TGU session 10-23-01 (2)

[continued from yesterday’s post]

R: [pause] Okay, the question has been raised about the concept of possession, in which another spirit takes over a body. Usually when that occurs the descriptions are of negative entities taking over a body. Is that something that occurs?

F: You only have trivial questions. [chuckles] Deep waters. [pause]

Well, as always, back up and look at it from unity and from multiplicity. From multiplicity, you have your amoeba. All right? You yourself. And part of that amoeba is born when you are born, dies when you die and lives your life in the meantime. That being makes choices its entire life. And the rest of the being almost invariably respects those choices, waiting to see what kind of flower is produced by the end of the experiment, by the end of the life.

Now, within the field of flowers that is all of reality there are infinite numbers of infinite kinds of flowers, many of them hostile to each other. Many of them representing antithetical qualities, which seems to them that they are good and the opposite is evil. That being so, unpredictably any of your energies, any of your beings, may find themselves in combat with others, and that combat is not necessarily restricted to physical manifestation, and it’s not necessarily restricted to one life at a time. So that in fact you may have your amoeba conflicting with others. In fact, not may, you will.

This is not to imply a state of constant warfare. It’s to state that within totality, all possibilities exist, many of them seemingly incompatible. Looking for a good example; it’s not real obvious.

Matter and anti-matter within reality annihilate each other. (Well, that’s how it seems, anyway. They appear to annihilate each other. What they actually do is move out of this reality into another one. To re-form, you know. To combine. But that’s another story.)

The short answer to your question would be, “yes, it happens,” if that weren’t such a misleading statement. Because if we say “yes, possession takes place,” you will think one individual by him or her self is possessed by another individual him or her self. In other words, forgetting that both are part of a larger being, possibly the same larger being.

But when we factor that in, it becomes a lot less – [pause] This might take a minute, let us sort this out a little.

All right, start up at the human mundane level. You may have magicians on earth. That is to say, you may have people who use their psychic abilities to get what they want against others. All right? Certainly that’s well documented. This is one individual fragment, one piece of a larger being, attacking other fragments for its own welfare, not even perhaps recognizing that it’s part of a larger being, but knowing how to use these abilities to get what it wants. Well, there’s no reason at all for you think this happens only among individual fragments.

In other words, just because the larger being is huge, and extends to other lifetimes and other dimensions and other realities, doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily wise, benevolent, or even particularly intelligent. So one way – this is only one way, but one way — to look at this would be to say that indeed, you have good and bad spirits; you have malevolent and you have benevolent spirits; that is to say, larger beings. Of which their local representatives are just that, our local representatives.

If you’re going to look at it that way, though, it’s important to remember to continue the context, and to remember that they themselves are part of a larger balance that is the universe. You remember that we said “a long time ago” [humorous cough] that the whole universe is and must be in balance; that you cannot have positive and no negative, that negative will express, in some form. There’s no reason for you to think that we on this side are uniformly positive as seen by you. Now bear that in mind, too, you know.

What appears quite evil to you will appear quite good to someone else, and not because that someone else is warped, but just because it’s subjective. You don’t see your own shadow, they don’t see their own shadow, and it could even be argued that it’s not really a shadow except that it’s in the shadow; that is, that if it were conscious it would be as good as anything else.

[change sides of tape]

R: But you mentioned along the way that it was possible even two components of the same amoeba were involved in a transposition —

F: Oh sure, because supposing that the amoeba is balanced, or even unbalanced, it can have elements that are relatively plus and relatively minus, you know. It just depends on how they sort out. They may sort out into two beings each of which is a mixture of plus and minus (which is of course usually the case), or that one is overwhelmingly plus and one is overwhelmingly minus. The only really ultimate condition of the universe is that it all balances out ultimately, but that doesn’t say anything predictive about what the local balance will be.

How’s that?

R: I see what you’re saying there. And in the same context, I wanted to ask about what are called walk-ins, where there seems to be a total shift in a personality of a person at one time. And those may be positive changes, as well as negative.

F: [pause] Well – We have quite a quarrel with the terminology, with the underlying thought there, because it implies movement where there really isn’t movement. It implies –

Well, look at yourself, now. You are a creation of your larger being. That’s one way to look at it, anyway. Your body was created and is maintained over a certain period of time. And within the body is the mind and it’s all motivated by the same spirit. All right? Now, it’s true that another part of your being could move in and you move out. Actually this may be what they’re talking about.

Supposing you had ten lifetimes and one of those lifetimes was a magician and one lifetime was a gardener. And you began this lifetime more like a gardener and then something shifted, and you began pulling in more of the magician and less of the gardener, you know? It might look as though you had been replaced.

Now, this is not commonly what they’re talking about, by walk-ins, but it’s worth looking at in that context, because where are you to go? And where is the new person to come from, in this walk-in idea? Can it come from anywhere other than a part of yourself?

R: I wouldn’t think so.

F: Well, you see, that’s what’s kind of missing in that concept. There is a sloppiness of thought that thinks of you, and thinks of all individuals, as if there really were such a thing in the world as an individual, rather than as a concept that’s a convenient concept, but not a real concept.

If there really were individuals, and the individual spirit could leave and another spirit enter, then it would be a question of “well is that possible, or is it not?” But the whole groundwork is wrong because it’s like the people who think that when you go out of body you’re leaving [laughs] your body empty and something else can come in and take it over! But there’s no movement! That’s not what’s happening. And so because it’s not what’s happening you can confidently say, “well, no, there’s nobody going to take it over while you’re gone, because there’s no `gone’ to go to!” You know. We’d say the same with the walk-ins. It’s –

We will say, though, the apparent phenomenon  is very interesting to look at, because it does show how you can slide – how one unsuspected part of yourself can move in, shall we say, seemingly a stranger. It’s a slight exaggeration, from our point of view, of a process that happens all the time anyway, which is that you all drop in and out of various parts of your lives. Kibitzing, you know? Putting in a little here and taking a little there. At first you don’t realize it, and then after a while you do realize it, and then after a greater while, you begin to do it deliberately. So not only are you aware of other lives, as you call them, but you’re then participating in them. And they’re participating in you, consciously rather than, from your point of view, unconsciously. And this becomes an exaggeration of that.

R: That’s very interesting. That does explain some things that I —

F: The whole theme of our work here is how many pretty acute observations are being misunderstood because of the persistent illusion of individuality on our end and even on your end! You know, you’re not the individuals you think you are. That is to say, you’re not as — [pause]

Some of you call each life a fragment of the larger life, and of course it isn’t really. It’s like talking about your shoulder. Your shoulder is not a fragment of your body, it’s just a part of your body that you’re choosing to put a name to and treat as an individual thing. But it’s actually seamless. If it isn’t, it doesn’t work very well as a shoulder.

R: But in the context of us in our other lifetime, there’s the matter of consciousness being here, and not elsewhere.

F: This is true. Say that again–?

R: Well, our consciousness from this perspective seems to be totally consumed with this particular life.

F: Well, now, let’s go back. Look at this in terms of the effective consciousness versus the full consciousness. Your flashlight is here, and your flashlight may get a  bigger battery, or come under better circumstances, and be able to illumine more, or it may be aimed at something different, but the background light remains. You’re just not always aware of it, because of the intensity of the flashlight.

R: Okay, okay. Yes. Thanks for connecting those.

F: You will find, we hope, these concepts gradually begin to illumine each other.

R: Mm-hmm. It’s a task for us to bring them all together.

F: It is, and it’s a good task. It’s good for you, and it’s good work. [pause] We’re not exactly watching you squirm, with satisfaction. [they laugh] We are attempting to help.

R: All right, now here’s another question. Someone asks about the validity of astrology.

F: Mm-hmm. By which we assume they mean, is it a superstition, is it a science, is it an art? Is it somewhere in between.

R: Is it true. Is it a truth there to be discovered?

F: Well, as everything else, it depends on the definition. [pause] We would say that any form of divination is true in the sense that it may be used with great profit by the intuitive person who’s willing to use it. It doesn’t necessarily mean that every concept that’s spun within astrology is accurate. But it does mean that – Well, let’s back up just a hair here.

What you see as planets are actually alive, just as your own planet is alive and you are a part of that planet as well as you are a part of us. And we are a part of the planet as well as we are a part of you. And of course we are also a part of Mars, and Jupiter, and Saturn, and Alpha Centuri and everything else. The difficulty is that everything is all one, but there’s no point of application for you when you reach that kind of level, so what we are doing is systematically trying to broaden your concept of “one,” even though it’s very much restricted, from our point of view. So while we’re aware that all the Milky Way is one, we don’t talk of it that way; we talk of it as if all the earth is one, say, or all the solar system. Because they can all be looked at provisionally as a unit or as a totality, as long as you remember that it’s only a relative viewpoint.

All right, having said that, Jupiter is alive. Jupiter is the embodiment of certain energies, let’s put it that way. And you could rightly ask, what difference does it make what part of the sky Jupiter is in when I’m born, or when an enterprise is born. Why should it make a difference if it’s up in the top of the sky, or it’s at the bottom, or it’s out of sight? And the answer, in a way, is – it doesn’t make a difference. But in a way it’s, well, it’s all part of the master chronometer. Give us a moment here. [long pause]

Any correspondence that’s observed with sufficient precision over a long enough period of time has to be presumed to have validity, and astrology has been studied for several thousand years that you know of, and more before that. And what it shows is not really necessarily anything about the planets or the stars behind them, although it seems to. What it shows is, when this and that are in relationship, the times will be such that this will be in effect. You see? It’s a subtle difference. “Mars in the tenth house means this, especially if it’s trine Jupiter in the sixth house,” isn’t so much that it’s caused by that, it’s that when that situation arises, the emotional/physical/mental atmosphere is such.

That sounds like a meaningless quibble, and it will take us a while to sort out why. Because to us that distinction’s clear, but as we even say it, we can hear that there’s no distinction to you.

R: Well, the element of causality still seems to be in it when you say it.

F: Yes. That’s what we’re hearing, yes. And that’s not what we mean. [sigh] It isn’t –

Okay. The fact that the minute hand on your watch reaches twelve o’clock doesn’t cause it to be on the hour, it just indicates it. Do you see? It’s twelve o clock because it’s twelve o’clock, not because the clock says so. But if you have a clock that will tell you when it is, that’s valuable.

R: Because it has certain correlates.

F: Exactly. We still think this is going to be almost useless to everybody. For the next time, we’ll try and see if we can come up with a better answer.

The distinction between the fact that you can see something which will tell you that something else is in being, and thinking that what you see causes the other thing is an important distinction. But at the moment, we’re not real sure how to get that distinction across. Anyway, that’s not what they care about. What they’re asking is, can astrology be used, and the answer’s yes, it can be used. And the reason it can be used is –

Well, actually this will shed light on it. The reason it can be used, or tarot can be used, or other things, is because everything is connected. Since everything is connected, a change in anything – [long pause]

Think of astrology as being your internal weather report. It will not tell you whether you’ll get wet or not, but it may tell you whether it will rain. If you’re inside a house, you won’t get wet. You see? If you learn the astrological system, and follow it, you’ll find that it has great predictive value in reverse. That is, it will give you a good analysis of something that’s already happened. It will probably not tell you what’s going to happen, because there are too many ways in which it might express. What it will tell you is, whatever happens at that time will have this nature. The difficulty – and it’s a fortunate difficulty – is that there are too many things that could happen for it usually to be able to tell you anything. But after it happens, then you can see, “oh yes, this took this, this and this characteristic, just as it should.”

Now, that’s not you projecting onto it backwards, it’s an analysis of the characteristics of what happened. Had something else happened, it also would have had those characteristics, but according to its own nature, rather than according to the nature of what did happen.

We would say, too, using astrology to try to predict things is perhaps not a good use of the tool. Using it to analyze what did happen – Well, let’s think about that.

Use it to predict the kind of weather that will happen ahead of you, rather than how that weather will probably show. Had you looked at September 11^th, you could have quite easily seen what the various cross-currents and all were, but you could not have quite easily seen “there’s people going to run airplanes into buildings.” Do you see? After the fact, when you know that the airplanes running into the buildings changed your whole world, you could look and say, “well, this, this and this were elements in that situation.” If you’re looking for a road map that will help you to avoid things, there isn’t probably a very good one. And you should rejoice in that. But if you’re looking for something that will give you indicators– “I have to be careful this day because my temper might be on edge,” or “I have to be careful during this period of time because I’ll be likely to be careless,” that’s very possible, and that’s a good use for it. If you’re looking at it to say, “will a terrorist hold up a bank while I’m there,” we suggest you’re wasting your time.

R: And is part of the difficulty the time dimension itself?

F: Well no, the whole difficulty is freedom of choice, and that’s your saving grace, as well. The astrological dimension might be said to delineate the boundaries of your freedoms of choice, at a given moment. But what actually happens will depend upon what millions of people do in their freedom of choice within those constraints.

R: It still seems such an odd thing to me, to link predictions of the kind you’re talking about now, that look like such relatively minor things, to some immense system that we talk about when we talk about astrology.

F: You mean by that -? Well, tell us what you do mean by that. Try saying that again.

R: If we look at how people are reading physical data in the planets and their movement of bodies in the sky, that somehow this has some suggested correlate in what your mood’s going to be.

F: That’s right. But that’s not trivial, at all! That’s not trivial. You are the universe! And that’s why it works at all, because you/we – well, let’s see.

All of us are, in a very real sense, one thing. Okay, this is only an analogy, but perhaps an illustrative one. Think of reality as a hologram in which every fragment has a form, of lesser intensity, of the whole design. Therefore, you reflect the entire cosmos. You can’t help it. Well, this is a way of honing in on that. And to use that to describe your own moods, so that you can make your own choices, is not a trivial use, at all. That’s what you should be doing. Not that we’re advocating using or not using astrology, but using anything to make better choices, is what you should be doing. You are responsible for you, and there’s no one else responsible for you. So that’s your major task! It doesn’t sound like much, when you put it that way, but every other task is really kind of a shirking away from that task, unless it flows out of it. [pause]

You could pretend to worry about international affairs or something, but your real task is what you yourself do. (Now, if your life has you making an impact on world events, all right. But, you understand.) What people are thinking of as trivial, they’re only thinking of it as trivial because it’s close to home. And yet that ought to tell them, that’s vital, that first step.

There’s an old line of Emerson’s that, fortunately we can dredge the old mill here and find, and he said “should I raise my siege of a hencoop and march off to a pretended siege of Babylon?” And that’s what you do if you don’t run your own life and instead go off to do something else —

R: The big issues.

F: Exactly. So it’s not a trivial use at all, it’s a good use.

R: Okay, I’m wondering now about time. Should we move to another question, or is this about it for tonight? How’s Frank doing?

F: He’s fine. We’re okay. [pause] That is, go ahead.

R: This may be a very short question, but —

F: Yes. [they chuckle]

R: Which of the world’s major religions comes closest to the truth?

F: [pause] All of them, none of them. A better question is, which interpretation by any given individual of his own religion, her own religion, comes closest to the truth?

A close analysis of all of the religions would show that they all have aspects of the truth, and no one can have all of the truth, not while you’re in a body, not while you’re in time-space slices. Can’t be done. But you can have various aspects of the truth, and what one religion emphasizes, another one de-emphasizes, but it’s not so much a loss as it is different flowers. So that whereas one might emphasize nearness to the divine, another one might emphasize submission to the overall divine, and a third might emphasize, oh, shall we say, submission within rules. In other words, the first one might be, as in Islam, absolute willing submission to the lord, whereas in Judaism it might be flavored like, submission to the laws. You see, it’s a different flavor.

If you look at all the major religions, you’ll find they all have different aspects of divinity and they’re all accurate. They’re all true. You can’t say, this religion is wrong. But if you look at Zoroastrianism, with its right versus wrong, “the world is a battleground between good and evil,” that may or may not be in favor at any given time, but it’s an accurate aspect of things. It’s only one aspect of things, but that aspect is there, and the aspect of Hinduism that says “all is one and there is no conflict” is no more and no less accurate than Zoroastrianism. It’s just that they’re choosing different attributes. Within the overall unity of the world, there are no ultimate contradictions. But within the duality in which you live, there are many seeming contradictions, because it’s a matter of picking and choosing what your emphasis is. Is that–?

R: Yes.

F: Having said that, if you will worship us and send money on a regular basis.. [they laugh]

R: It seems as though some religions are more sympathetic with the human condition, or more appropriate on this level of existence, this physical plane of existence….

F: No, we can’t go along with that. Your western viewpoint leads you to certain values, and religions that don’t emphasize those values, or even oppose some of those values, seem to you inhuman, but yours seems inhuman to them. There’s just not an absolute standard. If there were an absolute standard, it would say something like “you’re all right, but you’re all —

R: Wrong.

F: — incomplete.” Well, you’re all wrong, yeah. [they laugh] You know Frank always says that he thinks God looks down and goes, “you idiots, what are you up to now?” [laughs] But it’s not that, it’s that you’re all different kinds of flowers, and to each its own nature. When you think of the vast variety of human psychology in the world, it would be ludicrous to think that one kind of religion would fit all. There are too many kinds of needs for one religion to meet all the needs. One religion will meet people who have a strong emotional need, and another for people who need to be part of the same thing, another for people who need to be freethinkers, another for people – you see.

There are infinite varieties of religion, because there are infinite varieties of emotional and mental and spiritual needs. And rather than condemning the various religions, it would be more appropriate and more fruitful to try to get inside of the mind of someone who would find that religion appropriate, and that will teach you lots. It will help you triangulate your own point of view by going to someone else’s point of view.

That was a good question, by the way.

R: [pause] All right, I was going to ask about dream analysis, thinking about the meaning of dreams and what’s the best way to interpret them that’s of best use to us. Starting with, what is that all about?

F: That will all depend upon the starting point of the person. Dream analysis for a person in an Islamic society or in a communist society as it was, or in a African society or in an American Indian society would be vastly different, not because dreams are different, but because the standpoint from which the local individual attempts to make sense of them is different. Do you mean, from an American-European point of view? We’ll do whatever you want, but we’re just trying to get the sense of where do you want us to begin the effort?

R: Okay, you’re saying there that dreams have different meaning for various parts of the population? Or are you saying that the way of going about analyzing them —

F: We’re saying that the standing-place of the individual is so different that they’ll have to approach dreams in a different way. No, dreams are the same things always. Dreams are your larger being communicating with you. But your society’s beliefs, and your individual beliefs within your society’s beliefs, will condition the way that you experience the dreams, and therefore what’s appropriate for a college-educated westerner in the 21^st century, would not be appropriate for – oh, say a Puritan in the 1700s in New England, just to make a neutral example. That’s all we’re saying. Dreams are serving the purposes, but the recipients of the dreams will experience them differently and therefore you need to know something about where they’re starting from.  Don’t know a better way to put that.

R: When you say that dreams are messages from the total being, is that the way you said it?

F: From your larger being, sure.

R: From your larger being.

F: Your amoeba.

R: Why do they make it so hard to interpret? Why aren’t the messages more easily understood?

F: Well, [pause] Well, a simple answer, and as usual somewhat inaccurate because a simple answer, would be, that you’re not all that familiar with the language of the dream. You – Rita – know Monroe’s emphasis on non-vocal communication, and it is that language that is your easiest language to approach dreams with, because your larger being doesn’t usually speak to you in words, it speaks to you in NVC, or in symbols. So even if the symbols are strung together to make a story, it’s a story that’s primarily in experience and emotional feel, rather than in words or logical concepts. If you have been educated in such a way as to recognize logical concepts and words, but not gesture or emotional symbolism — drama, in short — it’s going to be difficult for you to get to make sense of it.

When Frank began his own dream analysis, he had a very difficult time because, being so word-oriented and being so literal-oriented, he was continually trying to correct the dream. He would say, “well, it was my father’s house, but really my father’s house didn’t actually have this that and the other.” And he had to learn that there were no accidents in the dream, that that particular symbol had been melded to another symbol in a way that was illogical but that was emotionally significant. Once he learned the language, he began to learn how to do it.

But the basic answer to your question is, your society does not teach that language, either by example or certainly by general schooling. You had to learn it through specific schooling. And in any case, it has only been rediscovered relatively recently. How long has it been rediscovered, that language? A hundred years. Basically nothing. In fact, if we may say so, you are about as far with dreams as you are with the Monroe symbolism. [they laugh] Which actually is a hopeful thing, if you stop and think about it. You have much more to learn.

R: I think we might come back to that subject later, but I’d like to have the question that Frank had asked me to ask, which is about —

F: This is a good one to stop with, too. Let’s stop after this.

R: — whether we should speed up our process by having more sessions than we’ve been having. There are sub-questions to that, but that’s one part of it

F: No, we think not. We think you’re doing fine, and it’s well suited to your energies, and he’s just getting a little impatient. However, it’s a free will thing, and if you want to do more, we won’t not show up.

R: I understand, you’re available. Very reassuring.

F: [yawns] We would say that’s about it for tonight, though.