A further excerpt from an altered-state session with the guys upstairs, Rita Warren asking the questions, on February 26, 2005:
R: …. Well, I ordinarily think of both Frank and myself as being very tolerant of ambiguity with others who are very dissatisfied with that state. However, one of the things that has arisen for Frank a few times is my asking a question through him and his finding no answer. That seems to bother him because the structure seems to collapse on itself – the possibility that it will collapse on itself. So in that case, it seems to me, he isn’t very tolerant of ambiguity. He really needs to have some very clear sign that you are there to answer questions.
F: Well, you’re actually perceiving the external sign of an internal civil war, because bear in mind, one of his predominant characteristics is to doubt, and this doesn’t lead him to doubt others any more than it does himself. You see?
People must understand, doubt and belief are the same thing. If you looked at it as a three-position switch, one is knowledge, one is ignorance, and the third, between the two, could be labeled either doubt or belief depending on which way you looked at it. Neither in doubt nor in belief are you saying “it is true” or “it isn’t true.” That middle position, belief, is doubt. Okay?
There’s nothing wrong with that, that’s just the way it is. It’s just that if you look at it one way, it looks like doubt, and if you look at it the other way, it looks like belief, but it’s really the same middle position: It’s “I don’t know.”
Now, as an explorer, you are going to be continually working with beliefs, because that is the essence of working in unknown territory. Once you know it, you move somewhere else, or you stay there. If you stay there, then you’re among your “knowns.” But if you move on, then you’re back among beliefs. Now, to a large degree while you’re in a body and in the world, you’re going to be largely in beliefs whether you know it or not. But to some degree you can whittle them down and make them into what – from our point of view – look like “relative knowns.” They’re not absolute knowns, Bob Monroe to the contrary, because nothing is absolute in time-space. But for a working definition, you can have lots of knowns. They’re things that you are no longer interested in questioning, let’s put it that way. They are things that are relatively true, true enough that for practical matters it doesn’t matter that they’re not entirely true. That’s just the nature of reality. Nothing’s entirely true, nothing’s entirely false, within time-space. We’re not going to go into that. That’s just a little side-track.
But to return to your main point here. Because Frank primarily deals in beliefs, he primarily deals in doubts. Because he has doubts of the process, depending on what happens within the process, what becomes a belief becomes a doubt, or what becomes a doubt becomes a belief – for the moment. Do you see what we’re saying?
Now, when enough evidence arose, certain things moved from the doubt/belief category to the knowns, and he doesn’t bother with them anymore. (And, of course, parenthetically we will say that when you don’t bother with something because it’s a known, one way to look at that is: You’re no longer interested in examining it. Okay? But leaving that off to the side—)
The emotional stakes are greater when something which you are treating as a belief flips over to become a doubt and is the linchpin of many things. If it is something that’s relatively unconnected with other things and you begin to doubt it, well who cares? “I believe that it’s going to be sunny tomorrow. Well, maybe it isn’t.” Really, unless you’re going on a picnic or something, who cares? But if you believe that you are a multi-dimensional being with the ability to increase your awareness and your consciousness and the ability to become more aware of the larger you, to stake a good part of your personality on that belief and then have that belief swap to a doubt because of a circumstance, becomes a major stress. Okay?
So really, that’s what you are observing, there. There’s nothing wrong with it, and this process of talking about it helps, because he’ll be more tolerant of it. And that’s really the answer. This is true also of those who read the transcripts. The lesson to you is, when you find something that raises your stress level, just be more tolerant of it, shrug your shoulders at it, and move on, or continue with what you’re doing. That’s of course easier said than done, but just because it’s easier said than done doesn’t mean it’s not true.