November 20, 2001
R: Frank seems to have had a really good time at this conference he’s been to. [This was a Prophets Conference held in the Florida Keys the previous weekend.]
F: As we did too.
R: Is there anything that occurred that he didn’t take note of that would worth mentioning?
F: Good question. Very good question. The kind of question you might ask every so often. We’ve encouraged him to say “what am I forgetting to ask,” you know.
Actually, not a whole lot, because he lived very nearly all of the time consciously connected to us. Which is one of the reasons for the euphoria, if we may say so. If there were anything that we would call his attention to, it would be that there was still in him the tension between “what should I do, what could I do?” “What’s desirable, what’s possible?” — that kind of thing. But actually that’s really not worth mentioning, because every time the temptation came up he made the decision to say, “no, no I’ll trust.” And it’s the first time that he’s ever done it for such an extended period of time. There’s nothing he didn’t see that’s worth talking about. The question will be more in his living what he knows now.
R: Sounds really good.
F: It was very good. [pause] You see, to him it was a homecoming. At the end, he looked around and said – Well, how do we say this? He has said already that this is his time, as well as your time. This is a time that you all came here for, that culminates things. But it was at a different level of knowing this time. And now to see himself not as a potential player but to realize that he as Hampton Roads is already a player, was just very validating. And we finally got the word through to him. [chuckles] We’ve been telling him for years, “if you want to be a writer, be a writer, but that’s not as important as what you came here to do, which is Hampton Roads. And he’s had serious resistance to that message! [laughs]
R: But he’s now heard that.
F: He heard it. [pause] And appreciated it.
R: That doesn’t mean he can’t also be a writer.
F: Well, we never said he couldn’t be. In fact, this might be worth a word, because it has its instructive quality for others. One writes out of what one knows, and what one knows is partly one’s internal experience and partly external. And of course, partly what one knows internally comes from other lifetimes, other experiences, other dimensions. And in the case of genius, other things from the larger being are channeling through them.
So what a writer is flows out of what a writer’s life is. It’s not like a writer has to have an interesting set of external experiences in order to write about something that’s important. But the internal experiences are not divorced from the external life either. So in his case, he has been led, kicked, forced, prodded, encouraged into a life that he never would have chosen by himself, and he chose this life seemingly for other reasons. He often thought that he was in business in order to support himself. But really, this was part of his contribution toward providing a major axis of realignment for the world. That is to say, Hampton Roads as a company and Hampton Roads’ books as product, and Hampton Roads’ relationships among its authors and customers, and readers and investors and all, itself provides part of the way for people. This is not what he set out to do, consciously. And often he would have gladly given it up, save there was no way out. And often what he would have written wouldn’t have been much more than the exercise of a skill, had he had the opportunity to write in those ways — and he might have; we wouldn’t have had any objection. Whereas now, by what he has become and experienced and where he is and who he knows, the writing will be more than that; it will be in service.
Yes, well – it’s interesting. The way you asked the question, we answered the question, and the question that you asked was, “was there anything he didn’t realize, that we’d want to say,” and the answer more or less was no. But – it occurs to us now – had the question been “was there anything he realized that he hasn’t realized in this context,” the answer would have been yes.
Let’s tell it as a story.
He told you about Ilona Selke, and what a great impact she made on him. What he didn’t happen to tell you, only for lack of time, was that he’d spent time in the mornings watching the dolphins in these pens. Not cages, but a penned enclosure to keep them there, and even though it interacts with the waters right outside of it, it’s still penned off. And someone mentioned that Ilona had told them that she didn’t like communicating with those dolphins, it made her too sad, because they were captives, as opposed to the ones that she’s used to dealing with in the open oceans.
And although he saw that point of view, his immediate response was, “no, these dolphins are not having their lives wasted. They are in service. Many many more people will see dolphins in captivity than would ever see them in the wild, and those who see them can be changed. And so therefore, their life is a dedicated life of service.” And he specifically made the connection to the people who were working at the hotel, who weren’t necessarily thought of by the participants, you see, because they were sort of background. They were in a life of service as well, regardless of their intent. They may have been just there for a job. But the effect was a life of service.
The realization that he came to is just that, that the important tasks are tasks of service, not of an attempt to gain notoriety or money or satisfaction or the exercise of skill or anything like that. So – and please don’t take this as a criticism – it’ll show you how important your questions have been, that a slight nuance in the question elicits a seemingly different, sometimes seemingly contradictory, response. We’ve said that you point the question and we sort of coalesce around the point. And so this is an example of that.
R: It’s interesting that I had thought first about asking it in the terms that turned out to be the alternative question, and then changed.
F: Yes, and had you done that originally, we wouldn’t have come with this explanation. Well done.
R: Very good. [they chuckle] You mentioned in passing something about geniuses bringing forth parts of the amoeba that are not connected to other lives. Is that what you were saying?
F: Let’s look at it by analogy. A person who has muddy perceptions knows only a little bit about their own life and could draw on that if they were writing. Someone with clearer perceptions could draw upon psychological insights, memories, inferred connections, you see. They would have a much bigger portion of their own life to draw on in writing. Someone who was connected Upstairs to other lifetimes – as one example – might be able to draw on that, without drawing on it consciously. And by extension, someone who went, by way of the larger being, to another part of the larger being that had expressed as a dolphin, might be able to, seemingly fictionally, seemingly through imagination, express a dolphin’s world.
This is what we’re getting at. The larger the access, the clearer the channel, the more there is to draw on. Then it becomes a matter of a combination of the clear access plus the technical ability to do the writing, which involves several skills that have to be all together: vocabulary, perceptual strategies, that kind of thing.
R: And what determines the amount of the amoeba available to a person living this physical life?
F: Let’s for the purpose of clarification point out that you and we made a distinction a while ago, that there is level after level after level of seemingly separate things which become a part of a larger thing which becomes a part of a larger thing. You know, that there are chains of monads. So that when we talk of the amoeba, we don’t want people to accidentally slide into thinking of it sort of as a one to one correlation: one amoeba, one person. Or one amoeba, one person and the person’s other lifetimes. By extension, you could say all sentient life is one amoeba, with various subdivisions. We want to keep that in the readers’ minds, because there’s always a temptation to concretize things at the level of an individual, rather than remembering that everything is a two-sided monad. It’s individual at one level, but it looks upward to being part of a larger thing.
There’s not really an easy answer to what you said, because we don’t know any theoretical rules around it. If you have someone– just as an example – on the level of a van der Post or a Shakespeare, their range of sympathy and their range of suffering-driven empathy, shall we say, is so great that it’s kind of meaningless to try to say what made that possible. Do you see? You are all theoretically capable of accessing everything in the universe. It’s only theoretical, but it is there. Do you follow?
R: Well, I’m following, except that I had understood that in setting things in motion, you were making a lot of the decisions in this regard. And I would assume that one thing that’s a major factor would be the extent to which a multitude of things are available to the individual.
F: Well now, [pause] It may be that we misunderstand you, but we think you’re saying that we in creating an individual in space-time make a mixture of a series of attributes and abilities and what-all and put them into one package, so to speak. Is this what you mean?
R: Yes, and within that framework, lots of choice possibilities —
F: Exactly. That’s where we’re going. If a person is created who naturally has a lot of abilities in a certain line, by their choices to consistently maximize their potential – their exploring potential, their loving potential, their access-to-Upstairs potential – they could, if they consistently move in those directions, unpredictably widely extend their abilities to access. Does that sound circular?
R: Well, except I guess that I felt that you were putting emphasis on the plan for a particular lifetime coming about through decisions made by you and the individual involved.
F: That’s true, but some people’s plan is to be the eyes and ears of the species, so to speak. Some people’s plan is to grow as much as they can, given their own decisions and given the circumstances in a given lifetime. In other words, one person may be entering a life in which they need a life of emotional discipline, and so their externals are severely constricted. Another person might need a life where the physical constrictions are such that it moves them spiritually. And so perhaps they are imprisoned for life unjustly or something. You see what we’re saying. We may plan a life in which we say, “let’s see how far you can go with this.”
R: Mmm. That could be done from a range of abilities.
F: Absolutely. Can be and is. It’s not a rare thing. What is rare – what has been rare, due to the difficulties of your circumstances in matter — is that people maximize their opportunities for growth. Fear and inertia – or, not inertia so much as kind of getting off the beam –happens a lot, and it’s relatively rare for someone not to have one of those problems stunt their potential somewhat. When you see one whose potential hasn’t been stunted, such as Jesus, then you look and you just say, “my God, the rest of us are just wasting our time here!” [laughs] You aren’t, of course. The difference between his actuality and your potential is a measure of how much room there is for you to grow, if you wish. In other words, it can be looked at as a hopeful sign.
R: It’s suddenly occurred to me to wonder, what about the other end of that scale? People who seem to have very low desire to exploit any of their potential experiences.
F: Well, there is that, but we would also point out your very advised use of the word “seem.” You made Frank struggle tonight, and we were delighted to see it, with the idea of judging other people’s lives. It’s always a temptation to judge people’s lives, and you never have the data to do it. On the one hand you do need to do it, provisionally. On the other hand you need to keep in mind you can never really do it. So, yes, there are people who make little use of their opportunities. On the other hand, that itself can be used to fuel an opportunity at another time, for them. And also, that’s a flower in itself. If we can use the drunk who dies in the gutter, we can also use the person who just floats by and doesn’t have what seems to you much of a life. But you know the old poetic line from Blake: How do you know but the bird that cleaves the air is a world of delight, closed to your senses five? It’s difficult for you to judge, and it’s more difficult for you to remember that you can’t judge.
R: All right. I was going back over some of our work, this week, and ran into a couple of things where we said we needed to return. I’d like to mention two of those, and see if this is a good time to continue those discussions or not.
F: Frank would say, “see if we’ve arranged our cover story yet.” [they chuckle]
R: In one instance – this will be familiar – you said that we have the advantage over you in perception because we have the focus, and that you have the advantage in perspective, because you see wider and broader. And then I asked you whether it was just a situation where you simply understood more. And you said it was an interesting question, and we’d return to it.
F: Okay, this is a good enough time. [pause] Probably what will bring more clarity to the issue than anything else is to remember that when we said we have advantages and you have advantages, we’re talking about the same being. It’s like, we’re a two-ended wrench here, [laughs] and you use a box-end wrench on one side for some things, but in a restricted space you use the open-end wrench for other things. Same wrench, but different applications. And it is because you have no difficulty focusing on the moment that that’s your specialty! That’s relatively more difficult for us, because as we once told you, we have to sort of scan around to find where you are at the moment. Because to us we see it not in slices. Well, given that reality, how would you answer that question? You see the –?
R: Well, I guess I was assuming that you understand more because you always seem to be answering the questions that we have, as opposed to your questioning and our answering. So the understanding is implied in answering the question.
F: Well – What’s shaping the dialogue is the fact that by necessity it has to take place in time-slices, in 3D Theater. Therefore you’re asking and being answered in time-slices, therefore it looks to you like you can only ask and we answer. If we were on the other hand doing it on our side, we could ask and you answer. And in fact in a sense you could say that that does happen. It happens not only when you’re in the body but also when you come back, when the barriers are lifted, so to speak, because you see – let’s see now –
We find it works well if we have a physical analogy, something even like a box-end versus an open-end wrench. People will remember the analogy, and it will help them to hold the concept. Well, you point a question and we coalesce around the point, and that’s why you ask a question and we answer it. But when we ask you a question, it’s more like you live the answer.
R: I don’t really understand what you mean by that.
F: Supposing you look at it like we, the aspect of you that’s on this side, say “what would it be like if you lived as an academic and then retired and went to work at the Monroe Institute as a volunteer and got involved with very interesting stuff, which brought you away from the original but you still had the training, and then, 20 years later, you came and sat down and talked to us this way?” That’s a form of a question, you see. And your answer is what you live! But it doesn’t appear to you as question and answer, because it’s not in time-slices. Your lives are answers to our questions. It could be looked at that way, without a lot of distortion. It isn’t the only thing you’re doing, but in a sense, your lives have posed a question, and you’re exploring the answers. And no matter what choices you make, they’re the right choices, because that’s one answer to the question.
So your lives are like an algebraic problem that’s been set – No! No, that’s a mistake. No, because an algebraic problem would have only one answer. Your lives are a blank canvas. No, that’s not quite right either. When we find the right analogy, you’ll be amazed how it will open up. But the wrong analogies always – well, they at least don’t help, and sometimes they hinder.
A moment here. What’s a good analogy? [pause]
You know what it’s like, more than any other thing? [chuckles] It’s like, when we send you into life, we’re firing up into the sky a firecracker, and the firework goes off and we see what we have. Now, we knew we sent up a big purple flower, but the purple flower will form differently. Every one that we send up will be different. It’s also beautiful. It’s also evanescent, from our point of view. Doesn’t last very long. Pretty to look at. Interesting to watch. And you add the factor that the firework itself is choosing how it will go off, so that if it really wants to, it won’t be a flower at all, it’ll be a fireball, or a dud, or whatever, you know. That’s not a bad analogy. And in fact, we’re rather proud of it. [they chuckle]
You see the point, though. Looking at it that way, we are asking questions and you are living the answers to those questions. Bearing in mind that the we that’s asking and the we that’s answering are the same “we.”
R: But looked at from two perspectives —
F: Exactly. Exactly.
R: –which you have taught us to do
F: I know that we are driving you crazy with that, but it doesn’t —
R: No, not at all.
F: Okay good.
R: That’s the whole essence of the book, right?
F: Absolutely. Well, it’s much more important than the book. It’s the essence of your ability to get free of the singular point of view habit of mind which holds you to a lower state of consciousness than you need to be held to, because you’re way above that. That is –
Well, this isn’t anything you asked, but we’ll go on, since it started.
All the preparation work has been done so that you’re now (we’re now; whichever way you want to look at it) as a species, ready to move to the next level. This doesn’t just include humans. And as you do that, there are some things that are relatively holding you back, and one of them would be a clinging to a familiar but now constricting mental series of habits, the worst of which is the thing of “good and evil, my viewpoint only.” So we’re attempting to help release that little distortion, which will –
If you had a balloon that was trying to inflate, and someone had accidentally tangled a string around it or something, it couldn’t inflate past a certain point without bulging out in certain places. But if we removed the string or did whatever we had to do, then the balloon could assume its natural potential shape.
R: There are several things that came up there, and I’m trying to —
F: We often have this feeling we’re not answering your questions at all, we’re just using them as excuses. [chuckles]
R: Well, but isn’t that wonderful.
F: Thank you.
R: It is. Wonderful I was thinking what you said was one of the tasks still, to see the variety of perspectives available. And I was thinking about doing some work as a graduate student in which I would ask people to arrange a number of things in what seemed to be an appropriate order. And some people could hardly wait til they finished one order before they had another one in mind, and another and another. But most people had a “right” way to do it. And it was a sort of a discouraging thing that even people who should have known better were kind of stuck in this one perspective.
F: We’ll make a suggestion to you. If you’d like to. Go back. Go back to that younger self of yours, and suggest to it that it’s a simple trick that can be taught to them. Just as you talked to Frank about expressing his emotions, that it’s not a matter of intense study and all that, it’s just a learned skill, and an easy one. If you will have your younger self go back to them and show them, “look, there is a level of being at which you think there’s only one order, and the next level up –”
Set it up so that they’re told from the onset “there are three ways to order these,” and see if they can order them three ways. By the fact that they know there are three ways, they won’t be limiting it to one. And then, when they do that, say to them, “well actually there are five.” And if they do five, then say there are seven. You see, each time they will think “we’ve got what can be done,” and then they’ll realize “oh, there was more there all along that we did not see.” You might enjoy that, if you can go back. And therefore it won’t be frustrating and you won’t have wasted your time.
R: [chuckles]
F: And this will be an example of you moving across time to influence another part of yourself –you’ll go by way of the larger being down to the younger you, who will get this bright idea out of nowhere. It will relieve a lot of frustration. And we won’t even require a footnote.
[continued next post, August 19, 2007]