Navigating Towards Acceptance of and Coping with the Unacceptable in the Mediumverse
Together with thoughts on time, the dual nature of humans as material and spirit, and reincarnation
“The world was so big and I was so small
Your voice was always the loudest of all” — the refrain in The Backyard by Miracle Legion
While in my active meditative state of hypnagogic or hypnopompic thoughts in the wee hours of the morning last night, that lyric kept playing in my mind.
Along with thoughts about the disharmonic disruptions reverberating through the collective consciousness in the Mediumverse; and how should I react.
To write or not to write, to flee or not to flee, how to with authenticity and integrity mine own self be true — these are some of the questions actors recited in my mind’s Bardyard. Is Substack calling thee as I have resisted for months on end with images of 1) Leonard Tillerman announcing he’s starting to till soil there as he steers his ship through the oceans of content creation, to which I responded:
I’ve resisted the push to go there this far, and, I’m never going. Their model is great for writers/content creators. That’s not how I see myself. I see myself as a thinker and a feeler who shares by writing. I can’t wrap my brain around the concept of competing for individual paid subscribers. Plus, I don’t have the bandwidth to be on multiple platforms. That’s me. No dispersion cast on anyone else. At one point the people pushing Substack almost had me on board as posting only free content as an adjunct to my Medium paywall, but then they said the great and Almighty Substack Distribution Algorithm that they tout is actually only better to people who go paid. Too much doublespeak for me.
and 2) Saint Nancy telling me she’d have left Medium on principle long ago if it weren’t for the people, the friends, like me, she’s received here, which was so nice to hear.
The lamb known as Scott (and the rest of the corporate lemmings) is acting like one marching ignorantly to the slaughter, as displayed by inane responses to material questions and concerns from writers.
To my friend Mehmet’s post about the crisis, Unexpected Earnings Drop Concerns Writers: A Call for Patience and Understanding, by referring to his blogpost, Lamb’s reply resembled Trump blaming cat-eating immigrants for all that’s wrong in America when he should be looking in the mirror, but then again, while narcissists do admire their reflection, vampires have none. I took him to task.
Your answer and your blog have nothing to do with the price of tea in China. What you raise is important, but like a good politician, doesn’t address the question posed to you. Here’s the ticket I opened about 24 hours ago with no response, which I hope is because you are all acutely aware of the magnitude of the calculation system being broken and that the engineers are working overtime to plug the hole that allowed the attack and to repair the damage:
“My stats and earnings for January 7th and January 8th are out of whack across several stories. For my story [link], for those two days I have 21 member views, 14 member reads, 13 member clappers, 13 member highlighters, 14 member responders, and calculated earnings of $0.00.In [link], for those 2 days I have 5 member views, 2 member reads, and those readers engaged, but $0.00 earned.
[three more examples omitted to shorten the pull quote]
January 9th saw 2 cents earned for 10 reads with other engagement. I don’t know whether to hold off on publishing until it’s fixed or to trust that reasonable retro comp will be paid, which it wasn’t when y’all compensated for the fraud back whenever that was. You gave me $5 when I demonstrated you should have given me $70, saying the comp was not appealable.”
He has not replied.
To writing Regina Roz’s pointed question she offered as a response to his failed PR offering (the blogpost), which response has 6100 claps so far from 394 other stakeholders, he insulted our intelligence with irrelevance and platitudes in this non-responsive response. I replied to that with a less is more, “🤦🏻♂️.” Perhaps I should have said, “Whatever,” as someone told me not long ago about this meme: “There’s a little fuck you in every whatever.”
What Scott should have said, and what should have been posted on the support site before everyone got their panties in a bunch, is simply that they are aware of the issues writers are experiencing, which resulted directly or indirectly from fraudulent actions about which they cannot and should not provide details. They are working to rectify them and recalculate compensation. Please open support tickets and be patient.
That’s enough context for
To write or not to write, to flee or not to flee, how to mine own self be true
The world was so big and I was so small
Your voice was always the loudest of all
I’ve loved that song since I first heard it in 1984 and still have the vinyl EP (not with me here — housed with my other over 200 at Liz’s and the kids in a pile next to the bookshelf in the marital home where I had them dropped when I made my thought-would-be-temporary-healing-flight from NYC over four years ago).
And spinning on the turntable in hypnagogia, which I’ve loved since I first heard it in 1990 (the synchronicity 30 years in the making), was Put the Message in the Box by World Party, may Karl Wallinger rest in peace, or be pleased from the non-physical realm in which his soul now resides to see how often I refer to it as my Medium raison d’etre:
“And if you listen now
You might hear a new sound coming in
As an old one disappears
See the world in just one grain of sand
…
Put the message in the box
Put the box into the car
Drive the car around the world
Until you get heard
Now is the moment, please understand
The road is wide open to the heart of every man”
All that together with thoughts of being patient and not reactionary, I decided, at least for now, to write and not paywall. This way I can share my thoughts and feelings without the frustration and upset of seeing engagement not monetarily rewarded.
Now for some of that sharing. My readers may recall that I recently decided to put poetry aside and focus on essays. I had a few percolating in my mind when the shit hit the fan a few days ago. I’d like to end this post with some of the thoughts I wanted to “put out there” for your consideration. What follows probably does not count as an essay — more a collection of related thoughts of mine and others — dots through which I draw intersecting or tangential lines and planes — for your consideration.
My friend Rip Parker often posts contemplations as he grapples with thoughts of being closer to death than he’s felt before. I felt relieved to read in his latest, THE INTERFACE BETWEEN LIFE AND DEATH, that the hip injury does not seem to have precipitated a trip over the rainbow bridge. Yet, Rip writes he continues “To prepare for the inevitable death of the body, and at once seek life to the fullest is where I am. This is an amazing, informative challenge, to do both simultaneously.”
A couple of days earlier, Rip posted EVERYTHING, EVERYWHERE, NOW, in which he writes several interesting thoughts worthy of response or further development. Regarding time, Rip writes:
In truth, there is no past or future. Everything happens now. We are not mentally calibrated to fully comprehend that reality. This reality overwhelms our sense of causation, reason and logic. If it is true that there is no linear time with past and future but only the eternal now, it seems that we live in an impossible, even if real universe. Incomprehensible.
That is the simplest and likely accurate enough explanation for this life as Greg being Marcus’s 17,046th incarnation. More than a few, including one who speaks with the dead (Kat Medium), have scoffed at me publishing that number which they see as physically/scientifically impossible within the time frame of human existence as a species, and called me derogatorily a flag-waving member of the woo-woo brigade for my similar explanation of how my soul has experienced that number of lives, which seems large but is merely average:
I believe that souls are time travelers in that we can choose to improv-script our masterclasses at any point in time. I do not believe an already-lived life has to have taken place in the past nor that a yet-to-be-lived life has to take place in the future. I do not believe that the paradoxes of timeline crossing as discussed in science fiction present an issue. Each chosen setting is an alternate reality.
Next, as Rip wrote, “This subject brings us to the interface between two realities, material in which we now live, and a proposed spiritual reality. Both are real, but quite different. Material reality, which is the entirety of our universe, is temporary and limited. … If what I’ve said has a hint of truth in it, our question becomes, how do we integrate these two starkly different perceptions of reality into a functional unit that enhances our experience in this life?”
I responded, “Maybe ambivalence without cognitive dissonance is the key. Acceptance of simultaneous truths without integration. Kind of like my statement that we are not just humans having spiritual experiences nor are we just souls having human experiences, rather, we are simultaneously and inseparably both and the goals and wants of each may not be reconcilable.”
In many previous essays, describing an event in early May 2020, less than two months after Lindsey passed, I’ve written of integration thusly:
Still reeling from Lindsey’s death, my life often felt chaotic. Yet when I believed Marcus to be in control, I felt calm and philosophical. I literally felt like Marcus and Greg were entirely separate entities sharing this vessel. My guides had said to me that in order to move forward, in order to integrate, I had to become comfortable giving up control. In hindsight, I think they just meant to stop acting like I knew best. However, at the time, I thought I had to allow my identity, my ego, to fade into the background and let Marcus take over.
…During one [channeling] session [with Anne and my guides], Lindsey’s soul (Sitara), whom we had spoken to separately many times, sensing that I needed a dose of stability, beamed into our conference and had a private conversation with my lead guide, Rama, asking for permission to join our session.
Rama granted permission. At that moment, calmness enveloped me. Not only from Sitara’s presence but also because I experienced for the first time the feeling of Marcus and Greg occupying my conscious mind simultaneously, and we said to Rama:
“Integration is supposed to be a state of seamless interdependence — Greg cannot nor should lose himself to us — we should exist in harmonious symbiosis — we should each be aware of the other and of our separate completeness — the only thought that existed of this before we just wrote it was one word — interdependence.”
I’ll close with this exchange between Rip and me that immediately followed my “ambivalence without cognitive dissonance…” response:
Rip: “All is One.”
Me: “Yes, and not.”
Rip: “I am a lawyer. You talk like me.”
Me: “I’m one too, did you forget or not know? There’s rarely one answer to spiritual not religious matters.”
Rip: “No wonder I find much in common with you. I did not know. Thanks.”
When I first started planning this essay in my mind's eye, I intended to include Joe Merkle’s What’s Your Mission In This Lifetime?, You chose it before you were born, and to connect dots between it and DL Nemeril’s Your Soul Knows Why You’re Here, Do you want to know too? and thoughts of my own on the subjects therein. However, as today's thoughts became an add-on to my initial musings, and I’m already over 2000 words, I’ll leave you just with the links and perhaps you’ll read them and contemplate on your own until I come back to them in a future post.
Or is it a simultaneous post that already exists but hasn’t materialized in whichever reality you presently exist?
Additional Reading for Those Who May Want to Explore:
White Feather’s Simultaneous Selves, Thinking differently about reincarnation [and a friend link]
My, from March 2021, Cosmic Strings Of Time, Past, present, future | Linear | Ontological| All relatively true [and a friend link]
My, from October 2023, My Journey Toward Understanding the Cycles of Life, Death, and Between Life, A rondeau redoublé poem and a companion essay [and a friend link]
My March 2021 Life Is School for the Soul, A reader asked me: “What if upon reincarnation the person is still a narcissist?” I clarify my thoughts on… [and a friend link]
White Feather’s Forgotten Selves, And the dramas we act out together [and a friend link]
My May 2022 The Human Spirit Duality, Revisiting and directly responding for the first time to my KTHT guest prompt from July 2021 [and a friend link]
My June 2022 Spiritual Prompts for the Week of June 12th-18th, I’d like to share my and hear your thoughts on acceptance [and a friend link]
In Rama I create, with soul energy surging through my body, inspiring me and breathing wind into my sails,
