[continued from posting, July 4]
R: In Frank’s book Muddy Tracks, it seems that he was able to clearly distinguish between when he was speaking and you were speaking. When he speaks now, or when he’s in laboratory sessions, for me it’s difficult to know who’s speaking. Is this increasingly a stance for Frank?
F: No, what’s happening is, he was required to make a Copernican world-view shift first, and to do that found it either necessary or convenient – we couldn’t really be sure; it doesn’t make any difference – he found it expedient, anyway, to almost over-emphasize the difference between [him and] us, because that was the only way he could conceptualize it. But once he began realizing that we’re often speaking through him –
He initially saw it when we spoke through him to say something that was important to someone else who had to hear it from a human voice because they weren’t able to hear it inside. Once he realized that, he began seeing it more, and then he began seeing other aspects of himself — other lifetimes, as you call it — going in and going out, going in and going out, and then he began to deduce, correctly, that he does the same thing there, unconsciously usually. Then, the more he looked into it, the more it all folded in on itself and he realized, it isn’t “me” versus “them,” it’s really I/them, or it’s us, or it’s me. You know, all the distinctions blurred.
Which is good! Because the distinctions were never accurate in the first place. But they were, shall we say, a necessary detour, because if you are raised or entrapped in a given logical structure, the only way to get out of there may be to go to an equally inadequate structure which nonetheless is different, so that you then have the point of comparison which frees you from both. So he initially said, “this is me, this is them.” “Well, maybe this is me, well maybe this is them.” And then as time went on, found that in ordinary life –
See, there’s only ordinary life. And that was another distinction that he had to make as a halfway house. You know, the ordinary life versus talking with us! But there’s only ordinary life. Or, there’s only talking to us, whichever way you want to look at it; it doesn’t make any difference. Or there’s both. Or there’s neither. Pick three.
R: So, then this has to do primarily with the extent to which Frank is conscious of it.
F: [pause] We would say it has primarily to do with the re-structuring of mental structures. That your mental structures, of which he became blindingly aware last week [in a lab session with Skip] are ordinarily transparent to you, and therefore they are an almost infallible way of warping the world. Now, that’s not necessarily bad or good, but it’s the way it is. The getting through the structures is always a provisional thing, it’s always an incomplete thing, because you really can’t live in 3D Theater without structures. But it’s worthwhile to exchange them, to remind yourself that in fact you don’t have the structure; you know, the truth. [pause] That didn’t quite answer your question, did it?
R: [laughs]
F: Want to re-phrase it, then?
R: No, I think that’s fine. You answered a better question.
F: We heard the doubt, though. The hesitation, anyway, the reservation.
R: The doubt has to do with my next question. Recently Frank has talked as though he understands that there are many levels. Many levels of what I’m not quite sure, but a suggestion would be that because he’s in a physical body, he’s in a certain level. At another level you might be viewing things from a different perspective. Is this an appropriate way to think of him?
F: [pause] Well, we hate to paraphrase Bill Clinton, but we’re not sure what you mean by those things.
R: [chuckles] Well, I meant the concept of levels, here. Is that an appropriate way to think of him?
F: Do you mean levels of being, or levels of –?
R: Well, to the extent that Frank’s on one level and you’re on the next level, —
F: Ah!
R: — my next question would be, is there another level beyond that, and beyond that, and –?
F: No, no. We even said specifically in the book that the difference between us and you is much more a difference of the turf that we’re on than of any other thing. That you in our place would be like us. And we in your place would be like you. And what we didn’t say but could have is that it isn’t that it would be that way, it’s the way it is. The part of The One Thing That Is Us that is in time-space functions as you do because you’re in time-space. The part of The One Thing That Is Us that is not in time-space functions as we do because we’re not in time-space. But there’s no difference between you on your end and us on our end other than just where we are.
Now, if you’re talking about the difference in levels of being, that’s a different thing, but if you’re talking about you on your level and us on our level, you all tend to put us up on a pedestal, and it’s a mistake, because it not only removes us from you conceptually (which is not possible) but also under-rates what you’re doing, which is very lonely, is difficult, and requires skill, and is valuable and requires courage. So we respect it highly. At the same time, it’s us! You see? I mean, all of these things, the way your language is structured – and you do hear the word “your” [chuckles] — the way your language is structured, it continually quietly, between the lines, emphasizes divisions that are not real divisions. They’re circumstantial divisions. There is no you and us; it’s a all-us kind of thing. But there’s almost no way, in fact there probably is no way to speak without using that language, because the language was developed in your circumstances.
R: I think that the way that his notion of levels arose has to do with the suggestion that there are series of levels with a larger perspective than the previous level. And I’m asking the extent to which there is a series of these that you’re aware of, and are you aware specifically of a level just beyond your own?
F: [pause] As a spatial analogy, you might want to look at climbing a mountain, where each new level gives you a broader view, at the price of reducing your grasp of the detail. You can see more, but you can see less detail. We would say that’s the major difference in terms of difference of level, looked at one way.
Now we’ll take all of that back and look at it another way, and say that if you were to imagine yourself as if this were real, that you really were an individual, and there’s a part of you in time-space and another part of you outside of time-space, you around here anyway [meaning on the New Land] have come to that conceptualization. Okay? We would say it’s illusory, because there’s only one thing. But take it that way. If, then, you said that one percent of you is in time-space and 99 percent of you is outside of time-space, then the first step would be to increase your awareness beyond what’s time-space and maybe you could double your level of being; you could be a broader, deeper person with more resources and more awareness. And there would always be more and more and more until you filled your whole crystal. If you filled your whole crystal with awareness, then you would be the absolute maximum person that you could be. Now, we would say that would involve many different lifetimes (at the same time, you know) and it would involve many different times where we are –
But again, we want you to remember, we’re trying to cram all this into this time-space analogy, so we would have to say, “all of your lives at the times they’re there, and the time between times at the times that we’re here in non-time” — [laughs] It’s very clumsy. And it’s misleading. But you see the idea, we think. Only we would go further than that and say that since we’re all intimately, literally connected, we can’t conceive of any end to the level, because we can’t conceive of anyone being able as an individual to extend to all that is. On the other hand, [pause] just as in that movie The Global Brain the man speculated that 10 billion things make a new level of complexity, when x number of us achieve a certain [pause] “cohesion” is the best word, but it’s not a very good one —
All right, here’s an easy way. If every part of a starfish or every part of an octopus or something achieves so-called enlightenment at the same time, then you’ve got an enlightened octopus. Until then, you only have a partially enlightened octopus. No, that doesn’t work. We’ll try it again. We don’t mean the word “enlightenment” in any big sense, either.
If all of us come to know what we are, if all of us come into our full flower, we will realize that we are part of something bigger. Starting all over again, in other words. Just as the cells in your body are part of a larger being and some know it and some don’t, and you are part of a larger being, and some of you know it and some don’t, we are part of a larger being and some of us know it and some don’t. It goes on forever. We don’t know the ultimate, any more than you do, either way. We don’t know the ultimate small or the ultimate large.
R: I see. So do you have questions in your own mind about this? The idea of the larger and larger being, or the larger and larger entity, or energy?
F: Well, if we were humans we’d call it idle curiosity because our day to day work is in what we’re doing. Our being is in being, not in – we were going to say, not in speculating, but that’s a part of being. [sigh] Everything tells us that this is what needs to be done to go to the next step, but what’s beyond the next step is as blank to us as it is to you. We have ideas, but —
R: Not beyond the next step, but the next step itself, is that — ?
F: The next step itself – it’s this current step, it’s this bringing all parts of ourselves to awareness. Once that happens, something else happens. In fact, Bob Monroe said the same thing. He was talking to someone, someone in one of the INSPECs, one of us, and said — they said, he said, however you want to look at it – that certain things seemingly wink out of existence, and what they were describing was, they got all their element to a level of awareness, and we don’t know whether it’s all or whether it’s 93%, or 67.6%. You understand. But whatever it takes, they got their elements to a level of awareness and something happens at that point. Now, the something that happens takes them out of our viewpoint, takes them out of our reality, in a way, so we don’t really know. But there’s no sense of apprehension about it. It’s as clear to us that that’s the next part of the process as death is to you, only without the resonance of fear of death that is often in the piece with the physical body. But just as you know when you’re born, you’re born to die, we know that we are participating in this process in order to bring this on, but what happens after that, we’ll let you know. Except you will know too, because you’ll be —
R: Part of that process as well.
F: But the interesting thing, and the thing that’s hard to get across to you is, you’re part of this process too! [pause] The increase in awareness that we all get as a result of those parts of us that are in various kind of physical adds to what we’ve got. It isn’t like you’re the slow pupils and we’re trying to bring you on so we can go on to the next grade. It’s more like you’re the explorers and we’re listening to your reports and learning from them partially vicariously, and partly by participating. This is as much learning for us as it is for you.
R: Okay. Have all of you in your realm been through a process of physical body —
F: Oh, you don’t have any conception of how many of us – if you want to look at it individually – there are. It would hardly even be possible. This is a [pause] A moment. Let’s think about this.
Supposing you looked at the surface of a globe of the earth. Supposing that you looked at Greenland or some island. That island might represent the amount of reality that’s physical, and all the rest of the globe would represent the amount of reality that’s not basically able to be described as physical. There are people doing things everywhere.
R: Then I guess the answer to my question is no.
F: The answer is there are many more things to do than be in the physical, and relatively few people are in the physical. Except – we keep coming back to it – except, another way of looking at it would be to say that a very small portion of our body is in the physical. Because you could look at it, and we keep reminding you, as one thing. When you look at it as individuals, that’s true too, but you can also look at it as one thing and think, “we have a few fingertips in various physical matter realities. But those fingertips, by their nerve endings, report to the whole rest of the body. At the same time, they’re nourished by the whole rest of the body. That’s not a bad analogy.
R: I’m talking now about your own experience, either as a group or individual, either way: Have you had the experience of the physical?
F: Well, some of us have. You’re talking right now to about – if you look at us as individuals – you’re talking to about 30 individuals. Sort of.
R: So it isn’t necessary to have had a physical body for you to be in your realm of experience.
F: Oh no. No, no, not at all. No, any more than it’s necessary for a fingertip to have had experience as a white blood cell, or as a lung tissue. You see? In a way, it’s specialization of function, but in another way, it really is just a matter of definition. It’s so simple, it’s hard to get across. But we assure you, it’s easy, once you cross the line. [chuckles]
[continued in post, July 6]