TGU session 08-28-01 (1)

Rita Warren: All right, good evening to the gentlemen upstairs.

F: Hi there.

R: All right, if you want to move aside a little bit – [watches Frank yawning] All right, nice and relaxed; that’s good. I’ve been asking a lot of questions about the nature of the gentlemen upstairs. I have another one.

Frank: I can hear them groan.

R: I’ve been wondering whether in your state there are male and female energies, or whether there’s an absence of gender phenomena in your state.

F: Well, you’re going to get used to hearing this, but the answer is, it depends. Here’s what we could say. We say that we and you are different mainly by the terrain that we’re on, so therefore everything that’s a part of you is a part of us, and vice versa. So in that sense, we do have gender. That is to say, we have the relative – and we underline the word “relative” — polarity that you experience physically and psychologically.

The short answer to your question is that each of us, considered as a node, has both halves of the relative polarity within ourselves, in different proportions. And taking the totality of all of us as one, we also include the energy, balanced, just as it would electrically with positive and negative. So you could look at it as a balance with local fluctuations. Local and, at different times, different equations, fluctuating.

R: So one thing we had talked about had to do with specialty nodes, if that’s what we can call them, within the totality. I’m wondering, do you have experts on maleness and femaleness? If this were an appropriate response to a question being asked by Frank, would one node of your group be more appropriate to respond to that kind of question than another?

F: We have to see the question. It’s hard to imagine. It would be like any other polarity. Experts in height or shortness or in dark or lightness; it’s a little abstract. You may think that we’re abstract [laughs], but to us it looks very abstract. If you ask the right question, we’ll probably learn something ourselves. Surprising you though that may —

R: If Frank or I were to ask you a question about the nature of maleness or femaleness in some respect, does that cause special certain members of your group —

F: Ah. Well, you’re making a jump that we wouldn’t say is warranted. One needn’t be predominately male to be an expert on maleness, so to speak, just as one needn’t be a tree to be an expert on forestry. Although having been a tree would be an advantage. Does that make sense?

R: Yes. I think I understand that..

F: In general – having overheard your earlier conversation – ask what you want. We’ll do our best to oblige.

R: All right.

F: [“Not again!”] [they laugh]

R: So you all sometimes act as a council? I understand that you’ve explained that Frank is part of you and vice versa, but do you sometimes act as a council in order to advise Frank about something?

F: That would be a metaphor, but a metaphor we would move toward more would be the automatic habit systems in your brain. It’s more like he is an extension of a certain neural function of the brain that is all of us. That is to say, rather than thinking of it as a council, which implies not only individual wills but conflict and clashes, we would think of it more as an automatic adjustment of energies. For instance, you asked this question. We don’t need to sit around and discuss how to answer the question; the question polarizes the answer. It’s not discussion thing, it’s a pooling of what we know from what we are. In fact, you could argue that those of you in bodies are largely responsible for our consciousness because you’re limited, and because you’re pointed, shall we say.

R: Mm-hmm. Well, implied in my question was the concept of you sometimes existing responding to something without Frank included and other times with him included. Is that–?

F: Well, with him conscious and other times without him conscious, but he may be off doing other things, too, from our point of view.

Frank: [laughs] Shut up! “And frequently is,” they said. [laughs]

R: So the situation wouldn’t arise, then, where Frank would be doing something and you all would be saying to yourselves “boy this is not a good thing for him to be doing.”

F: Oh [laughs] This is a less theoretical question than you might think! But there’s nothing more absolutely respected than free will. Because that’s what you’re there for. You know, we can watch you walk and play in traffic, and we can say “that is not a smart thing to do,” and there are occasions where we’ll step in for overriding reasons, but in general the rule is, “no, if you go play in traffic, take the consequences.” Even though we don’t like the consequences.

R: Okay, so he’s operating on the principle of free will and you’re having some reaction to this which doesn’t include him, at least as a conscious level.

F: That’s a very good qualifier: “at least at a conscious level.” Exactly. That’s the nature, in a way, of conscience. It’s not only “did I do the right thing or the wrong thing,” but it’s also “am I on the beam or am I off the beam” in a morally neutral way, you know? If your conscious mind wants to do something, and unconsciously you’re hearing, “no, this is not the best thing for you to do,” or, “you could react better to the situation than the way you are,” the thinness or thickness of the barrier between that realization and your individual will determines how easy it is for you to stay on the beam. Not only we, but also another part of yourself, in a more direct way, is trying to give you guidance, and it’s up to you to say yes or no. It’s a continuing process.

R: Mm-hmm. So this suggests that you may have an opinion of something that is quite different from Frank’s opinion about that —

F: Oh sure!

R: — and different from his interpretation of events–

F: Sure.

R: –and so on.

F: In fact, even when we agree with what he’s doing, we have a different view, because it’s just inherent in the situation. Outside of time and space there are threads that are separated by time-periods. And to you while you’re in a body those seem to be absolutely different. To us the thread might seem clearer than the moment of time you’re in. So yes, we always see it differently.

R: Okay, and you suggested a bit ago that by and large you wouldn’t call these differences to his awareness; it would be rare cases in which you would —

F: Oh no, that’s not quite what we meant. We will always call it to his awareness if he’s interested in hearing it. That is, if he doesn’t block it out. But what we almost never would do would be to override his will. That could happen, but it’s somewhat a last resort.

For instance, supposing someone in a lifetime has important ramifications for the people around them, and — for their own sake and for the people around them — it’s really important that they stay on the beam and they’re about to fall off the edge. It could happen that it would just be decided, “no, that’s too disruptive to the whole pattern. It can’t be allowed to happen.” In that case it would be more a matter of that person’s own self over here invading his consciousness, you might say, and causing him to act in ways that would be inexplicable to the conscious person. But that’s very rare.

R: Would Frank be aware if this intervention occurred?

F: Well, it would depend partly on introspection, partly on the dissonance between the action and what that particularly active part of his own mind wanted to do. [pause] A lifetime of introspection will help you in that regard to make it clearer when you are receiving transmissions, shall we say.

R: But more typically, he’s asking for your input when you give it.

F: [pause] We’re talking about a lot more than input. We could theoretically override what he wanted to do, so that he basically would not have his free will available to him. And that’s what is forbidden, almost always. The input is always offered, and is always available. [pause] The input is really, in a way, only a more sophisticated version of his own pondering and experience and wisdom and thought. It’s just from a larger perspective.

R: So I guess the experience would be, more typically, he’s thinking things through and some of the things that occur to him are coming from his experiences in this life and some are coming from input from you and all that’s coming to him, undifferentiated?

F: Yes. Not only thinking but also — in fact, more — hunches, intuitions, feelings, emotions. Predominantly the non-rational impulses of a person’s mind come either from the body or from us, rather than the personality who’s hanging in the middle. In fact, your language says, lower impulses or higher impulses.

R: I’m not sure if I’m following all that.

F: Well, you might have a sex impulse out of the body, or a hunger impulse out of the body, or an attraction to feel or touch or taste or smell. Nothing wrong with them, one way or another, but those impulses, preferences, attractions, whatever, can come from the body – what we would call a lower impulse – or things from the other side, from us, coming in what we would call a higher impulse, saying “well, this would really be a good thing to do. Why don’t you study Greek?” Or, “boy, it’s really neat to put things together,” or “I’ll bet playing the violin would be a good thing.“ You see? And some of them could blend so that it would be hard to say whether it’s a lower or a higher. And we do not mean that in a – what do you call–?

R: Judgemental or hierarchical way?

F: Exactly. It’s just that that’s a way of describing. You could say body or spirit, same way; it’s about the same thing.

R: Body or spirit. Do you consider yourself a spiritual force?

F: Well, spiritual in terms of the fact that we don’t have a three-dimensional body, yes. Any other associations that might be with that word is problematical. I mean, after all, you’re spirits in bodies.

R: What about when we add the mental level? The brain is obviously part of the body but there are mental processes going on at your end too, right?

F: The mind and the brain, as you well know, are very different things. You have a brain in the same manner that you have a kidney or a lung. It is a physical organ to transmute energy. You could look at us — it’s more or less true, but only more or less — you could look at us as the spirit and the body as the body and you in the middle, as the mind. It’s sort of true. You are the focus that is centered in one time and one place, and continues with a certain amount of continuity for a certain amount of time. That’s the best we could describe what you call the mind. Now, when the body dissolves and the spirit returns to us, the content of the mind doesn’t get destroyed, but the mind itself is more of a habit than a living function. If you can understand that.

R: It’s hard to understand, that the mind is a habit.

F: You’re familiar with the concept of ghosts. You could look at the ghost in the bodily form as a sort of a habit of the body. Just talking strictly as a structure. It’s more like a habit of the body than the body. The mind when it is divorced from its physical associations that hold it into certain patterns – the neural synapses, the habits, all of those things, the real, the actual connection with the body – is brought forth as a memory of everything else back to us, and so if you were then to talk to “me,” whoever “me” may be, when “me” is dead, it would have the same flavor but it wouldn’t be the same thing. Do you follow that?

Okay, let’s do this way. Frank dies today; tomorrow you go upstairs to talk to him; you talk to his spirit through the habit system of his mind, but it’s not the same as his physically connected mind is now. The spirit’s the same. We’re not saying it’s a delusion, but you aren’t dealing with quite the same mind, any more than you can hear his voice with your physical ears, once he’s over on the other side.

R: I feel like I understand that from trying to communicate with my husband. It seems familiar, but it’s not the same.

F: That’s right. That’s right. Nor could you expect it to be. Nor will you be. You will be in an environment in which you are unlimited sideways. That is, you’ll have unlimited access not only to every part of yourself in the lower sense, but every part of yourself in the sense of all of us! And that moment-to-moment unlimited access means that rather than a small intensely focused consciousness, you’ll be a part of a large less intensely focused conciseness. A totally different flavor.

R: Mm-hmm. Yes. I have a feel for that.

F: Now, if someone from Downstairs then calls you, and you wish to respond, you will express in a way that will feel different to you up there, while you’re doing it. It’ll actually have a nice little flavor to it. But at the same time the person talking to you will say, just as you did, “familiar but not the same.”

R: Mm-hmm.

Frank: That’s very interesting. Wonder if it’s true. [laughs]

R: Who’s asking that question?

Frank: You know who’s asking that question! [they laugh]

R: Well, let’s see. I was heading in two directions at once there. Let me reconnoiter here.

Frank: That was a very interesting answer.

R: Mm-hmm. It was.

Frank: [yawns] I don’t know if it’s me or them, I think it’s them, saying “you ask nice questions.”

R: Huh. That’s good.

Frank: They probably want to borrow money, be careful.

R: [chuckles] All right, now let’s see. This is another way of phrasing what we’ve already been talking about, but let me ask it anyway. Would you say that you see the physical world through Frank’s eyes?

F: Well – not exclusively.

R: Because you’re also seeing through the eyes of others.

F: Exactly.

R: Mm-hmm. Okay. But it’s not a perception independent of those in physical body.

F: [pause] Are you saying, are our only eyes the eyes of those who are in the physical?

R: Yes, that’s what I mean.

F: No. No, we can’t say that. Just as you’re aware of things in Focus 27, as you say, without being dependent on one of us to filter it through, we’re aware of Focus 1 without having to have you to focus through. Wait. Okay, this is worth pursuing perhaps.

Every point of reference, every point of view, adds to the depth of field and to the clarity of focus. So if we’re looking through one person’s eyes and another person’s eyes and, shall we say, through the trees, or through the general ambiance of the moment, those are all different viewpoints and – coming back on this side, they’re all integrated.

You could in fact say [pause] — this may be more confusion than help, but – everything is perceived from over here, it’s all here; the question is which cluster, as you like to say, knows what or is focused on what at one given time. If we wanted to see Caesar crossing the river somewhere in France, there’s a part of us that’s doing that. Okay? But that doesn’t mean that’s us. No, that’s not the way to say it. Well, it is, sort of. Our lives form a library, and the libraries are all interconnected. Everything’s here, but whether this book and that book ever happen to be on the same shelf, — well, it’s getting tangled, but we think you understand.

All of you are valuable, not primarily as eyes, but primarily as what you create by what you choose. It’s the creation of your essence, the particular flavor that you become by the way that you consistently choose things, that is the achievement here, not the allowing us to see the world in 1948 or whenever.

R: Okay, [pause] I will come back to that, if I can remember. But I want to back up a little bit, to ask about the reliability question.

F: He’s very unreliable. [laughs]

R: When you say, just as we can perceive focus 27 and see what’s there, you can do the reverse of that, well, I have great questions about the truth of what I see when I look at 27. Major questions around that. I think of it as an interesting idea, but I don’t confuse that with the truth of what it is.

F: Well, we’d like to make a point here. We have the advantage over you in this sense. [Gesturing] Taking – putting this hand up to be the barrier, so called? [They meant, using the hand to represent the barrier between our consciousness and the other side] And we’re on this side? There are millions of us, if you want to look at it that way, or you could look at it as “I”, we, whatever, going through the barrier in a million places, in a million ways. All of this is connected for us. On your end, each of you is acting seemingly in isolation, so you have only the crudest ways to transmit to each other your understandings of what you’ve seen. Whereas with us, we all get it first-hand, so to say. That’s the major difference in perceptions.

R: That must be quite an advantage.

F: Well, it is. [they laugh] In fact, we could throw in one more thing: That is the advantage. Our advantage on this side is perception; your advantage on your side is action. And that’s the difference. You can act. But we can perceive. But you can also look at it the other way around: We can perceive, but you can act.

R: But it seems to me that we also perceive and build our whole experiential life around what we perceive.

F: That’s right. And we can also act, but not in the same way. It’s a matter of emphasis. Our primary advantage is the ability to perceive huge amounts of things as one; your advantage is primarily the ability to form what you are by repetitive conscious choice. But obviously you can’t choose without perceiving. And obviously there’d be no point in our perceiving and not using that perception, which is to say, us acting.

R: Okay, now I want to go back to the other point and see if I got it. You were saying that what you receive from us is not so much perceiving the world through our eyes, but it’s that what we do adds something to the mix of the perception and the action that is what comes to you from us.

F: Your “doing” is in creating yourself. That’s all we mean by that. It’s not an external thing like “do you paint pictures.” Everybody who lives, even if it’s only for ten minutes, to some degree creates that person. And that person is what we perceive and that’s our gift from you, if you want to put it that way.

R: Yes, I like that way of putting it. [pause] You had mentioned something called emotional states before; I wanted to ask a little more about that. Do you all react emotionally as Frank does, say, or is there an absence of emotional experience in your reactions?

F: [pause] It’s a hard balance to strike. We would say there’s an absence of isolation in which to act emotionally. That is, if an emotion arises, it doesn’t play out in an isolated individual, but it rather like it spreads – well, it’s – wait

Supposing something raised the temperature of one of the cells of your skin. If that cell were in isolation, it could get exceedingly hot, or burn, or whatever. To the degree that that cell is connected with other cells and is able to spread the isotherm, then it will have proportionately less damage and it’ll affect a wider area, but less damage. The effect when you are connected is not the same as it is when you are in relative isolation. However [pause] beyond that we would say that you if you were able to come here as you are now, you would find it relatively chilly, emotionally. But you won’t [find it so], because you will – be here! [they laugh] And it’ll be normal.

[continued in next post]