Monroe Institute Black Box session July 13, 2004

Edited transcript of a PREP session in the Bob Monroe Lab at TMI held Tuesday morning, July 13, 2004, Skip Atwater at the controls, Rita Warren at the microphone, Frank in the black box.

Rita: [helping Frank relax] … and you’re getting comfortable and relaxed and letting that happen.

Frank: Very relaxed.

Rita: Release all those muscles that are tied up with current events.

Frank: Psychic muscles.

Rita: Yes. Relax all the muscles that might interfere with our session today.

Frank: [yawns]

Rita: Put the ego in the box.

Frank: No! Never.

Rita: Up to you.

Frank: Ego’s an important part of this.

Rita: Well, while you’re in the box, maybe it’s not such an important part of it, because maybe that function is being handled out here.

Frank: We may not be meaning the same thing by the same word. Since about ’93 or ’94 I’ve always functioned with the energy [conversion] box wide open. I wanted to integrate everything.

Rita: You don’t have any sense that it’s interfering with —

Frank: Well, [yawns] if I did I would put it away.

Rita: Mm-hmm. Okay, well part of this has to do with questioning whether your concerns in the material world you’re living in get in the way of what we’re trying to do here, and so we like to make conditions ideal, whatever that calls for.

Frank: Well, I think if we go up to 21 just as if I’m not here, it will be as usual.

Rita: Okay, I don’t have my helper here at the moment who knows how to run the machines, so I’ll–

Frank: Why don’t you do it my way? Just hit something at random, see what happens. [they laugh]

Rita: Well, you know how to go up to 21.

Frank: Mm-hmm. I’ll do that. [pause] [yawns]

Actually, I get the sense that that would be a good discussion at some point. Because there’s quite a bit of misunderstanding about the function of the ego. And the ego should be looked at much as the left brain is looked at, as a placeholder and as a thing to allow you to function in one time and one place, like a switching system, rather than as an obstacle. And it is precisely people’s habit of viewing the left brain as an obstacle that causes them to become, not dissociated, and not dislocated, but it causes them to become somewhat ungrounded because having an experience in which they don’t integrate what you’re calling the ego, they at some point have to, or it can’t manifest into the world, into their own life. And in the absence of that, you have these people in flowing gowns who go to New Age conferences and talk about love and light unless you happen to dent their car, when they’re ready to kill you. But in the presence of integration, you find people who become ever more – the reality in which they function is ever less divided into discrete and perhaps incompatible compartments.

Now by the way that I said all of that, [meaning, by the tone of voice and somewhat staccato delivery] you can tell that that’s them and that’s me, and I’m sort of letting them go through, but at the same time they’re not pushing me out either, you know. It’s an important message, there.

Rita: I understand what you’re saying. However, we have always assumed that the workings of the control room here can substitute for the left brain activity during these sessions.

Frank: Yes, but that’s a misunderstanding that is not usually a problem but this is a good time to bring it up. What is actually happening in those cases is that the person in the control room is functioning as though they were the left brain of the person in the box in the sense of providing direction, and in the sense of continuing the flow of externally directed consciousness. What they are not doing, though, is functioning in a left-brain in any meaningful way in terms of keeping the person connected to time and space and going moment by moment by moment, which is what it actually does.

So that although it doesn’t seem much of a distinction, the main purpose of the monitor in the control room is to provide the ability for the person in the booth to not control anything, but to flow. In other words, to be in a receptive rather than in a receptive-alternated-by-an-organizing-or-a-proactive state of mind.

Do you see, your language, that has now become – if we may say it – enshrined in 25 years of practice, is that you are functioning as the left brain of the person inside, but what’s actually happening is that you are functioning as the, let’s say, “free-will director” that is habitually employed by the person’s left brain. But the left brain itself is busy keeping that person moment by moment in the eternal now, and providing continuity between past, present and future as you experience it. The switching system, as we described it. So this may be perhaps making more of it than is necessary, but it’s probably good to have the distinction in functions on the record. Your direction provides the ability for Frank to lie and respond, rather than to have to think about it, and then respond. You know, “what am I going to do next,” boom. But it does not and cannot, and should not, and will not, function really in the sense that a left brain functions in any way other than providing direction for the session.

Rita: So you feel that even during these experiences you need to be continually aware of the time and space dimensions of what’s happening here rather than allow those to be handled for you.

Frank: No. That’s not at all what they just said. It isn’t a question of my being aware of it at all. It’s a question of my left brain is automatically keeping my psyche, my body, everything, together moment by moment as we move through time. That is it’s function. They’re just making a distinction between that function, which cannot be given off to anyone, on the one hand, and on the other hand your function of providing the direction for it. Insofar as you provide direction, Frank on the downstairs level just drifts and often daydreams or does whatever while the guys and you talk, and that’s as it should be. But there’s no way that you or anyone could ever actually perform the left brain function, as we have somewhat sloppily said, these last 25 years.

I known that you think that it’s Frank feeling like he has to be in control, but it isn’t and never has been. We’ve had that discussion a long time. You’ve had it with them, you’ve had it with me. It’s just that there isn’t—

When you’re talking to them, you’re talking through my habit system, language, vocabulary, choice of metaphors, all of that. The major difference is, I’m not making any attempt to structure it, but it flows through what would ordinarily be my own channels, and sometimes I come up and I make a comment or something, and other times I don’t, but usually (I say “usually” because I don’t know if it’s always, but usually) I’m there listening, I mean, I can hear what’s going on. I’m never not there. Just as in my life, they’re never not there. They’ve been saying that from the beginning, and I think you’re finding it hard to believe. I think they would say – well, let’s see what they would say.

Boy, this would be interesting, if I could describe what we’re doing at the same time we’re doing it. [pause] Because I know, reading the transcripts it’s hard to determine, just from the words, who’s putting his oar in, whether it’s me or them.

But again, see, it’s kind of a meaningless distinction.

Rita: Yes, and getting harder to distinguish. But if you could just have a clear intent of letting them speak from their perspective about this issue —

Frank: Oh, but I always have that! [pause] That isn’t the problem. The problem is, later I second-guess it and say, “well, was that me, making it up as I went along?”

Rita: Well, that hypothesis just doesn’t hold much water with us anymore.

Frank: [laughs] Well, not much with me either, but I have to occasionally have my doubts. [laughs] And I don’t think it’s a real obstacle.

Rita: Okay, well, nonetheless it’s an important point that’s being brought up, and we may need to do some more talking about it –.

Frank: Well, actually let us say something about that right now.

Rita: Okay.

Frank: It is important that the message came up now, as opposed to all these session in the past, because now we’re ready to move to another piece of the discussion.

If you think of yourselves as individuals in a body who have some connection to us on the other side, but that connection is intermittent or is voluntary or can be interrupted, whatever , you’re going to have some model of the way things are. But our model of the way things are is quite different, and that’s why we have been insisting, quietly, over these last years, that your model is not really an accurate one from our point of view.

If you will look at yourselves and at life from our point of view, you will see that not only do we regard you as sort of a moving target, and do we regard individuals as what we call a convenient fiction, but you will see that we feel the continuity is on our side rather than your side, because of course our view of totality is not interrupted by time-slices. Since we can more to the place we want to move, in time-space, we recognized on the one hand the immutability of it all and on the other hand the infinite flexibility of it all. Sounds like an absolute contradiction, but they’re just two ways of looking at things.

If you were to say “there is Frank and the ego and the lower self and the time-space-bound personality on the one hand, and there is the guys and their eternal – that is to say, non-temporal (in terms of your own frame of reference) — point of view on the other hand, this sets up a dichotomy in your mind, which sets up a series of false interactions which are not really real. And we have been saying this and you’ve not really been believing us,. But your own guys upstairs – all of you – are you, and it would be like saying, “I’m going to function on Tuesday without my left foot being aware of the rest of me, so left foot, go to sleep, and the rest of us will go play.” Or the other way around: “Today, on Tuesday, I specifically want to become aware of my left foot which I’m usually not aware of.”

Now, these aren’t terribly good analogies, but you really don’t yet see – you will, with time and experience and the change in the world, but as of now you don’t yet see — that you as individuals, to the extent that you may be considered as individuals, are not at all bounded by your body. And you think that you know that you’re not, but it is nearly impossible for you to really know it because it contradicts all your sensory evidence, and contradicts your moment-by-moment functioning in the world. But the actual fact is that neither your physical body, nor your mental, your emotional, your spiritual body – there is not a part of you that is as definite, defined, bounded, as it seems to you. More than anything, we would say what seems to you to be your mind and your psyche – and therefore seems to you to be somewhat bounded and somewhat have an identity of its own — that’s probably less individual than any other part of it. It isn’t that we are a part of your mind, of course; it’s more like you are a part of our mind. Although, both of those are merely local statements. They don’t have any absolute validity.

But what we’re trying to say is, your model of the universe still leads you to make distinctions between things that are not distinct, and therefore causes all sorts of logical problems farther on. We know that you cannot conceive of the fact that Frank downstairs and we upstairs are always [pause] co-experiencing. That’s probably the best way to put it. Now, there are times when a part of him is not; there are times when much of us doesn’t seem to you to be, and of course what we’re underlying here is, he is not in any way unique here. This is the way you all function, it’s just that it doesn’t seem like it to you, because those who have barriers between the pieces stop at the barrier without realizing that the barrier is – how shall we say? – it’s transparent, it’s permeable, it’s really almost more a matter of agreement than anything else. You can go through the barrier as soon as you want to. There’s nothing really stopping you.

That’s a lot, so we’ll stop and you go ahead.

Rita: Well, I think it’s helpful to keep reminding us, and we are very aware of abilities and lack of them in doing the things you suggesting, but we are trying.

Frank: Well, when you say your lack of ability, what do you mean?

Rita: That for so long our focus here has been one of coping with the material world, and to do that we use a lot of the left-brain as well as the right brain, and so a discussion about it is always useful to us.

Frank: We would suggest, though, don’t think of it as a failure to this point, just think of it as this is where you as a species have grown to now, where you’re taking the next step, as we’ve said.

Rita: Okay. What is behind my efforts to talk to Frank about what he’s doing or not doing in the booth, has to do with the fact that I’m very aware how concerned he is about things going on in this material world right now, in the political side of things, and the things going on in our country, and the thought was how best to keep those concerns in their place, wherever that place is.

Frank: mm-hmm.

Rita: and it has always seemed to me that those kinds of anxieties about those kinds of things and thoughts about possible solution to them and so on belong in the place that might interfere with what we might hope to have in these sessions.

Frank: All right, this is a very good discussion. That whole question tangles up several things, and untangling those threads would be worthwhile. [pause]

Now, we’re going to speak of Frank as if he’s not right here speaking the words, and we’ve done this all along because there’s no other way to make sense of it. We do want to put a bookmark there. Frank could come up and say “I’m here,” we could say “he’s here,” it’s the same thing, okay? But here’s the thing. When he’s in the black box, as now, if you’ll look at his anxiety levels or his tension levels, you’ll see that they’re quite acceptable. It really doesn’t impinge. It’s been many a year since he learned that you don’t need to –

Actually, we’ll go a little farther than that. In the early sessions, especially in Gateway, and the early programs, he used to use the energy conversion box as Bob Monroe rightly recommends that people use it, to take anything that would be a distraction and put it in the box, close the box and be able to have it come out again later. But at a certain time he made a decision to want to have all the pieces of his life be integrated, as sort of an adjunct that he wanted to remove all internal barrier between, as he put it then, between God, between himself, and between other people.

Well, he didn’t do that until he had already learned to be able to have this – this is misleading, but we’ll say – cleared space, within which he can deal with whatever is at the moment in the black box, and none of that impinge. So that as far back as the sessions of 2000, he was even back then leaving his energy conversion box open – to the degree that he even thought about it – and there was not a problem of day-to-day matters making him unable to function. And the reason why is because he sort of decreed that by definition anything that came up was a part of that moment, and rather than looking at it as a distraction he would look at it as something to be dealt with. And this is a good thing for all of you to be able to do, because the alternative to this is to live your life in compartments.

Now, it is true that in his life external to this – let’s call this a sacred space; let’s call the sessions within the black box a sacred space, because he’s here with a purpose, he is in familiar surroundings that remind him of that purpose – we do not mean the physical black box is a sacred space, but the time-space of it becomes a sacred space. Within that time-space, he is protected – uh, no. That’s the wrong word. Within that time-space, his emotional and mental and in general psychic functioning is not going to be impinged upon by anything mundane. He would not be distracted by saying, “I have chores to do, I have lawn to mow, I have logs to cut,” whatever. That just wouldn’t come up.

And in the same way, anxieties which express verbally as politics but in reality he’s trying to feel which way the changes are coming, and what can be done to protect oneself – “oneself” in the wider sense – none of that is going to come in here and interfere, because you see, by his definition it wouldn’t be an interference. If it came in here, he would deal with it, and we would suggest to you that in your lives, that is a very good way to deal with the present moment. Work on the assumption that whatever’s in the present is exactly there to be dealt with, and by definition you’ve just redefined your life away from a tension between competing demands and more toward a nice graceful dance.

Now, we’re not at all implying that he’s always able to do this, but within the sacred space, he’s always able to do it. When he’s loading computers or doing other things, then he’s exercising his vocabulary, but within a sacred space—

Oh, and as a footnote to this, that’s a very good reason for people to create a sacred space. Many people create altars or they have rituals or they meditate or whatever they use. All of those are ways to create a clearing in the forest, a protected – well, the reason we shied away from “protected” before, and will again, is that it has a sort of a fear connotation underneath it. But we can’t think of a better word that implies “nothing to fear, nothing to be interfered with, just a tranquil living of wherever you are at that moment.”

Again, that’s a lot.

Rita: It is, but it’s all – we’re hearing it, and hearing some of the implications of that, that there are certain things that in this process we really don’t have to be concerned about.

Frank: That’s right.

Rita: They’re happening automatically.

Frank: That’s right. And of course, although we said “within the black box,” you understand that you’re part of that sacred space as well, that you and Skip and the control room are a part of the process; therefore you’re part of the sacred space. That doesn’t seem obvious to you, but we’ll throw it in.

Rita: And all of this I assume has to do with our intent.

Frank: [pause] Yes. Yes, that’s a very concise way to say it. And we could have saved ourselves many words, had we come up with that. [laughs]

Rita: Well, you gave us that one last week. Reminded us that intent was what was making this process occur as it does.

Frank: Well, there you are.

Rita: It’s not that sometimes our interchanges aren’t on familiar topics, but always a new way of thinking about them, or phrasing them.

Frank: That’s right. When you mentioned “intent,” you came around the back of the barn and surprised us, because we hadn’t been thinking of it that way. [pause]

Rita: It’s always a challenge for me to think about the best way of our using this time, and I heard your repeated efforts to get me to direct things by the questions I ask, and I’m willing to do that, knowing that those directions somehow make sense at some level.

Frank: Mm-hmm. Well, again, as we said, your intent is not coincidental. As long as your intent is good, you can’t do anything disruptive.

Rita: One of the things I wanted to ask about today is what happened at the end of the last session, when Frank was simply relaxing in the box toward the end of our time, and began having some visions of being in an Egyptian setting, having an experience of being in a sarcophagus, having what seemed almost like memories, but we’re asking the question, really, what are these experiences? Are we, in experiences like that, moving part of ourselves to Plane B? Are we just having fantasies or dreams? Touching into other incarnations? What’s happening there, and is that a useful thing to do and record?

Frank: It’s certainly a very useful question. It’s a difficult question because of the structure of words. You ask, are we going to Plane B, and we’re tempted to say “you’re going to Plane B and then following a different thread back down to Plane A, where that occurred.” And that’s true enough. In other words, you’re following a thread, a cable, that is to say a complex of emotions, experiences, skills, predelictions, and, let’s say emotional consequences, for the moment. That’s a major cable in Frank’s life that extends to the Egyptian and also to the British individuals, so called, who are doing the same thing that he’s doing at the moment in this session.

Those others could be looked at as other incarnations – well, we’ve been all through it before, and the reason that we’re not making as much progress as we might is because it has to be all left indefinite, otherwise it gets more misleading. There is no reason not to say “he is a reincarnation of the Egyptian and the Englishman.” On the other hand, there’s every reason not to say it. But we have found a way, we think, to make our position a little clearer. And Frank got the inkling of this at the end of the last session, which he had totally forgotten about when you asked him about it before you put him in the box.

This almost sounds embarrassingly true, but – the past comes first. The past, and then a nearer past, and then a nearer past, and then what you’re calling the present, which quickly becomes the past – you know, all of that. The fixed part of that, in physical matter reality, occurs in a certain order, and it does do because your –

Well, we’re really tempted to go into the diversion of why time flows only in one direction, but it is a diversion, for the moment. We will talk about it, any time you want to talk about it, except right now, because right now we’re going to follow a different thread.

If you have the Egyptian, and eh lives first, his cable – and by a cable in this instance we mean the way we just defined a cable – all of that complex of abilities and interests and experiences remains as a cable. They’re not loose threads any more. He has crystallized them, to that degree. Now, that cable goes forth and becomes an integral part, let’s say, of another being, and that being is in England in the middle ages, and he becomes a monk and then he becomes a priest, all right. That person could be looked at as a reincarnation of the Egyptian priest, to the degree and to the extent that it contains that cable. It is not a reincarnation of the Egyptian priest, to the degree and to the extent that it does not include all the other threads of that previous incarnation. And those threads go elsewhere.

So if you’re with us so far, you see that it depends on which aspect of reality one follows, or emphasizes, as to whether or not one says “we do reincarnate, we don’t reincarnate.” Now, that one cable, that complex, that set of experiences of the Egyptian priest, goes toward Bertram. Bertram assimilates those; he doesn’t leave them unchanged, because that’s the purpose of his life, is to play with what he has been given. And that cable then goes forth – and we’re not saying these are the only stops on the way, of course – and it comes into Frank. Frank comes with this given, this cable — which is a connection of predilections, experiences, unsuspected talents, detriments, all kinds of things, you know – and then it’s his place to play; he does what he can with them, he goes on, the cable goes on to someone else and the cable goes into the future.

Now, this is pretty tangled; we’re tying to keep it untangled. On the one hand, it is true that Frank can influence the past by sending his consciousness back along the cable that he shares with the other two and interacting with them. He has done this not with them, but with for instance the man who lived on the frontier in America. He actually— But all right, we’ll leave that aside.

He could move back and therefore influence past – what can only be seen in this case as – incarnations of himself. He could also influence the future one, not only by what he does with his life, but he could have a direct conversation with the next one down the line to get this cable.

Now, that’s all well and good, and there’s nothing wrong with it, but look at the other part that is also equally true. The Egyptian also had other aspects of his life that had nothing to do – well, at least had relatively little to do with the cable we were discussing. And other things might be cable-size as well. He may have other complexes of emotions, desires, experiences, talents, drawbacks, all of that, in some totally different direction that he doesn’t share with Frank at all, and doesn’t share with Bertram at all. Being an Egyptian in a land long ago, his life is in some ways unimaginably different. Certainly their psychic day-to-day life is unimaginably different from yours. Therefore there’s no reason for you to expect that all the cables of his life would go to help form another individual who’s living in the middle ages in England, or one who’s living in the early 21st century in America.

So from that point of view, that individual – and every individual – could be looked at as splitting his influence in many directions. And if you will go back to the picture that we had [laughs] either “we had Frank paint,” or “Frank painted,” but you know what we mean. If you’ll go back to that picture and envision those empty spools with threads in different directions – think of them not as threads, now, but think of them as cables, because as we said, you are billions of threads, at a very insignificant level, in a way, and you bind them into twines or yarns or wires or cables. In other words, some of your things are only a few, and they’re inconsequential. Some are only a few and they’re important, some are many, many, many.

When you do this, you have cables coming from many places, and you have cables going in many places. You’re not a reincarnation, exactly, of all those various ones who provided cables, and all those you provide cables to are not, exactly, reincarnations of yourself. It is because you think of yourselves as more of a unit than you actually are that all of these perplexities about “do we reincarnate or do we die and divide when we leave the body” arise.

With us?

Rita: Yes, I think so.

Frank: And you can see, perhaps, although it took us a while, that we found a way to clear up what seems to be – you must admit – it seems to be an absolute division, an absolute “either/or,” where you either reincarnate or you are collections of threads, but in actual fact, either one is more or less true, and more or less a way of seeing things. Yes?

Rita: Yes, I hear that.

Frank: Now, supposing the Egyptian who passed his cable to Bertram, supposing he passes a cable to a third party, who has its own experiences, and that particular cable, whatever it may be, passes its cable to Bertram. Now Bertram has two cables coming in, two major complexes, psychologically, or whatever –now Bertram has two cables, both of them ultimately connecting back to the Egyptian, but one of them different.

And we will remind you that at one point Bob Monroe, in his long attempted explanation of the same subject, talked about AA and BB and they were looking for each other? And the one had trouble identifying the other because there had been an overlay of other experiences since. Well, that is a different way of saying what we’re saying here. It was a different way of seeing it; we’re not implying that Bob saw it quite the same way, although more so than you might think. And re-reading his books – particularly Far Journeys – will give you all some good triangulation on what it is that we’re saying. But although he in his book looked at it more like a straight-line incarnation, reincarnation, re- reincarnation, nonetheless now with the idea that we’re giving you here, you can see that it braids. It’s not a straight-line progression. It’s not even a weaving, but it’s a braiding, and so it gets more and more complicated. As of course the universe is.

So the Egyptian sends out ten cables. One of those cables goes to Bertram. A second goes to a third party, which then goes to Bertram. Now, Bertram has two of those ten cables. He’s still not the reincarnation of that Egyptian, but you can’t exactly say that he isn’t. He is, but he’s not.

Now of those other eight strands, they may be so totally different that someone looking at the Egyptian and Bertram would say, “they just happened to be people who share certain things in common,” but in fact we would say to you that it’s stronger than that.

Now, what gets even more interesting is, the Egyptian, going through that third party and then into Bertram, has given Bertram –

Trying to think how to say this.

The third party, let’s call him Party C, there, he has a cable from the past that also extends into his own future, yet when it extends into his own future, the spool that it connects to – meaning Bertram – connects directly back to the Egyptian, which is in Spool C’s past. We’ll give you just that; we don’t want to pursue it because we don’t think we can keep it untangled, but that’s just to give you just a sense of how incredibly complex the interactions are among all of you, which is exactly the kind of complexity that you should expect in the universe. The mechanisms are often very simple. The complexities and the interconnections are incredibly complex. That’s where the fun is. That’s the potential of the whole system. Okay?

Rita: All right, and – What is your role in working with these kinds of dimensions?

Frank: Well, you all on Plane A are parts of us on Plane B. You, Rita, saw the initial part of the painting that we’re presently working on, to try to show the distinction, and in that painting you see that one of the major barrels, or empty spools or whatever, on Plane B, is being shown connecting down and wrapping various of the empty spools on your plane. The idea being that you, as so-called individuals, are to us what your components are to you. And as we’ve said many times, it goes all the way up and all the way down. Looking at yourselves just physically, without even going into the psychic components, you can see that you are composed of intricate systems, each of which is composed of smaller pieces, intricately connected, which are composed of – you know, and it goes down.

So you could look at us as a higher level of yourselves, and to that degree you could say we are your higher self in more ways than one; that we are a spool, that is holding many, many, many threads, each of which is an individual at your level, and each of those individuals at your level is the holding of many many, many threads of pieces of being that are less than the individual level. In other words, they are traits, they are talents, they are predilections, et cetera.

Rita: Would it be so that you are working with these other incarnations we’ve talked about here, Bertram and the Egyptian and so on. Do you play some role in the directing of these activities? Do you have the same kinds of connections with those individuals as you have with Frank?

Frank: Oh, sure. Sure. Remember, from outside of space-time, it’s all going on. It isn’t like they were and they’re not.

Oh. Oh, and this is another piece that we meant to bring you, too. From outside of space-time, as you know, past, present and future are all just – they’re there and they’re to be chosen from. But from within space-time, it only goes one way, and therefore – you can’t sit in a building that hasn’t been built yet. You know? It’s a mistake that people occasionally make, when they begin to change perspectives, to think that the real world is –

Because it isn’t what it appears, some people tend to define it out of existence as if it didn’t exist at all, and then of course when they finish with their meditation or with their black box or whatever, they go right back to their previous container, and the containers don’t have anything to do with each other.

So what we’re saying is, from outside of time-space, we’re dealing with Joseph the Egyptian, we’re dealing with Bertram, we’re dealing with frank, we’re dealing with others that come, and to us to they’re all alive and they’re all open to – Well, I don’t know if we would say “manipulation” as much as “interaction.” You know, consciousness has no time, although your bodies hold you in one place and time, but consciousness has no time. So, yes we are interacting with all of those others. And we would say to you that that’s our way of looking at it. Your way of looking at it could almost equally be that Frank and Bertram and the Egyptian and all those others, in their interactions, create us at level B.

Now, needless to say, that’s not an interpretation we favor, but we can see that it would look to you that way.

[change sides of tape]

Frank: We don’t understand the question.

Rita: Well, all of us on this level seem to be operating with a process that has to do primarily with physical matter, but we also have much interaction with what we call the characteristic of having a consciousness that is an awareness of all of these dimensions as they are occurring, or a reflection on past connections, and wondering are you operating as a consciousness, as a spirit in some way.

Frank: Well, you have us scratching the head that we don’t have, because how could we not have consciousness? We couldn’t be talking to you without consciousness.

Rita: Okay.

Frank: Is your question implying “are we a part of one larger, defined, separate consciousness?”

Rita: Well, that would be one question related to it, that the various cables, or this cable that is coming in to you, that includes these various individuals at this level. Is this a collecting of consciousness at your part?

Frank: Well, we think that a good analogy is that we are a cell in a larger organism, and you all are feeding this cell, and you are being fed by smaller cells, smaller than your own organism. So that you could say that taking us together on Plane B, we are a cell in Plane B. And this cell that we are has its own consciousness and this cell that we are is a part of the consciousness of the tissue, or the organ, or the structure, whatever you want to call it, of which we are a part. At the same time, we are [pause]

Words are very misleading here, so we’ll step carefully. We were going to say “at the same time we are a collection of all the consciousnesses of all of the pieces of us that are in Plane A.” “Collection” is not the right word. “Collective organism” is not quite the right word. What we mean to say is, “what you are in totality is what we are.” We are like the [pause] organized, living, conscious representation of all of our parts, as is the same for you. You don’t experience a bone or a nerve or an organ as separate from yourself, yet they all add to, and are an important part of, the conscious unit that you feel yourself to be. Similarly, each cell within your bone, say, is the collection of all of the smaller pieces that comprise it. That it comprises, rather.

Rita: That’s, of course, always easier to think of in terms of the physical body, and harder to talk about when we talk about components of the consciousness.

Frank: Well, that’s right. That’s why we’re trying to give you this analogy of us as a cell in a tissue, so that you don’t think that Plane B is not an organized complex structure.

Rita: A long time ago, I asked you a question about whether or not you were given the assignment of being responsible for certain energies, or the threads from certain energies. Let me ask the question again. How is it that you’re doing this, and is it simply that “you’re doing it, therefore that’s the way it is,” or is this part of the structure of Plane B?

Frank: Well, we’re a little lost in terms of definition, because we don’t know exactly who you mean by “you,” in a way. Let’s take this cell of Plane B. This cell’s joy and duty and function and every-day-ness is to represent, interact, embody, in a non-spatial way, all the pieces that comprise us. And [pause] [laughs] Frank’s quarreling with the grammar, so we’ll change that. That we comprise. [laughs]

But, again, we’ll answer you as we answered you the last time you asked the question. When you’re looking at the sun, what’s the ultimate meaning of that? When you’re sitting on a chair, what’s the ultimate meaning of that? It’s just that that’s what you’re doing. Now, you might be sitting on a chair for a purpose, but the sitting-on-a-chair-ness is, that you’re sitting on a chair. You know? And so, you’re asking us what’s the meaning of our life, in a way, and we’re saying, well, what’s the meaning of your life? And the answer is, to live it. It isn’t that the answer is, what you’ll get out of it at the end of it, or what you will conclude, or how you should have done better or anything like that. The answer is, to live it. So it’s not a question that we can find an answer to, any more than we did the first time. We interact with all the parts of ourselves because that’s what life is.

If we were to say to you, “what’s the purpose of your interconnection with the blood flow in your thigh, or the bone in your big toe,” you could make up an answer, saying, you know, mutual maintenance, and all this, that and the other, but really the only answer is just – you’re part of each other and you live together. [pause]

[laughs] we’re highly intuitive: We sense that didn’t satisfy you, so try again. [They laugh.] Try again, and we’ll try again.

Rita: Well, it has to do partially with your being very clear in our last structure about there being structure on Plane B.

Frank: Uh-huh.

Rita: And we’re asking something about how that works. What is the structure, how do —

Frank: Sure, but we’re giving you the same answer again. It’s the same as asking what’s the structure between two tissues within your body. You could give an anatomical answer, but you can’t give a meaningful answer. It’s just part of your body. [pause]

If the answer “we don’t know” would be more acceptable, we can do that. But to us it seems like the real answer is, the structure here is just the structure as it is. We are part of something larger. Now, what the ultimate meaning of that is, maybe others know. We don’t. We’ve been through that before, too. Where we are is where we are. [pause]

If you asked a cell inside one of your specialized organs what the meaning of your body’s purpose is, we don’t know that that cell would be able to give you much except, “well, I’m busy maintaining blood sugar levels and passing oxygen through” or whatever that cell does. Do you see? It would be a stretch for it to say, “well, I’m actually part of the parathyroid, and our function is to do so and so.” But it would be a vastly bigger stretch to say, “that’s part of a larger system that does this and that and is balanced by this system that does this and that, and all of this is just to maintain the thing in homeostasis, so that we can—“

You know, it’s –

What you’re asking demands too much of yourselves as well as of us, in a way. By which we mean we can tell you things about where you should be going, what you should be doing, where we should be going, what we should be doing, much easier than we could say what the ultimate purpose is. You know, you have lots of people who have given you readings on the meaning of life and the universe. You’ve got people who have said “this is what your supreme creator being does, means, instructs, wants,” whatever. We are keeping it near to the fact, because this is unplumbed territory.

If we were to describe to you the intricate structure of Plane B, and from there move on to say what the grand scheme of things is, we think it would all get lost in la-la land, and wouldn’t have immediate relevance to you and the readers and listeners to this, at all important in the way that what you took almost as a throw-away question, about “am I talking to Frank or am I talking to the guys,” and “do you use the energy conversion box” and all of that, see, those are things that are practical, and they’re really of near-term use to people, and will allow them to get to a place where they can function even better. But this other is – yes, it’s theoretically interesting, but it’s not going to help you live your live right now, in the way that we’re hoping to do.

[pause] And we can in fact use that as a segue. Obviously we heard Frank’s question to you about how an you bring back something of value out of all these sessions. And we would say, you may have gotten enough or nearly enough about our view of the structure of things, for the moment. (We don’t mean this session, we mean this series.) Because, you run the risk of being overwhelmed with data and being unable to translate that data into meaningful directives for people.

“With this new view of the world, I will now go out and do this.” Do you see? What we want is to encourage you and to empower you, not to entertain or amuse. That’s prejudicial; you know what we mean. We don’t to do something that has no useful relevance.

Rita: Okay, I’m hearing you okay, and you’re right that my temptation is to really get to ultimately to have you give us what you see of the big picture. We understand that you don’t fell that’s a useful thing for us to do, and that we need to keep our feet on the ground, so to speak.

Frank: Well, you know, you’ve gotten a tremendous amount of big picture. And we would say it’s time to pause and express what you’ve gotten, because no one can say everything, and no one can get everything, and it’s helpful to pause at a certain point and say, “okay, I’m going to express my understanding of this at this point,” and of course what that will do is also make it more concrete. You’ll live it more and understand it less.

Rita: [pause] That’s not totally satisfactory.

Frank: Tell us how.

Rita: To be doing things while you’re not understanding them is a very frustrating state.

Frank: Oh. That’s not quite what we meant. We mean, you will be living them more, as opposed to merely understanding them. We don’t mean to misunderstand, or to not understand. In other words, you know how Cayce said that understanding not lived is sin. More or less. What we’re saying is, you don’t want to leave all of this just on a theoretical level, which you might understand but not really embody mentally. And so we’re saying our hope is that you will be able to take this and express it at the level on which you understand it now, which will then enable you to live it better, which will open you up to better understandings that can flow from there.

Remember, you’ve had a four-year process of initiation here, although you may not have been looking at it in that way. And you are already finding it difficult to remember some of the misunderstandings that you came into the process with. (We don’t mean you as an individual., Rita) And therefore, you every day get farther from remembering where your potential readers and hearers are. So it’s important to stop before you get out of sight. That’s what we’re saying.

That doesn’t mean stop forever, but it means this is a good [pause] we think, anyway, this is a good place for you to begin, now , to go back to the job you started in the winter of ’01-’02, and express what it is that you have learned and gotten from all these sessions, in such a way that people reading it can not just follow your journey but learn to make their own journey. That they can be helped by it. Because of course they’ll be helped from the inside. It isn’t like they have to do it on the outside. But your words in a book that they read can be used by their own guys upstairs to spark them, you see?

Think of the whole thing as cue cards. Cue cards can be used to bring people much farther , much faster.

Rita: All right, well we certainly accept your idea that this is a time to stop and ask the question how can we produce something of value from this material, and we would like to have you help us think about that question.

Frank: Yes, well, we believe that one part of this has to be the summarization of the knowledge in very readable, very easy words, without making any attempt at scholarly precision that will preserve our words or Frank’s words or your words or anybody’s as though it were a transcript or as though it were scriptures of any kind. Just paraphrase us freely, and say, “here’s the way we understand the world to be.” If you want to do it chronologically and start with session one, and freely and easily paraphrase it, that might work. There’s a million ways to write a book; we’ve always said that.

You could always, you know, put these sessions on CD-ROM, and if anybody wanted the CD-ROMs, they could buy the CD-ROMs. Or you could just dupe tape to tape and sell tapes. The transcript aspect of it is not nearly as important as the [pause] well, how shall we call it? The explanation of what the transcripts mean.

We know full well, having watched all the frustration of it, that Frank is sort of inclined to [pause] record every false step, or record every “um” and “er,” out of a mistaken intent for accuracy, to try to get the sense of it, in a way that he got the sense of the sessions between Jane Roberts and her husband. But in trying to do that, he fell between two stools, because the sessions became relatively unreadable, and yet because they were unreadable there was no point in having people see what the original, exact quotations were.

So, between what we’re saying now, and experience, we think he’s got that idea.

Now the question becomes, is a book the best way, the only way, the right way to bring back something of value. We rather think you can think of other ways or additional ways. You for instance, Rita, have been talking to people about some of the things that have come up, as has he. Putting the material out in transcripts and sending them to people who are interested has unpredictably spread the word. [pause]

What would you prefer? We’ll put it back on you. What will be perceived by you as something of value?

Rita: I don’t think it’s any more specific at this point than just to get the material out to those who might be impacted by this material. We’re doing it in a disorganized way, that is, sending out the transcripts throws it out there. We leave it up to people’s interest whether they look at it or not, and how seriously they take it and so on. We talk about it. Both Frank and I talk to people because it tends to come up in our discussions, for some unknown reason.

Frank: [laughs] “Unknown reason.”

Rita: Yes. But as you know, we have really struggled with this now for the past few years. What’s the proper form for this? You’re suggesting now that we operate at a level of easy understanding perhaps noting that there are complexities but not describing those complexities. We can take another stab at doing that. We’ve tried at the level of pulling out the lessons: What are the lessons we learned from this particular interchange? None of the paths that we’ve explored so far seem to really grab us as a way of being very effective with this, so we’re still struggling with the question, how do we produce this.

Frank: Well, you see some of our difficulty – not to say frustration – just in the fact that it’s difficult to say anything without oversimplifying it, and in making an oversimplified statement, the fact that it’s oversimplified almost overwhelms one, in making the statement.

We think that’s been a major problem for both of you as well. You don’t want to mislead people, but you almost have no choice if you’re going to put out anything at all.

Rita: And you’ve had the same difficulty in explaining things to us.

Frank: Oh yes.

Rita: So the way you did it was to give us simple explanations as you could, knowing that there were some communications that were erroneous in that presentation.

Frank: Well, we figured that over time the embedded errors would smooth out, and we would say that they are smoothing out. You could trust in the same way, you know. Just – Remember, just because you put it into writing doesn’t necessarily fix it forever. We would say, write a chapter at a time and send it out to your same list and see how they respond to it. That will tell you very quickly what is and isn’t understood, and it will also remove from you that feeling of working in a vacuum.

Rita: Okay, where I’m left with that is that we need to try to do some of this and just see how it goes, learning along the way what will and won’t make sense to people.

Frank: Well, from the beginning, we’ve seen this as Frank’s project. It’s up to him to be able to do this. This is his background. If he will look at it as writing editorials instead of writing scriptures [laughs] he will proceed with a little less angst.

Rita: Ah, but he wishes to be a saint.

Frank: [laughs] But the saints don’t write scriptures. Scriptures are written about the saints. [laughs]

Rita: Ah, that’s what held him up all this time. He needs to be written about.

Frank: [laughs] Well, in fact, that’s not a bad idea. If someone who were privy to all this information and understood it from the inside would write about your – that is, Rita’s, and Frank’s and Skip’s – interactions over these four years, they would find it actually easier to write from outside than you would from inside. But we’re not necessarily saying that that’s really in the cards. But it’s always easier to write about than to write from the inside. It’s easier, but it’s also less accurate. Trade-off.

Rita: Maybe we can get Skip to write it.

Frank: He’s part of the process too. However he could write – you could all write your observations of it, and compare them. But, again, you’re all part of the integral process. [pause] [yawns] Let’s go visit 27 for a while if we can.

Rita: All right, we’ll do that. Would you like to have some time to experience?

Frank: Well, I don’t know. I got a strong prompting, so I said “yessir, boss.” How are we doing on time?

Rita: Well, we have some more time?

Frank: Do we have like ten or twenty minutes?

Rita: More than 10.

Frank: Yeah, let’s do that then. That may be it for the day with them.

Rita: All right, and if you can come back with a report as you did last time, that will be fine; if not, that’s okay too.

Frank: All right. If I don’t begin to come back, when we have a few minutes of tape left, then just call me and we’ll see. I might just say “leave me alone, I’m having fun,” I don’t know.

Rita: Okay.

Frank: It’s interesting. They’re gone for the day, though. I heard that. [yawns] Coffee break.[pause] I figured it out. They’re college professors. They’re used to lecturing for 50 minutes and then they quit.

Rita: Right.

Frank: [yawns] [A one minute pause.] I’ll tell you what. After we get to 27, let’s see if we can’t talk to David. I’ve been forgetting about David.

Rita: All right, I think we’re in Focus 27. Are you making contact with David?

Frank: [pause] Not yet. Trying. [pause] What I would like is for David to come through directly and you ask him some questions, or maybe he’ll have something to say to us. [pause]

Rita: All right.

Frank: There must be large cables between him and me.

Rita: Maybe following one of those cables-?

Frank: Mm-hmm, that’s what I’m trying to do. [pause]

Yes, yes. And now [pause] now you have remembered [pause] now you have gotten more clearly the difference between reincarnation and affinity, and you can see that your own efforts to see it as reincarnation have actually been getting in the way, because it assumes a larger cable, so to speak, than exists. You have drawn in your picture spools that have only one cable coming in and one cable going out. And if that were a reality, you would then have someone who was the entire reincarnation of someone else. That is not the case here, although it can be the case. You will note, by the way, that when you painted the picture in that way, your conscious dissatisfaction was, “this does not make sense, this cannot exist,” but in fact it does and now will serve to illuminate your understanding of the varieties of interrelationships between lives. You’ve been looking for David Poynter and you’ve had your scholar friend looking for David Poynter, not finding him.

Rita: And is this because this cables are minimal contact?

Frank: No, in this case we’re referring to the fact that he is looking for physical traces, and has not been able to find the physical traces associated to the name David Poynter, and the documentation has not been found because for instance there is no comprehensive list of those who were on the staff of the newspaper. However, if you will tell your friend to examine the membership rolls of the Golden Dawn, she may find the name there.

Rita: Thank you for that information. Can you tell us some more about your life that will help us in this identification?

Frank: Well, the parish rolls in south Wales would also have my name, and they do exist. The parish church’s name – it ends in “dudno.” You would not think that would be something one could forget, or rather, be unable to access. The simple answer of course would be that I do not exist, and am a figment in Frank’s imagination. A more accurate explanation is, that as you perhaps know from experience, bringing across names, dates, numbers, non-emotional connections, is difficult. Therefore it becomes easier to get a story than it is to get documentation of a story.

Rita: Can you tell us something about your interests and work experiences in that incarnation?

Frank: Yes, at what point in time? At what point in the life?

Rita: Well, from the time you were a young man, on.

Frank: [laughs] What we were asking was what part of the life, and you’re saying, “oh, no difference, all of it. [laughs] Okay. [pause] The primary interest was to avoid spending a life raising sheep, which meant leaving that protected valley, which in retrospect looked better as the years went on, although it wasn’t a life that I could have led. But going from Wales to London looking for a job in the big city, you know, the centre of things, and finding it difficult to move beyond my background. Fortunately I had a quick mind and a good mind for words and so I started off as –

Really, it was to be a copyist, but became soon enough a composer of letters and next a private secretary – and you know the secretaries in those days were men, primarily, and a meaning of the word that you’ve let get by is “the person who helps keeps the secrets,” in other words, was confidential. This led to a position in which my social inferiority and my tender years were not terrible impediments because I was, so to speak, the tail of a larger kite.

The mutual interests – that’s not the way to put it –

[pause]

Hmm, well, I don’t know. I don’t know, Rita. I’m getting the sense of making it up, as opposed to letting it come. But it’s like – it’s a sense almost of “okay, what do we fit in here now.” I’m getting Lord Bullwer-Lytton, and I’m editing. I’m saying, “well, it probably wasn’t Lord Bullwer-Lytton.” Now, whether that’s just me clutching, I don’t know.

Rita: Well, let’s ask the guys. Is this possible to do what we’re trying to do, to get in touch with David to find out more about him, or is this impossible or too difficult?

Frank: What it is, rather, is an illustration of the nature of the difficulties and possibilities of this kind of a path. You will notice that as a routine thing, Frank is in connection with various other lifetimes. And it is only when it becomes a matter of verification that he clutches, which of course immediately crimps the hose.

Rita: Well, perhaps we can work on that issue of the things that make it difficult, and come back to this next time as one of the things that we want to look into.

Frank: Yes, that’s a good idea.

Rita: We have about five minutes left. Is there something else you would like to do?

Frank: Yes, let me – I’ll just drift in silence here.

[A pause of about a minute] Next time we’ll make an effort to not have me present. They’re going to have a little experiment.

Next time we’ll do in a way what you wanted to do. It’s almost like we’re going to put me in the conversion box.

Rita: Mm-hmm.

Frank: And see what happens. I guess I’ll have to pull the door closed from the inside.

Rita: A box within a box.

Frank: A box within a box. [yawns] I get the sense that they don’t know what will happen either. Which is funny. You’d think they would. Oh, there’s too many possibilities, that’s why.

Next week, think of all the hard questions that we’ve been unable to answer, and when I’m gone, see how they do.

Rita: Make them responsible for themselves, instead of your helping guide them.

Frank: I don’t know that I usually guide them. I just provide the words.

Rita: Okay, we’re getting ready to move you down from focus 10, and we’re ready to count you back.

[end transcript]

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