Professional Documents
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Chapter 10
Chapter 10
The Hinge of
Memory and Possibility
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from the work in which we are engaged, but we also wish to retain the
memory that we have inadvertently unearthed. The Life History Log
serves as the section where we can record the memory briefly, while
being free to continue with the exercise in which we are working. At a
later time, we can return to it and enlarge our description of that past
experience, reentering It and extending it in further feedback exercises.
This is part of the active interplay of our Journal contents by
which we multiply and cross-fertilize the various aspects of our lives. It
is a dynamic factor in the Journal Feedback process that becomes much
more visible at a later stage of our Journal work when its cumulative
effects change our perception of our lives in unexpected ways. At this
point, however, as we are engaged in the basic exercise of
TimeStretching and are gathering the essential data of our life
experience, our use of the Life History Log is more elementary. Here
we use it for the particular task of recalling and collecting memories of
events and relationships and circumstances as they occurred in the
Steppingstone Periods.
All these happenings of our life, which were experienced by us
subjectively when they took place, we report as objectively as we can
without judgment or editorial comment, We simply record them and
gather them together here in the Life History Log, letting the pieces fit
themselves together as we make the varieties of entries of our memories
through the continuity of our Journal work. It is thus that our past
progressively reconstructs and draws itself into focus in relation to the
present moment. The Life History Log plays an important fact-
gathering role in this.
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very midst of the movement of our lives. With it, we place ourselves
back in those experiences that brought us to a point of transition, to an
intersection in our lives, where a change of some kind became
inevitable.
Some of those changes took place because of decisions which we
ourselves made. Others took place because of decisions that were made
by others, or that were forced upon us by the impersonal circumstances
of life. However they occurred, they were particular experiences which
determined the direction and shaped the contents of our lives from that
point onwards. Their effects were felt throughout that unit of Life/
Time, the period which began at that crossroad and continued at least
until we came to a further point of intersection. Now we reenter those
moments of crossroad, not to judge them by hindsight but to reconnect
ourselves with the inner movement of our lives and thus to give
ourselves access to the possibilities which they contain for our future.
Underlying the exercises of this section is the image of the road.
Our individual life is like a road that passes through many
environments. As conditions change, it varies its style of movement. It
takes detours. When necessary, it moves very slowly and cautiously on
a broken roadbed. It shifts its direction or moves in circular paths in
order to avoid mountains and other obstacles. Through all its changes,
however, the road remains itself; so does our life maintain its identity
by sustaining the inner continuity of its movement despite all the
variations and cycles through which it must pass.
Working in the dimension of Life/Time, especially as we use the
Steppingstones, we place ourselves back on the road of our life so that
we can develop an inner perspective of its movement. Retracing our
Steppingstones has the effect of marking off the lines of continuity in
our development. We can see where we are, and we can follow the
succession of events by which we came to the present situation of our
life. We also recognize the points along the road of our life where we
came to intersections, and where we had to choose which road to
follow. Very often, at those moments of choice the signposts were
unclear. The
information available to us was very limited, and we had no way of
knowing what sort of terrain lay further along the road we would
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choose. Very often, also, we had to make our decisions in the midst of
the pressures of events, while travelling at full speed and without an
opportunity to stop and study the alternate possibilities. Of necessity,
then, we have all made many blind choices at the intersections of our
life.
As we pause now to consider our life in retrospect,we recognize
that the choices we made at those intersections left many potentialities
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the dream and return to that time in the past to explore the possibilities
and the implications of the events that took place then. When we place
ourselves back in the period to which the dream is recalling us, we
often find that a decision was made at that time, knowingly or not, in
which we chose one path and left another untaken, Some aspect of that
unlived experience may now be relevant for our consideration, and the
dream is calling our attention to that possibility. If it does this in an
ambiguous way that is easily misunderstood, that. is only because the
dreaming process has no other means of speaking than by indirect and
symbolic allusions. Though we may not be able to recognize
immediately what dreams are trying to say to us, we can at least follow
in the direction that they are pointing. When we go back to the earlier
times that these dreams are indicating to us, we often find an
intersection with an unlived possibility that is relevant to explore at the
present time in our life. Doing this is facilitated by the interplay
exercises of Jounal Feedback, as we shall see at a later point in our
Journal work.
Similar to dreams, the experiences we have in Twilight Imaging
often draw us back in their symbolic style to crossroads in our life
history where significant decisions were made. In this way also, the
nonconscious cognition that is inherent in the depth of us directs us to
areas of our life where our conscious minds would not ordinarily think
to go. When we have become sensitive to these deeper-than-conscious
directives and can follow them with an open, nonjudgmental attitude,
we find that we have given ourselves access to an important additional
source of knowledge for the conduct of our life.
The principle that underlies the Intersections section of the Journal
is that we are simulating the time-guidance which our dreams and
Twilight Imagery seek to give us as expressions of our own deep
psychic nature. We are stimulating the movement of these depth
processes and providing exercises by which an equivalent intuitive
cognition can become available to us through our Journal work whether
or not we. remember our dreams. Just as dreams and Twilight Imaging
take us back down the time track of our life history, so also do the time-
stretching exercises. They make it possible for us to explore afresh the
decisions and choices we made in the past so that we can recoup the
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For many possible reasons, the road that could not be taken
earlier in our life may now be taken, both more appropriately and more
successfully. It may be that the original project will now be in a greatly
altered form as it will have moved to another phase of its development.
It may have ripened from within, or it may have changed in order to
respond to the needs of the environment. In any case it is clear to us
that the roads not taken at an earlier time in our life are not necessarily
dead ends. We see in them the first tangible expressions of the deep
stirrings and potentialities of our personal nature. Rather than bury and
forget them, we wish to open them to the light of fresh experience.
We do this by exploring equally without judgment and without
self-recrimination decisions made by ourselves and made for us by
others, choices made and left unmade, roads taken and not taken. We
wish to reenter our experiences of the past so that we can reacquaint
ourselves with the potentialities that have stirred within us in earlier
days but have not yet been able to reach their full expression. By going
back to the various intersections of our life and treating them as new
starting points, especially by following the roads not taken so that they
can indicate the destinations that are possible fot us,we draw from our
life history those seeds that have not grown in our past but can grow
very meaningfully in our future.
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