[In the black box at The Monroe Institute]
Rita Warren: Are you totally comfortable in there?
F: Yes, indeed.
R: Okay.
F: Was that too low?
R: Everything’s fine. Just relax and move on to a place where you’re comfortable and can report, and let us know when you are there.
F: All right, how about if we just go up to 21. That feels like the flavor du jour.
R: All right, just taking your time, move up to 21, and us know when you’re there.
F: Okay. [Long pause, with yawns.] All right, that feels pretty good.
R: All right. Very good. Can you tell me what you’re experiencing right now?
F: Just very calm. I used the energy conversion box, which I don’t always use. I’ve got the beginnings of the crystal building around my feet, which are quite cold. And I’m encouraging that to happen.
R: [pause] Are you aware of the guys being with you?
F: Well, not any more or less than ever. They’re just always there. I mean, you can talk to them if you want and we’ll see what happens.
R: I was wondering if they are aware of the difference in their experience, being in the booth, or being outside.
F: Hmm. What say you to that, my friends? Well, the first thing is that they get that I’m more concentrated here, that I’m more here. That’s interesting. You aren’t as — wait a minute. The crystal’s up to my thigh. Let’s wait just a little bit before we go into that question. Give me just a moment until it gets up over my waist, and then we’ll see.
R: All right, very good. Just let us know.
F: It’s building nicely, and it’s amazing, because the bottom of my body is quite warms with the waterbed, and then there’s this [laughs] unbelievable cold. [Pause.]
The answer to your question is, it has something to do with outside cues, that in the absence of them I’m actually more concentrated. So that when there are no flowers to look at, or windows to look outside, or things to flick my eyes from one thing to another without even knowing I’m doing it, therefore I’m more in one place. [Laughs.] They have a problem holding me in one place.
R: I’m not sure what that means, “holding you in one place.”
F: I think it means my attention. That I flit from this to that to the other.
R: Mm-hmm. But you’re able to concentrate more on the situation we’re in now?
F: Mm-hmm..
R: Well this crystallizing is very interesting, because I’d like to ask a question around it. In one of our sessions, the guys were noting that when we drop the body, if we’ve crystallized our soul during our lifetime, we will remain crystallized as we move over, and be able to carry that into another lifetime. I’m wondering if there’s a relationship between that idea and the phenomenon of finding yourself surrounded by crystals in the booth.
F: Well yes. In both cases, it’s an analogy, but a pretty useful one. When we say that having crystallized an essence of yourself — it isn’t that that crystallized essence then goes in to take another lifetime, but that the same –
OK we have to back up. Remember that from your point of view you you’re always looking at things as individuals, as perhaps connected individuals, but individuals. But you should put more attention on the connection, and less attention on the individuals, in a sense. The sense in which we mean you crystallize your personality is, that then when you have dropped your body and your attention’s back here, your previous what-you-have-been can be used as a lens to send another excursion out into matter, but it isn’t exactly like you are going back, and this is something that all of you find very hard to understand.
In other words, you say “when I have a past life,” and “when I have a future life,” and that’s in a way true, but it’s truer to say that the whole being has lives, some of which are focused through previous lenses. You know, focused in the sense of taking certain tendencies or certain patterns in the energy field, you might say. So having said that, the visualizing of a body within a crystal is just a form of exteriorizing an image to remind you of the communication that is always possible. So Frank’s now got the idea that “Inside a crystal I can contact the Egyptian, or the Norman.” Which is true enough. At the same time, it isn’t so much communication — which implies overcoming distance — as it is identifying, that’s all. You see, they’re holding the frequency and he’s holding the frequency, so they’re in the same place.
R: If I understood that, there’s not necessarily any relationship between your having this experience in the booth and the notion of crystallizing the soul.
F: That’s right. It’s just a convenient analogy. [Pause.]
You mean, can the crystal the only held in the booth, or more conveniently held in the booth, and the answer to that is no, it could be held anywhere, and in fact it would be pretty useless if you can only be held here, but this is a good place to inculcate the habit, because there’s no distraction.
Okay, we can go a little further with that. When he is lying on the bed in your room, talking to you, or we’re talking to you, or whatever it is that is happening, there is not the physical isolation that there is here. That’s the only thing that’s–
[pause.] You could do all the same things at high noon on Broadway, if you happened to be of a mind to, and already knew how to do it — and in fact that’s the idea. It’s just that here, all the physical surroundings act as subliminal clues saying, “concentrate on the internal.” That’s perhaps the best way to put it.
R: All right, I think I can understand that. So that one wouldn’t think of this is any kind of practice for the process of moving to the other side?
F: [pause] Do you mean especially in the booth?
R: Whenever the crystallization occurs.
F: Ah. Well, more like practice in redefining yourself so that you’ll know a little more of the extent that you extend to. And it’s true that a part of that is on the other side, but we wouldn’t put the emphasis on that as much as expanding yourselves in all directions.
R: All right. I’d like to go on to the question, unless you have something more to say about that.
F: No, at your service.
R: I’ve been wanting to ask the guys about this, that we understand that there’s now quite good scientific evidence for the non-local nature of our consciousness, and it’s clear that our consciousness does not seem to reside in the brain or in the physical body. There’s now interest in the same question with respect to memory. Do you have any comment you’d like to make about that?
F: Well, it’s all the same thing. You’re looking in matter for things that aren’t material, and you’re not going to find them. Given that the organizing principle for the whole body is outside of the physical, and the physical is laid down on energy patterns that are set from beyond the physical, it would be foolish for us to then entrust a vital part of the mechanism to a physical place, when it’s already in a nonphysical place. So that, for instance, your heart is a physical organ, and can’t be—
Wait a second, we have to sort this out. The circulation of your blood, using the heart among other things to do it, is a physical function. The storing of your memories is not entirely a physical function. It’s partially, because the accessing of the memories is more physical than anything else, but the actual storing of them is not. Just as with your consciousness, the accessing of your consciousness is partly physical. If you have a brain injury (even though that’s also an energetic injury, you could look at it just as a physical injury) and that may make it impossible for you to access memories or abilities that you had prior to the injury. But you’ll find when you drop the body that all of those abilities and memories are still there on call, because they weren’t destroyed. Because they were never there [in the physical] in the first place. Your access to them was destroyed, or damaged, but not the actual ones. This is why some of you have been surprised that people with extensive head injuries who were given sympathetic and loving attention over long periods of time regained their abilities that had been thought to be lost. It’s because what happened was, they learned new pathways, given attention, and the pathways were to something which was invulnerable because it wasn’t in the physical. Is that the-?
R: All right, can you talk about the process — it’s important to some of us, these days — about losing memories as we age?
F: Well again, you aren’t losing the memories, you’re losing the access to the memories. The memories are there, as you would find were you to have an operation and have them open your brain and touch portions of the brain with the needles, you know, they’ve done that for years, they know that’s there. But it isn’t that that particular piece of the brain exactly has the memory, it’s more like that particular piece of the brain is the doorkeeper to the memory. A subtle difference, but a big one. Do you see?
R: So that something has happened with respect to the antenna that picks up the external information
F: The switching mechanism, we would say. Like a telephone exchange. It could be that portions of the lobes that are the gateways no longer function, and in that case it’s as if the memories are gone. But ordinarily it’s that the switching function is inhibited, and can be restored sometimes. And when the switching function is restored, it’s found that, lo and behold, the memories were there all along.
You see, there are two things going on. The switching function on the one hand, that enables you to access the places in the physical gateways, which then access the memories, and the gateways themselves on the other. So if a gateway cell, shall we say, is destroyed, then there may not be any access to that memory, although perhaps another one can be developed. Or, if the switching system fails to access the cell that’s perfectly good, still you’ve lost your access. In neither case has the memory been lost absolutely, it’s all there, as you would say, in the Akashic record. Which ought to tell you that in fact, it’s there in the first place. That is to say, it hasn’t been so much transferred from the physical, that’s where it was stored in the first place, was in the nonphysical.
R: So is this sometimes a matter of choice on the person’s part?
F: Well, as always we’re going to ask you, what you mean by the person? You know, which level of person? It’s sometimes a level of choice, as you say, Upstairs. [pause] Partly you could look at it as the result of habit. A person who does crossword puzzles every day is going to have a more active switching mechanism than someone who doesn’t do anything to keep the little mental muscles limber, you know. However, that statement is “other things being equal,” and of course between people they are never equal.
R: I’m wondering about this in part because Frank feels he has a memory problem.
F: He has an access problem.
R: Yes, an access problem. Is that a physiological state?
F: [Pause.] Well, we would say it’s a switching systems problem, which only backs the question up as to why that problem is there. He has a pretty large vocabulary, and perhaps it’s just as well that he doesn’t use it entirely. No, that’s not the way to put it. Perhaps it’s just as well that he is humbled every so often at being unable to find the words that he wants. [pause] It’s not a progressive disease, or disability, if that’s what you’re worried about.
R: Well, it was more his worry than mine, obviously.
F: [Laughs.] Well to us it’s all you. [Laughs]
R: Does the Free Cell activity in helps this?
F: Well that actually doesn’t hurt it. That’s actually a very astute question. It’s a matter of seeing patterns, shall we say nearly unconsciously, that is to say, such rapid recognition of sequential possibilities as to become nearly automatic, and it is a similar kind of a process. Actually though, what he uses it for, whether he knows or not, he thinks on an emotional level while he is playing Free Cell. That is, things run through his mind as daydreams that are important to –
A stream, a sort of a flavor of consciousness and subject matter will flow through in almost a daydream kind of a way, while his surface attention is concentrated on the Free Cell. And were it not, he would never put the surface attention on that, and put it front and center. So this way it gets tended to, sort of. [pause] That’s not your question, but we thought you’d be interested.
R: Skip has a question here for me to ask. He’s asking, what is the equivalent of the switching system when you leave the body?
F: Well, you see, when you leave the body, you don’t need that switching system in just that way, because although it may not look like it, that switching system is necessary because you’re living in time slices. You’re going blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, and so there is a sequence. That is, there is a – [laughs.] Hold on a moment, we’ll look for the word. [Laughs.]
There’s a limitation on your consciousness, which is that it can only hold so many things in consciousness at the same time, and your consciousness really does sort of have to move moment to moment, to stay in the same place. Once you’re outside of the time-slice problem, and once you’re outside of moving moment to moment to stay with a sliding present, you don’t have that same situation, and then it’s more like the crystal analogy that we gave you a long time ago, in which we said that the volume of the crystal has innumerable places in it, all of which interconnect. They don’t move, it just depends on which way you shine your flashlight.
Is that too –? Did that answer the question? Your switching system is because your consciousness is required to hold things together while you’re moving from moment to moment in the present, that is to say, while the present is moving around you and you are staying up with it.
R: Yes, that does answer the question, but takes me back to the question about Free Cell activity and what’s going on underneath it. How is that working with the attention in two places?
F: Well, you all work with your attention in many places, whether you know it or not. When you drive a car, your primary attention is on the driving, and then occasionally your primary attention is on the conversation you’re having, or the radio that you’re also playing, or a daydream that may sort of overwhelm your physical presence at the moment — and they all go on at the same time, and they mix back and forth in various proportions. So you all do that. You all think on many levels. Not only think but experience on many levels at the same time. In fact, we doubt it would be possible for you to experience on only one level a given time. It would be probably painful, if even possible.
R: Yes, that sounds right. So all these activities, the daydreaming and the attention to all the things we’re doing, are something we should think of as being part of the field rather than part of the physical apparatus?
F: Hmm. It’s difficult to see why that’s an important distinction, really, but yes you could. It’s more accurate if you’re going to be –
Well, you have to look at it that you in the body are an interface between systems anyway, and so in a way you could say it’s meaningless to say that something is physical or not physical, because if it involves you it has to by definition involve both. You can’t move a muscle strictly through physical activity. And you can’t move a muscle without physical activity. Everything you do has to be a mixture. Not even a mixture, it’s just integrally connected. You know how people say “flesh and blood” as a saying, but in actuality you couldn’t have flesh without blood or blood without flesh and have it function.
We’re just suggesting that the distinction about “is a daydream a physical process or a metaphysical process” — we know why you’re asking the question and we know that your science has been tied up in knots over this for years — but rather than say “well yes, it’s primarily a nonphysical function,” we would prefer to take it out of that either/or situation at all, because either end of the either/or is equally misleading. We’d rather you thought of it a different way. But actually, we’d rather you thought of yourselves a different way.
R: Yes, well this comes up because of the resistance of science to move outside the body at all.
F: Mm-hmm.
R: So, this is important to us.
F: But, you see, by definition they won’t listen to this anyway so –.
R: [laughs.] Well, someday.
F: But we do want to say that, as little as Frank is inclined toward their point of view, still theirs is one end of a polarity, and the truth is in both ends of the polarity, not either end.
R: Well, in other words in this movement toward recognition of external dimensions, we’re trying to take the physical out of it to more of an extent than is appropriate.
F: Well, he certainly has. We’ve been correcting that. [pause] With some success, finally.
R: All right, I’d like to want to another question if you’re ready for that.
F: Sure.
R: Frank, you will remember that we talk to the guys about their awareness that there is some energy beyond them that perhaps acts as guidance for them. I wanted to see if from where you are now you can make some contact with that energy. See if you can call on that energy to make some kind of communication contact with you. And see what happens.
F: Well, it would probably be easier if we function toward it as you function toward us, which implies a question. Do you have a question that we can relay? [laughs]
R: OK, I think I was taking into consideration the possibility that it might not be a verbal communication, that there might be some energy contact that you could become aware of that might or might not have a communication capacity. Could you try it just without verbalization first, and let’s see what happens?
F: All right [Pause.] hmm.
[Pause.] Well, I don’t know how they’re doing, but I’m getting an image that’s kind of perplexing. It’s like, if I’m at the bottom, and they are above it, and there’s something above them, that above them is actually circular and comes back through me. It’s as though you kept looking in a microscope at something smaller and smaller, and you realize that it’s actually bigger than the microscope. Or the other way around with a telescope. Let’s see what more we get here. [Pause.] It’s got to do with a hologram.
[Pause.] Well, it’s like a sphere. Like this big — I don’t know if it’s hollow or what — sphere. Seems to be more or less featureless. Using the sphere as a symbol — Well –
[Pause] The sphere is a symbol of everything that exists, not just physical but otherwise. And the sense of it is again, it’s a matter of viewpoint, as to whether something is a certain portion of the sphere inside or it’s part of the sphere. In other words, it’s a viewpoint still as to whether to look at it as an individual or as part of a thing. And in that sense, that’s why they mention a hologram, that sense of guidance that they have outside them is in fact larger than them, smaller than them, and them. And larger than me, smaller than me, and me. Well, we just keep coming back to the same cliches. It’s all one thing.
R: Would it be helpful to think of it in terms of a series of concentric circles, where you represent the most dense point in the center?
F: No, that’s not what they’re getting at. They mean that all of us interpenetrate the whole thing all the time. You know, we talk about levels, which is a spatial analogy, but there aren’t really levels that separate things or people or whatever. We’re all everywhere, just like a hologram. So I guess that means — well let’s see what it means.
[Pause.] That was a pretty good explanation, and probably as good as you’re going to get for the moment. The totality of things is not bigger or smaller than the biggest or the smallest part of the thing. It’s all one thing — except it’s not a thing at all, but you understand. This would be true at any level –
Ah! So, you don’t have to be able to comprehend larger levels to be able to see those larger levels in miniature, right in your hand, so to speak. And you don’t need to be able to comprehend smaller levels to see them in magnification in your own hand, so to speak. The fact that we can’t necessarily be conscious of other levels of being (that we have been thinking of as above us, or larger than us, or as more extensive) doesn’t mean that they are not in fact in evidence at every moment of our life. Which means at every moment, because again, we’re all one thing. It’s really almost too simple to explain, and too complicated to begin to explain.
The only things that come to mind now are the sphere and the hologram, those two concepts. If you see yourselves as holographically part of the entirety of the universe, this doesn’t mean that you’re a tiny part of something huge, it means you’re an integral part of the whole thing, and there isn’t any size that’s relevant. It’s just really not relevant. And the sphere again, only used as an analogy of completion, of totality. It doesn’t mean that reality is literally a sphere. (It may be an egg — in which case who laid it?)
[continued next post, Aug. 23, 2007]