Monroe Institute Black Box session June 22, 2004

 Edited transcript of a PREP session in the Bob Monroe Lab at TMI held Tuesday morning, June 22, 2004, Skip Atwater at the controls, Rita Warren at the microphone, Frank in the black box.

 Rita: If you have something that you’d like to start with, we’re open to that. Otherwise, we’ll begin.

Frank: No, I’m all right. [pause] Or you meant, do they have something? No I don’t think they do.

Rita: All right then, one of the things that we try to do constantly in this work is to challenge our understanding of what we’re getting, and our last session was full of things that on their surface were not easily understood by us. Another part of this is that you guys may have noticed that we sometimes get so enamored of a metaphor, or an analogy, that we move toward accepting the analogy for the thing that’s being analogized. So what would be the main error or misinterpretation in using the metaphor of spools and threads? Is there some way in which we’re tempted to misunderstand that because we get too hooked into the metaphor?

Frank: Let us start by saying that your habit of recapitulating your understanding of what has been said, is an excellent one not only for you but – whether you can believe it – for us. Because in your recapitulation of your understanding of what we have been conveying, we will in our usual picky way say “well, that’s not quite that, or that’s not quite that” and it has the effect of putting the needle onto the record and telling us which place we need to talk about a little more. So, to the degree that you summarize what we have said, it is a good way not only to check your own understanding, but also to give us a jumping-off point for further elaboration or course-correction.

Now, having said that: Remember that we say we’re giving you somewhat contradictory hard-to-meld analogies for specifically the reasons that they work against each other and eliminate all but a couple overlapping areas. So that it’s very difficult for you to think of a spool and threads on the one hand, and crystals interconnected in facets, on the other hand. It’s hard for you to hold both of those images for the same reality. And that’s a good thing, that it’s hard to hold.

Yes, we agree with you that it is a constant temptation to confuse the map and the territory. We are giving you maps that are not quite saying “here there be tigers,” but our maps say, “if you look at this in this light it looks like this, but if you look at it in that light, it looks like this.” That of course is quite deliberate. And it is, if we may say so, a very useful technique.

Now, spools holding threads are too passive an analogy. Neither the spool analogy nor the crystal analogy provides the sense of active shaping that is your part. And this is something that we will indeed need to get into. [pause] Your question, just by chance, gives us a jumping-off point, but we think we’ll hold off on this for a little bit, until you say some more or ask some more. But at a certain point we will then go back and we will say that all along, what we have been calling spools holding threads are really something more active, more alive, more integral, because the spools aren’t so much containing the threads as being composed of the threads. And the threads aren’t inanimate in the way that you often think of things as inanimate, not only because everything is animate, but even in a relative scale, the threads are not inert matter to be bundled. They interact with other things up and down the thread, they interact with each other, they interact with what we’re calling the spool.

So let’s bookmark all that and we’ll come back to it at a proper time, and go on in the meantime.

However, we’re perfectly willing to continue on this if that’s where you want to go, but what we’re saying is, `over to you.’”

Rita: Okay. One of the terms that you used in our last session referred to the “cosmic memory” of the bundle of threads that represents us. the “cosmic memory” of that, which seems to occur after we’ve moved on, out of body. Could you say some more about that?

Frank: Give us your tentative understanding of it?

Rita: Well, you had been talking about, `at some point we’ll move on to discussing what the bundle of threads is like before and after the body experience.’ And you talked about this as somehow the system maintains a “cosmic memory” of this bundle with which we cross to the other side.

Frank: All right, now [pause] You see [pause] That’s part of the difficulty of talking about things from an assumed point of view of time. That’s all that’s going on there Rather than cosmic memory, we could as easily have said “the crystal exists, and when the body no longer exists – that is to say, when you look –

Well let’s back up the whole thing, just a little bit. This is not your problem as much as it is our problem, really, because [pause]

Even speech is of course a sequential motion of air through vocal cords. Time is so integrally connected with anything that it is very difficult to explain, but we will try. We will try.

When we say, the universe has a cosmic memory of that bundle, the word “memory” implies, it no longer was and now it is, you know. And when we say the bundle is there after the body is gone, or before the body was there, either of which is true, it implies, again, a sequence of time. And if you’re outside time [pause]

You could look at it as if you’re on two different references. We’ll think of an analogy, but – [chuckles] and do you hear that? “We will think of an analogy.” It’s all throughout everything. But on one page we could look at it in time and say “the bundle is collected, the bundle lives, the bundle is remembered.” And within that frame of reference, there’s nothing wrong with that statement. But a different page might say, “one of the characteristics of the universe is that this bundle is one part of it, and this bundle [pause]

But you see, right in the middle of the sentence, then one has to change references, and say “the bundle came into existence, existed, went out of existence, and it’s still there in the cosmic memory, the akashic record.” But the akashic record is not so much a memory as it is a schematic. From your point of view, things haven’t been and then they are and they aren’t any more, which implies creation, and that’s what you’re doing now. You know, you’re creating your lives moment by moment. From a point of view outside of that, it is still true but just looks entirely different.

We can’t exactly say there’s no space and no time outside of space-time – except there isn’t. [laughs]

[Well, thank you, that cleared that up!}

Rita: Are you saying it’s difficult to talk about without those dimensions in it?

Frank: Well, that’s what we meant by talking about the way that voice comes out? That it’s impossible to talk about it, because everything in your world runs through space-time. It can’t help it. Well, we are pretending, in our discussions, that we’re not in space-time. In other words, you, while listening to us, and we, while speaking, are pretending that we’re not in space-time. In other words, we are envisioning not being in space-time. And this can give you sort of a faint echo of the ways things are outside space-time, but not a very good one, because in your pretending, you’re still moving from time-slice to time-slice. Your switching system is still keeping you up with what you call the present. You know what we mean. So if you were underwater and you were talking about life in the air, in the atmosphere, and you were drawing analogies – and even if you were creating a model of some kind – everything you did would still be suffused by being underwater. You couldn’t help it.

That doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing. We’re just reminding you and ourselves that the analogies have to take account of the physical reality in which the analogy is being purposed.

Now, Frank has just finished reading the beginnings of something that has clicked with him, and is giving him a sense of it, that every time you move up a level, the –

Well, let’s see.

Supposing your world contains 10 dimensions, and you perceive three of them, and the fourth is perceived as time. All those other dimensions – you exist in all those other dimensions. You couldn’t not exist [in them]. Everything that is, is everywhere. It can’t help but be. You know, you don’t exist in height, but not in width and depth. You can’t. Not if you’re in 3D. Well, you’re in 10D let’s call it, and what he recently read began to explain to him that as you perceive another dimension, that dimension is carved out of what you had previously perceived as part of time.

You could – not too wrongly – say that time is the shall we say jumbled perception of everything that you can’t yet perceive separately.

Now, perhaps that’s clear, perhaps that’s not clear. What it will tell you, though, is, to say `we exist outside of space-time’ – which has worked well up to this point –

His understanding is now beginning to move a little bit, and we’re going to move yours with it, hopefully. Remember, we told you we’re backing up an inch at a time, to try and keep it thoroughly grounded. What you mean when you say `outside of space-time’ is not quite what you think you mean.

Do you remember from the beginning we have said to you, there is duration here?

Rita: Yes.

Frank: And we set a distinction between duration and time; we were torturing the language in order to create a new understanding that could be encapsulated by that one word `duration.’ Now we’ll give you another sense of that and say that what happens is, the farther you extend into another dimension, the more – let’s see, how to say this –

(What typically happens here, we’ll say parenthetically, is that someone explaining these things jumps and shows it to you from where we are – explains it conceptually – and then you have to tie it to your own life. One of the difficulties of what we’re doing is that we’re not doing that, for a very good reason. Seth gave you all you would ever need to know, if you understood what it was he was saying. And he expanded your horizons remarkably. Now we’re attempting to more than expand your horizons; we’re attempting to stretch you toward the horizon.)

Now, you exist in three spatial dimensions plus time. You grow – you do the things that you learn to do at the Monroe Institute, and some of you then sort of poke forth into the fourth dimension, and at first, if you are remote viewing or if you are manifesting, or if you are seeing visions or if you are making connections non-sensorily – in all of those ways at first it’s sort of a stumbling around, and then gradually becomes a clearer, more taken-for-granted process, and you begin to live naturally in that world. By which me mean, you begin to live in that world in a natural fashion.

Now, the world that several of you up at the Institute live in is not the ordinary three dimensional world plus time that people elsewhere take for granted as the only reality. And this is because you have begun to function, taking these other perceptions, and these other ways of being, for granted, and integrating them into your daily lives. What this does is change your sensory mix in such a way that – although it is a poor analogy – one might say that you have developed another sense. Rather, we would prefer to say you’ve begun to live somewhat in the next dimension that you can perceive.

This being so, your perception of time changes, because the time begins to be [pause] Wait.

Your perception of the world changes because, as you integrate this new dimension into your ordinary life, what is left to be perceived as time is not what was previously perceived as time. Now, we’ll stop here and see if you understand what we’re saying.

Rita: Are you saying that what we not include in our definition of time is separable into come components –

Frank: Yes

Rita: — and as you get into this next dimension, you’re using a piece of what we called time before, pull off to look at in a different way.

Frank: Well, almost right. You are experiencing additional things than you did before, and those additional things were previously lumped in with your experience of time, and now they are not, so not only do you now live in a slightly different universe in terms of having wider abilities, but also, whether or not you pay attention to it, your experience of time has altered. [pause]

All right this is a terribly misleading analogy, but you know, one of those boxes where you can put a little piece of plastic in it and it makes another compartment, it subdivides it? If you had a box that could be subdivided into ten compartments and only three dividers had been put down, you would have three defined compartments and a leftover compartment that included everything else. If you put down now a fourth partition, you now have four divided spaces and one undivided space that’s smaller than it was before. Do you see that?

In a way, you could say that as you move your perceptions forward, you sort of slice it out of time. You know what you do? You structure it. That’s a good way of looking at it. You already function in the psychic dimensions as they’re called, because you can’t help it; that’s what you’re born in. Everybody does. A baby does. But, as you begin to structure your psyche, some things are on the inside and some things are the outside. And the outside things are sort of shapeless and formless, to you, and the inside things are sort of structured and more easily experienced and also used. Now you have just added another partition, so your available resources are greater. The chaos outside of you doesn’t particularly seem any smaller, but you experience the change in the ratio by the increased ability to deal with the universe that you recognize.

Now, that’s rather a lot, and that all was sparked by your saying something about –

[laughs] Lost ‘em. Wait a minute. [yawns] I notice that when they try to remember what you said and can’t, then boom! They’re out. [laughs] I think they get embarrassed.

Rita: Mm-hmm, well it’s complex enough so this seems to me to be —

Frank: Okay, I’m on the line again. What’s going on is, they’re saying they’re having to explain why there actually is duration on the other side. That’s what started this off. What they’re saying is, we – well, let me go—

We are continually attempting to mislead you ever less, let’s put it that way. In order to start anything at all, we need to mislead you and then gradually clarify it, and clarify it, and clarify it, and clarify it, a not-ending process. So that when we began you were misled if only by default into asking are we individuals or are we a group. And we had to try to less-mislead you, lead you back more toward where we are. We early on said there is duration which is different from time, and now we’re sort of un-lumping things. We’re trying to separate things out so that you see that the reason we were so adamant about that now comes into play a little more.

Your [pause]

All right, we need to go back a little farther than this. Beyond us is a sphere which to us seems timeless and to us seems to have not even the orientation that we have in terms of space, because we’re sort of oriented toward time-space because part of us is there, you know. Well, we’re saying to you that our situation here has its analogies to your situation there, in that there is a known and an unknown. There is still an unknown beyond us. And your – not you personally – your understandings of the universe are too conceptually simple, and the world really isn’t that way. It isn’t like there’s only one distinction: time-space and everything else. Rather, there are layers upon layers upon layers upon layers. There is structure upon structure, there is interaction upon interaction. You needn’t feel that on the other side, once you’ve left the body, that you’re going to be bored because everything is simple. It isn’t simple because who would want it simple? But beyond that, it’s probably not simple because how could something as complicated as earth come from something simpler? Rather, simple things come from more complex things. If you were to make a painting or a pottery, it would be simpler than you are. Regardless of skill. It might take great skill to do it, but the result is simpler than the cause.

So having said that, what we’re attempting to do – we’re laying a little more groundwork for later – understand that there is in other words to us a perception of time flowing for us, which may not at all be any different from the fact that we have areas to which we have not grown.

Until now, we have said time does not flow for us, and yet you will remember we have said “we have duration rather than time.” Earlier on we made important distinctions about that, such as the fact that you are stuck in the eternal now, and we don’t have that particular obstruction. This is because we are outside of time-space and we are not experiencing life as time-slices. But it should be obvious to the more thoughtful among you that as we experience things, obviously there’s a before, a during and an after, or some equivalent. Now, we won’t go into this further, but we’ve told you that really, if you could see us the way it is, it would look to you like the moments are side by side, rather than the way you experience them as past-present-future, in other words, only existing one moment at a time.

Now, that’s a lot, so let’s stop there. You can look this over as it’s transcribed, and we’ll go on to your next point, or to questions about this point. Whichever way you prefer to work it.

Rita: Well, one of the things we wanted to do today is get back to Plane A and Plane B, but I have one other concern that I’d like to bring up first, which is on the same level as the material you’ve been talking about in relation to time and space.  You have been teaching us to downplay the idea of individuals. You haven’t rejected the idea that there are individuals as well as non-individuals, totalities, in some way, but since one of those is easier to get ahold of than the other, the focus seems to have been to downplay the idea of individuals in our thinking.

You’ve been doing this as a way of differentiating between our side and your side. Is that true?

Frank: It’s true, but that’s not the whole truth. That’s not the only reason why we’ve been doing that. We’ve also been doing it to elevate your mind beyond seeing things [only] one way.

Rita: Okay, that aspect of it is fine. The notion of reminding us that there’s another way of looking at things is very helpful to us.

I don’t know what a psychologist is doing in this role I’m playing here —

Frank: [laughs]

Rita: — because if psychology does anything, it focuses on the differences between individuals.

Frank: Well – in focusing on the differences between individuals, are you not at the same moment, in the same process, focusing on commonalties among people?

Rita: Sometimes, that’s part of it. But the differentiating seems to be particularly characteristic of psychology, because of our concept that one can only truly understand if one really takes that individual on as a single entity, traces its history and so on.

Frank: Well, yes, but in actual fact, you don’t exist as individuals in the way that you study yourselves as individuals, but you have to have a coherent field of study. Now, some psychologists study identical twins, and find that the closer they look, the less boundary they understand other than of course the actual physical differences in bodies. One might say as an example that if you had Siamese twins who were so integrally linked that they could not be separated – in other words one would have to die – you could certainly look at them as two individuals who are connected by one body, which is what you do. However you could equally psychologically examine them as one organism that had started to split but hadn’t entirely.

We’re not going to – we will if you want, but there’s no point in discussing how the science of psychology began and continues to be rooted in perceiving people as individuals. The answer’s pretty obvious; that’s what your culture does. However, we would say that you study threads much more than you realize. In fact, the very things you refer to as traits, which are probably difficult to explain as a concept to beginning college freshmen, — all of those things are threads, and [pause]

Well, perhaps we mistake your reason to bring this up. So let’s be sure we have that reason. Tell us where you’re going with this again.

Rita: Okay, the question behind this is what’s the point of our living through our life experiences, focused primarily on individuals, if the individuals are only a convenient fiction?

Frank: ah! Okay. Okay. Good. Well, this brings us to the next lesson, what a surprise.

Now, when we have said repeatedly we see individuals more as a convenient fiction more than as the individuals you think you are, this again is a matter of changing the emphasis, of course. You do function as individuals, you do have separate bodies, you do have the maintenance of that separate body in your own care, you do experience yourself separate from the outside world – you even call it the outside world – on an on-going basis, and you have the longing to alleviate that separation which results not only in mating but also in bonds of other kinds. Professional bonds, bonds with children, bonds with relatives, bonds with any one that is felt to have a significantly closer similarity than the world in general. So to that degree you’re certainly all functioning as individuals.

What we are attempting to say is, in a world in which everyone things that you are individuals, it is worthwhile and important for you to realize that there’s another way to see yourselves, equally valid, in which the individual is just what Buckminster Fuller used to call a knot on a rope. You can slide the knot up and down the rope. The knot was still the same, but it was in a different place using a different part of the rope. How could this be?

This is how we would see, you, you know: You are knots that can slide up and down a rope; you are convenient fictions. You are temporary collections of various traits, threads, and you exist for a while and then all of those threads do not cease to exist. They all continue even though you as an individual are quite defined in time. Now, you know, we’re well aware this whole discussion is enmeshed in time, but it can’t be helped, so we’ll go on.

If your society was in the habit of seeing you all as expressions of threads, then we would be here insisting, “no, no, no, you should look at yourselves temporarily as individuals.” You see, it’s a balance, it’s not an either-or.

Rita: Okay, I can understand that. I–

Frank: Well, let’s go just a little farther. Therefore if you are on the one hand being taught to change your self-definitions repeatedly, to change your point of view repeatedly, to actually begin to feel yourselves as collections of threads rather than as the genetic individuals that you customarily have felt yourselves, this will change your perceptual world. It is changing your perceptual world.

Now we’re not going to describe how it’s going to change your world, because that would to a degree not only falsify it, but it would impede the process. You make your best progress when you’re looking in one direction and you’re moving in another, believe it or not.

Rita: This experience we’re having of increasing our perceptions as more than individuals, I’m wondering what’s the contribution to you of our doing that?

Frank: Well now, remember– [pause] That’s a very good question, isn’t it? Not something we would have thought of.

Remember, we’ve said, that in your incarnating, you create (at least potentially) a window for us. And your gift is what you are. You will remember at one time we called you fireworks. We thought a question and said “what would happen if this combination of characteristics were put into the world,” and boom, off you go, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, and we get to watch. Well, you are now becoming more complex fireworks. That’s one way of looking at it that’s quite simple. In other words, there’s no necessity for people coming into the body to be unaware of the other side, at all. You have grown to the point that now you can function in a new way. And we gave Skip this answer long ago – in his time – when he asked us, what’s the next step, and what’s the step beyond that. And we said the first step is, you’re going to walk around in bodies still fully aware that you’re connected on the other side. And the final step – as far as we can go, anyway – is that you will be walking around well aware that you are one creature. Not having to remember conceptually, but that’s where your perception will be. Okay?

Is that too far afield for you?

Rita: No, that’s fine. I’m trying to sort out – you’ve used the concept that we are, in this process, making a contribution to the other side and we’re continually trying to find out what that it. And it comes up often, so I expect we’ll be talking about it often.

Frank: We don’t understand what you don’t understand. Your existence – you know, all of you, everyone who is – is an on-going show. It’s an on-going research project, it’s an on-going entertainment, it’s an on-going process of growth, it’s an on-going everything, and we enjoy it as much as you do. In fact, [laughs] we perhaps enjoy it more than you do, having a wider view and less pain.

Rita: So this is an ideal situation in a way, of your teaching and then getting feedback on what happened. Doing a lot of research on that and then sending us back the next task to do in development.

Frank: Well, you could look at it that way, or you could look at us as – You know what you could look at us as? Gardeners, pruning trees. (You started off as a worm, now you’re a tree.) And as the tree grows, the gardener takes out limbs that are either unsightly, or diseased, or will interfere with the proper growth, or for whatever reasons. And as the gardener prunes the tree, the tree is just growing – although the tree is a little more cooperative than that, but to you it looks like it’s just growing. So it all happens a little more naturally, and a lot more organically and enjoyably than a mechanical analogy would indicate, or even an academic analogy saying “we do this experiment and then we report and then we do another experiment.” It’s more like, you live and you grow, and you’re always moving toward the sun, and you’re always pulling moisture from the ground, that kind of thing. As you live, as you grow, as you develop, you are at the same time doing nothing but that, and also feeding continual input into the other side – our side – and receiving it from our side. It’s both. It’s the same thing. It’s just a matter of looking at it.

Rita: I sensed in something you said before, today, that your development is on-going, as well as ours.

Frank: That’s right. Everyone’s is. As far as we know.

Rita: And is it that your process will take us to the level where you now are, meanwhile you’ll be moving to another level?

Frank: Well, remember, you are us. You have to keep remembering that.

Rita: Well, but there is a teacher and a student here.

Frank: Remember, we talked about that. In a way you could say that the teacher-student role reverses frequently. We learn from you. And you’re learning from us now, but we learn from you—

In fact, we talked about this specifically, probably [comic cough] a long time ago, and we said to you (seems just the other day) you ask us questions and we give you an answer sequentially. But when we ask you questions, you live the answer, which is why you don’t perceive us as asking you the questions.

Rita: I do remember that.

Frank: And, it’s much more like the right forefinger asking the left index finger a question and getting an answer, than it is a teacher and a student with a separation between them. You are part of us. As your awareness flows back to ours, which it does either permanently after you’re no longer in a body, or temporarily and unpredictably whenever you wish or can, when that happens you remember than in fact you are a part of a larger being. We don’t know any clearer way to say it.

Bruce Moen’s books make it quite clear, Bruce Moen’s books do, and one of Bob Monroe’s books does, particularly the sense of joy in reunion as you flow back from your long separation and you realize well it want’ long, and it wasn’t’ separation, but “wow,” you know. There is a sense of joy of reunion – the joy comes more from your shedding the idea that you had been separate than it does from any other thing.

Let’s go on to Plane A and Plane B, because we’ll give you the first part of it.

Let’s assume that you are on Plane A, and you are a bundle of threads. What is it that is the bundle? What is it that is the container, the spool?

The spool comprises one of our threads—you may think of us as a bundle up here. Suppose you think of us as a spool, you’re one of our threads. But our thread is a larger diameter thread – this analogy is going to break down really badly, but we’re going to push it, all right? [laughs]

Okay, instead of a spool, think of yourself as a binding. The way they used to bind hay in bales, with twine? Think of the twine that binds your bundle – which you are thinking of as yourself [pause] well–. All, right, we’ll straighten this out a little, but that was a good analogy. That’ll work well, actually.

Instead of thinking of yourself as spools, or as anything hard, metallic or non-organic, wooden, plastic, metal, anything like that, think of yourselves as bundles of threads, and the bundle is made by being wrapped by twine, okay?

Now this is a good amendment to our analogy, because you can see a little more easily the temporary nature of that bundle, if it’s only held together by twine. And you can follow that twine up to Plane B. And if you follow that in your mind, the picture that Frank’s working on, with great frustration, but he’ll get there, if you follow that twine from the bundles on level A, where you are, up, you’ll find that piece of twine is only one among many in a larger bundle. And that’s where we are now.

Now, who is the twine around ourselves up here, well – we’ll find out. But one thing at a time. You get the analogy that we’re doing here?

And of course, we might as well continue, all the threads of your bundle may themselves be the binders of bundles of micro-threads. And so forth and so on, up and down the scale.

Now, the only really seriously distorting thing in this analogy is that it depends upon an implicit sense of scale, of large or small, which is in a way quite misleading. But leaving that for the moment, let’s leave the analogy in that way. You are a bundle that has been wrapped. You’re wrapping is part of a bundle that has been wrapped –

[change sides of tape]

Frank: — to give you a physical analogy, you as a physical analogy, you as a physical body have all those cells; all those cells, some of them are formed into organs—you remember we used this analogy for a while; we dropped it recently, but we can bring it back – you don’t know if you are a cell in an organ of a larger body or whether you are –

No, let us drop that.

Holding the analogy, though, take a given muscle. Perhaps that muscle might be looked at as a bundle of cells wrapped by some intent of your body’s maintenance system to call it a muscle. In other words, your bodies are not bundles of undifferentiated matter. They’re quite specialized. You have livers, and you have bladders, and you have lungs, and hearts and palates and eardrums, and hair follicles. All of those very, very, very, very, very, very, very specialized pieces may still be looked at as part of one whole, and they may be looked at as a part of a whole in a larger and larger and larger sense. So that one cell may be a part of one bone. The bone may be a part of a leg and the leg part of the body. It depends on what scale you choose to relate it to, but the cell doesn’t change. Well, you can take that analogy and move it forward and backward. Or up and down, or however you wish to put it: larger and smaller. And you can see that you all as individuals, so-called, may be a part of one specialized part of ourselves at this level. And now we’re going to throw you a curve and leave this alone for a while.

We will remind you, there are esoteric traditions that say that the universe is Adam Kadmon, it is a human body on a larger scale. And that of course makes no sense whatever in terms of your ordinary understanding. We’re going to drop that there and leave it, and at another point we’ll come back. But we’re just going to leave that stone in the stream, so that the ripples can flow around it.

Rita: Can I ask about that, though? Are we referring there to the difference between Plane A and Plane B understanding?

Frank: Say more about that?

Rita: Well, when you use a special analogy there–

Frank: Oh! Oh, yes! What we’re doing is, we’re saying that at each level – between each plane – a lower plane may conceivably be looked at as a specialized organ of the higher plane.

 

Rita: Yes, that’s what I was asking. [pause]

Frank: You’ll notice – well, we’ll say this, because we don’t know if you’ll notice – this is easier on Frank than the last one was. We would assume that the instrumentation will show the same thing. He’s more – he got more accustomed to what we’re doing. Don’t know a better way to put it. Anyway, go ahead.

Rita: I didn’t quite understand what you just said.

Frank: You will remember that in the last session, there was a physical tension involved with the whole process of stretching out as we were doing that, and we’re saying that there’s not the equivalent tension this time for two reasons. One, the information is more like filling in the initial stretch than it is like stretching his farther. Not a big deal, just thought we would mention it.

Rita: Okay. And the analogy you just used of the universe being seen as a large body. That’s all part of the same development that he’s getting more comfortable with?

Frank: Well – well, we wouldn’t have put those two together. We were just leaving you something to be bookmarked for later, saying the mystical traditions – some of them, anyway — have significant [pause]

You will at some point be able – “you” meaning someone who reads or listens to this; anyone, unpredictably – could use that –

All right, stop. Full stop. Start again. [pause]

There are those in the audience, eventually, who have been suffused in the mystical traditions that will allow them to triangulate our material and that material and come up with a more sophisticated understanding of what it is we are attempting to convey. Because the [pause]

This is a way of viewing things that is not common, and is not simple, but a translation – [pause]

See, you’re in the situation where, you have all of these things described to you at length in many traditions but not understood. And the only thing we’re attempting to do is to sort of stretch a rubber band between where you are and where any one of these accessible explanations are, so that you can move just a little and understand what has been said. It isn’t like we’re trying to tell you something that’s never been said before. But we are trying to tell you something that cannot be easily understood, not because it ceases to be true, but because you, your civilization, has moved beyond it.

This is not an easy task, and it’s not a task for someone like Frank who just touches the worlds. This is a task for someone who’s deeply involved in one world and can be deeply involved in a second world, and their whole life can be spent building the bridges. And a good life, a good satisfying meaningful life.

If one were suffused in medieval Christian theology, and at the same time were from first-hand experience today, deeply involved in shamanic explorations, the bridges that were built between those two would be very helpful for the future. If someone were on the one hand involved in shamanic exploration in the modern sense today, and on the other hand deeply suffused in ancient Egypt, — you see our point. We are attempting to help you build bridges to things that were already well understood, and therefore we’re not attempting to – nor could we, with this particular body – do more than sketch out enough to move you in those directions.

Rita: This discussion is very helpful. I wanted to ask about your comment that Frank was more relaxed into this this week. What are the factors in that?

Frank: Well, we don’t know how to put it other than to say that the last time, we took him into totally new territory, and this time it’s not so new. He adjusts rapidly and he doesn’t entrench a position and stay there. He’s willing to move, but it is as if it were a yoga posture, it just had to be learned. The initial times you do a yoga posture, they can be quite painful, actually, and certainly they involve stretching you to places where you haven’t been. That involves tension, just physically. And then when you’ve done them a few times, you are actually living in a different body. It has different body memory, it has different – it just moves differently. That’s in fact the point of doing it.

So it isn’t a big deal at all. The simplest thing is just to say he was stretched. We’ll say more if you ask the right question, but that’s all we can think of to say at the moment.

Rita: Okay. To move on into this discussion of Plane A and Plane B, I had the sense that you wanted to move that way with specific material you were going to bring up. Is that the case?

Frank: Yes, and we’re doing it. You are coincidentally providing it. [laughs] We’ll give you one piece now, all right?

You have asked how many of us there are in this group. And if you remember, the number was 30.3, we think, or maybe it was 30.7. It changed a lot. [laughs] However, not to carry a joke too far….

Let’s take our group as though we were somewhat more invariant than we are, because as we have told you, people come in and out, and they help as needed. But say that there is one; say that we are a group. This one group of us may be looked upon as being bound by a thread which makes us into the equivalent of one thread in a larger being. However, if you will look at anything – rope, yarn, string, cable – all of them are made by taking smaller units and binding them, usually by twisting them. So if you want to make a cable, you take several ropes, and you twist the ropes one way and the cable the other way, laterally. Never mind, it doesn’t matter how you make cables, but you see what we’re saying? If there are 14 of you down there, 14 different strings, and we take those strings up and turn them into one larger string – in other words, we use each of them as a component of something which we then bundle into something bigger – then you begin to get an idea of some of the more productive complications of this discussion.

You are aware that people talk about soul groups, and that people talk about reincarnation, that people talk about in other words, the interplay between what are seen as individuals not only among lives but also in between times, when they are on this side and not yet in lives. A lot of that we could call a fundamental misunderstanding, based upon the fact that people are used to seeing yourselves as more individual than you are. But it’s not a total misunderstanding.

You will remember that we said that the way we will go about this is to start with your perplexities about the difference between the way we describe you all as collections of threads, on the one hand, and the way you experience yourself and the way you are often seen by others as at least mostly individual, reincarnating from time to time with agendas. Yes?

Those would seem to be pretty incompatible ways of looking at a thing.

Rita: Yes.

Frank: Well now we’re going to make them a little more compatible.

If you as a collection of micro-threads, which are – okay, this isn’t difficult conceptually, but it’s going to be rather difficult to keep it straight while we say it, so we’ll try.

You have collections of cells which are bound together and become muscles or nerves or specialized functions within the body. Those specialized functions are bundled together and become the sort of an abstraction that says “nerves.” Those and other bundles are bundled together and become your nervous system. The nervous system bundle is bundled together with the bundles that say muscles and parathyroid and circulation of blood – do you understand what we’re saying? What you conceive of as your body, just leaving everything else out – your body could be conceived as a bundle that is made of bundles that are made of bundles that are made of bundles all the way up and all the way down. Down to the sub-atomic level. And there’s nothing wrong with seeing it that way. That’s actually an accurate enough way to see it.

Now psychologically the same. Psychologically your mind could be looked at as bundles of bundles of bundles of memories, traits, reactions, characteristics that have been built up over this lifetime’s experience, characteristics that have come through from other threads that for one or another reason have been taken as a characteristic of this particular bundle. All of that becomes a bundle.

So you as a person, looked at from our side, are bundles of bundles. And you have your physical bundles, you have your mental bundles, your emotional, your spiritual, your mental – they’re all capable of being seen as separate, and that’s not wrong. They’re capable of being seen as all parts of one thing, and that’s not wrong. However you will admit that this description is a little more sophisticated than  the kind you usually use as shorthand to describe yourselves.

Now, we take the bundle of bundles of bundles of bundles of bundles that is called Frank, and as we follow those threads beyond time and space, not only do we follow them laterally, so to speak, to other lifetimes, some of which have enough common bundles that they seem to him to be his lifetime, others of which share only one or two threads and therefore seem to him to be more like the common human experience. We take all of those bundles of bundles that is him and that is, perhaps, only one bundle of many bundles comprising a larger being, and this larger being may be looked at as the soul group with whom he has primary interaction.

That soul group, in turn – that bundle of bundles of bundles forever is part of a bundle of a larger – do you see where we’re going with this? There is in an absolute sense, no ultimate separation between anything. Obviously. And there is in an absolute sense, any level at which one could carve things up and say “this may be looked at as a unit.” There are no absolute units; there is no absolute – how shall we call it? [pause] We’ll drop that sentence and say it a different way.

The universe is a very complicated but not unstructured place. In the structure is the fun. In the structure is the interplay, is the working out of things. A tomato is a relatively simple organism, yet if you cut it through and look at it, the more closely you examine it, the more complicated intricate and miraculous it is. Particularly if you then look at that tomato the other way — that is, through time rather than through space — and see it as it became translated from a tomato seed through the tomato plant, into the tomato itself, which has seeds, etc.

What we are saying to you is, your view of the world becomes more accurate when instead of looking at anything as though it were individual, or, instead of then sliding to the opposite extreme, and saying “all is one” as if that were the end of the matter – if you get into the habit of saying “anything may be examined more closely and found to be bundles, or may be examined in a wider context and found to be a part of a larger bundle.

Now, that’s quite a lot to say, but we think you absorbed all that.

Rita: I think we were following that. It’s as though everything comes with a history of development and looks forward to a further development in the process of rejoining the totality.

Frank: Well, that’s a very good statement, up to the point of saying “in the process of rejoining the totality” because, of course, you never leave the totality. You couldn’t if you wanted to. How would you do it? There’s no “there” there, as they say. But yes, that’s a very good understanding of it. There is structure to the universe, and there’s structure to every level of the universe. And it is conceptually fine to simplify structures as the painting for instance simplified the structure phenomenally. It’s fine to simplify in order to facilitate understanding. But if one then takes the simplification to be an exact photograph, this no longer facilitates the understanding, this then begins to distort it.

 

Rita: I’m not sure how this squares with the image of the process during a lifetime in which threads come together in a spool, become crystallized, and are transferred as a crystallized unit to the other side.

Frank: Okay, well, where your confusion is coming in – and it’s not a lot of confusion, but there is a little there, is because of the spatial analogy sneaking its way in again. Of course, nothing is transferred. Nothing has to move. There’s no place to move it to. Your existence — as a bundle wrapped with twine — exists. It doesn’t need to be moved from the physical to the non-physical. The only thing that moves, if anything moves at all, is your consciousness, which had been holding itself confined to the physical and often even forgetting that it had a non-physical component to it. Your consciousness moves back to realizing all of its larger connections. But nothing else moves. It isn’t like the bundle is created in time-space and then has to be transferred over to non-time-space.

Rita: All right. However, my question, stated wrongly with the transfer idea, still had to do with the image of the tomato, let’s start with that, with the tomato seed moving into the tomato and going through what we think of as a lifespan of a tomato, and that if we see ourselves in that same way, of developing as a spool with certain threads, adding other threads for our consciousness to move along, during the lifetime, and moving out of the physical. The tomato was also leaving the physical, its energy still existing in some way. Our energy still existing in some way. I had asked about the compatibility of that image with the image that says this energy continues

Frank: I see. We think–. If we understand what you said right, we think there’s another little distortion sliding in here, and that is the idea that during your lifetime you add threads to the spool. All of your potential is gathered before you go into the physical world, and you enter with that potential. You may not use all of it, or it may not express, or may not be obvious , but it isn’t like you develop new threads within the lifetime.

But —

Rita: Let me just ask about that before we move on. I had had the impression that as certain interests developed in a person’s lifetime, for example a sudden interest in music, and a continuing thread related to that, in which consciousness can move along a musical thread. Are you saying those were inherently there as threads before that interest developed?

 

Frank: Sure. Oh, absolutely, because otherwise it couldn’t have developed. It develops by becoming aware of the thread and following it through. Nothing that you have – you know, you’re packed with billions of threads, you couldn’t possibly run out of interests – but nothing that ever gets you—

We’ve said 100, but that was only for the purpose of simplification. You’ve got so many threads, that you could follow any given thread for a lifetime, so to speak. You understand what we’re saying: You could fill a lifetime following various threads. You’d never come anywhere close to running out. But, the other way of saying that is, you never come close to fulfilling your potential in any lifetime, because you couldn’t.

If you have 50 major talents that could be developed, you don’t have time to develop 50 major talents. If you have 50 major vices that could be fallen into, you probably don’t have time to fall into 50 different vices. You understand. There is a process of choice. Choice, choice, choice, choice, choice. There is not a process so much of creation except you are kind of creating –

It is as though—

Okay, well we could look at it this way. It is as though, as you choose, you are bundling within your bundle. [pause] In fact, that’s a very good analogy. Supposing you have various traits and you bind them together — as a psychologist you could see this – you bind them together closely enough that they become a complex organism within you. That bundle may then continue to be bundled outside of that particular lifetime, and be used in another lifetime. It’s the same thing we’ve been talking about when we’ve said “a lens through which we shine.” But this works better with this analogy, provided that we all remember that it is an analogy and not a physical description. But we could say that if you gather together certain of your threads and bind them together to make a cable out of them, that cable then may, beyond your own lifetime, come into another lifetime as a defined cable. That’s the same thing, to us – although it will not look like it to you – as saying you can lead a life as a crystal and we can then project another life into being, shining it through your crystal. From our point of view, that’s the same statement. [pause] And the different between the two analogies may help you get what they have critically in common.

 

Rita: You mentioned at one point our needing a description of what we are before and after being in a body. I had the sense that this issue had to do with the threads and spools and what form those take, or what those are like in a non-physical way.

Frank: You’re exactly right. And – how can we answer this? If someone in the non-physical who was not experiencing it through you (or didn’t know it) asked you what it was like to experience various bodies wandering around the outside of your own existence, so to speak, how in the world would you describe it? You see?

You are – from out point of view – you could be described as bundles of bundles of bundles of bundles, all the way up and all the way down. Or you could be described as crystals; as one relatively permanent knot in the cosmic tapestry. Or you could be described other ways. They’re only analogies designed to tell you what can’t be said.

If we follow the thread analogy and if we say that your lifetime is a process not quite of quilting, but of choosing which particular threads you’re going to bundle, this actually will pull together a couple of other perplexities we had in how we are going to say things to you. You know how we have said that some lives aren’t worth continuing, and at first that seemed to you a great tragedy, and then you realized that was just putting the materials back in the mix. You could look at it as a life in which they didn’t particularly bond any particular sets of threads in any meaningful way. So all of the threads are there for others anyway — there’s no reason to save that particular knot. But if you have someone who’s particularly – well, the analogy is getting tangled up, but you understand. That’s what happens when you deal with threads, it gets tangled. Joke.

Rita: So the thread is maintained and the knot doesn’t need to be there.

[It looks to me, transcribing this, that they misheard what Rita said.]

Frank: Well, that’s right, but if it’s an interesting knot, if it is a particularly good window on the world, then it is maintained; there’s no reason to pull it apart. If you need the individual threads, they’re still available all over the place, in other places. But at the one place is a knot, and in that one place, all of those threads are bound together forever. [pause] That’s one way of looking at it.

[pause] Now, you can’t envision looking through a knot, so the analogy breaks down. But we’ve warned you, we’re going to have to continue to alternate analogies.

[pause] You could look at us as collections of various collections of strings – cables, let’s call them – from Plane A, so that I, if you want to call us an “I,” may be 16 collections down there that were seen as individuals. And in a way, that’s true. We’ve told you that other lives of Frank are here; well, that would be true if they were individual and he were an individual. So we have to say it’s true enough.

Rita: I feel like we’ve gotten quite a lot of information today, and we’ll have to sort it out as we see it in print. We’re going to be easing out of this session. Are there some other important things to say before we finish this session?

Frank: Well, yes. One is, that one of the knots that Frank is going to make is continued complaining about transcription after a while [laughs].

I am sitting here – I’m not sitting at all but it feels like I’m sitting, and I want to record this, in a chair that has a circular kind of an armrest so that my arms are leaning on it horizontally in the way the Egyptian leans on that triangular chair of his, but this is like chromium or something. Only in the last few seconds, when Rita started that last thing, did this come to me this clearly. The word “spaceship” comes to mind, and I think this is more designed for its associations than to be taken as a literal spaceship. I mean, it could be as simple as the Egyptian past, the spaceship future, it’s designed to be permanent – I don’t know. But that’s really a very clear and a very interesting feeling.

Rita: Does that mean that you feel like you’re either speaking from the past or the future?

Frank: No, it only means that – it’s the physical feeling of leaning my hands on this circular chromium-like ring that’s part of this chair, and I’m just saying that for all I know it could be an analogy about past or future, but I don’t know what it means. I wanted to record the sensation the way I recorded the Egyptian’s chair that time.

And I guess we have to quit, but this has been very interesting. I’ve been seeing things while we talk. I’ve been seeing – you know the picture that I’m working on, about Plane A and Plane B, I’ve been seeing ways to paint it, conceptually, and it’s not involved with trying to paint it, it’s making the concepts clearer in my mind. They were clearer before I painted that first painting but now you can see them? It’s like, they’re going to use this so that I can get it inside, where there’s no words –

Ah! That’s it! Of – Well, maybe I’ve already said it. Maybe it’s simple. Painting is a way to transfer understandings that can’t be put into words. They can give me the visual sense of it, and to the degree that I can transfer the visual sense, they are transferring to you what cannot be said in words!

Isn’t that cool!

Rita: That’s very cool.

 [end transcript]

 

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