The Second Hundred

Introduction to The Second Hundred

THE FULL WORKS which constitute The Book of Wesley have been dubbed “Wesley’s 500” or optomistically “The Thousand,” although it is not clear that he had a thousand coherent thoughts, much less that he wrote them down. Even though he considered the work “irrational,” a more appropriate term might be “non-rationalized.” He simply wrote his own observations and feelings and did not make an attempt to sort and categorize, but simply to express.

Each “C” or Book of One Hundred, explores at successively deeper levels the understanding that this one person came to have of life while living in a suspended state of consciousness. There has been no attempt by this editor to isolate and categorize the topics covered in anything more than the order in which he wrote them. Thus, cross-references are made only to preceding statements, and never anticipate or look ahead to future thoughts.

Wesley used Roman numerals to identify each Hundred verses (C, CC, CCC, CD, D, etc.) and we have continued that convention by tens for releasing the book in this forum. The editor has chosen to continue consecutive numbering in Arabic numerals rather than beginning each hundred at one. Cross-references to statements will be shown in parentheses () only by the Arabic numeral and will not make reference to which Hundred.

Nathan Everett, editor

August 2, 1981

CX

101. The soul mate (41) cannot be chosen in time/space relationships. They are chosen in the super-conscious which is not bound to the physical world and the measurements it imposes. The soul mate may work through different physical manifestations at different times.

102. Time is not an absolute, nor a constant. The measurement of time is proportionate to the universal motion. Time, therefore, is a “physical” thing. (23)

103. If the universal motion were inconstant, in other words, speeding up or slowing down periodically, time would also speed up and slow down in relation to it. Since all material things are dependent upon their relation to the universal motion, the mechanics of our clocks and measuring devices would slow or speed at the same rate as the universal motion. We would, therefore, not be able to ascertain the change in universal motion, all relative things—even the deterioration of atomic particles—maintaining their relative speed.

104. If change in the universal motion cannot be ascertained, can such change be said to exist?

105. Trying to explain time, I asked what a year was. 365 days. What is a day? 24 hours. What is an hour? 60 minutes. A minute? 60 seconds.

106. So what is a second? Logically, in my elementary school mind, I believed a second was the basic element of time. That is what the skinny hand on the wall clock swept past that built all the quantities of time that followed it.

107. But reversing the order of definition brought a clearer definition of time. A second is 1/60th of a minute which is 1/60th of an hour which is 1/24th of a day. The basic units of measurement—our clocks, if you will—are defined as proportionate to the day. These also have astronomical implications which are more easily seen in the larger units.

108. A day is the period of time from sunset to sunset. It is, therefore, measured by the earth’s rotation (motion), not by a pre-determined time unit. A year, is marked by the earths revolution around its sun (motion). Thus, our basic units of time are derived from the relative movement of the cosmic bodies.

109. Imagine if you would, what would happen if it took “more than” 24 hours for the earth to rotate on its axis. Rotation and revolution are bound together like the gears in a clock. The distance around a center gear is measured by the number of times a small revolving gear will rotate on its axis during one revolution. That number is always the same, no matter how fast the rotation.

110. The mechanical measuring devices that we create to mark off our progress in this revolution and rotation are equally as dependent on that motion as the rotation of the earth is. Our very body chemistry—even entropy—is linked to the same cosmic clock.

CXX

111. If during the time of this writing, the universal motion had somehow slowed, our revolutions around the sun slowed, our rotation on our axis had slowed, our mechanical timers had slowed, and our own bodies compensated to slow down to that rate, then we would have no way of gauging or ascertaining that velocity shift.

112. Time is thus strictly controlled by the cosmic motion and cannot have meaning outside that context. Time travel (86) is not possible when considered outside the context of motion. The secret is not to travel “when” but “where.”

113. The logical extension of this concept is that we are simultaneously at all times. Our consciousness is the only time traveling entity. (8, 20)

114. Law is a convenient codification of a standard of behavior to enable people to interact with each other in an orderly and mutually satisfying way. It is created by the people who it governs and is effective only in so much as it is accepted.

115. The greatest error of governance is to attempt to legislate morals. This is the failure of most religion as well.

116. When law steps beyond the bounds of social structure and interrelative action and attempts to govern thought pattern (or morality), it ceases to be valid as law and one is no longer bound to obedience. Oppression, therefore, is inherently illegal.

117. For every true law that exists there is at least one viable and legal alternative to obedience. Without choice, there is no governance. The test of the validity of a law is the alternative to obedience.

118. Note the first law: “Of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat... [or] thou shalt surely die.” The legal alternative to obedience, however, is explained soon after. “Now lest they put forth their hand and eat of the tree of life and live forever...” A second tree offered immortality in the garden as an antidote to the effect of the first tree. To have eaten of it first (nowhere forbidden) would have voided the effect of the first law.

119. The problem with philosophy is that too many people study it and too few do it. Genius is born not in analyzing and categorizing, but in philosophizing.

120. Valid law must prescribe remedy, not punishment. (117, 118)

Editor’s Note: Verse 119, seeming to be somewhat flip, begins a lengthy section written in pencil. This is the second section in the Book of Wesley written in pencil. It seems that this may be material that Wesley intended to rewrite, was being tongue-in-cheek about, or that he expected to contain a lot of questionable math.

CXXX

Editor’s Note: This section regarding Wesley’s understanding of law is in its entirety, a pencil section. Did he intend to rewrite? Or erase?

121. All things being relative, law cannot indicate “rightness” or “wrongness,” but is indicative of the price society prescribes for certain types of behavior. This, one society may prescribe a high price for behavior which in another society may have no restitutional value at all.

122. There having been no “rightness” or “wrongness” to the first trespass (28, 118), a price was placed on a mode of behavior. There is responsibility for payment of the price, but no guilt based on right and wrong. (19)

123. For the civilly disobedient entity there are two choices: a) be willing and able to pay the remedy, or b) be able to find and utilize the viable legal alternative to obedience. (118)

124. Mass civil disobedience may be defined as one of two things: a) the result of a change in societal norms making the law obsolete and resulting in its change, or b) a reaction to the legislation of morality, demonstrating its invalidity as law.

125. The principles of civil law and disobedience may be applied carte blanche to physical law. (17)

126. The inability to pay the remedy is a viable legal alternative to obedience. i.e. Death releases a person from all legal obligations.

127. The person who has nothing and is willing to lose that which he or she has, is thus free to disobey at will, or to obey only him/herself.

128. It is most frequently seen that the “saviors” (those who seem to live outside the realm of physical law) have no possessions and are possessed by no one.

129. The inability to pay is one branch of the viable legal alternative to obedience that may be called negating the remedy. If the remedy is negated, the law is rendered impotent.

130. The character of a savior (128): A savior is an embodiment of the essence of humanity, demonstrating in all its limitations all its infinite possibilities.

CXL

131. The sounds that we call words and language are combinations of musical sequences overlaid as a camouflage to each other. Words are our means of disguising the music of our emotions. Since our real feelings are frequently in conflict with each other and with the emotions we wish to convey, the resulting sounds are an interweaving of different melodies.

132. The principle is as if you could play Dvorak’s New World Symphony and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring at the same time and hear Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address out of the cacophony.

133. What is truly unique about the principle, however, is that a person may be able to play both symphonies and any combination of other sounds and hear each one distinctly and separately. That theory expanded means you may listen to the human voice and hear separately and distinctly, each emotional overtone and melody.

134. The tuning of oneself to the music of other people (97), stripping away the camouflage that we so carefully lay to conceal our feelings from others, leads to the empathic response (98, 99). But that empathy may be singularly painful to the receiver, who will hear not only the pure emotions of the heart laid bare, but also the desperate cacophony, that we spread in an attempt to conceal our emotions from others.

135. Emotion is non-programmed. It is basically the same across all cultural bounds. That does not mean that the triggering mechanism for the emotion cannot be programmed. Take, for example, fear. One person’s fear response may be triggered by heights, another by snakes or spiders or tight places. But all would recognize the basic response or emotion as the same. The emotion of fear is innate.

136. We recognize far fewer emotions than we experience. We know joy, fear, anger, love, and hatred, and little else. Despair, melancholy, and sadness round out our emotional vocabularies. Because of this, we find ourselves struggling to find words when we are struck by emotions that are unfamiliar. Either we seek and find a means of expressing the emotion, or we deny its existence and program ourselves not to respond to it.

137. The emotions that we recognize tend to be at the extremes of our emotional registers. In reality there is not a moment of our lives that we do not experience some sort of emotion.

138. As our emotions are carefully concealed in our words, they are just as much revealed there. Certain sounds that we make trigger certain emotions. These sounds, however, have become culturally relative. The tone of voice in which they are spoken remains a much closer clue to their meaning.

139. A more basic key is the written word. Since the handwriting is closely related to the gesture (92) and gestures are far more universally meaningful than words, it is possible to tell much more about a person from the stroke of a pen than from the words that are written.

140. It may be said, with as much logic as any other statement herein, that the gesture precedes the spoken word, i.e. we reach before we ask, etc. As such, it is frequently more descriptive of the actual object or emotion than the spoken word is.

CL

141. Just as one may attune oneself to hear the music in another’s voice through the words, one may also align oneself to see the gesture in the stroke of the pen that actually describes the subject of the written word.

142. It is possible, therefore, to look at a person’s writing or the marks that one makes while doodling, and read the frame of mind in which something was written. And since the gesture is universal (though not absolute—it may vary in form from culture to culture, but not in its flow), it is possible to read the writing of any language and perceive the image represented.

143. So, looking at any series of characters, we should be able to “feel” the images thought at the time of writing by the author. These images will be played back to us through the framework of our own experience. (56)

144. The most natural means of expressing these perceived images will be through music. Music will then act as a relay medium, receiving, amplifying and transmitting images from person to person, culture to culture, even time to time.

145. The image perception is most easily accomplished when looking at symbols that are not immediately recognized as having defined meanings. It is much more difficult to get a “feeling” from a word written in one’s own language than in a foreign tongue not known to the reader.

146. Scarcely a modern English-speaking person has looked at an Egyptian hieroglyphic and not gained some feeling from the writing even though they have no idea of the meaning of the symbol.

147. While everyone has that latent ability to attune themselves to another’s emotions, most people are able to block or shield themselves from being “read.” There is, however, that rare person who is so un-camouflaged, so open and honest, so innocent, that everyone with whom he or she comes in contact can not only tell instantly what that person is feeling, but can feel every twinge of that person’s emotions.

148. Projective empathy, then, is not so much an art of projection as an inability to shield. Only insomuch as a person is able to control the emotions that he or she is experiencing, can that person be said to control the emotions of others.

149. The projective empathy is his or her own impregnable defense against other experiencing entities. To attack a projective empathy would be tantamount to attacking oneself since each emotion of the victim would be felt by the assailant.

150. Our conscious carries on a complex and continual juggling act between the physically experienceable and the consciously knowable. And the pattern of the juggled realities creates what we know as time and space. (38)

Editor’s Note 1: In this section, Wesley attempts a “scientific” explanation of his unique ability to read emotion in writing and to translate it into music so that those emotions are experienced by others. To our knowledge, it was never shown that this ability could be reproduced in others following his procedures. Wesley himself would argue that this was because the person making the attempt was not fully opening himself to receiving the emotions, and/or was not honest and innocent enough to transmit them. Nonetheless, these statements would seem to defy truly scientific proof.

Editor’s Note 2: Verse 148 begins the second “brown” segment of The Book of Wesley (the first seen in the second 100). It is curious that this also marks a subtle shift in Wesley’s subject. It is virtually certain that he is attempting to explain the unique ability of his granddaughter (Ariadne Allen Paris) to play music that fully conveys her emotions and who is so open and innocent that she is completely “unshielded.” These three verses and the next four (151-154), may be the result of Wesley’s constant drive to maintain his own sanity in the face of physical and emotional experiences that lay outside the norms of humanity.