing it. Apparently it wasn’t that impressive to me at the time. I remember the event—I remember she bled and she fell down the stairs, but I don’t remember helping her.
So I was in a really intensive training program and I imagine so were you and the difference between D and I is how we chose to go at life. I chose to go at life like a good sport, hoping for the best. I chose the positive path, and so did D, but he just couldn’t make it work. I have a much more common sense approach to life than he does. I know it’s my responsibility to keep my family warm and fed and I know it’s equally his. If the agreement between two people is that one will work and one won’t and that’s the way it is, and if two people agree to change that agreement as you and D did and you go to work, then that’s fine too. Of course, you’re responsible to keep the kids clean and have clothes to put on and have food in their tummy and warmth, that’s basic. But it doesn’t have to be on a grand scale. I don’t think you care one bit whether you’re living in the grand house you’re living in or whether you’re living in a two room shack. You’d probably make it just as nice. You probably wouldn’t notice much—I never did.
I never minded the circumstances—I never yearned for a big house and all that stuff—other than clothes I don’t really have addictions like that to getting ahead. I don’t have any ambition. I think when you release ambition you also release fear and once you’re not afraid, once you’re not armored, once you’re completely naked and vulnerable it’s quite obvious that you’re a very strong person, because you can do that. It’s the hardest thing you can do in the world is reveal yourself to another person but it shouldn’t be hard.
That’s always been my thought, so I’ve always been, because of my own very idiosyncratic development as absolutely honest with those I can be with those who are intimate with me—my mother, my husband, if I’d had children—it’s the approach I took in the kindergarten class so I don’t think there is an age beyond which you can’t teach kids, but I think that they are learning more attentively and intensively because of the catalyst when they are in this period and because they haven’t had any guidance as to the different between the illusion and the situational ethics and everything being relative, and the reality—the unknowable reality, which to me is acceptable.
I don’t have to know, for sure, I don’t have to have proof. As far as I’m concerned one look at the things that I enjoy most will tell me that God is most kind and I believe it is true that we’re not given anything that is not true, it’s just that we have to try as hard as we can. And, this is no criticisms but I think that you are a little overbalanced on wisdom because—I’m looking at your letter—you have had to learn how to have compassion for a man that won’t reveal himself to you.
I’d get in the middle here but it’s not my business between you guys. I don’t tell you what D said unless I feel it wasn’t said in confidence and I don’t tell D what you’ve said unless I feel that it was not said in confidence. Both of you can trust me, and actually, both of you know that. But the reason that you know that is because you’ve lived with me awhile and as I recall it only took one disagreement for you to learn about me and that was that you could trust me—that you had a really deep misunderstanding with me on some point or another—I don’t think you thought I was being fair enough with Don, which would be typical given your wise nature. Because Don did not err in wisdom, he erred in committing himself to cherishing and loving in every way that he could and valuing and learning from the person he chose to spend his life with.
I think it’s a choice, I really do. I think if you’re with somebody that is honorable I think you can learn to love the person and learn to respect that person for him or herself. If the person can’t be trusted, there is very little chance in developing a deep relationship especially with someone as vulnerable and sensitive as you are. Somehow I think that you got more out of fifth density than you did out of fourth and you’re sitting in sixth density probably trying to balance yourself toward compassion, because you may make a fool out of yourself, because what is compassion but a fool’s thing to do—it doesn’t make any sense in this world.
In D’s system of ethics, agreements are the only ethics and freewill—his own freewill, of course, must remain untampered with. And because of his terrible relationship with his mother—well, it was a very loving relationship but it was very distorted and crazy on both sides but I count that the mother’s fault—she was older than he was—but she smothered him and she smothers everybody—she’s got love but not a whole lot of wisdom.
D saw that and I think his reaction again the Baptist stuff and the pain of our divorce, he didn’t see that the meditation had done him any good in his life. I think he made the decision that was his to make—to live an extremely lonely life and do what he thought was right. That is a lesson that takes a lifetime and he’s cheered himself as well as he can, but he’s basically armored himself against just about anybody. The only person that ever broke through that guy’s shell to see the very dear person on a consistent basis, in his whole life, at least that was a woman, was me, and the reason that he met me is my IQ.
I’m sure I’ve told you this before, but it’s important in understanding—this not being able to deal with him—I think you’re dealing with him to the absolute very best of your ability and I really respect and admire you for hanging in there. I would have to call on a great deal of wisdom if I were unable to get D to talk to me. I could always get him to talk to me—he’s actually a real pussycat when he realizes that you are honorable and that you do keep your agreements and so forth, and really, in any situation try to analyze it in terms of what he thinks your agreement is and sit down with it and clarify the agreement. Say, okay, in this situation, here’s the principle I’m working with. In order for us to do this thing together, we have to solve it together—here’s my input and I want to hear yours. Just open yourself to him—he is trustable—he will tell you …
[Tape ends.]