A Sample from The Sphere and the Hologram

Although it may seem like I forget it from one month to the next, this website and blog are here not merely to air my opinions about things that (I think!) I know something about. They are also  supposed to lead people to the books in which I have put what I know, as best I can.

A while ago, a reader asked it I would put up a sample of what’s in The Sphere and the Hologram, which I consider my most important book so far. So here is a small sample, beginning at the beginning. My friend psychologist Rita Warren asked the questions, and I from an altered state — not from trance — conveyed the sense of what came.

[During the first sessions, I lay there listening to a Monroe Institute free-flow tape on earphones, to help me to get into an altered state and remain there. After a couple of minutes, I told her that I was ready to go.]

Rita: I’d like to talk directly to The Gentlemen Upstairs. Can you do that?

Frank: I can’t guarantee that I won’t be here but I’ll relay what I get. What I mean by that is that I’ll be here, but the words will just come through like from them. I don’t ever space out entirely.

R: You don’t need to space out, you can just move over a little bit, and let them speak directly to me, if that’s acceptable to them. I’d like to have a little more information about them, from them. About who they are, how they relate to you,

[I moved into an altered state.]

TGU: What would you like to know, as a starting place?

[Rita’s very first question plunged us into deep water.]

The Gentlemen Upstairs – Individuals or a Group?

R: Are they a group, or a solo individual?

[I suggested that she address them directly, rather than talk to me, so as to make it easier for me to remain receptive, passive, neutral.]

R: All right, I’d like to speak to The Gentlemen Upstairs and ask them to tell me a little more about themselves, whether they represent themselves as individuals or a group –

TGU: Well you might find it hard to understand, but individuals versus a group is a meaningless concept even on your end, but much more meaningless on our end, because it’s a matter of viewpoints. If you look at it one way, it’s all one thing with individual nodes, and if you look at it the other way, it’s all individuals who are closely cooperating. It’s the same on your plane, but it doesn’t seem like it to you because your physical bodies hold you apart and you have the illusion that your minds are separate because they seem to you to be in different heads. You can look at us either way and be partially correct.

R: Is there a spokesman who talks to Frank in response to a question he asks?

[I got a visual image that I found hard to describe. Think of a circular ring filled with marbles, as an omelet would fill the bottom of a frying pan. At any given time, the one that will come forward will be the one most closely attuned to the question or the questioner. I expressed this, and then shifted back into their voice.]

TGU: It isn’t a hierarchy or a rigid structure, it’s more like, if you had a cloth and the cloth were woven this way and that way, the warp and the weft, every intersection point of the thread could be represented as an individual. There’s no hierarchy there, it’s just all interconnection.

R: Yes, I wasn’t thinking of hierarchy so much as, on a particular topic some one might be more relevant to answer.

TGU: That’s right. It’s not necessarily predictable who that’ll be. Some are sort of permanently stationed here [chuckles] from your way of looking at it, although of course, you know about multi-tasking; that’s what we’re doing too. But when you’re interested in talking, we’re interested in talking. Some aren’t necessarily part of that, they are doing other things, but they are on tap when we need something more specific. But that’s more or less transparent to you, because you don’t have the skill at hearing nuance as to who’s different.

Some people would be unable to function with the metaphor we just gave you. They would have to have a metaphor of individuals cooperating. So they would get a story that would allow them to function. The more sophisticated the understanding, the more sophisticated the metaphor that we can use to then stretch you.

R: Do I hear the suggestion that some of the energies are usually with this group, and others come and go?

TGU: That’s right. You might think of us as a task force, or connected individuals. And of course this is not the only thing we do with our time.

R: So it isn’t always Frank that you work with then?

TGU: Hardly. Think how often he doesn’t use us, even unconsciously.

R: So you have this kind of responsibility with other individuals on earth?

TGU: Yes. Not just on earth.

R: Not just on earth. But are all the individuals that you work with in physical bodies?

TGU: Not necessarily human physical bodies. And not necessarily aliens as you’re thinking, but more like, if something’s in another dimension, it has a sort of a body, but there might not be a sort of a body that would be recognizable to you.

TGU’s Work

R: Would you think of the work that you’re doing with Frank and others as an assignment that you’ve been given?

TGU: [pause] Too many definitions. “That we’ve been given,” particularly. You could say it’s more like a location that we gravitate to. It’s somewhere between a hobby and an endearment. It’s a way of fulfilling our own nature. It’s not a one-way street. The giving is the receiving, you know? So, we once told Ed Carter [my friend with whom I did many TGU sessions] we’re teachers. He understood it that way, and we knew how he’d understand it. That’s close enough. We do it for the satisfaction of doing it.

There is the nuance, now that I think of it, of being assigned, but if there is an over-arching assignment pattern, we don’t necessarily notice it. [pause] Interesting thought. We might think about that ourselves.

R: With respect to the work you’re doing with Frank and with others, are you involved in other activities that are very different from this particular activity?

TGU: [pause] We don’t mean this in any disrespectful or impatient way, but it’s nearly impossible to talk about it because our and your frames of reference are so different. Frank always says we go around the barn [in explaining things], but sometimes it’s necessary to take a long perspective. Let’s try a metaphor.

If you were to ask a similar question of various organs in the human body – the liver and the pancreas and the white blood cells, say – each of them might have an entirely different concept of what it is they were doing. Depending on their mood at the time, they might say, “well, yes, we do x,” or they might identify with a different part. A muscle cell might define itself one time as muscle, another time as part of the right arm, another time as flesh, you see. All those are true; they’re all inadequate. You must remember that we extend into your dimensions. You all tend to think of us as being in Focus 27, or somewhere. But that’s only sort of true.

R: Are you rejecting the notion of space?

TGU: More, rejecting the notion of limitation. We’re everywhere as you are everywhere, and we would say you don’t, we don’t, nobody really moves; it’s a question of where your attention is. And so perhaps you ought to think of us as a localized part of all that is. Part of us is in your physical matter reality and part of us isn’t.

You’ve been told that you exist in every dimension, because you couldn’t exist in height and depth but not in width, say. Well, if reality were 30 dimensions, let’s say as an example, then everyone must be in all 30 dimensions. So it isn’t really true, from our point of view, that you are there and we are here, but it’s that we are – where we are. We’re in the only place there is. We’re all in the only place there is, because there’s only one of us, maybe, or maybe there’s a million of us. (Definitions!) We know that sounds vague, but it’s the best that can be done. It is, in fact, worthwhile to break down the unconscious assumption that there’s a “there” and a “here,” there’s an “us” and a “them,” there’s a “now” and a “then.” It’s all one thing. It’s all the only thing there is, but it can only be experienced as separations and distinctions.

R: I think I see what you’re saying there, however that leads me to difficulties.

TGU: We did warn you. [chuckles]

TGU and We Co-Exist

R: When Frank speaks to you, it’s as though he thinks you are seeing things from a somewhat different perspective than he is, or perhaps a higher perspective than he has. So the different perspective suggests that there’s some separation there.

TGU: Think of it as a difference in emphasis. If you are partly in time-space and partly outside of time-space, as you move your emphasis, you move your experience. We – meaning what he calls the guys upstairs – are primarily outside of time-space. You are primarily in time-space. We both extend both places, because there’s no other way it can be. Everyone is everywhere. Everyone is the only place there is. But if our emphasis is over here and your emphasis is over there, yes, it is going to change the point of view. We would suggest to you, though (which will shake up everybody’s concepts, we hope) that we can slide our point of view down toward you, and in fact we do it all the time. You can slide your emphasis up toward us, and you do it all the time. As would have to be, because it’s the same thing!

It’s difficult for us to explain how it is, because everything you see is divided by time-slices, and a reality that is experienced in time-slices, or space-slices, can only be experienced as sequential or fragmented. There’s nothing wrong with that. But we once showed Frank that it was difficult for us to kind of remember where he was, because if you had a five-foot long fish, and you had to find one scale on the fish because that’s where he happened to be, you could have occasional difficulties finding that scale on the fish, you see. [they chuckle] We know that he doesn’t like the analogy much, but that’s too bad.

R: Were you available to Frank before he recognized that consciously?

TGU: Oh, certainly! It would not be possible to live in 3D Theater, as you call it, with only the resources that you have [on your side]. You don’t recognize the help you’re being given every minute. You can learn to, but you don’t necessarily.

R: Was there an effort on your part to get Frank’s attention?

TGU: [laughs] We would hardly say an effort! [they laugh]

Frank: I think they’ve insulted me enough, we can go on. [Rita and I laugh] They were implying stubbornness, if you didn’t hear it. [We chuckle again, then it’s back into TGU mode.]

TGU: In fact one of the things that makes him the most valuable made him the most difficult, and that is the repeated, “I don’t want to be fooling myself, I don’t want to assume something’s true which may not turn out to be true, I don’t want to be a dupe, I don’t want to be a victim of wishful thinking.” It required demonstration after demonstration after demonstration. But that exact trait also makes him a better witness, because it gives him a place to stand. Nobody could possibly be as stubborn resisting him as he was resisting us.

R: That sounds in character, there.

TGU: [chuckles]

Blurring Distinctions

R: In Frank’s book Muddy Tracks, he seemed able to clearly distinguish between when he was speaking and you were speaking. When he speaks now, or when he’s in laboratory sessions, I find it difficult to know who is speaking. Is this increasingly true for Frank?

TGU: No. What’s happening is that he was required to make a Copernican world-view shift first, and to do that found it either necessary or convenient to almost over-emphasize the difference between us. That was the only way he could conceptualize it. But he began realizing that we’re often speaking through him, perhaps to say something important to someone else who had to hear it from a human voice because they weren’t able to hear it inside. Once he realized that, he began seeing it more, and then he began seeing other aspects of himself – other lifetimes, as you call it – going in and going out, in and out, and then he began to deduce, correctly, that he does the same thing there [i.e., speaking from other lifetimes’ point of view], unconsciously usually. The more he looked into it, the more he realized, it isn’t “me” versus “them,” it’s really I/them, or it’s us, or it’s me. You know, all the distinctions blurred.

Which is good! Because the distinctions were never accurate in the first place. They were, shall we say, a necessary detour, because if you are entrapped in a given logical structure, the only way out may be to go to an equally inadequate structure which nonetheless is different, so that the comparison frees you from both. So he initially said, “this is me, this is them,” then went to “well, maybe this is me, maybe this is them,” and as time went on, found that in ordinary life – there’s only ordinary life.

That was another distinction that he had made as a halfway house, you know, the ordinary life versus talking with us! But there’s only ordinary life. Or, there’s only talking to us, whichever way you want to look at it; it doesn’t make any difference. Or there’s both. Or there’s neither.

R: So, then this has to do primarily with the extent to which Frank is conscious of it?

TGU: [pause] We would say it has primarily to do with a re-structuring of mental structures. Your mental structures are ordinarily transparent to you, and therefore they are an almost infallible way of warping the world. That’s not necessarily bad or good, but it’s the way it is. Getting through the structures is always provisional, always incomplete, because you really can’t live in 3D Theater without structures. But it’s worthwhile to exchange them, to remind yourself that in fact you don’t have the structure; you know, the truth. [pause] That didn’t quite answer your question, did it?

R: [laughs]

TGU: Want to re-phrase it, then?

R: No, I think that’s fine. You answered a better question.

TGU: We heard the doubt, though. The hesitation, anyway, the reservation.

R: The doubt has to do with my next question.

TGU: Ah.

The Sphere and the Hologram