[continued from previous post]
R: When I was asking you about improved human beings and we talked earlier about improved societies, I was asking about them as goals, aware that we’re a very goal-oriented culture. And yet we’re constantly being told to live in the moment, not analyzing our past or anticipating our futures.
F: We don’t think that’s the proper understanding of that statement.
R: Perhaps you would expand on that.
F: If you don’t mind. You can plan for the future and be in the present. You can review the past and be in the present. Conversely, you can be walking down the street doing nothing and not be in the present at all. The emphasis on that is to remember yourself continually. To keep your consciousness conscious.
Let’s say you’re planning to build a house, say. While you’re working on the architectural design, you can have your attention shot outwards toward the architectural design to the degree that you forget yourself. Or, being mindful, you can work on the architectural design. Externally they look like the same thing. But the second one is in the now. “In the now” does not mean being incapable or planning and incapable of remembering. In fact, to the degree that it was possible, it would be extremely undesirable. What it does mean is that no matter where you send your consciousness, you go with it. [pause] That’s our understanding of it.
R: So if you’re totally engrossed with the architectural plans, forgetting who and where you are except for that future, you’re putting your total consciousness on the future event.
F: Well, it’s more like you’re dimming your consciousness by only thinking of the future event. You see? Just as you can be very much aware of yourself, and very alive, eating an ice cream cone, without at all detracting from the taste of the ice cream, in fact enhancing it, by being conscious of yourself enjoying the ice cream cone, so you can do the same thing while you’re totally involved in an artistic or creative or an academic or any kind of endeavor that requires you to focus outward.
It would be desirable for you to learn to focus outward without dimming the lights on the inward. That’s really what’s meant there. You are always here to choose. The more consciously you choose, the more you’ll get out of the experience.
Now, having said that, there are some things that people deliberately don’t put their consciousness in. People in a lynch mob withdraw their consciousness from what they’re doing, although they don’t know it. That’s why mobs are so much less intelligent than individuals.
So, we would say by all means live in the now. And while you’re in the now, do what you want, which includes planning, remembering, daydreaming, active thought, scholastic comparisons – all of that can be done with you sitting in the middle of the spider’s web enjoying yourself. [pause]
[Humorously] First we called you a worm, now you’re a spider. We don’t know how this is going. [they laugh] You haven’t been a dinosaur yet. [they laugh]
R: Okay, in an earlier session I asked a question that you declined to answer at that time —
F: Because you had other fish to fry that night.
R: Yes, well, I’m asking whether this later is now on this question, and if it’s not, we’ll move to something else.
My question was, when you talked about the relationship between you and Frank, you indicated that you’re not working with Frank as an assignment, but rather what you called a relationship of affinity. Can you say more about that?
F: The part of that assignment idea that we don’t like particularly is the implied person who assigns. However, we have to say that since we declined to answer that, you’ve also made us wonder whether or not we’re being more directed than we thought we were.
When we say affinities –By now you are more in tune with the reality as we see it over here, which is that it’s sort of a floating coalition of individuals intimately linked, and more fluid, shall we say, than it is where you are. Therefore Frank’s advisors, and of course yours, but we’ll stick to Frank—
[pause] All right, let’s back up here just a little bit.
Have you ever noticed that in different parts of yourself you seem to be radically different people? You have interests that are all-consuming, and then you rather lose interest in those interests and you have others that take their place, or maybe nothing takes their place. And you have propensities or you have avocations or you have – You know, the flavor of your life changes from time to time, and it’s almost as though there were someone else living it. In retrospect.
Well – in our side, as those shifts happen – and we’re not implying causality either way; we stay away from that for the moment – as those shifts happen on your side, different members of the poker club over here horn in on the game
If you become interested in stock car racing, those of us who resonate more with motors and noise and mechanics and competition and living on the edge will sort of move in because that’s the affinity. When the person loses interest in stock car racing and develops more interest in drinking beer [chuckles] then others who resonate with more quiet (not necessarily quiet, but could be quiet) perhaps introspective, perhaps emotionally, perhaps– [pause]
Hmm, you’re going to get us on a lecture on drink here in a moment. But, but whatever a person’s proclivities are at a given moment, there will be those on our side who will resonate to that, and they’ll sort of move in, except of course there’s no movement. So it wouldn’t be accurate to say that anyone was assigned to do anything, except in the largest sense of all of us being assigned to all of you. You see? It’s much more like, we’re invited to kibitz.
R: So there’s not a core group that you would say was —
F: Only in the sense that there’s a core to any of your personalities. Which there is. But only that. If you radically change your being because of circumstances internal or external, then the guys, as you say, on the other side will change as well, not because they’re required to, but because – it’s so automatic it’s hard to even —
R: Now, you also said — something that was more difficult for me to understand — that some of you are more closely connected in an on-going way; an affinity of soul.
F: Mm-hmm. That’s what we were just saying, it’s more or less the same thing. Because the core essence of a person doesn’t really change during a lifetime, those of us on the other side that are the closest in affinity to that core don’t change either, but we don’t mean more than that.
R: Okay. You’re calling that a spiritual affinity rather than a task affinity, or something of that sort.
F: That’s right. In other words, if you are a philosophic –
[change sides of tape]
[Frank: I don’t know how much we lost on the leader.]
F: A person’s task affinity can change radically because they can in the course of their progression in their lifetime change what it is they’re doing. They could start off being a politician and wind up being an artist. But their core being is less likely to change, and they could be a dreamy introvert of artistic proclivities and spend 20 years in politics, sort of working against their own nature, shall we say, and then move into becoming a painter and be more comfortable with what they are, but their internal essence hasn’t really changed much. And so a relationship of affinity is less likely to change merely because the underlying personality is very unlikely to change. It can develop, it can have snags, it can even go in the wrong directions, but it’s liable to be the same thing.
R: Was Frank a part of your collectivity between his earth lives?
F: [pause] Well, you’re going to get tired of hearing it, but – yes and no. Yes, in that all of you are a part of us even right now. No, in that there was no Frank. There was the underlying being that is now Frank and in other times is Bertram or David, you see. It would be a mistake to think that the – All right, we’ll back up.
Remember we said that when you are on the other side you’re not quite the same, even mentally, as you were when you’re on this side? Because you’re in different circumstances. Well, when you go on the other side, you won’t be the same. There’ll be that penumbra of you, or — that flavor of you will remain, as we said, but maybe that penumbra goes to focus 25 and goes to, oh, San Francisco in the 1940s, and hangs out. You know? Has fun for a while. And then maybe goes up to focus 25 and fools around, and then maybe goes into another lifetime. During all that, that part of that existence can’t be said to be one of us in that respect. However, there, as here and now, there is a part of that existence that is us, and we are it. Impossible to explain using one perspective, but we think you’re getting the idea by us continually shifting perspectives.
R: Yes, but one of the things that seems to happen between lives is that there is some energy or other doing some planning about the next —
F: Remember, we said you’re doing that now, as well. You’re planning, moment by moment. So you’re always planning.
R: Mm-hmm. But that energy becomes a more diffuse energy once out of the physical?
F: [pause] Let’s say the center of gravity shifts? While you are on your side and you have a body to coalesce around — a body that sort of holds the various pieces together — you have more of a specific gravity, so to speak, than you do when you don’t have the body holding it together, and your various bodies can go in various directions, and various parts of your consciousness can become relatively dissociated. (Not in a pathological sense.) So that the part of you that is living in a belief system territory may forget what it knew about us while you were here. That’s the nature of the belief system territories, really.
All right. Now the people who don’t take that sojourn, the people who can remember being part of us, avoid all that. That’s the point. [pause] There’s nothing wrong with doing that. We don’t want to say that it’s a detour or that it’s unhealthy or anything like that. People go to those vibrations because that’s where they’re vibrating. By definition. And so it’s the appropriate place for them at that time.
But, on the other hand – to contradict ourselves as always – from our point of view it’s better if you can remember yourselves. If you remember yourself and don’t do that, and don’t let your consciousness diffuse, then yes, you’ll be on our side with us and you may not come back. [pause] Avoiding the wheel, in effect.
R: So that sounds as though the planning aspect would be easier done while we’re in body.
F: Well, easier in the sense that —
R: We’re more coherent somehow.
F: All right, that’s fine, more coherent in the sense that you have a continuity to your consciousness that is upheld and supported by your bodies. But less so because you’re stuck within the space-time slices mentality, or matrix. So it has advantages; it has disadvantages.
R: I guess, deciding to come back in physical body or not is one of the choices.
F: Well – [pause] The question – [chuckles] You’re never going to get a straight answer out of us, you might as well just resign yourself to it. The question there depends on who’s making the choice. If a person is in a position to make the choice, fine, they can make the choice. If their mind is too clouded or too diffuse for them to make the choice, another part of themselves will make it for them, and it will seem to them like it’s made beyond their own control. All right?
R: Another part of them–
F: Just as we’re another part of you, say. So if, when your Downstairs has been razed to the ground because you’re dead here, if you’re then on the other side, what was your Upstairs has not lost its clarity of vision, or its wider view. But you may well have lost the pointedness that you had because you were in one slide of time and one slice of space. In that changed condition, you may be very much dependent upon what is what you now call your Upstairs to put you back into the earth to give you another place to stand. It’s not a punishment, it’s not a reward; it’s the only place for you to apply yourself, if you’re in certain situations.
If you’re in certain mental situations, if you have developed yourself to the point that you can hold your mental clarity and your mental focus without a body, then it becomes a matter of choice whether you come back or not. But if you can’t, then in the absence of coming back, you’d be unable to develop, you’d be unable to function beyond a very minimal way, because that part of yourself wouldn’t have enough consciousness to function.
Again, the thing that will clarify this more than anything else is to listen to all these explanations and then rephrase them from the opposite point of view. So we just gave all of this as though we believed that all of you were individuals. Now, rephrase it, starting with all of us as one, and what you have is that we, as one, developed individual pieces of ourself, as best we can, and when those pieces need to be cooked a little more, we put them back in the frying pan. [they chuckle] If that doesn’t make sense, tell us and we’ll pursue it.
R: I’m following it, but I don’t know if I’m getting all of my questions answered about this.
F: Pursue it, by all means.
R: [pause] It’s seen by some religious groups that having the choice of not returning to a body is somehow the ultimate reward, the ultimate state to seek, and I’m not hearing that from you.
F: Not at all. We think they’re making a basic mistake. We think they’re confusing the fact that those who achieve and are able to hold their consciousness on the other side don’t need to come back — which is clearly a gain — with the thought that not coming back is in itself a gain. Which it is not. You see?
R: Mm-hmm.
F: The appropriate place and the appropriate time is the best place and time. Sometimes being in 3D Theater is, sometimes not. The gain is the ability to hold yourself away from it if you want to. They’ve got that, but they’ve sort of tangled it up with the idea that earth is inherently painful, diversionary, illusory, and in general undesirable. And we would say earth is inherently painful and illusory and eminently desirable. [pause] It’s not the only game in town, but it’s a nice game
R: And the other choices are very limited from our view here. We think well maybe we could be living on another planet or something of that sort, but the choices beyond that aren’t very clear to us.
F: You must understand, when we say coming back to earth, we don’t necessarily mean this earth. To us, all physical matter is physical matter. We think we ought to make that clear, probably. To us, it’s the same. If you come back on another star system, you’re still living on an earth; you’re living in 3D, even if the physical laws are somewhat different.
R: And is it true that it would be totally un-understandable to us, while we’re in this state, what some of the other choices might be that didn’t involve living on a star, or star system?
F: Well [pause] it will be more understandable the more you’re able to reflexively see things both from an individual viewpoint and at the same time the contrary-seeming “all is one” viewpoint. The more you get stuck in one viewpoint or the other, the more distortion comes in. You see, here’s why; because if you think of yourselves as individuals, as really the center of the universe for you, there’s nothing wrong with that, to a degree. But if you’re then going to try to envision what it will be like when you’re not in a body but you still think of yourself as an individual, you’re making a basic logical shift in the middle of the sentence! And of course it’s going to invalidate things. However, since you can’t really envision what it’s like over here as part of one — without having lost your individuality, you’ve gained everyone else – a good halfway house is to go back and forth between the two.
Now, [pause] a better question, a more pointed question, will get a more pointed answer about what the possibilities are. We don’t know where to go with this at the moment.
R: Yeah, let’s leave for now. I want just to comment that these sessions have given me what seems like a much better notion of what it would be like to be in the oneness state where you are. This may be distorted in lots of ways (undoubtedly is), and yet I have a sense of beaming in on something there that’s much more understandable than it’s ever been before.
F: Well, we’re delighted for two reasons. One is that your basic integrity deserves to be responded to, and two is, you’re also a very powerful focusing mirror – what do you call those things? A lens! And you can focus this for others. So again, you’re part of the Plan B. Plan C16.
[continued next post]