Our connections and what they can accomplish
Outside time-space, neither separation nor delayed consequences apply. Since we exist part in and part out of separation, it is helpful to realize that a vital part of our nature exists on the other side. It will save you from the superstition of thinking you are an orphan of the universe, marooned without connections on a pointless and mysterious ride from nowhere to nowhere. It will also make clear to you the nature of guidance as it may be experienced.
Everybody touches on everybody. Changing your state of being changes who you hang out with.
Start with the concept of the individual as a ring holding threads that pass through it and connect to other rings. Any individual is a connector of an innumerable number of threads, a huge number of strings made by weaving threads together (an analogy, bear in mind), cords made of string, ropes made of cords, cables made of ropes. You could look at it that way.
Well, we as individuals are both freed and constrained by our circumstances in 3D Theater. Freed, because we can associate with unlike others, and because we experience the advantages in perspective of delayed consequences. Constrained, in that we can be only in one place at one time and are less able to see and feel connections as strongly as we feel separations.
If someone – call him Hank – is bitter and resentful and dies that way, the bitterness and resentfulness carries over; it is a part of completed-Hank. How is he to change it from there? It is 3D Theater that gives us our best chance to shape ourselves, mold ourselves – not surprisingly, as that is what it is for! Association with unlike others, and delayed consequences (or what might be called persistence of form) allow and encourage and almost but not quite require that we spend our lives choosing (if only by default) what we will be. What we begin from is not under our 3D control, but all else is. Laugh at anyone who denies free will – s/he is using free will in choosing to be persuaded that free will does not exist.
The other side, though, have neither constraints of one-time-one-place in the same way we do nor delayed consequences. Because the fields upon which we and they live are so different, we offer each other complementary advantages. They can give us broader perspectives, and can facilitate communication regardless of space and time. We can put them into spaces they cannot go themselves, or can go only very laboriously and indirectly, and then not often or long.
If you, in a body, interact with someone no longer in a body, as you easily can by the thoughts and emotions you feel for them, and the prayers or curses you send them – you can affect who they are; which affects what kinds of others they now gravitate toward or feel comfortable with. (The language dictates concepts like “change” and “movement.” Just remember that nearly everything that can be said is analogy.)
If you forgive someone, or if you so act as to elicit forgiveness from someone, the connections between the sides are to that extent altered. If there has been a chain of hatred, say, we feel it as though it were “merely” psychological. The other side experiences it as an external constraint. By altering those bonds we allow them to move, in a much more real and nearly tangible way than you commonly suspect. What are prayers for the dead, but the offering of energy to them that will allow them to “move” higher – they themselves being relatively helpless to change what they are, once they leave a body.
The nature of the other side
I have asked, more than once, what is life like on the other side. The guys have said that if it could really be told, it would be told, but the explanation gets overwhelmed by translation errors between time-space and non-time-space. As a way of helping us intuit our way toward a better understanding, they suggested a thought experiment:
“If your life and motivations and surroundings were exactly the same except that you knew and experienced at all times that all is connected, and if consequences were not delayed, and if you could range where you wanted to in time and space – but could not be fixed in one time-space and could not experience delayed consequences – what would your life be?
“And if at the same time you were in this condition of freedom-of-time-and-place and immediate consequences and total connection, one part of you was connected to just those opposing conditions –what would your life be?
“That is our situation; and given that you are part of us, it is your situation as well. You identify with one end of the continuum, we with the other – for the moment. That is the biggest difference.”
Reincarnation? Or resonance?
I once asked the guys which view of our connections is true. Were we experiencing “past lives,” the results of personal reincarnation, or were we merely feeling resonance with others, which did not necessarily imply physical continuity? At different times, they appeared to express first one view, then the other. “Resist the pull of premature clarity,” they said in response. “Neither view is quite true, both may be seen as true. With time, you see that nuance is all.”
Brief transcript of that session:
Hard to see how it can be just a matter of choice, so to speak. Surely it is more one than the other?
Well, let’s look at it. Perhaps the easiest approach is via definitions. Your question assumes definitions that are contradicted implicitly in the same definition.
For instance, individuals.
We have said that what look to you like individuals may look to us like rings holding threads – knots, as Buckminster Fuller said. Thus, a container of threads is not the same thing as an unchanging “something” that had taken the threads and made them into a welded object. That is, your bodies look solid to you, even though you know intellectually that they are in continuous flux. Similarly, your psyches.
Well, you may treat those bodies and psyches as individuals, as units, and you will not be wrong. You may treat them as collections of components, shifting over time, and you will not be wrong. Either view emphasizes certain qualities and in so doing automatically de-emphasizes other, contradictory, qualities.
Remember as you can, we advise you always to shift points of view, or overlap them so as not to stick yourself in a place of false precision. It is perfectly fine to consider that people reincarnate and go from task to task, from purpose to purpose – so long as you remember that this is one way of seeing things. Someone looking from a microbe’s scale, or a cell’s, or an organ’s, or — TGU’s! — would see flow where you see stability, would see continuity where you see distinction, would see separations that do not exist for you.
Well, I do see that I have been getting caught up in one way of seeing.
Good. Now leave it but don’t leave it behind. Embrace the many and leave the one. Rather than Emerson’s “make your option which of two” we would say, don’t, or, if you do, revisit frequently. You aren’t after an award for consistency.
This will be a very interesting journaling exercise. These are my favorite paragraphs this week:
“’If your life and motivations and surroundings were exactly the same except that you knew and experienced at all times that all is connected, and if consequences were not delayed, and if you could range where you wanted to in time and space – but could not be fixed in one time-space and could not experience delayed consequences – what would your life be?
“’And if at the same time you were in this condition of freedom-of-time-and-place and immediate consequences and total connection, one part of you was connected to just those opposing conditions –what would your life be?'”
I admit, however, that I have been able to get only the vaguest idea of what it would be like.
“We can put them into spaces they cannot go themselves” Something about this line has me thinking about Christian theology, and the story of God choosing to become human. Makes it an entirely different kind of story for me.
Also striking me is:
“offering of energy to them that will allow them to “move” higher”. So Buddhist!
Every year, I regret more than I don’t know more about Christian theology. It is the key to many things. That makes sense, actually, because any study of reality that has gone on so long, so collegially (i.e. with so many studying in the same intellectual context; I don’t mean to imply that they all got along famously) would be bound to furnish a more sophisticated understanding of the situation.
The difficulty I find in studying theology is that it tends to mix descriptions of experience with prescribed rules that amount more or less to “do it this way or else.” A notable example is The Cloud of Unknowing. Invaluable as a description of experience, but not so valuable as a laying down of rules.
Regarding that same part that Charles quoted — I got the analogy of a family with a teenage son who’s addicted to a video game. Most of the family comes and goes freely, and interacts with each other and with outsiders very fluidly. But one part of that family stays in just one place and is highly focused on just one activity, to the exclusion of all else. It takes quite an effort for the larger family to get the son’s attention and establish communication, which is often brief and dis-jointed.
With the additional consideration that that teenager, living in his own world, may be incubating a set of experiences and abilities that will blossom in unsuspected directions later in life.
Frank,
This is so well expressed and very connected to what I experienced in Lifelines.
“Everybody touches on everybody. Changing your state of being changes who you hang out with.
Start with the concept of the individual as a ring holding threads that pass through it and connect to other rings. Any individual is a connector of an innumerable number of threads, a huge number of strings made by weaving threads together (an analogy, bear in mind), cords made of string, ropes made of cords, cables made of ropes. You could look at it that way.
Well, we as individuals are both freed and constrained by our circumstances in 3D Theater. Freed, because we can associate with unlike others, and because we experience the advantages in perspective of delayed consequences. Constrained, in that we can be only in one place at one time and are less able to see and feel connections as strongly as we feel separations.”
Resonance, however, can appear tricky when in its opposite which both fascinates and terrifies. That is why it is so challenging to put into words. Let me explain.
For example, yesterday I saw a program on Oprah about a woman whose face was shot off by her husband! She had been submitting herself to his will and outburst for years until this ended the pattern.
The pairing was victim/ perp. The experience shifted her into a stronger person now…after the hell of 22 operations and a face that will never be what it was.
What creates those polarities within resonance? Or is this her shadow, a repressed fire that he expressed?
Can people we pray for also help us from the other side?
Just more questions for the guys. I really thought this was very helpful. Thanks and any comments on polar resonances?
I’m no longer sure about what’s really going on in such interactions. In one of Rita’s and my sessions with the guys (it’s in The Sphere and The Hologram somewhere, but God knows where), Rita asked about the long-term effect of childhood traumas, which can have a life-long ill effect on a person, reverberating throughout adult life.
Rita, from her position as a career psychologist, considered such an outcome to be an avoidable tragedy, but they gave us a different way to look at it.
Suppose, they said, that someone goes into life interested in exploring a certain emotion or complex of emotions in depth. An efficient way to do so is to experience a childhood trauma that would imprint on the personality certain traits and reactions (these are my words, not theirs) that would result in them facing the same situation again and again, until they were finished with it.
When I hear of a tragic situation such as you describe, I now how have ask myself, I wonder what’s going on? For I do not believe in coincidences, including the interaction between a perpetrator and a victim. I sometimes wonder if that is what Jesus meant when he said that offenses must needs come into the world, but woe to him by whom they come!
As someone who experienced childhood trauma, I can speak from first-hand experience that these events most defintely have a long-term effect on my life. I can also add that I would not change one minute of those events. Each and every one of them lead to the next step in my life and to many experiences which would have been totally different had those things not happened. One of the best tools I used to discover this was when I did a “what if” timeline. What I did was start with an outline of major life-changing events like the birth of my daughter and then think about how that event came about. What I found was there were many things which had happened in my life which some people may have considered trajedies, that I could begin to see had they not happened, she would not exist as the person she is. And for that matter, I would not be the person I am. And most of the time – that’s not so bad!
As far as the “why” of what happened? Who knows – whether it be for my this-time life experiences, or the other persons, just doesn’t seem to matter any more. I just settled it in my mind that it IS and whatever “it” is – serves a purpose or otherwise, “it” would not BE.
Love and blessings,
Dear Diane,
I do so appreciate what you have shared here. And most of the time think this way, but at this moment in my life I feel I am in a crisis of being stuck in a pattern that I can honestly say at least began at 8 years old, a pattern that influenced and shaped my journey for a long while, may have made it marvelous in some ways but has also taken its toll. I have so longed to and worked on changing this pattern which for the sake of brevity shall describe as each time I stand up to be my best someone(an outsider) comes in to slap me down, steal the fruits of my work, or just plain let me know I am worthless.
Now…maybe I will go to timeline to explore this further, because in midlife it is really a gadfly I want to be liberated from. The resonance and its stuck energy wears me down. For eg. after working 8 years for a non profit and asking for a stipend I was denied only to learn a rather well liked member was getting far more. Now the old me goes into fight or flight, but the new me feels like I give up. None of these however really tell me how to move beyond the pattern.
If you have any advice or Frank would love it. I am trying not to act out of pain which I now am sure is not the best way.
again thanks for your honesty.
Frank,
I honor your response which is considered, humble and thoughtful. I too feel a huge sense of wonder at such an experience and the concept of choice here too. To really choose to experience a life of in depth trauma leaves me in a state of confusion.
I am more comfortable with oversoul seven (Jane Roberts character ) who said some beings just jump in and bite off more than they can chew.
Bob also mentioned something similar in his books. He was careful not to reincarnate in some dire circumstances after he learned the ropes.
To honor the soul I accept it is grist for the mill but to equally honor the human portion of my beingness I concur we jump into mills we know not of and pay the piper.
Now if there is no coincidence then I am interested in looking even further into past life ideas or simultaneous lives…all so curious.