November 6, 2001
[Rita had given me, as a gag gift, a “laughing bag” – a sort of soft misshapen pyramid with a smiling face on it which, squeezed, gives off maniacal laughter. Her label on the box said “to your amoeba from my amoeba.” TGU had said, playfully, that they didn’t think it was a very good image of them.]
R: I’m going to go back to where we started, which is this criticism of the image that was presented tonight in a yellow triangular form. The response seemed to be that it wasn’t a very good picture of you! And the fact is that I was thinking of it as not a very good picture of the amoebas, but still, a move in that direction.
F: Well, this is a very productive – Keep going.
R: And so I’m back to asking again, aware as I read our notes that I’m sometimes not very clear where we end up about whether the amoebas are something predominately on that side, with a little life popping out of it now and then to be lived on this side, or whether the amoebas are operating primarily from this side. I’m confused.
F: It’s not a meaningful distinction. What you could think that would be more meaningful is that you, as an individual, are part of an amoeba that extends well beyond your one physical life and your one physical time and space slice, wherever you happen to be at the moment. That larger being may have other life forms in the physical or it may not, and by definition it exists outside of time and space with one or more extensions of itself in time and space. Of course, there are also amoebas that don’t extend into time-space, but we’re not talking about them at the moment. So the question about whether it’s primarily there or primarily here is a misunderstanding, really. There isn’t any “there” there. The point is that you and we are parts of the same thing, and we exist within the amoeba. Now, remember we only invented that term as a convenience.
R: Yes, I’m aware of that, and yet it seems to be individualized.
F: Remember as well, though, that from the beginning we’ve told you that we on our side are individual but not individual. We are one thing, but not one thing. That is, we are monads. We could be looked at as cells comprising one tissue, or we could be looked at as individuals cooperating closely. It’s not at all the hard and fast division that it appears to be, to you, because you’re living in time-slices.
R: Well, the amoeba takes time-slices out of it, doesn’t it?
F: Mm-hmm.
R: I mean, when you talk about other dimensions, or —
F: You are part of that amoeba, now, remember.
R: Yes, I’m understanding that.
F: So the part of you that’s experiencing time-slices, means part of it is experiencing time-slices. But only that way.
R: Mm-hmm. But there are many other aspects to the amoeba.
F: That’s right. If you’ve had ten other lives, chances are those ten other lives are going to be part of the amoeba. But to say you’ve had them is from your point of view. From the amoeba’s point of view, it’s had them.
R: All right, but we’re not only talking about lifetimes but we’re talking about other realities, other dimension, and all.
F: Sure. Anything that’s possible. And, we have to point out that amoeba is also an artificial concept. Remember we said a while ago that we pretend somewhat that distinctions exist that really don’t, but if you go too far, you always come back to saying “everything is part of one thing,” which isn’t helpful. So if we were describing the earth, we could talk about Europe and Asia as if they were different things, for the sake of keeping them clear, but it’s the same thing! Or we could talk about Eurasia as if it were a thing, but it’s part of the whole globe. You see what we’re saying, it’s merely a matter of convenience, and it’s important to remember that amoebas don’t exist any more than France exists. Or an individual exists. It’s just in the concept that you wrapped around —
R: This is a very helpful concept, however.
F: [comic cough] That’s why we brought it in! [they chuckle]
R: We appreciate your bringing it in. As long as we don’t carry it too far, we’re okay.
F: Well, we know that was only an aside, but, you know, there’s something to be said for carrying things too far. In fact, there’s an old saying that you know very well, “the path to wisdom lies through excess.” If you don’t go too far, how do you know it’s too far? And anyway, what’s “too far” mean? But – when you do, we’ll rein you in. [they laugh]
R: All right, something I wanted to check up on from our last session. We were talking about the process of our choosing, and that that choosing led to increasing differentiation of us as individuals, and that individuality – you mentioned – would be preserved on the other side. Now, what does that mean?
F: Well, it means that we’re monads, as we said from the beginning. We’re not an undifferentiated piece of jello over here. The flower that blossomed in your lifetime, that you were, that you are, remains a flower on our side; otherwise, what would be the point of it, in a way? That flower that blossomed in a certain area of time-space remains. So, flow through it one way and it’s an individual that retains its individuality. Flow through it another way and it is a one part of the brain cell that is everything.
R: I guess I had the impression that when we move to the other side, that we were moving toward much greater awareness of the all-is-one phenomena.
F: Well, but now bear in mind, who do you mean by we?
R: Those of us who are going to get rid of the —
F: No, no, no —
R: These little sub-aspects of the amoeba that have been over on this side for a while.
F: Yes, but you see, you are not who you are at the moment thinking you are. You are a part of your larger being that is encased in a body and a mind, in space-time slices. Take away the casing, and your awareness expands, but it isn’t like you – A moment here; let’s think about how to describe this.
You remember we said a while ago, you could have an effective consciousness of three out of a hundred, say. And your flashlight could illumine three and your background lighting would be the other 97. Well, maybe the amoeba is 10,000. Now, you could say that when you drop the body, you drop the flashlight. There’s not the need, because the hundred units are no longer sealed off from the rest. They’re no longer artificially preserved – not that they were meant to be hermetically sealed, but existing in time-space tends to focus your attention, that’s what it’s for. Well, without it being constrained in that way, now you’re part of the ten thousand, rather than seemingly only part of a hundred. You always were part of the ten thousand, but you didn’t really have access to it; now you do. But the hundred that was here is still the same hundred, but now the physical barriers between it and the rest of the ten thousand are gone.
So suppose you have ten lifetimes, each of them using a hundred out of the ten thousand – the proportions are wildly wrong, but it doesn’t matter. Then you have one thousand units, in ten places, all of them seemingly connecting to each other and to everything else. We say seemingly only because it would depend on from which portion’s point of view, okay? You’re accustomed to thinking of each of them as individual, and when you take away the individuality – You don’t take away the individuality, you sort of flow into it. It’s hard – again, your language isn’t designed to say this. You [pause]
You enter a highly cooperative arrangement in the way that the cells of your body are in a cooperative arrangement. The cells of your liver may be looked at as part of one thing, or they may be looked at as individual cells cooperating. Okay? It’s much the same thing.
R: Okay then, back to this question of the individuality being preserved. Does that mean the sense of individuality is somehow preserved within the amoeba?
F: Mm-hmm. That’s the flower, you know?
R: So that the sense of individuality of that aspect of the amoeba might continue, might be, as you say, ten of those or something.
F: It’s not “might”; it does! Unless it’s dissolved and found unnecessary, if there was no profit to it, as we talked about once.
R: By the sense of individuality, are we including what we think of as our identity, our personality?
F: Well – Well, it’s a little more like, if you were an actor who had been playing Hamlet, it might be closer to your looking at the movie of yourself playing Hamlet, and remembering what it was like and how you felt and all that, and at the same time seeing the effect and it’s frozen in time, so that you can always see yourself playing Hamlet the same way, but you don’t identify with it in that moment any more. You can allow yourself to identify with it, but you don’t automatically. Okay? Because you’re not only more than your physical body, you’re more than the role that you played, you’re more than the costume you wore, and all that.
R: So that our identity might be more with the total amoeba.
F: Yes, that’s what’s hard for you to understand. It always is with the amoeba, but because within time-space you think of yourselves as being separate, and you experience yourself as sort of coming into consciousness from childhood, and gradually watching the consciousness get larger – because that’s the way you think that happens, you think this is going to be a change. But it’s going to be the dissolving of the barriers that prevented you from seeing it in the first place. And in that context, let us say that widening your access to your guidance is an example, of what will happen to your afterwards, do you see?
R: Mm-hmm.
F: You are being lived, or we should say you are being dreamed, by the amoeba every second. You couldn’t live without it. The breath of the eternal flows through you every second. And you think it’s your own breath. And, it is your own breath. But it’s the breath of the eternal. You needn’t fear death as a big change, because the only change is the melting away of the illusion of separation. You don’t change, so much as your perception of limitations change. Which of course changes you, but you understand what we’re saying.
R: How about carrying on the memories from this lifetime?
F: Oh absolutely! Absolutely. [sputters, looking for words so fast] What would be the point of not? But – but, you see, here’s the thing. [pause]
What makes it difficult for you to understand this is that to say “carrying on the memories” seems to you to imply someone sitting there all the time, holding on to them. You find it hard to imagine a third position between someone always holding that memory and holding that sense of that lifetime, or someone sort of dissolving in the whole thing and not particularly noticing it. But that’s a false dichotomy. It’s more like the cells of your body – this is probably going to be the easiest analogy for you to follow – the cells in your body, if you were to experience them on a cellular level, you would see that they experience themselves as cells but you could experience them as part of an organ, or part of the larger being.
You wouldn’t think to yourself that the cell that’s part of your kidney – well, the analogy breaks down, because we can’t think of a way to make the analogy of the kidney cell dying without it actually ceasing to function.
You needn’t fear that your individuality is going to be lost; that’s the whole reason you were sent in here, or sent yourself in here, whichever way you want to look at it.
R: You attribute fear in a number of those questions. I’m not experiencing it that way —
F: Not necessarily talking to you! [laughs]
R: Fear would hold it that way, yes.
F: Actually, though, we could eliminate the word “fear” and say, “it’s wrong to anticipate that possibility.” That possibility is not a possibility. The only thing you came in here for was to choose and to create a flower, and they’re not going to forget that when they pull you back over on the other side! [they chuckle]
R: I’m still somewhat caught up in this phenomenon we talked about last time, of some energy coming into physical existence here and not having what we call a successful life so that it’s parts were returned somehow to the total energy pool. I have no concept whether we’re talking about “this happens now and then,” or “this is the major picture and those people who are really trying to stretch their consciousness and so on are the exceptions” —
F: You’re making a wrong turn here. You’re making a mental association that we do not mean, that in order to not be dissolved, you have to in some way “earn it.” And that’s not at all what happens, it’s just that some lives don’t contain within them something interesting enough, or important enough to be worth continuing, and so, just put it back in the mixture again. If you were creating a field of grass, you might have 99 percent of that grass basically identical. That doesn’t mean that that’s not valuable. You need those 99 percent that are identical. So it is not a question of being unusual, but it’s a question of being – [pause]
Well, [pause] we may have to put that in abeyance until we can think of a way to describe it differently. We know you don’t think we have duration, but – we’ll think about it. It’s so simple– you put the stuff in the mix and it works or it doesn’t work, and if it doesn’t work, you put it back in again. But we realize that you don’t know what we mean.
R: One more question about this and then I’ll quit. When you say put it back in the mix, is this back in the mix of the amoeba? Or something beyond the amoeba?
F: [pause] Well, we know that sounds like a meaningful question to you, but we’re having a little bit of difficulty with it. It’s not –
You’re saying the amoeba, and we think that means that you think that we mean that anything coming into the 3D Theater comes from an amoeba.
R: Yes, that’s what I thought.
F: But not the same amoeba, but just any.
R: An amoeba.
F: Yes, okay, that’s fine. We just wanted to be sure. [pause] Yes, where else would it come from? Oh! Okay, here’s why we can’t make sense of your question. There’s a linguistic problem with the question, and we can’t figure out how to untangle it. Your language makes it seem that if there’s not whatever puts people into existence, that there would be something other than that. And that’s tangled in your language, it’s not tangled in reality. It’s not meaningful.
R: The sum of the amoebas is the sum of –
F: No, it’s more like, by definition whatever puts something into the physical can be considered an amoeba. By definition, you see. And it would be like saying, “can I change without changing,” or “can I have a life without living,” or something. On our end, it’s a contradiction in terms, but it’s hidden by your language structure.
R: But that doesn’t work the other way around?
F: Hmm?
R: I got lost in trying to straighten out the language there. But you were saying, by definition, anything that puts an energy into the physical is an amoeba. But an amoeba doesn’t have to put someone into the physical.
F: That’s correct.
R: Okay, so that’s what I meant by the other way around.
F: We’re beginning to wonder if we’re going to regret having invented this concept, but we’ll keep going with it for a while.
R: There’s a temptation to concretize everything —
F: Exactly! Exactly!
R: and I don’t want to do that, but we’ll see what happens. Okay, that was the last question in that frame.
F: We get paid by the hour, we don’t care. [they chuckle]
R: Okay, here’s one I wanted to ask. Does developing our psychic abilities increase our Upstairs development, or our moving closer to you?
F: When you say your Upstairs development, you mean — ?
R: Well, our amoeba.
F: Yes, but do you mean, does your — ? It sounded like you’re asking, do you, in increasing your own development, increase our development. Is that what you meant?
R: Hmm. No. No.
F: Okay, good. Because the answer would be no.
R: No, what I meant was, one of our goals on this side, as we understand it, is to become more like you. To move closer to you.
F: To broaden your access to us, is what we would say. There’s a difference.
R: All right. Let’s use that then and ask, does developing our psychic abilities on this side increase our chances of doing that?
F: We would put it just the other way around. The easiest way for you to develop your psychic abilities is to increase your access to us first. To broaden your channel, to extend your willingness to say “your will, not mine.” Not in the religious sense, exactly, but to say, “I –
Well, an example from Bob Monroe would be when he said his total self should do the driving when he went out of body – not necessarily his idea, by the way, although he thought it was – and the minute he did that then everything changed for him, because he had increased his access by handing over the reins.
If you want to increase your psychic abilities, the easiest, simplest way to do it is to broaden the channel from which they flow. Anything else is doing it the hard way. In fact, it may not even be possible. Since psychic abilities are inextricably connected with your ability to overcome the illusion of separation, and since that ability is always connected through the heart, whether consciously or unconsciously, and since the decision to flow through the heart can be taken consciously –
[interruption]
R: We were talking about psychic abilities and the best way to develop them is to —
F: Open your heart, open your channels. That is so simple. That’s why people have it happen to them without intent, surprising themselves. Because they’ve had their mind on something else, when the heart opens. [pause]
Now let’s flip the tape, because your next question takes a longer answer.
Frank: They’re bossy.
[change sides of tape]
R: Okay, Hearing this, I’m trying to take that in while I think about psychic abilities. It seems such a wide range of things. I guess I wouldn’t have thought of them all as coming through the heart, but you’re saying that’s the case.
F: Well, we’re saying they come as a result of enlarged access between you and your larger being, between you and the amoeba, which, not coincidentally but by side-effect results in your opening your channels to each other, by way of the larger being.
R: So a person who doesn’t have this perspective, and is using their psychic abilities in some way or another, can we think about that as a way of their stretching their consciousness? Is this a help or an interference?
F: Well, it’s true that for some personality types what we just said would be abhorrent and would actually interfere with their efforts. Some people might have such a need for perceived autonomy, and such a need for control, that they would not allow themselves to realize what they’re doing. [chuckles] They would still be opening the channel, but they wouldn’t be thinking of it in those terms. In other words, for many people what happens to them is less important than the way they think about what happens. Suppose you had someone with a bigotry against religious symbolism and anything that reminded them of religion. If you were to quote the words of Jesus, they would be emotionally shut down, because of the associations that they consciously or unconsciously put with it. But that same person, if you put it in terms of “identify with all that is,” or put it in some sanitized (by their point of view) context, could do the exact same thing, but [chuckles] they’d have to see it differently before they’d be able to do it. That’s all.
We can’t think offhand of any psychic ability that doesn’t depend upon your connection with us, with the larger being, with the other side. By definition. And so an expanded access has to make everything else easier. Now, some of you will connect primarily through emotions, some through intellect, some through the heart. That’s fine, it doesn’t matter either way. But you want to open the access Now, we say that, and it sounds like an absolute contradiction to what we just said, which is the heart is the only way, but it isn’t really. Someone who is a thinking person and thinks their way through to the idea of all things being one, they’ve done something radically different from an emotional person who feels the unity. You see? But it’s just your own invisible mental structures making distinctions that seem to you to be absolutely real or they’re so transparent that you can’t even see them, but it’s just – oh, how shall we say? – your perceptions playing games with you.
R: All right, just one more thing on this and then —
F: As much as you want.
R: It feels to me like I’ve seen individuals who went straight to the attempt to connect directly with you, and out of that process gained psychic abilities, and other individuals who seemed to develop psychic abilities and maybe out of that move toward the connection with the other side.
F: The operative word here is “seemed.”
R: Seemed. Okay. [chuckles]
F: Well, it’s just that you can’t any of you see what the others are coming from, and half the time you can’t see where yourself is coming from, because there’s so much going on that’s in the background or in the shadow. [pause] Nothing wrong with it. That’s the way it’s set up, but – it’s not an exact science. You’re back again to whatever it was you said that time, “we can measure that it seems to be this.” [they chuckle]
R: Something like that.
F: Close to that.
[continued in tomorrow’s post]