[continued from previous post]
R: [pause] Yes, I think that’s helpful in thinking about that question. One of Frank’s questioners actually then wanted to know is this going to be a hard winter. [they chuckle]
F: Did they mean climatalogically?
R: I think so.
F: Or emotionally?
R: I think they meant what’s the climate. And other people of course are looking at the caterpillars to see how fuzzy their coats are, to get this information.
F: Well, Let’s leave it at this. Remember how every time you ask us what’s going to happen we say “yes”? [they laugh]
R: Yes.
F: Yes it’s going to be a hard winter; no it’s not going to be a hard winter, yes it’ll be an average winter, no it won’t be an average winter. Depends on where you go! Now. We’ll qualify that. You’ll notice we didn’t say that about the increased level of earth activity. And the reason we didn’t is, because it’s well past the point where it could not be. That is, the level of manifestation and the form and the variety of manifestation, and the time period over which it occurs, is all still subject to flux, but that it has to happen. At some point that energy must be balanced. That’s the best way we can put that. And the simplest, most effective way to balance it is the last one you as “people” will try. And that of course is, change of heart.
R: [pause] Hmm. Yes. Well —
F: The religious would say, repentance. Metanoia.
R: And you suggested that this had been in some way held off, delayed, for a bit but that the delay is not going to continue.
F: Well – it may continue, but for it to continue, a tremendous amount of choices have to be made in the right direction.
R: In the right direction.
F: That’s right. All we’re saying to you is that the odds are, based on people’s records, that it won’t. But it could. And any one of you could have an unpredictably strong effect. You mustn’t overlook that. You’re not helpless victims here.
R: [pause] Okay, now while we’re still in this territory, I’m going to move to a slightly different focus. You said that we’re all volunteers for whatever experiences we’re having, if I understood you correctly. But this still is such a difficult thing to believe that people would choose human suffering in the way that, for example, people in Africa are experiencing the AIDS epidemic, or people in Afghanistan are choosing starvation and war. I guess it’s easy to understand the individual choices, or even small group choices, but when one talks about such immense problems of this sort — the same principles are still at work?
F: We think that the difficulty for you is the concept that these are immense — but what’s a few million people? [pause] If it’s true for an individual, it’s true for a few million individuals. To us that’s not – In the first place, there’s only one individual! [laughs]
You see? We understand and we respect and we honor the humanitarian feeling that you don’t want to see this kind of suffering on this widespread a scale. That’s certainly honorable. But what is a little askew here is that it assumes that – to put it in light humorous way – it assumes the universe can only handle itself when it’s in small limited numbers. You see? Do you remember the scriptural saying that no sparrow falls unnoticed? Literally true.
Well, if it’s true of sparrows, it’s true of people, and that’s what Jesus was getting across – Well, he wasn’t getting it across, but he was attempting to get it across! And that is, there are no accidents. There is no neglect. Nobody dies of anything, or lives of anything, or lives in any circumstances because the universe slipped up. Now this is not to say that it’s not worth your while to try to relieve that suffering. But it is to say that that lifetime in that circumstance with the possibility of suffering was chosen. That doesn’t mean that person would necessarily be disappointed if instead they got fed, or got cured. You see? In fact the experience of mercy that they received might make a huge difference in that soul’s existence. [pause] But, if they don’t receive it, it isn’t like they got cheated.
Also, there are some people who like to live on the edge, and they like to go into hazardous situations for the fun of it, for the thrill of it. For the, perhaps we should say, for the skill of it.
[pause] You’re thinking to yourself. “this is so selfish of us to be living here in comfort and safety,” and we’re saying to you, “your life’s not any more easy than theirs, because theirs is simpler and yours is highly complex and highly divided. You’re each specialized instruments; don’t worry about it.”
R: Don’t worry about it.
F: Don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about your guilt, you see.
R: Okay. [pause] All right, we’d had a leftover question last week that wanted us to look into this issue of what Bob Monroe in his first book called Locale III.
F: All right. By the way, have you done your exercise?
R: I’ve done my exercise around Seth.
F: Okay, good. [pause] Bob Monroe as an honest reporter, and also a man with a taste for drama, did his best in his first book to give a sampling of various perplexities that he had at the moment – including some which he later entirely forgot about, but that’s neither here nor there. They’re rather left as lacunae in his archipelago there. When he talked about Locale III he did not at that time understand much at all, certainly not in terms of what he understood later. At that point he was still sort of quietly flabbergasted at the existence of the non-physical to begin with. Later, when he came to define the various focus levels – somewhat arbitrarily, in terms of the numbers, but a good definition of what’s there – had he grown up in the tradition that he later founded, he would have identified Locale III as most likely Focus 23.
We need to say one more thing here, too: He also, even to the end of his life, misunderstood the nature of focus 23, which he took – because this is the way he experienced it – as a land of people who are disoriented and desperate. He did not see it, as we explained it to you a long time ago [prolonged laughing]
Frank: They really like that! [again, laughing several times] I don’t know why that tickles them so much.
R: Yes, you’re trying to explain Focus 23 here.
F: We know. [laughs]
R: I do remember your talking about him.
F: We said to you then that the difference between focus 23 as you call it and consciousness one as you call it is mostly a matter of your own personal choices as you walk along. The path you choose seems realer to you than the others. Monroe did not realize that Focus 23 is a vibration of unlived possibilities on earth. [pause] See, neither of those is really the right way to look at this, but– Well, we don’t have time to do that now, we’ll do it another time.
Staying within the Monroe concept? We will say that he saw other lifetimes of himself in which he had taken other choices, and those other choices included winding up in societies that were significantly different. And he interpreted those societies to be less fluid than they –
Well, no. He took it as more either-or. And so he was either in locale one or he was in Locale III. He thought, you see, that Locale III was different from Locale II, because he experienced Locale II as having great freedom and fluidity, and in Locale III he experienced the same kind of constraints he was used to in ordinary life. What he wasn’t realizing was that those constraints were part of that belief system. Let’s put it that way. That’s the easiest way to do it.
R: So it seems as he describes it just either a different lifetime, or maybe it was a different dimension.
F: Well, how do we go about this? In a very real sense, it was –
Well, we were about to say, in a very real sense it was a different earth. But a better way of looking at is, which might make clearer to you what’s going on: Take it out of focus 23 entirely. Imagine it as a belief-system territory. Now imagine that in the earth, oh, 100,000 years ago – totally arbitrary, this is not meant as real – there was a society like that. And in that society he existed. And he one day, in one of his excursions, wound up in the belief system territory, attracted to the analog of himself – and found himself living that lifetime. You can see where the potential for terminal confusion is. Now, we should say that neither belief system territory is really quite right, but it’s good enough for the moment. We hope it’s good enough for the moment; you tell us.
R: By saying it’s good enough for the moment, you’re saying it’s —
F: Another long story. [laughs]
R: But it’s approximately true, or something of that order.
F: It puts his experiences into a closer approximation to the truth than you’ve had. But your present understandings of focus 23, -4, -5, -6, and -7 are vague and more tentative than you think they are. You think you know more than you do. Or rather, you think you’ve explored further than you have. And if you don’t think this is going to raise some anxiety as we go through it [laughs] you’re wrong!
R: All right, well let’s say some more about that, because people who are Monroe students are being exposed to this. I’m sure there will be some questions around that.
F: Mm-hmm. Well, the first thing to remember is that you’ve just barely gotten Columbus ashore. Or Cortez or somebody. You haven’t even seen a whole city, let alone a whole continent. Let alone the whole universe. You see? So that, for instance, focus 22 is understood as the frequency level at which people who are still carnate but disoriented for one reason or another are liable to be encountered. And that’s true enough. But focus 23 was initially experienced as people who were dead and disoriented. Totally lost, no idea what to do with themselves.
R: To some extent. There were other groups that —
F: Right. And that is true, It’s an accurate perception, but it’s only a small part. There is, beyond that, all of the living out of this huge expanse of every possibility unlived in C1. And to talk about the difference between C1 and 23 is going to require more putting together than we’ve done yet. We can do it, and we probably will do it, but it will be a chore, because your questions will help us to sort it out.
So when you come to focuses 24, -5 and –6, which he called the belief system territories, your initial assumptions, his initial assumptions, were that these were basically societies that people had experienced on earth and recreated unconsciously, or shall we say gravitated into, because they were still resonating to those belief systems. That’s not exactly true—
There’s nothing wrong with that explanation, but another explanation that will give you a different viewpoint on it is that the people in each of those various territories are there not because they have similar beliefs but because they have similar vibration. Their essence is similar to each other, and a natural result of that is that they will have similar beliefs. The important part of the experience that we gave to Frank with the old man, the father of the Katrina, was sending him to look for him on the basis that he was a socialist, scientist, atheist—he was Jewish, atheist, socialist, and scientific. You see?
He got the bright idea “all by himself” to go searching for the old man on the basis of those characteristics. We didn’t send him to search for the old man on the basis of, “look for somewhere in Poland or Switzerland.” What we sent him looking for was true defining characteristics of a person, which is what they vibrate to.
Now, supposing that person is an atheist, socialistic scientific Jew, and in the belief system territory, let’s suppose for the moment that it was possible for him to change on his own and that he retained his socialistic scientific views but realized that he wasn’t in a body and he didn’t have to be Jewish anymore — Let’s suppose that. In that case, his essence would change vibration a little, and he would sort of settle out in a slightly different place. Okay? This sounds like quibbling, but it’s–
R: No, it sounds very interesting.
F: Okay. A valuable resource to any of you, and Frank talks about it but hasn’t read him yet, is Swedenborg, because Swedenborg talks about heavens of similar souls. And it should be apparent to Frank — and it hasn’t been until we say this now — that when he comes across an idea and the idea resonates deeply, to the point that he begins referencing it, without having read about it, that is suspicious. In fact we’re giving him a little prodding there and saying “this is the way it is, here’s an excuse for you to think it.” You see?
So we say the Swedenborg explanation of souls of a feather flocking together, although that’s Frank’s terms and not Swedenborg’s, is a good way for you to understand how things sort out. People are not in the same heaven because they’re Presbyterian, they’re in the same heaven because they are what they are, which made them more likely to be Presbyterian.
That’s a vast oversimplification, but you could have someone who’s a Presbyterian in this life who resonates in the same way that an atheist or a Catholic or a Muslim or somebody resonates, so once they shed the body and the external cultural features, would wind up in the same place, more or less. In those cases, what are they?
Just for the sake of a thought experiment, suppose you had a Moslem and a Jew and a Christian and an atheist who for some reason or other had very similar vibrations. They die, go back to the other side, and in the other side they find themselves drawn to each other, because they are more or less the same thing. How would you describe their situation? Are they in a Mosque? A temple? A church? [laughing through the three choices] Or – You know?
So the initial way that Monroe saw these things is rather inaccurate in that very subtle but important respect. The tendency is to think of them as being environments that have been determined for people. But it’s a little more accurate to think of them as being people at the same electrical frequency who create around themselves something that is familiar or comfortable. (Well, we say create around themselves; it’s actually created for them, but they don’t know this because they’re not really thinking about these things.)
R: All right. Let me try another example of an experience I had when I went looking for a belief system group. I found a group of individuals who seemed to have in common the fact that they had all died for their country. Now, is this enough of a similar vibration that one could think in those kinds of very specific terms, or –?
F: Well, you see, it was. However, the only caveat we would add to that is, there are different ways of being
[change sides of tape]
R: All right.
F: The only caveat we would add is that different people can do the same thing with very, very different feelings about it. If you die for your country resentfully, you’re unlikely to be of the same vibration as the person who died for his country either gladly or with resignation or, you know, out of valor. But, sure, that’s enough.
R: All right.
F: And we would add, what you just described is not to be found in Monroe’s literature, is it?
R: No. I just found it when I went into that space that he’s describing.
F: Well, our point of course is, that you’re only beginning the explorations. In fact, you’re missing tremendous amounts of – Although ultimately it won’t matter, it would be nice if more of this were recorded from the people who do it in a program, and the various program people hear about it, and it’s forgotten about.
R: Mm-hmm. That’s true.
[continued next post]